The Freemason Invention of the Nazi Party

April 21, 2023

Dedicated to the memory of Richard Stanley, whose works inspired this one

A fact that has been largely unrecognized is that the infamous Nazi Party seems to have been a longstanding project of Freemasonry. This secretive organization was able to achieve this without being recognized by using a proxy, Helena Blavatsky, and the pseudo – mystical organization she invented, the Theosophical Society.

While may strike the reader as farfetched, it is the case that virtually every aspect of what became the Nazi party originated from a member of the Theosophical Society. Whereas one or two aspects could certainly be circumstantial, the number of disparate elements that owe their origin to members of the Theosophical Society is unlikely an accident. It appears that the Theosophical Society was used as a mystical camouflage under which the Nazis symbols, racial and economic perspectives, the Nazi party itself and finally its leader, Adolf Hitler, were created.

It is perhaps surprising that all of the facts asserted in this article are well known. The only original aspect of this analysis to to present them as a group, which to my knowledge has never been done before, and to note the obvious fact that when seen as a collection, it does not seem to be something that could have occurred by chance.

One obvious question that needs to be answered is why hasn’t the obvious connection between the elements that created Nazism become part of the historical understanding?

Blavatsky Was a Freemason

Freemasonry’s ‘Nazi Project’ began with its promotion of the famous mystic, Helena Blavatsky. Developing a reliable account of Blavatsky’s early life is impossible because she seems to have deliberately provided contradictory accounts and falsifications about her past. Furthermore, few of her own writings before 1873 have survived, meaning that biographers must rely heavily on later accounts. The accounts of her early life provided by her family members have also been considered dubious by biographers. (Wikipedia)

Based solely upon this analysis, Blavatsky’s claims to have been in Tibet as a youth where she had a mystical experience, were presumably fabricated to create some plausibility for her strange attraction for the mystical spiritualism she presented within Theosophy.

However, one fact about her that is known is that in 1867, at the age of thirty-six, Blavatsky was a member of the all-volunteer army of the Freemason Grand Master Giuseppe Garibaldi, and therefore was at the battle of Mentana where Garibaldi battled the army of Pope Pius IX. By the time the battle was over, Blavatsky lay bleeding in a ditch. Left for dead, she was rescued by Italian civilians who appeared to help the wounded.

For some reason, likely because of her Masonic zealotry, Garibaldi selected her and brought Blavatsky with him to England and introduced her to other high level Freemasons.

As an example of her zealotry, when Blavatsky met the Freemason Henry Steel Olcott in London in 1874, he reported that she was still wearing a Garibaldi ‘red shirt’, the army’s uniform.

She told Olcott about being wounded at Mentana. “In proof of her story,” he wrote in his diary, “she showed me where her left arm had been broken in two places by a saber stroke, and made me feel in her right shoulder a musket bullet still embedded in the muscle, and another in her leg.” (Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, pp. 4-9.) As a doctor and veteran of the American Civil War, Olcott recognized her injuries as authentic battle wounds.

Though typically described only as a Theosophist, Blavatsky was also a Freemason. John Yarker – who also initiated the satanist Alister Crowley – made Blavatsky a ‘Brother’ of the ‘Adoptive Rite of Freemasonry’. Blavatsky’s Masonic diploma was signed by Yarker and reads:

“We, the Thrice-Illustrious Sovereign Grand Master Generals… do declare and proclaim our illustrious and enlightened Brother, H. P. Blavatsky, to be an Apprentice, Companion, Perfect Mistress, Sublime Elect Scotch Lady, Grand Elect, Chevalière de Rose Croix, Adonaite Mistress, Perfect Venerable Mistress, and a crowned Princess of the Rite of Adoption.”

The Other Founders of the Theosophical Society Were Also Freemasons

To begin to understand Freemasonry’s connection to Nazism, it is necessary to recognize that the Theosophical Society was an annex of it. This is shown by the fact that, like Blavatsky, the other cofounders were also either overt Masons or had a direct connection to the organization.

On 7 September 1875, George H. Felt gave a talk at Helena Blavatsky’s parlour in New York. He spoke about the elemental spirits of the Egyptian temple mysteries, which he claimed to have subjugated, tested, and found efficacious. The assembled audience was so impressed at the importance of this work, that they agreed to form a new fellowship which would become known as the Theosophical Society. (Esoteric World of Madam Blavatsky, ch. 6). Felt was a versatile scientist, engineer and inventor, and was a member of a Masonic Lodge. (Felt Genealogy).

Henry Steel Olcott was a co-founder and became the first president of The Theosophical Society. In 1859, while reporting the hanging of John Brown, the abolitionist, for the Tribune, Olcott was arrested as a spy and condemned to death. However, he was released upon his appeal to his captors under the seal of confidence as a Freemason. (Theosophy Wiki)

Charles Sotheran, another co-founder, was initiated as a Freemason on April 8, 1872, in the United Grand Lodge of England. Sotheran was also active in the English Brotherhood of the Rosie Cross, and in Egyptian Rite masonry. (Theosophy Wiki)

William Q. Judge (1851–1896) another individual present at the seminal meeting, was the son of Frederick Judge, a well known Freemason. (Theosophy Wiki)

The term theosophy came from the Greek theos (“god(s)”) and sophia (“wisdom”), thus meaning “god-wisdom” or “divine wisdom”. It should be noted that one mystery this analysis clarifies is Theosophy itself. Its spiritual system is so ridiculous that it begs the questions as to why it was invented, let alone popularized. However, once it is recognized that the group was organized for political purposes, the mumbo-jumbo is explained.

In addition to Blavatsky, Garibaldi also brought to England a new version of Freemasonry called The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm, sometimes known as “Egyptian Freemasonry”. Garibaldi was the “Grand Hierophant” or leader of the order. After his death, above mentioned John Yarker was named Grand Hierophant in 1902. The philosophy presented by Memphis-Misraim was the basis for much of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which Dieter Eckart claimed somehow inspired Adolf Hitler.

The Theosophical Society and the Rite of Memphis-Misraim had substantially overlapping memberships. For example, Mr. Reginald G. Macbean, the British ambassador to Palermo and a member of the Theosophical Society, was elected Grand Master of the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm in Italy in 1921. The Rite went dormant again in 1925 because of opposition by the Mussolini government. But, Macbean issued a charter to five prominent Freemasons who were both members of the Memphis Misraim Rite and of the Theosophical Society:

James Ingall Wedgwood (England),
Charles Webster Leadbeater (Australia),
George Arundale (England),
C. Jinarajadasa (India), and
Oscar Kolleström (Australia)

(Masonic Biography of James Ingall Wedgwood; History of Misraim and Memphis)

The Nazis’ Use of the Swastika Came from the Theosophical Society

Blavatsky used the Swastika to represent her organization. She wrote:

“Few world-symbols are more pregnant with real occult meaning than the Swastika. It is symbolized by the figure 6; for, like that figure, it points in its concrete imagery, as the ideograph of the number does, to the Zenith and the Nadir, to North, South, West, and East; one finds the unit everywhere, and that unit reflected in all and every unit. It is the emblem of the activity of Fohat, of the continual revolution of the ‘wheels’, and of the Four Elements, the ‘Sacred Four’, in their mystical, and not alone in their cosmic meaning; further, its four arms, bent at right angles, are intimately related, as shown elsewhere, to the Pythagorean and Hermetic scales. One initiated into the mysteries of the meaning of the Swastika, say the Commentaries, ‘can trace on it, with mathematical precision, the evolution of Kosmos and the whole period of Sandhya’.”

“The Secret Doctrine”, H. P. Blavatsky, Vol. II, Theosophy Company, Los Angeles, p. 587.

In fact, Blavatsky’s bizarre understanding of the swastika seems to deliberately misdirect from one important fact. Given her connections to Freemasonry, it is dubious that Blavatsky was unaware that the swastika was the premier symbol of Operative Freemasonry.

Though seemingly trivial, her failure to mention Freemasonry’s use the swastika is important. It is an example of the use of mythicism to camouflage Theosophy’s connection back to Freemasonry. Moreover, based upon this analysis, the Nazis’ use of the symbol was chosen to cryptically indicate who was really in control of the organization.

Thomas Carr wrote:

“Among Operative Freemasons the VII° candidate is taken into a vault under the Grand Lodge Room and from the darkness looks up to the centre of its roof and there sees a large letter G. from which a plumb-line is suspended which hangs down into the chamber in which he is placed. He is told that this plumb-line comes down from the Pole Star and that the Swastika is its symbol. The Swastika is depicted on the Sacred Pedastal in front of him. When an Operative Lodge is opened in the VIP each of the Grand Masters puts his “Square” together with the Square on the Volume of the Sacred Law in such a way as to form a Swastika which is a much venerated symbol among all Operative Freemasons and is held to represent El Shaddai or the Most High, Himself.”

Thomas Carr – The Rituals of Operative Freemasons

The Nazi Concept of the Aryan Race Comes From Theosophy

The concept of the “Aryan Race” was not used by Germanic people to self identify before Blavatsky, who invented the application of the term that was subsequently used by the Nazi Party. She asserted the mystical notion that humanity is now in something she claimed was the fifth Aryan root race, which she saw as having emerged from the previous fourth root race (the Atlantean root race) beginning about 100,000 years ago in Atlantis.

Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol II, P 249

If Nazism was a long term project of Freemasonry, the idea of the “Aryan Race’ was invented to begin the process of giving the German people a focused racial identity that would ultimately be used by the Nazis to promote their racial separatism. Of course, as history played out, Blavatsky’s invention of the ‘Aryan Race’ was not a gift to the German people, but simply isolated them for destruction.

Writing about Blavatsky, Peter Staudenmeier noted:

The Secret Doctrine drew a pointed contrast between Aryan spirituality and Jewish materialism, characterizing the Jews as an “unspiritual people” who have “falsified” and “mangled” their own scriptures and systematically degraded the traditions they borrowed from other peoples; Judaism is “a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside of itself.” The “national features” of this “stiff-necked race” included “the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day – gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality.” According to Blavatsky, “if the root of mankind is one, then there must also be one truth which finds expression in all the various religions – except in the Jewish.” Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation in Germany and Italy, 1900-1945 by Peter Staudenmaier

The World Leader – the ‘Lord Maitreya’

Blavatsky invented the concept of the ‘Lord Maitreya’—a term she borrowed from Buddhism — to describe an Aryan Messianic figure who would come to Earth to rule it.

Though it has been little noticed by historians, Blavatsky’s disciple Dietrich Eckart claimed that Hitler was the Maitreya. Eckart claimed that he was “told in a séance that the ‘Lord Maitreya’ would soon make his appearance as a German messiah. Eckart saw himself as being charged with the responsibility of ‘nurturing’ the Maitreya.” (The Twisted Cross, Joseph Carr, p.110).

This fact could not be more important because, as shown below, Eckart can be said to have created the ‘Adolph Hitler persona’.

The Concept of National Socialism Came From Theosophists

Edward Bellamy and his cousin Francis Bellamy were Theosophists who developed the concept of ‘national socialism’ which they also called “military socialism”, as they wanted all of society to emulate the military. Following their development of the term and practices in the US they brought National Socialism to Germany in the late nineteenth century.

Blavatsky wrote in the Theosophist’s magazine how pleased she was with the Bellamys’ international progress in promoting National Socialism in Germany. She wrote: “The organization of society, depicted by Edward Bellamy, in his magnificent work ‘Looking Backward’, admirably represents the Theosophical idea of what should be a first great step towards the full realization of universal brotherhood.”

In fact, Looking Backward actually advocated a dehumanized bureaucracy in which all decisions would be made by the State. Consider Bellamy’s description of a central government with the humans removed: “The machine which they direct is indeed a vast one, but so logical in its principles and direct and simple in its workings, that it all but runs itself” (p. 129).

Bellamy’s next quote is critical and is not merely an amazing foreshadowing of fascism. Within the context of this analysis it is literally its definition and, by the advocation of it, part of the way it was implemented:

‘The organization of the industry of the nation under a single control, so that all its processes interlock, has multiplied the total product over the utmost that could be done under the former system. [It may be compared] with that of a disciplined army under one general – such a fighting machine, for example, as the German army in the time of [Prussian general] Von Moltke.’ (p. 165) Looking Backwards

Given that there is no obvious connection between the mystical world view promoted by Theosophy, and the centralized economy and focused nationalism promoted by the Bellamys the question arises as to why were they brought together?

Moreover, as shown below, this was not the only time this strange fusion occurred. Theosophy spawned the Thule Society, a Germanic racial-mystical organization looking for Atlantis, the Holy Grail and the origin of the Aryan Race, but without the economic perspective promoted by the Bellamys. This mystical group then, through a tortuous process, ultimately merged with German Workers organizations founded by the Theosophists to form the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP on February 24, 1920.

The Nazis’ One Arm Salute Came From Theosophists

Francis Bellamy created the Pledge of Allegiance that is still performed in the United States. As he invented it the Pledge was recited with a straight armed military salute that was extended outward to point at the flag. The Bellamys then influenced the National Socialist German Workers Party in its rituals, dogma, and symbols.

Those wishing more documentation concerning the Bellamys’ connection to Nazism should review Rex Curry’s website.

https://sites.google.com/site/francisbellamy2/rex-curry

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Came From a Theosophist

According to the received history, Justine Glinka, a Russian Theosophist and, in fact a close friend and colleague of Blavatsky’s, was the person who brought the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the public’s attention. She somehow obtained a copy of the Protocols that she claimed had been stolen from a Masonic Lodge in Paris. Glinka then purportedly gave the manuscript to her uncle, General P. V. Orzhevsky, who tried—and failed—to show it to Tsar Alexander III. Eventually, Glinka’s stolen manuscript made its way to Sergei Nilus who published it in his 1905 book.

Despite the fact that they had been exposed as a fraud, they had great influence in Germany after World War I. “ There they were used to explain all of the disasters that had befallen the country: the defeat in the war, the hunger, the destructive inflation.”

Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945.

The 1800s was a century that delivered legal reforms and emancipation that improved the rights and status of Jews in many parts of Europe.

An 1830 motion by the French government recognised Judaism as an official religion, alongside Catholic and Protestant Christianity. Jews in the German-speaking states were granted economic and legal rights that exceeded those of their compatriots elsewhere. They were permitted to enter into legal contracts and purchase land and businesses. These reforms allowed German-speaking Jews to flourish. They became involved in banking and finance, law, medicine, higher education, theatre and the arts. This momentum reversed however for a number of reasons, among them the Protocols and the influence of Theosophy.

As shown above, Blavatsky subtly promoted anti-semitism by asserting the superiority of the ‘Aryan Race’ over the Jews. Thus, the notion that her colleague would have been the individual who discovered it seems preposterous. A more logical explanation would be that the forgery was prepared as part of the overall plan to bring the Nazis to power.

This theory is supported by the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the forgery. As Wikipedia explains:

In 1920-1921, a dramatic exposé showing that the Protocols were fraudulent occurred in the series of articles in The Times by its Constantinople reporter, Philip Graves, who discovered the plagiarism from the work of Maurice Joly.

According to writer Peter Grose, Allen Dulles, the future CIA chief who was in Constantinople developing relationships in post-Ottoman political structures, discovered ‘the source’ of the documentation Graves ultimately provided to The Times.

Grose writes that The Times extended a loan to the source, a Russian émigré who refused to be identified, with the understanding the loan would not be repaid.^[50] Colin Holmes, a lecturer in economic history of Sheffield University, identified the émigré as Michael Raslovleff, a self-identified antisemite, who gave the information to Graves so as not to “give a weapon of any kind to the Jews, whose friend I have never been.”^[51]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#The_Times_exposes_a_forgery,_1921

Raslovleff’s explanation is, of course, totally incoherent but simply adds to the improbability that any part of story of the Protocols was real. The claim that a close friend of the individual who brought the ‘Aryan Race’ to Germans was also the person who discovered the Protocols is as far fetched as the idea that a CIA chief was then the individual who discovered the they were a fraud. The idea that both of these events were circumstantial is too unlikely for consideration.

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80B01676R004200150032-7.pdf

A Theosophist Oversaw the Financing for the Nazi Party

Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, was a dedicated Theosophist. According to biographer Andrew Boyle, Norman typically shared his religious views primarily with married women friends. But on one occasion, “he took briefly into his confidence a Bank of England colleague whose cultured breadth of mind he admired. After a long and earnest defence of theosophical principles, Norman rose to his feet, tapped the heavily panelled wall of his library and said with calm emphasis: ‘I could walk through this wall and do no harm to it our myself if I were so minded.'” (Andrew Boyle, Montagu Norman, pp. 86-87.)

This Theosophist banker was responsible for the financing that put Hitler into power and enabled to him build the war machine that the German nation, in effect, committed suicide with. The following analysis comes almost completely from research done by the ingenious Larouche scholar, Anton Chaitkin, who has given me permission to use it.

While the thesis that the other elements in the chain of connections from Blavatsky to Hitler were circumstantial is far fetched, the fact that an element so removed from the other aspects as the Nazis’ financing was also brought about by the individual Chaitkin identifies as a “satanic Theosophist” seems to indicate that some ‘hidden hand’ was behind all of them.

The following is excerpted from an article by Anton Chaitkin that appeared in New Federalist, June 9, 1997, under the title “Now, as Then: Bush and the British, from Auschwitz to Africa.”

“When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, his Nazi Party was in the minority. The Nazis had just suffered setbacks in the German elections of Nov. 6, 1932, losing 34 Reichstag seats. President Hindenburg had appointed Kurt von Schleicher Chancellor.

Yet, less than three months later, on Jan. 30, 1933, after a well-financed Nazi propaganda and armed-terror campaign, Hindenburg appointed Hitler to take Schleicher’s place. The Nazis got Hindenburg to schedule new elections for March 5. With streams of money for their propaganda and guns, the Nazis “won” the election, and Hitler seized power.

The two principal German organizers of this Hitler takeover, were Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen. Both men were operatives of the British Empire, through Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, and of a British-controlled Wall Street grouping at the center of which were Averell Harriman, and Harriman’s partner, Prescott Bush, the father of the later U.S. President George Bush.

Over several years, every Nazi step toward power in Germany was coordinated, and Nazi campaign finances were overseen, by this British-New York axis. Hitler’s master-race ideology, which led to mass extermination, was simultaneously promoted and given the stamp of approval by this same British-New York faction.

Thyssen-Harriman-Bush

Fritz Thyssen was the earliest important financial backer of Hitler. In 1923, he gave Gen. Erich Ludendorf 100,000 gold marks for the Nazis, prior to the attempted putsch by Hitler. From then through the 1930s, the bulk of the funds to build both the Nazi party, and Hitler’s career, went through Thyssen.

On Oct. 5, 1942, during World War II, U.S. government investigators reported on Thyssen’s Nazi base in America: “Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist.” Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York.

“[C]ertain of [Harriman’s] associates would serve as directors.” Thyssen agent “H.J. Kouwenhoven . . . came to the United States . . . prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection.”

The first Harriman-Thyssen meeting was most likely in 1922, when Averell Harriman had been in Berlin to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. This Harriman banking house had recently been created by the British-allied American financier, George Herbert Walker (George Bush’s maternal grandfather), who was the bank’s president.

In 1924, Harriman and Walker formally organized, within their New York office, a shell company entirely devoted to projects to be run through Thyssen, called the Union Banking Corporation. This interlocked with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands, which represented Thyssen’s German interests.

Thus, the W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the European Thyssen projects. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization became the controller of Thyssen’s banking operations outside of Germany.

In 1926, Walker’s son-in-law, Prescott Bush (George’s father), joined the firm as vice president, and soon became its Chief Executive. That same year, Wall Street’s Dillon Read set up the United Steel Works, Thyssen’s main German corporation.

On Jan. 1, 1931, the Harriman bank merged with the old British-U.S. company, Brown Brothers. This put the new Brown Brothers Harriman, which would be the world’s largest private investment bank, directly under the control of London’s Montague Norman. The governor of the Bank of England, personally a satanic Theosophist, and Britain’s best-known public supporter of Adolf Hitler, Norman had earlier been a Brown Brothers partner; his family had run the firm since the 1860s. London’s Hitler project was stepped up, with Harriman, Bush, and Thyssen as leading intermediaries.”

Norman’a creation of Brown Brothers Harriman bank merged Theosophy with Skull and Bones, another renamed annex of Freemasonry. Eight of the original ten partners listed were Skull and Bones members.

Skull and Bones, like Theosophy, used one of the premier symbols of Freemasonry to represent itself , and was founded by Freemasons. Alphonso Taft, was a prominent member of Kilwinning Lodge No. 356 in Cincinnati and two of William’s brothers had already been raised Masons, William Taft, the future President, didn’t become a Mason in the traditional way. Instead, he was “made a Mason at sight.” The other founder – Russell – family’s was also masonic.

^{https://pittsburghcemeteries.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/charles-taze-russell-grave-and-pyramid/}

Returning to Chaitkin’s article, he wrote:

“Schacht Passes the Hat

After Hitler was appointed Chancellor, Hjalmar Schacht hosted and chaired a meeting on Feb. 20, 1933 at Goering’s Reichstag President’s palace for Thyssen’s representatives and a few other German businessmen. Schacht passed the hat, raising 3 million gold marks for the final drive to Nazi dictatorship.

The biggest contributors there were Karl Bosch and Georg von Schnitzler for the IG Farben company, steelmaker Gustav Krupp (who had previously held off supporting Hitler), and the Thyssen-Wall Street United Steel Works chief executive Albert Voegler. Herr Voegler was also a director of the Harriman-Bush affiliated BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Hamburg-America shipping company, which would soon be owned jointly by the Harriman-Bush enterprise and the Hitler government.

With Hitler and the Gestapo in power, Central Bank President and Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht threw all resources into creating a Nazi war machine. Fritz Thyssen was made the dictator of the Ruhr region, with mammoth war contracts. He and his British-Wall Street allies took complete ownership of every industrial concern in which Thyssen was involved; his opponents were defeated, purged, and arrested.

While Hitler cynically denounced the IG Farben company as an “international Jewish organization,” Schacht simultaneously awarded that company huge contracts to produce munitions and chemicals for the military buildup.

Throughout this period, up until 1937, banker Max Warburg was the leading stockholder of IG Farben. Warburg (like the Rothschilds, politically loyal to the British crown) meanwhile presumed to instruct his fellow Jews in the western countries not to boycott or otherwise protest Hitler’s anti-Jewish persecution.

Max Warburg had brokered the Harriman-Bush takeover of German companies, and their subsequent staffing by Nazis. The Warburg family’s Kuhn Loeb bank in New York had earlier launched the Harriman family’s railroad fortune, with capital from the British monarchy. In the 1930s, Kuhn Loeb was selling new bonds in New York for Hitler and Schacht, to replace, at a lower interest rate, the German public and private bonds held by Americans. Max Warburg meanwhile served as Schacht’s deputy at the German central bank.

In May 1933, an agreement was reached in Berlin, for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Co., led by Averell Harriman’s first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler’s Germany to the United States. This pact, reported in the May 20, 1933 New York Times, had been negotiated in Berlin by Hjalmar Schacht and John Foster Dulles, attorney for Harriman, Prescott Bush, and various Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg. Leading up to this agreement, a telegram (now in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress) was sent to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: “Much disappointed to have missed seeing you Tuesday afternoon. . . . I hope to see you either in Washington or New York before you sail. With my regards, W.A. Harriman.”

At the top, Montague Norman made all the decisions. Schacht went abroad to meet several times each year with Norman to plan the budget of Nazi Germany within the guidelines of British credit policy. These meetings were often at Montague Norman’s London house, or at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland, which was controlled entirely by Norman and his Nazis. Norman, whenever he was in the U.S.A., coordinating Britain’s Hitler project with his New York allies, would stay at the home of his fanatical devotee, Thatcher Brown, the partner of Harriman and Bush.”

The German organizer of the Nazis’ funding was a Freemason.

Hjalmar Schacht stated, “Freemasonry runs in my family,”,,, “my father belonged to an American Lodge. My great-grandfather, Christian Ulrich Detlev von Eggers, was one of the Masonic notables of the Age of Enlightenment.”

Schacht sent a letter to Hitler in August of 1932, commenting that “Your movement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity that victory in one form or another cannot elude you for long,” adding “Wherever my work may take me to in the near future, even if you should see me one day within the fortress – you can always count on me as your reliable assistant.”

On March 17, 1933, Hitler asked Schacht to reassume the presidency of the Reichsbank. Schacht accepted and became president of the Reichsbank. He declared: “the Reichsbank will always be nothing but National Socialist, or I shall cease to be its manager.” Schacht’s status in the party skyrocketed. In August 1934, Hitler appointed Schacht as Minister of Economics, though he still retained his position as president of the Reichsbank.

Less than a year later, in May of 1935, Schacht was appointed General Plenipotentiary for the War Economy. Hitler even made jokes about how useful it was to have a Freemason as minster of economics because Schacht’s time as a Mason had trained him in the ways of “Jewish banking” and thus prepared him to beat international Jewish capitalism at its own game.

http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2011-08-9993/THOMAS-DISSERTATION.pdf?sequence=2

One fact that is put to rest by Hitler’s relationship with Schacht is the idea that Hitler was trying to destroy Freemasonry.

Hitler did ban the lodges after taking power but this was done, as was the entire tortuous process of the creation of Nazis, simply to hide the fact of who was truly behind the organization. In fact, a large numbers of Masons worked inside the Third Reich.

The Nazi Party Sprang From an Organization Created by a Theosophist

The founder of the Thule Society the organization that led to the creation of the Nazi Part was Rudolf von Sebottendorf, the alias of Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer. Glauer was a Theosophist who was influenced by the writings of Madame Blavatsky. “He used Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine to launch his own recreation of ancient Germanic myth, positing a coming historical moment in which he theorized that the Aryan race would be restored to prior glories by the appearance of a race of Supermen.”

In his 1933 book, Bevor Hitler Kam (Before Hitler Came), Rudolf von Sebottendorf claimed that the Thule Society led directly to the founding of Hitler’s National Socialist movement. He stated,

“It was Thule people to whom Hitler first came and it was Thule people who first united themselves with Hitler. The armament of the coming Leader consisted, besides the Thule itself, of the German Workers’ Society, founded in the Thule Society by brother Karl Harrer and the German-Socialist Party led by Hans Georg Grassinger, whose organ was the Munchener Beobachter, later the Volkische Beobachter. From these three sources Hitler created the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.”

The Jewish Virtual Library further explains:

The Thule Society, which espoused ideas of extreme nationalism, race mysticism, virulent anti-Semitism, and the occult, was formed shortly after the end of World War I in Munich by Glauer. It attracted about 250 ardent followers in Munich and about 1500 in greater Bavaria. Members of the Thule Society included the future Nazis Rudolf Hess, Dietrich Eckart, and Alfred Rosenberg.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/rudolf-von-sebottendorf

The Thule Society had a parallel Aryan race mystical society, the Ariosophists. This organization also produced individuals who became members of the Nazi party. The Ariosophist Society was founded by the Theosophists Guido von List and Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and was active in Vienna before the First World War, It was another renamed annex of Theosophy.

Members of the Thule Society – Anton Drexler, Karl Harrer and other – developed links to right workers’ organizations in Munich. They then formed formed the Political Workers Circle (Politischer Arbeiter-Zirkel) in 1918. Drexler then merged the two organizations into what became known as the München Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP). It was the DAP that Adolf Hitler became involved with in 1919. By April 1, 1920, the DAP had been reconstituted as the Nazi Party. Thus the economic nationalism of the Bellamys’ was again merged with Blavatsky’s Aryan Race mysticism.

It is useful to see a diagram showing the linked societies that led to Hitler:

Freemasonry – Theosophical Society – Thule Society – DAP – Nazi Party – Hitler

The Man Who Trained Hitler was a Theosophist

During his early years in Vienna, Adolf Hitler claimed to have studied occult religions as a way of gaining power. Eventually he came under the influence of the Theosophist, Dieter Eckart, the ‘high priest’ of the Thule Society. Eckart claimed that he was told in a séance that “Lord Maitreya” would soon make his appearance as a German messiah. Eckart saw himself as being charged with the responsibility of ‘nurturing’ the Maitreya.

As noted above, Eckart claimed that Hitler was the Maitreya.

Eckart stated, “Here is the one for whom I was but a prophet and forerunner.: He began introducing Hitler in Munich occult circles as “the long-awaited savior.”

Fulfilling his goal of nurturing the Maitreya, Eckart gave Hitler books to read, bought him a a trench coat to wear to make him seem more manly, and made corrections to Hitler’s style of speaking and writing. Hitler was to say later “Stylistically I was still an infant.” Eckart also schooled the provincial Hitler in proper manners.

Hitler dedicated the second volume of Mein Kampf, to Eckart, writing that Eckart was “one of the best, who devoted his life to the awakening of our people, in his writings and his thoughts and finally in his deeds.”

The following quote from Eckart is important to this analysis. It completely exposes the hidden linkage between the Freemasonry and the man who led the German people to destruction.

Eckart stated:“Follow Hitler. He will dance, but it is I who have called the tune! I have initiated him into the ‘Secret Doctrine;’ opened his centers in vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any German.”

Hitler’s Cross, Lutzer, p61

Eckart claims are supported by the fact that U.S. Army historians catalogued Hitler’s personal library. Among the books was the one that Hitler is rumored to have kept by his bedside, “The Secret Doctrine” by Madame Helen Blavatsky.

The Man Who Installed Hitler was a Theosophist

Hitler did not come to power through his charisma or by the German working class seeking a ‘strong leader’. He was installed by a conspiracy organized by Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff the German general, politician, military theorist and, as shown below, someone with direct links to Theosophy.

Ludendorff achieved fame for his central role in the German victory at Tannenberg in 1914. Following his appointment as Erster Generalquartiermeister of the German Imperial Army in 1916, he became the chief policymaker in a de facto military dictatorship that dominated Germany for the rest of the war.

Notice in the passage below that, for the second time, Hitler was identified as a ‘Maitreya’ or messianic leader before he came to power, though in this case seemingly by accident. The following excerpt is taken from “I Was Hitler’s Boss” an article by Karl Mayr who was Hitler’s immediate superior before and after his joining the DAP.

“Ludendorff hunted diligently through the Bavarian mountains for a red headed peasant girl to play the part of a German Joan of Arc who could be sold as a goddess, a divine messenger sent straight from Valhalla to wake up the Germans and save them from their bondage by leaving them to victory and everlasting glory, But no girl was found with the right kind of vitality and glamor to incite the masses. This is where Hitler came in. In discharging his duties he had visited a meeting of the newly founded German Workers Party. This handful of workers, though most of them were miserably poor, still had a great deal of respect for the former officers and capitalists. A day or two after I had received a report on this patriotic organization, Ludendorff came into my office to get details. At that time he and his friends were like Hollywood scouts looking for talent. In this case for “loyal” workers and they too, almost at the same time as Hitler came across these extraordinary patriots of the German Workers Party.

Members of the Reichwehr were not allowed to join political parties but to please Ludendorff whose wishes were still respected in the Reichwehr, I ordered Hitler to join the Workers Party and help foster its growth. He was allowed at first the equivalent of twenty gold marks weekly for this purpose.“

I was Hitler’s Boss, p 195, Captain Karl Mayr.

Mayr’s story about the identification of Hitler as the messiah does not ring true. Ludendorff was seeking a messianic leader, but did not pick Hitler, Mayr did. However, Mayr did not choose Hitler, who he described as a “tired stray dog”, for any special reason but seemingly only to respect Ludendorff’s search by sending someone to attend a DAP meeting. This accidental candidate is then somehow recognized by Dieter Eckart as the messianic leader or ‘Maitreya’ that he and Theosophy had been looking for and he starts to groom him. Finally, even though he could not find a single candidate in the Bavarian Mountains that could meet his qualifications, Ludendorff then agrees with Eckart that Mayr’s accidental candidate may be the messiah he has been looking for and funds Hitler. The described process is so illogical as to completely defy belief.

A more parsimonious explanation is that Ludendorff had found his messianic race leader and therefore sent him to the DAP meeting where Eckart was waiting knowing that the ‘Lord Maitreya’ was going to attend. Historian Thomas Weber suggested that Hitler’s political radicalization occurred during this post-revolutionary period when Hitler was working with Karl Mayr. (Weber, Hitler’s First War, p. 345)

Hitler’s rise in popularity was not an organic function of the German people. Ludendorff’s conspiracy used propaganda to ‘sell’ their agent to the public.

“Ludendorff and his friends decided to put everything on a strict business basis, In fact they cited American methods of salesmanship. The party in Munich was so organized that its ideas were gradually pushed by political salesmen into every home in Germany.”

I was Hitler’s Boss p 195 Captain Karl Mayr.

As with all of the linked elements above, Ludendorff ties directly into Theosophy.

“In 1925, Erich Ludendorff founded an umbrella organization called, Tannenbergbund (Tannenberg League) that had approximately 100,000 members (Mecklenburg, 1996:375). Its aim was to disseminate a specific metapolitics. Part of the umbrella organization was the Verein Deutschvolk (German Volk Society), founded 1930. Its purpose was to disseminate Mathilde Ludendorff’s ( Erich Ludendorff’s wife) science-based religious views called Gotterkenntnis (God-knowledge or – cognition).”

https://people.ucalgary.ca/~kpoewe/PDFs/revludendorf.pdf P 9

Mathilde’s religion was spawned from the Thule Society and thus rejected Christianity and promoted its Aryan-Germanic paganism.

Mathilde von Kemnitz Ludendorff was an active member of the Edda Society, that had been founded by Rudolf Gorsleben (1883-1930) as a spin off of the Thule Society which he was a member of. In April 1919 Gorsleben was arrested together with Dietrich Eckart (shortly after to identify Hitler as the ‘Maitreya’) by communist insurgents during the Soviet revolution in the city. Only Eckart’s quick-witted answers under interrogation prevented their summary execution in common with the other Thule hostages. Undaunted, on 18 December 1920 Gorsleben delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Aryan Man’ to the Thule.

Gorsleben regarded old Icelandic literature, especially the Edda, as ‘the richest source of Aryan intellectual history’.” On 29 November 1925 he founded an Aryan study-group called the Edda Society at his farmhouse in Dinkelsbuhr.

THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology NICHOLAS GOODRICK-CLARKE P 153

“After being banned In 1937, following a new rapprochement between Hitler and Ludendorff, the latter founded the Verein Deutsche Gotterkenntnis (Society for German God-knowledge). Its members were Mathilde’s followers.”

https://people.ucalgary.ca/~kpoewe/PDFs/revludendorf.pdf P 9

‘Gotterkenntnis’ is a German translation of ‘Theosophy’; as noted above, the term theosophy came from the Greek theos (“god(s)”) and sophia (“wisdom”), thus meaning “god-wisdom” or “divine wisdom”.

There can be little doubt that ‘Gotterkenntnis’ was a reference to Blavatsky’s mystical philosophy. Mathilde von Kemnitz Ludendorff was a known follower of Blavatsky. Mathilde accompanied General Ludendorff when he visited Hitler in prison . After marrying Ludendorff in 1926, she interested him in numerology and freemasonic magic squares.

The Occult Establishment, by James Webb, 1976. pp. 306-307.

Her concept of the “German knowledge of God” is worked out above all in the writings “Triumph des Immortlichkeitswillen” (1922) and “Der Seele’s origin and essence” (3 vols., 1927-1934).

A central axiom of her world view states that the religious experience of a people occurs individually depending on its “racial” characteristics. Measured by the ability attributed to them for individual and collective “knowledge of God”, humanity is hierarchically divided into “light” and “shaft peoples”.

Mathilde Ludendorff followed a concept of God shaped by monism and pantheism. She emphasized the divine animation of the entire cosmos – from simple matter to protozoa, plants and animals to humans.” These ideas were taken from Blavatsky, who also saw God as shaped by monism and pantheism.

https://www-historisches–lexikon–bayerns-de.translate.goog/Lexikon/Ludendorff-Bewegung?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400872794-008/pdf

Ludendorff was therefore not merely a Theosophist in the sense that he was someone who promoted Blavatsky’s mystical ideas, he can be said to be its greatest promoter as he created its largest congregation, the Verein Deutschvolk. Moreover, he created a German Theosophical Society, a second time.

This analysis suggests that Ludendorff selected Hitler to destroy the German people. If this is correct it was the second time he used a messianic leader to destroy a nation. Ludendorff was the individual who sent Lenin into Russia.

“Ludendorff agreed to send the Bolsheviks into Switzerland by train through Germany from where they would then travel to Russia via Sweden. Lenin, however, still took some convincing, insisting that he be sent on a sealed train. Lenin ultimately agreed on 31 March, and departed Switzerland on 8 April 1917.” Wikipedia

One mystery that this analysis seems to clear up is the Bolsheviks’ paper currency that cryptically depicted Blavatsky’s right angle swastika in the notes’ center. The same group controlled both political systems. When the February Revolution of March 1917 dethroned the autocratic monarchy, one of the first decisions of the Provisional Government was to print new money. The swastika could be seen on the banknotes until 1922.

Motivation

The central question on motivation is why did the Freemasons use a mystical camouflage to develop Nazism? The answer seems to be that they needed a layer of buffers to escape detection. Mysticism is by definition confusing to the normal mind and when critics of Nazism during its ascendancy or later historians researching its origins discovered mystical societies they tended to look no further, as mysticism neither requires nor permits analysis. Moreover, all of the ‘mystical racial principles’ placed into German culture by Theosophists worked together to create a deluded mental state in Germans from which Hitler would be seen as a Savior.

Thus, the mystical history of Nazism is a narrative woven together for social control, first to confuse the Germans into following Hitler and then the historians who tried to understand how he emerged.

The second question is what was their purpose? To this question I can see no answer other than they wished to bring about what happened – the destruction of the German people. The secret society Ludendorff was part of inserted Hitler for the same reason it inserted Lenin.

It must be noted however that there may be another hidden reason. British Freemasonry in the mid eighteenth century was proto zionist. For some reason, all of its Grand Master promoted the bizarre notion that “now was the time for the Jews to return to the Holy Land”. This was the political force that led to the Balfour Document.

So the question must be asked: Did Freemasonry maneuver the people of Europe like pieces on a chessboard to reverse the war of the first century, where the Romans were victorious and the Jews expelled from Israel?

Discuss in Forum!!

The Aten Bomb: Cultural Fission and Conquest in Exodus

Richard Stanley and Jerry Russell

May 4, 2018

In earlier installments of this series, we have described the rather sordid adventures of the dysfunctional family of Abraham. In spite of considerable attention from God, they never seem to understand, really, what “ethics” is all about.

We have to ask just why their newly emerging god, the all powerful Creator of the Universe, could not just lay down all the essential rules for humanity; and then proceed to provide some unbelievably awesome supernatural shock and awe, from which no human would dare to ever cross the line from there on out. You say to us, … well, Jerry and Richard, God did just this when he flooded the entire Earth for 40 days and nights.

But with this amazing storm: apparently Ham and Canaan didn’t get the moral subtext of the shock and awe message. They only took it as punishment for mans’ past sins, but then went right on sinning. Perhaps the problem was God’s fault?

So, God tried again during Moses’ time. And this time, rather than relying on oral transmission, he set down the law for all time, on stone tablets no less. But strangely, Moses’ God bore a peculiar relationship to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten‘s god, the sun god Aten (aka Adon’Ai); as well as another member of the Egyptian pantheon, Seth, who was rather more Satanic.

Thus we assert, rather tongue in cheek, that The Exodus was a metaphorical Aten Bomb sprung upon society. It was another form of Shock and Awe, following up on the ‘splashier’ time of Noah.

Moses and Superman

As we have stated before with Abraham, we can only guess that these Patriarchs are probably mostly fictional characters, retrojected far into the past and assembled to establish a foundational legend for the synthetic basis of Judaism’s Israel. Apart from the biblical texts, there is little convincing evidence as to their having ever existed in reality.

In 1993, William Dever wrote, “The overwhelming scholarly consensus today is that Moses is a mythical figure.” And in her encyclopedic last work “Did Moses Exist?“, Acharya S answered resoundingly in the negative: that Moses never existed. Thus, we must take this as the prevailing rationalist wisdom: that Moses was not a real historical person.

At one level this seems obvious: the stories of ten magical plagues, and of burning bushes, are clearly mythical. But even allowing for such embellishments, there are basic archaeological problems. There is no evidence that the Israelites originated as an enslaved people within Egypt who sojourned in the desert for 40 years, and then emerged to conquer Israel as their promised land.

Moses’ mythical nature is further betrayed by his heroic aspect. In fact, as Simcha Weinstein wrote in “Up, Up and Oy Vey“: Moses, Aaron and Joshua were original Hebrew superheroes. “They all wielded courage and supernatural powers to protect and serve their people.” Moses became possibly the most important literary inspiration for Superman. Funny, nobody is confused that Superman doesn’t exist.

So if the Old Testament tales of the Exodus are not history, then what are they? Who wrote them, where, when and for what purpose? What can they tell us about the actual historical circumstances, uncovered by archaeology? And, what does the story of Moses tell us about the world of today?

In contrast to all of this, there is an element of detailed historical veracity in the Biblical account. Not so much in terms of a credible portrayal of the main characters, but in terms of numerous contextual and cultural elements and details which have been verified by archaeology. Thus, it seems likely that the surviving texts were based, in some way, on earlier sources which are now lost.

If the Biblical characters may indeed have some historical basis, we suggest that they were used as conveniently propagandized literary tropes. The initial audience may have had some familiarity with those earlier sources. Aspects of those sources were included to facilitate the massive religious transition imposed upon the audience.

An Imperialist Front

In keeping with our approach in this Old Testament series: we interpret the text, within the framework that the biblical Lord (Yahweh, El, etc.) represents the goals and intentions of earthly Lords. That is, the wealthy and even more so, the powerful: pharaohs, kings, priests, and nobility. Thinking of God as a fantasy or superstitious relic, or even as a well-meaning theological construct, is a serious analytical error.

In this interpretive framework, the Exodus emerges as an act of contrived cultural division. The voice of God (through Moses) is saying that he wants the Israelites, the slaves of Pharaoh, to go into a new land and conquer it. We ask, Cui bono?

God promised the Israelites their freedom. But it is a strangely restricted freedom, with convoluted new laws and a new tribe of elite overlords and priestly authorities, the Levites. If it is Pharaoh’s voice speaking through Moses and the priests, then the story makes perfect sense from the geopolitical perspective. It is Pharaoh who is directing the Israelites, as his front line troops, to go and conquer the land of the Canaanites. That is, the Israelites are basically a controlled front of the Egyptians and are conquering Palestine on their behalf.

Remember that according to the Biblical account, it was only four generations earlier that Moses’ ancestor Joseph manipulated monetary policy during a famine to place all free Egyptians into bondage (Genesis 47). Perhaps this new ‘freedom’ is just slavery by another name.

There is no God over Pharaoh

The Israelites would have been far less enthusiastic about this imperialistic project, if it was being done for the benefit of the hated Pharaoh. But for themselves, their freedom and their own land, the cost-benefit calculation tilts the other direction. According to the Biblical narrative, the Israelites enthusiastically supported Moses and Joshua. Or at least, as long as the operation proceeded smoothly.

The trickery and deception is that the Moses and Pharaoh were never really at odds. That was all for show. From the Egyptian perspective: Pharaoh said that the Hebrew God was responsible for their misfortune, when actually Pharaoh himself was stoking the flames. And the Israelites believed that Moses spoke for God, when behind the scenes he was working for Pharaoh’s benefit.

Remarkably, it seems that the Israelites were being set up as a sort of “controlled opposition” with respect to the Egyptians left behind.

As Freud famously noted, Moses is an Egyptian name. The Biblical narrative tells us that Moses came from Pharaoh’s household. So, whether as actual family members or householders, it’s easy to imagine that they could have shared common goals and a common outlook, and hatched this scheme to inspire the Israelites into the role of fearsome conquerers — on behalf of their higher geopolitical aims, of course.

Jan Assmann, borrowing Freud’s observation for the title of his “Moses the Egyptian“, said that he would not even ask the question of whether Moses was an Egyptian, historically speaking. But we will risk an answer: at least in terms of the way the Biblical story is written, he seems to be a “Crypto-Egyptian”. That is, a fake Hebrew. This may also be hinted at in the verses describing Moses’ leprous white hand (Exodus 4:6) or his shining face (Exodus 34:29-35); perhaps his complexion was lighter than his asiatic Hebrew subjects.

The skeptical reader may note that this is a “conspiracy theory“. However, the “official story” in this case is that God really did authorize the conquest, with the accompanying genocide of the Canaanites. Which, we submit, is not only impossible, but also an unspeakable evil.

“Secrets of the Exodus”

On behalf of our suggestion that ‘God’ should be read as ‘Pharaoh’, we would like to cite the book, Secrets of the Exodus (2002) by Messod and Roger Sabbah. This book also posits the central role that the 18th and 19th Egyptian Dynasties played in founding the Abrahamic religions. The authors compress most all of the Genesis and Exodus narratives, from Creation till Moses and Joshua, into this period centered upon Akhenaton’s reign at Amarna.

These brothers are Jewish rabbis, and are thus also part of a most helpful trend. Numerous Jews (including Freud, Velikovsky, Shahak, Feather, Sand, etc.), have addressed, in various ways, the actual Egyptian historical roots of the Jewish religion; and indeed, Western Civilization itself.

Unfortunately, some Jews do not approve of such honest examinations of their CULTURE. Thus, authors such as these run the risk of being labeled self-hating Jews by their own kind. And, of course, there are many goyim who are scared witless. Such examinations also threaten the artificial ‘Gentile’ cultural Identity, spoon fed to them from cradle to grave.

But, there is no need for anyone to fear. Once the origins of these cultural biases are widely recognized, we hope that humanity can tuck them safely in the past, where they belong.

The Secrets of the Exodus should have gotten much more notice, but for these neurotic cultural insecurity factors. But, as well, we should acknowledge once more what Martin Bernal exposed in great detail (Black Athena Vol. 1): the top down, institutional academic effort (via the 1730’s formulation of Romanticism) to deny the massive input to Western Civilization from Egypt. This Romantic project insisted instead that the Classical Greeks developed it all, despite the Classical Greeks’ denial of same.

The Elohim: the Image of Pharaoh

To set the tone, let’s first look at the Sabbahs’ proposed real meaning of Elohim and Nephilim. The Sabbahs rely on the analysis of Rashi, who was a famous 11th century French rabbi.

From Chapter 10, The Elohim, page 74-76:

According to Rashi, the “upper” world is made up of a celestial host, the angels, sitting on the right and the left hand of God, who is seated on His throne. The divine family is a mirror image of Pharaoh and his assembly. The expression “on the right (or the left) hand of the king” was included in the titles of the nobility of ancient Egypt. …

“When mankind began to increase in population on earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of the Elohim saw that the women were beautiful. And they married those of them that they wanted” (Hebrew Bible, Genesis 6:1-2).

Rashi offers this explanation about the beings that appear in these verses:

The sons of the Elohim: children of princes and judges. Another explanation of the Midrash [Hebrew commentary on the Bible]. They were heavenly beings, accomplishing a divine mission. They were also mixing with the women. In any case, the word Elohim always carries with it the sense of supremacy. It is thus that God said to Moses: “Thou shalt be for Aaron one of the Elohim” (Exodus 4:16), Or again, “Behold, I shall cause you to be one of the Elohim for Pharaoh.” (Exodus 7:1)

The commentary gives us a better glimpse of the priests of ancient Egypt. The pharaohs succeeded one another in the course of the different dynasties, and each one had numerous wives and children. They assured the futures of the princes by assigning them functions in government, the army, and above all, the priesthood.

The Nephilim and the Nobility

The true meaning, then, of the word Elohim is the pharaohs of Egypt. It is thus that the first verse of the Bible meets the Pyramid Texts, proclaiming loud and clear that the king of Egypt is a cosmic being, called upon to mount the celestial ladder or stairs, to sit on a shining throne, nourished by heavenly fruit and reigning over a celestial world.

“The Nephilim were on the Earth in those days and afterward too, when the sons of the Elohim mixed with the daughters of men. And those daughters bore children to them. They were the ancient heroes and men of renown” (Hebrew Bible, Genesis 6:4).

Although the Hellenists translated nephilim as “giants,” the sense of the verse was contested by Fabre d’Olivet:

The simplest things are always those the scholars see least. They go searching into the beyond, with infinite pains, neglecting the truth right under their noses. The savants had the Latin word nobilis, under their eyes, which carries the same root as the Hebrew Nephilim … and which has to be seen in the Nephilians of Moses, not as giants of men of colossal height, but the grandees, distinguished, illustrious men, In short, the nobles.

This explanation, based on semantics, permits us to reinforce the sense of “sons of the Elohim” as those belonging to the pharaonic nobility, ambitious and proud of the past.

The Sacred and the Profane, Inverted

The Israelites of the biblical Exodus story are marked by profound cultural distinctiveness, placing them into opposition with the surrounding peoples. This was noted by outside observers such as Tacitus, who wrote: “the Jews consider everything that we keep sacred cred as profane and permit everything that for us is taboo“. Jan Assmann called this basic principle of the Jewish religion: “normative inversion”. For example, Tacitus noticed that the Jewish sacrificial ram makes a mockery of the Egyptian god Amun, and that their sacrificial bull similarly mocks Apis. (Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, Kindle Locations 512-513).

In our view, this is the basic psychological mechanism that the Egyptians used to create the Israelites as a distinctive people. Their mission would be as conquerors, a thorn in the side of all surrounding peoples.

Laurent Guyénot, in From Yahweh to Zion, argues that the distinctive Hebrew god Yahweh is modeled on the Egyptian god Seth. But, who is Seth? Jenny Hill of Ancient Egypt Online explains:

Set (Seth, Setekh, Sut, Sutekh, Sety) was one of the most ancient of the Egyptian gods and the focus of worship since the Predynastic Period…. He was a storm god associated with strange and frightening events such as eclipses, thunderstorms and earthquakes. He also represented the desert and, by extension, the foreign lands beyond the desert.

Seth and the Hyksos

Hill goes on to state that Seth became associated with the Hyksos during the 2nd intermediate period. In fact, Jan Assmann said, the Hyksos king Apophis “did not worship any other deity in the whole land except Seth.” (Jan Assmann. Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, Kindle Location 664). Seth’s reputation took a turn for the worse when the Hyksos were conquered and ejected from Egypt at the beginning of the 18th dynasty.

Thus, the adoption of a Seth-like god by the Hebrews, at a time when Seth was being demonized by the Egyptian priesthood, constitutes a very significant cultural inversion. Guyénot says that “From a point of view of Egyptian metaphysics, the god of the Jews betrays a Sethian character. Yahweh is Seth on an archetypal or paradigmatic level.” (From Yahweh to Zion, Kindle Location 895).

Seth as the Anti-Osiris

Guyénot points to the story of Cain and Abel as an example of a story that points to the role of Seth in Hebrew religion:

There is an obvious symmetry between the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Seth, and the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cain, the elder, is sedentary and cultivates fertile lands like Osiris, while Abel, the younger, is a nomadic shepherd inhabiting arid lands like Seth. Yet the biblical god acts opposite to the Egyptian pantheon: he upsets the social order by favoring the younger brother, thus provoking the elder’s legitimate sense of unfairness. As in a mirror image of the Egyptian myth, the Bible has the elder brother kill his younger brother.

The epilogue added to the Cain-Abel story reinforces the symmetry. Like Osiris, the murdered Abel gets a new life of some kind, when Yahweh grants to Adam and Eve “another offspring, in place of Abel.” And this third son, a substitute or alter ego of the second, is named Seth (Genesis 4: 25). This homonymy cannot be a coincidence, but rather strong evidence that the Cain-Abel story, in the form that has come down to us, is dependent on the Osiris-Seth myth. (Kindle Locations 809-816)

Anti-Egyptian Views on Paradise and the Afterlife

Possibly the deepest meaning of this inversion of the Osiris story, is that Judaism rejects the Egyptian view of Paradise and the afterlife. Guyénot says:

Yahweh is also Seth (the anti-Osiris) in his denial of life after death… The Hebrew Bible differs from all religious traditions of Antiquity by the inability of its authors to conceive of an afterlife beyond sleep in the humid darkness of Sheol: “For dust you are and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3: 19), without any soul worthy of the name. Yahweh does not care about the dead, whom he “remembers no more” (Psalms 88: 6). …

Here is the explanation for the asymmetry between the myth of Osiris and its biblical inversion: there is no resurrection for Abel, as Seth-Yahweh is the god of death, not resurrection. There is no Other World for the good dead in the Torah: the Yahwist scribes have borrowed Paradise, the land of blessed immortality, from neighboring cultures, but shifted it to the beginning of the story, then closed access to it forever. The originality of the Bible, as we shall see, is often merely the inversion of motifs from other cultures…(Kindle Locations 906-915).

All of this “normative inversion”, we submit, is another indication that the Torah is describing false flag imperialism. The Israelites of the Bible are no longer able to be at home in Egypt, not even as slaves, because of their religious isolation. To survive in a hostile environment, they have no choice but to succeed as warriors.

Authoritarianism in the Biblical Exodus

Biblical Moses famously goes to Pharaoh with the demand to “set my people free”. But in fact the narrative has little to do with “freedom”, at least not in a modern sense. Perhaps the emphasis should be on Moses’ characterization that the Israelites were “MY” people, that is, owned by Moses.

Most tellingly, the tribes of Israel were not a self-governing federation. On the contrary, they were ruled over by the Levites, who were Moses and Aaron’s relatives. And, under Moses, Aaron and the Levites, the Israelites were subject to a bewildering 613 laws covering every aspect of behavior. They were, virtually, portrayed as slaves to Yahweh, with sacrifices due at every turn. And (under our basic interpretive framework) we know who Yahweh represents.

The role of Aaron and the Levites is on display in the remarkable episode of the Golden Calf, Exodus 32:1-35. As the chapter opens, we find that some of the Israelites are still polytheistic. Aaron encourages all these backsliders to turn in their gold, which he fashions into a calf for them. Then Moses returns, and calls down the wrath of God against those who fell for Aaron’s invitation. Or rather, the wrath of the Levites, who “there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” (Ex. 32:28).

But Aaron himself was not punished. He kept his slot in the leadership, even though he had shaped and organized the rebellion. As to whether the peoples’ gold was really ground into a powder and scattered on the water, we are skeptical.

On the contrary, the true Machiavellian goal of Aaron & Moses (as depicted in the story) was to disorient the pagan Israelites, take their money, and install the Levite priestly caste as rulers over them.

Mapping the Exodus into History

As we mentioned above, the Exodus tale cannot be found, per se, in the archaeological record. Finkelstein & Silberman in “The Bible Unearthed” (2001), along with most archaeologists, argue convincingly that there was never any mass migration of Israelites from Egypt. In general, Israel and Judah emerged from the highlands of Palestine, where the inhabitants were typically Canaanites, ethnically and culturally, perhaps aside from an aversion to pork.

Megiddo, 8th Century BCE (from Finkelstein & Silberman)

The first characteristically Israelite monumental architecture that has been found by archaeologists to date, is from the time of the ruler Omri. Finkelstein & Silberman contend that the various six-chambered gates and city walls that have sometimes been attributed to Solomon, are in fact from the Omride dynasty or even later. This is based on the similar building style to Samaria, which is generally accepted as built by Omri. Similar monumental architecture has been unearthed all over the territory ascribed to the northern kingdom of Israel, while there is a complete absence of any such ruins in the southern kingdom of Judah, or any of the major cities of Solomon’s kingdom that was supposedly in Judah.

Finkelstein says that Judah was far less developed and prosperous during the 10th through 8th centuries BCE, compared to either Israel or to the coastal settlements of the Philistines or Phoenicians. As such, there was no material basis for a great empire such as the one ascribed to Solomon. Finkelstein & Silberman don’t dispute that David and Solomon might have existed: but if they did, they must have been local chieftains, rather than captains of empire.

Similarly, there is simply no evidence for the existence of any complex state apparatus anywhere in ancient Israel before the Omrides. Thus, conventional historians are at a loss to explain how the stories of the Exodus, Judges, or the Kingdom of David and Solomon (as eyewitness history) could ever have been written down by anyone. This is a crucial point, because as we will demonstrate, these stories do indeed have analogs in real historical events.

Exodus as a Consolidation of Narrative Sources

If these histories were not written down by the Hebrews, then by whom? Our answer is that the records must have been maintained by the Egyptians, and by their proxies, the Levite priests. And indeed we find that some Egyptian records describing similar scenarios do exist. If (as we contend) the stories describe a covertly directed operation, then the Egyptian records should describe the events from an Egyptian point of view. One must decode the propaganda to see the mirror image of the events from the Israelite point of view.

In further explanation of our views, we point again to Jan Assmann, who suggested that the Exodus narrative has no single origin, but rather combines numerous historical experiences into “a coherent story that is fictional as to its composition but historical as to some of its components”. (Assmann, Jan (2014). From Akhenaten to Moses: Ancient Egypt and Religious Change, p. 26)

These traumatic events include the expulsion of the Hyksos; the religious revolution of Akhenaten; a possible episode of captivity for the Habiru, who were gangs of antisocial people operating between Egypt’s vassal states; and the large-scale migrations of the ‘Sea Peoples‘. We will look at each of these events in turn, and explore how they contributed to the development of the Biblical story.

If all of these separate historical events were originally represented by source documents, which were combined in a literary fashion to produce our received Exodus narrative: then which of those events was a Machiavellian covertly-directed conquest, as we have suggested? None of them, or all of them? We will return to this question at the end.

The Hyksos Exodus

The Hyksos people (also known to the Egyptians as “asiatics”) were a West Semitic people akin to the Canaanites. During the Middle Kingdom period, they moved into Lower (Northern) Egypt, either by conquest or assimilation. By the time of the Second Intermediate period, they were ruled over by the “Fifteenth Dynasty” of Hyksos Pharaohs, who in many ways emulated Egyptian culture. Meanwhile, the traditional Egyptian pharaohs continued to rule in Upper Egypt, possibly as vassals of the Hyksos. Eventually, these Upper Egyptian pharaohs emerged triumphant, and drove the Hyksos out of the Delta region and into the Levant.

The tale of the Hyksos is told in Book 1 of Against Apion by Flavius Josephus. The purpose of the book is to defend Josephus’ work in the Antiquities of the Jews, against certain unnamed critics who say that the Greeks know nothing of the ancient origins of the Jews. (Apion isn’t mentioned until book 2.) Josephus says that his information about the Hyksos comes from the Egyptian historian Manetho. The story is narrated very approvingly, as a true story of the great antiquity of the Jews.

According to Josephus, Manetho said that the Hyksos came to Egypt as ruffians from the East, and conquered the country, governing from Memphis while setting up Avaris as a frontier fortress. After “511 years”, the Hyksos were finally driven out, and they went first to Avaris, and then on to Judea, where they built the city of Jerusalem.

Josephus notes several similarities between Manetho’s account and the Hebrew bible, including the idea that the Hyksos were called “shepherds”, and also “captives”. He mentions that at the same time as the Hyksos were driven out by the Egyptians, that Danaus left for Argos, and comments that this was a thousand years before the Trojan war.

Hyksos, Patriarchs and the 18th Dynasty

Related to Josephus’s narrative, author Ralph Ellis, in “Jesus Last of the Pharaohs“, noted a similarity between the names of certain Hyksos pharaohs of the 14th dynasty, and the names of Biblical patriarchs. For example, he suggests that the name of the throne name of the pharaoh Sheshi, which is Mayebra, may have been pronounced backwards as Ayebra’m or Abram, or Abraham. Other suggestions include Cainan (son of Arphaxad) = Khyan, Heber = Yakub-her, and Jacob = Yakbim. Very little is known about these 14th dynasty Pharaohs beyond their cartouches and scarabs. Even their sequence is not agreed on. Therefore, there is little if any evidence to confirm or deny the relationships suggested by Ellis.

Ellis argues that these Hyksos Pharaohs were distinguished from the Theban Pharaohs more by their religion than by their ethnicity. He says that they were characterized as “shepherd kings” because they had observed the precession of the zodiac, and therefore had chosen to worship Aries the ram, rather than Taurus the bull. As mentioned above, it is also known that these Hyksos worshipped Seth above other Egyptian gods.

A possibly confusing aspect is that the term ‘Hyksos’ may refer either to the entire people (who are thought to be West Semitic) or to the Hyksos rulers, who might not be ethnically the same as the commoners. As we have discussed elsewhere: the Biblical narrative indicates that Abraham came from Ur, which most likely means Edessa, a territory hotly contested by Hittites and Mitanni. These are the peoples that brought chariot warfare to the ancient near east, introduced in turn into Egypt by the Hyksos. The Levirate marriage contract seems to be another common cultural feature.

According to all known archaeology, the Hyksos kings were driven from Egypt to Jerusalem by Ahmose I, the first 18th dynasty pharaoh. And from there, they disappeared from all historical records.

About this same time (give or take), the great volcanic eruption of Thera occurred. Apocalyptic rainstorms were described on Ahmose’s Tempest Stele, consistent with the result of a massive volcano explosion. While some scholars argue that this is confirmation of some seemingly miraculous aspects of the Biblical exodus, others say that the Tempest Stele should be interpreted metaphorically.

Regardless of which is the case, Josephus’s identification of the Hyksos exodus with the biblical Israelite exodus seems plausible. It was widely accepted by 19th century scholars, and later rejected only because the Hyksos seemingly disappeared, rather than achieving any verifiable archaeological continuity with the later Israelites.

Amenhotep III: A Hyksos Resurgence?

Ellis goes on to suggest that the Hyksos ruling family continued to live in Jerusalem during the time of the 18th dynasty. Furthermore, he proposes, they took on a role as advisors to the Theban pharaohs during that time, as exemplified by the biblical Joseph. Ellis suspects that the last Hyksos pharaoh driven from Egypt by Ahmose I was Jacob (aka the pharaoh Yakbim) and that Joseph was a title denoting several generations of Pharaoh’s viziers.

If this is correct, and Jacob was in fact the Hyksos pharaoh driven from Egypt by Ahmose, then perhaps the odd story of Genesis 32:22-32 is a parable of this event. According to the story, Jacob wrestles overnight with God until daybreak, and the battle ends in a draw. God then tells Jacob that his new name will be Israel. In accordance with our interpretive framework, we say that Jacob has not fought with God, but rather with Pharaoh; that is, Ahmose. Perhaps, are insiders being informed that Pharaoh has sponsored the nation of Israel as a front, to advance a hidden agenda?

Eventually, Egyptian history tells us that the vizier Yuya‘s daughter Tiye married the pharaoh Amenhotep III, and Yuya’s granddaughter, Nefertiti, married Akhenaten. Yuya’s tomb is known as the most opulent one yet discovered in the Valley of Kings (aside from Tutankhamun) and he is suspected of non-Egyptian ethnicity, either Mitanni or “asiatic”. Ellis notes that Amenhotep II and Amenhotep III both included the glyph for ‘hyk’ in their cartouches, and states that Amenhotep III called himself “The Hyksos King of Thebes”.

Amenhotep III was the son of Thutmosis IV with Mutemwiya, who may have been the same person as a daughter of King Artatama of Mitanni who was taken as a bride by Thutomosis, whose name is otherwise lost to history. At any rate, DNA testing indicates that Yuya was not only Amenhotep III’s father-in-law, but also genetically closely related.

Given all this information, we contend that these Hyksos pharaohs (aka Biblical patriarchs) were in fact Indo-European (that is, Aryan) foreigners, ethnically allied with the Hittite and Mitanni ruling classes. If so, then the central dialectic of Western civilization, based on the tension between Jewish and Christian elements, is essentially built on a massive ‘identity’ scam. The tribe of Judah, David, and Christ is not Semitic, but Aryan. The irony should set any Zionist or White Nationalist’s head spinning.

Ahmed Osman says that Amenhotep III gave the city of Zarw to his wife Tiye, and built a pleasure lake there the year after Akhenaten was born. Osman believes that this city was built exactly on the site of Avaris, the former Hyksos capital.

If indeed there was some continuity between the Hyksos and the later 18th dynasty Pharaohs, this helps explain why animosity developed between Akhenaten and the Theban priesthood. It might also explain why Akhenaten chose to build a new capital in upper Egypt at Amarna, roughly half way between Thebes and Zarw / Avaris.

However, the late 18th dynasty Pharaohs seemingly abandoned the Hyksos anti-God, Seth, in favor of the solar deity Aten. This may have been based on a recognition that Seth’s reputation had deteriorated to the point where rehabilitation was impossible. But, the underlying theological view of Seth seems to have survived in the Hebrew view of Yahweh.

The symbol of the Burning Bush (with its unquenchable flame) may be interpreted as a link between Aten, Yahweh and Seth.

An Exodus from Akhenaten’s Amarna

Stephen G. Rosenberg, writing in an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, noted some similarities between the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamen, and the scenario of the Exodus. According to the Old Testament, the Israelites were slave workers in mudbrick; and, we now know from archaeology, Akhenaten’s capital city of Amarna was hastily constructed of mudbrick. After Akhenaten’s death, there must have been a departure or exodus of some sort from the newly built city. And finally, Rosenberg says that the design of the Israelite tabernacle described in the Old Testament is similar to the portable war shrines built by the Pharaohs of that time.

As the Sabbah brothers also noted, Tutankhamun’s tomb contained a chest of sculpted wood, with carrying poles, covered in gold leaf. Another container was sealed with gold panels depicting winged angels or cherubim. And the tomb was within a wooden frame covered with a large linen cloth. The entire scenario evokes the tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant as described in the book of Exodus.

Putting these elements together, Rosenberg suggests that the Israelites were Akhenaten’s slaves at Amarna. At his death, they departed, and took Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s war shrine with them.

Plagues in the Restoration Stele

Rosenberg thinks that the script of Tutankhamen’s “Restoration Stele” is echoed in the Biblical text:

After only 16 years, Akhenaten died, his reforms had been deeply unpopular and when he died, his new religion was abandoned, and so was his city. Akhenaten and his beautiful wife Nefertiti had had no son, only six daughters, and so it was one of the sons-inlaw who succeeded him: Tutankhamun, the famous boy king Tut.

He had the onerous task of restoring the old order, the old religion, the old gods and their priests, and he was under threat if he did not do so. The restitution stele says that the old gods would punish him if they were not given back their old rights and positions.

Hapi, the androgynous god of the Nile, would make its waters undrinkable; Kermit, the goddess of fertility, would release her frogspawn to swarm over the land; Osiris, the god of corn, would not prevent the locusts from consuming his cereals, and Ra, the sun god, would refuse to shine. Sound familiar?

Josephus describes the Amarna Exodus?

After identifying the Hebrew exodus as the Hyksos exodus, Josephus goes on to relate an alternative version of the origin of the Jewish people: as lepers. This story seems to be loosely based on the fall of Akhenaten’s headquarters in Amarna.

Josephus says the story comes from three different sources: Manetho, Chaeremon and Lysimachus. Josephus himself is skeptical, and seeks to prove that they are all lying, by showing up the contradictions in their various stories. But as readers, we must suspect that there must be some kernel of truth in the various stories, which overall seem pretty compatible with each other.

The most complete version of the story is from Manetho, who says that Pharaoh Amenophis expels 80,000 lepers from Egypt to work in quarries. These lepers chose themselves a ruler named Osarsiph, who makes an alliance with the Hyksos from Jerusalem. They conquer Egypt, while Amenophis takes refuge in Ethiopia. Osarsiph changes his name to Moses. Finally, Amenophis and his son Rampses return from Ethiopia and drive the lepers and Judaeans back to Syria. Josephus contends that the whole story is absurd on multiple levels.

But, Chaeremon tells more or less the same story, except that there are 250,000 lepers instead of only 80,000, and Chaeremon is confused about where the lepers found their allies, who seem to have come out of nowhere. Chaeremon has Joseph as a contemporary of Moses.

Lysimachus’ version is the most spare on details, gives the Pharaoh’s name as Bocchorus, and says that the lepers were about to be thrown in the ocean wrapped in lead sheets when Moses saved them.

A Nation of Priests

Ralph Ellis suggested that these people were “Lepers” because of their “diseased” spiritual beliefs, rather than any physical problem. And, the Sabbahs identify the exiles with Akhenaten’s priesthood, the ‘Yahud’. In Secrets of the Exodus, Chapter 25, Culture of the Nile, page 259, the Sabbahs assert that the ‘Yahud’ originated in Egypt, as a priesthood of the time of Amenhotep III.

They mention that the Hebrew Yehuda (for Judah) is a theophoric name, containing reference to ‘Yahwe’. And that Judah was the son of Leah, as was Levi. Leah was the ‘hated wife’ of Jacob, the preferred being Rachel. The Sabbahs claim that the Yahud were indeed monotheistic priests, based upon the root words, ‘Hodah’ and ‘Yahu’, meaning ‘praise God’. This, of course, begs the question of the relationship of the Levites to the Yahuds then in regards to priesthood status. Whatever the case, this may help answer the question of why Judea was considered a nation of priests.

A nation of priests needs common people to handle the mundane tasks of life. Here, the Sabbahs provide that the city of Akhet-aten must have had various common peoples such as trademen and craftsmen, etc. But they also explain that a nomadic tribe of Semites, named the Shasu, had earlier been brought to Egypt by Tuthmoses II as prisoners of war. In a temple (Soleb) in northern Sudan today, built by Amenhotep III, was found an inscription reading, “The house of Yahu in Shasu land.”

Yahweh of Edom

Ancient Edom was an area in the Levant located between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. The city of Petra, located at its center, was about 100 miles south of Jerusalem.

‘Shasu land’ was in Edom, where some have suggested that the Biblical exiles remained until the time that Moses died, letting Joshua fulfill the Conquest. In fact, with regard to Petra, there are several shrines named after Musa or Moses. Including a spring, claimed to be the one where Moses struck a rock and water sprang forth. Later on, the region was known as the home of Antipater and the Herodian dynasty.

The name Yahweh is likely to have originated in Edom, later to wind up in Judea. With this information, we can now see the likely exact path of transmission and just why Yahu / Yahweh became the chosen vehicle to launch the monotheist project. This name added a layer of obfuscation, hiding that Egypt was the true source of monotheism in its departure from Akhet-aten. Also, remember that this is the name which is not to be spoken.

The Sabbahs explain that the roots for Yahudah are Yahu-Daeh and are found in the Egyptian words Yahu-Dueh, meaning adoration, prayer, homage, and giving praise. sounds like a priestly type of name. But were the Shasu really the Yahud, or were they just a convenient metaphorical mule of sorts to transport the concept?

The Divine Lions of Soleb

At any rate, the hieroglyphic word for Yahut (or Yahud) breaks down to “divine heritage, function, mission”. As the Sabbahs state on page 263:

… Only the Yahud priests had the authority to write a name like that on the temple columns. The Shasu did not have the right to practice sacred writing. Consequently, Yahu is one of the divine names of the god-king Amenhotep III. Yah is written on the two lions of of Soleb.

The Sabbahs forgot to mention that the lion is the symbol for the tribe of Judah.

The Pharaoh Ay

The Sabbahs make the remarkable claim that the various important personages of the Exodus all have their corresponding analogs in the Pharaohs of that era.

In Chapter 4, Pharaoh Ay, the Sabbahs discuss this pharaoh as essentially the mastermind of the Exodus. As Akhenaton’s father-in-law, Ay was more than witness to the creation of the Aten religion and the city of Akhet-Aten. Ay had been Akhenaten’s very active vizier, as Joseph had been to his pharaoh (here displaced far in time). In the case of Joseph, he had conspired with pharaoh to manipulate the markets and end up enslaving all the people of Egypt (Genesis 47). All the people of Egypt, but not Hebrews … because as the Sabbah brother rabbis conclude, there were no such people … as the extensive lack of evidence shows.

That Ay was an active participant in both the Rise and Fall of Akhenaten is just one of the aspects of this business that should indicate that this was all orchestrated. As often the case with controlled opposition operations, we do not expect to find a signed confession in the government annals. Nevertheless, the signs of a contrivance are clear, with or without drawing a connection between the religious innovations of Akhenaten, and the innovations of Moses.

Adonai and “Aten-Ay”

From Chapter 6, The Bible of Ay, pp. 46-48:

The Aramaic Bible, called the Targum, is a prime reference source because of its precedence in time. It is a translation of a Hebrew Bible into the Aramaic language. All extant copies of the Books of Genesis and Exodus in Hebrew [such as the Masoretic – RS] were written after the Aramaic Bible. Aramaic is an ancient Semitic language very close to Hebrew and Arabic; it was the spoken and written language of Jesus of Nazareth. By Jesus’ time, Hebrew had been a dead language for centuries. The Aramaic Bible is the one that Jesus would have read.

The Aramaic Bible states the name of God as “Ay.” When the Divine Father Ay granted the Land of Canaan (the Promised Land) to the monotheistic priests, they deified his name, and used it as one of the names of the One God. The Aramaic Bible also reveals Ay as a “warrior” or “a man of war.” “Ay is a warrior. Ay is is name” (Aramaic Bible, Exodus 15:3). “Yahwe is a warrior” (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 15:3). This verse illustrates the anthropomorphism of the God of the Bible. The concept of an abstract god was a later development.

Ay was the god of the Yahuds. It was probably after Akhenaton’s and Smenkhkare’s death that Ay’s name became Adon-ay – Lord Ay. With this continuing tradition, much later during the Babylonian exile, God was referred to as “Adonay,” even though the name was written on the page as “Yahwe”; in this way the holy name was avoided, the name “which was never to be spoken.”

The Missing Israelites

Ironically, the archaeologists cannot find any Jews during the time of the 18th dynasty, but some alt-right researchers of current affairs seem to find them all over the place today, as with the masons. The common denominator is the source of both: Egypt and the pharaohs, or at least the 18th and 19th Dynasty pharaohs.

One can see where the Sabbahs may have gone wrong in superficially assuming, like the archaeologists, that the Aten experience was to be taken at face value, rather than a massive ruse. In this case, both the old culture and the new culture of fanatics converted to monotheism. Ay and Akhenaten had not only defiled the old gods, but had bled the old culture to near death so as to make Akhet-aten a virtual Garden of Eden, filled with luxuries and beautiful women.

From pg. 36:

Ay found himself confronted with the most difficult decision of his life. [Unless this was the plan all along. RS] He would have to blame the population of Akhet-aten for the woes of the country. The cosmopolitan life created by Akhenaten became a pretext for the accusation of corruption, adultery, and exhibitionism against the city. Akhet-aten had to be destroyed, and its monotheistic priests had to be exiled or killed. They had, after all, been guilty of corruption and fraternization with foreign women.

Killing priests was certainly not an Egyptian custom. Such an act was considered the crime of crimes. Besides, Ay himself had been venerate and deified by the monotheistic priests [who had just prior been polytheistic priests of such as Amun – RS].

Levites and Yahuds: Priesthoods Seeking People

So what was a good [or bad?] vizier to do? The city of Akhet-aten was abandoned after the death of Akhenaten’s son Smenkhkare. It was done quickly and systematically, with no sign of violence as discovered by the archaeologists. As recorded by the accounts, and as mentioned above, the city was very wealthy having scraped the rest of the country clean. Little was left, except as what hidden treasure appears to have been recorded on a copper scroll and was later found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves (i.e. the Copper Scroll as discussed by Robert Feather in his book of the same name).

As such, where would these thousands of Aten priests and other court officials go, if not into an approved exile, a Promised Land of sorts? If these had gone to nearby Canaan as hated exiles, one might think that later Egyptians would have had no compunction in eliminating them. But there is no record of any such genocide. Exodus 12:35-36 concurs that “the Hebrews” were allowed to take all the booty of Egypt along with them.

Furthermore, the Sabbahs discuss that the so-called Restoration Stele, erected in the time of Tutankhkamen, by Ay, records that the old religions had to be reformed via the recruited sons of such as the bureaucrats, and not from the traditional sons of the priests. Why? Because the old priesthood was gone to Disneyland.

A Buffer Zone in Canaan

As recorded in the Pentateuch (Numbers 35), the Levites were set up as the effective rulers of the 48 largest cities in Canaan. From here, their sons would become the future Levites of Judea and Israel, such as the ancestors of Josephus Flavius. This is a description of a contrived False Dialectic, with a contrived priesthood transported off to a contrived exile.

The Sabbah brothers introduce an interesting and compelling idea that Ay got the additional benefit of placing the exiles in Canaan, so as to create a buffer zone in the region that had been wracked by turmoil of various sorts. The Canaanite king, Rib-Hadda, and others had frequently complained to Akhenaten about being attacked by such as the Apiru. At this time the Hittites were still a nearby power. Here they quote the one of the Targums (an Aramaic translation of the older non-extant Hebrew Bible): “On exactly that day, all of the armies of Ay left the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 12:41) In other words, the Egyptian army actually escorted the exiles into their new promised land, rather than chasing them.

Like Rosenberg, the Sabbah brothers discuss that Akhet-Aten was built mostly with bricks, which they say was unique in Egyptian history. The Bible story of the Hebrew slaves having to make bricks is famous. Yet there is no evidence of such slaves, as distinct from ordinary Egyptians. Also, it is now known that bricks were used later on in delta cities like Avaris.

It seems far more likely that the Yahud or Levites represented a relatively small vanguard. Slaves used for construction of Amarna had presumably left earlier, during the years between the city’s construction and its abandonment. The bulk of the “Hebrew People” never lived in Egypt, but were indigenous Canaanites and/or Edomite Arabs.

Aramaic Bible says that Moses was a Yahud, not a Hebrew

Continuing to develop the theme that the historical exodus at the end of the Atenist period was an exodus of priests, the Sabbahs state:

The Aramaic Bible makes a clear distinction between the Hebrews (Children of Israel) and the Yahuds. The Hebrew Bible does not make such a distinction. The Aramaic version related that it was the Yahuds who went out of Egypt under the aegis of their god Ay. The Hebrews were assimilated into the Children of Israel, the Egyptian commoners, the “multitude.” “Then they [Moses and Aaron] said, ‘The God of the Hebrews has met with us'” (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 5:3); “Then they [Moses and Aaron] said, ‘The God of the Yahuds has met with us'” (Aramaic Bible, Exodus 5:3).

The Moses of the Bible was a Yahud, a son of Levi. The two Bibles deal with this fact differently. “At that time, Moses had grown up. He went out among his people and saw them toiling at hard labor. He saw and Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people” (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 2:11); “At that time, Moses had grown up. He went out among his people and saw them toiling at hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Yahud, one of his people” (Aramaic Bible, Exodus 2:11).

…
The Aramaic Bible reveals that the Yahuds were priests of Egypt, of a different caste from the Hebrews, the “multitude,” in ancient Egypt. “Yahud” (or “Yahut”) is a heiroglyph meaning official or civil servant, an hereditary position of one charged with serving pharaoh. Hebrews as a distinct and separate people simply are not to be found in the ancient land. They were an invention of scribes who wrote centuries later, in a far-off, foreign land.

In Egypt, Everyone Except Pharaoh was a Slave

The Sabbahs then continue with a discourse about the contextual meaning of the word slave; as in that everyone, from the vizier on down could be considered a slave. So this must be taken into account when the Bible refers to the Hebrews being slaves in Egypt.

Except… Rashi’s comment on Genesis 18 states that the Midrash has it that the Tribe of Levi “had never been Pharaoh’s slave.” This may reflect that the priesthood was attempting to establish an independent power base; and indeed, later Egyptian history showed a decline of Pharaoh’s power, and a rise of a priestly oligarchy.

Just as our previous textual analysis of the relationship between subservient Judah and exalted Joseph (Ephraim) puts the Jewish construct in a different light, consistent with our False Dialectic Model and SSM (Shepherd Sheepdog Model), the Sabbah brothers have delivered a detailed account that dovetails very, very well with ours.

Moses and Ramesses I

Getting back to the Sabbahs’ idea that each major character in the Exodus narrative is an analog to an Egyptian pharaoh: Chapter 17 of Secrets of the Exodus is titled Moses and Ramesses I. The chapter begins with a discussion of some of the murals from Ramesses‘s tomb. One mural shows the god Amun brandishing his rod over the 12 coiled serpent, Apophis. Apophis was also the name of the Hyksos king that was defeated by the first king of the 18th Dynasty, Ahmose I, many years before. (Or was that Jacob who was defeated?)

The second mural is that of 12 Egyptian goddesses of the night watching Apophis flee into a depiction of a parted sea. According to the Sabbahs, these images represent “the origin of the legend of the nocturnal expulsion of the twelve tribes of Israel and the crossing of the Red Sea”.

Reviewing the birth legend of Moses, the Sabbahs discuss its similarity to the prior legends of Sargon I, Gilgamesh, Cyrus (the first Persian Emperor and Biblical Jewish savior) and the Egyptian Sinuhe. However, in those prior legends, an allegedly royal baby is hidden and cast away, to be raised as a commoner. In the Moses legend, a common Hebrew child is cast off, to be adopted and raised as a royal. Another clever narrative inversion to serve a relatively transparent political purpose, to hide Moses’ “crypto-Egyptian” ethnic origins.

Although, the Sabbahs point out, the Targum has it that Exodus 2:6 calls Moses a “Yehudaeh” rather than a Hebrew. If this is correct, then Moses was born into the Pharaoh’s cultic priesthood.

As further evidence that Moses’ birth story establishes him as a divine royal hero, the authors point to the following illustration, showing Isis hiding her son Horus among the reeds.

So here one can see Isis, bearing the Sun disk, giving life to the divine child within the sea of reeds, the papyrus marsh. The gods Amun and Thoth are assisting, along with two foster mothers holding serpent rods. The crowns of the foster mothers are those of the upper and lower kingdoms of Egypt, indicating that they are of the royal court.

Taken from page 143 of the book is the graphic detailing the cartouche of Ramesses I:

On the right side we see the hieroglyphs for Min and Nun, which both make up the main components from the god Amun, thus Min (who emanates from) above the Nun (the primordial waters) provides the underlying substrate for the (Mess) birth of the king – emanating from the primordial waters. The hieroglyph Mess appears to be three bullrushs or ‘reeds’. Per the graphic’s annotation, the word Maim is Hebrew for water.

Note too, in the lower right is a lion, which is also featured at Amenhotep III’s temple at Soleb – where the Yahud priesthood seemed to be originally located. Of course, the lion (Hebrew lavi) is the biblical symbol associated with Judah in the book of Genesis, later to be traced through various European royal house heraldry.

From pg. 141 then is quoted the relevant Bible verse:

The child grew, and she [the nurse] brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter. And he became her son [Leben]. She named [ Vaykra] him Moses, saying, ‘Because I drew him [Masheti-oo] forth from the waters [Min A-Maim]'” (Exodus 2:10).

To the Sabbah brothers this is the most important message in the Bible, and maybe so. This, because in reading between the lines we see the princess drawing a connection between Moses and Ramesses I, as well as Levi and the lion of Judah.

This does create some confusion though, as Levi and Judah are brothers within Jacob’s lineage, albeit both from the “unloved” mother Leah. Here, as throughout the book, the Sabbahs don’t seem to realize the Biblical importance placed upon Ephraim, the favored son of Joseph. But in any case, they identify the Yahud ‘Levites’ as the army of Ramesses I.

Or, at least (in our view) as the army portion that will remain the occupiers of Canaan, as depicted in detail in Leviticus and Numbers, with the Levites being placed in control of the largest 48 cities of Canaan. This irregardless of the general territories of the other 11 tribes, many of which may have been really indigenous ‘Canaanites’ at the time. And the tribe of Dan, having been the Mycenaean tribe of the Danoi in the post collapse period of the Late Bronze Age.

Joshua ben Nun and Seti I

Continuing on, the authors mention that Seti I, Ramesses I’s son and also equated with the Biblical Joshua ben Nun, wrote a declaration that corresponds to the Biblical account of the Exodus. From Dominique Valbelle’s Histoire de l’Etate Pharoanique (1998) pg. 288, as quoted in Secrets of the Exodus pp. 143-144:

(The text in brackets is the authors, the red highlighting is added.)

I speak of what I did [what I became] until I was the master of the two shores. I came from the womb [of my mother] like the Bull of Maat [Emet in Hebrew], impregnated by good counsel and teachings. When he [Ramesses I] was Re, I was with him as a star at his side […]. I [subjugated] the lands of the Fenekhu, I drove out for him the dissidents [the Yahud monotheists of Akhet-Aten] into the desert country. I organized his monarchy like Horus on the throne of Unennefer. I chose Maat for him everyday, and I bore him on my bosom […] in his name Mehenyt. I assembled his army and gave him a single heart [Lev in Hebrew: the army of the Levites]. I sought for him the subsistence of the double land and I placed my arm in the service of his close protection in the foreign lands the names of which were [still] unknown. I was a courageous hero in his presence in order that he might open his eyes upon my perfection.

Next begins a discussion of the Ten Commandments upon the stone tablets supposedly given to Moses by God while upon Mt. Sinai.

As they say, apart from the prohibition of worshiping all the other gods, of making graven images, and of resting on the 7th day, the other commandments are included within the traditional Egyptian wisdom literature. The three exceptions mentioned just prior are part of the massive cultural inversions imposed upon the new synthetic society that Egypt is imposing upon its neighboring region, i.e. the 613 Mosaic Laws. The seven laws that are yet in common with the Egyptian ones are known in Judaic oral tradition as the “seven laws of Noah” or “Noah’s laws”. In any case, a good Egyptian had to justify his mortal behavior before the celestial tribunal by the upholding of these laws as well as 35 others.

The authors discuss that Moses and Joshua, really Ramesses and Seti, escorted the “dissidents” along with their new monotheistic accoutrements, focusing here on their conception of a dual arched stone tablet, similar to a hieroglyphic paired cartouche on exhibit in the Turin Museum. The first and last words on the cartouches form “Ankh Aten”, the basis for Akhenaten’s name, and conforming with the first biblical commandment said to have been inscribed on Moses’s tablets, that of “Anokhi Adonay”. Note that Hebrew, or any other script alphabetic writing, did not exist at this time.

Then comes a curious remark that the 11th century CE Jewish commentator, Rashi, had stated that the 613 Mosiac Laws were contained within the 10 Commandments, and that those all derived from the first law. Hence, according to the Sabbah brothers, they can be seen as all essentially flowing from the name for Akhenaten.

The Sabbahs derive the name Shaddai from the cartouche of Seti I, with the dual yod glyphs associated with the glyph for the god Seth (or Shad as an acceptable pronunciation). Then the Sabbahs equate biblical term “Yahu-Shua, son of Nin” with the Egyptian “The great God Shaday, beloved of Ptah and Nun.”

The Sabbahs then go on to discuss the military campaign of Joshua and how it matches that of Seti I. Joshua began his campaign upon the death of Moses, while Seti began his campaign upon the death of his father Ramesses I.

Next is related that Seti had to confront a coalition of unhappy Canaanite kings, just as Joshua did. Then he must deal with such as the powerful Hittites as at Kadesh. Seti and Joshua set up stone memorials (stele), with Seti’s being found in Beth-Shean in Israel.

There is no recorded war between the Egyptians and these otherwise rather powerful forces of Hebrews described in the Bible. The Sabbahs suggest that this makes sense if Joshua (Seti) was commanding the forces of the Egyptians, with the same stories being told from two perspectives.

Lastly, the Sabbahs mention the silver trumpets which God ordered Moses to have made. These are used by Joshua’s men to help bring down the walls of Jericho. In Tut’s tomb were found four silver military trumpets.

Moses and Akhenaten

The author Ahmed Osman also believes that the events of the Exodus occurred during the late 18th and early 19th dynasty period. However, in his book “The Lost City of the Exodus“, Osman contends that Akhenaten was in fact the person depicted as Moses in the Old Testament, while Ramesses I was his opponent Pharaoh. In support of this view, Osman notes that Akhenaton might have been hidden at birth, because of priestly opposition to his mother Tiye. The priests would have preferred that Amenhotep III should have married his sister, according to the tradition. Akhenaten may have been raised at Tiye’s summer palace at Zarw, away from Amenhotep’s Theban court. These circumstances might have inspired the biblical story of Moses’ unusual upbringing. Akhenaten called himself “the long living” and represented himself as Osiris, both possible indications that he considered himself fortunate to have survived against priestly opposition. Osman also points out that Amram, the name of Moses’ father, is similar to Imran, the name of the god Aten’s father.

While it is generally believed that Akhenaten died in the 17th year of his reign, Osman contends that in fact he went into exhile in the Sinai wilderness, and then returned at Horemheb’s death. Ramesses I was not of the royal blood, leading Akhenaten to challenge him for the throne. After this challenge failed, Akhenaten fled again, this time with his followers, to go to Jerusalem.

Osman presents only non-specific, circumstantial evidence that Akhenaten survived beyond his 17th year. However, if the biblical Exodus story is a literary composition based on various earlier sources, there’s no reason that the Moses character shouldn’t be based both on aspects of Akhenaten and Ramesses I. And, these relations may be valid even if “Exodus” never really happened as a discrete historical event.

The Danaoi and the Danites

Dr. David Elan, an archaeologist with Hebrew Union College, has identified Aegean-style artifacts and structures at his excavation at Tel Dan, the biblical city of Dan. Based on this finding, Philippe Bohstrom of Haaretz says:

The discoveries have rekindled a longstanding academic brawl over the origin of the Danites. Were they really just a tribe of Israel that was left in the cold, found a conveniently isolated city and conquered it? Do they have anything to do with a mysterious kingdom called Danuna mentioned in ancient writing found in Turkey? Or maybe with the Denyen – a faction of invading Sea Peoples, according to ancient Egyptian sources? Or with the Danaoi, one of the Greek tribes? Or are these all one and the same? The findings at Tell el-Qadi (now Tel Dan) suggest they could well be.

The connection between the biblical Dan and the Mycenaean Danaoi is also bolstered by chapter 5 of Judges, the Song of Deborah, which mentions the tribe of Dan failing to leave their ‘ships’ to aid their neighbor tribes.

Gilead abode beyond Jordan: and why did Dan remain in ships? Asher continued on the sea shore, and abode in his breaches. Judges 5:17 KJV

The Dan remained in their ships because they were primarily a seafaring people, not a seafearing people. The difference between seafaring and seafearing is deeply embedded one’s respective Culture.

Here we must also remember the Greek legend about the schism between Danaus and Aegyptus that caused the former to depart from the land of Goshen with his 50 daughters, to go to Argos in Greece.

Upon the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, Mycenae disappeared from that land, not arise again centuries later with the Classical Greeks. As Cline related in his 1177 BC, Collapse of the Late Bronze Age book: in this collapse, violence was very selective. In many cities, it was limited to just the royal palaces. The common people simply disappeared, and some apparently showed up peacefully elsewhere. For example, the more advanced Peleset immigrated into Palestine, and intermarried with the Canaanites. That is, they became the Philistines. Once this process is over, only Egypt is left standing among the major powers in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Cline’s book also mentions a variety of evidence of a unique trip taken by Amenhotep III (Akhenaton’s father) or his high level emissary, to Mycenae, via Crete. The “exodus” of the Peleset into the Levant occurred much later than Amenhotep III’s visit to Mycenae, and also much later than the “exodus” from Amarna / Akhet-aten.

Tel Dan is also notable as the location of the Tel Dan Stele, the only object that records the name of a character named David. It is apparent that the temple here would have been perceived in later times as a rival temple to the one in Jerusalem, as was the Samaritan one. Was this name David later fictively adopted in the narrative redactions to help pacify the northerner remnants left after the Assyrian and Babylonian forced migrations?

The Habiru of the Amarna Letters

The Amarna Letters paint a picture of Palestine as a region of beleaguered Egyptian allies. The region is under attack by a mysterious enemy known as the “Habiru”. The name seems to be a rather nonspecific pejorative, meaning “brigand” or “marauding band”.

Most mainline scholars reject an identification of the Habiru with the later Hebrews for the same reason as they reject an identification with the Hyksos: the archaeology doesn’t reveal any identifiably Israelite cultural attributes for these Habiru. The first culturally distinctive Israelites come much later.

However, fundamentalist scholars such as S. Douglas Waterhouse point to similarities between the biblical conquest narrative, and the situation depicted in the Amarna letters. He notes that the first cities conquered by Joshua, such as Jericho, Bethel, Gibeon, Shiloh, Mizpeh and Debir, are silent in the Amarna correspondence. Gezer was beseiged from an enemy in the highlands in both scenarios, as was Jerusalem. And, in both narratives, the land of Schechem was turned over to the Habiru / Hebrews, without a fight. The website ‘bible.ca’ also has an interesting page dedicated to the similarities between the Habiru invasion of Palestine during the late 18th dynasty period, and the Biblical description of Joshua’s conquest.

To judge from the Amarna Letters, Amenhotep III and Akhenaten were largely unresponsive to desperate pleas for help coming from their allies and dependencies in Palestine. They were busy with their internal religious reform projects, and neglectful of their imperial duties. We are told that it was not until after Akhenaten’s monotheistic fanatics had been put in their place, and the Theban gods restored, that Egypt was able to attend to the restoration of its power in Palestine. This was accomplished under Ramesses I and Seti I.

If the Sabbahs’ view that the first projection of Atenist monotheism into Palestine occurred after Akhenaten’s death, then the Habiru presence in Palestine would be a largely unrelated event. Or, the fall of Palestine to the Habiru might have been the actual motivation for an Egyptian reconquest of Palestine. In this case, the later invasion of Ramesses I and Seti I into Palestine might have been more of an infiltration, rather than a brutal conquest. The goal might have been to superimpose the Levite priesthood onto the Habiru, thus creating a culturally imposed control mechanism. And, the story of the Habiru conquest of Palestine was re-invented with a new ideological foundation.

It’s also possible that the Habiru were themselves a “false flag” operation, and that Akhenaten was unresponsive to his vassals’ cries for help because the Egyptian government was secretly arming and funding the Habiru “rebels”. From the perspective of Occam’s Razor, this seems unlikely: why would the Egyptians have used the Habiru to conquer the region, if they already controlled it? However, considering the sophistication of the “divide and conquer” scheme exhibited in the Biblical text as we have received it, the Egyptians may have been capable of a multi-layered, multi-generational Machiavellian scheme.

Conclusion: Sources and Processes

According to the ‘Documentary Hypothesis’, the story of the Exodus in the Pentateuch is based on source documents known as J (the Yahwist), E (the Elohist), P (the Priestly source) and D (the Deuteronomist). In “The Bible with Sources Revealed”, Richard E. Freeman argues that the J and E sources are the oldest. He suggests that they were composed sometime during the period of the Divided Kingdom, between 922 and 722 BCE, while the P source was composed shortly after the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel. These three sources contain narratives of the Patriarchs, Moses and the Exodus which are highly compatible, although not identical.

The sources represent a fictionalized version of events which were already long in the past by the 8th century BCE. According to our view, various earlier sources must have been drawn on, but the biblical authors did not hesitate to embellish, draw connections, make inferences, or simply fabricate new tales as needed. All of this was in service of the political and ideological agenda of the Levite priesthood and the monarchs.

If our hypotheses here are correct, the Pentateuch represents a view of history that is distorted in some aspects, while accurate in others. It seems likely that the imposition of the Levite priesthood over the Canaanite culture of the Levant was a somewhat gradual, stealthy process. The image of a vast number of Hebrews descending from Abraham seems to be a fabrication superimposed on history, to hide a much more synthetic, Egyptian-driven process. There may be a grain of truth in the original development of the Hyksos as a culturally distinct entity from the ancient Egyptian culture of Thebes. But we say that by the time of Ay and Akhenaten, the Egyptian dynasty was one big happy family, combining both Theban and Hyksos ancestry. Ay and Akhenaten were intentionally whipping the divide between the priesthoods of Thebes vs. Amarna, with the goal of throwing off a schismatic population that could project Egyptian power into the Levant.

The heroic characters of the Pentateuch, such as Abraham, Joseph, David, Solomon, Moses, Aaron and Joshua, seem to be based on Egyptian royalty. However, if this is correct, the biographies have been fictionalized and romanticized to the point where it is difficult if not impossible to draw specific conclusions about the actual lives of the historical Pharaohs depicted.

On a more certain basis, we can say that the picture of a heroic schism between the Hebrews and other cultures of the area, has been preserved in the Pentateuch because it served the interests of generations of later rulers. This begins with Josiah. Under his rule, the Deuteronomic source was most likely written, and the J, E and P sources were redacted and combined so as to justify Josiah’s own innovations. Josiah’s version of the ‘Law’ augmented and amplified the system of normatively inverted laws set forth in the Priestly texts, crystallizing the isolation of Hebrew culture. This set the stage for Josiah’s own imperialist ambitions.

But, did Josiah perhaps forget the essential aspect of Levite loyalty to Egyptian foreign policy goals? We are told that the pharaoh Necho put an unceremonius end to Josiah’s plans. Not long thereafter, the Egyptians themselves permanently lost control of their outposts in Palestine.

However, later civilizations including the neo-Babylonian, Persian (Achaemenid), Hellenistic Greek, Roman, medieval Catholic, and modern Anglo-American empire, have all been able to exploit the uniquely isolated and insular Hebrew culture as a resource; for scapegoating, division and conquest.

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Nukes R Us. (And, them.)

Jerry Russell

March 30, 2018

tsar-bomb — 'Tsar Bomb' test, Russia, 1961

This brief post is an appreciation of a long essay by John Steppling, entitled “It Is Us”. Steppling begins by saying that “The manufacturing of Russia as the arch enemy of not just the U.S. but mankind in general has reached levels of absurdity and pathology. This is all sort of obvious, though, I think.” And he goes on to note, with some despair, that there is virtually no opposition to the consensus narrative about alleged Russian crimes such as the Skripal poisoning.

And then he asks the question I’ve been asking:

What does the ruling class want? Almost every major government official who propagates the anti Russia rhetoric is wealthy. Or at least affluent. Why do they want to promote conflict? To make more money? If so, what can that extra money buy them? What does John Bolton not have that he wants? What does Rachel Maddow want that she can’t afford? This has always troubled me. When I ask such questions I usually get an answer like “they want power” or “they want control”. But why? What does more power bring you? The ability to create institutions in your own image, in accordance with your ideological leanings? Is that it? If this is correct, for some, what does being able to shape institutional authority actually bring you? What benefits? Is it some moral demand for change? ….

For the reality is that nobody benefits from a nuclear war. NOBODY. But tens of millions die. And maybe everyone dies.

Is this not something the propagandists know? Do they want to die?

As to the opinion of the masses about all this, I think, Steppling gets exactly the right answer: they are in denial, they just don’t think about it. And furthermore, when they do think about it, they conclude that the US is making a stand for righteousness.

Why do so many people regard US foreign policy as coherent? The answer is the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t think about US foreign policy at all. They might know of Kim Jong Il, but they know nothing of the history of US/Korean relations. And they have no idea just how extensively the CIA has funded the very same Muslim jihadists they fear are ready to break into their homes. They hear some mainstream media story, often with a celebrity front person, about stopping this or that genocide (invariably caused by the United States) and decide yes, *we stood by* in Rwanda. Or, *we HAD to go into Yugoslavia to stop the Serbs*, etc. The reality is always diametrically opposed to the one manufactured by the U.S. State Department. The reality of Kagame or Milosevic, or Hezbollah, or China, or Venezuela is obscured and mystified. And the “white saviour” narrative remains the most popular. Posit that the third world NEEDS western help and you have a winner in the minds of most Americans.

It’s only in his conclusion, I think, that Steppling stops short. He says that America is a “self hating nation”, repressing and sublimating its psychic wounds.

What’s he missing? First, of course, that some of the powerful elite themselves must be persuaded by their own propaganda. Second, that some of the motivation is religious, to bring about the apocalyptic scenario at the heart of the ancient Abrahamic scriptures.

And possibly most importantly, that the US political establishment senses how badly they could fail, and how far they could fall, in a military confrontation with the rest of the world. By huffing and puffing, and blowhard bluffing, and select projections of military power, they hope to postpone the inevitable.

Steppling concludes:

The one core truth for me today, at least politically, is one must resist western Imperialism. You don’t have to agree with the rest of the world that resists it, but you must stand with them. It is only white privilege, hubris, that allows for a westerner, an American, to criticise Maduro, or Assad, or the DPRK. Or Iran. Yes, Iran was a conservative revolution, but they are part of a bulwark against the nightmare of Western capital today. Self determination. America has never wanted to save anyone. Ever. America has always had ulterior motives. The self loathing American. The Ugly American. We have met the enemy, and it is us.

But in resisting “Western Imperialism”, one is also standing with the idealistic vision of America, and Americans. As Steppling rightly notes, the vast majority of Americans just don’t understand what’s going on. Part of the hope for our planet, is that Americans might yet see through the falsehoods being foisted on them by the neo-con warmongers and mass media propagandists.

Also, perhaps it is going to far to ask Americans to refrain entirely from criticizing Russia? They too have a long history of imperialism, having grown from a small principality around Kiev. And they, too, have chosen the path of militarism, even if it’s in self-defense at this point.

Anyhow, Steppling’s essay is highly recommended.

It Is Us

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Unacceptable Risk of Nuclear War

Jerry Russell

March 26, 2018

What would be an acceptable risk? One per cent? Ten per cent? You wouldn’t get into an automobile every day with a 1% chance of crashing. At that rate, you wouldn’t survive a year.

At this moment, two of my favorite authors, Caitlin Johnstone and “the Saker”, are both raising the alarm. The risk, they say, is incalculably high.

I prefer to stay focussed on the chance that there might not be a nuclear war. Maybe we’ll make it through this. What is the point in planning for the worst? We may be surprised to find ourselves still here on this planet next year; and if so, we need to plan and prepare for that happy circumstance.

And after all, the oligarchs and authoritarians in this world are just as much at risk as everyone else. They are playing a game for high stakes. But they know that if full-scale nuclear war breaks out, the game is over and they’ve lost.

The theory of a deep, world-dominating conspiracy is in many ways disturbing. But in one way, it’s comforting. If the Ephraimites or “Sons of Jesse” or the CIA (or whoever “They” are) really are in control, then surely they won’t let the situation get out of hand.

No Command, No Control

But even if there is a central hierarchy; even if Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un are just as much “pawns in the game” as Trump and Bolton are; nevertheless, the weapons are in the hands of numerous field commanders. Or at least, if you believe Daniel Ellsberg’s book “The Doomsday Machine”:

With respect to deliberate, authorized U.S. strategic attacks, the system has always been designed to be triggered by a far wider range of events than the public has ever imagined. Moreover, the hand authorized to pull the trigger on U.S. nuclear forces has never been exclusively that of the president, nor even his highest military officials.

As I discovered in my command and control research in the late fifties, President Eisenhower had secretly delegated authority to initiate nuclear attacks to his theater commanders under various circumstances, including the outage of communications with Washington (a daily occurrence in the Pacific) or a presidential incapacitation (which Eisenhower suffered twice). And with his authorization, they had in turn delegated this initiative, under comparable crisis conditions, to subordinate commanders.

To my surprise, after I had alerted the Kennedy White House to this policy and its dangers, President Kennedy continued it (rather than reverse the decision of the “great commander” who had preceded him). So did Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. So, almost certainly, has every subsequent president to this day, even though in the past several decades there may have been at least nominal “devolution” to some civilian outside Washington. This delegation has been one of our highest national secrets.

The same was true for the Soviet Union, now Russia. Public discussion of American plans for “decapitation” of Soviet command and control led to the institution and maintenance of a “Dead Hand” system of delegation that would assure retaliation to an American attack that destroyed Moscow and other command centers. This, too, has been treated as a state secret: paradoxically, since on both sides the secrecy and denial diminish deterrence of a decapitating attack against it.

An urgent reason for enlightening the world’s public on this reality of the nuclear era is that it is virtually certain that this same secret delegation exists in every nuclear state, including the new ones: Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. How many fingers are on Pakistani nuclear buttons? Probably not even the president of Pakistan knows reliably. Meanwhile, frequent leaked reports in the American press throughout 2016 and 2017 of U.S. contingency plans and exercises aimed in crucial part at decapitating North Korean leadership and command structure have, in my opinion, very probably had the effect in that country of creating a Soviet-like Dead Hand system for assuring retaliation to such an attack.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (pp. 15-16).

And did I mention that two of my favorite authors are in panic mode? Let me finish this article by quoting from them. Caitlin Johnstone:

Well I got news for you, snowflakes: if we all get nuked, there ain’t gonna be no midterms.

As of this writing, #StormyDanielsDay is the top US trend on Twitter. I don’t know what #StormyDanielsDay is. I don’t care what #StormyDanielsDay is. Neither should you. Neither should anyone else.

Please stop this shit, America. If the US war machine goes after Iran or Russia it will likely mean a world war against multiple nuclear-armed countries, which could very easily send our species the way of the dinosaurs should a nuke get deployed in the fog of war. We don’t have time to focus on Stormy fucking Daniels.

Those most fiendishly devoted to the service of the empire would rather take that risk than see the US lose its dominant role on the global stage; for them there is no difference between the end of their empire and the end of their lives. From their point of view they are fighting for their lives, and they are willing to take all-or-nothing gambles with the lives of every terrestrial organism in order to win.

We are staring down the barrel of world war and possible extinction. This should deeply impact the hearts and minds of Trump’s opponents and his supporters. Stop arguing about Stormy fucking Daniels and spread awareness about things that really matter.

And, The Saker:

What happened to the West I was born in?!

Frankly, I am awed, amazed and even embarrassed. I was born in Switzerland, lived most of my life there, I also visited most of Europe, and I lived in the USA for over 20 years. Yet in my worst nightmares I could not have imagined the West sinking as low as it does now. I mean, yes, I know about the false flags, the corruption, the colonial wars, the NATO lies, the abject subservience of East Europeans, etc. I wrote about all that many times. But imperfect as they were, and that is putting it mildly, I remember Helmut Schmidt, Maggie Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, even Chirac! And I remember what the Canard Enchaîné used to be, or even the BBC. During the Cold War the West was hardly a knight in white shining armor, but still – rule of law did matter, as did at least some degree of critical thinking.

I am now deeply embarrassed for the West. And very, very afraid.

All I see today is a submissive herd lead by true, bona fide, psychopaths (in a clinical sense of the word)

And that is not the worst thing.

The worst thing is the deafening silence, the way everybody just looks away, pretends like “ain’t my business” or, worse, actually takes all this grotesque spectacle seriously. What the fuck is wrong with you people?! Have you all been turned into zombies?! WAKE UP!!!!!!!

Let me carefully measure my words here and tell you the blunt truth.

Since the Neocon coup against Trump the West is now on exactly the same course as Nazi Germany was in, roughly, the mid 1930s.

Oh sure, the ideology is different, the designated scapegoat also. But the mindset is *exactly* the same.

Same causes produce the same effects. But this time around, there are weapons on both sides which make the Dresden Holocaust looks like a minor spark….

So I ask this simple question: do you really want to go to war against a fully united nuclear Russia?

You think that this is hyperbole?

Think again.

The truth is that the situation today is infinitely worse than the Cuban missile crisis. First, during the Cuban missile crisis there were rational people on both side. Today there is NOT ONE SINGLE RATIONAL PERSON LEFT IN A POSITION OF POWER IN THE USA. Not ONE! Second, during the Cuban missile crisis all the news was reporting on was the crisis, the entire planet felt like we were standing at the edge of the abyss.

Today nobody seems to be aware that we are about to go to war, possibly a thermonuclear war, where casualties will be counted in the hundreds of millions.

All because of what?

Because the people of the West have accepted, or don’t even know, that they are ruled by an ugly gang of ignorant, arrogant psychopaths.

OK, so maybe I’m not really so calm about all this, either.

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FCC: Net neutrality ends in 60 days

Jerry Russell

February 28, 2018

non-neutral — Non-neutral Internet offers in Portugal

Needless to say, access to the Internet is essential for the existence of websites like Postflaviana.

From WSWS.org:

In the latest step in the drive by the US ruling class to censor the Internet, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) on Thursday published its order abolishing Internet neutrality in the governmental Federal Register, initiating a 60-day countdown for the law to come into force.

The FCC’s ruling represents a far-reaching attack on the democratic rights of the entire population and public access to the Internet. Beginning April 23, multibillion-dollar corporate behemoths, such as Verizon and AT&T, will be free to restrict access to or completely censor Internet sites as they see fit.

On December 14, the FCC voted by a 3-2 margin to overturn the previous characterization of Internet broadband as a public utility under the 1934 Communications Act. This definition required that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide customers with the same level of Internet access, regardless of what they were connecting to. Moreover, ISPs could not selectively block or reduce speeds for specific sites or services, and could not create a multi-tiered system by charging users or content providers for higher traffic speeds.

Since the ISPs will not be forced to treat all content the same, they will be able to block web sites and services at their discretion. The claim, promoted by the FCC and its chairman Ajit Pai, that competition between ISPs for market share will prevent such actions ignores the fact that the telecommunications infrastructure is largely monopolized, with four companies controlling 75 percent of all high-speed Internet service. Over half of American households have only one ISP to “choose” from. These corporations are now being handed an incredible power over global communications.

The ISPs will also be able to establish a class-based system of Internet access, including by offering “packages” of Internet content. They may, for example, introduce a premium “Wikipedia package,” charging customers to access Wikipedia, a repository of humanity’s collective knowledge currently accessed by over 400 million people each day, just as cable television networks charge for news and sports.

The fight for net neutrality rules is not over. There is a drive to get a Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the FCC regulatory action. The vote is breaking along party lines, with Democrats supporting net neutrality and Republicans opposing. And there are also court battles looming: even internet giants such as Google and Facebook are concerned that ISP’s could support their own content at the cost of any company that doesn’t own the infrastructure.

For whatever it’s worth, we support efforts such as the one at www.battleforthenet.com to lobby Congress to save the existing net neutrality rules.

However, both of these approaches to preserving net neutrality are facing serious challenges. The Republican party, in general, has been suspicious of net neutrality, so the CRA faces an uphill battle in Congress. And, the courts have generally held that the FCC has the authority to regulate the Internet.

What happens next?

So, assuming that the rules change in 60 days, what can we expect? My guess is that changes will be gradual at first; but eventually, we will see the large Internet sites make deals with the telecom companies, and perhaps even a cycle of mergers and acquisitions. Medium sized sites may work through content aggregation providers that would similarly negotiate with the telecoms.

For Internet users, it will probably mean that basic access to telecom-provided assets will be cheapest, and any broader service will cost more. Acquiring unfiltered access to everything that exists on the Internet backbone, could end up requiring expensive specialized radio links.

All of this will interact in complex ways, with the current move to censor social media sites such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. “Alt Media” sources and consumers are being driven off those sites, and onto less popular sites where it is much harder to gain a broader audience. And those smaller sites will be more expensive or even impossible to access for many readers.

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Apocalypse How, Part 1

Richard Stanley

January 30, 2017

A Secular, Cyclical Reading of Revelation

In this multi-part post, I provide a rationalist reinterpretation of the apocalyptic End Times prophecies of Christianity. As with the Old Testament analysis series, my goal is to allow the texts to speak for themselves, while showing how they relate to our modern context. Of course, Joseph Atwill has shown that those same End Times prophecies referred to Titus and the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE. It might then come as a surprise to find me discussing a contemporary End Times scenario as well. But my claim is that the prophecies from Revelation are being re-used on a cyclical basis.

I will discuss throughout that the Biblical texts, and then later on that the underlying Zodiacal Age motif, operate as a convenient trope to push culture-bound societies, kicking and screaming, into new modalities seen by the elites as more appropriate for the evolving circumstances of the day. Hence, a New World Order, indeed a popular rallying cry of various culture warriors for many decades now. However, we might come to think that this term should more properly be the Newest World Order, since the term was already invoked for the first Prince of Peace more than two thousand years ago.

With my demonstration that so many prophetic End Time aspects are being fulfilled, it might seem that some divine or supernatural agency is at work. I hope that readers are scientifically modern-minded enough to eschew such explanations. However, considering the authoritarian religious freaks now being employed by the new White House administration, it would not surprise me if I am soon forced to become a crypto-Rationalist. Postflavians are not above speaking in code, if that’s what it takes to stay alive and keep publishing. With this last, please note the topical quotations excerpted near the end of this first post of the series.

In any case, according to the Hellenistic system, we are just now making the transition from the Pisces into Aquarius. This is not only the beginning of a New Age, but the beginning of the entire Great Year cycle. Hence the Mother of all Christmases is looming, or perhaps just loomed not too many years ago.

The Series Roadmap

In today’s installment, Part I, the initial focus is on highly relevant, preliminary global marker events foretold in the book of Revelation. These events are now occurring like falling dominoes at this turn of the millennium in our Anno Domini calendar system, correctly starting in 2001. Revelation even provides some details that describe a select group of individuals that direct the global play, by virtue of their unique and secretive understanding of the ‘new song’ that sets the appropriate moods. The employment of the term “new song” strongly implies that there was an ‘Classical’ old song before that, and in the subsequent parts we’ll see that this is indeed so.

In Part 2, among other discussion bolstering Part 1 we’ll see just how this secretive group developed the theological basis for using the new song of Christianity a second time. A second coming of the Second Coming, so to sing. We’ll also discuss more about parallel events that happened near 1000 AD, and near 1500 AD, marking part-way milestones in the great cycle.

In Part 3, I’ll compare today’s cultural and political landscape to the historical conflict of the imperial Romans versus the then nationalistic Jews. These two parallel conflicts both focus around issues of multiculturalism and globalism versus xenophobic nationalism. And, importantly I’ll discuss the employment of Zodiacal Astrology in the theological schema, and that for the times it was seen as the cutting edge Hellenistic science of the day. And here I am not talking about personal horoscopes.

Part 4 will examine some evidence that suggests that similar principles were in operation even before the time of Christ, and even before Hipparchus’ supposed ‘discovery of the Precession of the Equinoxes. When the Book of Revelation was written, the idea of cyclical, script-driven social transformation may have already been ancient history, evidence also existing in the books of the Old Testament. And I’ll discuss a four phase process of ‘unfolding globalization’ that fits within the millennial framework that the Zodiacal ‘ages’ provide, and made explicit in the Book of Revelation.

With that said, let’s start our Part 1 analysis discussing a few key premises before launching into what I consider to be the cogent current events of the times that match particularly well to the End Times scenario laid out in the Book of Revelation. With that accomplished, we’ll then skip ahead to the so-called 5th Trumpet, prior aspects being somewhat non-specific. And then finally I’ll add some additional bolstering analysis and data.

So who takes this stuff seriously?

In recent centuries, so-called ‘latter day’, prophecy-driven interpretations have repeatedly failed. On this basis, one might conclude that the entire concept is irrelevant hokum. But, those interpretations were issued by seemingly rank outsiders, pandering to small and marginalized sects of fundamentalists. In contrast to those seemingly discrediting failures in our just prior centuries, today the human power brokers of the world are, once again, setting the relevant, real world events in motion. Thinking along Machiavellian lines, perhaps might we consider that these prior failures were successfully intended to frame our mindsets against recognizing the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. This, even when it should otherwise be obvious, had we been paying close enough attention, and knowing just what to look for versus what to ignore as ‘noise’.

Many of us today have a contemporary and secular bent, or perhaps a ‘liberal’ theological bent. As such, one is more prone to summarily dismiss the fundamentalist milieu as a curious, superstitious relic. Their notion of ‘Time Ending’ is especially mind-jarring. For here, an epic Judgement Day, or Doomsday, will result in an eternal moral cleansing. Or did someone say ‘an ethnic cleansing’? In fact, time inexorably rolled along during the first Second Coming in 70 CE, and yet now rolls right along. The better, ‘sophisticated’ humans have been making continual progress, albeit in fits and starts. Thus, in two thousand years time we should have have moved far beyond all that ‘nonsense’, right?

Our cultural framers from mass media have been working overtime in the last few decades in getting us to consider the central term apocalypse as pertaining to massive disasters and other calamities. These disasters are mostly portrayed as having organic roots, either in degenerate ‘modern’ humanistic social dynamics, or in natural catastrophes of all variety.

Human Shepherding is the Framing and Stampeding of Minds

Alas, perhaps our awesome Western selves have gone past our highest perch of cultural perfectibility. In the last few decades we have been assaulted on all sides by dark forces of ‘degradation’. Or so it seems to some, who also assert that in the midst of emerging from institutionally approved slavery, two world wars and more, that we momentarily achieved a state of relative cultural perfection. Alas, the optimum has been cruelly snatched away in a seeming blink of one eye. Indeed, Culture that once uplifted us in our Liberty, is now rampant with the Libertine – or worse. As such, we are being told to assign responsibility for such ‘degrading’ aspects to certain specific players with long standing, retrograde and inhumane agendas. How convenient .. and comforting in a backhanded way.

And in some cases, perhaps for different specifically inclined audiences’ benefit, narratives of different aspects of Satan, and similar, are also sometimes invoked. Well, if all this is the supernatural case, then surely the only solution can be to have a new heavenly savior become manifest to us. Hallelujah!! The fact that almost all rationalists, except for maybe me, don’t believe in such phenomenon, supernatural or not, ironically only makes the application of such ‘scripted’ melodrama easier to pull off – on the biggest stage.

And as such, perhaps our ‘modern’ attempts to govern and regulate ourselves are being constantly undermined? Perhaps our recent spate of cultural ‘degeneracy’ is akin to ‘planned obsolescence’ in an automobile? If so, one might see this then as a Machiavellian form of social engineering. Such a strategy fits perfectly within our Postflavian SSSM sociological model of Shepherds, Sheepdogs, and Sheep, which is otherwise known from ancient times as a form of “divide and conquer” strategy. And are we then, being cynically primed to accept a new ‘cleansing’ to launch the new age, just as has happened before? Are we also being encouraged to blame the scarecrow, or the sheepdogs instead of the shepherds?

A Biblical Secret Society of Secretive, Celibate Males

And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps: And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. (Revelation 14:1-3 KJV)

A great deal of information is packed into the above three verses. We are told that there is indeed an elite secret society, one that is singing a song which no one else is privy to. And that these will be “redeemed from the earth”, and that there is some relation to ‘Sion’, or Zion. This all raises a considerable number of questions, which I’ll address later.

According to Revelation, there is no gender diversity, and precious little ethnic diversity, among these 144,000. They are specifically limited to celibate males, descended from the 12 Hebrew tribes of Israel. Perhaps this might include Ashkenazi and the Kittim (Romans, or as the Talmud calls them, Edomites) as well as the tribe of Judah? If we are to go strictly by the genealogies of Genesis, then the answer seems ‘no’ for the Ashkenazi. The Edomites were related to Jacob, aka Israel, and so for them the elite door appears more plausibly open.

And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel. (Revelation 7:4 KJV)

These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb. (Revelation 14:4 KJV)

But, in any case, in terms of being ‘redeemed’, or earning a free pass from the ‘tribulation’, the goyim in general are out of luck. And by the numerical terms alone, so are the balance of the Jews, Ashkenazi or not. However, all those who have managed to be ‘faithful’ and acknowledged the new messiah, will be resurrected and sing wonderful hymns of praise all day and night. Those not so faithful or repentant (or, not predestined), will get a metaphorical hall pass to the circular file, leading ultimately to God’s eternal incinerator.

Curiously, Christians must ride out the seven years of Tribulation, while 144 thousand of the Elect chosen people from the twelve Hebrew tribes get a rapturous free pass, including 12 thousand from the troublesome tribe of Judah. Not only did the Romans think the Jews were trouble, but curiously the Jews’ own Holy Book records them as being uniformly so from the time Judah was born. This is a clue worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

Not to seemingly digress, but this also begs an important question of why the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel would be included in the count when they were long gone to parts unknown, having been removed from the land by the Assyrians, never to return. Especially considering that included within the Lost Tribes was the half-tribe of Ephraim, whose half Egyptian patriarch had been granted the Eternal Blessing of Abraham by grandfather Jacob. Curiously this permanent exile of the ten tribes occurs within the literal, historical fog surrounding the mythical foundation of Rome. The founders are Rome are reputed to descend from the survivors of Troy, having established a curious ‘romantic’ fallout with a Semitic woman, Dido (not the techno-pop singer BTW). Hmmm, beware of women scorned?

The subtextual message is: learn the coming messiah’s new ‘new song’, or else. The coming messiah? Further on, we’ll see that one has already been quietly announced to us recently, while a false messiah is now ‘entertaining’ us. So sad. This false messiah is surrounded by institutional acolytes of a secret society of celibate males. So … coincidental?

Rapture as a Last Resort?

Such individuals might have advance knowledge that would allow them to avoid various geopolitical tribulations. Marching to a drum that only they can hear, and thus forewarned to ‘Flee to Pella’ for safety sake? I will discuss this apocryphal story further on in Part 2, but as well there did seem an odd homage to this story in the events of September 11, 2001.

Who can these secretive, celibate males be throughout Western history?

And for all those cultural Christian, white supremacists out there, is it passing strange that the Christian Good Book places 144,00 celibate Hebrews before them, including 12,000 Jews? Might the description of them, and their mission, match the Society of Jesus, and our assertion elsewhere that the mission, at least, can be traced back to the the 18th Dynasty goals of Egypt. This linking them to the Biblical Exodus story and the original formulation of Zion. Whose current ethnic cleansing debacle evokes the original Conquest?

Well at least the book does reveal that all the ‘other’ faithful, of every ‘nation’, kindred, tongue, and people, will be saved in their own resurrection. This happening at the denouement of the End of Time, apparently whether they had corporeally survived the 7 years of tribulation or not. As your dad or your coach used to say: “It only hurts for a little while”. Or maybe more apropos for today: “And if you believe that, I’ve got some swampland in Florida to sell you”.

In reality this is where the book seemingly gets a little dodgy, or incoherent. Because in some cases is discussed a Heavenly ending for faithful humans, while in others is discussed a ‘resurrection’ onto a restored earth, cleansed from the wickedness of the dragon, Satan. This confusion, in my opinion, is getting to the real crux of what the apocalyptic End Times were and are about. A new order was and is to be imposed by the men behind the curtain, and a cleansing is required to eliminate those that are incompatible with the demands of the New Boss. As that ‘old’ song by The Who stated, the metaphorical New Boss is really the same as the Old Boss, but the circumstances of the day have changed.

In these apocalypses, the prior social orders, seemingly at their apexes, are torn asunder by various degradations, that seem to some eyes to be programmatic and contrived. I believe that this is indeed the case, but take issue with most other interpretations of this phenomenon, especially as to just who is real agent of change, and thus ‘degradation’ here. The goal of the change is to achieve the next new order of the coming age, and the subtext of the Bible, from beginning to end is the ultimate achievement of globalism.

Now we have achieved the ultimate degradation, the selection of a Western world premier democratic leader whose personal values and behavior represent the antithesis of so called Christian Family Values. Yet many of his coterie of advisers seem to be joined at the hip to a secretive society of celibate males that follow the slain Lamb of God wherever he goes. And curiously this secretive society is best known by many as running educational institutions that heavily featured the teachings of the pagan Classical Greeks. This seeming conundrum is only resolved by understanding the true underlying nature of what is going on, rather than pointing fingers at Jews and Gentiles, the central false dialectic of Western Civilization.

Ironically, the word ‘rapture’ means ‘pleasure’. Albeit that specific word (‘rapture’) does not appear in the canon, but rather being an artifact of certain prior and popular evangelical interpretations, yet stemming from such canonic notions as “being redeemed from the earth”.Indeed, it is likely a relative pleasure to be able to bypass such 7 years of war and disasters. But the word’s root is from ‘rapt’ and the Latin rapio, meaning to seize, plunder, and to agitate. This latter as related to passion or animi motus. Emotionally seizing the collective mind is a form of performance magic, distracting all from the true underlying machinations.

Many pastors say that their flocks are part of this Elect, by their mere acceptance of Christ as savior. But the congregations of a few megachurches today quickly exceeds that numerical limit, nor will they meet the other requirements. Does the superstitious, literalist audience see the contradiction here? Perhaps the Christian mullahs have literally ‘seized’ their minds, using the carrot and stick approach of heavenly paradise versus the abject fear of eternal damnation. If the devout believe that they are the Elect mentioned, then they will not be inclined to question what is really being ‘revealed’.

Elect-fulfilling Prophecy?

On the superficial level, generally religious ‘prophecies’ seem to be intended as divine predictors for the future. In reality, they were mostly written after-the-fact, as ‘retrodictive’ historical reportage. In other words, they were conceived as thinly disguised religio-political propaganda. As such, they have no real supernatural – prophetic power in themselves. But, in the case of Christian ‘apocalyptic’ certain circles do indeed utilize these texts today as if they were true divine prophecies, as yet unfulfilled, and albeit somewhat recycled. Here, they are capable of becoming self-fulfilling … via human agency.

I divide these human agencies into two basic categories. The first is that of exoteric ‘true believers’. Some of these overly devout and arrogant humans try to act as God’s fulfillment agents. They take it upon themselves to “Immanentize the Eschaton”, as the late conservative commentator, William F. Buckley once said. Such acts involve a radical redefinition of the word ‘spiritual’. That is, they see themselves as performing the role of God’s judge, jury, and executioners, even if they have appointed themselves so. These types are particularly dangerous to individuals operating within the moral frontiers of our culture wars, such as with abortion providers. However, these individuals and groups tend to be marginalized, with their scope limited. And in this case their dramatic and frequently hypocritical actions only help serve to distance others from taking such as End Times ‘scripts’ seriously as being on the table for consideration.

In other words, these people inoculate us ‘moderns’ from becoming aware to the real operators, or ‘actors’. The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) is a prime example of the latest infection of the mainstream American polity:

… For fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, the prerequisite for the second coming was the physical restoration of Israel or the return of unconverted Jews to modern day Israel. But for the apostles and prophets of the NAR, the prerequisite for the second coming is the spiritual restoration, or conversion of Jews to their brand of Christianity. The result has been the development of Messianic communities and missionary training centers around the world.

Moreover, while fundamentalists look to the scriptures for secret meaning in current events and messages from God, the modern-day apostles and prophets claim to be the bearers of God’s direct ongoing revelation. The results can be bizarre. The leading thinker of the NAR, C. Peter Wagner, stated on NPR in 2011 that the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima was a result of the Japanese emperor having had sex with the sun goddess, that there is “a lot of demonic control” in Congress (and that demons can possess entire cities as well), that it is important to cast spells to protect politicians from witchcraft, and that non-Christian religions “are part of the kingdom of darkness.” All in one hour with Terry Gross.

And yet, the NAR is not on the fringe, but at the center of today’s Republican Party. The Response, a massive Houston prayer event hosted by Rick Perry in 2011, was led by prominent NAR apostles and prophets joined by other Christian Right leaders. Perry’s event was patterned after and led by leaders from TheCall events hosted around the world by “prophet” Lou Engle and Mike Bickle, head of the International House of Prayer (IHOP). These events focus on fighting abortion and gay rights, and on proselytizing Jews in order to bring about the second coming. Engle’s events include one held in Jerusalem and another in Uganda, where local apostles in the movement spoke in support of the “Kill-the-Gays” bill then under consideration by the Ugandan Parliament.

Other Republican politicians have looked to this religio-political movement for support as well, including Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Sam Brownback, Duke Aiona of Hawaii, Katherine Harris of Florida, and many more. One of the NAR’s training centers, the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute (MJBI) in Dallas, featured President George W. Bush as the keynote speaker at its annual fundraising gala. … http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/22/meet-bibi-s-new-tribulation-courting-jew-converting-demon-exorcising-american-allies.html

Note the theme of Jews being converted to Christianity to facilitate the new Second Coming, of which I’ll return to later.

The Knowing, Among the Unknowing

Hidden behind these fundamentalists is a second, much smaller esoteric group. These are the elites that ‘piously’ perform and ‘act’ on the End Times prophecies and other ‘occult’ matters. Here I am using the word ‘pious’ in the original, ‘dutiful’ sense of the word, to describe an emotionless, mechanical ‘ritual’ intended to initiate a temporal unfolding. In the times before Christianity, and even for the Biblical patriarchs of the Old Testament, it was considered dutiful for the head of a household to ritually honor the familial ‘household’ gods in a timely fashion, lest disorder visit the household. With the consolidation of spiritual principles into Judaeo-Christianity, this principle still held sway, albeit disguised within the wider church environment.

However, the ritual evolved to encompass broader goals, including prophecy and fulfillment. I believe that there is an elite human agency that ‘shepherds’ the enactment of the End Time scripts. These few ‘actors’ who are participating wittingly and intentionally, are able to entrain others into going along for a profitable ride, as well as providing inspiration to the devout or unwitting believers mentioned prior. Hence, the human level, scripted plot unfolds repeatedly as time passes. At the end of each era, the Heavenly clock announces a new performance is beginning.

Scripture as Script?

Suppose that a script says that an event is going to happen at a particular time, and then it does. Was the occurrence initiated by divine agency, or by that of human ‘actors’? The answer to the question reveals a confidence game. The true believers are being played for fools, as the highest Material stakes are diabolically disguised as being of Divine origins. And so here is one motivation for linking human geopolitical activities to the Heavens via religious narrative. That is, to help fool the masses as to who is actually pulling the strings.

By the same token, mainstream Rationalists are also being played. Accustomed to ignoring religious rants, they insist that such occurrences are merely coincidences. Thus, they are blinded to the unfolding of the scriptural ‘script’ for Western geopolitics. Here, I am referring to the phased emergence of kingdoms and nations upon the global stage, as cryptically described in Daniel, Revelation, and other (lesser) prophets. The prophets go to the trouble to reveal what their metaphorical symbolism means, but we have been culturally ‘framed’ to ignore all this. In the case of Daniel, we have been fooled by the fact that textual anachronisms revealed that the Book was not written in the time that is claims, but rather in the time of the later Hasmoneans. And thus the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

And so to reiterate, all this should be telling us that these scriptures are indeed scripts, and not so much ‘prophecy’. Unless that is, one wants to redefine the words.

And Away We Go, Staring into the Abyss:

“For unto us a child is born, … The Prince of Peace.“

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this. (Isaiah 9:6-7 KJV)

911-memorial-fountain — Ground Zero Memorial Fountain, the Abyss – aka the Bottomless Pit of Revelation

Back from the Abyss, or Back to the Future?

In September 2015, Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, made an interesting visit to the USA. There is an interesting Catholic Church prophecy that Francis will be the last pope of the Church. But as well, at the first mass, held in NYC’s Madison Square Garden, the above verses from Isaiah 9 were read prior to Francis’ homily.

Just prior to this announcement, Francis made a visit to Ground Zero in New York, and stared into the Abyss. Or at least, the virtual abyss formed by the geometry of the 9/11 Memorial Fountain. He visited this landmark besides passing by several other related biblical aspects. Then in his flight home to Rome he looked out the window of his plane at an apocalyptic Blood Red Moon. Just another coincidence?

One might easily be tempted to say that all these occurrences mean absolutely nothing. After all, where is the priest who doesn’t read Isaiah 9 from time to time? And, what tourist to New York doesn’t go to see Ground Zero? However, note that the verses from Isaiah were oddly delivered in Spanish. And of course, these verses are normally delivered as part of a Christmas message, not in September.

Why, pray tell, would the Pope announce that a new savior is born, after staring into the Bottomless Pit? Perhaps it will become clearer upon pondering the relationship between the Apostle Paul’s visit to Rome and Castor and Pollux, which I’ll discuss later on. Also, see my related 9/11 article.

The Abyss of 9/11/2001 (not 2000), the Fifth Trumpet

Francis leaves 2 white roses at WTC Memorial Fountain, the Bottomless Pit

Next, let’s examine what else happens in relation to the narrative in the Book of Revelation. As to what transpired on 9/11/2001, I have previously speculated that the event appeared to be a ritual ceremony of some sort. At that time I had not realized the significance of the fact that there was no year Zero in the Anno Domini calendar system. And thus while everyone had been excited about Y2K, the year 2000, or (party like it’s) 1999, our focus should have been on 2001. This in regards to any millennial End Times analysis, at least.

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. (Revelation 9:1-2 KJV)

Of course, there are other details not quoted, like locusts, scorpions, and men unsuccessfully seeking death, as well as four earlier angels and trumpets. While such aspects might be meaningful to initiates or insiders, I have not identified a compellingly unique and powerful analysis. That said, there are also many references throughout Revelation that are Zodiacal in nature, but let’s discuss that later.

The Collapse into the Pit: Revelation 9/11?

When the Twin Towers had collapsed into their basements, only smoke arose out of the two pits. Once the reconstruction was completed, one tower was replaced while the other site was turned into a memorial fountain, whose bottom cannot be seen while standing anywhere around the periphery.

And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. (Revelation 9:11 KJV)

The angel’s name is Apollyon, in honor of the pagan god Apollo, the Sun god. And importantly, as I related in my 9/11 analysis about the myths about Apollo giving a feast to honor his father Jupiter, both Jupiter and Apollo, the Sun god, were directly overhead on the celestial stage that day. In fact, the Sun and the Moon framed Castor and Pollux, with Jupiter directly between them. Castor and Pollux were the twin saviors of the age prior to Christ for the Greco-Romans. The Moon’s relative motion, the fastest celestial object, actually clocked the timing of the major events of the day.

bad-hombre — Castor and Pollux, Twin Mounties of the Golden Horde?

Apostle Paul rode on a ship named Castor and Pollux for his fateful trip from Malta to Rome where he initiated normative Christianity, or so we are told. And in mythicist terms, Jesus became a type of Apollo, honoring his father, ‘Yah pater’. I have not been the first person to make this equation, although it has also been debated. If Yahweh is Jo’ve, the equation symbolizes the cross-cultural unity of the elites at the highest levels of the western system. In the same way today, at the top, the distinction between Republicans and Democrats functionally fades away to nothing.

Finally, notice that at about the same time as Pope Francis was having Isaiah 9 recited en Español before his homily at the Madison Square Garden papal mass, Donald Trump was ranting about “bad hombres” crossing the southern border with Mexico in hordes. And, Trump’s strange affiliations with Vladimir Putin were becoming increasingly noted. Perhaps Trump and Putin are being cast as another instantiation of the ancient pair of saviors.

More on Castor and Pollux later, further linking them to Apollo, Christ, the Cross, and that earlier central Christian and Flavian symbolic motif, the Fish and Anchor.

The 6th Trumpet Announces War Loosed on the Euphrates…

And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men. And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them. (Revelation 9:13-21 KJV)

Within months of 9/11, George W. Bush launched an assault in Afghanistan with the stated purpose to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Then in March 2003, the US launched a major offensive in Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein. However, the US has not resolved the conflict, even now. This failure to complete the mission sets the stage for “time ending” in chapter 10, and then the appearance of “two witnesses” in chapter 11.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning“

The Iraq war brought back memories of Vietnam. In a scene from the famous 1979 Vietnam War movie, Apocalypse Now, an American jet fighter sortie approaches. Flying low, the fighters unleash a wave of bombs that engulfs an entire forest in flames. Robert Duval’s character, Lieutenant Colonel “Bill” Kilgore, watches approvingly. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, he says. If anyone was not familiar with the term ‘apocalypse’ before this film appeared, they certainly became so afterwards. Even among those who didn’t see the movie, it virtually redefined the meaning of the word. That is, any epic conflagration or disaster, either from man-made or natural causes, is now an ‘apocalypse’. And, why is it that so many people “love the smell” of an apocalypse? Just what is this fascination with destruction?

This secular meaning of ‘apocalypse’ has culturally evolved from its prior religious contextual association. The difference is that a modern apocalypse is now caused by man or nature, and no longer so much by divine agency. For the latter, perhaps the most spectacular example is the mythic imagery coming from the Book of Revelation. However, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark include elements of the same genre. They, in turn, were inspired by the Old Testament books of Ezekiel and Daniel. In all of these books, the so-called End of Time is a central motif. But after the End, God’s anointed surrogate comes to restore order in one fashion or another.

In reality, the term originates from the Greek apokalupsis, meaning to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal’. This was the original Greek title of the Book of Revelation. Of course, the book reveals a terrible conflagration and battle between Christ and various evil doers. In any case, over time the ‘revelatory’ term in the title of the main book in question has come to represent the melodramatic supernatural events depicted within it in a much more secular, albeit grandiose, fashion. Was this reframing of the apocalypse concept deliberate? While we all focus our collective attentions on a massive number of concerning man-made (and natural) distractions, the real mechanisms and structures of substantive cultural and governmental change are deceptively slipped past us … or down our throats.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick …. tock

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices. And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.

And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets. (Revelation 10:5-7 KJV)

Not completely specified as to just when, the tenth chapter quietly announces between all the blaring trumpets that time is “no longer”. Note the first highlighted text is another solar reference. One might be tempted to conjecture that the rainbow is a gay topical cultural reference for the new age, but I will circumspectly abstain. I can neither confirm nor deny.

Two Witnesses, Two Olive Trees, One Script

And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.

And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will. (Revelation 11:1-6 KJV)

Of course, any student of Iraq knows that the West created Saddam Hussein as a puppet. He subsequently received western assistance during Iraq’s long war with Iran, including receiving materials to manufacture chemical weapons. He represented the essence of nationalism, gone bad. At the same time, George W. Bush represented a paradigm of proud American nationalism. We got to watch the noose placed around Saddam’s neck, and a corresponding thunk. But we never got to see the hanging beef … for some reason. (Same with Osama. The latter’s family having been quite close to the Bush family.)

Fee, Fi, Faux, Fum, I Smell the …

With one Hussein actor taken care, another one popped onto the domestic scene, further inflaming apocalyptic fears amongst the hoi polloi. This despite that the latter (Barack Hussein Obama and his wife) were globalist corporatists like the faux populist Clintons, and the faux evangelical Bush, and the faux populist Trump.

Note that the witnesses also represent two separate ‘churches’, clearly identified by the ‘candlestick’ metaphor first employed by John in the opening chapters. They are also identified as being of two ‘olive trees’, and this is interesting in light of the typology of Romans 11 discussed in Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah. For in Romans 11 the branches discussed in the grafting are respectively from the wild and domesticated olive trees. And so if we apply the same thinking, then we can identify the trees. Namely, the globalist versus nationalist camps are represented by the ‘domesticated’ versus the ‘wild’ trees.

Globalists in Nationalist Clothing

While George W. Bush superficially represented nationalist America, in reality his family has always been internationalists, as epitomized by the old label of the Eastern Liberal Establishment. Historically, these families of the ELE can properly be seen as having Tory ‘royalist’ roots from before the Revolutionary War. Their wealth and status was collectively derived from aristocratic colonial land grants. This in contrast to Barack Hussein Obama, with a conveniently apocalyptic first name (in an Islamic context), who in reality was a Wall Street corporate functionary along with his wife. So despite the superficial appearances, the Obamas actually have similar internationalist leanings with the Bushes, rather than being the revolutionary jihadist of agitprop legend. Albeit his imperial ‘reactions’ to Republican legislative intransigence, explicitly asserted in order to “destroy his presidency”, inflamed the zealots du jour to even higher levels of paranoia.

Note then, the real life typological dialectic formed between the Republic and the Imperium. Today’s situation compares very closely to the rise to Empire under the first Prince of Peace, Augustus Caesar. And now we have a new savior, or false messiah, who is ruling imperially by executive order, his faux populism much like Augustus’ uncle, Julius Caesar. Today’s Republic may now be dead, and so beware the Ides of March.

The Beast From the Pit

The “two witnesses” are metaphorically defeated by the beast from the bottomless pit, and then rehabilitated … for playing their assigned acting roles:

And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.

And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them. And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven. (Revelation 11:7-13 KJV)

The Reality Show Beast Emerges from his Resorts

Here my cyclical model helps explain the wide variety of chaotic social phenomenon today. For example, consider the just finished, “rigged” US Presidential election debacle. Within my model the Seventh Trumpet has now unleashed a Yuuuge reality show beast of a Lifetime Actor, to use Joseph Atwill’s term. Okay, so all these presidential elections are rigged, but this one seems exceptional. For here it fits precisely into the most specific details of the canonic ‘script’ being played out, or ‘revealed’, in front of us.

One of the new President’s top advisers, Steve Bannon, has even made a high tech Internet address to a Vatican audience, where he calls for a holy war against both Islam, generally, and secular humanists. Could this be related to his institutional association with the select brotherhood mentioned in the Book of Revelation, or is this my overactive imagination? The new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, wants to starve the secular public school system, that built America’s middle class, to death and replace it with ‘for profit’ religious schools. Such holy crusaders being selected by a golden haired beast with the moral reputation far below a dubious golden shower. His associations with abuse of women, self suggestions of incest, actual racism, organized crime, failure to pay debts, bankruptcies, international money laundering ranked him successful enough for America’s ‘forgotten’ white sheep to raise him from the moral gutter, adjacent to the Abyss.

The 7th Trumpet

Next in the narrative sequence and the 7th Trumpet sounding we see an explicit globalist announcement:

And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. And the four and twenty elders, which sat before God on their seats, fell upon their faces, and worshipped God, Saying, We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come; because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned.

And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth. And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail. (Revelation 11:15-19 KJV)

Here we see the explicit announcement of a new world order, even more apropos for now than 2,000 years ago, and yet still tied to a millennial construct, via the association with the 24 elders, each one representing one millennium of the Zodiacal Great Year (to be discussed later). And also in this regard, we see an admission that the Lord, in some guise, comes repeatedly, apparently tied to a millennial schedule. The phrase ‘which art, and wast, and art to come’ seems to be an allusion to all of the three ‘ages’ and transitions I will be discussing in this series. Pagan, Christian and Judaic elements are linked together within one construct. And here consistent with our Old Testament analysis theme of the False Dialectic of Jews versus Gentiles.

We know from before that this person was identified as Jesus, who then came back as general Titus Flavius, the son of the god, Vespasian, to destroy the first Third Temple in 70 CE. While we do not know who the ‘Christ’ savior will be for this millenium, we do know that a parallel millennial event occurred for 1070 CE. This was the effective end of the Norman Conquest, which began in late 1066 CE, and was documented by the Domesday Book. Domesday as in ‘Doomsday’ – an explicit reference to Revelation. It seems that someone was indeed keeping time, and according to the original Christian notion of when the Second Coming occurred no less.

