Postflaviana covers a wide fabric of material whose purpose is to provide a broader and hopefully clearer understanding of Western civilization, at least, from its roots in pre-history till the current day. Our ultimate goal is to gain a better understanding of the topical events happening around us, as well as some better insight into the direction for the global future and where we might fit into it, or not. A key part of our new paradigm is a re-evaluation of the three Abrahamic faiths: Christianity, Judaism and Islam; that is, the “Peoples of the Book”; from both introspective and historical perspectives.
But first some:
Context on Creators of Good and Evil
As rationalists, we posit that from the earliest times religion was, and is, one key means of securing conformity and control over a respective society by its various … ‘lords’. On one level this can be seen as a desirable goal in, if nothing else, putting all members of a respective society into the same frame of reference. However, the result is determined by the perspectives and goals of the founders and sponsors of a religion, as opposed to its captive audience. Furthermore, the relative Darwinian success or failure of any religion must be in the degree to which that religion helps the ‘lords’ (and, only incidentally, their people) survive and prosper in competition with others, rather than how well its theological schema comports with ultimate reality, whatever that reality is.
At a minimum, in Western civilization, good moral behavior is taught, and here one frequently hears employed the inane maxim that morality stems from solely from the Abramic god. Sometimes just this aspect alone is enough for insecure and lazy modern parents to subject their lambs to such a fount of morality:
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. Isaiah 45:7 KJV
Of course, the ‘subtle’ apologists (the seekers of smooth ways?) find many ways to rationalize the meaning of this verse, and other Bible translations take the even easier route and water it, and many other verses, down into a different and more benign context. Ironically, the verse makes sense from a metaphorical or logical perspective as if there is one Creator of everything, this truly means … Everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We know that people interpreted it in this manner because such as the Gnostic sects, consistent with the scriptural text and subtext, interpreted this god, Yahweh, to being a vain, ignorant, jealous, and fearsome tyrant. But yet another way to interpret such verses is through a perhaps more cynical lens, say allegorically, as that of a ‘good’ shepherd, and his sheepdog, tending his flock – so that the sheep can be fleeced and/or taken fat to market, to be sold as food or slavishly to another owner.
Consistently then, this book of ‘fine’ morals for our children also elides the proper rules for slavery, prostitution, divorce, and even the ritual means for enticing Yahweh’s literal presence at your Saturday barbeque. You provide the meat and he’ll do the cooking. Now you know just some of the reasons why the mother Church claims it did not want the sheep to read this book. And perhaps this is the reason that atheists are underrepresented in prison, the divorce rolls, viewers of pornography, etc., etc.?
It has long been obvious to many observers, that the Abramic god of the Old Testament is considerably less benign than would now be considered lovingly ‘divine’. When the Bible finally became accessible to the lay public centuries ago, it quickly became apparent that Yahweh (the Father of Jesus) was quite the strict disciplinarian, to say the least, hence the ‘fire and brimstone’ preaching of early Protestantism. Now, in addition to the watered down bible verses, we are told by some apologists, that he (like the once infallible pope) has learned his lessons and mellowed. Similarly, this anthropomorphic Creator of this particular universe, at least, has chosen to become rather parsimonious with his once numerous and wondrous ‘miraculous’ interventions. Perhaps, instead the average human, religious or not, has made some leaps in the use of his or her critical thinking faculties in the last few thousand years? The time has come when another such leap is long overdue.
Yahweh’s Domination over Other Gods
At any rate, the ancient Hebrew Lord Yahweh was quite jealous of his brother gods and goddesses, the elohim, the earthly divine offspring of the Canaanite heavenly father, El. It appears that this sibling rural god may have had a fierce inferiority complex with respect to his urban brother Ba’al. To be fair (given that it appears possible, if not likely, that the Canaanites commonly practiced ritual sacrifice of the firstborn): Yahweh, in usurping his father El, appears to have accomplished a significant positive cultural result by letting the otherwise willing Abram (and by implication the audience) sacrifice an animal instead of Isaac. Of course, if we are to believe all this happened, then we can infer that Yahweh, or whomever was actually in charge, previously approved and also allowed this practice to occur for generations. Evidence of his maturation, or is some other process occurring?
Whatever the actual facts are regarding this aspect, we should appreciate that this claimed Monotheistic god of the One Universe started out life as one of many tribal sibling earthly gods, whose other siblings were honored as well. It was only upon this so-called ‘maturing’ process that his followers were told they must honor only Yahweh (or Allah, as the case may be). The downside has been a Western (including Middle Eastern) tradition of violent intolerance in obeisance to the demands of the subliminal, venal, and jealous god.
