This post is the introduction to a series focusing on the origins and intentions of the Old Testament (in Christian parlance), or the Tanakh (in the Judaic), in relation to the underpinnings of Western civilization. With some minor exceptions this series will generally focus on the narratives of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David and Solomon, the so-called Divided Monarchy, and the Babylonian Exile, all of which formed the core of the transitional Judaic Temple Cult period. This, in turn, became the basis of manipulation for the Seleucid Greeks, and then the Romans, in their ongoing efforts to integrate a new and ‘approved’ Judaism into an overarching social control mechanism.
The Old Testament (especially in contrast to Homeric and, later, Roman epic) also forms the basis of the primary false dialectic of Western civilization, namely that of the Gentile versus the Jew. It is this contrived oppositional thread of tension that runs continuously through our collective historical narratives, since the time fictively attributed for Moses, that keeps the majority distracted from what really matters and constantly blaming institutionalized scapegoats for real or perceived problems. The sad irony here is when we hear some modern day Jews complain that they were made, and still are, scapegoats for the doings of others. It is ironic because we assert that, within the Western schema, this was indeed the assigned role of the Jewish people from day one of their troubled existence, as formulated by the ‘real wise guys’. In this ‘assignment’ the Jews were ‘romantically’ encouraged by their various leaders, and later rabbis, to collectively adopt the metaphoric mantle of the Suffering Servant, from Isaiah, for atonement’s sake, ostensibly in the tortuously eventual betterment of all humanity. Importantly, this same victimological mantle was claimed by Christianity for Christ.
Of course, this is a radical proposal that will require the reader to drop their contextual presuppositions and cultural biases in order to grasp the new Postflavian framework. In a nutshell, we believe that the Judaic, and then the Christian (merged Homeric and Judaic typology) narratives, their respective theologies and even their ‘ethnic identities’, have been progressively tweaked so as to continually pit two otherwise similar (or maybe even otherwise identical) groups of common peoples against each other so as to profitably disguise the elite sponsors, the oligarchs du jour. This tweaking was masterfully done via numerous figurative ‘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.
The contrived creation of this dialectic is initially achieved wherein we find, with the Mosaic Law and Pentateuch, a radical new society formed with hundreds of its laws and customs inverted from those of the surrounding ‘heathens’ such as Egypt, and even from that of the surrounding fellow Semitic tribes (Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, pp. 55-74). Doing so, and including for what is prior claimed in the narratives for Abraham and the First Covenant (a Christian term), thus made this new society of transformed heathens into an exclusively ‘chosen’ Elect for a demanding and curious singular god. It was this god, Yahweh, who inscrutably preferred this particular group for the revelation of his latest plan, at the time, for how humans should relate to each other and to him. But, the invocation of such a monotheistic god, jealously demanding singular fealty while lovingly wielding a carrot and iron rod, was provocatively against the widespread grain of tolerantly syncretistic polytheism.
So, let us reflect upon what happens when either one individual or an entire group is set high up on a pedestal above all others, while rejecting all others’ customs and cultures. Hmmm … How to win friends and influence enemies? This is not to say that many, such as women, didn’t find attractive features (for instance, monogamy) in this radically new religious and social paradigm. A variety of such attractive forms of Judaism eventually came to achieve 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. However, they played a seemingly (but not really) opposite game of overtly absorbing others’ gods, and then even the Jews’ god, who finally supplanted all the others.
And in doing the latter, the Romans purposely left a remnant of this god’s people as a controlled opposition to themselves. In fact, in time, we will build a case for presenting their handling of the post-Temple Cult Talmudic Jews as being done not only for helping solve the exigent circumstances of the day, i.e. repressing and co-opting (supposedly organic) violent Judaic nationalism, but also with an eye towards manipulating circumstances yet to come. This is how elites typically and systematically co-opt and control the masses, via such tried and true human shepherding techniques.
In the Old Testament narrative, other gods were either absorbed into the one Judaic god, or the new god was equated with the Canaanite heavenly god, El. This all the while trying to make it seem in the texts that this was always the case, all other gods being false. As such, this is like saying ‘god’ and ‘gods’ mean the same thing. That is, the plural word ‘elohim’ for the sibling ‘gods’ is frequently conflated with the singular, ‘El’.
Prior to this imposition of monotheism, societies warred against each other for the vanities and ambitions of their rulers, but never because of religious problems regarding other peoples’ equivalent gods. In fact, such equivalent gods from different societies were typically seen as the very same divine entities whom were simply known respectively by different culturally appropriate names. But ever since this new and supposedly benevolent and loving god, or his human creators rather, made himself the exclusive god of gods, we have had nothing but religious based rancor and strife. Except, that is, during the good ol’ Dark Ages of feudalism, where everyone knew their fixed place in the Judeo-Christian caste system. Oops, we forgot Islam.