Mary Barker, in her book The Great Angel, said that the Christian invocation of the Suffering Servant motif taken from Isaiah, was intended to link Jesus, aka Yeshua, to Joshua, aka Yeshua, of the Exodus period. This Joshua was the leader of the Conquest fame. Thus, Jesus represented a type of earthly, martial messiah, consistent with the Jewish Zealot’s contemporaneous beliefs. More on this later, but we’ll see that these two ‘Yeshuas‘ were acting within two (out of four) distinctly different operational phases of a Western millennial construct, i.e. Conquest, Colonization, Consolidation, and Chasm.

However, the Jesus and Christ that we all grew up with, and the coming savior that Pope Francis’ mass announced will be operating in the same respective phases. And thus both their End Time actions will align perfectly with the transition of the ages, their respective Alphas and Omegas.

And in regard to the issues of globalism versus nationalism, we have above: “And the nations were angry.” How descriptive is this of today’s passionate, agitated rise of nationalism, about to be struck down in a violent tribulation, led by its faux populist?

From Sea to Eternally Draining Swamp

Mar-a-Lago translates word for word as “Sea to Lake”. However, there is no lake anywhere near the estate. At best, there might have been a skeeter infested green pond. More likely given the history of Florida in the day of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the land was a swamp. Thus the old refrain: “And if you believe that, I’ve got some swampland in Florida to sell you.” And so the name Mar-a-Lago was likely a typical real estate hype. The name properly should have been Sea to Swamp, Mar-a-Marisma, or just plain Marisma.

If we ignore the chameleon-like nature of the Bush family, George W. Bush appealed to his Republican voters as a nationalist, while Barack Hussein Obama appealed to his base as a globalist typical of a modern day Democrat. Importantly, in both case the beast from the bottomless pit defeated them and their legacies, thus setting the stage for the sounding of 7th Trumpet, and unleashing the loose and unhinged cannon. It seems transparent that Bush and Obama can be seen as the two witnesses, and Trump is the beast from the pit who has defeated them.

Then another beast (or, perhaps, the same beast) arises from the sea. Jumping out of sequence we see:

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. (Revelation 13:1-2 KJV)

Whether or not Donald Trump is the beast rising up “out of the sea” from Mar-a-Lago we can not be sure yet. It should be noted here, that one type of analysis on Revelation asserts that the attributions of actions listed separately for the 7 seals, the 7 trumpets, and the 7 angels with the seven bowls are really meant to be read in parallel, connecting the numbers, so to speak.

Then again, it’s possible that the modern re-enactment might cycle through these sequences in series, or jumping around. Similarly, the various beasts may be different, or they may be the same character. Such difficulties serve to enhance plausible deniability, for those who are inclined to believe that everything is coincidence, or that these alleged connections are a result of confirmation bias. The element of unpredictability also makes it difficult, if not impossible, to make a killing on the stock market simply by observing the sequence of events as an outsider. For that, it is necessary to be an insider, with access to a copy of the modern screenplay, with the actors’ names specified for all the characters.

But he at least appears to be a false messiah of sorts, as preceded Jesus and Christ Titus typologically. He has been helped to his election via his unabashed friendship with the Russian bear and its leader, Vladimir Putin. Below he has enlisted a religious zealot to help foment a holy crusade, along with others in his administration. Ironically in light of his Christian support, his cultural relationship to Satan seems much tighter, even if metaphorical.

Crowd Size at Pompeo’s Theater?

The eerie similarity of the name Pompeo to Pompey is another name oddity. Besides Julius Caesar’s civil war with Pompey, he was later assassinated in Pompey’s Theater, in a meeting with the Senate. Now, our new czar (from caesar) recently had his first meeting in Pompeo’s new ‘house’, at Langley, where he wailed like a weak sissy about being slighted, standing in front of a wall honoring dead CIA spooks. Et tu Pompeo?

… Donald Trump has appointed Pompeo to head the CIA; his confirmation hearings begin on Thursday [on 1/12/17 – ed]. If a normal Republican president had nominated a figure like this to head the country’s major foreign intelligence agency, there likely would have been a lot of attention paid to his apocalyptic religiosity and Manichaean worldview. Amid the fire hose of lunacy that is the Trump transition, however, Pompeo’s extremism has been overlooked. It’s worth pausing to appreciate the fact that America’s CIA will shortly be run by a man who appears to view American foreign policy as a vehicle for holy war. … http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/01/mike_pompeo_trump_s_pick_for_the_cia_wants_a_holy_war.html

Pompeo has indeed been confirmed as CIA Director since the above was written.

The False Messiah, the AntiChrist?

Whatever the case of accurately decoding parallel typological identities, on Christmas Day, 2016 we received the following official announcement that Donald Trump is the new King for the new age:

“Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind,” the message from RNC chair Reince Priebus and co-chair Sharon Day said. “Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King.” …
http://fortune.com/2016/12/25/rnc-new-king-trump-christmas/

But can this really be the case? Pope Francis had quietly announced just over a year before that the new savior had just been born. Could this have been a metaphoric reference to the Trump campaign, which had just gotten underway at the time? Well, maybe. But it might be a bad portent for the presumptuous king, if being along the narrative lines of Julius Caesar. Or are we now witnessing a new Tiberius, a Caligula, or Nero perhaps? If a type of Caesar, then my vote is on the first of the three. Or perhaps even more likely, I would guess that Trump is a false messiah of the zealous new nationalists.

As regards to such confusions regarding parallel within seemingly opposing camps, in Part 3 I’ll discuss a recent theory that placed two dynasties of Egypt as actively playing both sides of the fence in the Biblical Exodus story. This, of course, becomes impossible to do in the exact same manner due to the modern technology of mass electronic media. But this seeming obstacle does not stop our new Twitter President from appearing to be all things to all people, or from trying to.

Israel’s Interior Minister Expects a Messiah

As speculated regarding the 7th Trumpet announcing Donald Trump’s stage role in today’s drama, one can certainly dismiss such as the following Israeli rhetoric as fanciful. In any case, notice the theme and subtext being repeated again, an impasse over illegal Jewish settlements in ‘Zion’ leading us to an apocalyptic Armageddon?

… Trump’s election, he added, presages the coming of the Messianic Age.

“If such a miracle can happen, we have already reached the days of the Messiah. Therefore, we are really in the era of the birth pangs of the Messiah when everything has been flipped to the good of the Jewish people.” …
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Trumps-election-heralds-coming-of-Messiah-says-Deri-472282

And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads. (Revelation 14:1 KJV)

Of course, if we take the above, along with the earlier excerpt regarding the infiltration of such as the NAR into the mainstream of American ‘conservative’ politics, then perhaps this all should indeed be getting our serious ‘existential’ attention. This strain of evangelical Christianity emphasizes the importance of converting Jews to accept the coming messiah. Of course, Jews claim that they have been faithfully waiting for over two thousand years. Whatever the case, the opportunity now presents for Jews to indeed accept a new messiah, and if it just so happens that the Christian’s second Second Coming Christ is one and the same as the Jew’s messiah, then … what the Hell?

The Third Temple and the Second Third Temple

Right-wing Israeli lawmakers in town for Donald Trump’s inauguration addressed prominent American evangelicals gathered at Greater New Hope Baptist Church in downtown Washington, D.C. on Thursday, lecturing them on the importance of moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and offering hope that President-elect Donald Trump would fulfill his promise to do so.

Speaking to a gathering that included a who’s who of Christian right leaders — including Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, Faith & Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed, and Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson — Israeli Knesset member Yehuda Glick, who belongs to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, spoke about Trump’s election in messianic terms.

He began his remarks by approvingly quoting Psalm 72, which speaks of welcoming a new king. “It is a prayer for King Solomon, and it is the prayer for all kings and especially a prayer for the king of the United States.” …
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/19…-king-of-the-united-states-with-evangelicals/

Part of the literary mechanism used to recycle the biblical narratives involves some creative accounting regarding the Jerusalem Temple. Generally, in order for evangelical Christians to see their End Times scenario fulfilled, the Jews must rebuild their Jerusalem Temple, the so-called Third Temple. Once this is accomplished, then Christ can come again, as did Titus Flavius, and destroy the temple of the deniers of the new manifestation of Christ – for the new age.

The reason that creative accounting is required is that the Third Temple was actually destroyed by Christ Titus Flavius, as a consequence of his Second Coming and this grafting onto the Root of Jesse (Romans 11). According to the Bible, the first temple was Solomon’s, the second temple was Zerubbabel’s, and the third was Herod’s temple. And so the easy way to solve this problem, for repeatability’s sake, is to merge Zerubbbel’s and Herod’s temples into one edifice. Now a second Third Temple becomes possible to build and destroy. From a typological purity standpoint this, last event might be expected in the year 2070 CE; not that modern elites would necessarily feel bound to any particular interpretation of the script.

The Sistine Chapel replicates Solomon’s Temple

Or perhaps any new temple would be the third Third Temple. That is, the second Third Temple would be the one in New Jerusalem, i.e. Rome, with its Sistine Chapel. The latter built by the Franciscans as a replica of Solomon’s Temple, done so for their End Times fantasy five hundred years ago. For this question see the documentary, The Michelangelo Code. Importantly, this issue again brings up another concept, and that of a possible sub-millennial activity period of 500 years. This will be discussed more later, but suffice to say that this possibility provides for a mainstream chronological linkage with the expulsion of the Hyksos by Ahmose I around 1500 BCE. Around 1500 CE, the della Rovere popes, of the Sistine Chapel fame, were overseeing the massive push to colonize the New World. Both movements of peoples were precipitated by massive cultural chasms.

Whatever the case with the Sistine Chapel — as if on cue, the fundamentalist Zionist Jews of today are itching at the political opportunity to start rebuilding the temple. This is the very reason that modern Israel was created in the first place, so that this integral part of the End Times process could be made to transpire.

But in order to start the rebuilding process some incidents must occur first in order to alter the current political status quo between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Currently the Palestinians have political say so over what happens on the Temple Mount. Trump’s threat to move the American embassy to Jerusalem may indeed be part of precipitating the violent political changes needed, as the Palestinians see this action as meaning the possibility of a so-called Two State Solution as becoming impossible to achieve. Regarding the potential moving of the embassy, and Trump’s silence on plans for new Israeli housing units in the West Bank, and the potential for igniting regional violence:

… Trump on Thursday told Fox News it was too early for him to speak publicly on the issue. Giuliani, who was known during his tenure for a hard-line attitude toward even petty crime in New York City, dismissed Palestinian warnings that moving the embassy would ignite the whole region.

“I think this country is capable of dealing with waves of violence,” the former mayor said.

Giuliani predicted Netanyahu and Trump would have a “very, very good, collaborative relationship,” as opposed to what he described as the “hostile relationship” between President Barack Obama and the Israeli leader.

The changed atmosphere was already evident in the first week of Trump’s tenure. While construction plans beyond Israel’s 1967 border were a recurring source of friction with the Obama administration, Trump was silent this week as Israeli officials approved plans for 2,500 housing units in the West Bank and hundreds of apartments in eastern Jerusalem.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee, called the building plans a “flagrant violation of international law” and accused Israel of “exploiting the inauguration of the new American administration to escalate its violations and the prevention of any existence of a Palestinian state.” … https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-01-26/trump-will-keep-vow-to-put-embassy-in-jerusalem-giuliani-says

Would it be ironic to note here that the modern surname for Julius Caesar would be ‘Giuliani’? And was this person in Building 7, the Saloman Brother’s Building on September 11, 2001? This building was where the mayor’s Emergency Command Center was after all. If you’re going to hold a Mithraic Mass on 9/11 who better to have attend?

Armageddon – Megiddo

And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared. And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty. Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. (Revelation 16:12-16 KJV)

As with the sounding of the sixth trumpet being about the Euphrates conflict, the same is here with the sixth angel, eventually the scene of conflict shifting to a place called Armageddon, or Har Meggido, in modern day Israel. And once again, we see a global assertion, ubiquitous within the Judeo-Christian canon, and the Roman as well.

Considering the intervening verses, it is hard to say whether we have already arrived at the sixth angel with his vial. Perhaps this is a parallel (simultaneous) event with the sixth trumpet, perhaps not. In any case, war is still technically active in the Euphrates, and events and actions must precipitate the spread to Har Meggido. As the Wiki links suggests, one might take this as a metaphoric reference to Israel, and Jerusalem, generally.

Conclusion (of Part 1)

And so here we have learned that the Bible, in the odd Book of Revelation, has informed us that there is a secret society of celibate males that have a song, which only they know. They are one step closer to God than the rest of us in what appears to be a Zionist agenda. Imagine that, Christians with a Zionist global agenda!!!

And that world events are eerily transpiring according to specific references within the script of scripture. Given the focus on Lifetime Actors here at Postflaviana one might accuse me of having an a priori bias in my interpretation. Well, you decide.

As I will discuss in the next part, we’ll find out about a virtual silent coup d’etat that took place in the United States of America, while the latest President was only thinking about running for President, urged on to do so while getting roasted by entertainment elites joking about both their and his privy parts. Anything for a good cause. Whatever, the goddess Fortuna is now looking down kindly on us, as the new President’s vision is the Prosperity Gospel, his Cabinet of Zionist holy warriors will make the stockholders, and his uneducated rabble very happy.

“Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus (Titus, William, Castor and Pollux) going on before.”

Discuss in Forum!

Shakespeare, Jewish? Is That Anti-Semitic?

Jerry Russell

September 17, 2016

moorish-woman — Portrait of a Moorish Woman, after Paolo Veronese

Emilia Bassano: a Black Jewish Woman Wrote Shakespeare?

In his book Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, Joseph Atwill argues that the Shakespeare plays were written by Emilia Bassano Lanier, who he believes was secretly Jewish. Emilia’s father, Baptista Bassano, had emigrated to London from Venice to become a musician for the Tudor court. The Bassanos of Italy were Sephardic Jews of Moroccan ancestry. Emilia herself was referred to as ‘the Moor’. The woman in the image to the right probably looked nothing like Emilia Bassano, aside from the color of her skin. (However, Emilia Bassano’s mother was an Englishwoman and a ‘radical’ Protestant.)

Emilia received an aristocratic education at the estates of Susan Wingfield, Countess of Kent and Margaret, Countess of Cumberland. She became a mistress to Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin, Lord Hundson, and became pregnant at the age of twenty-three. She was then married off to her cousin, Alphonso Lanier, a volunteer in the British navy. The marriage was unhappy, and scholars have been speculating that Emilia was involved in an affair with William Shakespeare, who wrote about her as his “Dark Lady” of the Sonnets. Hundson went on to become the patron of Shakespeare’s theater company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

Atwill maintains that Bassano was the primary author, although he acknowledges the possibility of group theories. However, in this article I will argue that it’s just as likely that Shakespeare and Bassano worked together as a team to produce the works.

Maya Angelou agrees: “Shakespeare must be a black girl.”

According to The Atlantic, the famous author and civil rights advocate “was speaking metaphorically, of course.” Angelou quoted Sonnet 29, and said:

He wrote it for me:

“When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

Of course he wrote it for me: that is a condition of the black woman. Of course, he was a black woman. Nobody else understands it, but I know that Shakespeare was a black woman.

The CIA and the counter-culture

A major theme at this website is that the CIA and its MK-Ultra project set the 1960’s counter-culture in motion. We believe that in order to accomplish this goal, they promoted LSD and other drugs to the general public. As a result, many citizens have been turned into drugged, confused slaves. We claim that cultural heroes such as Ken Kesey, Aldous Huxley, and even The Beatles were part of the plot. Atwill argues that even Shakespeare should be regarded in the same way, as sophisticated propaganda.

By working to expose this scheme, we see ourselves in the role of cultural defenders. Paul Dunbar seems to agree with us about most of this. However, he does not extend that same respect towards Joseph Atwill’s review of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In his post Very Like a Whale, Dunbar ridicules Atwill’s view that Shakespeare himself was part of the plot.

I would like to respond on Atwill’s behalf, to aspects of this critique from Dunbar. This is based on conversations with Atwill, as well as the experience of working with him on podcasts over the last two years. Joe has reviewed and approved the statements made on his behalf. This post also includes my own reactions and responses to the issues Dunbar raised.

Dunbar’s critique of Joseph Atwill

Here is a summary of Dunbar’s critique of Atwill’s thesis:

It is ‘apophenia’ (that is, Atwill is seeing faces in the clouds) rather than legitimate analysis.
The approach is ‘reductivist’ (reductionist?), ignoring vast layers of meaning and significance in Shakespeare’s work.
It is culturally destructive, because Atwill wants his readers to avoid Shakespeare. Atwill says Shakespeare is boring and hard to read, not to mention sick. Dunbar complains that Atwill “must destroy what he does not understand.“
Emilia Bassano Lanier couldn’t have been the author, because she was too young.
It seems that Dunbar smells a whiff of anti-Semitism rising from Atwill’s theory.

Atwill’s reply

Again in summary form:

The analysis of The Tempest is entirely grounded in the known fact the author used Isaiah as the play’s symbolic framework. The parallels cannot be viewed in isolation, but must be evaluated in that context.
The new framework solves many previously inscrutable mysteries about Shakespeare. No other analytical framework is equally powerful.
If the analysis is correct, Shakespeare should be avoided.
Dunbar’s analysis of the chronology is simply incorrect. Many authors have produced significant works at the same age postulated for Emilia Bassano Lanier in the role of Shakespeare.
Dunbar is trying to accomplish by an obscene scatalogical slander, what he could not do with analysis. The bankruptcy of his position is only underscored by his curt dismissal of our attempts to engage in public discussion.

Atwill’s ‘Jewish Conspiracy’ hypothesis

In a follow-up post, Dunbar re-iterated his theme of an unpleasant smell coming from Atwill’s direction. Dunbar leaves some room for plausible deniability, but his meaning seems clear enough. Dunbar says that according to Atwill, The Tempest is ‘really’ about a “fiendish Zionist plot to put the Gentiles into an MKULTRA dream-state” which will lead to the end of the world. After this apocalypse, “there’ll be nothing left but owls and blossoms. And Jews, obviously”.

In his article on The Tempest, Atwill expressed it this way: “it is hard not engage in paranoid wondering of to what extent Jewish influence in the media is related to the ‘dream state’ for Gentiles described in the Tempest”. And furthermore, Atwill is certainly steadfast in maintaining that his fearful curiosity and concern about the political situation is well warranted.

Atwill’s view is that US and world governments, media, corporations, and religions are becoming increasingly dominated by a secret society. His working hypothesis is that, at its core, the secret society may be ruled by a very small group of oligarchs, or perhaps even a single family or person.

Considering the hierarchical nature of so many human organizations, Joe’s concern cannot be ruled out a priori. And if there is such a ruling center, its agenda might very possibly be rooted in some primitive tribal or ethnic viewpoint.

Atwill points to Shakespeare as the first evidence of a possible breakaway scheme by elite Jews, perhaps one particular family, to infiltrate and then achieve domination over ‘the Gentiles’ and their cultural and governmental institutions.

Can there be any justification for “paranoid wondering”?

Long-time visitors of this website will be well aware of a simmering controversy among the authors here, regarding this Jewish question. Rick Stanley and I feel that the hypothesis of a Jewish takeover of the New World Order is demonstrably wrong. As we have argued in several articles, actually the Jews seem to be in a scapegoat or sheepdog role with respect to more powerful Gentile institutions. And it’s often hard to know whether to describe this as a “plot”, or more of a result of age-old, impersonal cultural memes.

What’s worse: by entertaining the hypothesis, Atwill leaves himself (and, by extension, us) vulnerable to Dunbar’s charge of anti-Semitism. We have enough problems with marginalization of our ideas, without having to deal with this as well.

But, I don’t feel the charge of anti-Semitism is accurate, even when it comes to Atwill’s hypothesis.

Atwill is opposed to anti-Semitism!

Or at any rate, Atwill’s hypothesis of a possible Jewish conspiracy is very different from anti-Semitism in its classical, medieval or Fascist forms. He does not hold that there is any fundamental flaw in the Jewish character. Nor does he claim that Jewish religion is any more flawed than the other ancient traditions, Abrahamic or otherwise.

Indeed, if there is a Jewish conspiracy, Atwill believes the vast majority of Jews don’t know anything about it, and therefore are completely blameless. If indeed a tiny cabal of Jews has “taken over”, it’s purely an accident of history, and any other ethnic or religious group might have been in this role instead.

Futhermore, Atwill also recognizes that the plot involving MK-Ultra and the CIA seems to have involved people of various religions and ethnic backgrounds. Similarly, secret societies such as the Freemasons, Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg and so forth, are very diverse in ethnic terms, although to varying degrees they attract mostly elite participants.

Neither is there any obvious pattern of ethnicity at any other major power center. That is, except for the oft-noted concentration of Jews in media and banking. In both of these arenas, this can be explained in terms of Rick Stanley’s Shepherd-Sheepdog model. Or, more prosaically, the Christian religion has often taken a dim view of professions such as money-lending or acting. Thus, those fields have been wide open for Jewish participation.

Atwill’s call for DNA testing

Recognizing these issues, Atwill has stated that “DNA testing of all involved is necessary to determine the role ethnicity has played in the creation of the secret society that rules our country.” It is only on the basis of such testing, that Atwill believes anyone could be justified in going beyond paranoid wondering. He argues that such testing has the potential to put an end to speculation about Jewish plots, as well as the potential to confirm such speculations.

There’s no reason for anyone to oppose the evaluation of DNA data or samples that are offered voluntarily. With Facebook and Twitter, most people don’t have any secrets left anyhow. Sites such as 23andme.com already give customers the option to make their DNA information available for genealogy research.

However, many people (including, especially, elites) will not voluntarily choose to supply the data Atwill is asking for. In this case, principles of natural law (such as the right to privacy, and to avoid self-incrimination) come into play. I would strenuously oppose any efforts to get this data involuntarily, either through legal proceedings or stealth. Attempting to obtain DNA samples from deceased persons also poses ethical and practical problems. It may be extraordinarily difficult to acquire the sort of data Atwill is hoping for.

The Biggest Trial of the Ages?

Another question is, how would you know whose DNA to test? In other words, who is part of the alleged inner core of the conspiracy? And just as important, who is to be held guilty? We can only hope that even in the innermost circle, at least some of the elite are fighting hard against the tide of evil. Sorting out the guilty from the innocent would require a trial that would dwarf the Nuremberg proceedings. And who is fit to play the role of judge and jury?

And if we were able to put on such a trial, why would we then need DNA data? It would be purely a matter of scientific curiosity at that point, to determine the ethnic aspects of the conspiracy.

But without some sort of way to sort out the guilty from the innocent, and insiders from collaborators, there is a danger of circular reasoning from DNA. That is, it would be tempting to assume guilt based on racial criteria, rather than perform a fact-based analysis of the ethnicity of the conspiracy. Using DNA to ferret out some suspect ethnicity and eliminate them from powerful positions, would be the very essence of racial profiling.

Atwill needs to map out a strategy for how this pitfall can be avoided.

Dunbar plays the ‘anti-Semitic’ card

Regardless of the details of the analysis, it’s impossible to discuss the “New World Order” without having some model of the role of the Jews. So anyone who addresses this topic at any honest level, is at risk of being accused of anti-Semitism.

Considering that Dunbar seems generally inclined to share the analysis expressed by Jan Irvin and Joe Atwill at Gnostic Media, his attack on Joe seems most un-collegial. We especially don’t appreciate his playing the ‘anti-Semitic’ card. In the alternative media, we need to be able to follow an analytic path without fear of being called on the carpet for being politically incorrect. It should be clear enough, that elite Jews do have some sort of role to play in the power structure. If nothing else, the memes of the Jewish religion play an important part in the culture wars. We aren’t going to make much progress towards understanding, if we enforce a gag order about these issues. And this can be handled tactfully without giving a green light to hate speech.

Shakespeare as Jewish revenge literature

In Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, Atwill argues that the Shakespearean plays are all, in a way, the same. That is, they always involve the Jews taking revenge for sins of long ago. In the Jewish war of the 1st century, the Romans defeated the Jews after a titanic struggle. The Romans destroyed the Temple, and invented a new religion to compete with Judaism. The new religion mocked Jewish ideas of a Messianic leader. Instead, the world was given a pro-Roman pacifist as a Messiah. The Roman Empire impudently grafted itself into the Jewish tradition, as the new chosen people. And ever since then, the Jews lived as a second-class people, trapped in ghettos, or hounded from country to country.

In the Shakespeare plays, according to Atwill, the Jews turn the tables. They punish the Gentiles (that is, the white Europeans) for the ancient sins of the Flavian Roman Emperors. Atwill suggests that this can only mean that the true author of the Shakespearean plays must be Jewish. He finds that the most likely candidate is Emilia Bassano. Coming from a family of ethnically Sephardic Jews whose loyalty to Christianity was always open to question, she would have been well aware of the Jewish aspects of her heritage.

Emilia Bassano’s Cannibal Feast

Dunbar complains that Atwill’s Shakespeare is “nasty, vengeful and Jewish“. Although Dunbar says he hasn’t read Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, this is reasonably close to the views Atwill spells out in his book. He says that Bassano “intended to inflict the same sense of humiliation on uncomprehending Gentiles that Titus intended for the Jews“.

As Dunbar points out, Bassano published one long poem under her own name, in 1611. This is generally thought to be just after Shakespeare’s retirement from playwriting. This, Dunbar suggests, would be the place to look for Jewish revenge literature. Atwill has already thought of that. In SSM, he argues that the central metaphor of Bassano’s Salve Deus is the presentation of Jesus to the British noble women in her circle, first as an illicit lover and then as a cannibal feast. The rich carnal images are thinly disguised with the liturgical metaphors of church and communion.

Bassano’s poems includes a series of puns on the name of ‘Will’, similar to puns in the Sonnets. Atwill interprets these puns to mean that Bassano is identifying herself with Shakespeare. He suggests that the plays (or, perhaps, the playwright’s body) are being ‘served’ at the cannibal feast. Atwill concludes that Bassano “was taking a personal as well as a historical vengeance” with the dedications of the poem.

So, is this racist?

Dunbar doesn’t explain exactly why he finds this characterization of Shakespeare objectionable. Perhaps this is because there’s nothing to object to. What’s wrong with a Jew who takes some pleasure in imagining the tables reversed, after a millennium of oppression?

Now of course it would be evil for Shakespeare (or Bassano) to seek to actually carry out such a revenge project against all Gentiles. Such a dragnet would include innocent men, women and children who had absolutely nothing to do with the oppression of the Jews, either in the past or present. However, Bassano could hardly be blamed for imagining this reversal, as a literary device. Indeed, for anyone who understands the enormity of the Roman imperial conspiracy to create Christianity, it’s a delicious treat to see the Flavians and their proxies get their just desserts.

Furthermore, it would also be ridiculous to blame Bassano if such a plot were to materialize over the centuries after her death. Anyone who would seek to take ‘an eye for an eye’ in that fashion, is obviously lacking in the sense of humor necessary to read Shakespeare.

You don’t have to be Jewish to know a little Hebrew

Dunbar would also argue that we don’t need to worry about this alleged Jewish agenda in Shakespeare, because it’s all in Atwill’s imagination. Here’s where I don’t agree with Dunbar. I believe that Atwill is correct to see a pattern of Flavian reversal in Shakespeare. But when it comes to the interpretation, here’s where I diverge from both Atwill and Dunbar.

My view is that even a good-hearted Jesuit like Shakespeare (the Stratford man) might take some pleasure in a fantasy of revenge against injustice. And that Shakespeare may also have been working on a propaganda mission for the Tudor court. But if so, it may have been consistent with his own inclinations.

Many commentators have recently speculated that Bassano may have been Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’. If so, and if they worked on some or all of the plays together, so much the better. Such a partnership could easily account for the more strikingly Jewish elements in the Shakespeare plays. Of course, either could have gotten some help with Hebrew puns, from their friends in the Bassano family, even if neither of them knew any Hebrew.

Dunbar’s errors

As a basis for his view, Dunbar analyzes three particular examples from Atwill’s essay about the Tempest. Or rather, I should say he subjects them to ridicule, as Dunbar feels that there is no need to take the arguments seriously. Dunbar has cherry-picked these three items for condemnation, completely neglecting the broader context which Atwill has painstakingly constructed. Dunbar tells his readers to “Read it for yourself if you don’t believe me. Read it, before accusing me of creating straw men or any such thing.” We hope that if his readers take his advice, they will discover that is exactly what Dunbar has done.

Atwill’s analysis of The Tempest is built around the observation that the play is a re-enactment of Isaiah 29 through 35. Atwill is far from the first scholar to have remarked on the relationship between The Tempest and Isaiah. At a certain level it’s obvious, because of the shared character Ariel. What Atwill has done is to go further than other scholars, bringing out more of the parallels between Isaiah and The Tempest, which can be seen to extend across the entire play.

As Dunbar points out, some of those parallels are weak enough that they can only be seen if you’re looking for them. Maybe they were intentional, maybe they weren’t. But they’re consistent with Shakespeare’s strategy, as it emerges across many plays. This is, of course, discussed at greater length in Atwill’s book.

The Four Horsemen In the Clouds

Consider a similar interpretation of the ‘photograph’ that Dunbar uses at the heading of his article. This image, frankly, looks like it’s probably been Photoshopped. If not, it could be the result of combing through thousands of images of clouds. Or perhaps the photographer waited patiently for months, until the desired clouds appeared. In any case, the fact that the image depicts the ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse’ is no coincidence. It’s by design. (According to Snopes, the mystery has been solved. The image originally appeared in a Kenwood car stereo ad.) And furthermore, notice that two of the ‘horsemen’ are unmistakable. However, two others can only be seen because one knows what to look for. It’s a well-known trope that horsemen come in groups of four.

Now, what can you say to someone who says there are only two horsemen in that image? Well, from a purely legalistic perspective you can’t really argue, because they’re only wisps of grey on grey. But on the other hand, that attitude is certainly obtuse. All four of the horsemen are easy to see if you’re looking for them.

Now, similarly, Dunbar has chosen to single out Atwill’s most pale horseman for ridicule, while ignoring the clearer parts of the picture. And while it helps to have a deeper grounding in Atwill’s broader analysis, this is true even within the article at hand. It’s not necessary for readers to go beyond Atwill’s article about The Tempest, to realize that Dunbar’s analysis is cherry-picking.

Was Emilia Bassano too young?

She was five years younger than the Stratford man. But, the earliest works of ‘Shakespeare’ were just beginning to emerge in 1592. This was after the seven-year period known as the ‘Lost Years’. Shakespeare was 28 at this time, Bassano was 23. But, ‘Shakespeare’ was hardly already recognizable as ‘the greatest… genius in English literary history” by 1592. He (or she) was hardly as famous at that time as the 23 authors named in this article, 23 Writers Who Were Famous by Age 23.

Dunbar also claims that Bassano would have written Hamlet at age nineteen. This is either a joke or a blunder. Most scholars date Hamlet to between 1599 and 1602. Bassano would have turned thirty years old in 1599. Shakespeare himself would have been thirty-five. Either age seems equally amazing, considering the achievement.

This is not to say I would view the identification of ‘Shakespeare’ with Bassano as a proven fact, but Dunbar hasn’t given any basis to reject it. Certainly not on age considerations alone.

Did Shakespeare write Titus Andronicus?

Although Dunbar notes that Atwill’s interpretation of Titus Andronicus is a crucial aspect of the theory, he dismisses it as “substandard“, with a hint that perhaps Shakespeare didn’t write it. After all, he says, Shakespeare never published it in an “authorized edition”. Actually, Shakespeare never published any of his plays as “authorized” versions. Bootleggers produced the folios, and Shakespeare’s friends published the First Folio long after Shakespeare’s death. Like many other Shakespeare plays, Titus Andronicus was published in quarto form in 1594 and was included in the First Folio. This should establish its basic level of credibility as part of the Shakespeare corpus.

More importantly, Atwill’s analysis establishes through a series of highly dense parallels, that this play exists in the same thematic universe as the Flavian comic system exposed by Atwill in Caesar’s Messiah, but with the players’ fortunes reversed. That is, as Dunbar puts it, “endlessly repeated visions of dire and degrading punishments to be meted out to the Gentiles at the Apocalypse.” Or as A.L. Rowse said of the violence of Titus Andronicus: “in the civilised Victorian age the play could not be performed because it could not be believed. Such is the horror of our own age, with the appalling barbarities of prison camps and resistance movements paralleling the torture and mutilation and feeding on human flesh of the play, that it has ceased to be improbable.”

Is Titus Andronicus a Special Case?

However horrendous Titus Andronicus might be, it is far from unique among the Shakespeare tragedies. As Atwill shows in Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, the ‘romantic’ Romeo and Juliet and the ‘noble’ Hamlet are just as filled with violent and even cannibalistic imagery, as well as unmistakably clear and detailed allusions to the Flavian comic theme.

Yet while Dunbar sees these alleged counter-Flavian plot elements as imaginary, I see them as very real in the plays. However, the Flavian reversal is not organized on strictly ethnic or racial basis.

Crypto Who?

Atwill’s interpretation sometimes requires that apparently Gentile characters are actually Jewish. For example, he argues that ‘Friar Lawrence’ in Romeo and Juliet, and ‘Fortinbras’ in Hamlet, are playing that role. However, there is little if any evidence that would identify them as ethnically Jewish. In Verona, Catholic priests would typically be Italian, and Lawrence is a classic Roman name. The Norwegian royal family is descended from Nordic Viking roots, and Fortinbras is the crown prince of Norway. It is difficult to explain how ‘Friar Lawrence’ could have ethnic Jewish ancestry. It is almost impossible to justify this idea for ‘Fortinbras’.

The Jewish ethnic interpretation of The Tempest is also problematic, at least at a surface level. According to Atwill, Prospero is the type of the ‘Jewish’ righteous king. Yet, Prospero is also the rightful heir to the Dukedom of Milan. As such, he could be nothing other than the scion of a well-known old Italian Catholic family.

Is the Duke of Milan Jewish?

Prospero calls Antonio a “false brother” and a “false uncle” to Miranda. Describing Antonio’s treasonous alliance with the King of Naples, he demands of Miranda: “Mark his condition and the event; then tell me If this might be a brother“. So, clearly, Prospero is asserting that no true brother deserving of the name would behave so treacherously. Moreover, with the admonition “Mark his condition“, Prospero seems to be hinting that Antonio doesn’t even look like his brother.

Miranda replies “I should sin To think but nobly of my grandmother: Good wombs have borne bad sons“. That is, Miranda is asserting that Prospero and Antonio at least had the same mother. She presented both sons to the world with the claim that both had the same father as well. But if Prospero’s mother has in fact been unfaithful (as Prospero suggests), then with who? The obvious implication from Prospero’s accusation would be an illicit coupling with the royal family of Naples: that is, another ancient Italian Catholic family. It is difficult indeed to imagine how ethnically based crypto-Judaism could arise as an issue in such a situation. If Prospero is Jewish, it would have to be a result of an act of deliberate conversion on his own part.

Does Shakespeare reward the righteous?

Inclusion in “God’s chosen people” is not, for Shakespeare, a matter of being born into a Jewish family. What does it mean to be ‘chosen’? Perhaps it is a matter of righteousness. Prospero is a wise and noble magician. His enemies are drunken, scheming, worthless frauds. It does not seem to be a matter of class. Prospero and his arch-enemies such as Antonio and Sebastian are royal. But several of Prospero’s enemies are lower class. In other plays, we also find heroes and villains in all walks of life.

Is there a broader Shakespearean pattern of rewarding the virtuous, at least typologically? The answer is far from obvious, without further study. Juliet does not seem to deserve her fate in Romeo, unless you question the virtue of falling in love at such a young age. Aaron in Titus Andronicus is an ethnically Jewish avenger, but he is not portrayed as an especially noble character. Instead, his bitterness and anger knows no bounds. However, he is an atheist, not a person of the Jewish faith. And he is rewarded by passing his genes to the next generation, but also by being buried alive.

Who are the chosen, and who are unclean?

At any rate, what Atwill is missing in his analysis, is that the Old Testament, and all the ideas of a Chosen People, were taken over by the Christians. The ‘British Israel’ movement was already gaining strength in the Elizabethan era. So, there is no basis to interpret the Shakespearean literature as having an exclusively Jewish perspective, as opposed to a Catholic or even humanist perspective, regarding recapitulation and reversal of the Flavian comic system in the Gospels.

Is Shakespeare the essence of Western Culture?

It’s one thing to say that Ken Kesey was attacking Western culture. It’s quite another to make the same accusation against Shakespeare. On the contrary, many people would say that Shakespeare’s work is the greatest literature our culture has ever produced. The development of a taste for Shakespeare is a central part of every liberal education. As such, it seems to be the opposite of the ‘degraded’ hippy counter-culture.

Perhaps Dunbar’s anger is related to culture shock. Dunbar sees Shakespeare as the epitome of English genius, but Atwill says that ‘she’ was a Jew with an agenda. That is, a ‘Lifetime Actress’ who foisted vicious propaganda on an innocent public. It is hard to imagine any more culturally disorienting claim. As we said recently, culture provides the definition of people’s identities and their self-worth. Thus, any change, for better or worse, can be seen as a threat. We are old and cautious enough to feel threatened by the drug counter-culture. But it seems that Shakespeare is also part of Dunbar’s cultural self-image. Perhaps this is why Dunbar feels so disturbed by Atwill’s view.

Now, Dunbar would certainly object to find himself subject to this psycho-analysis. He would say that Atwill is simply wrong. Of course, I strongly disagree. But, for the moment, let’s just assume that Atwill is basically right. (I will return to a factual defense later.) First I would like to address Dunbar’s other points, which I think are far more interesting.

Is Atwill’s theory ‘Reductionist’?

At a surface level, The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan. First he achieves a just revenge against his enemies. But then he forgives them and permits his daughter to marry into their family. Many (though not all) Shakespearean plays have similarly basic plots. But, they feature richly developed characters, told with a fascinating combination of blank and rhymed verse.

Dunbar does not see any hidden agenda lurking beneath this surface narration. However, he does see a depth of meaningful nuance. He calls his work “the greatest poetic oeuvre in the English language“. The works had “a primary role in the unification, expansion and refinement of English into a literary language“. And, Dunbar obviously believes that The Tempest is a fine example of Shakespeare’s work. He describes one scene as “charming entertainment“. Ariel’s farewell speech is “a lyrical anticipation of pastoral bliss, the end of toil and resumption of play“. Prospero’s renunciation of magic is “one of the greatest speeches in English poetry…. So inward, yet so resonant, so limpidly clear even while contemplating the deep mystery of reality itself“.

Inasmuch as Atwill is rejecting all this, his view does seem to meet the definition of reductionist. I would add that Dunbar’s reading of Atwill is vulnerable to the same criticism. That is, Dunbar seems unable to detect when Atwill is speaking tongue-in-cheek, such as the remarks that the real Shakespeare had been kidnapped when the conclusion to The Tempest was written. Perhaps the writing wasn’t clear, and perhaps the analysis really hasn’t properly recognized the difference between comedy and tragedy. Atwill’s analysis of Merchant of Venice, another comedy, revealed a similarly veiled tragic subtext.

But there is at least some justification for Atwill’s disparaging remarks about Shakespeare, as I will now explain.

The Deification of Shakespeare

During the 18th century, the British admiration for Shakespeare evolved into a sort of secular religion. Simon Andrew Stirling delved into the story in his book Who Killed William Shakespeare. At a 1769 festival in Stratford, revelers honored a great statue of Shakespeare as “the God of our Idolatry”. An actor named David Garrick planned a magnificent pageant, including a masquerade ball, fireworks display, horse race, and grand procession. A huge rainstorm ironically ruined the festival. But, Garrick used the pageant as the basis of a London stage play dedicated to the Stratford hero. In 1815, a merchant was profitably selling wood curios in Stratford. The merchant said he carved the relics from a mulberry tree planted by “the immortal Bard” himself.

And then we have Atwill, who says that this same literature is “boring, incomprehensible, and sick“. Now, certainly everyone is entitled to their opinion. It’s not so easy to come up with an objective standard for the quality of literary art. Shakespeare can be tedious, paradoxical, and indeed at times almost as incomprehensible as if written in a foreign language. English of the 16th century is in some respects almost a foreign language. Many students who have struggled with Shakespeare, will smile in sympathy with Atwill’s complaint. But, others who have struggled through to achieve some comprehension, will be aghast.

In Defense of Cultural Quality

The established culture has spoken, and has declared that Shakespeare is virtually a secular God. I understand and respect why Atwill has taken an opposing position. But, my own opinion is closer to Dunbar’s: I think that Shakespeare at his (or her?) best, is really, really good stuff. Have I been brainwashed by the establishment? If the Bard is a mere propagandist, that’s shocking enough. But if it’s propaganda, does that take away its quality as literature? The mind reels at the contradiction.

Many readers will, no doubt, have the same feelings of disorientation. We all have drawn key parts of our personal identity from these cultural icons and their art. The Beatles defined the meaning of love and peace. Ken Kesey defined the difference between sanity and insanity. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley taught us how to recognize technological tyranny. The US Constitution is the basis of our democracy, even if it was mostly written by Illuminated Masons and Jesuits. And when it comes to ethics, the Bible is generally our cornerstone, even if it was also ancient elite propaganda. How can we escape the elite’s definition of our culture? And, would we want to? That is, if Atwill is correct that an elite agenda is behind them all.

Everyone’s a Sellout (but not to the same extent)

In every case, there is an undeniable genius behind these works. It seems obvious that the creators must have felt a strong, abiding drive and desire to create great, memorable and enticing art. To be great, this art must contain generous portions of truth, as well as profound insight. If the artist has a hidden agenda, nevertheless he still needs to be entertaining. And furthermore, in order to gain an audience, artists have always had to work with elites: either seeking patronage, or contracts. Some artists struggle to avoid “selling out”, but others seek fortune as well as fame. Either way, no artist can afford to come down too strongly against the interests of their great and powerful patrons.

And, those interest are not necessarily incompatible with great art. Surely the elite enjoy a good movie, novel or symphony as much as anyone. Their children need cultural role models, as much as anyone. Art such as Shakespeare must serve this purpose, at least to some extent.

Whether or not Atwill is reductionist, it is certainly unfair to claim that he is oblivious to surface meanings. But I’m not sure he has come to terms with the full extent of the paradox he has created. That is: literature that we are denouncing as black propaganda, is also the source of our culture. And at least to some extent, this includes Huxley and The Beatles, as well as Shakespeare.

However, Dunbar’s solution of going into denial is not the answer. We need a new way of looking at Shakespeare, and literature in general.

Shakespeare: The Myth of No Information

Along with The Bard’s apotheosis, Stirling argues that Shakespeare’s admirers invented two other myths. The first was the myth that little or no information has survived about Shakespeare’s life. The claimed lack of information opened a vacuum which historians filled with speculation, or legend. The second myth, Stirling argues, is the idea that the Stratford man was not the true author of the plays. Of course, according to Atwill, this is no myth at all. But, the literature has been so lionized that it can be hard to imagine any human being could have written it. At the very least, the author seems to know a lot about life at royal court. Additionally, Shakespeare’s plays exhibit a wealth of knowledge of many specialized topics. Many critics have felt that the author must have come from the noble class.

Stirling argues that Shakespeare’s life is not such a blank slate after all. In fact, there is significant evidence that Shakespeare was a Catholic. Or at any rate, he came from a Catholic background and traveled in Catholic circles. If this scenario is correct, it may explain how Shakespeare gained the education and experience necessary to write the plays. For an excellent review of this evidence, I recommend Clare Asquith’s “Shadowplay“. Asquith also provides an in-depth analysis of Catholic-oriented content in the Shakespeare plays. As Asquith notes, Shakespeare’s voice often seems pro-Catholic. This was at a time when open practice of Catholicism was considered treasonous. Asquith sees Shakespeare as brave, if not rebellious. However, she also notes that he did not cheer for open revolt. Instead, he advised peaceful accommodation. Accordingly, I argue, this is exactly what the regime needed.

The Stratford Man’s Deep-State Connections

In The Shakespeare Conspiracy, Martin Keatman and Graham Phillips build a circumstantial case that Shakespeare was involved with British state intelligence. They show that he led a sort of double life. He was an actor and playwright in London, and a tax delinquent. But in Stratford, he was a prosperous grain merchant who bought the finest home in town.

However, Keatman and Phillips conclude that the Stratford man and the London playwright were one and the same person. The best evidence of this, is a mention of some of the actor’s partners in the Stratford man’s will. They explain that Shakespeare needed to protect his family from the dangers of his life in London. Also, I would speculate, he may have needed to hide the income he was earning in London. Playwrights and actors didn’t normally earn much money. But Shakespeare might have earned a significant income as a spy, propagandist, or literary front man.

Marlowe and Shakespeare

Atwill has noted similarities between Christopher Marlowe’s work, and Shakespeare’s early work. Marlowe and Shakespeare were probably working for Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, at his acting company, in about 1592. Keatman and Phillips argue that they would have met at that time. Marlowe had been a spy for Francis and Thomas Walsingham’s secret service. Their goal was to uncover Catholic plots against the government. However, Marlowe had come under suspicion for atheism, and was allegedly killed in a quarrel with another of Walsingham’s agents.

Sir Thomas Hesketh may have introduced Shakespeare to Strange’s acting company. The Hesketh family may have employed William Shakespeare as a tutor, under the name of Shakeshafte. Another Hesketh tried to convince Lord Strange to plot to gain the English throne. Lord Strange declined to participate in the plot, and reported the plot to William Cecil. But Cecil doubted Strange’s loyalty, and he found himself under investigation for atheism anyhow.

The Atheist ‘School of Night’

Informants also reported that both Marlowe and Strange were associated with Sir Walter Ralegh‘s ‘School of Atheism’. This group also probably included Richard Field, Shakespeare’s early publisher. Field had lived in the same neighborhood in Stratford as Shakespeare, and was about the same age. Critics believe that Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost contains a reference to Ralegh’s group as the ‘School of Night’. If so, Shakespeare at least knew of the group.

Francis Walsingham had recruited theatrical actors and playwrights to serve in his Secret Service. He also recruited opportunistic Catholics and religious liberals. Thus, there was significant overlap between Walsingham’s group of spies, Ralegh’s school of atheists, the Catholic underground, and the London theatrical circuit. Shakespeare’s interests overlapped with all three of the latter groups.

After Thomas Walsingham’s death in 1590, Francis Walsingham took over his Secret Service group. Keatman and Phillips speculate that Francis may have been a wild card whose dedication to the anti-Catholic cause was uncertain. Some spies gradually gravitated to the direct service of William Cecil. Keatman and Phillips suggest that Cecil might have had Marlowe and Strange murdered because of his doubts about their loyalties.

Keatman and Phillips argue that Shakespeare must have been involved with this network. They suggest that Shakespeare served as an agent under the alias of William Hall. About the same time that Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, William Hall traveled to the Netherlands as a diplomatic courier. In 1603, Hall worked with an agent named Parrot to expose William Watson’s nebulous “Bye Plot”. They also exposed the related “Main Plot”, which implicated Walter Ralegh.

Anthony Munday and ‘Sir Thomas More’

One spy in Walsingham’s service was Anthony Munday. He traveled abroad in 1578 to Rome where he joined the Jesuit English College. On his return to England, he became a playwright. In about 1592, Shakespeare worked with Munday on the play ‘Sir Thomas More’. The original manuscript of the play has survived. The handwriting of one three-page scene matches the six existing Shakespeare (Stratford Man) signatures. Or at least this appears to be true, although experts are reluctant to draw firm conclusions based on such a small sample. The spelling is also typical of Shakespeare, and the section features Shakespearean cannibal humor.

Will Hall also received a payment for services rendered to Anthony Munday in 1592. This is another in the series of coincidences connecting Hall to Shakespeare, and connecting Shakespeare to Walsingham’s spy network. While this evidence suggests Shakespeare may have been a spy like Munday, it also suggests that Shakespeare was an actual author. However, in addition to Munday and Shakespeare’s work, several other authors also contributed. Thus, the manuscript shows the collaborative nature of theatrical writing at the time. Thus, there is no basis to rule out group theories of Shakespeare authorship.

Shakespeare’s Surprising Success

As Cecil became more powerful, many Catholics and their atheist friends fell under a pall of suspicion and/or were prosecuted. By contrast, Shakespeare’s career soared. After Marlowe’s death, “Lord Strange’s Men” combined forces with the Burbage Theatre. Thus, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, became Shakespeare’s patron. After Lord Strange’s death, the new boss was the Queen’s cousin, Lord Hundson. Finally, in 1603, King James himself adopted the company. He dubbed them as “The King’s Men“, and called on them for many performances for the royal court.

None of this proves that Shakespeare was the author of the plays. If he was serving as a diplomat and spy as well as an actor, he must have been very busy. This only adds to the idea that no one could have written so much in so little time. However, this alternative biography of Shakespeare seems rich enough in education and intrigue, to suggest that such a person could have been at the head of the authorship group.

Innocent until proven guilty?

None of this will convince the more skeptical reader. The identification of William Hall with William Shakespeare is clearly speculative. The rest of Keatman and Phillip’s case is largely an argument of guilt by association. And even if Shakespeare was somehow affiliated with Walsingham’s company of spies, this would not prove he was sympathetic with every aspect of the project.

But this seems more than sufficient to raise reasonable doubts. It no longer seems safe to simply assume that the author had no agenda other than creation of great literature. For more evidence, we turn to that literature itself.

Catholic interpretive level

Elsewhere, I have summarized arguments that the plays also include a symbolic level which plays off the Catholic-Protestant dialectic. Clare Asquith (in Shadowplay, pp. 265-273) provides an analysis of this Catholic layer in The Tempest. Atwill’s neglect of this level is another aspect where his view is arguably reductionist. In this symbolic layer, the plays provided reassurance that Catholicism is a fine religion. It is portrayed as far superior to all varieties of Protestant innovation. However, the plays also encouraged rebellious Catholics to exercise patience in the face of adversity. This message was, arguably, perfectly tuned to the needs of the authorities. The Catholic population at that time was large and potentially formidable. They needed to be seduced, not bludgeoned.

Asquith sees the plot of The Tempest as a sort of recapitulation of Shakespeare’s earlier plays. She argues that Shakespeare repeatedly represented the Reformation as a great storm. In her view, Prospero and his group represent the righteous Catholics. The Italian nobles remind her of the Anglican high church and the Tudor royalty. The clowns, she says, are like the Puritans and Calvinists.

A chess game between Catholic and Protestant

According to Asquith, the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda is an obvious message to Catholic recusants. Ferdinand represents the future of Protestantism reborn. Asquith sees a poignancy in the moment the lovers are revealed to Alonso and the other shipwrecked nobles. Miranda and Ferdinand are playing chess. It is, Asquith says, “the ultimate refinement of a war between black and white, of conflict within harmony. The scrap of dialogue over the chessboard in which Miranda laughingly accuses a protesting Ferdinand of cheating has profound significance. Though Ferdinand may wrangle for ‘a score of kingdoms’, when it comes to ‘the world’ the pair are at peace: a brief vision of the perfect balance… in which political power-games have no impact on matters of the soul“. In other words, it is (again) a message encouraging passivity and acceptance.

The Tempest as Shakespeare’s testament

In Asquith’s view, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest as a “comprehensive coded apologia for his life’s work“. As evidence of this, she points to its placement at the head of the First Folio. In her view, the most important aspect of this ‘apologia’ was Shakespeare’s use of the character Prospero to represent himself. As The Guardian‘s Sam Jordison points out, this is a difficult thesis to prove. We don’t have many details about Shakespeare’s life. But, one connection is that Shakespeare himself had once played a character named Prospero. This happened to be the central role in Ben Jonson’s most famous play, Every Man in His Humour. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s Prospero orchestrates every event in the play, just as a playwright would. Asquith explains:

From beginning to end, running jokes and puns remind the audience of another coded identity. The island has all the features of the stage, full of sounds that ‘give delight and hurt not’, the magic at every point mimicking the illusions of the theatre. … The Tempest is a play about play-making.

Shakespeare’s Retirement

In another possible analogy to Shakespeare’s (that is, the Stratford man’s) own life, Prospero repeatedly renounces his magic. In other words, he is announcing his eminent retirement from the theater. Following this play, the Stratford Man went home from London. After that, he wrote no more. The London audiences hardly knew he was gone, at least not for awhile. Two more great plays, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, appeared after his departure. However, most critics agree that those plays were largely or entirely ghost-written by John Fletcher.

Asquith suggests that Ariel, Miranda and Caliban also represent ingredients of the author’s personality. She imagines their dialog creating a form of “literary psychoanalysis“. Ariel represents the creative aspect. Miranda represents purity and spirituality. Caliban represents the lower, physical portion. Furthermore, Miranda and Ariel contrasted with Caliban represent “the most extreme refinement of the principles of ‘dark’ and ‘fair’“. That is, Miranda and Ariel are Catholic, while Caliban is Protestant. “By means of this double allegory, Shakespeare’s work is presented as integral to his nature,” says Asquith. Well, perhaps this is going too far, but it’s interesting.

The stage has been set by the witch Sycorax. She has given birth to Caliban, her dark (Protestant) offspring. Worse than that, she has also captured Ariel and frozen the spirit in a tree. To Asquith, Ariel must represent the spirit of English Catholicism. The Sycorax, Asquith suggests, is an “angry caricature” of Queen Elizabeth. Asquith supports these comparisons by observing that Caliban is referred to as a “moon-calf“. A Prague astrologer had famously hurled this epithet at Martin Luther, to the delight of Catholics everywhere. Ariel was confined with the help of Sycorax’s “more potent ministers“. This reminds Asquith of the action of Elizabeths’s royal court.

The diversity of Shakespeare’s sources

From Atwill’s perspective, the Flavian comic system is the most important source of Shakespearian typology. However, it is far from Shakespeare’s only source of inspiration. To the extent that Atwill ignores this, it is another basis for the charge that his view is reductionist. A complete survey would be a huge task. But, I would like to review some aspects of Shakespeare’s other sources for The Tempest.

The characters in The Tempest play roles that would be familiar to patrons of Commedia del’Arte. This form of Italian improvisational theater was popular in the mid to late 16^th century. The actors in these improvisations would always play the parts of a stereotypical set of ensemble characters. In The Tempest, all the characters have different names, but the actors are enacting the stereotypical roles.

Prospero resembles “Pantalone”, a wealthy elder man. He is always seeking to marry off his daughter “Isabella”, just as Prospero is looking for a mate for Miranda. Isabella is in love with “Fabian” (just as Miranda is in love with Ferdinand). Fabian’s father is “The Doctor”, an authority figure like Ferdinand’s father Alonso. “The Captain” is a cowardly blow-hard like Sebastian. “Brighella” is a manipulative schemer like Antonio. “Arlecchino” (the harlequin) is a clown like Trinculo. “Zanni” is a lower-class butler like Stefano. “Pulcinella” (Caliban), a deformed tragic figure, completes the ensemble.

Kings and Dukes named Prospero, Alonso and Ferdinand

Prospero Adorno, the Duke of Genoa, may have been another of Shakespeare’s inspirations for his character Prospero. Similarly, Shakespeare may have known of Alonso II, King of Naples, who abdicated the throne in 1495 in favor of his son Ferdinand.

As noted by Charles Creighton in Shakespeare’s Story of His Life, Trinculo had “lesser legs” like the ventriloquist John Marston. In The Tempest, Ariel plays a ventriloquist’s game with Trinculo and Stephano. Stephano builds a pun on Trinculo’s name: “vent’Triculo”. Creighton also suggests that Stephano may be based on Marston’s close friend, Ben Johnson.

Famous Shipwrecks

Shakespeare’s shipwreck seems clearly based on the wrecks of Josephus and Paul. Aeneas’s wreck at Carthage may have been the common root of all. However, Shakespeare also took elements of his tale from current events. Of course, all shipwrecks have many elements in common. Thus, the task of evaluating literary dependence is a matter of looking for distinguishing detail. Three accounts of a shipwreck in the Bermuda Islands in 1609, including one by William Strachey, are often mentioned as the most direct inspiration for Shakespeare’s descriptions of the wreck and the island. However, Peter McIntosh argues for earlier sources, describing explorations of Magellan, Drake and Sarmiento de Gamboa.

Shakespeare’s reference to the god Setebos indicates that Shakespeare may have used Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s voyage. Pigafetta released his Report on the First Voyage Around the World in 1525. Richard Eden translated the report into English in 1577. McIntosh said that Pigafetta mentioned “St Elmo’s fire, tempests and assorted giants and cannibals“. Francis Fletcher also mentioned the Setebos, as well as a tempest and a drunken native, in his account of Francis Drake’s 1577-1580 voyage.

Charles Frey further notes that according to Pigafetta’s account, a pair of sailors named Antonio and Sebastian mounted a mutiny against Magellan. Fortunately for Magellan, a hero named Gonzalo Gomez de Espinosa put down the mutiny. Furthermore, Pigafetta tells us that one of Magellan’s ships was wrecked, but “all the men were saved by a miracle, for they were not even wetted”.

Sarmiento de Gamboa’s voyage to the Straits of Magellan

In addition to Pigafetta and/or Fletcher, McIntosh argues that Shakespeare must have had access to Sarmiento de Gamboa’s journals. Like The Tempest, Sarmiento’s journal describes a flaming tempest and mariners stranded on a beach. Parallel features of Sarmiento’s island include berries, shellfish, pastures, freshwater springs, evergreens, and oaks. Sarmiento’s villains are named Alonso and Antonio, and witnesses to a ceremony were named Gonzalo and Fernando. Wine casks are washed ashore, lions are afoot, lights are seen in the sky and voices of devils are heard. McIntosh feels that all these parallels, taken in total, establish a connection between Sarmiento and Shakespeare.

And furthermore, McIntosh claims that Sarmiento de Gamba’s descriptions fit Shakespeare like a glove, while in many cases the details of Strachey’s tale are in conflict. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s apparent reference to Bermuda is a problem for McIntosh’s theory. McIntosh answers that ‘Bermoothe‘ was also a brothel district. Thus, Ariel’s quest for dew from ‘the still vex’d Bermoothe‘ might have been a joke about a search for purity in an unlikely place. Overall, McIntosh concludes, Shakespeare did not need to depend on Strachey. If this is correct, it’s possible that Shakespeare completed The Tempest before 1609. (The first recorded performance was in 1611.) The late date presents a problem for Oxfordians in particular, because de Vere died in 1604.

Conclusion: Was Shakespeare Jewish?

I believe I’ve made the case here to the contrary, that Shakespeare was more likely Catholic. Furthermore, this Shakespeare may well have had the education and connections necessary to have participated in writing the plays. Considering the collaborative nature of authorship in those times, it is impossible to rule out group theories. The author (or authors) knew about the Flavian comic system, and the atrocities that attended the creation of Christianity. There’s no reason why radical Catholics and Protestants of that era, as well as Jews, should not have shared a sense of rage, and a desire for redress.

But suppose we accept that Emilia Bassano Lanier alone wrote the plays from a sectarian Jewish perspective. Even from that conclusion, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this was part of a single conspiracy that continues to the present. Much less so, that the conspiracy was and is essentially Jewish in character.

Discuss in Forum!

Statement from Joseph Atwill, in response

Racism, Cultural Degradation, and Misplaced Paranoia

Richard Stanley and Jerry Russell

May 16, 2016

With the Democratic and Republican primary contests all but settled, any day now we expect some sort of dramatic and Hillarious farce-off between Trump and the Evita du jour. As entertaining as this might be, we’d much prefer a sincere campaign dialogue. But really, isn’t this the way it has always been, in American national politics? This year’s theatrics may be nothing more or less than the usual ballet around distractionary wedge issues and other trumpery, all veiling the usual hidden agendas of the elite. Or perhaps this represents another stage in the ongoing globalist degradation of the US government? But, rather than turning to despair, we intend to use the Trump vs. Hillary reality show as an entrée ‘door of perception’ to examine the dark Romantic underbelly of racism in Western and American culture. It’s all part of the larger tableau of Western society, with its central false dialectic cynically built upon the trope of anti-Judaism.

Origins of Multiculturalism and Feminism

In view of the current state of affairs, we feel we must begin with a history and defense of the standard that we use to judge current events. Our yardstick was defined during the Enlightenment, and codified in the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution. That is:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As further explained in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789):

Article IV – Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law.

Article V – The law has the right to forbid only actions harmful to society. Anything which is not forbidden by the law cannot be impeded, and no one can be constrained to do what it does not order.

Article VI – The law is the expression of the general will. All the citizens have the right of contributing personally or through their representatives to its formation. It must be the same for all, either that it protects, or that it punishes. All the citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, places and employments, according to their capacity and without distinction other than that of their virtues and of their talents.

As former Libertarians, and now reformed libertarians, your authors still generally hold to these ideals. But of course, when these words “all men are created equal” were first written, the phrase “all men” meant, literally, only white males with sufficient property. This came about because the American Founding Fathers held a great admiration for the Roman Republic — whose senators, at least, were from great families whose agrarian estates could be traced back to colonial conquest. It was thought that only such solid and dignified men, with assets at stake, could be trusted to act responsibly on behalf of the greater good (and, incidentally, to maintain their own great fortunes as well.) This, because their culture told them so.

It was not long before this conditional aspect was ironically pointed out. In 1791, a French women’s rights activist by the name of Olympe de Gouges wrote the Declaration of Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, and was sent straight to the guillotine for it. But ever since then, those words all the citizens have been sanctified by our culture. White women and people of all other races and of every economic station, heard and still hear these words and interpret them in their own hopeful light. Obviously, the guillotine was a bloody cold-shoulder reaction to such a cheeky cultural assertion. But this type of harsh pushback is exactly the meaning of the term ‘reactionary’. In a perceived zero-sum game, the chosen ones must somehow conserve their elevated status.

The American Constitution also provided some means for the underlings to seek to improve their lot. Conditional and tentative, to be sure. Constitutional freedom of speech has its limits if you need to keep your job. At election time, blacks and women couldn’t vote, even though blacks were at least considered as three fifths of a person. But this was not for slaves’ benefit, but rather to benefit the Southern slave states in terms of holding political parity with the Northern … uhm slave states. (In the North, slavery was being gradually phased out. In many states, the children of slaves were free, but adult slaves were slaves for life. New York didn’t begin this process until 1799, and the last slave in Pennsylvania was freed in 1847.) At any rate, one could always hope that the ‘liberal’ white male voters would at least occasionally vote against their own perceived self-interest.

The complexity of the federal/state system provided some avenues for activism, as the states supposedly held back the powers not enumerated for the central government, as discussed in Michael Maharrey’s Our Last Hope. This came into play when at least some of those ‘liberal’ white citizens were outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled Northerners to act as unpaid slave catchers for Southern estates; and by the infamous Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court of 1858, which stated that blacks were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race”. Perhaps, viewing the matter cynically, the Northern ‘liberals’ could afford their generous attitude because the Northern economy didn’t really need slaves nearly as much. But for whatever reason, it was the Northern white citizens who first rebelled against the Fugitive Slave Act, creating the Underground Railroad to take fugitive slaves away to Canada. In 1854, for example, Sherman Booth of the Milwaukee Free Democrat newspaper organized a crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 citizens for the purpose of freeing a runaway named Joshua Glover from prison. Booth wrote: “Citizens of Milwaukee! Shall we have Star Chamber proceedings here? And shall a man be dragged back to Slavery from our Free Soil, without an open trial of his right to Liberty?” As a result, Glover escaped to freedom in Canada, but Booth was in and out of Federal prison until 1861.

The women’s rights and women’s suffrage movement was a kindred spirit to the abolitionist movement in the 1850’s, and they contributed support to each other. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment of 1868 granted citizenship to blacks, but in 1875 the Supreme Court decided that “all persons” still did not include women, at least not when it came to the “equal protection” that would be provided by the right to vote. Women turned to a campaign in the states and territories, winning the vote in Wyoming in 1869, Utah in 1870, Colorado in 1893, and Idaho in 1896. After a backlash and a process of regrouping, Washington and California granted women’s suffrage in 1910 and 1911 respectively. After that, more states gradually granted the vote for women, and in 1920 the 19th Amendment was ratified.

Objections to Race Nationalism

Our motive for reviewing this history, is to point out that these great ideals are irreconcilably opposed to both the rhetorical Race Nationalist politics of Donald Trump, and the long-running ‘neocon’ interventionist politics of Hillary Clinton. We consider both of these as two sides of the same ‘corporatist’ coin, with the difference that Trump focuses primarily on internal ‘enemies’ of white America, while Hillary and the Neocons direct their hatred (as well as bombing raids) towards external nonwhite enemies.

Are You Serving the Kochs’ Hash or The Donald’s at your next cucktea party?

Although Trump and Hillary have wrapped up their nominations, their poll numbers across a broad spectrum of Americans are pretty poor. Most of those who will vote for either one, will be doing so in capitulative desperation about the other. The situation is resulting in some ironic crossings of traditional party lines, such as the recent (sincere?) announcement by the Koch brothers that they may have to go with Hillary. The Koch brothers have a long history of supporting the Libertarian Party, with David having even bought himself a VP position on the 1980 Presidential ticket behind Ed Clark. But more recently they have become major funders for the (Loose) Tea Party. While the Libertarians are very tolerant with respect to social issues such as drug legalization, abortion, and gay marriage, the early Tea Party organizers refused to take any position on such social issues, “for the sake of unity.” As a result, polls indicate that the Tea Party electorate are very conservative in regards to such cultural norms, although Libertarians and Tea Party activists still share fiscal goals. Thus, the Kochs have made a hash of the Libertarian’s social paradigm of “Do What thou Wilt, as long as you cause no harm”. Trump, meanwhile, has made a hash of the fiscal map in his campaign, with some of his positions quite liberal. And now the Kochs are stating that they will not eat The Donald’s brand of hash. Is this because Trump’s racist posturing is a bridge too far, or is it because they don’t trust him to reduce taxes on the wealthy? Whichever hash you choose, it came from the glue factory.

‘Cucktea party’, say what? Read on.

Sadly, we must admit that the ideal of multiculturalism flies in the face of perhaps a hundred thousand or more years of human evolution. Until relatively recently, most people lived in small villages made up of fairly close cousins. And as the “Human Biological Diversity” blogosphere insists, there are very real differences among the different races, along many dimensions. Men and women are also highly evolved for the gender-specific roles that they took on in primitive societies. For all these reasons, living up to multicultural and feminist ideals is not easy. Pushing too hard and too fast can and does lead to disaster, and this is an important factor for Trump’s grassroots support. Cities such as Los Angeles seem to be well on the way to being overwhelmed by the immigration of massive numbers of impoverished, mostly poorly educated foreigners who might harbor murderous intentions for jihad and/or the reconquest of Aztlan.

Like the Constitution, multiculturalism is not a suicide pact. There are limits to the degree to which any society can accommodate immigration flows, and integrate the newcomers into the existing political, social and economic system. Because of these difficulties, some intellectuals have taken to criticizing multicultural and feminist ideals as if they were invented in the mid-twentieth century by Postmodernists and/or the Frankfurt school, which is far from the truth of the matter. We will return to this issue later in this essay.

However, as is so often the case, reasonable solutions to these concerns are drowned in extremist dialectic. Trump’s apparent rhetoric appeals especially to fears of Islamic terrorists, and Obama only fans the flame with his plan to import 10,000 refugees from the Syrian civil war, at tremendous public expense. In this way, Trump’s popularity feeds on the fiasco created overseas by the Neocons, which increases the pressure to accommodate the flood of displaced refugees. The policies of Latin America’s neo-colonialist elite are another contributing factor. The problems with Mexico are the pretext for the most dramatic aspect of Trump’s immigration policy, which is his call for mass deportation of an estimated 11 million undocumented residents. In fact, many of these ‘illegal aliens’ have been here for many years or even decades, and some play an important role in the American economy. These are not mostly Islamic, but rather they are predominantly Chicanos from Central and South America. That is to say, their genetic makeup is anywhere from 30% to 60% Native American. By any rational standard, they have as much right to be here as anyone of European descent. (That is, unless you consider exclusion by cultural or biblical Providence to be a rational standard.) And even among the refugee immigrant groups with perceived highest levels of risk, actual incidents of terrorism or jihad are practically unheard of.

Here we also note that even before the Revolutionary War, America was multiculturally seeded from the start with a broad assortment of sectarian theocratic cults of various nationalities, the introduction of race based slaves, and …. women, aka WITCHES. Aaargh!! It was a witch’s brew and not merely a ‘melting pot’ as we were always led to believe by our cultural framers. Who let these people in, we ask? All humor aside, this question is critically important. For whatever reason, this has been our American fate to deal with this type of situation, right from the beginning. As difficult as the challenge may be, we feel strongly that we must continue to advocate democratic rights for all people, including those of all races, creeds and genders — otherwise we might as well just give up and accept the arrival of technocratic feudalism.

This conclusion also inevitably follows from a careful consideration of the practical implications of the alternative posed by Trump, or at least from that of his more extreme acolytes; that is, striving for the goal of achieving separate and pure race based nations. Admittedly, a few such nations claim to exist already, such as Israel– if it weren’t for the problem of those pesky Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Like Trump recommends for America, they are building walls to keep the racially pure Ashkenazi (that is, biblically Gomeric Caucasians) inside, and the Palestinians (that is, Semites) out. This would logically be considered anti-Semitic, but who needs logic. And from a practical standpoint, recent history seems to show, as well, that the Palestinians have been learning how to build tunnels, like the Mexicans have.

But the real problems start when people use airplanes, ships, or motorcars to move from one race nation to another. Once people are in, even legally, some might opt to stay beyond their visas, as has been pointed out to Mr. Trump. How shall this be prevented? Papers, please, at every checkpoint? Or better still, everyone could just be chipped. If we go with this techno-fix, maybe we won’t even need walls. But what shall we do about the younger generation? Kids being as they are, cross-racial hookups of various fashions will happen, as they have for thousands of years. Each time another “cross-breed” is born, do we need a new nation to accommodate that person’s mixed heritage, as unique as it is? This would bring new meaning to the term ‘subdivision’.

And as everyone knows, pure nation-states must be pure not only racially, but also culturally and spiritually. So what are we to do with white rappers (aka wiggers), or Native Americans who study Japanese martial arts, or Muslims who join either the Rastafarian or Pastafarian Churches? Do we need still more Pure Nations, or shall we just throw the miscreants in jail, or the .. ‘poor prison’ (poor as in: ‘not Pure’), to protect the purity of their respective homelands? Maybe guillotines or a gift of typhoid infected blankets would be a better form of tough love? More cost effective in any case.

Our inside sources inform us that allocation of these race nation boundaries will be determined by the combined outcomes of three-legged sack races and wife tossing contests. The definition of “three-legged” is purposely ambiguous, so as to give the noblest and ‘fairest’ race (wink, wink) a leg up, so to speak. It’s only ‘fair’. And we hear that Antarctica is warming up these days, if any race is interested in opting out of the contests in favor of a providential land grab.

Hmmm, but if we have such race nations, where then will get our next literal or virtual slaves from? That is, in order to keep our economies perking along as we have come to expect. Even Trump himself is known to find those of other races and creeds useful as low-cost hired help, but what will he and other business moguls do when that option is foreclosed? It seems to us that each of these race nations will either have to dedicate some of their own race to slavery, or make old school incursions into the other race nations, thus providing a new contextual and providential meaning for ‘off-shoring’. After all, God helps those who help themselves.

And, recognizing the many substantive differences between men and women, isn’t it obvious that the two genders are going to need separate nations? Right-wing “Machos Going Their Own Way” (that is, MGTOW’s) are in the vanguard here: they know that sleeping with the enemy involves loose lips, which leads inevitably to sunken ships.

Letting Koch Cuck Your Nestegg?

Emboldened by Trump’s success, some of his supporters have become increasingly strident in their denunciation of multicultural and related ‘establishment’ political values. Their political language is often vulgarly provocative, denouncing their opponents as “libtards” or “cuckservatives”. The latter meme, being applied to ‘politically correct’ moderate Republicans these days, is derived from the notorious practice of the cuckoo bird. This bird is famous for placing its eggs in the nests of other bird species, so as to let them be the unpaid nannies for the new cuckoo chicks. Applied narrowly to humans, the insult darkly hints at an existential threat to our White posterity, as our men are being cheated on and/or our women are being stolen by foreigners and their fellow travelers. The metaphor is more widely applied to any supposed deviation from the White Nationalist political and cultural ideals. But their own meme of “limited government”, which in our view is looking more like a desire to “end all American government”, is (as such) just another cuckoo egg. If the hatchling ever grows up, it will be an uber-Randian dis-Utopia for the oligarchic likes of the uber-Catholic Koch brothers.

‘Cuck’-calling, and similar other practices, have effectively swept moderate Republicans from the political arena. Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s documentary, Inequality for All, includes a remarkable lament over this purge by former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (WY). The Clintons have similarly cucked the Left spectrum rightward, infusing their historical corporatism into the nests of such as the feminists and old school progressives.

For that matter, Trump’s appeal to Tea Partiers and some Libertarians only serves to underscore the bankruptcy of such core wedge constructs as ‘Right’ vs. ‘Left’, and Liberal vs. Conservative, at least in the American context. There is a collective process of ‘forgetting’, leaving a vacuum which is then filled with clever political divisiveness to further cloud our minds. This has left the American polity in a confused and tangled mess, easily fooled into voting against their best interests. This also applies to both Democrats and Republicans, who have been tricked into nominating the likes of Hillary and Trump, respectively.

The Exceptionally Cultured Pearl of Americana

Aside from the race card, another key element in Trump’s appeal is the promise to “Make America Great Again”, which is starkly juxtaposed to Hillary’s claim that America never stopped being great. This begs the question of what “Greatness” is, and what we mean by America and its ‘culture’, and what is any culture’s value for that matter? It has become apparent at Postflaviana that various discussions about ‘cultural degradation’ have neglected to define the baseline and/or ‘ideal’ that is being degraded away from. It is similar to the Supreme Court decision decades ago that said they could not define what pornography was, but that they knew it when they saw it. Such a legal decision is not useful if one has a quibble between, say, the relative merits of pornography versus erotica. But given their repressed ‘cultural’ upbringing, is it any wonder that these judges were hesitant to wade into such waters? Similarly, considering the relative merits of sexual repression vs. excessively libertine behavior, or drug prohibition vs. legalization, it is difficult to have a conversation about ‘degradation’ without having some definition of either the supposed ideal situation, or as to what ‘culture’ is exactly in the first place.

Most any culture is ever evolving, either glacially or in fits and starts, for various reasons. Using very freighted and now effectively obsolete terms, ‘Liberals’ feel that America has evolved to a state in which equal rights for blacks, hispanics and women are right around the corner, and fear a reversal of the trends. ‘Conservatives’ decry the loss of the laissez-faire Capitalist republic, and fear the arrival of Socialist (if not Communist) Tyranny. Both of these abstractions are over-simplified. The actual social and economic condition of most blacks, hispanics and women has not improved much for a long time, while the condition of working class white males has now deteriorated to be almost on their level. Considering the Postmodern formalisms of Multiculturalism and Feminism, this outcome is not surprising.

As opposed to the comic book Conservative view of the economy, it might be more accurate to observe that colonial America began as multi-theocratic, slave-agrarian, and mostly king-loving, rather than laissez-faire. By the time of the Civil War, we had progressed to a protectionist slave-agrarian, manufacturing and mercantile hybrid economy. The early 20th century saw the era of monopolistic robber barons. This yielded in turn to the socialist-capitalist hybrid economy of the New Deal. Today we are living with a corporate transnational globalist anarchy, where the corporations’ lobbyists have effectively nullified much of the American government’s former regulatory power under the Commerce Clause. For example, such as Bill Clinton’s signing away the Glass-Steagall Act with Republican support. We suspect that our current economic world would seem roughly familiar to Alexander the Great, arguably the first globalist.

At each stage, and depending upon one’s perspective, is found the forces of either cultural degradation or the opposite.

For “liberals”, writ large, Trump represents a fearfully potent force of “cultural degradation” in the form of an attack on hard-won progress. At the same time, for many of Trump’s followers, Hillary (and Obama before her) epitomizes a continuing attack on the old white patriarchal culture. In other words, the two groups have vastly different conceptions of the American cultural ideal, while the same might not be said of their standard-bearers’ real standards.

As such, is it also possible for some aspects of culture to be improving while other aspects are heading in the wrong direction? Again, it depends from whose perspective. If there is some intentional effort to systematically degrade (or merely tune) culture, can it be ascribed to some single unified set of evil-doers, or is evil-doing also in the eye of the beholder? Or, can such offal degradation “just happen”, organically, without any external stimuli? And, finally do we thus need some form of cultural Censor to be re-invoked?

So it is at this point we need to stop and consider just what we all think we know about ‘culture’ and what it means for us. From the Compact Oxford English Dictionary we have two relevant contextual meanings:

culture ⋅ 1 the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. .. 3 the customs, institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or group.

The second definition expands the definition to include practically every aspect that surrounds us daily as individuals. Thus, culture is the metaphorical oyster that we are all born into as irritating little grains of sand. In terms of Jewish and Christian culture (aka Western civilization), the narrative in the OT envelops all of us, and metaphorically transforms us into near identical pearls. At least that is the functional intent of culturing a cult, or cultus. For at the end of the day, that is what we really are, as an ostensibly and generally conforming group of individuals. But apparently not all of us are so perfectly pearled. The combination of ‘degrading’ assaults and ‘reactionary’ responses creates the ‘Culture War’ as witnessed currently. Another example was the German 19th century Kulturkampf between the modernizer Bismarck and the Catholic traditionalists. We can also include the Reformation and Shakespeare as ‘assaults’, and the Counter-Reformation as another backlash reaction.

Another relevant term is:

culture shock ⋅ disorientation experienced when suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture or way of life.

Interestingly, such a ‘shock’ is experienced in response to any change in the culture, whether it is judged an improvement or a ‘degradation’ according to some ‘objective’ standard. The definition implies that the negative consequence of disorientation applies in either case. Why is this such an issue to many people? Perhaps because people’s identities, and thus self-worth, are intimately tied to their perceptions of themselves as defined by their culture. Thus, any change can be seen as an existential threat, and thus also a ‘degradation’ from the point of view of anyone who experiences this ‘disorientation’. If the change involves a loss of real or perceived social status, the negative reaction will be especially intense.

This same dictionary has only one ‘degrade’ based word variant whose definition applies directly to humans and that is degrading:

degrading ⋅ causing a loss of self-respect; humiliating.

In the United States, many have invoked the ‘patriotic’ notion of Exceptionalism. This is not so much different from the Jewish concept of the Chosen People. These concepts have been, and are still being given as ‘Justification’ for the Conquests of the respective lands. The opposite side of the coin is the necessary cultural humiliation of the Native Americans and Palestinians respectively. This ideology awards the Conquerors with satisfying visceral feelings of superiority, in having done God’s exalted work. Such feelings are especially helpful psychologically for the lower strata of the conquering peoples, who do most of the dirty work.

The scholarly field of ‘higher Biblical criticism’ has long been charged with undermining the culture, by the denial of Jesus Christ. Our Postflavian claim that Christ was Caesar is, surprisingly, sometimes used as an ironic ‘reactionary’ response to the culture shock created by the historical-critical skeptics. That is, one can claim that the Caesars are indeed suitable vicars of the fictional Christ, as are the popes. Kenneth Atchity makes just this proud claim in his Messiah Matrix, in which he envisions a future in which the Catholic Church renounces the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth in order to embrace the wisdom of Caesar Augustus. Many others have drawn comparisons, and found that America is an excellent modern analogue to ancient Rome, as our founders had hoped for. But yet, change is change, and time does not really flow backwards. ‘Biblical criticism’ is change, Postflavian biblical criticism is further change, and both have drawn and will continue to draw reactionary opponents.

And with the perspective of history, we must recognize that the elites of every time and place have an essential and powerful role to play in determining the course of cultural change and the flow of cultural innovation, for either the well being of all or for narrow avarice and greed. This is not to deny that cultural innovations can emerge organically from anywhere in society, nor that some aspects of culture simply represent universal human nature. But our point is that ‘culture‘ is not necessarily the ultimate value that we are trying to defend. For instance, many in the American South long decried, and some still do, the cultural degradation foisted upon them by the loss of their slaves (their Lost Cause). After all, slave ownership was culturally endowed to them in both the Old and New Testaments. Spain’s traditionalist monarcho-Catholics brutally put down the Republicans (a coalition of intellectuals, anarcho-athiests, socialists, and others) along with the assistance of Hitler and the Vatican’s Opus Dei, led by Saint Escriva. But we (Postflavians) do not defend the incumbent culture of the South, or of the Spanish Catholics — while the present-day Catholic Church broke all speed records in canonizing Escriva and John Paul II.

The Submergence of Class Warfare

It is most easy to see what is really going on, if we go back to the original political meanings of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, and ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. That is, the original (French Republic) ‘right’ conservatives sought to ‘conserve’ the rights and prerogatives of the divine order of the European monarchies, as well as their beneficiaries such as the gentry and merchants. These latter groups formed a middle class, the so-called bourgeoisie, who well understood which side their bread was buttered on. ‘Conservatively’ supporting the status quo was clearly in their best interest in a perceived zero-sum game with the lower classes.

The term ‘Class Warfare’ comes from the socialist idea that workers must struggle for their rights against the bourgeoise. Starting with Marx, the pretense has been that the truly upper classes have merged with the bourgeoisie (that is, middle class professionals and small business owners). And while your authors do still ascribe to the libertarian ideal that the working class and the bourgeoisie could (and do) work together in harmony, we have to deny wholeheartedly the conservative mantra that there is no such thing as ‘Class Warfare’ in America. This is the big political charade, especially when it comes to the strange omission of ‘Royalty’ and their successors in the analysis. In fact, we have come to almost the exact opposite position, i.e. that there is almost nothing but class warfare in America (disguised as race blame, gender conflict, or similar). While the ranks of the ‘liberal’ parties are drawn mostly from the middle class and racial minorities, the ‘conservatives’ consist of the very wealthiest individuals pretending to make common cause with the poor whites. Also included in this coalition are some bourgeois small business owners who aspire mightily to be moguls themselves, if only in their dreams. This is not limited to the United States of America, but rather to all of the Americas that were established by European colonization under the divine authority of the various crowns and the papacy.

For here we are getting to the nub of the conservative knee-jerk ‘reaction’ to various efforts to actually deliver a more desirable social environment. This has been the same issue since at least the time of the Classical Greek oligarchies, and so on till today. That is: the primary driver of class economic status stems from inherited wealth, especially real estate, and what associated means are attached to it. To offer a more optimal alternative, libertarians and other fiscal conservatives must recognize the important Georgist caveat that our planet, the Earth, is a common heritage which was not created by any human effort (we’re pretty sure), and which should be stewarded for the benefit of all the people. Hopefully we can even find room for a few wolves and sharks, at least. This is the principle that could allow past wrongs to be better redressed. Henry George pointed out that land tax is the one form of tax that does not penalize economic activity, since the amount of land is basically fixed by the finite size of the planet. But one man’s more optimal and balanced society is another Optimate’s worst nightmare. (The Optimates were the Roman oligarchs who struggled against the land reforms of Julius Caesar and the earlier Gracchi brothers.)

Meanwhile, in the current crypto-monarchist environment, it is unthinkable to suggest that the injustices of the current state of affairs, the sequel of centuries of slavery and conquest, should be seriously unwound by policy. ‘Affirmative Action’ programs pit the middle class against minorities, and leave upper class privilege untouched. Tensions frequently break across racial divides, making it easier to distract attention from the core issue. The colored ‘have nots’ can then be marginalized using rubrics akin to the old biblical Ham ruse. Their propagandic debasement serves to functionally elevate the ‘haves’ if only by relative perspective. And thus the upper class depends on their culturally sanctioned superiority, and this causes their fear of cultural degradation.

Don’t Fence Me Out

Sir Thomas More, in his 1516 work Utopia suggests that the practice of enclosure was responsible for some of the social problems affecting England at the time, specifically theft:

“But I do not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from hence; there is another cause of it, more peculiar to England.” “What is that?” said the Cardinal. “The increase of pasture,” said I, “by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns – reserving only the churches – and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

With the changes and demands wrought by, first, the Mercantile era and, then Enclosure and the Industrial Revolution necessity eventually forced some ‘enlightened ones’ in power to realize that the conditions of the lower classes needed to be elevated, so as to make their societies function better. This included the creation of opportunities for education, and some political rights. Such activity was seen as a ‘generous’ endeavor, and thus garnered the term ‘liberal’, from the common meaning of the word. Such ‘liberality’ provided the upper classes with a better educated and more productive class of factory workers and soldiers, but could not redress all the underlying problems. As such, one might suspect that some of these ‘liberals’ were nothing more than overt or covert (crypto) monarchists.

I’ve Been Right So Long, It’s All Been Left to Me

In this MSNBC video link , George Wallace’s campaign manager of the 1960’s and ’70’s, Tom Turnipseed, compares the Trump campaign to Wallace’s craven presidential campaign racial politics. Trump, wearing his branded flipflops, is treading a well worn trail of others’ tears. This in responding to widespread fears and concerns on the part of the (no longer) working class Americans, whose living standards and prospects have been deteriorating alarmingly for decades now. Their situation has reached a crisis point, especially given the current high suicide and drug addiction rates amongst those of our Boomer generation, perhaps second only to those of veterans of the ongoing faux Bush and Obama War on Terror.

The dark irony here is that Donald Trump would categorize these poor souls as Losers. To be sure, because of continual appeals to their vanity, these descendants of mostly former European serfs do not understand that they are well on their way to becoming serfs again, or worse. Ironically, the grandparents of today’s American serfs cum self-entitled bourgeoisie forced the New Deal changes upon the political class, more so than the other way around. And now the worm has turned, with the corporate powers having found their way back to the sacred cash cow of virtual slave labor, foreign or domestic. Thus, there is no more need to indulge the serf descendants, aside from today’s cheap equivalent of the Roman “bread and circuses”. That is, on TV, with no bread.

There have been massive changes in Trump’s historical political posture during his presidential runs. His new campaign manager recently admitted that he has only been ‘big stick’ posturing in the early primary campaign, so as to appeal to his mostly uneducated Boomer base. We have to wonder what this obvious pandering is really meant to achieve. Even lusty Ann Coulter is having trouble maintaining lip service for the Donald’s recent limp stance. But, Trump does maintain a consistent emphasis on his numerous means and ends of ‘Winning’. Accordingly, one might be justified in considering his current means as merely demagogic opportunism in service to his massive ego. Perhaps so, but his big stick campaign may also be the cover for some worldly Trojan whore, perhaps the onset of globalist corporate fascism.

That said, and as we finish writing this, Trump has taken to tacking to the left of Hillary for the general election, leaving some to half-joke that he’ll now offer Bernie Sanders the Republican VP slot. Perhaps Trump has noticed that Sanders is significantly outpolling Hillary, and Trump, when the two are placed opposite Trump. But again, all this drama may be purely for entertainment purposes, as Trump has also recently given an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he backtracked from his left-wing position, emphasizing the virtue of ‘flexibility’.

Is you is, or is you ain’t … a fruit of white slavery?

As detailed by Martin Bernal in his Black Athena, Vol. 1, the Hanoverian sponsorship of the Romantic movement delivered the first cultural expressions of racial superiority in Western history. (That is, aside from the ancient Jewish question.) The purpose of this was to justify global imperial colonization under the rubric of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, including the new notion of race based slavery. In earlier times, slavery had not been determined by racial or ethnic factors. On the contrary, it was primarily associated with defeat in warfare, or hopeless debt. The Romans would enslave anyone but fellow Romans. The Greeks would enslave anyone – including other Greeks. In feudal times, the interrelated nobility held most white people in virtual slavery under the job description of ‘serf’.

The new Romantic narrative provided a basis for the former ‘serfs’ to conquer and dispossess their new enemies. Ironically, this is exactly what had happened to their ancestors centuries earlier, during the Roman conquests of Europe. While the former serfs got a cultural upgrade, the new ‘barbarians’ got an unwelcome cultural downgrade. As with the Holy Bible, all this demonstrates the value of social engineering, race-based or otherwise.

Early in the primary season, Trump brought his two-front populist war to his mostly lower middle class, white base, whom have long been on an addictive binge of anti-intellectualism. This is a dark vestige of the 18th century’s Romantic Movement, fobbed off on the West by George II’s cynical initiation of the modern ‘scientific’ university system at Göttingen University. This perverse and baseless philosophy grants primacy to hysterical, gut ‘feelings’ over rational thinking processes. These feelings are given their highest expression when based in a geographical substrate that darkly translates to hierarchical ethnic and racial terms. The ‘feeling’ here is that generations upon generations of life upon prime geographical real estate is everything, in terms of determining racial merit.

The first prong of Trump’s populist campaign is based in such racist ‘romantic’ notions, as discussed above. The second prong is aimed at the current American economic malaise. He is targeting the same ignorant white audience that rallied to Ronald Reagan – who successfully mocked Jimmy Carter for his use of the term ‘malaise’. Because such citizens are not fact based, but feelings based, they are not capable of discerning that it was really Ronald Reagan’s policies that started the slide to their worst declines. Robert Reich, President Clinton’s first term Secretary of Labor, details in the documentary, Inequality for All, the effects of Reagan’s policies as steering the American economy from a previously upward Virtuous Cycle to a downward Vicious Cycle. From upwards to downwards, that is, for everyone below the upper middle class, while the reverse for everyone else – especially for the very well to do. Unfortunately, and as admitted by Reich, Clinton’s policies were a general continuance of Reagan’s Koch and Mont Pelerin based policies — aimed at bestowing massive largess on the worthies, in hopes that some would trickle down to the neo-serfs. That Reagan’s director of the OMB, David Stockman, declared that Supply Side economics was a massive failure, is merely indicative of our thesis here about the ultimately dystopian consequences of anti-intellectualism.

And perhaps worse, Reagan’s trickle-down policy was framed within the straw man, the faux intellectual foil, of Libertarianism’s extreme anarcho-capitalism. This advanced the destructive hidden agenda of traditionalist Catholics like the Kochs, to demonstrate that egalitarian democratic principles can’t work — if only because they are busy 24/7 to undermine them. Just as these elites conveniently hid behind Marx’s atheistic skirt on the one side (to mitigate against socialism), they also hid behind Ayn Rand’s atheism on the Libertarian side.

Reich’s Virtuous Cycle worked mainly because its engine was driven by the fact that the middle class demographic must, by default, spend a much higher proportion of its income than does the wealthier strata of society. This increases the ‘velocity’ of money, making the same amount in circulation work more for the benefit of the general economy. Here, the documentary enlisted billionaire businessman Nick Hanauer to confirm this point. He added that, despite his continual investments in new business ventures, the vast bulk of his annual profit income goes to such as hedge funds. This capital is deployed in non-productive investments and/or overseas, thus providing rather little boost to an economy that can produce and sustain jobs for the domestic society. And he asserts that this is typical for people in his strata.

Ronald Reagan, elected on a platform of limited government, turned out to be the opposite, funding massive increases in military programs and in financial market and government credit expansion. Thus, he got the political credit for collapsing the Soviet Union, which many had predicted must happen in any course, and for the significant economic gains made by the upper middle class and above. This political credit was ironic given that Reagan’s base was his so-called Blue Collar Democrats. It just goes to show that no bad political deed goes unrewarded. This has been known since before the populist times of Julius Caesar, the father of Christ Augustus.

The Clintons were involved in similar duplicity in Arkansas, favoring corporations over citizens, despite their populist-left rhetoric. For example, they colluded with southern elite whites in seeking to influence public utility commissions to jack up rates, to the detriment of poor ratepayers, both black and white. This was detailed in Roger Morris’s Partners in Power. As for credibility bona fides here, Morris was a member of the Johnson and Nixon era National Security Councils before he and two others resigned in protest over the illegal Cambodian bombing campaign. The above revelation should be indicative as to why Robert Reich, in his video linked above, could not get the Clinton Administration to follow through on his economic recommendations, leading Reich to leave at the end of the first term.

Thus, the Virtuous Cycle is transitioned to the Vicious Cycle, by various means of siphoning income streams from the lower strata of the middle class. The loss of disposable income, and worse – sustenance income, leads to the gleeful opportunity for demagogues such as Trump to pander to the hysterical fears of the ignorantly emasculated blue collar worker. Historically, such prolonged periods of economic malaise lead, one way or another, to the various stressed groups hysterically blaming one another for being the cause of the problems.

The ever-popular Jewish Question

This pitting of group against group, a long known practice of the elites, termed “divide and conquer”, brings us back to another fascinating aspect of Trump’s race-based politics. Historically, when we arrive at such a juncture, the political class opts to distract the hoi polloi with human scapegoats to take the blame for the problems caused by the elites. Here the mother of all scapegoats, at the cynical core of the Western Judeo-Christian construct, is the ever popular Jewish Question.

While Trump’s campaign against multiculturalism is centered on Islamic and Mexican immigrants, we’ve noticed that some of Trump’s staunchest supporters are far more concerned about Jews. By this we mean notable figures such as David Duke and Kevin MacDonald, as well as many others like the ones identified by this ‘helpful’ list from anti-semitism.net. And although Trump’s overtly stated message treats Jews with tremendous respect, his anti-Jewish followers detect more than a few hints that Trump might turn out to be in their camp. This may be a sort of psychological projection, rather than being based in anything tangible in Trump’s political platform or his history; but nevertheless, we maintain that their perception is very significant, as a manifestation of the archetypal significance of the conflict of Jews vs. Christians.

Distilled to its purist form, these self-styled “White Nationalists” are telling us that the deeply anti-Judaic central paradigm of Christianity is indeed true. That is, they would have us believe: the supposedly ‘genetically’ wicked Jewish race, the same ones who supposedly are responsible for having the Romans crucify (the ironically Jewish) Jesus Christ, are yet still the prime carriers of original sin in the world. This whether Rome’s Christianity was a pious fraud or not. These ‘carriers’ include members within the central and international bankers, the mass-media propagandists, the organizers of false-flag terrorist attacks, and the schemers of trans-humanism and technocracy. Depending on the individual’s perspective, the culprits can include the entire global Jewish demographic. A number of other usual suspects, such as the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jesuits, Bilderbergers, Bohemians and so forth, are seen as little more than Jews with a cover story, and their ranks complemented with goyim useful idiots.

Baldly asserting a particularly extreme version of this perspective (while denying that any conspiracy is even necessary for the Jews to implement their plot), Andrew Anglin (now webmaster of “The Daily Stormer” with its slogan “Total Fascism”) wrote:

https://web.archive.org/web/2014051…e-confusing-and-impossible-jewish-conspiracy/

The genetic nature of the Jew is that of a predatory parasite, and it is hardwired into the psychology of each and every one of them to find weaknesses in their host societies and exploit them, both for personal gain and the gain of their race. … It is impossible to know what goes through the mind of a Jew, as they are so entirely alien to us in every conceivable way. Asking what a Jew is thinking when he robs and abuses us is like asking what a mosquito is thinking when he drinks our blood. We must cease in our attempts to find a recognizable human pattern to their behavior, for none exists. They do not need to meet secretly in order to attack us, any more than a swarm of termites must meet secretly before destroying the frame of a house.

The unstated implication is that if we could just find some sort of Final Solution for this problem (neglecting, for a moment, the Muslims and Mexicans and so forth), the rest of us could then soon achieve a state of virtual Utopia. With those of stout White blood restored to power at the helm of perhaps a Democratic Christian Republic, we could look forward to honest government, universal prosperity, and a high-minded, clear-thinking culture, based on stable families. Or perhaps the people might prefer something like secular Anarcho-Capitalism and a noble Non-Aggression Principle. In either case, the people would abide in a state of freedom from any assault, whether from drugs, the media, politicians, or anything else. Right?

A Trumped-up Trope?

Perhaps the biggest clue that the Judaic narrative is spurious, is that the founder of the Jews, namely Judah and his descendants, are depicted uniformly in a negative light in the Old Testament. Yet this is the foundational narrative of Western Civilization, which has traditionally been considered the Word of God, and the touchstone of its ‘Cult-ure’. Such narratives, such as Rome’s Aeneid, are more typically cast as panegyrics, glorifying the moral superiority of their founders. This dark depiction of Judah in the Bible is sometimes taken by modern scholars as an indication of veracity: because it’s so unexpected, it ‘must be’ honest. As discussed in Isaac and the Fortunate Scions, we think it’s more evidence that the Torah was designed from the beginning to place the Jews in the role of scapegoats, and servants to others.

Along these lines, we feel it’s significant that ever since the inception of our discussion forum here at this website, we have been repeatedly approached (or accosted) by numerous posters carrying this same anti-Jewish agenda, framed variously. These apparently well-meaning posters have advanced this agenda ostensibly in the name of seeking Truth and correcting the vector for achieving a better world, or at least preventing a worse one.

There are some obvious reasons why our forum is a lightning rod for this sort of activity. First of all, we are highly critical of most all religious formulations and especially the Abrahamic ones, which are all built upon the cultural foundation of one lineage of oxymoronically depicted noble shepherds. For that reason alone, critics who focus their attacks on Jewish targets might expect that they would find a companionable welcome among us. However, the difference is that while we are critical of all these religions, we are careful to place the primary blame on those elite elements that perpetuate the fraud, even though they should know better.

Another factor is the company we keep. Joseph Atwill has been a regular guest on Red Ice Radio, and Jerry has also appeared there once. Red Ice, in turn, features guests like David Duke and Benton Bradberry, who are well known for their White Nationalist leanings. In turn, Red Ice’s host Henrik Palmgren is a regular at Freeman TV, where Joseph is another regular guest. So again, it stands to reason that the followers of these Internet personalities would come here expecting to find themselves at home. Perhaps when we venture into these forums, we need to be more careful to delineate our position.

It’s interesting to note that the anti-Jewish agenda can be ironically further justified using one of the central organizing motifs here, namely Atwill’s discovery that Jesus of Nazareth is a cynically fictional construct of elite Imperial Romans collaborating with elite Herodian and Hellenized factions of ‘Jews’, including Philo of Alexandria. This can be interpreted as a necessary reaction to Jewish extremism of the time — with the Imperial Romans perhaps even in the role of heroes of the civilized White Race against the obtuse and hopeless resistance of the Jews. At any rate, this was essentially the justification given by Josephus for his role in the Jewish War.

Followed to its logical conclusion, this could lead to the view that it was unfortunate that the Romans failed to completely wipe out and/or culturally destroy the Jews at the time, because now we’re faced with finishing the job they started. Especially, because we are told that the once passivated Jews retained knowledge of what was done to them over the years, including the faux Jesus business, and have now seized the moment to launch a silent and grand global coup, all while distracting us with Zion, Ersatz Israel.

The Fertile Cuckoo Eggs of Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism

Another sophisticated anti-Judaic argument, is the view that intellectual movements such as Postmodernism and the Frankfort School have invented and/or exploited (M)ulticulturalism and (F)eminism, re-casting these as weapons to use against the Gentiles. It is rightly observed that many Jews do not take their own medicine, remaining insular and tribal while expecting everyone else (especially white American and European males) to adopt an extremely self-effacing posture with respect to those who have been wronged in the past. And while we cannot deny the reality of this sub-plot, we feel it’s important to point out some mitigating factors. Firstly, as we have discussed extensively above, the goals of (m)ulticulturalism and (f)eminism have a fundamental (p)rogressive appeal, the service of which may have been a primary motivation for many fellow travelers of (P)ostmodernism. Secondly, as with many good ideas that have been corrupted by too much elite-driven scholarly attention, it should be possible to recover the core values from the baroque superstructure. Thirdly, the correct response if this is a Jewish plot would be to demand that the Jews (and all other races for that matter) start to live up to multicultural ideals, not to abandon them and attempt to re-create the German Third Reich on American soil, or in Israel for that matter.

But what is this business about fertile (prickled) ideological cuckoo eggs? It sounds pretty ‘kooky’ you say? We are suggesting that the basically positive principles of multiculturalism and feminism, are now being ideologically cuckholded by the politicized, extremist formalization of such principles. Such organized formalization necessarily produces a defensive cultural backlash, or reaction. This also touches on the issue of elite and reactionary ‘co-optation’ of reform movements in general. Organic efforts towards social improvement can be met with cynical reactionary efforts to neutralize the movement by the process of ‘Entryism‘. One tactic of Entryism is to subvert a cause by introducing militant Formalism via either agents provocateur or by encouraging pre-existent members to radicalize themselves. Another tactic is to create or commandeer a hierarchical control mechanism (such as, for example, the board of directors of a nonprofit) to turn a grass-roots movement into a formal and rigidly doctrinaire ‘ism’ that loses touch with a balanced view. Such radicalization, via Entryism, is usually meant to create a Machiavellian backlash against the original movement by the unwitting wider public. As such, your authors (as can be seen with others’ similar approach) make use of small and capital letters (sometimes inside parentheses) to distinguish between a general movement and some co-opted and radicalized (F)ormalism of that movement. That is, we distinguish ‘feminism’ vs. radical Feminism, or ‘libertarianism’ vs. Libertarianism.

In light of all this, it should be clear where we stand with respect to the anti-Jewish theorizing of David Duke, Kevin MacDonald, and the like, and why we ultimately feel it’s all terribly misguided. As discussed above, we take our stand with the ideals of the democratic rights of all mankind, including equality of all peoples under the law. Thus, to the extent that any individual Jews are seeking to carry out elitist conspiracies against the common people, of course, we are in opposition. But guilt needs to be assigned on the basis of actions, not because of race; and we believe there is plenty of guilt to go around for all races.

A thorough web search will reveal an abundance of anti-Islamic, anti-Catholic, anti-Black, anti-Chinese, or even anti-American racist literature, in addition to the anti-Jewish genre. It may be true that the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ surpass everything else in the height of evil depicted. However, the fraudulent nature of that document should cause suspicions to rebound against the perpetrators of the forgery. An objective reader should eventually come to the realization that elite criminality is an equal-opportunity sport for all races, or at least for all White races and fellow travelers. The ‘Protocols’, as well as the entire genre of “fear porn” that it inspired, seek to promote a sort of a misplaced paranoia. The reader is led to fear that soon the wicked ones (Jews, Muslims, Chinese, Americans, whoever) will succeed in carrying out their plot, at which point they will utterly destroy and/or enslave their victims, and the rest of the world. In hopes of avoiding this demise, the reader is encouraged to support an elite savior of their own tribe, who is most likely (in reality) just as evil. All of this is just another variant of the much earlier apocalyptic Christian fear porn, rooted in the book of Revelation — although the White Nationalist version of this apocalypse is lacking in any salvation for the faithful. Or perhaps we should say that the White Nationalists do entertain the hope that salvation will come — currently, in the name of Donald Trump, their champion.

Conversely, we find that an understanding that the global elites are of diverse racial and ethnic makeup, leads to a certain amount of relaxation. One recognizes that matters have been bad for thousands of years, but are unlikely to take a sudden turn for the worse — at least, not as a result of the sudden triumphant rise of (for example) the Jews. The cultural role of the Jews in particular, as scapegoats for the elite, is certainly nothing new. We know that the Roman empire of the first century CE, with the assistance of the elite Jews of the day, co-opted the remaining passivated Jews, rather than completely eliminating them all from the empire. They even gave the Rabbinical Jews a city, Yavneh (Jamnia), to reformulate their texts and outlook, and an ethnarch that answered to Rome. This system, minus the ‘nasr’ ethnarch, was passed onto the papal system and was thus folded into feudal Europe with the Jews becoming the institutionalized buffer class of the day, essentially the Middle Class. Hence Rome did not fail at its job, it did exactly what it intended.

From then until now, the Western system has maintained the same general cultural posture of cynical antagonism. (That is, with the fasce-inating exception of Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), where the Jews are now absolved by papal fiat, and John XXIII declaring significantly that he is the Jew’s Joseph. The two sticks of Catholicism and Judaism are being combined into a single fasces? That is, a single bundle of sticks, perhaps holding an axe blade? We await anxiously to see how this will unfold. We may find that Islamics and Blacks take on the scapegoat role formerly shouldered by the Jews. Barack Hussein Obama, known to be half Black and suspected of being Islamic as well, may be the harbinger of this trend.)

Our model agrees with David Duke and the Stormers at least to this extent: we concur that the Jews of today (of various types and persuasions) hold dominant positions in the media and banking industries, and this is a fact that needs an explanation. Even in going this far, we have distanced ourselves from mainstream discourse, which exists in a state of cold silence and denial about the issue of Jewish power. Is this state of affairs perhaps a purposeful ‘elephant in the room’? Unlike mainstream media sources, and even many ‘alt media’ ones, at this website we will never be afraid to address these questions frankly, no matter how “politically incorrect” the results might be. For example, just what did happen in the Jewish “Shoah” of World War II, and how does it compare to the genocide of Germans and Russians in that same conflict? Can Americans take such a self-righteous attitude about this, considering what happened to Native Americans? And, how can we moderate the toxic effects of all forms of tribalism and religious fundamentalism, including (even) if the tribe happens to be Jewish? At this website, we want to use bright day-glo colors to illuminate all these hidden elephants.

However, the primary fundamental flaw of logic in the White Nationalist argument against the Jews is described by the old saw “correlation is not causation”. Indeed, the presence of so many Jews in such prominent positions of influence is being interpreted wrongly, via a cognitive reversal of the directionality of cause and effect. As mentioned earlier, the true cause of presence of the Jews where they are today is a cultural residue of institutional decisions made long ago, by the elites of Imperial and Catholic Rome. The logical error (the reversal of cause and effect) is culturally primed for easier acceptance amongst the populace via the official and underground propaganda institutions and rumor mills of Western society for the last two thousand years, and especially coming from the Church. The reality is that the media and banking industries are only two components of a greater elite power structure that also includes governments, the military-industrial complex and their intelligence agencies, organized religions, and ecumenical/international secret societies such as the Freemasons and many others.

And we hold that the Jews are still playing the same cultural role today as they have for at least two thousand years (if not more), as typologically and psychologically necessary implementers of various roles on behalf of the wider elite. Certainly, the vast majority of Jews are unwittingly passive in this role: their ‘crime’ is just in their existence. Even the acceptance of Christ is dubious redemption, as ethnic and cultural factors stay in play, especially with suspicions of crypto-Judaism. And the ‘hofjuden’ are always in their assigned roles, dragging the rest along. Thus eternally condemned, the Jews serve as lightning rods for popular outrage, and as scapegoats for the problems created by the system as a whole. Even among elite participants in the system, it’s difficult to say who might be aware of this archetype, which seems to have a life of its own. We suspect that many or even most elite Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Islamics and humanist technocrats are ignorantly playing out their cultural role within the grand scheme, pursuing their own narrow interests within the narrative of their particular faith or nationality. And some of these individuals may be just as stereotypically evil as their detractors imagine.

However, we also believe that at least a few individuals have the benefit of conscious insight into the manner in which the various cogs interact to create spectacular outcomes such as the events of 9/11/2001, which act so often for the benefit of the elites of all the various religions and races. We believe that such very sophisticated elite individuals are found as top members of international and ecumenical secret societies.

When all is said and done, it is really a question of what model is most accurate, if not absolutely correct. Your authors say, as we have before, that all the evidence points to the idea that all the elites are effectively working together against everyone else, including against non-elite Jews. Thus, our position is ultimately opposed factually as well as ideologically, from those who blame a Jewish conspiracy for all the problems. Unfortunately for the goal of settling this controversy one way or the other, one cannot clearly isolate Jews and so-called Gentiles into those categorical camps. Historically, ethnic Judaism has been defined in terms of matrilineal descent, but the starting point is imagined to be the twelve sons of Jacob from four different wives, creating a lot of genetic diversity right from the beginning. These twelve sons may very well have been avatars (or perhaps externally-imposed rulers) for twelve diverse tribes assembled into a political unity by conquest. The ultimate fate of at least some of these twelve tribes remains mysterious, but surely the concept of ‘Jewish’ cannot be restricted to sons of Judah. The initial narrative diversity is not an auspicious starting point for the concept that “the Jews” are a discrete race that can be defined in terms of DNA. But over the thousands of years since, the situation has gotten far worse, as whatever pure Jewish DNA ever existed, has been admixed with the blood of neighbors and converts all over the globe. This theme is explored in more depth in the essay Genetics of the Oligarchs: Eloi, or Upstarts.

While it is all very interesting to present evidence that Shakespeare or Ignatius of Loyola or even Roosevelt must have been a Crypto-Jew, it begs credulity to extend that argument to the many elite Catholics and Protestants in extreme positions of power, such as in the CIA, Congress or the Supreme Court. It is, in fact, the Judaic presence in both the models that allows for the critical and profitable obfuscation, the veiling of the true wizards (who may, for all we know, include certain Jews in positions as powerful as anyone.)

Along these lines, Joseph Atwill still thinks that a more parsimonious explanation of the phenomena we address here, is that one or more elite groups are acting out of tribal and ethnic motivations. Other readers might also feel that the cultural control mechanism proposed by your authors (Richard and Jerry) is simply too complex and fantastical for anyone to take seriously, except for maybe Machiavelli. The correct analytic path might indeed turn out to be that these various secret societies, governments and corporations are exactly what they appear to be: completely independent power centers. Or, worse, that some singular racist entity is really emerging out of the chaos into total control. Accordingly, we all agree here on the importance of continuing to gather data, including DNA information if possible.

Contrary to Atwill’s view, your authors argue that any failure (on the part of the dominant elite) to provide a front group to take the cultural blame, would be the height of Machiavellian malpractice. To then argue that this is only evidence of just how devious the Jews are, would then exhibit an apex of absurdo infinito. Not that anyone has yet made that argument against us. For that matter: to our knowledge, no one has ever asserted our central argument before. Meaning that no has seen fit to see the Jews (loosely defined) as an integral and somewhat expendable ‘limited hangout’ front for the greater control system. Only Israel Shahak has come close in his Jewish History, Jewish Religion, but was not depicting the larger picture to the level we are. As a logical complete system, our model may actually be more parsimonious than any other model. In other words, the model should be as simple as it needs to be to fit the data, but not simpler.

That some cohort of these Jews may indeed be part of a ‘Hidden Hand’ control construct is really beside the point we are making. In fact, that such individuals may indeed be acting so, is consistent with the evidence for exactly such Romano-Judaic collaboration, at elite levels, during the time of the formation of Christianity, and even before that. This master and servant collaboration is narratively confirmed by the birth order and mothers of Judah and Joseph, as discussed in Richard’s last post Isaac and the Fortunate Scions. The next post in the OT series will flesh this relationship out even further, showing Judah’s subservience to Joseph, who was “as if the pharaoh”.

Of course, the very easy response to this is to claim that since Joseph was a Hebrew, then your authors here are making an inane argument by showing this distinction. But, are we really? In The Genesis of Western False Dialectic in the Old Testament, we claimed that the word ‘gentile’ should not be understood as a general term for Christians. In its original sense, it specifically referred to ‘gentlemen’ — that is, the nobility. Here, we will argue that a similar obfuscation has occurred with the ‘identity’ of the lineage of Joseph. That is, the descendants of Abraham and Joseph may encompass a far broader spectrum of peoples than is commonly acknowledged today. At a deep level, the sons of Abraham could include the Romans, Celts, Phoenicians and Greeks (Danaans) as well. As argued in Steven Collins’ The ‘Lost’ Ten Tribes of Israel… Found!, the correct collective name of the twelve tribes who followed the law of Moses as worshippers of Yahweh and heirs of the Blessing was the “Berith” or “Covenant” people (in Hebrew consonant spelling, B-R-T), whose name may be reflected in such places as Brittania, Iberia and Hibernia; as well as the name the Phoenicians called themselves, also the B-R-T. Collins claims that the Celtic people, in general, are descendant from the Phoenician lost tribes. He suggests that the Trojans might also have had some relation to these B-R-T, which would make their seeming arch-enemies the Romans distant relatives as well. (Perhaps that explains the strange collaboration between the Romans, Herodians and Alexanders? More likely, a matter of convenience at the time.) Elsewhere, we have argued that some of the current political elites may be remotely descended from a small founder tribe of Indo-Europeans that capitalized on their mastery of the horse and the wheel to conquer the southern agricultural world of their time. If any of this is the case, then the White Nationalists may be correct that the elite conspiracy is in some sense a united racist tribal endeavour — though the connections between the various components are far more remote in history, and the racial and genetic diversity is far broader than they imagine. This argument does not depend upon Joseph being factual or fictional in representing either an individual or an eponymous tribe.

Ancient Roman Roots of Anti-Judaism

As if we should really have to remind anybody: the two-thousand year old system enshrined by Roman Catholic theology is indeed centered around the alleged Jewish perfidy towards Jesus. The lasting effects of this ideology seem to extend to all who have been culturally baptized into the waters of Fear Porn. But this manipulation is even older than Christianity. The genre had many manifestations in ancient Rome, as the final paragraph of Beard and North’s Pagan Priests states:

from pg. 255:
The political order of the Empire chose its moral enemies well. Being merely structural products, they functioned not as threats to the dominant order, but rather as its allies in its constant task of naturalization, of being taken for granted. One might even say that the moral enemies of the Roman order, from perverts to cannibals [such as Lucan’s fictive parody, the night-witch Erichtho – rs], from Christians to witches, were among its most effective friends, making their own contribution to weaving the veil of imperial enchantment. The Roman order attempted to dehistoricize sacrifice. Part of its strategy was to invent ‘natural’ social diseases which lurked, like germs, in dark cracks, waiting to pounce. In alliance with the civic gods, the emperors, like Vim, kept the sink sparkling.

Needless to say, the above could just as easily be said about the Roman’s superficial cultural relationship of tension with the Jews. Today, this ideology persists in spite of the official modern day Catholic and ecumenical zeitgeist that the Judeo-Christian ‘God’ has evolved from His jealous and vengeful nature into that of an All Loving Cheshire Pussy Cat. However, the substantive operative relationship between the Roman and Jewish elites may have been more cooperative. Today, this cooperation has come into the open, and we are told that God wants to bring the Jews back into the flock, if indeed they ever left. We don’t see how this latter scheme can work in the long run to preserve the power of the elites, unless the hate can be redirected against Blacks, Hispanics and/or Muslims.

James Carroll, a former Catholic priest, went to extensive lengths to detail the anti-Judaic message found within the works of every major Catholic theologian from St. Augustine till recent times. In his book Constantine’s Sword, Mr. Carroll argued that this virulent anti-Judaism was the result of a logical desire of proto-Christians to distance themselves safely from the Zealot Jews of the day. However, this implausible attribution of motivation does not undermine, one whit, from his careful quoting from Catholic theology.

Whatever the initial motivation, the medieval popes and their staff theologians saw profit in having the Jews physically present in their prescribed ghettos in cities across Europe. The Jews were maintained in such squalor so that they could take their culturally necessary role as demonic whipping boys and girls, for the express purpose of maintaining a reactionary state of mind in the Christians. The presence of such living demons proved very effective in maintaining adherence to the religious paradigm, including the extraction of the ten percent tithing skim. If all the Jewish demons were to be literally eliminated, as was the operative ‘pogromatic’ mindset from time to time, then the perverse hold of the fake religion on the masses might evaporate.

Since the 19th century emancipations of the remaining Jews from the ghettos of the ancien regime, this slow evaporation to secularism is indeed what has happened generally, but not universally across Christendom. Perhaps the European backlash of revulsion for the collusion of some Christians with the Nazis, may have been a factor in driving many Europeans to abandon their religion during the postwar period. This backlash never appeared in the United States, perhaps because this knowledge was not delivered here by the organs of media. The American Catholic Church, with some pre-war exceptions such as the infamous Father Coughlan, openly supported the Allied Cause once the war broke out. Prior to this time, all Catholics globally were called to support Hitler’s cause against the Bolsheviks via the Second Prophecy of Fatima. This prophecy, by the way, was later used to undergird the incitement of American involvement in Cardinal Spellman’s War, aka Vietnam.

As a highlight of Constantine’s Sword, Carroll detailed that as a young boy he attended, in 1959, the second unveiling of Christ’s ephod, the seamless robe of Jesus stored at the Trier Cathedral. The Church maintains that this robe was the regalia of the Jewish high priest, worn in order to fulfill Jesus’ dual nature as a spiritual and secular Messiah. Trier was the preferred seat of Constantine’s governance, inspiring the title of the book. Carroll attended this ceremony along with his father, a general of the U.S. Army Air Force who was engaged in rebuilding Europe as part of the Marshall Plan.

The first unveiling of Jesus’s ephod in the twentieth century was in 1933, to celebrate the ascension of Adolf Hitler to power, with the essential help of the Catholic Zentrum Party. The common denominator for the two unveilings was the presence of Fritz von Papen, the man who negotiated the Vatican Concordat for the Nazis, and who later became a Papal Chamberlain. At the first ceremony, Hitler was invited to attend but ‘minister’ von Papen came in his stead, to cheerfully witness all the Swastika emblazoned flags hanging in the cathedral. Here is the insane irony of the Mother Christian Church claiming, via this faux relic, that Jesus was indeed the high priest of Judaism, even as Hitler was preparing his attempt to eradicate the Jews from Europe. One is reminded of the imperial Roman mockery that Jesus was the king of the Jews, signified by the inscription INRI on the cross.

Meet the New Age: the same as the Old Age…

So, one might ask us, what is the ‘cui bono’ purpose of the Church in apparently shooting itself in the foot? ‘Aha’, our detractors say, the ‘goy’ Church has obviously been infiltrated by the demonic Jews, via the Illuminati, the Jesuits, and the Freemasons. Prior to this happening, the Church was allegedly doing an admirable job of evolving into an institution that epitomized the values of Christ Jesus, that high priest of the demonic Jews. This would include values like getting mad at barren fig trees and such. Richard has explained this gospel reference here, as a humorous pagan cryptic allusion to the ongoing change of Ages. And just who was really driving the donkey of change? In this case, the change was that first textually espoused by Virgil in honor of Octavian Augustus Caesar, the first Prince of Peace and divine author of the glorious Pax Romana. Virgil, for his 4th Eclogue effort, was honored posthumously as a Christian in the breech, and still is to this day.

Some people suggest that we are in the proximity of another ‘new age’ (zodiacal or otherwise), or perhaps a New World Order. If this is the case, might we expect that the veiled sponsors of the Church might be inclined to submerge the image of Jesus of Nazareth, in order to ‘prepare the way’ for the next salvic paradigm to be shoved down our throats? Here, we say: yes indeed. It is not the Jews who are causing the Christians to abandon Jesus. And similarly, we see that there is a distractionary basis for another Fear Porn Industry that has raised up around the New Age movement of recent decades. This includes claims, not entirely without factual basis, that the apex of Western Cultural achievement of American (zombie konformist) Freedom is about to be destroyed, in the wake of an economic and/or ecological collapse — by rampaging zombies.

Getting back to our anti-Jewish critics: they say that the dastardly Jewish infiltrators have even gone so far as to convert the ‘goy’ Catholic Church into a ‘gay’ pedophile Church. Curiously, many of the pious goy faithful are willing to deny that the pedophile Church is really a long running institutional problem. This shows just how strong such ‘cultural’ programming can be. In fact, the pedophilia of the Church may extend back to the 4th century and Cyril of Jerusalem, as hinted (but not definitively demonstrated) by David C.A. Hillman in his Original Sin: Ritual Child Rape and the Church. It’s also possible that such ‘Perverse’ behavior has its roots in priest and nun celibacy, and the resultant dearth of approved sexual opportunities. And let us not forget the dog-matic refusal to admit that homosexuality occurs naturally in the animal kingdom, which includes humanity. Ignoring all of this history and biology, the pedophile priest problem is characterized, at least by those willing to admit that there is any such problem, as a matter of the misbehavior of certain individuals. Even the coverup is justified on the basis of claims that the Church ecclesia has been guided by good intentions to protect the Church instead of rooting it out. No kidding.

Perhaps the most fundamental driver of the false dialectic, is the true meaning of Isaiah 45:7 (as correctly translated in the KJV) that the Judeo-Christian God asserts logically, proudly, and unequivocally that he is indeed the author of all things. He is the author of all that is Good, and … explicitly all that is Evil. Here we see the true basis for the Church’s need for the Romanized Jews to play the role of the eternal evil foil to Christ and the poor goyim. Under monotheism — if Satan exists, he must be in the role of God’s agent. And we are told in the New Testament that Satan does exist, just as Evil certainly does. And then it follows, as night follows day, that Satan too must have his earthly agents. Who else, if not the Jews.

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. (Isaiah 45:7 KJV)

We assert that most Jews have long been subverted unwittingly into this cultural role by the religious appeal to their Identity vanity, just the same as the goyim have been pandered to. That observers can look all around them and see evildoers constantly attacking them is all part of the big stage magic distraction. It all acts as if it were designed as a single construct, in which the globalist Men Behind the Curtain are brilliantly distracting the observers from themselves, thus making the observers continually take the wrong bait, based upon cynically emotional appeals to ‘saving the children’ and such. Who knows, perhaps this construct has indeed been designed and maintained by the Lords themselves.

Any such concerned observers, today, and especially in America, would do much better in protecting their children by teaching them to reject all such culturally motivated Fear Porn, and build bridges to other marginalized flocks of sheep. In the absence of such foresight, the dynamics are today being sardonically reversed, and the American Nationalist and other White Power advocates are being culturally transmuted into the dialectic equivalent of the Judaic xenophobic Zealots of Christ Titus’s time. And they will likely gain the same ‘reward’, in the Evangelical’s Futurist version of the End Times, fobbed off on them by the casuistic Jesuits. The precise timing of this is known only to the Lord — but we doubt that these Patriots will be among the 144,000 of the globally Predestined Elect who will get to bypass the Tribulation.

To finish, we suggest that Anglin is mistaken with his thesis that the perceived negative Jewish behaviors at issue are driven by genetics. Instead, to the extent that they have any basis in reality at all, they must be meme-driven by the millennial weight of their synthetic cultural imperatives. And furthermore, what is bad for the gander is bad for the goy-oose. As such, what if we could hit the reset button on Western Culture, reboot to the desired optimal culture parameters, and then the problem disappears from the Matrix? Could a universally delightful and secular (a)pocalypse be as simple and peaceful as that, as juxtaposed to the prior Final Solution?

Here at Postflaviana, we are humbly trying to find that reset button via our (r)evelations.

Discuss in Forum!

Isaac and the Fortunate Scions

Richard Stanley

February 26, 2016

In this installment of the Old Testament series, we will review the curious ‘life’ of Isaac, the only son of Abraham ‘that counted’, and the father of Jacob, the metaphoric avatar for Israel. Jacob, in turn gave twelve grandsons to Abraham, and again we find that one appears to have ‘counted’ for more than the rest: Judah, who bequeathed his name to the Jews via a seemingly seamy contractual ‘affair’ with his dogged daughter-in-law. Most all worthy of a modern soap opera, as detailed below.

Just why did Isaac ‘count’, at least from the Judeo-Christian perspective? To reiterate what we learned previously: prior to Abraham, the Biblical grand narrative was somewhat expansive regarding the ever branching of genealogies. Obviously this is ignoring the apparently ineffectual morally and genetically cleansing consequences of the Flood, because the surviving humans didn’t seem to get the shock and awe message that God wanted them to change their ways. But in any case, with Abraham and God’s granting of the so-called Eternal Blessing, the focus begins narrowing quickly through Isaac, Jacob, and then onto Judah’s Jewish progeny, who appear to have been ‘chosen’ to receive the blessing, or curse depending on one’s perspective.

This is why Isaac ‘counted’ — as opposed to Ishmael and the other uncounted and erstwhile Semitic half-brothers sired from the concubines and wives, maids and slave women of Abraham.

The Quantum Blessing?

Conversely, from the Islamic perspective, it was Ishmael (father of all the Arabs and Muslims) who counted. This contrast forms the foundation for yet another mirror image society to the Jews. Amazingly little commented upon by religionists is that Abraham and his two notable sons appear to assume a supernatural or quantum nature, even at the macroscopic level otherwise occupied by Schroedinger’s cat. This by acting in two separate geographic theaters at the same time, but with polar opposite outcomes as to the favored lineage. The opposite outcomes are presaged by the fact that according to the Quran, it was Ishmael who was the intended sacrifice victim for Islam’s first scion, as opposed to Isaac.

Keep this in mind when we discuss below the Eternal Blessing and the respective domination of one brother by another regarding Jacob and Esau.

And, of course, in this regard the uncounted Esau was in the same relation to his brother Jacob as Ishmael was to Isaac. Earlier, poor Canaan fared even worse for his father’s sin. All this should make us briefly stop again to wonder about the actual underlying basis of this curious god’s providential global real estate acquisition Plan, and the Chosen Family’s Values. And how is this all related to seemingly banal sibling rivalries, the order of male birth determining relative status (but curiously the traditional “pride of place” status frequently inverted in the Biblical narratives), and such inanity as Ham’s inadvertent viewing of his naked and drunk father? Is such human dreck as this all there is to our wonderous divinity’s manifest scheme, from the entity alleged to have created the entire universe? Perhaps more importantly, are we being subtly informed that there is one set of rules for the divine, err ‘royal’, family and another for the rest of us?

Wonder now …. OK, stop wondering.

With that pause, it is also a good time to alert the reader that because we are dealing throughout the series with the overlapping generational narratives of family individuals, that there can thus be no clear demarcation in the posts between one individual and the next. In this regard, we will shortly revisit Abraham via the alleged attempted sacrifice of his son, Isaac.

This seminal and aborted human sacrifice seems to be the dramatic high point of Isaac’s life, as the rest of it appears rather anticlimactic by comparison to his father’s and his progeny’s active and exciting lives. In this regard, Isaac seems to have been the Caspar Milquetoast of his time, and here we are wondering if our allusion to the early 20th century cartoon may have more than a superficial resemblance to it. For one thing, the creator of the cartoon, H.T. Webster, settled in New Canaan, Connecticut. Coincidence, or conspiracy? You ‘connect’ the dots.

Just kidding …. or are we?

Hear Ye, Laugh Ye

But seriously, the seemingly dramatic sacrificial high point does not mean that there was no levity involved in Isaac’s life, with his very improbable conception and birth giving impetus to his being named Isaac, which means laughter:

And Abraham was an hundred years old, when his son Isaac was born unto him. And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me. And she said, Who would have said unto Abraham, that Sarah should have given children suck? for I have born him a son in his old age. (Genesis 21:5-7 KJV)

While Abraham was only 100 years old, Sarah was more impressively age 90, and we are not kidding here, but maybe the authors were? As such, we remind the reader that this is yet another clue to the alert and less credulous, .. to “all that hear”, that we are meant to look for meaning beyond the literal sense. This evokes Jesus’s later message for “those with eyes to see and ears to hear”.

And before we go on further, and fitting in with our premise that these texts are really about elite families, we must add that we forgot to mention in the prior post that the name Sarah means ‘princess’:

The Hebrew name Sarah indicates a woman of high rank and is translated as “princess” or “noblewoman”.

Also, as for Sarah’s prior name:

The name Sarai uses the semitic root Šarai or law and like El has the sense of power, authority, lord, deity, natural law, law as might be expected for the lady of the house.

What, He’s No Rambo?

Isaac is indeed entirely passive in most everything that happens after he is made to carry the wood for his own burnt offering, a holocaust. At one point (Genesis 26) the text informs us that the adult Isaac has sown crops, but this is only euphemistically so, in an aristocratic sense. In reality, and as betrayed later in the very same paragraph, it is his ‘servants’ who do sow, as well as shepherding his flocks, and digging out the wells, just as they had done for Abraham in his time. And as we’ll discuss in more detail below, Isaac (as his father did earlier) appears to have had some dealings with phictional phantoms that make us wonder if perhaps ‘Casper and the Relatively Friendly Ghosts’ might be more appropriate for representing Isaac’s relationship with Abimelech and his Philistines ‘at that time’. As such, we must examine below whether Isaac himself, at least, is something of a literary puff piece, marking time for his literary creators.

But whatever the case with his relative fictionality, Isaac does not seem to fit in with his lineage as actively advancing the divine agenda, much less being in the heroic mold of a robust action man full of ‘manly’ adventures. He is an “odd man out”, even duped by his wife and her preferred twin son, for all the divine stakes of the Eternal Blessing, no less. Of course, we can’t really blame the female here, as God told her which son would prevail when they were yet fighting in the womb.

If not a Rambo, how’s about that thar Ram in the Boughs?

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

The angel of God aborts the sacrifice of Isaac (the father of Jacob, aka Israel) artist: Peter Paul Rubens

And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. (Genesis 22:1-13 KJV)

Once Abraham had finally settled into family life with ol’ Sarah, God commands him to demonstrate his loyalty by sacrificing Isaac. This was allegedly a common practice in parts of the wider Semitic world (as well as other ancient cultures), and the existence of this practice is (arguably) supported in the archaeological record. According to the story, the Phoenicians would sacrifice their first born to Ba’al so as to ensure the coming of the season’s adequate rainfall, necessary for crop fertility and livestock survival. Whatever the extent of the practice, we notice that the biblical Abraham was in no way surprised by God’s demand. And apparently being a properly pious pagan at the time (evidenced by this and other wider familial practices), he went straight ahead and took Isaac up to Mt. Moriah and began to piously go through with the ceremony.

You are my First Son, my only First Son ..

There is yet ongoing scientific debate about the actual existence of Semitic child sacrifice. One argument is that these claims were nothing more than typical Greco-Roman demonizing propaganda. If so, such propaganda was typically self-serving and hypocritical: the Greeks and Romans may have evolved beyond human sacrifice, but nevertheless it was considered perfectly respectable to expose unwanted children to the elements, with the justification that those babies might be saved by passers-by, or by God.

If such practices as ritual child sacrifice did not really exist, then it is somewhat ironic that the three Abrahamic religions each start with the attempted sacrifice, at least, of their respective firstborn sons: Isaac, Ishmael (as per the Quran), and Jesus.

In the following verses, when Isaac meekly asks where is the expected lamb to be offered up as a burnt sacrifice: is Abraham merely telling Isaac an ‘innocent’ white lie here so as to fool his son into proceeding peacefully to the altar of his demise? Or, instead is the verse’s author having some fun with his readers by allowing the possible interpretation that Abraham knows in advance that Isaac will not really be harmed?

We are also presented with the dilemma of wondering whether the supposedly all omniscient God of Abraham really has to test Abraham to see whether or not he will be faithful to God’s sadistic demand, before sending his angelic messenger to stop Abraham’s knife – just in time. After all, doesn’t divine prescience, at least, mean that such a god already knows in advance what will happen? As such, how can there be any valid test, in a rational sense, involving such a god? Here, and even given our concern about any such test — we suggest that a considerably better test would have been to let Abraham complete the gory sacrifice, and only then have this god restore Isaac to life, even allowing him to now ‘laugh’ at the imponderables of the whole affair. But just who was asking us at the time?

After all, how was anyone to know whether or not the angel stopped Abraham a fraction of a second too soon? And thus no one can be sure whether or not Abraham was really planning, all along, to stop the knife of his own volition before crossing the Rubicon of Isaac’s carotid arteries? Maybe they were both playing Chicken? As an exemplary test of Free Will, the story falls short.

But, as the story goes: just before he terminates Isaac, and thus Israel-to-be (via Isaac’s son Jacob), Abraham is informed that he has sufficiently demonstrated his loyalty to God, and that he can therefore substitute a nearby, conveniently stuck ram in Isaac’s place. And thus the same will be so for Abraham’s descendants from then on, minus all the human dark comedy at least. Note that the angel has mentioned that Isaac is indeed the only son (that counted) of Abraham’s; despite Ishmael, at least, being born before Isaac; and all the other sons that didn’t count.

As we can see within the context of later posts, and what has already been discussed in Abraham and the Sabian Legacy, this episode can be taken as a message to the targeted audience: that in being converted to Hebrews, they will no longer be performing this human sacrifice; but rather, that animals will now be substituted in place of first born sons. And before long the previously widespread local sacrificial practices were consolidated to the Temple cult practice in Jerusalem, at least according to the redacted narratives. Ignoring for now that the Samaritans and other factions had their competing central temples (over time) — this centralization to the one temple, of course, made it easier to oversee control over the conversion process and ensure conformity to monotheistic Judaism.

More Sacrificial Typology

In the aborted sacrifice of Isaac, a ram was substituted for the human victim. By the same token: some people, like the Muslims, don’t believe that Jesus died on the cross – possibly also having benefited by a body double substitution. But regardless of what might actually have happened: in both cases, at least via their narratives, their respective legacies went on to form the next two of the Abrahamic religions that have also stood the test of time.

Another curious parallel is Julius Caesar’s funeral bier. Upon its ignition, Caesar was seen to ascend to Heaven to join the gods. It was reported in several accounts that the loudest to mourn him were the Jews of Rome, because Julius had defeated the hated Pompey the Great, who had earlier defiled the Jerusalem Temple. With this action, Caesar joined the ranks of foreign Messiahs of the Jews, along with Cyrus, who had rescued them from Babylonian captivity. There are many typological parallels of Julius Caesar’s passion to Jesus’s Passion on the Cross, as recorded by Francesco Carotta in his Jesus was Caesar. Julius can readily be seen as a pure sacrificial lamb, being led along the Sacred Way to the slaughter at Pompey’s Theater in front of the Roman senators (≅Sanhedrin). And directly to our point here about staged contrivances: Julius had dinner with his claimed ‘assassin’, Brutus, the night before, and joked with everyone about his immanent demise. The Last Supper, indeed.

Within the contrivance of the aborted sacrifice, Abraham made Isaac, “thine only son”, sardonically carry the wood which was to be used to barbecue himself with. This forms a rather interesting typological link to Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb of God, who was also forced to carry his own wooden cross. And as well, Jesus was God’s firstborn and only son — except, that is, for those other sons of God mentioned in Genesis 6; which again reminds us of Abraham’s other sons that don’t seem to matter. Apparently the only sons that ‘count’ are the children of the primary wife of status.

That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. (Genesis 6:2 KJV)

And thus we suggest that this sacrificial inside joke, with its white lie, might also be another possible basis for the name ‘yitzchaq’, meaning ‘laughter’, as mentioned earlier. Was Isaac like Caspar Milquetoast here, or was he really laughing internally, at least, when he stoically asked Abraham where the lamb was? For here he was old enough to know that, as he was technically the firstborn, it should otherwise have been his destiny to become the sacrificial ‘lamb’ himself.

Art Thou else a Seedy Wallflower?

According to the Biblical narrative (Genesis 24), Abraham must send his unnamed senior household servant to the city of Nahor in Aram-naharaim, the city of his uncle, Nahor, in order to obtain a wife for Isaac. This was Rebekah, Nahor’s granddaughter. This is not to conclude here that a literal Isaac was necessarily lazy, as it was not the custom in those days for a man to romantically go a-courting as in more recent times. As we have already discussed, marriage was a serious contractual matter in those days, usually arranged, and with romantic love being merely the optional icing on the begetting cake. And in this case, as explicitly stated, it was not desirable for Isaac to obtain a wife amongst the local Canaanites. This as they had been thrown out of the Semitic family tree, dis-graced long before by the propagandic, fictional misdeed of Ham with his drunken father Noah.

But if we are correct that Isaac is a fictive artifice, part of the narrative scaffolding of biblical Israel, then what are we to make of this marriage to his second cousin, Rebekah? We assert that this is merely indicating, to the alert reader, the traditional aristocratic manner of securing political alliances via the practice of marriage, and as well, that this is done frequently via a network of already related elites. Are we really to expect that some family of shepherd peasants would go to this extent? This is the traditional methodology of the entirely interbred (until recent generations) European royals. We already mentioned in the Intro post that there are some hints of elite familial connections between Rome and Judah that begin to make more sense in our false dialectic construct.

In that light, we can discern that Nahor is an important man, like his brother Abraham, because the city is named after him. After the proper dowry gifts are made, although Rebekah has never seen Isaac, she consents by simply saying “elek”, meaning “I will go”, after her family first approves by saying “She shall go.” (Genesis 24:55-58)

Next the family blesses her with more dark food for thought:

And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them. (Genesis 24:60 KJV)

At this very point in the long family saga, the very beginning of the metaphoric Israel: why, prey tell, should anyone hate the seed of Rebekah? What did those which hate them know, and when did those know it? Were they really prescient enough to understand that even their descendants would be hated by so many? Here again, we assert that this is evidence that verses like these were written by those pushing a hidden agenda upon another people who were undergoing a generations long, programmatic culture transplant. And as such, either the fictive patriarch characters were pushed far back in time, so that the targets of this social engineering had no means to disprove the narrative bring forced upon them, or there must be some other explanation for their presence.

And perhaps more importantly, we can see that the plan of God, or those writing in his name rather, is that those who label themselves Hebrews (but in reality Jews) shall indeed go forth and be hated by the rest of humanity. While perhaps most, whether religious or secular, take this premise as some form of given for various reasons, we assert that this reason was purposely baked into the matzo ball, so to speak. This is setting the foundation for the widespread Jewish belief in their universal raison d’etre, which is the neurotic assumption of the mantle of the Suffering Servant for the ostensible betterment of humanity. All stemming from the involuntary birthright into the Eternal Blessing first delivered to Abraham.

What better way to make people hate you, than to start out with the biblically inspired premise that … uhm … everyone hates you? This self-fulfilling prophecy is the black hole of the perverse and cynical nature of the Abrahamic divine plan and the false dialectic that we proposed. And imagine having to go through life with this heavy and cynical artificial chip yoked onto your shoulders. Some people say that it is better to be feared than to be hated. If so, with gods like this who needs enemies?

This hateful ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ really constitutes one means to facilitate the self-organizing principles that holds the Abrahamic religions together, but especially the Jews with their Chosen status and linked claim of ethnicity. Because, and central to the narrative, we are here tracing through the passage of the coveted Eternal Blessing from God to Abraham through his progeny, it will be interesting to pay attention to what happens to it by the time we reach the patriarch of the Jews, Abraham’s grandson Judah.

And it came to pass after the death of Abraham, that God blessed his son Isaac; and Isaac dwelt by the well Lahairoi. (Genesis 25:11 KJV)

Upon the death of Abraham, at age 175, both Isaac and Ishmael are present to bury their father. However, and seemingly in passing (no pun intended), God only blesses Isaac. This after Abraham had given Isaac everything he owned, excepting the unspecified ‘gifts’ that he gave to the sons of his concubines. Ishmael’s presence here raises some questions, as he and his mother had been sent packing long, long ago. In this case, however, Ishmael had at least become the father of a nation himself, as per God’s instructions (Genesis 21:13 KJV), albeit now presumably without the Eternal Blessing that came from proximity to the blessed family (excepting for his presence at this burial). Which makes one ponder what this additional blessing given to Isaac was all about?

Or does Ishmael’s presence at the burial indicate that Ishmael really is still part of the Eternal Blessing, perhaps covertly? If Ishmael is out founding a nation, how long of a journey would it be to have him alerted to his father’s passing, and then for Ishmael to travel there so as to attend the burial in a timely fashion? There is no explanation provided for this, but it seems to imply that Ishmael was not really that far away from his father and half-brother. Perhaps just on the other side of yonder mountain?

Looking beyond the surface narrative here, imagine if instead of rude and nomadic ‘shepherds’, we are really cryptically talking about Egyptian ‘kings’ and their kin. In that case, maybe there was enough time for Ishmael to be notified and travel to the funeral. Here we are alluding to the extended period of time necessary to properly prepare a deceased body for mummification. And in this regard, we have previously mentioned Ralph Ellis’s suggestion of a sequential correlation of Patriarchal names with Egyptian king names.

With this last in mind, then what can we make of stories about the scioness of a Mesopotamian city being the “mother of thousands of millions”, and her half-brother-in-law who is round and about fathering yet another nation? For one thing, this definitely evokes “X fecund, if not Y naughty”. More importantly, this type of situation fits our Postflavian premise discussed previously regarding all of these tales of Hebrew Patriarchs actually being stories about high status elites and their artifice of a synthetic nation as their veiling and protective foil – also floating their stated global pretensions.

With Holy Kin Like These Who Needs Twinemies?

With Isaac and Rebekah’s sons, some prior themes are re-enacted. First we have the issue that Rebekah is barren for the first 20 years of the marriage, and thus requires God’s intervention in order to conceive. Secondly, we have a similar sibling rivalry as with Isaac and Ishmael, this time starting to play out while the two twin boys are still within the womb, and the younger son will, again, predominate.

Another remarkable aspect of the Isaac narrative, besides Isaac’s general passivity, is the ubiquity of interfamilial deception practiced by various holy family schemers. Here, Isaac’s sons and Rebekah conspire together, both against each other and against Isaac himself. But at least in this one case, namely the respective outcomes for Isaac’s feuding sons who are to become fathers of neighboring feuding nations — God has already foretold the outcome to Rebekah while they were yet fighting in the womb. So now we are left to ponder whether this deception and feuding was sanctioned by God. Why not? God logically states that he is the Creator of everything, including all that is evil (Isaiah 45:7 KJV).

But we don’t have to go to this extreme, as we have discussed in the prior post that the moral nuances in those times were different than today’s. Albeit with all the moralizing hype heaped upon us today, all this otherwise grifting behavior might seem to some a little too discordant to reconcile. Perhaps this is why such lurid tales have been adorned with a sacred gloss?

And Isaac intreated the LORD for his wife, because she was barren: and the LORD was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived. And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the LORD. And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb. And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau. And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob: and Isaac was threescore years old when she bare them. And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents. And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob. (Genesis 25:21-28 KJV)

Here, Rebekah is disturbed by the conflict between the two in her womb, and God answers her inquiry by explaining that she will bring forth two nations from her womb. One can either take this as a metaphor for representing pre-existing peoples, or in the case of fundamentalists, one can see this as a euphemism for the two offspring literally fathering separate nations.We assert the former proposition as a key component to our main thesis in this series.

In any case, as we mentioned earlier, God additionally tells Rebekah which son will earn the Eternal Blessing over the other, and we are left to wonder whether this conditions her preference for Jacob. Did Isaac ever learn of this oracle? If he prefers Esau to the end, why does he pass the Eternal Blessing onto Isaac without a fuss?