Importantly here, our individual world and cosmoviews are almost entirely conditioned by what has been presented to us from cradle to grave by people and institutions that we generally trust, usually by default. We process what is important or irrelevant to us based upon this data and then act accordingly. However, in a cosmopolitan world, the various monotheisms exist in ‘fundamentalist’ conflict, driving not only the global “Clash of Civilizations”, but individual psychological instability as well. We can see the impact of this when, for instance, an individual is confronted by newly conflicting information or experiences that causes him or her to convert to a different religion or sect, and maybe even in doing so become so zealous as to sacrifice their own life and others. For instance, the respective cosmoviews of Sunni and Shia Muslims are so conflicting that they can barely tolerate each others’ existence, to the point that the term Islam (peace) might only be taken in reference to their fellow sect members.
Of course, Christians have always had such conflicts; not just the more recent centuries of bloodshed between Protestants and Roman Catholics, but from the very beginning: we are told that the apostles, who supposedly knew Jesus, had strong disagreements with Paul over just who the proper audience should be for their exclusivist sect of Judaism, or in Paul’s case, universalism. Sardonically, we are told that the most important stumbling block was over the issue of surrendering or keeping one’s male foreskin. Is it a coincidence that the backdrop for this otherwise curious argument mirrors the dynamics of the radically xenophobic nationalism of Judaic Palestine, versus the then geographically constrained globalism of Imperial Rome? Imagine if some or all of these bloody controversies were contrived, prefiguring Machiavelli.
If there is some unseen Creator entity, the true ‘Lord’, lurking in the extra-dimensionality of the quantum foam: speaking for ourselves at least, we simply do not know how to prove such exists – or does not. However, based upon our investigations and analysis, we are prepared to demonstrate that Yahweh (or Allah) and His Son Jesus, as depicted in the canons, are man made frauds. As part of our wider project, we will examine the canonic and other texts with a credulous eye; and attempt ‘reverse divination’ (similar to reverse engineering) into the motives of the authors.
Abraham’s Seed Becomes Insinuating Roots and … Grafted Branch
And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite. Ezekiel 16:3 KJV
The late archaeologist Cyrus H. Gordon’s The Bible and the Ancient Near East demonstrated how Abraham’s descendants (the Hebrews, if we are to believe the canonic accounts) must necessarily have been half-Hittite (i.e. Aryan). Of course, the biblical claim that Abraham came to Canaan is no surprise to most, but he chose to park his family’s bones in a Hittite trading colony, Hebron, where the Hittites there recognized him for being a very important man. Gordon found multiple external support for this:
- This description of Abraham is typical of contemporaneous wealthy caravan merchants with a necessary armed retinue, here being Abraham’s tsabian host. This armed host also served the function of shepherding their retainer’s flock of sheep and goats which were the main source of renewable and trade-able wealth besides the typical stash of gold and silver carried by such merchants.
- Today’s Urfa was and is misinterpreted as the large city of Ur (also misnomered slightly as Ur of the Chaldeans) further to the south, when in reality this northern Ur was a typically named trading colony outpost of the larger city, as was Hebron for the Hittites.
- The general region where Abraham is said to have come from, today’s Urfa (Edessa) / Harran, that there is record of the Amorite people using ‘Yah’ based personal names.
- Yahweh is known to have been the typical patron god of the desert tribes to the south of Jerusalem. In my estimation this likely means that the fearsome and bloodthirsty god had been transported virally back to the Ur / Harran region. No doubt he is a great inspiration for ISIS.
- Cylinder seals from this area demonstrate that camels are not an anachronism as commonly claimed.
- The early descendants, at least, of Abraham practiced the ‘levirate’ marriage practice, common to the Hittites. In this practice when the husband dies the wife automatically becomes the wife of a brother-in-law or the father-in-law.
- Other archaeologists, such as Silberman and Finkelstein in their Bible Unearthed, have noted that there is no evidence to support the Book of Exodus claims of either the exodus from Egypt or the related genocidal conquest of Canaan by Joshua.
- Also from Bible Unearthed, curiously, it seems that the Canaanite peoples who prior occupied the area (of Judea and Israel) in three widely separate climatic cycles of hill country boom and bust had only one thing unique about them from other neighboring Canaanites and similar hill people of the wider region, namely that they clearly didn’t eat pork. Yet we are told by the religious canon that this innovation didn’t occur until Moses’ ~600 laws of pagan cultural practice inversion were enacted.