And today we are still left contending with the legacy of this ‘seeming’ mother of all cultural wars appearing to stem from that ‘Father loved them best’, and that those ‘others’ are too good to join us for supper. Of course, it is deeper than that, as it supposedly pertains to the ‘true’ nature of this seemingly overly particularist and mysterious god, and whether one has had their foreskin clipped for him or not. While the latter aspect has been somewhat ‘bandaged over’, we are all still left, like Damocles’ Sword, with what is claimed to be this god’s yet unfulfilled global plan – whether or not we feel ourselves individually under his sway anymore. Again 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 graffed in. (Romans 11:19 KJV)
As discussed in Caesar’s Messiah, the Flavians, with a little help from their elite and ‘almost Jewish’ friends (that is, the Herodians, Josephus Flavius, and Philo and his ‘Alexander’ relatives) grafted themselves onto Isaiah’s Root of Jesse, whose descendants are to inherit the Earth. Who then, was this Jesse, and why was his son David anointed into Judaic royalty (1 Samuel 16)? And 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 rather that from the wider substrate of common peoples of the day, including that of Semites, that the terms Jew and Gentile are contrivances. As such, this series of posts will attempt to address these questions and issues. And as a separate and later task delve even further, into such as what now appears to be the likely prequel to all of this.
Identity scams and other crimes
With the relatively recent ‘return’ to Zion, we are all thus dragged back to the typological milieu, if not the actual scene, of the original identity crime. As we are told: as a result of some inanely obscure interaction of Ham with his drunken father, Noah, all of Ham’s Canaanite descendants were unceremoniously kicked out of the fellowship of Semites (Genesis 9:18-27).
In examining both the wider historical context and the internal narrative problems perhaps we can divine that we have all been sold a pig in a poke. But who sold us this pig — that is, these people who don’t eat pork, and 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 (perhaps before Abraham factually or fictively arrived), 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). Here we are not raising this issue to be provocatively humorous, but rather as an important indicator that we have 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 what was the original motivation for not eating pork we can only speculate, but it doesn’t seem likely that this directive came via Moses as the oracular vehicle. As we’ll find out later, his narrative has too many epic holes in the pork barrel (coming in “Fictive Dead Men Tell Whoppers at Their Own Wakes”).
Semitic peoples were, of course, around a long time before the alleged time of Abraham and Noah, and just as with so-called ‘gentiles’, they occupied then, as now, the full spectrum of political, ideological, and moral camps. This statement is not controversial, and the most direct descendants of those Canaanites today would be the Palestinians. Moreover (and importantly for our thesis) it is commonly accepted today that the major population demographic of Europe, sans perhaps the Nordic, is composed of agrarian peoples that immigrated in successive climate driven, ebbing and flowing, waves, out of the wider Fertile Crescent region. This is discussed in such books as Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People and Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer. In other words, the dominant racial makeup of Europe is a mix of Semitic and Nordic genetics, but more predominantly Semitic. And, of course, the Arab Islamics are also closely related (genetically speaking) to the ancient Canaanites.
In contrast to mere ‘Semites’, it is said that the one thing that has and does unite radically disparate Jews everywhere around the world is their religious canon and its focus on the dream of Zion, even for those of no faith. This, then, provides them their seemingly unique identity. It is only unique from the two thousand year old ‘Judeo-Christian’ (that is, Flavian) viewpoint, with their half truth (if that) that the Jews represent a separate ethnic identity. And here we are not even addressing the issue of the Ashkenazim, with their Khazarian origins, who make up the majority of Jews today. Rather, here we are discussing that the prior and original substrate of Judaism was created by: first force, and then intermarriage and heavily proselytized conversion, despite all the protestations of practices to the contrary over time. That there are indeed genetic evidences of Levitical priests today only goes to support our thesis, as the OT narratives are really telling us that these individuals were the outsiders imposing the new system on the native ‘tribes’, forcing a bloody conversion from Canaanite polytheism to Judaic monotheism, with the struggle recontextualized as ‘backsliding’.
It is explained in the bible that the priestly tribe of Levi, that of Moses and Aaron, was unique from the other tribes in that they would not be assigned their own territory in the Promised Land, but rather disbursed amongst the 11 tribes. This is really telling us, amongst other evidences, that the other tribes were indigenous Canaanites all along.
Additionally, and as another parallel, the story of Ham is later further twisted such that his descendants are purposely conflated with black Africans so as to religiously ‘Justify’ the Euro-American episode of slavery. This to fill the economic void of vanishing serfdom created by the exigent demands of such as the Industrial Revolution. This is what it’s really all about, the ongoing elites’ need to reposition one’s contextual advantage according to ever changing circumstances. And fortunately for the savvy wise guys, the various collective victims are still enjoying their respective victimhoods, or conversely their perceived short term advantages, too much to allow us all to escape the nightmare. So today, with America’s literal slavery virtually gone, the system has simply moved what is now ‘wage slavery’ offshore – where the ultimate capitalists, the Communists, can supply a near infinite supply of cheap labor. Come back Ross Perot.