With the ‘older’ twin, Esau, we are uniquely and curiously informed that he is ‘red’ and ‘hairy’ all over. Esau is said to become the father of Edom, perennial nemesis of the Hebrews. Here the Hebrew word admoni, for ‘red’, seems to be etymologically connected to Edom, as with the word se’ar, for ‘hairy’, is similarly connected to Seir, as spelled out in the Genesis 36 genealogy for Esau. Why should we care about this character having red hair, as nothing is mentioned about Isaac’s hair? For all we know, Isaac’s unstated hair might have been red as well, but instead we are left to guess that it is not red, perhaps to be of a more typical raven hair of the Semites. Hmmm, who knows?

The Birthright or My Brother’s Keeper?

And Jacob sod pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was faint: And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint: therefore was his name called Edom. And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright. And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me? And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright. (Genesis 25:29-34 KJV)

The color red comes into play once more, as it is the color of the ‘pottage’ food, most likely lentils, that the starving Esau begs of his brother so as to save his life. Instead of being his brother’s keeper, and kindly feeding his starving brother (as Semitic custom demands hospitality to even strangers), instead Isaac uses Esau’s sorry condition (belying Esau’s depiction as a cunning hunter) as leverage to negotiate for obtaining what is Esau’s traditional firstborn ‘birthright’. Here, the narrative is referring to the traditional mundane material inheritance, and not the Eternal Blessing.

Also, little comment is heard of this aspect, that is, compared to Jacob becoming ‘Israel’, but notice that Esau quietly assumes an alter ego of Edom. With this, once more, and as with Isaac and Ishmael, the narrative creates an geopolitically based enmity that is to continue in perpetuity, and all within one special family. Thanks God.

We are also left to ponder why Esau, the cunning hunter, was starving — especially considering that his father had abundant herds. This question will loom large in the next deception regarding the Eternal Blessing. The last verse of the prior excerpt says that Esau ate of his father’s venison, and curiously that Isaac loved him for this and doesn’t mention any other reason for such a preference towards Esau. We are also left pondering that Jacob, always dwelling in his tent, is the stronger. Stronger in what way than his brother, who is the cunning hunter who loves his father’s venison? Like the unilateral mention of Esau’s red hair, what are we supposed to presume about Isaac’s diet or lifestyle and what it implies by comparison? Is this all an allusion to the ultimate superiority of the city dweller, who has gained by cunning subterfuge?

So once again, we suggest that the alert reader is figuratively being shouted at to ignore the superficial narrative and examine the much more important subtext.

Philistine Phictional Phantoms?

Per the Jewish and Christian canon, at least, while whether Ishmael strayed very far from home is a question, it seems certain that Isaac never did. That is, except for one odd and nearby excursion at least, as by inheriting Abraham’s flocks and other wealth he generally stayed around Hebron, and was buried there as well. This excursion apparently comes after the birth of his sons and the birthright issue, and it is made to Gerar because of a famine around the area of Hebron. From the text Isaac amazingly goes there of his own volition, however God appears to him and tells him to stay put instead of seeking famine relief in Egypt – as would be the case for Joseph’s brothers later on.

It is in the Philistine city of Gerar that we once again encounter its king, Abimelech. And while Isaac repeats the mistake of Abraham in trying to pass off his beautiful wife as his sister, the very old Abimelech has not forgotten the previous incident and thus upbraids Isaac for the possibility of getting himself and his people in trouble with Isaac’s god again. But Abimelech does not send Isaac off just yet, letting him grow crops nearby:

Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an hundredfold: and the LORD blessed him. And the man waxed great, and went forward, and grew until he became very great: For he had possession of flocks, and possession of herds, and great store of servants: and the Philistines envied him. For all the wells which his father’s servants had digged in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines had stopped them, and filled them with earth. And Abimelech said unto Isaac, Go from us; for thou art much mightier than we. And Isaac departed thence, and pitched his tent in the valley of Gerar, and dwelt there. And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them. (Genesis 26:12-18 KJV)

But it is only after Isaac’s success at growing crops (a hundredfold), and apparently the additional sight of Isaac’s large herds, that Abimelech now enviously sends Isaac off. To where? From the city of Gerar to the … valley of Gerar. And here Isaac’s men dig wells, and apparently they are very successful at all this too, and this becomes a source of contention with the people and Abimelech. The overt takeaway from all this is that Isaac has shown up the Philistines, and doubly so because these were the same wells that Abraham and his men had dug earlier, and which the Philistines had filled in upon Abraham’s death for some unknown reason. Perhaps to discourage alien squatters?

As a result, and apparently to avoid garnering more punishment from Isaac’s god, as he had already experienced from Abraham’s time, Abimelech ends up requesting to make a covenant with Isaac. One that implies that Isaac will continue to be able to peacefully graze and water his herds in the valley of Gerar, in exchange for Isaac and presumably Isaac’s god leaving Abimelech and his people alone.

This apparently is what God’s Eternal Blessing provides to the worthy, a cheap real estate acquisition, aka Providence. Earlier, with Abraham, he declines to profit materially from the king of Sodom upon defeating the forces of the Elamite Chedorlaomer, but as we can see now merely upon having the divine blessing, little else is needed if such as (promised) land is the objective. However, we are left with the seemingly oxymoronic question of why God must keep refreshing the Eternal Blessing first granted to Abraham?

But since we are now talking about real estate once again, we have to wonder if anybody bothered to do a proper escrow title search before approving these transactions with the Philistines. Odd, it seems that during the rather generous time window allowable for either Isaac or Abraham, that there is no record of any Philistines being in the general area. Evidence of these Philistines is so sketchy today that it seems that there is no consensus on just who they were. Oddly, the Septuagint translation bifurcates the original term with the vast majority of the references taking a curiously nondescript nature:

The Hebrew term “pelishtim” occurs 286 times in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible (of which 152 times in 1 Samuel), whereas in the Greek Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, the equivalent term phylistiim occurs only 12 times, with the remaining 269 references instead using the term “allophylos” (“of another tribe”).[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines

Why not just stick with the same translated term instead of attempting to redirect our focus onto a generic term? If these people ever existed, could it be that we, and all the previous western scholars have been looking in the wrong place, if not the wrong time, for them? It seems that just this case is being made these days.

No Philistines, Pharaohs, or Pyramids?

Authors such as Kamal Salibi (The Bible Came from Arabia), Assraf Ezzat (Egypt Knew No Pharaohs and Israelites), and Bernard Leeman (Queen of Sheba University) have been arguing that the true locale for the biblical patriarchal and king narratives should be placed in the southwest Arabian peninsula, where much of the otherwise odd context for them suddenly becomes coherent. Ezzat demonstrates that the Egyptians never identified their leaders as ‘pharaohs’, but rather that the Arabic term faraon is the common term for a tribal chief. If the true locale for the origin of these biblical ‘pharaoh’ related stories is not in Egypt, it helps explain why there is no mention of pyramids or similar details. As well as to why there are other anomalies and anachronisms such as Isaac and Abraham’s phony Philistines.

However, Ellis’s comparisons between Egyptian king lists and Patriarch names would then be dismissed as coincidence, or weird typology, or that there is yet another explanation for their presence. With the latter, Ezzat seems somewhat too ‘romantic’ in ascribing purely benign motives to the entire lineage of Egyptian dynasts, except for the Hyksos aliens of course.

In regards to these Philistines, Ezzat believes that the Yemeni Phalist tribe of Arabia were the people relocated to what then became known as Palestine. And that it was the various neighboring and feuding tribes of Arabia that were eventually taken into Exile and relocated several times by the Assyro-Babylonians before becoming the ‘original’ Hebrews and Jews more familiar to us, with their quaint and sordid homeland tales being heavily recontextualized in the Septuagint translation.

Perhaps Another Time, Phoenix?

Among other things, Ezzat’s hypothesis can provide solutions to problems in historical Chronological Revisionism as advanced by Immanuel Velikovsky. Perhaps most prominent of which is related to the actual location of Queen Hatshepsut’s land of Punt, what her relationship, if any, to the Biblical Queen of Sheba was, and thus providing a corroboration with ancient commentators regarding the origins of the ‘Punic’ Phoenicians. Velikovsky claimed that the two women were one and the same, based upon parallels between the Bible and Hatshepsut’s wall murals – and many other sequential parallels. But what happens if Punt was really located somewhere in southwest Arabia and/or central eastern Africa just across the Red Sea?

Of note here, it has recently been claimed by some Israeli archaeologists that the famous terraces of Jerusalem are simply too late to have been in Solomon’s time. The terraces of Punt are a prominent feature in the story of Hatshepsut’s temple mural. As such, is this a case of someone wanting to make the evidence fit the new narrative?

We believe that there is a considerable amount of merit in this general thesis, with the major caveat that we believe that the hypothesis has the same shortcoming as the mainstream theory asserted by the Biblical subtext. Namely, there is no rational explanation how Abraham’s obscure family rose up to the extent that it has effected the course of Western civilization to the extent that it did. But nevertheless, that family, real or fictional, did just so; and as such we assert that there was, and still is, a real and veiled human agency behind all this. In this regard then, we suggest that Ezzat, Salibi and Leeman may indeed have provided the actual structural narrative origins for the Biblical patriarchs. As such, we assert that the Egyptian kings had a common long term motive, along with their Mesopotamian ‘brother’ kings, to advance a global agenda veiling the machinations of their scions.

Jacob and Rebekah’s Deception of Isaac regarding the Eternal Blessing

Jacob’s opportunistic purchase of Esau’s birthright is not yet enough, as passive Isaac must next be deceived by both Jacob and Rebekah into having the dying man grant the Eternal Blessing to Jacob under false pretenses. Here Jacob falsely appears before him in Esau’s stead, wearing distinctive smelling clothing and sporting goat hair over his skin, all at his mother’s urging and assistance. Remember that Rebekah has been told long ago that Isaac was to receive the blessing, and she makes sure that this will happen by her agency, and apparently not trusting in the supernatural means ostensibly at God’s disposal.

And it came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see, he called Esau his eldest son, and said unto him, My son: and he said unto him, Behold, here am I. And he said, Behold now, I am old, I know not the day of my death: Now therefore take, I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take me some venison; And make me savoury meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die.

And Rebekah heard when Isaac spake to Esau his son. And Esau went to the field to hunt for venison, and to bring it. And Rebekah spake unto Jacob her son, saying, Behold, I heard thy father speak unto Esau thy brother, saying, Bring me venison, and make me savoury meat, that I may eat, and bless thee before the LORD before my death. Now therefore, my son, obey my voice according to that which I command thee. Go now to the flock, and fetch me from thence two good kids of the goats; and I will make them savoury meat for thy father, such as he loveth: And thou shalt bring it to thy father, that he may eat, and that he may bless thee before his death.

And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man: My father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem to him as a deceiver; and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing. And his mother said unto him, Upon me be thy curse, my son: only obey my voice, and go fetch me them. And he went, and fetched, and brought them to his mother: and his mother made savoury meat, such as his father loved. And Rebekah took goodly raiment of her eldest son Esau, which were with her in the house, and put them upon Jacob her younger son: And she put the skins of the kids of the goats upon his hands, and upon the smooth of his neck: And she gave the savoury meat and the bread, which she had prepared, into the hand of her son Jacob.

And he came unto his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I; who art thou, my son? And Jacob said unto his father, I am Esau thy firstborn; I have done according as thou badest me: arise, I pray thee, sit and eat of my venison, that thy soul may bless me. And Isaac said unto his son, How is it that thou hast found it so quickly, my son? And he said, Because the LORD thy God brought it to me. And Isaac said unto Jacob, Come near, I pray thee, that I may feel thee, my son, whether thou be my very son Esau or not. And Jacob went near unto Isaac his father; and he felt him, and said, The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. And he discerned him not, because his hands were hairy, as his brother Esau’s hands: so he blessed him. And he said, Art thou my very son Esau? And he said, I am. And he said, Bring it near to me, and I will eat of my son’s venison, that my soul may bless thee. And he brought it near to him, and he did eat: and he brought him wine, and he drank. And his father Isaac said unto him, Come near now, and kiss me, my son.

And he came near, and kissed him: and he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the LORD hath blessed: Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine: Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.

And it came to pass, as soon as Isaac had made an end of blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the presence of Isaac his father, that Esau his brother came in from his hunting. And he also had made savoury meat, and brought it unto his father, and said unto his father, Let my father arise, and eat of his son’s venison, that thy soul may bless me. And Isaac his father said unto him, Who art thou? And he said, I am thy son, thy firstborn Esau. And Isaac trembled very exceedingly, and said, Who? where is he that hath taken venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou camest, and have blessed him? yea, and he shall be blessed. And when Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and said unto his father, Bless me, even me also, O my father. And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing. And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. (Genesis 27:1-36 KJV)

As we had mentioned previously, regarding the birthright sale: Esau, the great hunter, was curiously starving; not to mention the great domestic herds of Isaac’s that should have been available to the favorite son. Yet in this second episode, Esau returns fairly quickly with the successful catch of his hunting, only a little too late.

Both Jacob and Rebekah are clearly conscious that they are deceiving Isaac, and here Rebekah tells Jacob that she will take all the blame, … for fulfilling God’s promise. Also interesting is that Jacob incorporates God in the lie to his father.

And next Isaac informs the distraught Esau:

And by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother [Jacob, aka Israel]; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck. (Genesis 27:40 KJV)

Revenge of the Red-Headed Stepchild?

With the red hair of Esau’s Edomomites, we are reminded that the later Herodians are stated to have been from Edom, and thus if we are to believe the biblical narrative, then the Herodians were also of the Abrahamic blood line, via Esau. The New Testament depicts the Herodians being viewed with suspicion and distrust by the Jews because of their contentious Edomite origins, despite their claim of conversion to Judaism.

If we apply the Postflavian lens that Jesus Christ was a product of the Romans, and we know of the long relationship of the Herodians with the Roman royals, including romantically to such as Titus (or the hypothetical Arrias Calpurnius Piso), then we can see a path for this dominion to extend all the way to modern times. Julius Caesar, as discussed by Carotta in Jesus was Caesar, was one typological source informing the Christian narrative. As discussed in Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul, the Romans expected marriage alliances to occur to cement political ties with the newly conquered European tribes. In this light, we might understand the claims of many European nobility that they had descent from Christ, via a Caesarian lineage.

Some of the Herodians ended up in either Rome or today’s southern France, and legends have it that the Virgin Mary and children of Jesus ended fleeing there as well. This leads to the claims of the Merovingian kings, with their long, uncut red hair, perhaps odd remembrances of the Nazarite vows from Leviticus.

Medieval artwork almost always depicts the divine family characters with red or red/orange hair for some reason, and this includes even depictions of the pagan gods and related characters. Considering that most all this artwork was produced for paying clients, where did this impetus for depicting red hair come from?

The late Nicholas DeVere, in his sweeping The Dragon Legacy, claimed that his red headed, green eyed clan were the real Jews of the Old Testament; presumably in opposition to Ashkenazi pretentions. The historical implications of this enigmatic claim are manifold.

Well now!! Just when does this prophecy come to pass? That is, when does Esau have dominion, and when does the yoke of Israel come off of Esau’s neck? Certainly not in Esau’s lifetime, but what about for some of his Edomite progeny? And what does this imply as relates to the Eternal Blessing?

If this is not a reference to at least the Herodians, then to who? Previous rebellions of the Edomites against the dominant Judeans can’t qualify as gaining ‘dominion’. These rebellions were quickly put down, according to the chronicles of the kings, and thus can’t qualify as ‘dominion’.

Can this seemingly grifted Eternal Blessing be grafted onto later, perhaps by inserting a “wild branch” into the “natural root”? This referring to the grafting of the Root of Jesse found in Romans 11. If the verse predicting the future dominion of Esau verse is related to this, then might it also be a later interpolation created by the Herodians during their collaboration with the Flavians?

Jacob Flees from Esau’s Rage

After obtaining the mundane birthright inheritance, via fire sale discount pricing from Esau, and in short order obtaining the separate familial and divine Eternal Blessing from Isaac by deception, Jacob is forced to flee. Esau believed, after the fact, that both inheritances belonged rightfully to him. From Isaac’s and his mother’s deception, and Esau’s seller’s remorse, ignorance and/or jealousy, Esau is none too happy with Jacob. This to the point that Esau has expressed the intent to kill Jacob after the immanent mourning period for the waning Isaac is over. Fortunately for Jacob, and for the sake of maintaining the veracity of God’s oracle about Jacob’s success (and in the divine plan’s subsequent need to assume the mantle of Israel via his later renaming), Rebekah overhears Esau’s comments and warns Jacob to flee to Haran.

And Isaac called Jacob, and blessed him, and charged him, and said unto him, Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of Canaan. Arise, go to Padanaram [aka Haran – ed.], to the house of Bethuel thy mother’s father; and take thee a wife from thence of the daughters of Laban thy mother’s brother. And God Almighty bless thee, and make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, that thou mayest be a multitude of people; And give thee the blessing of Abraham, to thee, and to thy seed with thee; that thou mayest inherit the land wherein thou art a stranger, which God gave unto Abraham. And Isaac sent away Jacob: and he went to Padanaram unto Laban, son of Bethuel the Syrian, the brother of Rebekah, Jacob’s and Esau’s mother. (Genesis 28:1-5 KJV)

Note here that even though Esau is the favorite son, Isaac does not punish Jacob for the deceptions, but rather he blesses Jacob once more for good measure, this time invoking Abraham’s name. Perhaps he forgot to do so the first time? Jacob is told, while waiting out Esau’s anger there, to obtain a wife from his mother’s brother, Laban. This immediately after an express prohibition not to take a Canaanite wife. Esau, careful here not to displease his father, heeds the warning about Canaanite women, and seeks a wife from uncle Ishmael:

And Esau seeing that the daughters of Canaan pleased not Isaac his father; Then went Esau unto Ishmael, and took unto the wives which he had Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebajoth, to be his wife. (Genesis 28:8, 9 KJV)

On Jacob’s flight to Haran he spends the night in Bethel, where he observes angels ascending and descending the so-called “Jacob’s Ladder to Heaven”. This is taken by many Bible scholars to be a reference to a temple that was there in the later times after the succession of the northern tribes from the United Monarchy, and thus closer to the time of the textual redaction.

And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. (Genesis 28:10-17 KJV)

On his way back home, decades later, Jacob will stop again in Bethel and have a very odd wrestling match with God. This is taken by some scholars to be an indication that an earlier layer of the story had Jacob fighting a pagan god who didn’t want him to return to Canaan cum Israel, perhaps akin to the warning to Julius Caesar not to cross the Rubicon on his way home. In this view, this version of the story admits, as per the earlier monolatrous times, that there were other gods besides El Shaddai, as he was known then. And thus the later redactors made the curious change to have God himself fight Jacob, after having told him to return home to face Esau. Compared to his milquetoast father, Jacob must have been a real bad ass dude, to take on the Creator of the Universe – and survive no less. Hmm, or maybe this was staged like professional wrestling?

We assert that Jacob’s Ladder was indeed related to an important temple, but likely the event represented an important meeting of the imperial interests launching their ersatz proxy project of Israel. Here, Jacob not only sees the angels, but he sees God who reiterates the Eternal Blessing to him for some reason. Perhaps God didn’t think that Jacob trusted him?

The metaphor of a ladder is similar to a Stairway to Heaven found in relation to other ancient temples such as ziggurats with external stairways. Importantly, for us, the prior Hittite name of Bethel (House of God) was that of Luz, which in a PIE context translates to “light”. Here we curiously see that Jacob not only gives his name to the ladder, but he has the honor of renaming Luz to Bethel. And also, as people do later with hotel robes and other items, he makes off with the stone pillow he had slept and dreamt upon. This allegedly becoming the famous Stone of Destiny in Scotland, .. or is that England?

And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first. And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, So that I come again to my father’s house in peace; then shall the LORD be my God: And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee. (Genesis 28:18-22 KJV)

Jacob’s Got Stones

And he looked, and behold a well in the field, and, lo, there were three flocks of sheep lying by it; for out of that well they watered the flocks: and a great stone was upon the well’s mouth. And thither were all the flocks gathered: and they rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the sheep, and put the stone again upon the well’s mouth in his place. … And while he yet spake with them, Rachel came with her father’s sheep: for she kept them. And it came to pass, when Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban his mother’s brother, and the sheep of Laban his mother’s brother, that Jacob went near, and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother. (Genesis 29:2-10 KJV)

Jacob has just previously had a mystical experience ostensibly from using a stone as his pillow, and from the nature of the dream, we might wonder if he was indeed ‘stoned’. And so now when he approaches the outskirts of Haran, he comes across his relative’s three flocks and their shepherds. Jacob ends up rolling the stone from covering the well’s mouth that had taken all the other shepherds to do so. We are left to wonder then if it was the sight of the beautiful Rachel who inspired this display of manly virility, and as to whether we are supposed to take this as having some supernatural aspect. Especially given what we have previously previewed about Jacob’s coming successful wrestling match with none other than God Almighty himself. If Rachel was indeed the inspiration for this act, then certainly she must have been exceedingly beautiful, perhaps akin to the famous Helen.

In any case, could this rolling away of the stone serve as some sort of typology for the supernatural rolling away of the stone at the Resurrection?

Hotel Californica

Upon his arrival in Haran, Rachel’s father, Laban, another nephew of Abraham, welcomes Jacob warmly as the close kin that he was. Jacob asserts his desire to wed Rachel and agrees to serve Laban for seven years in exchange. However, when the seven years is up and upon the wedding feast, Laban substitutes Rachel’s older sister, Leah, into Jacob’s wedding bed, and we are to assume that Jacob cannot tell the difference, either because of a lack of light, or because he is either inebriated, and/or perhaps stoned once again.

In any case, Jacob discovers the deception in the light of morning. Laban explains, only now, that it is unacceptable in these parts for a younger sister to be wed before older ones. In this case, Jacob makes yet another contract with Laban to serve yet another seven years so that he can also take Rachel to wife. Based upon the texts, we might presume here that there was no sacramental wedding ceremony as we have today, only a drunken feast for the tribal men (Genesis 29:22), for then there would be no need to present the ‘proposed’ bride to the groom before the presence of others and God. And thus the sexual consummation act being the primary or sole determinant of the contractual marital bond, in this case presumably poorly lit – for romance’s sake.

And so Jacob eventually completes his second seven year bondage to Laban and wins the hand of his desired Rachel. And thus we become witness to more of the divine soap opera, this time as pertains to sisterly jealousies. Perhaps in this and other cases the authors are trying to communicate the necessity to later command monogamy as the true desire of God for humanity, but then why not just have the divine family depicted as always having done so? And why communicate that the future Chosen tribe will be the progeny of an unloved and unwanted wife?

And he went in also unto Rachel, and he loved also Rachel more than Leah, and served with him [Laban – ed.] yet seven other years. And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren. And Leah conceived, and bare a son, and she called his name Reuben: for she said, Surely the LORD hath looked upon my affliction; now therefore my husband will love me. And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Because the LORD hath heard that I was hated, he hath therefore given me this son also: and she called his name Simeon. And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Now this time will my husband be joined unto me, because I have born him three sons: therefore was his name called Levi. And she conceived again, and bare a son: and she said, Now will I praise the LORD: therefore she called his name Judah; and left bearing. (Genesis 29:30-35 KJV)

The second verse above is correctly translated that Leah was hated, as opposed to being merely ‘loved less than’ Rachel. While Rachel, like Sarah and Rebekah before, is barren, Leah apparently doesn’t conceive in this second seven year period, for what we can only guess is due to the loathing that Jacob is made to feel because of what he is made to endure for his desire for Rachel.

And somewhere upon the commencement of the third period (14+ years in) the Lord has figured out that Leah was hated and decided to “open her womb”, yet leaving Rachel’s womb barren. All this is rather incoherent, but what else should we expect from the supposed world’s greatest literature? If the Lord opened Leah’s womb, then either Jacob or some other entity had to fill it. Whatever the case, it is directly stated that Jacob is the father of the twelve Hebrew tribes (including Judah, the father of the Jews) via his twelve scions.

Despite the stated ‘hatred’, Leah gets hooked up with Jacob somehow and delivers him four sons, each time hoping in vain that her relative success will win Jacob over to her. This, of course, is a common theme yet today, for many young wives whose husbands have their attentions elsewhere. Perhaps this ‘hatred’ is nothing more than a feint, a spur to jealousy, to compete with the boredom which would otherwise set in. In any case, Judah is the last and fourth son of Leah’s and is named so because of her praising the Lord for this last son.

And she conceived again, and bare a son: and she said, Now will I praise the LORD: therefore she called his name Judah; and left bearing. (Genesis 29:35 KJV)

Similarly, Levi, Leah’s third son, was named for this third position (Genesis 29:34), and his progeny would become the priesthood of Judea and Israel, including Moses and Aaron.

Barren Rachel, like Jacob’s grandmother Sarah, takes the approach of offering her husband her maid, Bilhah, who delivers two sons to Jacob, Dan and Naphtali. This prompts the desperate Leah to offer her maid, Zilpah, similarly to Jacob. He being no fool, takes up the challenge, being rewarded with two more sons, Gad and Asher.

As such, one wonders if this is where the term ‘one-upmanship’ came from? Leah continued to play the game with another innovative strategy:

And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me, I pray thee, of thy son’s mandrakes. And she said unto her, Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son’s mandrakes also? And Rachel said, Therefore he shall lie with thee to night for thy son’s mandrakes. And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night. (Genesis 30:14-16 KJV)

Mandrake, from Dodoens, Rembert, 1583. Stirpium historiae pemptades sex sive libri XXX. Antverpiæ, ex officina Christophori Plantini

Mandrake, what is this some kind of human/duck hybrid like a Centaur? No, mandrake is rather a common Mediterranean plant … with hallucinogenic properties. Additionally, if prepared properly, it can be used as an anesthetic, or for our immediate purposes here: an aphrodisiac, aka the Love Apple. There are also some associated claims for it to act as a fertility aid, or perhaps, a “womb opener”. As Joseph Atwill has noted, the mandrake is also the species mentioned in the “root and branch” metaphor for Messianic grafting, found in Josephus, the Gospels, and Shakespeare.

This all begs a few questions now. Leah has already borne Jacob four sons, but now needs to purchase the right to sleep with Jacob by paying off her sister with the mandrake plants? The apparent result of this union, explicitly stated and not implied, is that of Issachar. We are not told what circumstances brought Jacob’s seed to visit Leah’s open womb yet again, but two more children ensued: son Zebulon and daughter Dinah. So what is the mention of this mandrake all about then, at least as far as Leah is concerned?

At long last, God remembers to take care of Rachel, as he did for Sarah, Rebekah, and Leah, and he opened her womb as well. This is indeed a very unusual … and sterile clan. But in any case, we are left to wonder whether the mandrake might have played played a role here too, especially considering that Jacob had already been so enamored of Rachel all along. Surely he was not otherwise too exhausted from servicing his hated wife and the maids? So, was it God or the mandrake that finally opened Rachel’s womb? And if so, why didn’t the Bible just say so, rather than obliquely hinting that ever-fertile Leah had the benefit?

And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her, and opened her womb. And she conceived, and bare a son; and said, God hath taken away my reproach: And she called his name Joseph; and said, The LORD shall add to me another son. (Genesis 30:22-24 KJV)

The famous Joseph and finally Benjamin are the sons of Rachel, Jacob’s preferred, but second wife. The latter son would be born upon the return to Canaan cum Israel, but Rachel would not survive the birth of this last son.

And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing, (for she died) that she called his name Benoni: but his father called him Benjamin. (Genesis 35:18 KJV)

The name Benoni allegedly means ‘son of my sorrow’, while Benjamin supposedly means ‘son of my right hand’. Later in the biblical narrative, we will be told that Joseph was the favorite son. But it is Jacob himself (via his name change) who becomes the namesake of the northern polity of ‘Israel’, while fourth son Judah becomes the tribal patriarch of southern ‘Judea’. The texts describe the bitter animosities between the two polities in both the prior United Monarchy of David and Solomon, and the later Divided Monarchy. Ultimately here, after exiles and forced migrations, it will be younger Benjamin’s progeny who will survive in Palestine (along with Judah’s and Levi’s), but not Joseph’s, nor any of the rest of the twelve brothers born of four mothers.

The Odd Return

With the birth of Joseph, the eleventh son, and first of Rachel’s, the preferred wife, Jacob demands that Laban let him return home to Isaac (Genesis 30). This leads to some negotiation over how Jacob and Laban will divide up the herds, so that Jacob will have earned some wages, in order to maintain his immense household: not just the wives, concubines, and sons, but various other servants. In addition to being delayed so long regarding the marriage to his beloved Rachel, he is upset at Laban having changed the terms of their initial wage agreement 10 times over the years.

In this case, Jacob agrees to take only the spotted, speckled, and otherwise imperfect livestock, which were apparently considered less desirable, and in any case were in the minority of the flock. But before doing so, Jacob performs some rather detailed wizardry of animal husbandry in order to make the coming generation of livestock be delivered so as to his benefit and not Laban’s.

Jacob and household then take off for Palestine unbeknownst to Laban (Genesis 31), and here Rachel absconds with Laban’s household patron god figurines. No reason for her doing so is given, but this does help the soap opera continue along. All this angers Laban, and thus he attempts to overtake Jacob, eventually doing so. But God has told Laban to leave Jacob alone, and thus Laban and Jacob agree that the place of meeting up will be their boundary that will not be violated. But Laban insists on searching Jacob’s belonging for his gods. This ends up in failure for Laban, as Rachel has placed them in her camel’s luggage and then sat upon this. And next told her father that she can not allow herself to be searched because the monthly “custom of women” was upon her. Laban then returns home, leaving Jacob to continue on his way home.

If Not for Those Lentils I Wouldn’t Be in This Stew

And Jacob lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, Esau came, and with him four hundred men. (Genesis 33:1 KJV)

Next Jacob worries about Esau’s reaction to his returning (Genesis 32), considering Esau’s original desire to kill Jacob. So Jacob first sends advance messengers to Edom to inform Esau of his intent. Esau decides to come and greet Jacob with 400 retainers, and this, of course, has Jacob very worried that Esau has not had a change of mind towards him. So Jacob obsequiously sends a series of livestock gifts to curry favor with his brother, while also hedging his bets by splitting his party in two, so as to try to save at least one of the two.

But this proves all for naught as Esau seems to have indeed had a change of heart, even not wanting to accept Jacob’s gifts at first. Interestingly, this warmth between the brothers does not seem to last into the subsequent generations, as Judah will be a yoke over Edom for some time. Perhaps more importantly, one wonders why Jacob should ever get so concerned in such matters, as God has not only told him what to do and where to go, but has also told him that he has the protection implied by the Eternal Blessing.

As with Abraham and his 318 retainers, Esau, the supposed first generation of biblical Edom, already has 400 men at arms. This meaning that he is either a very prolific breeder or that, like the rest of these stories, he and his lineage manage to be very good at insinuating themselves into power – wherever they go. Except perhaps with their fellow kin, like Laban.

As Jacob continues on he retraces his original path back through Luz (Genesis 32:22-32), which he renames to Bethel, meaning House of El. Which is somewhat odd because these patriarchs only know the name El Shaddai, one ‘el’ among many, until then. Here Jacob must engage in a night-long wrestling match with a theophany of God. The outcome of the struggle is that God changes Jacob’s name to Israel, thus signifying that all these odd machinations prior are cryptically leading to the artifice of Ersatz Israel (more on this below).

Additionally, during the all night wrestling match (or mandrake flashback?), Jacob’s thigh or hip was injured by God’s touch, and thus observant Jews are not allowed to eat of shrunken thigh sinews yet today. Strangely, neither do your authors, but we are not aware of any such prohibitions placed upon us. In any case, this all points out the odd nature of this wrestling contest. Why wasn’t the rest of Jacob’s body so injured via God’s touch during such an epic encounter? Or did God himself also suffer any injuries, as tough Jacob gave as good as he got? At any rate, Jacob continues on to a place named Succoth where he builds a house and corrals for his cattle. Then he curiously names the place Succoth, which seems rather redundant.

Night of the Bloody Cocks

Next he heads to the Canaanite city of Shechem, where Jacob buys a parcel of land (Genesis 33:18-20). Here, daughter Dinah gets loose just long enough to be defiled by Shechem, the son of Hamor, the Hivite, prince of the country, not just the city (Genesis 34). This, of course, does not go over well with Jacob and the twelve brothers, despite Shechem wanting to marry Dinah, and Hamor wanting Jacob and his kin to dwell together with them at Shechem (the city) in peace.

Revenge on the Ham Handed Ravisher?

We wonder if Hamor, the Hivite, just might be the anachronistic inspiration for Ham, the one who condemned his Canaanite progeny to biblical perdition. However, in this case it was Hamor’s son, Shechem, who committed a sexual sin, apparently otherwise only acceptably performed with a harlot. Hamor is also unusually attested to be a “prince of the country” as opposed to a mere typical city king.

Jacob and his sons agree to do so, but only on the condition that all the males of Shechem undergo circumcision. The Shechemites agree, and foolishly they agree to undergo this rather uncomfortable procedure all on the same day. While they were recovering, Simeon and Levi decide to take terminal revenge for Dinah’s sake, and thus smite all the ‘foreshortened’ Shechemite males and plunder their goods for good measure. And almost as the ‘conquering’ Israelites would do later coming back from Egypt, they recorded that they allowed the Canaanite children and wives to survive and join Jacob’s growing band of Blessed Men. But in what capacity?

Because of Simeon and Levi’s executive actions, Jacob is thus angry, afraid that they will now have to incur revenge via all the Canaanites of Palestine. But the brothers were still angry that Dinah was treated as if a harlot. This makes an interesting juxtaposition with the coming episode of Judah and his daughter-in-law.

Turn out the Luz … again, the Terror-ific Party is Over

To assist Jacob, God tells him to return to Bethel (Genesis 35), but someone is confused and has him return to Luz, such that Jacob can rename it Bethel once again, before renaming it to Elbethel, God’s House of Gods? Maybe Jacob got stoned again? But in any case, God also terrorizes the neighboring Canannites and Perizittes, such that they leave Jacob and his family alone.

Back at … that place originally called Luz, God again renames Jacob to henceforth be ‘Israel’, apparently forgetting that he had already done so after the wrestling match that happened there just recently. And then Jacob reciprocates and renames Elbethel to Bethel. We wonder what the county recorder was thinking about having to deal with all these name changes? Was he mumbling something about mandrakes? (Of course, in this case and many others, scholars following Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis believe that the multiple divergent and sometimes contradictory accounts are a result of the compilation of the Old Testament by late redactors working from four or more independent source documents.)

Once things have stabilized with the Canaanites, Jacob is again on the move, this time to Ephrath, otherwise known as Bethlehem. Here Rachel give birth to Benjamin, and dies doing so.

Jacob then continues on to Hebron, the city of his father and grandfather. And rather laconically, we find out that Isaac then “gives up the ghost” at the ripe old age of 180. Esau is close by enough to come and help Jacob bury Isaac. But we are left to wonder at Isaac’s reaction to the return of ‘Israel’ and the friendly reunion of his sons.

You say Eretz Israel, I say Ersatz Israel

Another possible reason for Isaac’s ‘funny’ name might be that when Jacob gets his name changed to ‘Israel’ this creates a telling problem – or clue, of sorts. Importantly, to us, Jacob becomes the metaphor for the synthesis of a newly engineered Israel.

In the more usual sense of other biblical characters being eponymously considered as the respective patriarchal fathers of their namesake tribal progeny, Isaac, via his son Jacob, is somewhat unusual. Because Jacob will be granted the new name Israel, in this unusual sense then Isaac breaks the mold, passively once again, by posthumously becoming the literal father of metaphoric ‘Israel’ in the more mundane and secular sense of using the term ‘father’ as the parent of an individual. In this case then, the child, Jacob/Israel then becomes the patriarch in the more typical eponymous sense seen with other Biblical patriarchs. And as we have discussed previously, a Biblical name change signifies a change of primary agenda for the affected person (and/or perhaps the signified tribe).

And even if such names should really normally signify tribes or groups of people, what might we infer if Jacob, the ‘person’ who becomes ‘Israel’, has deceptively secured the birthright from his older brother? Given what we discussed in the Intro post about the appearance of the creation of the false dialectic of Jew versus Gentile, is all this yet another cryptically humorous (given the meaning of Isaac’s name: laughter) indication of the ersatz synthesis of the Israel side of the equation?

And as we explained in the introductory post, the subtext of the OT historical narrative of the formation of Israel and Judea is one of ethnic cleansing, forced migrations, and massive religio-political re-education. So here we suggest that the name change for Jacob, mimicking the prior names changes for Abram and Sarai, are to cynically memorialize the new demographic ‘character’ and outlook of the newly minted ‘nation’ of Israel. At the start of the process ‘laughing’ Isaac starts out as merely being the father of Jacob, but ends up being the father of Ersatz Israel.

Yet another possible benefit of this name change might have been to actually help facilitate the slipstreaming of the newly introduced masters and their religious paradigm on top of the old, by incorporating an older accepted name, Israel, into the new paradigm. If this was not ‘Israel’ itself, then the Canaanite heavenly ‘father’ god, El, certainly was known everywhere. ‘Jacob’ is similarly a theophoric name referring to Jah, or Yah.

It is thought by some that ‘Israel’ means some human agency’s struggle with El. ‘Ish‘ means man in Hebrew. In this light we see that the incoming agents of Yah struggle in a wrestling match with El, and El concedes victory to the agents of Yah and thus gives Jacob rights to incorporate his name and what advantages might go with it.

The Hebrew Bible says at Genesis 32:28-29 and 35:10, that God changed Jacob’s name to Israel. Etymologically, it has been suggested that the name “Israel” comes from the Hebrew words Hebrew: לִשְׂרות (lisrot, “wrestle”) and Hebrew: אֵל (El, “God”).[4] Popular English translations typically reference the face off with God, ranging from active “wrestles with God” to passive “God contends”,[5][6] but various other meanings have also been suggested. Some commentators say the name comes from the verb śārar (“to rule, be strong, have authority over”), thereby making the name mean “God rules” or “God judges”;[7] or “the prince of God” (from the King James Version) or “El (God) fights/struggles”.[8]

His original name Ya’akov is sometimes explained as having meant “holder of the heel” or “supplanter”, because he was born holding his twin brother Esau’s heel, and eventually supplanted Esau in obtaining their father Isaac’s blessing. Other scholars speculate that the name is derived from a longer form such as Hebrew: יַעֲקֹבְאֵל (Ya’aqov’el) meaning “may God protect”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob#Etymology

Judah, Chosen Scion of an Unwanted Wife

We will finish this post by focusing on Judah, the fourth scion of Israel, and his typically odd progeny. It is from Judah, the namesake of the foundational Abrahamic religion, that we uniquely and curiously get both a claimed Chosen ethnicity and what becomes the centerpiece Western religion. The former ethnic claim is rather ironic considering the nature of Judah’s profane choices of begetting partners, and all the periodic fuss over maintaining the purity of the murky gene pool. Doubly ironic via the Ashkenazi issue, as well as the earlier biblical introduction of Hosea’s offspring with the whore Gomer (Hosea 1). And as we’ll see, Judah and his Jewish progeny became the moral foil for Christianity.

With his first action detailed in the Bible we see Judah looking to profit from the sale of his brother Joseph into slavery, rather than to simply kill him, which would not yield any cash payment. This would be selling Joseph to their Ishmaelite relatives, only one generation removed from them, therefore making them their cousins. Real cousins unless, of course, one chooses to interpret these narratives in a non-literal fashion.

Here Judah is also juxtaposed with his oldest brother Reuben, who merely wants to return Joseph to his father, perhaps somewhat shaken up and scared. Of course, this doesn’t say much for the others who wanted to kill Joseph (Jacob’s favorite scion, the firstborn of Rachel), but at least it is not for money’s sake. This theme gets repeated in the typology of Judas, where Judas betrays Jesus to the priests in exchange for some coins.

And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stript Joseph out of his coat, his coat of many colours that was on him; And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there was no water in it. And they sat down to eat bread: and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and, behold, a company of Ishmeelites came from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt. And Judah said unto his brethren, What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal his blood? Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmeelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother and our flesh. And his brethren were content. Then there passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmeelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt. And Reuben returned unto the pit; and, behold, Joseph was not in the pit; and he rent his clothes. And he returned unto his brethren, and said, The child is not; and I, whither shall I go?

And they took Joseph’s coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood; And they sent the coat of many colours, and they brought it to their father; and said, This have we found: know now whether it be thy son’s coat or no. And he knew it, and said, It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces. And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days. And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him. And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh’s, and captain of the guard. (Genesis 37:23-36 KJV)

Note here that Jacob (who is supposed to be ‘Israel’ now, but the authors and redactors forgot) has ‘daughters’, meaning at least one more than Dinah. Does this mean that Dinah was only mentioned by name because of the ravishing incident with Shechem? Who was the mother, and were there more mothers … and sons that aren’t mentioned?

Smite the Canaanitish Seed Waster and Levirate Scofflaw

And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah. And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah; and he took her, and went in unto her. And she conceived, and bare a son; and he called his name Er. And she conceived again, and bare a son; and she called his name Onan. And she yet again conceived, and bare a son; and called his name Shelah: and he was at Chezib, when she bare him.

And Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, whose name was Tamar. And Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him. And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also. Then said Judah to Tamar his daughter in law, Remain a widow at thy father’s house, till Shelah my son be grown: for he said, Lest peradventure he die also, as his brethren did. And Tamar went and dwelt in her father’s house. (Genesis 38:1-11 KJV)

In the OT’s parsimonious style we see that Judah does not accomplish much of note, until he finds a wife, Tamar, for the sons of his unnamed Canaanite wife. So much contempt is shown for Canaanites, that Judah’s wife’s name is not mentioned despite her father being named. This seems to redundantly predispose the outcome away from the favor to any Canaanite bloodline, despite the marriage to Judah, whose subsequent progeny become the Chosen. We are also left to wonder if Jacob had forgot to tell Judah, at least, about not marrying Canaanites, or if this is supposed to be an example of the rebellion of youth?

With the first son, Er is apparently so evil that his sins cannot even be mentioned, and so bad that it is God himself who smites Er. Next we observe the workings of the levirate marriage practice that we mentioned in the Intro post. In this case, the next oldest brother must step up and provide seed for the sake of allowing the bride to fulfill her end of the marriage contract. Namely, in delivering progeny that will also ensure her security.

But in this case, for some unexplained reason, Onan knows that “the seed should not be his.” But if not his, then whose? This is a mystery for sure, but in any case God decides that this failure to launch is worthy of his directly smiting Onan as well. But here we are also left wondering what the actual offense was, or if it was a combination of factors. Did Onan’s, and Er’s Canaanite blood play any role here, perhaps giving them an eternal evil tinge, of the “Bad Seed”? Was it the failure of the levirate contract terms, or was it that Onan spilled his seed, however the latter was accomplished?

Even more curious is just what factor(s) caused Onan to make this abortive seed delivery in the first place. The term “go in unto” means to consummate, and thus activate the initiation of marriage. That he “went in unto her” means that his seed delivery plumbing was so primed and enabled for delivery, and yet he spilled the seeds anyways. In other words: that he ‘went into her before he went out of her’.

This whole business, termed Onanism, is frequently taken as a general proscription against male masturbation, at least, but we are not so sure that this was not really meant to only apply to premature withdrawal after arousal. Meaning that sexual union is for procreation purposes only, and not for pleasure’s sake. That is: one, if a woman that is not a harlot is involved; or two, if anyone but a man of Canaanitish blood is involved. The latter remembering the curse of Ham visited upon Canaan. If one violates these terms then they are subject to being smitten by God, while this yet says nothing about whether or not you might be smitten with your partner.

The Case of the Faux Harlot and the Seed Gone to Naught..y

And it was told Tamar, saying, Behold thy father in law goeth up to Timnath to shear his sheep. And she put her widow’s garments off from her, and covered her with a vail, and wrapped herself, and sat in an open place, which is by the way to Timnath; for she saw that Shelah was grown, and she was not given unto him to wife. When Judah saw her, he thought her to be an harlot; because she had covered her face. And he turned unto her by the way, and said, Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto thee; (for he knew not that she was his daughter in law.) And she said, What wilt thou give me, that thou mayest come in unto me? And he said, I will send thee a kid from the flock. And she said, Wilt thou give me a pledge, till thou send it? And he said, What pledge shall I give thee? And she said, Thy signet, and thy bracelets, and thy staff that is in thine hand. And he gave it her, and came in unto her, and she conceived by him. And she arose, and went away, and laid by her vail from her, and put on the garments of her widowhood.

And Judah sent the kid by the hand of his friend the Adullamite, to receive his pledge from the woman’s hand: but he found her not. Then he asked the men of that place, saying, Where is the harlot, that was openly by the way side? And they said, There was no harlot in this place. And he returned to Judah, and said, I cannot find her; and also the men of the place said, that there was no harlot in this place. And Judah said, Let her take it to her, lest we be shamed: behold, I sent this kid, and thou hast not found her.

And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told Judah, saying, Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burnt. When she was brought forth, she sent to her father in law, saying, By the man, whose these are, am I with child: and she said, Discern, I pray thee, whose are these, the signet, and bracelets, and staff. And Judah acknowledged them, and said, She hath been more righteous than I; because that I gave her not to Shelah my son. And he knew her again no more. (Genesis 38:13-26 KJV)

With Tamar acting as a prostitute to fool her father-in-law into complying with the terms of the customary Indic levirate marriage contract, and as we had pondered in previous posts with what all the Hittites were doing appearing centrally to the Judaic foundational narrative, we must now wonder what all the appearances of prostitutes are similarly doing there. This with such as Hosea’s Gomer and now Tamar, albeit that the latter, a fine and proper lady in the context of her times, is only pretending to be a street walker so as to gain her just due.

Note that in line with the levirate marriage practice indicating Indic heritage, that burning of wives for various reasons is also of such an origin. It is also a good time to ask what sin or contract breach, if any, was incurred when Shelah was passed over in the proper groom order? In any case, neither Judah or Tamar get smitten, either directly or indirectly, by God.

And so it came to pass that Tamar would bear Judah the two sons that counted, the progeny of which became the Chosen of Judaism, along with the Benjamites and Levites. These are Pharez and Zarah, whose twin birth evokes that of their father and uncle’s. But here we only get to know the competitive birth details, an acknowledgement of the stakes involved in the order of birth, if only by minutes:

And it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold, twins were in her womb. And it came to pass, when she travailed, that the one put out his hand: and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet thread, saying, This came out first. And it came to pass, as he drew back his hand, that, behold, his brother came out: and she said, How hast thou broken forth? this breach be upon thee: therefore his name was called Pharez. And afterward came out his brother, that had the scarlet thread upon his hand: and his name was called Zarah. (Genesis 38:27-30)

Besides their place in the genealogy of Judah, below, why was the above vignette so important to solely detail about their lives? It would be with the second to appear, yet still firstborn, Pharez who fathers the royal and Blessed lineage. We seem to get the impression that Zarah may have been pulled back into the womb by Pharez. The midwife takes pains to declare to the covetous infant that in his haste to be first out of the womb, so as to seize the traditional birthright, that the responsibility would be upon him for any injury to his mother or brother.

Seriously, are we really to take this literally, that a newborn can have such an instinct and thus need be scolded so? As we have mentioned before, the inclusion of all these blessed family foibles are usually interpreted by the believers as just another sign of literal veracity. But this case seems especially obvious that it has been included to paint a different picture. Was this to place a sardonic scarlet letter on Pharez, the first born of the Jews? Or, as Cyrus H. Gordon had stated in his works, that such exhibitions of guile and chutzpah were more acceptable in those times, and thus Pharez’s behavior was to be seen as a competitive exemplar to be emulated in adult life, generation after generation? And only later to be turned on its head by early Christians looking to draw distinctions and wanting to inculcate passivism.

Note below that it was important for the redactors to reiterate into the separate 1 Chronicles genealogy that Judah’s first sons were born of an unnamed Canaanitess. And that Onan’s also being slayed by God was omitted, with only Er being listed as being evil. Shelah’s fate we never find out. Given the eternal damnation of the progeny of Canaan, placed in the time of Noah, what are we to make of Judah’s decision to go against this patently wrathful god and his parent’s proscriptions, based upon the respective starkly contrasting outcomes? We suggest that such as these are typical contrived object lessons for those being converted into the new religious paradigm and polity.

The sons of Judah; Er, and Onan, and Shelah: which three were born unto him of the daughter of Shua the Canaanitess. And Er, the firstborn of Judah, was evil in the sight of the LORD; and he slew him. And Tamar his daughter in law bare him Pharez and Zerah. All the sons of Judah were five.

The sons of Pharez; Hezron, and Hamul. And the sons of Zerah; Zimri, and Ethan, and Heman, and Calcol, and Dara: five of them in all. And the sons of Carmi; Achar, the troubler of Israel, who transgressed in the thing accursed. And the sons of Ethan; Azariah.

The sons also of Hezron, that were born unto him; Jerahmeel, and Ram, and Chelubai. And Ram begat Amminadab; and Amminadab begat Nahshon, prince of the children of Judah; And Nahshon begat Salma, and Salma begat Boaz, And Boaz begat Obed, and Obed begat Jesse, And Jesse begat his firstborn Eliab, and Abinadab the second, and Shimma the third, Nethaneel the fourth, Raddai the fifth, Ozem the sixth, David the seventh: (1 Chronicles 2:3-15 KJV)

And oddly, a son named Carmi appears miraculously from nowhere into the middle of the list. Consistent with the moral motif here, his son, Achar, will be singled out for trying to abscond with a forbidden object reserved for the Lord (Joshua 7:1), and which had been booty from the sack of Jericho, thus placing all of the Hebrews in mortal peril of God’s wrath. Similarly with Ham’s misdeed affecting all of Canaan’s progeny, one man’s greedy and blasphemous misdeeds can imperil the whole enterprise of the Blessed Family? We suggest that this is yet another ham-handed attempt to produce conformity via fear. God has already pushed the reset button once with Noah, and has placed Isaac (and thus the future Israel) at mortal risk supposedly as a sophomoric test of faith which the omniscient god should already have known the answer to.

Blessing, Blessing, Who’s Got the Blessing?

As we mentioned much earlier, the central thread of these narratives is the blessing given to Abraham, representing the imprimatur of God, which was then passed down through the generations, to the benefit of only one fortunate scion at a time. With the passage of several thousand years, we can now see that the progeny of Judah seem to have emerged as the dominant tribe. Accordingly, it seems logical that that they should have been the ones whose scion du jour received the blessing from Jacob / Israel.

But this was not the case. Here, we must take into account that Judah was the fourth son of the Hated Wife, and look briefly into the account of Joseph (whom we’ll cover next), the first son of the Beloved Wife. Upon the last days of Jacob / Israel, he meets his grandsons.

And Israel beheld Joseph’s sons, and said, Who are these? And Joseph said unto his father, They are my sons, whom God hath given me in this place. And he said, Bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I will bless them. Now the eyes of Israel were dim for age, so that he could not see. And he brought them near unto him; and he kissed them, and embraced them. And Israel said unto Joseph, I had not thought to see thy face: and, lo, God hath shewed me also thy seed. And Joseph brought them out from between his knees, and he bowed himself with his face to the earth. And Joseph took them both, Ephraim in his right hand toward Israel’s left hand, and Manasseh in his left hand toward Israel’s right hand, and brought them near unto him. And Israel stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim’s head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh’s head, guiding his hands wittingly; for Manasseh was the firstborn. (Genesis 48:8-14 KJV)

This situation starts to get confusing (and will only get worse), as it turns out that Jacob blesses both sons and Joseph, contrary to the “only one at a time” rule. But the confusion here can be resolved by the fact that the younger son, once again, gets the big prize by Jacob’s witting choice of hands.

And when Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand upon the head of Ephraim, it displeased him: and he held up his father’s hand, to remove it from Ephraim’s head unto Manasseh’s head. And Joseph said unto his father, Not so, my father: for this is the firstborn; put thy right hand upon his head. And his father refused, and said, I know it, my son, I know it: he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great: but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations. And he blessed them that day, saying, In thee shall Israel bless, saying, God make thee as Ephraim and as Manasseh: and he set Ephraim before Manasseh. (Genesis 48:17-19 KJV)

In the next chapter, Jacob calls all the sons together and announces their respective fates, a seemingly odd thing to do for a loving father considering some of what is said for them. As for Judah, we are given the following destiny:

Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee. Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be. Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes: His eyes shall be red with wine, and his teeth white with milk. (Genesis 49:8-12 KJV)

This presents us with something of a interpretational conundrum, as Ephraim (and most all commentators agree) is truly the one with the Abrahamic Blessing. He is supposed to seed a multitude of nations, but then how does this relate to Judah’s destiny? The above states that the sceptre, the šê-ḇeṭ (shebet), shall not depart Judah, but is this the tribe or the land of Judah? ‘Shiloh’ is commonly agreed to mean the expected Messiah, and here one can speculate a range of time from that of Cyrus the Great till some time in the future.

Interestingly, the tribe of Ephraim was one of those stated to have been relocated by the Assyrians, but to where, and to what fate did the scions come to? This is one point where there is some solid archaeological grounds, in that the Assyrians recorded that they did conquer and relocate peoples of the area en masse. Prior to this, following Jeroboam’s abortive first revolt against Solomon, he ended up in exile for a time at the court of ‘pharaoh’. Jeroboam was of the tribe of Ephraim, but also a descendant of Joseph’s Egyptian wife selected by ‘pharaoh’. And considering the manner in which Judah’s behavior and his prophetic destiny are so darkly framed, we suggest that perhaps Judah is merely the greater scheme’s visible front or lightning rod, veiling the true fortunate scions, the pagan descendants of Jeroboam who consorted with ‘Pharaoh’ and wound up partnering with the Assyrians.

For now, we will just mention that the story with the blessing doesn’t end here, and we’ll return to it subsequently. Suffice it to say that a parallel to Romans 11 can be found in Ezekiel 37 which, at some point in time, is to bind Judah and Ephraim together as one. Some say that this was done at the time of Christ or earlier, but we don’t think this is the case, but rather that we are witnessing the process with the current state of Israel (whose name Ephraim was considered synonymous with – as opposed to Judea). The Jews today are living in Israel, not Judea.

Conclusion

There were only ten generations from Judah till King David, the last son of Jesse, who is later cryptically memorialized with the graft found in Romans 11, central to the thesis of Caesar’s Messiah. If the earlier stated assertion is true about Ersatz Israel, then how does this curious patrimony also reflect on the nature of the later graft of Christianity into it?

As we have mentioned before, the moral and cultural contexts of those times were different than the present one today, and thus we should not project our values onto what is clearly divine, … or rather claimed as such. Here, we are particularly focused on the present Judeo-Christian zeitgeist that their unchanging god is ‘now’ only about love, goodness, and redemption, despite explicit messages to the contrary. We are thus left with the oxymoronic conundrum that this once jealous and wrathful ‘eternal’ god has mellowed and matured with age, as some theologians posit, while the canonic texts statically record otherwise.

Christian theology, especially supercessionist (i.e. the First Covenant was wholly replaced by the Second), has been focused on the conceit that the relationship of the Abrahamic God was indeed changing with respect to mankind. It thus capitalized on the mystique of the ever pernicious sons of Judah, whose behavior had been framed so well. These who cravenly killed the Son of God, and sardonically one of their own.

Yet, having said all that, it is rather remarkable to view the wily and acquisitive moral behaviors that are associated with the Eternal Blessing, which grants the right to globally spawn kings of nations, garnering great wealth and such. If nothing else, at least we can say that the Blessed Family was living up to the high standards of our contemporary leaders today, and that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

But in another light, is the odd behavior so remarkable? Once we remove the ‘romantic’ gloss off of the narratives, we can see that the vaunted OT patriarchs are little different from the esteemed heroic foundational patriarchs of Rome, themselves equally murky in the dubious mists of time. These are all stories of acquisitive aristocrats seeking to impose a new order on their newly colonized domains.

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Ken Kesey, Lifetime Actor

Joseph Atwill

January 20, 2016

In his premier novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey portrayed a mental hospital that was controlled by an evil ‘Combine’, whose tentacles extended well beyond the hospital walls. This ‘Combine’ was described using Masonic symbolism, as a society with a secret, hateful agenda to remold the world and to govern it as an empire of human drones and slaves. Kesey’s novel powerfully depicted the psychologically destructive potential of psychiatric institutions and their tools, including electroshock therapy and prefrontal lobotomy, and portrayed those methods as weapons that were used by ‘The Combine’ to achieve their goals of control and dominance. The book seemed to be openly and defiantly critical of these Masons and their allies in the psychiatric professions, and it seemed to represent a call for rebellion against this life-destroying system. And indeed, Kesey’s next project, his cross-country bus trip with the ‘Merry Pranksters’, appeared to represent a concrete expression of that same impulse towards freedom and rebellion.

However, the form of ‘rebellion’ promoted by Kesey was strangely consistent with the methods of ‘The Combine’ as described in his novel. His drug of choice, LSD, was by then well-known (at least by insiders) as another weapon in the psychiatric toolkit, whose primary effect was to induce a dangerous, lasting psychosis in at least a certain percentage of those who took it.

In other words: Kesey’s ‘rebellion’, far from being a potent act of resistance against ‘The Combine’, was tailor-made to further their goal to achieve the technological enslavement of humankind.

Jan Irvin and I, in our article “Manufacturing the Deadhead“, have shown that many of Kesey’s closest friends and associates at the Palo Alto VA hospital, and among the ‘Merry Pranksters’ and the ‘Grateful Dead,’ were deeply involved with Freemasonry, the Bohemian Grove, and the CIA MK-Ultra program. These affiliations, combined with Kesey’s inside knowledge of Freemasonry and the tools of psychiatry as demonstrated in Cuckoo’s Nest (as we will show below), make it extremely difficult to take Kesey’s public persona seriously. While the most charitable interpretation is that Kesey’s promotion of LSD was ultimately deluded or even hypocritical, it seems far more likely that he was in fact a Lifetime Actor. In other words, his public personality was nothing more than a ruse that had been carefully ‘crafted’ to lure young people into taking the psychosis-producing drug LSD. If this is the case, Kesey himself was actively involved in this organization that was determined to debase an entire generation in order to make them easier to control; and he himself may have designed his seductive persona for that purpose.

The success of Black Propaganda depends on the victim’s trust in the attacker. Thus, Kesey presented himself as a hip, spiritual seeker who drove across the country in a brightly colored bus, engaged in free love, and purportedly used LSD to expand his mind. America’s youth trusted Kesey’s motivations, and were thus tempted to copy Kesey and his ‘Merry Pranksters’ and take the LSD they gave away. In fact, Kesey was leading America’s youth into cultural oblivion, using tools that had been developed by ‘The Combine’, and working with artists and technicians who were openly and proudly affiliated with ‘The Combine’.

FREEMASONRY IN CUCKOO’S NEST

The symbolic level of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest cannot be seen without understanding the strand of typology that it is derived from. It is the same genre of symbolism that was used by J.D. Salinger to create his homage to Freemasonry in Catcher in the Rye.

At the beginning of Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey introduces a group of Master Masons who know the “hate secrets” of Freemasonry described in the earlier article ‘The Freemason in the Rye’. Kesey uses the classic literary device of having the ‘visions’ of a madman actually see reality.

The schizophrenic Chief Bromden’s visions provide the basis for Kesey’s description of Freemasonry. Like the version of Freemasonry Salinger described, it is not the beneficial one presented to the public, but rather an organization dominated by a hate that is kept secret.

To understand the symbolism in the next passage one needs to recognize the Freemasonic fascination with black and white. Checkerboard floors are a standard feature of Masonic temples, and indeed the third level of Freemasonry – the Master Mason – wears clothes of black and white. Thus, Kesey below is using typology to describe three individuals ‘wearing’ black and white, who were selected for their high level of hatred. The fact that they keep ‘secrets’ is course part of becoming a Master Mason.

They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.

They’re mopping when I come out the dorm, all three of them sulky and hating everything, the time of day, the place they’re at here, the people they got to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don’t see me. I creep along the wall quiet as dust in my canvas shoes, but they got special sensitive equipment detects my fear and they all look up, all three at once, eyes glittering out of the black faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes out of the back of an old radio.

They laugh and then I hear them mumbling behind me, heads close together. Hum of black machinery, humming hate and death and other hospital secrets. They don’t bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I’m nearby because they think I’m deaf and dumb. Everybody thinks so. I’m cagey enough to fool them that much. If my being half Indian ever helped me in any way in this dirty life, it helped me being cagey, helped me all these years.

While the stereotypical Master Mason is a white man wearing a black suit and white apron, the specific imagery described by Kesey also is reenacted from time to time in Masonic lodges, as depicted in the image at the right.

Kesey describes how difficult it was for Nurse Ratchet to find the right ‘applicants’ to fill the positions of her staff. Most did not possess enough “hate”. The description of Nurse Ratchet’s selecting from her applicants repeats the theme in Catcher in the Rye of a cryptic depiction of the Freemason initiation process that works through different ‘levels’, requiring and instilling a secret hatred.

First, Kesey notes the one-month period between an applicant’s registration and his taking the test to gain the first level.

Her three daytime black boys she acquires after more years of testing and rejecting thousands. They come at her in a long black row of sulky, big-nosed masks, hating her and her chalk doll whiteness from the first look they get. She appraises them and their hate for a month or so, then lets them go because they don’t hate enough. When she finally gets the three she wants – gets them one at a time over a number of years, weaving them into her plan and her network – she’s damn positive they hate enough to be capable.

The first one she gets five years after I been on the ward, a twisted sinewy dwarf the color of cold asphalt. His mother was raped in Georgia while his papa stood by tied to the hot iron stove with plow traces, blood streaming into his shoes. The boy watched from a closet, five years old and squinting his eye to peep out the crack between the door and the jamb, and he never grew an inch after. Now his eyelids hang loose and thin from his brow like he’s got a bat perched on the bridge of his nose.

Next, the novel depicts the Freemason initiation that requires that the initiate be ‘hood-winked’.

Eyelids like thin gray leather, he lifts them up just a bit whenever a new white man comes on the ward, peeks out from under them and studies the man up and down and nods just once like he’s oh yes made positive certain of something he was already sure of. He wanted to carry a sock full of birdshot when he first came on the job, to work the patients into shape, but she told him they didn’t do it that way anymore,

The training helps the initiate learn to hide his hate:

made him leave the sap at home and taught him her own technique; taught him not to show his hate and to be calm and wait, wait for a little advantage, a little slack, then twist the rope and keep the pressure steady. All the time. That’s the way you get them into shape, she taught him.

Kesey then describes becoming a Master Mason and the required wearing of black and white.

The other two black boys come two years later, coming to work only about a month apart and both looking so much alike I think she had a replica made of the one who came first. They are tall and sharp and bony and their faces are chipped into expressions that never change, like flint arrowheads. Their eyes come to points. If you brush against their hair it rasps the hide right off you.

All of them black as telephones. The blacker they are, she learned from that long dark row that came before them, the more time they are likely to devote to cleaning and scrubbing and keeping the ward in order. For instance, all three of these boys’ uniforms are always spotless as snow. White and cold and stiff as her own.

All three wear starched snow-white pants and white shirts with metal snaps down one side and white shoes polished like ice, and the shoes have red rubber soles silent as mice up and down the hall. They never make any noise when they move. They materialize in different parts of the ward every time a patient figures to check himself in private or whisper some secret to another guy. A patient’ll be in a corner all by himself, when all of a sudden there’s a squeak and frost forms along his cheek, and he turns in that direction and there’s a cold stone mask floating above him against the wall. He just sees the black face. No body. The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and the black face and hands seem to float against it like a ghost.

Kesey notes that once a Freemason has been selected and trained in the ‘hate secret’, they are able to function autonomously. The passage is important in that it shows that there are no written instructions within the organization. This is logical in that such a project would never want to make any records of its existence.

Years of training, and all three black boys tune in closer and closer with the Big Nurse’s frequency. One by one they are able to disconnect the direct wires and operate on beams. She never gives orders out loud or leaves written instructions that might be found by a visiting wife or schoolteacher. Doesn’t need to any more. They are in contact on a high-voltage wave length of hate, and the black boys are out there performing her bidding before she even thinks it.

The other part of Ratchet’s carefully chosen ‘staff’ is a doctor – cleverly suggested to be a ‘thirty-third-degree’ mason. Note the clever typology.

Ken Kesey wrote:

Year by year she accumulates her ideal staff: doctors, all ages and types, come and rise up in front of her with ideas of their own about the way a ward should be run, some with backbone enough to stand behind their ideas, and she fixes these doctors with dry-ice eyes day in, day out, until they retreat with unnatural chills. “I tell you I don’t know what it is,” they tell the guy in charge of personnel. “Since I started on that ward with that woman I feel like my veins are running ammonia. I shiver all the time, my kids won’t sit in my lap, my wife won’t sleep with me. I insist on a transfer – neurology bin, the alky tank, pediatrics, I just don’t care!”

She keeps this up for years. The doctors last three weeks, three months. Until she finally settles for a little man with a big wide forehead and wide jowls…”

MCMURPHY – THE FLAVIAN CHRIST

To understand the book’s symbolic level, it is first necessary to recognize that its lead character – R. P. McMurphy – was created as a ‘Christ’ figure; though not a positive individual like the Christ described in the Gospels. McMurphy represents the lineage of the Caesar that Jesus Christ foresaw, Titus Flavius. To create this linkage, Kesey used typology, Gospel quotes, crucifixions, and a fishing trip described as “fishing for men”

Critics have speculated that McMurphy was some kind of Christ ‘type’ and many of the connections between him and the story in the Gospels are obvious. (For example, see this article by Raven Moot.) In the beginning of the novel, McMurphy is baptized with a shower. The reader is also introduced to Ellis, a character that spends the entire novel in a cross-position “nailed against the wall, arms out.” Another typological linkage is presented during the electroshock therapy where McMurphy willingly lies down on a cross-shaped table, ending up in the position that Ellis foreshadowed. McMurphy also asks for his ‘crown of thorns’. Before the ‘crucifixion’ a schizophrenic patient approaches him and says “I wash my hands of the whole deal“, as Pontius Pilate said to Jesus before sentencing him to death. Jesus was also a friend of a prostitute, just as McMurphy befriends prostitutes.

The most obvious linkage between McMurphy and Christ is the fishing trip in which he leads his twelve disciples – the twelve patients. McMurphy takes the “twelve of us [patients] towards the ocean” just like Jesus’ 12 disciples, both as a way of strengthening their faith in him and empowering them to rise above their humble position of mental patients.

With the fishing for men trip McMurphy became the leader of the patients, just as Jesus led his disciples. When the trip is over, the Chief describes the sense of change that most of the patients had and even claims that they “weren’t the same bunch of weak-knees from a nuthouse anymore.”

Moreover, Ellis, the crucified ‘type’ of Christ, tells Billy to become a “fisher of men”.

Ellis pulled his hands down off the nails in the wall and squeezed Billy Bibbit’s hand and told him to be a fisher of men.

McMurphy also affected Billy Bibbit, who is typologically linked to Judas Iscariot. Billy betrays McMurphy’s guilt for the fishing trip, claiming: “McMurphy did it!” As a result of his betrayal, Billy later takes his own life as Judas did when he gave Jesus to the Romans for crucifixion. In another act of betrayal, Billy refuses to accept the catching of men. Billy is in effect rejecting Flavian Christianity.

And Billy, watching the brass brads on that woman’s Levis wink at him as she walked out of the day room, told Ellis to hell with that fisher of men business.

Similarities can also be drawn between McMurphy and Jesus’ healing. Jesus made blind men see and mute men speak. McMurphy is the one who prompted the Chief to speak for the first time and eventually, McMurphy “heals” the Chief of both `deafness’ and `dumbness’.

However, although McMurphy’s typological link to the biblical Jesus Christ is well understood, there is a subtle distinction that needs to be made. McMurphy is also linked clearly to the Flavian version of the savior, Titus Caesar. This is hinted at the book’s end when Big Nurse confronts McMurphy and states that he is someone who gambled with “human lives – as if you thought yourself to be a god.” Readers of this paper will find the Flavian connections to the Gospels that Kesey is responding to in my book Caesar’s Messiah.

Kesey began the connection to the Flavians by creating a clever typology showing the Flavian trinity. Kesey depicts this unholy trinity at the beginning of the book with his characters Ellis, Ruckly, and Colonel Matterson. The Flavians are represented in the institution as ‘Chronics’. In other words, they are brain dead.

Ellis represents Titus. The character’s name is based upon ‘Eli’, the Jewish god Titus aspired to become. As shown below, Ellis’s connection to the Christ character in the Gospels is transparent.

Moreover, Kesey shows an awareness of the occulted meaning in the Gospels – the Flavian typology – by his description of Ellis as ‘brain murdered’. This is the most important typological concept in Cuckoo’s Nest, as it sets up the entire symbolic level. The fate of Ellis was based upon the Flavians’ removing of the Jewish Messiah’s brain at Golgotha (empty skull). Ellis’s brain murder foresees the fate of McMurphy given at the end of the book where he has his brain destroyed, which reverses the story in the Gospels.

Ellis is a Chronic came in an Acute and got fouled up bad when they overloaded him in that filthy brain-murdering room that the black boys call the “Shock Shop.” Now he’s nailed against the wall in the same condition they lifted him off the table for the last time, in the same shape, arms out, palms cupped, with the same horror on his face. He’s nailed like that on the wall, like a stuffed trophy. They pull the nails when it’s time to eat or time to drive him in to bed when they want him to move so’s I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when roll check came around.

‘Ruckly’ – ruckus – represents Domitian, the Flavian Caesar who was famous for his sexual depravity, particularly sexual intercourse with the wives of his associates.

But he exercised all the tyranny of his high position so lawlessly, that it was even then apparent what sort of a man he was going to be. Not to mention all details, after making free with the wives of many men,…

Suetonius, Domitian, 1

Kesey wrote:

Ruckly is another Chronic came in a few years back as an Acute, but him they overloaded in a different way: they made a mistake in one of their head installations. He was being a holy nuisance all over the place, kicking the black boys and biting the student nurses on the legs, so they took him away to be fixed. They strapped him to that table, and the last anybody saw of him for a while was just before they shut the door on him; he winked, just before the door closed, and told the black boys as they backed away from him, “You’ll pay for this, you damn tarbabies.”

And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later, bald and the front of his face an oily purple bruise and two little button-sized plugs stitched one above each eye. You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; his eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside like blown fuses. All day now he won’t do a thing but hold an old photograph up in front of that burned-out face, turning it over and over in his cold fingers, and the picture wore gray as his eyes on both sides with all his handling till you can’t tell any more what it used to be.

The staff, now, they consider Ruckly one of their failures, but I’m not sure but what he’s better off than if the installation had been perfect. The installations they do nowadays are generally successful. The technicians got more skill and experience. No more of the button holes in the forehead, no cutting at all – they go in through the eye sockets. Sometimes a guy goes over for an installation, leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the whole world and comes back a few weeks later with black-and-blue eyes like he’d been in a fist- fight, and he’s the sweetest, nicest, best-behaved thing you ever saw. He’ll maybe even go home in a month or two, a hat pulled low over the face of a sleepwalker wandering round in a simple, happy dream. A success, they say, but I say he’s just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure, like Ruckly sitting there fumbling and drooling over his picture. He never does much else. The dwarf black boy gets a rise out of him from time to time by leaning close and asking, “Say, Ruckly, what you figure your little wife is doing in town tonight?” Ruckly’s head comes up. Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery. He turns red and his veins clog up at one end. This puffs him up so he can just barely make a little whistling sound in his throat. Bubbles squeeze out the corner of his mouth, he’s working his jaw so hard to say something. When he finally does get to where he can say his few words it’s a low, choking noise to make your skin crawl – “Fffffffuck da wife! Fffffffuck da wife!” and passes out on the spot from the effort.

Colonel Matterson represents the oldest Flavian Caesar, Vespasian – the father of Titus and Domitian. Kesey named his typological character ‘Matterson’ because the name is a variation of ‘Matthew’. The ‘Matthew’ in the Gospels was a publican or tax collector and Vespasian was the most famous tax collector in the Roman Empire.

Vespasian was also a famous General of the Roman Legions, thus the title ‘Colonel’. The ‘First War’ Kesey refers to is the war between the Flavians and the Jews during the first century. Matterson is “teaching some kind of history” from his “left hand” to depict the ‘left handed’ or false history the Flavians tried to teach with Josephus and the Gospels. The statement also shows that Matterson is a false god. In Hebraic literature God always produces the truth from his right hand. Kesey intended for Matterson to reverse the false history of Matthew 22:44 – Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.

As Salinger did in his Freemason homage Catcher in the Rye, Kesey is displaying a deep understanding of the occulted meaning of the Gospels. The Flavian typology in Cuckoo’s Nest clarifies the basis for the “hate secrets” or, as Salinger called them, the F.U. of Freemasonry. As shown below, the basis for the hatred would be the ‘First War’, which was the war between the Romans and the Jews between 66 and 73 C E.

Ellis and Ruckly are the youngest Chronics. Colonel Matterson is the oldest, an old, petrified cavalry soldier from the First War who is given to lifting the skirts of passing nurses with his cane, or teaching some kind of history out of the text of his left hand to anybody that’ll listen. He’s the oldest on the ward, but not the one’s been here longest – his wife brought him in only a few years back, when she got to where she wasn’t up to tending him any longer.

Throughout the story McMurphy is described as a gambler. This is related to the Flavians who ‘gambled’ with the lives of their subjects to become a human god. In other words, they accepted the deaths of the Jewish war as an acceptable wager in his desire to become god. It was a bad bet. Kesey wrote:

First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives – gambling with human lives – as if you thought yourself to be a God!

The statement clarifies everything, as it shows that McMurphy is a false god. Thus Kesey’s ‘Christ’ character is the Flavian Caesar.

Moreover, by having the head of The Combine expose McMurphy as a false god: Kesey shows that far from seeing The Combine as evil, he believes it to represents moral righteousness. This is an important insight in that it also shows why Kesey accepted the positive morality of MK Ultra’s and The Combine’s use of citizens as animals.

McMurphy’s brain murder in Cuckoo’s Nest reverses the fate of the Jewish Messiah described in the Gospel’s typology in which his brain was removed. (See Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah.) In other words, it is the Gentile McMurphy that has his brain removed.

THE COMBINE – ORDER OUT OF CHAOS

In the key section that contains the representations of the Flavian Trinity, Kesey provides a clear description of the Freemasons’ belief that they are creating order out of chaos. In other words, they are restoring the world to the condition that existed before Christianity.

Nurse Ratchet calls McMurphy a disrupter of order. When another nurse, Miss Flinn, asks why he does this, she replies:

You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.

The next passage is of critical importance in that it describes the ‘chaos’ that McMurphy has created and the ‘order’ that Ratchet’s organization creates. Kesey is describing the ‘order out of chaos’ that Freemasonry claims to be bringing about. This is what is depicted by phrase ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’ – ‘New Order of the World’ – on the U S dollar.

The Big Nurse tends to get real put out if something keeps her outfit from running like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine. The slightest thing messy or out of kilter or in the way ties her into a little white knot of tight-smiled fury. She walks around with that same doll smile crimped between her chin and her nose and that same calm whir coming from her eyes, but down inside of her she’s tense as steel. I know, I can feel it. And she don’t relax a hair till she gets the nuisance attended to – what she calls “adjusted to surroundings.”

Kesey then describes The Combine. This is the organization of secret societies, governments and businesses that are under control of the group that Freemasonry is a part of. As Kesey describes it, The Combine controls the entire world.

Under her rule the ward Inside is almost completely adjusted to surroundings. But the thing is she can’t be on the ward all the time. She’s got to spend some time Outside. So she works with an eye to adjusting the Outside world too. Working alongside others like her who I call the “Combine,” which is a huge organization that aims to adjust the Outside as well as she has the Inside, has made her a real veteran at adjusting things. She was already the Big Nurse in the old place when I came in from the Outside so long back, and she’d been dedicating herself to adjustment for God knows how long.

And I’ve watched her get more and more skillful over the years. Practice has steadied and strengthened her until now she wields a sure power that extends in all directions on hairlike wires too small for anybody’s eye but mine; I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants. I was an electrician’s assistant in training camp before the Army shipped me to Germany and I had some electronics in my year in college is how I learned about the way these things can be rigged.

What she dreams of there in the center of those wires is a world of precision efficiency and tidiness like a pocket watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable and all the patients who aren’t Outside, obedient under her beam, are wheelchair Chronics with catheter tubes run direct from every pantleg to the sewer under the floor.

Kesey called the organization ‘The Combine’ perhaps because he was describing more than simply high level Freemasonry, but all of the secret societies that are united under the “hate secrets”. The total control over the mental Institution in Cuckoo’s Nest is a microcosm for The Combine’s control over the whole world.

KEN KESEY AND MK ULTRA

But exactly which groups made up ‘The Combine’ that Ken Kesey wrote about in 1960? Certainly at least part of it were the secret societies that were united in producing the counter culture that Kesey’s book helped to bring about.

For example, when Kesey stood backstage at one of the Acid Tests while the Grateful Dead were playing and LSD was being given out for free to youths, he would have been in the midst of a number of Secret Societies and black ops government agencies. Within the Grateful Dead, its management, the band’s financers, its sound technicians and drug suppliers were members and associates of the Freemasons, Bohemian Grove, MK Ultra, OSS and the Tavistock Institution. Such a collection could not be circumstantial and shows the interconnection of the secret societies into ‘The Combine’.

At left is a hand drawn poster to one of Ken Kesey’s first ‘Acid Tests, where Kesey first gave away LSD to the public. Note the all seeing eye of Freemasonry, as well as the twin pillars of Jachin and Boaz. The pillars appear to be slightly curved, and equipped with teeth like chain saws. And what are those dots dripping from the ‘Acid Test’ logo: are they tears, or are they drops of blood? The Grateful Dead were then known as the ‘Warlocks’, yet another indication of their occult interests. The Acid Tests were where Kesey first gave away LSD to the public.

Here is a description of the poster’s provenance:

This is a One-of-A-Kind Poster, hand drawn, and not mass distributed for the event. It is likely the only one made, or at least, the only one that survived. At this point in the early acid test days, Posters and handbills were not being used to advertise events. Instead, small Posters were placed up in local coffee shops and hangouts around town, of which there were several up and down the bay, but the most prominent of these was a little place called the Catalyst. At the time, it was a lively coffee shop, but now it has moved up the street and small bands play there, as it has been turned into a club.

At the right is a flyer for the first Grateful Dead Album, dominated by the Eye of Horus, depicting the band members standing between the pillars of an Egyptian temple. Its inscription, ‘In the land of the dark, the ship of the sun is driven by the Grateful Dead,’ seems to be a boast of control over the counter-culture, exerted by ‘The Combine’ via their rock idols and drugs.

Another secret society that Kesey consorted with was MK Ultra. The CIA created the project to, among things, develop techniques the government could use to affect the citizens’ subconscious. Kesey was well aware of this objective, and described it in the book. He wrote:

Bring these old sins into the open where they can be washed by the sight of all. And participate in Group Discussion. Help yourself and your friends probe into the secrets of the subconscious. There should be no need for secrets among friends.

Our intention, he usually ends by saying, is to make this as much like your own democratic, free neighborhoods as possible – a little world Inside that is a made-to-scale prototype of the big world Outside that you will one day be taking your place in again.

Throughout the book Kesey shows awareness of the criminal techniques developed by MK Ultra, and how they were related to the technologies which were in use, both then and now, in America’s mental health system. This understanding would contradict what Kesey would have been told in his employment as a night orderly at the Palo Alto VA hospital. Psychologists claim that electroshock has therapeutic benefits for patients suffering from depression and anxiety. At the time Kesey was writing, those same benefits were claimed for prefrontal lobotomy. (Today, of course, drugs such as Prozac are most widely used for these purposes.)

However, Ken Kesey describes EST and other brain mechanical techniques being employed by ‘The Combine’ for the express purpose of breaking the subject’s mind and without any therapeutic purpose. This was acknowledged within MK Ultra, but has always been ignored or denied within any normal mental health hospital. Kesey might have learned that the technology was effective for these purposes, in conversations with the personnel who were involved in carrying out the experiments with LSD and other psychoactive drugs at the VA hospital at that time, which were being covertly sponsored by the CIA.

Kesey wrote:

We’re benched in a long row down a bail leading to a door marked X-RAY. Next to X-ray is a door marked EENT where they check our throats during the winter. Across the hall from us is another bench, and it leads to that metal door. With the line of rivets. And nothing marked on it at all. Two guys are dozing on the bench between two black boys, while another victim inside is getting his treatment and I can hear him screaming. The door opens inward with a whoosh, and I can see the twinkling tubes in the room. They wheel the victim out still smoking, and I grip the bench where I sit to keep from being sucked through that door. A black boy and a white one drag one of the other guys on the bench to his feet, and he sways and staggers under the drugs in him. They usually give you red capsules before Shock. They push him through the door, and the technicians get him under each arm. For a second I see the guy realizes where they got him, and he stiffens both heels into the cement floor to keep from being pulled to the table – then the door pulls shut, phumph, with metal hitting a mattress, and I can’t see him any more.

“Man, what they got going on in there?” McMurphy asks Harding.

“In there? Why, that’s right, isn’t it? You haven’t had the pleasure. Pity. An experience no human should be without.” Harding laces his fingers behind his neck and leans back to look at the door. “That’s the Shock Shop I was telling you about some time back, my friend, the EST, Electro-Shock Therapy. Those fortunate souls in there are being given a free trip to the moon. No, on second thought, it isn’t completely free. You pay for the service with brain cells instead of money, and everyone has simply billions of brain cells on deposit. You won’t miss a few.”

He frowns at the one lone man left on the bench. “Not a very large clientele today, it seems, nothing like the crowds of yesteryear. But then, c’est la vie, fads come and go. And I’m afraid we are witnessing the sunset of EST. Our dear head nurse is one of the few with the heart to stand up for a grand old Faulknerian tradition in the treatment of the rejects of sanity: Brain Burning.”

The door opens. A Gurney comes whirring out, nobody pushing it, takes the corner on two wheels and disappears smoking up the hall.

McMurphy watches them take the last guy in and close the door. “What they do is” – McMurphy listens a moment – “take some bird in there and shoot electricity through his skull?”

“That’s a concise way of putting it.”

“What the hell for?”

“Why, the patient’s good, of course. Everything done here is for the patient’s good. You may sometimes get the impression, having lived only on our ward, that the hospital is a vast efficient mechanism that would function quite well if the patient were not imposed on it, but that’s not true. EST isn’t always used for punitive measures, as our nurse uses it.”

The fact that MK Ultra used EST to burn the brains of unwitting subjects is well documented. Below is from the Cathy Fox blog:

Perhaps the most famous case of mind control in Canada is that perpetrated by Scottish Dr Donald Ewen Cameron [20] at the Allan Memorial Institute, Montreal, MKULTRA Subproject 68, and the Institute was part of the McGill University. From January 1957 until September 1960, Dr. Cameron’s project received $64,242.44 in CIA funds.When the CIA stopped funding him, Cameron received $57,750 from the Canadian government to continue his research [61]. John Gittinger, CIA agent and psychologist, was Ewen Cameron’s project officer [61] . Gittinger said “brainwashing was largely a process of isolating a human being, keeping him out of contact, putting him out of control, putting him under long stress in relationship to interviewing and interrogation, and that they could produce any change that way”

Wikipedia lists MKULTRA Subproject 68 [20] as “one of Cameron’s ongoing attempts to establish lasting effects in a patient’s behaviour” using a combination of particularly intensive electroshock, intensive repetition of prearranged verbal signals, partial sensory isolation, and repression of the driving period carried out by inducing continuous sleep for seven to ten days at the end of the treatment period….

It is known that at least four MKULTRA Subprojects were on children, but not known if these were carried out in Canada. The deliberate creation of multiple personality in children is an explicitly stated plan in the MKULTRA Subproject Proposal submitted for funding on May 30, 1961. BB 61, 176, 177 [60] [61] [37]

An article from McGill Daily of the Mcgill University, which is the University Cameron was part of, MK-ULTRA Violence Or, how McGill pioneered psychological torture, states in one comment “children’s homes were set up across Canada in the 1960s and afterwards, with links to psychiatric institutions where some highly questionable experiments were taking place. Children in care had very little protection, and were often considered throwaways — with tragic consequences. Films like Warrendale popularized the notion that certain “emotionally disturbed” kids could benefit from special treatment facilities that used experimental techniques first developed at the London-based Tavistock Institute, the birthplace of MK Ultra mind control. The “Warrendale method” spread across Canada in the 1960s and 70s and was taught to childcare workers everywhere — the “holding therapy” it was based on has since been discredited. Reportedly, powerful psychotropic drugs were also tested on this captive child population.

NATIVE REVIVAL

Gregory Bateson was present at the Palo Alto VA at the same time as Ken Kesey and his participation in the MK Ultra experiments, and it was Bateson who developed the anthropology that was the basis for the ‘counter culture’. Bateson’s science also provides a possible motivation for Kesey’s advice to his readers to “turn on, tune in and drop out”. In other words, Kesey was encouraging his followers to take psychosis-producing drugs and return to the land as serfs.

As quoted in my article Gregory Bateson and the Counter Culture, Bateson wrote:

The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on.

OSS … might move gently towards making the British and the Dutch more aware of the importance of processes of this kind (Bateson 1944:6-7).

Kesey depicted Bateson’s aboriginal native revival and return to the land with his story’s ending. After the rebellious McMurphy is lobotomized, the ‘Chief’ kills McMurphy and rips apart a ‘Control Panel’, representing technology. He uses the panel to break a window at the asylum, making a triumphant escape to nature. Thus, a reader takes in the message that ‘The Combine’ is invincible, and the only escape is to abandon any sort of struggle against their power. The message is reinforced by the fact that the Chief transitions from insane to sane by returning to nature.

At the book’s conclusion, again reiterating this message of passivity in the face of injustice, Kesey wrote:

I’ve even heard that some of the tribe have took to building their old ramshackle wood scaffolding all over that big million-dollar hydroelectric dam, and are spearing salmon in the spillway. I’d give something to see that. Mostly, I’d just like to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again.

______________________

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Mateo Piso Christ, Sun of Jane the Virgin

Jerry Russell

January 1, 2016

The rather unlikely premise of the popular CW telenovela series Jane the Virgin is that the hapless Jane Villanueva has been accidentally impregnated at a routine gynecological checkup gone awry, in spite of her best efforts to preserve herself intact for a Catholic wedding.

As the story goes, a sperm sample has been taken from the hunky heart-throb Rafael Solano, a wealthy young hotel magnate who has been rendered infertile by a bout with cancer. Rafael’s sister Luisa, an MD, has been entrusted with the sperm and is intending to impregnate Rafael’s blonde, Nordic wife Petra. But somehow Luisa is so scatter-brained that she manages to inject the sperm into Jane instead, oblivious to the fact that Jane, a Latino woman, doesn’t look anything like her brother’s wife.

However: Jane, as coincidence would have it, is an employee at Rafael’s hotel. The couple reluctantly admit to having flirted romantically, if only in the distant past. And if indeed their romance was ever interrupted, it quickly resumes at high intensity.

Throughout the series, events depicted as happening in “real life” are interspersed with fantasy scenes — that is, to the extent that any fictional tale can be said to have “real” as well as fantasy aspects. So it is quite impossible for us as viewers to know whether this accidental artificial insemination event ever “really happened”. Even with all the snafus in the modern medical world, such a dubious story hardly even rises to meet the criteria for “plausible deniability”.

Nevertheless, Jane (played by Gina Rodriguez, who won a Golden Globe award for “Best Actress” for her performance) is so engagingly honest, pure, diligent, and innocently righteous in everything else about her life, that no one on the cast dares to openly question this white elephant. If this is indeed a scam, then Rafael and Luisa are certainly insiders along with Jane. But we also find Jane’s ever-patiently celibate fiance Michael, and Rafael’s wife Petra, and Jane’s saintly grandmother Alba, and her worldly-wise mother Xiomara, all acting like Republican senators at a dinner party for George Bush — doing their best to ignore the many elephants in the room, such as 911 truth. In other words, it just goes without saying that Jane is, in fact, a virgin. Just who do you think you are, to suggest otherwise!

Aside from her virgin maternity, Jane is also set up as a parody of the Virgin Mary in other ways as well. Jane has her doubts about the reality of the divine Jesus Christ, but nevertheless, she is a devoutly observant Roman Catholic, goes to church, and prays with her grandmother’s rosary whenever tough situations arise. To supplement her income from hotel waitressing, Jane lands a job as a substitute teacher at a Catholic high school. The ‘fact’ that Jane is a pregnant virgin leaks out, and the nuns at the school capitalize on this opportunity by making Jane an object of religious veneration. The nuns coin and distribute a medallion captioned ‘Jane the Virgin’ and prominently showing her extended belly, and true believers have the opportunity to receive a hug and a blessing of fertility. Jane herself is wise enough to see the foolishness in this, but the nuns are blackmailing her to continue with the ruse. After all, she needs the salary, and the job experience.

Both in the nuns’ medallion and in the series logo, Jane is signified with bright solar imagery, and in the medallion, her son in the womb is also superimposed over a white solar disk shining in the background, exactly as we would expect for the virgin Mary and the child Jesus.

As the second season begins, the blessed baby is born and is named Mateo. Or to be more precise, he is called Mateo Gloriano Rogelio Solano Villanueva. The family becomes nationally famous, as the child is kidnapped and then miraculously returned to his mother’s arms, and the paparazzi fight among themselves to snap elusive photos of the virgin mother and child. The typological link to the biblical Virgin Mary is so strong that even the New York Times has to admit it.

Meanwhile, Jane remains entangled in a triangle between her two love-besotted suitors, Michael (now ex-fiance, but still in the running) and baby-daddy sperm donor Rafael. In this regard, at least, the scenario seems rather extremely unlike the Gospels.

The gospel of Arrius Calpurnius Piso

But is it possible that the creators of the show had a different gospel in mind? That is, could they have possibly have heard of Abelard Reuchlin’s pamphlet “The True Authorship of the New Testament” and based their screenplay on the theory expressed therein? Or perhaps seen his recent video interview? (Sadly, Mr. Reuchlin reportedly passed away last March 2015. May he rest in peace.)

Or could they have heard of Roman Piso and his recent book, Piso Christ?

Their theory leads to the conclusion that the child ‘Jesus’ was the product of just such a love triangle.

Or perhaps the creators of ‘Jane the Virgin‘ have insider knowledge of the story, as deep historical truth or as a preserved myth — as it might be taught in secret quasi-Masonic meetings of Ordo Templi Orientalis and the like?

I don’t claim to be certain of how this happened. Or for that matter, maybe it’s all a coincidence. What could be more ordinary than a love triangle involving a virgin mother? But let’s look at the Piso theory, and then review the depth of the coincidence.

Regular readers of this website will know that, as discussed by Joseph Atwill in Caesar’s Messiah, we believe that the canonical Gospels were written as postwar propaganda by a circle of intellectuals in the court of the Flavian Roman Emperors. This circle included the historian Flavius Josephus, as well as members or employees of the Herodian dynasty in Jerusalem, and the wealthy Alexanders of Egypt. That is as far as we are willing to go, based on analysis of the Gospel text, and its many parallels to the works of Josephus himself. We would not presume to know exactly who the authors known as ‘Matthew’, ‘Mark’ and ‘Luke’ are; or whether they might all be the same person, or not.

However: since the 1978 publication of his pamphlet, ‘Abelard Reuchlin’ (a pen name) has claimed to know that, in fact, the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, as we know them, were all written personally by Flavius Josephus. And furthermore, Reuchlin states that this ‘Josephus’ was an alias for a Roman patrician whose true name was Arrius Calpurnius Piso. He explains that this child was the son of Arria the Younger, granddaughter of Aristobulus. As to the father, that is not entirely certain, because Reuchlin believes that Arria was betrothed to Gaius Calpurnius Piso, a very wealthy Roman senator and noted philanthropist; but the emperor Caligula showed up at their wedding, took notice of Arria’s charms, and took possession of her for himself. Shortly thereafter, Arria and Gaius were caught flirting, and Gaius was banished from Rome. Sometime during the next year, Reuchlin says, a child was born to Arria. And during that same year, Caligula was assassinated by a mysterious conspiracy, and Gaius C. Piso returned to Rome to rejoin his bride. Just possibly, humiliating Gaius Calpurnius Piso was not a wise action on Caligula’s part.

In this scenario, Arria’s predicament is not so different from Jane the Virgin’s. Especially if she had not consummated the marriage with Gaius, she would be wisest not to admit to having bedded Caligula either. Best for her to claim to be a virgin mother! Or at any rate, no one outside the immediate family had any need to know the true paternity. And while Reuchlin prefers to call the child Arrius Calpurnius Piso, he believes the man has been remembered in history as Gnaeus Arrius Antoninus, which refers to Caligula’s descent from Mark Antony. This man went on to be the grandfather of the emperor Antoninus Pius. Reuchlin believes that that the emperor Trajan joined the family by marriage to his daughter. So this man was the ultimate king-maker of the era which Gibbon famously called “in the history of the world… the most happy and prosperous.” Inasmuch as important Romans often took on long names, his full nomenclature might well have been Gnaeus Arrius Antoninus Calpurnius Piso. Reuchlin believes he was known by other aliases as well. We will call him simply Josephus, as that is by far the most well-known today of all his various names.

In his autobiography, Josephus described himself as a descendant of the Hasmonians on his mother’s side, which would be the case if his mother was Arria the Younger. As to Josephus’ father, his name is given only as Matthias, a Jew. If Reuchlin’s theory is correct, this would be a blatant lie: whoever Josephus’ father was, he was no Jew. But at any rate, according to Reuchlin, Josephus went on to write the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. And when he did so, he wrote himself into the story, making it into another autobiography of sorts, as authors often do. As such, Reuchlin sees echoes of Josephus in the character of Jesus himself, the son of the virgin Mary. (We need to allow some confusion among the names Mary, Arria, and Miriamne, which all sound more or less the same, and may be variant spellings of the same name originally expressed in Hebrew, Latin or Greek, and transliterated to English.)

So, let’s recap. According to Reuchlin, we have the ‘virgin’ Arria (aka Mary), who was betrothed to Gaius Calpurnius Piso — but she was stolen away and possibly seduced by Caligula, a powerful playboy. Their son, Josephus (aka Gnaeus Arrius Antoninus Calpurnius Piso, aka Jesus) writes that his father’s name (and his great-grandfathers’ name as well) was Matthias.

Meanwhile, on TV we have the ‘virgin’ Jane, who was betrothed to Michael, but who was stolen and seduced by Rafael, a powerful playboy. Jane names her son Mateo, after his grandfather.

Looking deeper into ‘Jane the Virgin’, we find that Jane’s mother is named Xiomara. This is a common Latino name, but according to the urban dictionary, Xeo is also a neologism meaning ‘ideas or knowledge of things yet to be discovered.” So this name, Xiomara, could indicate ‘new insights about Mary’. Also, Arria the Younger’s mother was Arria the Elder, that is, another Mary.

Rafael is the scion of a crime family whose dealings are as complex and mysterious as Caligula’s family, the imperial Julio-Claudians. Rafael’s father Emilio seems to be guiltless and upright, like Caligula’s father Germanicus, and both are murdered in mysterious circumstances. Beyond that, specific parallels to the Julio-Claudians are difficult to find. The primary center of evil is the mysterious ‘Sin Rostro’, that is, ‘the faceless one’, who operates a plastic-surgery ring in the basement of the hotel, where notorious drug criminals are given new identities. This may be a reference to the 1950 film Hombre Sin Rostro, or the 1993 film Man Without a Face, or (most likely) to the ‘Faceless Ones’ of the Game of Thrones series, who are a secret society of shape-shifting assassins dwelling in the ‘House of Black and White’. This, in turn, would remind us of the black and white checkerboard floor of the Freemasonic temple, as well as the dark and light sides of the Force in Star Wars. In Jane the Virgin, it is revealed that ‘Sin Rostro’ is Rose, Rafael’s red-haired stepmother; and that Rose is the one who killed Emilio. Does ‘Rose’ represent the Rosicrucian secret society? So far, the series Jane the Virgin has been light on clues in this regard, but the season isn’t over yet.

Abelard Reuchlin’s pamphlet is silent on the topic of how ‘Josephus Flavius’ can be said to be descended from the Flavians. But, Roman Piso has suggested that Arria the Elder was married to Titus Flavius Sabinus II, the brother of emperor Vespasian. As the counterpart to the Flavians, we find Jane’s father Rogelio de la Vega, whose vainglorious telenovela stardom makes a fabulous satire of Vespasian’s sense of humor regarding his own promotion to divine status.

Nice theory, but where’s the evidence?

Now, before we get too carried away with all this, I have one more comparison I’d like to make between the analysis of Abelard Reuchlin and Roman Piso regarding ‘Arrius Piso’, Josephus, and the New Testament, versus my analysis of Jane the Virgin. That is: as much merit as they might have from a received or intuited point of view, both are equally unsupported by hard-core evidence.

As far as my analysis of the TV show is concerned, the comparison to Reuchlin’s theory about Roman history is at a very superficial level. Beyond the obvious comparison of Jane to the Virgin Mary, the rest of the comparison is very circumstantial, and could possibly be coincidental. Or at any rate, the odds against such a coincidence might be significant, but certainly not astronomical. Specific verbal parallels between Jane the Virgin and the classical texts which would meet MacDonald’s criteria of density, ordered sequence, and distinctiveness have not been found; and considering the nature of the dialog in Jane, I feel it’s unlikely that they would be found. So I can only offer it as speculative, and hopefully illustrative and entertaining.

It must be said that Reuchlin and Piso’s theory has the tremendous merit, that it fills in certain glowing lacunae in the “official story” of Roman history. Specifically, the man named Arrius Antoninus above, seems to come out of nowhere into great prominence and wealth, to become Antoninus Pius’ grandfather. Similarly, Trajan comes essentially out of nowhere, with the benefit of marriage to a Piso family woman whose parentage, again, is unknown. If indeed Arrius Antoninus were child and heir to the great Calpurnius Piso fortune, and father in turn to Trajan’s wife, this would represent an adequate explanation for a situation which is otherwise mysterious. But, just because the conjecture is convenient, doesn’t constitute a proof.

So now let us break down Abelard Reuchlin’s analysis “Proof that Josephus was really Calpurnius Piso“, which appears on pp. 43-45 of the pamphlet.

In Pliny’s letters that particular one of the various identities of Josephus in which he is Pliny’s wife’s grandfather is Calpurnius Fabatus. And soon we find the name Calpurnius again.

Pliny’s letters do include eight notes addressed to Fabatus, who is undoubtedly of gens Calpurnius. The name Fabatus does contain similar consonants FBS as the name Flavius, FLVS. If it were true that Pliny the Younger married into the family of Calpurnius Piso, it would help to explain his ties into the Roman power structure, including his connection to the Emperor Trajan. So it does seem that perhaps Reuchlin is on the right track here.

But, unlike Pliny’s letters mentioning Calpurnius Piso or Arrius Antoninus, this Fabatus is not acknowledged by Pliny as a man of either great wealth and power, or great literary achievement. The notes to Fabatus are familiar and comfortable. An inscription to Calpurnius Fabatus has been discovered in Pliny’s hometown of Comum, according to Wikipedia (citing Jan Gruter’s Inscriptiones Antiquae of 1603). So it also seems quite possible that Calpurnius Fabatus is a different person, from a different branch of the Calpurnius family. Either way, this hardly seems decisive, or even relevant, to the connection between Gaius Calpurnius Piso and Arrius Antoninus.

In Josephus’ The Jewish War, he inserted himself as Cestius Gallus when he was the Roman general who provoked the Jewish revolt. For he saw himself as gallus, the priest or midwife of the new god he was creating, Jesus. Soon, in The Jewish War, Cestius Gallus has an assistant, Caesennius Gallus, commander of the 12th Legion. But he is still Gallus–that is, Josephus. Then Caesennius Paetus appears as governor of Syria; but because he is still Caesennius, he is still Josephus.

Reuchlin argues that the Piso name is associated with Gallus, the cock or chicken, because the Pisos had estates in Gaul, and because the cock is associated with the worship of Attis and Cybele. A throne dedicated to Cybele and Attis was found at the Calpurnius family estate, the Villa of the Papyri, in Herculaneum. So again, Reuchlin might indeed be on Josephus’ trail.

However, Josephus does have an alibi: during the years 63 through 66 when Cestius Gallus was legate of Syria and commanding the failed Roman assault on Jerusalem, Josephus claims that he was in Rome working to gain the release of some Jewish priests imprisoned there. Then upon his return to Jerusalem, he was an advocate against war against the Romans, but was appointed commander of Galilee for the Jews following Gallus’ withdrawal. So if Josephus was really Gallus, his account of his own life at that time is unveiled as a complete fiction, the very opposite of the truth. And as to the connection between Gaius Calpurnius Piso and Arrius Antoninus, again it seems almost irrelevant.

Moreover, the name Paetus seems familiar. It had appeared in the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus, as Thrasea Paetus, Stoic philosopher, killed by Emperor Nero about the year 65. In Tacitus, a few pages earlier, Nero also kills the leader of a group of conspirators who plot his life. The leader is named Calpurnius Piso. Somehow he seems to resemble Thrasea Paetus. Could they be identical? Moreover, the name Calpurnius reminds one of Calpurnius Fabatus, which was Josephus’ name in Pliny’s letters when he was Pliny’s wife’s grandfather.

Comparing and contrasting the narratives in Tacitus chapter 15 on the Calpurnian revolt, and chapter 16 on the condemnation and death of Thrasea Paetus, there are some unmistakable similarities. Both men are accused of disloyalty to Nero. Both of them are encouraged by their followers to reply to the charges, and both decide to remain silent. Both wait patiently for their fate, and both die by slitting their own wrists in accordance with imperial decree. However, there are also contrasts. Calpurnius Piso’s virtue is of a mixed sort: although he was a wealthy, handsome philanthropist, Tacitus accused him also of frivolity, ostentation, and debauchery, and he certainly was conspiring against Nero to bring about the tyrant’s death. Paetus, by contrast, was a model of virtue, although his attempts to deal honorably with Nero did lead to unavoidable conflict. While Piso’s friends encouraged him to speak out publicly to spur on the revolt and look for more allies, Paetus’ friends wanted him to emphasize his own honor and blamelessness. And while Piso sullied his honor by putting “disgusting flatteries of Nero” in his will, Paetus’ death was a model of dignity.

So it seems possible that Tacitus is telling the same story twice: once from the official Imperial perspective, and then again in an occulted fashion, telling a more sympathetic version of the tale. Thus, Abelard Reuchlin’s perspective seems to have some merit.

But — the similarities and contrasts might be nothing more than a literary device, Tacitus’ way of comparing Gaius Calpurnius Piso’s dubious nature against Thrasea Paetus’ incorruptible nobility. Thrasea Paetus is a notable character of the period in his own right, mentioned not only in Tacitus (in several chapters) but also in Cassius Dio, Pliny’s letters, and in Juvenal, and it seems awkward to dismiss him as a literary phantom of Gaius Calpurnius Piso. And as to the relevance to the theory that Josephus was Gaius Calpurnius Piso’s son, its main purpose is to fill in the information that his mother was Arria the Elder. As we will see, this is problematic on several aspects anyhow.

At this point the following steps quickly occur:
1. One checks a Latin classical dictionary and finds the famous Calpurnius Piso family.
2. From a Latin dictionary, one also finds the source of the Piso name, as “pistor,” meaning one who”ground,” or a miller or baker. He then thinks of the many allusions to the baker and is caught up on the trail of bread crumbs.
3. He, thus, realizes that Josephus was a Calpurnius Piso.

“At this point”, I find that I have completely lost the ability to follow Abelard Reuchlin’s reasoning. I’m not aware of the “many allusions to the baker”, at least not with reference to Josephus or any other of his alleged aliases. So for me, the “trail of bread crumbs” is lost here.

4. The conspirator Calpurnius Piso of about the year 65 appears to have perished in fact, and not merely in literature in Tacitus’ Annals Book XV. But Tacitus explains that others of the conspirators are exiled or given immunity. These including “Natalis” (Nativity?) — whom Tacitus described in as being “the partner of Piso in all his secret councils. ’’ Likewise “Montanus” (the mountain?) “is spared out of consideration for his father’’ when Thrasea Paetus is killed.
5. One recalls that Josephus appears in Judaea a year later as Cestius Gallus.
6. Then one realizes that: (1) Josephus was the son of the condemned conspirator, Calpurnius Piso, and was himself also a Calpurnius Piso; and (2) many others have, themselves, previously followed this same trail of bread crumbs.

Aside from readers of Abelard Reuchlin’s pamphlet, I have no idea who else has followed this convoluted trail. But look what Abelard Reuchlin says next!

This, then, is the method of learning that Josephus was really Calpurnius Piso! That is, unless one happens to be an evangelist and has already been so informed in seminary or by another evangelist! [My emphasis.]

Here we get to the crux of the matter. The trail of breadcrumbs is so sparse, no one is going to see it unless it’s pointed out “in seminary, or by another evangelist.” And as it turns out, Reuchlin apparently was tipped off in just such a manner. In a comment to a review of Reuchlin’s pamphlet posted at Amazon.com, Judy Reckart provided the following information:

I heard rabbi Reuchlin on WFLA in Tampa back in 1998 touting his new revelation about the Piso conspiracy. I called into the show. I ask Mr. Reuchlin if he is the one who discovered this conspiracy? He replied others had told him about it but he is the one who figured it all out and who the players were in the Piso family who wrote the Septuagint and the New Testament books. I ask him if anyone else before had writen any of this and did he document who and what books or writings we could find them. He replied that only among the Jews was this known and they held it a tight secret.

Our own Joseph Atwill further collaborated this information in a podcast recorded for this site, in which he states that Abelard Reuchlin personally confirmed that the theory originated with English rabbis of Abelard Reuchlin’s family. However, Reuchlin was never willing to put this information in print. On the contrary, his pamphlet claims that the path of transmission is very different. He claims that there is an “inner circle” that preserves and makes use of this knowledge, and he begins section 10 of the pamphlet (The Inner Circle, p. 46) as follows:

This knowledge has always been the play-thing of the (Non-Jewish) intellectual theological, and political establishments of the world, who have always used it for population control. Yet still today, almost no Jews know anything about this subject nor that our ancestors’ coded responses to Piso’s creation are scattered all through our ancient writings and ritual.

To repeat: although Reuchlin himself received the knowledge through Jewish channels, he asserts that the “Inner Circle” is predominantly non-Jewish. Remarkably, Reuchlin goes on to state:

Inner Circle allusions—in numbers, names, and various types of clues and hints—are all through the world’s literature. The Gesta Romanorum, Decameron, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rabelais, Tolstoy, Milton, Spencer, Tennyson, Thackeray, Kipling, Stevenson, Poe, Burns, Browning, Noyes, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, ad infinitum.

At this website, we are only beginning to explore this assertion. What we’ve found is that allusions to the Roman origins of Christianity are indeed prevalent in Shakespeare, Kipling, Poe and Burns at least. We’ve also shown the pattern continuing in works of JD Salinger, the Beatles, and the Wachowski brothers. However, in every case we’ve looked at, the Josephan satire is reversed rather than re-enacted, making the perspective pro-Jewish, anti-Flavian and anti-Christian. Indeed, Joseph Atwill has suggested that Shakespeare and Kipling might be crypto-Jewish. Salinger and the Wachowskis are openly Jewish, and Paul McCartney married into Judaism.

Another possible explanation is that at the royal level, Jewish and Christian elites have engaged in a long process of intermarriage, probably beginning before Judaism and Christianity were invented. As such, within this “inner circle”, the polarity of Jew and Gentile is known to represent a false dialectic. However, the polarity of Royalty against Everyone Else is a real dialectic, and plans for genocide by the oligarchs against the general population may be very real.

Roman Piso’s quest for proof: the “New Classical Scholarship”

Abelard Reuchlin’s reasoning seems to be little more than a thin veneer of speculation, pasted over what is, fundamentally, a received truth passed down through rabbinical channels. By contrast, ‘Roman Piso’ (another pseudonym) has been on a quest to demonstrate the factual nature of this viewpoint, through careful and exhaustive scholarship. He states that his book “represents a tremendous amount of research, done during a period of many years”. Moreover, he has posted many more papers at his page at academia.edu.

Through the process of this research, Roman Piso claims to have invented a whole new way of looking at the ancient world, which he calls the “New Classical Scholarship.” This is defined in contrast to “Old Classical Scholarship”, which he claims (in Piso Christ) may be characterized as follows:

They assume that the ancient authors

(1) of history were who they claimed to be.

(2) were writing in an honest and forthright manner.

(3) did not use hidden agendas or ulterior motives for misleading the reader, or listeners.

(4) were not closely related to each other and therefore, were not writing in concert with each other.

(5) were not writing from within a “controlled environment” where only certain people could write for public consumption. (Meaning royals only, no matter how it would “appear” that a measure of freedom of speech existed in those times.)

(6) were not using literary devices and other methods in which to deliberately deceive the masses.

The true situation, as Piso says he has discovered through his research, is that the royals created a set of eight facades for themselves:

One. The facade of a measure of Freedom of Speech. Only the royals had this ability, and then, only to some extent. They (ancient royalty), could not openly say anything that they wanted to. Nor could they say anything that would threaten the system that was in place for the royals.

Two. The facade of Upward Mobility. An ancient ‘Glass Ceiling’ was in place. Like the carrot being hung in front of the horse to make the horse go so that it would pull the carriage, so also was there an illusion for the masses to make them stay in their place and try to work their way up the social ladder….

Three. The facade of Roman Dislike of Christianity (early on). They had to create the illusion that they were not involved in creating it (Christianity) so that they would not be suspected of that…

Four. The facade of What the War (of time in which Christianity was being created) was About. Since the Romans were really the “bad guys”, they could not let that fact be known….

Five. The facade of “Foreigners”. Since it took the cooperation of ALL major (royal) rulers in many different lands, and because with the genealogical data we can actually see how these rulers were related to each other and/or had the same common (royal) ancestors, and knew about it – there could hardly have been any ‘real’ foreigners in the way that people were led to believe. In fact, royals were only allowed to marry other royals to preserve the royal bloodlines….

Six. The facade of Dynasties. They had to create the illusion that there were dynasties (that rose up out of thin air, and which many times, began from an individual of “peasant stock”, or one who “rose in the ranks”, or “of humble origin”, etc.), so that the non-royal public would never know that they were being ruled over perpetually by the same royal families….

Seven. The facade of ancient Authors Speaking Forthright and Honestly. The ancient authors were royals and yet they could not say to outright. So, by necessity, the had to lie about who they were and about much of what they were saying in their writings…. They tried not to lie when they did not have to or when trying to give important or necessary information so as to be able to leave a means of recovering and knowing the truth and true nature of their writings; they made use of literary devices such as disclaimers and did say truthful things, often out of context or in deceptive ways….

Eight. The facade of Many Different People Writing. Since only the royals were doing the writing and recording of history, as well as being the authors of biblical and other religious texts, it was necessary for them to make it appear that more people were writing than actually were…. So, the authors played many parts and wrote using alias names and pen names in order for that to be accomplished.

Furthermore, the maintenance of these facades required the invention of a hidden language, as explained in Piso’s essay on the New Classical Scholarship:

Whereas Reuchlin had thought in terms of the Piso’s using a “code”, we found it was actually an entire language within language, and that it was universally used in the languages of the day; but that only royalty knew of, and used the “royal language”.

Piso has only partially described this “royal language”, which seems to include double entendres, especially sexual ones, and letter substitution to produce aliases.

What to say in response to all this? First of all, there is all too much truth in Piso’s ironic characterization of “old classical scholarship”. In defense of this “classical scholarship, one must admit that on first reading of a text, it might be reasonable to take note of who the author claims to be, and what is the surface meaning of the text. This is the starting point for any analysis. One might even give the benefit of the doubt, and assume that the text is telling the truth until proven otherwise.

But certainly it is also prudent to at least consider the possibility that the authors of ancient texts are not who they seem, and that there is a hidden agenda which might be very sophisticated and systematic. All too often, traditional classical scholars fail to go much beyond the surface reading.

Better classical scholarship: a compromise approach

But, I would argue that Roman Piso goes too far in the opposite direction. In his published works so far, he has not offered anything like a proof of his major propositions of “New Classical Scholarship”. Apparently, the conclusions emerge as the conclusion of Roman Piso’s multiple studies of particular instances. But it is impossible for the reader to verify the conclusions, except by undertaking to repeat Roman Piso’s lifetime of research.

What seems far more plausible to me, at least as a set of working hypotheses:

One. Literacy in the ancient world was very limited, to less than 10% of the population by most estimates. For most of those 10%, writing was used for practical commercial purposes. Only a tiny minority had the time to write extensively. Furthermore, without the printing press, books needed to be copied by hand, and were extraordinarily expensive. As a result, the landed nobility and the royals must have controlled the creation and distribution of the vast majority of literary materials. But it is hard to believe that it was necessary (or possible) for the royals to outlaw possession or limited distribution of works by non-royals.

Of course, the conventional view of the New Testament is that it must have been for many years a sort of samizdat literature, produced without Roman imperial sanction. We dispute this, claiming that the New Testament was indeed written by the royal court. But, Roman Piso’s “facade #1” simply assumes the fact which we seek to demonstrate.

Two. Of course there must not have been much upward mobility, but perhaps more so under the Roman system than under later Medieval Feudalism. Accordingly, any reports of upward mobility should be viewed skeptically, but cannot be rejected out of hand.

Three. Some Romans might have covertly supported Christianity, while others (including some royalty) probably hated it. Accordingly some incidents of Christian suppression might have been faked, or involved suppression of unapproved Christian sects, while other incidents might have been real. Again, the evidence must be evaluated on its own merits.

Four. In the Wars of the Jews (which, Roman Piso rightly states, extended through the entire 1st century AD and into the 2nd century) the Romans might very well have been the “bad guys”. But the Jews were humans also, and as such, could hardly be expected to have achieved a state of purity. The Jews might well have been receiving support from the Persian empire, which was not notably more progressive than the Roman, propaganda claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

Five. The ancient world consisted of many nations and nationalities and races. Accordingly, “foreigners” were a reality, at least as far as the world of commoners was concerned. However, it seems highly likely that the ruling elite of the major nations of the ancient Near East were racially much more uniform than their subjects, and were probably descended from a founder clan of “Indo-European” (Caucasian) roots. Furthermore, the elites of all nations shared a common purpose to maintain control over their followers.

Six. Claims of the advent of new dynasties, or of marriage of commoners into royal families, must be treated with skepticism, and the evidence for any such events must be evaluated on its merits. Oftentimes, hidden relationships may be revealed.

Seven. As the authors themselves generally admitted, much of ancient literature that has survived to our time was generated under the control of the royal court. As such, this literature was written with an agenda which in many cases is obvious. Accordingly, any and all statements presented by any ancient literature must be treated with skepticism, and analyzed for evidence of the actual agenda of the author. The truth may be difficult or impossible to disentangle, and classical scholarship often must reach tentative conclusions based on limited evidence.

Eight. In ancient times (just as now), many authors wrote using aliases or pen names, while others wrote using their true names, just as they were known to their friends and family in everyday life. Then (as now) authors had the choice to use the real names of their subjects, or to disguise those names using aliases. In ancient times, the line between fiction and non-fiction was not even so clearly drawn as it is now. It is not always easy to detect these issues, much less to resolve them, but we do the best we can.

Roman Piso logic

In the competition between “Old Classical Scholarship”, Roman Piso’s “New Classical Scholarship”, and my proposed compromise, obviously a vast amount of information must be processed and evaluated before any conclusions can be reached. Can we rely on Roman Piso’s lifetime of scholarship, and therefore accept his conclusions as good coin? I would suggest that before we can do this, we need to look at the quality of his reasoning in a particular example.

As far as the case of Josephus and whether he is the same person as Arrius Antoninus, Arrius Calpurnius Piso, Calpurnius Fabatus, Natalis, Cestius Gallus, Thrasea Paetus’ son Montanus, and so forth: Roman Piso’s argument is very similar to Abelard Reuchlin’s. (There are some differences: Roman Piso adds a few more aliases, including the famous authors Philo and Dio Chrysostom. He believes that Arria the Elder and her daughter were not descended from Herod and Aristobulus, but rather from the line of Antony and Cleopatra — thus accounting for the Antonine component of Arrius Antoninus’ name. The Herodian and Flavian parts of Josephus’ lineage came from Arria the Elder’s marriage to Titus Sabinus, a descendent of the Herodians as well as the Flavians by way of Vespasia Pollo. “Old Classical Scholarship” would, of course, dispute this analysis at several points.)

Also along these lines, I’d like to note that Gaius Calpurnius Piso’s wife at the time of his plot against Nero, may not be the same person as his wife that was stolen by Caligula. At any rate, the official story is that the one stolen by Caligula was named Livia Orestilla, or Cornelia Orestina. His second wife was Satria Galla. And again, “Old Classical Scholarship” knows of no reason why either of these women would be identified with Arria the Younger, or Mary.

As another example of Roman Piso’s research, let’s consider his argument that “Neratius Priscus” is a pseudonym for “Cornelius Tacitus”. Tacitus, of course, is the well-known historian and author of the “History” and “Annals”, while Priscus was also a well-known author of legal texts, whose works have survived as excerpts and abstracts in the Digest of Justinian.

Roman Piso’s case is given in his paper “Discovering Tacitus As Neratius Priscus“, excerpted below along with my responses.

Let’s begin this with info from “The True Authorship of the New Testament,” by Abelard Reuchlin. In it, Reuchlin states; “The family also put their friends into the story. Justus (Piso) inserted Cornelius Tacitus, the Roman historian. He became Cornelius, the Roman centurion in Acts, Chapter 10, who was devout and feared God; and he was also (Cornutus) Tertullus, the prosecuting attorney against Paul in Acts 24:1-2. Tacitus reciprocated by dedicating his ‘Diologues on Oratory’ shortly after the year 100 to “dear Fabius Justus”.” This, on page 14 of Reuchlin’s booklet.

Cornutus Tertullus served as a Roman regional governor, consul and prefect. Cornelius Tacitus’ public career seems tandem to Tertullis’: both were regional governors during the period from ~80 to ~96, then returned to Rome, and completed their careers in Anatolia after 112. So the observation that they could be the same person seems very astute, although far from proven. Similarly the proposed reciprocal tributes of Justus Piso (in the New Testament) and Cornelius Tacitus (in the Dialogues) is a plausible speculation.

Reuchlin further states (on pg. 17); “Now the family had other writers place Jesus and Christianity in prior history. First, the Pisos used their friend Cornelius Palma, the jurist. Writing under the name Cornelius Tacitus between 115 and 120, he mentioned Christ and said that he had founded the Christians and had been crucified by Pontius Pilate; and also detailed that Nero had caused Christians to be torn by dogs and burned on crosses.” (Ref. Tacitus, Annals, XV.44, Loeb Classical Library edition)

Tacitus’ statements about the Christians are well-known. And indeed, Palma and Tacitus led somewhat parallel lives, but not exactly. Tacitus was consul 97, Palma was consul 99. Palma was governor of Syria under Trajan, while Tacitus was governor of Asia. Palma is thought to have been killed in 117 by Hadrian, while Tacitus seems to have lived longer than that, though it’s not known for sure. So the speculation that Cornelius Palma and Cornelius Tacitus were one and the same, is once again found plausible.

Now as for Cornelius Tacitus as Neratius Priscus, it may well have been that the late Roman history scholar Ronald Syme knew of this and several other items relating to the truth about ancient Roman history. Syme is a major source for the critical examination of these names and personages, because of his extensive work in this area. (See his articles in JRS – The Journal for Roman Studies)”

“Syme says in his article “Tacitus: Some Sources of his Information”,* that; “The case of the jurist Neratius Priscus is instructive, consul suffect in 97, the same year as Cornelius Tacitus.” And this is precisely how one needs to work through these names and identities – carefully following EVERY clue.

This is not so much of a clue. There is no hint in the passages quoted from Syme, that he believed these names represented the same individual. During this period, there were up to a dozen consuls and suffect consuls each year, with new ones appointed every two months. This could certainly be a coincidence, that Tacitus and Priscus were consul the same year.

One finds Cornelius Tacitus as Cornelius Palma, a jurist. And we see Neratius Priscus (also a jurist), as consul suffect in 97, the same year as Cornelius Tacitus! Persons who research these names need to consult lists of consuls (as well as other lists of compiled data), compare dates and events, titles and positions, names of relatives and even cross-reference material.”

Cornelius Tacitus could also be said to be a jurist, without relying on the identity with Palma. So now Tacitus and Priscus have two things in common: both jurists, and both consul in 97. But obviously there could be more than one lawyer in Rome, and (then as now) many lawyers were also politicians. So this is a less powerful coincidence than it might seem.

In Syme’s article titled “People in Pliny,” he says; “Proconsuls of Asia and of Africa are likewise not much in evidence. Asia from 103/4 to 120/1 (the list is now complete) exhibits only two, viz. Cornelius Tacitus and Cornelius Priscus.” So, here we see Tacitus again with the same title, in the same place, at the same time… this time with another “Priscus” (who just so happens to have the name “Cornelius” as well). As a person works through the maze of names in this way, the evidence mounts and the likelihood of coincidence disappears.

Now we have the coincidence that Cornelius Tacitus and Cornelius Priscus were both mentioned as proconsuls of Asia. But this can hardly be taken as much evidence that they were one and the same. Cornelius, Tacitus and Priscus were all fairly common Roman family names that were basically mixed and matched to form a person’s complete nomenclature, presumably according to their family history and parental whim. So again, this is not an unlikely coincidences. And, mathematically speaking, two very weak pieces of evidence do not combine to make stronger evidence.

Moreover, in the same article, we find our friend Neratius Priscus (now known to us as the person who wrote ‘history’ as “Tacitus”), as the husband of Corellia Hispulla (See pg. 147). In addition to such overwhelming evidence as that which we find in following these clues, we continue to find (and disclose) even more.

This is actually evidence contrary to Roman Piso’s thesis. Tacitus was married to Julia Agricola, whose family history is well known and has no obvious overlap with Corellia Hispulla. In fact many details of the lives of Neratius Priscus and Cornelius Tacitus are well known, and while some are compatible, others are conflicting.

When one reads, for instance, “The Life of Hadrian,” by Aelius Spartianus, one learns that (at least supposedly); “There was, to be sure, a widely prevailing belief that Trajan, with the approval of many of his friends, had planned to appoint as his successor not Hadrian, but Neratius Priscus, even to the extent of once saying to Priscus: “I entrust the provinces to your care in case anything happens to me.”

Both Neratius Priscus and Cornelius Tacitus seem to have been held in high esteem by Trajan, holding high positions, and both fell from favor under Hadrian. But again, this is a weak level of coincidence.

To summarize the points in Roman Piso’s article:

(1) Cornelius Tacitus is mentioned in the NT as Cornelius the Centurion, and as Cornutus Tertullus the jurist.

(2) Cornelius Palma and Cornelius Tacitus were the same person, and both were jurists.

(3) Neratius Priscus was also a jurist, and was consul in the same year as Cornelius Tacitus.

(4) Cornelius Tacitus and Cornelius Priscus were Asian proconsuls.

(5) Neratius Priscus married Corellia Hispulla.

(6) Trajan planned to appoint Neratius Priscus as his successor, but did not follow through on that intention.

Even if we accept each individual point (and several of them are debatable) it doesn’t add up to a convincing case that Cornelius Tacitus and Neratius Priscus are one and the same person. The only way this argument makes sense, is if you start from the premise that only a few Romans were writing and that most or all authors used aliases. In Bayesian terms, this shifts the “prior probability” so that very tenuous clues can be used to discriminate between possible sets of aliases.

Using the type of reasoning given in Roman Piso’s paper, many pairs of possible author aliases could be identified as possible matches. Using this data, aided by circular reasoning and confirmation bias, could lead to a conclusion justifying the premise that Roman authors always wrote using aliases. However, the correct analytical path would be to begin by identifying a large number of cases where there is substantial proof of the use of pen names, and then move from that abundant and confirmed information, to the generalization that this was a frequent if not ubiquitous practice. Based on information provided by Roman Piso, there is no way to establish whether this was, in fact, the method that he followed.

So, was Jesus really Caligula’s love child with Jane the Virgin?

And how am I supposed to know? But I will say it makes an interesting story, fit to be hanged for. And furthermore, Abelard Reuchlin says he heard it from the rabbis of the “Inner Circle”, which could be as good of a source of authority as any.

While mining this vein of ore, also please consider Ralph Ellis’ theory that when this same love child (possibly operating under the name of St. Paul) arrived at Nero’s imperial court, presumably holding a grudge against the Julio-Claudian family because of his weird childhood: he succeeded in seducing Nero’s wife Poppaea, and getting her pregnant. Nero was so angry that he kicked Poppaea down the stairway and killed her, along with the unborn child.

Next thing you know, a successful rebellion was organized against Nero, and he was killed by his secretary, Epaphroditus. Strangely, St. Paul also had an affiliate by that name, and an Epaphroditus was also involved in the murder of Domitian.

Somebody needs to make this into a telenovela.

Discuss in Forum!

Shakespeare’s apocalyptic “Brave New World”

Joseph Atwill

September 22, 2015

Empty prison cell Original Filename: 73979720.jpg empty jail cell

Shakespeare’s play The Tempest was the origin of the expression “brave new world” that has since been used prominently by Rudyard Kipling and Aldous Huxley. Huxley used it as the title for his novel (published in 1932) that depicted a world populated by five castes (alpha through epsilon) of genetically stratified slaves, all ruled over by a tiny elite of ten “World Controllers”; while Kipling used the expression to describe a faux Utopian social condition that existed before an apocalypse, in his 1919 poem ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings‘:

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

In Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah (hereafter, SSM), I showed that some Shakespeare plays have a hidden symbolic level which inverts the Flavian comic system of the Gospels and Josephus. Did Shakespeare have such an occulted meaning for the expression ‘Brave New World’, and how should we now understand the phrase?

On its surface, The Tempest seems to be a play about forgiveness, because at the end of the play the main character Prospero seemingly forgives the nobles that had stolen his dukedom. However, I have now discovered that the author has also created an occulted outcome that is completely different than the surface narration. At this occult level, far from forgiving his usurpers, Prospero is actually arranging their demise. This is, of course, keeping with the core structure of the Shakespearian plays shown in SSM, which reverse the black comedy in the Gospels and often end with a cannibalistic slaughter.

While this analysis shows that Shakespeare’s purpose in writing The Tempest is adequately explained by a Jewish sectarian agenda, there are other frameworks that have been proposed. More information will be appearing at this site shortly.

Isaiah’s apocalyptic vision

The plot of The Tempest is framed around a re-enactment of the apocalyptic and messianic vision of the book of Isaiah. Many aspects of Ariel’s character stem directly from the Bible story. In Isaiah 29:4, Ariel’s voice is said to come from the ground. Thus, Shakespeare ‘s character does “business in the veins of he earth, when it is baked with frost” and speaks directly from the ground to mystify the nobles. In the play Ariel is depicted as a spirit who does the bidding of Prospero, a usurped noble who represents the legitimate, righteous king described in Isaiah 32.

Isaiah begins his apocalyptic story in chapter 29, by describing ‘Ariel’ – in this case indicating the city of Jerusalem – as besieged and distressed with “heaviness and sorrow”. The city will be brought down so far that the voice of ‘Ariel’ (representing the spirit of Jerusalem) will come “from the dust”.

Beginning with verse 29:6, God intervenes, the tables are turned, and the multitude of ‘nations’ (Hebrew, ‘Goyim’) fighting against Jerusalem are judged and placed into a dream state, which is like a ‘tempest‘, the basis for the title of Shakespeare’s play. After this stage passes, the nations face an Apocalypse. They will be slaughtered, and their land will be turned into a wasteland where owls live and nest. Isaiah describes the ‘end of days’ for the nations, in which their world will ‘dissolve’ – a word often used in the Bible to depict the ‘End Times’ of those that wage war against Israel. Finally, the desert “blooms” into a paradise, a land of complete bounty, but only God’s chosen ones are permitted to enter.

The prophet uses the term ‘Ariel’ in a cryptic manner that can be seen as both as a synonym for Jerusalem and for the spirit of the Jewish people in general. Moreover, the word may also signify an altar of burnt offerings, which suggests the grim notion that the Jews and Gentiles who died in the battles for control of the city were sacrifices to god. It is important to recognize that the author of The Tempest is interpreting Isaiah’s story from Isaiah’s obviously Jewish prophetic perspective, in other words from the perspective that the vengeance of ‘Ariel’ is justified, not a perspective one would expect from a Gentile author.

Of course, other scholars have noted that Shakespeare made use of Isaiah in this play; for example, see Paul Olson, Beyond a Common Joy, pp. 130-136. But what has not been noted before is an element of very subtle cannibal humor, in which Shakespeare jokes about body parts such as ‘stinking feet’, which are ‘licked’, ‘trimmed’ or perhaps ‘severed’ in Prospero’s ‘court’ of justice. Thus, Shakespeare’s reenactment of Isaiah’s apocalypse also inverts the Flavian mockery of the sacrament of the Eucharist at Martha’s feast, where Lazarus’s smelly and decaying body was implicitly “made into a supper”.

Unlike Olson, I also show that the playwright’s careful use of the Biblical text continues through Isaiah’s chapter 34, where the prophet depicts the destruction of the nations arrayed against Israel; as well as chapter 35, which depicts post-apocalyptic bliss. This completes the apocalyptic vision of the author known as First Isaiah. It should be noted that many biblical scholars believe that the latter parts of the book of Isaiah (beginning with chapter 40) were written by much later authors.

34:1 Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye people: let the earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things that come forth of it.

2 For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter.

3 Their slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come up out of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood.

4 And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.

A typological dream shipwreck

The play opens on a ship in a raging storm at sea. In fact the entire reality the characters are experiencing is a dream, a fantasy they have been placed in by Prospero’s magic spirit Ariel. The characters have essentially been placed inside the ‘dream’ reality described in Isaiah 29:6.

While shipwrecks, in general, are literary tropes, Shakespeare’s shipwreck contains specific elements that link it to well-known incidents in the New Testament and Josephus. Those, in turn, were written in homage to Aeneas’ shipwreck at Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid; not to mention Ulysses’ shipwreck at Scylla and Charybdis.

Among tremendous bursts of thunder and wind, the courtier Gonzalo and several royal passengers emerge from their cabins to express their concerns to the crew. The Boatswain rebukes Gonzalo, saying: “You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority.” Gonzalo replies with a prediction that the boatswain will survive the storm, if only to perish by hanging later on for his impertinence. Gonzalo’s prophecy is like Paul’s prophecy in Acts (27:22):

“And now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship…

Watching the storm from the shelter of a nearby tropical island, Prospero’s daughter Miranda is alarmed at the fearsome prospects for loss of life on the ship, but Prospero tells her to calm herself, because he has ordered that “not so much… as an hair” of anyone on the ship will be harmed.

The shipwreck in the Tempest is typologically linked to those described in Acts and Josephus in which Paul and Josephus, respectively, are miraculously spared from perishing. Humorously, the characters of Gonzalo and ‘the Boatswain’ seem to represent both of Josephus’s types — Joseph of Arimathea and Paul, simultaneously present on Shakespeare’s boat.

Prospero’s action to rescue the ship has fulfilled Gonzalo’s prophecy, just as in both Acts and Josephus we find that all have survived, by God’s providence:

the centurion, wanting to save Paul, kept them from [their] purpose, and commanded that those who could swim should jump [overboard] first and get to land, ⁴⁴ and the rest, some on boards and some on things from the ship. And so it was that they all escaped safely to land. (Acts 27)

our ship was drowned in the Adriatic Sea, we that were in it, being about six hundred in number, swam for our lives all the night; when, upon the first appearance of the day, and upon our sight of a ship of Cyrene, I and some others, eighty in all, by God’s providence, prevented the rest, and were taken up into the other ship (Josephus, Life).

Prospero’s ‘art’ has produced the first of the many dreams in the Tempest. In this case, the entire shipwreck was a hallucination that all of the victims experienced.

Prospero’s overthrow, a parallel to the fall of Jerusalem

Prospero then tells his daughter of his real background that he has kept secret from her. This scene may represent how the young Emilia Bassano was told about her family’s Jewish background and the real meaning of the Gospels. Miranda remembers that she once was attended by a royal court, but cannot remember how she came to be on a remote island with Prospero. Prospero goes on to tell his daughter that he was once the Duke of Milan:

PROSPERO

Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since,
Thy father was the Duke of Milan and
A prince of power.

MIRANDA

Sir, are not you my father?

PROSPERO

Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said thou wast my daughter; and thy father
Was Duke of Milan; and thou his only heir
And princess no worse issued.

Prospero’s cryptic language evades admitting directly to be Miranda’s father. This is, perhaps, an example of Prospero’s scrupulous honesty, in that no man (in the age before DNA testing) could ever be certain of paternity, except by relying on the virtue of his wife. However, it also seems to be the beginning of a theme of ambiguity with respect to Prospero’s gender.

Explaining the circumstances leading to the loss of his kingdom, Prospero admits he was preoccupied: “being transported And rapt in secret studies” in his library. These studies, presumably, culminated in Prospero’s gaining magic powers over the spirit ‘Ariel’, and the ability to create dream states as prophesied in Isaiah. But said magic powers were not brought to bear, as Prospero was overthrown by a conspiracy of his brother Antonio in concert with Alonso, the King of Naples. Prospero explains:

PROSPERO

A treacherous army levied, one midnight
Fated to the purpose did Antonio open
The gates of Milan, and, i’ the dead of darkness,
The ministers for the purpose hurried thence
Me and thy crying self.

This evokes a parallel to the play-within-a-play in Hamlet depicting the fall of Troy, which in turn evokes the fall of Jerusalem to the Flavians. In this parallel, Alanso and Antonio are in the roles of Vespasian and Titus, with Alanso as the senior power and Antonio as the junior conqueror.

A pair of treacherous Flavian trinities

The Tempest depicts two mockeries of the Flavian trinity of emperors and gods; both sets are linked to Isaiah by their being depicted as drunkards. The first set is made up of Antonio, Alonso and Sebastian, who are described as a group of “three men of sin” who are “among men the most unfit to live”. Later Gonzalo states that “All three of them are desperate: their great guilt, Like poison given to work a great time after Now ‘gins to bite the spirits.” Alonso and Sebastian are the King of Naples and his brother and thus are easier to understand as types of the Flavians. The third member is Antonio, who is called the brother of Prospero — although Prospero repeatedly complains of his perfidy, and disputes whether such an evil personage could actually be his brother. One must also bear in mind that the author of the Shakespearian literature was aware that members of the group that conspired to create Christianity had Jewish blood. In fact, the Herods (the family of Bernice) had ‘grafted’ themselves onto the lineage of the Jews’ royal family (the Maccabees) by forced intermarriage.

The other depiction of the Flavian ‘trinity’ is a comic send up made up of the three clowns Stefano, Caliban and Trinculo. ‘Stefano’ – meaning crown – is Vespasian, the Flavian that seized the throne from the Julio-Claudians. ‘Caliban’ – an anagram of cannibal – represents Titus, the Flavian linked to the ‘flesh eating humor’ in the Gospels. Like Titus’s claim of ownership of Judea, Caliban falsely claims ownership of the island, ‘this island’s mine”. Prospero states that Caliban is of a “vile race” and that he has taught him “words”, indicating Titus’s use of Jewish typology in the gospels. ‘Trinculo’ – playing off of his focus on the number three and the ‘trinity’ – is Domitian. Joking with Trinculo, Stephano speaks of a jacket (a ‘jerkin’) using the enigmatic phrase “like to lose your hair and prove a bald jerkin”. This is typology based upon the description of Domitian’s baldness in Suetonius (Domitian 18), who claimed that he wore wigs and even wrote a book on hair care. Trinculo states, “I shall not fear fly-blowing”. ‘Fly blown’ means to be contaminated with the waste of flies and refers to Domitian’s penchant to be with flies that was also recorded by Suetonius:

“At the beginning of his reign he (Domitian) used to spend hours in seclusion every day, doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly-sharpened stylus. Consequently when someone once asked whether anyone was in there with Caesar, Vibius Crispus made the witty reply: “Not even a fly.” Suetonius, Domitian 3.

Trinculo’s “fly blowing” statement is witty in that it also captures the typology in Revelation describing the many-eyed creatures that surrounded the ‘Lord God’ Domitian. This is why ‘Trinculo’ states “I shall not fear” in order to mimic the “shall not fear” phrase of Scripture (Psalm 27, etc). Again notice that understanding Shakespeare as Jewish literature that reverses the Flavian typology provides an understanding to all of the play’s mysteries.

In keeping with the theme seen in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Merchant of Venice (all analyzed in SSM), the hero Prospero has typologically stepped into the role of the ancient Jews who were destroyed or deposed by Titus; but also, above, he represents God himself, in his ability to control the storm and save every hair on the passengers’ heads.

Josephus and Gonzalo, keepers of (Prospero’s) Books

Now it is Prospero’s enemies who are in danger in their ship. Continuing his narration, Prospero tells Miranda that they themselves were saved from a similar plight at sea, also by divine providence.

MIRANDA

How came we ashore?

PROSPERO

By Providence divine.
Some food we had and some fresh water that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, being then appointed
Master of this design, did give us, with
Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,
Knowing I loved my books, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

The character ‘Gonzalo’, presented in a positive light, may be representing primarily Joseph of Arimathea. To flesh out the typological linkage to the Gospels’ character, he is referred to as a counselor and described as a bringer of linen. Although Joseph of Arimathea ‘foresaw’ Joseph bar Mathias (that is, Josephus), Gonzalo does not necessarily represent the negative aspects of Josephus, the turncoat who became the historian for the hated Flavians. In the Gospels, Joseph of Arimathea was simply a “good counselor” that faithfully tried to serve the Christ, a role Gonzalo repeats by his faithful service to Prospero.

Prospero’s stomach bears up Miranda

Prospero goes on to tell Miranda the story of their loss of the Dukedom, and their arrival on the island. Speaking of the travails of their journey by sea, Prospero uses words strikingly similar to the way a woman would describe a pregnancy, continuing a theme of play with Prospero’s gender.

MIRANDA

Alack, what trouble
Was I then to you!

PROSPERO

O, a cherubim
Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile.
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck’d the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burthen groan’d; which raised in me
An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.

Miranda wonders how this tale of woe is related to the storm and shipwreck she has just seen. Prospero explains that the shipwreck has brought his old enemies, Antonio and Alonso, into his hands for punishment.

Ariel’s magic drives Prospero’s enemies mad

Prospero tells Miranda that she must fall asleep, and as soon as she becomes quiet, we are introduced to the spirit Ariel, who reaffirms that he has created the tempestuous dream world in which the master’s enemies have been driven into a “fever of the mad”.

Prospero’s ability to command this spirit is nothing less than divine. The name of ‘Ariel’ (or ‘Uriel’) appears frequently in apocryphal and traditional sources as the name of a powerful angel or demiurge, and he is characterized as the voice of Jerusalem in Isaiah (29:4). Ariel’s words are evocative of God’s powers described in Job chapter 38, calling down thunder and fire, roaring and bold waves. These are powers beyond ordinary mortals, and reserved in the Bible to God himself, but Prospero commands the same, through Ariel. He also has power to preserve mortals from the mighty storm and shipwreck, fulfilling the prophecy given above.

The mariners on the ship (aside from the royal party) have been charmed and stowed asleep on their ship, which is also “safely in harbour.” After this awesome display, we are left puzzled as to the source of this power.

The Sycorax and her son Caliban

Prospero and Ariel provide much-needed background information in their discussion. Prospero states that the “damn’d witch Sycorax” has been banished from Argier, and the “blue-eyed hag” was brought to the island with her son Caliban, “a freckled whelp hag-born — not honour’d with a human shape”. Finding Ariel on the island, Sycorax, “by help of her more potent ministers”, confined Ariel into a “cloven pine” where the spirit was imprisoned.

Scholars have puzzled over the source of the character ‘Sycorax’. Our hypothesis is that this name is a pun or a composite of the names ‘Sychaeus’ and ‘Sicharbas’, which are the names given by Virgil and Servius respectively for the character that was the first husband of the Widow Dido, founder of the city of Carthage. The Widow Dido will be mentioned again in the play later on.

In the Shakespearian literature, Carthage – a Semitic city – is used as a type for Jerusalem. Dido is thus recognized as a ruler with Jewish connections, and her second marriage, to Sychaeus who was later killed by her son, probably represents a marriage of convenience to a Gentile. This is clarified by the fact that Sychaeus was a priest of Heracles. After Sychaeus’s death, Dido refuses to marry Aeneas, the founder of Rome, thus setting up the schism between Jews and Gentiles.

In The Tempest, Sychaeus (Sycharbus) is rendered as a woman (Sycorax), a “blue-eyed hag” and thus a Gentile like Sychaeus or Aeneas, and she has given birth to a son “not honour’d with a human shape.” This is ‘Caliban’ the type of Titus, and therefore the playwright can be seen as setting up a broad-stroke typology of the battle between Christianity versus Judaism.

Caliban enslaved by Prospero

Prospero is soon discussing Caliban with his daughter. Although Miranda says Caliban is “a villain… I do not love to look on”, Prospero admits that they need his services, to “make our fire” and “fetch in our wood”. Even as a refugee on this island, Prospero sees himself as an aristocrat, and Caliban is put to work as his slave to do menial tasks. Within Shakespeare’s comic system, Caliban typologically represents the ironic situation of a Christian slave in service to the powerful elite. The name ‘Caliban’ is an anagram of ‘Canibal’, prefiguring his role in re-enacting the Flavian typology.