By combining the propagandized biblical subtext of supposedly ‘backsliding Hebrews’ with Gordon, Silberman, Finkelstein and others we see that some elite minority element begins a long, brutal conversion process, first in the figurative backwater of Judea and then in prosperous Israel. The effect, if not the purpose, was to create an insular society at fundamental odds with its neighbors on almost every level. While it is also known that communities of Yahweh adherents lived peaceably amongst the El and Ba’al adherents’ neighboring communities for a long time it should be telling to note that the Bible tells us that it was only the priestly tribe of Levi that was not apportioned tribal land after the claimed conquest.
So, in light of all this, could there be a different explanation than either the canonic one or that of the complete deniers of biblical historicity allow for? Yes, and it is that we can clearly see the contours of a takeover via ‘cultural insinuation’ and ‘identity sublimation’ and thus the hijacking of a region and its Semitic Canaanite populace by a relatively small number of non-Semitic outsiders (Abraham’s descendants) – who claim to be Semitic. We assert that this modus operandi was repeated elsewhere, by related peoples, in Sparta, Rome, Normandy and England, at least. We see it replayed most recently in modern Israel and Palestine – Canaan.
Yes Pilgrims, the Abramic Religion Trifecta is a huge scam with layers upon layers of murderous deception, that plays to people’s delusional identity conceits and fears, amplified by programmatic ignorance flowing from the ‘divinely’ ordained shunning of the metaphorical Tree of Knowledge. For knowledge is power, and if you refuse it, that power will be wielded by others with the drive and ambition to do so. All the better if you slavishly consent and tell yourself that it is in your best interest to be ignorant. Go ahead, kick the tires, but don’t look behind the sacred veil.
Western Civilization is “Flaviana”
The Flavian dynasty was a branch of Rome’s elite Sabine tribe. Along with what we suspect was their extended family — the Sabas, Sabians, (the biblical) tsabians, Sakas, Scythians, Ashina, Ashkenazi, and the later Savoy, al Sabahs, and Sauds — the Sabines have a much older history than that of ancient Rome, while also extending unbroken into the present, which we’ll be discussing to a major extent in future content.
Strictly speaking, the root term for this website might better be Sabiana or something similar. But since the Flavian branch of the Sabines played such a pivotal role in the foisting of what is generally termed Christianity upon the world, our specific emphasis upon the Flavian imperial dynasty seems appropriate. Besides, it has a better ring to it than Postsabiana, right? The root syllable sab has three distinct meanings in ancient texts: in the Indo-European tongues it represents wisdom, in the Semitic tongues it stands for the mystic number seven, and in Sumerian it means shepherd. This odd mash-up of sacred meanings may be the reason why this became such a widespread signifier of royal power.
At its core we assert that Western Civilization is a product of Flavian construction. To provide some background for those not familiar with the Flavians: they were a dynasty of late first century Roman emperors, who were most famous for the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and for providing sponsorship for the Jewish priest-turned-historian Josephus Flavius.
Through the recent comparative literary analyses of Joseph Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah, it can now be definitively stated that the life of the Apostle Paul (the imagined founder of Christianity for the gentiles) was a literary reflection of Josephus Flavius’ exploits as a Roman operative. Indeed, the entire New Testament corpus is closely intertwined with Josephus’ War of the Jews, indicating a systematic effort, such that neither work can be fully and properly understood without referring to the respective context of the other. Atwill was not the first to have made such observations. However, such arguments have often been summarily dismissed with by simply claiming that the equivalence can not be true because the events of the NT and the Jewish War occurred decades apart. Atwill’s analysis shows that the widespread claims of the NT’s chronology ultimately are self-referential, despite the centuries of claims by ‘respected’ scholars, both secular and within the church. The events in the NT can be placed anywhere in time since it was only Josephus Flavius himself that provides historical commentary regarding the period and region in question. How convenient.
You have probably never heard of the Flavians, which only goes to show how successfully and systematically they have deflected attention away from themselves and onto the religion they invented (Christianity), as well as its institutionalized poor cousin, Judaism. This unique religion, of course, existed as a creation of political statecraft much earlier — but Vespasian, Titus and Domitian took control of its institutions and re-invented it in a new role: the Chosen People cast upon their identity pedestal as eternally privileged ‘scapegoats’, the killers of Christ.