Here we will assert that both dialectic identities of Gentile and Jew are purposely misleading fabrications, two sides of a coin first counterfeit by collaborating Egyptian and Hittite elites, and later refined by Persian and then Roman elites, in order to achieve their long desired and explicitly stated, canonized ambitions. We are not necessarily saying that there has ever been a single, united, international elite, nor are we excluding the possibility. But, 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). Furthermore, they faced a common problem of controlling their respective tribes of “sheeple”. 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 first of these long desired ambitions, the universal harmonization of spiritual beliefs and practices, could otherwise be seen as beneficial to wider humanity if it were not for clear and cynical indications to the contrary. The second ambition, a pathological greed for accumulating disproportionate 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 an intimate tool of the political elite class that plays on the continuing neuroses of the gullible and/or wiles of ambitious sycophants.
And now these new occupiers of Zion, using the Tanakh as their dubious historical basis, have the chutzpah to claim that they are indeed Semites when their group identity, that of the Ashkenazim, is clearly stated otherwise in the very same holy ‘history’ book. As per Genesis 10:3, Ashkenaz was a son of Gomer, a grandson of Shem’s brother Japheth; while Abraham and all the Israelites were descended from Shem, the original Semite. The present farce, then, is a near perfect and ironic redux of the original. And you can be sure the new Zionists aren’t there for their health, but rather because our human shepherds have a rapturously global plan in mind for them, to be revealed – apocalyptically, in line with both the Jesuit Futurist End Times and the Schofield evangelical system.
Steps towards a Globally Harmonized Religion
As to the first ambition of a globally harmonized religion, Thomas McEvilley in his The Shape of Ancient Thought discusses the appearance of highly likely and plausible, widespread collaborating priesthoods from India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt witnessed by approximately simultaneous (~1,000 BCE – See Chapter 2) textual assertions demonstrating priestly, at least, 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. This collaboration also necessitates, in our opinion, the existence of a parallel motive by the respective priesthoods’ ‘secular’ ruling counterparts in desiring to establish (or perhaps re-establish?) a uniform global caste system, overt or disguised, which essentially encompasses the second motive. Of course the credulous can still claim that such near simultaneous expressions were only part of God’s planned process of gradual ‘revelation’.
And, while the goal of harmonization seems to paradoxically exist in conflict with a “divide and conquer” dialectic agenda, such division might either be encompassed within a globally accepted system, as suggested by George Orwell in 1984‘s tripartite division, or that “divide and conquer” is only a bloody means to the global end.
This gradual transition of religious form can be easily seen when reading the Old Testament, or Tanakh, where the existence of all the polytheistic gods are acknowledged by even the Hebro-Judaic god, but the lovingly bloody focus gradually shifts jealously to the ‘one’ real god, who was originally either just a junior sibling member of the wider Canaanite pantheon, or possibly a rank outsider, the latter 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 of a junior sibling god is uniquely echoed in the Judaic narratives of such as Jacob and Joseph among others, and these human versions are even acknowledged within the narratives as being outside of and inverted from ‘all’ cultural norms of primogeniture. This deviation is also taken to be a metaphor for the otherwise odd (fictive) rise to prominence of Israel and Judea, especially, as to their being comparative backwaters to their extremely powerful neighbors around them.
While the credulous see this as yet one more evidence of their curious god’s favor, something akin to a divine version of The Beverly Hillbillies, the more clear thinking can see this as further evidence of elite human (lords’) machinations. In fact, it was their very ideal geographical positioning that led to Canaan’s selection for the imposition of the harsh lessons of the failed Amarna experiments in monotheism. The main lesson being that such radical religious transformation takes generations and a lot of bloodletting, so better to do it in the middle of nowhere. And so in any case, for the more astute the more appropriate modern cultural metaphor for all of this might better be Green Acres rather than The Beverly Hillbillies.
As to the ancient roots of the latter ambition of global wealth and power accumulation, 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. This is why the late chairman of the Department of Greek and Latin at Columbia University, Moses Hadas, stated at the end of his preface in Hellenistic Culture, Fusion and Diffusion (1959), that ‘some unnamed people’ would disapprove of what he would be cautiously revealing in his book, where the most time is spent drawing the widespread linkages between the Jewish and Greco-Roman Hellenic cultural and foundational tableaus. Fortunately for those ‘unnamed people’, this type of book is not read by most people, and many of those adventurous enough (and without any contextual preparation) will likely not grasp the deepest implications.
In any case, then, there is no point in Western history that these supposedly radically differing groups can ever be viewed in isolation, as they developed as integral parts of the elite’s artificial and dialectical synthesis of Western civilization. Knowing the psychological proclivities of humans to generally be trusting of superficial ‘appearances’, the word of ‘trusted figures’, and the deep social need to be on a team – any team: we have been primed to almost always identify with one or the other side of this false dialectic, while the sponsors of this system profitably maintain control, no matter how sophisticated and ‘modern’ we consider ourselves.