Caliban, Prospero and Miranda meet. The men trade symmetrical curses, but Caliban has no power over Prospero, while Prospero’s curses strike terror into his defenseless slave. Then, they share their story that Caliban had been loved, cared for, and educated by Prospero and Miranda, until Caliban “didst seek to violate the honour” of Miranda. Caliban saw this as perfectly reasonable, that he wanted to have “peopled… this isle with Calibans”; but Miranda and Prospero recoiled in horror, like true aristocrats. The entire scenario is yet another reversal of the “root and branch” theme in the Gospels, in which Caliban has tried and failed to inject his genes into the Jewish pool.

Caliban is sent to gather firewood. As he goes, he remarks that Prospero’s power is great enough to make a vassal out of his ancestral god Setebos. ‘Setebos’ was the god of the Patagonian natives, who had been recently discovered in Shakespeare’s time. As ‘Setebos’ is used in The Tempest, it represents a false god of primitive Gentiles, the structure of Christianity understood by the author of Shakespeare.

Miranda discovers her divine partner Ferdinand

Moving on to the next scene, Ariel lures Prince Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, to meet with Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Ariel sings of the prince’s father Alonso’s death, but notably without using any recognizable cannibal imagery. In yet another reversal of Josephus’s theme of the ‘new root and branch’, Prospero is planning to marry his daughter to the Prince, thus grafting his family back into the royal line. Miranda is quick to make her own declaration of Ferdinand’s divinity, as she first encounters him: “I might call him A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble.”

Miranda and Ferdinand quickly fall in love, just as Dido fell in love with Aeneas. Prospero is delighted, but nevertheless resolves to put roadblocks in their path, “lest too light winning make the prize light.” He tells Ferdinand:

PROSPERO

Come;
I’ll manacle thy neck and feet together:
Sea-water shalt thou drink; thy food shall be
The fresh-brook muscles, wither’d roots and husks
Wherein the acorn cradled. Follow.

‘Fresh-brook muscles’ would be a type of fish. Thus, within the Flavian system, this is a cannibalistic threat, and not entirely in jest, as Ferdinand’s royal line is to be subsumed to Prospero and Miranda’s Jewish line in the upcoming “new root and branch” reversal. Or as described above: a ‘withered root’. Prospero also gives Miranda his ‘opinion’ about Ferdinand:

PROSPERO

Thou think’st there is no more such shapes as he,
Having seen but him and Caliban: foolish wench!
To the most of men this is a Caliban
And they to him are angels.

With this tongue-in-cheek verdict, Prospero expresses real disdain for royal privilege, and speaks the truth about what “most of men” think of the preening elite.

Royal villains and fish food

At the opening of Act II, the royal villains from the shipwreck are wandering around the island and exchanging seemingly harmless banter. Gonzalo remarks on how their clothing is as good as new, verifying Ariel’s report. They joke about the Widow Dido of Carthage (and the ‘Widower Aeneis’) while discussing the wedding of Alonso’s daughter Claribel in Tunis, which Gonzalo (almost correctly) asserts was synonymous to Carthage. This marriage is yet another cyclical repeat of the “root and branch” theme, as Claribel, a Gentile, has become attached to the king of Tunis (a Phoenician, an African and a type for the Moorish Jews.) The reference becomes ominous as the bantering discussion returns to Gonzalo’s doublet from the wedding, which Antonio says was ‘well fished for’, hinting that Claribel’s marriage in Tunis is similarly doomed. Remember that Dido’s first husband and true love had been killed by her brother, and Aeneas became a “widower” because Dido killed herself after his departure.

Continuing in this ominous vein, Alonso laments that his daughter might as well be lost. Indeed, in Shakespearean typology, she certainly has been lost, her bloodline ‘pruned’ by the intermarriage with Jewish royalty.

GONZALO

When I wore it at your daughter’s marriage?

ALONSO

You cram these words into mine ears against
The stomach of my sense. Would I had never
Married my daughter there! for, coming thence,
My son is lost and, in my rate, she too,
Who is so far from Italy removed
I ne’er again shall see her.

Next, Alonso is in despair with the realization that his beloved son Fernando has become fish food, and thus is lost as well. The correct interpretation of his statement is that he too will be pruned and grafted by his love for Miranda, and figuratively be eaten by the ‘fish’ in a reversal of the Flavian eucharist.

ALONSO

O thou mine heir
Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish
Hath made his meal on thee?

Gonzalo plans his kingdom

After more such banter, Gonzalo tells of his ideal philosophy for ruling such an island as they have landed on. It will be a commonwealth with no riches or poverty, where everyone is idle, and “nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people.”

Though, as widely noted, Gonzalo’s words are taken directly from an essay “Of Cannibals” by Montaigne, the sentiments are inspired by the prophecy of post-apocalyptic bliss that occurs in Isaiah 35 when “the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” This paradise will come after the genocide of the nations, and it is intended only for the “innocent people”, while the ‘unclean’ and ‘fools’ will be excluded. Gonzalo’s description of an “innocent people” will be contrasted with those who wish to be pardoned for their sins at the play’s conclusion.

Sebastian and Antonio ridicule Gonzalo’s inconsistency in wanting to be King of an egalitarian utopia, and Alonso rejects Gonzalo’s advice as “nothing”.

Sebastian also plots to gain a kingdom

Continuing the fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah 29, Ariel charms Gonzalo and Alonso asleep, leaving Antonio and Sebastian (Alonso’s brother) to plot against Alonso. They realize that if Alonso and Gonzalo were killed, no one would be the wiser, and Sebastian would inherit the throne of Naples. Antonio and Sebastian reminisce about Antonio’s wicked theft of Prospero’s dukedom, and agree that guilty feelings have not been a problem. This is a rich and hilarious parody of the trinity of Flavian emperors, evocative of Domitian’s repudiation of the Flavian churches and his reconstruction and re-invention of the Christian religion after their deaths. Meanwhile, on the surface level, there is also rich irony in that it is far from obvious how the plotters will ever get back to Naples to claim their prize.

As Antonio and Sebastian are standing with their swords drawn and ready to plunge into Gonzalo and Alonso’s necks, Antonio’s speech includes another hint of cannibal imagery: Alonso is referred to as “This ancient morsel”. Ariel awakens Gonzalo and Alonso in the nick of time, foiling Sebastian’s bid for the throne.

Clowns need kingdoms, too

The next scene opens with Caliban giving yet another cannibalistic curse against Prospero: “All the infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him By inch-meal a disease!” Caliban adds that it is by ‘trifles’ that Prospero is able to control him. This may be a reference to Pliny’s description of Christianity as trifles, or ‘toies and fooleries’.

Trinculo the clown enters, and Caliban drops to the ground, hiding under his cloak. Trinculo identifies Caliban as a ‘Fish’: that is, a Jewish or Christian hoi polloi, a victim of the aristocracy. He has a “very ancient and fish-like smell.” A storm approaches, and Trinculo decides to hide with Caliban under the cloak: “misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows”, he says.

Stephano enters drunk:

STEPHANO

Sings

The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I,
The gunner and his mate
Loved Mall, Meg and Marian and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate;

Stephano’s grouping of himself and five other ‘Roman’ shipmates courting different women whose names all derive from ‘Mary’, mocks the many ‘Marys’ in the Gospels, that were created by the Flavians to represent the rebellious females of the messianic movement.

Caliban believes at first that Stephano is an agent of Prospero; that is, a proxy of God. Stephano believes that his liquor “will give language to” Caliban, as Titus intended that the Gospels would give a new voice to the Jews. But, as Stephano and Trinculo exchange cheery banter, Caliban becomes convinced that Stephano is a god in his own right, and not just as a representative. Stephano accepts Caliban’s adulation, and promises that if Caliban will “kiss the book”, then he will “furnish it anon with new contents.” With this, Stephano again reminds us of the Flavians, who also furnished the New Testament with “new contents.”

Stephano tells Caliban that he has was once the man in the moon. Caliban has replied that he saw him there, along with his dog and his bush. This recalls Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the character ‘Moonshine’ in the rough mechanical’s interlude also has a dog and a bush. Trinculo laughs that Caliban has been rendered “puppy-headed” by Stephano’s drink and propaganda, and has now become a suitable target for beatings.

Suddenly the conversation takes on a more serious tone: like Antonio and Sebastian, Stephano now confesses that it is the thirst for power on this deserted island that is his deepest motivation. Caliban fancies that he will win his freedom, even as his new boss, Stephano, is giving him his marching orders.

After the clowns go offstage, at the beginning of Act III, we find that Ferdinand has taken up Caliban’s burden and is carrying piles of logs, a task unbecoming a young man of royal blood; but in his view the task is ennobled by his love for Miranda, who reportedly told him “such baseness had never like executor.” Miranda tells him that Prospero the wizard is busy, “safe for these three hours” (a period reminiscent of Jesus’s time on the cross), tempting him to pleasures of the flesh; but actually Prospero is hovering in the background, watching everything that transpires. Ferdinand and Miranda continue to talk flirtatiously, and pledge themselves to be married.

Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban continue to wander about the island, and Trinculo has returned to his opinion that Caliban is a fish, because he drinks like one. Caliban pleads with Stephano to destroy Prospero and his books, take Miranda to bed, and take sole power over the island — while the spirit Ariel toys with them with ventriloquist tricks, and provokes them to quarrel.

We are reminded that Isaiah 29:4 warns Ariel, that is Jerusalem: “thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust”. Aside from making Ariel a type for the voice of Jerusalem (that is, the breath or spirit of the Jews), this also makes her an appropriate sprite for playing the role of a ventriloquist.

Stephano and Trinculo are alerted by the sound of Ariel’s pipe playing a tune, but Caliban reassures them:

CALIBAN

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

Caliban’s wish to return to his dream continues the theme of re-creating the dreams of Isaiah 28. The sound of “a thousand twangling instruments” reminds us of Paul’s “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1).

A cannibal feast for a king

Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian and Antonio continue wandering around the island in search of Fernando, and they are growing weary and about to sleep. Perhaps they are indeed asleep and dreaming when they suddenly find a marvelous banquet. The banquet is later taken away, creating a fantasy fulfillment of Isaiah (29:8):

It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite: so shall the multitude of all the nations be, that fight against mount Zion.

Prospero watches invisibly over the group, as the banquet is laid out for them by “strange Shapes” seen as a “gentle-kind”. In an aside, Prospero contrasts these spirits against the royal court, who he describes as “worse than devils”.

Alonso is reluctant to eat, and Gonzalo’s words do not seem reassuring: he says the banquet reminds him of “mountaineers… whose throats had hanging at ‘em Wallets of flesh” and “men Whose heads stood in their breasts.” It seems that Gonzalo knows that the banquet consist of flesh and breasts of men — the understanding of the Eucharist in the Shakespearean literature. The cannibal imagery is palpable. But, Alonso quiets his concern, and agrees to partake.

Ariel suddenly appears “like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table”, and the banquet vanishes. Ariel pronounces a condemnation on the men, reminding them of their theft of Prospero’s dukedom.

The Gentile nobility are types of the Flavians and are thus described as the “most unfit to live” of all men. Ariel says that he has driven them mad, and threatens that “Lingering perdition, worse than any death can be at once, shall step by step attend you and your ways.” While this fate is generally consistent with the fate of Gentile lords in the Shakespearian literature, Ariel suggests that perhaps they can be guarded from the wrath of the powers, by “heart-sorrow and a clear life ensuing”. In other words, Ariel holds out the hope that perhaps the nobles can achieve forgiveness through contrition, and by reforming their lives.

Prospero, however, is satisfied that “these mine enemies are all knit up in their distractions; now they are in my power.” These words will help explain the symbolic meaning of the phrase ‘brave new world’ discussed below.

Wedding plans for Miranda and Ferdinand

Beginning Act IV, Prospero pronounces his blessing over Miranda, Ferdinand, and their love, and looks forward to a grand wedding. In the meanwhile, he chides them to remain chaste, and also calls Ariel to “bring the rabble”, presumably meaning two trios of captives. As Ariel exits, Prospero promises to bestow “some vanity of mine art” upon the young couple.

Prospero’s promised “art” is a vision of Juno, Ceres and Iris, who are conjured up to bless the marriage. These three are the steadfast Roman goddesses of statecraft, agriculture and information, while the eroticism of Venus is noted to be absent from the pageant. Thus, the marriage between Miranda and Ferdinand reverses the founding of Rome in which the righteous outsider Aeneas (son of Venus) marries Lavinia, heir to the royal throne of the Latins. This also repeats the theme of Titus Andronicus in which a Jew is inserted into the Gentile’s royal lineage.

While the vision is still unfolding, Prospero suddenly remembers that Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo are still at large on the island, threatening to kill him. He abruptly ends the revelry, and sends Ferdinand and Miranda off to his ‘cell’, instructing Ferdinand to sleep.

A trumped up trap for the clowns

Although the “revels” have dissolved, and Ferdinand and Miranda await quietly in the cell, Prospero himself is still very busy. Working with Ariel, he prepares a trap for Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo by putting “the trumpery in my house” onto a clothesline where the three clowns find it. They have lost their wine, which Stephano says is an “infinite loss”, perhaps a metaphor for loss of Christian faith.

However, as compensation for their loss, they have found the royal and priestly apparel that Prospero and Ariel have left for them, and they revel in playful pomp. The “trumpery” seems to be a parody of the banquet that was laid out for the King of Naples and his party: the gentile royalty aspire to eat real flesh, while the clowns, pretenders, get only the opportunity to fancy themselves as royalty for a moment. One commentator thought that the garments represent Shakespeare’s writings; that is, the “paschal lamb” prepared by Bassano in the Salve Deus.

Caliban warns the clowns that the moment to carry out their criminal conspiracy against Prospero is passing. Stephano shushes Caliban, making an enigmatic comment about a jacket that will lose its hair and become a “bald jerkin”.

As the clowns are playing, “divers Spirits, in the shape of dogs and hounds” enter to drive them away, as Prospero curses them. Thus, their plotting against the master is brought to an abrupt end.

Prospero promises forgiveness (??)

With both trios of scoundrels completely under Prospero’s control, this is where we would expect the prophecy of Isaiah 34:2-4 to be ultimately fulfilled, that is, with the slaughter of the unclean ones, and the stink coming out of their carcasses. But, the surface-level action proceeds in a most unexpected fashion from here. Ariel calls on Prospero’s pity for the royal party, and especially for Gonzalo, whose “tears run down his beard, like winter’s drops from eaves of reeds.” Ariel is sure that if Prospero were able to see their sorrow and dismay, his “affections would become tender.” The dialog then unfolds as follows:

PROSPERO

Dost thou think so, spirit?

ARIEL

Mine would, sir, were I human.

PROSPERO

And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ‘gaitist my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel:
My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore,
And they shall be themselves.

Prospero, an aristocrat, elitist, and former duke himself, has seemingly decided to recognize his common humanity with his royal enemies, and to forgive them; that is, at least according to the surface narration. At this point one is tempted to speculate that ‘Shakespeare’ has been blackmailed into showing so much unfamiliar kindness; or perhaps, that the earlier author has been replaced entirely, and an alternate author has been enlisted to craft such an uncharacteristically happy ending.

Nevertheless: considering the relentlessly unforgiving nature of ‘Shakespeare’ as we know from Titus Andronicus, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, discussed in SSM — one must suspect that there is a trick. Along these lines, please note that Prospero’s promise of forgiveness is carefully couched: Ariel says he would forgive “were I human” but he is not human, but only a spirit of Prospero’s instrumentality. Prospero himself is not necessarily of the same ‘kind’ as the prisoners. Finally, Prospero tells us his intentions ‘shall’ become tender, but perhaps only after proper punishment has been dealt.

While he appears to be preparing to set the prisoners free, Prospero reviews how he has called upon the elves and spirits for his magic. In doing so, he uses the words of Medea from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As discussed in SSM, ‘Shakespeare’ frequently refers to Ovid’s Philomela (book 6) but this time is different. The choice of this parallel is apt: in Ovid’s tale of book 7, the heroic Jason and the Argonauts have come to Colchis, where the king’s daughter Medea has fallen in love with him. Her passion burns, but she chastely waits until Jason agrees to marry her. Medea’s father assigns Jason the task of winning the golden fleece, which he accomplishes with the aid of Medea’s magic.

Up until this point, Medea is a parallel to Miranda, and Jason is parallel to Ferdinand. However, from this point forward in Ovid’s story, Medea’s life turns to wickedness, and then unhappiness. At Jason’s request, she conjures up a magic spell to restore his father Aeson’s youthful powers. Then she “pretended to a sham quarrel with her husband” and left him to go to the court of Pelias, where she used her trickery and magic to kill him. Meanwhile, Jason has remarried, and Medea kills his new wife and all the children too.

Rather than proceed down Medea’s wicked path, Prospero “abjures” this “rough magic” and promises to break his staff, and drown his book.

Prospero enchants the royal party, and chides and then forgives them, as they stand mute and motionless. Then, he speaks of a time soon to come when he will set Ariel free and the spirit will enter a world where owls cry and the boughs have blossoms. This is the post-apocalyptic world that Isaiah and Gonzalo described above, which will be inhabited by owls and blossoms, that will abide after all of Isaiah has come to pass.

PROSPERO

quickly, spirit;
Thou shalt ere long be free.

ARIEL sings and helps to attire him

Where the bee sucks. there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Compare to Isaiah 34:11 and 35:1-2:

34:11 But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.

35:1 The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

2 It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God. ….

As the play moves rapidly forward to its conclusion, the master and boatswain are brought forth, and set free. Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban come forward, and are given a blessing. Caliban accepts this blessing and promises to become wise, and “seek for grace”. He sheepishly regrets his folly, saying: “What a thrice-double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a god And worship this dull fool!” The “thrice-double ass” is the false Christian/Flavian Trinity that Caliban has worshiped, and has now forsaken. It is also (as mentioned earlier) a reference to the ‘ass’ humor and ‘Lazarus’ humor in the Gospels.

Tomorrow, Prospero promises, there will be expeditious sailing back to Naples. From there, Prospero plans to go to Milan, where he will resume his dukedom.

Apocalypse approaches

The puzzle described in this post, concerning Prospero’s ‘cell’, begins to unfold during Prospero’s dream vision blessing the marriage plans of Ferdinand and Miranda. As this vision of goddesses nears its end, a country dance of nymphs and “sunburnt sicklemen” is organized. These “reapers” are symbols of the Apocalypse. Prospero states that he ended the ceremony because he had forgotten the conspiracy the Flavian clowns created against him, but the reapers have brought them back to his mind, and he states and that their “minute’ is almost up. The “minute” he is referring to is the time line of the Apocalypse laid out in the Book of Revelation.

This is made completely clear in the famous passage, the most important in the play, in which the enraged Prospero gives a description of the coming Apocalypse of the Gentiles envisioned by Isaiah.

Prospero’s use of the term ‘dissolve’ below is one of the two keys needed to understand the passage and he is using the term in the same context as Isaiah does in 34:2-4, describing the slaughter of all the nations, the stink of their carcasses, and the melting of mountains with their blood. As noted by scholars, when Isaiah describes the “dissolving” of the sun, moon and stars – the hosts of heaven – he is referring to the kings, empires and states that were hostile to Israel. In the passage, Isaiah is also repeating this concept as he had previously given it in 13:10 and 13:11.

Thus, in the first part of the passage, when Prospero indicates that actors are “the stuff that dreams are made of”, he is actually saying that the actors are part of the dream that Isaiah foresaw which leads to the apocalypse of the nations. His use of the term “globe” indicates the Globe Theater. That is, Prospero thinks of the plays themselves as part of Isaiah’s “dream”.

PROSPERO

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The puzzle of Prospero’s ‘cell’

The second part of Prospero’s speech, which immediately follows, contains the second key that sets up the puzzle concerning ‘cell’. Shakespeare created this puzzle to show the informed reader that Prospero does not expect the Gentiles to be forgiven later in the play. In fact, he is setting them up for a cannibal feast to reverse the humor in the Gospels.

PROSPERO

Sir, I am vex’d;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb’d with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.

Notice above that Prospero sends Ferdinand to his ‘cell’ and instructs him to go to sleep. Miranda exits with Ferdinand, presumably also going into the cell, which is where we will next see her. The puzzle in The Tempest concerning Prospero’s cell is the second key needed to understand Prospero’s plan for his enemies.

To learn the solution to the puzzle one needs to understand how the Gospels made fun of the butchering of the Jewish Messiah Eleazar, and described the foul smell of his rotting feet, which then led to a vulgar strand of humor concerning the Messiah riding on three ‘asses’.

The author of Shakespeare has used a double entendre mocking the one in the New Testament. In this case, the author has used the same symbolic elements the authors of the NT used to create their vicious subtext, to create a hidden storyline inside of The Tempest.

Below is the explanation of the Gospels’ ‘smelly feet’ and ‘three asses humor’ humor as presented in SSM.

Recognizing the Gospels’ symbolism concerning the ‘ass’ begins with understanding the typological meaning of the phrase “there they made him a supper” (John 12:2).

In brief, the typological meaning of the phrase is established by its linkage to Josephus’ description of a ‘human Passover Lamb that was a son of Mary’ (Josephus, Jewish Wars 6, 201-219). Both Josephus and the Gospels’ stories of the ‘human Passover Lamb’ contain the concepts of Lazarus, Mary, eating, and a ‘fine portion’ that was not taken away. This linkage builds upon the foundation established by the positioning of the ‘human Passover Lambs’ relative to the overall sequential typological mapping that exists between Jesus’ ministry and Titus campaign.

Further, as I also show in Caesar’s Messiah, when Jesus ‘raised’ Lazarus from the dead, he did not restore Lazarus to life, but merely ‘raised’ his decomposing body from the ground.

These facts enable the typological meaning of the Gospels’ story that next describes Eleazar after he is ‘raised’ from the dead – the ‘anointing party’ where Jesus and his followers are described as ‘reclining’ and preparing ‘supper’ and ‘anointing’ – to become clear. When the author uses the pronoun ‘his’ to define whose head is covered with perfume is it not necessarily Jesus’. In fact, the passage links back – logically enough – to the Gospels’ last mention of a scent – the smell emanating from Lazarus’s corpse; and the author used the ambivalence inherent in pronouns to mask his real meaning.

Thus, it is the head of Lazarus that is covered with perfume in Mark 14:3. It was done to mask its odor. This is also why ‘his’ feet were ‘perfumed’ in the version of the story given in John 12; 1-9, and why the feet were ‘saved’ for the day of the burial. The dark humor behind this mentioning of Lazarus’s body parts is that to “make a meal” of any large animal it must first be butchered, and this is the activity that occurred during the ‘anointing party’ where ‘they made him a supper’. The supper being prepared was the “last Supper’ in the Gospels, which would eat the ‘bread’ of Eleazar’s body.

[….]

The theme describing Lazarus’s ‘body parts’ continues in John 12:12-19 as, following the ‘anointing party’ Jesus is said to have previously found (the past tense) a ‘young ass’ to sit upon. Notice that in John 12:1 Lazarus is said to be ‘reclining’ – the only way the dead can posture – hence he was easy to be ‘sat’ upon. I must note that there is an unfortunate sexual ‘innuendo’ behind the image as the Romans sought to humiliate the Jewish Christ in the most extreme (and to them comic) manner possible.

[….]

However, the typological relationship between the Gospels and the next event Josephus describes – concerning a ‘son of Lazarus’ and the ‘hauling of bodies through the Jerusalem’s gates’ – is much more difficult to determine and can only be understood once the typological meaning of the stories of Jesus’s ‘triumphal entrance’ on an ass in the synoptics is understood.

A reader must first recognize that the stories in Matthew, Mark and Luke occur following the ‘triumphal entrance’ in John, which took place four days before the Passover. This is necessary because, as shown below, it establishes Lazarus as an ‘ass that has been sat on before’ and therefore distinct from the asses Jesus asks to be brought to him in Mark and Luke, which he stipulates can not have previously been ‘sat on’.

What the author is actually doing is providing just enough details to make it logically clear that four ‘asses’ were brought to Jesus – Lazarus and the ‘donkey’ that are described in Matthew, and the two colts described in Mark and Luke. The image that the author is working to create is a spoof of the prophecy in Jeremiah 9:9, which, if read literally, seems to indicate that the king of the Jews rode three asses simultaneously.

See your King comes to you,
Righteous and having salvation,
Gentle and riding on a donkey,
On a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zech. 9: 9)

To digress, it should be noted that the literary technique the author is using occurs throughout the Gospels. The Romans loved to hide their meanings ‘in plain sight’, so to speak. Thus, the literal meaning of the words is often used to convey the typological linkage, as in ‘fishing for men’, or ‘eat of my flesh’. In this vein the synoptics’ story of Jesus’s ‘triumphal entrance’ is a literal ‘fulfillment’ of Zechariah 9:9 and shows that the Jewish ‘king’ did indeed ‘ride’ on three Asses.

To see the typological point they make, a reader must pay close attention to every detail of the three versions of the story in the synoptics. The ‘young ass’ in Matthew is said to be at Bethany – the place where Lazarus was last seen ‘reclining’ – and is not described as being ‘tied’, while the colts in Mark and Luke are both described as tied and having never having been sat upon before. Further, Mark’s colt is said to have been brought to Jesus immediately, while the one in Luke is not.

Thus, the logical reading of the stories indicate that the ‘young ass’ in Matthew must be Lazarus who has been depicted as an ‘ass’ in the earlier story in John. He must be the ‘young ass’ described at Bethany because not only was he last described there, but he was not ‘bound’ as the asses in Mark and Luke were as he has already been ‘loosed’. (Note that the same word that describes the untying of the asses in Mark and Luke was used to describe the ‘loosening’ of Lazarus from his burial clothes in the prior story in John.) And as he has been ‘sat on’ in the earlier story in John, he cannot be either of the asses described in Mark and Luke who have never been sat on before.

Moving through the typological storyline, the ‘need’ that Jesus tells his disciples in the synoptics’ ‘triumphal entrance’ story that he has for ‘asses’, is actually to transport the Passover meal – the butchered ‘ass’ Lazarus – to Jerusalem. And once he has his ‘quartet’ of ‘asses’, he places Lazarus’ body onto the team of three mules. Jesus can now ‘fulfill’ the prophecy in Jeremiah because he has assembled three donkeys and the ‘King of the Jews’ – the ‘ass’ Lazarus. The ‘triumphal entry’ that the Gospels actually describe is that of three mules carrying the butchered body of the king of the Jews, while he is being sat upon by the Romanized Christ, Jesus.

Only with this information can a reader understand the typology concerning ‘smelly feet’ Shakespeare created in The Tempest. To link the passages of the puzzle, the author placed the word ‘cell’ in all of the relevant passages, which are presented below. Note that the passages are not in a single place but scattered throughout the play.

The first ‘cell’ passages simply presented the concept of the smelly feet, to link to the Gospels.

ARIEL
Which entered their frail shins: at last I left them
I’ the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell,
There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake
O’erstunk their feet.

A second passage links the concepts of ‘cell’, ‘foot’, and ‘blind mole’, an unpleasant albino creature of the depths:

CALIBAN

Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not
Hear a foot fall: we now are near his cell.

Not to be outdone, the third passage speaks of ‘foot-licking’ near Prospero’s cell, which can only be a prelude to foot-eating.

CALIBAN

Prithee, my king, be quiet. Seest thou here,
This is the mouth o’ the cell: no noise, and enter.
Do that good mischief which may make this island
Thine own for ever, and I, thy Caliban,
For aye thy foot-licker.

Thus, we have been primed to expect smelly body parts and cannibalism to be associated with Prospero’s ‘cell’.

The brave new world, and the chamber of horror

With Ariel departed, Prospero wakens the wandering royals, chides them again, and demands the return of his dukedom. Alonso questions whether Prospero is actually the long-lost duke, and Prospero insists it is true. As he pulls back a curtain covering his ‘cell’ to reveal the lost Ferdinand (with Miranda) to the bereaved Alonso, Prospero refers to the cell as a ‘court’.

This, you will remember, is the same ‘cell’ where we can expect to find smelly body parts being licked; perhaps these are the same stinking carcasses referred to in Isaiah 34:3, after the slaughter of the nations. A ‘court’, of course, is where a judge delivers justice.

The use of the word ‘cell’ is fairly unusual in the Shakespearean corpus. Using the concordance at Open Source Shakespeare, we find that the word ‘cell’ appears only 31 times in the entire collected works: 12 times in Tempest, 10 times in Romeo and Juliet, and 9 times in 6 other plays. In Romeo, the sinister Friar Lawrence has a ‘cell’. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, Friar Patrick has a ‘cell’, which is mentioned three times. And in the rest of the plays, a ‘cell’ often refers to a tomb, or perhaps a jail. More often, when Shakespeare wants to refer to someone’s bedroom or study, he uses the word ‘room’ (46 times in 28 works) or ‘chamber’ (99 times in 26 works.)

Miranda goes on to give the group her famous blessing, and Alonso then asks a less well-known question about Miranda’s identity.

MIRANDA

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

PROSPERO

‘Tis new to thee.

ALONSO

What is this maid with whom thou wast at play?
Your eld’st acquaintance cannot be three hours:
Is she the goddess that hath sever’d us,
And brought us thus together?

FERDINAND

Sir, she is mortal;
But by immortal Providence she’s mine:

Miranda’s blessing recalls Hamlet’s soliloquy “what a piece of work is man”, but without the dark conclusion that “he delights me not”. However, Alonso’s conjecture that Miranda is “the goddess that hath sever’d us” may be equally grim as Hamlet’s conclusion. The passage may be playing with the ‘severed’ humor concerning Paul found in Acts and presented in SSM:

Prior to the scene in Acts 13, Saul/Paul had attacked a member of the ‘way’ – Stephan – who has been preaching for ‘Jesus’. In other words, Stephan had been preaching for the Flavian Christ. Following this event Saul shows up in Antioch with a group that includes a ‘stepbrother’ of Herod. Then the ‘Holy Spirit’, for some reason, orders Saul ‘separated’ – the Greek word used can also mean ‘severed’ – and the group then “placed their hands on him” – the word used for “placed” can also mean ‘attack’. Following the event Saul becomes ‘Paul’ (Greek: Paulos), a word that means ‘tiny’ (Latin: Paullus). In other words, Paul has been ‘severed’ – or castrated – by the group led by Herod’s ‘stepbrother’ as revenge for his participation in the attack on a member of the ‘Way’ – the Caesars’ version of Judaism – and Saul thereby became ‘Tiny’.

Paul’s original name of ‘Saul’ is also explained by this reasoning. Saul was the Jewish king that had demanded David obtain ‘a hundred Gentile foreskins’ and the Romans named their character ‘Saul’ to imply that his ‘circumcision’ involved – like the one ordered by his Old Testament forerunner – more than a single foreskin. The author of Acts clarifies the relationship by actually mentioning the Old Testament Saul in the passage where ‘Saul’ becomes ‘Tiny’ – Acts 13:21. The Old Testament Saul’s reign had the space of forty years. This foresees the forty years between the beginning of Paul’s ‘ministry’ at approximately 40 CE and the start of Domitian’s reign in 81 CE – a roughly forty year cycle parallel to the one which linked Jesus to Titus.

The typology is witty in that – logically enough – it suggests that castration may be an appropriate punishment for the gentile nobility, in retaliation for the Roman castration of the Christian hero ‘Paul’.

As the play moves rapidly forward to its conclusion, Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban come forward. Prospero tells Caliban: “Go, sirrah, to my cell; Take with you your companions; as you look To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.” Caliban accepts this blessing and promises to become wise, and “seek for grace”. He sheepishly regrets his folly, saying: “What a thrice-double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a god And worship this dull fool!”

Caliban’s phrase “thrice-double ass” is a reference to the ‘three ass’ cannibal feast humor in the Gospels. The ‘three asses’, Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban, are sent into Prospero’s cell; that is, his courtroom of justice, where stinking body parts are found. Caliban has been instructed to “trim it handsomely”. Most commentators believe this is referring to the room itself, but we believe it more likely refers to its contents, including people and/or body parts.

Finally, Prospero invites Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio into his “poor cell” to rest and sleep. He tells them he will “waste” part of their night “With such discourse as, I not doubt, shall make it Go quick away; the story of my life And the particular accidents gone by.”

The words “make it Go quick away” are subliminally chilling. The hidden puzzle concerning ‘cell’ indicates that Prospero fully intends, at some occulted or symbolic or magical level, that the plan described in Isaiah shall be carried out — if not by Prospero himself (having abjured his magical powers), then perhaps by God.

The references to Prospero’s ‘cell’ have created a hidden storyline. A possible interpretation of this storyline is as follows:

Prospero’s ‘cell’ is where vengeance is delivered. First, Prospero describes his cell as a “court” – in other words where justice is delivered. Then he orders Ferdinand to sleep there. While he is asleep Miranda ‘severs’ Ferdinand – in other words castrates him. Then, Caliban is told to ‘trim it handsomely’ – meaning to circumcise Ferdinand’s castrated member. Finally, the Gentile nobility is told to spend a night inside the cell – to participate in a cannibal feast of the ‘trimmed’ member.

In Hamlet, the author refers to the murdered King Hamlet’s decaying body as “lazar-like”, and hints that the body has been consumed at his mother’s wedding banquet which followed quickly after the former king’s death. We take this as confirmation that ‘Shakespeare’ was broadly familiar with the view of Lazarus’ fate that we have described above. As to the usage of terms such as ‘sever’ and ‘trim’ to refer to cannibalistic cuisine, many more such instances are described in SSM.

Ferdinand, moreover, is important for the plan of grafting Miranda’s branch into the royal rootstock of Naples. Accordingly, perhaps rather than being castrated, he has merely been circumcised, and it is only the foreskin that has been ‘trimmed’ by Caliban and subsequently consumed by the remainder of the party. Circumcision may well be a form of ritual castration anyhow, in which case at a symbolic level there is little if any difference.

Or conversely, perhaps the entire ensemble of sinners will be sliced to pieces. The exact nature of God’s vengeance is veiled. But in Isaiah’s ancient tribal vision, mercy and salvation are reserved for the God’s chosen people, the Jews, and not for the goyim.

Given the depiction of the ‘Globe’ as an element in the dream state that leads to the Apocalypse of the Christian world, it is hard not engage in paranoid wondering of to what extent Jewish influence in the media is related to the ‘dream state’ for Gentiles described in the Tempest. Or as John Lennon stated –hopefully tongue in cheek – “show business is an extension of the Jewish religion.”

The dream state the Gentiles have been placed in is the basis for the expression “brave new world”. This is why writers such as Kipling and Huxley, who understood the typology in The Tempest, have used the phrase. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the word “brave” was used in Shakespeare’s time meant something that dazzled the senses and was often used as a word of approval or praise. In other words, it was more of a cognate of the modern acclamation “bravo!”, rather than the personal property of courage. The expression “brave new world” is a description of the “world” during the midst of the apocalyptic project that Isaiah describes, during the time that the goyim are held in a dream state, but before they have been annihilated. Note that the “goodly creatures” are the unjust Italian royal usurpers whose minds have been “enchanted”.

Isaiah’s assault on mercy

In the play’s epilogue, Prospero seemingly asks for the audience’s applause and their pardon to set him free to return to Naples. In fact, there is another darker meaning. The language is very precise.

EPILOGUE
SPOKEN BY PROSPERO

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

First, the author is stating that the Gentiles must not understand the dream state they have been placed in for the ‘project’ to succeed. – Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails

The prayer that ‘pierces’ is Isaiah and it ‘assaults’ mercy itself. In other words, it provides the moral basis for creating an apocalypse for the Gentiles. The “crime” that the Gentiles must be pardoned from was their war against the Jews in the first and second century. And the applause for the play which is the accepting of the dream world the Jews have created will set free the author from her task – which is to bring about the apocalypse described by Isaiah, the “indulgence’ the Gentiles must pay and which will set the Jews free.

Prospero’s feminine aspect

The theme of Prospero’s gender ambiguity begins with his dance around his fatherhood of Miranda, and continues with his description of Miranda’s arrival on the island in terms suggestive of a pregnancy. The powerful parallel to Medea continues this theme. As we have mentioned earlier, the film director Julie Taymor noticed this feminine side of Prospero, and cast Helen Mirren in the role. This duality has a special poignancy if indeed the playwright ‘Shakespeare’ was not only a Jew masquerading as a Christian, but also a woman playing the part of a man in the world. The equation of Prospero with the author, especially in the epilogue, seems to constitute a hint that it is so. In an interview, Taymor explained:

In the era of Shakespeare’s time, again, women were burned at the stake for even dabbling in medicinal arts, let alone alchemy. And therefore the whole issue of white magic/black magic is right there in terms of a woman who was given the freedom by her husband, if you follow the backstory, to practice in the sciences and her brother uses it to have her accused of witchcraft to usurp her dukedom. So Prospera may feel and start as a benevolent sorcerer or alchemist, but because of the revenge factor of having her kingdom taken away and her daughter and she sent out to die, the vengeance part takes over her spirit and she moves into the dark side. I think what you get with Helen’s performance is this unbelievably complex woman who’s both powerful and vulnerable, has an incredible maternal side to her, which is very unique, to have this mother-daughter relationship, she’s got a sensuality and a humor to her because she’s Helen Mirren, and in the end when she puts her corset back on, it’s very different than when a man puts on his duke’s robes. You see that she is really giving up her life to go back into civilization for her daughter; she’s giving up her freedom, because to go back into that courtly society she has to go back into the corseted stays of women of that time. So there’s an enormous amount of the various changes that happen by putting a woman into this role, but ultimately the play is the play, and the themes of Shakespeare’s play don’t change.

The fact that the Jewish director, Julie Taymor, choose to cast Prospero as a woman, coupled with her informed transition of the conclusion of Titus Andronicus, suggests she may have an awareness of the occulted meaning of Shakespeare, as well as the identity of the author.

Discuss in Forum!

Posting history: an earlier version of this article was posted in pdf format on 10/20/2014.

A few typos and other minor snafus cleaned up, 6/1/2016

Abraham and the Sabian Legacy

Richard Stanley and Jerry Russell

August 30, 2015

Wolpertswende_St_Gangolf_Hochaltar_Detail — "Wolpertswende St Gangolf Hochaltar Detail" by sculpture: Moriz Schlachter (1852–1931); Photo: Andreas Praefcke

The Western foundational narrative essentially begins with the story of Abraham and his descendants, this set in dialectic contrast with Homeric epic. It is the intentionally tortured fusion of these two core cultural constructs that has led to the yet unresolved synthesis of the world we have today. Unresolved at least for now, because the global elites’ combined and explicitly stated global ambitions have not been achieved … just yet. As we are told of this agenda in Isaiah 49:6 —

And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.

As we’ll see, the Biblical stories seem designed to serve this elite agenda, even “to the end of the earth”; albeit the tales are cleverly disguised to keep their main audience comfortably focused on the otherwise prosaic and seemingly banal aspects. As such, Abraham and his descendants seem to be ordinary nomadic shepherds, whose casually intimate nexus to the divine makes many incredible events seem credible … to the credulous. But, some zany episodes are clearly intended to alert some of us that something deeper is going on below this surface reading. From the artworks shown in this post, one can see that Abraham is not shown as a rude shepherd, but rather as one of a much higher social status. He and his family rub elbows with pharaohs and other kings in rather amazing contexts. The alert reader would see this subtext, while the hoi polloi might only see the simple, yet divinely blessed, shepherd. In this regard, the Bible is like the old cartoons of Rocky and Bullwinkle, sending different messages to both children and adults at the same time, each addressing their own level of understanding.

In any case, here we have a remarkably dysfunctional family, chosen and ‘eternally blessed’ by God to rule over their promised land, and eventually to rule over the world. And yet here we are still dealing with the clearly dysfunctional outcome over 3,000 years later. Today’s situation is not so very much different than with Abraham — with one big exception, namely that the veiled heirs, those ruling in the name of all the ‘Abrahamic’ religions, occupy a much larger amount of global real estate and other assets now. Is this the result of divine will? Or, are certain people, then as now, better at the game (and/or born in better circumstances) than the rest of us? Are they better at the game, perhaps because they have a better contextual understanding of the rules?

Jews, Christians and Islamics can rightly take great pride in their clear advancements in numerous aspects of morality over predecessor societies. However, this begs the question of why the Abramic religions are so tortuously ‘revelatory’. Why didn’t God establish his ‘perfect’ order of societal laws and such intact from the very beginning? Perhaps God is maturing just like his human ‘copies’ do. This is the premise of Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, but for him it is simply a tongue-in-cheek literary device, as he makes it clear that the collective human understanding of this ‘God’ is what is evolving. Moreover, he states:

the gods that have populated human history— rain gods, war gods, creator gods, all-purpose gods (such as the Abrahamic god), and so on… exist in people’s heads and, presumably, nowhere else.

The authors generally agree, however we claim that this is because certain elite humans are indeed driving this ‘maturation of God’ process as they expediently go along, but ultimately all with a specific end in mind. That is, our human ‘lords’ are evolving their divine avatar, as contingent upon the exigent circumstances found along their geopolitical roadmap. And when ethical ‘improvements’ occur, they must necessarily be in tune with the long term interests of those same elites. Thus the imaginary gods, or God, via their human handlers, reveal that prior religious laws are to be periodically revised – for harmony’s sake. Harmony, that is, after all the evil-doing laggards, zealous conservatives that is, are dealt with.

In stark contrast to Jesus of Nazareth, who is depicted as an exemplar of moral virtue (with the forgivable exception of getting mad at a barren fig tree), Abraham and his progeny are all too human in their guile and lust. The tales are compelling in a lurid manner, like soap operas. Indeed, such wily behaviors were more openly accepted and even appreciated in both the Hebrew and Homeric ages. After all, at some primal level a hunter or warrior must be able to outwit his or her prey or foe to survive if not succeed, the concepts of ‘fairness’ and ‘decent’ behavior only evolving over time per the demands of ‘civilization’. In this context then, Abraham and Moses were among the most wily of their time.

So on the superficial level, and by negative example, hopefully the audience can better learn ethical behavior from the zany moral foibles of these otherwise exalted people. But on a deeper level, the underlying subtext is to establish a modus operandi of justified and providential territorial conquest and geopolitical power insinuations, sophisticated propaganda and other cultural manipulations. Like any good spy novel, there is sexual intrigue as well; all on the yellow brick road to some alleged higher calling. As such, and just as with the gods “that exist in people’s heads and, presumably, nowhere else”, we suggest that all these Old Testament ‘heroes’ are indeed either purely or mostly fictional, and that they must generally be avatars for the real human elites hiding behind their veiling curtains.

Setting the Blessed Stage

With Abraham, the later compilers and redactors of the various texts were dealing with a subject matter that may have been as much as a thousand years before their times. As a result, if nothing else, the finer contextual usage of such matters might be expected to become distorted in various ways — especially when such details might refer to the reviled practices of former neighboring societies, now long distant in time or geographically to the otherwise unaided redactors.

Typically we are otherwise plausibly told that prior to more recent times, oral transmission was the means to explain why such stories had survived so long, supposedly accurately. However, it is hard to believe that mere oral story telling could transmit the level of accurate detail found in the Biblical tales as described above. Moreover, how could such oral transmission also account for the ‘fisherman’s exaggerations’ that we find in Biblical accounts such as of Jonah and the whale? Not to mention the tale of God’s eternal vengeance against the Canaanites in retribution for the odd sin of Ham (the generationally distant, yet key, prequel to Abraham), detailed further below? And why would oral transmission create such a politically charged, ultimately elitist and racist narrative?

Indeed, some indigenous peoples such as nomadic Bedouin tribesmen still use oral transmission. Their stories are believed to be reasonably accurate with respect to contextually valued aspects, although chronological time spans are typically inaccurate. Of course, this explanation is given to us with the underlying expectation that we are to believe that the core of these epic stories are essentially true in the first place. But there may be yet another explanation for these narratives. To wit: that they were fictionally cobbled together, as if in a modern day ‘historical fiction’, for furthering an ambitious and steadfastly deliberate agenda. And this, we claim, is not much different than which happened later with the Flavian gospels – ala Caesar’s Messiah. In fact, we claim these two, time separated, literary projects are intimately connected. And thus, that the ‘Flavian Vanity’ discussed there is likely much broader in context than merely contained to the Flavian ‘branch’ of the larger Sabine family corporation. That is, generally speaking: those including the Roman republican consuls, the imperial Caesars, and the Catholic popes and the ‘traditional’, ethnically ‘non-debased’ Curia. This entire family enterprise was descended from conquering colonists … from the ‘East’, at least if their own legends are to be believed.

As the late archaeologist, Cyrus H. Gordon, showed in his books (specifically, Gordon & Rendsburg, 1998, The Bible and the Ancient Near East): while the Old Testament contains many epic lavish embellishments, at the same time one also finds a wealth of references to details that have been externally confirmed to be rather accurate. The granular level of accurate contextual detail in the finished Judaic narrative would be nearly impossible for a team of isolated scribes and clerics to fabricate out of thin air. On the contrary, they must have been operating with both the imprimatur of, and with the preexisting textual resources of, the political ‘powers that be’ of the day. Such resources would have come from various preexisting regional factions. The job of the ‘redactors’ then was to compile and harmonize these various accounts. Such regional harmonizing must necessarily precede the long and bloody process of global harmonizing. However, whether on purpose or not, the redactors left traces of the original sources within their compilation. Accordingly, we can get a rather good idea of what is really happening by reading between the divine lines.

As the Homeric works literally became a sort of bible for the wider, polytheistic Greek world, the epic stories of the Hebrew patriarchs fulfilled the same function in Judea. Here, Abraham became actively engaged with one particular and uniquely peculiar god who, at some point, gradually began to jealously demand Abraham’s and his descendants’ sole allegiance. This god warns them to ignore all those other silly or evil gods, whose actual existence is not denied at first: this being a transitional phase, called monolatry, on the brutal road to monotheism where the other gods are now denied as being real. With the latter phase, as Jan Assmann and others have noted, such a singular god is necessarily militantly jealous in asserting his sole primacy over his former peers, with social consequences that can be seen as more desirable for efficient political control, … and in setting his chosen faithful profitably apart from the rest of humanity. This more efficient religio-political control is implemented coincident with the nascent rise of imperial expansionism (of the Persians), where the fewer gods to deal with in the newly acquired regions might make for more unity across an empire.

The Abraham cycle is distantly linked to the Creation epic and Adam and Eve by the various genealogies that gradually narrow their focus down to Abraham, who receives the eternal blessing (for global success) from God. Thereafter, this blessing is transferred by hook or crook to various subsequent younger brothers (or half-brothers in some cases). This younger brother motif forms an important metaphor for the underlying reality which we discuss later on.

And like all good dramas, this incredibly valuable blessing is even suspensefully put at risk on many occasions, including by Abraham’s various escapades involving both his wife and son. We assert that these multiple instances of risking of divinely blessed progeny is a clever diversionary ruse to imbue the narratives with ‘common’ human traits that serve to draw away attention from the possibility that much more powerful human sponsorship is involved behind the scenes.

The very beginning of the narrative then is linked to the apparent fall of Sumeria, or Shinar, and the Tower of Babel story, where the people propose to build a city and an imposing structure, so as to ‘make a name for themselves’. Their hubris was offensive to God for some reason back then, but apparently not so much in the last few thousand years. In God’s angry wrath, he destroys the tower and city, disperses mankind, and for good measure confounds their languages.

Out of all this judgmental destruction, and as ‘mitigation’, Abraham is ‘called’ by God and uniquely granted the eternal blessing (to dominate the Earth) for his progeny’s sake, and ultimately for all of our eventual good sakes (so we are told). But, perhaps this blessing can extend to others somehow ‘grafted’ onto the later root (of Jesse that is)? In any case, this fishy blessing is a reversal of not only the Tower of Babel judgement on humanity, but also a reversal of God’s prior global curse on Adam and Eve and their progeny, found in Genesis 3:16-19. So from the time of this blessing, the biblical subtext is that the closer one’s proximity to the blessed family, the better, and conversely the more distant, the worse.

But before we can launch now into the Abraham narrative, we must consider that brief and very odd prequel mentioned earlier:

Noah’s Ham and Wine for Breakfast

Another ironic moral note is that according to the Bible, every man and woman today is descended from the world’s first vintner … and drunkard, though he obviously didn’t have a very large customer base after the Flood.

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. (Genesis 9:20-27)

In order to justify the Patriarchal narrative of the Hebrew’s displacement of the alleged prior occupants of Canaan, the first order of business must have been to de-legitimize the ‘indigenous’ peoples, by re-contextualizing them. Or in terms of anthropological warfare: to simply make them disappear, in a manner of speaking, from their true role as ancestors of the Israelites. This task was deftly handled, allegedly generations before Abraham’s time, simply by creating the bizarre story that Ham had committed the sin of stumbling upon his naked and fallen drunk father, and then tattling to his brothers about it.

This drunken father was none other than Noah, who had earlier been singled out for a great reward by God, because of Noah’s superior qualities relative to his fellow humanity. Noah’s reward, of course, consisted of receiving a warning to build a huge boat so as to escape God’s genocidal rage against the rest of his defectively degenerate human creations gone awry. After the flood, God gave the rainbow as a token for a covenant that he would never again destroy all mankind (Genesis 9:8-17). However, in making this covenant, God did not mean to stop behaving wrathfully; from then on, his wrath was simply displayed on a tribal basis rather than universal basis.

But it is important to realize here that the new ‘Hebrew’ tribe was in reality a synthetic meta-tribe consisting of numerous pre-existing tribes. And ironically, God would be inflicting most of his punishment on his own Chosen people for centuries, apparently until they had agreed to adopt their new identity, for the most part.

"Ham sees his father, Noah, naked and drunk; Shem and Japheth Wellcome V0034223" — Ham sees his father, Noah, naked and drunk; with Shem and Japheth (Wellcome V0034223)

In order to demote the Canaanites, the first step was to claim that they descended from Shem’s brother Ham, rather than from Shem himself. This was sufficient to create a completely distinct ethnic identity, more akin to African blacks who, later, were also considered descended from Ham (to provide the pretext to ‘righteously’ enslave them). Then, punishment for Ham’s awkward, allegedly sinful viewing of Noah was visited on all of Ham’s Canaanite descendants, who were demoted in status to the slaves of Ham’s brothers. Is it too heavy-handed to point out that this is an obvious geopolitically motivated pretext, which also gives divine imprimatur to the unjust theme that the sins of the father should be visited on his sons to the Nth generation? In any case, how convenient considering that the Canaanites were obviously typical Semites, based upon archaeological findings detailed by such as Finkelstein & Silberman (p. 118).

Hosea’s Ho’sers?

Even before the field work discussed by Finkelstein and Silberman, Gordon mentions emphatically in his books that the Canaanites were indeed stripped of their correct Semitic origins in the genealogies of Genesis. This Biblical dispossession of the Canaanites doubles the dark irony of the extreme Ashkenazi predominance (>90%) amongst today’s Jewry, not only in today’s Israel, but globally – when the very same genealogy explicitly states that the Ashkenazi are not Semitic, i.e. descendants of Shem.

This is reinforced by the metaphoric narrative in Hosea 1, which describes Hosea’s sacred dalliance with the whore, Gomer. The book of Hosea contains internal clues that would date it to the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. However, it may actually come from the later Achaemenid conquest, as it seems to describe the merger of Israel with Judea. Just as Jacob was a metaphoric representation of Israel (father of the twelve tribes) in an earlier phase, so Hosea conceives the next metaphor, his son Jezreel, whose name is a contraction of Judea and Israel.

And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD. So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which conceived, and bare him a son. And the LORD said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel. And it shall come to pass at that day, that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. And she conceived again, and bare a daughter. And God said unto him, Call her name Loruhamah: for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away. But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the LORD their God, .. (Hosea 1:2-7 KJV)

Gomer’s name is recycled from the Genesis 10:2-4 genealogy, where a man of this name was the father of the Ashkenazi, and a son of Japheth. Thus, we have an explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible statement of Hosea 1:10 — “… that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God.” The explanation is that the former chosen people of Judea and Israel have been replaced, and shall henceforth consist of a cross-breed of Hebrew and Gomerites, but not necessarily the Ashkenazi – who seem to arrive in the Judaic camp in the late first millenium CE. Both the Assyrians and Achaemenids deported many native Canaanites and replaced them with immigrants. ‘Jezreel’ seems to be a very apt metaphor indeed.

Furthermore, all of these superficially individual names are actually eponyms standing in for pre-existing groups of tribal or ethnic peoples. Therefore, regarding the wife Gomer, the focus should be on the word ‘whore’ as relating that ‘she’ and the related Japhetic ‘children’ are profitably accepting a role in the Semitic narrative as figurative ‘whores’ and not as literal sexual prostitutes. But because of the metaphoric ruse being employed, the normal convention of using only males in the genealogies must be reversed so that Gomer is now awkwardly, and tellingly, made into the very first human transexual. The unusual inclusion of the ‘children’ in this situation is also a clue that the names should be taken as eponyms.

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah; Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. (Genesis 10:1-4 KJV)

Genesis 10:5 then supports our thesis that the Gomerites and Ashkenazim originated as non-Semitic goyim, albeit we have no way of knowing whether or not the modern day Ashkenazi are one and the same as those mentioned biblically.

By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations. (Genesis 10:5 KJV)

Please note (as we discussed in the Intro post) that the term ‘Gentile’ here means the elite aristocracy, and does not refer to the common person. Also note that certain texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls equate the ‘Kittim’ with the Romans, though we assert that the proper identification is more complicated. Finally, note that via the order of listing, the so-called ‘pride of place’, Japheth is the youngest son of Noah, and if staying consistent with the common ‘youngest son’ motif throughout the rest of the OT, then the youngest son is the actual primary line. Interestingly, the related verses contradict the traditional order by explicitly stating that Ham is the youngest son.

If then we are to believe the biblical narrative, then the Ashkenazim, as descendants of Japheth via Gomer, must be considered merely the distant poor cousins of those “dwelling in the tents of Shem”. Or rather, the whorish dupes of the real gentil authors of the narrative. These distant ‘poor cousins’ have now been placed on yet another dubious Zionist pedestal, as per the Christian mandates of Romans 11:22-24 (KJV). Is this a setup for an upcoming apocalypse, or is it a distraction from other global, neo-Hellenizing sleights-of-hand writ large? In any case, the present day occupiers of Israel insist to us that they are indeed Semites despite their own Ashkenazi identification. This is the justification offered for their current presence in Israel, where the land has been taken from today’s so-called ‘Palestinians’. Of course, these Palestinians were likely the actual descendants of the ancient population of Judea (Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People). As such, they were the original ‘Jews’ as well as, before that, the original Canaanites.

With such grave aspersions cast upon the identity of the Canaanites, the narrative may be implying some darker sort of untoward filial interaction, besides merely the overtly stated naked viewing. Perhaps the following quote from Leviticus indicates the true gravity of the crime that is being insinuated.

And the man that lieth with his father’s wife hath uncovered his father’s nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:11 KJV

We suggest that this aspersion was part of the long process of convincing some Canaanites that they were really descendants of the fictive conquering Judean Hebrews. At the same time, their northern Canaanite neighbors, the Israelite “Lost Tribe” Hebrews, were conveniently relocated far away by the Assyrians.

A similarly disparaging fictional ploy will be employed with Lot and his alleged descendants, but will later get ameliorated when the politics become expedient. However, with the Canaanites, there was no such rationale to reverse the aspersions: as the ‘Israelites’ had long since forgotten their prior identity as such.

Who’s Dwelling in your Tent Tonight?

In the verses immediately following the episode regarding Canaan’s punishment for Ham’s sin, we are told that for some unknown and unstated reason, that the offspring of Shem’s brother, Japheth, is “dwelling” in Shem’s tents.

And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. (Genesis 9:24-7 KJV)

Now to fully grasp the magnitude of what is being stated here, one must realize that the Genesis author(s) or redactor(s) are informing us that after the Flood that the world has been divided into three general races of man, to eventually repopulate the entire world over. How this genesis of three races can be accomplished via the offspring of one man is truly a miracle. But more importantly for our purposes is that now we are being told, metaphorically speaking, that one of the three races is now “dwelling in the tents of Shem”, one of the other two races of men, that being the Semites.

Of course, one cannot possibly take this wording literally, because then we would have one man dwelling in an untold number of tents of one of his brothers. All with absolutely no other context being provided as to why and for how long, excepting of course that Japheth shall be “enlarged” by God. As we have just mentioned that the Semites are the ‘race’ of men born from Shem, then just who are the sons of Japheth? It seems that most all commentators agree that Japheth represents the white European or Caucasian race, which may further be identified with the so-called Indo-European language group.

And while some of those commentators suggest that the progeny of Japheth have been “enlarged” by their geographical spread, this is meaningless as just so did the progeny of Shem and Ham spread out from Noah’s ‘tent’. As such, we suggest that Japheth has rather been “enlarged” in power status – via the ruses cleverly and deceptively related within the canonic narratives.

Considering that part of our thesis is that Judea and Israel were placed in an intensive ‘conversion’ process by the surrounding elites and part of the input to that conversion was obviously from an Indo-European source, it is hard to imagine a more incriminating item of evidence than this verse. An otherwise standalone verse that seems to garner little notice as to what it might mean for those who owned the tents. As such, we assert that this verse is another clear indication that a foreign elite has been insinuated into the leadership of the Judean and Israelite polity. In a future post we will discuss just how this was accomplished.

One of God’s Many Prior Names, and What It Means

And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God [bə·’êl] Almighty [šad·dāy or Shaddai], but by my name JEHOVAH [YHWH or Yahweh] was I not known to them. (Exodus 6:3 KJV) For the Hebrew words see here.

According to Exodus (6:3), Abraham did not even know that God’s name was Yahweh. Instead, he was known to Abraham as bə·’êl šad·dāy, which is usually translated to mean “as God almighty.” The word “El” is the name of the god, which is believed to be the Hebrew form of the name of the most ancient proto-Semitic God, and which also has cognates in ancient Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Akkadian.

But we are not convinced that the syllable “ba” means ‘as’. In the verse, bə·’êl appears to be a single word, which is very similar to ba’al, the Canaanite or Phoenician deity. As is well known, vowels were not used in the earliest Hebrew texts. So, in the original (now lost) ancient sources, the names bə·’êl and ba’al may have been one and the same.

Even today, the English refer to their earls and dukes as Lord this, or Lord that. Similarly, in Biblical days, these names of gods, such as El, Ba’al and even Yahweh, were used as titles applied to human leaders. Such generic names were also attached to the names of local and regional patron gods such as Ba’al Hadad. This has the effect of placing the leader’s status and ear close to his god, and even allowing him to speak (to the gullible) as a voice for the god.

And though Shaddai is translated as ‘Almighty’, evidence seems to indicate that this name was originally that of the regional god of the mountains. This is clever obfuscation, like Moses muddying the waters of the Nile by turning it to blood. The intent was to merge many prior gods (including Shaddai) into the new singular god.

The new Judaic god was also known by many other names, about seventy according to some sources. Some of these multiple appellations were originally the names of this rising ‘alien’ god’s former pseudo-siblings within the Ugaro-Canaanite pantheon, while others may have merely been various respective aspects of some particular god. The Lord (Yahweh) Sabaoth (tsba’owt), for instance, is usually watered down today to the ‘Lord of Hosts’ (for example, Jeremiah 43:10, Amos 5:27). However, ‘host’ was a term that meant either an armed group, or one of a multitude of patron angels or stars. Typically, such a patron angel’s human followers were also addressed by the same name; as was the case with King Abimelech’s soldiers, who were referred to as tsbaians (Genesis 21:22).

Inasmuch as the Canaanite religion was resolutely polytheistic, the gods were also referred to collectively as Elohim, the plural form of El. This name occurs frequently in the Hebrew bible, but modern translators and interpreters are reluctant to consider the implications. Thus, today we see confusing claims that the words for ‘God’ and ‘gods’ mean the same thing. That is, in translations, the plural word ‘elohim’ for the prior sibling ‘gods’ is frequently conflated with the singular god name, ‘El’, as it is claimed now that the plural form (as left intact in the Hebrew texts) was always used in context as if it were singular.

According to the widely supported Kenite Hypothesis: the new and improved god, whose name was given to Moses as Yahweh (or Romanized to Jehovah), was indeed an ‘alien’ imported storm god from the northwest Arabian Peninsula, Edom and Midian. This God most likely arrived by means of caravan traders, such as the fabulously wealthy, erstwhile ‘nomadic shepherd’ Abraham. This all ties in with male ‘Yah’ based names which were found on clay tablets around the region of Abraham’s Harran and Urfa, in the correct time frame typically attributed to the narrative.

With Edom and the Kenites, we also have narrative linkages back to Abraham via Esau, the older, red haired and ruddy skinned brother of Jacob who was ‘tricked’ into selling his birthright to the younger brother. Later the Jews force the Edomites to convert to Judaism, and irony of ironies, we find that an Edomite, Herod the Great becomes a ‘hated and feared’ king of the Jews. His descendants become friends and lovers of the Romans, the latter’s elite tribe known as the ‘Sab’ines. Curious indeed.

On the other hand, many scholars (such as, for example, Igor Garshin) have suggested that ‘Yahweh’ stems from the ancient Indo-European root *dyēus or *déiwos, the sky god whose cognates include the Latin Jove, Greek Zeus, and Sanskrit / Avestan Daeva. (This Daeva, after the Zoroastrian reforms, became interpreted by the Persians as a fallen (former) God who had become a demon, or (in English) the Devil — once again emphasizing the intimate theological relation between good and evil, as explained by Isaiah 45:7 – best translated in the KJV). It may be that the Edomites and Midianites somehow borrowed this deity from an Indo-European source, or the Israelites might have borrowed the name more directly from an Indo-European neighbor. Such matters are, of course, very difficult to trace with any certainty. In any case, we assert that the Abraham narrative more than hints that Abraham and his god were indeed such aliens.

The so-called Merneptah Stele in Thebes, dated to 1219 BCE, mentions ‘Israel’ as an apparently Canaanite people and not as a place. Presumably the ‘el’ is appended to ‘Isra’ as a reference to the Semitic chief god, El, and the stele text does not mention Yahweh in association with them. However, it does refer to a ‘Yhw’ (in the land of the Shasu) which appears to scholars to be a place name and not a god, at least as a direct reference. The nomadic Shasu pastoralists are importantly considered to have been from the region of Edom. These peoples are also depicted on the stele as being captured by the Egyptians, presumably to become slaves, thus evoking the later depictions of the Hebrews as becoming slaves in Egypt.

Also, and perhaps importantly, the stele states that Israel’s “seed is not”, implying that the Canaanite populace of Israel has been severely depleted, if not eliminated altogether. Perhaps propagandic over-exaggeration, but this might also explain why the followers of Yahweh end up coming to dominance in polytheistic Canaan proper, and which we assert was done under the sponsorship of the greater powers of the region. Here, imagine the English later placing Englishmen and Lowland Scots Protestants into Northern (once Catholic) Ireland and sardonically calling them Scots-Irish.

Perhaps here is the reason for the later merging of the so-called E and J texts by the redactors with the motive to merge the two differing foundational accounts, and their respective Israelite and Shasu peoples, evidenced by contradictory doublets and more? We say yes. While there is scholarly debate still going on about this, we strongly believe that this is evidence of the redactors using the above as one means of merging two pre-existing gods (the Semitic El and the Indo-European and/or Kenite Yahweh) into one, and thus merging their followers as well. This, in our opinion, is likely to have all happened as late as the time of the so-called Babylonian Exile, and not during the alleged times of Moses and Joshua.

Thus we have an upstart god, from a seemingly rather remote region, taking over a slightly less backwater Judea, interposed between surrounding and much more powerful neighbors. Sounds like a recipe for some propagandic stew. And all done so where it will be an easier process to ‘convert’ the natives, so to speak, via their fewer numbers relative to the larger and more powerful surrounding countries.

A Hittite’s Journey

"James Tissot, Caravan of Abram circa 1900" — James Tissot, Caravan of Abram circa 1900

Before continuing on, we want to explain that we take the agnostic position as to whether such characters like Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar were real people, or just meaningful honorific avatars for what they represent, albeit strongly leaning towards the latter position. The same goes for the rest of the biblical Patriarchs, who are likely avatars for pre-existing peoples or tribes in the case of the sons of Jacob. Thus the dialectic relationships of such as Isaac and Ishmael, and between the various sons of Jacob, may represent the respective underlying political dynamics of the various narratives’ subtext. This subtext then is what is really important for analyzing later historical episodes in Western history.

Having said that, we note that the Old Testament itself provides a significant amount of information that appears to fix Abraham at a particular point in time and space. To begin with we find Abram, as we are told was his original name, beginning his life’s journey leaving Ur for a temporary way station called Harran (Genesis 11:31). It is frequently assumed that this Ur is the once magnificent ancient Euphrates river city of the Sumerians and/or the later Chaldeans, as some translations even embellish this as “Ur of the Chaldees”. But Gordon states that it is much more likely that Abram’s Ur should properly be taken as today’s Urfa in southeastern Turkey. As was frequent then, and even in more modern times, a remote trading outpost of an important city might be named after the sponsoring city, its very name helping to serve somewhat like a modern day billboard does to identify a brand or loyalty.

Urfa, or Şanliurfa, which was also known in Medieval times as Edessa, is also claimed by Muslims as the city of origin of Abraham. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Şanlıurfa.) During the First Crusade a major contingent headed by Baldwin of Boulogne, who later became king of Jerusalem, made an odd detour to Edessa. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_of_Edessa.) It was in Edessa that architecture already existed that became the model and inspiration for the Gothic cathedrals soon sponsored by the Templars in Europe (Adrian Gilbert, Magi, pp. 245-247.) We do not believe any of this is coincidence, but rather we note that Edessa is one of the most ancient and renowned archaeological sites on the planet, if you include nearby Göbekli Tepe, the oldest temple complex known, only a few kilometers to the north. And the Edessa/Urfa area has long been revered among elite occultists, as well as being the seat of several very early Christian Churches outside of Roman orthodox mainstream.

Amorite Who?

In the seemingly obscure and unrelatable comment of Ezekiel’s, we are left to ponder just who these Amorites are, as the Hittites are relatively better known today as an early expansionist state, perhaps a proto-empire. It seems that these ‘northwest’ Semitic peoples are the connecting historical thread, from which the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Ugarites, and the Canaanites, to name a few, descended.

Fitting with the overt shepherd motif of Abraham, the clay tablets reveal the Amorites as rude pastoral nomads. Yet on the other hand, the some Amorites apparently in amorous conjunction with the Hittites, rise to considerable prominence, most notably Hammurabi who gave us the first known legal code.

From Amos 2:9 they are taken by many to have literally been giants in physical stature, but we assert that this really means that they were metaphorically powerful giants in terms of their geopolitical influence for the day – consistent with our thesis.

They occupied areas southward into Canaan such as Jerusalem and Hebron, the latter of which became the Hittite trading colony.

Later in the Abraham narrative, we find him leading a trading caravan into the Hittite trading colony of Hebron just south of Jerusalem where he, near his end, even buys a plot to bury himself and his kin (Genesis 23). He is immediately recognized as a man of great import amongst the Hittites there. As Gordon related, all of this fits very accurately into the cultural milieu of the respective regions and times, and Ezekiel later states that Abraham’s descendants, in Jerusalem, are half Amorite and half Hittite (Ezekiel 16:3). As was the practice of the day, such colonies were somewhat like modern day embassies in how any such colony’s land was treated, and therefore it is rather unlikely that the Hittites would sell him a plot of land for burial unless he was an important one of their own. Here, and in the future, it will be helpful to consider that the Hittite elites were like a caste, and not of the same ethnicity as the common man and woman (more likely Hurrians). This is similar to the Norman rule over the majority Anglo-Saxons in England, an historically very common practice.

According to conventional wisdom (that is, Wikipedia), the Hittites are believed to have arrived in Anatolia sometime before 2000 BC, but the Mittani conquered the region around Edessa circa 1500 BC. After the fall of the Mitanni about 1300 BC, it once again became Hittite territory. The Hittites and so-called Neo-Hittites continued to control the region until it fell to the Neo-Assyrian empire around the 9th century BC. Chronological dead reckoning based exclusively on Biblical data gives an estimate that Abraham entered Canaan from Harran in 1921 BC (Floyd N. Jones, Chronology of the Old Testament), which would be consistent with Hittite rule in the region.

Josephus (following Manetho) suggested that the Israelite sojourn in Egypt should be equated with the Hyksos period of foreign rule in lower Egypt. Following that suggestion, Ralph Ellis (in Jesus, Last of the Pharaohs) noted a sequence of (arguably) significant relationships between the names of the Hyksos pharaohs, and the names of the Hebrew patriarchs. For example, Abraham’s name may be compared to the pharaoh now known as Sheshi, whose ‘throne name’ may be read as Mayebra, or perhaps ayebra-M. Sheshi’s grandson was Jacobaam, which is reminiscent of Abraham’s grandson Jacob. If this is correct, Abraham (as Sheshi) would be dated to ~1630 BC according to conventional chronology. If (as commonly held) the Hyksos were Phoenician or Canaanite or Danaanite or other ‘Asiatic’, nevertheless it is possible that their leadership was at least partly Hittite, consistent with the text of Genesis and Ezekiel.

For our analysis (fortunately), the determination of the exact time and place, and the identification of the Biblical characters with archaeologically identifiable situations, is not so important as what we can discern about their political and social intent, simply by reading the text with a critical eye.

Priestly Wizards and Armed Shepherds

As we have noted above, Abraham was not some sheepish ragamuffin on the make as is commonly conceived, but rather he was in command of a large retinue of armed and trained servants. Such servants might also be known as tsabians, tending to the livestock moving along with his caravan, such as those controlled by Abraham’s counterpart, King Abimelech. As noted by regional archaeological finds, this was typical practice in the time attributed to Abraham, in order to protect the herds and caravan from both human marauders and animal predators.

And back in Urfa we are also just a few miles away from Harran, where Abraham is said to have first briefly moved to, along with his father and uncle, before moving onto Canaan. Let’s also pause in Harran to ponder another biblical conundrum, rather akin to pondering the logical absurdities of Adam and Eve’s sons’ curious begetting problem, namely that in having only one woman around to beget with. Here, we are told that Abraham is the ancestral father of the Hebrews and the Arabic Semites, yet he has 318 servants and ‘household’ retainers at his disposal. Typically, a caravan’s retinue is a family affair, or mostly a family affair. What to make of these servants and retainers then? What of their offspring, or are we supposed to believe they were eunuchs? If this is not weighing heavily on you, then …. why not?

Slave or Saved?

We recall that Jesus Christ, the Flavian savior, stated that the ‘truth will set you free’. So in regards to the sab root, we also note that the ‘b’ and ‘v’ letters were cognate. Does it follow that the term ‘savior’ indicates that gaining wisdom or knowledge is the real route to true freedom, as salvation, rather than via slavish blind faith?

Well, in Harran we are later told, extra-biblically, that this same city, dedicated to the moon god Sin, was occupied by a pagan cult of wizardly, star watching priests, called … Sabians, and curiously included in the Quran as members of the ‘Peoples of the Book’, along with Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians (and yes, their Magi). This phonetic root ‘Sab’ has a remarkable variety of possible sources. Indeed, its cross-cultural significance may have contributed to the mystique of the concept. In ancient Sumerian, saba means ‘shepherd’. In Semitic languages, the root word sab denotes seven, the number of ‘wisdom’, an astrologically significant number that might, as such, have been meaningful to the Harranian priests. The Proto-Indo-European root *sap-, ‘to taste‘, evolved to indicate a form of knowing, especially in Romance languages: for example, Spanish ‘saber’, ‘to know’ – a quality necessary for wisdom. Elsewhere ‘saber‘ is a form of sword. All just a coincidence we are told, .. and obviously there can be no association between ‘priestly wizards’ and ‘armed shepherds’, right?

In a previous post we related that the secretive Roman Mithraic mystery cult was focused on a zodiacal (starry and planetary) basis and targeted towards a military demographic. (We also mentioned, by the way, the importance of Castor and Pollux as markers of the transition points of the Ages). And doesn’t this evoke such as the Templars, the Knights of Malta, the Jesuits, and even the Freemasons? And here this reminds us that the highly esoteric Shiite sect known as the Ismailis, Nazari or Seveners (Sabiyah), had an elite cadre of black ops wet workers famously known as the Assassins. This name was derived from hashashim, perhaps because of the hashish which they smoked during their famous and murderous training ritual, whose purpose was to help dupe the prospective operative that he would be well received in Heaven by 70 virgins.

The name ‘Nazari’ may be derived from the Nazarene sect of zealous Jews. And to our thesis, the Egyptian root, ‘NZR’ means ‘prince, and thus they all were followers of some (Egyptian?) prince, like their Hidden Mahdi perhaps. In any case, all of these groups have numerous parallels and linkages, with even the Templars having been accused by Christians and Muslims of having covert alliances with the Ismailis during the Crusades.

Perhaps a coincidence, or not: the much later pharaoh Necho II crossed the Euphrates in order to conquer this same Harran, as explained by Wikipedia:

Necho soon captured Kadesh on the Orontes and moved forward, joining forces with Ashur-uballit and together they crossed the Euphrates and laid siege to Harran. Although Necho became the first pharaoh to cross the Euphrates since Thutmose III, he failed to capture Harran, and retreated back to northern Syria. At this point, Ashur-uballit vanished from history, and the Assyrian Empire was conquered by the Babylonians.

Important to our larger thesis, Necho II also fought, seemingly defensively, against Judea’s King Josiah, who reportedly found the ‘missing’ texts from which the religious ‘reforms’ were launched upon the Canaanites cum Jews. Hilariously, the redactors report that Necho tells Josiah that God is with him:

…What have I to do with thee, thou king of Judah? I come not against thee this day, but against the house wherewith I have war: for God commanded me to make haste: forbear thee from meddling with God, who is with me, that he destroy thee not. Nevertheless Josiah would not turn his face from him, but disguised himself, that he might fight with him, and hearkened not unto the words of Necho from the mouth of God, and came to fight in the valley of Megiddo. (2 Chronicles 35:21-22 KJV)

Needless to say, Josiah didn’t get the message from God (err … uhmm … Necho), and paid the ultimate price, and thus became the trope with which to hang the Judaic so-called ‘reforms’ upon, including the Abraham narrative’s spin. Of course, the faithful say that this was a sinful boast by Necho, but instead it is more likely telling us what really happened when reading between the divine lines, especially since this is the Jewish canon telling us so. In any case, this may be the ultimate example of “No good deed goes unpunished”.

Hittite Typology?

Back with Abraham, the portable princely merchant: after briefly stopping in Canaan, his new base, he takes his caravan on to Egypt. This is perfectly logical for a caravan based operation – given Egypt’s wealth and need for international trade. Once he and his wife arrive, he garners an audience with the conveniently unnamed pharaoh du jour. This might be yet another clue to the alert reader that Abraham is no ordinary piker. Here, while apparently engaging pharaoh in witty repartee, pharaoh espies the effulgent charms of 65-year-old Sarah and decides that she is worthy of adding to his harem of wives and concubines (Genesis 12:10-20.) In the course of such domestic affairs, of course, pharaoh came to know Sarah in the biblical way. Abraham carries away a ton of booty as pimply quid pro quo for sampling Sarah’s booty, and then God inscrutably decides to punish ‘pharaoh’ for such an abomination, which was not his fault by the way. This punishing the innocent seems to be becoming a habit.

But this would not be a quandary if we could believe the stated justification, that Abraham was afraid that ‘pharaoh’ would kill him if he knew that Sarah was his wife. This begs a simple question as well, namely, that if Abraham was aware of such a possibility then why didn’t he simply leave Sarah back at his Canaanite base camp with a few of his ‘household’ retinue? Could it be that he didn’t trust his staff, or Sarah, or both? Or, are we having our legs pulled?

Here, we are also immediately reminded of the later story of King David who desires the beautiful Bathsheba, and thus has her husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed in battle (2 Samuel 11.) Well, with this being the case, maybe one might be inclined to simply say that Abraham’s fears appear to have been justified. But we’re thinking that now it’s even more important to ask: what it is with all these Hittites, and pharaohs, involved in these stories central to Judaism? Later there will even be a priest and a prophet both by this Hittite name, and these professions are involved in the later bloody attempts to convert the hapless Canaanites into Hebrews and Jews. Even earlier than David, Esau marries not one, but two half-Hittite women amongst his at least three wives (Genesis 26 and 36).

With this story, there is also a later sequel, where on a leg of another caravan journey, Abraham admits to the lust besotted king Abimelech of Gerar that old Sarah is indeed both his sister and his wife (Genesis 20:1-16). This was a typical pharaonic marriage practice (along with motherly Oedipastery) whose purpose was to keep the matrilinear bloodline intact. Perhaps the inclusion of this tidbit was included to allow for Judaic denial that this matrilineal practice (that one’s legal ethnic claim to being a Jew descends from the line of the mother – as well as from Shem, who was a … man) did not derive from Egypt, because Abraham was already doing so? Once again, Abraham rides away from this ‘exchange’ considerably wealthier.

Also, before we go further, let’s also remember that Abraham had many concubines, at least by the time of his second wife, Keturah, from whom ol’ Abraham begat even more children (Genesis 25:1-6). The sons of the concubines were kindly given unspecified gifts and sent away from Isaac, to the ‘east’ and thus away from the divine blessing. No wonder conservatives get upset about decaying Family Values.

Lot’s Location, Location, Location

Once back from Egypt, Abraham gets settled, nomadically speaking, into Canaan. Both he and Lot become even more prosperous, the latter from his association with Abraham, who has already received an unconditional blessing from God (Genesis 12:1-3) for his descendants and kin. But, this mutual prosperity is problematic for the uncle and nephew, as their respective herds and people can’t share the same lot (Genesis 13). Therefore, Abraham lets Lot decide what real estate he would prefer to occupy, and Lot thus chooses the otherwise prime land of the well watered Jordan plain, that just so happens to come with the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot thus pitches his tent “towards Sodom”. This is what happens when you don’t employ a good real estate agent, for we think you all know what is to eventually come to pass. Abraham, by the way, chooses to set up conveniently in Hebron, the Hittite trading colony.

One now has to wonder why, if Abraham and Lot could work out their differences so easily, with other heathen peoples’ land: why is it that God, or his angels, failed to warn Lot about the ‘covenants, codes, and restrictions’ that came with this doomed real estate? But obviously, that would interfere with the plot, so to speak.

For some odd reason, with Lot’s mutually agreed geographical separation from Abraham’s blessing, he ‘haplessly’ falls into the middle of an armed rebellion (Genesis 14). Four vassals, including the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, have joined an uprising against the Elamite king, Chedorlaomer. The rebellion is defeated, hapless Lot is taken hostage by Chedorlaomer, and Abraham must now come to rescue him. After Abraham and his allies defeat Chedorlaomer, and rescue Lot, the king of Sodom tells Abraham that he can take all of Sodom’s goods (which had been taken by Chedorlaomer) and that he only wants his people back. Abraham refuses this gratitude with the excuse that he doesn’t want to later be falsely accused of enriching himself. This an odd claim, especially in light of his adventures with pharaoh and king Abimelech, where he has no such qualms about enriching himself where his wife/sister is ‘involved’.

In consequence, Abraham receives a curious blessing from the apparent priest/king of Salem (Jerusalem), Melchizedek. This act is recorded apparently to retrojectively legitimize Jerusalem’s divine status from the claimed time of Abraham, though why a supposed heathen would be granting such legitimacy is rather curious. Wasn’t God’s later ‘blessing’ enough? Apparently not. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that in Psalms (47:2, 57:2, 78:35, 56) God is addressed as Yahweh Elyon, where we understand that El is the heavenly god of the Canaanite / Ugaritic pantheon, thus the Abraham narrative is being grafted into the Canaanite divine root. This is a hint that the redactors’ audience still understood the existence and function of the prior priest/king Melchizedek.

As we mention later, Lot’s fortune is tied up intimately with his proximity to Abraham’s blessing. After being rescued, he goes to live within the city limits of Sodom, with his ‘interesting’ daughters.

Another Miss Conception?

V0034436 The childless Sarah presents Hagar, her handmaid, to her husband Credit: Wellcome Library, London. — The childless Sarah presents Hagar, her handmaid, to her husband (Wellcome Library, London)

One of the more curious aspects of the Abraham narrative cycle is the matter of ol’ Sarah being unable to conceive, and thus Abraham must resort to the business of genetic succession via conscripting the ‘unhired’ help. This is another otherwise accurately depicted cultural practice for the period based upon such as the clay tablets found at Nuzu. In this case, he mates with the bonded (slave) Egyptian maid, Hagar (Genesis 16). The elderly Abraham is successful here in siring Ishmael. Only after this is done, God decides to make good on one of his promises to Abraham and thus performs some supernatural wizardry for the 89 year old Sarah to conceive and give birth to Isaac (Genesis 21:1-3), whose son Jacob is later to be called ‘Israel’ (Genesis 32:28).

When told of this absurdly late pregnancy at age 89, both Abraham and Sarah laugh at the suggestion’s seeming impossibility. While Sarah’s sarcastic laughter is taken as a lack of faith by God, for some reason Abraham’s similar reaction passes without note. The motif is completed etymologically with Isaac’s very name, yitzchaq, which means laughter. We can only see a very narrow caste [sic] of characters seeing humor in this, based upon the widespread suffering that has followed.

Given all the odd clues, we are now left to wonder whether it really was Abraham that begot Isaac. Perhaps it was the great Egyptian Pharaoh, either in his own right or via his typological stand-in Abimelech (who claims to have righteously avoided mating with Sarah, in spite of having had every opportunity to do so.) We assert that this is exactly what is implied, and thus that this really cements and/or memorializes a long term geopolitical plan hatched by the Egyptians and the Hittites, who in actuality made amends after the Treaty of Kadesh, including a marriage. Of course, there are huge chronological problems here, and there is no reason to associate the Abraham story with this particular treaty. But some similar sequence of events may be what is hinted at by the claim that Sarah became pregnant at such a late age, and that both Sarah and Abraham laughed at the idea. At least, the hint is that one should not be taking the narrative at face value. As we have learned with such as Caesar’s Messiah, there is no need for absolute, literal chronological accuracy, in either a complete fiction or in ‘quasi-historical propaganda’. Perhaps this is a sign to the alert by the author / redactors that this is all an epic put on.

The proceedings are also marked by the curious change of Abram’s and Sarai’s names to Abraham and Sarah, signifying their new foundational roles, or missionary positions if you will. This last then begs the question of what really were their implied prior roles, as if we need to be informed of this by a change in their names. Here we are hinting at the prequel to the ‘western’ Abraham story that we mentioned before and we hope to address later.

You Submit, I Submit, We All Submit for I Scream

With this scandal, the redactors and their sponsors foreshadow a future of seemingly unending familial enmity between Jews and Ishmaelites, at least. However, they ironically left two glaringly incoherent and contradictory versions in the text, side by side (Genesis 16). The ‘J’ version leaves the Ishamaelites in an unredeemable state of sin, while ‘P’ elevates Hagar from slave/maid status to being a polygamous second wife, with Sarah encouraging the affair. And furthermore, according to ‘P’, Abraham ends up naming the child.

Wright suggests (pg. 365) that the Persian ‘P’ redactors, at the time, were interested in elevating the status of the Ishmaelites with respect to the Judeans, for the sake of harmony in the new Persian empire. We also note that they strangely included the contradictory ‘J’ text as well, perhaps because too many were familiar with it. Muhammad later exploited the contradictory text to further exalt the status of his Arab followers: as Ishmaelites, he argued, they were legitimate heirs to Abraham. That is, as long as they submitted to Allah, and sacrificed a beast at the Eid al-Adha.

While on the subject of marriage, it is also worth mentioning that Abraham’s patriarchal descendants, per the bible, practiced what is known as the ‘levirate’ form of a marriage contract. This is essentially a serious business arrangement, as opposed to the later cultural degeneracy of ‘romantic’ love introduced by the proto-masonic troubadours of Europe. Here, if a woman’s first husband should die, she has the marriage right to the entire succession of her mate’s male siblings, and even her father-in-law (as a creepy last resort), so as to ensure she and her offspring will be supported. We learn this from stories about Jacob and Judah, the latter being the father of the tribe of Judah. He participated in the levirate arrangement as the begetting ‘victim’ of a hilariously Machiavellian whopper of a proposition from Tamar, his daughter-in-law, who thus became the mother of Judah’s tribe (Genesis 38). At any rate, and according to Gordon, this levirate marriage practice is known from the Hittites, and also from India. However, it does not appear in the accounts of the Sumerians, the Assyrians, or other regional Semites, except for those said to descend from Abraham, i.e. the Hebrews and Ishmael’s Arabs. In other words, it is essentially an Indo-European rather than a Semitic cultural construct.

Gordon & Rendsburg (p. 130) points out here that the identification of the Patriarchs with Israel is a rather blunt hint that we should take this aspect (if not the entire Abraham cycle) as metaphor, in this case, for the genesis of a future ‘nation’. Which (we suggest) really means the creation of the foundational centerpiece of Western civilization (via human literary artifice and a few pinches of brutality) by a brotherhood of crafty ‘wise men’, trained ‘prophets’ and priests, standing in metaphorically for ‘our Lord(s)’, pharaoh and the Hittite king.

The importance of Ugarit

In 1928 a Syrian peasant plowed into a Mycenaean Greek tomb, and thus the ancient city known from the Amarna Letters was discovered. In 1929, clay tablets were discovered there revealing a previously unknown script. The tablets are discussed in Professor Cyrus H. Gordon’s 1965 book, The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilization, Chapter 5, titled “Ugarit: Link between Canaan and the Aegean”. In this long excerpt Gordon will introduce some bi-directional parallels, that were: “notable overlaps that could not be accidental.”

From pp. 128-131:

Ugarit is of unique importance for reconstructing the origins of Western Civilisation. The reason is reflected in the nature of the discovery that called attention to the site in 1928. A Mycenaean tomb in the vicinity of a Semitic port meant that the area was one in which the people of Canaan and the Aegean had commingled. The archaeological finds at Ugarit brought this out quite clearly, and comparative archaeologists soon used those finds for studies of Mycenaean civilisation embracing Crete, the Peleponnesus and other parts of the Greek sphere. The late Miss H. L. Lorimer, in her notable book, Homer and the Monuments(London, 1950), went further: she drew heavily on the archaeological finds at Ugarit for illuminating problems arising from the text of Homer. However, she did not make a single reference to any of the Ugaritic texts, even though it seems obvious in retrospect that if the art of Ugarit is related to the text of Homer, the epics found at Ugarit ought to be still more directly related to the epics of Homer. The long delay in recognizing this important fact was due to the circumstances that Semiticists, and not Classicists [Gordon was uncommonly both – ed.], deciphered and interpreted the Ugaritic tablets. Those Semiticists were admirably equipped for pointing out biblical parallels, but most of them were unconcerned about the Greek side of the problem.

The scribes of Ugarit required an educational system to train them from the bottom up. The simplest school texts found there are ABC tablets listing the letters of the local alphabet in their fixed, invariable order. The Phoenician alphabet of twenty-two letters is derived from the longer Ugaritic ABC of thirty letters. Contrary to the strict alphabetic principle, the last three letters of the Ugaritic ABC are appendages so that twenty-seven remain for our consideration. Five sounds in the repertoire of twenty-seven came to converge with other sounds because of soundshifts in standard Phoenician. The remarkable fact is that when those five sounds are eliminated, the remaining twenty-two letters appear at Ugarit in precisely the same order as they are still preserved in the Hebrew alphabet. The traditional order of the Greek alphabet reflects its Phoenician origin. The Latin ABC is only a step further removed. Accordingly, whole blocks of letters (such as j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t) appear in the same fixed order in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. When an extra letter appears in Ugaritic (as in l, m, d, n) the order of the letters that survive into Hebrew is always the same (for the Ugaritic d is one of the five letters rendered unnecessary by the soundshifts mentioned above.

It stands to reason that the community that provides us with the most primary form of the ABC so far discovered should be of exceptional importance for the study of the cultures associated with the development and use of the ABC in the East Mediterranean. Aegean influences contributed to the Ugaritic ABC. Then the Ugaritic ABC gave rise to the Phoenician-Hebrew ABC, which in turn was borrowed by the Greeks. The centrality of Ugarit in the basic elements of East Mediterranean culture impresses itself on us again and again.

Ugarit was a city in the hands of a West Semitic community. By water, it joined Western Asia to the Mediterranean. It lay between the Hittite Empire and Canaan. It had enclaves of Assyrians, Hurrians, Hittites, Egyptians, Aegean folk and other foreigners. The polyglot nature of the community is mirrored in the vocabulary texts, whereby the scribal students learned to translate Ugaritic words into Sumerian, Akkadian and Hurrian. The two main scripts were the Akkadian syllabary and the Ugaritic alphabet: both written in cuneiform with a stylus on clay. The normal language for business, law, and diplomacy was Akkadian; the normal language for religion, literature, and local administration was Ugaritic. Hurrian was also used not infrequently for rituals and incantations. A few tablets in Cypro-Minoan attest the intimate connections with Cyprus, Egyptian and Hittite hieroglyphs round out the repertoire of scripts found at Ugarit.

The Ugaritic tablets come from the Amarna and Ramesside Ages (ca. 14th-12th centuries B.C.) in which the traditions of both the Hebrew Patriarchs and the Trojan War are rooted. More than any other excavated site, Ugarit was the meeting place Semite and Indo-European; a cosmopolitan city where a literature was produced reflecting the varied heritages of the component parts of the population. Ugaritic literature, therefore, anticipates basic aspects of the earliest Hebrew and Greek literatures, providing a historic backdrop for both, as we shall bring out later in this chapter.

The poetry of Ugarit is so close to Hebrew poetry that it has cleared up a mystery of long standing. It used to be thought that classical Hebrew was linguistically the creation of “primitive” Hebrew tribesmen, and that it was a sort of miracle for such tribesmen to produce a polished literature from the very start. It turns out that the Hebrews found in Canaan a highly polished literary medium, now attested by the Ugaritic myths and epics. The distinctive contribution of the Hebrews is the content of the Bible rather than the literary medium which they found waiting for them upon their advent in Canaan. In the Old testament, the Hebrews never call their language “Hebrew” or “Israelite,” but quite correctly “the language of Canaan.”

It should be noted that Gordon is writing long before the later archaeologists, such as Finkelstein have shown that the Hebrews and Israelites of the OT were indeed Canaanites. That had later been converted through various means, and that there is no evidence for the enslaved sojourn in Egypt and subsequent Exodus, – as recorded at least. Therefore, the import of the last paragraph above is that the redactors of the Hebrew ‘Bible’ were able to make use of pre-existing texts, themes and motifs that were already long existing and polished – just as was the case for the Greeks.

Gordon excerpt from pp. 132-135:

For twenty years after the first discovery of the Ugaritic tablets, a vast number of biblical parallels were pointed out by many scholars in many lands. In comparison, the Greek parallels went virtually unnoticed. Meanwhile, I had been noting literary resemblances between Ugaritic and Greek epic. In the briefest way, I mentioned the relevance of Ugarit for the study of Homer, in a publication of 1941. World War II interrupted my studies, but the break enabled me to return to them in 1946 with a fresh outlook instead of depending on “authoritative” attitudes. In gathering the Homeric parallels to Ugaritic literature, a striking fact impressed itself upon me: there was a notable overlap that could not be accidental. The two-way parallels unmistakably linked Homer and the Bible. The most important of these parallels had to do with the central themes of the Kret Epic. King Kret (named after the eponymous ancestor of the Cretans) had lost Hurrai, his only wife destined to bear him the children who would carry on his line. Accordingly, he mustered an army and marched to the land whee she was being held, and recovered her so that the divine promise of predestined progeny could be fulfilled.

This theme is completely lacking in the older literatures of the ancient East, including the Gilgamesh Epic, and the Middle Egyptian Romances. On the other hand, the Helen of Troy motif is central in Indo-European epic, both in Greece and India. I refer to the hero who must recover his destined wife from here abductors. The divine promise of progeny through the destined wife is central in early Hebrew literature from Abraham and Sarah on, though this too is alien to the older Near Eastern literatures, such as the Gilgamesh Epic or the Egyptian stories. Moreover, the biblical narratives themselves assumed a new aspect because of the Ugaritic parallels. The destined bride of Abraham, was twice wrested from him, once by the King of Egypt and once by the King of Philistine Gerar. (The latter king, or one of his subjects, also came close to wresting Rebecca from Isaac.) But the hero Abraham retrieved the destined mother of his royal line, both times. In other words, the Helen of Troy motif permeates the Patriarchal Narratives of Genesis, but no one noticed it because ingrained attitudes kept our Greek and Hebrew heritages in water-tight compartments. Ugarit, being new and not part of our traditional heritage, was able to bridge the gap between Homer and the Bible. We shall note more of these triple parallels (Ugaritic, Hebraic, and Greek) in this and the following chapters.

I pointed out a group of Ugaritic and other Near East parallels to Greek epic in the American Journal of Archaeology 56, 1952, pp. 93-94. …

As we have already observed, the whole subject of early Greco-Hebrew relations is touchy. While a galaxy of Classicists, Orientalists, and Biblical scholars have understood and elucidated various aspects of the problem, the academic rank and file tend to shun this kind of topic. It would be overoptimistic to expect at this time a universal understanding of the role of Ugarit in linking early Greek and early Hebrew literature. The subject is not for those who have developed a mental block before they examine the evidence. Nor have we any right to demand that every student of antiquity be perceptive in the field of comparative culture.

Note the mention of ‘predestined progeny’ by Gordon, which is the proper contextual usage of the NT term ‘Predestination of the Elect’ where many of today’s Christians all believe that they are all exalted members of the Elect, thus ‘predestined’ to be ‘saved’. This was a major aspect of contention between Protestants and Catholics, all a phony and deceptive argument, but in any case, it really meant that the human progeny of the elite were predestined to thrive over the not so predestined. Caveat Emptor.

Three paragraphs later he goes on regarding the Kret Epic of which was the first known example (at least at the time – maybe so even today?) of the Helen of Troy motif:

The scribes of Ugarit called the text “Kret” after the hero: a king, whose very name shows Cretan affinities. He had betrothed his rightful wife by paying the dowry, but she departed. The word “departed” is never used as a euphemism for “died.” Nevertheless, until I pointed out the Helen of Troy theme in this text, tb(c)t “departed” was taken to mean that Kret’s wife had died, and that the heroine of the Epic was, therefore, another woman. The element of romantic marriage whereby (no matter how polygamous the society, nor even the household of the hero himself) there is only one woman who counts in his life, is generally alien to the earlier literatures of the Near East. It comes in with the advent of the Indo-Europeans and appears at Ugarit and in the Bible (from Abraham to David) as well as in the Iliad.

One should be careful to distinguish between “romantic marriage” and the later courtly “romantic love” which did not enter the mainstream of western culture until the Chivalric Age via the troubadours. With the latter, elsewhere in the book Gordon discusses professional guilds of such singer-musicians and prophets who are ‘called’ to and fro to influence respective cultures. Sound familiar? Such guilds were in parallel with the building craft guilds, such the masons.

We conclude our overview of the Ugaritic texts with this quote from the Kret Epic regarding its Helen of Troy motif:

Sleep overcame him
And he lay down in a deep sleep
And he was disturbed, an in his dream El descended
In his vision the Father of Man
And he drew near while asking Kret:
‘Who is Kret that he should weep?
Or shed tears, the Good One, Lad of El?
Does he desire the kingdom of the Bull, his father,
Or sover[reignty like the Father of Ma]n?

‘Father of Man’, ‘Lad of El’? — Son of Man?

He Walks with Me and He Talks with Me, and …

The very first time that Yahweh interacted with humanity, he ended up evicting the first pair of uppity humans from Paradise for eating some forbidden fruit, albeit they were tempted to do so by a snake. After this, he genocidally wiped most everyone (his defective ‘mistakes’) out, that is, those not allowed onto Noah’s drunken party ark. So much for ‘Right to Life’ and Free Will. (Perhaps ‘Genocide’ is an epithet which only would apply if God were human.)

At a later theophany, God and two of his angels appear at Abraham’s tent during mid-day. This appearance of a god and two attendants is a common device found in Canaanite polytheism, suggesting that the uhmm … initial Canaanite (cum Jewish) audience would find this familiar. Here, Abraham makes a great show of hospitality to the creator of the cosmos and his angels — running around, tasking ol Sarah with baking leavened bread of the finest flour, selecting the proper animal for the feast, and then providing his guests cream and curds typical of a nomad then, and even today (Genesis 18:8, Isaiah 7:21-22).

This in contrast to Lot’s lesser ‘city’ hospitality (Genesis 19) to the same two angels where he miserly serves them unleavened bread, albeit that later that night he does offer up his virgin daughters to the Sodomites to abuse instead of granting the Sodomites’ request to biblically dally perversely with the angels. Not that the angels needed such generosity, as they soon proceed to make Lot’s offer moot by striking the Sodomites blind such that said Sodomites were now unable to even find Lot’s door, despite their best efforts to persist. Somewhere in all of this excitement, Lot’s virgin daughters get married, possibly officiated over by the angels, and here the angels tell Lot that he and his family must leave town. But, the new sons-in-law aren’t very impressed, even after witnessing the blinding of their fellow Sodomites, and thus decided to tragically stay behind.

Everyone knows the story about Lot’s wife not heeding the instruction to not turn around on the way out, and thus she is turned into a pillar of salt. But less commonly told is the story about how Lot goes to live in a cave with his now widowed and yet still virgin daughters, who immediately complain that “there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth.” Their virgin hormones must have been all aflutter from having been the target of such lusts, and then having suffered the immediate losses of their grooms. Accordingly, they decided to get Dad drunk and get themselves with child, not even waiting to mourn for Mom. Nothing is said about what the angels thought of all this, or that they might be bothered to have corrected the daughters’ mis-impressions about the availability of other men. But we can discern indirectly, at least, that God has punished them, and their descendants, by separation from Abraham once more.

However, the authors of the story seem to let us know their opinion, five times, by reversing the standard Semitic patriarchal useage of shakab (lie with). Usually a sober patriarchal man lies with (atop) his woman, but Lot’s daughters lied with him. And then similarly it is noted that the daughters name their resulting children and not Lot, contrary to custom. This episode seems to be a typological parallel with Noah’s strongly implied drunken dalliance with Ham. With both situations, the audience is warned of the need to be fruitful, consistent with good eugenic hygiene and divine order. Ham and Noah’s action had a multiplicative factor less than one, while Lot’s story is a reminder that impertinently hysterical women must not be allowed to assertively take advantage of otherwise good men, including their fathers. Hence those acts being sins. Since the coming conquests did need boots on the ground, family values needed to prevail, thus presaging Christ Augustus’s later Roman edicts.

The fateful offspring become the progenitors of Moab and Ammon. Once again, the sexual misdeeds and the renewed separation from Abraham’s blessing, do not bode well for the future. The tension between urban and rural plays out between Lot and Abraham, somewhat like it did before with Cain and Abel, and later between Joseph and his older brothers. Lot, not descended from Abraham, loses everything when he separates from Abraham, but regains it back whenever rescued by Abraham, who has the blessing. And, similar to the story with Noah and Ham, this narrative’s use of a sexual taboo is intended to reflect the enmity frequently seen in the biblical narratives (also witnessed ‘historically’ by the Mesha Stele inscription) between the new Hebrews and the Moabites and Ammonites. As mentioned earlier, this enmity will be reversed, at least for the Ammonites, once the final redactions are made. These redactions are typically labeled the ‘P’ texts, for ‘priestly’. But we think that maybe a better fitting appellation than ‘priestly’ is that of ‘Persian’, reflecting the latter’s desire for geopolitical harmonization within their nascent expanding empire, when the bulk of the redactions we’re discussing actually take place.

And when thou comest nigh over against the children of Ammon, distress them not, nor meddle with them: for I will not give thee of the land of the children of Ammon any possession; because I have given it unto the children of Lot for a possession. (Deuteronomy 2:19 KJV)

Whoops, what happened to all that incest business?

Furthermore, the lust of the Sodomites for the angels, is a curious typological reversal of the lust shown by the sons of God for the daughters of men found in Genesis 6:1-4. Until the time of the only begotten son of God, Jesus, these other sons of the sole God were the black sheep of the polytheistic family.

V0034231 Abraham and his men begin to circumcise themselves. Etching Credit: Wellcome Library, London. — Abraham and his men begin to circumcise themselves.
(Wellcome Library, London)

But with Lot and the angels we’re getting ahead of the story, as God and Abraham walk, talk, and dine on their yummy curds, while calmly discussing the coming executive punishment of the Sodomites and the Gomorrites (Genesis 18). Brave Abraham impertinently asks the divine one to scale back the punishment just a notch, which results in the angels’ intercessionary action with Lot and his family just mentioned. But just before this negotiation, God provides Abraham (and extended to his descendants) with a contract giving them the land of Canaan. In return for this, God asks only that the ‘Hebrews’ need to trim their eight day old boy parts as a thankful ‘sign’ of perpetual acknowledgement.

In reality, circumcision is a form of ‘branding’ of the new flock, and in such an extreme form as to make a non-Jewish adult male think twice about converting — especially after hearing about the later Shechem massacre, the Day of the Bloody Cocks (Genesis 34:13-31). But, eight day olds don’t have much of a say-so in their own genital mutilation. Of course, there was no later problem with ‘gentile’ women wanting to convert, especially as they came to like hearing about Mosaic monogamy, to the further chagrin of ‘gentile’ males. And most importantly, this perverse branding is also telling us who your real Daddy is, considering that similar mutilation was a pharaonic practice. More on this below, and in later posts we’ll cover more about the pharaohs and other Egyptian aspects that curiously ended up in Judaism.

But wait, there is more than just circumcision. God also demands an extensive period of slavish travails in Egypt and the ‘Wilderness’ desert, before the Promised Land is given to them for conquest. The boundaries of this bequest just happen to entail the ideal limits of the alleged Davidic and Solomonic states in the tenth century BCE, from the Nile to the Euphrates. How convenient for the redactors writing retrojectively in the 6th century BCE. As far as we know in reality, those boundaries have belonged only transiently to a few of the most powerful pharaohs, Tuthmoses I and III, and Necho II. Seriously, we’re supposed to believe that Judea and Israel’s western boundary extended to the Nile, when practically no evidence can be found for David or Solomon’s mere existence, even in Palestine today? Certainly no evidence that remotely comes close to the biblical depictions for wives, concubines, and wealth that could only equate to a pharaoh.

In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: (Genesis 15:18)

And with this First Covenant promise necessarily comes the promise that Abraham, in his mid-eighties, will have descendants needed to populate the Promised Land. Despite the fact that old Sarai is later enabled to conceive, first Abram (his name at the time) is steered so as to “come into” Hagar, his Egyptian (wink, wink) slave wife, and beget Ishmael, the claimed patriarch of the Semitic Arabs. But if old Sarai is later ‘enabled’ to get with child, what was the need for the whole business with Hagar and Ishmael? The intent can only be to foreshadow everlasting family trouble ahead. Thus, the authors are announcing that they have proudly set the entire bloody stage for the next three plus millenniums. Shades of the Abraxis? It’s then all cemented by a celebratory first sacred barbecue where this god then appears to Abraham yet again (Genesis 15:8-17).

Also, this so-called First Covenant (from an odd Christian perspective) was actually preceded by a covenant with … uhmmm Noah, where the eternal divine blessing, originally granted to Adam and Eve (in an even prior covenant), is reiterated to Noah (Genesis 9:1-17) for which the regenerated Post-Flood humanity should eat the flesh of all the animals and must not commit murder or blood shedding any more (but mere killing of humans is apparently OK.) Furthermore, they must agree, again, to go forth and multiply. It seems that Fruitless Buggery or Onanism is only implicitly disallowed at this point until either Abraham’s or Moses’s time. The ‘sign’ of Noah’s contract (for all of humanity’s sake) is that of the rainbow, rather less dramatic (pain-wise at least) than that of circumcision, where the divine ante has been upped for the Hebrews. For with Abraham’s contract an exclusively Elect status (not yet made global until Isaiah’s time) has been conferred upon the Hebrews, thus requiring a higher quid pro quo exchange. By Moses’s time, not only is there circumcision to deal with, but the Hebrews are further restricted from eating certain animals that God had previously told everyone else were perfectly acceptable to eat. If nothing else, at least now we know why there are so many Jewish lawyers.

But before we go farther, we must first acknowledge that all of the varied pre-Abramic stories before this ‘foundational’ contract are not only supposed to be talking about all of humanity, but as well, these are all cribbed and modified (including morally inverted) from the Mesopotamian cultural library. For example, the story of Noah’s flood was taken from Gilgamesh: see Gordon & Rendsburg, The Bible and the Ancient Near East, pp. 50-51. Similarly, Moses’ later Ten Commandments were taken and revised from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And the earliest, such as the conflicting Creation narratives, are clearly metaphorical interpretations, as were the originals. Indeed there is an ‘inversion’ from some of the originals: in the Mesopotamian versions the city dwellers are good and the rural shepherds are suspect, while with the Judaic version just the opposite, e.g. David.

In other words, such divine claims as occur in the Old Testament had been the standard bolster for statecraft for thousands of years prior, albeit those prior divine depictions were much more skewed to a mythic nature. And as discussed in the introductory post, the entire OT presents itself as the first known linear ‘history’ transitioning from an epic character to an annalistic one. Curiously with the various subnarratives such as Abraham’s, one notices a rather laconic and matter-of-fact approach to the renderings of the otherwise eye popping circumstances. There is no character development and little if any emotional content, except oddly to laugh at God’s audacious fertility magic.

Apologists have made incorrect claims of uniqueness for the OT in that there is no mythic aspect within, no divine soap opera that is. Robert Wright, in The Evolution of God (pp. 118-120) demonstrates that this is not the case. Instead, the ‘godly’ enemies of God have been incongruently reduced to mere mundane geographical features, simply by altering the treatment of the opposing god’s name. For example, at Psalms 74:13, Yamm the Canaanite sea god is generically converted to yamm, the mundane ‘sea’. Hence, God is made to seem as batty as Jesus getting mad at a barren fig tree, by God’s doing battle with the literal sea. But even if we accept the case that God is growing up or evolving on paper, via redactions and edits, we are left with the rather bizarre earthly soap opera of Abraham’s caste of characters, including his anthropomorphic God, whose very name Abraham doesn’t know.

The real literary uniqueness of the Old Testament is its seamlessly linear transition from the epic and obviously metaphoric style to the annalistic historical presentation of the drama of Israel and Judea. That their synthetic Hebrew populations are Providentially ‘Chosen’ sets them apart from all other humanity. Ironically, the canon goes on to record that the Chosen are repeatedly unable to carry out the terms of the contract. Typically, such ‘honest’ accounting of failures is taken as sure evidence of veracity, as opposed to otherwise typical propagandic aggrandizing. Very clever of the authors. However and ironically, the Patriarchal examples seem more often to lead by negative example, ostensibly to be addressed by Moses’ reforms. But even then, the Hebrews can’t get their act together. Knowing their god’s propensity for acting out, we have to wonder if this may really be an early case of ‘planned obsolescence’? In a later post, we will argue that this is indeed the case.

With this first covenant, we should be able to discern that we are not dealing with any sort of ‘historical’ account. Rather, we are dealing with matters of immediate and pivotal political import to the much later author/redactors(s). Paying attention to such matters, they lose sight of maintaining their new god’s coherence of claims for moral superiority, judgement of character, and such. It is here that later so-called gnostics somewhat correctly discerned that the god of this covenant had some severe character flaws of his own. Thus, the gnostics also argued that ‘God’ (rechristened as the ‘Demiurge’) and his fellow odd cast of characters were merely apt metaphors for our underlying material reality of necessarily clashing opposites. However, we assert that we are rather looking at a complete narrative fabrication, a propagandic historical novel, if you will. The purpose is the fabrication of a synthetic ‘nation’, to use as a clever foil to advance a deeper hidden agenda. We’ll see its mirror image in the creation of Lycurgan Sparta, and even similar versions in modern day North Korea and Israel (the latter curiously not named ‘Judea’ by the replacement Ashkenazi ‘Jews’). The populace of all these states are unfortunate and unwitting tools of the global elites.

For if Judea and Israel were not such foils, then what to make of their god’s curious employment of them from then till now? As expressed by Isaiah’s Suffering Servant metaphor, the Jewish perspective is that they have been chosen to Atone, by their suffering, for the ultimate betterment of mankind. If we grant that in some sense that this is true, then what to make of certain other ‘Elect’ peoples, namely the Romans and their far flung descendants, who have been profiting wildly from all this? And what does this curiously lazy God think about them?

The Egyptian, Hittite and Mesopotamian Mash-Up

And so what can the discerning rationalist take away from this odd and loopy narrative? First and foremost, we have a tale of a rich and powerful foreigner, a Hittite, entering into another’s land, based upon what has been told him by a god whose proper name he doesn’t even know. He is furthermore promised that his descendants will inherit this land after their spending a long and slavish sojourn in Egypt. He, Abraham, then proceeds onto Egypt where he outwits ‘pharaoh’ into sending him away with much more wealth after a ruse regarding his old yet irresistible wife. While both Abraham and his wife know that she is ‘literally’ too old to bear a child, God (wink, wink) performs some of his typical fertility magic and causes a metaphorical nation to sprout forth. Once Isaac is old enough this god tests Abraham’s loyalty by ordering him to sacrifice Isaac, and because this custom is apparently familiar to Abraham he attempts to fulfill the command, until this god releases him, and apparently all subsequent generations from this otherwise previously ho hum burden. Later on, during Abraham’s descendants’ sojourn in Egypt: Joseph, in cahoots with a later ‘pharaoh’, manipulates the markets during climatic feast and famine so as to enslave all the Egyptians and capture their wealth (Genesis 47).

Who makes this stuff up? Later the Christians would say, “It is absurd, therefore I believe?” Postflavians choose a different cliched metaphor: Abraham (like the drunken Noah) has no clothes. However, the very absurdity of it all does indeed seem to serve up an almost magical psychological spell on the credulous, while at the same time signalling the more avaricious insiders that there is much more to the story than meets the superficial eye. The subtextual messaging, on different levels of understanding, to the respective intended audiences is that there is a blessing, eternal or otherwise, conferred by the somewhat seemingly arbitrary and mysterious ‘grace’ of God (the veiled pharaoh > caesar > king > ‘powers that be’) for those that, despite the whopping moral misadventures of the Patriarchs, keep the faith and don’t ask too many uncomfortable questions. This latter is why whistle-blowing prophets are not welcome in their own land.

And on more reflection, there is a third audience for these seemingly bizarre and inane narratives. Skeptical and secular readers (who have always been with us, even in ancient times) are more likely to throw up their hands and proclaim it is all nonsense assembled by only ‘God knows who’. Thus, the subliminal messaging and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) embedded in the texts, have the opportunity to work their subconscious magic even with nonbelievers. This is the position that we (your authors) were in, and we have been surprised at the extent to which we have arrived at new insights in the process of researching and writing this post. No doubt there are still discoveries yet to be made.

Based upon the underlying details of this crazy (like a fox) fictive narrative, mocking its audience’s credulity, we will later argue that there was indeed a mashup of elite Hittites and Egyptians that eventually led to the Judeo-Christian synthesis and our current sad state of hyper-polarized affairs. Its compilers and redactors, acting like modern day authors of historical fictions, profitably made use of pre-existing ‘historical’ materials, textual scrolls and steles, etc.. to craft the narrative basis for what has driven, even till today, the proverbial Winds of Moriah. The story of Abraham and the Patriarchs represents the synthetic creation of a national and allegedly divinely driven mythos, apparently drawn from what must have been a much more mundane tale of an elite earthly family on a pilgrimage of conquest. This narrative was then weaved into a grander, global scheme, as we shall see.

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Revision history: This is the first revision of the original post, which appeared Aug. 30, 2015. The authors have attempted to improve the readability, and to provide better contextual support of the various details discussed. The original is here.

‎The ‘Genesis’ of Western False Dialectic in the Old Testament

Richard Stanley and Jerry Russell

August 20, 2015

1200px-Jerusalem_temple4 — "Jerusalem temple4" by Johnreve

This post is the introduction to a series focusing on the origins and intentions of the Old Testament using our Postflavian lens of materialist, rationalist and skeptical interpretation. Our goal below is to provide a clear contextual explanation for the major narratives, by examining the underlying concepts employed by their authors and redactors. Then with this new framework in mind, we will be more able to see what actually transpired in those times, as opposed to what we are commonly led to believe. We have provided a concise summary of our major analysis results found here.

The scope of this series includes, among others, the tales of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David and Solomon, the Divided Monarchy, and the Babylonian Exile. These narratives formed the core of the Judaic Temple Cult, as it was provided to Judea under the Persians. This, in turn, became the basis of manipulation for the Seleucid Greeks, and then the Romans, in their ongoing efforts to integrate an ever evolving, new and ‘approved’ Judaism into an overarching social control mechanism.

We will discuss how the Old Testament (in addition to Homeric and Roman epic) also forms the synthetic basis of the primary false dialectic of Western civilization, namely that of the Gentile versus the Jew. Although we will show that both these ethnic categories originated as cynical contrivances, nevertheless they have a long life of their own. More broadly, we refer here to the continual battle of Greek, Roman, and later Christian peoples, on the one side, against the Jewish people and their later proxies, the Islamics, on the other. This is not to deny the existence of the broad categories of humanity such as the Semitic peoples, but rather our analysis reveals that under an assumed aegis of divinity the authors and redactors of the OT canon have made a profitable hash out of these categories – for their sponsors sake.

Of course, the world has not stood still since the sixth century BC, the apparent time of the major OT redaction. But despite all the world’s changes, the underlying drama has remained much the same. And even the changes that have occurred, have not necessarily been organic or unrelated. Instead, we believe these later developments to a large degree have been driven by the same global ambitions and so-called prophecies recorded in the ancient religious canons.

In any case, this contrived oppositional thread runs continuously through our collective historical narratives, since the time fictively attributed for Moses. This ever-simmering conflict keeps the majority distracted from what really matters, and constantly blaming institutionalized scapegoats for real or perceived problems. Just as the OT’s God used proxy agents of warfare and terror as elements of his “iron rod” to control outcomes then, the same is being done today.

The sad irony is that some modern day Jews complain that they have been, and still are, made scapegoats for the evils of ‘others’. We find this ironic because we assert that this was indeed the assigned role of the Jewish people from day one of their troubled existence. The role was created by the ‘real wise guys’, the Persian clerical redactors of the Old Testament, and likely building upon the prior efforts of the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians before them. In carrying out this assignment, the Jews have been encouraged by their various prophets (such as Isaiah) and later rabbis to collectively adopt the mantle of the Suffering Servant, ostensibly for atonement’s sake and the eventual betterment of all humanity. Importantly, this very same victimological mantle was claimed by Christianity for Christ.

We believe that the Judaic, and then the Christian narratives, their respective theologies, and even their ethnic identities, have been progressively tweaked so as to continually pit otherwise similar (or maybe even otherwise identical) groups of ordinary ‘common’ peoples against each other. This tweaking was masterfully done via numerous sleight-of-hand techniques ranging from the literary domain to various psychological and physical brutalities, not a few of which have been put to use again in more modern times. During this entire process, the guilty oligarchs du jour have remained disguised behind the scenes.

Did You Say No Bondage, or No Bonding?

Studies today have shown that ‘breaking bread’ together is a great way to increase social bonding and done so within the work sphere to improve group performance because of greater co-operation. In Greco-Roman times, at least, different social groups would commonly dine together, apparently because they understood this bonding advantage. However, under the banner of obeying their god’s ‘new’ strict dietary laws, the Jews were prohibited from such social dining practices – only with non-Jews that is. And oddly doing so at a time when they were actively proselytizing for converts amongst the goyim, the so-called ‘Gentiles’.

With the Mosaic Law and the Pentateuch, we find the achievement of a radical new society with hundreds of its laws and customs inverted from those of the surrounding ‘heathens’ such as Egypt, and even from those of the surrounding fellow Semitic tribes (Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, pp. 55-74). The combination of these new laws and customs, the nationalistic narrative of the Torah, and the new god Yahweh, made this new society of transformed heathens into an exclusively ‘chosen’ Elect. Both the people and their god went provocatively against the grain of tolerantly syncretistic polytheism which prevailed before Yahweh came on the scene. But with his demands for singular fealty, and his ‘lovingly’ wielded carrot and iron rod, ‘Yahweh’ was able to pull his people together and hold them together, even against all odds.

So, let us reflect on what happens when such a group is set high up on a pedestal, while rejecting all others’ customs and cultures. Hmm… How to lose friends and enrage enemies? Granted that many, such as pagan women, found attractive features (for instance, monogamy) in this radically new religious and social paradigm. A variety of such forms of Judaism eventually attracted approximately 10 percent of the Roman Empire’s population. But later on we’ll see that the Romans also portrayed themselves as another exclusive set of chosen people. They played a seemingly opposite game of overtly merging others’ gods, and then even the Jews’ god, who finally supplanted all the others. That is, the Homeric and Roman polytheistic religious traditions and philosophy were syncretized with Judaic monotheism to form Christianity. This, in time, became the dominant religion of the entire Empire, and remains as the central cultural pillar for the West till today, despite much secularization.

At the same time as they created Christianity, the Romans purposely left a remnant of the Jews as a controlled opposition to themselves. Of course the radically ‘conservative’, violent and nationalistic Jewish sects were purged, as they had taken the Biblical propaganda too seriously. In their place, the Romans created Rabbinical (Talmudic) Judaism as a unified and defanged successor. This not only solved the immediate challenges of the day, but was also useful throughout the Roman empire, and for many years yet to come. This is how elites typically and systematically co-opt and control the masses, via such tried and true human shepherding techniques.

Yahweh Who?

In the Old Testament narrative, the prior gods of the region were absorbed into Yahweh. And, as well, Yahweh was promoted in rank by equating him with the Canaanite heavenly god, El. The redactors ultimately pretended that this was always the case, but hints of the gradual transformation were retained in the texts. The earliest sources claim that Yahweh was now preeminent amongst his other sibling gods, while later texts proclaim that all those same other gods had always been false. With an ultimate desire to impose a new and universal religious paradigm on a global basis (as per the canonic ambitions), the use of a new, externally sourced god, Yahweh, seems appropriate. As we discuss further on, this is frequently memorialized by use of the ‘younger son’ metaphoric trope for the Patriarch’s narratives.

The actual source of this name ‘Yahweh’ is far from clear, as some scholars trace it to Edomite or Midianite origins, while others suspect a relationship to the ancient Indo-European god *déiwos, also known as Jove and Zeus. And yet Jews and Christians also still pay allegiance to ‘Amen’. (Regardless of how this latter benediction is translated or interpreted, it is also the name of the most preeminent deity of Egypt, who came to subsume all others in the era of the New Kingdom.)

Prior to this imposition of monotheism, societies warred against each other because of the vanities and ambitions of their rulers. However, their gods represented natural functions such as the stars and the weather. It was easy to see that all these respective gods were equivalent, even when they went by different names. Thus, we doubt that these earlier peoples went to war over those equivalent gods. But ever since this new and supposedly benevolent and loving god was styled the exclusive god of gods, there has been nothing but religiously based rancor and strife. There may have been something of a brief respite during the good ol’ Dark Ages of feudalism, when this single god reigned over all Western civilization, and everyone knew their fixed place in the Judeo-Christian caste system. Up until the Crusades, that is.

Today we are still contending with the legacy of this seeming mother of all cultural wars, which appears to stem from the idea that ‘Father loved us best’, and that those ‘others’ think they are too good to join us for supper. The conflict, of course, has grown more complex, as new players (such as the Islamics, and then Protestants of various types), have joined the fray. Geopolitical conflicts masquerade as theological disputes about the true nature of this overly particularist god, and whether one has had his foreskin clipped for him or not. While the latter aspect has been somewhat ‘bandaged over’, we are all still left with this god’s ‘next’ planned Apocalypse hanging over us like the Sword of Damocles. “We will all fry together when we fry”, in any universal holocaust — whether or not we feel ourselves individually under His sway anymore.

Jesse Who?

Alternatively, we may be subsumed into a global empire run by the elite, as all the nations are grafted into the root of Jesse. From Isaiah:

And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. (Isaiah 11:10-12 KJV)

Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in. (Romans 11:19 KJV)

So, who was this Jesse, and why was his son David anointed into Judaic royalty (1 Samuel 16)? Well, Jesse was the stated father of King David. He married a Moabite (hence non-Judaic) woman, Ruth, and David was their son. Thus even David violated the orthodox matrilineal laws for becoming a Jew. What then does this say about Solomon, or Jesus for that matter? Again, we find the categories are an artificial contrivance.

For readers new to Postflaviana, our name and central motif is focused and built around the premise delineated by Joseph Atwill, in his Caesar’s Messiah, which discusses that the Jesus Christ mythos was fabricated by the literary team of the Flavian emperors, especially including Josephus Flavius. The critical core of the Christian mythos being that the obscure ‘son of a carpenter’, Jesus of Nazareth, was actually a lineal descendant of King David, the son of Jesse. So if Jesus was actually a descendant of David and Jesse, then why did he need to be ‘grafted in’ to the lineage?

As such, among other things in these posts, we will be examining the Old Testament context around the legendary kings, David and Solomon, to see if the canonic narratives for them can really support the mainstream claims for them. To wit, were they truly furthering the unfolding earthly aims of the divine creator of the cosmos? Or, alternatively, were they serving some ‘other’ purpose?

As discussed in Caesar’s Messiah, the Flavian Roman Emperors had a little help from their elite ‘almost Jewish’ friends as they grafted themselves into the role of God’s chosen ones. As is widely known, Philo of Alexandria crafted the philosophical underpinnings of the merger of Judaism and Hellenism. His nephew, Tiberius Julius Alexander, exhibiting even less tribal loyalty to his clan of chosen people, led a Roman legion against the more traditional Jews of Palestine for the Flavians in the Jewish War. In that war, Josephus’s subtext in his accounts makes it clear he was a double agent — undermining those Jews, while aiding his Roman friends at every turn.

So who were these ‘almost Jewish’ people? By asking this question, we are not saying that such as Josephus and Philo were not Jews as we commonly understand the term. But all of them seem to be linked to the Herodian usurpers of the Judaic throne and their Roman allies, at least typologically if not genetically. At this elite level, group allegiance as Jew or Roman (that is, ‘Gentile’) seems to have been a matter of convenience or expedience.

For that matter, who are the Roman Catholics and who are the Jews of today? These are the sorts of questions and issues we will be addressing with this series of posts. Our radical proposals may require you, the reader, to suspend your contextual presuppositions and cultural biases in order to consider the new Postflavian framework. We hope you will bear with us as we continue.

Identity Scams and Other Crimes

According to the authors (or redactors) of Genesis 9:18-27, all of Ham’s Canaanite descendants were summarily rejected by God from the fellowship of Semites, as as a result of some inanely obscure interaction of Ham with his drunken and naked father, Noah. Thus, the Canaanites are seen as racially distinct from the Hebrew descendants of Shem via Abraham. But the Hebrews are supposedly distinguished, among other things, by their law against pork consumption. In examining both the historical context and the internal problems of this tale, perhaps we can divine that we have been sold a pig in a poke. But who sold us this pig — that is, these people who don’t eat pork, and supposedly conquered their land from people who .. curiously also didn’t eat pork? Oy veh, who doesn’t like pork after all? Well, during the entire Iron Age, the Canaanites didn’t eat ham. This was unique amongst all their similarly situated highland Semitic neighbors, according to the archaeologists. (Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, p. 119).

We are not raising this issue only to be provocatively humorous, but also as a clue as to what is really going on. That is, as Finkelstein & Silberman tell us, “The early Israelites were — irony of ironies — themselves originally Canaanites!” (p. 118). As to why they didn’t eat pork we can only speculate, but we don’t believe that it was at Moses’ orders. His narrative has too many epic holes in the pork barrel. It seems much more likely that the cultural divide was created by a stroke of the pen, rather than an act of God. We suspect it may ultimately have been the pharaohs of Egypt who invented these Jews, with a little help from their new friends such as the Hittites. These are the pharaohs who first invented monotheism, but spectacularly failed in their attempt to impose it at home.

Of course, Semitic peoples had been around a long time before the alleged time of Abraham and Noah. They occupied then, as now, the full spectrum of political and ideological camps. The Semites included not only Jews / Canaanites, but also Egyptians, Arabs and Phoenicians, to name a few. The most direct descendants of the ancient Jews (that is, Canaanites) today would ironically be the Palestinians. And, of course, the Arab Islamics are also closely related to the ancient Jews, as Semitic people. Thus, the current usage of the term “anti-Semite” is ironic. An “anti-Semite” today is someone who hates Jews. But, most Semites are not Jews. On the contrary, at least according to the stereotype, the Arab Semites are mostly “anti-Semitic”. To complete the irony, most modern Jews are not exactly Semites, as discussed here:

Eran Elhaik (2012) was able to show that European Ashkenazi Jews, whose autosomal genetic signature has long been known, are more similar to Georgians and Armenians from the Caucasus and contain more recent DNA contributions from that region, compared to Palestinian populations. The European Jews are also related to Palestinians, but at a more ancient distance. Elhaik concludes that this supports the theory of a Khazarian sojourn for these European Jews. https://postflaviana.org/elite-sub-species/

The nature of Jewish identity today is complex and somewhat elusive. A wide variety of people call themselves Jews. Religiously, they range from orthodox conservatives to secular agnostics and atheists. Ethnically, most are either Ashkenazi or Sephardic, but there are also Ethiopian and even Chinese communities, as well as many others. In various ways, however, all Jews claim to trace their heritage to a single ancient and original substrate, that was created by some combination of force, propagandic texts, intermarriage, and heavily proselytized conversion.

The Levitical Veil of Moses Typology

This veiling concept was so important that it was re-employed to embellish the Second Covenant of Christianity. Paul, seemingly unaware of any ethnic aspect, has converted the veil into a metaphor.

2 Corinthians 3:7-15, KJV:

But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious? …

Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech: And not as Moses, which put a vail over his face, that the children of Israel could not stedfastly look to the end of that which is abolished: But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the old testament; which vail is done away in Christ. But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon their heart.

The Bible (Genesis 49, Joshua 21) explains that the priestly tribe of Levi, that of Moses and Aaron, was not assigned its own territory in the Promised Land. Instead, they were disbursed amongst the claimed 11 other ‘Canaanite’ tribes, in fact they were granted control of 48 Canaanite cities and the immediate surrounding pasture lands around them. This is a broad hint that the Levites were elite outsiders programmatically imposing the new religious paradigm on these native and otherwise rural ‘tribes’.

There are also other hints that these Levite priests may have been ethnically distinct from the other tribes, who had been indigenous Canaanites all along. Just as Abraham was described as Hittite, we note that Moses is described as having a shining face (Exodus 34:29-35), so bright that it needed to be veiled. Elsewhere his skin is also described as white from leprosy (Exodus 4:6). These descriptions of Moses as (temporarily) white, can be viewed as creation myths that might have been offered to explain why the Levites had white skin. If there is indeed a distinct genetic signature which is characteristic of Levitical priests today, this would only go to support our thesis.

So with such as the fictional Ham ruse and the insinuation of the foreign Levites into the Canaanite polity, we see the basis for what we are characterizing as an Identity Scam. From the many Old Testament descriptions of massacres of Canaanite populations and the forced migrations, we can only surmise that the conversion process of the indigenous population was long and bloody. After the time of the fictively depicted ‘Conquest’, any opposition to the conversion process from Canaanite polytheism to Hebrew monotheism was recontextualized as ‘backsliding’.

We were pretty excited to learn of this strange business regarding Noah, Ham and Canaan and to realize what it really means. However, it pales in comparison to what immediately follows that episode where on a subsequent investigation we discovered that someone else started ‘dwelling in Shem’s tents’, but at least according to the way the genealogies are constructed they weren’t complete ‘strangers’. However, according to the strict rules of Judaism, they certainly can’t be considered ‘Shem’ites unless that is, it was only the lady Semites getting the ‘strange’ attention. All levity aside, this provides a possible avenue for explaining the presence of the Ashkenazi amongst today’s Judaic population, however there are several possibilities here that must be discussed later, and which we do not believe will be beyond the pale face of Moses, so to speak.

Steps towards a Globally Harmonized Religion

The elite have two great and long-standing ambitions, which were expressly stated many times in the ancient canonical literatures of the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans. The first of these long desired ambitions, the universal harmonization of spiritual beliefs and practices, could be seen as beneficial to wider humanity; that is, if such a uniform belief system for all mankind would be a suitable price to pay for those benefits. The second ambition, a pathological greed for accumulating great material wealth and power based on a sense of class or caste entitlement, seems obviously and mundanely crass. Conceivably there could be other motives, but that possibility will be beyond the scope of this series. Whatever the case, the first ambition serves and helps to disguise the second. Religion, as has been observed frequently by the more astute, is a tool of the political elite class that plays on the continuing neuroses of the gullible and/or to the wiles of ambitious sycophants. As such, the development of monotheism was an important part of this agenda.

The Yahweh Bridge from Aton to uhmm … Adon

During the famous reign of Akhenaten, monotheistic Atonism was imposed in rapid order upon the entire Egyptian populace, including the immensely powerful priesthood of Amun. The violent backlash created, due to the sudden imposition of the radically different spiritual paradigm, caused Atonism to be a complete failure. In its wake, Akhenaten’s royal city of Amarna was rapidly, yet peacefully abandoned, completely. Where did its inhabitants, especially the elites, go?

We suggest that after the epic failure of Atonism, the Egyptian elites still persisted in their goal to create a monotheistic society. However, they took a much more conservative and gradual approach, by planting the new religion in a relatively unpopulated Canaanite backwater, called Judea, after first weeding the wider area of ‘conservative’ objectors. Here, the seed and shrub could be nurtured in relative isolation until the time was ripe to allow its own seed to be sent forth. In the centuries-long process, the tree would occasionally need ‘pruning’, so to speak, for allegedly going astray of the Lord’s (the lords’) wishes. In this way, the once ‘wild’ seed would become domesticated, only to have a ‘wild branch’ grafted back in later as told in Romans 11.

Ironically, the now domesticated branches (such as the true believer Zealots and ‘original’ Pharisees) would have to be pruned. Here, Josephus said that there were two competing schools of Pharisees and that the Romans terminated one of them with extreme prejudice while leaving the second to become today’s normative Talmudic rabbis. And to what end then?

Is it really a coincidence that one of the many monikers applied to the ‘new’ deity of the Hebrews was Adon, or Adonai, as compared to Akhenaton’s Aton? And that for some reason, this new moniker had uniquely monotheistic overtones compared to the other monikers adopted from their polytheistic pasts?

The global aspect of these ambitions can be traced at least back to ~1000 BCE. Thomas McEvilley in his The Shape of Ancient Thought (ch.2) discusses approximately simultaneous textual assertions from that time, demonstrating priestly desires for subtle transitions from polytheism to pantheism. That is, they began to poetically express the view that all the gods are merely different exoteric aspects (or parts of the body) of one underlying supreme god that permeates all existence. It is highly plausible that these texts were produced by collaborating priesthoods from India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Such a collaboration also implies, in our opinion, the existence of a parallel motive by the respective priesthoods’ secular ruling counterparts. Perhaps their goal was to establish (or re-establish?) a uniform global caste system. If so, this would encompass the second, greed-based motive within a spiritual cloak. Of course, the credulous can still claim that such expressions were only part of God’s planned process of gradual ‘revelation’.

The gradual transition of religious form can also be seen when reading the Old Testament, or Tanakh. The oldest texts acknowledge the existence of all the polytheistic gods, but the focus gradually shifts jealously to the ‘one’ real god, confusingly known by several names. The plural elohim were originally part of the wider Canaanite pantheon. Yahweh was possibly a rank outsider, mirroring Abraham’s insinuation into Canaan. (For more on Judaic polytheism, also see Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God). The rise to the top by this junior sibling god is echoed in the Judaic narratives of Jacob and Joseph, among others. These were younger brothers who also arose to prominence, defying cultural norms of primogeniture.

The triumphs of younger brothers like Jacob and Joseph may also be taken as a metaphor for the otherwise odd (fictive) rise of Israel and Judea. In reality, the two regions had been relative backwaters and vassals to their much more powerful neighbors. While some might see this as something akin to a divine version of The Beverly Hillbillies, where the anointing ‘oil’ of God was bestowed on seemingly unlikely beneficiaries, we rather see it as further evidence of elite human planning. From the failed Amarna experiment, the elites learned that the imposition of monotheism was not a quick and easy thing. Thus, Palestine’s circumstances and geographical positioning (in the politically convenient middle of nowhere) was ideal for such a project.

But even so, as with any new real estate development or start of a new farm, the land must be cleared of troublesome weeds and other obstructions, humans in this case. Thus, the more appropriate modern cultural metaphor for all of this might be Green Acres rather than The Beverly Hillbillies. The barrenness of the patriarchs’ wives, which is overcome by the intervention of the ‘Lord’, is a metaphor for the clearing operation which must have preceded Israel’s synthetic creation, in service of the (human) lords’ agenda.

As to the ancient roots of the dialectic of Jew and Gentile, it is important to realize that the Western narrative’s antithesis to the ‘Jews’, i.e. the Romans and their Spartan heroes, had intimate foundational connections to their supposed opposites. Moses Hadas, the late chairman of the Department of Greek and Latin at Columbia University, revealed the widespread linkages between the Jewish and Greco-Roman Hellenic cultural and foundational tableaus in his Hellenistic Culture, Fusion and Diffusion (1959). In his preface to that book, he stated that some of his colleagues who assisted him with the project would remain ‘unnamed’ because they would disapprove of the result. Fortunately for those ‘unnamed people’, this type of book is not widely read. Even those adventurous enough to read it will likely not grasp its deepest implications, at least not without contextual preparation.

Hadas’ research shows that there is no point in Western history at which these supposedly radically differing groups can ever be viewed in isolation. The two ‘teams’ developed in dialectical opposition from the beginning. Humans are generally inclined to trust superficial appearances and the word of authority figures, and they have a deep social need to be on a team – any team. Thus, we have all been primed to identify with one or the other side of this dialectic, while the sponsors of the system profitably maintain control. The conditioning is extraordinarily difficult to overcome, no matter how sophisticated and modern we consider ourselves.

We are all now deeply ingrained with these false ‘identities’. As such, we ‘muggles’, in Harry Potter parlance, always have someone (but never the deserving party) to blame. If there are no humans around to blame for our transient personal problems, we’ll even punch holes in our walls, kick dogs, or worse. But having a persistent human scapegoat subculture around to kick, for killing the claimed savior of our eternal souls — well, it just doesn’t get any better than that! Unless we are able to discern this core deception, we will be condemned to interpret everything we see through a highly distorted contextual lens. This turns us into the opposite of what we’d like to believe about ourselves, insidiously making us mental slaves and working against our best overall interests. Ironically, if the claimed savior hadn’t allegedly been killed by the alleged Christ-killers, then the Christians wouldn’t have him to worship. Thus, Christians should be kissing the ground that Jews walk on!

Of course, the gospels allow for the interpretation that the Romans were responsible for killing Christ. If one accepts our thesis, this is one more darkly delicious inside joke. Conversely, if the idea of Jew-as-scapegoat is rejected, the habit of looking for scapegoats remains, and a constant stream of candidates is advanced by modern propaganda. If you don’t hate the Jews, well then you can hate the Communists, or the uber-Capitalists, or the Republicans, or the Democrats; or, especially, the Muslims.

We are not necessarily saying that there has ever been a single, united, international elite. (On the other hand, we would not want to exclude that possibility, either.) The most plausible explanation is that the system was evolved over time by loosely collaborating Egyptian and Hittite elites, and later refined by Persian and then Roman elites, all facing similar and common problems of controlling their respective tribes of “sheeple”. Regardless of the degree of collaboration, the ancient elites (as well as today’s) were unquestionably in a position to communicate with each other and to exchange ideas, as well as brides and other luxury goods. Accordingly, the contrived dialectic of Jew versus Gentile durably served their commonly held ambitions, easily transcending the rise and fall of empires and nations.

The goal of harmonization seems to paradoxically exist in conflict with the “divide and conquer” dialectic agenda. Such divisions might either be encompassed within a globally accepted system, as suggested by George Orwell in 1984‘s tripartite nightmare, or perhaps “divide and conquer” is only a bloody means to the global end. It is impossible to say whether either ancient or modern global elites truly aspire to end all divisions, and unite the globe into a single harmonious “New World Order”. Or in any case, that speculation is beyond our scope here.

Synthetic Formulation of Greek Epics

The monotheistic transformation of Hebrew society was later mirrored by the equally synthetic, bizarre and immediate social transformation of the Greek region of Sparta. This previously rather typical region became renowned as the most strict military dictatorship ever known until modern times. According to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, the oracle at Delphi gave the dictatorial approval for this transformation to Lycurgus of Sparta. Lycurgus seems to be as ephemeral as Moses. Estimates of the time of his reign range anywhere from 900 BC to 700 BC. This is the general time frame of the early Divided Monarchy era, when we believe the Canaanites were being transitioned to monotheism.

The god Apollo was invoked as the ultimate source of the Lycurgan command, thus lending divine authority. This Spartan culture was lionized by Plato and his ‘ideal’ republic, as discussed in his Republic and Laws. With all this we can see the ultimate man-made implementation of a Hegelian Dialectic. On the one hand was a synthetically evolving Jewish spirituality, focused xenophobically on a small, contrived Promised Land. On the other hand was the equally synthetic Hellenic and Roman culture and statesmanship, ruling over the remainder of the Mediterranean region.

The book of 1 Maccabees (12:20-23) contains a letter, allegedly written by King Arius of Sparta, which states that the Spartans and Jews were both descended from Abraham. As discussed in Hadas (pp. 84-86), some Jews of the day believed the claim was true, inasmuch as it pleased their vanity to share this connection with the dominant powers of the region. Specifically, this would be the upper social strata of urban Judean society, including the high priests, who were happily Hellenized within the globalizing zeitgeist of the day. At some deeper level, the story may actually have been true, as the Spartan and Judaic elites may have shared an ethnic (Indo-European) connection.

These early Maccabees (aka the Hasmoneans) were also happily in league with the Romans, overtly at first. Together, the Romans and Maccabees idolized the by now bizarre and faded Spartans. But the Maccabees are usually recast today as ‘heroes’ of ancient Judaic nationalism. At the same time, other Jews of a more conservative and generally rural (perhaps Semitic) bent were loudly decrying the ‘alien’ degradation of their sacred and exclusive culture. After all, their sacred narrative had granted them a Promised Land to genocidally conquer under the aegis of Divine Providence, and now they saw it slipping away. Sound familiar, Pilgrims?

Just as the Spartans enslaved and terrorized their neighboring helots, the Romans later aspired to enslave the Greeks, whose cultural and intellectual prowess Romans acknowledged they could not match. The Romans justified their conquests, as did the Hebrews, by a revealed and sacred global mission. Similarly, in more modern times, Europeans justified their land grabbing conquest of the New World as the blessing of the same Providence, albeit with some functional differences.

Western societal elites, traditionally liking to cast themselves as ‘shepherds’ over their respective human flocks, have long employed a human herding tool long known as ‘Divide and Conquer’. Today we know this as ‘wedge politics’, in which some various chronically divisive issues of minimal import are introduced into the political theater’s debate du jour. The primary purpose of such tactics is to divide various groups that could otherwise come together democratically to defeat or support other more weighty matters. From their creation until today, the unique Judaic and Spartan societies and their descendants have served as convenient tools and foils to achieve hidden agendas.

So despite the rhetoric we here yet today, as in the past, about the differences between the Jew and Gentile systems, the underlying dynamics remain the same, whether one god or many. What is most important is maintaining the respective ‘piety’ of the society members. This not only ensures social cohesiveness but allows the concentration of massive wealth to the religious centers, in the case of the Jews, this was solely to the Jerusalem Temple, and those elites who controlled it. But the same followed for the Gentile societies. An easy ten percent skim off the top is a nice haul in any man’s perspective.

Realdialectik: Ultra-Elites vs. Everyone Else

Whatever the ultimate reality behind these ‘historical’ depictions, it must be realized that the central Hellenic institution of the Greek gymnasium, including the one in Jerusalem, was highly class conscious and only open to the elites. Such Hellenic cultural aspects crossing over into the Judaic polity, as well as similar factors from before the Jewish synthesis, serves to expose the underlying tensions between the entitled ultra-elites and pretty much everyone else. The false Judeo-Gentile dialectic, then as now, was tremendously successful in diverting attention away from this very real problem.

This class tension was also ignored by the Classical Greeks in their discussions of the oligarchs and plutocrats. No matter the underlying governmental form, the welfare of the common man, the hoi polloi, was rarely if ever of concern. Indeed if the helots or other slaves were ever mentioned at all, it was only with disdain. All versions of the system were based on seizure of vast quantities of land, by once nomadic or colonizing conquerors on their way to becoming aristocrats. Disproportionate wealth could be generated by these Providential lands, when combined with the cheapest possible labor. Prefiguring such as the Mormon Church, Pentecostals and Scientologists of today, the conquerors made themselves priests and began inventing pious schemes to religiously justify their continuing right to squat on said lands.

For example: Roman aristocrats, the senatorial class, were all members of various pagan priestly orders. Later, these were directly subsumed into the near identical format of the Roman Catholic ecclesia (see Beard and North’s Pagan Priests). In fact, the various orders acted much like today’s American Senatorial committees in function. This was paralleled roughly by the Jewish Sanhedrin. In both cases, the lands were worked by the lower classes and slaves, and thus the claim that “Israel was a land of priests” cleverly disguises the underlying reality. The Roman and the Jewish systems were otherwise the same, including their similar deity names: Jo’ve and Jehovah (Yah’ve).