For this key aspect, for those so inclined, we highly recommend first, James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, specifically for its exposition of the Roman Church’s consistent theologically driven dialectic treatment of the Jews as living examples of evil (the killers of Christ) amongst us, and (as such) too valuable to extirpate as with the case of lesser heretics and heathens. Secondly, the late Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion, focusing especially on Chapter 4 regarding the Roman de jure creation of a Jewish buffer class, to insulate the emergent Euro nobility from the masses. Third is Shlomo Sand, whose Invention of the Jewish People provides an historiography of the multi-generational program to justify the creation of modern Israel, modeled upon the previously concocted foundational narratives that form the basis of European nation-state identity, and enters into a valuable discussion of tribal identity and genetic legerdemain. One irony here being that the Book of Genesis specifically lists the Ashkenazi (most of today’s Jews) as not being Semitic; and that the modern Palestinians must be the descendants of Herodian era Jews — as the claimed (Flavian caused) Diaspora was vastly oversold.
We are well aware that many of our readers will be quite positive and adamant that the Flavians — and more broadly, the Caesarians and Sabines — cannot possibly play any role in current society and events. Such grand meta-narrative is impossible (or is that rather – to be avoided?) beyond more than a few human generations, or so says all convention and institutionalized Postmodernist cant. Everyone knows that the Roman Empire collapsed long, long ago. …. Or did it? Perhaps the common and superficial understanding of the parameters and context of this “collapse” are obscuring what is actually important to comprehend?
Curiously, the so-called barbarians that invaded the Roman Empire were not ‘pagans’ as typically inferred, but rather Christians. It’s just that they were not Trinitarians who insist upon the triune divinity of Jesus, rather they were ‘unitarian’ Arians who held to a more mundane tradition that Jesus was a purely human, albeit ‘noble’, shepherd of sorts. By shepherd’s hook or crook, the Arian case lost again, and Europe and the West became unified under the divine Trinitarian schema. Apparently in order for the Western social scheme to unfold to its current vector, Jesus needed to be fully acknowledged as a divine entity, rather than as a mundane and typical human rebel seeking temporal power in zealously ‘delivering’ his subjects from the oppressive dominion of Rome. The Hellenic graft, ala Romans 11, upon the Judaic Root of Jesse took centuries to fully take upon the collective western mind.
Besides being a convenient fiction, Nicene Christianity, at least, is a diabolically ingenious amalgamation and political reworking of the prior ubiquitous Mystery Cults. These cult’s functionally equivalent rituals served to reset the prior mental framing of the initiates via a process of purification, via confession of sins, followed by a phantasmagorical ceremony of shock and awe, and a brief ‘audience’ with the salvic divinity. But, because Christianity became the operant paradigm from cradle to grave the shock and awe conversion was no longer needed and as such was replaced with the mild sacrament of baptism, and the carrot of Heaven and the stick of eternal Damnation. Fear is the most powerful motivator of the brain, and it serves to cause the subconscious hard wiring to knee-jerk override a calmer and conscious state of mind where rational processes take place.
In any case, we encourage you to open your mind and consider that your contextual framework of understanding has been too programmatically constrained. Or perhaps you have other motivation for being adamantly opposed? For some, the current paradigm has been profitable to a greater or lesser extent, but even for those that have not materially fared so well their existential social ‘identity’, if not their delusional sense of eternal fate is slavishly tied to a concept of a cartoonish concept of cheaply gained Salvation. We assert that an essentially fear driven adherence to a faux salvation is a devious form of self-regulating slavery built upon layers and layers of bad contextual framing, aka conventional history and especially its interpretation.
Our overarching thesis is that what was put in place by the Flavians et al. as the central and crystallizing social motif that binds us loosely together within the western global oecumene is what is much more important than the temporal status of waxing and waning empires and states. What cannot be denied is that globalization is occurring at a rapid pace. Is this good or bad? Perhaps this is not the best framing of the question, and perhaps it should better be, under what terms should such ‘harmonization’ occur? Will the new global boss be the same as the old boss, i.e. the scions of the Flavians, the Caesarians, and their Sabine clansmen?
Postflaviana More Broadly Defined
And this leads us to the reason we have chosen the name Postflaviana for this website. We consider ourselves to be Postflavians, as a rejection of the means and methods of these scions, or the Scionists [sic], and that a globalization, or new world order, can only be positive for humanity if such a deceitful and selfish oligarchy is not allowed to continue to sit upon the inherited extreme apex of power, maintain and increase its absurd imbalance of wealth at everyone else’s and the environment’s expense.
As such, we awaken slowly as from a dream within a dream, to the realization: “Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.” The past is prologue and as such this site is collectively intended as a grand meta-narrative, which will emerge via the blog posts and other content, with the goal for an emerging book.
We hope you’ll join us and contribute to our outwardly spiral process of traveling down the yellow brick road. But, like Dorothy, will we find a wizardly shepherd behind the veil? One(s) that are merely misguided albeit kind and gentle. Dream on.
Richard Stanley
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