In this manner, the muggles, in Harry Potter parlance, always have someone to blame – except for the right party. We need someone to blame, and if there are no humans around to blame for our transient personal problems, we’ll even punch holes in our walls, kick the dog, 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 thus be condemned to selectively interpret everything we see through a highly distorted contextual lens – one that turns us into the opposite of what we’d like to believe about ourselves, thus making us insidious mental slaves and working against our best overall interests. Sardonically, if this claimed savior hadn’t been killed, by the alleged Christ-killers, then the Christians wouldn’t have him to worship, at least in the way that they do. Instead, Christians should be kissing the ground that Jews walk on. But the credulous are credulous for a reason, and here we say that this is more from nurture than from nature. Of course, the gospels allow for the interpretation that the Romans were responsible for killing Christ, and here, if one accepts our thesis, is one more darkly delicious inside joke.
Synthetic Formulation of Hebrew and Greek Epics
On the Hebrew side of this counterfeit coin the process generally begins with the darkly hilarious and ironic biblical narrative of Abraham, and completes itself with the destruction of the so-called Second Temple. This history can only be recovered in its broad outlines, because the Hebro-Judaic canon is a fairly masterful amalgamation of cribbed fictional folk stories, embellished epic, and redacted annalistic historical accounts that provide an arguably accurate yet randomly de-contextualized picture of the greater region’s history and cultural practices – supposedly over almost two millenniums’ span. This includes what was in reality a long, brutal process of religious conversion, disguised fictively as Exodus and Conquest, and the theocratic formation of the Davidic and Solomonic state followed by the so-called Divided Monarchy states of Judea and Israel. This conversion process was really managed by an insinuated foreign priesthood not much different than later seen by colonizing Christian priests and ministers in the New World. (And which the current pope is now apologizing profusely for. Just what kind of church ‘propaganda’ is this? Caveat Emptor.)
In this series of posts, we will cover this entire epic as it unfolded — until the Old Testament was complete in the textual form that it has been transmitted to us, via the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint and the Masoretic text.
Critically, this transformation to monarchical monotheism was later ‘somewhat’ diametrically mirrored by the equally synthetic, bizarre, and immediate social transformation, of the previously rather typical Greek region of Sparta. It became renowned as the most strict military dictatorship and bizarre society ever known until modern times. This happening on the supposed say so of the god Apollo, to lend divine credibility, as ‘commanded’ to Lycurgus by the oracle of Delphi (as we are told in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives). This stark transformation can be seen as an implementation of the ‘ideal’ republic as lionized by Plato in his Republic and Laws. Earlier, this transformation was also foreshadowed by the odd twin sons of Sparta, Castor and Pollux, the brothers of the famous Helen, that would become heavenly gods and salvic heroes of the Greco-Roman world. Their contextually bizarre heroism was later memorialized at the scriptural inauguration of Roman Christianity via the transport of (the Jew) Paul to Rome (on the ship figure-headed by Castor and Pollux: see Atwill, Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, p. 260). With all this we can see the ultimate man-made implementation of a Hegelian Dialectic, whose poles were a synthetically evolving Jewish spirituality, focused xenophobically on a contrived Promised Land while ‘ostensibly’ opposed to synthetic Hellenic and Roman culture and statesmanship in service of otherwise typical oligarchs. But in this case the thesis and anti-thesis did not completely resolve happily into the then ‘new age’ synthesis of Christianity, but rather lingered to the cynical profit of a few and the horrific pain and loss to many.
One clue that we can use to determine the artificial synthesis of this all is the usually marginalized letter, allegedly written from King Arius of Sparta to Onias the priest (1 Maccabees 12:21), which claims a common Abrahamic descent for the Spartans and Jews. We will later on discuss reasons to think that either this letter was not forged, or at least that at a minimum that many people, including many Jews of the day, believed the claim was true [Hadas, pp. 84, 85]. Furthermore, the ‘history’ books of the Maccabees demonstrate the degree to which the upper social strata of urban Judean society, including the high priests, were happily Hellenized within the globalizing zeitgeist of the day. And with others of a more ‘conservative’, and generally rural, bent loudly decrying the ‘alien’ degradation of their sacred and exclusive culture, cynically revealed to them generations before as a Chosen Elect, a supposed genetic elite. And in their sacred narrative they were granted a Promised Land to genocidally conquer under the aegis of Divine Providence. Sound familiar Pilgrims?