Unfortunately, since the ancient inception of the dialectic, it has become masked by many complicating factors, making it difficult for individuals to grasp the very simplicity of how it generally works. Furthermore, in the contemporary mental framework, it is inconceivable and heretical for most to consider that effective control can be maintained over human beings. The various nations today certainly appear to be harder to herd than cats. As part of the ‘postmodern’ (not Postmodernist) milieu ourselves, we suspect that even some of today’s shepherds (if not all) may be equally as unconscious as the sheep, perhaps meme-walking through life. Historical analysis is uncovering deep leitmotifs, literary archetypes, and social networks that are major factors driving the unfolding of modern events. We can only speculate as to which of the oligarchs are, or were, overtly aware of these complex factors and are able to utilize them to the greatest possible extent.

Caste, Slavery and Freedom

As shown by Georges Dumezil, the idea of a tripartite social caste system is basic to Indo-European culture. A paradigmatic example is the Vedic Indian caste system, consisting of the Brahman (priest / king), kshatriya (warrior), and vaishya (agriculture / trade) classes. This caste system, generally, was known in the Mediterranean region via Plato’s Republic, if not earlier. If partly forgotten, it was re-encountered in Alexander the Great’s time, when the Greeks ran headlong into it on the way to India. Hellenistic art from that period and region shows a cultural fusion of people in Greek attire portraying Buddhist themes. Aspects of this Indian cultural fusion later found their way into the elite Roman and Helleno-Jewish formulation of Christianity. From there, in turn, flowed the horrors of feudalism, the inquisitions, holy and not so holy wars, institutionalized Jewish ghettos, and so on.

The Fish (not the Bird) was the Word

Via Philo, Platonism found its way into Christianity, as the Logos as mentioned in the Gospel of John. In English, the Logos was further contextually diluted via its translation into the Word. This concept then becomes the basis for the Trinity’s third party, the Holy Spirit. By design or (no) coincidence, Christian Europe’s feudalism mimicked the caste system discussed by Plato.

However, Stephen Knapp argues here that in the original Vedic concept of the caste system, one’s place was not determined by one’s birth (though as it does today it certainly helped). Rather, it was more of a meritocracy. Moreover, everyone had an inherent dignity and satisfaction in their respective societal contributions and rewards. He provides a folk story that attempts to explain why and how this system devolved. Inasmuch as this all happened in prehistoric times, perhaps this is the case.

Nicholas De Vere, in his The Dragon Legacy, makes the same underlying argument — that there was once a widespread ancient and benevolent caste system. De Vere believes that it was his ancestors, the red headed and green eyed clan of Aryans, who emerged as the rulers by universal acclaim of their self-evident merit. Since the collapse of that system, De Vere’s ultra-exclusive Aryans have been quietly and gallantly fighting off the greedy “tinker nobility”. These latter would be either the descendants of conquering warlords of other clans, or the latter day merchant class nobility. The pseudo-fascist Julius Evola argued somewhat similarly for what he claimed was the oldest sect of Buddhism, that of the Pali. He says that subsequent schools of Buddhism debased the ‘divine’ caste system in their successive attempts to popularize Buddhism.

Similarly it is claimed that in the days of ancient Sumeria, the practice of actual, overt slavery was relatively benign. One might become a ‘bonded’ slave to another to address an exigent downturn in personal circumstances. However, one could not only emerge from this condition, but while still in it one could even buy and sell property as a slave. Perhaps the book of Leviticus contains a memory of this context, where such ‘bondage’ could not last for more than 7 years, and one must treat one’s enslaved brother better than the others.

Based on all this speculation, it seems entirely possible that at the dawn of written history, there was a divide, the same as there is today, between two general traditions, or ideals, for societal organization. While some societal elites preferred a static caste system, other elites (along with many commoners) held to an ideal of social mobility based upon merit and such, using some form of modified caste or no seeming caste at all. But even if De Vere is being grossly self-serving, and/or deceptive, and Knapp may be misguided, all this gets to the heart of the matter of the true dialectic.

For here, if the reader pays attention, the book of Genesis ironically, precisely and explicitly describes Abraham as a typical wealthy caravan merchant. When he arrived at Hebron, a typical trading colony inside of a foreign state, the Hittites there immediately recognized him as a princely man of importance. Abraham’s traveling retinue of 318 shepherds served double duty as his armed host. That is, the claimed patriarchal father of the Hebrews was both a princely merchant and acted in a militaristic fashion, as did his conquering descendants. And yet, the pious view of Abraham is that he (and his famous progeny) were not so very different from common and lowly shepherds of literal sheep.

With the ‘invention of the Jewish people’ (to borrow from Shlomo Sand) and the synthetic Judaic construct, the conflict between rigid caste and social mobility hardened into a social false dialectic. We find Egypt (and, later, Greece and Rome) taking the more rigid approach, while the Hebrews saw themselves as beneficiaries of a slave revolt. Thus they saw themselves as more likely to honor individualistic values. The new-found state of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, however, resulted in the continuation of hierarchical practices under a new set of labels and laws. Their new and unique god was yet still an avatar for their veiled human masters.

The Temple Cult is emblematic of this dialectic, partly because it seems that the First Temple may have never really existed as it was depicted, possibly aside from the conveniently undateable megalithic platform. Instead, it may have been creatively retrojected into the past, with the iconic confabulations of Solomon and his father, David. The alleged precursor to the temple, the tabernacle, and its main accoutrement, the so-called Ark of the Covenant, are nothing but Egyptian in origin and commonplace pharaonic reality (i.e. military campaign portable shrines in the case of the tabernacle). This may be taken as a strong hint of what is to come in our narrative analysis.

The fictional character of the narrative is further indicated by the fact that the Old Testament contains three mutually exclusive descriptions of the so-called ark. Also, the realm of David and Solomon was described as extending from the Nile to the Euphrates. In reality, such a claim could be made only by a few of the most powerful Pharaohs at the height of the Egyptian empire. Consider these as talismanic markers, if you will, indicating which way leads to reality, if you care to wake up from your dream.

Hmmm, maybe with all this presence of Egyptian paraphernalia around at the time, maybe the so-called First Temple, and its massive platform still standing there, was really built by Egyptian pharaohs. And then centuries after the fact, the responsible name were changed to Solomon?

The Controversy over David and Solomon

As discussed in the current November 2015 issue of Discover magazine (Witness to Armageddon, Weintraub), archaeological debate about the nature of David’s and Solomon’s existence is still raging on in Palestine. The central issue is the precise dating of the “red brick layers” which appear at Israel Finkelstein’s dig at Tel Megiddo. These are ostensibly the last Canaanite layers, before the layer which is presumed to be Solomon’s, based on its refined ashlar palaces. Because of extensive destructive fires in the red brick layers, Finkelstein and his opposition are waging a scientific war to prove whether or not the dating can fit the chronology. In addition the article states: “… King Solomon, might have no earthly foot-print inside the tel. That “would change the entire understanding of the history of Israel,” Finkelstein wrote in [the journal] Levant.”

Whatever the case with the dating, these archaeological finds cannot come close to matching the opulent majesty depicted for David and (especially) Solomon of the Old Testament. And aside from cryptic finds such as the Tel Dan inscription, there is little to connect these layers with the two famous Judaean rulers. By contrast, the evidence of Egyptian influence seems much stronger to us. For example, consider the slab inscription of the Tanis pharaoh Sheshonq’s, found at Megiddo – and of whom we and others consider to be the real Solomon. As such, we claim that archaeological results strongly support our textual analysis that the two ‘legendary’ kings were heavily fictionalized tropes with a role to play in the massive historical propaganda of the Old Testament.

In our view, David and Solomon should mostly be seen as fictive avatars for the pharaohs, and early examples of ‘predictive programming’. We find Solomon constantly engaged in supernatural ‘occult’ practices, including the use of such to build his fairy temple. This aspect should be a clue to a dialectic bugaboo for normatively Christian conspiracy wonks, such as ‘Vigilant Citizen‘. That is, Freemasonry’s very foundational mythos revolves around this very biblical ‘hero’, a putative ancestor of Jesus. For a Christian to be upset about ‘the Illuminati’, is failing to see the forest for the cedar trees. If you think there is a problem with Freemasonry, then what should this be telling you about the entire biblical construct … and our general society which is based upon such deceptive nonsense? Jesus of Nazareth is just another avatar for the historic Caesars and today’s veiled ‘powers that be. Moreover, all are avatars for the static caste system, and for the overwhelming power of winner-take-all hierarchy. Welcome to Wonderland where nothing ‘is’ as it seems, as even Bill Clinton will tell you. With respect to Clinton, and also to Caesar Augustus (who gave us today’s proper Family Values), we are told to pay attention to what they say, and not notice what they do.

Modern archaeology is now telling us that the Canaanite cum Hebrews were really lower class individuals that escaped their serfdom and slavery of their Canaanite city-state overlords, when those systems broke down. They created their own egalitarian communities in the highlands of Palestine. As such, hating dynastic kings, they periodically voted themselves temporary leaders, called ‘judges’ to handle exigent emergency situations. But yet, in a relatively short period of time, just like the later republican Romans, they end up with the dynastic kingship that they deplore.

In fact, the OT narratives ironically tell us that David and Solomon were detested by the common people, for their overbearing big government, high taxes, and forced labor. Nevertheless, via induced schizophrenia and vanity Christians and Jews generally salute these two kings yet today as cultural heroes, with Christians even hailing these adulterous occult icons as sacred ancestors of their Christ. And if ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ was an embellished version of a real man, or an amalgam of real men, then perhaps David and Solomon were also composite characters. In this case, they may have been Canaanite vassal kings with pharaonic attributes grafted in. Whatever the reality, we suggest that this is yet another example of elite co-optation of reform movements as was discussed in prior posts.

As with Marx’s obfuscating co-optation, this is the way social reforms, in general, work (or, rather, fail to work .. on purpose). Legitimate reforms are frequently, if not almost always, co-opted by the powerful interests that stand to lose. And in performing a proper co-optation, it is best to steal the name of the original movement, so as to enhance one’s faux legitimacy.

We also notice that supernatural miracles and theophanies more or less end at Solomon’s time. This is another clue that David and Solomon are avatars, and the story is not to be taken literally. It is also an indication that when these tales were redacted into their current form, they had been retrojected into a past far enough that no one alive could gainsay the miracles. This does not repeat until Jesus’ time, when the next paradigm installment was grafted in. The Gospels were probably written in 80 AD or later, but retrojected at least two generations back in time.

In the Jewish War and the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt, the Romans won a stunning military victory over Second Temple Judaism. This was followed by the even more stunning propaganda victory of the Flavian New Testament, extending not only over Judaism but also over all other Hellenistic liberal trends. Feudal Christian (read Roman Catholic) society became a fixed caste system once again. And to demonstrate how such matters do devolve, we only need examine the brutal slave practices of Catholics, Protestants, and Talmudic Jews in the New World in the more recent centuries. Such practices were ‘justified’ by spurious appeals to the Old and New Testament canons. (This is after the Apostle Paul, a purported Roman citizen and Jew, had told the slaveowners of his day to treat their slaves kindly and for slaves to obey their masters.)

Since the invention of the printing press and the so-called Reformation and Enlightenment, the Catholic elites and their many heirs have been struggling to keep the genies of ‘liberty’ and ‘egalitarianism’ in the bottle. The freed serfs of Europe, fleeing trumped-up religious wars, made their way to America where they could patriotically enjoy their new ‘freedom’, occupying conquered land that ‘Providence’ conveniently provided. (But remember that ancient Roman slaves who became ‘freedmen’ were still required to behave faithfully with regard to their former owner, the patrone, lest their ‘freedom’ be revoked.)

In today’s global battleground between ‘slavery’ vs. ‘freedom’, the seemingly massive American middle class victory of so-called progressive liberalism and modernity has been pyrrhic. Since its apex it has been systematically undercut by the traditionalists, the elites or their unwitting minions, who want a return to the ancien regime, by one means or the other. Deceived ‘Libertarians’ cheer unrestrained capitalism’s “race to the bottom”, with its utilization of the global labor pool’s nearly endless supply of wage slaves. Ronald Reagan’s biblical ‘shining city on a hill’ was an illusion created by massive debt and monetary manipulation, disguising the beginning of the figurative whoosh (presciently made famous by H. Ross Perot) of jobs and factories leaving for parts Communist. American fundamentalists may yet see this as a redux of the epic clash between the nationalist Zealots and the globalizing Herodians and their Roman friends.

But due to the incredible psychological strength of false ‘identity’, we constantly find the sad ironies of people who don’t have the proper frameworks to characterize themselves properly within the widest societal spectrum. Hence one person’s conservative is another’s relative liberal or vice-versa, a collective form of induced multiple personality disorder. And with this, peoples’ world and cosmoviews, their figurative houses, are built upon sand. And we know what Jesus said about that, right? As such, these people can’t figure out which side their political and economic bread, unleavened or not, is buttered on; and thus are easy fodder for both the cannons and the canons.

Religion, the Primary Control Mechanism

Today’s religious fundamentalists are well aware that religion can be wielded as a means for social control. They would only like to see more such power in their own hands, and less in the hands of ‘Satanic Illuminati’ popular culture. In reality, the actual controllers work both sides, in a manner not unlike the famous man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz. The difference between Postflavians and religious fundamentalists is that we believe that human agency has designed and revealed their loving and violently jealous and genocidal God, and their Satan too. As such, it is past time to pull back the curtain and reveal how this globally ambitious system works and how it has been constructed.

From Polybius, a 2nd century BCE Greek student of Roman institutions:

My own opinion at least is that the Romans have adopted this course of propagating religious awe for the sake of the common people. It is a course which perhaps would not have necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men, but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held by invisible terrors and such like pageantry. For this reason, I think, not that the ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in introducing among the people notions concerning the gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that the moderns are most rash and foolish in banishing such beliefs. (6.56.9) from the translation of W. R. Paton, LCL

We agree that organized religion was, and still is, exoterically provided for the deceptional control of the common man. We also suspect that the field of philosophy, as a separate ‘intellectual’ sister branch from that of religion, may have had its origins as a proto-Cynical shamanic counter to the nascent ‘state’ religions of the new agrarian societies. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, echoing a long tradition of itinerant Cynic philosophy, argued that pursuit of wealth was folly, and similar ‘subversive’ aphorisms from the elite’s perspective.

But the mainstream of philosophy eventually developed into a discipline suited only for the elites with sufficient leisure time to ponder. Wealthy Stoics and Epicureans developed an opposite perspective from that of the Cynics. Thus, one eventually arrives at the critical figure of Plato, whose highly sophisticated, Pythagorian based thought provided a justification for a rigid, hierarchical caste system. Platonic thought also found its way deeply into Christianity via the assistance of a professedly pious Alexandrian Jew by the name of Philo. His nephew, Tiberius Julius Alexander, commanded a Roman legion against the Jews of Palestine in the campaign led by the Flavians. Let this be another clue to what is being discussed here, i.e. don’t judge a gentile or Jew by his ‘cover’.

With the Gospels and Josephus, the elite Caesarian Romans and elite Jews covertly adopted the mantle of a pacified Jewish messiah, whose message was to “render unto Caesar …”, while his sidekick Paul told slaveowners to be kind to their slaves. This dark comedic masterpiece, masquerading as divinely ‘good’ inspiration, has indeed stood the test of time, having withstood literally centuries of critical analysis before being definitively decrypted by Shakespeare, and now Joe Atwill. It has ‘truly’ been ‘good’ for some and horrific for others, as the rule and not the exception.

The remaining legacy of all this literary didgeridoo is that so many of the dominant Christian peoples, of all sects and even those of lapsed faith, are still obsessed with those persistent ‘deniers of Christ’. Some strongly embrace them and become Christian Zionists, while others still blame them (or their typological substitutes, the Islamics) for all the Western world’s problems. As we discussed in Peoples of the Flavian Book, the blaming aspect is all baked into the theological cake from the time of St. Augustine. The Roman Catholic form of Christianity defined itself in dialectic opposition to Judaism, to such a degree that many popes and theologians explicitly informed the faithful that they needed the Jews as proper negative examples of the consequences of denying Christ. Therefore, ‘please don’t kill too many of them’. The Church may have officially softened its tone in the last few decades, but the ship turns slowly. Perhaps things will change eventually, but possibly too late to help the Jews, who might meet the fate of previous “heretics” such as the Cathars.

James Carroll, a former Paulist Catholic priest, explained all this in his Constantine’s Sword. However, he presents this dialectic contrast as the unintended and unfortunate consequence of early Christian efforts, to help protect themselves from Roman eyes, to differentiate themselves from the troublesome nationalistic and xenophobic Jews of the day. Would that this were the case; however, in light of Caesar’s Messiah, this argument does not hold water.

Another form of this obsession with the Jews is the proposition that today Jews have risen to ultimate and exclusive power, and have chosen to bite the goy hand that has well fed them. Ironically, this viewpoint is sometimes held by even those that accept that Christianity itself was an elite Judeo-Roman collaboration. Although this ethnic reversal is sometimes overtly proclaimed, a more popular version leaves this potentially anti-Semitic component simmering under the surface. Instead, the problems are blamed on bankers, or the media, or the Satanic Illuminati. However, (wink wink), ‘everyone knows’ that all of these elements are ultimately under the control of Jewish Kabbalist elites. Well, even if this is the case, that still leaves vast swathes of the modern power structure, including the political system, industrial corporations, and religious hierarchies, unaccounted for.

And since the original Israelites and Judeans were typical Canaanites, and that the roots of the Judaic Kabbalah extend back to the older Mesopotamian culture and was widespread across Eurasia long before the Jewish synthesis, we have yet another straw man added to the false dialectic.

The True Meaning of ‘Gentilism’

If the entire concept of Judaism is a darkly humorous construct, the same is true of the concept of ‘Gentilism’. In times gone by, the proper order in the social hierarchy was that of nobility, gentility, Jew, tradesman, and finally peasant or serf. Women of all castes (except for maybe the very top) were merely contractual baby makers, domestic engineers — in other words, chattel. Fundamentally, the original etymological concept of ‘Gentile’ was that of nobility and aristocratic (landed) entitlement. To be a ‘gentile’ was to be a ‘gentleman’, as opposed to a laborer or other peasant. This is a hard concept for contemporary humanity to grasp now, because we have all been conditioned to consider Westerners as either Gentile or Jewish.

The present-day misunderstanding of Gentilism has been facilitated by confusion of the term ‘Gentile’ as an equivalent to the Hebrew term ‘Goyim’, which does indeed mean all nations aside from Jews. Those of us “Caucasians” who are not Jews see ourselves as descended from stout Greek, Roman, Nordic, or Anglo-Saxon roots. That is, to be Gentile is to be White, which is quite distinct from the vaguely oriental sources of ‘Semitic’ Judaism. (The place of Africans, Chinese and other non-Westerners is conveniently left undefined.)

Moreover, we are now supposedly all liberally emancipated from the ancien regime of truly traditional class (caste) values, even if we are of Jewish or peasant stock. And in so long now having had our vanity stroked, in believing that we are all ‘gentiles’, we have long lost touch with this reality and its implications. We are all equals now… or are we?

Here, it might be helpful to consider more deeply the esoteric meaning of the movie Jupiter Ascending which was reviewed by us here. With Jupiter Ascending, in the Abra-axis [sic] we have an apex family so distantly elite that humanity cannot even comprehend the Abraxis family’s existence. In an analogous way, if we cannot fathom the literary and other linkages between the Homeric, Judaic, and Roman core cultural bases — including that of Livy, Virgil, Horace, Jesus, Paul, Josephus Flavius, Philo, and his most exemplary uncle Tiberius Alexander — not to mention their modern-day equivalents, we will find the elite are beyond our comprehension.

Polybius, from his 2nd century BCE perch, could hardly foretell the shenanigans of these later individuals. But he at least understood the formative concept, if not the true motivation. Stating that elites’ machinations are only being done for the ultimate good of humanity is belied by the staggering amounts of evidence to the contrary. Con men always say that they are doing their marks a favor.

There are many faux Gentiles, and even many faux Jews (Latter Day – Ashkenazi Khazars or otherwise), who have partially awakened to the manifold problems that have been created for most of humanity by this system. Nevertheless, they are still as yet unable to break out of the final mental box, or peel the last layer(s) of the ‘truth’ onion, to discern that the human shepherds have been having great and profitable fun pitting them against each other. These shepherds, the true ‘Gentiles’, are gradually ‘harmonizing’ the globe, just as is explicitly stated to be the common goal of our religious canons. In doing so, they are only continuing the earlier Hellenizing campaign of Alexander the Great, and the conquests of his great and jealous admirer, Julius Caesar. This is why we maintain the classy ‘Greek’ system at our modern day gymnasia, the modern day universities.

Comparing and contrasting Homer vs. the Old Testament

On the Greek and Roman side of the conflict, the defining documents were the Homeric corpus, including the tales of Castor and Pollux and their typological parallels, Romulus and Remus. These collectively formed a sort of bible to the Greco-Roman world until they were supplanted by the New Testament. In fact, Homeric typology is found in the gospels as well as typology from the Old Testament. (See Dennis R. Macdonald’s The Gospels and Homer.)

Helen, in the highly embellished Homeric epic, wonders where her Spartan hatchling brothers, Castor and Pollux, are in regards to helping to ‘rescue’ her from Troy. Unbeknownst to her, they are already dead, having been killed by their cattle rustling cousins for considering how to steal their previously stolen cattle. With their seemingly ignominious deaths, Castor and Pollux thus become the Greco-Roman’s premier religious saviors of that age. From our modern perspective, their heroism may not be so obvious. But in that ancient context, retribution was the key.

Question then: did Helen really need or want to be rescued, or was all this a fictional ruse, perhaps all in order to ‘frame’ Classical minds? For one thing, we can likely doubt that Helen and her brothers were really hatched from eggs. And if not, did she really “launch a thousand ships”? Who cares, you say? Well, what really matters is that the Greeks, too, have come to drink the Jonestown KoolAide, and falsely believe the Hellenistic version of a Chosen vanity device. Now they have been subtly ‘framed’ to identify with the dubious ends of their masters.

It is now believed that Heinrich Schliemann discovered the ancient city of Troy on the Hisarlik mound in today’s Turkey. However, the site does not generally impress one that such an ‘epic’ invasion and siege could, or would, last as long as it was reported by Homer in his Iliad. For one thing, the logistics for such a decade plus long endeavor (and for that many men) would indeed be staggering. The warriors would be away too long from their domestic livelihoods, and unable to support their families. Troy seems more likely a convenient, dramatically diversionary trope, and indeed this is the whole propaganda purpose of ‘epic’ narrative. Grandly portrayed as such by Hollywood, it works even better.

Could there also be such exaggeration in the book said to be the ‘greatest ever produced’ — namely, the Holy Bible? Well, obviously so; and here we can start with the fact that the so-called Pentateuch has epic style, (disguised) mythos, and other parallels similar to both the Homeric works and the works discovered on the clay tablets of the Ugarites, Semites to the north of Canaan. (For details, see Cyrus Gordon & Gary Rendsburg, The Bible and the Ancient Near East, pp. 315-326.) Thus, the (false) attribution of this work to Moses’ authorship is just another ‘heroic’ exaggeration.

As further explained in Cyrus H. Gordon’s 1965 book, The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilization, the Ugaritic clay tablets tell an epic tale of King Kret, who lost his wife Hurrai and went on an exaggerated military quest to recover her. Gordon sees manifest similarities, both to the Homeric epic in which Helen of Troy is retrieved from peril, and to the tale of Abraham who must recover his wife Sarai from both the Pharaoh of Egypt, and from King Abimelech of Gerar. However, we would suggest that perhaps the military component has been cleverly broken out from the Ugaritic precedent and applied to Lot’s abduction by Chedorlaomer, the king of Elam. Other researchers have noted ‘Trojan Wars’ being said to have played out all the way from the Baltic Sea region to the Egyptian Nile. The French city of Troyes seems to memorialize this phenomenon in that region. We suggest that this is no coincidence, but rather a ubiquitous elite modus operandi for the general time.

But there are some important differences in outlooks between the Greek and the Jewish canons, curiously involving their treatments of time and sin. Ancient Greek works, including Homer’s, have an ahistorically timeless sensibility. The Greeks, like their gods, had some notions of right and wrong, but their values were quite detached from our understandings of ethics. With the Judaic sensibility, there is a strong sense of historical events following one after another. The reader of ancient Judaic works is inclined to see a pious need to conform to their demanding god’s strictures, so as to fit himself properly into the divine order and its linear flow of time. This is not to say that the epics’ Jewish ethics are congruent with modern sensibilities either. Guile was explicitly admired then, while we operate on the “wink, wink, nod, nod” system today. In any case, we find that, at least by the time of Augustus, if not before, the Romans adopted the Jewish sensibilities rather than the Greek. This created a seemingly incongruous rift in the concept of so-called ‘Greco-Roman Culture’. (See Hadas, pp. 54-56.)

With the elite Roman and Jewish fusion of Christianity, this Jewish concept of time and pious morality (as opposed to secular morality) has carried through to the present day. Perhaps this explains why the Christian canon has been grafted onto the back of the Jewish one – for continuity of linear time, for ‘historical’ legitimacy, and for pious moral justification’s sake. The foundational mythos of the Romans, from Virgil’s Aeneid, as well as the historical works of Livy (the neo-Levite?) are little but a mosaic of Mosaic typology. As the Jewish canon elevated the Jews to a Chosen Elect status, so did the works of Virgil and Livy for the Romans. The later Christians retain this fused legacy via the Second Covenant. (Hadas, pp. 57-58.) All of their respective global ambitions are also inseparable. Virgil has even been adopted as an honorary Christian … because it logically makes perfect sense!

Who might have had the means, motive and opportunity to create and exploit this primary Western Identity dialectic? If we are not to superficially accept its authorship at its divine face value, then we must, by default, look to others. Using the model of The Wizard of Oz we must look for those who wish their identities to be kept veiled (occulted). Or perhaps the authors intended to be confused with dependably more expendable others, who for a price, and via having their Suffering Servant vanity being stroked sufficiently, were only too happy to claim credit for various nefarious events.

In this search, we will sardonically discover that most all of the clues to discovery were left in place, just as with the textual interlinking of Josephus with the New Testament Gospels. These clues are probably only obvious once they have been pointed out. With this we shall begin our examination of the Old Testament, from Abraham almost until Christ Titus’s time.

Don’t Gore Our Oxen .. Just Yet

Before going on too far, and in light of what could appear as a general attack “life as we know it”, we would be absurdly remiss if we did not acknowledge our relative happiness with being part of the contemporary Western World, with some caveats of course. This, as opposed to being a part of the ancient ‘Heroic Age’, where the contextual meaning of such as a ‘hero’ has dramatically different modern meaning today than the oligarchical elitist context of then. Like everyone else on this ‘boat’ we are the product of several thousand years of painful struggles by our ancestors, and our examination here is looking into just how the painful process got started. As such, we are not calling for ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’.

Ironically, many of today’s major problems are framed as struggles between modernity on the one hand, and on the latter hand the traditional values that drug us through the good old days of such as serfdom and slavery. Today’s debauched so-called Conservatives were yesterday’s debauched Liberals, who for the most part would be screaming bloody murder if they really had to return to the traditional ways of the ancien regime, which has ever reacted against our collective, long divisive struggle to leave Plato’s Cave. Getting out of that cave is a process where our blinkered perspectives must necessarily change as we get ever closer to the goal.

And unfortunately those climbing the cave walls beside us sometimes look like our enemies, and so here we must acknowledge our debt to all the Islamic scholars of yore who maintained ancient texts lost to the light of the Christian regime, and to all the Judaic scholars who have similarly followed the courageous path of looking for rational truth under as many rocks as possible (except perhaps within Shem’s tents). In a direct sense, without many of the latter we could not have reached our conclusions here.

Next: Abraham and the Sabian Legacy

Discuss in Forum!

Revision history: This is the first revision of the original post, which appeared Aug. 20, 2015. The authors have attempted to improve the readability, and to provide better contextual support of the various details discussed. The original post is here.

Titus Andronicus as Elizabethan black propaganda

Jerry Russell

June 12, 2015

Readers of this website who have studied Gregory Bateson and the art of black propaganda, or for that matter have understood the Flavians’ purpose in creating the Gospels as a pacifist message to radical Jews, will understand that the perceived bona fides of the information source are crucial to the effectiveness of the message. That is, the audience must believe that the source is one of their own, and is working in their benefit.

Noting that “Shakespeare” seems to have been a nom de plume, many skeptics have suspected a hidden motive for the plays, and focused their efforts on resolving the “authorship question”. However, from a black propaganda perspective: even if the Stratford man did not write the plays, still it is important to understand who he was; and (just as important) who he was perceived to be.

In Shadowplay (2005), Clare Asquith presents a spirited argument, not only that the Stratford man was Catholic, but that the plays were filled with coded messages that would have been transparently obvious to the beleaguered Catholics of the Elizabethan era.

To understand Asquith’s point of view, it is crucial to realize that the Protestant vs Catholic dialectic had taken center stage in Elizabethan England, contrary to textbook illusions that the English had promptly, universally and enthusiastically rejected all the trappings of ‘popery’. In reality, the situation was perhaps analogous to what would pertain in America if after every election, the winning party outlawed the losers, beheaded the opposing party leadership, and made it illegal to possess, alternately, red items or blue. Of course all the underlying disagreements, hatreds and fears can only be exacerbated by such events. In England, the entire country had been flipped from Catholicism to Protestantism under Henry VIII in 1533, back to Catholicism under ‘Bloody Mary’ in 1553, and flipped again in 1558, with turmoil and bloodshed at each turn. In the wake of Elizabeth’s accession, many Catholics in England remained emotionally committed to the old religion and its traditions (though not necessarily to the Pope himself) and some looked abroad to Philip II for rescue.

It was not illegal simply to exist as a Catholic in Elizabethan England — but it was, at least nominally, illegal to possess a rosary or other paraphernalia, to be a priest or harbor a priest, or to fail to attend Protestant church services. In many situations, a loyalty oath to the Crown as head of the church was expected. Stephanie Mann in “Supremacy and Survival: how Catholics endured the English Reformation” estimated that “During Elizabeth’s reign, 189 Catholics, 128 of them priests, were martyred for their faith.” Although a fearful total, this indicates that the vast majority of English Catholics survived the sustained purge without undergoing this ultimate penalty. Inasmuch as it was impossible to kill all the Catholics, it was necessary to convert them; a process in which I am arguing ‘Shakespeare’ played a major role.

In his essay Bardgate, Peter Dickson also notes “a growing suspicion among scholars who sense that the man from Stratford-on-Avon might have been living a ‘double life’ as a secret Roman Catholic.” According to Dickson, possibly the most notable biography supporting this viewpoint is Shakespeare: The Evidence (1994), in which author Ian Wilson cited the following:

1 The explicitly Catholic-style testament of John Shakespeare, the Stratford man’s father. Chapter 4 (44-58)

2 The fact that John Shakespeare’s name appears on the recusancy list for March 1592 (123) and the Stratford man’s daughter (Susanna) on a similar list for April 20, 1606 (320)

3 The Stratford man’s marriage to Ann Hathaway in Temple Grafton in 1582 in what appears to have been a Catholic ceremony (57)

4 The Stratford man in 1585 naming his twins after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, a couple well-known as Catholics (58)

5 The Bard’s dedications to the Earl of Southampton, who was raised a Catholic until age 8, but later became a staunch Protestant, a fact Wilson ignores (136-137)

6 “Shakespeare’s” impresa design in 1613 for the Earl of Rutland, whose Catholic orientation is overstated by Wilson (371)

7 The warning on the Stratford man’s tomb not to move his bones in violation of the Protestant practice of removing bones for storage after a period of time (394-396)

8 The Stratford man’s ties to Warwickshire Catholic families, some of which were deeply involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, drawing on research by Leslie Hotson and Peter Levi (314-320, 453- 455, 485)

9 Thomas Combe and William Reynolds, two Catholics who appear in the Stratford man’s will (391)

10 A note from the 1660s by Richard Davies, chaplain at Corpus Christi (Oxford), that the Bard “dyed a Papist” (410-411)

11 A Benedictine tradition that the Bard received the last rites of the Catholic Church (397, 450).

12 Purchase by Shakespeare in March 1613 of the Blackfriars Gatehouse, a haven in London for secret Catholics, three of whom (John Jackson, William Johnson, and John Robinson) appear as co-trustees or leaseholders of the property––Robinson also appearing in the Stratford man’s will of 1616 (372- 376, 396-297, 418)

An essay by Richard Wilson, “Shakespeare and the Jesuits“, collects the evidence that the Stratford man, who we will call ‘Shagsper’, spent some part of the “first lost years” from 1578 to 1582 in Lancashire under the alias of “William Shakeshafte”, in the company of Edmund Campion and Alexander Hoghton — where he became “a member of a household which was for six months, it seems, nothing less than the secret college and headquarters of the English Counter-Reformation.” The connections made there in Lancashire may have helped ‘Shagsper’ find his next position.

Sometime around 1590, ‘Shagsper’ joined the acting company of “Lord Strange’s Men” in London, and the plays which were later published under the name of ‘Shakespeare’ began to appear. The company’s patron, Ferdinando Stanley (Lord Strange, Earl of Derby), was suspected of being the beneficiary of Catholic plots to place him on the throne. The company itself was noted for its production of politically controversial plays. Later on, many actors from “Strange’s Men” went on to join the “Lord Chamberlain’s Men”. In 1598, the company moved their operation to the Globe Theater in Southwark, a neighborhood which Asquith describes as a “dissident powerhouse“. The area was under the protection of Magdalen Montague, who was oddly able to overtly practice a pious Catholicism until her death in 1608 in an era when such practices would normally have led to serious penalties. She and her family used their considerable resources in patronage to other Catholics (such as ‘Shagsper’) whose loyalties were only thinly veiled in deference to the Elizabethan police.

Considering this network of connections, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that savvy Catholics of that era might have looked to the “Shakespeare” plays for secret Catholic messages. Of course, if anyone at that time had recognized that such messages were contained therein, they would in turn have referred to them in veiled terms which have gone undetected up until now, at least as far as I am aware. This is an area for future scholarship. Meanwhile, as these biographical hints have emerged, enterprising Catholic scholars have likewise been re-examining the plays, looking for a pro-Catholic subtext. Asquith’s Shadowplay is possibly the most ambitious of these efforts. Asquith fruitfully covers the entire Shakespearean corpus, and other such works have also appeared. Again, it is beyond the scope of this article to review all of Shakespeare’s work in this context; our goal is simply to study Titus Andronicus as it relates to the Flavian Gospel dialectic as well as the Catholic-Protestant dialectic.

Atwill argues that the true author of the plays (or, at least, the most important person among the authorship team) was Emilia Bassano, an ethnically Jewish woman who is known as the first female to have registered a poem for publication in England. Atwill shows that several Shakespearean plays contain a typological level which inverts the Flavian comic system hidden in Josephus and the New Testament. In this inverted typology, a Jewish person (or, occasionally, a ‘friar’ or some other nominally Christian person) causes the Gentiles to murder and cannibalize one another, reversing the ancient scenario in which the Jews were forced to engage in cannibalism by the Romans in the Jewish war. The scenario sometimes concludes with a Jewish person grafted into the Gentile royal lineage, inverting the Romans’ insertion of their own lineage into the Maccabee (Jewish royal) line. Viewed at this level, the Shakespearean literature may be seen as Jewish revenge literature, making Emilia Bassano a highly plausible authorship candidate.

As I mentioned above: in Shadowplay, Clare Asquith detects a partisan pro-Catholic allegorical level in the Shakespearean literature. While at first glance this seems contradictory to Atwill’s position in Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, at least it can be said that Catholicism and Judaism both suffered severely as targets of the Elizabethan police state, and followers of both were forced underground to survive during Elizabeth’s reign. Accordingly, both Catholic and Jewish authors would have had good reason to use veiled language to convey their messages. Since England had been so recently and so rudely converted from near-universal Catholicism, of course there was a much larger potential audience for materials dealing with the Protestant-Catholic dialectic. Also, the English elite identified themselves as “British Israel“, beginning as early as Henry VIII; so Atwill’s “Jewish” protagonists might actually represent the Elizabethan court’s own view of themselves, variously as ‘Jewish’, Jesuit, or other strong-armed characters.

In the book, Asquith discusses a number of Elizabethan authors, including Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Robert Southwell, Philip Sydney, Robert Chester, Edmund Spenser, Ben Johnson, and Thomas Kid, and argues that all of them participated in developing a hidden, coded style of subversive literature sympathetic to Roman Catholicism. This “plausibly deniable” literature, according to Asquith, reached its highest expression in the Shakespearean works. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail regarding this development process, but the reader is encouraged to go to Asquith’s book for further information about the related material.

Atwill states that of all the Shakespeare plays, the Flavian typology in Titus Andronicus is the most transparent, with dense and highly interpretable parallels to the Flavian comic system. In fact, its very title is an homage to the typological ‘savior’ of the Flavian system. This was the play that first alerted Atwill to this aspect of the Shakespearean literature.

In Shadowplay, Asquith also argues that Titus Andronicus is an ideal starting point for understanding Shakespeare’s Catholic symbolic framework. Asquith wrote:

Denial is the word that best sums up the later critical reaction to Titus Andronicus. How could Shakespeare have written such a terrible play? Terrible in every sense: not only do its many digressions make it appear, in the words of one seventeenth-century critic, ‘rather a heap of Rubbish than a Structure’, but it is embarrassingly tasteless, alternating obscure debates with bouts of sadistic violence…

Many scholars have tried to prove that Shakespeare was not the author, but the consensus is that the play is unmistakably his, foreshadowing the themes of later dramas and closely related to the poems he wrote at the time. The current approach is that it was an experimental early work, and much ingenuity has gone into proving that it must have been written in the late 1580s or very early 1590s. However, the playhouse records mark it as ‘new’ in 1594, when Shakespeare was producing his most sophisticated work; and indeed there is a puzzling sophistication within the brutal framework of Titus Andronicus.

One of the revelations of the coded readings is that Shakespeare’s ‘bad’ work always has a purpose, albeit a purpose that relates to a topical context we no longer recognize. Of all his plays, Titus depends the most completely for an appreciation of its high degree of artistry on an awareness of the forgotten history of the times. It is the first of Shakespeare’s ‘Roman’ plays, all of which are directed primarily at the Catholic community. Like The Rape of Lucrece, though in more sensational style, it dramatizes the sufferings of England up to the year 1594; and the strange plot has clearly been devised around the hidden message — a passionate plea to the country’s dissidents to refrain from violent rebellion in spite of the now intolerable pressure, and to await the promised invasion. This message is identical to the instructions from Catholic leaders abroad, who repeatedly promised that diplomacy or invasion would one day bring rescue.

(The above, and all following quotes from Asquith, are found in pp. 90-101 of her book.)

For a reader who is alert to techniques of black propaganda, this message “to refrain from violent rebellion in spite of the now intolerable pressure” looks like yet another gambit drawn from the typical playbook. That is, a diversionary message that benefits the status quo. So should we consider this Shakespearean literature as truly pro-Catholic, or is it a false flag propaganda attack against the dissidents?

In the remainder of this post, we will reprise the analysis of Titus Andronicus presented in Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah. Additionally, we will discuss Asquith’s discoveries, and show how they interact with Atwill’s earlier observations to produce a richer understanding.

Plot Summary

The plot is based on a struggle between the Romans and the Goths, who have been at war as the story begins. Although the Goths and Romans fought a series of wars throughout the fourth through sixth centuries, which ultimately led to the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, the plot of Titus Andronicus is not in any way a historically accurate view of any of those wars. On the contrary, as Asquith and Atwill would certainly agree, Titus only becomes coherent when it is taken allegorically.

As the story begins, the warrior Titus Andronicus, victoriously returning to Rome, brings a group of defeated Goths in tow. The Goth royal family’s eldest son is brutally and gratuitously sacrificed to the memory of Romans who died in battle, as Tamora (Queen of the Goths) and her sons vow revenge.

Titus has been elected as the new emperor by the citizens. However, he yields the throne to Saturninus, the eldest son of the previous emperor. He then announces that his daughter Lavinia shall be betrothed to Saturninus. Titus is humiliated when Lavinia, already pledged to be wed to her lover Bassianus (brother to Saturninus), flees with Bassianus in defiance of Titus’ command. Saturninus, seemingly as much satisfied as humiliated, turns to Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, to be his bride instead.

At this point, Aaron the moor emerges as a central character. Captured in battle along with the Goths, he proclaims that he is Tamora’s lover, and that he will cuckold the Emperor and become the ruination of the commonwealth. Tamora and her sons, Demetrius and Chiron, become his willing and eager accomplices. They murder Bassianus, frame two of Titus’s sons for the crime, and have them executed. Aaron tricks Titus into allowing him to chop his hand off. Titus seemingly descends into madness.

Lucius, Titus’s only surviving son, goes in search of an army to complete the cycle of revenge. His men discover Aaron with a black child who he has sired with Tamora. With the rescuing army at hand, Titus murders Demetrius and Chiron, bakes their bodies into a pie, and serves them at a banquet. In the subsequent melee, Tamora, Titus and Saturninus are killed. Lucius emerges as the new Emperor, and Aaron is buried alive, but his child is spared.

Inversion of Flavian Gospel Typology

In a strikingly original interpretation, Joseph Atwill observed that the plot of Titus Andronicus is a reversal of the Gospel scenario, in which the Jewish royal line is ‘pruned’, the Jews are tricked into cannabalizing their Messiah, and the Roman dynasty is ‘grafted’ onto the ‘Root of Jesse’, and its spawn, the House of David. Thus, the emperor Titus Flavius becomes the new Christ. In Titus Andronicus, it is the Roman and Gothic lines that are ‘pruned’, their sons are cannibalized, and a Jewish ‘graft’ is inserted into the royal lineage.

Titus Andronicus and his brother Marcus are identified by ‘Shakespeare’ as the Flavians, Titus and Domitian, by a passage in which Marcus kills a fly with his knife (III, 2, 52-80) in a manner identical to Domitian (Suetonius, Domitian, 3). The name ‘Andronicus’ is familiar as another conqueror of Jerusalem identified in 2 Maccabees 4:30-38. Titus and his daughter Lavinia have their limbs lopped in a manner similar to the many descriptions of atrocities committed by the Romans against the Jews, as described in Josephus’ Wars.

Aaron the Moor is established as a type of Josephus, and his son as a type for the Messiah, by a scene in which the child is hung on a tree and then brought down by Aaron (V, 1) in a manner reminiscent of the story of Joseph of Aramathea in the New Testament, and its echo in Josephus (Vita, 26). Also, Aaron’s activity in seducing Tamora and thus cuckolding the emperor Saturninus recapitulates Josephus’ Decius Mundus puzzle (Antiquities 18.3.4) in which a man named Saturninus is the victim of a similar scheme.

While Atwill’s view is very well supported across the entire Shakespearean corpus, with many very explicit verbal parallels showing a deep understanding of the Flavian typology on the part of whatever person wrote the plays, at the same time the Atwill theory cannot necessarily explain every plot device and every aspect of character development. In many cases, ‘Shakespeare’ also seems to have inspiration from current events, even for major aspects of the plays.

In Titus Andronicus, for example, Atwill does not attempt to explain why the ‘Gentiles’ are divided into two major camps: the Romans versus the Goths. What does this conflict mean and why does it exist, aside from being the substrate for Aaron’s wickedness? The same problem exists for Atwill in several other plays — for example, Romeo and Juliet: if the Friar is the mastermind of evil, then what is the meaning of the conflict between Montague and Capulet? For Asquith, the answer is that the Romans in Titus, like the Montagues in Romeo, represent the Catholics; while the Goths, like the Capulets, are Protestants.

Romans vs. Goths

While Atwill sees the above characters and events as a typological reversal of the ancient Flavian Gospel narrative, Asquith sees the same text as a topical allegory of current events in Elizabethan England. She identifies Titus and his family as representations of the Roman Catholic church. Titus himself is ‘surnamed Pius’ (I,1,28) and the names of Marcus and Lucius are, of course, the Gospel authors. Lucius is said to have had “twenty popish tricks and ceremonies” (V,1,76). In the person of Titus’ daughter Lavinia, Asquith sees the lost and blameless spirituality of English Catholicism, symbolized as a light-colored deer. Lavinia is lamented in terms similar to “thousands of images of the Madonna and the saints… still being mutilated in this way all over England…. Titus compares the bleeding but strangely unmoved Lavinia specifically to a picture, and later to the broken arches of a ruined church that once sheltered royal tombs…. She is associated with common images of the takeover — Lucrece, Philomel, the plundered hives of the monasteries, ‘pillage’. As with the church, the ‘heavenly harmony’ of her music has been silenced. Her spouts of blood twice evoke the word ‘martyrdom’.” (Asquith, pp. 93-94)

If Titus’ family represents the Catholics, Asquith reasons, the dangerous Goths must represent the Protestants. In the play, Titus brings the Goths’ undying hatred upon his head by gratuitously giving the order for the execution of Tamora’s eldest son, Alarbus. He is given “Religiously” as a “sacrifice“. Titus’s four surviving sons, thirsting for blood, take Alarbus away swearing to “hew his limbs” and throw them into a fire “till they be clean consumed“. (I, 1, 138-146) Asquith says this is “an echo of the martyrdoms of Protestants under Mary when some were burned, others hanged, drawn and quartered“.

Titus is the people’s favorite, and has been justly elected to become the new emperor of Rome, but he chooses instead to honor the rules of dynastic succession. Thus he turns the throne over to Saturninus, an obviously unscrupulous and undeserving scoundrel. Asquith argues that “Shakespeare is dramatising a central argument from Persons’s “Conference About the Next Succession”: the dangerously radical proposition that the legitimate heir to the throne was not necessarily the right choice.” Compounding his errors, Titus attempts to sever a love match and a planned marriage between Bassianus and Lavinia, with the goal to force Lavinia to marry Saturninus, as his dynastic plans require. Thwarting Titus’ plan, Lavinia flees with Bassianus. Saturninus quickly betrays Titus’ trust by choosing Tamora, the Goth, as his bride and queen, instead of Lavinia. Thus, Titus himself has created the situation in which his own worst enemies are in a position of ultimate, unbridled power over his destiny. He has sealed his doom: by brutally murdering Tamora’s son, by choosing his successor unwisely, and by his hubris in thinking he can overrule the power of romantic love within his own family.

Hyper-Black and Hyper-White

If Asquith is correct that the Goths represent the Elizabethan royal court, then this was an “extraordinarily daring” literary gambit on the author’s part. The portrayal of the Goths in the play is hardly flattering. If Queen Elizabeth or her agents shared this view, their pique could easily have been sufficient to send the Stratford man to the gallows. (Unless, of course, ‘Shagsper’ was only pretending to be a Catholic, but was actually distributing black propaganda directed towards pacifying the Catholic population.)

Asquith argues that however daring this interpretation might be, it is also quite obvious. ‘Saturnus’ was a nickname of William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief political advisor, Secretary of State, and Treasurer; while “her Moor who cannot change his color” was a title that Elizabeth bestowed upon her spymaster Francis Walsingham, on the occasion when he opposed her planned marriage to Francis duke of Anjou. As noted below, Aaron is also a moor who cannot change color. Asquith suggests that Aaron may be a compound character, also incorporating characteristics of Richard Topcliffe, a sadistic iconoclast who boasted that he slept with the Queen.

In her essay “Reading Like the Japanese: The Gothic Aesthetics of Horror in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus“, Adriana Raducanu points out that while Aaron is black, Tamora and the Goths are hyper-white, and thus also “other” with respect to the mediterranean Romans. She explains:

Saturninus’ reference to Tamora’s “hue”, his acknowledgement of her Germanic paleness and beauty, develops into a classical comparison of significant aesthetic value. Thus, he compares her with the pale goddess of the moon: “lovely Tamora, Queen of Goths, That like the stately Phoebe ’mongst her nymphs Dost over-shine the gallant’st dames of Rome” (I.i.315-320). Interestingly, Shakespeare appears to deconstruct complacency in automatically associating white with purity and beauty, by having Aaron, the black character, deride Tamora’s sons’ skin colour and the disadvantages this brings with it: “Why, there’s the privilege your beauty bears. Fie, treacherous hue, that will betray with blushing The close enacts and counsels of thy heart” (IV.ii.117-118). Instead, Aaron proudly seems to suggest that his skin colour matches up to the standards of beauty, conceived as fixed, ‘non-treacherous’, resistant and eternal: “Coal-black is better than another hue In that it scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white Although she lave them hourly in the flood (IV.ii. 98-102).

The idea of pale, hyper-white Germanic “Goths” might suggest the foreign source of Lutheran and Calvinist ideas — an association that might have been obvious to the English of the time, even if ‘Shakespeare’ didn’t explicitly say so.

However, the black-white racial theme is not maintained without a sense of irony. Tamora, in the forest with Aaron and flirting amorously with him, compares herself and Aaron to (widow) Dido and her “wand’ring prince” (II, 3, 22). This is either a race or a gender reversal: Dido was Phoenician, while Aeneas was Trojan, that is, white. The comparison is also bizarre in that the relationship between Dido and Aeneas does not end happily. Later, Aaron, confronted with the birth of his black child, comes up with a scheme to prevent anyone from discovering what happened. Another blackamoor friend of his, Muliteus or Muley, has mated with a white woman, but their child is white. Aaron sends Chiron and Demetrius to this couple, carrying gold, hoping that a baby swap can be arranged. That way, a white child (carrying unexpressed black genetics) will be raised in the imperial family, while Muley will have a black baby to raise as his own (IV, 2, 150-164).

Ongoing Events of the Reformation

Following his murder, Bassianus’ body is thrown into a pit, and Titus’s sons are lured to fall into that same pit, leaving them in a highly incriminating position. A forged letter seals their doom. This pit is reminiscent of the famous dungeon of the Tower of London. Regarding Titus’s attempts to bargain to save his sons’ lives, Asquith writes:

This scene — where Titus loses his hand in exchange for two heads — reflects meek Catholic cooperation with the penal laws that banned priests and the Mass, laws that instead of leading to toleration were actually given new force by the 1591 ‘Proclamation against Recusants’. While presenting with physical accuracy Titus’s reaction to losing a hand, Shakespeare makes the scene historically accurate as well. In his secondary role as old England, Titus falls, a ‘feeble ruin’ while holding ‘one hand up to heaven’ (III, 1, 207-208), recalling the broken arches of the ruined abbeys. Next, his sighs and Lavinia’s dim the sky and blot out the sun, evoking smoke from the great fires rather than sighs. There follows one of Shakespeare’s most frequent images for the Reformation: Titus becomes a storm (‘I am the sea’) in which earth threatens heaven; and finally, retching was a metaphor used for the most awesome weather-event of Elizabeth’s reign, the earthquake of 1580, seen as a momentous physical symptom of the country’s spiritual upheavals. When Aaron returns the heads and the hand, adding insult to injury, Titus’s response is that of many in England: ‘When will this fearful slumber have an end’? (III, 1, 253).

Asquith contends that the play continues from this point forward as an exact allegory of the ongoing events of the English reformation. In Act III, scene 2, a sort of requiem mass is enacted by Titus in respect of the loss of Lavinia and his sons, suggesting “the claustrophobic world of Elizabethan catacomb Catholicism” of the early 1580’s. At the end of act III, Lucius, seeking revenge for his family’s losses, goes abroad to seek an army to regain the country — just as English Catholics looked abroad to help from Spain or France. Meanwhile, in Act IV, scene 2, young Lucius is inexplicably sent on an errand from Andronicus to bring “the goodliest weapons of his armoury” to the Goths, which Asquith relates to a tax on Catholic recusants that was used to fund a war against Irish Catholics, and later against the Spanish armada.

In Act IV, scene 3, Titus Andronicus and his family stand outside the royal compound and shoot arrows towards the Emperor’s court, with messages to the classical gods wrapped around them. They then meet with a clown, and task him with bringing a ‘supplication’ to the emperor, along with two pigeons and a dagger. The clown goes to meet the emperor, tells him that the message is from ‘God and Saint Stephen’, and reads out the ‘supplication’.

As Atwill points out, a ‘supplication’ was in Roman times a synonym for ‘Gospel’, that is, news of military victory. The two pigeons fulfill the requirement in Luke 2:24 that two pigeons be sacrificed at the birth of the Messiah. However, if Atwill’s interpretation of the text seems incomplete, perhaps it is because the playwright was constrained by a simultaneous goal of representing the continued flow of current events in Elizabethan England. Asquith argues that the volley of arrows carrying classical references represents Robert Southwell’s romantic pro-Catholic poetry of ~1589, while the Clown’s message represents his Humble Supplication of 1592, along with Richard Shelley’s petition for toleration. The Clown is killed for his efforts, as were Southwell and Shelley.

Saving Aaron’s Royal Child

As Aaron and his child stand before Lucius for judgment, Aaron now extracts the crucial pledge that his child will be allowed to live. As child of the empress, he will be the sole surviving claimant to the royal lineage (alongside Lucius and Young Lucius, whose claims seems to be political and spiritual rather than through regal descent.)

Aaron

Lucius, save the child, And bear it from me to the empress. If thou do this, I’ll show thee wondrous things, That highly may advantage thee to hear: If thou wilt not, befall what may befall, I’ll speak no more but ‘Vengeance rot you all!’

Lucius

Say on: an if it please me which thou speak’st Thy child shall live, and I will see it nourish’d.

Aaron

An if it please thee! why, assure thee, Lucius, ‘Twill vex thy soul to hear what I shall speak; For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres, Acts of black night, abominable deeds, Complots of mischief, treason, villanies Ruthful to hear, yet piteously perform’d: And this shall all be buried by my death, Unless thou swear to me my child shall live.

Lucius

Tell on thy mind; I say thy child shall live.

Aaron

Swear that he shall, and then I will begin.

Lucius

Who should I swear by? thou believest no god: That granted, how canst thou believe an oath?

Aaron

What if I do not? as, indeed, I do not; Yet, for I know thou art religious And hast a thing within thee called conscience, With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies, Which I have seen thee careful to observe, Therefore I urge thy oath; for that I know An idiot holds his bauble for a god And keeps the oath which by that god he swears, To that I’ll urge him: therefore thou shalt vow By that same god, what god soe’er it be, That thou adorest and hast in reverence, To save my boy, to nourish and bring him up; Or else I will discover nought to thee.

Lucius

Even by my god I swear to thee I will. (V, 1)

The passage above is notable because it identifies Aaron as an atheist, while Lucius is a good (popish) Catholic who believes in God and keeps his oaths. Both Aaron and Josephus have questionable credentials as Jews: both seem lacking in any sense of moral compass, or respect for the Ten Commandments, much less the rest of Jewish law. Although Josephus claims to be a Jew, he moves with an uncanny degree of comfort within Roman imperial circles; persistent Internet rumors suggest that perhaps Josephus is really from the Roman Piso family. Whereas, according to Asquith, the Aaron character also represents the Machiavellian spymaster Francis Walsingham, whose namesake and distant cousin was a noted Jesuit priest.

Young Lucius carries Aaron's child into the sunrise. — Young Lucius carries Aaron’s child into the sunrise.

Asquith interprets the ‘royal child’ as a symbolic representation of the future religion of England, as a changeling offspring of Protestant and Jewish parents, pretending to belong to the ancient Catholic lineage but really with little if any Catholic aspect at all. Nevertheless, she believes that the nature and the fate of this baby would have been of foremost importance and interest to the original audience. The baby’s rescue from the cross seems to be a hopeful sign. In Julie Taymor’s film Titus, Aaron’s child was carried into the rising sun by young Lucius, showing that she must have understood this symbolism at some level.

Agents provocateur, and a black mass

To quote Asquith’s analysis of the flow of events in act V, scene 2:

With a final glance at the role of government agents provocateurs in fomenting popish plots of revenge (Tamora’s attempt to persuade Titus that she and her sons are the figures of Revenge, Rape and Murder, ready to perform his will), Shakespeare’s account of the Catholic experience under Elizabeth has reached the early 1590’s — the point at which the play was written. In Act V, he moves on from exploring the history of suppressed English Catholicism to delivering a stark warning — on no account must they rebel, they must wait for rescue from abroad.

Like another celebrated figure of persecuted old England, Hieronymo, the hero of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Titus has gone through three stages — long-suffering loyalty, suppressed rage and madness. Now, quite deranged, he stages a second banquet. Here again, there are specific echoes of the Mass, but this time a black parody of the Mass. In a bid to shock Catholic extremists into recognizing the evil of assassination, Shakespeare substitutes the divine sacrifice at the centre of the eucharistic ritual with a grisly sacrifice inspired by human vengeance. The horribly memorable spectacle could hardly be a more graphic illustration of the Catholic prohibition on murder: a sin that makes a mockery of everything the Mass celebrates.

The Mass text still refers to Old Testament precedents for Christ’s sacrifice. In the murder of Tamora’s two sons, Titus regresses to just such a primitive, pre-Christian ritual. The victims are bound and silenced like sacrificial lambs; Titus ceremonially cuts their throat while Lavinia, following the ancient Jewish custom, catches their blood in a basin.

The irony is that Asquith, as a devout Catholic, cannot recognize what the playwright undoubtedly knows: that the Catholic mass itself is also a cynical re-enactment of just such a grim scenario — the brutal treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Roman Flavian emperors and the actual fate of the Messianic rebel Jesus, if indeed there was such an historical person.

Conclusion

If act V scene 2 represents a horrific warning to Catholics, in scene three we enter a realm of Catholic fantasy or wish fulfillment. In the play, the events represent a stunning comeback for the Catholics. Although Titus and Lavinia meet their doom, Lucius has returned with an army to save the day. The Protestant sons Chiron and Demetrius are upended, slaughtered and cannibalized. Tamora meets the ‘knife’s sharp point’, and the vile Aaron is buried alive. Of course, in real life, such a rescue never came — although if the winds had blown differently for the Spanish Armada, who knows what might have happened. At some level, elite figures such as Aaron don’t really care: they always win, no matter who loses.

Followers and fans of Atwill vs. Asquith might be tempted to argue over which interpretation is closer to the original playwright’s intention. Skeptics, of course, will think that both are seeing castles in the clouds, and that Shakespeare was simply a humanist with a knack for clever plot devices. However, doubters of Asquith’s theory, in particular, might also consider her analysis of As You Like It.

Criteria such as distinctiveness, density, sequence, and interpretability have been suggested for evaluation of parallels. In my opinion: by such criteria, Atwill’s parallels are much more highly demonstrable, while Asquith is more vulnerable to criticisms of “parallelomania”. In “Shadowplay“, she briefly analyzes every play in the canon at breakneck speed, in most cases allowing only a few pages for each play, leaving plenty of room for future scholarship to explore the parallels (if any) in more detail.

I would suggest that both Asquith and Atwill might very well be correct. If so, then the Shakespearean literature reflects a fascinating typological structure with a surface entertainment level, an allegorical level of black propaganda regarding Elizabethan current events, and a deep level carrying the Flavian typology.

It seems clear to me that the vast majority of Elizabethan theatre-goers would no doubt have a similar reaction as modern audiences when presented with the play. That is, it seems to be a gory spectacle with a baffling, nearly meaningless and unintelligible plot. Nevertheless the audience would have been delighted with the special effects.

A few well-educated, politically savvy middle class members of the audience would have seen through the second level, as described by Asquith. They would have seen the depiction of the Catholics and Protestants, and would have experienced various emotional reactions depending on their own loyalties and their perceptions of the political struggles of the day. These struggles were, of course, a matter of life or death for the participants, and the interpretations would have been much argued over at pubs and parties.

Orthodox and ethnic Jews might also have recognized Aaron as one of their own, however atheistic and hate-filled he might have been, and presumably they would have been angered by the anti-Semitic overtones (essentially, blood libel) in the unfair portrayal of Jewish villainy. A much smaller number might also have recognized the Josephus parallel, and Aaron’s hidden victory.

(Amusingly, the Oxfordian scholar Eva Lee Turner in her book “Hidden allusions in Shakespeare’s plays” (1931) expects the author to have Protestant leanings, and accordingly in Titus she sees the Romans as English protestants, Lavinia as Elizabeth herself, and the Goths as Catholic. Aaron is arch traitor Charles Arundel. While I personally find this analysis extremely strained and lacking in evidence, it is possible that ‘Shakespeare’ may have intentionally created enough mixed signals to leave such an alternate interpretation open.)

The deep level of typology discovered by Atwill, would have been visible at the time only by the most sophisticated, classically and historically trained sector of the population. Most likely, these would be members of the inner circle of the court, who were privy to the secrets of the government and the history of religious propaganda. In other words, they were the initiated and sworn members of the elite secret societies of the day. They would probably have recognized that the struggle between Protestant and Catholic was a false dialectic, stoked by the elite for the purposes of preventing the masses from organizing and asserting their rights. (We will expand on this theme in a future essay at this site.) The play shows the rival Catholic and Protestant protagonists destroy each other in an orgy of murderous revenge and counter-revenge, as orchestrated by the Machiavellian, atheistic Aaron who stands above the fray. At this level, the portrayal of Tamora, Saturninus and Aaron (that is, Elizabeth, Cecil and Walsingham) as dark, wicked and atheistic (if not Satanic) figures would also be recognized as a shibboleth for popular consumption, and nothing that anyone should take seriously. Or, perhaps, these elite figures took a certain gloating satisfaction at their portrayal. At any rate, it was understood that the playwright was doing a good job on their part, as part of the black propaganda team.

As to the identity of that playwright, the portrait of the Stratford man as a crypto-Catholic has emboldened some advocates of the idea that ‘Shagsper’ was, in fact, the true author. In their view, the ‘missing years’ might have been filled in with the sort of highly educational experiences that would have enabled the Stratford man to write the plays. This seems unlikely to me, because “no true Catholic” would ever be able to design the cynical Flavian typological aspects. That is, the existence of the deeply hidden Flavian level is the proof that the author was being duplicitous in any presentation of a Catholic layer, because the author of the Flavian layer was aware that Christianity (of any fundamentalist flavor) is a scam. So, especially if ‘Shagsper’ was a devout (exoteric) Catholic, he could not have written the plays.

Furthermore, even if ‘Shagsper’ somehow picked up a suitable education during his ‘missing years’, it’s difficult to understand why he would let his daughter grow up illiterate. Atwill argues that the author must be Jewish, but my feeling is that the Jewish vs. Gentile conflict is also a false dialectic, and the actual author could have been above that fray as well. Someone with atheist, Jesuit or Freemason leanings could easily project a Jewish persona. Having said that, I would still argue that Emilia Bassano is a leading ‘dark horse’ authorship candidate. She had the requisite knowledge, experience of court life, and had the time available to do the work, while ‘Shagsper’ was busy as an actor and, presumably, as a ‘Catholic’ provocateur and double agent for the royal court. Christopher Marlowe might very well have been involved in the creation of the plays, if indeed his death was faked, as Peter Farey and others have suggested. The poet and statesman Thomas Sackville is another candidate with an unorthodox Catholic background, who was a significant poet in his own right, with style and vocabulary very similar to “Shakespeare”. Group theories are also very credible, and the Stratford man might have been a sort of literary secret agent for plays from a variety of sources.

Discuss in Forum!

Gregory Bateson and the Counter-Culture

Joseph Atwill

May 19, 2015

Because of his duplicity in proclaiming spiritual benefits of “magic mushrooms” as psychoactive drugs, while simultaneously accepting CIA funding for his exploits, the newspaperman and banker Gordon Wasson could be considered a “Lifetime Actor” — that is, a person who cultivated a public image which was completely the opposite of his true agenda.

Another possible “Lifetime Actor” was the famous humanist Gregory Bateson. Bateson was an early supporter and teacher at Esalen, an organization devoted to personal growth, meditation, massage, Gestalt, yoga, psychology, ecology, spirituality, and organic food. Yet although Bateson cultivated this image during the Cold War period, he had earlier been a major participant in the creation of ‘Weaponized Anthropology’ for the OSS to control ‘inferior peoples’.

The ‘weaponized Anthropology’ Bateson developed during WW2 was documented by Dr. David H. Price in his article, “Gregory Bateson and the OSS: World War II and Bateson’s Assessment of Applied Anthropology,” as well as his book Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of Anthropology in the Second World War.

Price found that during the second world war, the OSS (direct institutional predecessor to the CIA) employed over two-dozen anthropologists including Gregory Bateson. By 1947, as many as three-fourths of professional anthropologists were “working in some war-related governmental capacity”, either full or part-time. In fact, what we know as the science of “applied” anthropology was a government project that began in the OSS to determine how to control civilian populations.

It is an established fact that these anthropologists were developing social science that could be used against civilian populations. As shown below, what has not been understood is that this science was used by the CIA against the American people in the creation of the 1960’s counter culture.

Schismogenesis and black propaganda

Price noted that “Bateson spent much of his wartime duty designing and carrying out ‘black propaganda’ radio broadcasts from remote, secret locations in Burma and Thailand, and also worked in China, India, and Ceylon.” Bateson was ideally qualified to pursue this work, since his earlier anthropological research was on the subject of “schismogenesis”, which is to say, the study of how societies become divisive and dysfunctional.

As Christian Hubert explains:

  In his first major anthropological study, Bateson studied the Iatmul tribe in New Guinea. From his fieldwork, he concluded that an Iatmul village is nearly perpetually threatened by fission of the community because it is characteristic that intense and growing rivalries occur between two groups. It puzzled Bateson that usually the community does not disintegrate. He found that one elaborate event heading off a blowup is the elaborate “Naven” ceremony which entails tranvestism and buffoonery.

The nature of the ‘black propaganda’ Bateson developed during WWII needs to be completely understood by citizens because it was the basis for the present ‘mind control’ operations the government uses against them. As Price wrote: “In this work Bateson applied the principles of his theory of schismogenesis to help foster disorder among the enemy.” Black propaganda is false information that purports to be from a source on one side of a conflict, but is actually from the opposing side.

The fact that the source of the propaganda must be credible is the basis of what we have named the ‘lifetime actor’ above. This is clear in the case of Wasson given above as certainly the public’s willingness to repeat his purported use of psychedelic drugs would have been tempered if it were aware that his journeys to Mexico were an MK Ultra project intended to determine how the government could control the minds of its citizens.

Bateson presented a narrative in which he claimed to be concerned over whether or not anthropologists would use their knowledge as a weapon. In 1942, he wrote that the war:

…is now a life-or-death struggle over the role which the social sciences shall play in the ordering of human relationships. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this war is ideologically about just this – the role of the social sciences. Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate peoples as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented and power hungry individuals to whom the instrumentality of science makes a natural appeal? Now that we have techniques, are we in cold blood, going to treat people as things?” (Bateson 1942, as quoted in Price.)

Taken in context, Bateson’s concern in this warning was that the Nazis would be the ones who would be applying social sciences towards evil ends. However, Price discovered that Bateson had no dilemma whatsoever in “treating people as things”. By using the FOIA, Price was able to discover a paper written by Bateson that was “not with the OSS archives, but the Central Intelligence Agency – the institution that did take over for the OSS at the war’s end.”

Bateson’s 1944 position paper below illuminates the “Black Propaganda” type of intelligence work he carried out for the OSS.  As we cannot improve on Price’s analysis, we quote his text below.

Bateson’s primary concern in this OSS position paper was to advance the position that American diplomatic and intelligence policy makers should keep an

eye on longer range planning, we are here to promote such a state of affairs in [South Asia] that twenty years hence we may be able to rely on effective allies in this area (Bateson 1944:1).

He begins by arguing that “it will actually pay the Americans to influence the British towards a more flexible and more effective colonial policy” (1944:2). In this paper, Bateson envisions that the post-war period will mostly look and function like it had in the pre-war period. He identifies two significant “faults in the pre-war colonial system” (1944:2). Bateson wants to strive for a new and improved colonial system, and starts by asking if it is possible to: “diagnose remediable faults in the British and Dutch colonial systems and can we present our diagnosis to the British and the Dutch in such a way that the system will be improved?” (Bateson 1944).

These “two weaknesses of the imperial system” (1944:5) are labeled the “lack of communication upwards from the native population to the white [population]” (1944:2), and the British failure in the area of the “delegation of authority” (1944:4). Each of these two points are discussed separately below.

(1) Lack of communication upward

In discussing how British colonialists traditionally received information from “natives” he notes that, “In the late 19th century and up to 1914 it was customary in British colonial governments to conduct monumental surveys of language, population, religion, caste, [and] village industries” (1944:2). He argues that, while these efforts were often flawed in their methodology and results, at least under this system “every District Commissioner was compelled to go and interview people in the native communities” (1944:2). At a minimum, this traditional system forced colonial managers to undertake some level of participant-observational contact with native populations. Despite the awkwardness and artificial pitfalls of these meetings, Bateson argues that colonial managers did acquire

some vivid awareness of what native life is about. He might not be able to convey this awareness in his books but he learned to feel with his elbows the trend of native thought. (1944:2)

Bateson points out that after the First World War colonial managers abandoned these personal meetings with native populations, instead favoring more distant statistical approaches – and British managers suffered from this loss of first-hand interactive knowledge.

Next, Bateson discusses the past importance of information which colonialists gathered through intimate contact with their local mistresses. He notes that the strategic uses of these relationships have been relegated to the past due to a variety of factors.

With the improvement of transportation, the discovery of quinine, the development of sanitation, mosquito control and public health measures generally, it has become increasingly easy for the white man to have his white wife and even children with him in the colonies. The presence of large numbers of white women relieves the official from the pinch of loneliness which formerly drove him to the native woman and at the same time the white women not unnaturally use their influence to build up strong moral sanctions against the taking of native mistresses – even to the point of ostracizing the guilty officials. As a result the more durable and more educative type of relationship with the native women has been reduced to a minimum and only the casual, impermanent – and educational[ly] useless – types of relationship persist. (Bateson 1944:3)

In these passages, Bateson clarifies that the extent to which past British colonial authorities in India had established groundup communication networks – including those with their indigenous mistresses – helped them to understand and control some of the features of Indian village life. The loss of these relationships between colonizer and colonized is noted in the context of loss of information, with the clear implication being that post-war colonial authorities would be wise to re-introduce some variety of such “ground-up” communication networks.

2) The British delegation of authority: colonial codependency and paternalizing the white man’s burden

Next, Bateson discusses the overall British failure to delegate authority among the Indian population by drawing on startling imagery of Paternal-British-Colonialists and their Child-likeIndian Subjects. He begins by conjuring up caricatures of American and British differences in parenting dynamics to analyze the shortcomings of the British rule in India. He argues that the British could improve their colonial system by acting less like rigid British parents, and more like nurturing American parents. We are told that in Upper and Middle Class British households, parents “think of themselves as models who the children should watch and imitate,” while in America, many of the parents come from alien cultures, so they are more content to watch their children and to learn from their offspring who achieve great things in this world they (the parents) imperfectly understand. Bateson stretches this comparison even further by noting that “the American family thus constitutes, in itself, a “weaning machine” (1944:4). In diametrical opposition to this is the codependent

English family [which] does not contain this machinery for making the child independent and it is necessary in England to achieve this end by the use of an entirely separate institution-the boarding school. The English child must be drastically separated from his parents’ influence in order to let him grow and achieve initiative and independence. (1944:4)

Bateson’s analysis is arguing that the British would be more effective colonialists if they would become less like British parents and more like American parents. Though he does note the presence of indigenous anti-colonialist movements, he does not recommend moving towards dismantling the colonial system at war’s end. Instead, he offers advice on how to improve it functionally – that is, to reinforce its longevity. Bateson clarifies that the U.S. should not side with the growing liberation movement and he advises that “we ought not to think of altering the imperial institutions but rather of altering the attitudes and insights of those who administer these institutions” (1944:5).  This is in some sense a culture and personality based analysis of the differences in British colonial and American neo-colonial approaches to the administration of global patron/client relationships. Bateson is advocating that the longevity of the British presence in India would be strengthened in the postwar period if British administrators would but change the “personality” of the administrative bureaucracy.

Bateson’s recommendations

In the paper’s conclusion, Bateson recommends that after the war the OSS should take four steps – to take advantage of these above mentioned “two weaknesses of the imperial system” (i.e., the lack of communication upward and the British delegation of authority). It is not exactly clear to what end these “two weaknesses” are to be put, but it is clear that they are not to be exploited as a means of ending the foreign-colonial rule of the Indian people.

Bateson recommends that: First, the OSS should gather as much intelligence as possible from British sources – while the wartime alliance is in place; Second, they need to undertake detailed analysis of pop culture – especially in terms of content analysis of Indian popular films – as a way of gauging popular sentiment; Third, and most importantly, America must learn from Russia’s successes in conquering ethnic minorities by praising and co-opting aspects of their culture – on this point he specifically suggests that it might be possible to co-opt some components similar to the symbolic capital that Gandhi has used so successfully; and finally, Bateson suggests that the postwar OSS be sure to continue with its wartime education programs for colonialist authorities. Of course, the OSS was disbanded at the end of war. Or more accurately, it was transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency – the agency which kept the copy of Bateson’s report until I gained a copy of it under the Freedom of Information Act ….

Bateson’s comments on point three reveal much about the tone of his wartime OSS work and are reproduced in full below:

(3) The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man (Phenomena, comparable to Ghandi’s spinning wheel may be observed in Ireland and elsewhere). If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.

 OSS can and should do nothing in the direction of stimulating native revivals but we might move gently towards making the British and the Dutch more aware of the importance of processes of this kind (Bateson 1944:6-7).

Dr. Price was unable, of course, to recognize the importance of Bateson’s recommendation above concerning an archaic revival in controlling populations because he was unaware that the government had created the ‘psychedelic counterculture’. However, every citizen should study the concluding quote from Bateson carefully. Bateson’s recommendation can certainly be understood as having led directly what the psychedelic drug guru Terence McKenna described as the ‘archaic revival’. In other words, the counter culture in the 1960’s was created by using ‘black propaganda’ to bring about an archaic revival of America’s youth and thereby make them easier to control, as had been determined by the secret anthropological experiments that Bateson somehow knew about.

The documents obtained through the FOIA reveal a clear and sinister trajectory. That anthropologic science that was developed to enslave Russia’s Asiatic tribes by bringing about a Native Revival was used against the American people. Bateson brought his science with him when he helped developed the MK Ultra program which then created the counter culture based upon the elements that the Russians had used to enslave the Asiatic tribes – the Shaman, psychedelic drugs, ‘trance music’ and dance were combined with the archaic appearances of the music idols to convey the message that the feudal past was where a young person should head — rather than a future with the technology and thinking power that might threaten the oligarchs.

Bateson, the CIA, and MK Ultra

Following the war (as Price explains), Bateson claimed to have become “uneasy” with his wartime role as an OSS operative and black propagandist, as he cultivated relationships within the human-potential movement. However, there are reasons to doubt Bateson’s sincerity in this regard.

First, let us note that Gregory Bateson played a significant role in the creation of the CIA. After the war Truman wished that the OSS be disbanded. Its head, William Donovan, wrote to Truman’s budget director, and presented him with a rationale that the organization be not only kept in existence but expanded. At least part of this rationale was written by Gregory Bateson. In an article at the CIA website entitled “The Birth of Central Intelligence”, Arthur Darling states that Bateson argued as follows:

…the bomb would shift the balance of warlike and peaceful methods of international pressure. It would be powerless, he said, against subversive practices, guerrilla tactics, social and economic manipulation, diplomatic forces, and propaganda either black or white. The nations would therefore resort to those indirect methods of warfare. The importance of the kind of work the Foreign Economic Administration, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Strategic Services had been doing would thus be infinitely greater than it had ever been. The country could not rely upon the Army and Navy alone for defense. There should be a third agency to combine the functions and employ the weapons of clandestine operations, economic controls, and psychological pressures.

In spite of Donovan’s protest, Truman disbanded the OSS in 1945. However, in 1947, Bateson and Donovan’s recommendations emerged victorious, and the various US intelligence agencies (including those that had been split off from the former OSS) were re-assembled as the new Central Intelligence Agency. Given Bateson’s argument for its existence, it is no surprise that it immediately began to perfect the science of social control. One project in this vein had the name MK Ultra and funded (among other criminal activities) Wasson’s above-mentioned trip to harvest magic mushrooms.

The claim that the US government’s interest in LSD began with MK Ultra (which was started in 1953) is incorrect. The US Navy’s Medical Research Institute had been experimenting with psychedelics in their CHATTER program under the direction of Charles Savage, whose research report from 1951 was revealed by an FOIA request. The MK Ultra project, however, represented a considerable broadening of this earlier interest. On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.” Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to “unwitting subjects in social situations.” At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.

Bateson apparently maintained at least a casual involvement in the CIA’s ongoing drug research and promotion activities, as explained by John Marks in “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate“:

[CIA contractor] Harold Abramson apparently got a great kick out of getting his learned friends high on LSD. He first turned on Frank Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation which passed CIA money to Abramson. In this cozy little world where everyone knew everybody, Fremont-Smith organized the conferences that spread the word about LSD to the academic hinterlands. Abramson also gave Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead’s former husband, his first LSD. In 1959 Bateson, in turn, helped arrange for a beat poet friend of his named Allen Ginsberg to take the drug at a research program located off the Stanford campus. No stranger to the hallucinogenic effects of peyote, Ginsberg reacted badly to what he describes as “the closed little doctor’s room full of instruments,” where he took the drug. Although he was allowed to listen to records of his choice (he chose a Gertrude Stein reading, a Tibetan mandala, and Wagner), Ginsberg felt he “was being connected to Big Brother’s brain.” He says that the experience resulted in “a slight paranoia that hung on all my acid experiences through the mid-1960s until I learned from meditation how to disperse that.”

Anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson then worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. From 1959 on, Dr. Leo Hollister was testing LSD at that same hospital. Hollister says he entered the hallucinogenic field reluctantly because of the “unscientific” work of the early LSD researchers. He refers specifically to most of the people who attended Macy conferences. Thus, hoping to improve on CIA and military-funded work, Hollister tried drugs out on student volunteers, including a certain Ken Kesey, in 1960. Kesey said he was a jock who had only been drunk once before, but on three successive Tuesdays, he tried different psychedelics. “Six weeks later I’d bought my first ounce of grass,” Kesey later wrote, adding, “Six months later I had a job at that hospital as a psychiatric aide.” Out of that experience, using drugs while he wrote, Kesey turned out One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He went on to become the counterculture’s second most famous LSD visionary, spreading the creed throughout the land, as Tom Wolfe would chronicle in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

It is also very interesting that for his postwar research, Bateson chose topics which were of crucial interest to another of MK Ultra’s goals, which was to use drugs and hypnosis to create dissociative personalities. Bateson’s interest in double binds and the development of schizophrenia was perfectly analogous to this MK Ultra agenda. As noted by the Swiss journal “Current Concerns“, in its comments accompanying a reproduction of Price’s article about Bateson:

Metalog technology, future workshops and pseudo appreciation of “more indigenous” cultures

The American Gregory Bateson, highly-praised guru of the European future workshop scene, once developed models of communication theory for use in the military, in a circle of “chosen ones”, the Palo Alto group. Their civilian waste-products have today seeped into everyday-life vocabulary, as for instance the terms “metacommunication” and “double bind”. The term “metalog”, which the strategists of the “future workshops” use, originates in Bateson’s work and means something as harmless as the fact that the contents of a discussion are always to be connected with the form of the discussion.  Among other things Bateson was active in the research and therapy of schizophrenia. He demonstrated the conditions in which human beings can become schizophrenic, i.e. mentally confused, so that they slip off into a psychosis and are no longer able to master their lives. In the mainstream literature on Bateson, his work is highly praised as being to the benefit of people, in particular to those who acquired a form of psychological disorder. It was not the work in the Californian Esalen institute that made him an esoteric, but it deepened his knowledge of group dynamics and large group control, the mainstream media report about him. So far, so good.

Research into schizophrenia – what for?

If one reads, however, the accompanying text of David H. Price on Bateson’s activities for the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) during World War II and his suggestions, how the colonial peoples are to be subjugated even after the war in a more effective way than the British and the Dutch had ever done it, some doubt arises on the integrity of the psychological researcher Bateson. Was it not interesting for the military to use the results of schizophrenia research in order to shatter the minds of prisoners of war and drive them mad, in order to be able to rebuild their personality again – or do so with whole subpopulations in “enemy nations”, or even in the[ir] own country? Bateson used his anthropological knowledge not only to the advantage of but also directed against human beings. We therefore have to assume that during the Cold War and probably still today power strategists use the findings of his schizophrenia and/or disorder research to direct them against human beings.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Finally, as we also noted recently elsewhere at this website, Bateson was also involved in the development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), another important technology for propaganda.

Bateson had established a scholarly relationship with hypnotist Milton Erickson as early as 1932. …Bateson would have been fascinated with Erickson’s research, which involved the idea that hypnotically effective trance states could be established in the course of ordinary life activities such as reading, talking to a therapist, or watching motion pictures, especially if intense and traumatic emotional states could be evoked by the experience. During such trance states, Erickson believed, the subconscious mind of the the target could be accessed by means of hypnotic suggestion….

This idea was later taken up by Bateson proteges Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who commercialized it as the system of “Neuro-Linguistic Programming”, described in their 1975 work “The Structure of Magic“. They drew on Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar to explain that the subliminal messages could be formed within a deep linguistic structure lurking beneath the surface interpretation.

While we cannot demonstrate a direct relationship between Bateson and the CIA during the postwar period (that is, after the termination of Bateson’s contract with the OSS), nevertheless the pattern of his research interests creates a reasonable doubt that Bateson never deviated from his agenda to promote ‘superior’ people in their quest to subjugate the ‘inferior’ ones.

Following the war Bateson headquarters was at the Palo Alto VA hospital were the CIA developed the MK Ultra project, which had earlier sent Gordon Wasson to Mexico and began the psychedelic drug movement. Also in Palo Alto, the CIA-funded drug research program introduced the individuals who would later lead America’s youth off a cliff to LSD – Alan Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead member Robert Hunter and novelist Ken Keasy.

Thus, when we see the visual images of the ‘rock idols’ that helped to create counter culture we can now understand their purpose. Below is a photograph of David Crosby, a member of the Byrds whose 1966 hit ‘Eight Miles High’ virtually created the LSD-inspired ‘acid rock’ genre. He is sitting congenially next to his father, Annapolis graduate and former OSS member (and Oscar-winning cinematographer?!), Floyd Crosby. A picture is worth a thousand words:

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(Bateson cartoon credit: https://comunidad3h.wordpress.com/tag/gregory-bateson/)

Genetics of the Oligarchs: Eloi, or Upstarts?

Jerry Russell

May 3, 2015

In H. G. Wells’ classic novel “The Time Machine”, the Time Traveler is translated to the year 802,701 AD. In this future world, the human race has evolved into two completely distinct species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The effete Eloi elite live in comfort above ground and do no work, while the brutal Morlocks toil endlessly at their underground industry. Wells wrote:

At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you—and wildly incredible!—and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way…. the exclusive tendency of richer people—due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor—is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country is shut in against intrusion. And this same widening gulf—which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich—will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.

However, neither the Eloi nor the Morlocks have remained fully human. The Eloi have grown lazy and dull, while the Morlocks, crude as they are, have somehow regained the upper hand in the war between the two species. In a sort of comic reversal, they have taken to cannibalizing the Eloi that they feed and clothe.

In an earlier version of this post, “The Eloi and the Morlocks”, I argued that the elite of our planet may similarly represent a distinct race or sub-species of humanity. That is, they are descended largely from a small founder group, such as a tribe or a small set of tribes. If so, they may have an ethnic, xenophobic, or even nepotistic sense of their own power and entitlement. This could be the beginning a trend that could eventually culminate in a situation similar to the nightmare vision of the Wells novel.

This has proven to be a controversial view even at this website. Forum member “Collectivist” suggested instead that the oligarchs from the feudal era have been overthrown by a small vanguard of very powerful Jews and crypto-Jews. These Jews would be the “Upstarts” in the title of this post. We claim that since ancient times, the Jews have been in the role of a buffer (scapegoat) class between the ‘gentile’ elites and the commoners. How, then, could this tiny minority launch a coup d’état against their masters? When and where did this take place? Was it before or after the Jews were emancipated from Catholic-originated legal strictures in Europe, and also in relation to the ‘liberal’ rise of the democratic nation-state system? The proposal raises as many questions as it answers.

Meanwhile, we are also concerned that casual or out-of-context discussion of the ethnic or racial characteristics of the oligarchs can easily take on an unsavory Aryan Nazi – White Supremacist aspect. The suggestion that the true core group might be Jewish could add the appearance of a dark, ugly shadow of anti-semitism, to use this genetically over-freighted term. Unsupported or unsupportable racist allegations could easily result in the marginalization of our entire Postflavian project. (That is, if our rejection of all major organized religions and national political parties is not sufficient in itself to result in that fate.) Therefore, racial or ethnic statements about elite secret societies must be fully supported by the evidence, and placed in proper context.

Elsewhere, we have argued that the trumped-up conflict between Gentiles versus (Romanized Rabbinic) Jews has been the single biggest false dialectic underlying Western Civilization. So now we are being told that these downtrodden and abused “Christ Killers” have emerged as the new (secret) masters of the universe? This would be supremely ironic, to say the least. We must at least consider what sort of evidence would be required to establish the truth or falsehood of the proposition.

Given these concerns, the statistical null case also deserves careful consideration. Wells’ supposition, that “promotion by intermarriage … at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification” may very well be correct. Or in other words, perhaps upward and downward social mobility swamps any tribal organization of the elite. If so, there may be no demonstrable genetic, racial or ethnic distinction between the oligarchs of our planet, versus the rest of our species. Or, even if there is some difference which can be theoretically defined and proven from genealogy charts or DNA testing, that difference might have no functional effect. According to this view, the elite criminality discussed on this site must be explained entirely on the basis of the persistence of cultural memes; institutional continuity; social selection; scientific and technical knowledge; and many other factors unrelated to genetics. Obviously such factors must be very important, regardless of whether or not genetics, race and ethnicity play a role.

This is obviously the beginning of a long-term research project. The context is that these are not racist allegations, certainly not directed against particular individuals, but rather they are genetic, genealogical & ethnic questions which we hope to resolve in the future. The earlier post is being revised to further develop a conceptual basis for the research, and to describe some of the tools which could possibly be brought to bear.

The “Eloi” Model of Elite Genetics

This theory would claim that throughout history, the class of oligarchs (that is, the wealthy & powerful) are far more likely to have chosen their mates from among other wealthy & powerful people, rather than from the lower classes. Because of international politics, opportunities for travel, and cosmopolitan values, the wealthy and powerful are far more likely to choose their mates (or have mates chosen for them by their elders) among individuals from far distant locations, different religions, different cultures, or different languages, compared to low-class people with far more limited options. However, all of these mates chosen from all these different locations, regions and cultures would have one thing in common: that they would have been wealthy and powerful.

If this is correct, the oligarchs may by now have become a distinct ethnicity or breeding pool, which is now increasingly diverging from the rest of humanity. By the same token, the members of this wealthy and powerful ethnic group are becoming increasingly more genetically similar to each other, than they are related to any of the peoples that they rule over.

According to this “Eloi” model, it is also highly likely that the oligarchs are descended primarily from a small founder group. That is, near the beginning of agricultural “civilization” there was a single tribe, or a small number of tribes, that became extraordinarily successful in either insinuating control or conquering the various nations, so to speak, of the ancient Near East (Eurasia and North Africa). Thus, they became the rulers over the members of the less fortunate ethnic groups.

Michael Hart, in “Understanding Human History”, argues that at the end of the Paleolithic era, the peoples living in arctic climates had evolved a cluster of genetic characteristics including pale skin and greater technological skills required for survival in adverse conditions. Meanwhile, the people living in southern regions (with darker skins) had the misfortune of living in lands that were far more fertile and thus more valuable. Thus, Hart argues, tribes from the North had both the capability and the motivation to become dominant over people of the South, either by conquest or by infiltration. The northern tribes spoke Indo-European and / or Uralic languages. As they became rulers over the various nations of Semites, Africans and Asians, the invaders would have been highly motivated to breed only amongst themselves. Having originated from a distant location, these pale-skinned rulers would have had a very distinct sense of their peculiar racial identity in contrast to their subjects.

It is difficult to say to what extent these ancient tribal genetics have actually been preserved to the present time by the elite. Over deep time, many factors militate against it. One factor would be the rate of intrusion of random breeding partners from outside the elite class into the core bloodlines. Another factor would be the loss of members of the bloodlines because of downward social mobility, death of entire family lineages, or other misfortune. If the elite view themselves as a distinct class, this may be a matter of cultural memes and/or self-deception as much as anything else.

Nevertheless, there are signs that at least some of the elite have an awareness of themselves as a class with a familial, ethnic or xenophobic nature, as well as a nepotistic sense of entitlement to wealth and power. As such, they also have access to a wealth of knowledge and experience regarding the science and art of maintaining control over the masses. This knowledge is certainly preserved in colleges and universities which are accessible primarily to the elite and their middle-class collaborators, but it might also be maintained as family lore, or held in secret libraries within the innermost circles of elite secret societies.

If this oligarchical sub-species still exists, it must have also had a significant amount of genetic material introduced from local elites all over the world from every racial background. There have also been distinct evolutionary pressures arising from the unique environment of the elite. As it is often said: “uneasy is the head that wears the crown.” In other words, there has been some selection pressure for raw survival to reproductive age, based on cunning in social relations and in battle.

The elite also have a very powerful sense of the importance of family connections and genealogy. It is possible, at this point, that the elites do not view themselves as any more akin to ‘Nordic’ or ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Jewish’ commoners, than any other race of hoi polloi. According to the strong version of this “eloi” hypothesis, they are a distinct racial entity unto themselves. Or, if the “null hypothesis” mentioned above is correct, then we can still propose a weak version of the “Eloi” model: that many elite think of themselves this way, even if it isn’t literally genetically true.

For example, under the “British Israel” doctrine, the British consider themselves to be ‘Lost Tribe’ Hebrews and, as such, part of “God’s chosen people” even though historical or genetic support for this claim is far from obvious. That said, we have our own interpretation of biblical history where there can indeed be some, rather varnished, contextual credence to such claims. And which we will use to complement this effort.

In either case, we have an Earthly model for the Abraxas family in the recent movie, Jupiter Ascending. As we showed in our recent review, the Abraxas are portrayed as a close-knit family which rules over many herds of humanity, each of which lives on a different planet, an allegory here for races and tribes living in different Earthly regions.

The “Upstart” model: Judaism Ascending?

According to this view, the ancient “eloi” as discussed above may well have been in control during the time of the Roman Empire and indeed throughout feudal times and even up until recently. However, the conflict between the Flavians and other Roman emperors, versus the Jewish rebels, may not have ended with the utter defeat of the Jews in the many wars against them, and the Roman dominance over rabbinical Judaism. Instead, is it possible that the Jews maintained a grim determination to reverse their humiliating defeat and to establish world domination over their rivals, a plot which is now nearing consummation?

There are some basic facts which form the core of this speculation, and which are not in dispute (or at least, not here.)

The story seems to date back to the first Crusade, which was organized as a European response to Islamic conquest of the holy lands of the Middle East. French noblemen related to participants of the First Crusade organized the Knights Templar and set up shop at the newly conquered Temple Mount, and were given the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church in 1129. The Templars became very successful as bankers, introducing innovative practices which they may have learned from the Islamics. It is suspected that the Templars were not orthodox Christians, but that some of the organizers were Cathars. The Cathars emerged at about the same time as the Templars: first reports of Cathar theology in France emerged around 1143. The beliefs of both the Cathars and Templars are obscure (their writings having been destroyed) but are believed to have been basically gnostic, or perhaps Kabbalist. The Templars were accused of worshiping Baphomet, although there is little if any evidence that this is true, or who they thought Baphomet was. Images of Baphomet as a man with a goat head apparently originate from the 19th century.

The Cathars came under severe pressure from the Albigensian Crusade beginning about 1208, and were utterly crushed by 1330. The Knights Templar were terminated and suppressed in 1307, although remnants were merged with the Knights Hospitaller (of whom later became today’s Roman Catholic Knights of Malta), the Portuguese Knights of Christ, the German Teutonic Knights, and so forth. The vacuum left in the banking industry was taken up mostly by Italian and Venetian bankers.

The intolerance of the medieval Catholic church extended also to the Jews. The Inquisition, which initially targeted the Cathars, impacted Judaism as well beginning about 1242, and intensified in the Spanish Inquisition beginning in 1481. Many of the Jews were forced to convert to Christianity. However, some of these conversos (converts) continued to practice Judaism and/or Kabbalism in secret, and so the loyalties of the conversos were always open to suspicion. The name Marrano (pig or swine) was also attached as a pejorative to these people.

The invention of the printing press in 1440 enabled many commoners, craftsmen and merchants to read the Bible (and to a lesser extent, Josephus Flavius) for the first time. This led to a realization that the beliefs and practices, such as indulgences, of the Catholic Church were not entirely compatible with the ancient scripture. This, as well as the excesses of the Inquisition, may have led to the advent of the Reformation. As a popular attack on the Catholic Church, the Reformation was actually in full swing by the time of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses of 1517.

The overt counter-reformation of the Church was led by the Jesuits, an order formed by Ignatius of Loyola with the authority of Pope Paul III in 1540. Curiously here, the archbishop of Venice, who supported the founding of the Jesuits and the Council of Trent (whose purpose was to hear and rule upon the Protestant complaints) also wrote letters of encouragement to the Calvinist Protestants. The center of the Calvinist theological dispute was over the means (works versus grace) of Salvation and the related doctrine of Predestination, of which we proclaim was a manufactured controversy.

However, although nominally Christian, the theology of the Jesuits was in some ways more similar to the that of the Alumbrados (that is, the illuminated or enlightened ones), a group of Spanish gnostic conversos denounced in 1525 by the Inquisition. Ignatius of Loyola himself was a converso, as was the prior Spanish Inquisition’s Torquemada, and had been accused of sympathies with the Alumbrados, although he was acquitted. The Jesuits became the main educational and missionary (that is, propaganda) arm of the Catholic Church and became increasingly powerful from the 16th through the 18th century, until 1773 when they were suppressed and largely disbanded by the order of Pope Clement XIV.

Strangely coincidental with the alleged ‘termination’, or rather the Disestablishment, of the Jesuits, came the rise of the Rothschild banking empire, and the creation of the “Bavarian Illuminati” by Adam Weishaupt, a Jesuit professor of Catholic canon law at the Jesuit’s University of Ingolstadt. Mayer Rothschild obtained the position of “court factor” for Crown Prince William of Hesse in 1769, beginning his meteoric rise to become the primary banker to European royalty. Weishaupt’s group was founded in 1776, and took up the function of Illuminist propaganda and missionary work more or less where the Jesuits left off, and also worked to influence the Freemason lodges of the time. There are allegations that Weishaupt was also from a converso family and was a crypto-Jew.

Whether contrived, as Tupper Saussy claimed in his Rulers of Evil, or not: his claim is that the timely, and supposedly bloody, Disestablishment of the Jesuits is what enabled the Catholics to garner the good graces of the highly Protestant American colonists, who otherwise hated them. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and thus Jesuit based Catholicism is ironically the vastly predominant form found in the United States of America, and the most powerful block in American national politics, with some considerable help from the JFK assassination.

The Jesuits were restored to the good graces of the Catholic Church beginning in 1801 in Russia. Meanwhile, the Bavarian Illuminati were officially condemned in Prussia in 1785, but continued to infiltrate the Freemasons whose work continues to this day.

These events were watersheds. Ever since then, these influences can be seen in the banking system, in Freemasonic dominance over “democratic” governments in America and Europe. In the mass media, the use of “illuminati symbolism” as well as reversed Gospel typology can be seen as a trademark of this influence.

According to the “Judaism Ascending” model, characters such as Ignatius of Loyola, Adam Weishaupt and Mayer Rothschild should be seen as vanguards of their own race, upstarts from the humble ghettos where the Jews lived as an oppressed minority. “Shakespeare” (that is, perhaps, Emilia Bassano) may also be seen as part of this cabal. Any question whether the Shakespearean literature is more Jewish or Jesuit in character is basically irrelevant, as both Jesuitism and Kabbalist Judaism are manifestations of one evil. This entire movement is essentially Jewish (Kabbalistic), ethnic, and targeted to reverse the humiliations suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Romans. According to this model, the “New World Order” conspiracy must be seen as fundamentally racist, and it is now targeted towards genocide of all other races aside from the Jewish “chosen people”.

“Eloi” model, revisited

The “Eloi” model of elite genetics (discussed above) does not deny any of these events, but gives them a different interpretation. Just as the Roman Emperors were pagans hiding behind a Christian front, the Roman Catholic church throughout its entire history may have been, at its core, an “illuminati” institution and not a Christian one. Christianity itself has never been anything more than an exoteric, populist con game to be foisted on feudal subjects. Similarly, Rabbinical Judaism has been a con game foisted by those same elite insiders onto the Jewish commoners.

“Eloists” would say that the emergence of the Jesuits, “Bavarian Illuminati”, modern Freemasons, and the Rothschild banking empire, were all manifestations of the old elite coming out from behind their Catholic cover story, re-asserting Imperial control under cover of stealth. If this is correct, we would expect to find the institutions of old feudal Europe such as the Catholic Church, the various Royal courts, and the nobility, all covertly collaborating with the Jesuits, Illuminati, Freemasons, and Jewish Bankers.

By the same token, Kabbalism should not be viewed as uniquely Jewish, but rather part of a greater Hellenistic trend, and going back even further in time and geographically widespread with roots in shamanism. Philo was incorporating Platonism from the Greeks into Judaism, and the same seems to be the case for wider gnosticism. All of this can be traced back ultimately to the Mesopotamians and Egyptians. In general, these esoteric religions may have been reserved for elites, as the inner church. The Cathars may have been an unapproved stream, via such as the Bogomils, that escaped the clutches of the church until it became predominant and thus dangerous to the Roman church’s monopoly in the Languadoc and eventually even wider.

It’s possible that at least some, if not all, of the founders and elite leaders of the “crypto-Jewish Illuminati” will turn out to be as closely related genetically to the noble class of Europeans, as they are to the common class of Ashkenazi and / or Sephardic Jews. These “Hofjuden” or “Court Jews” tended to intermarry with the royals and nobles, or favored close cousin marriages.

I will not try to hide my own views here. I believe that the Roman Catholics and European royalty and American “democracy” have collaborated far too closely with the Jesuits, Freemasons and Jewish ‘International Bankers’, for the latter to be seen as an upstart rebellion. I believe it has been a cooperative venture from the beginning, and continuing to the present day. This includes the strange alliance of Jewish Zionists, “Christian Zionist” Neocons and American and European military intelligence, which seems to be at the heart of the “New World Order Conspiracy” today.

Nevertheless, it has been proposed that genetics and/or genealogy might be a key to resolving this particular dispute, and revealing the true nature of “the secret society”. Accordingly, I would like to review some concepts that might prove helpful.

The concept of ‘species’ and ‘sub-species’ in modern biology

Biologically, a “species” is defined as a group that can successfully interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Thus, all human beings are considered part of the same species. We can choose a mate from anywhere on the planet, without hurting our chances of reproductive success.

If a species is separated into two or more groups which are not allowed to interbreed, they will start to drift apart genetically. If they are subject to different selection pressures, then the process of genetic divergence is accentuated and directed. Thus, the separated populations may start to become anatomically and functionally distinctive as well. Yet this can go on for quite some time, before mating between the groups becomes impossible. As long as most or all pairings are fertile, the populations are considered to belong to the same species. But, because they have distinct local characteristics, they are called “sub-species”.

A good example of “sub-species” are the various breeds of purebred dogs. These populations are separated by their human breeders, so that there is little if any genetic exchange between the breeds. If dogs from different breeds do mate together, the result is called a “mongrel” and is excluded from the entire category of purebred dogs. Although of course mongrels are still members of the species of dogs, they are not considered a part of either of the “sub-species” of their parents.

Races and ethnic groups

The terms “race” and “ethnic group” are similar but not identical in their connotations. “Ethnic group” tends to be more associated with groupings based on culture, religion or nationality, while “race” has a more genetic and physical connotation. In practice the terms overlap for reasons which I will explain.

A modern concept of race and ethnicity is shown in this graph from “Out of Africa Again and Again” by Alan Templeton (Nature 416, 45–51, 2002).

The figure illustrates that humanity consists of a number of lineages which have descended in parallel through many generations. Humans naturally fall into groups which are separated by factors such as distance, geographical barriers, language, and culture. Such barriers serve to delineate the populations and limit the amount of genetic cross-flow at each generation. Thus, each lineage is inbred to some degree. However, all couplings between human beings are potentially fertile. “Miscegenation” can and does occur in spite of all obstacles to the contrary. Major events denoting vast migrations of peoples from place to place (shown in red in the diagram) have contributed additional intermingling.

The biological concepts of sub-species or breeds are potentially applicable to such human groups. However, because of the amount of interbreeding among human groups, the physical and genetic differences between groups of people are far less significant than the differences between the various breeds of dogs. This is in spite of the fact that these subspecies of dogs have been created in a relatively short period of time compared to man’s evolution. (Most modern breeds of dogs have been created by breeders in the last 150 years or less, and are still diverging rapidly.)

Rather than crisply defined “breeds”, humankind consists of an undefined number of lineages that blend imperceptibly together, with no clear edges. Accordingly, efforts to use such concepts to create clear boundaries in legal or nationalistic contexts have often ended as intellectual and/or political fiascos. However, this does not mean that the concept of “race” is meaningless.

Genetics and family trees

To further help explain what we mean by these concepts of “subpecies” and “inbreeding”, I would like to bring in some figures and information from the excellent blog article “Your Family: Past, Present and Future” by Tim Urban.

Your Ancestor Cone

So let’s start with the past, and see what happens if we keep going up the family tree, or what I’ll call your Ancestor Cone:

You can see that things get hectic pretty quickly when you start moving back generations. The top row is the 128-person group of your great5 grandparents, or your grandparents’ grandparents’ great-grandparents. The thing that I find surprising is how recently in time you had such a large number of ancestors. Estimating an average generation at 25-30 years, most of those people were your current age around 1800-1825. So the early 19th-century world contained 128 random strangers going about their lives, each of whose genes makes up 1/128th of who you are today.

With respect to this drawing, it is possible to define three lines of descent: paternal ancestry along the purely male line, maternal ancestry along the purely female line, or what I might call general ancestry, that is, the entire cone. In genetic research, data may be extracted from either Y-chromosome DNA (a probe for paternal ancestry), mitochondrial DNA (a probe for maternal ancestry), or autosomal DNA (which derives from the entire ancestral cone.) The vast majority of DNA in the human genome is autosomal DNA.

Notice that as we go higher in the ancestral cone, the maternal and paternal lines represent a smaller and smaller sample of the total ancestry of each person. That is, at the 7th generation back (as shown in the diagram above) the paternal and maternal lineages each represent less than 1% of the total genetic heritage of the individual. In genetics, these lineages can be explored using Y-DNA and mt-DNA respectively, establishing relationships going deep back into time. Y-DNA and Mt-DNA can be used to trace ancestries all the way back to “Mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-Chromosome Adam”, the most recent maternal and paternal ancestors of all living humans.

Autosomal DNA draws information randomly from the entire general ancestral cone, but gives less and less information about each individual ancestor as time recedes. At each generation, segments of DNA from each parent are snipped and recombined at random. Thus, in comparisons of DNA genomes among close family relations, segments of varying length may be found to be “identical by descent”, that is, IBD. As relations become more distant, the IBD segments get chopped into smaller and smaller pieces, until they either become too short to detect, or are randomly omitted altogether by the recombination process. Analysis of IBD segments can reveal family relationships very reliably to the 5th degree, and sometimes up to the 11th degree. That is, we can trace three to five generations up to an ancestor, and back down his or her family tree another two to six generations through another child of that ancestor to find distant cousins.

Inbreeding and pedigree collapse

Getting back to Tim Urban’s blog, he notices that as we continue going back in time, the number of ancestors in everyone’s family tree continues to explode, reaching ~68 billion ancestors at 1100 AD. As Urban explains:

The reason that’s problematic is that the world population goes like this:

So how do we explain this?

With a concept called pedigree collapse, which is what happens when people end up with a mate who is somewhat or very closely related to them. So for example, if two cousins had a child, that child would only have six great-grandparents, not eight. Or, to put it another way, there are eight filled great-grandparent spots on that child’s family tree, but two of the spots are duplicates of two other spots—

Before you wince, absorb this fact: according to Rutgers anthropology professor Robin Fox, 80% of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer.

The reason for this is that for most of human history, people spent most of their lives in the same five mile radius, and the other people in that same area tended to be immediate and extended family. To get away from their extended family when courting, men would have to walk over five miles away, which after a long day of hunting you just don’t feel like doing.

In the Western World, this is largely a phenomenon of the past, but in many parts of the world, this is still a common practice—for example, in most of the Middle East and North Africa, over 50% of today’s marriages are between second cousins or closer.

I would add that according to Fox’s research, another important reason for the prevalence of these 2nd cousin marriages is because they are specifically favored according to the laws and customs of many traditional societies. This may be because they preserve some family cohesiveness, without the well-known genetic downsides of marriages among even closer cousins or siblings.

This is what we mean by “inbreeding”: the shrinkage of the ancestor cone due to pedigree collapse. This occurs when distant cousins are intermarrying at a rate higher than would happen by chance in a large population. Returning again to Urban’s blog, he offers this further explanation of distant cousin relationships:

…every stranger in the world is a cousin of yours, and the only question is how distant a cousin they are. The degree of cousin (first, second, etc.) is just a way of referring to how far you have to go back before you get to a common ancestor. For first cousins, you only have to go back two generations to hit your common grandparents. For second cousins, you have to go back three generations to your common great-grandparents. For fifth cousins, you’d have to go back six generations until you arrive at your common pair of great-great-great-great-grandparents.

Since a lot of people get confused about cousin definitions, I made a little chart illustrating what a second cousin is.

So notice that for you and your second cousin, A) your parent is a first cousin of their parent, B) you have grandparents that are siblings, and C) their parents are your common great-grandparents. For third cousins, everything just goes up a level—your parents are second cousins, your grandparents are first cousins, your great-grandparents are siblings, and you have a common pair of great-great-grandparents….

The number of cousins you have grows exponentially as the degree of distance goes up. You may have a small number of first cousins, but you likely have hundreds of third cousins, thousands of fifth cousins, and over a million eighth cousins.

Measures of inbreeding

Urban explains his computations for the number of distant cousins as follows:

The formula is (n-1) 2^d n^d

—where n is the average number of children being had by a family and d is the degree of cousin you want to find the total number of.

It boils down to a simple multiplication of the number of top-level siblings [(n-1) 2^d] times the number of “eventual offspring on your generation level” each of those top-level siblings ultimately produces (n^d).

This is correct for modern national populations that have been choosing mates more or less at random for many generations. However, as mentioned above: in paleolithic times, and to a large extent up until the industrial revolution, most people lived in small villages or towns, and chose their mate from within that town. Some were directed by tradition to chose a 2nd cousin, while a few of the more adventurous might have gone a few towns away at most, but marriage was generally a very local affair.

Even now, there are populations in which the size of the breeding pool is severely limited, and has been for many generations into the past. In such populations, the number of relatively close cousins in the local area is increased, and the number of distant cousins depleted, compared to the formula. In a town of ~500 people, it might be that the breadth of the ancestor cone continues to increase into the distant past, but an increasingly high percentage of the slots in that cone would be filled by only 500 individuals at each generation, no matter how far back. At a sufficiently isolated island, the ancestor cone might theoretically never have included more individuals than the population of the island. So, the chances of a new marriage occurring between close cousins is increased, perpetuating the inbreeding.

The degree of inbreeding leaves an unmistakable signature in the genome of an isolated population. Henn et al (2012) studied IBD between random pairs of individual DNA samples collected by the 23andMe customer database and the Human Genome Diversity Project, and found:

With data from 121 populations, we show that the average amount of DNA shared IBD in most ethnolinguistically-defined populations, for example Native American groups, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews, differs from continentally-defined populations by several orders of magnitude.

The data table from the Henn study shows their measure of population mean pairwise IBD ranging from 1870 for the Surui, an indigenous Brazilian tribe of ~1100 individuals, to 54.3 for Orcadians (population ~22,000); 23.0 for Ashkenazi Jews; and 12.3 for Icelanders — compared to figures of 0.1 for continentally mixed populations such as the United States, France or the UK. These estimates can be calculated for sample populations as small as five, although 10 to 20 samples or more provide better accuracy.

Inbreeding can sometimes be demonstrated in a DNA sample from a single individual, by looking for IBD segments from maternal and paternal sources within the same gene. This measure is called ROH, or “Runs-of-Homozygosity”. McQuillan et al (2008) measured ROH in DNA samples from the North Orkney Islands and an island in Dalmatia, comparing them to continental populations from Scotland and Northern Europe (sampled in Utah). In the case of the Orkney samples, they were able to compile accurate genealogical data to directly calculate the degree of inbreeding, for comparison with ROH. They found that 28% to 30% of Orcadian and Dalmatian samples contained ROH’s greater than 10 megabits, while only 1% or 2% of continental samples contained ROH’s as long as that. However, it is not clear whether this method would detect intermediate degrees of inbreeding, such as Ashkenazi or Icelanders.

Of course, very high levels of inbreeding can also be detected directly by genealogical pedigree. Cecil Adams noted, for example, that Alfonso XIII of Spain (1886-1941) had only ten of the expected sixteen great-great-grandparents. The pedigrees of European nobility have to some extent been available in books such as Burke’s Peerage, and additional data of this type may be coming on line. The London School of Economics explained:

Newly available genealogical records are helping to provide insights into the lives the European nobility…

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ (LDS) practice of the baptising the dead by proxy has resulted in the church developing the largest genealogical library in the world.

These extensive historical records have been put together by the LDS Church to enable it to baptise all who have died without undergoing the rite. It believes, in doing so, that it gives the deceased the opportunity to enter the Kingdom of God.

Now this huge database is being digitised and made publicly available online, giving economic historians like Dr Neil Cummins of LSE’s Economic History Department access to genealogical ‘big data’ for the first time.

Describing the significance of the newly digitised information, he says: “Individual demographic data before 1538 in England is extremely rare – that’s the time of Henry VIII, Cromwell and the English reformation. Before that we only had scraps.”

Now the digitisation has allowed Dr Cummins to construct the family trees of European nobility – a group that has left behind abundant evidence about itself – and analyse trends in how long they lived between 800 and 1800.

When he looked at the age of death of 121,524 nobles during this time period he found that their lifespans began increasing long before the Industrial Revolution, with a marked increase around 1400, when life expectancy went from around 50 to 55. After 1500, life spans seem to decline again until around 1650 when an uninterrupted rise begins.

This data, presumably, can also be reviewed to determine the degree of inbreeding that occurred during all that time, and the extent of social mobility in and out of the noble class. In many cases, it would be a straightforward matter to assess suspected or known modern-day oligarchs and “secret society” members to determine their connections into the European class of nobility as it existed in the year 1800.

Significant amounts of genealogical data for Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews may also be available for analysis from LDS records and other on-line sources, to complete the analysis.

Who were our ancestors?

Tim Urban said:

You can see why it’s not really that impressive when someone tells you they are descended from famous royalty who lived a few hundred years ago. Look how many people you’re descended from only about 300 years back! Within [those ~4000 people], there’s probably some royalty, in addition to some peasants, scholars, warriors, painters, prostitutes, murderers, lunatics, and any other kind of person who existed back then.

Cecil Adams similarly remarked:

Pedigree collapse explains why it’s so easy for professional genealogists to trace your lineage back to royalty — go far enough back and you’re related to everybody.

But, nevertheless: all of us are not alike in this regard. The indigenous Brazilian Surui are obviously not going to have any European royalty in their pedigree, no matter how far back you go. Most Americans and Europeans might have one or two noble ancestors among their thousands of peasant ancestors of 300 years ago. Of those thousands of ancestors, most of us can only trace a few if any, and know nothing about them, unless we are indeed able to find a royal.

But if the Eloi hypothesis is correct, members of that elite class would be able to look back 300 years or 1000 years, and might very possibly be able to fill in much of their ancestor cone with the names of illustrious individuals straight from the history books, each repeated many times in a web of ancestral paths.

Or if the situation is similar to the “Judaism Ascending” hypothesis, the ancestor cones of the elite would be full of repeated names of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews from the ghettos of Europe.

Race and Locality

Intuitively, Americans tend to define “race” in terms of a few visually salient properties of human beings, such as their skin color (black, yellow, red or white), facial features (broad, long or hooked nose, for example), hair color and texture, and so forth. Such concepts tend to correlate broadly with continental origin. Black-skinned folks are from Africa or Australia, yellow-skinned from Asia, red-skins from the Americas, and whites from Europe. Although Africans and native Australians both have dark skins, they are very different in other aspects. This results in a short list of five races based on the five continents.

An early 20th century view of the "Five Races of Man". — An early 20th century view of the “Five Races of Man”.

We might try to make this into a practical definition by applying fuzzy-set math. Supposing we design an instrument to measure skin color, another to measure nose shape by width and breadth, another to measure hair color, and so forth. Using these instruments, we would be able to characterize every individual on the planet in terms of these measurements. Next, we could assign a fuzzy score (from zero to one) for the similarity of each individual person, with some prototypical ideal of a typical individual from each of the five “races”.

Some individuals would receive a high score (near 1.0) in a single race category, and very low scores (near 0.0) in all other race categories. However, many other individuals would receive middling scores in several race categories. This might be because those individuals came from areas near cosmopolitan seaports, or because some of their ancestors had migrated from one global region to another.

Scientists from the Romantic era attempted such measurements and classification, using not only skin color and other readily distinguishable characteristics, but also craniometry and phrenology. Then they attempted to draw correlations with other measures such as “intelligence”, whatever that means. Unfortunately, any subtlety of scientific nuance was lost in jingoism with imperialist and/or colonialist agendas. And the entire efforts were generally used to help justify those Romantic agendas, revealing perhaps a hidden motivation for a particular outcome.

But from the fuzzy point of view, it is all right that many people don’t fit neatly into one or another of these continental racial categories. Also, while “intelligence” and other aspects of personal character may be determined to some extent by genetic factors, “race” plays only a small and fuzzy role. Epigenetic and environmental factors are just as important if not more so.

The blogger Steve Sailer suggests that while race is a fuzzy concept, nevertheless it can be useful at a much finer-grained level than the five continental races. In support of his view, Sailer poses the following quiz:

Which of these four conflicts are between different races and which are merely clashes between some other kinds of groups?

1. President Mugabe`s black supporters vs. white farm-owners in Zimbabwe

2. Sudan`s civil war between the brown people in the North and the black people in the South

3. Rwanda`s civil war between the tall black Tutsis and the short black Hutus

4. The Troubles in Northern Ireland between Catholics (often red-headed) and Protestants (often red-headed).

And if you think you know the answer to which of these fights are between races and which are not, please try to explain to yourself why you drew the line where you did.

Contrary to Sailer, I would suggest that while the concept of “race” might make most sense for case 1 (black vs. white in Zimbabwe), the other conflicts are between what I would prefer to define as “ethnic groups”. An ethnic group would be any distinguishable subset of one of the larger continental races. Whether an ethnic group is defined by geographic, political or religious boundaries, all of these boundaries lead to a degree of inbreeding. This is the key genetic definition of an ethnic group.

There are a great many distinguishable ethnic groups on Earth, and the processes of history tend to alternately raise and lower the barriers between these groups. Thus, those ethnic groups which are “neighbors” (either geographically or in some other shared history) tend to be relatively similar to each other; while those drawn from far-distant regions are more distinctive. When we compare, say, an ethnic group from Africa, against another from Northern Europe, the differences are undeniable. So, we feel comfortable with the conclusion that the groups are from different races as well as different ethnic groups. When it comes to Scotsmen and Irishmen (even including the effects of Viking and other invaders), the genetic boundary is far less clear, and so we consider that the difference is ethnic rather than racial. But again, the difference between “race” and “ethnic group” is a fuzzy concept.

America is essentially a “melting pot” of mixed ancestry going back many generations, so most or all local structure is probably lost, aside from the continental racial makeup: even today only about 5% of couplings in the USA are inter-racial. However, in Europe, it is still not that hard to find individuals who can say that all four of their grandparents were born within a few miles of their present place of residence. People such as these living in the UK were the target of a recent study by Leslie et al. They found that the autosomal DNA samples from these individuals could be clustered into a fine structure of seventeen groups which corresponded to geographic locality with very few outliers, as shown in the figure below. The samples from southern / central England were more homogeneous over a broader area than any other region.

Similar techniques, of course, can readily be used to distinguish groups such as Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, not only as to their Jewish aspect, but also as to their particular European region of origin. Eran Elhaik (2012) was able to show that European Ashkenazi Jews, whose autosomal genetic signature has long been known, are more similar to Georgians and Armenians from the Caucasus and contain more recent DNA contributions from that region, compared to Palestinian populations. The European Jews are also related to Palestinians, but at a more ancient distance. Elhaik concludes that this supports the theory of a Khazarian sojourn for these European Jews.

While this result is historically interesting, for the purposes of this article it is mainly relevant to note that the technology is readily available to ascertain whether the DNA of any individual is strongly related to the European Ashkenazi Jewish population, or for that matter any other ethnic group located nationwide.

But…

The Oligarchs are also a fuzzy set!

Based on most available objective criteria (political power, wealth, influence) the set of oligarchs blends smoothly into the set of merely important people, which in turn blends smoothly into the upper class, and from there into the middle class. Many secret societies exist, and in many cases we know something about the membership of these societies, but not necessarily who their core policymakers or beneficiaries are. Thus, there is no particular boundary unless there is some secret list of “names in the book of life” that is maintained in some secret library, but we are not going to get access to that library any time soon. Genetic and/or genealogical analysis may reveal a surprise, that there is some small set of people who are nearly as conscientiously inbred as the Surui tribe.

But what’s more likely is that some sort of fuzzy relationship will be revealed between the nobles of Europe, the Jews, and modern oligarchs; and that the historical hypotheses discussed above will be verified or falsified to some extent.

Discuss in forum!

Revision history: rev 1.0, 10/22/2014

A Pedophile Fantasy in the Rye

Joe Atwill and Jerry Russell

April 16, 2015

In a prior article available on this site, J.D. Salinger’s book The Catcher in the Rye was shown to contain a hidden symbolic level that depicted Holden Caulfield’s initiation into the Freemasons. The article also showed that Salinger described a kind of Freemasonry that did not shy away from violence to protect its secrets.

Will Weaver, blogging at the Huffington Post, noticed another disturbing fact about JD Salinger’s literature:

As we pass the two-year anniversary of J.D. Salinger’s death, why is it that no one remarks on the obvious? In his life and in his fiction, Salinger had a predilection for young girls and women that, at least from a 21st century lens, does not seem all that healthy.

The first story in Salinger’s collection, Nine Stories, includes a scene at a beach with a “young man” (in his twenties) and a little girl. She is described as wearing a two-piece bathing suit that she would “not be needing” for nine or ten years. That’s slightly creepy coming from a grown guy. But he knows her by name, and our inner parent lets out a sigh of relief — until he compliments her again on her bathing suit. Soon he is holding her hand as they walk further down the beach where they go swimming together, and, in an intensely described scene, he helps her float by holding her ankles.

A story or two later in the collection we find a soldier in World War II, who, after reading some letters from his wife, goes out for tea. He encounters a governess and her ten-year-old charge. The little girl is quite friendly, and wears anklets and has “lovely” feet. When it’s certain they’ll talk, the soldier becomes concerned about the gap in his teeth, and the color of his mustache. Weirdness Alert: why, when about to talk to a young girl, would a grown man be concerned about his looks?

And if you look closely at Catcher In The Rye, there are odd moments of Holden watching the skater, or sitting in his young sister’s bedroom — Holden with his gray hair, remember. But an Existentialist reading, in full critical flower when Salinger was publishing and still fragrant in his work today, forgives almost everything. It’s all about “alienation,” his fans maintain. Okay. But these facts remain: about 75 percent of Salinger’s fiction centers on characters under the age of 21, and of that, about half on girls under the age of twelve.

Unfettered by any Existentialist pleasantries, we would like to put Salinger’s “alienation” into a more Postflavian context. Our suggestion is that Salinger’s encrypted message needs to be understood as a consequence of his being a member of military intelligence during WWII.

MK-Ultra, the CIA, and the Counter Culture

Following the war the OSS transitioned into the CIA and began a secret program called MK Ultra. As shown in our article “Manufacturing the Deadhead“, this program was instrumental to the creation of what was called the counter culture – the cultural force that caused America’s youth to abandon their middle class values and embrace sex, drugs and rock and roll as freedom. This was presumably done at the direction of some hidden power that wished to debase the morals and intellect of the baby boomer generation to make them easier to control. In fact, MK Ultra intended to place them within a kind of mental slavery.

We ask the reader to consider whether Salinger created The Catcher in the Rye as part of this project. Culture moves slowly, and the book seems to have been intended to operate as a precursor to the more destructive ideas about sex, drugs and music that would follow. The book helped to – among other things – began the process of isolating teen-agers from their parents in order to break down the family structure. The trend started by Holden Caulfield’s lonely teen-age angst, would end up in Woodstock with drugged out baby boomers experiencing casual sex in the mud while their rock idols – many of whom were the children of military intelligence– played music designed to diminish their intellect.

Furthermore, we contend that part of Salinger’s attack against America’s youth was directed against their subconscious. By 1951 and the publication of Catcher in the Rye, the CIA had already begun to study the subconscious to learn how to use it for control. Specifically, Gregory Bateson had established a scholarly relationship with hypnotist Milton Erickson as early as 1932. (As we will be demonstrating in a new article to appear shortly, Bateson was another key figure in the early development of the OSS and the CIA and their program to create the counter culture.) Bateson would have been fascinated with Erickson’s research, which involved the idea that hypnotically effective trance states could be established in the course of ordinary life activities such as reading, talking to a therapist, or watching motion pictures, especially if intense and traumatic emotional states could be evoked by the experience. During such trance states, Erickson believed, the subconscious mind of the the target could be accessed by means of hypnotic suggestion.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

This idea was later taken up by Bateson proteges Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who commercialized it as the system of “Neuro-Linguistic Programming”, described in their 1975 work “The Structure of Magic“. They drew on Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar to explain that the subliminal messages could be formed within a deep linguistic structure lurking beneath the surface interpretation.

An interesting example of this is found on the cover of the Life Magazine that described Gordon Wasson’s 1957 article which began the public’s awareness of psychedelic drugs.

The Life Magazine cover highlights a box and inside the box are the words:

Great Adventures in The Discovery of Mushrooms That Cause Strange Visions

—————————–

Teen Age Allowances

Gordon Wasson’s ‘discovery’ has now been shown to be part of MK Ultra. His trip had the official MK Ultra designation of sub project 58. Wasson’s story has also been shown to be a lie. See the article on this site, “Manufacturing the Deadhead“, for a description of the evidence.

What we are seeing on Life’s cover seems to be an early example of neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP. On the surface, it appears that the items in the box refer to two different articles on two different subjects. However, considering that this was the grand initiation of the MK Ultra project that intended to move teen-age culture to accept psychedelic drugs, it stretches the bounds of credulity to argue that this breathless invitation to “Great Adventures” could have been juxtaposed to the words ‘Teen Age Allowances’ by accident. Bert Lahr, the “Cowardly Lion” and “Bumbling Lover”, seems to be part of the tableau in the role of a clown. Real men and teenagers go boldly, not bumbling, into the great adventure. Every citizen should study the cover of the May 13, 1957 edition carefully. It reveals the sad and horrible truth that there is some organization with destructive intent hidden within our government and media.

As a member of military intelligence, Salinger may well have been aware of science that Bateson and Erickson were developing to influence the subconscious. Our view is that he intentionally used an early form of neuro-linguistic programming in a subtheme within Catcher in the Rye. Salinger designed the theme to operate subconsciously and break down his reader’s résistance to inappropriate sexuality.

Holden and Phoebe, best of friends?

On a surface level, the relationship between the sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield and his ten-year-old sister Phoebe appears to be a strong and affectionate brother-sister bond which has generally been praised by critics. For example, see this commentary at LitCharts.com:

Though only ten years old, Phoebe is considerably more mature than Holden. She is a voice of reason throughout the novel, both in Holden’s thoughts and in the advice she gives to him in person. Phoebe is also unusually perceptive: her insight into Holden’s misanthropy, his hatred of almost everything, is a key turning point in the novel. It’s no coincidence that perhaps the most level headed and intelligent character in the novel is a child. Holden idealizes childhood and values children’s ideas and opinions more than those of adults. Phoebe’s intelligence and wise counsel offer a strong contrast to the lectures he receives from the various teachers and headmasters that he despises.

However, under closer scrutiny, Holden and Phoebe express feelings and actions for each other which are well along the slippery slope that leads to incest and pedophilia. This would help set the stage for the baby boomers’ acceptance of the free love (and no marriage) culture of the sixties.

The “Sex Maniac”.

Salinger begins his assault on his male readers’ subconscious by having his anti-hero state that he is a “sex maniac” and describing sexual activity designed to open his reader’s subconscious to such behavior. Holden admits that he would do some “very crumby stuff ” if the opportunity came up. What teenage boy wouldn’t?

The trouble was, that kind of junk is sort of fascinating to watch, even if you don’t want it to be. For instance, that girl that was getting water squirted all over her face, she was pretty good-looking. I mean that’s my big trouble. In my mind, I’m probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw. Sometimes I can think of very crumby stuff I wouldn’t mind doing if the opportunity came up. I can even see how it might be quite a lot of fun, in a crumby way, and if you were both sort of drunk and all, to get a girl and squirt water or something all over each other’s face. The thing is, though, I don’t like the idea. It stinks, if you analyze it. I think if you don’t really like a girl, you shouldn’t horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you’re supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It’s really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes. Girls aren’t too much help, either, when you start trying not to get too crumby, when you start trying not to spoil anything really good. I knew this one girl, a couple of years ago, that was even crumbier than I was. Boy, was she crumby! We had a lot of fun, though, for a while, in a crumby way. Sex is something I really don’t understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away.

Although, in fact, Holden’s “crumby” squirting fetish seems relatively harmless, incest and child abuse are definitely not in the same category. Although Egyptian royalty may have engaged in brother-sister marriages to preserve the purity of the bloodline, this behavior is well known to lead quickly to expression of maladaptive recessive genes causing monstrous birth defects. Avoidance of such relations seems to be instinctive among many mammalian species as well as humans. Accordingly, the near-universal human taboo on incest (that is, aside from Egyptian royalty) is highly functional and in accordance with natural law; the same cannot be said for Salinger’s work.

Furthermore, of course, prepubescent children are not physically or psychologically ready for sexual activity with adults, and such activity often leads to trauma and to a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder which is very difficult to overcome later in life. This is an extremely widespread problem in America today; one estimate claims that as many as 28% to 33% of all American females were subject to childhood sexual abuse.

Madonna-Whore Complex

In the passage above, Caulfield is also expressing a madonna-whore complex, which is defined as “the inability to maintain sexual arousal within a committed, loving relationship… this psychological complex is said to develop in men who see women either as saintly Madonnas or debased prostitutes”. Holden’s problem is only compounded by the fact that he sees himself as sexually aroused primarily by his fetish for squirting “water or something”. Accordingly, Caulfield engages in “necking” and “horsing around” with characters like Sally Hayes and Anne Louise Sherman who he does not respect, while he idealizes Jane Gallagher, who he can hardly bring himself to touch aside from genteel hand-holding. The thought of Jane behaving sexually with his roommate Stradlater drives Caulfield into a frenzy. Ironically, Caulfield hires a prostitute, Sunny, and winds up placing her on this same Madonna pedestal. Thus, he remains endlessly virginal and sexually frustrated. We aren’t even sure Holden would understand how to go about having sexual intercourse if the opportunity presented itself, much less whether he understands what “crumby” behavior really might entail.

Holden Caulfield’s sister Phoebe is also idealized as a sort of Madonna, most saintly and yet most desirable. Salinger described Phoebe as “nice skinny” and “roller skate” skinny”. With his descriptions, Salinger is connecting the subconscious mind of his young male readers to the idea of a sexually desirable but underage girl. At the same time, because of the Madonna-Whore complex, Holden Caulfield is blinded to his sexual attraction towards his sister; as is the casual reader.

But you ought to see old Phoebe. She has this sort of red hair, a little bit like Allie’s was, that’s very short in the summertime. In the summertime, she sticks it behind her ears. She has nice, pretty little ears. In the wintertime, it’s pretty long, though. Sometimes my mother braids it and sometimes she doesn’t. It’s really nice, though. She’s only ten. She’s quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that’s what she is, roller-skate skinny. You’d like her.

Salinger then describes Phoebe as dressed up as an adult. This is done to create the sense of Phoebe as a sexual being in the minds of his readers. But, at the same time, the imagery of white gloves maintains the illusion of her purity and inaccessibility.

Old Phoebe. I swear to God you’d like her. She was smart even when she was a very tiny little kid. When she was a very tiny little kid, I and Allie used to take her to the park with us, especially on Sundays. Allie had this sailboat he used to like to fool around with on Sundays, and we used to take old Phoebe with us. She’d wear white gloves and walk right between us, like a lady and all.

Salinger mentions Holden’s touching of his sister. Notice that Salinger is creating a parallel between Holden’s touch, with that of a slightly older adolescent girl’s tentatively sexual touching of Holden.

One other thing I just thought of. One time, in this movie, Jane did something that just about knocked me out. The newsreel was on or something, and all of a sudden I felt this hand on the back of my neck, and it was Jane’s. It was a funny thing to do. I mean she was quite young and all, and most girls if you see them putting their hand on the back of somebody’s neck, they’re around twenty-five or thirty and usually they’re doing it to their husband or their little kid–I do it to my kid sister Phoebe once in a while, for instance. But if a girl’s quite young and all and she does it, it’s so pretty it just about kills you.

Salinger goes on to describe a record Holden buys for Phoebe. He sexualizes this gift by noting that he bought her the “whorehouse” version of a child’s song for his sister. The reference to “Little Shirley Beans” may represent Shirley Temple, the prepubescent Hollywood idol who remarked in her 1988 autobiography that she was also ashamed of her missing teeth. The scene precedes and foreshadows Holden’s fantasy of catching children falling off the cliff as they are playing in the rye field, which takes on an even more creepy pedophiliac tone in the context of imagining the nubile little Shirley (Temple) Beans in semantic juxtaposition to the whorehouse:

I started walking over toward Broadway, just for the hell of it, because I hadn’t been over there in years. Besides, I wanted to find a record store that was open on Sunday. There was this record I wanted to get for Phoebe, called “Little Shirley Beans.” It was a very hard record to get. It was about a little kid that wouldn’t go out of the house because two of her front teeth were out and she was ashamed to. I heard it at Pencey. A boy that lived on the next floor had it, and I tried to buy it off him because I knew it would knock old Phoebe out, but he wouldn’t sell it. It was a very old, terrific record that this colored girl singer, Estelle Fletcher, made about twenty years ago. She sings it very Dixieland and whorehouse, and it doesn’t sound at all mushy. If a white girl was singing it, she’d make it sound cute as hell, but old Estelle Fletcher knew what the hell she was doing, and it was one of the best records I ever heard. I figured I’d buy it in some store that was open on Sunday and then I’d take it up to the park with me. It was Sunday and Phoebe goes rollerskating in the park on Sundays quite frequently. I knew where she hung out mostly.

A relationship “too affectionate”

Holden then makes a secret visit to his sister’s bedroom. He describes himself as a criminal because he is trying to avoid an encounter with his parents, but it also creates a sinister subtext for the midnight tryst with Phoebe.

I got off at our floor–limping like a bastard–and started walking over toward the Dicksteins’ side. Then, when I heard the elevator doors shut, I turned around and went over to our side. I was doing all right. I didn’t even feel drunk anymore. Then I took out my door key and opened our door, quiet as hell. Then, very, very carefully and all, I went inside and closed the door. I really should’ve been a crook.

It was dark as hell in the foyer, naturally, and naturally I couldn’t turn on any lights. I had to be careful not to bump into anything and make a racket. I certainly knew I was home, though. Our foyer has a funny smell that doesn’t smell like anyplace else. I don’t know what the hell it is. It isn’t cauliflower and it isn’t perfume–I don’t know what the hell it is–but you always know you’re home. I started to take off my coat and hang it up in the foyer closet, but that closet’s full of hangers that rattle like madmen when you open the door, so I left it on. Then I started walking very, very slowly back toward old Phoebe’s room.

Holden finds his sister asleep in his oldest brother’s bed. The fact that she is in an adult’s bed suggests that Phoebe is ready for adult activity.

Finally, after about an hour, I got to old Phoebe’s room. She wasn’t there, though. I forgot about that. I forgot she always sleeps in D.B.’s room when he’s away in Hollywood or some place. She likes it because it’s the biggest room in the house. Also because it has this big old madman desk in it that D.B. bought off some lady alcoholic in Philadelphia, and this big, gigantic bed that’s about ten miles wide and ten miles long. I don’t know where he bought that bed.

Holden describes his sister’s bed and asks the bizarre question: “What’s old Phoebe got to spread out?” Phoebe would presumably answer that she needed the room for all her books and papers. Holden answers his own question with a denial, stating that Phoebe has nothing to spread out. But Salinger knows that his readers’ subconscious will suggest another answer – her legs.

Anyway, old Phoebe likes to sleep in D.B.’s room when he’s away, and he lets her. You ought to see her doing her homework or something at that crazy desk. It’s almost as big as the bed. You can hardly see her when she’s doing her homework. That’s the kind of stuff she likes, though. She doesn’t like her own room because it’s too little, she says. She says she likes to spread out. That kills me. What’s old Phoebe got to spread out? Nothing.

Holden finds his sister asleep but – for some reason – he notices that her mouth is open, and imagines spit all over the pillow. This connects to subliminal visions of oral sex, and Holden’s facial squirting fetish.

Anyway, I went into D.B.’s room quiet as hell, and turned on the lamp on the desk. Old Phoebe didn’t even wake up. When the light was on and all, I sort of looked at her for a while. She was laying there asleep, with her face sort of on the side of the pillow. She had her mouth way open. It’s funny. You take adults, they look lousy when they’re asleep and they have their mouths way open, but kids don’t. Kids look all right. They can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look all right.

Salinger describes Phoebe’s clothes next to the bed, suggesting her nakedness. Caulfield’s narrative avoids mentioning whether she is wearing a nightgown, although he is generally very attentive to Phoebe’s attire. Much later, Holden notices that Phoebe is wearing sleeveless pajamas.

I went around the room, very quiet and all, looking at stuff for a while. I felt swell, for a change. I didn’t even feel like I was getting pneumonia or anything any more. I just felt good, for a change. Old Phoebe’s clothes were on this chair right next to the bed. She’s very neat, for a child. I mean she doesn’t just throw her stuff around, like some kids. She’s no slob. She had the jacket to this tan suit my mother bought her in Canada hung up on the back of the chair. Then her blouse and stuff were on the seat. Her shoes and socks were on the floor, right underneath the chair, right next to each other. I never saw the shoes before. They were new. They were these dark brown loafers, sort of like this pair I have, and they went swell with that suit my mother bought her in Canada. My mother dresses her nice. She really does. My mother has terrific taste in some things. She’s no good at buying ice skates or anything like that, but clothes, she’s perfect.

Holden wakes his sister up. They immediately began a physical relationship that is described as “too affectionate”. Holden thinks it is “too affectionate” presumably because of its sexual nature. Holden returns the hug with a kiss. Is this “too affectionate” as well? Salinger directs the readers’ attention away from this question, quickly bringing their interaction back to a level of chatty banter.

She wakes up very easily. I mean you don’t have to yell at her or anything. All you have to do, practically, is sit down on the bed and say, “Wake up, Phoeb,” and bingo, she’s awake.”

“Holden!” she said right away. She put her arms around my neck and all. She’s very affectionate. I mean she’s quite affectionate, for a child. Sometimes she’s even too affectionate. I sort of gave her a kiss, and she said, “Whenja get home?’ She was glad as hell to see me. You could tell.

They talk about a flirtatious interaction Phoebe has had with another boy in her class, Curtis Weintraub. He pushed Phoebe down the stairs, because Phoebe had painted ink on his windbreaker. Salinger has Holden chide the ten-year old Phoebe for her childish tit-for-tat behavior, while hinting on the contrary that she is an adult ready for sex.

“ What are you–a child, for God’s sake?”

A Very Hot Dance

Salinger descries Holden and Phoebe having rough physical contact on their bed, as Phoebe is outraged to learn that Holden has failed again at school. While the conscious mind is focused on the drama of their conflict, the subconscious is simultaneously tantalized with images of sex play.

“I told you. They let us out early. They let the whole–”

“You did get kicked out! You did!” old Phoebe said. Then she hit me on the leg with her fist. She gets very fisty when she feels like it. “You did! Oh, Holden!” She had her hand on her mouth and all. She gets very emotional, I swear to God.

“Who said I got kicked out? Nobody said I–”

“You did. You did,” she said. Then she smacked me again with her fist. If you don’t think that hurts, you’re crazy. “Daddy’ll kill you!” she said. Then she flopped on her stomach on the bed and put the goddam pillow over her head. She does that quite frequently. She’s a true madman sometimes.

“Cut it out, now,” I said. “Nobody’s gonna kill me. Nobody’s gonna even–C’mon, Phoeb, take that goddam thing off your head. Nobody’s gonna kill me.”

She wouldn’t take it off, though. You can’t make her do something if she doesn’t want to. All she kept saying was, “Daddy s gonna kill you.” You could hardly understand her with that goddam pillow over her head.

[…]

She wouldn t take it off, though I tried pulling it off, but she’s strong as hell. You get tired fighting with her. Boy, if she wants to keep a pillow over her head, she keeps it. “Phoebe, please. C’mon outa there,” I kept saying. “C’mon, hey . . . Hey, Weatherfield. C’mon out.”

She wouldn’t come out, though. […]

When I came back, she had the pillow off her head all right–I knew she would– but she still wouldn’t look at me, even though she was laying on her back and all. When I came around the side of the bed and sat down again, she turned her crazy face the other way. She was ostracizing the hell out of me.

In response to Phoebe’s withdrawal, Holden pinches Phoebe on her ass. While Holden tells us this is playfully “just for the hell of it”, there is no denying Salinger’s intent here, which is to trick the reader into accepting that such invasively flirtatious behavior is normal between affectionate siblings. But wait, let’s do a double take: Holden is sixteen and is fully mature sexually, while his sister is still a child. Uuugh… this is NOT okay. Note that Phoebe’s attempted retaliation is completely ineffectual. One must ask: why has such a book become mandatory reading for America’s young adults?

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I passed English.” Then, just for the hell of it, I gave her a pinch on the behind. It was sticking way out in the breeze, the way she was laying on her side. She has hardly any behind. I didn’t do it hard, but she tried to hit my hand anyway, but she missed.

Salinger describes Phoebe’s mouth is an awkward position. Within the context it suggests the possibility of oral sex.

Old Phoebe said something then, but I couldn’t hear her. She had the side of her mouth right smack on the pillow, and I couldn’t hear her.

“What?” I said. “Take your mouth away. I can’t hear you with your mouth that way.”

While she is lying in bed and he is sitting next to her, Phoebe challenges Holden to name one thing he likes a lot.

“Because you don’t. You don’t like any schools. You don’t like a million things. You don’t.”

“I do! That’s where you’re wrong–that’s exactly where you’re wrong! Why the hell do you have to say that?” I said. Boy, was she depressing me.

“Because you don’t,” she said. “Name one thing.”

“One thing? One thing I like?” I said. “Okay.”

The trouble was, I couldn’t concentrate too hot. Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate. “One thing I like a lot you mean?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer me, though. She was in a cockeyed position way the hell over the other side of the bed. She was about a thousand miles away. “C’mon answer me,” I said. “One thing I like a lot, or one thing I just like?”

“You like a lot.”

Holden struggles to find an answer, remembering the story of James Castle’s death in an extensive internal dialog, before returning to Phoebe’s question. He admits that he likes horsing around with Phoebe, but she doesn’t believe their interaction has any great significance, certainly nothing that Holden should be living for.

“What?” I said to old Phoebe. She said something to me, but I didn’t hear her. “You can’t even think of one thing.”

“Yes, I can. Yes, I can.”

“Well, do it, then.”

“I like Allie,” I said. “And I like doing what I’m doing right now. Sitting here with you, and talking, and thinking about stuff, and–“

“Allie’s dead–You always say that! If somebody’s dead and everything, and in Heaven, then it isn’t really–“

“I know he’s dead! Don’t you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can’t I? Just because somebody’s dead, you don’t just stop liking them, for God’s sake– especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that’re alive and all.”

Old Phoebe didn’t say anything. When she can’t think of anything to say, she doesn’t say a goddam word.

“Anyway, I like it now,” I said. “I mean right now. Sitting here with you and just chewing the fat and horsing–“

“That isn’t anything really!”

“It is so something really! Certainly it is! Why the hell isn’t it? People never think anything is anything really. I’m getting goddam sick of it.”

The reader’s subconscious is led to consider that what Holden really wants is sex. He is, after all, a teenage young man and admitted “sex maniac”. But, that would be incest as well as child abuse, right? The Caulfield siblings quickly skate away from the implications.

Holden tells Phoebe of his fantasy of catching children playing in the rye field as they are about to fall off of a cliff. Phoebe ignores and then rebuffs the dream, so Holden bolts from the bedroom to make a phone call, to set up his later visit with Mr. Antolini. As he exits, Holden mentions his awareness that his sister is “pretty”, which of course also means desirable.

I got up from the bed then, because what I wanted to do, I wanted to phone up this guy that was my English teacher at Elkton Hills, Mr. Antolini. He lived in New York now. He quit Elkton Hills. He took this job teaching English at N.Y.U. “I have to make a phone call,” I told Phoebe. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go to sleep.” I didn’t want her to go to sleep while I was in the living room. I knew she wouldn’t but I said it anyway, just to make sure.

While I was walking toward the door, old Phoebe said, “Holden!” and I turned around.