As well, it must be further discussed later on that the early Maccabees (the Hasmoneans) were happily in league with the Romans, overtly at first, and who also idolized the now bizarre and faded Spartans. But they are usually contextualized today as ‘heroes’ of ancient Judaic nationalism. Similarly, Josephus Flavius was also allied with the Romans, as double agent for the emperors. The same goes for Saul / Paul and the Herodians. Imagine then the implications of learning that 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. And as the Spartans enslaved and terrorized their neighboring helots, the (equally Elect) Romans then later aspired to enslave the Greeks, whose cultural and intellectual prowess the Romans acknowledged they could not match. But here the Romans were yet justified in their conquests, as were the Hebrews, by a revealed and sacred global mission.
In this regard, the contemporary warm notions of the shared Judeo-Christian god seem conveniently incongruent to that record, while the Bible records something more in tune with those land grabbing times, and then repeated once more to great effect with the Providential conquest of the New World. The ploy is easily understood by grasping that 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’. In today’s political parlance we also know this as ‘wedge politics’, where some ‘actors’ introduce various chronically divisive issues of lesser import into the political theater’s debate du jour for the purpose of dividing various groups that could otherwise come together democratically to correctly defeat or support other more weighty matters that the shepherds contrarily deem highly important to their continuing control and/or profit.
realdialectik: Ultra-Elites vs. Everyone Else
Whatever the ultimate reality in these ‘historical’ depictions, it must be realized that the central Hellenic institution of the Greek gymnasium, including that of Jerusalem’s, was highly class conscious and only open to the elites. Almost identically as with back then, it is thus our contention that the real underlying tension today in Western civilization, at a minimum, is that between the entitled ultra-elites and pretty much everyone else. And that the false Judeo-Gentile dialectic, along with many lesser ones, has been tremendously successful in diverting attention away from the real problem.
Here the real problem was recorded by the Classical Greeks, at least, in their discussions of the oligarchs and plutocrats, where no matter the underlying governmental form, the welfare of the hoi polloi is rarely if ever of concern, if they are ever mentioned at all. As we will discuss in future posts, it seems that as with earlier Mesopotamia, the manner of access to land and the disproportionate wealth it could generate when combined with the cheapest labor possible (free – ignoring any overhead ‘burden’ of course) led to the aristocratic ‘entitlements’ of the either once nomadic or colonizing conquerors, whom then saw fit to squat onto their new and respective Providential lands. And then, in prefiguring such as the Mormon Church, Pentecostals and Scientologists of today, made themselves priests and began inventing pious schemes to sacrally justify their continuing right to squat on said lands.
For example, Roman aristocrats, the senatorial class, were all members of various pagan priestly orders, that 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, and thus, “You say Jo’ve, and I say Jeho’veh”.
Unfortunately, the rather long time frames involved from the time of this dialectic’s artificial inception till today makes it very difficult for individuals, of most all conceptual frameworks, to grasp the very simplicity of how it generally works, albeit that there are many dynamic religio-psychological and other ‘moving parts’, so to speak. Furthermore, in today’s contemporary ‘postmodern’ mental framework it is inconceivable and heretical for most to consider that any human agency can sustain effective control over numerous nation’s of humans that otherwise appear to be harder to herd than cats. Here, while literal shepherds and sheepdogs operate their control within the hard-wired behavioral framework of their literal sheep, the exact same operating modality is true for figurative shepherds of humans and their various human flocks, and other social animals as well, sometimes even with cats. As part of the ‘postmodern’ milieu ourselves, we suspect that even some of today’s shepherds (if not all) may be as unconscious as the sheep, as to the deep historical leitmotifs, literary archetypes, and social networks that are driving and facilitating their behavior – combined with some facets of high functioning psychopathy.
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. As if this same caste system, generally, was not already known in the Mediterranean region via Plato’s Republic, at least, then it was certainly known during Alexander the Great’s time, when the Greeks ran headlong into it on the way to India. Hellenistic art from the period and region shows a cultural fusion of people in Greek attire portraying Buddhist themes. Plato’s totalitarian pre-figuration of modern day North Korea, in Lycurgus’s Sparta, later found its way into the elite Roman and Helleno-Jewish formulation of Christianity from whence flowed the horrors of feudalism, the inquisitions, holy and not so holy wars, the papacy’s cynical institutionalized Jewish ghettoes, and so on.
However, Stephen Knapp argues here that in the original Vedic concept of the caste system, one’s place in it was not determined by one’s birth (though as today it certainly helped), nor that within one’s lifetime one was permanently cast into their first caste. Here, that it was more of a meritocracy, if you will, but in any case where everyone had an inherent dignity and satisfaction in their respective societal contributions and rewards. He then provides a folk story that attempts to explain why and how this system devolved, and maybe 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, that his tight knit and genetically unique (red headed and green eyed) clan, the real Arya he claims, just happened to be at the top of. And whom, ever since its collapse, have been quietly and gallantly fighting off the greedy “tinker nobility” of – either the descendants of conquering warlord cum aristocrats or the more 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, but that subsequent schools of Buddhism debased the ‘divine’ caste system in their successive attempts to popularize Buddhism, basically reformed Hinduism – of the latter which Knapp explains is merely debased, unscriptural Vedism.
But even if De Vere is being grossly self-serving, and/or deceptive, and such as Knapp may be misguided, all this gets to the heart of the matter of the primary false dialectic, used to hide the real dialectic. For here, the book of Genesis ironically, precisely and explicitly, describes Abraham as a typical wealthy caravan merchant, who was also immediately recognized by the Hittites of Hebron (a typical trading colony inside of a foreign state) as a princely man of importance. Abraham’s traveling retinue of 318 shepherds serve double duty as his armed host. That is, the claimed patriarchal father of the Hebrews is both a princely merchant and acts in a militaristic fashion, as do his conquering descendants.
And as with the caste system, similarly it is claimed that in the days of ancient Sumeria, at least, that the practice of actual, overt slavery was much more benign than of the context that we have understood it generally for at least the last two millennium. In this case, one would become a ‘bonded’ slave to another to address an exigent downturn in personal circumstances, and that one could not only emerge from this condition, but while still in it one could even buy and sell property as a slave. It may be here that the book of Leviticus contains a memory of this context where such ‘bondage’ could not last for more than 7 years, and that 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, same as today, between two general traditions, or ideals, for societal organization. The one preferred almost universally by societal elites was that of a static caste system, while on the other hand, some held to an ideal of social mobility based upon merit and such, using some form of modified caste or no seeming caste at all. With the ‘invention of the Jewish people’ (to borrow from Sand) and the synthetic Judaic construct, this hardened into a social false dialectic, with Egypt (and, later, Greece and Rome) taking the more rigid approach, while the Hebrews saw themselves as beneficiaries of a slave revolt. The new-found state of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, however, resulted in the continuation of the old practices under a new set of labels and laws.
The Temple Cult is emblematic of this dialectic, partly because it seems that the only thing that ever really existed (possibly aside from the convenient and undateable megalithic platform) was a fictive description of the First Temple that had been creatively retrojected into the past for 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, thus giving you 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. The realm of David and Solomon was described as extending from the Nile to the Euphrates, which was a claim that could (in reality) 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 to reality, if you care to wake up from your dream.
With David and Solomon, seemingly and otherwise miscast epic characters in terms of what so-called Judeo-Christians are to use as moral exemplars for their lives, we might consider them as early examples of ‘predictive programming’. As with the later Caesar Augustus who gave us today’s proper Family Values, ‘do what they say and not what they do’. And in fact the narratives tell us that David and Solomon were detested by the Israelites, whom in our interpretation were yet still Canaanites under the process of forced labor and religious conversion. Yet, via induced schizophrenia we salute them yet today as cultural ‘heroes’, with the Christians even hailing them as ancestors of their Christ. In reality, David and Solomon are fictive avatars for others, just as Jesus of Nazareth is an avatar for the historic Caesars and today’s veiled ‘powers that be’, the vicarious vicars. Moreover, they were avatars for the static caste system, and for the overwhelming power of winner-take-all hierarchy.
With Solomon we also find an interesting phenomenon, central to our wider Postflavian thesis, whereby he is constantly engaged in supernatural ‘occult’ practices, including the use of such to build his fairy temple. This theme is central to the dialectic bugaboo for such as normative Christians and lower grade conspiracy wonks, in that Freemasonry’s very foundational mythos revolves around this very biblical ‘hero’, a putative ancestor of Jesus, and the building of his mythic temple. This is called not seeing the forest for the cedar trees. For if you think there is a problem with this Masonic aspect, then what should this be telling you about the entire biblical construct … and our general society which is based upon such deceptive nonsense? Welcome to Wonderland where nothing ‘is’ as it seems, even Bill Clinton will tell you so.
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 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 Jews in the New World in the more recent centuries, that were all Justified by appeals to the Old and New Testament canons. (This after the Apostle Paul, a purported Roman citizen and Jew, had told the slaveowners of the day to treat their, now permanent, slaves kindly. Permanent, that is, unless, one was legally transformed, or manumitted, into a freedman who must yet do the patriotic bidding of his now patrone lest his manumission be revoked.)
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’, unwittingly doing the bidding of their old aristocratic patrones. In today’s global battleground between these organizational models (and its associated culture wars), 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, wanting a return to a simulacrum of the ancien regime, via unrestrained capitalism’s “race to the bottom” utilizing the vast vacuum of the global labor pool’s near 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 of jobs and factories leaving for parts Communist. Helping to mask it all, the phony Cold War and the current American fundamentalist redux of the epic clashes celebrated in the greater Abrahamic family psy-opera, most specifically that 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.
And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: (Romans 11:26 KJV)
This verse is from the (Flavian) Christian narrative, by the way, not the Judaic.