She was sitting way up in bed. She looked so pretty.

After completing his phone call, Holden makes a second visit to his sister’s bedroom. He finds Phoebe in a yoga position. In other words, she is sitting spread legged. She has forgiven Holden, and wants to re-engage him. Holden’s unconscious push-pull seduction has been successful. Holden and Phoebe engage in close contact dancing and in between the dances, Phoebe continues clinging to her brother’s body. Note that Salinger also describes the yanking up of a dress of a little girl, something that Holden would not do in public. In the scene they are alone, and the reader’s subconscious is directed to the image of Phoebe’s dress being lifted.

When I got back to D.B.’s room, old Phoebe’d turned the radio on. This dance music was coming out. She’d turned it on low, though, so the maid wouldn’t hear it. You should’ve seen her. She was sitting smack in the middle of the bed, outside the covers, with her legs folded like one of those Yogi guys. She was listening to the music. She kills me.

“C’mon,” I said. “You feel like dancing?” I taught her how to dance and all when she was a tiny little kid. She’s a very good dancer. I mean I just taught her a few things. She learned it mostly by herself. You can’t teach somebody how to really dance.

“You have shoes on,” she said.

“I’ll take ’em off. C’mon.”

She practically jumped off the bed, and then she waited while I took my shoes off, and then I danced with her for a while. She’s really damn good. I don’t like people that dance with little kids, because most of the time it looks terrible. I mean if you’re out at a restaurant somewhere and you see some old guy take his little kid out on the dance floor. Usually they keep yanking the kid’s dress up in the back by mistake, and the kid can’t dance worth a damn anyway, and it looks terrible, but I don’t do it out in public with Phoebe or anything. We just horse around in the house. It’s different with her anyway, because she can dance. She can follow anything you do. I mean if you hold her in close as hell so that it doesn’t matter that your legs are so much longer. She stays right with you. You can cross over, or do some corny dips, or even jitterbug a little, and she stays right with you. You can even tango, for God’s sake.

We danced about four numbers. In between numbers she’s funny as hell. She stays right in position. She won’t even talk or anything. You both have to stay right in position and wait for the orchestra to start playing again. That kills me. You’re not supposed to laugh or anything, either.

Anyway, we danced about four numbers, and then I turned off the radio. Old Phoebe jumped back in bed and got under the covers. “I’m improving, aren’t I?” she asked me.

After dancing the couple returns to their bed and Phoebe has Holden touch her to feel her body’s heat, playfully and unconsciously suggesting the sexual heat after intercourse.

“And how,” I said. I sat down next to her on the bed again. I was sort of out of breath. I was smoking so damn much, I had hardly any wind. She wasn’t even out of breath.

“Feel my forehead,” she said all of a sudden. “Why?”
“Feel it. Just feel it once.”
I felt it. I didn’t feel anything, though.

“Does it feel very feverish?” she said.

“No. Is it supposed to?”
“Yes–I’m making it. Feel it again.”
I felt it again, and I still didn’t feel anything, but I said, “I think it’s starting to, now.” I didn’t want her to get a goddam inferiority complex.

She nodded. “I can make it go up to over the thermoneter.”
“Thermometer. Who said so?”
“Alice Holmborg showed me how. You cross your legs and hold your breath and think of something very, very hot. A radiator or something. Then your whole forehead gets so hot you can burn somebody’s hand.”

That killed me. I pulled my hand away from her forehead, like I was in terrific danger. “Thanks for telling me,” I said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t’ve burned your hand. I’d’ve stopped before it got too–Shhh!” Then, quick as hell, she sat way the hell up in bed.

She scared hell out of me when she did that. “What’s the matter?” I said. “The front door!” she said in this loud whisper. “It’s them!”

Don’t Tell Mommy and Daddy

While Holden hides in the closet, Phoebe lies about her contact with Holden to her mother. This suggests the willingness of the young victim to engage in incest and hide the relationship from the world.

I heard my mother go out and close the door. I waited a couple of minutes. Then I came out of the closet. I bumped smack into old Phoebe when I did it, because it was so dark and she was out of bed and coming to tell me. “I hurt you?” I said. You had to whisper now, because they were both home. “I gotta get a move on,” I said. I found the edge of the bed in the dark and sat down on it and started putting on my shoes. I was pretty nervous. I admit it.

“Don’t go now,” Phoebe whispered. “Wait’ll they’re asleep!”

Phoebe offers Holden money to tide him over, and Holden cries. Fearful, Phoebe pleads with Holden to stay:

She told me I could sleep with her if I wanted to, but I said no, that I’d better beat it, that Mr. Antolini was waiting for me and all.

Holden departs undetected, and goes to the Antolini apartment. The theme of unwanted sexual intent emerges again in the meeting with Mr. Antolini, as he approaches Holden with an affection that Holden detests as latently homosexual. An overt manifestation of such an affection would be statutory rape, as Holden himself is still an adolescent. Mr. Antolini represents the highest authority of Freemasonry. Is this yet another hint of a dark secret within? The question is very important, though it goes beyond the scope of this article.

Please take me with you…

After the meeting with Antolini, Holden arranges a meeting with Phoebe at the museum (that is, the temple). Salinger’s last scene within the theme describes Phoebe’s wish to run away with Holden, a common pedophile fantasy. The abuser likes to imagine that the abuse is not only harmless, but even invited or appreciated.

Phoebe tells Holden that if he allows her to run away with him, she will not bring any clothes. Her nakedness is subliminally suggested, and the statement demonstrates the clarity of the thesis that the relationship between Holden and his sister was structured to subconsciously influence the reader toward sexual permissiveness.

Finally, I saw her. I saw her through the glass part of the door. The reason I saw her, she had my crazy hunting hat on–you could see that hat about ten miles away.

I went out the doors and started down these stone stairs to meet her. The thing I couldn’t understand, she had this big suitcase with her. She was just coming across Fifth Avenue, and she was dragging this goddam big suitcase with her. She could hardly drag it. When I got up closer, I saw it was my old suitcase, the one I used to use when I was at Whooton. I couldn’t figure out what the hell she was doing with it. “Hi,” she said when she got up close. She was all out of breath from that crazy suitcase.

“I thought maybe you weren’t coming,” I said. “What the hell’s in that bag? I don’t need anything. I’m just going the way I am. I’m not even taking the bags I got at the station. What the hellya got in there?”

She put the suitcase down. “My clothes,” she said. “I’m going with you. Can I? Okay?”

“What?” I said. I almost fell over when she said that. I swear to God I did. I got sort of dizzy and I thought I was going to pass out or something again.

“I took them down the back elevator so Charlene wouldn’t see me. It isn’t heavy. All I have in it is two dresses and my moccasins and my underwear and socks and some other things. Feel it. It isn’t heavy. Feel it once. . . Can’t I go with you? Holden? Can’t I? Please.”

“No. Shut up.”

I thought I was going to pass out cold. I mean I didn’t mean to tell her to shut up and all, but I thought I was going to pass out again.

“Why can’t I? Please, Holden! I won’t do anything– I’ll just go with you, that’s all! I won’t even take my clothes with me if you don’t want me to–I’ll just take my–”

Holden refuses to let Phoebe run away with him, and the couple engage in physical touching.

“You can’t take anything. Because you’re not going. I’m going alone. So shut up.” “Please, Holden. Please let me go. I’ll be very, very, very–You won’t even–” “You’re not going. Now, shut up! Gimme that bag,” I said. I took the bag off her. I was almost all set to hit her, I thought I was going to smack her for a second. I really did. She started to cry.

“I thought you were supposed to be in a play at school and all I thought you were supposed to be Benedict Arnold in that play and all,” I said. I said it very nasty. “Whuddaya want to do? Not be in the play, for God’s sake?” That made her cry even harder. I was glad. All of a sudden I wanted her to cry till her eyes practically dropped out. I almost hated her. I think I hated her most because she wouldn’t be in that play any more if she went away with me.

“Come on,” I said. I started up the steps to the museum again. I figured what I’d do was, I’d check the crazy suitcase she’d brought in the checkroom, andy then she could get it again at three o’clock, after school. I knew she couldn’t take it back to school with her. “Come on, now,” I said.

She didn’t go up the steps with me, though. She wouldn’t come with me. I went up anyway, though, and brought the bag in the checkroom and checked it, and then I came down again. She was still standing there on the sidewalk, but she turned her back on me when I came up to her. She can do that. She can turn her back on you when she feels like it. “I’m not going away anywhere. I changed my mind. So stop crying, and shut up,” I said. The funny part was, she wasn’t even crying when I said that. I said it anyway, though, “C’mon, now. I’ll walk you back to school. C’mon, now. You’ll be late.”

She wouldn’t answer me or anything. I sort of tried to get hold of her old hand, but she wouldn’t let me. She kept turning around on me.

“Didja have your lunch? Ya had your lunch yet?” I asked her.

The return of the red people-shooting hat

She wouldn’t answer me. All she did was, she took off my red hunting hat–the one I gave her–and practically chucked it right in my face. Then she turned her back on me again. It nearly killed me, but I didn’t say anything. I just picked it up and stuck it in my coat pocket.

“Come on, hey. I’ll walk you back to school,” I said.

“I’m not going back to school.”

I didn’t know what to say when she said that. I just stood there for a couple of minutes.

“You have to go back to school. You want to be in that play, don’t you? You want to be Benedict Arnold, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. Certainly you do. C’mon, now, let’s go,” I said. “In the first place, I’m not going away anywhere, I told you. I’m going home. I’m going home as soon as you go back to school. First I’m gonna go down to the station and get my bags, and then I’m gonna go straight–”

“I said I’m not going back to school. You can do what you want to do, but I’m not going back to chool,” she said. “So shut up.” It was the first time she ever told me to shut up. It sounded terrible. God, it sounded terrible. It sounded worse than swearing. She still wouldn’t look at me either, and every time I sort of put my hand on her shoulder or something, she wouldn’t let me.

Holden asks Phoebe to walk with him, and she runs away from him, but he walks towards the zoo and she follows him. Finally, Phoebe makes the statement of a jilted wife or lover to Holden: “Keep your hands to yourself”.

There weren’t too many people in the zoo because it was sort of a lousy day, but there were a few around the sea lions’ swimming pool and all. I started to go by but old Phoebe stopped and made out she was watching the sea lions getting fed–a guy was throwing fish at them–so I went back. I figured it was a good chance to catch up with her and all. I went up and sort of stood behind her and sort of put my hands on her shoulders, but she bent her knees and slid out from me–she can certainly be very snotty when she wants to. She kept standing there while the sea lions were getting fed and I stood right behind her. I didn’t put my hands on her shoulders again or anything because if I had she really would’ve beat it on me. Kids are funny. You have to watch what you’re doing.

After we left the bears, we left the zoo and crossed over this little street in the park, and then we went through one of those little tunnels that always smell from somebody’s taking a leak. It was on the way to the carrousel. Old Phoebe still wouldn’t talk to me or anything, but she was sort of walking next to me now. I took a hold of the belt at the back of her coat, just for the hell of it, but she wouldn’t let me. She said, “Keep your hands to yourself, if you don’t mind.”

Holden wins his way back to his sister’s good graces one more time, by tempting her with a ride on a carrousel. He wears his red shooting hat as he watches her go around and around, and both siblings are filled with happiness. Who knows what is really going on here? Smoke gets in your eyes. Is this a subliminal mass murder scene, or is Phoebe enjoying sexual experiences with her horse, either in reality or in Holden’s imagination? Or is there a parallel being drawn between genocide and sexuality? The mind can only recoil at the possibilities.

As is often the case with black propaganda projects such as this, the perpetrators were striving for plausible deniability. However, hopefully this subterfuge will be effective only for the most extremely credulous and/or skeptical critics of our work. We believe that the sexual implications of Phoebe and Holden’s relationship, although well hidden, are obvious enough once they’re pointed out.

In terms of DSM-IV diagnosis, Holden Caulfield is not a pedophile in the sense that his sexual interests and activities also involve adults, and his interest in children such as his sister seems to be opportunistic and situational, rather than primary and chronic. Colloquially, opportunistic and situational pedophilia is still pedophilia. Whether Holden’s behavior steps over the line to child abuse would probably be controversial among professionals, and certainly it would be difficult and counterproductive to get a conviction in court. The same might be true of Salinger himself: by all accounts, he seems to have waited until his partners reached the age of 18 before engaging in intercourse.

Considering these facts, a critic might propose a possible alternative explanation that Salinger himself struggled with his sexual desires for very young women, adolescents and prepubescent children, and was working to stretch the bounds of acceptable behavior, without this aspect being any part of a grand over-arching conspiracy.

However, this is belied by Salinger’s affiliations with military intelligence organizations, as well as the other covert subtext of Catcher in the Rye, which is its homage to the Freemason initiation ritual. We feel confident with our position that the relationship between Holden and his ten year old sister was created as an assault of the minds of Salinger’s teenage readers — just as the May 12, 1957 Life Magazine cover was an assault on them and their parents. It was all intended to prepare the way for the sexual and moral permissiveness of the sixties and beyond.

Citizens should read this analysis carefully as, if it is correct, it indicates that there has been a powerful organization with a sinister motivation operating within our most trusted institutions – an organization that may very well be still in existence and still wrestling for control.

Discuss in Forum!

9/11: A Malapropic Myth-raic Mass

Richard Stanley

April 5, 2015

484px-RomaForoRomanoTempioCastori — The Temple of the Castori in Rome

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring (Luke 21:25)

In Even Jove G’nows, we discussed the allegorical meaning of the movie Jupiter Ascending as revealing the true and dark nature of our hidden, or occulted, human leadership. However, considering the astronomical aspects of the movie, my attention was brought back to the fate of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. In the complex of events that transpired that day, I have discovered certain rather impressive, sequentially correct, parallel astronomical correlations, or rather ‘signatures of human authorship’ in my opinion, somewhat hidden in the plain sight of free computer software.

I will begin by offering a concise list summarizing the correlations that I have identified in the Stellarium generated skymap shown below. The summary will be followed by some background historical material as well as more detailed analysis for placing all this within the context of our Postflavian worldview. In any case, I recommend that the reader try to adopt the mindset when beginning to view the skymap and reading the list that they are viewing either a religious or cultic initiation ritual or ceremony, or alternatively a mythic ‘passion’ play unfolding in the heavens, just as some ancients literally considered, and as reflected by the opening gospel verse above and the subtitle immediately below. The gods, in this context, are not always benevolent, as the contemporary zeitgeist for the Judeo-Christian apologists would un-biblically have us believe for their amalgamated neo-Jupiter.

In Heaven as on Earth

Note that the green line is the NYC horizon (or the stage floor of sorts) and the red line is the ecliptic.

Event Summary

The following is a concise list of the astronomical alignments on 9/11/2001 detailed in the general order of earthly corresponding occurrence per the day, and then as they may have significance for the ‘age’:

Saturn is at the base of the right horn of Taurus. At approximately 6 AM on 9/10, the Moon is conjunct there along with Saturn and it moves towards the club of Orion, the hunter. At approximately 7AM on 9/11 the Moon arrives at the tip of the club and this is approximately the time when the first plane, AA11 was boarded. Flights AA11 and UA175 both took off from Boston’s Logan International Airport, where Cape Cod juts out from the mainland like a bull’s horn.
The planet Jupiter is between his Gemini ‘twin’ sons, Castor and Pollux. He is there is perfect position to hear the plea of the divine Pollux to allow him to die with his ‘mortal’ twin, Castor, who has been attacked first. This represents the destruction of the WTC twin towers.
The first ‘usage’ of Venus, as the occulted Statue of Liberty, is from her island perch (near Cancer the crab) where she is witness to the destruction of the twins. Note that in this short time frame Venus is at the peak of the ecliptic for the most dramatic act of the day.
The second ‘usage’ of Venus, represents the Pentagon, again adjacent to the water (the Potomac this time) and the crab.
Across the heavenly Potomac is Regulus, the bright star of Leo which we might take as Washington D.C., the lion being a common symbol for rulership.
To prepare for a sacrificial feast in honor of Jupiter, Apollo, as the Sun, sends Corvus, the crow, out to fetch water with his bowl (in Greek a krater), but because Corvus tarries, Apollo sensing a lie upon his ‘delayed’ return, in disgust throws Corvus and the krater away, while Flight 93 has an odd ‘delay’ and then lands in a crater while ostensibly on the way to strike somewhere in Washington D.C., based upon the claimed diverted flight path. In addition to throwing Corvus away, Apollo changes him from white to black.
The modern constellation, Sextans, is also along the heavenly hijacked way back to Washington D.C., perhaps indicating that modern navigational tools were needed such as entering GPS waypoints into the Flight Management Controller, or perhaps even remote control of some other type.
Mercury (aka Hermes) is at the left hand of Virgo, and it might represent the otherwise odd E4B electronic warfare plane seen circling above Washington D.C while the Pentagon was attacked, as well as being the operational platform coordinating the various 9/11 flights including ‘Corvus’ as Flight 93 , or perhaps even all 9/11 flights.
Virgo, the virgin, is also equated with Athena and Minerva (among many others including the Virgin Mary), the respective Greek and Roman virginal goddesses of war. The events of 9/11 almost immediately triggered … uhmmm … war.
Libra, or blind Justice, is starting her rise above the horizon, but cannot see clearly the events as they transpire.
Pluto, representing a dark and hidden agenda (of the plutocrats?) rests astride Serpens and Ophiuchus, the latter of which is sometimes equated with Asclepius, a competitor of Jesus.
Mars, the god of war, is resting on Sagittarius’s bow, already waiting to be fired as per the neoconservative PNAC agenda (needing another Pearl Harbor to trigger).
Neptune, has Capricorn’s goat, or throat that is, while Uranus won’t let the goat get away — because George W. Bush must deliver a Black Mass to black school children, reading about a goat down below the NYC horizon in Florida. Note on the skymap that Capricorn is almost directly at the bottom opposite Venus, in the mythic ‘underworld’.
While Capricorn is about to begin its ascent, like John the Baptist and Baphomet perhaps, it prepares the way for the next ascent, that of the water man, Aquarius.
The fish(es) of Pisces are heading down, or upside down. Jesus, we hardly gnew ye.
Returning full circle, and (perhaps ignorantly) skipping Aries (albeit related to the former mythic Golden Fleece) and the Masonic(?) or Pythagorean Triangle, we see that Taurus is about to fall below the horizon. In the ancient context, the bull is the best known of the ruling constellations and the one which the ‘latter day’ Roman Mithraicists used to denote the changing of the ages, as well as demarcating the annual cycle. This aspect regarding Mithraic symbolism involving Taurus and the Gemini Twins, and the dynamics of the Twin Towers destruction, is the first key to my detailed analysis below.
In the middle of the chart, we see the ‘pirate ship’ Argo (subdivided these days into Vela, Puppis, and Carina) stealthily sitting on the horizon, watching the fate of its former shipmates, Castor and Pollux, and their feuding cousins, also former Argonauts.

With the above it should noted that the visually slower (from our Earthly perspective) Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus have generally been in place for several days or more, and so rather it is more with Venus, Mars, and the Moon in ascending order that seem to precisely trigger the ‘initiation’ timing for 9/11. As with the post’s title, with the exception of Mars, we find all of the historical Mithriac cult’s tutelary planetary gods on the ‘exposed’ heavenly ‘stage’ just as the events play out on the earthly stage of the New York City horizon. With this Mithraic version of Mars and the other heavenly ‘characters’ even here the mythic and modern day ‘underworlds’ are mirrored with their respective longer term hidden agendas.

For readers who find themselves intrigued by this scenario, I will now offer a background context giving my interpretation of the meaning of the correlations in the widest sense, as well as a more detailed analysis with links to excerpted data that bolster the thesis.

Context

I am neither embarking on a statistical study here or some attempt at a typical Astrological horoscope analysis, but merely revealing what I have seen by star-gazing into a readily available computer simulation of the sky on the day the towers fell. I believe that the stars and planets portray the events of 9/11 within an interpretation that is highly natural and unforced, and all the key events are depicted in sequence. From a purely combinatorial perspective, the odds against this particular stellar configuration having arisen by chance are no doubt “astronomical”; yet the relationships have been discovered by a process of creative discernment, and critics might argue that it is the creative process that has created an illusion of uniqueness, similar to a child discovering patterns in the clouds. No attempt has been made to assess the probability that a starmap taken from any random date could give rise to a distinct yet similarly salient interpretation.

However, the results of this effort will indeed inspire an examination of other important historical dates as time permits. Others have long since discovered historical ‘initiation’ or ceremonial events tied to such as the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog Star. revered by the ancient Egyptians.

While one can find discussions of some of the astronomic and astrological alignments on the day of 9/11, I’ve yet to find any discussion as to how I dynamically present them here. That is, vis-à-vis the typological relationship of their ancient mythological narratives in relation to either the ‘initiating’ or termination of the Augustan New World Order, the end of which necessitates the beginning of the next one. As such, I am doing nothing different than the original authors of variant myth narratives, or those later astrologers who variously applied the myths to the heavenly constellations per their expedient needs of the day. And, as well, we can now see a clearer, covertly symbiotic, connection between early Christianity and the exclusive mystery cult of Romanized Mithraism, perhaps with the latter being supplanted by Freemasonry and other orders. This rather than as they are typically portrayed as rival religions competing to succeed the older ‘traditional’ religions and mystery cults.

With the relatively popular cultural employment of terms like the New World Order (or NWO), and other observed socio-cultural manifestations such as the ongoing New Age tableau (again tied to the Zodiac ages) and the 60’s counter-culture, there is a general tendency of induced poor expectations that we must consider such a transition to be equated with something even more dramatic than with say 9/11, and that its arrival will be obvious in a manner akin to the graphic apocalyptic imagery invoked in the Book of Revelation. But even with this latter work, we know that the process had a seven year ‘tribulation’, and was not an overnight event. Indeed, if we are to consider the prior transition into Augustus’ NWO as a model, then we should expect the presently considered NWO proper to slowly slide into place in installments, with a few fireworks here and there to grease the skids and distract us with intermittent Shock and Awe.

I am not saying that the Age of Aquarius has necessarily begun, as for one thing this is supposedly several hundred years off according to the supposed zodiacal rules, for whatever those are worth. Similarly I make no claims as to know from the same dubious basis when the current Age of Pisces began, but we do know that the Christians adopted the evocative fish as their ‘secret’ meeting symbol, taking over culturally from Aries and Taurus before that in at least what was the respective dominant religious symbologies of their day. We might ponder whether or not the sign of the fish in those early days was really only used by covert evangelical agents of the imperial cult involved in the long term transition from Caesar worship to Christianty? Then as now.

Of course, 9/11 has been a transforming historical event for not only America, but much of the world. This topic is also highly germane here because, after all, the tagline for Postflaviana.org is “Beyond the New World Order”. With my analysis here I assert that the events that happened that fateful day marked the covert, yet otherwise loud, announcement of a critical phase in the ending of the prior ‘western’ order that had been trumpeted in by Virgil’s 4th Eclogue for his sponsor, Augustus Caesar, the Prince of Peace, and his acclaimed Pax Romana, which was later merrily co-opted by the Roman Catholic Church for Christ’s sake. This then later formalized textually by the Flavian gospel graft (revealed in Romans 11) which was part of the long term process of slipstreaming what eventually became normative Christianity atop the brittle and transparent bones of the imperial cult of the Divii Julia. Christianity’s graft, once firm enough, then institutionally cemented into place by Constantine I.

Because beginning with at least Alexander’s Hellenization, Western civilization is a grand cultural mash-up of a sort, it is important to also realize here that other typological elements have been included. While in ancient times the destruction of the Herodian Temple marked the centerpiece of the seven years of tribulational (ala the Book of Revelation and Josephus’s Jewish War) war between the Flavian Romans and the Jews, the modern age witnessed on ‘9/11’ the destruction of one building that has a typological structural similarity to the Temple Mount platform and a typological nomenclature similarity with the Solomonic Temple, and just before that two adjacent towers that can be equated with the famous columns that stood outside the Herodian Temple. Additionally, with the earlier rise of the Roman Imperium via Augustus and his adoptive father, Julius, marked the effective end of the celebrated Republic. Though not in the same sequence, we witnessed a similar dagger blow to the American Republic via the already prepared Patriot Act.

As Joe Atwill discussed in his Caesar’s Messiah, we know from the early church fathers that the seven year Tribulation was referring to the Flavian war having bookended the siege and conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Herodian Temple. But as with any literary typology, this type of material can be put to reuse. In fact, until 9/11 perhaps, in defense of Protestant claims of the papacy being the Anti-Christ (as opposed to accurately being the vicarious Ante-Christs) the Jesuits made perhaps the most ambitious typological effort in simultaneously advancing the mutually exclusive Preterist and Futurist Schools of the End Times. With the latter we can then see such phenomenon as the reinterpretation of the gospel word ‘generation’ (as employed by Jesus in the gospels – importantly discussed at the conclusion) by Cyrus Scofield to typologically comply with a yet to arrive event.

And so with 9/11, we see the simultaneous typological use of the Twin Towers as both the Gemini Twins and as Jachin and Boaz, the twin (but similarly different) columns just outside the Temple of Solomon.

If there might perchance be some seasonal or other cause and effect relationship to human personality differences, we Postflavians certainly don’t believe that Zodiacal Astrology can drive specific and highly planned events such as happened on that day. Rather we see such astronomic and mythological associations as typically and purposefully ‘occulted’, here as vanity signatures that can then be plausibly denied in coordination with the blind eye of institutional media. Such an ‘occulting’ aspect also serves for some misdirection of focus and marginalizing of those erstwhile ‘truth seekers’ prone to believe in a literal Satan and even others of a more rational bent. Anything that can deflect and prevent a critical mass of calls for real justice should be expected to be employed by those with such booty to be ‘harvested’, to use the Jupiter Ascending metaphor.

However, to help keep things in perspective as to: first, how and why the people of Hellenistic times fit such star and planetary imagery into their lives, which includes even Jewish apocalyptic; and secondly, why we might see modern day groups choosing to continue to make use of such alignments as part of their ‘hidden’ agenda:

First of all, one must always remember that Hellenistic astrology was both a religion and a science. The planets were gods, who ruled the universe according to scientific law. Astrologers might emphasize the religious or the scientific aspects as it suited them, but both were always present. Even Ptolemy, who tried hard to explain everything in terms of four element physics, says that ultimately the planets move as they do because of “divine, unchangeable destiny,”/59/ and a famous poem attributed to him in the _Greek Anthology_ says:

I know that I am the creature of a day; but when I search into the multitudinous revolving spirals of the stars my feet no longer rest on the earth, but, standing by Zeus himself, I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of the gods./60/
Address : <http://www.smoe.org/arcana/diss2.html>

Though astrology originated in Mesopotamia and Egypt, by the time of Alexander’s Hellenization project it was widely considered the cutting edge ’cause and effect’ science of the day by its adherents. Despite widespread Christian denials of belief in the principles involved, such as the common usages of the phrase, “on Earth as it is in Heaven” is just one of many allusions to these principles, perhaps sublimating the then exoteric to an esoteric domain. It is our belief at Postflaviana that this is indeed just how the general system works for the Abramic religions, at least, where the masses are profitably dissuaded from partaking from the figurative Tree of Knowledge generally speaking.

And so for the elites, whether constrained at times to the priesthood or not, who either get first crack at benefiting from advances in the technological state of the art, or hold a monopoly wherever possible. So while in the course of two millennia the elite class certainly has no further ‘practical’ sympathetic use of such symbology, there is yet the same underlying motivation in play that is today commonly termed ‘globalization’, perhaps Alexander’s Hellenization of the oecumene and/or the later Pax Romana writ large.

To realize such ambitious aims still requires the discrete recruitment of numerous disparate ‘talented’ individuals where some means must be employed to securely bind them together in a common goal, hence a perverse initiation rite, the level of perversity proportionate to the degree of security required. Exoteric Christianity uses such means as the barely disguised ritual cannibalism of Communion watered down such that one is only consuming a substitutional fig-mint of a human, so to speak. But Christians and other exoteric Abramists are not asked to do too much beyond occasionally partaking in sanctioned wars to ‘protect’ their freedom granted by their patrones. Wars covertly sanctified (where the word sanction derives) – in the heavens perhaps?

By extension then, what further must be done to bind together those select few to perform the occasional ‘wet work’ in the shadows needed to further the agendas hidden from the masses that would otherwise object? Here I submit that modern societies are replete with various organizations, such as college fraternities and sororities (Greek culture), for example, where various means, such as perverse initiations and coerced and drug aided sexual encounters, are used to psychologically profile and categorize recruits as to just whom makes good material to advance(?) into the operative organs for covertly getting dirty deeds done.

In modern and popular parlance ‘Greek Culture’ was recently, if not now, a crude euphemism for anal sex, whether consensual or otherwise, and either heterosexual or homosexual. But in the Classical context, young males were mandated to take an older man as a ‘mentor’ who would teach them many of the skills of life including – the modern context previously mentioned. In Sparta, at least, these young men were also required to go out and terrorize (or kill) the Helot slaves before being allowed to advance in society. An initiation ‘rite of passage’ so to speak. Imagine today if such as an American President had to undergo such rituals, even frequently admitting his young charge past the eyes of the erstwhile ‘ever diligent’ Secret Service.

As was discussed in Joe Atwill’s post, Freemason in the Rye, the Freemasons have an initiation ritual which promises the initiate certain death for breaking his vows, and as such we find a copy of Catcher in the Rye in the possession of the assassins of those who have indeed broken their vows. This book as a talismanic message to those other members that might be thinking of straying. The ‘contract’ terms will be fulfilled.

In this vein, I assert that 9/11 was both a ritual announcement to the insiders with “eyes to see” that the long term global project was advancing to the next major critical phase, and as a further collective reinforcement that their participation and contextual silence is mandatory at the cost of executive termination. Silence may be broken only if the manner of communication is properly cryptic for plausible deniability sake and to serve the perverse vanity of the sponsors.

Detailed Analysis: Castor & Pollux

Central to Greek mythology and Classical Greco-Roman culture are the two sons of Zeus (aka Jupiter, Jove or Yahweh), that is Castor and Pollux, who die and take their place in the heavens as the Gemini Twins that we more commonly know today from the still ubiquitous practice of Zodiacal Astrology. The twins, also known as the Dioscuri or Castores, were especially revered by the Spartans of whom they were the brothers of the famous Helen, who’s face it is claimed ‘launched a thousand ships’ in the course of setting off the epic Trojan War following her abduction.

Female abduction and rape, it seems, was a central ‘heroic’ theme in those times as even our deified Gemini twins were lusty participants in such activities, acting against the marital love interests of even their own twin cousins, in fact. It is our opinion that this ‘heroic’ theme is carried through to the Roman story of The Rape of the Sabine Women, as a modus vivendi and perhaps reflective of ‘traditional’ Western attitudes towards women.

Dioscuri_rape_Vatican_Inv2796 — The Dioscuri Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, from the Vatican

There are several variants of the Castor and Pollux story, and as pertains to our focus, the twins and their cousins were once fellow shipmates on Jason’s Argo, where they went in pursuit of the Golden Fleece and engaged in other ‘heroic’ (manly) pursuits such as cattle rustling. At some point after their Argonaut days, Castor and Pollux come across the penned cattle previously stolen by their cousins and make plans for yet another Five Fingered Discount. But before Castor and Pollux can actualize their plans, when returning to their already stolen cattle, Castor and Pollux’s cousins come across them and realize what is up.

Already having had their intended wives raped by Castor and Pollux, from the scene above, they were likely not inclined to take this additional ‘double cross’ lightly. In their first skirmish, the mortal (via a mortal father) Castor is fatally wounded and thus the divine Pollux cries out to his father, Zeus, to let him die along with Castor. Zeus consents, and thus after their cousins finish them off they ascend to heaven and assume their immortal role as the constellation Gemini.

As an aside, one may be tempted to ask how Castor and Pollux can be twins if they have different fathers. Well, given that we are dealing with such as mythology, and in what was actually a ‘religious’ context back in the day, then perhaps we might say that ‘through the gods all things are possible’. Besides, when you and your sister (Helen in this case) are hatched from eggs then why have qualms about the ‘fraternal’ nature of such twin brothers? But, in the case of twins with different fathers, we do know that this happens today from time to time.

Also, in my astrological ‘ritual’ sequence, as applies to 9/11, it can be questioned about whether or not I should be including the participation of ‘planets’ that were unobservable before the ‘modern’ era, and in this regard there are also the addition of possible ‘modern’ constellations that plausibly might play a peripheral role in the sequence. I say that this is of no concern as in ancient times myths and such were constantly adapted to meet the needs and context of the day. Hence the different ancient versions of the Castor and Pollux narratives, for example.

As with the discussions of literary ‘typology’ elsewhere on this site, we know this is exactly the way ‘typology’ is utilized, i.e. by taking prior literary elements and themes and then adapting them to new situations. In this way we can see an encrypted elite continuity connecting the 9/11 planners, in this case, to the prior mythological usages.

So to return to the analysis, henceforth the divine Spartan twins become the favored gods of all the Greeks and then the later Romans. To honor the twins the Spartans would carry a dual upright cross, the dokana, before them as a battle standard just as later Christians would with the Cross of Christ Caesar.

Castor and Pollux later became the patron protective gods of sailors. With Christianity, in its dominant Pauline or ‘Nicene’ variation, in Acts 28 the apostle Paul, after being shipwrecked and spending 3 months on Malta, departs for the Italian peninsula, and then onto Rome, via a ship whose masthead was that of Castor and Pollux. Thus Paul inaugurates the arrival of the fishy Pauline Christianity, at least in a literary fashion, with the symbolism of Castor and Pollux. Note that Acts’ author only seems concerned to convey the name or masthead of the Castor and Pollux and not the prior wrecked ‘pagan’ ship. Why was one important to note and not the other?

Not so incidentally, Paul then meets with the Jews of Rome, whose ancestors just a few generations before had hailed Julius Caesar as their messiah for dealing with the temple defiler, Pompey the Great, and had wailed loudly as they watched Julius ascend to Heaven on the third day to become a god. At the funeral Julius’ wax effigy was draped uniquely ‘a-cross’ an otherwise common tropaeum funereal display post (normally used for displaying military breast plates) which then allowed the depicted stab wounds in his side to be emotionally displayed by the then Pontifex Maximus (erstwhile pope), Marc Antony. These Jews then ‘decided’ not to become Christians, but rather to stubbornly stay Jews, having ‘deliberated considerably’. This then conveniently helps establish the long term institutional Church theological Christian versus Jewish dialectic.

Interesting to note here, but practically the entire prologue to Malcolm Bull’s The Mirror of the Gods is devoted to a discussion of numerous Renaissance notables, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Boccaccio, and perhaps more importantly and long before them, Church theologians like Tertullian and St. Augustine, all who employed the term ‘shipwreck’ (referring to pagan Rome) as a common allegorical trope. This discussion also links the ‘shipwreck’ to the goddess Fortuna’s Wheel of Fortune (good and bad) and Boethius’s recounted cyclic aspect of this in Consolatio (2.1), “I will reign, I reign, I have reigned, I am without reign.” Hence we can see, as did the later Renaissance luminaries resurrecting the ‘shipwrecked’ pagan gods in their artwork, at least, the similar statement of Jesus to his twelve disciples that he would be with them to the end of the ‘Age’.

Bull also noted that, in fact, in the 12th century CE it was noted that statues of the twins, training their horses, stood on the Quirinal Hill of Rome, as they still do today. Given as how the Christians had tossed the artwork of the metaphorical pagan ‘shipwreck’ overboard to such an extent that they were otherwise rather thoroughly buried in a literal sense, and that Classical pagan art did not make its come back until the Renaissance, then we can likely assume that the statues of the twins survived from far earlier given their exalted status, and perhaps auspicious assistance to Paul.

Click on the Stellarium derived images to expand them.

If we can then translate this to Tuesday, September 11, 2001 then what do we see? First we see that Jupiter is slowly rising (moving in relative terms from right to left) and takes his place directly amongst his twin sons, conveniently where he can hear Pollux cry out, perhaps even typologically evoking Jesus’s later calling out to ask why his father had forsaken him to inaugurate the transition from Aries to Pisces. Note as well, that Saturn is reposing on the base of the right horn of Taurus. The two airliners, AA 11 and UA175, that struck the twin towers took off from Boston’s Logan Airport, if we can believe the official script that is. The nickname for Boston’s poobahs are the Brahmins, which besides the Indic caste allusion is also a type of cattle, the Brahma. Also, Cape Cod’s shape evokes the horn of a cattle.

As the first tower is mortally struck, Pollux, the second tower cries out to their adjacent father, before he too is struck by the second plane that circles back for the second skirmish. Then they both die. In any case, depending on how one wants to sequence the details, and maybe it doesn’t matter precisely, the falling of the first tower, or twin, marks the end of the Augusto-Flavian and perhaps Piscean Age and the falling of the second marks the beginning of the ‘Next’ New World Order.

Venus, Liberty, and the Pentagon

We can also see Venus precariously near a claw of Cancer. Venus, of course, because of its visual orbital dynamics with respect to the Earth, is known to be the inspiration for the 5 sided star symbol, from whose geometric interior we derive a pentagon shape. The Pentagon is directly adjacent to the Potomac and thus presumably not too very far away are some tasty crabs. Flight 77 which supposedly struck the Pentagon, departed from Dulles International Airport a short distance away and circled back to attack.

It is suspected by some people that the Statue of Liberty is an encrypted depiction of Venus, holding up her ‘illuminating’ torch. I was reminded of this by the brief mention in Joe’s recent post regarding Catcher in the Rye:

Bernice doesn’t like that type language

In another fascinating passage, Salinger describes the language style of the Oligarchs – typology, or as he playfully terms it “type language”. Caulfield dances with ‘three witches’ in the ‘Lavender Room’. ‘Royal Purple’ is a popular variety of lavender, so this tells us that the three witches represent royalty. Caulfield describes “Bernice” as a “real queen”, indicating that she is a ‘type’ of Bernice the granddaughter of Herod the Great who helped create the ‘type language’ in the Gospels. The other two ‘witches’ are pagan goddesses: dancing with Marty is said to be like “dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor”. That is, the famous gigantic idol of the Goddess known as Libertas (and also known as Aphrodite, Ishtar, Astarte, Isis or Venus), designed by the masonic sculptor Frederic Bartoldi. Marty’s sister Laverne seems to be another obscure Latin goddess, Lavarna, the patron saint of thieves and the underworld.

If this esoteric identification of the Statue of Liberty with Venus is true, then on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 an Earthly manifestation of Venus witnessed the ritual sacrifice of the Greco-Roman twin saviors with another front row seat, besides that provided for those watching from Building 7, see further on. Strictly speaking, the ancient Romans undoubtedly considered Libertas a distinct entity from Venus, but considering many of the statue’s attributes, the identification with Venus is at least a plausibly deniable interpretation. The statue’s trademark “crown of seven spikes” is, however, most often seen on images of Sol Invictus, as well as on some imagery of Ishtar, Venus’s widely ascribed precursor, the so-called Whore of Babylon.

However, simply considering the overt identification of the statue with Libertas, and what we know of the cynical oligarchs’ traditional context for the concept of ‘freedom’, we certainly saw with the rapid enactment of such as the Patriot Act a certain attack on ‘traditional’ American freedoms, by our own government. But what’s new here? A Roman ‘freedman’ was a slave who had been ‘freed’ because his patrone believed that the freedman would ‘patriotically’ do his bidding, else lose his freed status.

Another synchronicity here with the Freemason in the Rye excerpt is the mention of ‘Bernice’. Within the 9/11 astrological context, is the minor constellation of Coma Berenices on the far side (from the ecliptic) of Virgo, whom are both also witness to the 9/11 drama. This constellation was not named for the Bernice of Flavian fame as mentioned above, but rather for a prior ‘Berenike’ (the bearer of victory), the wife of Ptolomy III who launched a military campaign in what is now Syria/Iraq. Berenike offered up her golden locks to the gods if her husband would return from the war safely, hence her hair became this constellation. Another interesting topical factoid about this Berenike is that she was from the Cyrene (Libyan) city that we know today as Benghazi.

Many people have noted the correlations of Building 7 to Solomon’s Temple such as the trapezoidal platform geometry, and that its major tenant was Salomon Smith Barney (the first name from the former Saloman Brothers). Likewise, the Twin Towers had interesting apocalyptically named tenants such as an IT business named The Beast, located at one of the points of impact. So besides Venus watching the ritual demise of Castor and Pollux across the water, were there any other ritual observers with a front row seat?

On September 11, 2001, Barry Jennings, Deputy Director of the Emergency Services Department of the New York City Housing Authority and Michael Hess, New York City’s corporation counsel, headed to the Office of Emergency Management’s Emergency Operating Center (FEMA), which was on the 23rd floor of WTC 7. Hess was expected to meet with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the office. ….

Jennings recalled finding a large number of police officers in the lobby of WTC 7 when they arrived before the collapse of the New York World Trade Center Towers. The two men went up to the 23rd floor, but could not get in, so they went back to the lobby. The police and security took them back up in a freight elevator. When they arrived on level 23, they found the 23rd floor had been recently deserted and absolutely abandoned, “coffee that was on the desk, smoke was still coming off the coffee, I saw half eaten sandwiches”.[16]

At that point, Jennings made some phone calls, and an un-named individual told them to “leave, and leave right away”. Jennings and Hess then proceeded to the stairs, and made it down to level 6, when there was an explosion, and the stairwell suddenly blew out and collapsed from under their feet. Jennings was left hanging for his life from the stairwell, but was able to climb back up to safety.[17]

They made it back up to level 8 where Jennings had a clear view of the twin towers, both buildings were still standing. Jennings and Hess were trapped on level 8 north side of the building away from south side facing the twin towers. On the 8th level, they began to break out windows for fresh air. From outside, firefighters advised Jennings not to attempt to climb down to safety on a suspended fire hose. It wouldn’t hold him.[18]

Subsequently and after the collapse of the World Trade Center Twin Towers, Jennings and Hess was rescued by firefighters that led them back down into the lobby. When they made it to the lobby, Mr. Jennings found it destroyed and littered with dead bodies. He said it looked like, “King Kong had came through it and stepped on it, (it was) so destroyed, I didn’t know where I was. So destroyed that they had to take me out through a hole in the wall, that I believe the fire department made to get me out.”[19]
Address : <http://mindcontrolblackassassins.com/category/pacifica-radio/>

Mercury, Virgo, Flight 93 and Shanksville

Note also that the sequence of events from right to left, has the order of attack correct from the Twin Towers to the Pentagon. At the time of the first version of this post I had not been able to determine a similar astro-mythological clue for Flight 93 and Shanksville, and I conjectured that maybe this was because of the highly dubious nature of this event, as pointed out by many alert 9/11 researchers.

But to show that persistence can pay off, I discovered the following separate myth involving the Sun god, Apollo, who wanted to give a feast, presumably involving a typical sacrifice, to honor Jupiter. Here, just a little further examination of the skymap reveals the nearby presence of a constellation called Crater, this time just across the ecliptic from Virgo, and most importantly – in the proper corresponding sequence, as revealed by the position of the planet Mercury adjacent to Crater and Virgo, following after Venus along the arc of the ecliptic. Associated with Crater are two others, Corvus (the crow or raven) and Hydra (the water snake).

These three constellations are accompanied by an interesting myth as told by Ovid’s Fasti: Apollo, the Sun god (also present for the 9/11 astrological sequence), has decided to give a feast for Jupiter and commands Corvus to go fetch some water using Apollo’s ‘krater’, or bowl. Corvus takes the krater and goes out in search of water, but before he can complete the mission he spots a fig tree. Stopping here, he finds the figs not ripe enough to suit him and decides to wait until they ripen. Now having taken too long at his assigned task, he realizes he needs an excuse, so he finds Hydra the snake and takes Hydra and the krater back to Apollo. He explains that Hydra prevented him from fetching water, but Apollo immediately recognizes that Corvus is lying about this and in disgust throws Corvus, the krater, and Hydra as far as he can. Thus they end up as constellations in the heavens. Most interestingly, in the process Apollo also changes Corvus from white to black.

So with this additional myth we now find parallels with the Flight 93 aspect of 9/11 in the flight leaving Newark International Airport supposedly on its way to San Francisco. As it reaches the area near Cleveland, OH it is hijacked and then turns back in a line towards Washington D.C. where it is speculated to have had either the Capitol building or the White House as a target, considering that the Pentagon was already stuck by Flight 77.

Notice in the following two excerpts that Flight 93 actually experiences not one, but two delays, with possibly the first being beyond anyone’s control.

The aircraft was scheduled to depart at 08:00 and pushed back from gate A17 at 08:01.[26] It remained delayed on the ground and did not take off until 08:42 because of heavy airport congestion, just four minutes before American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.[27] The three other hijacked flights all departed within fifteen minutes of their scheduled times…

The hijacking on Flight 93 began at 09:28.[32] By this time, Flights 11 and 175 had already crashed into the World Trade Center and Flight 77 was within 9 minutes of striking the Pentagon. The hijackers on those flights had waited no more than 30 minutes to commandeer the aircraft, most likely striking after the seat-belt sign had been turned off and cabin service had begun.[21] It is unknown why the hijackers on Flight 93 waited approximately 46 minutes to begin their assault.
Address : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93>

This begs the question, of course, in that if the first delay was incidental, was the second delay shortened from some preconceived operational plan, or not, by the same general period lost from the first delay? Whatever the case, the effect generated a significant operational delay that, if not granting the USAF NORAD interceptors more time to respond, it allowed the passengers, if we are to believe the official narrative, time to learn, via phone, what was happening elsewhere and thus to cause the flight to crash and create the disputed ‘crater’, near to a body of water, Indian Lake.

With these delays then, we see a seeming breakdown in OPSEC, otherwise known in military parlance as ‘operational security’, where without the seemingly excessive delay(s) it is much less likely for the passengers to have garnered their phony(?) ‘intelligence’ and organize to take the claimed action against the claimed hijackers.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the ‘modern’ constellations is Sextans, or the ‘sextant’, which is the first ‘modern’ device used for nautical navigation measurements, by checking the position of various stars at certain precise times. Here we have another typological parallel with the requirement for modern navigational technology, such as GPS, to have been employed on 9/11. This might certainly be the case with the WTC impacts, as GPS guided remote flight control was well within the capabilities of certain parties. In fact in was already commonplace on airliners for routine landings to be done under such means, and the military had even more accurate GPS technology at its disposal.

But, with Flight 93 and the Corvus myth, with their curious typological delays, there is the hint of a complete fabrication in what took place. For one thing, the ‘crash’ site near Shanksville, as with the renovated wedge at the Pentagon, and then Turner Construction (err … demolition) at the Twin Towers, presented a perfect environment for pre-staging. In this case, perhaps for the ‘crater’. Besides many other peculiar aspects of these events, and here with Flight 93, was the sparsity of good photographic evidence of an actual jetliner crash. Instead, the public was told that the plane impacted at such an angle and speed that there was literally nothing left, but this curiously odd crater.

As I discovered in recent days, there are now some posted photos of identifiable airplane parts available, all such being within the plausible realm of being salted there from parts previously recovered from actual airliner crashes as appears the case for the Pentagon. In any case, we now know what such a debris field should look like from the recent deliberate high speed crash of the Germanwings airliner into the hard bedrock and covering black gravel of the French Alps. The debris field is massive and includes a range of sizes from small fragments to the size of an automobile.

With the 9/11 airliner flights, it has frequently been claimed that in-flight substitutions of the airliners took place using a maneuver whereby a second plane uses various ongoing confusions to substitute itself for the plane(s) that took off from the various airports. This maneuver was described in the leaked plans for Operation Northwoods. As such, were the planes that took off from the airports typologically ‘white crows’, that were then transformed mid-flight into ‘black crows’?

Interestingly, here we also find a curious, albeit not perfect parallel, with a tactic employed by the Roman navy against the Carthaginians during the Punic Wars. Instead of using their vessels for ramming as was typically the case, the Romans outfitted their otherwise inferior vessels with a hinged boarding ramp that required them to come alongside the Carthaginian vessel, instead of ramming them at an oblique angle. This ramp, with a beak-like spike on the end, was called a corvus.

As such, could the tactic of using a ‘black’ plane for a substitute, be cryptically known by same name for such a maneuver? One is reminded here of watching crows or ravens playfully, or not, tailing after each other.

Within the context of what happened after 9/11, and the sequence, we must be reminded that Virgo, the virgin, is equated with not only the Virgin Mary, but the respective Greek and Roman virgin goddesses of war, Athena and Minerva. And then just coming up on the horizon is Libra, or blind “Justice”, who was unable to accurately perceive what transpired, thus the stinger of Scorpio and the bow of Sagittarius awaits with Mars upon it.

Mithraic Shooting of the Bull

The Precession of the Equinoxes, which Zodical Astrology is based upon, was known by at least 127 BCE, that is if Aristarchos of Samos or someone else didn’t discover it even sooner than Hipparchus did. And similarly the highly Romanized variant of Persian Mithraism had already come into play in order to be highly relevant to the discussion here. As discussed in detail in the Wikipedia link, this new cult appears to have been a typical syncretistic mash-up of prior religious and mythic systems, most likely invented in Rome for the purposes of the ruling elites to covertly steer a select demographic consisting mostly of select military personnel and similar civilian males. Interestingly we find here a type of secret society whose very ‘planetary’ grades seem to comprise the general hierarchy of the significant 9/11 heavenly cast.

The Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux, found their way onto the Roman Mithraic cosmological central iconography of the Tauroctony, an example of which is seen below.

One might be tempted to say, “So what? This is likely just a coincidence.” But in the Mithraic Tauroctony Castor and Pollux, also known as Cautes and Cautopates, by the opposite pointing of their torches, symbolically denote the death of one age and the rebirth of another. The bull in the center of the Mithraic imagery is being killed by the god Perseus, denoting an even earlier occurrence of the transition from Taurus to Aries. The Gemini twins, of course, preceded Taurus in the zodiacal sequence.

Also note that the Sun and the Moon are framing the central drama and in versions of the Mithraic account, they play a role in Perseus killing the Bull. I’ve already noted that it seems that the Moon’s arrival at the club of Orion seems to trigger the beginning of the day’s sequence of events.

Precious little is left of the actual rituals of Mithraism, albeit it may be that more remains hidden from public eye in certain private and exclusive libraries, therefore we are left to wonder what really occurred based upon the context of what little has been left to us. The Mithraic initiation hierarchy, at least, begins with the lowest grade of Corax (the raven or crow) and its patron planet is Mercury, and here we can clearly see that the crow is closely watching the seeming command of Sol (as Apollo) to Mithra (or Perseus as you prefer) to slay the bull. These characters are almost always depicted in such a position in such tauronoctonies. So the beginning of Mithraism is clearly represented in the 9/11 sky, but as stated early on, all the Mithraic players are present and active on the stage although the initiation ritual does not appear to portray the 9/11 drama with any systematic precision, as shown by the table’s symbolic attributes below:

Grade	Symbols	Planet/tutelary deity
Corax, Corux or Corvex (raven or crow)	beaker, caduceus	Mercury
Nymphus, Nymphobus (Bridesman)	lamp, hand bell, veil, circlet or diadem	Venus
Miles (soldier)	pouch, helmet, lance, drum, belt, breastplate	Mars
Leo (lion)	batillum, sistrum, laurel wreath, thunderbolts	Jupiter
Perses (Persian)	akinakes, Phrygian cap, sickle, sickle moon and stars, sling pouch	Luna
Heliodromus (sun-runner)	torch, images of the sun god, Helios whip, robes	Sol
Pater (father)	patera, Mitre, shepherd’s staff, garnet or ruby ring, chasuble or cape, elaborate robes jewel encrusted with metallic threads	Saturn

However, Venus here has a lamp and a diadem. Mars is a soldier, and Jupiter as the ruling god of the day can still reasonably be associated with Leo, a symbol of rulership and ‘regulation’. Saturn, the Roman equivalent to the Greek Cronus, is the malevolent father of the malevolent Jupiter (Zeus). Mithraism scholars debate today whether or not it is Mithra or Perseus that kills Taurus, and as well, other similar imprecisions typical with this milieu, and as such I don’t think I, or the putative planners of 9/11, need to be held to such rigor.

It should also be noted that in the run up to the Christian age, as stated previously, this new, highly revised form of Persian Mithraism was imported into the Roman army and shortly became widespread amongst its, and other, elites as a secret mystery cult. One might ask what would motivate a ruling elite to create and sponsor such a cult and/or secret society open only to such a membership. And perhaps could such a phenomenon be applicable in modern times? Thanks for asking!

This is much like the Skull and Bones Society of Yale (the epitome of Greek Culture) that the Bushes and John Kerry are associated with. It is known that the rituals performed inside its bunker evoke that of what is known of the Mithraic rites. It is said that they are related to similar elite European secret societies. Finally, the theme of “Shooting the Bull” is also central to Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye“, as a favorite activity of Holden Caulfield’s strange Masonic school fraternity. In Persian Zoroastrianism, where Persian Mithraism derived, Mithra was known for being the god of commerce and contracts. Within the framework of Atwill’s Freemason in the Rye analysis, an initiate’s contract terms must be terminally enforced, lest the perverse system fall apart. But before such punitive finality is enacted other behavioral blackmail means are employed to ‘slut shame’, so to speak, its adherents, placing them outside the accepted norms of ‘respectable’ exoteric society.

Uranus, Neptune, Capricorn and the Black Mass

Next, we find that Uranus is sitting remarkably near the … uhmm … anus of Capricorn the goat, while Neptune (the mythical holder of the ‘satanic’ Trident) is at the throat of the ‘satanic’ goat, Capricorn. It should also be recalled that the base columns for the Twin Towers evoke tridents. It was during the strikes on the twin towers that George W. Bush was down south in Sarasota, FL reading a goat story to black children in a manner (from an apparently successful teaching method) that evokes a parody of a Black Mass, with Baphomet superimposed on his pentagram.

Curious viewers of Moore’s film who have tried to track down the book “My Pet Goat” have been unsuccessful, for two reasons: Moore, in his voice-over, got the title wrong—it is “The Pet Goat”—and it is not a book but an exercise in a workbook called “Reading Mastery 2.” This much was sussed out last month by a resourceful blogger named Peter Smith after he studied the raw footage from the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. Noticing that the teacher repeatedly cued the class with the same precise language (“Get ready to read these words the fast way”), Smith guessed that some particular pedagogical theory was at work. That’s what led him to Direct Instruction, a controversial teaching model that Engelmann developed in the nineteen-sixties.

…

For years, Direct Instruction’s impressive performance in large-scale studies did little to win over his critics, who call his techniques “controlling” and “robotic.” D.I.’s phonics-based reading curriculum—Engelmann has also applied his principles to math, science, social studies, and handwriting—sometimes requires children to chant words in unison while a teacher snaps her fingers to keep time.

D.I.’s fortunes began to change in 2001, when Bush introduced his No Child Left Behind legislation, which mandated that only “scientifically based” educational programs be eligible for federal funding. And here’s where Michael Moore missed an opportunity. No Child Left Behind has meant big profits for the publisher of the D.I. curricula, McGraw-Hill. So it’s easy to imagine one of Moore’s hallmark montages, spinning circumstantial evidence into a conspirational web: a sepia-toned photograph from the thirties of, say, Prescott Bush and James McGraw, Jr., palling around on Florida’s Jupiter Island; a film clip from the eighties of Harold McGraw, Jr., joining the advisory panel of Barbara Bush’s literacy foundation; Harold McGraw III posing with President George W. Bush as part of his transition team; and, to tie it all together, former McGraw-Hill executive vice-president John Negroponte being sworn in as the new Ambassador to Iraq.
Address : <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/07/26/the-pet-goat-approach>

Mars and Mercury Take us to War

Also note above that Mars, the Roman god of war, has just set up on Sagittarius’s bow, ready to be fired. As such, 9/11 was the trigger for the war against our taxpayer funded enemies, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan and an otherwise non sequitur entry point, against our old ally Saddam Hussein, into the Iraq War, at least.

Next let’s look at Pluto sitting atop Serpens. This snake, is represented in some symbology as wrapping around the Earth’s equator, hence possibly denoting a global aspect. The character holding Serpens, is Ophiuchus, said to be the 13th constellation of the Zodiac, not to be confused with the 12 ‘signs’ of the Zodiac. This character was also known to the Romans as Asclepius, who is sometimes thought to be a candidate for the Christ, after all Jesus had 12 disciples in his mystery cult. But perhaps, since the Serpent was revered by Gnostics such as the Ophites, then maybe Ophiuchus might also relate to somehow to Lucifer, the Light Bringer and the Morning Star, Venus.

Beyond the Mithraic identification of Corvus with Mercury, I’m not completely certain what to make of Mercury, aka Hermes the (secret) messenger, but one evocative possibility is the mysterious E4B electronic warfare plane seen flying over Washington, D.C. during the attacks. We might remember here that a major contingent of the reputed fatal casualties at the Pentagon, which was struck on its supposedly just completed renovation and, then, as yet to be occupied, were electronic technicians. Here, while Mercury is down lower towards Virgo, its orbit takes it almost back to the star Regulus which perhaps symbolizes the capitol. Given the planet Mercury’s close physical relationship to the Sun, or Apollo, and Corvus and Crater as well maybe given Mercury’s path back towards Regulus, as Washington D.C., is suggesting the path and fate of Flight 93? Maybe the reader has other suggestions?

Beating Around the Babbling Bush

In light of the significance of August 5th, you have to wonder if the following widely-known quote from President George W. Bush—taken from remarks he made in Washington, D.C., on August 5th, 2004—is just another Bushism, or perhaps something much more intentional and deliberately spoken: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

Making the comment even more compelling is that he was reading closely from prepared remarks when he made it, during a speech at the signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense spending bill (The Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2005). Interesting, too, is that no one in the audience of military brass or Pentagon chiefs reacted in the slightest. Maybe Bush wasn’t quite the bumbler everyone thought he was, and maybe he meant it when he said in 2009: “I’m telling you there’s an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That’s the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best.”

Bain, S. K. (2012-09-11). The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual (Kindle Locations 2055-2063). Trine Day. Kindle Edition.

By the way, Bain’s book is also great for discussing the occult numerological aspects of all the 9/11 ‘numbers’, e.g. the flights, the floors struck, etc..

The Bush family and similar would have been known in Roman Classical times as equites from where we get the financial term ‘equity’, and also in a horsey equestrian sense as ‘knights’ in the military context. So:

At Rome, the worship of the Dioscuri or Castores was introduced at an early time. They were believed to have assisted the Romans against the Latins in the battle of Lake Regillus; and the dictator, A. Postumius Albus, during the battle, vowed a temple to them. It was erected in the Forum, on the spot where they had been seen after the battle, opposite the temple of Vesta. It was consecrated on the 15th of July, the anniversary day of the battle of Regillus. (Dionys. vi. 13; Liv.ii. 20, 42.) Subsequently, two other temples of the Dioscuri were built, one in the Circus Maximus, and the other in the Circus Flaminius. (Vitruv. iv. 7; P. Vict. Reg. Urb. xi.) From that time the equites regarded the Castores as their patrons, and after the year B. C. 305, the equites went every year, on the 15th of July, in a magnificent procession on horseback, from the temple of Mars through the main streets of the city, across the Forum, and by the ancient temple of the Dioscuri. In this procession the equites were adorned with olive wreaths and dressed in the trabea, and a grand sacrifice was offered to the twin gods by the most illustrious persons of the equestrian order. (Dionys. l. c.; Liv. ix. 46; Val. Max. ii. 2. § 9; Aurel. Vict. de Vir. illustr. 32.)
Address : <http://www.mythindex.com/greek-mythology/D/Dioscuri.html>

During the reign of the Dictator, Julius Caesar, there was a massive correction in the calendar to adjust for accumulated precessional errors, thus giving us the Julian Calendar, when July and August were added. The calendar was since made even more accurate again as the Gregorian Calendar. I’ll let the ambitious reader do any speculative math, but I’m guessing that using the date of the precise planetary and lunar alignments (of the gods) for Tuesday, 9/11 trumped all other factors.

The first step of the reform was to realign the start of the calendar year (1 January) to the tropical year by making 46 BC (708 AUC) 445 days long, compensating for the intercalations which had been missed during Caesar’s pontificate. This year had already been extended from 355 to 378 days by the insertion of a regular intercalary month in February. When Caesar decreed the reform, probably shortly after his return from the African campaign in late Quintilis (July), he added 67 more days by inserting two extraordinary intercalary months between November and December.[22]
Address : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar>

It should also be noted in the above link that the Twins conducted their cattle rustling campaign into Messene and Laconia. This is where the widely celebrated Spartans enslaved and terrorized the Helots, who became state serfs. Heroes indeed. Historical déjà vu, or modus operandi?

Pluto and the Plutocrats

The action for Uranus and Neptune with Capricorn, Mars with Sagittarius, and Pluto with the Serpens all take place under the horizon, sub rosa so to speak. With Bush reading the Black Mass, Florida is literally under the horizon with respect to NYC. We, who have ears to hear, gnow that there was a hidden PNAC agenda for war. And here with Pluto?

In Roman mythology, Pluto is the god of the underworld and of wealth. …

Astrologically, Pluto is called “the great renewer”, and is considered to represent the part of a person that destroys in order to renew, through bringing buried, but intense needs and drives to the surface, and expressing them, even at the expense of the existing order. A commonly used keyword for Pluto is “transformation”.[citation needed] It is associated with power and personal mastery, and the need to cooperate and share with another, if each is not to be destroyed. Pluto governs big business and wealth, mining, surgery and detective work, and any enterprise that involves digging under the surface to bring the truth to light. Pluto is also associated with the day Tuesday alongside Mars.
Address : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_in_astrology#Pluto>

As a caveat, in the years after Tuesday, 9/11 it has been claimed frequently that they were indeed known as Castor and Pollux, but I have not been able to find actual evidence of this being the case before 9/11. Perhaps they never were known before by this appellation, but I say that it doesn’t really matter if they were or were not known publicly as this, at least. There are numerous twin buildings throughout the world with this nickname, and “if the glove fits the narrative you must …”. It should be noted here, as well, that the buildings were also nicknamed David and Nelson, for the Rockefeller brothers who were involved with their construction.

That the Twin Towers may have been sacrificial altars of a sort, within this ritual sequence I have presented, 9/11 researchers back in the day would discuss whether or not the structures had been structurally designed for their actual demise. It is known that the architect designed the buildings to withstand the impact of an airliner and that they were supposed to otherwise ‘fail’ in a vertical fashion so as to avoid peripheral building damage to any major extent. For here it is also interesting that the buildings were generally not well received by its occupants for having poor general design esthetic, and considering that with their great height they had generally poor views because of the close spacing of the external box columns and the recessed windows, and then the terrible wind induced swaying.

And finally, let’s also keep in mind that regarding the Golden Fleece, that there was supposedly a significant cache of gold in the basement of WTC 4, as well as still missing trillions of taxpayer money then under investigation at the Pentagon – whose assigned bookkeepers were supposedly ‘terminated’; not to mention the business of the Black Eagle Trust.

The End, Again

As discussed prior, the prior gospel End Times which the early Church Fathers crowed about having occurred precisely as retrodictively prophesied by Jesus within the ‘generation’ of 40 years, as was then commonly understood and discussed in Caesar’s Messiah, has been typologically reworked by Cyrus Scofield and his elite sponsors. This new framework of apocalyptic understanding is now the dominant non-Catholic, Christian paradigm in the United States and is found in many other countries. In terms of typology then, its contemporary adherents should consider the parallels between themselves and the Jewish Zealots and Sicarii, including their xenophobic nationalism. The common Jews both then and now, like the common Americans of today, have either never clearly understood their respective foundational histories, or have forgotten certain key aspects.

For here the clear canonic subtexts of Judaism, Christianity, and even that of pagan Rome, is to complete Alexander’s project of global harmonizing. In the context of Judaism, the nationalists were ground into dust, and we were thus left of the globally approved, Romanized rabbinic Jews, playing their assigned false dialectic role of stiff necked Christ killers, who programmatically have to periodically pay the piper. As such, caveat emptor to today’s Christian militia, who typologically rail against the same globalizing forces.

In this vein, please consider my typological reinterpretation of the relevant gospels below:

From Luke 21 KJV:

The Destruction of Jerusalem (also from: Matthew 24:15-25; Mark 13:14-23)

20And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. 21Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. 22For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. 23But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. 24And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

With regard to 9/11, we should remember that most, if not all of the top executives of the tenants of the Twin Towers were curiously away at a business conference in Omaha, NB. Even George W. Bush ended up there on 9/11 for some strange reason. Might the typological purpose of this destination be its 160 mile proximity to Pella, IA, which admittedly is further away than Des Moines along the same route? But perhaps there are airport logistical reasons. Or, perhaps even a stronger reason being that actually having these people go to Pella would be a dead giveaway to all those fundamentalists, especially in that region, that know exactly what the biblical meaning of Pella is.

Pella, IA was named for the Palestine city of Pella, where the proto-Christians (that is, those collaborators with the Romans hinting at the Ebionite – Nazorean schism) were told to flee the Roman siege and destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE. In Flavian context, this was the cynical Second Coming of the Son (Titus) of God (aka Vespasian).

Also, in our context of defining terms, Gentile means the ‘gentil’ societal elites, whether non-Jewish or Jewish, the Elect or true Chosen ones.

The Return of the Son of Man (also from: Matthew 24:26-31; Mark 13:24-27)

25And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; 26Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. 27And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. 28And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.

How more evocative can this get of of what is represented by the skymap and the events of 9/11?

The lesson of the Fig Tree (also from: Matthew 24:32-35; Mark 13:28-31)

29And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree, and all the trees; 30When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand. 31So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. 32Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled. 33Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.

Note that Corvus, the crow, was delayed in returning to Apollo with the water because he had spied a fig tree whose figs were not yet ripe, and so he waited for them to ripen. So instead of the gospel event which occurs when summer is nigh, perhaps here we must wait for the figs to ripen for Tuesday September 11, 2001. I have to acknowledge here that the timing of fig ripening can be variable, depending on species and climate conditions, but here I am mainly typologically focused on the original gospel authors tying of the fig to the time of when the End Times are nigh.

And perhaps we now gnow why Jesus was mad when his fig tree was barren, from Mark 11 KJV:

Jesus Curses the Fig Tree (also from: Matthew 21:18-22; Mark 11:20-26)

12And on the morrow, when they were come from Bethany, he was hungry: 13And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. 14And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it.

Jesus and his entourage have entered into the final phase at the Mount of Olives, but he has realized that the Flavian Roman graft has been made onto the Root of Jesse, and his fig tree is barren and will soon wither.

Jesus’ Authority Challenged (also from: Matthew 21:23-27; Luke 20:1-8)

27And they come again to Jerusalem: and as he was walking in the temple, there come to him the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders, 28And say unto him, By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things? 29And Jesus answered and said unto them, I will also ask of you one question, and answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. 30The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men? answer me. 31And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why then did ye not believe him? 32But if we shall say, Of men; they feared the people: for all men counted John, that he was a prophet indeed. 33And they answered and said unto Jesus, We cannot tell. And Jesus answering saith unto them, Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.

And so, as with the above, was 9/11 ordained by the gods in heaven, or by certain men having dark and profitable amusement at everyone else’s expense?

Caveat Emptor indeed.

Discuss in Forum!

Revision history: Rev. 1.0 published 3/1/2015 with the title “Jupiter Rising, WTC Falling”

Rev. 2.0 published 4/5/15

The Freemason in the Rye

Joseph Atwill

March 4, 2015

J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is a work with many mysteries attached to it: perhaps the least of which is that, though it is both incoherent and morally destructive, it has been forced-fed by America’s public school system to America’s adolescents for sixty years. A mystery more often cited by the public press, however, has been the book’s association with assassinations.

In fact, among the assassins purportedly in possession of Catcher in the Rye were three of the most famous in history. Mark David Chapman, after he had shot and killed John Lennon, calmly opened his copy of Catcher in the Rye and proceeded to read it before being apprehended. John Hinckley was also carrying the book while attempting to kill Ronald Reagan. It is alleged that Lee Harvey Oswald had a copy in his apartment and that it was one of his favorite books, though this is disputed.

The strange cluster of individuals in possession of the book at the time they assassinated a famous person have led some to speculate that the book is somehow a trigger for ‘mind controlled’ subjects, as was the case for the assassin who was depicted in the book and film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’.

In this work I will decode the symbolic framework of the Catcher in the Rye and this will explain why the assassins were alleged to have possessed it. The book was not necessarily a trigger for the murders, but it was certainly a warning to those who understood its real meaning. The warning was to maintain silence about what Salinger described as a “secret fraternity”.

Studying ‘the Egyptians’ for 28 days

The Catcher in the Rye describes many ‘secrets’. For example, the book begins with the central character, Holden Caulfield, noting “my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.”

The central secret of The Catcher in the Rye is the identity of the “secret fraternity“ that Holden Caulfield was a member of:

“And they had this goddam secret fraternity that I was too yellow not to join.”

To learn the identity of the “secret fraternity”, a reader must recognize that Salinger is using the cryptic style of typology used to create the Gospels and the Shakespearian literature. Catcher in the Rye is especially difficult to decode because the framework much of it is based upon – the initiation rites of the Freemasons -are often secret and may not be uniform from one lodge to another.

However, many descriptions of the rites have been published, and it is obvious when comparing the ‘type scenes’ in Catcher to these descriptions that Salinger is using a framework connected to them.

The first typological clue Salinger provides to the identity of the ‘secret society’ is given in a scene at the beginning of the book where Caulfield is discussing his grade with his history teacher, Mr. Spencer, who states that Caulfield “studied the Egyptians” for twenty-eight days and then failed a test about the subject.

“We studied the Egyptians from November 4th to December 2nd,” he said. “You chose to write about them for the optional essay question. Would you care to hear what you had to say?”

“No, sir, not very much,” I said.

While the symbolism is oblique, once a reader adopts the correct interpretive framework, the meaning is transparent. The “secret fraternity” is the Freemasons, and the twenty-eight days spent studying the Egyptians refers to the period of studying a candidate must spend between the time of his initiation as an “Entered Apprentice”, to the time he takes the exam to become a second degree Mason.

Salinger is using the concept of the ‘Egyptians’ to represent the Freemasons because the group claims lineage from the ancient Egyptians and uses their symbols in its rites. In other words, as with the Gospels and the works of Shakespeare, underneath the book’s surface narration there lies a symbolic path to a completely different storyline.

Thus, on its surface, Catcher in the Rye appears to center on the internal life of Holden Caulfield, a neurotic seventeen year old who is expelled from his prep school. However, its symbolic meaning reveals a process whereby Caulfield, having failed to progress through Freemasonry’s ‘levels’ in his first attempt, nevertheless obtains the knowledge needed to join the “secret fraternity” and learn its deepest secret.

The kind of Freemasonry Salinger described was not the beneficial stereotype that does charitable works, but rather an organization with a sinister agenda. At the book’s conclusion, Holden Caulfield has become a ‘Master Mason’ and is permitted to enter the ‘Holy of Holies’ to learn the ultimate secret of the Freemasons – which, apparently, is that the “Sons of Light” as Robert Burns describes Freemasonry, has sworn to implement an ‘Apocalyspe’ on all non-Masons and to kill everyone who exposes the organization’s plans.

Anyone who reads this analysis and finds it credible has a responsibility to determine exactly who the ‘Sons of Light’ Burns describes are and to learn the nature of the oaths they swear at their highest levels.

Learning the rules

In the book a series of individuals give Caulfield advice. While the advice is cryptic, it is the information that a Freemason needs to rise through the organization’s levels to its secret knowledge,

In his session with Spencer, Caulfield recalls the advice he received from his headmaster, Dr. Thurmer, who pointed out that life is a game with ‘rules’. Holden states that it is a game with rules if you are on the correct side, the side with the ‘hot shots’. If you don’t belong to the correct side then there is no ‘game’ at all. Central to understanding the book is learning the identity of the ‘hot-shots’ and the nature of their ‘rules’.

On its surface, the passage describes Spencer’s disappointment with Holden’s inability to understand the truth about the ‘Egyptians’. What is symbolically depicted is that Holden failed his second-degree initiation exam for entry into the Freemasons.

However, in the meeting with Spencer, Holden begins to learn the truth, and hints that he may be moving on to the next level:

“Do you feel absolutely no concern for your future, boy?”

“Oh, I feel some concern for my future, all right. Sure. Sure, I do.” I thought about it for a minute. “But not too much, I guess. Not too much, I guess.”

“You will,” old Spencer said. “You will, boy. You will when it’s too late.”

I didn’t like hearing him say that. It made me sound dead or something. It was very depressing. “I guess I will,” I said.”

The fact that his teacher makes Holden feel dead at this point indicates that Holden has moved on to the third degree of freemason initiation, in which the candidate is made to imitate the death of Hiram Abiff during his initiation.

Bulls, Ducks and Fishes

Holden finishes his meeting with Spencer by “shooting the bull.” Within the cryptic writing style of the Gospels that Salinger is adopting, the repetition of a concept is a key to alert the reader that a deeper level lies beneath. What Holden is really learning here is that a bull must be shot, as happens at the end of the story.

Well, you could see he really felt pretty lousy about flunking me. So I shot the bull for a while. I told him I was a real moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would’ve done exactly the same thing if I’d been in his place, and how most people didn’t appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull.

While ‘shooting the bull’, Holden opens a motif that continues throughout the book concerning “ducks and fishes”, by stating that he is confused about the nature of ducks. An obvious allegorical interpretation is that the ducks represent the outsiders, or the ones who have strayed from the path; while the fishes represent the chosen ones who abide in the truth of Freemasonry, which in the opinion of the secret fraternity is permanent. The passage prefigures the book’s conclusion, where the truth about the ducks is understood, and a ‘bull’ is shot.

Notice below how often the phrase ‘shoot the bull’ is used below, though it is seldom used in the rest of the book:

The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull. I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go. I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.

I’m lucky, though. I mean I could shoot the old bull to old Spencer and think about those ducks at the same time. It’s funny. You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to a teacher. All of a sudden, though, he interrupted me while I was shooting the bull. He was always interrupting you.”

Later in the story Caulfield will learn about the ‘ducks’ and the ‘fish’ by asking a cab driver named Horwitz, the name of a famous rabbinical family. While Caulfield says that the ducks are not permanent, Horwitz believes that ‘Mother Nature’ takes care of the fish, so they are permanent. Since the ducks occur in the same context as the “bull” or Taurus, it follows that they represent Flavian Christianity.

He turned all the way around again, and said, “The fish don’t go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddam lake.”

“The fish–that’s different. The fish is different. I’m talking about the ducks,” I said.

“What’s different about it? Nothin’s different about it,” Horwitz said. Everything he said, he sounded sore about something. “It’s tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake.”

I didn’t say anything for about a minute. Then I said, “All right. What do they do, the fish and all, when that whole little lake’s a solid block of ice, people skating on it and all?”

Old Horwitz turned around again. “What the hellaya mean what do they do?” he yelled at me. “They stay right where they are, for Chrissake.”

“They can’t just ignore the ice. They can’t just ignore it.”

“Who’s ignoring it? Nobody’s ignoring it!” Horwitz said. He got so damn excited and all, I was afraid he was going to drive the cab right into a lamppost or something. “They live right in the goddam ice. It’s their nature, for Chrissake. They get frozen right in one position for the whole winter.”

“Yeah? What do they eat, then? I mean if they’re frozen solid, they can’t swim around looking for food and all.”

“Their bodies, for Chrissake–what’sa matter with ya? Their bodies take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that’s in the ice. They got their pores open the whole time. That’s their nature, for Chrissake. See what I mean?” He turned way the hell around again to look at me.

[….]

When I got out in front of Ernie’s and paid the fare, old Horwitz brought up the fish again. He certainly had it on his mind. “Listen,” he said. “If you was a fish, Mother Nature’d take care of you, wouldn’t she? Right? You don’t think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?”

“No, but–”

“You’re goddam right they don’t,” Horwitz said, and drove off like a bat out of hell. He was about the touchiest guy I ever met. Everything you said made him sore.

Sleeping in Eli’s Bed

The next example of how Salinger weaves aspects of Freemason Initiation into Catcher in the Rye is his story depicting ‘Ely’s bed’ — a concept he repeats three times.

That got him excited. “He did? No kidding? He did?”

I told him I was only kidding, and then I went over and laid down on Ely’s bed. Boy, did I feel rotten. I felt so damn lonesome.

“This room stinks,” I said. “I can smell your socks from way over here. Don’tcha ever send them to the laundry?”

“If you don’t like it, you know what you can do,” Ackley said. What a witty guy.

“How ’bout turning off the goddam light?”

I didn’t turn it off right away, though. I just kept laying there on Ely’s bed, thinking about Jane and all. It just drove me stark staring mad when I thought about her and Stradlater parked somewhere in that fat-assed Ed Banky’s car. Every time I thought about it, I felt like jumping out the window. The thing is, you didn’t know Stradlater. I knew him. Most guys at Pencey just talked about having sexual intercourse with girls all the time–like Ackley, for instance–but old Stradlater really did it. I was personally acquainted with at least two girls he gave the time to. That’s the truth.

“Tell me the story of your fascinating life, Ackley kid,” I said.

“How ’bout turning off the goddam light? I gotta get up for Mass in the morning.” I got up and turned it off, if it made him happy. Then I laid down on Ely’s bed again.

“What’re ya gonna do–sleep in Ely’s bed?” Ackley said. He was the perfect host, boy.

Salinger is describing the ‘Introduction to the Prophetical Office’, a rite of Freemasonry in which someone is described lying down in Eli’s bed and the light being turned off. This is part of the ritual of the “Supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch”. (The scriptural quote is 1 Samuel 3.)

In the introduction to the Prophetical Office the following passage is read: “And the child Samuel administered to the Lord before Eli. And it came to pass at that time when Eli was laid down in his place and his eyes began to wax dim that he could not see because the lamp of God went out in the temple of the Lord. And Samuel was laid down to sleep and the Lord called Samuel and he answered “Here I am for thou called me” And He said “Lie down again for I called not.” (Freemason Manual, Jeremiah How, Ch. 16, p. 180.)

The ‘people-shooting hat’

Salinger then brings up the most important image in the book, his ‘people-shooting hat’. As is often the case in cryptic writing, the literal but unexpected meaning is the correct one. In other words, Holden will wear the hat while he is (figuratively) shooting people at the book’s conclusion.

He took another look at my hat while he was cleaning them. “Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That’s a deer shooting hat.”

“Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.”

Notice that Salinger invokes the concept “one eye” in the passage. This reminds us of the ‘one eye’ of Providence, or the ancient Egyptian Eye of Horus; or, if you prefer, the all-seeing ‘eye of God’ floating at the peak of the unfinished pyramid on the US dollar bill. It is, of course, a renowned symbol of Freemasonry. For Salinger, it is an eyeball taking aim down the barrel of a rifle, an evil eye, a harbinger of death and genocide.

Re-enacting the death of Hiram Abiff

Salinger then goes on to describe a ‘blind person who seeks the hand of a sighted one.” This is another representation of the Freemason third degree initiation ritual wherein the initiate is blindfolded, holds the hand of his mentors, and then is knocked to the ground in imitation of the death of Hiram Abiff.

I slid way the hell down in my chair and watched old Ackley making himself at home. I was feeling sort of tired from the trip to New York and all, and I started yawning. Then I started horsing around a little bit. Sometimes I horse around quite a lot, just to keep from getting bored. What I did was, I pulled the old peak of my hunting hat around to the front, then pulled it way down over my eyes. That way, I couldn’t see a goddam thing. “I think I’m going blind,” I said in this very hoarse voice. “Mother darling, everything’s getting so dark in here.”

“You’re nuts. I swear to God,” Ackley said.

“Mother darling, give me your hand, Why won’t you give me your hand?”

“For Chrissake, grow up.”

I started groping around in front of me, like a blind guy, but without getting up or anything. I kept saying, “Mother darling, why won’t you give me your hand?” I was only horsing around, naturally. That stuff gives me a bang sometimes. Besides, I know it annoyed hell out of old Ackley. He always brought out the old sadist in me. I was pretty sadistic with him quite often. Finally, I quit, though. I pulled the peak around to the back again, and relaxed.”

Then he really let one go at me, and the next thing I knew I was on the goddam floor again. I don’t remember if he knocked me out or not, but I don’t think so. It’s pretty hard to knock a guy out, except in the goddam movies. But my nose was bleeding all over the place. When I looked up old Stradlater was standing practically right on top of me. He had his goddam toilet kit under his arm. “Why the hell don’tcha shut up when I tellya to?”

Bernice doesn’t like that type language

In another fascinating passage, Salinger describes the language style of the Oligarchs – typology, or as he playfully terms it “type language”. Caulfield dances with ‘three witches’ in the ‘Lavender Room’. ‘Royal Purple’ is a popular variety of lavender, so this tells us that the three witches represent royalty. Caulfield describes “Bernice” as a “real queen”, indicating that she is a ‘type’ of Bernice the granddaughter of Herod the Great who helped create the ‘type language’ in the Gospels. The other two ‘witches’ are pagan goddesses: dancing with Marty is said to be like “dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor”. That is, the famous gigantic idol of the Goddess known as Libertas (and also known as Aphrodite, Ishtar, Astarte, Isis or Venus), designed by the masonic sculptor Frederic Bartoldi. Marty’s sister Laverne seems to be another obscure Latin goddess, Lavarna, the patron saint of thieves and the underworld.

The scene may indicate that understanding the typology in the Gospels is a ‘level’ of Freemasonry. Bernice’s connection to Christianity will play a central role in the book’s conclusion.

Bernice complains that Caulfield is using ‘type language’ after Caulfield paints himself as a ‘type’ of Jesus, by claiming that he is twelve years old and is big for his age. This is based upon Jesus’ experience in the Temple as a child, where he revealed his messianic wisdom to the priests. Caulfield’s name is part of this theme, as a child born inside of an intact amniotic sac is said to be born ‘en caul‘, which is a very rare indication of a special individual. Caulfield also has white hair and a great height showing that he has advanced beyond his age.

I began giving the three witches at the next table the eye again. That is, the blonde one. The other two were strictly from hunger…

“Hey–how old are you, anyhow?”

That annoyed me, for some reason. “Oh, Christ. Don’t spoil it,” I said. “I’m twelve, for Chrissake. I’m big for my age.”

“Listen. I toleja about that. I don’t like that type language,” she said. “If you’re gonna use that type language, I can go sit down with my girl friends, you know.”

The lunatic that cut himself with stones

Later that night, as he is trying to go to sleep, Caulfield also shows his awareness of the typology in the Gospels with his reference to the story of the Demon of Gadara, from Mark 5:1-20 (also found in Luke 8:26-39). He understands that the ‘lunatic’ who “cut himself with stones” in the Gospels was a ‘stone-cutter’ or ‘Tekton’, the Greek word for a stonemason, architect or Freemason.

I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.

In Caesar’s Messiah the typology concerning the “lunatic” who cut himself with stones is explained as follows:

I noticed that at the conclusion of the siege of Jerusalem in Wars of the Jews, Simon and John both take refuge in subterranean caverns beneath Jerusalem. Eventually they are forced by starvation to come out of these “tombs” and surrender to the Romans. This event struck me as a parallel to the description of the demon-possessed men “coming out of the tombs” in the New Testament.

The passage in Wars of the Jews that describes these caverns confirms that they are indeed “tombs.”

. . . the Romans slew some of them, some they carried captives, and others they made a search for underground, and when they found where they were, they broke up the ground and slew all they met with.

There were also found slain there above two thousand persons, partly by their own hands, and partly by one another, but chiefly destroyed by the famine;

but then the ill savor of the dead bodies was most offensive to those that lighted upon them, insomuch that some were obliged to get away immediately . . .

As I have mentioned, the demon-possessed man at Gadara is described as “cutting himself with stones.”Cutting oneself with “stones” is, of course, unusual—a stone is not a tool someone would normally use to cut with. What is the author of this passage actually referring to? I realized that if the demoniacs of Gadara are intended to satirize the rebel leaders, then there was a satiric answer to this question.

The phrase in the New Testament where the demoniac is “in the tombs . . . cutting himself with stones” shares a darkly humorous relationship with the passage in Wars of the Jews that describes the “tombs” that John and Simon take refuge in. The scornful joke comes from the unanswered question in Mark 5:5 – this question being, what does one call someone who cuts himself with stones? In a passage in Wars of the Jews relating to the rebel leader’s hiding in the “tombs,” one can see an ironic answer. Someone who cuts himself with stones is “stone-cut,” and can therefore mockingly be called a “stone-cutter.”

This Simon, during the siege of Jerusalem, was in the upper city; but when the Roman army was gotten within the walls, and were laying the city waste, he then took the most faithful of his friends with him, and among them some that were stonecutters, with those iron tools which belonged to their occupation.

If, indeed, Salinger was aware of this entire typological scenario, then Caulfield was expressing that he felt the most sympathy and identification with Simon and John, the actual heroes of the Jewish rebel movement. On the other hand, Caulfield may have simply been expressing an ironic respect for the Biblical underdog.

The next day, while speaking with two nuns he meets on the train, Caulfield also shows awareness of the Shakespearian literature in that he picks out Mercutio, the most blameless character in the play, as his favorite. Mercutio’s death, however, provoked an intensification of the discord between the two Gentile families, the Montagues and Capulets.

“Well, I’m not too crazy about Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “I mean I like them, but–I don’t know. They get pretty annoying sometimes. I mean I felt much sorrier when old Mercutio got killed than when Romeo and Juliet did. The think is, I never liked Romeo too much after Mercutio gets stabbed by that other man–Juliet’s cousin–what’s his name?”

“Tybalt.”

“That’s right. Tybalt,” I said–I always forget that guy’s name. “It was Romeo’s fault. I mean I liked him the best in the play, old Mercutio. I don’t know. All those Montagues and Capulets, they’re all right–especially Juliet–but Mercutio, he was–it’s hard to explain. He was very smart and entertaining and all. The thing is, it drives me crazy if somebody gets killed– especially somebody very smart and entertaining and all– and it’s somebody else’s fault. Romeo and Juliet, at least it was their own fault.”

The Freemason in the Rye

The most important puzzle to solve to understand the real meaning of Catcher in the Rye is Caulfield’s ‘misunderstanding’ of the freemason Robert Burns’ poem: ‘Coming through the Rye’. Caulfield overhears a child singing the song.

Here is one version of Burns poem:

“Coming thro’ the Rye” (1796)

Coming thro’ the rye, poor body,
Coming thro’ the rye,
She draiglet a’ her petticoatie
Coming thro’ the rye.

O, Jenny’s a’ wat, poor body;
Jenny’s seldom dry;
She draiglet a’ her petticoatie
Coming thro’ the rye.

Gin a body meet a body
Coming thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body—
Need a body cry?

Gin a body meet a body
Coming thro’ the glen,
Gin a body kiss a body—
Need the warld ken?

Even in the above G-rated version, the poem is clearly discussing a sexual encounter out in the tall grass. Another, less well-known version spells it out, in case anyone misses the point.

Here is the ‘whorehouse’ version of the song.

O gin a body meet a body,
Comin’ throu the rye:
Gin a body fuck a body,
Need a body cry.

Comin’ thro’ the rye, my jo,
An’ coming’ thro’ the rye;
She fand a staun o’ staunin’ graith,
Comin’ thro’ the rye.

Gin a body meet a body,
Comin’ thro’ the glen;
Gin a body fuck a body,
Need the warld ken.

Gin a body meet a body,
Comin’ thro the grain;
Gin a body fuck a body,
Cunt’s a body’s ain.

Gin a body meet a body,
By a body’s sel,
What na body fucks a body,
Wad a body tell.

Mony a body meets a body,
They dare na weel avow;
Mony a body fucks a body,
Ye wadna think its true.

In order to understand which version the child was singing requires recognizing the image given in the passage directly preceding the one in which the child is singing Burn’s song.

There was this record I wanted to get for Phoebe, called “Little Shirley Beans.” It was a very hard record to get. It was about a little kid that wouldn’t go out of the house because two of her front teeth were out and she was ashamed to. I heard it at Pencey. A boy that lived on the next floor had it, and I tried to buy it off him because I knew it would knock old Phoebe out, but he wouldn’t sell it. It was a very old, terrific record that this colored girl singer, Estelle Fletcher, made about twenty years ago. She sings it very Dixieland and whorehouse, and it doesn’t sound at all mushy.

Notice that the song ‘Little Shirley Beans’ is for children, but that the singer gives a “whorehouse” version of the song. This is the framework the author wishes a reader to use in the next paragraph; where we encounter the description of the mysterious ‘catcher’ in the rye. Holden believes he overhears a child singing, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” This lyric does not occur in either version of the Burns song; the phrase is either “when a body meet a body” or “when a body fuck a body”. Holden understands the words of the song in a way they were never written. The alert reader will recognize that the child is singing – as in the paragraph above – the “whorehouse” version of the song, which Caulfield will understand at the book’s end.

Where Caulfield heard ‘catch’, the child must have been singing ‘fuck’. Salinger’s ‘real’ title is therefore ‘Fucker in the Rye’ and this describes Caulfield’s ‘revelation’ in the Freemason’s holy of holies given below. In other words, that the deepest secret of Freemasonry is “fuck you”, which appears to be Apocalypse to non-Freemasons and death to members that are traitors to the organization.

Walking the straight line

Notice that the child who is singing the song is walking is straight line. This is something that children seldom do, but is a requirement within Freemason lodges; which reveals the identity of the ‘church’ the family has just left.

It wasn’t as cold as it was the day before, but the sun still wasn’t out, and it wasn’t too nice for walking. But there was one nice thing. This family that you could tell just came out of some church were walking right in front of me–a father, a mother, and a little kid about six years old. They looked sort of poor. The father had on one of those pearl-gray hats that poor guys wear a lot when they want to look sharp. He and his wife were just walking along, talking, not paying any attention to their kid. The kid was swell. He was walking in the street, instead of on the sidewalk, but right next to the curb. He was making out like he was walking a very straight line, the way kids do, and the whole time he kept singing and humming. I got up closer so I could hear what he was singing. He was singing that song, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” He had a pretty little voice, too. He was just singing for the hell of it, you could tell. The cars zoomed by, brakes screeched all over the place, his parents paid no attention to him, and he kept on walking next to the curb and singing “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” It made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more.

Following his encounter with the singing child, Caulfield comes to a museum which he cannot enter. This is because the museum represents a Freemason temple with its holy of holies. Caulfield cannot go in because he does not yet have the correct information that he would need to possess the ‘level’ that permits a Freemason to learn its deepest secret. This information will come after his encounter with Antolini.

Then a funny thing happened. When I got to the museum, all of a sudden I wouldn’t have gone inside for a million bucks. It just didn’t appeal to me–and here I’d walked through the whole goddam park and looked forward to it and all. If Phoebe’d been there, I probably would have, but she wasn’t. So all I did, in front of the museum, was get a cab and go down to the Biltmore.

Albert Pike thinks he’s hot stuff

Salinger makes a digression to create a cryptic homage to Albert Pike, the most infamous American freemason, who he describes as someone who was “conceited”. This is probably depicting Pike’s delineation between the vast intellect of insider Freemasons and those who not enter the inner circle. I suspect that this cryptic story about ‘Al Pike’ indicates a level of Freemasonry in which its history and the intellectual status of those permitted to rise to its higher levels is revealed.

Pike wrote:

It should be noted, that the great majority of Masons are far from being “initiated” and “are grovelling in Egyptian darkness” (Chr., 1878, II, 28). “The Masonry of the higher degrees,” says Pike [4], I, 311), “teaches the great truths of intellectual science; but as to these, even as to the rudiments and first principles, Blue Masonry is absolutely dumb. Its dramas seem intended to teach the resurrection of the body.” “The pretended possession of mysterious secrets has enabled Blue Masonry to number its initiates by tens of thousands. Never were any pretenses to the possession of mysterious knowledge so baseless and so absurd as those of the Blue and Royal Arch Chapter Degrees” (ibid., IV, 388 sq.).

Salinger’s satirical depiction of Pike rings true:

She was dating this terrible guy, Al Pike, that went to Choate. I didn’t know him too well, but he was always hanging around the swimming pool. He wore those white Lastex kind of swimming trunks, and he was always going off the high dive. He did the same lousy old half gainer all day long. It was the only dive he could do, but he thought he was very hot stuff. All muscles and no brains. Anyway, that’s who Jane dated that night. I couldn’t understand it. I swear I couldn’t. After we started going around together, I asked her how come she could date a showoff bastard like Al Pike. Jane said he wasn’t a show-off. She said he had an inferiority complex. She acted like she felt sorry for him or something, and she wasn’t just putting it on. She meant it. It’s a funny thing about girls. Every time you mention some guy that’s strictly a bastard–very mean, or very conceited and all–and when you mention it to the girl, she’ll tell you he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he has, but that still doesn’t keep him from being a bastard, in my opinion.

Seeking the light from Old Luce

Caulfield meets with a Carl Luce or ‘light’. ‘Light’ informs him that there are “patterns” to one mind that need to be understood to mature.

So what I did finally, I gave old Carl Luce a buzz. He graduated from the Whooton School after I left. He was about three years older than I was, and I didn’t like him too much, but he was one of these very intellectual guys– he had the highest I.Q. of any boy at Whooton–and I thought he might want to have dinner with me somewhere and have a slightly intellectual conversation. He was very enlightening sometimes. So I gave him a buzz. He went to Columbia now, but he lived on 65th Street and all, and I knew he’d be home. When I got him on the phone, he said he couldn’t make it for dinner but that he’d meet me for a drink at ten o’clock at the Wicker Bar, on 54th. I think he was pretty surprised to hear from me. I once called him a fat-assed phony.

Finally old Luce showed up.

Old Luce. What a guy. He was supposed to be my Student Adviser when I was at Whooton. The only thing he ever did, though, was give these sex talks and all, late at night when there was a bunch of guys in his room. He knew quite a bit about sex, especially perverts and all.

[….]

“Maybe I’ll go to China. My sex life is lousy,” I said.

“Naturally. Your mind is immature.”

“It is. It really is. I know it,” I said. “You know what the trouble with me is? I can never get really sexy–I mean really sexy–with a girl I don’t like a lot. I mean I have to like her a lot. If I don’t, I sort of lose my goddam desire for her and all. Boy, it really screws up my sex life something awful. My sex life stinks.”

“Naturally it does, for God’s sake. I told you the last time I saw you what you need.”

“You mean to go to a psychoanalyst and all?” I said. That’s what he’d told me I ought to do. His father was a psychoanalyst and all.

“It’s up to you, for God’s sake. It’s none of my goddam business what you do with your life.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. I was thinking.

“Supposing I went to your father and had him psychoanalyze me and all,” I said. “What would he do to me? I mean what would he do to me?”

“He wouldn’t do a goddam thing to you. He’d simply talk to you, and you’d talk to him, for God’s sake. For one thing, he’d help you to recognize the patterns of your mind.”

“The what?”

“The patterns of your mind. Your mind runs in– Listen. I’m not giving an elementary course in psychoanalysis. If you’re interested, call him up and make an appointment. If you’re not, don’t. I couldn’t care less, frankly.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. Boy, he amused me. “You’re a real friendly bastard,” I told him. “You know that?”

He was looking at his wrist watch. “I have to tear,” he said, and stood up. “Nice seeing you.” He got the bartender and told him to bring him his check.

“Hey,” I said, just before he beat it. “Did your father ever psychoanalyze you?” “Me? Why do you ask?”

“No reason. Did he, though? Has he?”

“Not exactly. He’s helped me to adjust myself to a certain extent, but an extensive analysis hasn’t been necessary. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. I was just wondering.”

Caulfield again revels a messianic aspect to his identity by showing a woman his grey hair and telling her he was 42 a number divided by seven.

I showed her my goddam gray hair and told her I was forty-two–I was only horsing around, naturally.

Caulfield sees that there are no ‘ducks’ left in Central Park. This foresees the story’s ending when he shoots all the ‘ducks’.

I didn’t see any ducks around. I walked all around the whole damn lake–I damn near fell in once, in fact- -but I didn’t see a single duck. I thought maybe if there were any around, they might be asleep or something near the edge of the water, near the grass and all. That’s how I nearly fell in. But I couldn’t find any.

A message for Bernice

Throughout his adventures, Caulfield often ominously remarks that something ‘kills’ him. After his walk in Central Park, the fear of death crystallizes for Holding, who decides to go home and see his sister Phoebe before death overtakes him. Caulfield meets with his sister – whose name means ‘radiant, bright, prophetic’. He sees her notebook has some cryptic writing on it. The writing symbolically depicts the Freemason’s understanding of the book of Revelation.

Phoebe’s writing indicates that she has something important to tell “Bernice”, who was mentioned earlier in Catcher as the blonde dance room ‘witch’ who objected to Caulfield’s self-description as a type of Jesus. The message is “Shirley you said you were sagitarius but your only taurus”.

That is, ‘Shirley’ (a pun on ‘Surely’), the founders of Christianity claimed to be Sagittarius – often identified as the white horse of Revelation 6:2 representing Jesus (or perhaps ‘conquest’ as a harbinger of the apocalypse), but which I have shown (in Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah) is Archippus, the symbol of the Roman emperor Domitian. However, they were only Taurus or bull.

Phoebe is interpreting the conclusion to the Book of Revelation as disclosing that the Roman Imperial invention, Christianity, is only bull (that is, bull shit) and is going to be shot or brought to an end.

the arithmetic was a geography, and the book under the geography was a speller. She’s very good in spelling. She’s very good in all her subjects, but she’s best in spelling. Then, under the speller, there were a bunch of notebooks. She has about five thousand notebooks. You never saw a kid with so many notebooks. I opened the one on top and looked at the first page. It had on it:

Bernice meet me at recess I have something very very important to tell you.

That was all there was on that page. The next one had on it:

Why has south eastern Alaska so many caning factories? Because theres so much salmon

Why has it valuable forests?

because it has the right climate.

What has our government done to make life easier for the alaskan eskimos? look it up for tomorrow!!!

Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield

Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield Phoebe W. Caulfield

Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield, Esq. Please pass to Shirley!!!!

Shirley you said you were sagitarius but your only taurus bring your skates when you come over to my house

Daddy is going to kill you, Holden Caulfield

Phoebe is horrified when she realizes that Holden has come home early, which means he has been expelled from school. She hits him with her fist, repeatedly yells “Daddy is going to kill you!” and then starts crying into her pillow. Holden tells her not to worry; he’s going to go get a job at a ranch in Colorado. She demands to know what has gone wrong: Holden says it’s a million reasons, but especially their snobbery and their “goddam secret fraternity”:

Then all of a sudden, she said, “Oh, why did you do it?” She meant why did I get the ax again. It made me sort of sad, the way she said it.

“Oh, God, Phoebe, don’t ask me. I’m sick of everybody asking me that,” I said. “A million reasons why. It was one of the worst schools I ever went to. It was full of phonies. And mean guys. You never saw so many mean guys in your life. For instance, if you were having a bull session in somebody’s room, and somebody wanted to come in, nobody’d let them in if they were some dopey, pimply guy. Everybody was always locking their door when somebody wanted to come in. And they had this goddam secret fraternity that I was too yellow not to join. There was this one pimply, boring guy, Robert Ackley, that wanted to get in. He kept trying to join, and they wouldn’t let him. Just because he was boring and pimply. I don’t even feel like talking about it. It was a stinking school. Take my word.”

Old Phoebe didn’t say anything, but she was listening. I could tell by the back of her neck that she was listening. She always listens when you tell her something. And the funny part is she knows, half the time, what the hell you’re talking about. She really does.

Salinger then describes the messianic – Roman Christian – lineage that the Freemasons will end and that Caulfield will emerge from. In the story “James Castle” is a type of Jesus Christ. Note that the “genealogy” showing the messianic linage from Castle to Caulfield at the end of the passage is reversing the absurd messianic lineage given in the Gospels, in which the false Roman messiah emerged from the lineage of the true one.

The names before Castle and Caulfield’s – “Cabel, Cabel,” – are punning on the word ‘cabal’, The two ‘Cabals’ being referenced are Roman Christianity and its replacement ‘secret organization’, the Freemasons.

The term cabal derives from Cabala (a word that has numerous spelling variations), the Jewish mystical interpretation of the Hebrew scripture. In Hebrew it means “reception” or “tradition”, denoting the sod (secret) level of Jewish exegesis.

“All right,” I said. But the trouble was, I couldn’t concentrate. About all I could think of were those two nuns that went around collecting dough in those beatup old straw baskets. Especially the one with the glasses with those iron rims. And this boy I knew at Elkton Hills. There was this one boy at Elkton Hills, named James Castle, that wouldn’t take back something he said about this very conceited boy, Phil Stabile. James Castle called him a very conceited guy, and one of Stabile’s lousy friends went and squealed on him to Stabile. So Stabile, with about six other dirty bastards, went down to James Castle’s room and went in and locked the goddam door and tried to make him take back what he said, but he wouldn’t do it. So they started in on him. I won’t even tell you what they did to him–it’s too repulsive–but he still wouldn’t take it back, old James Castle. And you should’ve seen him. He was a skinny little weak-looking guy, with wrists about as big as pencils. Finally, what he did, instead of taking back what he said, he jumped out the window. I was in the shower and all, and even I could hear him land outside. But I just thought something fell out the window, a radio or a desk or something, not a boy or anything. Then I heard everybody running through the corridor and down the stairs, so I put on my bathrobe and I ran downstairs too, and there was old James Castle laying right on the stone steps and all. He was dead, and his teeth, and blood, were all over the place, and nobody would even go near him. He had on this turtleneck sweater I’d lent him. All they did with the guys that were in the room with him was expel them. They didn’t even go to jail.

That was about all I could think of, though. Those two nuns I saw at breakfast and this boy James Castle I knew at Elkton Hills. The funny part is, I hardly even know James Castle, if you want to know the truth. He was one of these very quiet guys. He was in my math class, but he was way over on the other side of the room, and he hardly ever got up to recite or go to the blackboard or anything. Some guys in school hardly ever get up to recite or go to the blackboard. I think the only time I ever even had a conversation with him was that time he asked me if he could borrow this turtleneck sweater I had. I damn near dropped dead when he asked me, I was so surprised and all. I remember I was brushing my teeth, in the can, when he asked me. He said his cousin was coming in to take him for a drive and all. I didn’t even know he knew I had a turtleneck sweater. All I knew about him was that his name was always right ahead of me at roll call. Cabel, R., Cabel, W., Castle, Caulfield–I can still remember it. If you want to know the truth, I almost didn’t lend him my sweater. Just because I didn’t know him too well.

Among the numerous insights pointed out to me by Dr. Jerry Russell that improved my analysis is the fact that Castle had the misfortune to trigger the ire of the secret fraternity; that is, the “conceited boy”, recalling the description of Al Pike.

James Castle would not renounce his effrontery to Freemasonry, even under torture, which plays off on the silence under torture of the Christ in the Gospels. In other words, Salinger is reversing the events of the Gospels. In his version, the Freemasons execute the false Messiah of Christianity, which prepares the way for the return of the ‘different line’ or ‘Antolini’.

Caulfield then describes his misunderstanding of Burns’ song to his sister. He envisions a future where he attempts to help children who are, for some reason, jumping off a cliff. Phoebe repeats the warning that “Daddy’s going to kill you.” We have already been told that Caulfield’s Daddy has secrets; in other words, that Daddy is a Freemason too. Thus, Phoebe’s concern seems very well founded.

I wasn’t listening, though. I was thinking about something else–something crazy. “You know what I’d like to be?” I said. “You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?”

“What? Stop swearing.”

“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like–” “It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”

“I know it’s a poem by Robert Burns.”

She was right, though. It is “If a body meet a body coming through the rye.” I didn’t know it then, though.

“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,'” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

Old Phoebe didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, when she said something, all she said was, “Daddy’s going to kill you.”

Is Caulfield indulging in a pleasant fantasy of living a life of service after he has left the ‘secret fraternity’? Perhaps, but it seems as if he should know better, and his steady stream of cynical banter hardly lends much credence to the idea that he will suddenly become a Good Samaritan.

Gaining entry to the inner sanctum

Fearing a traumatic encounter with his parents, Caulfield decides to go take one last lesson in the Craft, which will allow him to enter the holy of holies and learn the ultimate secret of Freemasonry. The final lesson is to be given to him by Mr. Antolini. ‘Anto’ ‘lini’ means ‘different line’ and indicates a different messianic lineage than that of the Roman messiah represented by Castle.

I listened, and I heard something, but it wasn’t much. “Good,” I said. Then I went out in the living room and called up this teacher I had, Mr. Antolini.

I made it very snappy on the phone because I was afraid my parents would barge in on me right in the middle of it. They didn’t, though. Mr. Antolini was very nice. He said I could come right over if I wanted to. I think I probably woke he and his wife up, because it took them a helluva long time to answer the phone. The first thing he asked me was if anything was wrong, and I said no. I said I’d flunked out of Pencey, though. I thought I might as well tell him. He said “Good God,” when I said that. He had a good sense of humor and all. He told me to come right over if I felt like it.

“Good God” – another invocation of Caulfield’s role in the story as a messiah figure. In the next passage Antolini reprises the role of Josephus Bar Matthias/Joseph of Arimathea in the Gospels, carrying the dead body of false Roman messiah, James Castle.

He was about the best teacher I ever had, Mr. Antolini. He was a pretty young guy, not much older than my brother D.B., and you could kid around with him without losing your respect for him. He was the one that finally picked up that boy that jumped out the window I told you about, James Castle. Old Mr. Antolini felt his pulse and all, and then he took off his coat and put it over James Castle and carried him all the way over to the infirmary. He didn’t even give a damn if his coat got all bloody.

What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert Ackley. I hated them once in a while–I admit it–but it doesn’t last too long, is what I mean. After a while, if I didn’t see them, if they didn’t come in the room, or if I didn’t see them in the dining room for a couple of meals, I sort of missed them. I mean I sort of missed them.”

Mr. Antolini didn’t say anything for a while. He got up and got another hunk of ice and put it in his drink, then he sat down again. You could tell he was thinking. I kept wishing, though, that he’d continue the conversation in the morning, instead of now, but he was hot. People are mostly hot to have a discussion when you’re not.

“All right. Listen to me a minute now . . . I may not word this as memorably as I’d like to, but I’ll write you a letter about it in a day or two. Then you can get it all straight. But listen now, anyway.” He started concentrating again. Then he said, “This fall I think you’re riding for–it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. You follow me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

He got up and poured some more booze in his glass. Then he sat down again. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I don’t want to scare you,” he said, “but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause.”

Antolini could hardly make his threat more clear. If Holden Caulfield quits the ‘secret fraternity’ he will die for a cause (that is, Christianity) that Antolini believes is worthless. This threat will be repeated at the story’s conclusion and is the reason the book is associated with so assassinations.

He gave me a funny look. “If I write something down for you, will you read it carefully? And keep it?”

“Yes. Sure,” I said. I did, too. I still have the paper he gave me.

He went over to this desk on the other side of the room, and without sitting down wrote something on a piece of paper. Then he came back and sat down with the paper in his hand. “Oddly enough, this wasn’t written by a practicing poet. It was written by a psychoanalyst named Wilhelm Stekel. Here’s what he–Are you still with me?”

“Yes, sure I am.”

The ‘advice’ Antolini writes down for Caulfield simply describes the fact that from now on he must live ‘humbly’ for a cause, that is he must live with a secret and without revealing his real purpose.

“Here’s what he said: ‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.'”

He leaned over and handed it to me. I read it right when he gave it to me, and then I thanked him and all and put it in my pocket. It was nice of him to go to all that trouble. It really was. The thing was, though, I didn’t feel much like concentrating. Boy, I felt so damn tired all of a sudden.

You could tell he wasn’t tired at all, though. He was pretty oiled up, for one thing. “I think that one of these days,” he said, “you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there. But immediately. You can’t afford to lose a minute. Not you.”

I nodded, because he was looking right at me and all, but I wasn’t too sure what he was talking about. I was pretty sure I knew, but I wasn’t too positive at the time. I was too damn tired.

“And I hate to tell you,” he said, “but I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school. You’ll have to. You’re a student–whether the idea appeals to you or not. You’re in love with knowledge.

Antolini describes the oral exams of the Apprentice Freemason – the Oral Comp.

And I think you’ll find, once you get past all the Mr. Vineses and their Oral Comp–”

“Mr. Vinsons,” I said. He meant all the Mr. Vinsons, not all the Mr. Vineses. I shouldn’t have interrupted him, though.

“All right–the Mr. Vinsons. Once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you’re going to start getting closer and closer–that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it–to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them–if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.” He stopped and took a big drink out of his highball. Then he started again. Boy, he was really hot. I was glad I didn’t try to stop him or anything. “I’m not trying to tell you,” he said, “that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It’s not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with–which, unfortunately, is rarely the case–tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And–most important–nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker. Do you follow me at all?”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t say anything again for quite a while. I don’t know if you’ve ever done it, but it’s sort of hard to sit around waiting for somebody to say something when they’re thinking and all. It really is. I kept trying not to yawn. It wasn’t that I was bored or anything–I wasn’t–but I was so damn sleepy all of a sudden.

Antolini describes the level of intelligence that must be held to pass through to the highest level of Freemasonry. Only the most intelligent are permitted to enter the higher levels.

“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”

Then, all of a sudden, I yawned. What a rude bastard, but I couldn’t help it!

Mr. Antolini just laughed, though. “C’mon,” he said, and got up. “We’ll fix up the couch for you.”

I followed him and he went over to this closet and tried to take down some sheets and blankets and stuff that was on the top shelf, but he couldn’t do it with this highball glass in his hand. So he drank it and then put the glass down on the floor and then he took the stuff down. I helped him bring it over to the couch. We both made the bed together. He wasn’t too hot at it. He didn’t tuck anything in very tight. I didn’t care, though. I could’ve slept standing up I was so tired.

We were all done making up the couch then. “It’s all yours,” Mr. Antolini said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with those legs of yours.”

“That’s all right. I’m used to short beds,” I said. “Thanks a lot, sir. You and Mrs. Antolini really saved my life tonight.”

“You know where the bathroom is. If there’s anything you want, just holler. I’ll be in the kitchen for a while–will the light bother you?” “No–heck, no. Thanks a lot.”

“All right. Good night, handsome.”

“G’night, sir. Thanks a lot.”

Finally, Caulfield has the necessary knowledge and Antolini administers the ceremony of the Master Mason.

Then something happened. I don’t even like to talk about it.

I woke up all of a sudden. I don’t know what time it was or anything, but I woke up. I felt something on my head, some guy’s hand. Boy, it really scared hell out of me. What it was, it was Mr. Antolini’s hand. What he was doing was, he was sitting on the floor right next to the couch, in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head. Boy, I’ll bet I jumped about a thousand feet.

“What the hellya doing?” I said.

“Nothing! I’m simply sitting here, admiring–“

“What’re ya doing, anyway?” I said over again. I didn’t know what the hell to say-

-I mean I was embarrassed as hell.

“How ’bout keeping your voice down? I’m simply sitting here–“

“I have to go, anyway,” I said–boy, was I nervous! I started putting on my damn pants in the dark. I could hardly get them on I was so damn nervous. I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they’re always being perverty when I’m around.

Now that he has passed the ‘levels’, and received the blessing from Antolini’s hand, Caulfield is finally ready to learn the deepest secret of the Freemasons, which is found within the Holy of Holies, a room inside the Freemason Temple.

As he leaves Antolini’s home, Caulfield is shaken by a repeated curse of ‘Fuck you’. The message is ominous, particularly as it is received as indelible handwriting on the wall, recalling the message that was given to Belshazzar at Daniel 5:26-28: “… God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it….Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting….Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”

While I was walking up the stairs, though, all of a sudden I thought I was going to puke again. Only, I didn’t. I sat down for a second, and then I felt better. But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them–all cockeyed, naturally–what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it. I figured it was some perverty bum that’d sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall. I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I’d smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody. But I knew, too, I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. I knew that. That made me even more depressed. I hardly even had the guts to rub it off the wall with my hand, if you want to know the truth. I was afraid some teacher would catch me rubbing it off and would think I’d written it. But I rubbed it out anyway, finally.

I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another “Fuck you” on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn’t come off. It’s hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the “Fuck you” signs in the world. It’s impossible.

I looked at the clock in the recess yard, and it was only twenty to twelve, so I had quite a lot of time to kill before I met old Phoebe. But I just walked over to the museum anyway. There wasn’t anyplace else to go. I thought maybe I might stop in a phone booth and give old Jane Gallagher a buzz before I started bumming my way west, but I wasn’t in the mood. For one thing, I wasn’t even sure she was home for vacation yet. So I just went over to the museum, and hung around.

While I was waiting around for Phoebe in the museum, right inside the doors and all, these two little kids came up to me and asked me if I knew where the mummies were. The one little kid, the one that asked me, had his pants open. I told him about it. So he buttoned them up right where he was standing talking to me–he didn’t even bother to go behind a post or anything. He killed me. I would’ve laughed, but I was afraid I’d feel like vomiting again, so I didn’t. “Where’re the mummies, fella?” the kid said again. “Ya know?”

I horsed around with the two of them a little bit. “The mummies? What’re they?” I asked the one kid.

“You know. The mummies–them dead guys. That get buried in them toons and all.”

Toons. That killed me. He meant tombs.

“How come you two guys aren’t in school?” I said.

“No school t’day,” the kid that did all the talking said. He was lying, sure as I’m alive, the little bastard. I didn’t have anything to do, though, till old Phoebe showed up, so I helped them find the place where the mummies were. Boy, I used to know exactly where they were, but I hadn’t been in that museum in years.

The following is a description of the Holy of Holies that is inside every Freemason Temple:

“Every student of Jewish antiquities knows and every Freemason who has taken the Third Degree ought to knows, what was the peculiar construction, character, and uses of the Sanctum Sanctorum or Holly [sic] of Holies in King Solomon’s Temple. Situated in the western end of the Temple, separated from the rest of the building by a heavy curtain, and enclosed on three sides by dead walls without any aperture or window, it contained the sacred Ark of the Covenant, and was secluded and set apart from all intrusion save of the High Priest, who only entered it on certain solemn occasions. As it was the most sacred of the three parts of the Temple, so has it been made symbolic of a Master’s Lodge, in which are performed the most sacred rites of initiation in Ancient Craft Freemasonry.

In the next passage two ‘brothers’ – experienced Freemasons – accompany Caulfield to the Holy of Holies.

“You two guys so interested in mummies?” I said. “Yeah.”

“Can’t your friend talk?” I said.

“He ain’t my friend. He’s my brudda.”

“Can’t he talk?” I looked at the one that wasn’t doing any talking. “Can’t you talk at all?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t feel like it.”

Finally we found the place where the mummies were, and we went in.

“You know how the Egyptians buried their dead?” I asked the one kid. “Naa.”

“Well, you should. It’s very interesting. They wrapped their faces up in these cloths that were treated with some secret chemical. That way they could be buried in their tombs for thousands of years and their faces wouldn’t rot or anything. Nobody knows how to do it except the Egyptians. Even modern science.”

To get to where the mummies were, you had to go down this very narrow sort of hall with stones on the side that they’d taken right out of this Pharaoh’s tomb and all. It was pretty spooky, and you could tell the two hot-shots I was with weren’t enjoying it too much. They stuck close as hell to me, and the one that didn’t talk at all practically was holding onto my sleeve. “Let’s go,” he said to his brother. “I seen ’em awreddy. C’mon, hey.” He turned around and beat it.

“He’s got a yella streak a mile wide,” the other one said. “So long!” He beat it too.

As he leaves the tomb, Caulfield again encounters the secret knowledge – “Fuck You”.

I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you’d never guess what I saw on the wall. Another “Fuck you.” It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones.

The “Fuck You” is an oath that is taken to the death – it will be on their gravestones. Notice that there is no place on earth that one can escape this curse, a point I will return to at the conclusion.

That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.” I’m positive, in fact.

Holden passes out, which may be alluding to some state a Mason enters into after the secret knowledge is given; or it may be alluding to the extreme fear of punishment that he is living under.

After I came out of the place where the mummies were, I had to go to the bathroom. I sort of had diarrhea, if you want to know the truth. I didn’t mind the diarrhea part too much, but something else happened. When I was coming out of the can, right before I got to the door, I sort of passed out. I was lucky, though. I mean I could’ve killed myself when I hit the floor, but all I did was sort of land on my side. it was a funny thing, though. I felt better after I passed out. I really did. My arm sort of hurt, from where I fell, but I didn’t feel so damn dizzy any more.

Meeting again with Phoebe, he finds that she has packed her suitcase and is ready to leave with him. Caulfield begs her to go back home, to no avail. Perhaps out of love and concern for his little sister and her fate, Caulfield finally agrees to come home with her, which will mean mending fences with his father, and his secret fraternity.

Acceptance and commitment

At the story’s end Caulfield now has the ultimate knowledge, and at the same time he has resigned himself to his role and his place in life as a Freemason. He no longer wishes to “catch” the children; rather he is the ‘fucker in the rye’ who lets them fall. He is wearing his shooting hat and is presumably now “shooting the bull” (that is, Christianity) deliriously happy as he is soaked by falling rain. The horses on the merry go round symbolize the ‘four horsemen’ who ride at the Apocalypse. The “smoke in your eyes” is the smoke from Caulfield’s symbolic rifle. (Or is it a real rifle? Caulfield’s sanity and his grip on reality seem fragile; perhaps his report is a sugar coating of a real mass murder event.)

“Maybe I will the next time. I’ll watch ya,” I said. “Got your ticket?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead, then–I’ll be on this bench right over here. I’ll watch ya.” I went over and sat down on this bench, and she went and got on the carrousel. She walked all around it. I mean she walked once all the way around it. Then she sat down on this big, brown, beat-up-looking old horse. Then the carrousel started, and I watched her go around and around. There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the song the carrousel was playing was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” It was playing it very jazzy and funny. All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddam horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.

When the ride was over she got off her horse and came over to me. “You ride once, too, this time,” she said.

“No, I’ll just watch ya. I think I’ll just watch,” I said. I gave her some more of her dough. “Here. Get some more tickets.”

She took the dough off me. “I’m not mad at you any more,” she said.

“I know. Hurry up–the thing’s gonna start again.”

Then all of a sudden she gave me a kiss. Then she held her hand out, and said,

“It’s raining. It’s starting to rain.” “I know.”

Then what she did–it damn near killed me–she reached in my coat pocket and took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head.

“Don’t you want it?” I said.

“You can wear it a while.”

“Okay. Hurry up, though, now. You’re gonna miss your ride. You won’t get your own horse or anything.”

She kept hanging around, though.

“Did you mean it what you said? You really aren’t going away anywhere? Are you really going home afterwards?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. I meant it, too. I wasn’t lying to her. I really did go home afterwards. “Hurry up, now,” I said. “The thing’s starting.”

She ran and bought her ticket and got back on the goddam carrousel just in time.

Then she walked all the way around it till she got her own horse back. Then she got on it. She waved to me and I waved back.

Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way; but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.

In closing, Caulfield reminds us (as he told us in the beginning) that he’s been sent off to some sort of rehabilitation camp on the West Coast, where he is being subjected to psychoanalysis (or mind control), before he will go on for more schooling:

That’s all I’m going to tell about. I could probably tell you what I did after I went home, and how I got sick and all, and what school I’m supposed to go to next fall, after I get out of here, but I don’t feel like it. I really don’t. That stuff doesn’t interest me too much right now.

A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I’m going apply myself when I go back to school next September. It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question.

[….]

D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn’t know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Salinger already indicated the fate that may be coming to Stradlater, Ackley, and Maurice. In a previous passage he used prefiguration typology to subtly indicate Caulfield’s hostility towards them and the entire world. The passage shows Caulfield’s schizophrenic combination of anger and fear, and at the end he expresses a genocidal desire to ride an atomic bomb – perhaps the inspiration for a similar scene in the Apocalyptic film Dr. Strangelove.

He once told Allie and I that if he’d had to shoot anybody, he wouldn’t’ve known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were. I remember Allie once asked him wasn’t it sort of good that he was in the war because he was a writer and it gave him a lot to write about and all. He made Allie go get his baseball mitt and then he asked him who was the best war poet, Rupert Brooke or Emily Dickinson. Allie said Emily Dickinson. I don’t know too much about it myself, because I don’t read much poetry, but I do know it’d drive me crazy if I had to be in the Army and be with a bunch of guys like Ackley and Stradlater and old Maurice all the time, marching with them and all. I was in the Boy Scouts once, for about a week, and I couldn’t even stand looking at the back of the guy’s neck in front of me. They kept telling you to look at the back of the guy’s neck in front of you. I swear if there’s ever another war, they better just take me out and stick me in front of a firing squad. I wouldn’t object. …Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.

The line “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” implies that high-level Freemason must maintain the order’s secrets in strictest confidence or else they will start “missing everybody” – in other words be killed. This line was why the book was present at so many assassinations, to remind those who have sworn the oath to remain silent or be killed.

Salinger’s warning repeats the one given by another Freemason, Mark Twain’s, at the conclusion of Tom Sawyer

“When are you going to start the gang and turn robbers?”

“Oh Right off. We’ll get the boys together and have the initiation tonight.”

“Have the which?”

“Have the initiation.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s to swear to stand by one another and never tell the gang’s secrets, even if you’re chopped all to flinders, and kill anybody and all his family that hurts one of the gang.”

Twain’s warning is an example of how long and how far-ranging the Freemasons’ control of culture and the political system has been. It seems to exert its pernicious influence over much of what we call democracy and popular culture — either alone, or as part of a many-tentacled system involving other equally secretive organizations. Hopefully the truth will come to light soon.

This needs to happen because as Salinger wrote:

That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose.

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Even Jove G’nows

Richard Stanley and Jerry Russell

February 25, 2015

With the recent opening of the movie Jupiter Ascending, we are treated to a futuristic science fiction thriller by the Wachowskis, in some ways akin to their famous Matrix Trilogy. Unlike The Matrix, this film has failed to achieve either critical acclaim or commercial success: no doubt, because the uninitiated (typical) movie critic or fan sees only a boring film with poor character development and an annoying overabundance of excessively loud explosions.

However, those with ‘eyes to see and ears to hear’ can confidently assert that the film is an especially heavy-handed example of the genre of typological science fiction, and thus it becomes a fascinating target for literary and historical analysis. What is this film trying to say, what goals is it trying to achieve, and who is behind it?

Demonic propaganda, or progressive artistry?

Among those reviews that take the (appropriate) symbolic view of this film, the most typical reaction is to see it as demonically inspired Illuminati propaganda. ‘Vigilant Christians’ and ‘citizens’ are advised to stay clear, lest they be corrupted by this attempt at Satanic mind control. These fundamentalist Christians (or rather, Flavian mind control victims) are, of course, correct that this is not an orthodox Christian movie, at least not in any sense that a 1st century Roman or Jew could recognize. Nevertheless, the ‘Jupiter’ who is ascending, like Somni-451 in Cloud Atlas, is clearly an allegory of historical Jesus: a truly human, allegedly divine Savior Messiah figure. (Fundamentalist Christians are also outraged at the box office blockbuster “Fifty Shades of Grey”, perhaps rightly so, because the heroine Anastasia Steele is put in a symbolic bird cage as a victim of a mind control scheme. Nevertheless, this resistance is ironic, because the film so accurately depicts traditional Biblical values of masculine dominance and female submission within a monogamous relationship. The male protagonist is not called “Christian” for nothing.)

Regardless of all this, we believe that it isn’t necessarily true that “Illuminati Symbolism” is used only by evil oligarchs and Satan-worshippers. This symbolism permeates our culture, and there’s no reason to believe that psychopathic oligarchs or Luciferian ‘devils’ have a monopoly on the genre. We, on the contrary, believe the movie contains messages which are certainly intriguing, and perhaps even edifying, uplifting or hopeful. Psychopathic oligarchs may indeed have a hammerlock on the studios and distribution system, but perhaps individual mavericks like the Wachowski siblings can still manage to smuggle in commentary that deserves to be called Postflavian, or at least progressive.

And perhaps it might be even more edifying, if not illuminating, that we consider that a pastor’s (in Postflavian terms – one form of metaphoric sheepdog) role, after all, is to keep his flock in the pasture where they can best be fleeced and their reality frame manicured. Many consider however, that it is part of the real oligarchic shepherd’s code to explain the system in one fashion or another, and like the literal fine print in a contract that you neglect to read, then …

Moreover, we have detected a possible astrological connection whose implications are certainly troubling, although not particularly easy to interpret — at least if one avoids jumping to unwarranted conclusions. As usual, we leave it to the reader to evaluate our evidence and consider our arguments. (Warning: for those who would like to see the movie without pre-conceptions, this review contains many spoilers.)

Alien astronauts, panspermia and transhumanism

Like Biblical typology, the film has both a surface-level interpretation and an occulted symbolic interpretation. On the surface, a casual viewer can see that the movie depicts a strange, powerful and very advanced alien civilization that has seeded the earth (and untold thousands of other planets in the universe) with the human species, at a time 100,000 years ago. It is said that in Earth’s case, the aliens wiped out the dinosaurs in preparation for the implantation of this crop of humans. In the fullness of time, it has been planned that civilization on Earth will reach a state of over-population, at which point its eight billion humans will be ripe for harvesting.

The elite beings of this alien civilization are human as well, but they have gained a god-like ability to vastly extend their lifespan via some technological genetic legerdemain. They do this by harvesting innumerable humans from their many inhabitable planetary properties distributed throughout their respective regions of the Milky Way, and then extracting the DNA so as to obtain perfect matches for their own DNA. This DNA is then stockpiled and when needed this harvested DNA is transplanted into each and every cell of their bodies while they repose in a special bath. This is apparently repeatable indefinitely as each successive set of DNA eventually wears out its end cap ‘telomeres’, which is one manner in how we all genetically age.

The alien civilization is ruled by a family of three siblings named Balem, Calique and Titus, the heirs of the Abrasax dynasty. As the Earth is nearing ripeness for harvest, Balem is eager to get on with the harvest, expecting windfall profits. But, a problem has surfaced: a certain toilet cleaning lady (an illegal alien to boot?) on Earth has been discovered to have identical DNA with the mother of the three ruling siblings. Accordingly, she is the rightful heir of the Abrasax fortune, and accordingly she is the true owner of not just Earth, but the Abrasax’ galactic empire. Drama ensues as each of the three siblings attempts to control this woman, Jupiter Jones (played by the very delicious Mila Kunis). Balem’s strategy is to kill Jupiter and absorb her DNA; Titus wants to marry her; and Calique just wants to be her friend. Jupiter Jones, who seems to be a completely normal and ordinary young woman, has been thrust into this bizarre situation by pure random chance, and wants nothing of the Abrasax’ gruesome DNA harvesting plans. Her goal, throughout, is to escape from the clutches of the Abrasax and allow the Earth to continue in peace.

Fortunately for Jupiter, she is befriended by the handsome Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a genetically engineered superhero (part human, part canine) equipped with brightly blinking anti-gravity flying shoes that leave a trail of fairy dust behind them. Caine is a member of Aegis, an ‘intergalactic police force’. Following Caine’s lead, the Aegis police force unites to acknowledge Jupiter’s claim to the rightful throne, and then bursts into a full-fledged rebellion against the Abrasax siblings. After a great many very confusing galactic dogfights, brawls and explosions engulfing entire planets: Jupiter’s Team Aegis emerges victorious, the plot to harvest Earth is terminated, and earthly human civilization resumes as if nothing ever happened. Caine gets his artificial, ‘angelic’ wings back (leaving us to wonder why he ever had them in the first place, as dogs don’t normally have wings), and Caine and Jupiter fly off together, romantically onward and upward.

The film obviously appears to be paying homage to futuristic but at least moderately reputable scientific topics such as panspermia, transhumanism, and genetic repair & replacement, as well as more wildly speculative notions such as Zecharia Sitchin’s ancient astronauts, David Icke’s reptilian alien elites, and maybe even Mormon astral theology. However, the movie makes no discernible effort to move these theories forward as respectable science, instead using them mainly as fantastic pretexts for spectacular CGI effects. While some critics go little farther than to warn their readers that these ideas are not “Christ centered”, we believe that these non sequiturs should be viewed as signals that the story should be interpreted allegorically and typologically.

On the other hand, if the oligarchs are intending that the next world order will be based on a mythology that the elite are aliens from outer space, or battling aliens from outer space, then the surface message of the movie is aligned with this plan, and corporate and imperial support for this movie may be explained on that grounds.

Apocalyptic allegory and ritual cannibalism

The movie is deeply rooted in the modern zeitgeist of apocalyptic fiction. As mankind is facing the all too well-known problems of overpopulation, global climate change, pollution, resource depletion, economic collapse and catastrophically destructive warfare, the idea that we are facing some sort of apocalyptic regression to a dark age seems unavoidable. In the face of these catastrophes, our ruling elite seems only concerned with profitably exploiting both the planet and the people. The obliviously self-important and arrogant Abrasax siblings seem to be a personification of whatever is wrong with our corporate industrial civilization, and one can only rejoice at their comeuppance at the hands of the charming and humble Jupiter Jones and her friends of the intergalactic police.

Terry Gilliam appears in a scene evocative of his classic film Brazil, in which Jupiter Jones is forced to wait in line in a bureaucratic Steampunk nightmare office on Abrasax’s home planet Ores to claim her “inheritance”, and Gilliam’s character ultimately gives his stamp of approval. This episode solidifies the typological link between the underpinnings of the Abrasax dynasty, and the overgrown bureaucracies that serve the interests of the modern oligarchy.

As a theory of social change, the idea that a rebellion driven from the professional (petit bourgeois) or police / military sector, in an alliance with populist goals & ideals, leaves much to be desired. At the end of the day, how can it be assured that the new boss (Jupiter Jones and the Aegis team) is any different from the old boss (Balem Abrasax and his cronies)? The young Jupiter might easily turn out to be just a chip off the old block. But on the other hand, up until now this is arguably the only type of revolution that has ever accomplished much if anything at all. The Aegis team and their equipment are in various ways visually evocative of the Star Wars Rebel Alliance who defeated the Galactic Empire in that far-away universe, and Caine Wise’s otherwise inexplicable canine wings may be a representation of Pygar, the hero of the sexual revolution in the cult classic Barbarella.

Going beyond any likely real-world apocalypse, the gruesome DNA “harvesting” technology is an updated version of cannibalism. What else but food is “harvested” and then “absorbed” into the body, giving life? Regular readers of this website will know that we recognize cannibalistic genocide as a persistent theme in symbolic literature, dating back to the brutal suppression of the Jewish rebellion in 70 AD, and its veiled representation in the Gospels and the Eucharist, as explained in Caesar’s Messiah. Also, an upcoming post will discuss the sources of the legend of the famous vampire, Count Dracula; and to what extent the legend represents a real elite taste for blood: past or present, metaphorical or actual.

Gnostic theology and cynical imperialist politics

Moving on to the names and iconographies of the various entities in the film, we find that the Abrasax dynasty (and, particularly, Balem) is particularly affiliated with the god Jupiter. This is shown by Balem’s ownership of the planet Jupiter, where he maintains a giant factory for human DNA processing, as well as the protagonist Jupiter Jones’ name, and also by the relation of the god Abrasax with Jupiter by means of the number 365. While it is typically denied for a most profitable reason — Jove, also known as Jupiter by the Romans, and Zeus by the Greeks, may very well be one and the same as the Judaic god YHWH, Jehovah. In fact, all the primal attributes of these gods are the same, although the latter more lately glossed over with a cynically warm and loving veneer, while also being generically neutered to just … ‘G_d’. The motive to keep the Greco-Roman and Judaic identities separate is parallel and for the same reason as in the creating and maintaining of the human dialectic identity scam introduced in Peoples of the Flavian Book. This is also directly related to the discussion in Sheepdogs in Wolves’ Clothing, in that one cannot be a ‘gentile’ if one is not of the ‘gentry’, or the junior nobility; and neither can one be a Jew in the classic sense if one is an Ashkenazi.

The ancient god Abrasax (or Abraxas), however, is also associated with gnostic concepts of the Demiurge, or Yaldabaoth. This identification, problematic in the most ancient texts and artifacts, has become arguably clearer in modern references by Aleister Crowley and Carl Jung. Any differences between Yaldabaoth and Abrasax are beyond our Postflavian abilities to discern. In the Gnostic scheme, there is a purely good, purely spiritual, and supreme God whose name is unknowable (or perhaps is named Sophia), but this benevolent deity is so remote as to be inaccessible except perhaps through the intercession of Jesus Christ, or some other Jesus perhaps. Meanwhile, Yaldabaoth (and perhaps his underling Yahweh) were responsible for botching the creation of Earth, in its corrupt and evil form as we know it.

By associating the Abrasax dynasty with Jupiter (or Yahweh), the film affirms the Gnostic view of this deity, and also confirms the mundane, fallen (indeed, psychopathic) human nature of the oligarchic powers who serve as Abrasax’s worldly vicars. The character ‘Balem Abrasax’ reinforces this association further, not only by his name (taken from Balaam, the ancient Phoenician / Palestinian object of pre-Judean idolatry) but also by statements such as “I Give Life, and I Take It”, and “Life is an act of consumption.”

In 1899, the Encyclopædia Biblica article Baal by W. Robertson Smith and George F. Moore states:

That Baal was primarily a sun-god was for a long time almost a dogma among scholars, and is still often repeated. This doctrine is connected with theories of the origin of religion which are now almost universally abandoned. The worship of the heavenly bodies is not the beginning of religion. Moreover, there was not, as this theory assumes, one god Baal, worshipped under different forms and names by the Semitic peoples, but a multitude of local Baals, each the inhabitant of his own place, the protector and benefactor of those who worshipped him there. Even in the astro-theology of the Babylonians the star of Bēl was not the sun: it was the planet Jupiter.
Address : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal>

Furthermore, as mentioned in the above link, Ba’al was generally a rain god critical for agriculture, and just like his bloody rival brother Yahweh, the names were early on honorific titles for the local community leader, or lord – as the Brits say. It is perhaps in these attributes that Balem Abrasax can best be equated rather than with other similar Biblical character names like Balaam and his ass. For here we can see the nascent existence of the system we still have today of veiled terrestrial lords or ‘shepherds’ in our Postflavian parlance. This was also noted and further explained by Neil Hague of the “Through Ancient Eyes” blog:

The Bee and the serpent was a symbol associated with the Hyksos priest-kings (or Shepard Kings) of Egypt and their connection to what later became the aristocratic families of Europe, not least the Rothschild banking elite. Could the Abrasax who rule from Jupiter (in the movie) be a mirror of the rule over the Earths resources by these elite families on behalf of their off planet ancestors? Of course they could?

The staff held by the shepherd, wise men, the Moses figures, druids and other religious figures, is a symbol for the ancient cults associated with the planets and stars. The ‘good shepherd’, for example, was the name used for the ancient astrologers that watched their ‘flocks of stars’. Shepherd symbolism in religious text relates to the already mentioned Hyksos Priest Kings of Egypt that would later appear in the Old Testament as the Israelite father figures, such as David, Solomon and Moses. Both King Alexandra [sic] the Great was depicted with horns just like Moses and of course both are symbols of Ammon (Jupiter) a horned god-man who ‘rises up’ from his ‘royal heritage’ to lead the worker bees out of captivity. Solomon was said to be the son of David, who was King in Jerusalem, one who mastered and controlled ‘all spirits of the air, on the earth, and under the earth. In simple speak, he was not of this world. A Lord who conversed with off-world demons and the Abrasax.

Jupiter Jones: fully human, accidentally divine

The entire population of the planet Earth is slated to be cannibalized, and is spared from this fate by the intervention of Jupiter Jones. This in itself is more than sufficient to mark her as a Messiah figure. She is not the child of a virgin, but rather a single mother; arguably, a modern saintly equivalent. Her amateur astronomer father, Maximilian Jones, perished in a Russian robbery before she was born, and she was raised in completely humble circumstances in Chicago. Her name, Jupiter, represents her connection with the Abrasax dynasty; but in other respects, Jupiter is more readily associated with Venus, as stated by “Through Ancient Eyes”:

Jupiter Jones is clearly depicted as the ‘double goddess’ in the film. She is both mother of the Abrasax (Archons) and the ascending queen of the Earth. She is therefore Sophia, Isis, Demeter, Venus (the Maleficent as her dark side) and the star that rises (ascends) in the sky. The Wachowskis couldn’t have made it any plainer.

The identification of Jupiter Jones as the reincarnation of an ancient earth goddess, is further reinforced by her role in the film as a putative supplier of fertile eggs, as well as by her strange, queen-like ability to compel swarms of bees.

Venus, of course, is another name for Lucifer, which in turn is another name for Jesus Christ, the metaphorical rising star. Christians are often zombatically confused about this, seeing Lucifer as a fallen angel or a synonym for Satan, but this is biblically not the case. See: Jesus Christ is the True Lucifer by ‘Sanctus Visalia‘:

Origins of the word Lucifer

… Before we begin let us figure out Lucifer means. In Latin Lucifer means “Light Bringer” and is the name of the Morning Star. The word Lucifer appears only once in the Bible and only in the KJV. Isaiah 14:12: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”

But did the word Lucifer always exist? NO! In the Hebrew language, the word Lucifer is derived from the Hebrew word הילל (Hêlēl). In fact, the term Lucifer didn’t even exist in the Biblical ages! Put thought to it; Lucifer is a Latin word. (Lux = light/fire Ferre = to bear/to bring). The Old Testament was written primarily in Hebrew, so the word Lucifer could not have been in their language….

Jesus the Morning Star the Lucifer

Now we have also noticed that only one commonly accepted translation of the Bible keeps the word Lucifer and that is the King James Version. Even then it appears only once, and is given to a fallen being. But in reality, Jesus Christ is the true Lucifer. Remember, Morning Star, Shining One, Light Bearer. All of these terms were used by Jesus himself and his disciples.

Revelation 22:16 I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.

2 Peter 1:19 ¹⁹And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

Ha! Then how do we explain the word Lucifer being used in Isaiah? Who is Satan? He is a being trying usurp God. Who is the Lucifer in Isaiah? If Jesus Christ is the true Lucifer, then the fallen Lucifer must be a counterfeit. If Jesus is the Christ/the Messiah, then the fallen Lucifer must be the anti-Christ/the false Messiah.

Titus Abrasax, Bride of Christ?

The role of Titus Abrasax is clarified by his interaction with Jupiter: he desperately seeks to marry her. With genders reversed, of course, the bride of Christ is the Church. Titus and Jupiter are slated to be married in a gigantic Gothic cathedral; Titus wears a red vestment, symbolic of funerals and death, and perhaps his cannibalistic plans for Earth; Jupiter wears a white dress with red floral highlights (for attracting bees?), and a strange headdress vaguely reminiscent of a Medusa, again festooned with red roses. Could the choice of the name Titus as the husband-to-be of this Messianic figure indicate that the Wachowskis are aware of the role of Titus Flavius in the creation of the Gospels, or perhaps the equivalence in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, as discovered by Joe Atwill? We will watch for more clues when the movie is out on video.

In the same vein, Kalique Abrasax (whose name is reminiscent of Kali, the Hindu goddess of the underworld) is Jupiter’s friend, confidant and tutor. She is also a really nice (for being psychopathic) type of person, who is happy with the knowledge (or belief) that the victims of “harvesting” hardly feel any pain. Allegorically, this all feels evocative of the mass media, and politicians, and all other purveyors of smooth pleasure and pacification.

Fallen Angels

As mentioned above: along with Jupiter Jones, the main protagonists of the film are Jupiter’s true romantic interest, Caine Wise, and his sidekick Stinger Apini (Sean Bean). They are identified as fallen angels or nephilim, because they are products of hybridization; they have lost their wings; and also, of course, because they have become enemies of the Abrasax. (Aegis, the name of their intergalactic police company, was the shield of Jupiter in ancient mythology.) Caine seems possibly a representation of the god Mercury, because of his winged feet, and also because of his affiliation with Jupiter (as her child; this is a confused mish-mash, if this typological link was even intentional.) As a canine, Caine might represent Sirius the dog star, or Seth the killer of Osiris, who was also represented as a sort of dog or wolf. (The home planet of the Abrasax, Ores, sounds like a blend of Osirus and Horus. The planet was attacked and severely damaged by Caine.) Stinger Apini gets his wings as a fanciful hybrid of man and bee, but he seems to exist in the movie mainly to engage in a strange male bonding ritual with Caine Wise, and to give worshipful respect to Her Highness, Jupiter Jones.

All this so far provides an excellent allegory for our Postflavian worldview of elite shepherds, with perhaps the sole exception that in the movie the various planetary communities of humans have no idea about the others’ existence and thus have no basis to conduct interplanetary wars, at least, and such as Earthly human communities are otherwise urged on to do by the shepherds’ agents provocateurs. But as we at Postflaviana and elsewhere know, our elite human shepherds pit their Earthly flocks against each other for their never-ending profit. And if anyone will be able to take advantage of life extending technologies, being worked on now or having already been developed, it will be they who can afford it from their ill gotten gains as our hidden virtual gods behind the veil of Jesus their ancestors cynically bequeathed to us.

Cleverly included in the movie are a metaphorical mashup of subservient dragons and various other minions that employ common alien (UFO) motifs, such as performing human abductions and performing DNA tests on the terrestrial human herds. The movie’s dragon motif, ubiquitous in various cultures over time, and similar others have been granted a vastly different interpretational context than we have traditionally framed them, and which may be useful in helping to understand our relationship to our putative lords, which we’ll expand on in the near future.

The movie’s ending lends itself to further interpretation as to whether humanity will awaken, or continue to repose in ignorant bliss, confidant that we will be taken well care of — by Jove.

Discuss in Forum!