Religion, the Primary Control Mechanism
Ironically, the people who seem most receptive to this general concept would be today’s religious fundamentalists. This is no accident, for we believe that it is through the very agency of religion that this perverse control system is amazingly wielded, not unlike the famous man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz. However, here the difference between Postflavians and religious fundamentalists is that we believe that human agency has also designed and revealed their loving and violently jealous and genocidal God. 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
As organized religion was, and still is, exoterically provided for the deceptional control of the common man, the field of philosophy, as a separate ‘intellectual’ sister branch from that of religion, may have had origins as a proto-Cynical shamanic counter to the nascent ‘state’ religions of the new agrarian societies. But this eventually developed into a discipline suited only for the elites with sufficient leisure time to ponder, and thus arrive at an opposite perspective from that of the Cynics. Here one eventually arrives at the critical figure of Plato, whose highly sophisticated, Pythagorian based thought found its way deeply into Christianity, among other schemes, via the assistance of a professedly pious Alexandrian Jew by the name of Philo. His nephew, Tiberius Julius Alexander, who commanded a Roman legion against the Jews of Palestine in the campaign of the then, soon to be Flavian emperors. Let this be a clue to what is being discussed here, i.e. don’t judge a gentile or Jew by their ‘cover’.
With the Gospels and Josephus we learned that the collaborative efforts of the elite Caesarian Romans and elite Jews created a brilliant literary graft that allowed the Flavian dynasts, in this case, to covertly adopt the mantle of a pacified Jewish messiah, whose message is to “render unto Caesar …”, while his sidekick Paul tells slaveowners to be kind to their slaves. Truly, we say to you, this dark comedic masterpiece, masquerading as divinely ‘good’ inspiration, has indeed stood the test of time, having withstood literal centuries of critical analysis before being definitively decrypted by Joe Atwill. It has ‘truly’ been ‘good’ for some and horrific for others.
The remaining legacy of all this literary didgeridoo is that of the dominant Christian peoples, that of all sects and even those of lapsed faith, either coming to strongly embrace or yet still blame all of Western man’s, at least, significant problems on those persistent ‘deniers of Christ’. As we discussed regarding James Carroll in Peoples of the Flavian Book, the blaming aspect is all baked into the Roman Catholic theological cake from the time of at least St. Augustine, till today, albeit that the Church has softened its tone in the last few decades. Fitting precisely with our theme here, the Roman Church form of Christianity defines itself in dialectic opposition to Judaism to such a degree that all the major Catholic theologians and many popes explicitly informed the faithful that they constantly need living examples of the consequences of denying Christ to serve as the optimal negative exemplars for them. Therefore, ‘please don’t kill too many of them’. After all, who today gives a damn, in terms of making profitable hay, about all those dead Cathars?
Carroll, a former Paulist Catholic priest, explained all this in his Constantine’s Sword. However, he presents this dialectic contrast as occurring as the unintended and unfortunate consequence of the nascent Christians desiring to differentiate themselves (i.e. making themselves look better in the Roman’s eyes), in their various writings including the gospels, 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.
We are then left with the common proposition, ironically held by even those that accept that Christianity itself was an elite Judeo-Roman collaboration, that today we are instead under the domination of contemporary elite (and long Hellenized) Jews, who have chosen to bite the elite goy hand that has well fed them. While some overtly proclaim this ethnic reversal, a far more popular version leaves this potentially anti-Semitic component simmering under the surface, as the problems are blamed on bankers, or the media, or even the Satanic Illuminati. Even if (as is claimed but seldom proven) all of these elements are under the control of Jewish Kabbalist elites, this leaves vast swathes of the modern power structure, including the political system, industrial corporations, and religious hierarchies, unaccounted for.
Ignoring here whatever the ethnic makeup of contemporary common Jews are today, what if the entire notion of the basis for Western societal elites is a sham? And what then if this extends even into the Muslim world?
True Meanings of Judaism and ‘Gentilism’
As we have clearly hinted or explained in previous posts, the entire concept of Judaism is a darkly humorous construct. The same is true of ‘Gentilism’, if you will. This is a hard concept for contemporary humanity to grasp now, because we have all been ‘framed’ to consider the Western world as either Gentile or Jew. The misunderstanding has been facilitated by the confusion of the term ‘Gentile’ as an equivalent to the Hebrew term ‘Goyim’, which does indeed mean all nations aside from Jews. In other words, those of us “Caucasians” who are not Jews see ourselves descended from stout Greek, Roman, Nordic, or Anglo-Saxon roots, quite apart from the vaguely oriental sources of ‘Semitic’ Judaism; that is, we accept that we are ‘Goy’. Moreover, we are now supposedly all (both Jews and peasants) liberally emancipated (freed) from the ancien regime of truly traditional class (caste) values, where the then proper (un-degenerate) order in the social hierarchy was that of nobility, gentility, Jew, tradesman, and finally peasant or serf (permanent virtual slaves – for their own good of course); and where women were mere contractual baby making, domestic engineers, uhmm … chattel.
Fundamentally then, the original etymological concept of ‘Gentile’ is that of nobility and aristocratic (landed) entitlement. And in so long now having our vanity stroked in believing that we are all ‘gentiles’, we have long lost touch with this reality and its implications. 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, on Earth and elsewhere, cannot even comprehend their existence. As a metaphorical analogy then, what is the case 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 epitomized perhaps by his nephew – Tiberius Julius Alexander), etc.? Well, Polybius had a plausible excuse from his 2nd century BCE perch in regards to these later individuals’ doings, but he at least understood the formative concept, if not the true motivation. Stating that such 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.
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, 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. All the while, they are gradually ‘harmonizing’ the globe, just as is explicitly stated as the common goal of our religious canons. And, not coincidentally here, in continuing the earlier Hellenizing campaign of Alexander the Great, and the conquests of his great and jealous admirer, Julius Caesar, the father of Christ Augustus and heroic messiah of the Jews.
Comparing and contrasting Homer vs. the Old Testament
Helen, of course, 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 rustle their cousin’s previously rustled cattle. With their seemingly ignominious death, Castor and Pollux thus become the Greco-Roman’s premier religious salvic heroes of that age, by the then contemporaneous mores and contexts of understanding ‘heroes’ – which are far different than our popular context.
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 while the rude rubes are being distracted by such wild nonsense as this, and whether YHVH parted the waters for Moses, that the respective audiences are coming to drink the Jonestown KoolAide and falsely believe that they are either gentil gentiles or some other Chosen vanity device. Now they have been subtly ‘framed’ to identify with the dubious ends of their masters, the real Gentiles.
While it appears that Heinrich Schliemann, and others, discovered the ancient city of Troy on the Hisarlik mound in today’s Turkey, 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, and then grandly portrayed by such as Hollywood. For one thing, the logistics for such a decade plus long endeavor (and for that many men) would indeed be staggering, also taking them away too long from their domestic livelihoods and erstwhile support for their families. Troy seems more likely a convenient, dramatically diversionary trope, and indeed this is the whole propagandic purpose of ‘epic’ narrative.
Could such exaggeration as this be a clue to understanding the greater picture with the literature reputed by some to be the greatest ever produced — namely, the Holy Bible? We assert that just such is the case, and here we can start with the fact that the so-called Pentateuch, commonly (falsely) attributed to Moses authorship, has both an epic style and other parallels similar to both the Homeric works and the works discovered on the clay tablets of the Ugarites and others, Semites to the north of Canaan. (For details, see Cyrus Gordon & Gary Rendsburg, The Bible and the Ancient Near East, pp. 315-326.)
But there are some important differences in outlooks between the Greek and the Jewish canons, curiously involving their treatments of time and sin. Whereas Greek works, including Homer’s, have an ahistorically timeless sensibility, the Judaic is the complete opposite in this regard. With the former, the Greeks, like their gods, have some notions of right and wrong, but the values are much more detached from our understandings of ethics; while with the Judaic sensibility one is inclined to see a pious need to conform to its demanding god’s strictures so as to fit oneself, the reader, properly into the divine order and its linear flow of time. This is not to say though that the Jewish ethics depicted in the epics, at least, are congruent with modern sensibilities either, as guile was explicitly admired then – while we operate on the wink, wink, nod, nod system today. In any case, with these differences we then curiously find that, at least by the time of Augustus if not before, the Romans have ‘adopted’ the Jewish sensibilities rather than their otherwise revered pagan Greeks’ – thus creating a seemingly incongruous rift in the concept of so-called ‘Greco-Roman Culture’. (See Hadas, pp. 54-56.)
And with the elite Roman and Jewish fusion of Christianity this concept of time and pious morality (as opposed to secular morality) has carried through to the present day. And thus the reasons why the Christian canon is grafted onto the back of the Jewish one – for linear time’s continuity providing the new one’s ‘historical’ legitimacy and for pious moral ‘justification’s’ sake. As the Jewish canon elevates the Jews to a Chosen Elect status, so do the works of Virgil and Livy for the Romans (sans the cultural practice inversions), and then the later Christians thus retain this fused legacy via the Second Covenant. (Hadas, pp. 57-58.) Inseparable, as well, are their respective global ambitions explicitly stated, where Virgil is even adopted as an honorary Christian … because it logically makes perfect sense.
In getting to just who might have had a motive in creating this primary Western Identity dialectic and its similar foundational narratives, that is if we are not to superficially accept its authorship at face value (as we are always told to do in this and similar matters) — 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 (or occulted), or if not completely possible, then confused with others. Perhaps even to be confused with dependably more expendable others, who for a price, and via having their Suffering Servant vanity being stroked sufficiently, are only too happy to claim credit.
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, only obvious once it has been pointed out to you. With this we shall begin our examination of the OT biblical narratives from Abraham till Christ Titus’s time.