Links:

Jupiter Ascending at IMDB

Christian symbolic analyses:

http://beginningandend.com/jupiter-ascending-or-lucifer-rising-a-film-promoting-the-illuminati-false-gospel/

http://vigilantcitizen.com/vc-community/jupiter-ascending-olympians-2-0/

http://sitsshow.blogspot.com/2015/02/abraxas-mythos-in-jupiter-ascending.html

http://illuminatiwatcher.com/channing-tatum-illumi-naughty/

http://illuminatiwatcher.com/mkultra-mind-control-symbolism-fifty-shades-grey-film/

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Sheepdogs in Wolves’ Clothing

Richard Stanley

February 12, 2015

A frequent metaphoric trope underlying Christianity is that of the Good Shepherd, tending with loving care to his flock, bringing them back into the fold, and into his forgiving good graces, from which they frequently are tempted to go astray. Like the Passion of the Crucifixion (cribbed from the funeral of Julius Caesar) and the virginal Nativity (similarly cribbed from the birth of Augustus), the image of the Good Shepherd was, and still is, intended to evoke compelling warm emotions, tinged with a subliminal guilty eroticism. Perhaps the ultimate example of such questionable taste is Michelangelo’s iconic depiction of the temporarily dead shepherd laying in the arms of his unexpectedly young virgin mother.

A more contemporary cultural mirror of this open duality, if you will, is the patriotic moralizers on Fox News, who are constantly decrying all manner of actual and fabricated assaults on their values — while their Australian patrone, Uncle Rupert Murdoch, broadcasts, with impunity, a never-ending bounty of exactly such depravity on his other media channels. It is all intended, from an insider’s point of view, as a figurative poke in the eye of the sheep, who are kept inflamed with agitprop stoking their fears.

“They know I’m doin’ it Mike,” Nugent shouted over his shoulder, to Huckabee, who was plugging away on a bass guitar.

While these fox-rattled sheep rail against ‘alien’ workers (needed to maintain the holy profit margins of Republican farmers and Democratic hotel owners), they turn a blind eye to allowing Uncle Rupert to cut to the front of the immigration line. Even darker yet is watching the gluttonous fox, Reverend Mike Huckabee (Southern Baptist), playing Cat Scratch Fever (~May 2011) with Ted Nugent, Mr. Wang Dang Doodle. But according to the good reverend it’s ‘OK’ though, because the Huckabee lambs won’t be able to watch daddy “make the pussy purr”.

That’s because the huckster equivocated by saying that, unlike the case with Beyoncé and the Obama lambs, his little lambs were asleep at the time, or at any rate they weren’t at his side:

[Christian Post]: … National Journal’s Ron Fournier said you have a “hypocrisy problem” because you once shared a stage with Ted Nugent singing “Cat Scratch Fever,” which is a sexually explicit song. What would your response be to Ron Fournier?

Huckabee: I know Ron very well, a good guy. First of all, Ted changed the lyrics pretty dramatically when he sang it on the stage that time. And secondly, I wasn’t sitting down with my teen-aged daughter, my daughter, who is, of course, an adult now and has her own children.

It has to do with the propriety of the context. Again, I’m not a prude. I’m aware that there certain expressions that in certain contexts would not be considered inappropriate. Now frankly, I think some of the gyrations of a stripper pole, I’m not sure how wholesome that is at any time. And, you know, I’m sure I’ll deserve some criticism I take for things I do and that’s one of the reasons we have free speech in America.

Unfortunately for Huckabee, the videotape shows that the lyrics were just as naughty as ever. And the little lamb was already on the PAC payroll. Let’s hope, for his lambs’ sake, that Huckabee doesn’t follow the example of huckster Cyrus Scofield, who scribbled the Jesuit’s Futurist School of the End Times into the pseudo-Talmudic marginalia of Scriptures for the benefit of the Low Church Protestant sheep. After he first abandoned his wife and children and committed massive financial fraud, that is.

We must agree with the Church, that it is necessary to forgive these needy sheep. Their sinning against humanity, and all other existence, is born from a profound ignorance and insecurity programmatically passed down to them generationally by their parents and clergy. We know that they are sinners, because the Church cynically tells us so, even though they no longer really like to explain what the real Sin is. So here, I will tell you. Back in the days of fire and brimstone, they would tell you that we are all sinners because the (metaphorical? ancestral?) Eve, in league with the Devil, got Adam to partake of the metaphorical(?) Tree of Knowledge. In reality and conversely, the real Sin is that via the blind acceptance of faith, one thus becomes blissfully ignorant of the craven actions of the figurative shepherds and sheepdogs of humanity, thus betraying not only one’s own self, but everyone else.

This cartoonish plucking of the heartstrings has a most profitable purpose, not only when one does the fiduciary math for the shearing, err … tithing of the flock, but just as importantly it helps provide the means to maintain and build a critical mass for projecting geo-political power in pursuit of the always ongoing global ends of the temporal shepherds, vicariously standing in for their euphemistic exemplar, Christ (Caesar).

Here it is time to briefly address our ambiguous blog byline, “Beyond the New World Order,” as for here, in one sense at least, we mean that the next iteration of a new social order will come, one way or the other. “The only thing that never changes is Change.” Importantly, if enough sheep do not awaken from their blissful slumber, then all of us, and our descendants will be left with the New Boss being pretty much the same as the Old Boss, to paraphrase the Who. The Old Boss, was the ‘collectivist’ shepherds that inherited the universal, harmonized, church invented by the Caesarian emperors, implemented and tuned over many centuries.

This is why the Roman Church still pays such homage to Virgil and his 4th Eclogue’s New World Order. The church insiders know that Augustus ‘Jasius’ Caesar and his caesarian and papal vicars are the cynical shepherds euphemized by the fictive Jesus Christ, the son of a tekton. They, the supposed proud descendants of the fabulous king Solomon, who conjured up demons and spirits, and had a harem of hundreds of purring pussies.

As such, now is the time for all transcendent sheep to demand a new and different paradigm, one without figurative shepherds that rig elections with dark money and hand crafted candidates. Shepherds that don’t fool you into sacrificing your begotten sons and daughters to Moloch, so that they can enrich themselves in various blood soaked con schemes.

In this Next iteration New World Order, quite possibly already in the Tribulatory transitional process: without your intervention, do you really expect that the New Boss will be any different in his nature towards you? Do you really think that you should continue to accept, like any other herd animal, that there is safety in numbers, and that therefore your best game plan is to not stick out from the others, and thus Konform?

If the New Boss will be the same as the Old Boss, then can we expect his coterie of minions, the metaphoric sheepdogs, to be any different in the new age from those of the old? That’s a question I’m not totally sure I can answer right now.

But, if we are ever to make any attempt to do so: first we need to identify the collective historical players, or is that board pieces, in the seemingly never ending and bloody Abramic Game that plays out before us on the global stage. This symbiotic game is fueled by the neurotic and insecure aspirational vanities of its enabling victims (us, the sheep), the acquired sociopathology of its collaborators (the sheepdogs), and the (inbred?) psychopathology of its instigators (the shepherds). Here, my title refers metaphorically to the second group, but it is important to recognize that there are nuanced levels in applying these terms, and further on we’ll look at some others’ recent use of these metaphors so that we can see the importance that one’s perspective makes in applying them. And thus, how easy it becomes to cynically set various groups, the flocks of human sheep, against each other by how our respective views are framed.

It is important to recognize that I am stating that the vast majority of all peoples under this Abramic Matrix, if you will, are indeed truly pawn-like victims — not only via the direct actions of other competing flocks of sheep, but ultimately more so because of the provoking Hidden Hand of the shepherds and their collaborative agents, the sheepdogs. By “sheepdogs”, I mean any person who agrees to carry out the agenda of the shepherd class, whether being paid in cash, or via appeals to their vanity, conceit, or fears.

The Abramic game has been generally framed with great success by the real shepherds, to create the illusion that their first ‘Chosen’ flock (that is, the Jewish people) appear to many others as if they are the foremost sheepdogs, or perhaps even the shepherds themselves. But in a subsequent post we’ll meet a proud representative of some metaphorical werewolves that literally claim to be the rightful and sincerely ‘Good’ shepherds.

And consistent with my prior posts, I assert that most of us have been lied to by the various Pied Pipers of Western History. This includes academia, whose institutional roots are in maintaining the deceptions of divinity for the shepherds’ sake. Unlike today, all universities were church (and thus generally state) institutions, and this includes America’s Ivy League institutions. At one time the latter were seriously considering to make Hebrew the academic language of choice.

In any case, these first Chosen of God, the Jews, have even adopted a deep cultural term for their role: that of the ‘scapegoat’. This would be generally accurate as a metaphor, except to those other sheep and sheepdogs who perversely enjoy playing the sick, distractionary game. One can even find discussions evoking a mass Stockholm Syndrome of sorts: Jews heroically accepting the Suffering Servant mantle, or crown of thorns perhaps, in taking this ‘necessary’ scapegoat role as part of the canonic schema in order for the Abramic god to ultimately reign supreme globally.

As to being sheepish victims within my framework, this generally includes most common Jews, many of whom have figured out, one way or the other, like many others, that this general regime of Abramic Terror is bogus. The list of Jewish scholars and authors whom I consider as true heroes, is indeed long — along with others who are gradually lifting the veil off this system. Thus my application of the metaphors are not meant to be applied as if Christians (and Muslims), say, are the Sheep and conversely that Jews are the Sheepdogs — though that is exactly what the Caesarian Catholic system cynically wanted us to perceive it as.

Of course, the parameters of the game have been altered in the last few centuries and further more so in the last few decades.

First, with the general Western transition to modern and democratic nation-states, we have been ‘liberalized’ away from the monarchical ancien regime in which Christ the King formed a euphemistic and vicarious metaphor for the secular kings and the caesaro-papacy. This change was accompanied by the economic transition from feudal agriculture to Mercantilism and Industrialism, more likely, driven by various inevitable technological advances. The scalability of commercialized mechanization led to the realization that there was more gold in them factory workers than in them serfs, if only one applied their capital funds to such ventures. And ‘pharaoh’ let the ‘serfs’ go free, so to speak.

As a result of these perhaps inevitable changes, the social dynamics for the shepherds had to react and change to the new environment. As I briefly discussed in Black Collared Magic, the serfs leaving the manors and estates of the gentil nobility and the Church were now actually under even more stress from the new capitalists, who gleefully found themselves in a wage race to the bottom, and considered their results as via divine Providence. As a result, the appearance of the Predestined Elect seems to have morphed from that of the hereditary descendants of the long landed, war lords to that of what ancient Rome used to term the Equestrian Class, or equites, from the same root as our modern ‘equity’.

The Equestrians were so named because, in the earlier Roman Republic era, there was no professional standing army. Because they could afford the expense of a horse and associated gear: those of an entrepreneurial nature, and successful as such, were allowed to participate in the aristocrats’ calvary rather than being restricted to the infantry as the plebes and freedmen were. As such, they were also entitled to a higher share of the war booty than the infantry. Later, they became known as ‘knights’, which, by the way, is why this piece on a chess board has a horse head.

I submit that the hereditary shepherd class has not disappeared altogether, despite such as the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, but only that the surviving remnants have veiled their continued existence and/or learned to appear to restrain the behaviors, while pruning a few odd branches off the family tree (the one grafted onto the Root of Jesse – Romans 11). Furthermore, since the very time that the monarchical system began to appear to disintegrate, we have been institutionally conditioned to think that the equites, and other categories of sheepdogs, now actually run the asylum.

Martin Bernal’s lengthy Black Athena (Volume 1) exposed the mechanisms and motive behind the creation of the ‘modern’ university system by the Hanoverian nobility, in order to give (baseless) justification to the Romantic construct for the exploitation of non-Europeans. This, among other exploitable things, was the source of the teeming multitude who would be needed to eventually replace the former serfs heading to the industrial cities, and to populate the colonies granted by God’s Providence to the Euro royals. Eventually those serfs would begin to clamor for better compensation after all.

It should be noted that Bernal’s purpose in his series was to demonstrate that black Africa’s contributions, via Egypt, to Western society were, in the process, being shoved under the carpet. I have a different take on the purpose for which Egypt was ignored, which I will save for a different time.

Another shift in the dialectic is the Catholic Church’s more recent decision to soften its stance viz-a-viz the Jews as being Christ killers, by shifting the focus back onto the Roman soldiers. This last tack didn’t take too well with Catholic traditionalists such as Mel Gibson, the producer of the movie The Passion of Christ, his father, and the millions of other Christian viewers that mostly didn’t even know the difference. Here, we might label Mel Gibson as a sheepdog, perhaps of the unwitting variety, as it appears that he doesn’t understand that his ‘traditional’ Catholic values should not support a res publica as his role in the movie Patriot depicts.

I also assert that all those who continue to engage with this metastasizing Abramic cancer in various manners are serving as enablers, the so-called Useful Idiots, who can be ever depended upon to act and vote against their better interests, frequently because they aspire to transcend from being a sheep into that of a sheepdog, at least. It is not benign as so many secular thinkers are wont to allow.

And no doubt, some deranged individuals will attempt to take my words out of context, as was done for Israel Shahak with his Jewish History, Jewish Religion, indeed ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. His work courageously helping to lift the veil off of the underpinnings of the game got him tarred by his own kind as a ‘Self Hating Jew’. In Chapter 4 he provided some of the details in how Jews were intimately incorporated into the fabric of Christian society, … for a specific purpose. To wit, they would serve as a buffer class between the gentil nobility and the various non-gentil elements of the lower classes, i.e. the plebian craftsmen and artisan, the freedmen, the peasants and/or slaves.

Please note that if one was not part of the medieval nobility, and what later was termed the ‘gentry’, then one was not really part of the ‘gentil’ clique, otherwise known in occult Christian parlance as the ‘Elect’. Prior to modern ‘liberal’ democracies, even the monarchs and emperors who were not the hereditary continuations of dynasties had to be ‘elected’ by their noble ‘gentil’ peers. But today, to keep the religious and cultural scam going, the common folks’ vanities are now massaged into allowing themselves to ‘fancy’ themselves as Gentiles. At the time of the American Revolution, a landed, gentry aristocrat like a George Washington, or a Thomas Jefferson, was thus a ‘gentleman’, unlike a rude Low Church dirt farmer. Later, in the antebellum South, such a dirt farmer might Exceptionally aspire to become a gentrified, slave owning member of the neo-Elect. Today, almost anyone can own an iPhone, with Siri as a slave. This is just part of how the Sheep are still fleeced of their ten percent, as has been the case since at least ancient Sumeria.

As is commonly admitted, today’s rabbinic Judaism was established as being built upon what was known, in the time of Christ (or perhaps technically then as Chrest) Caesar, as the Judaic sect of the Pharisees. What is either profitably ignored or forgotten is that Flavius Josephus stated that during the first war that there were two ‘schools’ of the Pharisees and that one school was exterminated. I hope that I don’t need to explain to the reader why one school ‘died’ and the other survived. Especially after we learn that the erstwhile troublesome Jews, as we are misled to believe as being these surviving Pharisees, were granted ‘liberty’ to re-establish themselves at Javneh, or Jamnia, whence it is stated that their current textual canon, the Tanakh was set in order. All under the imprimatur and all seeing eye of the victorious Flavian regime who had just fulfilled Christ Caesar’s End Times prophecy in Matthew, i.e. that the (third) temple would be torn down to the last stone, exactly within the ‘generation’ (40 years) of the disciples.

Are we really to believe that the Romans, who had already gone to so much bloody trouble to restore order, would allow anybody but collaborators to do such at Javneh? The leader, to become an ethnarch vassal of the emperor, of these Jews had, after all, proclaimed Vespasian (or Titus?) as the coming emperor; as did Josephus, a man with a biography remarkably like the Apostle Paul’s.

Please note that I said ‘third’ temple, as the first was Solomon’s, the second Zerubebel’s, and the third was Herod’s. But today, the Scofieldian Protestants and the Zionist rabbis have conflated the second and third temples, such that we are supposed to be still expecting the third to be built (any time now) so that the genocidal zombies of fundamentalist Christianity can feel justified in their salvic and rapturous blood lust … for Christ’s sake. Incidentally, by doing so, the Jesuit’s Futurist School of End Times prophecy can be made workable without denying the claims of the Early Church Fathers that Titus’ victory was the perfect fulfillment of the Matthew prophecy.

Under the long term Caesarian project to slipstream a pseudo-monotheistic amalgamation of pagan mystery schools under a convenient Judaic façade, the empire’s Jews (comprising roughly ten percent of the population) were institutionalized as a buffer, or middle class, which provided several benefits to the shepherd nobility:

The Judaic façade of the new order would mitigate against the prior social tensions.
The Jews could be scapegoated whenever times were bad as is frequently inevitable, or not.
It helped that there was an historical affinity between the elite Jews and the crème-de-la-crème of the Romans, the Sabines.

It is important here to realize the distinction between the elite Jews and the not-so-elite Jews. For here, we find that the average Jew, frequently isolated in a walled ghetto, as prescribed by the Church, usually led a rigidly defined life, legally confined to certain ‘professions’, or similar occupations such as monopoly traders, as authorized by the gentil nobility. The dark irony being that, besides being canonically and ritually blamed for being Christ killers, they were despised for engaging in occupations and behaviors that were prescribed by Christian law, and yet vital to the function of the monarchy.

As I mentioned in Peoples of the Flavian Book, all this was enshrined by the papacy and in Church theology, as discussed at length by James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword. To summarize the theology: the vile Jews were necessary to retain in society as a ‘living example’ of what Christians must strive not to be, all the while being legally forced to be just that. This system lasted until the process of modern ‘liberalization’ began to occur in earnest, and the Jews were thus ‘emancipated’; yet we still see the ‘Romantic’ cultural legacy today an otherwise disproportionate predominance of Jews in many professions and other tensions. Where it used to be ingrained in law as to what Jews should pursue as a vocation, now cultural pressure does this job.

In bolstering my claim as to the relationship between the elite Romans and the Jews, Shahak went further and discussed how it was only elite Jews that were allowed the exception of marrying into the European royalty, themselves the interbred legacy of prior Roman alliance marriages. Another elite relationship was that of so-called hofjuden (royal house Jew) status garnered by some individuals doing the direct business or acting as advisors to the royal houses.

From the time of Christ Caesar, these reconstituted Jews, in accord with the Catholic theology described by Carroll, were also especially demonized during Easter, being negatively caricatured, physically and behaviorally, as radically different from the faithful worshipers of the supposed ‘one good Jew’.

Why haven’t you read such an account before? It’s because our institutions of higher learning are heavily biased not to lift the veil. One needs to understand that originally all universities were essentially religious in nature, and religion was, and still is, the left arm of the power structure of society. As Bernal explained, the ‘modern’ university system was launched in Germany at the University of Gottingen, under the the sponsorship of George II, the Hanoverian (German) King of England. While it pronounced itself to be an exemplar of the new scientific approach to scholarship, its first papers were unsupportable racist drivel that advanced the new philosophic paradigm of Romanticism. Unsupportable, though this does not stop those addicted to the propagandic legacy of Romanticism ever since. Sadly, or hopefully, depending on one’s perspective, Bernal pointed out that there is no cultural evidence of significant racial animus between the various flocks of sheep prior to Romanticism.

Can it be any coincidence that the ‘modern’, faux scientific university system came about in the same general time frame as the serfs were transitioning to the city factories? That perhaps this is because a Justification was needed to gloss over the elite exploitation of the other peoples of the world, including rights to their land and resources? This is what religious Justification is all about after all. It is a Game Redefinition that allows otherwise unallowed behavior to be allowed. One does not have to Justify correct or decent behavior, do they?

Next, once the factory and other workers learnt that they could leverage themselves collectively, it was then time to shift their workload, wherever possible, to places where there was once again a virtually limitless workforce, and one where the post-colonial leaders had learnt their lessons in controlling their sheep from the colonial shepherds and their descendants. As discussed in Black Collared Magic, Communism as cleverly formulated by the elite sponsored Marx and Engels was designed to co-opt the earlier socialist attempts to achieve a modicum of balance in economic power with the new capitalists, which included ‘forward thinking’ elements of the nobility, not still wed to the perverse pseudo-caste system of Feudalism. So once more, here we are left to blame the traditional sheepdogs and be distracted from the shepherds.

As stated above, in a coming post I will discuss a radically outrageous claim, that in contrast to the Roman’s Judaic institutional sheepdog schema, that the whole Romantic Aryan construct is also a gross distortion. Imagine if Hitler, a descendant of farmers, can no longer be considered a proper Gentile, because he is not gentil as I discussed above, that now in addition he (and most all of us) can’t even qualify as an Aryan. If so, what’s a vain sheepdog to do?

The purpose of the examination of this enigmatic and highly crafted claim will not be to either advocate or debunk it as much as to examine its potential to either dramatically clarify or obscure the correct contextual understanding of our societal underpinnings. This, as ‘could’ be the case with other literary works or general human communication’s, including my flawed efforts. But whether this metaphorical werewolf’s claims are true or not to whatever extent, a major part of his focus is on establishing completely different, detailed, and ‘inverted’ contextual frameworks for numerous cultural ‘occult’ phenomenon such as being focused on now at Postflaviana. This is important for several reasons, but such ‘inversions’ are central elements to the Abramic Game and found elsewhere such as in the .. ah Brahmic Game. Oh no, more Aryans.

Also, as mentioned above about the Tree of Knowledge, the ‘werewolf’ will give us a wider, and ‘shamanic’ cultural context for what was once merely an ancient and globally widespread attempt to articulate a vision of the unseen underpinnings of reality, perhaps akin to Plato’s efforts, into a latter day psychological ‘scarecrow’.

Discuss in Forum!

Deuterium shell game

Jerry Russell

February 10, 2015

The introduction to “The Secret of the Three Bullets” (subtitled: “A New Generation of Micro-Nuclear Weapons is on the Battle Field”), by Maurizio Torrealta and Emilio Del Giudice, states that “it is just a novel… told as though it were a figment of the imagination”, and that “it is up to the reader to determine whether we are fantasizing or simply recounting what really happened.” In a world full of dogmatic certainty, this humility is refreshing. It is in this same spirit of respect for the reader, that we offer this summary of their work. Hopefully there will be no objections to the “spoilers” below, since Torrealta is a journalist who reported the same “terrible but true” stories for Rai News 24, the state-owned 24-hour Italian news TV channel; and Del Giudice (sadly, recently deceased) was a physicist who also published his findings in two brief publications: a letter, “First Steps Toward an Understanding of Cold Nuclear Fusion” (1989, with T. Bressani and G. Preparata); and a conference presentation, “Coherent Nuclear Reactions In Condensed Matter” (2005, with A. DeNinno, A. Frattolillo and Martin Fleischmann).

So the cat’s out of the bag, so to speak, as the authors have been doing their best to promote this material as factual since many years ago; and furthermore it has had the benefit of presentation on Italian official media, as well as the scientific press. This book itself appeared first in Italian in 2010, and has only recently made its way into English, published by TrineDay in Walterville, Oregon.

The book describes an experiment done at Italy’s ENEA, their national lab for nuclear & energy research. In 1999, ENEA received a grant of over 1 billion lire, to carry out a meticulous study to determine whether there was any truth to the rumors of cold fusion reactions in palladium substrates. After making a preliminary report of successful results, there was initially a great excitement within ENEA, but then a stony silence: the reports could not be released or published, and funding was abruptly canceled. However, eerily, other French and Italian government agencies came to the lab, reviewed the results, and made offers of further funding — only to later rescind or re-direct those offers.

The results of this same investigation were apparently reported in Del Giudice’s scientific paper with Fleischmann et al, which was presented to the 12th International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems (ICENES 2005) in Brussels, Belgium: that is, a rather academically disreputable gathering of cold fusion aficionados who were largely unable to get their papers into peer reviewed journals. Their paper laments the fact that cold fusion experiments had been plagued by poor and irreproducible results, to the point where most scientists doubted the reality of the effects. The authors argue that experimental reliability is crucially dependent on achieving sufficiently high loading of deuterium in the palladium substrate. To facilitate this, they created a thin-film, serpentine palladium electrode that could sustain large electric fields, driving an influx of deuterium ions into a critical region. In this electrode, they could sustain high rates of reaction – at least for a short time, until the electrode destroyed itself by melting. They dryly note that for “civilian applications”, the electrode “must be robust enough to dissipate the expected energy density”. (The image at the top of this post shows the damaged palladium electrode.)

When the required density is achieved, Del Giudice and Fleischmann explain, electrons oscillating “in tune with a coherent e.m. field “ create “coherence domains”, which are “permanent lumps of negative charge able to catalyze nuclear fusion in a way akin to the muon catalyzed fusion.” Regular readers of this website will note that this is exactly the same mechanism described at greater length in my post entitled “Haroche’s Cockroach”. “The Secret of the Three Bullets” strongly hints that Giuliano Preparata was the true inventor of this theory, as it was described in abstract mathematical formalisms in Bressani, Del Giudice & Preparata’s letter that appeared in Il Nuovo Cimento of May 1989. Fleischmann states that he also was well aware of theoretical justifications for the experimental project of Pons & Fleischmann, carried out in the late 1980’s. Their famous press conference was on March 23, 1989, while Il Nuovo Cimento received the letter on April 26, barely a month later. That was some quick thinking! However, this clear & straightforward theory has since been largely lost and almost forgotten in a cacophony of alternate explanations for cold fusion.

Del Giudice speculates that cold fusion research was delegitimized following Pons & Fleischmann’s press conference because of a coalition of military and hot fusion workers who were provoked by the sudden announcement. He suggests an analogy to “Tutankhamen’s Curse”: that is, just as the Earl of Carnarvon died of pneumonia a few months after having funded the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, so also both Preparata and Fleischmann were stricken by an unusual cancer of the intestines, and journalist-advocate Eugene Mallove was murdered under suspicious circumstances. Of course this could be a coincidence; Del Giudice notes that he himself is a counter-example: “when I was twenty, I had my fortune told by a gypsy, who predicted that I would have an exceptionally long life.”

Accordingly, Del Giudice says he will speak in riddles: he asks, what if you use uranium as the substrate for the reaction, instead of palladium? The book goes on to note that Edward Teller, ‘father of the H-bomb’, asked this same question at a conference in October 1989. And in an interview, Martin Fleischmann agrees that this is a very good question. Fleischmann says that “anyone and anywhere”, could try it, and that such a technology is the only way he can imagine, to explain the highly explosive and high-temperature effects of ‘depleted uranium’ anti-tank weapons. However, Fleischmann denies that he has ever tried to create cold fusion in a uranium substrate: contrary to rumors indicating that just such an experiment was responsible for a notorious explosion in Fleischmann’s lab.

It is in this context, that Torrealta and his colleagues at Rai News sought to interpret information regarding several strange incidents in war theaters. These include an explosion in Khiam, Lebanon on July 25, 2006, which created a radioactive crater with traces of enriched uranium residue; a 5-kiloton nuclear explosion on Feb. 27, 1991, near Basra in Iraq, reported by Jim Brown, a US Army veteran of the first Gulf War, and verified by seismic confirmation, which was accompanied by large releases of ‘depleted uranium’ from other weapons; and mysterious bombs used in Gaza, causing small explosions with grizzly and horrifying effects.

Confronted with this information, Del Giudice tells Torrealta that uranium can be charged with deuterium to a greater loading factor than palladium. According to research done by Percy Williams Bridgman in the 1930’s, when uranium is compressed at very high pressure (such as in a projectile impact), its lattice can be fragmented, inducing a great release of energy involving ‘paranuclear phenomena’. Del Giudice speculates that if a uranium projectile is charged with deuterium and then fired at a target, the impact will cause deuterium fusion to occur, releasing gamma radiation that could then trigger a fission chain reaction in the uranium. In support of this hypothesis, Del Giudice notes that after the ENEA cold fusion study, the palladium electrodes were shown to contain about 10% nickel atoms, which could only be the result of palladium fission which occurred during the fusion experiment.

While it is believed that a conventional nuclear bomb might use 7-8 kg of highly enriched uranium to create a 20 kiloton explosion, Del Giudice believes that this cold-fusion trigger technology could create a much smaller 2-ton (TNT equivalent) explosion using only 100 grams of natural uranium, or a larger explosion if enriched uranium (U235) is added. Making an analogy to a three-card shell game played by a con man, Del Giudice argues:

I’m not inventing anything… you have the evidence that the three-card game was done with three different bullets: the official depleted uranium ones that exist almost exclusively in books; the dirty uranium ones with traces of materials produced by fission – that may have occurred in a nuclear reactor or at the moment they exploded, and that anyway serve to increase radioactivity, which will poison the area where they’re used and cover up the third type of bullet – the uranium one charged with deuterium, which acts as a primer for a nuclear bomb the size of a bullet. … Well, this game of the three bullets is now happening in several countries…. And so now, with ambiguity crafted to perfection, the true prohibition is broken, the one that humanity decided nobody could break: the return of nuclear weapons.

In conclusion, the authors mention a 2005 patent for projectiles made of uranium or several other metals, or hydrides of those metals, whose energy release may be increased by adding a pressure containment structure. However, the patent claims that any excess energy release is the result of chemical reactions. They speculate that this projectile patent may be referring to the same technology as discussed in another patent filed by cold fusion researcher Yoshiaki Arata, describing cold fusion in a zirconium matrix.

Viewed in the context of my earlier post “Haroche’s Cockroach”, this book by Torrealta & Del Giudice represents a collaborating argument from both theoretical & practical perspectives. While the suggestion that cold fusion technology was in use as early as 1991 is fascinating, I would add that the theoretical and experimental studies carried out by Serge Haroche and his colleagues and peers (including Steven Jones and Joseph Jacobson) probably led to the development of a more sophisticated pure fusion weapons technology during the 1990’s, necessary for covert use in false-flag operations such as the WTC in 2001. I would no longer assume that these weapons leave anything other than a very short-lived radioactive signature, caused by the release of gamma radiation during the explosion.

Discuss in forum!

Richard Carrier: meet Barnum & Bailey.

Jerry Russell

January 31, 2015

A slogan (attributed apocryphally to PT Barnum) holds that there is no such thing as bad publicity. And it can safely be said that Richard Carrier’s scathing review of Joe Atwill and the Flavian Origins theory of Christianity brings this slogan to mind. At our Postflaviana website, we do not mind returning the favor; as I now turn to an evaluation of Carrier’s recently published magnum opus, “On the Historicity of Jesus”.

In his book, Carrier claims to establish that the odds that “historical Jesus” existed, are somewhere between 1 in 3 and 1 in 12500. With such amusingly wide ‘error bars’ resulting from the book’s elaborate mathematical scaffolding, the weakness of Carrier’s approach should be self-evident. And in a sort of pre-critique posted at his blog in Oct. 2013, Carrier further undermined the importance of his own effort as follows:

… criticizing Christianity with a lead of “Jesus didn’t even exist” is strategically ill conceived–it’s bad strategy on many levels, it only makes atheists look illogical, and (counter-intuitively) it can actually make Christians more certain of their faith.

[….]

Supernatural miracles, and disembodied minds, and blood magic, have odds of millions or billions or even trillions or quadrillions to one against. So why would you hang your case against Christianity on a mere 1 in 12,000? You can make a far better case against that religion by granting historicity and then showing the odds against it are trillions to one. The additional reduction in the probability that Christianity is true that is added by calculating-in the possibility Jesus didn’t exist is relatively so minuscule it’s honestly not worth troubling yourself over (the more so as no Christian will accept estimates that get you to 1 in 12,000 without first having already given up their faith…so the most you can hope for is to get them to that measly 1 in 3, and even that won’t be likely, and it’s weak tea anyway).

Nevertheless, for Christian apologists, Carrier’s book is obviously red meat – as can readily be seen by looking at the book’s customer reviews at Amazon. As of this writing, 45 of 56 reviews are five-star, highly complementary reviews by Carrier’s fans — but a negative review by apologist David Marshall drew some 555 comments, in which the debate between the Christians and the Heretics is a circus that would make Barnum & Bailey proud. In this context, we can only wonder whether the provocative image featured above (showing Carrier flashing the Satanic 666 hand sign) is a regrettable accident, or further bait for the culture wars. (Lest anyone accuse me of having gone off the wagon here — I’m well aware that from a Bayesian perspective, the prior is that at least 99 out of 100 times that someone gives that hand sign, they mean either “OK” or “NADA”; while real Illuminati Satanists are rare as hens’ teeth, and obviously Richard is too much of a rationalist to be attending any witches’ covens.)

However, if we take Carrier at his word, his book is not ostensibly targeted towards Christ’s faithful followers, but rather aimed towards academic specialists, as well as a popular audience of religious liberals, humanists, atheists, and agnostics. And of course, Carrier is hoping that those readers will be persuaded that the odds of Jesus’ existence are closer to his allegedly most realistic (“a judicantiori”) estimates – that is, 1 in 12500. But even in that goal, Carrier is tilting against an essentially meaningless windmill. Carrier formulates “just three minimal facts” defining his historical Jesus (Chapter 2, § 4):

1. An actual man at some point named Jesus acquired followers in life who continued as an identifiable movement after his death.

2. This is the same Jesus who was claimed by some of his followers to have been executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.

3. This is the same Jesus some of whose followers soon began worshiping as a living god (or demigod).

This is minimal indeed: this man need not have been called “Jesus” during his lifetime, but only later; he need not have actually been executed, so long as his followers thought he was; and of course, he need not have been a god, or even done anything remotely manifesting any higher nature (aside from whatever he did to attract followers), so long as those same followers thought so.

In contrast to the theory that Christianity had at its core some human figure as defined above, Carrier offers the following five-point definition of “minimal mythicism” (Chapter 3, § 3):

1. At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other.

2. Like many other celestial deities, this Jesus ‘communicated’ with his subjects only through dreams, visions and other forms of divine inspiration (such as prophecy, past and present).

3. Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm.

4. As for many other celestial deities, an allegorical story of this same Jesus was then composed and told within the sacred community, which placed him on earth, in history, as a divine man, with an earthly family, companions, and enemies, complete with deeds and sayings, and an earthly depiction of his ordeals.

5. Subsequent communities of worshipers believed (or at least taught) that this invented sacred story was real (and either not allegorical or only ‘additionally’ allegorical).

The problem with this formulation as a basis for applying Bayes’ law, as pointed out in a very astute review by Thomas Colignatus, is that these two hypotheses are by no means mutually exclusive. On the contrary, it is highly likely that both hypotheses are true; as I will now demonstrate by arguments taken directly from Carrier’s own book, which consists primarily of a series of “definitions” and “elements” describing background information which Carrier considers well-established, followed by an analysis of the “evidence” which he finds relevant to the question of Jesus’ historicity. Carrier seems to strangely miss the import of the following item, with regards to his own thesis:

Element 4: “Palestine in the early first century ce was experiencing a rash of messianism. There was an evident clamoring of sects and individuals to announce they had found the messiah.” (Chapter 4, § 5)

Carrier goes on to discuss four ‘Messiah’ figures documented by Josephus, known by him as ‘The Samaritan’, ‘Theudas’, ‘The Egyptian’, and an (unnamed) ‘imposter’. Each of these four, according to Josephus, attracted a following which compelled a mass military response from the Romans. Carrier continues:

…all four of these messiahs, as reported by Josephus, were equating themselves with Jesus (Joshua) and making veiled claims to be the Christ (messiah). In other words, here we have in Josephus four Jesus Christs. Ours simply makes five. The Gospel character of Jesus thus fits right into the trend documented by Josephus. (Chapter 4, § 5)

Carrier’s argument that the Pauline epistles constitute evidence against the likelihood of ‘minimal historicity’, is crucially dependent on his view that the authentic writings of St. Paul described a celestial and mythical Jesus, rather than an earthly one. Overall, Carrier assigns just a 6% “a judicantiori” likelihood P(e|h) that the epistles are consistent with a historical Jesus. However, this argument completely fails once we realize that Paul might be describing only one out of two or more pre-Christian sects of his time, including historicizing as well as non-historicizing sects.

According to Carrier, we can be reasonably certain that Paul was writing during the 5^th decade of the first century, and that his observations were true descriptions at least of his own sect. In this presumption, Carrier is neglecting not only the recent and very well-known book by Robert M Price entitled “The Amazing Colossal Apostle” , but also the entire school of Dutch Radical Critics, as discussed in Herman Detering’s peer-reviewed 1996 article. It’s just as plausible, according to these critics, that our extant Pauline corpus is largely or even entirely a pseudepigraphic product of the 2^nd century.

But regardless of any of that, taking Carrier (and Paul) at their own word:

Element 21: ( a) Paul and other NT authors attest that there were many rival Christian sects and factions teaching different gospels throughout the first century. In fact, evidence of such divisions and disagreements date as far back as extant records go. Yet we know very little about these other versions of Christianity (and in some cases nothing at all). And (b) of these only a few amalgamated sects survived the process of competition to remain in the Middle Ages…

We therefore cannot simply assume surviving texts report what was normative for the original or earliest sects of Christianity. (Chapter 4, § 7)

Noting that Carrier refers to the survival of “a few amalgamated sects”, how can he deny the plausibility that while one or more of those “amalgamated sects” were initially mythicizing sects as Carrier believes Paul was describing, while yet others of these sects were initially messianic Judaising sects composed of followers of the likes of ‘The Samaritan’, ‘Theudas’, ‘The Egyptian’, or any other ‘imposter’?

Carrier’s belief that the “mythical Jesus’ argument is somehow exclusive of the ‘historical Jesus’, can only be based on an implicit model of institutional church growth, postulating that the start of Christianity was something like the start of Mormonism — where a singular kernel exploded through a process of conversion driven by evangelism and managed by a tightly controlled hierarchical leadership. Yet as Carrier himself admits, nothing could be farther from the truth such as we know it about the chaotic nature of early Christianity.

So even if we agree that Paul’s epistles accurately describe an authentic early 1^st century Christian sect that believed in a celestial Jesus, that would in no way deny the existence of the sects that followed the various other messianic figures of that time. All that would be required for any of those messiahs to have met Carrier’s definition for a “historical Jesus” would be for their sect of followers to have continued to exist through the first century, and eventually become “amalgamated” with the greater Roman church.

Literally speaking, it is difficult to say that any sect “survives” the deaths of its founding members; but in terms of ideological and generational (that is, genetic family) continuity, it seems obvious that the 2^nd century church(es) must have merged and preserved the diverse aspects of their 1^st century predecessors. At any rate, it would surely be impossible to demonstrate that Christianity survived solely as a product of the celestial sect or sects, to the exclusion of the personally driven messianic sects — when we have every reason to believe that both of them must have existed.

To compound the problem of determining what happened, as Carrier further tells us:

Element 22: (a) We have no credible or explicit record of what happened within the Christian movement between 64 and 95 ce (or possibly even as late as 110 ce). (Chapter 4, § 7)

At the beginning of this era of silence, we have (perhaps) St. Paul’s church, St. Peter’s church, and probably a motley crew of other assorted Messianic sects; and at the end of the era, we begin to see the emergence of Gospel-driven Christianity spreading all over the Roman empire, out of the chaos of the Jewish war.

Carrier also makes much of the silence from history about a world-renowned Jesus figure living during the first half of the first century; but when you think about it, if there really was a Pauline Christian Church that was spreading all over the Mediterranean during Paul’s time, surely the near-silence of history regarding that exploding Church is far more significant, and far more damning to the view that Paul’s epistles reflect the genuine historical state of the Christian movement circa 50 AD. It seems far more likely that Paul’s church is a highly fictionalized version of one or more cults that really did exist at that time.

Having said all that: in terms of Carrier’s hypothetical dilemma of a ‘minimal historical Christ’ vs. a purely ‘Mythical’ Christ, I don’t believe any serious mythicist would have a problem loudly proclaiming “BOTH”. The reason, of course, is that Carrier’s ‘minimal historical Jesus’ is such a non-entity that only the most extreme fanatic would put any energy into denying that such a person (or persons) existed, or might have had a role in Christianity’s embryonic development.

From a point of view of the Roman Origins theory, perhaps the most interesting part of Carrier’s book is his discussion of Plutarch’s description of Romulus. Carrier wrote (Chapter 4, § 1):

In Plutarch’s biography of Romulus, the founder of Rome, we are told he was the son of god, born of a virgin; an attempt is made to kill him as a baby, and he is saved, and raised by a poor family, becoming a lowly shepherd; then as a man he becomes beloved by the people, hailed as king, and killed by the conniving elite; then he rises from the dead, appears to a friend to tell the good news to his people, and ascends to heaven to rule from on high. Just like Jesus.

Plutarch also tells us about annual public ceremonies that were still being performed, which celebrated the day Romulus ascended to heaven. The sacred story told at this event went basically as follows: at the end of his life, amid rumors he was murdered by a conspiracy of the Senate (just as Jesus was ‘murdered’ by a conspiracy of the Jews— in fact by the Sanhedrin, the Jewish equivalent of the Senate), the sun went dark (just as it did when Jesus died), and Romulus’s body vanished (just as Jesus’ did). The people wanted to search for him but the Senate told them not to, ‘for he had risen to join the gods’ (much as a mysterious young man tells the women in Mark’s Gospel). Most went away happy, hoping for good things from their new god, but ‘some doubted’ (just as all later Gospels say of Jesus: Mt. 28.17; Lk. 24.11; Jn 20.24-25; even Mk 16.8 implies this). Soon after, Proculus, a close friend of Romulus, reported that he met Romulus ‘on the road’ between Rome and a nearby town and asked him, ‘Why have you abandoned us?’, to which Romulus replied that he had been a god all along but had come down to earth and become incarnate to establish a great kingdom, and now had to return to his home in heaven (pretty much as happens to Cleopas in Lk. 24.13-32; see Chapter 10, § 6). Then Romulus told his friend to tell the Romans that if they are virtuous they will have all worldly power.

… There are many differences in the two stories, surely. But the similarities are too numerous to be a coincidence— and the differences are likely deliberate. For instance, Romulus’s material kingdom favoring the mighty is transformed into a spiritual one favoring the humble. It certainly looks like the Christian passion narrative is an intentional transvaluation of the Roman Empire’s ceremony of their own founding savior’s incarnation, death and resurrection…. Other elements have been added to the Gospels— the story heavily Judaized, and many other symbols and motifs pulled in to transform it—and the narrative has been modified, in structure and content, to suit the Christians’ own moral and spiritual agenda . But the basic structure is not original.

While it is difficult to precisely date Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, the author is believed to have lived from about 46 AD to 120 AD, and thus his description of Romulus might very well have been written after Mark, not before. Moreover, as Courtney and Carotta would have quickly pointed out – the quoted aspects of the Jesus narrative also represent a close parallel to the birth narrative of Augustus Caesar, and the death narrative of Julius Caesar. These narratives all seem somewhat mythologized, and may very well have co-evolved.

This review is not the place to evaluate Atwill’s theory that the Gospels should be seen as most tightly linked to the Flavian emperors (rather than to Romulus), but it is heartening to see Carrier’s acknowledgement that Roman literature was also part of the Gospel milieu. However, before concluding, I would like to point out a few other selected lacunae in Carrier’s work (that is, aside from the glaring flaw of his pathetically vague and yet demonstrably ridiculous conclusion.)

Many earlier reviewers have pointed out various flawed aspects of Carrier’s argument regarding Jesus as a Rank-Raglan hero. Most of those discussions have centered on whether Carrier is applying the criteria accurately to Jesus as well as other mythical or historical characters, or whether the specific criteria are even appropriate to the task of identifying which is which. But most fundamentally, Carrier has totally mis-stated and misunderstood the Euhemerist philosophical position. Euhemerus argued that the well-known mythological gods of his time, were actually historical characters that had been deified through the respect of their followers and heirs. Thus, the belief that there was a historical person at the root of the Jesus myth, would be a Euhemerist position, as explained at Acharya’s web forum. And, “euhemerization” is actually defined as the process by which a human person is converted into a myth.

Carrier is confused when he argues the opposite, that euhemerization is a fictionalization process by which mythical characters are provided with real earthly and historicized biographies. Aside from this semantic confusion, Carrier ignores the real philosophical point of Euhemerus as it applies to the modern era — which is that for ancient tales whose origin is lost in the prehistoric or paleolitic era, it is impossible to say for sure whether these tales are purely legendary, or whether there is some real-life hero and some ancient tribe of his followers at the root of it all.

It is certainly well known that many historical rulers laid claim to some degree of divinity, ruling by divine right, and those claims were often enhanced by the passage of time. Carrier gives many examples in his book. So, how can anyone say whether some prehistoric ruler was the basis of Zeus, or Hercules? It is impossible to know, and moreover, it doesn’t matter. There is nothing of real historical value that can be recovered from this material, in terms of biographical detail. (Although, along these lines, Alexander Hislop in “The Two Babylons” (1853) argued that the mythical Hercules and Osiris were derived from heavenly Orion, and thus from the debatably historical human Nimrod.) From a scientific perspective, it might be perfectly reasonable to treat all those narratives as pure myth, because they might as well be. But it is surely foul play for Carrier to proclaim that all other ancient mythical heroes were purely myth with no historical basis whatsoever; and therefore Jesus must be too. It is simply making an assumption out of his theorem to be proven. Thus, while Carrier argues for an “a judicantiori” prior P(h) on ‘minimal historicity’ of 1/15 (0.0625), I would argue that there is no basis for any prior information at all in this argument.

In his very first element, Carrier proclaims:

The earliest form of Christianity definitely known to us originated as a Jewish sect in the region of Syria-Palestine in the early first century ce. Some historians would challenge this, but their theories have yet to survive peer review or persuade anything near a consensus agreement among experts. Rather than prove it true here, I will simply state it as a given fact of our background knowledge, to be revised only if it is clearly disproved. (Chapter 4, § 5)

And that is that. Of course Carrier is fully aware of who these historians are; and thus he is also well aware of the profound lack of archaeological evidence to this effect, as well as the corrupted nature of the surviving literature. Needless to say, I would certainly not agree: the earliest form “definitely known to us” was invented by the Romans no earlier than the last half of the first century, and probably had its headquarters in Rome from the beginning; while all earlier forms are a matter for speculation and conjecture at best.

To mop up my critique of Carrier’s evaluation of the consequent likelihood of historicity, I must also mention his analysis of the book of Acts, and of the “extra biblical evidence.” In both cases, even Carrier’s own “a judicantiori” estimates are relatively weak: 1/10 for the “extra biblical” texts (Epiphanius, the Babylonian Talmud, 1 Clement, Ignatius, the Ascension of Isaiah, and Hegesippus), and 1/5 for Acts. At his other extreme, Carrier himself accepts that all these sources are basically a wash with regards to historicity: “a fortiori”, P(e|h)=0.46 for “extra biblical” and P(e|h)=0.72 for Acts. But I think that even these latter figures are too stingy with respect to the case for minimal historicity. The only argument that has any merit at all in my view, is that Epiphanus and the Babylonian Talmud report that the sect of the Nazoreans believed that Jesus lived in the 1st century BC at the time of Alexander Jannaeus. Carrier argues that if there was a historical Jesus, there should at least be some agreement about the era of his life, and I would agree. On the other hand, it seems perfectly possible that late sources might simply make a chronological error; or that two or more historical messianic figures, widely separated chronologically, each gave rise to sects that were ultimately amalgamated into Roman Christianity. I’m willing to grant Carrier his “a fortiori” estimate P(e|h)=0.8 on this term. The rest of Carrier’s “extra biblical” argument is based on the same fallacy as his argument about the epistles: my answer is that these documents might well be describing a mythicizing sect rather than one or more co-existing messianic sects, so there is no evidence against historicity contained within.

As to the book of Acts, Carrier argues that the trial speeches of Paul were referring to a celestial Jesus, and thus that they represent an originally Pauline source, rather than having been composed by Luke. Supposing that this is true, it only means that Paul represented a celestial rather than a historicizing sect, which does not constitute evidence against minimal historicity. And, Carrier notes that Acts does not mention anything about Jesus’ family or other earthly affiliates, who promptly vanish from the story. Contrary to Carrier’s statement “This a historicist cannot plausibly explain”, it is easily explained if the author of Acts was attempting to “amalgamate” two or more sects into one; in this case, the less alienating detail provided, the better. And this is widely agreed, that Luke was an “amalgamater”: at the very least, he was trying to smooth over the differences between Peter and Paul. So again, I see no evidence against historicity here, even at Carrier’s “a judicantiori” extreme.

As to a more reasonable “a fortiori” estimate (that is, generous to the argument for historicity): many readers will see abundant evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus of some sort in the book of Acts; much more so in the Gospels, which Carrier rates as completely worthless regarding the question. (Atwill’s thesis that the Gospels constitute veiled but undeniable evidence that their authors’ candidate for the true Messiah was the Flavian emperor Titus will, of course, remain controversial — at least for now.)

As to ‘peer review’, Carrier’s respect for this process is very selective: he certainly complains clearly enough about the poor results of the process in terms of the reliability of academic “historical Jesus” studies. As for himself, he takes pride in calling his book “peer reviewed” — but the standard academic peer review process is seldom if ever applied to books, but only to journal articles. At his website, Carrier describes the peer review process applied to “On the Historicity of Jesus”: he selected his own reviewers, and sent the book to them. This is not ‘peer review’, at best it’s ‘pal review’, and there’s a difference. For ‘pal review’, I send this post to Rick and Joe. In the journal process, the editor selects articles based on their relevance & expected interest to the journal’s readership, a process rife with opportunities for gatekeeping and suppression of academic disagreements; after getting past the editor’s cut, the articles are sent to the editor’s selection of reviewers, whose identity is kept secret from the author. The latter part of the review process can also result in gatekeeping and suppression (they might send your mythicist article to Bart Ehrman, and of course he’ll say it’s no good), but it’s more likely to be an opportunity for corrections of errors and discovery of additional arguments and evidence. But, the anonymity of the process hopefully gives the reviewers the opportunity to be more honest, without damaging professional relationships.

One can only wonder whether the professional relationship between Carrier and the Post-Flavians is hopelessly ruined, or whether there is yet any hope for a recovery. All criticism aside, there is much to be praised in Carrier’s book. One can only hope that in the future, Carrier will realize that his clownish behavior is making New Testament mythicism look like a circus.

Discuss in forum!

Black Collared Magic

Richard Stanley

January 22, 2015

I came across a curious and anonymous, unabashedly Catholic diatribe, The Union Jack (1970), which proclaims to its purportedly broader ecumenical Christian audience that the British-Israel movement is the primary, if not sole, cause of the modern world’s major problems. British-Israel, now almost forgotten, was the interesting conceit that the British Commonwealth, the Americans, and most of the rest of Europe comprise the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. While one might be tempted to see all this as a rather obscure and dated attack on an equally obscure religious and political phenomenon originating in the 19th century, one might better consider that in the first half of the 20th century almost half of the British ‘global’ population had accepted the tenets of British-Israel across all sectarian boundaries — excepting Roman Catholicism, where it would have been a non-starter, based upon their long standing, well … foundational theological and cultural enmity with respect to Judaism.

The Union Jack presents a fascinating view into economic, political, and religious false dialectics, and how they fuel the engine of Western civilization’s endemic religious and cultural angst, distracting us from what is really important. In my view, what is really important in this regard can be boiled down to one primary dialectic issue, or perhaps the master key if you will. This key has been hidden in plain sight for several hundred years, but is perhaps only a fractal outgrowth of a much older issue as I discussed in my prior post, Peoples of the Flavian Book. Differing here from the anonymous author, I will try to separately identify what that primary false dialectic is and why ‘both’ sides of these bogus distractionary arguments want us to look either right or left, but not directly ahead.

In this regard my task is not too difficult, as the author has done a reasonably good job of explaining how these contrived controversies work; only here I will assert that the author is either being disingenuous or allowing his faith driven confirmation bias to blinker his reasoning. In other words, he is telling a half truth, a half truth that leaves half of the story untold and thus veiling the hidden dialectic, by ‘magically’ distracting us with the half-truth(s).

As such, in the excerpt below that I will be deriving my argument from, the author lists a wealth of artificial political and economic dialectics, or false dichotomies, that the whole world is said to have been burdened with “since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I”. This in the presumed aim of wrestling “the political power and wealth of Catholic States” away to that of the British Empire, which the author advises the reader, if they did not already know, is secretly of a varigated Atheistic Judeo-Communist, Illuminati-Masonic, Materio-Rationalist, Satanic and Pagan nature. Quite a mouthful, however this is simply the illuminated pot calling the illuminated kettle black. This laundry list of heretical aspects, from the Catholic perspective, could be added to – but this would help give the magic game away, as I will do so further on.

So here the anonymous author proclaimed:

British Israel always divides issues between two myths of its own creation — one to represent “bad” and one to represent “good.” Some recognizable examples of this double dealing are materialism versus the kingdom of God; separation of church and state versus the theocratic state; God is dead versus crypto-Christianity; paganism versus Millennialism, Americanism versus communism, Republicanism versus Democracy, communism versus the free world, National Socialism versus Communism, Heathenism versus Western Civilization, superstition versus religion, white Christian versus Negro, paganism versus Christian Civilization, totalitarian Communism versus the world under God’s law and Godless atheism versus Judeo-Christianity. One can change ideologies and still be under the spiritual-political control of British Israel….

To enlarge upon the spiritual aspects of international intrigue we see clearly that the aim of Jew-British Pax Brittanica is the removal of Pax Romanum as a spiritual force in the world. Since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I the British Empire has sought to wrest the political power and wealth of Catholic States through Machiavellian politics. The Empire has extended its control under many names and fronts from National Socialism to Communism to Republicanism and many times it has maneuvered these ideologies against itself and against each other to advance its cause. Its ace front is the “Christian State” and it is the ideology of the kingdom of God which has advanced the spiritual attacks of the Empire upon the Catholic Church both from without and from within. In this context it has been able to permeate its propaganda into the church and infiltrate the leadership almost completely undetected by the vast majority of Catholicism.

(Source: Chapter Five, ‘The Union Jack’)

With respect to the last sentence, fortunately for us there was at least one astute individual in the temporal world of Catholicism. I suspect, however, that there are a few more than one.

More importantly, we are already confronted with the mirrored conceit that “the power and wealth of Catholic States” is anything other than the crass accretion of material wealth by an immoral institution whose deceptive means justify its stated global ambitions. By ‘institution’, I mean the distributed network of the Church’s corporate diocese and the even wider historical network of elite families that have profited by sponsoring it and filling its curious Curia. These families, a faux nobility, have ever enriched themselves by coerced religious tithing of the masses and via undue access to material wealth seized during their earlier appellations as warlords, imperial colonizers, Caesars, Czars, and such.

While I do not question the view that all of the Union Jack dialectics are indeed either ‘myths’ or human contrivances, however it does seem rather unlikely that the British Empire, as the superficially apparent promulgator of the British-Israel concept, is the solitary cause of all of this widespread conflict — or that the always woeful Catholic Church and its adherents are its sole, or real, target. Fortunately, the anonymous author has bravely done us the favor of not hiding his romantic spiritual and political inclinations, if not his name and office. (The Union Jack was distributed by Helen M. Peters, a ‘Christian’ newsletter publisher who could easily have been mistaken for the author, at least by the uninitiated.) We don’t need to do much reading between the lines to detect that the author has the ubiquitous religious flair for one-sided screeds that seem likely to inflame the paranoiac passions of the ‘faithful’, who always trust that they have been provided all the truth they need by ‘respected authority’, even when anonymous. Here, I detect a similarity to the notorious and anonymous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where the most sophisticated analysis rests authorship upon ‘Machiavellian’ Jesuits. Its brazen title only serves to point out just how dim (or ‘unenlightened’ as those same ever Luciferian Jesuits might say with their knowing smile) the target audience was, at least when it comes to Machiavellian thinking.

Thinking about the diatribe, I realized that a Libertarian construct (originally from David Nolan) could help parse its erroneous analysis. It seems to help explain several reasons for the ‘Communist hot button’ for denizens of the hard right in general, but particularly with Catholic ‘reactionaries’. It also helps explain the dynamics of both the Vatican and Britain vis-a-vis Russia (in all its ‘byzantine’ forms).

The political terms “Left” and “Right” were first coined during the French Revolution, when they represented a stark binary simplicity: the nobility, clergy and other supporters of the King seated on the Right, and their opponents, the revolutionaries, seated ironically on the … uhmm Republican … Left. This original bifurcation was remarkably similar to our Postflavian view: that the most fundamental political and economic struggle is that of the common people against the tiny fraction of society that rule over the rest. This was the case recorded for the Greek oligarchs and plutocrats, and then again with the Roman aristocrats against ‘land reforms’ (whose leaders, the Gracchi brothers were assassinated) going against their interests. And more recently witnessed by the bloody Spanish Civil War (again those revolutionary, leftist Republicans) and brutal repressions of social and land reforms in Latin America. The common element between the Classical Period and the 18th century being the Catholic Church – under which feudalism long reigned. With this example we find the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Saint Escriva, the founder of Catholic order Opus Dei, doing God’s Work in coming to the aid of fellow defender of the Faith, Generalissimo Franco, in brutally suppressing the ‘evil’ aspirations of the res publicans and the anarchic peasants who could barely feed themselves under the Spanish ancien regime.

Since 1789, we have seen a long struggle to obfuscate this simple class-based analysis, in conjunction with the elites’ never-ending quest to control the masses, and infiltrate and subvert their emergent leadership, using whatever means necessary. During the 20th century, “Left” largely came to denote a socialist or communist economic viewpoint, whereas “Right” denoted a capitalist or free-market orientation; while the monarchists, nobility & clergy had become merely a ghostly presence, forgotten and ostensibly insignificant. Or at least that’s what they want us to believe. The simple binary division developed into a linear scale, with various political parties arranged according to the intensity of their points of view.

David Nolan’s innovation was a further variation on this one dimensional, Right vs. Left scale of political analysis. He suggested that it would be more descriptive to use a two-dimensional graph, assigning one axis to the standard left-to-right economic scale, but with the second axis and
domain being that of social issues. In this way one could more accurately place people like populists or religious socialists, etc. that could not be placed on the old scale.

Other commentators, looking at the ‘Nolan chart’, realized that the chart can also be used to define a new, circular political spectrum. So if one starts near the top of the circle (which would be the center of the old line), as an economic and social ‘libertarian’ or ‘anarchist’, then going left one eventually gets to gradations of socialism, and going right one becomes increasingly capitalistic. The interesting thing is, when using the circle paradigm, is that continuing on in either direction gets you to the same point.

Over time, I for instance, have moved about 90 degrees counterclockwise on the circular scale from initially being a moderate ‘right’ libertarian, through minarchism and anarchism, to becoming an ‘upper left’ centrist (having abandoned contemporary and absolutist libertarianism as hopelessly Utopian and impractical.) In other words, a Classical Liberal, or what most of the American Founding Fathers claimed they were, with the pragmatic exception that I do not subscribe to didactic right / left givens. One uses a hammer where one needs to and a sledge hammer when the former is insufficient.

Also, in terms of the original (French Revolutionary) definition of the Left and Right dichotomy, the old ‘Left’ is generally found towards the top of the Nolan chart, where we find various forms of economic and social liberalism, libertarianism, left anarchism, and right anarchism; while the old ‘Right’ is found at the bottom of the chart, where Communists, Nazis, Fascists and Neocons cluster together with the ghostly presence of the ancient Royalists; and the Republican and Democratic Parties and other hack political creations (forms of populism, usually driven by demagogues like Rudi Guiliani and his putative ancestor, Julius Caesar) take up their inconsistent positions as per the modern convention, where ‘pseudo-left’ and ‘pseudo-right’ parties trade insults, peddle absurdities, and seek to divide the people equally into warring camps of confusion. Dialectics re-coined as ‘wedge issues’.

So, the take home lesson is that extreme capitalism and communism are pretty much the same thing, functionally. Practically the only thing that might change is the puppet faces of who are in charge. Here is the big secret that the anonymous author(s) of The Union Jack and the ‘Flavian’ Vatican doesn’t want us to figure out. From understanding this master key to false dialectics we can then unravel the otherwise seeming rat’s nest of motivations for the subordinate false dialectics.

By blaming the current Anglo-British system for the invention of Communism, the Union Jack diatribe has gotten too cute by half. For if one wants to describe the roots of the British system as having come out of traditional feudalism, then, Hell Yes, this is indeed Communism — at least, in the sense that the British (and European) feudal system was at the bottom of the circular Nolan chart, (infinitesimally) to the right of the Communists — that is, if Communism is defined as the Soviets did, as a system in which a few elite people are placed in centralized control over the essentially enslaved and immobile masses. After all, that is what the original ‘Church of Christ Caesar’ gave us. But they gave it to us from a ‘Right’ perspective, so thus it is Godly and good.

It is from this perspective that such as ‘liberal’ (both Republican and Democratic) Americans, and ‘Americanization’ are apostate and ‘Satanic’ from the traditionalist, ultramontane Catholic perspective, and this includes American Catholics, who are, significantly, mostly of the Jesuit flavor. But at the end of the day, globalized sheep are sheep, no matter What The Flock (WTF).

With the rise of, first Mercantilism, and then the Industrial Revolution (and the Enlightenment), the Church elites started to see the possibility of losing their monopoly grip. By default, the serfs were necessarily leaving the estates of the ‘crypto-communist nobility’, and going to work for wages in the new factories of the cities. But because most every profit seeking capitalist seeks to reduce his expenses to the greatest degree possible, so as to maximize his now godly return, he will attempt to drive wages as low as possible. With a seemingly endless supply of available labor this resulted in very low wages for the workers. Thus, in a metaphorical Satanic reaction, came the concepts of labor unions and socialism.

Seeing all this nightmare unfolding before their very feudal eyes, the godly decided to fight fire with fire. ‘If they want socialism, let’s give it to them.’ As Wolfang Waldner explained in his online essay “Marx and Engels: who were they really” (source in German, translated with the help of Google Translate):

In the 19th century, a fierce resistance to the impoverishment of the masses by the capitalist industrialization developed. Autocrats, government officials, industrialists and bankers were afraid because of strikes and violent resistance to the attacks of the anarchists. But when Marx and Engels took over the communists’ ideological leadership, the revolutionaries became peaceful, with value-form analysis employed instead of dynamite.

As further explained in the online introduction to Waldner’s book, “Karl Marx, Prussian government agent”:

The famous Socialist theorist was the brother-in-law of the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Ferdinand von Westphalen

It was and is no secret to those skilled in the study of political agents: even without the Prussian Minister of the Interior as his brother, Marx’s curriculum vitae would lead to this conclusion at first glance. For a private citizen, Marx had a remarkable number of contacts with important contemporary political figures. Towards his fellow dissidents, Marx displayed a sustained commitment to personal hatred and self-righteousness. From the ruling circles, Marx was praised for his deeply thought-out critique of capitalism. Starting out his spying career as the closest friend of theologian Bruno Bauer, Marx suddenly became the editorial director of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, funded by the prime minister Ludolf Camphausen, who later promoted him to work in his ministry. Marx’s theories were directed against well-known targets among the early socialists. Marx and his cronies began by infiltrating Weitling’s Confederation of Craftsmen, and later undermined the First International. Spokesmen of the labor movement found his theories useless, and only Bismarck’s adoption of the Socialist Law allowed Marx to win influence over the social democracy. Upon his arrival in England, Karl Marx joined a partnership with David Urquhart, an agent of the British crown, and they became involved in agitation against Russia, which was threatening the global interests of the British.

In an analysis of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Waldner argues that Marx’s “scientific” socialism is based in the absurd proposition that economic conditions under capitalism would inevitably decline until nearly everyone would become part of the “proletariat”, suffering under starvation wages and terrible working conditions, until finally the workers would rise and rebel. However, as many observers have since pointed out, such a monotonous decline was hardly inevitable; and furthermore, Waldner argues, the insistence on inevitability was a sabotage to any attempts to improve the workers’ conditions in the short run:

Imagine if Abraham Lincoln had announced in the US that first the system of slavery would abound more and more, until almost all citizens of the United States had become slaves; until at last sometime the overwhelming number of slaves would overthrow their slave owners and justify a slave state. Until then, no one could do anything, because this development would be historically-materialistic inevitable and scientifically proven. Human intervention in the specified course of history would not be possible or would even hinder progress on its inevitable way. To live according to the teachings of Marx and Engels, was to reject any concrete and practical resistance of the workers and citizens against the interests of big business.

As Marx & Engels themselves wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

As Waldner says, “the position is historically complete nonsense”, as the “bourgeoisie” did not spring from the serfs, but rather from a complex mix of commercial tradesmen, banking interests, early educational institutions (largely priestly and monastic in character) and the nobility. Furthermore, all of the “complicated arrangements” described by Marx as relics of an earlier age, were reflected in social structures which were still very much powerfully prevalent in the 19th century, just as they continue today.

As to Waldner’s claim that Marx served as a spy for the elite, Richard Wurmbrand’s “Marx and Satan” (p. 33) mentions:

The German newspaper Reichsruf (January 9, 1960) published the fact that the Austrian chancellor Raabe donated to Nikita Khrushchev, then director of Soviet Russia, an original letter of Karl Marx. Khrushchev did not enjoy it, because it was proof that Marx had been a paid informer of the Austrian police, spying on revolutionaries.

The letter had been found accidentally in a secret archive. It indicated that Marx, as an informer, reported on his comrades during his exile in London. He received $25 for each bit of information he turned up. His notes were about the revolutionary exiles in London, Paris, and Switzerland.

Wurmbrand’s book goes on to demonstrate that Marxist-Leninism in the Soviet Union often resorted to Satanist imagery in patriotic songs, poetry and propaganda. As to Marx himself, Satanism may have been only a momentary youthful indiscretion, exhibited in several poems he wrote as a teenager, perhaps in imitation of Goethe’s Faust.

Marx’s status as an ethnic Jew is unmistakeable, with many rabbis in his pedigree, and he may be descended through his maternal grandmother from the same Barent-Cohen family that married into the Rothschild clan, thus making Marx a distant cousin of the Rothschild banking family (that is, if David Barent-Cohen and Barend Berman Salomon Zelig Cohen, born in Amersfoort, NL around 1700, were either the same person, or closely related). Marx also had a very close relationship with Moses Hess, a founder of the Labor Zionist movement, and reportedly the source of some of Marx’s pithiest slogans. Yet Marx’s father had become a Lutheran (if only to save his career as an attorney in Prussia), and Marx proclaimed himself an atheist, and wrote a pamphlet “On the Jewish Question” as if from the vantage point of an outsider, indeed characterizing Judaism as the essence of capitalism:

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Remember here, that Marx later stated that he was “not a Marxist”— complaining (cynically perhaps?) that his ideas about historical materialism had been further bowdlerized by his ‘followers’ into a rigid ‘determinism’, if not ‘nihilism’. He was also not a ‘Marxist’ in the sense that ‘Marxism’ came to be synonymous with ‘socialism’; and yet, Marx’s brand of ‘socialism’ was fatally flawed by its insistence on ‘scientific’ central planning and control of the means of production by a few central planners; while earlier forms of socialism were based on worker-owned cooperatives.

At Postflaviana, we support a Georgist, liberal capitalist / socialist, hybrid framework where land and natural resources (not private factories or institutions) were to be managed by the .. community. And possibly even more important, the practice of ‘rent’ being paid to ‘landlords’ would be significantly altered and thus end possibly the worst mechanism of destabilizing disproportionate wealth concentration. Our society’s use of the term ‘Lord’ being derived from the landed aristocrats (a faux and undeserved warlord ‘nobility’) comes directly via this practice from the earliest of historical times. And thus, Lord Jesus, a fictive euphemism for our amalgamated, earthly faux nobility, is due his rent – or tithe, just as occurred in the prior Caananite Ba’al and YHVH [sic] real estate rental and ‘tax farming’ systems.

As with Marx’s obfuscating co-optation, this is the way social reforms, in general, work (or, rather, fail to work .. on purpose). Legitimate reforms are frequently, if not almost always, co-opted by the powerful interests that stand to lose. And in performing a proper co-optation, it is best to steal the name of the original movement, so as to enhance one’s faux legitimacy.

A cogent example of such co-optation is with the Libertarian Party, which was early on taken over by the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute. The former, as American oligarchs, with a supposedly arch-conservative Roman Catholic familial persuasion insinuated themselves into a polity that should otherwise be seen as an heretical anathema to their religious values. How does a political party that embraces individual freedom (for all) and the ‘res publica’ reconcile itself to such an association with supposedly devout members of a religion that actually insists upon the monarchical prerogatives of the ancien regime? Perhaps the Koch brothers are merely contextually ignorant and confused, as so many are, but if not, then what do we make of their penchant for subversive (to American democracy) political activities? The Libertarian Party, itself, promotes such confusion via their mantra of there being no ‘class war’ in America. This would be commendable if this was merely the goal, however, this has never been the American reality (for the majority).

Another similar example is the first-hand claim of Otto Strasser in his Hitler and I: that Hitler, a good Austrian Catholic schoolboy, infiltrated the National Socialist Party (the NSDAP); and once having ascended to power, betrayed the workers’ cause in favor of the German oligarchs, as well as all those American and other corporations that helped rebuild the now fascist Germany. Much more can be said on this matter in future posts.

This all is epitomized in the cleverly obfuscating diatribe of ‘The Union Jack‘, where we have the inane case of the (Catholic Pol) Pots calling the (British Commie) Kettles Black. The reason that even a hint of ‘socialism’ draws such a strong reaction from conservatives, is that Marx’s controlled opposition formulation of socialism (as Communism) plays upon the central fear and reward (addiction) nerve complexes in the ‘Reactionary’ brain. Because Marx’s formulation integrated his ‘pseudo-scientific’ economics with those of Darwin’s evolution ideas, this became a perfect Church foil to rant against intentionally conflated ‘Godless’ Science and Collectivism, i.e. Communism. Going against God neurologically induces the hysterical fear response (or paralysis) — literally, seeing ‘Red’ and Solomonic Red Shields. When the fear center of the brain activates, it precludes the conscious portion of the brain from engaging in rational thought processes, hence ‘knee jerk’ reactionaries. And all this while simultaneously threatening God’s neurologically based, addictive cocaine reward system of maximal ‘profit’ for the Elect princes and corporate oligarchs of the Church. For both its British and Roman branches … grafted onto the Root of Jesse (Romans 11).

There is a lot more that can profitably commented on, in The Union Jack, besides this look at false dialectics of Communism against Capitalism. For one, the 1970 authorship date is interesting in terms of the zeitgeist context of its terminology which in today’s respective mainstream cultural environment might be uncomfortable for some to read. With such as the use of the term ‘Jew’ as in “Jew-Masonic” instead of the slightly less accusatory sounding “Jewish-Masonic” one might get the feeling that the anonymous author was not yet ready to make ecumenically nice by that time, only a few years after Vatican II. And apparently to brazenly demonstrate the British Empire’s “Jew-Masonic” chutzpah bona fides, these British-Israelites are also the ubiquitous authors of the numerous listed “Jew Baiting” screeds and similar practices. No doubt to fool all of us, that they, the British-Israelites, aren’t Jews or their illuminated and duped agents, except the ever alert and ‘all seeing’ Union Jack author(s) that is.

This only serves to demonstrate the inanity of the author’s complementary argument, namely that Catholics, in contrast, only engage in sincere ‘Jew’ accusations and not ‘Jew Baiting’ … when they point out that British-Israel is indeed a “Jew-Masonic” conspiracy. This is otherwise known as hoisting oneself on one’s own petard. But this is frequently a problem in the entire Abramic religious milieu, in not being able to recognize one’s own solipsism and hypocrisy. Until very recently, Roman Catholicism has defined itself, in both the canons and by all its major theologians, in stark opposition to the Jews, as the rejecters and killers of the alleged Christ, one who came to fulfill the ‘Law’, whatever that ‘hermeneutically’ was, as Bill Clinton might say. The sardonic, core circular logic here, once again, is that the alleged killing of the alleged Christ is what actually gave us Christianity, ignoring that allegedly Jewish Paul guy, that is. Gee thanks, Paul … and the Christ Killers.

So in this regard, perhaps we might ask ourselves if the author has left at least one other, upper level, dialectic off the table for his audience not to consider? In this case, and in the now Union Jack illuminated light of sham oppositions and shields, that perhaps Cardinal Wolsey’s policy of pitting ‘learning against learning’ included a serious bit of contemporaneous Machiavellian thinking of his own in making the entire English Reformation a sham opposition to Pax Romanum? Perhaps this is what the Mother Church is so worried about that it needed to specifically mention on the 12/28/2014 episode (re-aired from 4/10/2011) of 60 Minutes that out of the millions of documents that it has archived, that it had all the love letters of Henry VIII to Ann Boleyn; … and that it had obtained them due to the (wink, wink) efforts of a sly contemporaneous Roman priest. No doubt that Henry, prior to the elaborately staged divorce, having been just recently named Defender of the (Roman Catholic) Faith, for his actions against the other faux and controlled Reformation(s), had confessed his affair (as with all the other paramours including Ann’s sister) to his Jesuit. Sigh, if only God had deigned to give Catherine a surviving boy child.

That episode of ’60 Minutes’ was preceded by a long paean to the new Jesuit white pope, Francis, who has been wowing everyone with lots of ‘liberal’ talk and no action, to anyone that might care. This all brought to you by the allegedly Zionist controlled American media who is allegedly allied against the Roman Church.

In future posts we will be able to view other instances of Roman and British post-English Reformation collaboration which belie the hypocritical and casuistic (aka Jesuitic) message of The Union Jack. For now, my favorite one is the failed Macnamara Concession of 1846 which promised to divvy up California real estate between the British Empire created Mormons (see Webster Tarpley’s “Just Too Weird”) and the Jesuits’ Irish immigrants. If this plot had been successful and Governor Pio Pico’s insanely generous offer of land had been successfully granted, then the Union may likely have lost the Civil War (from the loss of the California gold shipments, and cogently here, aid from the Russian Tsar) — and the slaves would not have been freed, among other things. Perhaps this, and similar perks of imperium, is leading to what the bravely anonymous Catholic author is really alluding to by what has been lost by the Pax Romanum? And in the specific case of California, what was also lost by Rome’s covert sham opposition, the British Empire.

After all, surely the brave, anonymous author is proud of the biblically justified heritage of slavery as reformulated from the utopian serfing paradise of European feudalism run by the combined efforts of the papacy and the aristocratic (landed) nobility and royalty, the first and last all slathered in their rancid holy annointing chrism oil ala le faux Christ. To be fair to the monarchists though, one can find them complaining that under the relative ‘liberalism’ of the new capitalist regimes of the Mercantile and Industrial ages that their serfs had been better clothed and fed that the capitalists were doing. Is this what the Apostle Paul meant when he told Christian slaveowners to be kind to their Christian slaves and for the slave to obey his master?

Not to digress, also to be considered is that British-Israel was indeed the ideological, ‘gentile’ framework to justify British and other support for the then nascent drive to restore Zionist ‘Israel’, witnessed by such as the Balfour Declaration. Remarkably, this new state was purposely coined ‘Israel’ and not ‘Judea’. The dark irony here, in terms of the stated ‘Jew-Masonic’ and other related ‘usual suspect’ subtexts, is that according to the OT historical narrative, the members of the alleged Lost Tribes of Israel hated the Judean kings, Solomon and David. It was King Solomon that is recorded as dabbling in the ‘pagan’ esoteric arts, as did the earlier reputed magicians Moses and Aaron. But then, so did the hero of Catholicism, Jesus (of the line of David … and thus Solomon). Or, as the illuminated Jesuits and Masons correctly know him by, Lucifer.

I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. KJV Rev 22:16

Yes, I am hinting that the magic here, specifically intended to be missed by the readers of the Union Jack, is that the Catholic Church is just as much an Illuminati-Masonic creation as its supposed nemesis. A great place to confirm this is by making a trip to the Vatican and look at all the Masonic related iconography, such as the great pillars of Jachin and Boaz. Jesuits, who understand, like their Masonic dupes, that when Black need be White or vice versa and if it profits the (Virgilian 4th Eclogue) global real estate cause of the Predestined Elect, then so be it. So please don’t tell us, sheepish Catholic apologists, that the Vatican has lately been infiltrated by the Masons and the Illuminati. This happened prior to Constantine when Flavian Christianity was formulated by amalgamating all the then extant mystery cults and the Imperial Cult into one corrupt vessel of mind and body slavery.

A further irony is that the Roman Catholic Church has somewhat quietly embraced the claimed rational Science of its own mythic Illuminati since at least the late 19th century, while letting its ‘other’ Useful Idiots, the various hysterical cultic sects of Low Church evangelicals and Pentecostals, maintain its profitable false dialectic.

In the cases of the Classic Greeks, the Romans, the creation of European Feudalism, and the creation of Latin American slave colonialism, one can not find a trace of Anglo culpability, but rather it is that “All Roads Lead to Rome.” However, to be fair and balanced, it is with the late 18th century, at least, that one begins to find a tag team collaboration between London, Rome, and … New York City.

Is this what might be profitably mined by examining the Catholic and/or Jesuit associations and hidden agendas of Napoleon, Marx, Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Castro, etc., etc.? And find that Anglo/American and Vatican veiled elite interests overlap much more than diverge?

This is the essence of pure (or occulted) Black Collared Magic.

Discuss in Forum!

Warning to Oysters: Beware the Walrus!

Joseph Atwill

December 31, 2014

For many in the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation, the Beatles were not just a fantastically popular band, but a symbolic representation of what was best about the era of their youth. The Beatles stood for Love, and Freedom, and Peace; and they stood against the extremes of the Cold War; that is, for common sense as opposed to either extreme Communism or mindless consumerism and capitalism. The Beatles were the polar opposite of Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon; they were the quintessential voice of the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement, and the Woodstock Generation (even though they had officially disbanded before Woodstock took place.)

However, even in their heyday, not everyone was equally impressed with the Beatles. Some were distressed by their rejection of Christianity, and their openly expressed alliance with Eastern religions. The Beatles’ work was also widely interpreted as encouraging the use of dangerous and addictive drugs, much to the dismay of the wiser & more socially prudent parents of the “flower children”.

Today, the debate rages on, as fundamentalist Christians (in particular) have increasingly noticed occult and even Luciferian messages in the Beatles’ music and imagery. While we see this primarily as a contrived false dialectic pitting fundamentalist Christianity (a bankrupt religious relic) against Satanism (another bankrupt fundamentalism), our purpose in writing this blog post is to look more deeply into the true purposes and the true alliances that the Beatles brought to the table.

John Lennon claimed that he wrote ‘I Am the Walrus’ to “throw together nonsense lyrics to confuse scholars trying to dissect The Beatles songs.” Lennon stated that he got the idea for the oblique lyrics when he received a letter from a student who explained that his English teacher was having the class analyze Beatles songs. Lennon answered the letter; and his reply was sold as memorabilia at a 1992 auction.

Lennon also claimed a drugged induced origin of the song in his 1980 Playboy interview: “The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko. Part of it was putting down Hare Krishna. All these people were going on about Hare Krishna, Allen Ginsberg in particular. The reference to ‘Element’ry penguin’ is the elementary, naive attitude of going around chanting, ‘Hare Krishna,’ or putting all your faith in any one idol. I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days.”

Lennon was playing a game with hidden truths. ‘I Am the Walrus’ (like most lyrics and imagery from the Beatles) is not difficult to decode. In addition to being saturated with occult references, its meaning shows that Lennon treated the topic of genocide with amused detachment; and that he participated in the deliberate creation of the destructive ‘counter culture’, along with others such as Gordon Wasson and Gregory Bateson, a lifetime actor.

Lennon’s description of a ‘crying Walrus’ in the song comes from the poem The Walrus and The Carpenter by Lewis Carroll, which is from the sequel to Alice in Wonderland called Through the Looking-Glass (1871). In his 1980 Playboy interview, Lennon said: “It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles’ work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, s–t, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it?”

Lennon’s statement is an intentional misdirection. In Lewis’s poem, the Carpenter and the Walrus share the same moral position. That is, they are murderers that kill and eat the generation of ‘young oysters’ that they have fooled into walking with them. ‘The Carpenter’ would be widely recognized as a symbol of Jesus, or (more generally but esoterically) a representative of ‘Tektons’ or Masonic architects in general; but he is certainly no friend to the oysters, much less any critic of the capitalist system.

“It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!
The Carpenter said nothing but “Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf–
I’ve had to ask you twice!”
“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,
“To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!
The Carpenter said nothing but
“The butter’s spread too thick!”
“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.

Thus the basic framework of Lennon’s song is a poem about genocide. Lewis Carroll clearly indicates this with his description of “sand” that for some reason the Walrus and Carpenter hate and wish that it would be cleared away. Carroll is using sand as it is used in Genesis to indicate a people or generation.

“that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore. And thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies.” Genesis 22:17

Carroll stays within his genocide theme by bringing to mind the apocalypse of the Prophet Daniel with his idea that “seven maids with seven mops swept for half a year” – in Daniel it is half a “week”.

The passage ‘foresees’ the conclusion of the poem wherein the ‘young oysters are ‘swept away, that is eaten.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,
They said, “it would be grand!”
“If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter, And shed a bitter tear.
“O Oysters, come and walk with us!
The Walrus did beseech.
“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each.”

I Am the Walrus’s opening line; “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together” is based on the folk song “Marching To Pretoria,” which begins with the lyric;

“I’m with you and you’re with me and we are all together.”

The purpose of Lennon’s paraphrasing is to begin his linkage to genocide. In this case, he uses the song that was sung by the Boers during the Boer war as they marched from Cape Town to Pretoria. This march ended badly, as they were captured and placed in Camp Irene, the infamous British concentration camp that housed many Boer women and children.

The Irene Concentration Camp was built with the intention that it would be one of the camps that would house Boer woman and children, driven from their land by the British “scorched earth” policy. This policy dictated the destruction of the farms and lands of Boer soldiers. The conditions in the camp, located on the chilly southern side of the town, were extremely primitive. Life was exceptionally hard, and very little notice were taken by the authorities of the deaths that their lack of interest in the inmates caused.

The population increased rapidly in these poor conditions. In April 1901, it was recorded that the Irene Concentration Camp accommodated approximately 3 703 inmates, of which 317 were sick and 49 had perished. By the end of 1901 more than 800 people had died.

http://www.southafricaexplorer.co.za/attractions/irene-concentration-camp/irene-concentration-camp.html

The next line of Lennon’s song describes the journey the Boers made while singing the song.

“See how they run like pigs from a gun see how they fly
I’m crying”

The ‘Boers’ (Lennon is using the word ‘pig’ to create a pun between ‘Boer’ and ‘boar’) are running from the guns of the British. The description of pigs ‘flying’ relates back to Carroll poem which questions whether pigs can fly.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

Carroll’s above passage is not gibberish, but relates to the Apocalypse described in the book of Revelation, which describes the sea going dry, and the seven ‘seals’. Lennon’s dense coupling of imagery from Carroll’s poem, and apocalyptic references to the Boer War, shows that he understands Carroll’s real meaning.

The song “I am the Walrus” was featured in the Beatles’ film “Magical Mystery Tour”, in which the walrus was shown cavorting with a troop of figures dressed in white. Are these “Eggmen” or are they the victorious ones dressed in white, as described in Revelation 3:5? The imagery from the film shows many other mysterious characters whose symbolism has yet to be entirely worked out, at least not by the authors of this website; but the reader is invited to speculate:

Getting back to the lyrics: notice above that Lennon does not quote the first line of ‘Marching to Pretoria’ but changes the words to “I am he” rather than “I’m with you”. This expression comes from Aleister Crowley, the esoteric Freemason whose doctrine was mentioned by Lennon in the aforementioned 1980 Playboy Interview:

“The whole Beatle idea was to do what you want, right? To take your own responsibility, do what you want and try not to harm other people, right? DO WHAT THOU WILST, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody…”

Crowley wrote:

“Let him train himself to think BACKWARDS by external means, as set forth here following:

(a) Let him learn to write BACKWARDS. . .
(b) Let him learn to walk BACKWARDS. . .
(c) Let him. . . listen to phonograph records REVERSED.
(d) Let him practice speaking BACKWARDS. . .
(e) Let him learn to read BACKWARDS. . .
(f) Instead of saying “I am he” let him say “eh ma I”

(Crowley, Aleister. Magick:Liber ABA, book four, 1994 Ordo Templi Orientis edition, p. 639)

Crowley has another connection to the Apocalypse: he claimed to the Great Beast mentioned in the biblical book of Revelation. In 1904, he claimed to have received a ‘bible’ describing the apocalyptic period, LiberAL vel Legis (The Book of the Law). It contains Crowley’s famous dictum “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

The Book of the Law states:

“This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine. Let him not seek to try: but one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the key of it all.

The fact that Lennon was deliberately using Crowley’s line is made clear from the fact that the ‘backwards talking’ Crowley describes is also a part of another poem from Through the Looking Glass – ‘Jabberwocky’.

Carroll wrote:

“It was like this, ‘YKCOWREBBAJ sevot yhtils eht dna ,gillirb sawT‘ ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD ,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA .ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA’

She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. ‘Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.” This was the poem that Alice read. JABBERWOCKY ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.”

Later on, Humpty Dumpty presumed to expound the meaning of Jabberwocky, explaining, among other things, that “‘toves’ are something like badgers — they’re something like lizards — and they’re something like corkscrews.” So we’re still not sure what this means, but it sounds ominous.

In the next lines Lennon describes another South African massacre, the “Bloody Tuesday” that occurred in South Africa in 1946 when striking gold mine workers, marching peacefully, were fired on by police. This image is important as it confirms the previous connection to the Boer War. The naughty boy whose let his face grow long, may be a reference to Oom Paul, the leader of the Boers whose long and bearded face appears on the Krugerrand gold coin.

Sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come
Corporation teeshirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man you been a naughty boy. You let your face grow long

Lennon then describes ‘egg men’ — both as himself and as some other group; followed by the expression ‘goo goo goo job’.

I am the eggman, they are the egg men
I am the walrus, goo goo goo job

This concept relates to Carroll’s character Humpty Dumpty, who I believe is a metaphorical embodiment of the Catholic Church and its founders, the Flavian Caesars, who were the original “masters” who used mangled meanings and “impenetrability” to create the subtext in the Gospels for their glory.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock down argument for you!’ ”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!

Lennon again mentions ‘flying pigs’, relating to Carroll’s metaphorical description of the Apocalypse. He also describes ‘Lucy in the Sky’ which of course is LSD, the drug that was promoted to youth by the Beatles. Lennon then goes on to state that he is the Walrus. In other words that he knew – and enjoyed- destroying the unsuspecting oysters that listen to his music. Lennon is ‘crying’ sarcastic tears; perhaps because there are no children left to destroy with the drug.

Mister City Policeman sitting, pretty little policemen in a row
See how they fly like Lucy in the sky, see how they run
I’m crying, I’m crying
I’m crying, I’m crying

For an example of Lennon’s public disingenuousness, it is difficult to beat his account of the meaning and origin of the phrase “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” As Victorino Matus explained in the Weekly Standard, 6/9/2004:

Maybe this isn’t as important as the G-8 summit (also receiving little coverage), but for Beatles fans everywhere, it is the equivalent of realizing, after all these years, that Alger Hiss really was a spy.

FOR THOSE NOT INDOCTRINATED, it seems fairly obvious: “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” is a mnemonic for LSD. … And not too long after the song came out in 1967, most people figured this out. Yet, for decades, the Beatles continued to deny the reference to LSD–claiming that, in fact, the title of the song came from a drawing by Julian Lennon, John’s son, who was 3 years old at the time. As is revealed in the Beatles Anthology (and collected from other sources like Rolling Stone), Lennon is adamant that it’s all happenstance:

I saw Mel Tormé introducing a Lennon-McCartney show, saying how “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was about LSD. It never was, and nobody believes me. I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelt LSD. This is the truth: My son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. I said, “What is it?” and he said, “It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” and I thought, “That’s beautiful.”…. the images were from Alice in Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep, and the next minute they’re rowing in a boat somewhere–and I was visualizing that. There was also the image of the female who would someday come to save me–‘a girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ who would come out of the sky. It’s not an acid song.”

…Fast forward to this month’s Uncut interview with Paul McCartney, who explains that “A song like ‘Got to Get You Into My Life,’ that’s directly about pot, although everyone missed it at the time.” “Day Tripper,” he says, “that’s one about acid. ‘Lucy in the Sky,’ that’s pretty obvious. …

Another possible reference, noticed recently by David Richards, is that Lucy may be Lucifer – that is, Venus, or Sirius the morning star, among the “Diamonds” or other stars in the sky.

Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye
Crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess
Boy you been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down
I am the eggman, they are the egg men
I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob

Above Lennon brings in the seemingly nonsense phrase “goo goo goo job.” He is relating to the work of another careful student of magic and the occult – James Joyce. Joyce’s passage, from Finnegan’s Wake, also relates to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelation.

“cramp for Hemself and Co, Esquara, or them four hoarsemen on
their apolkaloops, Norreys, Soothbys, Yates and Welks, and,
galorybit of the sanes in hevel, there was a crick up the stirkiss
and when she ruz the cankle to see, galohery, downand she went
on her knees to blessersef that were knogging together like milk-
juggles as if it was the wrake of the hapspurus or old Kong
Gander O’Toole of the Mountains or his googoo goosth she
seein, sliving off over the sawdust lobby out ofthe backroom, wan
ter, that was everywans in turruns, in his honeymoon trim, holding
up his fingerhals, with the clookey in his fisstball, tocher of davy’s,
tocher of ivileagh, for her to whisht, you sowbelly, and the
whites of his pious eyebulbs swering her to silence and coort;”

To decode Joyce’s apocalyptic passage would require too long a digression for this post. However it is obvious that Lennon could not have selected three frameworks for his song that used a symbolic framework as rare as Revelations’ Apocalypse by accident.

Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun
If the sun don’t come
You get a tan from standing in the English rain
I am the eggman, they are the egg men
I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob goo goo goo goo job

References to the sun (an esoteric symbol of divinity) are ubiquitous in Beatles lyrics, though getting a tan in the rain seems about as likely as pigs flying. Lennon goes on to ridicule the generation of drug smoking youths that the ‘expert textperts’ (the elitist and occultist wordsmiths that control the media) have produced.

Expert textpert choking smokers
Don’t you think the joker laughs at you
(Ha ha ha! He he he! Ha ha ha!)
See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snied
I’m crying

Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower
Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Alan Poe

Lennon’s statement “Kicking Edgar Allen Poe” is an indication to search for clues within the works of the Edgar Allen Poe, another author who was fascinated with occult and Masonic themes. The word POE is spelled out in capital letters in the CD’s liner notes.

The capital letters P O E relate to the apocalyptic movie Dr. Strangelove. Terry Southern, the movie’s author, appeared on the Sargent Pepper album cover (along with Aleister Crowley, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Edgar Allen Poe, and 61 other notables.) At one point in the film, the characters are desperately seeking to recover a lost secret code that could be used to recall the bombers that are about to destroy the planet. The disarmament code was some lost permutation of the first letters of “Purity of Essence” or “Peace on Earth” or simply POE (or OPE or EOP…). The point of the missing code is that there will be peace on earth once there is purity of essence – when there are only the ‘chosen people’ on the planet following the Apocalypse.

I am the eggman, they are the egg men
I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob goo goo goo joob
Goo goo goo joob goo goo goo joob
Goo gooooooooooo jooba jooba jooba jooba jooba jooba

Jooba jooba
Jooba jooba
Jooba jooba

John Lennon’s assassin (Mark David Chapman, 1980) was carrying a copy of Catcher in the Rye, a book that we will show on this site is a symbolic representation of a Freemason Initiation. It is possible that the purpose of the book was to issue a warning to other like Lennon that knew the truth and were tempted to speak the truth.

Lennon may have been murdered because shortly before the attack he gave an interview in Playboy where he said that the Beatles music was the product of “craftsmen” and that he did not want to continue being a “craftsman”. The expression “craftsman” is understood by magicians, occultists and Freemasons as a representation of their art, and would never be misunderstood by the author of ‘I Am the Walrus’.

In 1988, the Beatles released a compilation album, ‘Past Masters’, featuring 33 of their best-known songs. This is another Masonic reference: upon retirement, a Master Worshipful Mason receives the rank of Past Master: typically, after attaining the highest rank of thirty-third degree.

Lennon stated:

“I had become a craftsman and I could have continued being a craftsman. I respect craftsmen, but I am not interested in becoming one.”

“When the Beatles played in America for the first time, they played pure craftsmanship. Meaning they were already old hands.”

Lennon also spoke the truth about the origin of LSD, this would not have been approved by his higher level handlers who would not wish any scrutiny of MK Ultra.

“We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it, Harry? So get out the bottle, boy… and relax. They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.”

In these words of John Lennon, we as Beatles fans find some comfort; that perhaps Lennon himself did not buy into the genocidal agenda of the oligarchs; or perhaps that once he recognized it, he rejected it. The Beatles’ advocacy of the ideals of Love, Peace and Freedom may have been genuine, rather than contrived; and as we reject the Luciferian, occult and genocidal garbage, we need not also abandon all hope for their ideals, nor need we engage in a wholesale rejection of their work.

Discuss in forum!

Jerusalem: The Ultimate ‘White Man’s Burden’

Jerry Russell

December 31, 2014

In October 1943 (about the same time Bateson was developing the science used to create the counter culture), the Nazi armed forces still reigned supreme over continental Europe. However, on a global scale, Nazi power was rapidly faltering following the Russian victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. The Rommel offensive in North Africa and Egypt had failed in its objective to defeat the British in the Middle East, where the German army surrendered in May of 1943. Roosevelt would shortly travel to Tehran to meet with Churchill and Stalin in person, to finalize plans for the “D-Day” invasion, which would open a second front in Europe against the Germans. Stalin’s support for the invasion of Europe was bought at the price: the West agreed to concede postwar Eastern Europe to the Soviets.

The postwar fate of Mandate Palestine, and its Zionist project, was emerging as another looming question yet to be determined. The allied powers had been jockeying for influence in the Middle East against the Nazis; and in November 1943, Heinrich Himmler was still trying to rally support for the Nazi cause among Palestinian Arabs.

In the midst of this wartime situation, Winston Churchill was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, headed by Lord Alfred Webb-Johnson. In honor of Churchill’s election, Webb-Johnson presented him with a gift of two unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling: “The Burden of Jerusalem” and “A Chapter of Proverbs.” Churchill, upon receiving the poems, immediately suggested that Webb-Johnson should also forward them to Franklin Roosevelt in America. Webb-Johnson told Roosevelt:

I had the privilege of being a friend of Rudyard Kipling and of looking after him during his last illness. After his death Mrs. Kipling, as literary executor, had a great responsibility in regard to those of his writings which had not been published. She feared that the two works which I have the honor of offering to you, might lead to some controversy and she decided not to publish them. She evidently shrank from destroying them, however, for she entrusted copies to me. After her death I felt it my duty to ensure their preservation, although naturally respecting Mrs. Kipling’s decision that they should not be published.

And, just to be sure, Churchill personally sent Roosevelt an additional copy of the poems, along with his own brief transmittal note, which reiterated:

I understand that Mrs. Kipling decided not to publish them in case they should lead to controversy and it is therefore important that their existence should not become known and that there should be no public reference to this gift.

Roosevelt replied to both Webb-Johnson and Churchill (independently) on the same day, acknowledging receipt of the poems. He told Webb-Johnson:

I had read “The Burden of Jerusalem” before and I could understand why Mrs. Kipling thought it would be best not to publish it. Nevertheless, it is a gem. I had not read “A Chapter of Proverbs” before and I like it much.

To Churchill, Roosevelt wrote:

Those two little books are gems — and I can well understand why they should not be made public at this time. Perhaps “The Burden of Jerusalem” should wait until you and I are strong enough to carry Ibn Saud to Jerusalem and Dr. Weizman to Meca.

The poems were re-discovered by Christopher Hitchens researching at the FDR library in 1988, and have been the subject of several commentaries (Hitchens 1990, Hamilton 2013, Raine 2010) which, while claiming that “The Burden of Jerusalem” is to some degree anti-Semitic, nevertheless express their puzzlement about what in the poem would demand its suppression. The puzzlement is deeper regarding the second poem in the collection, “A Chapter of Proverbs”, which is not detectably anti-Semitic at all.

With this in mind, what do the poems reveal about Kipling? What do they mean? Why did Kipling’s widow, Roosevelt and Churchill all see they need to keep them secret? Why Churchill would see such importance in the poems, or why Roosevelt would respond to them with such glee? And, how did Roosevelt see the Burden of Jerusalem before Churchill sent it to him? The poems are the basis for a great number of mysteries, which concern individuals with great political power.

“Burden of Jerusalem” is prefaced by a quote from the Biblical book of Genesis (16:6) describing how Abram turned his consort, Hagar, the mother of his child Ishmael, over to his wife Sarai for punishment.

But Abram said unto Sarai, “Behold
thy maid is in thy hand. Do to
her as it pleaseth thee.” And
when Sarai dealt hardly with her
she fled from her face.
Genesis XVI.6.

Kipling goes on to characterize this event as the beginning of “a feud — still unsubdued” about possession of Jerusalem. At the time this poem was written, Kipling had just recently paid a visit to Palestine, where the Anglo-Americans’ Zionist project was faltering because of contention between Jews and the native inhabitants of the land, the Palestinian Arabs, who were understandably clinging to their homeland. In the context of this Arab-Israeli conflict, Kipling’s poem makes sense as an attempt to paint the portrait that this conflict between Arabs and Jews is rooted in ancient Biblical times; an assertion of the mass media, even though there was little if any historical basis for it.

Biblical scholars, on the other hand, sometimes interpret “Sons of Ishmael” to be a characterization of all Gentiles or non-Jews, regardless of race or creed. This is consistent with Paul’s view in the New Testament. (For example, see Galatians 4; although Paul ultimately concludes that it is the Christians who are true children of Israel.) If this was Kipling’s intent, it has the advantage of making the poem (mostly) more coherent to its stated theme.

THE BURDEN OF JERUSALEM

In ancient days
and deserts wild
There rose a feud –
still unsubdued –
‘Twixt Sarah’s son
and Hagar’s child
That centred round Jerusalem.

(While underneath
the timeless bough
Of Mamre’s oak,
mid stranger-folk
The Patriarch slumbered
and his spouse
Nor dreamed about Jerusalem).

For Ashmael lived
where he was born,
And pastured there
in tents of hair
Among the Camel
and the Thorn –
Beersheba, south Jerusalem.

But Israel sought
employ and food
At Pharoah’s knees,
till Rameses
Dismissed his plaguey multitude,
with curses,
Toward Jerusalem.

Across the wilderness
they came,
And launched their horde
o’er Jordan’s ford,
And blazed the road
by sack and flame
To Jebusite Jerusalem.

In the above verses, the poem indeed describes what seems to be the beginnings of a feud; that is, Israel’s descendants, after sojourning in Egypt, have returned to Jerusalem and triumphed over their opponents, the Jebusites.

However, contrary to the inference of an Arab vs. Israeli conflict: in fact, the Bible does not describe this as part of a long-standing quarrel of “sons of Ishmael” (that is, Arabs) against Israelis over the possession of Jerusalem. As the poem admits: while the Jews sojourned in Egypt, Jerusalem was possessed by the Jebusites: that is, by Canaanites, who (according to the Old Testament) were descended from an entirely separate branch of the human family from the Semites (Shemites). This split occurring the generation after Noah. The Israelites took the promised land of Palestine from the children of Canaan (that is, Phoenicians), not from the ‘children of Ishmael’. (Noting, of course, that the poem presumes the accuracy of the Biblical account; notwithstanding the independent witness of archaeological & historical data, which is hard pressed to detect any difference between the Canaanites and ancient Israelites, or any invasion event such as described in the Pentateuch.)

Then Kings and Judges
ruled the land,
And did not well by Israel,
Till Babylonia took a hand,
And drove them from Jerusalem.

And Cyrus sent them back anew,
To carry on as they had done,
Till angry Titus overthrew
The fabric of Jerusalem.

Then they were scattered
north and west,
While each Crusade
more certain made
That Hagar’s vengeful
son possessed
Mohamedan Jerusalem.

Where Ishmael held
his desert state,
And framed a creed
to serve his need. –
“Allah-hu-Akbar!
God is Great!”
He preached it in Jerusalem.

Once again, if the poem is attempting to depict a single, ongoing “feud” between the Arabs and Israelis, then Kipling has a problem — the Diaspora of the Jews from Palestine was caused (as Kipling himself explained), not by Arabs, but first by the Babylonian conquest and then by the Roman conquest of Judea. The Babylonians, Persians, or Romans are obviously not Arabs.

The poem seems deliberately confused as to whether the “feud-still unsubdued” represents the Arab-Israeli conflict, or whether it is depicting a feud of Israelites against the entire world of Gentiles of every possible creed and color.

The poem tells us (more or less correctly) that the Jews then were scattered to the north and west into Europe and the steppes of Russia, more so than into Arab lands. When the Arab followers of Mohammed took Jerusalem, they took it from the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) empire, not from the Jews. The extent and significance of the Diaspora may have been overestimated by 19th century Zionist historiography; Judaism spread to northern and western regions by evangelism and conversion, while Palestinian Jews were more likely to be assimilated to the culture of their Roman and Mohammedan conquerers.

According to the Bible narrative, the twelve tribes of Israel were driven out of ‘Israel’ by the Assyrians and never returned. It was the only Judeans, the elites and key others that is, that were driven from Jerusalem to be returned by Cyrus. As we will discuss later, Kipling would have been very well aware of this, because of the popularity of “British Israel” theology at the time; that is, the view that the British were descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and had inherited their mantle as God’s Chosen People.

And every realm
they wandered through
Rose, far or near,
in hate or fear,
And robbed and tortured,
chased and slew,
The outcasts of Jerusalem.

So ran their doom –
half seer, half slave –
And ages passed,
and at the last
They stood beside
each tyrant’s grave,
And whispered of Jerusalem.

We do not know
what God attends
The Unloved Race
in every place
Where they amass
their dividends
From Riga to Jerusalem;

But all the course
of Time makes clear
To everyone
(except the Hun)
It does not pay to interfere
With Cohen from Jerusalem.

For, ‘neath the Rabbi’s
curls and fur
(Or scents and rings
of movie-Kings)
The aloof,
unleavened blood of Ur,
Broods steadfast on Jerusalem.

In these passages, Kipling has depicted the fate of Diaspora Jews in Europe: they become outcasts, wandering through realms where they are hated and feared, robbed and tortured. But, ages pass, and the Jews at last find a place alongside the European tyrants, even though they are still the “Unloved Race”. They are, at last, left alone: “Everyone (except the Hun)” eventually realize that “it does not pay to interfere” with these Jews with their “unleavened blood” — in their brooding determination not to forget Jerusalem.

The poem has generally been seen as anti-Semitic, for reasons that begin to become clear in these passages: the Jews are portrayed as steeped in a brooding, irrational hate against Gentiles, rooted in an ancient Old Testament fable. The poem reinforces prejudices against Jews as international bankers and “movie kings”, who would whisper their secret plans past the graves of tyrants.

For all its emphasis on ancient roots of conflict between Jews and others, Kipling’s poem conspicuously omits any mention of the New Testament tale in which Jews are blamed for the crucifixion of Christ. Perhaps the apparently agnostic phrase “we do not know what God attends the unloved race” is an oblique reference to the Christian god of the European realms, who kicked the ‘unloved race’ under the curb. Obviously, the medieval enmity of Jews and Christian gentiles has nothing to do with the ancient Old Testament story of Sarai and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael. It has nothing to do with possession of Jerusalem, or the quarrels of Christian crusaders against Mohammedans. It has everything to do with the contrived dialectic conflict of Christians against Rabbinical Jews over the blame for the death of Christ: a conflict invented by the Flavian Caesars.

Next, the poem imagines the conflict returning to its center at Jerusalem:

Where Ishmael bides
in his own place –
A robber bold,
as was foretold,
To stand before
his brother’s face –
The wolf without Jerusalem:

A riddle: who are the “bold robbers” who are standing outside Jerusalem? And, where was this foretold?

In Wars of the Jews, Josephus described the messianic Jewish rebels as ‘robbers’. When Kipling uses the term ‘robbers’ in the poem, he may be reversing the situation Josephus described whereby the Jews were driven out of Jerusalem. Kipling is describing the ‘bold robbers’ returning to Jerusalem and recapturing the city.

In the Book of Revelation, a ‘New Jerusalem’ with a new population is foretold. This is perhaps the prophecy that Kipling is referring to.

Another (possibly layered) interpretation is that the “bold robbers” are the modern capitalist “robber barons”, the Anglo-Americans, who have recaptured Mandate Palestine from the Arabs. This is the return that was foretold in the Book of Revelation — as interpreted by Scofield and the Dispensationalists, at least.

The poem continues to describe the conflict unfolding into the present day:

And burthened Gentiles
o’er the main
Must bear the weight
of Israel’s hate
Because he is not
brought again
In triumph to Jerusalem.

At this point, the reader’s head explodes with the force of the internal contradictions in Kipling’s narrative. If the Jews have an age-old feud with the Arabs, then why is their hate directed towards Gentiles? On the other hand, if the “children of Ishmael” includes the Gentiles, then why is the poem suddenly claiming that the age-old hatred is because “he is not brought again in triumph”? Why would the Jews expect any cooperation from their ancient enemies? No matter what interpretation we subscribe to, the contradiction seems insurmountable.

In actual reality, at the time the poem was written, the Gentiles (that is, the European Christians and Anglo-Americans) had just recently formed a historically innovative alliance with the Jews to bring them back to Jerusalem. In doing so, the “Gentiles” created a new enemy for the Jews, setting them up in opposition to the entire Arab world — an enmity which had been lost and forgotten. The ostensible enemies of the Jews in Europe were the Germans (that is, the Huns), more so than the Anglo-American Gentiles. The Anglo-American Christian Zionists were trying to re-interpret a thousand years of European history as “Judeo-Christianity”: an invented scenario in which God’s will for Christians and Jews alike is fulfilled through the return of the Jews to Jerusalem. Yet the Jews are portrayed by Kipling as focusing their laser-like hate on the Gentiles, their ever-burdened benefactors.

Kipling tells us that the proximate cause of “Israel’s hate” is because “he” has no triumph in Jerusalem. The referent of “he” is ambiguous: we are not sure if Kipling means the Jews, or the Gentiles. The fact is clear, however, that the Jews hate the “burthened” Gentiles; and that their hate is a burden that weighs on the Gentiles.

The mention of a “burden” calls to mind Kipling’s most famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden”, in which the White Men are encouraged to support Anglo-American colonialist domination of the “new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child”, even though there is little if any reward other than “The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard”. In this context, the Jews seem to fit perfectly: they too are sullen, ungrateful and vengeful, inexplicably lost in hate towards their benefactors. Indeed, the hate of the Jews towards the Gentiles, inexplicable within the skewed historical theory of the poem, comes into focus with the understanding that the Jews have become colonial victims of the Anglo-Americans, in exactly the same was as Africans and Native Americans were earlier.

Ironically, Kipling is correct in the assessment that the benefits of colonialism (whether in Africa or the Middle East) are quite minimal for the average White Man (that is, English rank-and-file scurvy seamen and white trailer trash); while he conveniently forgets to mention the upper-class bankers and industrialists who reap the benefits of wealth and power.

In the final stanza, the poem blames Abraham for having given rise to the conflict:

Yet he who bred the
unending strife
And was not brave
enough to save
The Bondsmaid from
the furious wife,
He wrought thy woe, Jerusalem!

This “woe” of Jerusalem is, to a great extent, falling upon the Gentiles at this point, as the bearers of Israel’s triumphant hate. Nevertheless, there is plenty of woe to go around — and to the extent that the Jews are continuing to suffer in the world as well, it is difficult to deny the anti-Semitism of this statement that Abraham, one of the great Jewish patriarchs, was nothing but a coward who was responsible for all the tragedy that followed. In this sense, the verse represents the essence of “blaming the victim”.

Andrew Hamilton (CounterCurrents) argued that “The Burden of Jerusalem” was suppressed by Kipling’s widow (and, presumably, by Roosevelt and Churchill as well) simply because of its anti-Semitism. However, this does not seem to be an adequate reason for the poem to have been such an important state secret. Kipling’s anti-semitism was already well-known from his “Gehazi” and other works in “The Years Between” collection, published in 1919. Furthermore, as Hamilton noted: “In a letter written from Jerusalem to his only surviving child, Elsie, Kipling reportedly observed that ‘many races are vile but the Jew in bulk on his native heath is the Vilest of them all.’

Kipling’s view of the Jews was further demonstrated in his story THE TREASURE AND THE LAW, in which he described how Jews kept their religion even while undergoing hardships; displaying a certain grudging respect for them, even though they “slink among rubbish-heaps.”

“Puck fell back a pace, laughing. ‘Kadmiel is thinking of King John’s reign,’ he explained. ‘His people were badly treated then.’

‘Oh, we know that.’ they answered, and (it was very rude of them, but they could not help it) they stared straight at Kadmiel’s mouth to see if his teeth were all there. It stuck in their lesson-memory that King John used to pull out Jews’ teeth to make them lend him money.

Kadmiel understood the look and smiled bitterly.

‘No. Your King never drew my teeth: I think, perhaps, I drew his. Listen! I was not born among Christians, but among Moors – in Spain – in a little white town under the mountains. Yes, the Moors are cruel, but at least their learned men dare to think. It was prophesied of me at my birth that I should be a Lawgiver to a People of a strange speech and a hard language. We Jews are always looking for the Prince and the Lawgiver to come. Why not? My people in the town (we were very few) set me apart as a child of the prophecy – the Chosen of the Chosen. We Jews dream so many dreams. You would never guess it to see us slink about the rubbish-heaps in our quarter; but at the day’s end – doors shut, candles lit – aha! then we became the Chosen again.”

However, Kipling also made a comment about Jews’ secret facility to create wars, displaying the anti-Semitic view that Jews carry the bulk of responsibility:

“There can be no war without gold, and we Jews know how the world’s gold moves… a wonderful underground river… Such power have we Jews among the Gentiles. How should the foolish Kings know that while they fight and steal and kill?”

Aside from serving as a display piece for Kipling’s anti-Semitism, “The Burden of Jerusalem” seems to be cleverly contrived propaganda, justifying the Zionist project while obfuscating many historical realities — especially its suppression of the true reasons for enmity between Jews and Christians. With the new alliance between Jews and Christian Zionists, it was indeed a vital propaganda objective to put an end to that conflict. However, in the new postwar context, the poem’s anti-Semitism might have been seen as going too far towards undermining the friendship between Jews and Christians in the new post-war world. While anti-Semitism was nothing to be ashamed of in Kipling’s heyday, by 1943 it was no longer the least bit fashionable; which might have been sufficient reason for Roosevelt and Churchill to let sleeping dogs lie.

But why did Churchill and Roosevelt take such obvious glee in the poem? This question suggests another possible reason for the suppression of the poem: if Churchill and Roosevelt were anti-Semites themselves, they might have seen it as a rather jolly good joke at the expense of the Jews; which would be quite embarrassing in view of the fact that they were publicly posturing as friends of the Jews in the Zionist struggle against German oppression. Roosevelt was crucially dependent on the many Jews in his administration, and he relied on their support at election time. So much the worse, if the poem suggested that the Anglo-Americans saw the Jews as a racial minority to be exploited like any other colonialist holding.

Another clue to Kipling’s intention is found in its companion poem, “A Chapter of Psalms”, which on its face seems far more innocuous. Aside from Hitchens, there has been no commentary at all about it; and Hitchens’ comments were that stanzas 3 and 6 had something to do with Churchill’s reaction to Lend-Lease, and that stanza 24 evoked the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Such references, even if correct, would hardly justify classifying “Psalms” with “Burden of Jerusalem” as dangerous contraband.

By naming the Poem ‘Proverbs’, Kipling recalls the book of that name in the Old Testament, in which a father gives advice to his son, and the rewards of the righteous are contrasted to the destruction of the wicked. For example: Proverbs 6:12-15

A worthless person, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech,
winks with his eyes, signals[c] with his feet, points with his finger,
with perverted heart devises evil, continually sowing discord;
therefore calamity will come upon him suddenly; in a moment he will be broken beyond healing.

By their light-hearted, humorous (if somewhat pompous) tone, Kipling’s verses also feel reminiscent of Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes (“to thine own self be true”, & etc.) in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The advice is far-ranging, and often difficult to interpret.

A CHAPTER OF PROVERBS

1. The wind bloweth where it
listeth, and after the same
manner in every country.
Be not puffed up with a
breath (of it)

The biblical references are John 3:8 (“the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the spirit.”) and Jeremiah 1:60, “ after the same manner the wind bloweth in every country”, where Jeremiah is explaining that the wind and lightning obey God, and yet they are not gods. Kipling seems to be advising against the vanity of a spiritual path that is not close enough to God?

2. Of a portion set aside a
portion or ever the days
come when thou shalt see
there is no work in them

3. For he that hath not must
serve him that hath; even
to the peril of the soul

4. Take the wage for thy work
in silver and (it may be)
gold; but accept not honors
nor any great gifts

This seems to be basic advice for capital formation: by setting aside a portion each day, a man can become among the “haves”, and be always served by the “have-nots.” Kipling advises his son against vanity and to take only real things for his work.

5. Is ye ox yoked till men have
need of him; or the camel
belled while yet she is free?
And wouldst thou be eved
with these?

6. Pledge no writing till it is
written; and seek not
payment on (any) account
the matter shall be
remembered against thee.

The advice here, again, is to avoid being “yoked” like other “animals” — to avoid burdensome commitments such as pre-payments for future work.

7. There is a generation which
selleth dung in the street
and saith: “To the pure all
things are pure.”

It is the Apostle Paul who said “To the pure all things are pure” (Titus 1:15). Matthew, Mark and Luke agreed that Jesus said “this generation shall not pass away, before all these things have come to pass”, yet obviously the Second Coming of Christ in Glory has never yet occurred.

Is Kipling saying that Christianity is nothing but dung that is still being sold in the street? If so, as the virtual Poet Laureate of the British Empire, he was hardly in a position to say so more plainly than this.

8. But count (thou) on the one
hand how may be so minded;
and after write according
to thy knowledge.

9. Because not all evil beareth
fruit in a day; and it may
be some shall curse thy
grave for the iniquity of
thy works in their youth

Kipling reminds his son how rare this understanding of the world is, because the evil (of Christianity?) bears fruit slowly (if at all?). Noting that understanding is rare (and, it follows, that there are many ’sellers of dung’) — such knowledge should be referred to cautiously (if at all) because a person could be cursed in the grave for iniquity.

10. The fool brayeth in his
heart there is no God;
therefore his imaginings
are terribly returned on
him; and that without interpreter

The answer is not to turn to atheism, because that is a terrible, lonely and imaginary path.

11. Get skill, and when thou
has it, forget; lest the
bird on her nest mock thee,
and He that is Highest
look down

12. Get knowledge; it shall
not burst thee; and amass
under thy hand a peculiar
treasure of words;

13. As a King heapeth him
jewels to bestow or cast
aside; or being alone in
his palace, fortifieth
himself beholding (them)

14. So near as thou canst, open
not thy whole mind to
any man.

15. The bounds of his craft are
appointed to each from of
old; they shall not be known
to the cup-mates or the
companions

These passages describe a skill that must be acquired and forgotten, and a “peculiar treasure of words” that must be amassed, as a King heaps up jewels. This is the wisdom of the “craft” that is appointed “from of old”, which must not be revealed to “cup-mates”. The “craft” is a reference to freemasonry, which is to be kept secret.

16. For three things my heart
is disquieted; and for four
that I cannot bear:

17. For a woman who esteemeth
herself a man; and a man
that delighteth in her
company;

18. For people whose young
men are cut off by the
sword; and for the soul
that regardeth not these
things.

19. In three things, yea and
in four, is the metal of
the workman made plain:

20. In excessive labour; in
continual sloth; in long
waiting; and in the day
of triumph.

In these passages, Kipling seems to be describing his views of sins that he “cannot bear”, and the virtues of simple workmen who avoid both excessive labor and sloth, which brings about the day of triumph. Plato’s famous “Noble Lie” in his “Republic” referred to the metal of workmen, which is brass or iron — as contrasted to the metal of the elite, which is silver or gold.

21. There is one glory of the
sun and another of the
moon and a third of the
stars: yet are all these
appointed for the glory
of the earth which alone
hath no light.

Kipling’s essay “Proofs of Holy Writ” imagines that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson collaborated to come up with the text of Isaiah 60:1-3, 19-20 that was used in the King James Version of the Bible. The verses read:

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.

For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.

And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

[….]

The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.

Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.

In this poem “Chapter of Proverbs”, as in the Bible, the condition of the earth is that it has no light. Kipling’s poem has the sun, moon and stars supplying light and glory; while according to Isaiah, it is “the Lord” who is giving everlasting light which supersedes the sun and moon.

Supporting this contention is the manner that Lucifer is described at the end of Revelation, as understood by Freemasons. (As we will discuss later, Kipling had extensive connections with the Freemasons.) For example, Albert Pike wrote:

“Lucifer, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable, blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish souls? Doubt it not!” Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, p. 321, 19th Degree of Grand Pontiff;

Masons from the first initiation are urged to “seek the Light!” The average Mason is continually saying that he is “seeking the Light,” and will spend his entire life “moving toward the Light.”

22. Hold not back (any) part
of a price.

23. Despise no man even in thy
heart; for the custom of
it shall make thy works of
none effect

24. Use not overmuch to
frequent the schools of
the scribes; for idols are
there and (all) the paths
return upon themselves.

25. Envy no man’s work nor
deliver judgement upon
it in the gate, for the end
is bitterness.

These verses 22 through 25 seem to represent good Judeo-Christian fatherly advice to avoid idol-worship, envy and bitterness: perhaps trite, but hard to disagree with. But beginning at verse 26, we find the following:

26. Consider now those blind
worms of the deep which
fence themselves about as
it were with stone against
their fellows;

27. And reaching the
intolerable light of the
sun straightway perish
leaving but their tombs;

28 By those whose mere multitude
the sea is presently stayed;
the tide itself divideth
at that place.

29 Small waves after storm
laying there seeds, nuts
and the bodies of fish,
(at last) an island ariseth
crowned with palms; thither
the sea-birds repair.

The “blind worms of the dark” are, of course, people. Kipling may mean those “dark” people who are the “white man’s burden”, or he may mean to be talking about blind, stupid people of any race and creed. They have fenced themselves with stone against each other. Stone is the work of freemasons, and is found in dark (Platonic?) caves. The stones that divide people against each other might refer to the various exoteric nationalities and religions which are foisted on the hoi polloi by the elite and the elect.

While the “Gentiles” of Isaiah 60 rise to the light of the Lord and their days of mourning are ended, the “blind worms” find the light intolerable, and they are killed in a great multitude — great enough to stay the sea, divide the tide, and create an island. Seeds, nuts and the bodies of fish join in the rising mass. Kipling’s symbolic framework may come from Proverb 10, 20: “when the storm has swept by, the wicked are gone but the righteous stand firm forever.” Crowned with palms, the new island may represent the new state of Israel. The image of an island arising out of a storm is also an apocalyptic reminder of the Genesis flood, and Noah’s landfall — which God promised would never be repeated, but that promise now seems to be null and void.

30 Till man coming taketh
all to his use and hath no
memory of aught below
(his feet)

31 Out of the dust which
had life come all things
and shalt thou be other
than they?

32 Nevertheless, my son, dare
thou greatly to believe.

Kipling ends with a vision that those in the future will have no memory of the vast plague of death that brought about the new world. This is already true of present-day Americans: few remember, or even realize, that a flourishing, teeming multitude of Native Americans once filled the continent, before it was taken over by European caucasians.

The images are chilling. Kipling reminds his son that he is composed of the same dust that the worms are made of, but they are dead and trodden underfoot — while the elect survivors believe greatly, and “taketh all” with unconscious pleasure, and no respect for the dead. They are, after all, just dark worms (metaphorically speaking.)

There remains the question of who will be the survivors, and who will be the worms. In “Chapter of Proverbs” the answer seems clear enough: the enlightened ones will be the diligent capitalists who study the Craft (freemasonry and/or its affiliates), keep their wisdom to themselves, stay in the light, and avoid being caught in stone tombs. Another famous poem of Kipling’s, “Recessional”, provides further insight:

RECESSIONAL

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word –
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

In this poem, Kipling makes it clear that the Old Testament’s “Lord of Hosts” is now the patron of the British navy, who has been given “dominion over palm and pine”, that is, the domain that formerly belonged to Israel — as long as they remain prayerful, avoiding “such boastings as the Gentiles use”, much less the “lesser breeds”; and above all, as long as they never forget (their elect status.) Although the logic is not completely coherent, Kipling is clearly claiming that the British elite have displaced the Jews as well as other Gentiles in the role of God’s chosen people.

Another manifestation of British-Israel may have been the swift adoption of the practice of circumcision throughout the Anglo-American world at that time, ostensibly for reasons of medical sanitation. Kipling described this secret ersatz-Jewish identity in his work THE GARDENER (1926). Though the hero ‘Turrel’ seems to be a British Gentile, Kipling used veiled metaphors to indicate that the character had been circumcised. Kipling’s circumcision imagery below will be clear to all except the most metaphorically challenged.

“A christening, by the Rector, under the name of Michael, was the first step. So far as she knew herself, she was not, she said, a child-lover, but, for all her faults, she had been very fond of George, and she pointed out that little Michael had his father’s mouth to a line; which made something to build upon.

As a matter of fact, it was the Turrell forehead, broad, low, and well-shaped, with the widely spaces eyes beneath it, that Michael had most faithfully reproduced. His mouth was somewhat better cut than the family type. But Helen, who would concede nothing good to his mother’s side, vowed he was a Turrell all over, and, there being no one to contradict, the likeness was established. In a few years Michael took his place, as accepted as Helen had always been – fearless, philosophical, and fairly good-looking.”

In addition to his interest in British Israel theology, Kipling was also very involved in Freemasonry, as were Roosevelt and Churchill. Their Masonic connections are given in “10,000 Famous Freemasons” by William Denslow:

Sir Winston L. Churchill …. was initiated in Studholme Lodge No. 1591, London and raised March 25, 1902 in Rosemary Lodge No. 2851.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt … [was] a member of Holland Lodge No. 8, N.Y.C and received the 32° AASR (NJ) at Albany, N.Y. Feb. 28, 1929, while governor of N.Y. [His sons were all Freemasons and] he became the first honorary grand master of the Order of DeMolay. d. April 12, 1945.

Rudyard Kipling was initiated in Hope and Perseverance Lodge No. 782, Lahore, Punjab, India in 1886, by a special dispensation, because he was only 20 years and six months old. …. On his return to England, he became a founder of the lodge Builders of the Silent Cities No. 4948, in 1927, and of Author’s Lodge No. 3456. He was further appointed poet laureate of the famous Canongate Kilwinning Lodge No. 2, of Edinburgh, Scotland, in which, by tradition, Robert Burns, q.v., had previously served in a similar capacity.

Even Lord Webb-Johnson, the English physician who gave Churchill the poems, was a Freemason. In fact, he was the senior grand deacon of the Grand Lodge of England in 1936.

Freemasonry, of course, is a secret society. Little (if anything) is known about its higher levels because these higher levels require oaths of secrecy. However, it is clear that its philosophy is drawn from ancient Babylonian, Egyptian and Jewish sources; and that it welcomes members from all faiths and ethnic backgrounds, but its beliefs and rituals are not compatible with fundamentalist interpretations of any of the exoteric Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism or Islam).

Kipling was a close friend of Freemason Cecil Rhodes and the Jewish Freemason Lord Nathan Rothschild, whom he often vacationed with.

In his third will Rhodes left his entire estate to Rothschild as trustee. Rhodes stipulated that his gigantic fortune be used by his disciples to carry out the ‘secret society’ program he envisioned. Rothschild appointed Freemason Alfred Milner to head up the secret society for which Rhodes’s first will made provision.

Lord Milner once remarked of himself, “My patriotism knows no geographical but only racial limits. I am a British Race patriot.”

Upon his appointment by Rothschild to chair Rhodes’s secret society, Milner recruited a group of young men from Oxford and Tonybee Hall to assist him in organizing his administration of the new society. All were respected English Freemasons. Among them were Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Balfour, Lord Rothschild, and some Oxford College graduates known as “Milner’s Kindergarten.” In 1909, Milner’s Kindergarten, with some other English Masons, founded the Round Table. The grandfather of all modern British Masonic “think tanks” was born.

http://watch.pair.com/roundtable.html

This is perhaps the most important context for the “Burden of Jerusalem”. As powerful, well-connected British Freemasons, Kipling, Roosevelt and Churchill were were more concerned with matters of finance, international relations, and propaganda, and with the goal of preserving and furthering the aims of the Anglo-American imperial project, than they were concerned with a misinterpretation of ancient history. In that light, Kipling’s clever historical misdirection was a masterstroke of propaganda.

However, the poem, equally disdainful of Jews, Arabs, Germans and other Gentiles, may have been pitched too obviously to elite Masonic feelings of superiority over all varieties of “hoi polloi”. And I would argue that this is the most important reason why the consensus was so easily achieved, that the poem must be suppressed: especially in conjunction with “Chapter of Proverbs”, it gave away too much of the contempt of the Anglo-American elite towards all other peoples, including Christian Gentiles as well as brooding Rabbinical Jews.

I believe this is also the basis of Roosevelt’s remark that publication of the “Burden” should wait “until you and I are strong enough to carry Ibn Saud to Jerusalem and Dr. Weizman to Meca”? Because Kipling’s propaganda theme (that is, the theme of Zionist control of the Middle East) was based on bringing Ibn Saud to Meca, and Weizman to Jerusalem, under the pretense that Ibn Saud was entitled to rightfully possess Arabia as an Arab, while Weizman was entitled to rightfully possess Jerusalem as a Jew. To achieve the reverse, the Anglo-Americans would need to own both provinces outright, and establish a secular dominance over both. Or perhaps Roosevelt meant something equivalent to “when pigs fly”; that is, never.

The poems also display an understanding that the real reason for the Zionist project in the Middle East had little to do with justice for the Jews in the wake of the Hitlerian pogroms (which had not even yet occurred as of the time Kipling was writing). It was, rather, yet another chapter in the actual historical enmity between Christians and Mohammedans, now being fought by proxy; and (most importantly) it was justification for the projection of Western power in the Middle East, which was emerging as an economic necessity because of the growing recognition of the vital necessity of access to Middle Eastern oil.

The final ironic stanza indicates some possibility that Kipling had arrived at a self-conscious understanding that the Anglo-Americans were not blameless, saint-like figures. Abraham can be seen to represent not only the ancient Biblical figure, but also the new Anglo-American parents of the situation — who by cowardly promulgating the Balfour Declaration, had effectively given the holy land to the Jews without actually taking it from the Arabs. Thus, the British had in fact kindled a struggle between Jews and Arabs which had not existed as a historical reality since the 4th millennium BC, if ever. However, the cure for this problem (as Kipling would have seen it) would have been for America to redouble its commitment to the Zionist project, ensuring a Jewish triumph in Jerusalem and finally ending the strife that Abraham allowed to begin. This may have represented yet another level of insight that Churchill and Roosevelt wanted to keep away from the light of day.

Discuss in forum!

Christianity is Flavian Vanity

Jerry Russell

October 28, 2014

In Caesar’s Messiah, Joseph Atwill showed that the Flavian Caesars, Vespasian and Titus, invented Christianity, more or less in the form we know it today. Remarkably, the emperors left behind a veiled confession (or boast) of their work, embedded in the Gospels and the works of Josephus. The religion was invented as wartime propaganda, primarily targeted at Hellenistic Jews of the Diaspora, and also at the Gentiles (who were being approached by Jewish evangelists.) This covert act of psychological warfare was successful beyond the Romans’ wildest dreams: even today, the dominant view is that Christianity arose in humble circumstances, and grew to massive proportions while being driven by a variety of philosophical and religious trends, if not by God himself. However, as Atwill pointed out:

… as Christianity describes its origins, it was not only supernatural but also historically illogical. Christianity, a movement that encouraged pacifism and obedience to Rome, claims to have emerged from a nation engaged in a century-long struggle with Rome. An analogy to Christianity’s purported origins might be a cult established by Polish Jews during World War II that set up its headquarters in Berlin and encouraged its members to pay taxes to the Third Reich (29).

When Atwill published Caesar’s Messiah, he was concerned that his work not be seen as anti-Christian, but rather that it would help Christians as well as others to see how Christianity was manipulated by its elite creators for their own benefits. However, Atwill would be horrified if his work should ever be misused as a tool for those who would perpetuate the cycle of religious hate and revenge perpetrated by some of the various sects of Christianity as well as other religions. On the contrary, his hope is that humanity, by understanding the origins of these ancient wounds and ancient hatreds, can learn to overcome them — and that the people (regardless of their ethnic background or religious beliefs) can achieve the benefits of a more functional democracy that transcends the cycle of violence and genocide.

Although Atwill’s work is often (and rightly) seen as strikingly original, it should also be seen within the context of the theory of the Roman origins of the New Testament, which has much deeper roots. Bruno Bauer [i] suggested as early as the 1840‘s that the New Testament is characteristically Hellenistic and Roman, rather than Judean. Abelard Reuchlin[ii] and Cliff Carrington[iii] speculated that the Flavian emperors (Vespasian, Titus and Domitian) might have been specifically responsible.

Atwill’s contribution to the Flavian Origins theory was his discovery of a carefully constructed literary subtext that links the New Testament and the works of Josephus into a comic typological and theological system. Within this system, the Biblical Jesus is seen as both prophesying and foreshadowing the true arrival of the messianic “Son of Man” in the military campaign of the Emperor Titus and his destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Atwill was baffled as to why this subtext had gone un-noticed for so long, even though, as he pointed out, “the works that reveal their satire—the New Testament and the histories of Josephus—are perhaps the most scrutinized books in literature” (10).

For many readers, this will be a tough pill to swallow. The claims put forward in Caesar’s Messiah have generated a great deal of interest, but have also encountered great resistance. At a most basic level, the accusation leveled by Atwill’s critics is that the entire system he proposes is nothing but a figment of his own imagination; a product of “parallelomania”.

Furthermore, critics note, Atwill is a rather unlikely person to have made such a discovery. Although having studied Greek and Latin at a Jesuit school in Japan in his youth, he did not study any related subject in college, and his career was in the field of computer software. Only later in life did he return to his youthful preoccupation with New Testament studies.

Atwill reports that the Dead Sea Scrolls were crucial in re-calibrating his understanding of the historical milieu that gave rise to the New Testament. Many crucial aspects of the Scrolls were not unveiled to the public until 1991, at the instigation of Atwill’s friend and colleague Robert Eisenman, who suggested that a ‘Roman hand’ was at work in the New Testament. Eisenman’s work (for example, see James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code) was an important influence to Atwill’s discoveries.[iv]

So perhaps Atwill is not such an unlikely pioneer after all: with a love of the field, the freedom to think radically and creatively without fear of repercussions to his career, and with connections going to the vanguard of New Testament scholarship at this exciting juncture, he is a formidable advocate for the Flavian Origins hypothesis.

Judea and the Cycle of Rebellion against Roman Rule

During the historical period surrounding the alleged life and times of the biblical Jesus, Judea was (in reality) at the epicenter of an epic, violent conflict between the Roman Empire and the adherents of a virulently radical form of messianic Judaism. The roots of the conflict date back earlier, to the age when the zealous Maccabees (also known as Hasmoneans) rebelled against the Seleucids (the remnants of Alexander the Great’s Hellenistic empire) and achieved an uneasy independence in 164 BCE. In 63 BCE, the Romans invaded Judea, and the Maccabees became Roman clients.

A family of foreigners from Edom (in Arabia) eventually usurped the role of the Maccabees as the Romans’ clients and tax farmers in Judea. The rise of this Herodian regime began when Antipater, born as an Edomite nobleman whose family had allegedly converted to Judaism, insinuated himself into Maccabean politics while simultaneously currying favor with the Romans. Antipater was appointed Roman Procurator of Judea under Julius Caesar (47 BCE), and his son Herod became the governor of Galilee, while the Hasmoneans continued to hold the office of high priest.

The Jewish people and their Hasmonean spiritual leaders were deeply hostile to Roman and Herodian rule, and in 40 BCE they revolted under the leadership of Antigonus II Mattathias, who forged an alliance with the Parthians. However, Herod put down the revolt with the help of Roman armies. The Roman senate awarded Herod the title of “King of the Jews”, and Antigonus was sent to Mark Antony for execution in 37 BCE.

It is important to note that at this juncture, the Roman strategy of employing Hasmoneans under their control as high priests had ended in ignominious failure. From that point forward, Herod the Great and his successors appointed the high priests of Jerusalem from among their cronies. There was no way to hide the massive spiritual and nationalistic divide between the people of the Levant and the Herodians, who were hated Roman proxies. It was a problem that cried out for a solution.

Christianity before the Flavians?

The true course of events in Israel and Judaea during the ~100 years between the Roman and Herodian takeover which was completed in 37 BCE, and the end of the Jewish war in ~73 CE, has always been a highly speculative topic, which scholarship is unlikely to resolve. In fact an essential aspect of Atwill’s work is to show that the New Testament and the works of Josephus must both be regarded as Roman propaganda, and that treating these documents as factual reporting can only lead to serious analytical errors. Yet these same documents are viewed as far and away the most comprehensive and most primary sources that we have available for that entire historical epoch. Recovering the history of 1st century Judea is, therefore, a matter of judiciously paring away the layers of propaganda from Josephus and the New Testament, with the assistance of supplementary (sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory) information provided by archaeology, source criticism, and other ancient sources.

In Caesar’s Messiah, Atwill wrote: “This Imperial family, the Flavians, invented Christianity.” By this he meant that the Flavians (and their court intellectuals) created the religion in the form that we know it, and wrote the Gospels as they have come down to us. However, this does not mean that they invented the religion as an entirely new creation, like Venus emerging from the sea-foam as a fully-grown woman. On the contrary, Flavian Christianity certainly had its precedents. Robert M. Price’s review of Caesar’s Messiah complained that “There is way, way, too much else in any and all of the gospel texts that cannot be dismissed (really, neglected) as mere padding, ballast, which is all it would be if Atwill is right.” However, this was a misunderstanding of Atwill’s position. He accepts the fact that the extant Gospels were written by several individuals in different times and places. And he would certainly agree that the Gospels were written with many earlier sources in mind.

At a philosophical and inspirational level, the sources of the Flavian gospels may have included Philo, Seneca, Pythagoras, other Stoics and Cynics, Homer, Gilgamesh, all the Hellenistic mystery cults of the Mediterranean region, and the astro-theological myths of the ancients. Sorting all of this out is a Herculean task that has consumed many scholarly lifetimes, and no doubt will consume many more. However, none of this analysis can account for the specific historical circumstances and events that caused the Christian religion to take the particular form that it did. Similarly, redaction criticism can identify the common source materials that were used by the four canonical evangelists, but they cannot tell us the entire contents of those sources, much less identify their ideological motivations or biases.

The search for the ‘original sources’ of the gospels, along with the search for the ‘historical Jesus’, is often a spiritually-driven quest: that is, once the seeker is convinced that Christianity has been ‘corrupted’ (whether by Paul, or by Flavian influences, or by the Papacy, or by modernity) the goal becomes to recover the purity of the message that was originally delivered by the revered prophet. In terms of its spiritual value, however, the enthusiasm for this quest may be misplaced, as there is no guarantee that the original message is recoverable, or that the prophet had any unique wisdom to impart in the first place. My interest is more from a historical point of view, to understand the dynamics of religious development, and the interplay of elite and populist forces in this process.

In his book Did Jesus Exist, Bart Ehrman gave the following summary of scholarly opinion about the ‘historical Jesus’:

… there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea.[v]

If such a person did exist, he was certainly living within the historical milieu of that time, and interacting with the forces that were prevalent. To understand that environment, I recommend the works of Robert Eisenman, and also the highly readable summary and review of his work written by Andrew Gould, who wrote:

By careful distillation, Eisenman is able to exhume the lost voice of the defeated rebellion, which, while it did leave some traces in the New Testament, now speaks directly and forcefully to us through the Dead Sea Scrolls. …. many scholars recognize that the ideological conflict between James and Paul is the engine that drives the entire New Testament. But Eisenman is able to show that this conflict is identical to the one between Jewish nationalists and the Roman-backed Herodian state, which erupted into the conflagration of the Jewish War over exactly the same issues debated by James and Paul.[vi]

Gould’s review goes on to identify the driving issues behind this ideological conflict, which encompassed not only Judea, but also the entire Mediterranean region, wherever far-flung trading networks controlled by prosperous Jewish merchants and tradesmen of the diaspora competed with their Hellenistic counterparts. On the one side, the Zealots, Sicarii and radical Essenes of the rebellion, rooted in the nationalist tradition of the Maccabees, were concerned about circumcision; the purity of sacrifices and the presence or absence of foreign idols in the Temple; the Hellenistic elite’s practices of niece marriage and sister marriage and intercourse during menstruation, all of which the Zealots viewed as fornication; the purity of dietary practices; the plight of the poor, pitted against the predations of the rich; and the doctrine of salvation by works as well as by faith. On the other side, the Herodians and their allies sought to develop tolerant, cosmopolitan attitudes, in order to facilitate the greatest possible integration with the broader Roman and Hellenistic world.

Eisenman recognized several episodes in the New Testament that appear to be parodies of historical incidents as they were described in Josephus and other sources. From this, he concludes that the Biblical characters of James and Simon Peter are also likely to be parodies of the real leaders of the Jewish rebellion. In Caesar’s Messiah, Atwill reaches a similar conclusion, and also offers the view that another important rebel leader, and possibly a messiah figure to the rebels, was the character Eleazar.

The interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls is highly speculative because the scrolls were written as a sort of underground samizdat literature. All references to individuals were done using code words, and allegorical formulations were generally used for political commentary. However, based on a finely woven tapestry of comparisons to other sources, Eisenman argues that the Scrolls are also referring to the events leading up to the Jewish War, and that the colorful depictions of the Righteous Teacher and the Spouter of Lying are referring to James and Paul, respectively.

In some aspects, we might recognize the religion of the Jewish rebels as a sort of embryonic Christianity. The representations of the earliest Christian ‘koinonia’ community in Jerusalem in the book of Acts may very well be a parody of James’s church of rebels. Some of the wildly self-contradictory aspects of the New Testament may reflect the survival of the rebels’ literature, which was too popular and well-known at the time to be denied or suppressed, but could be incorporated into the Flavian version of the Gospels alongside newer materials promoting the Roman viewpoint.

However, it would certainly be a mistake to view the Jewish rebel coalition as a purely populist, spiritually and economically progressive movement. Josephus pointed out that they received substantial leadership and economic and political support from the royalty of ‘Adiabene’, consisting of the family of King Monobazus, Queen Helena, and their son Izates. Eisenman noticed that the realms of ‘Adiabene’ and the land of the ‘Edessenes’ seem to be overlapping, and Ralph Ellis has argued that Monobazus, Helena and Izates should be identified as the royal family of the city of Edessa, who were covertly affiliated with the Parthians. According to Ellis, this Izates (who he identifies as the historical King Manu VI) saw himself not only as a messiah to the Jews, but also as a contender for the throne of Rome. If this is the case, then the Jewish rebels were pawns in a vast dynastic struggle being played out between the Parthians and the Romans; and Izates himself was another of (possibly several) rebel leaders parodied as Jesus in the New Testament.[vii] Ellis argues that Izates was, quite simply, the ‘historical Jesus’; but I would have to disagree, based simply on Ehrman’s criterion that ‘historical Jesus’ should be defined as a Jewish man who was crucified under Pontius Pilate.

Both Ellis[viii] and another self-taught Biblical scholar, Lena Einhorn,[ix] have noticed extensive parallels between Josephus’s narrative of events occurring between the years 44 and 56 CE, and a similar series of events and circumstances in the New Testament narrative covering the years 24 to 36 CE. A central figure in Josephus’s account is the ‘Egyptian prophet’, whose story matches Biblical Jesus in many respects, except that his fate following his arrest at the Mount of Olives is not described by Josephus. Later on, according to Acts (21:38), the Apostle Paul was asked if he was the troublemaking ‘Egyptian’ who stirred up a revolt among the Zealots. Einhorn speculates that the New Testament authors told their story with a 20-year time shift, and that Jesus, Paul and ‘The Egyptian prophet’ may have all been the same individual;[x] or, I would add, perhaps ‘The Egyptian’ was indeed a rebel leader of the Zealots, and was the true (but, contrary to Ehrman, time-transposed) ‘historical Jesus’; and that after his execution, Paul the Herodian stepped into his place and tried to lead his movement in a different direction.

Aside from all this speculation about the Jewish rebel movement, its leaders, and its relation to Christianity: it’s also necessary to consider the possibility that there was an early Roman and Herodian-controlled form of Christianity which was invented well before the time of the Flavians, and which competed with the radical messianic Judaism of the rebels. This would explain the activities of ‘Paul’ in his conflicts with James, as a promoter of this early form of Christianity. As Gould wrote:

Paul, in particular, was a political/intelligence operative for the Herodian kings, not only before his famous “conversion” on the road to Damascus, but after as well.

In its most embryonic form, Paul’s religion could have been developed as an abstraction of the cult of Julius Caesar, the founding deity of the Roman imperial cult of emperor worship.

During his lifetime, Julius Caesar had aligned himself with the far left wing of the Roman political spectrum; that is, he was one of the populares, a supporter of reforms such as land redistribution, wider access to citizenship, and better pay for soldiers and the lower class in general. In this position, Caesar was at odds with the majority of right-wing optimates on the senate, who were determined to maintain the same extreme level of social stratification that prevailed at the time.

In Caesar’s sojourn in Egypt, he experienced the genuine adulation and reverence that the Egyptians felt for his paramour, Cleopatra VII of Egypt, who was not only admired for her statesmanship, but also was worshipped as a Goddess, an embodiment of Isis. Caesar was also a great admirer of Alexander the Great, who was similarly viewed as a sort of deity by the Greeks. As Pontifex Maximus, the head of the Roman priestly college, Caesar was already an honored religious leader of the Roman republic. And as a war hero and an advocate of the people’s human dignity, Caesar was fabulously popular with the general public of Rome.[xi]

In such circumstances, it seems perfectly natural that Caesar may have decided to orchestrate the process of his own deification. His image, carved in ivory, appeared among the assembly of gods at the Roman circus. A day in Caesar’s honor was added to the calendar alongside the days of Jupiter. A temple was built in his honor in Rome.[xii] Caesar was described as the savior of his nation, and was admired for his was willingness to extend forgiveness to his former enemies. He was revered as a liberator, a great giver of freedom to the Roman people. Reportedly, he was especially admired by the Jews, who regarded him as an ally in their struggle for religious freedom and self-determination.

Following Caesar’s death in 44 BC, his apotheosis proceeded apace, driven not only by Caesar’s enormous popularity amongst the rank-and-file people of Rome, but also by the industrious promotion by both of Caesar’s designated successors, his adopted son Octavian and his chief priest Mark Anthony. The Roman senate officially consecrated Caesar’s divinity in 42 BC, and thus Octavian obtained the title of Divi Filius, the Son of God, while Antony was confirmed as Flamine Divus Julius, the priest of the Divine Caesar. The memory of Caesar as a God served both of those men equally, so they both devoted the tremendous resources of the Roman state towards construction and promotion of temples of the Caesar cult, which were erected in Rome, Caesarea, Alexandria, Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, Phillipi, Thessalonica and Smyrna. These were the same locations that were later named as the earliest centers of the Christian church.

In his book Jesus was Caesar,[xiii] Francesco Carotta postulated that a key ceremony of this Divus Julius cult might have been a re-enactment of Caesar’s funeral and Mark Anthony’s dramatic memorial oration. As it has come down to us in the histories of Suetonius and Appianus, a centerpiece of the memorial service was a tropaeum, which was a pole with horizontal arms that was used to display war trophies. In this case, the tropaeum was used to display an effigy or wax simulcram of Caesar’s body cloaked in his blood-stained robe. In other words, it appeared as if Caesar was hung from a cross at his funeral.

Gary Courtney in Et Tu Judas? Then Fall Jesus also argued that the Biblical story of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion contains many illogical aspects and contradictions, which can be plausibly explained with the realization that the Gospel stories of Jesus’s trial, crucifixion and resurrection are dramatizations of the assassination of Julius Caesar, his funeral, and his apotheosis. Courtney wrote:

This religious play… may have evolved to comprise the following essential elements:

1. A great and just man who astounds his age by instituting a comprehensive policy of forgiveness.

2. On the verge of becoming the king, he is betrayed and murdered by those he had saved — the treachery epitomized by his turncoat friend Brutus.

3. When his tribulation begins, his close friend and religious deputy, sworn to protect him, flees in fear and disguises himself.

4. The murdered man’s ultimate triumph, being resurrected as a god.

5. His betrayer commits suicide.

What better foundation ‘myth’ could a religion hope for? It would be difficult to create a fiction that could lend itself more readily to a theatrical presentation…. Is it not possible that the betrayal and murder of this ancient founder of the Roman Empire, pontifex maximus and common Savior of Mankind, whose name – Caesar, Kaiser, Czar – came to be synonymous with king throughout the Western world, and the shedding of whose blood “pierced the hearts of all mankind”, influenced the development of the Christian religion? Is it merely a coincidence that the five points listed above constitute the heart and soul of the Passion of Christ?[xiv]

If the ceremonies of the hypothetical Julius Caesar cult eventually became the core of the Christians’ Easter commemorations of Jesus Christ, this could have been the result of a gradual progression. The Roman imperial cult typically focused its public adulation on the current emperor and his father, the most recently deified Caesar. However, it is also believed that the imperial cult functioned as a Hellenistic mystery religion,[xv] and my speculation is that Caesar’s funeral may have continued to be secretly re-enacted as a rite of the cult for its more advanced members, while the association of the ritual with Julius Caesar (as a particular human being) was gradually de-emphasized and forgotten. Particularly among Hellenized Jews, a realization might have gradually dawned that Caesar was the messiah that the Jews had been waiting for.

Or it is also conceivable that the Herodians made a deliberate policy decision to adopt this re-enactment of Caesar’s funeral as the core of their own new Hellenistic mystery cult, which would offer the abstracted Caesar to the Jews as the true incarnation of their Messiah. This could have begun at a very early date: Carotta has pointed out that according to tradition, “The Gospel of Mark was written in Latin in Rome 12 years after the ascension of the Lord.”[xvi] If Julius Caesar was indeed the “Lord” being referred to, this would be just 5 years after the ignominious defeat of Antigonus, last of the Maccabees; and the ‘Mark’ who was attributed with responsibility for this first draft of the Roman Gospel would have been Mark Anthony, the Roman overseer of the Judean province at that time. However, although Caesar was undeniably a historical person, Carotta’s claim that he was the ‘historical Jesus’ would obviously be rejected under Ehrman’s criteria on the grounds that he lived at the wrong time and place.

In an ongoing process of religious innovation, the Romans and Herodians may have continued to develop this hybrid of Jewish and Roman spirituality during the 1st century of the common (that is, Christian) era. As I will relate later, I believe that the Gospels and other documents of the early Roman church were most likely maintained as secrets of the inner sanctuary of the cult, which was operated like other Hellenistic mystery religions of the time; which would explain why copies of these materials have not survived, and would also how the Romans were able to evolve the story over time, while redacting earlier versions.

Stephen Huller in The Real Messiah[xvii] proposed that the ‘historical Jesus’ was the leader of a rebellion of the Samaritans during the reign of Pontius Pilate. As Josephus told the story of this event, a certain rebel leader inspired “a multitude” of armed Samaritans to gather with the goal of climbing Mt. Gerizzim to see “sacred vessels” placed there by Moses; but Pilate’s police routed the rebellion, and captured and executed the rebel leader (Josephus, Ant 18.4.85-87).

As a rebel “ordered to be slain” by Pontius Pilate in ~37 CE, this character seems to be an excellent candidate for ‘historical Jesus’ according to Ehrman’s criteria: at least, he is a Jew (although presumably a Samaritan) who lives at the right time and place, and who was a popular preacher — although Josephus does not tell us exactly where or how he was executed.

Huller goes on to argue that this Jesus was portrayed by the Herodians as a forerunner to another Messiah who would come as the political savior of the Jews. In order to fulfill that prophecy, Huller argues, the young Marcus Julius Agrippa (that is, Herod Agrippa II, then age 8) went to Alexandria in 38 CE, where he was crowned as the Messiah and King of the Jews. This coronation was said to be engineered behind the scenes by Philo, Marcus’s mother (or grandmother) Mary Salome, and the new Emperor Caligula.

The centerpiece of Huller’s evidence for his theory is an artifact called the “Throne of St. Mark.” Huller argues that this “Throne” could well date to the 1st century CE, as opposed to the dominant view that it is 5th century hagiographic relic. The throne has an inscription in Hebrew stating “Coronation of Marcus the Evangelist” and in Samaritan stating “Year 1”. It is decorated with 50 stars, which Huller argues is another indication (along with “year 1”) that the throne dates to a Samaritan jubilee year, which fell in 38 CE. On the front, the throne has an image of a ram (or lamb?) standing under a bush, which Huller interprets as an image of the ram that was sacrificed by Abraham in place of his son Isaac, after God released Abraham from the obligation to sacrifice his first-born son. Huller thinks this reflects an early Christology, in which the political Messiah on the throne (that is, Marcus Agrippa) received the benefit of the spiritual Messiah’s sacrifice as the Lamb or Ram of God; in other words, the sacrifice of the rebel leader who was executed by Pilate.

This Herodian form of Christianity would have been based on Philo’s view of the amalgamation of Jewish and Platonic philosophy, and it might very well have incorporated an abstracted form of the cult of Julius Caesar’s funeral re-enactment as well; and the ‘Gospel of Mark Anthony’ (if indeed it ever existed) evolved into the ‘Gospel of Marcus Agrippa’. Aside from the “Throne of St. Mark”, Huller offers a wide variety of tantalizingly suggestive evidence from other sources. However, sadly, the quality of his scholarship is (in my view) spotty at best, and one can only hope that his thesis will attract the attention of other scholars to either confirm or refute the hypothesis.

If indeed this primitive Herodian Christianity did exist, the Romans might well have been promoting it not only in the Levant but also throughout the Jewish Diaspora and indeed throughout the entire Hellenized portion of the planet. And if this is the case, there might well have been an “Apostle Paul” who was evangelizing around the Mediterranean and writing epistles to his churches, and if so, this “Paul” with his Roman and Herodian allegiances would have been seen by rebellious Messianic Jews in Jerusalem as a “Spouter of Lies”, just as Eisenman says.

One of the most predominant criticisms of Caesar’s Messiah is the evidence (however meager or controversial it might be) that Christianity existed much earlier than the time of Vespasian. And if any or all of this speculation is correct, then of course (literally speaking) the Flavians didn’t exactly invent Christianity. But they certainly did re-invent it, while obliterating any conclusive evidence that there had been anything earlier.

The fact is that we don’t have any of the source documents (such as “Q” or “proto-Luke” or the “Hebrew Gospel”) that are postulated by redaction criticism; nor do we have the hypothetical original autographs of the (Julian) Gospel of Mark Anthony, nor the (Herodian) Gospel of Marcus Agrippa, nor the pre-Flavian Pauline epistles. If Atwill’s hypothesis is correct, it certainly follows that any and all earlier sources have been heavily redacted if not completely re-written by the Flavians, and this fact needs to be the basis of any further analysis. While there may be some truth in what the redaction critics and the Julian Origins theorists and Huller are saying, Atwill is simply not interested in participating in this speculation.

The Flavians and the Jewish Rebellion of 66 CE

Regardless of whatever stratagems the Romans and Herodians might have devised during a hundred years of uneasy peace, they assuredly did not succeed in healing the deep wounds stemming from the Roman conquest. A movement organized by Jewish sects known as the Zealots and Sicarii was continually fomenting revolution, and in 66 CE the Jews rose up and drove the Romans and Herodians out of the country. Nero sent his general Vespasian, along with Vespasian’s son Titus, to recover the lost territory.

Vespasian’s family was intimately connected with the Herodians as well as another powerful Jewish family, the Alexanders of Egypt. When Nero was killed in suspicious circumstances, the support of the Alexanders and Herodians was crucial to Vespasian’s effort to gain the throne. This group of families obviously had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to create a new religion for Judea, and indeed for the entire world. Atwill continues:

…it is odd that so many members of the Flavian family were recorded as having been among Christianity’s first members. Why was a Judaic cult that advocated meekness and poverty so attractive to a family that practiced neither? The tradition connecting early Christianity and the Flavian family is based on solid evidence but has received little comment from scholars (38).

The rogue’s gallery of possible Flavian Christians cited in Caesar’s Messiah includes Titus’s mistress Bernice (possibly the same person as St. Veronica), Titus Flavius Sabinus (consul in 82 CE, Vespasian’s nephew), Sabinus’s brother the theologian Titus Flavius Clemens, Sabinus’s wife Flavia Domitilla, and the early Pope known as Clement. The patron Saint of France, St. Petronilla, was another member of what the Catholic Church refers to as the ‘Christian Flavii’. Legend had it that Petronilla was the daughter of St. Peter, but sixteenth-century notices show that she was related to the Flavius Clemens mentioned above, whose great-grandfather was Titus Flavius Petronius.[xviii] The New Testament also records that the Flavians hosted leaders of the early church in their court. While in some cases the sources of this information are late and hagiographic, in other cases multiple and/or possibly primary sources attest to early Flavian involvement in Christianity. These circumstances are extraordinarily difficult to explain if the origins of Christianity are as they are usually depicted: a movement built of humble fishermen, merchants and slaves from Judaea. But, as Atwill noted:

A Roman origin would also explain why so many members of a Roman imperial family, the Flavians, were recorded as being among the first Christians. The Flavians would have been among the first Christians because, having invented the religion, they were, in fact, the first Christians (33).

The great historian of that era, Josephus, soon became part of the Flavian milieu. As the story goes: initially a commander of the rebel forces in the Jewish War, Josephus (who claims to have been born as Josephus bar Matthias, a good Hasmonean name) was captured and delivered to the Romans. Given an audience with Vespasian, the historian predicted that the famous Star Prophecy of Isaiah would be fulfilled with Vespasian’s rise to the throne of the Roman Empire. When the prophecy was fulfilled, the grateful Vespasian adopted ‘Flavius’ Josephus into the royal family, and granted him the patronage necessary to write his extensive works. Therefore, Josephus’s history of the Jewish War, which ended in a tremendous bloodbath and the defeat of the Jewish rebellion in 73 CE, must be read with the understanding that it is a perfect example of the proverb “history is written by the winners.”

The Flavian Origins Theory is Straight-Talking Common Sense.

History tells us that Flavius Constantine the Great, inspired by a vision of a flaming cross of light at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 CE, shifted the vast patronage of the Roman government and its tax revenues to Christianity. The Christian Church was endowed with lands and property, and the entire city of Constantinople was built from the ground up as a Christian city. The Council of Nicea was held to unify the tenets of the religion under Constantine’s direction, and all the diverse sectarian forms of Christianity (aside from Roman Catholicism) became official heresies. Historians debate whether Constantine was truly a descendant of the Flavian dynasty of Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, or whether his genealogy was a fabrication, in which case his family name may have been chosen in homage to the Flavians and their creation of Christianity.

A brief pagan counter-revolution was attempted under Julian the Apostate (who reigned from 361-363 CE), but by 380 CE, the triumvirs Gratian, Valentinian II and Theodosius felt confident enough to issue the Edict of Thessalonica, which pronounced that all pagans and heretics in the entire Roman Empire “will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall decide to inflict.”[xix]

However, as the saying goes, “Rome was not built in a day.” Constantine’s experience in replacing the existing religions across the Roman Empire should be compared and contrasted with Akhenaten’s experience in his attempt to uproot the old religion of Egypt. Within a single generation, Akhenaten’s Atenite experiment was over, the old Gods and the old priesthood restored, and Akhenaten was all but erased from history (that is, unless he somehow lived on as a type of Moses in Canaan.) Religious beliefs are deeply and tenaciously held, and tend to be passed from generation to generation, so there is tremendous inertia and resistance to change. My view is that Constantine’s success must have been a result of many generations of sustained effort.

Long before Constantine’s time, Christianity (that is, Roman Catholicism) had manifested itself in a style that was clearly destined for Imperial greatness. As early as the epistle of Clement (~95 CE) the Church was already organized in a hierarchical, quasi-military fashion, taking orders from the Bishop of Rome, with a goal of evangelizing the world. Furthermore, as Atwill observed:

When one looks at the form of early Christianity, one sees not Judea, but Rome. The church’s structures of authority, its sacraments, its college of bishops, the title of the head of the religion – the supreme pontiff – were all based on Roman, not Judaic, traditions. Somehow, Judea left little trace on the form of a religion that purportedly originated inside of it (29).

Robert M. Price painted a vivid portrait of the absurdity of the conventional view of Christian origins:

Picture a religious ethic of conspicuous compromise with the occupying authorities, a gospel that tells its believers not to resist any who confiscate their property, but to pay Roman taxes and to carry a legionary’s field pack twice the distance stipulated by Roman law. Imagine a story that blames not just Jews but implicitly nationalistic, messianic Jews for the destruction of their temple. A story that has the messiah predict that the kingdom will be taken from Jews and given to a more worthy nation. Keep in mind how the preacher of this sect befriends Jews who collaborate with Rome and eulogizes a Roman centurion for having faith unparalleled among Jews. He is declared innocent by Roman authorities but nonetheless is done in by Jewish rulers. Then think of how the predictions of the fall of Jerusalem a single generation later correspond so closely to Josephus’ account of the events, and furthermore, how Josephus even mentions Jesus as a righteous man and even as the messiah of prophetic prediction (though he himself had proclaimed Vespasian the proper object of such prophecy). When someone suggests that Christianity may have been a “safe,” denatured, Roman-domesticated, messianic Methadone to replace the real and dangerous messianic heroin of the Zealots, and that Josephus had something to do with it, it does not sound unreasonable on the face of it.

Price, unfortunately, went on to reject the implications of his own analysis, adding:

What about the Roman-tilting anti-Judaism (maybe anti-Semitism) of the gospels? Again, the old explanations are quite natural and adequate: we are reading the documents of Gentile Christianity which viewed itself as superseding Judaism and Jewish Christianity. Why do their authors seem to kiss the Roman posterior? For apologetical reasons, to avoid persecution. Brandon, Eisler, and others saw that long ago.[xx]

Aside from begging the question of how and why these “Gentiles” would adopt a radical Jewish Messianic Christianity only to ultimately “supersede” it, or how any “Christian” sect that would kiss “the Roman posterior” could be considered anything other than a raw instrument of Roman government power: Price’s argument here is also based on a failure to understand the nature and extent of the specific literary evidence for Flavian complicity, which I will explain below.

But what about the martyrs?

Doubters will scoff that the Romans couldn’t have created and nurtured Christianity while they were simultaneously doing their best to stamp it out. A more extensive response to this question will be forthcoming, but meanwhile I would like to make the following observations:

1. Up until Constantine’s edicts, all forms of Christianity were equally forbidden from a Roman legalistic perspective. However, in addition to the Roman Catholic form, there were many other nominally Christian sects, including Gnostic sects, as well as (quite possibly) genuinely Messianic Jewish sects. In many martyrdom narratives, it can be difficult or impossible to tell whether the victim was an orthodox Roman Catholic, or a follower of some more zealous sect.

2. Modern scholars have found that the scale of martyrdom has often been overestimated. For a discussion, see Candida Moss’s The Myth of Persecution.[xxi]

3. Many of the ‘Christian’ martyrs were Jewish zealots. For example, Atwill shows in Caesar’s Messiah that the martyrdom of Simon ‘predicted’ by Jesus in John 21 actually foresaw the execution of the zealot leader Simon in 73 CE. Rome had, in effect, used its martyrdom of the zealots as part of its pseudo-history of Roman Christianity.

Literary imitation, typology, and enigma

Regardless of any reader’s intuition about the likelihood of a Roman conspiracy to invent Christianity, Caesar’s Messiah is fundamentally evidence-based and grounded in literary analysis. The basic methodology is the assessment of literary imitation; that is, borrowing or mimesis. By borrowing literary elements from a predecessor, an author betrays his awareness of the precedent material, as well as revealing his viewpoint or analysis of it.

Literary imitation has been a common practice in all ages, and was highly revered among the authors of the Old Testament, who were especially fond of chiastic forms. Chiasm involves a series of literary elements that are placed in order and then referred to in reverse order, unwinding the chiasm: for example, ABCCBA. These structures can be brief, or very extensive: almost the entire Torah from the middle of Exodus to the end of Leviticus is said to be a giant chiasm. New Testament scholars discovered that the Gospel characters and events are often foreshadowed in the Old Testament, in a relationship in which the Old Testament model is called the ‘Type’ and the New Testament embodiment is called the ‘Antetype’. The theological study of ‘Types’ and ‘Antetypes’ is called Typology, and theological practitioners see New Testament events as evidence of Divine intervention in history. Modern secular literary critics, of course, see it as proof only that the New Testament authors studied the Old Testament and invoked its authority and wisdom in their writings.

In Caesar’s Messiah, Atwill focused on a particular variety of typology that involves a series of parallels that are dense, sequential, distinctive, and interpretable.[xxii] When these criteria are met in abundance, they can be considered as sure evidence of literary dependency. ‘Density’ relates to the number of parallels that occur within a brief amount of text; ‘sequence’ relates to the extent that the parallel references occur in the same order; ‘distinctiveness’ relates to the degree that the parallels must relate to unusual and infrequent words, names or concepts; and ‘interpretability’ relates to the extent that we can understand the reasoning behind the choice to use a particular literary reference; the ways in which the reference has been transformed or slavishly copied, as the case may be; and the point that the author is trying to make.

The New Testament makes abundant use of dense, sequential, distinctive and interpretable mimesis of the Old Testament. A good example is Matthew’s story of Jesus’s empty tomb, which draws from the tale of Daniel in the lion’s den.[xxiii] The parallels are highlighted in bold typeface:

Daniel 6:17-28

Then a stone was brought and laid on the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it… Then the king arose very early in the morning and went in haste to the den of lions. And when he came to the den, he cried out … saying to Daniel, “Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions? Then Daniel said to the king, “O king, live forever! My God sent His angel and shut the lions’ mouths, so that they have not hurt me….”… And the king gave the command, and they brought those men who had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions … and the lions overpowered them, and broke all their bones in pieces … Then King Darius wrote: To all peoples, nations, and languages … I make a decree that in every dominion of my kingdom men must tremble and fear before the God of Daniel. For He is the living God… His dominion shall endure to the end…. And He works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth…

Matthew 27:59-28:20

When Joseph had taken the body… he rolled a large stone against the door of the tomb… [Pilate’s guards] went and made the tomb secure, sealing the stone and setting the guard. Now after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone … And the guards … became like dead men. But the angel answered and said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for He is risen… Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee… And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations… and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Parallels include the stone; the seal; the time (early in the morning, or at dawn); the angel sent from God; the guards (accusers) “like dead men” (or, killed); Daniel’s wish for the king to live forever, which foreshadows “Jesus is risen”; and the benediction to all nations in heaven and earth, under God’s dominion (authority) to the end of the age. All these specific parallels occur in two short, dense passages; generally (but not exactly) in sequence; and of course the message is that Daniel is a ‘Type’, that is, a prefiguration of Jesus who is the ‘Antetype’.

Similarly, the Old Testament Joseph (Genesis 45-50) is a type of the New Testament Joseph, and Moses (Exodus 1-32) is a type of Jesus (Matthew 2:13-4:10). As Atwill explains:

Joseph is described as bringing Jesus, who represents the “new Israel,” down to Egypt. … a previous Joseph brought the “old Israel” down to Egypt. … The New Testament Joseph is described, like his counterpart in the Hebrew Bible, as a dreamer of dreams and as having encounters with a star and wise men. Both stories regarding the journey of a Joseph to Egypt are immediately followed by a description of a massacre of innocents. … each massacre of the innocents’ story depicts young children being slaughtered by a fearful tyrant, but the future savior of Israel being saved. The authors of the New Testament then continue mirroring Exodus by having an angel tell Joseph, “They are dead which sought the young child’s life” (Matt. 2:20). This statement is a clear parallel to the statement made to Moses, the first savior of Israel, in Exodus 4:19: “All the men are dead which sought thy life.” The parallels then continue with Jesus receiving a baptism (Matt. 3:13), which mirrors the baptism of the Israelites (passing through water) described in Exodus 14. Next, Jesus spends 40 days in the desert, which parallels the 40 years the Israelites spend in the wilderness. Both sojourns in the desert involve three sets of temptations (16-17).

The first of these temptations involves bread; the second, tempting God; the third, worshiping and serving only God.

This typological mapping is widely acknowledged by scholars, even though the Old Testament half of the typology sprawls across acres and acres of Old Testament territory, and thus the entire argument could easily be criticized on the basis of Multiple Comparisons Fallacy (that is, each New Testament phrase is compared to many passages of the Old Testament, and thus you would expect a certain number of parallelisms to arise purely by random processes.) In other words, this example fails MacDonald’s density criterion. In this case, we certainly agree with the scholarly consensus that each individual parallel is sufficiently powerful to overcome the Multiple Comparisons bias inherent in this typological example as a whole.

It is important to notice that the differences between the ‘type’ and the ‘antetype’ passages, cannot defeat the proof of literary dependence. On the contrary, it is the differences that allow the later author to convey his own unique message. This point may be illustrated graphically with the three images of the Mona Lisa above.[xxiv] We know that the two images to the right are both inspired by the Mona Lisa (at the left) because of the shared theme and also because of the many shared details, even though the differences are also easy to spot, and each image has its own message to convey. Atwill’s position is that common sense is a good guide in determining whether literary mimesis is involved in linking two passages in literature, just as it’s a good guide in imagery.

Also, note that the use of literary mimesis does not (in itself) prove that the incident being described is fictional: a writer might easily decide to begin with a real but relatively mundane historical event, and dress it up with literary spices and delicacies. In our modern world, we would frown on a journalist or news reporter who was caught indulging in this sort of thing. However, no such code of ethics was even conceived of in ancient times; so the line between fact and fiction is not so easy to discern in ancient literature.

Sense of Humor Required

Another aspect of Atwill’s view of Josephus and the Gospels is that they both represent a highly developed, wicked sense of humor. For most of us, who are trained in one way or another to respect the Christian religion as a source of at least symbolic or allegorical spiritual wisdom, this view of the Gospels can be difficult to accept. Similarly, there is a natural tendency to respect Josephus as one would respect any other historian, and to expect a journalistic perspective from him.

The problem is compounded because one of the essential aspects of humor is its trust and respect for the audience in their ability to grasp the humorist’s perspective. That is, the comedian does not explain or expound upon the meaning of his joke — he just tells the joke, and then the audience laughs, which proves that they “got it.” The magic is broken if the humorist needs to “spell it out” for the audience.

The problem with Josephan and Gospel humor is that, up until Atwill, the audience (for the most part) hasn’t been laughing, because the ability to appreciate these subtle jokes has largely been lost. First of all, modern readers don’t have the historical background, nor do they have the same command of the classical literature such as Homer and the Old Testament that was possessed by the well-educated elite of the ancients. Many jokes are based on a detailed knowledge of their context.

Another essential aspect of humor is that it is always at someone’s expense; that is, the humorist is “making fun of” his target. Thus, I argue that humor can be a crucial clue in determining the directionality of literary dependence: humorous literature must always be written as a response to a prior source or event. That is, Sarah Palin’s real-life political adventures came first, and Tina Fay’s Saturday Night Live skits came afterwards, presumably to Palin’s chagrin. Again, it’s necessary to understand the historical context in order to see the arrow of time’s ever-forward progression.

In the Flavian comic system, the attack on the targeted Jews is vicious, which presents another problem for modern readers. The era of the Flavians was an era when perhaps the majority of people were held as slaves, treated little better than cattle; an era when death in combat was “up close and personal”; and an era when gladiatorial blood and gore was considered entertainment. It was, overall, an age of great cruelty. The modern zeitgeist has changed: even if the material condition of billions of people is really little better, those of us in positions of some comfort are at least more circumspect about taking pleasure at their plight. Thus, the Flavian jokes tend to fall flat on modern ears because we feel that a more appropriate response would be “ugh” or “ick”, rather than hearty laughter.

In spite of all these problems, my own experience in reading Caesar’s Messiah is that the book is disturbingly amusing, because the Romans were ingenious humorists in their own way, and there is an emotional rush in suddenly seeing the hidden joke. I hope that other readers will have the same experience.

The other type of literary reference studied by Atwill is the enigma. As explained in the online Jewish Encyclopedia article on Philo Judaeus,[xxv] Philo taught that allegory or enigma is generally signaled by devices such as:

the doubling of a phrase…

an apparently superfluous expressing in the text…

the repetition of statements previously made….

a play upon words…

any peculiarity in a phrase…

noteworthy omissions…

striking statements…

[or] numerical symbolism.

In Josephus, enigmas are often signaled by the insertion of an obvious fable or fantasy within the flow of the historical narrative. Again, humor comes into play, as discovering the solution to an enigma often brings a smile, or perhaps a grimace.

Enigmas may be taken as a license to go searching across all preceding ancient literature, to find relevant information and clues that might explain the meaning of the enigma in its context. Readers who take issue with Atwill’s solutions are, of course, invited to come up with their own, or search the literature for other solutions that have been offered in the past. The criteria for a good solution is that it fits all the information provided in the enigma (not just some of it) and that it makes a point consistent with the author’s overtly expressed intentions.

The Gospels’ dependency on Josephus

The dependencies of the Gospels on Josephus’s works are well known. While devout Christians might maintain that the striking parallels are a result of Jesus’s supernatural ability to foresee the future, secular scholars agree that the Gospel authors drew several passages directly from Josephus. The parallels are detailed, specific, extensive, sequential, highly interpretable, and cannot be traced to any earlier common source. Therefore, I am satisfied that this dependency exists in the strongest possible form: the Gospel authors must have had access to a copy of Josephus’s work and they intentionally chose to make use of it.

Atwill has gone beyond other scholars by discovering that the extent of subtle references to Josephus in the New Testament is much greater than has ever been recognized before. All of these parallels, both the well-known overt ones as well as the newly discovered ones, point to the interpretation that the biblical Jesus foretells that his second coming as the Messiah will occur in 70 CE when the Son of Man comes to destroy the Temple in fulfillment of the prophecies of Daniel. In parallel passages in Josephus, we learn that these prophecies (from both Jesus and Daniel) were historically fulfilled in the person of Titus playing the role of the Son of Man, with his conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple.

Of course this is not the Messianic outcome that the Jews expected — not only was Titus a Roman rather than a Jew, but he slaughtered the righteous Zealots and Sicarii and ordinary Jews by the hundreds of thousands, rather than concentrating his fury on the Romans and their Herodian collaborators. But the biblical Jesus’s prophecies were completely consistent with Josephus’s viewpoint: if Vespasian were divine, then his son Titus would obviously share in that divine nature.

Also, the spiritual campaign of Jesus Christ as depicted in the book of Luke foreshadows the military campaign of Titus in Judea, in a sequential series of parallels that Atwill calls “the Flavian Signature”. This creates a Roman parody of a “typological mapping” between Jesus Christ and Titus Flavius, indicating that the Gospel authors must have wanted the sophisticated reader to understand that Titus Flavius, like Jesus Christ, is to be viewed as the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies of Hebrew scripture.

When the biblical Jesus is seen in this context as a typologically camouflaged Titus Flavius, suddenly a grimly humorous aspect of the narrative emerges. The reader realizes that the Gospels are filled with witty double entendres and punning satire, generally at the expense of the Jewish Zealots as well as Christian gentiles who take the Gospels at face value.

Josephus’s knowledge of Christianity: the Decius Mundus puzzle

While many scholars acknowledge that the Gospel authors were aware of Josephus, the topic of whether Josephus knew anything about Jesus Christ or Christianity is far more controversial, and has been an endless topic of debate.

What is widely acknowledged is that two brief, famous passages in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews specifically mention the biblical Jesus. In one of these, known as the “Testimonium Flavianum” (18, 3, 63-64), Josephus states that one Jesus (the Christ) was crucified under Pontius Pilate, but appeared alive “to those that loved him” after an interval of three days. This seems to be a clear enough statement of the basic tenets of the Christian faith, but the endless debate goes on over whether Josephus really said all these things. or whether the passage (or some part of it) was a late interpolation by pious scribes of the early Christian era.

In the other passage, Josephus briefly mentions “…the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James…” (20, 9, 200). Again, this seems to indicate that Josephus was well aware of the existence of Jesus Christ, although there is some debate about what Josephus meant by “Christ” or whether those few words might have been a late interpolation.

The vexing aspect of this, which is (or should be) so confounding to faithful believers, is that Josephus could have known this much about Christ and Christianity, and yet have said so little more about it. During the period between 30 AD and 70 AD, the years at the heart of Josephus’s historical tale — were Christ’s disciples not hard at work in Judea, growing their Church, doing great miracles, and generally promulgating their proud and excitingly novel religious faith? How could Josephus have been aware of this, and yet not dedicated at least a few chapters to giving his views of this ‘good news’? Josephus was certainly never at a loss for words, in describing any other popular Jewish sect of the time.

Atwill argues that Josephus did indeed have an intimate knowledge of Christian narratives and theology, and that he referred to it often. However, instead of speaking plainly, Josephus wrote vicious satires of Christianity; and these satires were often placed within typological parallels to passages in the New Testament. Or in the case of the Testimonium Flavianum, Atwill argues that it can be recognized as genuine in its entirety, because it can be seen as part of a literary triptych, sandwiched alongside two enigmatic satires built on New Testament themes. Briefly stated: in the central satire, a rogue named Decius Mundus pretends to be the god Anubis, in order to trick a dignified lady named Paulina into having sex with her. The name ‘Decius Mundus’ is a pun on Decius Mus, the famous Roman war hero who gave himself as a sacrifice in battle to guarantee the Roman victory in war. ‘Mundus’ means ‘World’, so Decius Mundus is a ‘Sacrifice for the World’. Paulina and her husband, Saturninus, laughably agree that making love to a God would be no sin against Paulina’s chastity. So, Paulina and Mundus enjoy a night together, but then Mundus returns on the third day to boast that he is no God, much to Paulina’s chagrin. In the other pedimental satire, a woman named Fulvia (whose husband’s name, again, is Saturninus) is persuaded by three men to send her wealth to the Jewish temple; but in reality, the three men spend the money “for their own uses.” In the first satire, Mundus is an ‘antetype’ of Jesus; in the second, the three men may represent the Roman Trinity. The two stories are, of course, typologically coupled to each other as well, as they both tell essentially the same tale of a dignified lady with a husband named Saturninus who is tricked by a religious swindle. The choice to use the name ‘Paulina’ in the story may be a hint that the Romans viewed the original St. Paul, the author of the epistles, as a feminized victim of the swindle as well.

Strangely enough, the fact that the Testimonium Flavianum tryptich was a satire of Christianity was apparently understood as early as the 4th century by the Christian author pseudo-Hegesippus, whose Latin paraphrase of Josephus elaborated on the satire by having Paulina and Mundus discuss the possibility of a pregnancy, thus making her into a parody of the Virgin Mary. This was pointed out by Albert A. Bell in his 1976 paper “Josephus the Satirist?”,[xxvi] who mentioned that a 1927 paper by C. Pharr had also fingered the Josephus passage about Paulina and Mundus as a parody of the Annunciation. Bell, however, withheld his own judgment on the matter, stating:

[The view that Josephus was a satirist] has the decided disadvantage of being quite subjective. We must assume, on the basis of our own reactions, that the story of Paulina and Mundus appeared to Josephus as a parody of sorts of the Annunciation story and that he could depend on his readers to draw the same parallel. Lacking even a hint of literary evidence to support it, we are justifiably hesitant to accept this suggestion.

I can only hope that Bell was being ironic himself with this brief, dry spoof of hidebound academic caution and humorlessness — especially after having titled his paper with the bold assertion of Josephus’s comedic aspect, hedged only with a question mark. However, I note with some discouragement that Bell’s argument disappeared with hardly a ripple (three obscure mentions in the English language since 1976, in the Google Scholar citation index); this in spite of its obvious and even decisive relevance to the endless academic debate about the Testimonium Flavianum.

The problem of plausible deniability, and the “Smoking Gun Fallacy”

In Caesar’s Messiah, Atwill argues that the Flavians were proud that they invented Christianity, and that they wanted to be remembered by posterity for their accomplishment. But on the other hand, he often mentions that a particularly complex and obscure typological device was invented because a simpler means of expression would have made Flavian complicity “too obvious”. Is this a contradiction?

At first glance, this seems to be a serious problem with the Flavian Origins thesis. If, as Atwill claims, the Flavians created Christianity primarily for propaganda purposes, then they knew that their work needed to compete with all the other religious sects that were vying for the allegiance of Jews and Gentiles alike, anywhere in the Empire. For that reason, it was obviously essential that the texts be as appealing and as convincing as possible. It doesn’t make sense that the authors would have included anything (such as a complex, self-incriminating typological framework with satirical overtones) that could divert from that goal.

In his review of Caesar’s Messiah, Robert M. Price wrote: “only the most obtuse reader, the most tin-eared, can possibly fail to appreciate the sublime quality of so much of the New Testament”, as if Atwill’s theory does not recognize this; on the contrary, the Flavian Origins theory requires that the New Testament would be perceived as having just such a sublime quality, in order for it to succeed in its evangelical goals. Price continued: “As to Jesus’ teachings, Atwill declares that ‘those who see spiritual meaning in his words are being played for a fool’. Such a statement is only a damning self-condemnation, revealing the author’s own absolute inability to appreciate what he is reading.” This, again, is a mis-reading of Atwill’s point. He is not saying that the surface-level spiritual meaning is missing from the text, but rather that it is being used as a sugar coating on a Trojan Horse full of Roman ideological foot-soldiers. I wonder if Price would deny that a multitude of impoverished and enslaved Christians have indeed been played for fools by their masters, the elite.

Furthermore, the Flavian intellectuals also needed to write material that would seem credible within the cultural milieu of the ancient Mediterranean region. That means they needed to write material that was consistent with the pre-existing source materials including both Zealot and Herodian documents, and consistent with the general level of historical understanding among the general public.

However, this latter constraint is not as tight as it would be in a modern environment. At the time that the Gospels were written, the period of its historical setting (that is, the time of Tiberius and Pontius Pilate) was receding into the distant past, and many readers would have only a very general (and highly colored) understanding of the period. Furthermore, literacy was fairly rare at the time, and most of the intended audience of the Gospels would be hearing about them second-hand from the clergy. Of course there was no printing press, so copies of any historical literature were rare and hard to come by. Thus, the Gospel authors could feel that they could indeed take some liberties with historical truth, without much risk of being caught by the general public.

Nevertheless, there certainly were some intellectuals who would have had a deep understanding of the historical literature, including many documents that have not survived to the present time. For those readers, the Gospels would have conveyed a powerful message that the Flavians were brazen enough to blatantly falsify and invert the factual record, in service of their own propaganda objectives.

In light of the mission-critical “Prime Directive” to avoid alerting ‘hoi polloi’ about the nature of this strange, alien Imperial religious conspiracy, it seems undeniable that the operational security of the project would have been enhanced if the Flavians had chosen to avoid inserting typological traces of their crime directly into the New Testament texts and the works of Josephus. We need an explanation of why they chose to do so, in spite of the fact that they might easily have been inconvenienced at times by the need to explain themselves to careful and suspicious readers, or even threatened with failure of the project if the truth became too widely known.

Contrary to Atwill’s suggestions in Caesar’s Messiah, I do not believe they ever intended for the crime to be discovered by the slaves and commoners (“hoi polloi”) who made up the vast majority of Christian believers. However, considering the level of sophistication of the vast majority of people at the time, the Roman intellectuals simply weren’t concerned that the public would recognize the fraud. All they needed to do, was avoid leaving any “smoking guns” that would overcome the level of plausible deniability in the Gospel texts, and make the deception obvious to even the most obtuse reader. Within that limitation, they apparently considered themselves free to consider a variety of objectives with their writing. (In fact, as a general rule, I believe that evidence of elite criminality and conspiracy is strewn about today by the same general standard: obvious to the sophisticated reader, but never so obvious as to represent a “smoking gun” that might alarm the general public.)

Based on the extensive monuments that the Caesars of the Imperial cult constructed for themselves, their vanity may have been so great that we can hardly imagine it today. While they may not have cared what the ‘hoi polloi’ knew, they might have been especially concerned to leave a message that future royals and their intellectuals would understand and view with respect and, presumably, admiration.

My view is that the typology may have also been used as a teaching tool in the Imperial secret service, which may have been embedded within the Roman Imperial cult. The early Roman Catholic (Christian) church may also have been operated at that time as a mystery cult.[xxvii] Perhaps the temples dedicated to the worship of Jesus and/or the current Emperor were run like modern Masonic lodges, with the higher levels of membership (and the great secrets) reserved to loyal and long-term functionaries of the Imperial service, and that these higher levels were accompanied with appropriate accolades, prestige and financial rewards. And I’m imagining that, just as in the modern corporate and political system, exhibiting a certain level of sociopathy couldn’t have done any harm to a young man’s prospects. If this was the case, then Josephus was being ironical when wrote in his book Against Apion: “There have been indeed some bad men who have attempted to calumniate my history, and took it to be a kind of scholastic performance for the exercise of young men” (1, 53).

If this theory that the Gospels were primarily used as secret documents of the Roman imperial cult and the (closely related) embryonic Roman Catholic church, it would also help to explain the mystery of the Gospels’ late appearance in the overt historical record. We argue that the Gospels must have been written under the Flavians, not only because they contain so much material that is pertinent to their agenda, but also because there is little if anything in the Gospels that would indicate any knowledge of events that transpired after the death of Domitian (96 CE). However, the first church father to write openly of the existence of four gospels was Irenaeus, in approximately 180 CE.[xxviii] Because of this, there have been claims that the Gospels were first written at this time, falsifying Atwill’s theory.[xxix]

But, Irenaeus clearly stated his own viewpoint that all four of the canonical gospels existed from the earliest days of Christianity, and possessed full apostolic authority:

Matthew… issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia (Against Heresies, III, 1, 1).

Those who claim that Irenaeus invented the four Gospels, or that they were first written during his time, have not explained how he could foist such a fiction on other members of the Catholic Church at such a late date, and hope to retain any credibility. It seems much more likely that there is some grain of truth in his claim that they had existed much earlier, and that his true purpose in writing about the Roman Gospels was to assert their claims of superiority over the many apocryphal “gospels” that were proliferating at the time. Some of these apocryphal gospels might have been earlier Roman drafts that had been superseded, and others might have been similar to modern “fan fiction”. However, all of them needed to be stamped out, as the Roman hierarchy had determined that the time had come to bring Christianity into a single large tent. As Irenaeus explained:

It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the “pillar and ground” of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh (III, 11, 8).

Such arguments aside, the status of the four Gospels before Irenaeus remains a matter for speculation. However, considering the rapid spread of Christianity during the 1^st and 2^nd centuries,[xxx] the lack of any such documentary evidence is in itself quite surprising. From a Bayesian perspective, this increases the likelihood of the hypothesis that the Gospels were indeed maintained as secret documents of the early Roman Catholic Church.

Without further ado, let’s look at this lesson plan that might have been taught at the thirty-second degree of the Imperial cult. The lessons are presented in the order that they appear in the Gospel of Luke.

Fishing for men

The parallels are highlighted in bold typeface.

Luke 3:21

When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. ….And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’ Now Jesus … began his ministry. … “ (Luke 5) “ … Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret,… all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken … Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.’ So they … followed him.” …

Matt. 11:21

Jesus prophesied “Woe to you, Chorazain” .

Josephus (Wars 3.10)

“Vespasian pitched his camp… [at] the Lake of Gennesareth. … Jesu and his party … made a sally upon them. Vespasian… thereupon sent his son… to disperse them.” [Titus:] “For you know very well that I shall go into the danger first, and make the first attack upon the enemy. Do not you therefore desert me, but persuade yourselves that God will be assisting to my onset. … And now Titus made his own horse march first against the enemy, as did the others with a great noise after him… Jesus fled over the country, while others of them ran down to the lake … and some were slain as they were getting up into the ships.” The city was taken, but some rebels fled in ships. Vespasian went to the lake. [A long digression follows, describing the lake; the name Gennesareth is repeated 3x.] “Some have thought it to be a vein of the Nile, because it produces the Coracin fish as well as that lake does which is near to Alexandria.” [Vespasian’s vessels destroyed the rebels’ ships, leaving the rebels] “drowning at sea”, [to be] “killed by darts,” [or] “the Romans cut off either their heads or their hands.”

As a typological sequential parallel, this is only moderately impressive. Critics will note that every military campaign has its onset; and the warrior’s call for his troops to have courage, and his bravely leading them into battle, must be a commonplace across hundreds of ancient manuscripts. The somewhat distinctive shared elements between the New Testament and Josephus passages are: a son (of God, no less) sent into battle; the location (Genessereth); and the involvement of a character named Jesus (which was, however, apparently a very common Judean name at the time, judging from the sheer number of possibly distinct Jesus characters mentioned in Josephus’s text.)

However, if we recognize that the Josephus passage contains an enigma, the situation becomes more interesting. He says: “Some have thought it [the lake of Genessereth] to be a vein of the Nile, because it produces the Coracin fish as well as that lake does which is near to Alexandria.” It’s obviously ridiculous that anyone would think that the Sea of Galilee (Genessereth) is a vein of the Nile: the ancients for millennia before Josephus knew their geography better than that. And, there is no lake anywhere near Alexandria: it’s in the Nile delta, where any body of water would be more akin to a swamp. Such absurdities should surely be a clue that Josephus’s warped sense of humor is coming into play.

The answer to the riddle is that the Jews are like fish, and that Hellenized Jews are found in great numbers in Alexandria, just as they are in the area near the Sea of Galilee. The “Coracin Fish” seems to be a pun on the name of the town “Chorazain”, which Jesus curses in the passage from Matthew. In Josephus’s narrative, we find that Titus is slaughtering these “fish” by the thousands. To make the point clear, Josephus ends the story with his all too graphic description of the Romans killing men with darts, drowning them, or cutting their limbs off, in their rout of the Jewish rebels at sea.

This warrior’s metaphor of “fishing for men” is a well-known literary trope; see for example:

…the mighty Laestrygonians came thronging from all sides…. at once there rose throughout the ships a dreadful din, alike from men that were dying and from ships that were being crushed. And spearing them like fishes they bore them home, a loathly meal. (Odyssey 10:119-124; also see Odyssey 12:245-255, 22:381-389.)

Ancient readers of the New Testament, who learned their Homer in grammar school, might have been pleased to find that the Gospel authors appear to have inverted and ennobled this barbaric trope. However, in the final analysis, the joke is on the Christians, since Josephus’s humorous point is that the “Coracin fish” in the lake are the Jewish rebels that are being “fished” by the Romans.

The New Testament passage is tightly coupled to the Josephus enigma by this distinctive concept of “Fishing for Men” as well as by the various less distinctive elements. Jesus’s spiritual gathering of his followers and his call for them to be “fishing for men” grimly foreshadow Titus’s actual slaughter of the Jews, occurring at the same location at Genessareth, allegedly forty years later.

The Demons of Gadara

In Josephus (Wars 4.7.389-437) we meet the rebel leader John, who was “beginning to tyrannize” in the countryside. He attracted a following among the rebels, who “thought they should be safer themselves, if the causes of their past insolent actions should now be reduced to one head, and not to a great many.” Josephus explained that “as it is in a human body, if the principal part be inflamed, all the members are subject to the same distemper; so, by means of the sedition and disorder that was in the metropolis … had the wicked men that were in the country opportunity to ravage the same.” Men “joined in the conspiracy by parties, too small for an army, and too many for a gang of thieves … Nor was there now any part of Judea that was not in a miserable condition, as well as its most eminent city also.” Getting word of the threat, Vespasian “marched against Gadara”… the Jews were quickly surrounded by the Roman forces “and, like the wildest of wild beasts, rushed upon the point of others’ swords; so some of them were destroyed… and others were dispersed … But Placidus … slew all that he overtook, as far as Jordan; and when he had driven the whole multitude to the riverside … the number of those that were unwillingly forced to leap into Jordan was prodigious. There were besides two thousand and two hundred taken prisoners. A mighty prey was taken also, consisting of asses, and sheep, and camels, and oxen. … ”

In other words, Josephus is expounding a theory which likens the spread of “sedition” to a disease, in which the “distemper” of “one head” infects the multitude, who seek to abandon their free will and responsibility to that one individual. The rebels then become like wild beasts, fit to be destroyed. Elsewhere, Josephus explains his view that “Demons … are no other than the spirits of the wicked” (Wars 7.6.185), so by that definition John and his followers may all be seen as demons.

In Mark 5:1-20 (also Luke 8:26-39) Jesus has come to the “land of the Gadarenes.” He met a man (the demoniac) who was possessed “with an unclean spirit” who was always “crying, and cutting himself with stones.” Jesus asked the demoniac, “What is thy name?” The demoniac replied, “My name is Legion: for we are many. …. Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding…. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine; and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea (they were about two thousand), and were choked in the sea.” The demoniac was healed, and “began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him.” The version of the story in Matthew (8:28-33) has Jesus meet two demon-possessed men, who accuse Jesus of “tormenting us before the time”.

There are several peculiar and enigmatic aspects to this pericope. Why should one man be possessed by a legion of demons? Why are swine being herded in such huge numbers, where pork is taboo? Why does Matthew mention two demoniacs, where Mark and Luke see only one?

The enigma is solved by recognizing that Josephus’s John is an antetype to the demoniac: just as the biblical Jesus meets a man who is possessed by demons, who are sent into wild beasts and destroyed, so also John is like a demon who infects a multitude of Jewish radicals, and they become like animals to be destroyed.

Within this conceptual framework, there are many specific verbal parallels: the location near Gadara (at least according to some early manuscripts); the size of the parties “too small for an army, and too large for a gang of thieves” (which is a good definition of the size of a legion); wild beasts rushing; Jewish rebels (like the swine) forced into the sea; and the number “about two thousand” (or in Josephus, to be exact, “two thousand two hundred”) — although oddly, the two thousand biblical swine are destroyed, while the 2200 rebels in Josephus are captured. In Josephus, the Romans also capture a “mighty prey” of livestock, but no swine, presumably because the swine have been drowned.

Atwill suggests that perhaps the 2nd demoniac in Matthew’s version represents John’s brother Simon (Peter), and that they are being tormented “before the time” because the time of their torment belongs later in the typological sequence. Later on, John and Simon are caught coming out of the tombs (like the demoniac), where they have been cut by stones in tight quarters (like the demoniac). Then John was sent to Rome, where he presumably published the gospel of John, just as the biblical demon took the opportunity to publish in Decapolis.

Destruction of Jerusalem: prophecy and fulfillment

This set of parallels has been universally acclaimed since the early days of Christianity, so there should be no controversy that these are real parallels. Basically, the scheme is that Matthew’s Jesus launches into a series of prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem. The prophecies are fulfilled in Josephus’s Wars of the Jews (6.5) and a few other scattered passages, as will be noted below.

The devoutly orthodox Catholic explanation for this, of course, is that Jesus’s prophecies were fulfilled in history exactly as it unfolded, and as Josephus accurately reported. Unfortunately, the logic of this interpretation leads to the conclusion that Titus is the second coming of the Son of Man; an unpalatable conclusion which can be (rather awkwardly) finessed (but not really avoided) by viewing Titus as a passive instrument of God’s wrath, and moving quickly on to the prophecies of Revelation, where the true coming of Jesus “in power and glory” might be (arguably) deferred to the infinite future. If there are any orthodox Catholics or other fundamentalists reading this, I can only ask them to consider whether Atwill’s explanation makes more sense overall.

Liberal religious scholars prefer the explanation that the New Testament authors borrowed their quotes verbatim from Josephus.

It should be mentioned at this juncture, that Josephus in the Jewish Wars argued that all of the events that transpired, were in accordance with the arcane prophecies of the book of Daniel. As Josephus stated:

… And indeed it so came to pass, that our nation suffered these things under Antiochus Epiphanes, according to Daniel’s vision, and what he wrote many years before they came to pass. In the very same manner Daniel also wrote concerning the Roman government, and that our country should be made desolate by them. All these things did this man leave in writing, as God had showed them to him … (Ant. 10.11. 276-277).

And as Atwill explained, this led to some chronological claims by Josephus that seem suspect, to say the least:

[Josephus’s] recording of the perfect alignment of events in the time sequences Daniel predicted is either his witnessing of supernatural phenomena or a deliberate falsification. Currently there is contention among scholars regarding virtually all of the chronology Josephus gives in Wars of the Jews. For example, Josephus gives a later date than Suetonius and Dio for when Vespasian began to prepare for the civil war in Rome that led to his becoming emperor. It is probable that Josephus did this to provide support for the Flavian claim that Vespasian was not anxious to become Emperor. This “shaping” of time by Josephus to create Flavian propaganda is exactly the same technique he used to create the alignment between the Flavian campaign in Judea and the prophecies of Daniel (314).

Jesus, of course, endorses this same prophet Daniel; as well as, implicitly, the exact same jiggered interpretation of Daniel’s ambiguous prophecy as Josephus devised:

….and then the End will come. “When you have seen (to use the language of the Prophet Daniel) the ‘Abomination of Desolation,’ standing in the Holy Place—let the reader observe those words— “then let those who are in Judea escape to the hills…(Matt. 24:14-16).

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Josephus and the New Testament authors conspired together to achieve this synchrony; or at least, that Josephus was working from some independent source of the Christian narrative, and that he labored to comply with its chronology and its interpretation of Daniel. If the New Testament authors copied their timeline from Josephus, there would have been no need for Josephus to tamper with real historical events.

Even more convincingly: to accept the conventional explanation that the New Testament copied Josephus, requires a severely impaired sense of humor, as I will explain.

Jesus begins his prophesying in Matthew with this curse:

…upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. “Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation (Matt 23:34-36).

The scenario Jesus foresees does indeed begin to unfold exactly one generation (40 years) later. Jesus invokes the memory of Abel and Zechariah son of Berechiah, who are both well-known Old Testament characters who were ignored or mistreated by their contemporaries. Somehow, Josephus doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo that Jesus was talking about history, not prophecy; and in due course, we find that Zacharias amusingly meets his fate again in the temple, exactly as Jesus described. It comes as a humorous surprise to find history repeating itself as precisely as this.

…these zealots and Idumeans were quite weary of barely killing men, so they had the impudence of setting up fictitious tribunals and judicatures for that purpose; and… they intended to have Zacharias the son of Baruch, one of the most eminent of the citizens, slain… Now the seventy judges brought in their verdict that the person accused was not guilty… hereupon there arose a great clamor of the zealots upon his acquittal… So two of the boldest of them fell upon Zacharias in the middle of the temple, and slew him (Wars 4.5.338-344).

Surely Josephus knew his Old Testament well enough that we can be confident this joke was no accident.

After this, the prophecies and their fulfillment unfold smoothly enough (although the sequential order between Jesus and Josephus is not unbroken.)

Jesus:

the disciples… said, “… what will be the sign of your Coming and of the Close of the Age?” “Take care that no one misleads you,” answered Jesus… “Many false prophets will rise up and lead multitudes astray (Matt. 24:3-5);

Josephus:

The great distress the jews were in upon the conflagration of the holy house. Concerning a false prophet, and the signs that preceded this destruction (Wars, Heading to Book 6, Chapter 5).

Jesus:

“for then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world and assuredly never will be again (Matt. 24:21).

Josephus:

… the misfortunes of all men, from the beginning of the world, if they be compared to these of the Jews, are not so considerable as they were (Wars, Preface, line 12).

Jesus:

there will be famines and earthquakes in various places (Matt. 24:7);

Josephus:

many … were worn away by the famine….Moreover… the priests … felt a quaking, and heard a great noise… (Wars 6.5.274, 299).

Jesus:

“then let those who are in Judea escape to the hills; “let him who is on the roof not go down to fetch what is in his house; “nor let him who is outside the city stay to pick up his outer garment (Matt. 24:16-18).

Josephus:

the multitude also that was in the cityjoined in this outcry with those that were upon the hill….And now the Romans, judging that it was in vain to spare what was round about the holy house, burnt all those places… They also burnt down the treasury chambers, in which was an immense quantity of money, and an immense number of garments… (Wars 6.5.274, 281-282).

Jesus:

“And alas for the women who at that time are with child or have infants (Matt. 24:19)!

Josephus:

There was a certain woman that dwelt beyond Jordan, her name was Mary…. snatching up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said, “O thou miserable infant! ….” As soon as she had said this, she slew her son, and then roasted him, and ate the one half of him… (Wars 6.3.201-208).

Jesus:

…immediately after those times of distress the sun will be darkened, the moon will not shed her light, the stars will fall from the firmament (Matt. 24:29),

Josephus:

Thus there was a star resembling a sword, which stood over the city, and a comet, that continued a whole year… (Wars 6.5.289).

Jesus:

“Then will appear the Sign of the Son of Man in the sky; and then will all the nations of the earth lament, when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with great power and glory (Matt. 24:30).

Josephus:

…a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared: I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for, before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities (Wars6.5.297-299).

The Woe-saying Jesus

Immediately after having described all of these amazing signs from the heavens, and great holocaust of conflagration and slaughter, Josephus gives us a signal that his sense of humor is undaunted by the disaster.

But, what is still more terrible, there was one Jesus, the son of Ananus, a plebeian and a husbandman… (Wars 6.5.300).

In what possible way could this “Jesus, the son of Ananus” be “still more terrible” than everything that has happened to this point in the destruction of Jerusalem? Josephus goes on to explain that this Jesus is nothing worse than a self-righteous big-mouth with a strange and repetitive message:

four years before the war began, and at a time when the city was in very great peace and prosperity, came to that feast whereon it is our custom for everyone to make tabernacles to God in the temple, began on a sudden to cry aloud, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides, and a voice against this whole people!” This was his cry, as he went about by day and by night, in all the lanes of the city (Wars 6.5.300-301).

Hmm… why does this Jesus sound so much like Biblical Jesus?…

[arriving at Jerusalem at the time of the Passover feast] … His disciples came and called His attention to the Temple buildings. ”You see all these?” He replied; “in solemn truth I tell you that there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be pulled down” (Matt. 24:1-2).

“For just as the lightning flashes in the east and is seen to the very west, so will be the Coming of the Son of Man (Matt. 24:27).

the Kingdom of the Heavens be found to be like ten bridesmaids who took their torches and went out to meet the bridegroom and the bride (Matt. 25:1).

Josephus continues to regale us with the saga of Jesus ben Ananus thusly:

However, certain of the most eminent among the populace had great indignation at this dire cry of his, and took up the man, and gave him a great number of severe stripes; yet did not he either say anything for himself, or anything peculiar to those that chastised him, but still went on with the same words which he cried before. Hereupon our rulers, supposing, as the case proved to be, that this was a sort of divine fury in the man, brought him to the Roman procurator, where he was whipped till his bones were laid bare; yet he did not make any supplication for himself, nor shed any tears, but turning his voice to the most lamentable tone possible, at every stroke of the whip his answer was, “Woe, woe to Jerusalem!” (Wars 6.5.302-304).

Jesus ben Ananus’s fate seems to be unfolding in a remarkably similar way to the biblical Jesus of Nazareth: the indignation of the Jews, the beatings and chastisement, the trip to the Roman procurator, and the unresponsiveness to interrogation. Moreover, his repetitive curse “Woe, woe to Jerusalem” clearly echoes Luke 11:43-52, where Jesus calls down “woe to you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites”, repeating the curse five times, extending it to lawyers, and giving five different weighty justifications. In the synoptically parallel passage in Matthew (23:13-33), the curse “woe to you” is repeated eight times, again with eight different explanations.

However, unlike biblical Jesus (who was, of course, crucified), this Jesus ben Ananus gets off with a warning (although, like biblical Jesus, he is derisively referred to as a “madman”; see Mark 3:21 and John 7:20):

And when Albinus (for he was then our procurator) asked him who he was, and whence he came, and why he uttered such words; he made no manner of reply to what he said, but still did not leave off his melancholy ditty, till Albinus took him to be a madman, and dismissed him (Wars 6.5.305).

Nevertheless, Jesus ben Ananus ultimately meets his demise during the Passover season, comically in the exact same moment as he prophesies his own doom.

he continued this ditty for seven years and five months, without growing hoarse, or being tired therewith, until the very time that he saw his presage in earnest fulfilled in our siege, when it ceased; for as he was going round upon the wall, he cried out with his utmost force, “Woe, woe to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy house!” And just as he added at the last, “Woe, woe to myself also!” there came a stone out of one of the engines, and smote him, and killed him immediately; and as he was uttering the very same presages he gave up the ghost (Wars 6.5.308-309).

Biblical Jesus also mentioned the phenomenon of being crushed by stones:

“Have you never read in the Scriptures,” said Jesus, “The Stone which the builders rejected has been made the Cornerstone: this Cornerstone came from the Lord, and is wonderful in our eyes? That, I tell you, is the reason why the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you, and given to a nation that will exhibit the power of it. He who falls on this stone will be severely hurt; but he on whom it falls will be utterly crushed” (Matt. 21:42-44).

And also:

And some of the Pharisees called to Him from the crowd, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples.” But He answered and said to them, “I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out” (Luke 19:39-40).

But ironically, according to Josephus, when the stones came it was Jesus ben Ananus who was utterly crushed (thus making a mockery of Jesus’s prophecy); and furthermore, when the Jews cried out the coming of the stones: it was not the stones themselves that they proclaimed, but rather they said “THE SON COMETH”; that is, the Son of Man; that is, Titus.

… Now the stones that were cast were of the weight of a talent, and were carried two furlongs and further. The blow they gave was no way to be sustained….accordingly the watchmen that sat upon the towers gave them notice when the engine was let go, and the stone came from it, and cried out aloud, in their own country’s language, THE SON COMETH…(Wars 5.6. 269-274; see 1915 Dent translation.)

It might be objected that perhaps Josephus is lampooning Jewish prophetic voices in general, or the rebels’ messianic dreams and pretensions more particularly. But given all the detail in this portrayal of the woe-saying madman Jesus: in my opinion, Josephus could not possibly have made it any more clear that this Jesus ben Ananus is a parody of Biblical Jesus.

Moreover, time has proven that Josephus was exactly correct in his own prophecy that Jesus would become a more terrible calamity for the Jews than anything that happened in the war, by inspiring countless generations of anti-semitism. This is a cue that Josephus was not only fully aware of Christian narrative and doctrine, but he also understood its crucial importance in the grand schema of Imperial propaganda.

Although, as both Biblical Jesus and Josephus assure us, our individual fates are in our own hands:

Jesus:

… those who stand firm to the End shall be saved (Matt. 24:13).

Josephus:

Now if any one consider these things, he will find that God takes care of mankind, and by all ways possible foreshows to our race what is for their preservation; but that men perish by those miseries which they madly and voluntarily bring upon themselves… (Wars 6.5.310).

Lazarus, the Human Passover Lamb, and the Last Supper

Josephus tells a story which becomes the causus belli for Titus’s final assault on the Temple:

…. I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relates, either among the Greeks or Barbarians? It is horrible to speak of it, and incredible when heard. I had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of ours, that I might not seem to deliver what is so portentous to posterity, but that I have innumerable witnesses to it in my own age….

There was a certain woman that dwelt beyond Jordan, her name was Mary; her father was Eleazar, of the village Bethezob, which signifies the house of Hyssop. … and it was now become impossible for her any way to find any more food, while the famine pierced through her very bowels and marrow…. She then attempted a most unnatural thing; and snatching up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said, “O thou miserable infant! for whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine, and this sedition? …. Come on; be thou my food, and be thou a fury to these seditious varlets, and a by-word to the world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews.” As soon as she had said this, she slew her son, and then roasted him, and eat the one half of him, and kept the other half by her concealed. Upon this the seditious came in presently, and smelling the horrid scent of this food, they threatened her, that they would cut her throat immediately if she did not show them what food she had gotten ready. She replied that she had saved a very fine portion of it for them, and withal uncovered what was left of her son. …. she said to them, “This is mine own son, and what hath been done was mine own doing! Come, eat of this food; for I have eaten of it myself! Do not you pretend to be either more tender than a woman, or more compassionate than a mother; but if you be so scrupulous, and do abominate this my sacrifice, as I have eaten the one half, let the rest be reserved for me also” (Wars 6.3.199-211).

Josephus describes the incident as “so portentous to posterity, but that I have innumerable witnesses to it in my own age.” Why would this event be “portentous to posterity” and how would Josephus have “innumerable witnesses”? With this introduction, Josephus seems to be signaling that this story represents an enigma to be solved. Although the event was reportedly discussed among many, there could be at most a few of the “seditious” who witnessed the Cannibal Mary’s display of half her son’s carcass, and no witnesses at all to Mary’s first speech, or to the murder of the child.

The timing of this incident (at Passover), the reference to “the house of hyssop” (a plant used to mark Israelite houses at the time of passover), and the statement that the child is “roasted”, lead to the conclusion that the child is a human passover sacrifice. Thus, Josephus’s tale represents a grimly concrete actualization of the spiritualized ritual of the Christian eucharist.

The names of Mary and Eleazar also suggest a possible relationship to the New Testament. In Luke 2:34-35, Simeon gives Mary a prophecy that “a sword will pierce through your own soul”: a prophecy apparently fulfilled by the famine, which “pierced through her very heart and marrow.” Mary’s admonition to the “varlets” to “Come, eat of this food” is reminiscent of Christ’s words at the Last Supper, and the mention of “innumerable witnesses” seems to be an echo of the multitudes who reportedly witnessed Jesus’ resurrection, which indeed was a myth “portentous to posterity”.

Mary describes the event as a “myth for the world”, and a “fury to the varlets” that would “complete the calamities of the Jews”. Atwill further sees a pun on the words “mythos” (myth), “mysos” (an atrocity), and “misos” (inspiring bitter hatred, in this case the bitter hatred by the Romans against the Jews.) This again seems uncalibrated and inappropriate as a commentary on the plight of the starving Jews; but if it’s talking about the anti-Semitic effects of the Christian myth against the Jews, it is tremendously perceptive, if not prescient.

Atwill noted another odd parallel between the Josephus passage and the New Testament. Luke 10:38-42 and John 12:2-3 both describe a dinner at which Mary and Jesus are present, and Martha is serving. If we assume that the two passages are both describing the same dinner, they may be taken together as follows:

Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at table with him. (John 12:2–3)… But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:40–42).

In this pericope, Lazarus has just recently been raised from the dead. However, he’s been dead for 4 days, which is one day later than his soul would have departed from his body, according to Jewish lore. So unless one is inclined to believe in very unlikely miracles (from either a Gentile or Jewish perspective), Lazarus is nothing but a dead body. We also meet Mary, who is served a meal of “the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” This, of course, is exactly the same portion that Cannibal Mary has saved for herself of the child. And if Lazarus is dead, “they made him a supper” is an invitation to draw the conclusion that a macabre double entendre was intended.

Thus, to summarize: in Josephus, Mary is eating her child; in the NT pericope, Mary logically seems to be eating the body of Lazarus, who allegedly was resurrected but is obviously dead; and according to Christianity’s spiritualized interpretation, the believers are eating the body of Christ the son of Mary, after his alleged resurrection on the third day. The passages from Josephus and the New Testament are tied together primarily by the central and distinctive themes of the Eucharist and its association to cannibalism, the Passover sacrifice of Jesus, and the Resurrection. But the grim joke is also pulled together by the very specific verbal motif of the “good portion… not taken away.”

The New Root and Branch

Although “the New Root and Branch” is a many-tentacled and sprawling satire, it is relatively simple to understand. Atwill summarizes the system as follows:

The purpose of this particular satire is to document that the “root” and “branch” of the Judaic messianic lineage has been destroyed and that a Roman lineage has been “grafted on” in its place (219).

A recurring aspect of the theme is that the character who is “pruned” is always named Eleazar. This, along with Eleazar’s role in being “made [into] a supper” in the Cannibal Mary parallel, leads Atwill to conjecture that Eleazar is an antetype for the true leader of the Jewish rebellion, who was ignominiously pruned from history.

Is Atwill guilty of “Parallelomania”?

Perhaps the most common objection to Joseph Atwill’s work in Caesar’s Messiah is that his premises are based on what is called “parallelomania.” Samuel Sandmel (Journal of Biblical Literature 81: 1-13, 1962) defined this error as follows:

We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction…. The key word in my essay is extravagance. I am not denying that literary parallels and literary influence, in the form of source and derivation, exist. I am not seeking to discourage the study of these parallels…. Detailed study is the criterion, and the detailed study ought to respect the context and not be limited to juxtaposing mere excerpts.

In his writing in Caesar’s Messiah, Atwill was not primarily concerned with mounting a scholarly defense against these concerns. Instead, he was simply writing down the parallels as he encountered them in the texts, and exploring the implications of his particular interpretation. Nevertheless, his study is certainly detailed, the parallels are certainly extensive, and Atwill paints a compelling historical context.

In Caesar’s Messiah, Atwill made an argument that the Gospels were all written together, based on his solution of a puzzle embedded in the various Gospel accounts of the apostles in the empty tomb, looking for Jesus. My view is that as a mathematical argument, this can be largely defeated based on the assumption that the author of the Gospel of John had access to the other three Gospels when he wrote his own version. Similarly, early editions of Caesar’s Messiah included a statistical argument based on the sequential aspect of the parallels between Luke and Josephus; an argument that dismissed legitimate questions about the strength of the parallels, the possibility of common sources, the directionality of the parallels, and the effect of multiple comparisons.

Frustrated by criticisms, Atwill produced the Flavian Signature edition of Caesar’s Messiah (2011), which provided many more parallels in the sequence relating Josephus’s Jewish Wars to the gospel of Luke. However, this was arguably going in precisely the wrong direction to satisfy the critics, because the new parallels were, in general, not as convincing as the ones he had already identified. In the process of arguing from these new parallels, Atwill appeared to be violating Sandmel’s caution against “overdoing the supposed similarity in passages.”

Rather than relying on a simple combinatorial analysis of Atwill’s parallels, I would suggest that a more viable approach is to start by considering those parallels which have already been widely recognized. Atwill’s interpretive framework is far more powerful than any other framework in terms of explaining all aspects of these ancient literary devices, especially the ironic, enigmatic and humorous aspects. Once this is agreed to, the more obscure parallels in the Flavian Signature can only add to Atwill’s case; especially considering that most of these parallels are highly interpretable within the Flavian Origins framework.

It is certainly possible, as Atwill suggests, that the Romans themselves were well aware that the creation of a long sequence of literary parallels represents an indisputable statistical and combinatorial signature that the parallels were intentionally planted. If modern mathematical and experimental approaches to textual analysis can overcome critical objections based on multiple-comparisons considerations and source criticism, then this combinatorial approach has the potential to provide an academically ironclad proof of the Caesar’s Messiah thesis.

The critics have certainly not met the burden of proof of showing that there are any alternative source analyses or interpretations that could compete with Atwill’s, or that the parallels are not compelling, or that his work fails to meet Sandmel’s criteria of standing up to detailed analysis. However, fulfillment of any demand for a comprehensive, even Bayesian, analysis of the relative probabilities of the Flavian Origins hypothesis as compared to its competitors, will need to await the attention of a better (or at least, braver) mathematician. Meanwhile, it is my view that many of Atwill’s critics are far more avid practitioners of the sins of “parallelomania”, and that other authors generally attempt to support parallel source analyses that are far weaker; while Caesar’s Messiah builds a mountain of evidence that can only be explained by the Flavian Origins thesis.

Discuss in Forum

[i] Bruno Bauer, Christ and the Caesars: The Origin of Christianity from Romanized Greek Culture (A. Davidonis, 1998).

[ii] Abelard Reuchlin and Hevel V Reek, The True Authorship of the New Testament (Kent, WA: Abelard Reuchlin Foundation, 1979).

[iii] ‘Carringtons Classical & Christian Library’ <http://carrington-arts.com/cliff/cccl.html> [accessed 26 February 2014].

[iv] Robert H Eisenman, James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Penguin Books, 1998); Robert H Eisenman, The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ (London; New York: Watkins Pub.; Distributed in the USA by Sterling Pub. Co., 2006).

[v] Bart D Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2013), p. 12.

[vi] Andrew Gould, ‘Robert Eisenman’s “New Testament Code”’ <http://roberteisenman.com/articles/ntc_review-gould.pdf> [accessed 14 March 2014].

[vii] R Ellis, Jesus, King of Edessa (Cheshire; Kempton, Ill.: Edfu Books ; Adventures Unlimited, 2012).

[viii] R Ellis, King Jesus: From Kam (Egypt) to Camelot (Cheshire; Kempton, Ill.: Edfu Books ; Adventures Unlimited, 2008).

[ix] Lena Einhorn, ‘Jesus and the “Egyptian Prophet”’, 2012 <http://lenaeinhorn.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Jesus-and-the-Egyptian-Prophet-12.11.25.pdf> [accessed 15 March 2014].

[x] Lena Einhorn and Rodney Bradbury, The Jesus Mystery: Astonishing Clues to the True Identities of Jesus and Paul (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2007).

[xi] Michael Parenti, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome (New York: New Press, 2003).

[xii] Stefan Weinstock, Divus Julius (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press, 1971).

[xiii] Francesco Carotta, Jesus Was Caesar: On the Julian Origin of Christianity : An Investigative Report (Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2005).

[xiv] Gary Courtney, ET TU, JUDAS? Then Fall Jesus! (iUniverse, 2004), p. 61.

[xv] Gary Forsythe, Time in Roman Religion: One Thousand Years of Religious History (Routledge, 2012), p. 98.

[xvi] Francesco Carotta, ‘The Gospels as Diegetic Transposition’, 2007 <http://carotta.de/subseite/texte/articula/Escorial_en.pdf> [accessed 16 March 2014].

[xvii] Stephan Huller, The Real Messiah: The Throne of St. Mark and the True Origins of Christianity, Reprint edition (Watkins Publishing, 2012).

[xviii] ‘CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Saint Petronilla’ <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11781b.htm> [accessed 26 February 2014].

[xix] Henry Scowcroft Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1943), p. 31.

[xx] ‘Review – Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus by Robert M. Price’ <http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/rev_atwill.htm> [accessed 26 February 2014].

[xxi] Candida R Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2013).

[xxii] Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 8–9.

[xxiii] Richard Carrier, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2012), p. 147.

[xxiv] ‘Vridar » How Literary Imitation Works: Are Differences More Important than Similarities?’ <http://vridar.org/2013/05/15/how-literary-imitation-works-are-differences-more-important-than-similarities/> [accessed 26 February 2014].

[xxv] ‘Philo Judaeus’, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 <http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12116-philo-judaeus> [accessed 16 March 2014].

[xxvi] Albert A. Bell, ‘Josephus the Satirist? A Clue to the Original Form of the “Testimonium Flavianum”’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 67 (1976), 16 <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1454525>.

[xxvii] Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 133.

[xxviii] David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2000).

[xxix] ‘A Conversation on the Caesar’s Messiah Thesis’, Freethought Nation <http://freethoughtnation.com/a-conversation-on-the-caesars-messiah-thesis/> [accessed 17 March 2014].

[xxx] Susan Tyler Hitchcock and John L. Esposito, Geography of Religion: Where God Lives, Where Pilgrims Walk (National Geographic, 2004), p. 281.

Discuss in Forum

Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin – Manufacturing the Deadhead

Joseph Atwill

October 21, 2014

In 2012 Jan Irvin made an important discovery. In the course of re-publishing The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Allegro,[1] Irvin had been researching the letters of one of Allegro’s most prominent critics, Gordon Wasson, at various university archives (including Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford) when he came across primary documents – letters actually written by Wasson – showing that he had worked with the CIA.[2]

Though Gordon Wasson was both chairman for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Vice President of Public Relations for J.P. Morgan Bank, he is most famous as the individual who “discovered”, or more accurately popularized, magic mushrooms. An article in Life magazine described fantastic visions and experiences Wasson claimed to have had while under their influence (see Life, May 13, 1957 – Seeking the Magic Mushroom). Wasson’s claims were the first description of the effects of psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms presented to the general public.

Irvin saw troubling implications in his discovery. He was aware, of course, of the CIA’s infamous Project MK-ULTRA, in which the organization had given LSD to unsuspecting U.S. citizens. He also knew of the many conspiracy theories claiming that the government has been somehow involved with the creation of the ‘drug culture’. He was also aware of Dave McGowan’s research on the drug and music movement that had come out of Laurel Canyon in the 1960‘s, which showed that many of the ‘rock idols’ who created it were the children of members of military intelligence.[3]

So the fact that a member of the CIA had also been involved with the discovery of Psilocybe mushrooms fit into a large collection of troubling linkages between the American government and the drug culture that emerged during the 1960’s. Irvin decided to do further research into the government’s involvement with the ‘psychedelic movement’. An obvious question he hoped to answer was: Had Wasson been somehow involved with MK-ULTRA?

During this research, Irvin came in contact with another scholar, Joe Atwill, author of Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus. Atwill’s research into the origins of Christianity had led him to conclude that Rome had invented the religion. Further, he believed that the Caesars had deliberately brought about the Dark Ages. They had used Christianity as a mind control device to give slavery a religious context intended to make it difficult for serfs to rebel. Like Irvin, Atwill had become suspicious of the U.S. government’s many connections to the psychedelic movement, which reminded him of the Caesars’ intellectual debasing of their population to help bring on the Dark Ages.

When comparing the results of their research, Irvin and Atwill developed a theory about the origin of the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s: The ‘counterculture’ had been developed by elements within the U.S. government and banking establishment as part of a larger plan to bring about a new Dark Age; or, as it was marketed to potential victims, an “archaic revival.”[4]

In 1992 Terence McKenna published in his book The Archaic Revival:

These things are all part of the New Age, but I have abandoned that term in favor of what I call the Archaic Revival—which places it all in a better historical perspective. When a culture loses its bearing, the traditional response is to go back in history to find the previous “anchoring model.” An example of this would be the breakup the medieval world at the time of the Renaissance. They had lost their compass, so they went back to Greek and Roman models and created classicism—Roman law, Greek aesthetics, and so on.[5] [emphasis added]

~ Terence McKenna

In another chapter regarding his timewave theory, he states:

Within the timewave a variety of “resonance points” are recognized. Resonance points can be thought of as areas of the wave that are graphically the same as the wave at some other point within the wave, yet differ from it through having different quantified values. For example, if we chose an end date or zero date of December 21, 2012 A.D., then we find that the time we are living through is in resonance with the late Roman times and the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe.

Implicit in this theory of time is the notion that duration is like a tone in that one must assign a moment at which the damped oscillation is finally quenched and ceases. I chose the date December 21, 2012 A.D., as this point because with that assumption the wave seemed to be in the “best fit” configuration with regard to the recorded facts of the ebb and flow of historical advance into connectedness. Later I learned to my amazement that this same date, December 21, 2012, was the date assigned as the end of their calendrical cycle by the classic Maya, surely one of the world’s most time-obsessed cultures. [6] ~ Terence McKenna

Notice that the date McKenna chose – 12-21-2012 – was earlier falsely claimed to be the date of the Apocalypse foreseen in the Mayan calendar by professor and CIA agent Michael Coe in his 1966 book The Maya[7], although it was changed by McKenna in 1993 from Coe’s 2011 date to December 21, 2012.[8] Moreover, McKenna sees this date as resonating with the beginning of the Dark Ages. If, as the authors believe, the psychedelic movement was part of a general plan to usher in a new Dark Age, this suggests that McKenna’s promotion of a drug-fueled “Archaic Revival” was also a part of the plan.

I guess am a soft Dark Ager. I think there will be a mild dark age. I don’t think it will be anything like the dark ages that lasted a thousand years […][9]

~ Terence McKenna

Most today assume that the CIA and the other intelligence-gathering organizations of the U.S. government are controlled by the democratic process. They therefore believe that MK-ULTRA’s role in creating the psychedelic movement was accidental “blowback”. Very few have even considered the possibility that the entire “counterculture” was social engineering planned to debase America’s culture – as the name implies. The authors believe, however, that there is compelling evidence that indicates that the psychedelic movement was deliberately created. The purpose of this plan was to establish a neo-feudalism by the debasing of the intellectual abilities of young people to make them as easy to control as the serfs of the Dark Ages. One accurate term used for the individuals who were victims of this debasing was “Deadhead,” which is an equivocation for a “dead mind” or “a drugged, thoughtless person”.

Aldous Huxley predicted that drugs would one day become a humane alternative to “flogging” for rulers wishing to control “recalcitrant subjects.” He wrote in a letter to his former student George Orwell in 1949:

But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. [emphasis added] [10]

~ Aldous Huxley

Decades later, one of the CIA’s own MK-ULTRA researchers, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, while citing Huxley had this to say on the matter:

The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations. But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.

To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide a great freedom for private drug use and where hallucinogens are widely used today, are actually subsidized by our society. Their perpetuation is aided by parental or other family remittances, welfare, and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome-and less expensive-if they are living apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modesof expressing their alienation, such as active, organized, vigorous political protest and dissent. […]

The hallucinogens presently comprise a moderate but significant portion of the total drug problem in Western society. The foregoing may provide a certain frame of reference against which not only the social but also the clinical problems created by these drugs can be considered.[11]

~ Louis Jolyon West

The idea of drugs for control seems to be an ancient one. Italian professor Piero Camporesi, writing on Medieval Italy in his book Bread of Dreams, says:

Adulterated breads had been put into circulation by the untori of Public Health: criminal attacks orchestrated by the ‘provisionary judges’ who were supposed to oversee the well-balanced provisioning of the public-square.

On the 21^st, a Sunday, with Monday approaching, Master … [blank in the manuscript] Forni, Judge of provisions in the square of Modena, was arrested, along with the bakers, for having had forty sacks of bay leaf ground to be put into the wheat flour to make bread for the square, where it caused the poverty to those who brought it to worsen, so that for two days there were many people sick enough to go crazy, and during this time they could not work or help their families.[xii]

Camporesi later continues:

It would be wrong to suppose that one must wait for the arrival of eighteenth-century capitalism, or even of imperialism, in order to see the birth of the problem of the mass spreading of opium derivatives (first of morphine and then, today, of heroin) used to dampen the frenzy of the masses and lead them back – by means of dreams – to the ‘reason’ desired by the groups in power. The opium war against China, the Black Panthers ‘broken’ by drugs, and the ‘ebbing’ of the American and European student movements (supposing that hallucinogenic drugs were involved in the latter, as some believe), are the most commonly used examples – we don’t know with what relevance – to demonstrate how ‘advanced’ capitalism and imperialism have utilized mechanisms which induced collective dreaming and weakened the desire for renewal by means of visionary ‘trips’, in order to impose their will.

The pre-industrial age, too, even if in a more imprecise, rough and ‘natural’ manner, was aware of political strategies allied to medical culture, whether to lessen the pangs of hunger or to limit the turmoil in the streets. Certainly we could laugh at interventions which are so mild as to appear almost surreal, amateurish or improvised; but we must not forget that both in theory and in practice the ‘treatment of the poor man’, cared for with sedatives and hallucinogenic drugs, corresponded to a thought-out medico-political design.[xiii]

~ Piero Camporesi

A key element in the creation of America’s drug counterculture was “The Grateful Dead”, a rock band that passed out LSD to people attending its concerts in the 1960’s. At their concerts listeners were encourage to take LSD and to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” An expression that instructed the LSD takers to abandon the modern world and join what McKenna coined the “archaic revival”.

There is a recording of Dr. Timothy Leary actually describing the retrograde culture that those who ‘dropped out’ would participate in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7FoZvlkUS8 (Audio only – copied below:)

In this talk, Leary, Alan Watts, Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Allen Cohen describe how those that “tune in, turn on, drop out” would abandon modern culture and return to the status of a peasant.

It is important to note that marketing and PR expert Marshal McLuhan, who had a strong influence on Leary and later McKenna, is the one who actually developed the expression “Tune in, turn on, and drop out”:

In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was “given to him” by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary added that McLuhan “was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, ‘Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,’ to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, ‘Tune in, turn on, and drop out.’[xiv]

It is also notable that two individuals associated with the Grateful Dead were once employees of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program – band member and lyricist Robert Hunter [xv], and author Ken Kesey[xvi] whose ‘Merry Pranksters’ were often at the Grateful Dead shows promoting LSD use to the ‘Deadheads’. Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest promoted the ‘archaic revival’ by concluding with a heroic American Indian escaping from modern tyranny and returning to a primitive culture. Furthermore, Grateful Dead song writer John Perry Barlow, in 2002, admitted in a Forbes magazine interview ironically titled “Why Spy?” that he spent time at CIA headquarters at Langley.[xvii]

MK-ULTRA ran a number of its operations near Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco district where LSD would become commonly used. Declassified CIA records show that there were at least three CIA ‘safe houses’ in the Bay Area where ‘experiments’ – the giving of LSD to unsuspecting citizens – went on. This subproject of MK-ULTRA was code-named “Operation Midnight Climax”. Chief among Operation Midnight Climax’s ‘safe houses’ was the one at 225 Chestnut on Telegraph Hill, which operated from 1955 to 1965.

While the odd role that MK-ULTRA played in launching the psychedelic movement is well known, its involvement in bringing about another part of America’s descent into intellectual neo-feudalism is not. Incredibly, MK-ULTRA was also involved in bringing about the ‘New Age’ quasi-religious movement, which debased the reasoning of anyone who succumbed to its philosophies. Another progenitor of this movement, which believes in ‘channeling’ and other fictional elements, was the book A Course in Miracles, written by two MK-ULTRA employees; William Thetford and Helen Schucman.[xviii] In the book the reader is asked to believe that Helen Schucman, a Jewish scientist hired by the CIA to study how to control the mind, was chosen by Jesus Christ to ‘channel’ his current ideas to humanity.

At the same time the Grateful Dead was promoting LSD use in San Francisco, another music drug counterculture scene with many suspicious connections to military intelligence began promoting the drug to the young people attending the music clubs on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. The counterculture scenes in LA and San Francisco were part of a larger whole that included Britain and New York. The media gave the new music drug culture almost unlimited exposure, which reached its zenith with Life magazine’s coverage of the Woodstock ‘music festival’. Although Life presented Woodstock as three days of ‘Love and Understanding’ it was in fact a culturally debased event – a true ‘archaic revival’ – that featured drugged teenagers fornicating in the mud while their rock idols provided encouraging background music.

Many of the events that led up to the counterculture and Woodstock have been presented as accidental. For example, the string of occurrences that led to the publication of Life magazine’s cover story about Gordon Wasson’s experiences upon taking the psilocybin mushroom. Irvin has shown, however, in his paper Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth, that there were too many contradictions in his story line for Wasson to have had the “chance meeting” with the editors of Life that led to the publication of the article:[xix]

Wasson’s direct boss at J. P. Morgan was Henry P. Davison Jr. Davison was a senior partner and generally regarded as Morgan’s personal emissary.[xx] As it turns out, it was Henry P. Davison who essentially created (or at least funded) the Time-Life magazines for J.P. Morgan in 1923. After a row with Henry Luce for publishing an article against the war for Britain in Life, Davison “became the company’s first investor in Time magazine and a company director.”[xxi]

Another J.P. Morgan partner, Dwight Morrow, also helped to finance the Time-Life start-up.

Davison kept Henry Luce in charge of the company as president, as he and Luce were both members of Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society, being initiated in 1920. In 1946 Davison and Luce then made C. D. Jackson, former head of U.S. Psychological Warfare, vice-president of Time-Life. It seems to me that the entire operation at Time-Life was purely for spreading propaganda to the American public for the purposes of the intelligence community, J.P. Morgan, and the elite. […]

Yet another Skull and Bonesman behind the establishment of Time-Life was Briton Hadden, who worked with Davison, Luce and Morrow in setting up the organization. Hadden was also initiated into Skull and Bones in 1920. The list of Bonesmen that tie in directly to Wasson and his clique is astounding, and also includes people like Averell Harriman, initiated 1913, who worked with Wasson at the CFR[xxii], and was a director there.[xxiii] […]

Documents also reveal that Luce was a member of the Century Club, an exclusive “art club” that Wasson had much ado with and may have held some position with, and which was filled with members of the intelligence and banking community. Members such as George Kennan, Walter Lippmann and Frank Altschul appear to have been nominated to the Century Club by Wasson himself.[xxiv] Graham Harvey in Shamanism says that Luce and Wasson were friends, and this is how he came to publish in Life:

A New York investment banker, Wasson was well acquainted with the movers and shakers of the Establishment. Therefore, it was natural that he should turn to his friend Henry Luce, publisher of Life, when he needed a public forum in which to announce his discoveries.[xxv]

~ Graham Harvey

[…]

However, the most common version of the story is the one told by Time magazine in 2007:

Wasson and his buddy’s mushroom trip might have been lost to history, but he was so enraptured by the experience that on his return to New York, he kept talking about it to friends. As Jay Stevens recalls in his 1987 book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, one day during lunch at the Century Club, an editor at Time Inc. (the parent company of TIME) overheard Wasson’s tale of adventure. The editor commissioned a first-person narrative for Life.

[…]

Since this article was written in the post-Luce and Jackson age, the author was a little more candid about the Wasson/Luce/J.P. Morgan/psychedelic revolution connections:

After Wasson’s article was published, many people sought out mushrooms and the other big hallucinogen of the day, LSD. (In 1958, Time Inc. cofounder Henry Luce and his wife Clare Booth Luce dropped acid with a psychiatrist. Henry Luce conducted an imaginary symphony during his trip, according to Storming Heaven.) The most important person to discover drugs through the Life piece was Timothy Leary himself. Leary had never used drugs, but a friend recommended the article to him, and Leary eventually traveled to Mexico to take mushrooms. Within a few years, he had launched his crusade for America to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” In other words, you can draw a woozy but vivid line from the sedate offices of J.P. Morgan and Time Inc. in the ’50s to Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s to a zillion drug-rehab centers in the ’70s. Long, strange trip indeed.[xxvi]

In The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, a third version of this story was told by Allan Richardson:

Sometime just before or soon after our return from the ’56 expedition, Gordon and I were dining at the Century Club in New York. He noticed Ed Thompson, the managing editor of Life magazine, alone at a table nearby, and asked him to join us. We talked about the article Gordon was working on to publicize what he’d discovered in Mexico. Thompson said Life might be interested in publishing it, and invited us to make a presentation at his offices.

~ Allan Richardson

As we noted above, nowhere do these accounts mention Valentina’s write-up of her and Gordon Wasson’s mushroom experiences in This Week magazine, which was released that same week (May 19, 1957) to 12 million newspaper subscribers. Also coincidently, This Week was published by Joseph P. Knapp, who was a director of Morgan’s Guarantee Trust, where Wasson had begun working for Morgan in 1928. If Wasson’s claim that the publication of the Life article was the result of a chance meeting, how had it come to pass that Valentina’s parallel article was published in the same week?

In light of the above, the idea that Wasson published his “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” article in May, 1957, in Life, due to a “chance meeting with an editor” seems ridiculous. In fact, Abby Hoffman is quoted as saying that Luce did more to popularize LSD than Timothy Leary (who first learned of mushrooms through Wasson’s Life article). Luce’s own wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who was a member of the CFR, agreed:

I’ve always maintained that Henry Luce did more to popularize acid than Timothy Leary. Years later I met Clare Boothe Luce at the Republican convention in Miami. She did not disagree with this opinion. America’s version of the Dragon Lady caressed my arm, fluttered her eyes and cooed, “We wouldn’t want everyone doing too much of a good thing.”[xxvii]

~ Abbie Hoffman

If one compares the culture of Woodstock and the music drug scene of the 1960s with that of America at the beginning of the century, a number of distinct differences are visible:

Overt sexual images in the popular media (pornography)
Wildly uninhibited dancing
music idols
feminism
integration
psychedelic drug use

Culture normally changes slowly and for many reasons, and the 60’s American drug counter culture was certainly a long time in the making. But, incredibly, most of the events that led to it can be traced back to two men: Gordon Wasson and his close friend Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda. Given Bernays’ background and political perspective, his role in bringing about the drug culture is highly suspicious.

Bernays wrote what can be seen as a virtual Mission Statement for anyone wishing to bring about a “counterculture”. In the opening paragraph of his book Propaganda he wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.[xxviii]

Bernays’ family background made him well suited to “control the public mind”. He was the double nephew of Jewish psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud’s wife Martha Bernays.

When considering his influence on his nephew, it is important to bear in mind that though Freud is famous for his theories of individual psychoanalysis, he and the group that surrounded him developed the first theories concerning how to “pull the wires which control the public mind”. Among the key members of the Freudian psychoanalysis movement in England, most of whom were associated with the Tavistock Institute, were Gustave Le bon, the originator of the term “crowd psychology”[xxix]; Wilfred Trotter, who promoted similar ideas in his book ‘Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace’[xxx], and Ernest Jones who developed the field of Group Dynamics.[xxxi] Bernays refers to all of these theorists in crowd control in his writings.

“Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.”[xxxii]

~ Gustave La Bon

Freud often pointed out the positive effects of sublimation. In other words, that in order to maintain civilization, individuals needed to sublimate many sexual and violent urges. For example, Freud cited the need for males to sublimate what he named the Oedipal Complex, which he claimed was the innate desire of young males to kill their fathers in order to have intercourse with their mothers.

Certainly Bernays knew of Freud’s theories on civilization’s requirement for sublimation, as he constantly promoted his uncle’s work. Therefore the fact that Bernays helped bring about so many of the destructive elements that led to the music/drug counterculture in the 1960s demands an explanation.

Prima facie it seems that Bernays used his uncle’s insights to deliberately break down the structure of American civilization. To understand this requires recognizing that none of the elements of the counterculture of the 1960’s described above occurred without some prior events that shifted culture and made them permissible. This is self-evident because anyone acting like a ‘Deadhead’ in 1920 would have been arrested. All of the aspects of the counterculture had been preceded by events that led to the subtle cultural shifts that permitted the public to accept them. And Edward Bernays was at the root of these cultural shifts.

Overt sexual images in the popular media

1913 Bernays was hired to protect a play that supported sex education against police interference. Typically, Bernays set up a fictitious front group called the “Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund” (officially concerned with fighting venereal disease) for the purpose of endorsing the play and intimidating critics. When reviewing the play the New York Times glowed: “it is ‘sex’ o clock in America.”

Uninhibited dancing

Bernays produced the performances of Vaslav Nijinsky who mimed masturbation onstage, causing an outrage and sometimes actual riots; “The whole country was discussing the ballet,” Bernays wrote: “The ballet liberated American dance and, through it, the American spirit. It fostered a more tolerant view toward sex; it changed our music and our appreciation of it… The ballet scenarios made modern art more palatable; color assumed new importance. It was a turning point in the appreciation of the arts in the United States. ”

An example of how the elements Bernays introduced would eventually blossom into the counter culture is Jim Morrison of “The Doors” (named after Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception). Morrison performed the same on-stage miming of masturbation that Nijinsky had but to a far larger audience. To further debase his listeners, Morrison sang about a young man acting out Freud’s Oedipus complex in “The End”, an ode to an apocalypse of a culture where “all the children are insane”:

“The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on

He took a face from the ancient gallery

And he walked on down the hall

He went into the room where his sister lived, and…then he

Paid a visit to his brother, and then he

He walked on down the hall, and

And he came to a door…and he looked inside

Father, yes son, I want to kill you

Mother…I want to…WAAAAAA”

While Morrison sang about a young man acting out the Oedipal Complex, another culturally debasing activity was taking place right in front of him. Uninhibited ‘freak’ dancing was part of the counterculture’s promotion of drug use and appeared on the Sunset Strip music clubs at the same time that LSD did. ‘Freak dancing’ as it was called, was introduced through the efforts of Vito Paulekas. Notice in the following video clip that though Paulekas seems to be dismissing LSD, he actually provides a number of reasons for taking it. At the end of the clip his wife Szou, who seems to be a victim of mind control, cites Vito’s belief that people learn from those younger than themselves and that she has learned from her child, obviously a culturally destructive pattern of learning. Moreover, she claims at the end of the clip that LSD is a “military plot”. This begs the question of how someone who appears mentally deficient came up with this idea.

“[LSD] it’s a military plot” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2c_RfDihZk

People who are loaded behind that kind of thing, don’t do anything. This heavy kind of insistence everyplace you go with all the media about “Wow, look at the colors, look at the lights, look at the strobe things blinking! Man, you can really find a trip if you get loaded behind this stuff.” There’s a lot of that kind of thing insisting that we become aware of it, that we become sensitive to it. And a lot of the young people are sensitive to it, and they become curious about it. So they say “which of it is bad?”, and I say “Man, all of it’s bad”. […] “I’m just going to get wiped out and I’m going to stay wiped out baby, and nothing’s going to get through to me.”

~ Vito Paulekas

The following video clip of Vito’s ‘freak dancers’ shows that their dancing obviously led people into LSD use, a fact that he could not have been unaware of.

“Vito’s Freak Dancers” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVIO5k6U46o

Vito made sure that his ‘freak dancers’ attended the shows of the fledgling rock idols to assist the LSD promoting bands of Laurel Canyon to become as popular as the Beatles.

Vito was in his fifties, but he had four-way sex with goddesses … He held these clay-sculpting classes on Laurel Avenue, teaching rich Beverly Hills dowagers how to sculpt. And that was the Byrds’ rehearsal room. Then Jim Dickson had the idea to put them on at Ciro’s, on the basis that all the freaks would show up and the Byrds would be their Beatles.

~ Kim Fowley http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr98.html

3. Music Idols

Bernays wrote: “Human beings need to have godhead symbols, and public relations counsels must help to create them.”[xxxiii] Bernays saw his idol-making as vital to the salvation of society: “We have no being in the air to watch over us. We must watch over ourselves, and that is where public relations counselors can prove their effectiveness, by making the public believe that human gods are watching over us for our own benefit.” These human gods, created by astute public relations, would keep order by giving their followers reasons to live and goals to accomplish.

Bernays manufactured the public’s adoration of Enrico Caruso, who is often called the first American ‘Pop Star’. Bernays wrote: “The overwhelming majority of the people who reacted so spontaneously to Caruso had never heard him before.” “The public’s ability to create its own heroes from wisps of impressions and its own imagination and to build them almost into flesh-and-blood gods fascinated me. Of course, I knew the ancient Greeks and other early civilized peoples had done this. But now it was happening before my eyes in contemporary America.”[xxxiv]

In his 1980 interview in Playboy magazine John Lennon also claimed that the military and the CIA created LSD, though this did not stop him from encouraging its use:

We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it, Harry? So get out the bottle, boy — and relax. They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.

In light of the discovery that the CIA funded Gordon Wasson’s trip to Mexico, Lennon’s comments begs the question as to how he came to his understanding about the CIA creating LSD, and raises additional questions about his assassination.

The research of David McGowan has shown that the connections between military intelligence and the music idols that promoted drug use to America’s youth were too numerous to have been accidental. Among the many examples, Frank Zappa was the son of a specialist in chemical warfare. Jim Morrison’s father was Admiral Morrison, the same Admiral Morrison who oversaw the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the Vietnam War that was genocide against the Vietnamese, and killed tens of thousands of American boys. Other ’rock idols’ with direct connections to the military included the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, Jimmy Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and the Police.

The father of Police band member Stewart Copeland, was the founder of the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) – the precursor to the CIA, and he also co-founded the CIA. Ian Copeland, Stewart’s brother, went on to start the “New Wave” music movement, promoting bands such as his brother’s The Police, and also Squeeze, B-52s, The Cure, Simple Minds, The English Beat, and The Go-Go’s. David McGowan also pointed out that Ian Copeland deliberately associated government power with the pop music counterculture by the names he gave his organizations: “I.R.S. Records”, the band “The Police”, and his “F.B.I.” talent agency. [xxxv]

We would note that this is just a small part of McGowan’s research and hope that our readers study his work.

Many of the so-called leaders and pioneers of psychedelic research became ‘media idols’: Gordon Wasson, Terence McKenna, and Timothy Leary have been virtually worshipped as gurus or gods. It is of note that two professors: one who taught at Harvard and wishes to remain anonymous, and Prof. Bart Dean who studied there, have informed Irvin that, aside from the Wasson library, there is actually a chapel at Harvard dedicated to Wasson worship.

Ironically, as this article was being written, a new book of this genre was being published: Albert Hofmann: LSD and the Divine Scientist.

Though like many of those associated with the origins of the psychedelic movement, Albert Hofmann is called “divine”, evidence has come to light which exposes him as both a CIA and French Intelligence operative. Hoffman helped the agency dose the French village Pont Saint Esprit with LSD. As a result five people died and Hofmann helped to cover up the crime. The LSD event at Pont Saint Esprit led to the famous murder of Frank Olson by the CIA because he had threatened to go public. It was the exposure of Olson’s murder and his involvement with the MK-ULTRA program that caused the national uproar leading to the Church Commission.[xxxvi]

Incredibly, a paper to be published in Time and Mind this July by English researcher Alan Piper shows that LSD was known about years before Albert Hofmann supposedly “invented” it on 16 November 1938 (Hofmann claims to have not been aware of LSD’s properties until 16 April 1943). Piper has noted that in 1933 Jewish author Leo Perutz wrote the novel Saint Peter’s Snow wherein a new drug made from a fungus from wheat is secretly tested and used in a failed attempt to bring about a return of religious beliefs and return a Roman Emperor to his throne, with a priest who warns that it’s instead the worship of Molech. Rather than a return of Christian belief, the book ends in a communist rebellion. The relationship between psychedelics and communist or socialist political leanings is not uncommon and should be noted. Piper saw the parallelism between Perutz’s psychedelic drug and LSD as a mystery. The authors maintain that in light of the evidence showing that the psychedelic movement was part of a multi-generational plan, Perutz’s book clearly shows an awareness of that agenda. It’s ironic too that Perutz chooses the name of St Peter’s Snow for the title of the book from the following quote, as it states on page 93 that “in the Alps it was called St Peter’s Snow” and of course the Alps are primarily in Switzerland – where Hoffman supposedly invented the drug:

A few months later I came across the incomparably more important testimony of Dionysus the Areopagite, a fourth-century Christian Neo-Platonist, who states in one of his works that he imposed a two-day fast on the members of his community, who longed for the real presence of God, and he then regaled them with “bread made with holy flour’. […]

I came across an ancient Roman rural priests’ song, a solemn invocation of Marmar or Mavor, who at that time was not yet the bloodthirsty god of war but the peaceful protector of the fields. ‘Let your white frost invade the crop so that they acknowledge thy power,’ it said. Like all priests, Roman rural priests knew the secret of the hallucinogenic drug that produces a state of ecstasy in which people ‘become seeing’ and ‘acknowledge the power of the god’. The white frost was not a kind of wheat, but a wheat disease, a parasite, a fungus that invaded the wheat and fed on its substance.” […]

“There are many kinds of parasitic fungi,” the baron went on, “the ascomycetes, the phycomycetes, and the basidiomycetes. In his Synopsis Fungorum Bargin describes more than a hundred varieties, and nowadays his work is regarded as out-of-date. But among that hundred I had identified the only one that produces ecstatic effects when it is introduced into human food and thus finds its way into the human organism.” […]

There is – or was – a wheat disease that was often described in earlier centuries and was known by a different name wherever it appeared. In Spain it was called Mary Magdalene’s Plait, in Alsace it was known as Poor Soul’s Dew. In Adam of Cremona’s Physician’s Book it was called Misericord Seed, and in the Alps it was called St Peter’s Snow.[xxxvii]

The book continues later on with the same theme we’re discussing here, where two of the main characters of the plot argue over whether they should test the drug on themselves:

I did not at first realize that she was talking about the baron. “I’ve been quarrelling with him,” she went on. “A very serious quarrel. With whom? The baron, of course, about the hallucinogen. He maintained that we two, he and I, should not take it, but I disagreed. We were the leaders, he said, we must remain clear-headed and dispassionate and be above things, our task was to lead and not be carried away. That’s what the quarrel was about. I said that being above it meant being out of it, and just because he was the leader he must feel and think what the crowd thought and felt.[…]” [xxxviii]

Later in the story we discover that the woman, Bibiche, who created and tried the drug, is the one who headed the communist rebellion.

Feminism

In the 1920s, working for the American Tobacco Company, Bernays sent a group of young models to march in the New York City parade. He then told the press that a group of ‘women rights marchers’ would light ‘Torches of Freedom’. On his signal, the models lit Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of the eager photographers. The New York Times (1 April 1929) printed: “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom'”.

The study of the origins of feminism itself is an important one. A semi-anonymous Canadian researcher and author, Karen, who calls herself “Girl Writes What,” has spent the last several years investigating the history and origins of feminism, and found, like the ‘psychedelic movement’ many of the claims concerning its foundations are fraudulent.[xxxix]

Integration

In 1920 Bernays produced the first NAACP convention in Atlanta, Georgia. His campaign was considered successful simply because there was no violence at the convention. Bernays focused on the important contributions of African Americans to Whites living in the South. He later received an award from the NAACP for his contribution. During this decade he also handled publicity for the NAACP.

Though this is an obviously sensitive issue, it must be remembered that at the beginning of the nineteenth century rock and roll was almost strictly African-American music. If Bernays saw that music as helping to release sexual restrictions, integration would have been useful. Moreover, since they were emerging from slavery, the culture of African Americans in the 19^th century was much closer to the “Archaic Revival” promoted by the creators of the counterculture than that of white America. Thus, Bernays’ promotion of ‘integration’ was likely an attempt to debase the culture of white America, rather than uplift African Americans.

Psychedelic drugs

Though Bernays is not known to have overtly promoted LSD, as noted above, he did assist in establishing smoking tobacco as a socially desirable act, thereby seeding the ground for other drug use. Moreover, Bernays created the propaganda that enabled a destructive drug to be accepted by the American public – the PR campaign that fooled the country into believing that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health.

The wide-scale U.S. acceptance of fluoride-related compounds in drinking water and a wide variety of consumer products over the past half century is a textbook case of social engineering orchestrated by Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the “father of public relations” Edward L. Bernays. The episode is instructive, for it suggests that tremendous capacity of powerful interests to reshape the social environment, thereby prompting individuals to unwarily think and act in ways that are often harmful to themselves and their loved ones. […]

In fact, sodium fluoride is a dangerous poison and has been a primary active ingredient in a wide variety of insecticides and fungicides. The substance bioaccumulates in mammals, has been linked to dulled intellect in children, and is a cause of increased bone fractures and osteosarcoma.[…]

In the 1930s, Edward Bernays was public-relations adviser to the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). Alcoa’s principal attorney, Oscar Ewing, went on to serve in the Truman administration from 1947 to 1952 as head of the Federal Security Agency, of which the Public Health Service was a part. In that capacity, Ewing authorized water fluoridation for the entire country in 1950 and enlisted Bernays’ services to promote water fluoridation to the public.

Bernays recalled the fluoridation campaign in which he was involved as merely another assignment. “The PR wizard specialized in promoting new ideas and products to the public by stressing a claimed health benefit,” […]

One such approach to prompting public opinion involved correspondence from the City’s Health Department to the presidents of the NBC and CBS television networks, informing them “that debating fluoridation is like presenting two sides for anti-Catholicism or anti-Semitism and therefore not in the public interest.” Another method involved laying the ground work for making fluoridation a house-hold term with a scientific patina. He advised his clients to send letters to the editors of leading publications discussing what the specific aspects of fluoridation required. “We would put out the definition first to the editors of important newspapers,” Bernays recalled. “Then we would send a letter to publishers of dictionaries and encyclopedias. After six or eight months we would find the world fluoridation was published and defined in the dictionaries and encyclopedias.”

In 1957, the Committee to Protect Our Children’s Teeth suddenly emerged to tout fluoridation with several celebrity figures on its roster…[xl]

But the most direct connection between Bernays and the psychedelic movement is that he was a close friend, advisor and promoter of the above-mentioned Gordon Wasson – the so-called discoverer of ‘magic mushrooms’. Bernays wrote:

Gordon Wasson was one of those newspapermen who consciously or unconsciously recognized the implications of the contacts he made in that capacity. He found these contacts important, outstanding. This led to other places and other things. In the New York Tribune financial department he had made contact with the house on the corner, Broad and Wall – J. P. Morgan. Then he had given up newspaper work and become associated with the home [Morgan’s “house on the corner”]. First he was in the publicity department. When Martin Eagen died, he assumed the function of publicity man with J. Pierpont Morgan. He was highly respected by his own people. He was intelligent, smooth. His mind was a highly, splendidly geared functioning mechanism. […] Wasson made it his business and he got pleasure out of it too, of associating with a broad segment of society. This was not unimportant in maintaining contacts for the house on the corner [Broad and Wall – J.P. Morgan], with the rest of the world.

Not until long after I knew him did I find out in [Prof. Raymond] Moley’s book “The First Seven Years” [sic] published in 1939, a reference to Gordon Wasson. Moley wrote a memo in 1934 and made recommendations for the Stock Exchange Commission membership. Next to Gordon Wasson, whom he recommended, he added, “a resident of New Jersey, handled foreign securities for Guaranty Company, has acted a liaison between Wall Street and Landis, Cohen and Corcoran because his friendship with them was known downtown. Knows security business and the Act thoroughly having helped in its drafting, very well-liked by treasury and commerce, would certainly be recommended by the Guaranty and Stock Exchange and therefore would be acceptable to Wall Street. I saw Wasson very often between 1934 and ’44[…].[xli]

~ Edward Bernays

An example of Bernays’ influence on Wasson is Wasson’s article of September 26, 1970 in the New York Times, wherein Wasson claimed to feel remorse regarding the reports of “hippies, psychopaths and adventurers and pseudo-research workers” that had descended on Huautla de Jimenez in Oaxaca, Mexico to take magic mushrooms:

Huautla, when I first knew it as a humble out-of-the-way Indian village, has become a true mecca for hippies, psychopaths, adventurers, pseudo-research workers, the miscellaneous crew of our society’s drop-outs. The old ways are dead and I fear that my responsibility is heavy, mine and Maria Sabina’s. […]

As for me, what have I done? I made a cultural discovery of importance. Should I have suppressed it? It has led to further discoveries the reach of which remains to be seen. Should these further discoveries have remained stultified by my unwillingness to reveal the secret of the Indians’ hallucinogens?

Yet what I have done gives me nightmares: I have unleashed on lovely Huautla a torrent of commercial exploitation of the vilest kind. Now the mushrooms are exposed for sale everywhere—in every market-place, in every village doorway. Everyone offers his services as a “priest” of the rite, even the politicos. […] The whole of the countryside is agog with the furtive movements of hippies, the comings and goings of the “federalistas,” the Dogberries with their blundering efforts to root them out. [xlii]

~ R. Gordon Wasson

However, in a later letter to Bertram Wolfe that was found at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, Wasson remarks:

October 13, 1970:

Dear Mr. Wolfe: […] Do you remember your last letter to me? I was asking you where Tolstoy had said the printing press was a mighty engine for disseminating ignorance. This Mazatec affair is a case in point. [emphasis added][xliii]

~ R. Gordon Wasson

We can be certain now that Wasson was engaging in a Bernays-style misdirection to hide the truth with his claim to be sorry that he had ruined “lovely Huautla”. Within the trove of documents made public by the CIA on MK-ULTRA are some brought to the attention of Jan Irvin by MK-ULTRA expert Dr. Colin Ross. These documents prove that Wasson’s journey had been financed by the infamous organization. In other words, the resulting magazine articles from Life and This Week, cited above, were describing an operation funded by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA Subproject 58. These documents will be analyzed in a separate article but show that Wasson lied to conceal his agenda.

For brevity we’ll only include three of the CIA letters here. Other documents include financial information for the camera and recording equipment, a note stating that J.P. Morgan Bank and the National Philosophical Society were the subcontractors, and letters from Wasson requesting MK-ULTRA reimburse his expenses for his trips to gather hallucinogenic mushrooms, and several letters between Wasson and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, in the weeks before the Life magazine article was published – including an invitation from Dulles to Wasson to come and visit him.

February 8, 1956

Attention, Dr. [redacted – Sidney Gottlieb or Charles Geschickter?]

Dear Sirs,

Over recent months, as Dr. [redacted] will inform you, I have had conversations with him and Dr. [redacted – James Moore?] of the [redacted – Geschickter fund?] concerning certain pioneering inquiries that we are [unintelligible] hallucinatory fungi used by some of the more remote [redacted – Mexican Indian cultures] in association with their indigenous religious practices.

I am planning a fourth expedition to the mountains in the [redacted – Oaxaca region of Mexico] for July. I should like to hope that the expenses involved win this expedition would be borne by a [redacted] in the medical aspects of the research. With this in mind, I take the liberty of applying to you by this letter for a grand-in-aid of $2000 for the purpose of gathering the specimens in the field, identification thereof, their conservation either in liquor or in the dry state, and their conveyance to [redacted – CIA or Albert Hoffman?].

For your further information, Professor [redacted – Roger Heim], leading [redacted] mycologist and Director of the [redacted – Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle] has committed himself to accompany us on this trip. His great experience in mycology generally and in tropical mycology in particular will be of very great value to us. In order that we may plan accordingly, I should hope that your decision on this matter could be communicated to me before too long. I am leaving for a trip to [redacted] at the end of March to be gone for two months, and before my departure for [redacted – Oaxaca, Huautla de Jimenez] I should like to settle on all details concerning the equipment we shall take and the personnel of our expedition.

I remain Respectfully Yours

Gordon Wasson [name redacted in the original]

The following letters show exactly how close DCI Dulles was to Wasson. Obviously, as the head of the CIA Dulles would have known of and, as subproject 58 documents reveal, actually approved the secret agenda of MK-ULTRA’s ‘subproject 58’ – the promoting of psychedelic drugs to Americas’ youth.

21 March 1956

MK-ULTRA [unreadable]: COMPTROLLER

ATTENTION: Finance Division

SUBJECT: MK-ULTRA, Subproject 58

Under the authority granted in the Memoranda dated 13 April 1953 from the DCI to the DD/2, and the extension of this authority in subsequent memoranda, Subproject 58 has been approved, and $2,000.00 of the over-all Project MK-ULTRA funds has been obligated to cover the subproject’s expenses and should be charged to Allotment 6-2502-10-001.

[redacted – Acting Chief]

TSS/Chemical Division

APPROVED FOR OBLIGATION OF FUNDS.

Research Director [redacted]

Date: [redacted]

3 April 1957

Dear Gordon:

It was a great pleasure to write a letter of recommendation on behalf of my good friend, Ellsworth Bunker, to the Century Association. I enclose a copy. It was good to hear from you. Let me know if you are in Washington.

~ Allen Dulles[xliv]

An example of how Wasson’s activities for the CIA have been kept hidden is the work of MK-ULTRA ‘expert’ and author Hank Albarelli, a former lawyer for the Carter administration and Whitehouse who also worked for the Treasury Department. Though Albarelli presents himself to the public as a MK-ULTRA ‘whistleblower’, he attempted to derail Irvin’s investigation into Gordon Wasson. Over a 3-year period – which Irvin has carefully documented – Albarelli pretended to help Irvin file CIA FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests. During this period Albarelli repeatedly claimed that the FOIA requests had come back empty, or that the Agency had not responded and had not yet filled the FOIA requests. Albarelli’s claims were untrue. The agency had filled separate FOIA that Irvin had filed on Wasson in just 90 days.

Though several pages on Wasson were released to FOIA requests by the CIA in 2003, eventually Albarelli sent a fake CIA ‘response’ to Irvin, wherein Albarelli stated that the CIA’s response was: “0 on Wasson. All pages most likely “destroyed in 1973 MK/ULTRA destruction of documents.””. Then, after his many claims that the FOIA request hadn’t yet been filed by the CIA, Albarelli changed his story and claimed that the delay was due to the fact that he had never filed it, even though Irvin maintained numerous email records where Abarelli had claimed to have done so. Suspicious, Irvin filed his own FOIA request with the CIA, which was promptly filled by the Agency and exposed Albarelli’s cover story as, apparently, a fabrication intended to slow Irvin’s research. Here are just a few of the conversations regarding the matter that Irvin recorded:

On February 16, 2010, Irvin wrote:

Hi Hank,

Question, would you be willing to help me do a FOIA request on Wasson? I have no idea where to begin or who to send it to. I’ve looked a few times and it all was so intimidating for me – which is what they want I suppose. But that seems the best way to get to the core of this issue.

Best,

Jan

On February 16, 2010, Albarelli replied:

Sure. The first thing we need is an obit on Wasson from a major newspaper like the NYT’s. After that, I can do the rest for you.

On May 04, 2010, Albarelli wrote:

0 on Wasson. All pages most likely “destroyed in 1973 MK/ULTRA destruction of documents.”

On Oct 22, 2010, Irvin wrote:

I also asked if you would send me the CIA FOIA response so that I have it in my Wasson records?

On Oct 22, 2010, Albarelli replied:

[Y]ou can’t without my revealing all those other files/documents/subjects I requested and I have no intention of doing that… that simply was not part of our arrangement which is a bit one-sided thus far…

On July 04, 2011, Albarelli, contradicting his email of May 04, 2010, claims:

[Y]ou need to read more carefully– FOIAs have NOT been answered: these the refiled FOIAs..

I will share nothing with you that does not involve your writings or work…

[…] Please do not keep bothering me with this stuff… I do not share your interest in Wasson: I don’t care if he worked for the CIA; I am only interested in Pont St. Esprit and the French use of LSD, matters you know nothing about as far as I know.

On February 22, 2013 Albarelli wrote:

Huxley and MK/ULTRA: a pipe-dream on your part. Wasson was not CIA. I challenge you to document that.

90 days for a neophyte filing, but look at what you got in response; documents that were released 25 years ago.

I did NOT file a FOIA for you because I did NOT want to be associated with you in any way.

During the above conversation on February 22, 2013, Albarelli threw insult after insult at Irvin and refused to answer any direct questions. Though Albarelli claims that he did not want to be associated with Irvin in any way, after the above emails regarding the FOIAs and requesting his help, Albarelli did a full interview on Irvin’s podcast show to promote his book A Terrible Mistake, which he also agreed to publish this interview in print and did the editing of the interview himself. Albarelli accuses Irvin for being a neophyte for getting a response from the CIA in 90 days, but from the above February 16, and May 04, 2010 missives, it’s clear that Albarelli too received the response from the CIA within 90 days. Albarelli also claimed that the files had been released 25 years ago, when they had actually been released on 5/5/2003 – 6 years and 9 months before Irvin’s first request to Albarelli for help. When Albarelli claims: “you can’t without my revealing all those other files/documents/subjects I requested”, in fact the CIA answers each FOIA request individually by postal mail.

Between the CIA FOIA request documents that Albarelli apparently attempted to withhold from Irvin, and also the CIA documents from MK-ULTRA subproject 58, it’s quite easy to document that Wasson was involved with the CIA and MK-ULTRA – as we’ve already revealed above.

In our opinion, in light of the above and the documents showing that MK-ULTRA funded Wasson, Albarelli’s description of Wasson’s relationship to the CIA below can be seen as clever disinformation intended to hide the truth from the public.

Albarelli wrote:

Especially significant in the history of LSD and psychotropic drugs is the work of Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina Pavlovna. The couple traveled the globe in search of exotic and rare psychoactive mushrooms, and they were the first to use the term ‘ethnomycology’. Over a forty year period, the two collected and catalogued the “food of the Gods.” In 1977, Wasson commented that throughout his many excursions to Mexico from 1952 through 1962, “I didn’t send a single sample to an American mycologist. I didn’t get a penny, not a single grant from any government sources. I’m perfectly sure of that.”

There is no reason to doubt Wasson, but what he did not know at the time of his excursions was that the United States government was closely monitoring every one of his trips and that each and every one of his collected samples found their way back from Mexico to CIA-funded laboratories. Wasson also sent his samples to Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Labs in Switzerland. Hofmann, according to Wasson, “was doing the key work synthesizing the active ingredients” of the samples. What Wasson again did not realize was that the fruits of all of his and Hofmann’s labors were being plucked from the vine by the U.S. Army and CIA both of whom, since at least 1948, had covert operatives working in the Sandoz Laboratories.[…]

Wasson also reported that he had once been approached by either the CIA or FBI. “I’m not sure which,” he said. They wanted him “to do work for the government.” He turned them down, saying he thought the effort “patriotic,” but did not want his work being classified secret. “I wanted to publish all my findings,” he explained. [emphasis – ours][xlv]

Albarelli’s ‘research’ seems to only expose insignificant aspects of the overarching MK-ULTRA programs, sacrificing older operations to keep the more important and more current ones separate and hidden.

Also of note is that the CIA FOIA request that Irvin filed behind Albarelli’s was on Gordon Wasson, and several of the files received from the CIA are personal letters between Wasson and Allen Dulles (one is quoted above) – from just 5 weeks before Wasson’s Life magazine article was published.

Bernays, the Government Operative for Social Control

Bernays was also directly linked into another government effort to shape culture. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson engaged George Creel to influence the American public opinion in favor of WWI. Creel founded the Committee on Public Education and hired Edward Bernays. It is noteworthy that after the death of his wife, Creel resided at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, the secret society that also has members of the Grateful Dead – Bob Weir, Mickey Hart.[xlvi] As well, Alexander Shulgin, the famous psychedelic chemist, is also a member of the club. In his book Pihkal he refers to the Bohemian Club as “The Owl Club” for its famous mascot:

I happily rejoined the Owl Club and, to this day, I put on a polite shirt and tie and carry my viola to the City [San Francisco] and play in the orchestra every Thursday evening, without fail.

I should add that I’m the only Club member who wears, and always has worn, black sandals instead of shoes, having decided a very long time ago that sandals were infinitely healthier for my feet than the airless, moist environment offered by the kinds of footwear worn by my fellow Owlers. They are used to my sandals, by now, and they are used to me.[xlvii]

~ Alexander Shulgin

The Bohemian Club is the West Coast sister club of the CIA’s Century Club (cited above), formerly headed up by none other than DCI Allen Dulles and, apparently, Gordon Wasson.[xlviii]

One cannot understand Edward Bernays’ and Gordon Wasson’s influence on American culture by regarding each piece in isolation or as “one thing”. Their work must be viewed as a whole. From this perspective it is clear that they were part of a “tide” that eventually overwhelmed the youth of America. The authors would argue that given Bernays’ totalitarian political perspective and his understanding of group behavior, and Gordon Wasson’s now proven role in MK-ULTRA, the collection of destructive elements they introduced into American culture could not have been by accident. The turning of America’s youth into “Deadheads” was a longstanding project created by a secret organization within the US government that intends to usher in a new Dark Ages.

As the Cohen brothers wrote in their film “No Country For Old Men”:

Ellis: You know,

if you’d have told me 20 years ago.

I’d see children walking

the streets of our Texas towns.

…with green hair, bones in their noses…

I just flat-out

wouldn’t have believed you.

Bell: Signs and wonders.

Ellis: But I think once you quit hearing “sir”

and “ma’am,” the rest is soon to foller.

Bell: – Oh, it’s the tide.

Ellis: – Yeah.

It’s the dismal tide.

It is not the one thing.

Bell: Not the one thing.

Terence McKenna and the Esalen Institute

Terence McKenna eventually became the poster boy for Huxley’s and the Esalen Institute’s New Dark Age, or neo-feudalist, post-modernist agenda to enslave the masses and turn back history. McKenna’s book The Archaic Revival is essentially a rundown of nearly all of the items promoted by the Fourth World Wilderness agenda to accomplish these goals.[xlix]

In the introduction to The Invisible Landscape by brothers McKenna, Jay Stevens, author of Storming Heaven, makes clear the true agenda of the McKenna brothers’ work:

Our appetite for simplicity has caused us to compress the chaos of the ‘60s into one monolithic “Youth Revolt.” But there were two philosophies then among the revolutionaries on how the world might be remade. One path, endorsed by political power and using the vantage to raise consciousness and save the world. The other path proposed an attack on the consciousness itself using a controversial and soon outlawed family of psychochemicals-the psychedelics. [emphasis added][l]

~Jay Stevens

Confirming Stevens’ statement, in The Archaic Revival Terence McKenna admits:

You know, I am very much at variance with the wisdom of hindsight in looking back at how Leary and Alpert and Ralph Metzner handled it in the sixties. But to try to launch a “children’s crusade,” to try to co-opt the destiny of the children of the middle class using the media as your advance man [i.e. Henry Luce and Time-Life] was a very risky business. And it rebounded, I think, badly.

I think Huxley’s approach was much more intelligent—not to try to reach the largest number of people, but to try to reach the most important and influential people: the poets, the architects, the politicians, the research scientists, and especially the psychotherapists. Because what we’re talking about is the greatest boon to psychotherapy since dreaming. [emphasis added][li]

Later McKenna admits that Aldous Huxley was a key player behind MK-ULTRA and this neo-feudalism, all the while relaying the official version of the story:

When you go to the Amazon or when you take peyote with the Huichol it is quite a chore to get sufficient material for twenty people. So the release of so much LSD into modern society caused the powers that be [who released it] to assume that the whole social machine was being dissolved in acid—literally, before their very eyes. I think that this was a mistake, to go at it like this. There were many voices at the time, with many theories of how it should be handled. If Aldous Huxley had lived another ten years, it would have been very different.[lii]

Recently it has come to light that Aldous Huxley was also a member of the Century Club with Gordon Wasson and Allen Dulles.[liii]

In August 2012 Irvin published a short overview of some of his research points on Esalen, Huxley and McKenna, which revealed that Aldous Huxley and the Esalen Institute had long been a key center for distributing this New Dark Age, as well as Fourth World Wilderness agenda to dumb down the masses, essentially being a sort of MK-ULTRA headquarters with Michael Murphy apparently running the entire MK-ULTRA show today.

Is it coincidence that Terence would hang out with the great grandson of one of the key promoters of Darwin’s theories, Francis Huxley (1), who had ties via his own family to Darwin’s via his cousin (2), and was influenced heavily by Tielhard (3) – who created the Piltdown Hoax (4) – who happened also to have an intro in his book written by Julian Huxley (5), Francis’s father (6), and should then come up with the Stoned Ape theory (7), and promote it and the 2012 meme that was developed by a CIA agent, Coe (8), who just so happens to be an in-law with a friend of Julian’s, Dobhzanski (9), and then dispense the entire meme from Esalen (10), where he spent time with Aldous’s wife, Laura (11), and Esalen happens to be co-created by Aldous Huxley himself (12)? [liv]

The Invisible landscape, which is essentially an attack on thought, an attempt to get the youth of America to believe there is no truth, also talks about using psychedelics and ending critical thinking to bring about the apocalypse:

Achievement of the zero state can be imagined to arrive in one of two forms. One is the dissolution of the cosmos in an actual cessation and unraveling of natural laws, a literal apocalypse. The other possibility takes less for granted from the mythologems associated with the collective transformation and entry into concrescence and hews more closely to the idea that concrescence, however miraculous it is, is still the culmination of a human process, a process of toolmaking, which comes to completion in the perfect artifact: the monadic self, exteriorized, condensed, and visible in three dimensions’ in the alchemical terms, the dream of a union of spirit and matter. Presumably, were such a hyper-spatial tool/process discovered, in a very short time it would entirely restructure life’s experience of itself, of time, space, and of otherness, and then it would be these effects which would follow rather than precede the concrescence, and which, through their atemporal influence on the content of visionary experience, would be seen to have given rise to the “apocalyptic scenario” in the expectation of so many ontologies. The appearance in normal space-time of hyper-dimensional body, obedient to a simultaneously transformed and resurrected human will, and able to plumb the obligations and opportunities inherent in this unique juncture in energy’s long struggle for self-liberation, may be apocalypse enough. [emphasis added] [lv]

Eleusis

In 1978 Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, and Carl A. P. Ruck published The Road To Eleusis, a book which argues that the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries were based on a derivative of ergot, or early LSD. In the forward of this book Wasson states:

The initiates lived through the night in the telesterion of Eleusis, under the leadership of the two hierophantic families, the Eumolpids and the Kerykes, and they would come away all wonder-struck by what they had lived through: according to some, they were never the same as before.[lvi] [emphasis added]

In chapter one, Wasson continues:

Early Man in Greece, in the second millennium before Christ, founded the Mysteries of Eleusis and they held spellbound the initiates who each year attended the right. Silence as to what took place there was obligatory: the laws of Athens were extreme in the penalties that were imposed on any who infringed the secret, but throughout the Greek world, far beyond the reach of Athens’ laws, the secret was kept spontaneously throughout Antiquity, and since the suspension of the Mysteries in the 4^th century A.D. that Secret has become a built-in element in the lore of Ancient Greece. I would not be surprised if some classical scholars would even feel that we are guilty of a sacrilegious outrage at now prying open the secret. On 15 November 1956 I read a brief paper before the American Philosophical Society [an MK-ULTRA Subproject 58 subcontractor – see CIA files] describing the Mexican mushroom cult and the ensuing oral discussion I intimated that this cult might lead us to the solution of the Eleusinian Mysteries.[lvii] [emphasis added]

In the above two paragraphs Wasson admits that the entirety of the Eleusinian Mysteries were controlled by two families: the Eumolpids and the Kerykes. He states that initiates would come away “wonder-struck” and that they were held “spellbound”. He admits that everything regarding the mysteries was a secret under threat of penalty, or, as in the case of Socrates, death. But Wasson ironically claims the secret was “kept spontaneously throughout Antiquity” – which is absurd. If the mysteries were kept secret by force, they were, therefore, entirely controlled—state sanctioned. As Irvin has shown in lectures, secrecy and occultation are nearly always used against, or to control, those who don’t have that secret information.[lviii] Why would these two families need to keep something that’s supposed to be a spiritual or religious experience a secret, unless it was in actuality only for control?

Wasson goes on to discuss a paper he read on 15 November 1956 to the American Philosophical Society. CIA MK-ULTRA documents reveal that “10. National Philosophical Society” was a “Subproject 58 – Cosponsor”, but then go on to say “Unable to locate – not sent”. Why would the CIA be unable to locate the National Philosophical Society, unless the name is wrong? I think it’s highly likely that this reference to the National Philosophical Society is actually referring to the American Philosophical Society. There doesn’t appear evidence of a National Philosophical Society ever existing, and there is much for an “American Philosophical Society” – which was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743. So was the American Philosophical Society also behind MK-ULTRA Subproject 58? Online searches for a “National Philosophical Society” automatically pull up the “American Philosophical Society” – where Wasson gave his lecture on this very topic in 1956 – during the height of his MK-ULTRA activities.

CONCLUSION

The authors are in disagreement about the use of mind-altering drugs. One believes that we do should not dismiss the potential of these substances as biological tools to open doorways of the mind, and possibly spiritual dimensions; but those who consider these substances as only spiritual tools often ignore their dark side and never consider that they can be easily used as much for control. Like a knife may be used to cut your food, it can also be used to kill. It is important for people who use these substances to consider what others think of them who don’t use them for spiritual purposes. The other believes that given their provenance, they should not be taken under any circumstances.

We are in complete agreement however, that the only defense against those that would lead us into a New Dark Age is reason. We recommend the study of logic and critical thinking found in the Tritium pedagogy be used in all schools and become a part of everyone’s life.

We must consider: Does the predator think that these substances are tools for spiritual awakening, or for the control of others? What the reader may believe is not necessarily the whole truth.

How the elite of ancient Athens controlled the masses was through drug mystery initiations at Eleusis that they managed to keep secret for 2000 years during their reign, and the secret agenda of how the mysteries were actually used for control hasn’t been revealed for all to see until now – nearly 4000 years since the mysteries at Eleusis began.

Huston Smith in the introduction to The Road to Eleusis, says:

The Greeks, though, created a holy institution, the Eleusinian Mysteries, which seems regularly to have opened a space in the human psych for God to enter. The content of those Mysteries is, together with the identity of India’s sacred Soma plant, one of the two best kept secrets in history […]

For by direct implication it raises contemporary questions which our cultural establishment has thus far deemed too hot to face.

The first of these is the already cited question Nietzsche raised: Can humanity survive godlessness, which is to say, the absence of an ennobling vision – a convincing, elevating view of the nature of things and life’s place within it?

Second, have modern secularism, scientism, materialism, and consumerism conspired to form a carapace that Transcendence now has difficulty piercing?

In the answer to that second question is affirmative, a third one follows hard in its heels. Is there need, perhaps an urgent need, to devise something like the Eleusinian Mysteries to get us out of Plato’s cave and into the light? [emphasis added]

~ Huston Smith – Intro Road to Eleusis, p. 10.

Apparently that’s what was actually done: The elites and oligarchs, based on their own arrogance and ad vericundiam, or false appeal to authority, recreated the Eleusinian mysteries to pull the masses from one of Plato’s caves, and not into the light, but rather, into another cave.

The meaning of “the noble lie”, referred to as “an ennobling vision” by Smith, above, is defined: “In politics a noble lie is a myth or untruth, often, but not invariably, of a religious nature, knowingly told by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as described in the Republic.”:[lix]

. . . the earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack, and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth. . . While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious — but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though for the most part you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian.[lx]

All of this leaves us asking… Was the field of ethnomycology founded, not, necessarily, to study the myths and legends of cultures that utilized these substances, but rather to study how they used them for control – the noble lie? Was it also founded to promote this neo-feudalist, archaic revival? Were MK-ULTRA Subproject 58, the psychedelic revolution, and the Deadhead an expression of that control? Are these systems of control being continued today through the rave culture and “Burning Man”?

So it appears.

Just as the ancient Greek hierophants created the mysteries of Eleusis, just as Emperor Titus created the story of Jesus and Christianity, just as the Levitical priests created Judaism and the “chosen” ideology; today the elites have spun a new religion, the New Dark Age, a.k.a. the Archaic Revival –and they call this reverse direction into history “evolution”. Wasson, McKenna, Leary, and Hoffman are but the hierophants of this New Dark Age, and its new mystery religion, which is nothing but mind control in disguise.

As John Uri Lloyd, one of the first to actually experience psilocybe mushrooms in the 1800s, warns us in a footnote in his novel Etidorhpa (Aphrodite backwards):

NOTE.- […] If, in the course of experimentation, a chemist should strike upon a compound that in traces only would subject his mind and drive his pen to record such seemingly extravagant ideas as are found in the hallucinations herein pictured, would it not be his duty to bury the discovery from others, to cover from mankind the existence of such a noxious fruit of the chemist’s or pharmaceutist’s art? Introduce such an intoxicant, and start it to ferment in humanity’s blood, and before the world were advised of its possible results, might not the ever increasing potency gain such headway as to destroy, or debase, our civilization, and even to exterminate mankind?[lxi]

John Uri Lloyd, 1895 – Etidorhpa

The authors are not looking to bring anyone out of one cave and into yet another, but to free humanity from this insanity. And only the truth is capable of that. Esalen, Aldous Huxley, Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and the peddlers of this agenda: The spell is now undone and the true secrets of Eleusis, of the CIA and the psychedelic revolution, are now revealed for the entire world to see.

Though it seems incredible, Esalen, and Huxley, McKenna, Bernays, Wasson and Dulles appear to have been part of a secret agenda within the U.S. government that intends to usher in a post-modernist, neo-feudalism Dark Age and slavery in America. What makes this particularly difficult to believe is the unanswered question of the organization’s motivation. What would motivate such a group? Racism? Classism? Religious fervor? Power? All of the above? And how would it be able to maintain such secrecy, involving certainly hundreds, if not thousands of individuals over such a long time?

One thing is clear. Whatever is the basis for this organization, it resides within identifiable secret societies. The number of individuals that can be demonstrated to have taken part in creating the Deadhead who are also members of Skull and Bones, the Century Club and the Bohemian Club is simply too large to have been circumstantial. Moreover, Dr. Colin Ross has shown that high level Freemasonry was responsible for funding the original LSD research (citation?) and this group should also be inspected closely.

We appeal to scholars and to the public to help us find the truth behind MK-ULTRA and the creation of the Deadhead and the post-modernist, neo-feudalism movement.

Discuss in forum!

[1] John Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Gnostic Media, 2009.

[2] Jan Irvin R. Gordon Wasson: The Man, the Legend, the Myth: Beginning a New History of Magic Mushrooms, Ethnomycology, and the Psychedelic Revolution, May 13, 2012, Gnostic Media

http://www.gnosticmedia.com/SecretHistoryMagicMushroomsProject

[3] Dave McGowan – http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr98.html

[4] Terence McKenna, Archaic Revival, 1991, HarperSanFransico

[5] Ibid, p. 248

[6] Ibid, p. 110

[7] Michael Coe, The Maya, Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1966

[8] Terence McKenna: The Invisible Landscape, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, pg. 171. This citation is not found in the 1^st_,1975 edition, of The Invisible Landscape.

[9] Terence McKenna, Archaic Revival, 1991, HarperSanFransico. P. 215

[10] Rob King, In the future, I’m right: Letter from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell over 1984 novel sheds light on their different ideas. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111440/Aldous-Huxley-letter-George-Orwell-1984-sheds-light-different-ideas.html

[11] Louis Jolyon West (1975) in Hallucinations: Behaviour, Experience, and Theory by Ronald K. Siegel and Louis Jolyon West, 1975. ISBN 978-1-135-16726-4. P. 298 ff.

[xii] Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 0-226-09258-5. p. 84

[xiii] Ibid, p. 137

[xiv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out

[xv] Around 1962, Hunter was an early volunteer test subject (along with Ken Kesey) for psychedelic chemicals at Stanford University’s research covertly sponsored by the CIA in their MK-ULTRA program. [McNally 42] He was paid to take LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline and report on his experiences, which were creatively formative for him: “Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist…and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, every so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resoundingbells….By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.” [McNally 42-43]

[xvi] Lehmann-Haupt, C (2001-11-01). “Ken Kesey, Author of ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66”. The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-09-08.

[xvii] An interview with John Perry Barlow in Forbes: “Why Spy?”, October 7, 2002. – “A few weeks later, in early 1993, I passed through the gates of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and entered a chilled silence, a zone of paralytic paranoia and obsessive secrecy, and a technological time capsule straight out of the early ’60s. The Cold War was officially over, but it seemed the news had yet to penetrate where I now found myself.”

[xviii] See http://www.miraclestudies.net/BillCIA.html

[xix] Irvin, R. Gordon Wasson The Man, the Legend, the Myth – http://www.gnosticmedia.com/SecretHistoryMagicMushroomsProject – May 13, 2012.

[xx] Eustace Mullins, Secrets of the Federal Reserve, 1993. p. 1

[xxi] Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan, 2001 p. 466

[xxii] The CFR archives, Princeton University, Mudd Library: MC104, box 451: folder 1 – Mikoyan

[xxiii] CFR Historical Roster of Directors and Officers – http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/appendix.html

[xxiv] Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Wasson Archives, Harvard Botanical Museum. Foreign Affairs (CFR) letterhead, dated November 10, 1950. “Dear Gordon: I have written these Century members to say that you and I are proposing George Kennan for membership: Boris A. Bakhmeteff, Charles C. Burlingham, Allen Dulles, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Philip C. Jessup, Geroid Tanquary Robinson, William L. Shirer, Dean G. Acheson, James B. Conant, Edward Mead Earle, Herbert B. Elliston, Joseph C. Grew, William L. Langer, Robert A. Lovett. In addition George gave me some other names: Imrie de Vegh, John Foster Dulles, Thomas S. Lamont, Russell C. Leffingwell, Vannevar Bush, Everett Case […]

[xxv] Graham Harvey, Shamanism, 2002. p. 433

[xxvi] John Cloud, When the Elites Loved LSD – Time Magazine, April 23, 2007

[xxvii] Abbie Hoffman, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980, p. 73

[xxviii] Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, Ch. 1, P. 1.

[xxix] Gustave Le Bon, Psychology of Crowds, 1895, Sparkling Books LTD, 2009.

[xxx] Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, T. Fisher Unwin LTD, 1919.

[xxxi] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Jones

[xxxii] Gustave Le Bon, Psychology of Crowds, 1895, Sparkling Books LTD, 2009. P. 95.

[xxxiii] http://www.worldmag.com/world/olasky/Prodigal/appendix.html

[xxxiv] Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations, Macmillan, 2002. P. 15ff

[xxxv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Copeland

[xxxvi] Hank Albarelli, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Trine Day, 2009. P. 359

[xxxvii] Leo Perutz, Saint Peter’s Snow, Arcade Publishing, 1990. P. 92ff.

[xxxviii] Ibid. P. 121

[xxxix] Gnostic Media podcast episode #146: Karen of GirlWritesWhat – “The Feminist Fallacy”.

[xl] James F. Tracy, Poison is Treatment: Edward Bernays and the Campaign to Fluoridate America, p. 15 ff in Health Freedom News. Summer 2012/ Vol. 30 / No. 2

[xli] US Library of Congress, Bernays collection: Part I: Book File, 1890-1965, n.d. BOX I:459, Wasson, Gordon

[xlii] Gordon Wasson. “Drugs: The Sacred Mushroom.” The New York Times, 26 Sept 1970, p. 29.

[xliii] Hoover Institute, Stanford University. Bertram D. Wolfe papers. Box: 15, Folder: 72

[xliv] Documents and letters from the CIA archives on R. Gordon Wasson – FOIA request, February 2012. Approved for release 2003/05/05 : CIA-RDP80R01731R000700100003-5

[xlv] Hank Albarelli, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Trine Day, 2009. P. 359

[xlvi] Bohemian Grove 2008 Guest List, courtesy of TruthAction.org

[xlvii] Alexander and Ann Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Press, 2000, ISBN 0-9630096-0-5. Pg. 65

[xlviii] Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Wasson Archives, Harvard Botanical Museum. Foreign Affairs (CFR) letterhead, dated November 10, 1950. “Dear Gordon: I have written these Century members to say that you and I are proposing George Kennan for membership: Boris A. Bakhmeteff, Charles C. Burlingham, Allen Dulles, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Philip C. Jessup, Geroid Tanquary Robinson, William L. Shirer, Dean G. Acheson, James B. Conant, Edward Mead Earle, Herbert B. Elliston, Joseph C. Grew, William L. Langer, Robert A. Lovett. In addition George gave me some other names: Imrie de Vegh, John Foster Dulles, Thomas S. Lamont, Russell C. Leffingwell, Vannevar Bush, Everett Case […]

[xlix] George Hunt, UNCED, Earth Summit, 1992. http://youtu.be/JUdgiehz9d, see also George Hunt’s interview with Gnostic Media: “Say What Is UNCED – The Elite and the Environmental Movement” – #135, by Gnostic Media.

[l] Jay Stevens, introduction to The Invisible Landscape, 1993 edition, by brothers McKenna, p. XII.

[li] Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival, 1991, HarperSanFransico. P. 9

[lii] Ibid, P. 243.

[liii] Gordon Wasson presenting to the Century Club, The Century Club, 04-01-1971. Audio. Hear the introduction by the president of the Century discussing Aldous Huxley’s membership along with Gordon Wasson’s. Available through the Century Association library archives.

[liv] Jan Irvin, How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions – and began one of the largest mind control operations in history. Some brief notes. Gnostic Media, August 28, 2012.

[lv] Terence McKenna: The Invisible Landscape, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, P. 188

[lvi] Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, Carl Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, North Atlantic Books, 2008. P. 19

[lvii] Ibid, P. 22

[lviii] Jan Irvin, The Trivium – How to Free Your Mind, Free Your Mind Conference, April 10, 2011.

[lix] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie

[lx] Plato, Republic, Book 3, 414e–15c.

[lxi] John Uri Lloyd, Etidorhpa, The Strange History of Mysterious Being, 1895, p. 276. Forgotten Books, 2007. P. 273

Originally published as:

Manufacturing the Deadhead: A product of social engineering…

By Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin

Featured image credit: Eugene Weekly 10/23/14

May 13, 2013

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