Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Today a still-deluded race looks upon these statements as pagan opposition to “the light of the world” when they were but prelude to our spiritual dāmmerung . Little wonder the Jews did not accept this “superstition vain and frantic”; they knew too well what it really was—their old mythmakers at it again. Thus whatever the early Christians suffered, it was not as the Church asserts, because of the new gospel they preached, but because of the old absurdity they resurrected—belief in literal mythology. Another “Son of God,” No. 16, had appeared, miraculously conceived and virginly born, a third part of the Trinity walking about in Galilee. This was that “blasphemy barbarously bold,” Porphyry had denounced, yet a band of fanatics called Christians was actually demanding its restoration, which meant in plain words, a return to the dark night of pre-historic Greece and Rome. Well, this just must not happen —but by heaven it did. The darkness fell, and for two thousand years it covered the Western world. All the wisdom-knowledge of the ages was burned in the market place; the “light of the world” had triumphed and the light of reason died. As Canon Farrar said: “The triumph of Latin theology was the death of rational exegesis.” This is hindsight; those with foresight might well have anticipated Earl Grey: “The lights are going out all over Europe.” In the light of these facts, the “tyrants” Nero, Tiberius, Domitian, seem less monstrous; indeed they stand out as the defenders of truth. They tried to save the world from two thousand years of ignorance, but that ignorance was too much for them. They found themselves accused of the very things they tried to prevent, riot, arson, rebellion. The Christian priesthood, inheriting the libelous cunning of its Semitic prototype, caused the burning and the fighting and blamed them on its enemies. Whether it burned Rome or not, it burned the truth and that is worse. The destruction of all evidence of Christianity’s gnostic and pagan source was “the first work.” It was the evangelists themselves who started it, in Antioch, as stated in Acts. Speaking of just such things the Emperor Julian said he would deal with them more at length, “when we begin to explore the monsterous deeds and fraudulent machinations of the evangelists.” And of their followers, Edward Carpenter wrote thus: “. . . they took special pains to destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own dishonesty.” By order of the Church all the books of the Gnostic Basilides were burned, likewise Porphyry’s thirty-six volumes. Pope Gregory VII burned the Apollo library filled with ancient lore. Emperor Theodosius had 27,000 schools of the Mysteries paprus rolls burned because they contained the doctrinal basis of the Gospels. By offering rich rewards Ptolemy Philadelphus gathered 270,000 ancient documents; these too were burned for the same reason. As someone has said, the early Christians heated their baths with the Ancient Wisdom. And what knowledge they may have contained!

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  There are many others, a good example of which is the Lenten season. Its forty days, we are told, is the time for spiritual observance, abstinence, penance, meditation, etc. To understand its perversion we must go back to Christmas. The forty days of the Christmas season (twenty before and twenty after) is the time when physical nature is asleep. It is at this time that the psychic forces (we will not say spiritual) are most active. As “The night time is the daytime of the soul,” so winter is the daytime of the spirit. In this, Christmas is to the year what the Sabbath is to the week, a time for spiritual attainment. This is nature’s time for this and the Initiates so use it. But three months after it has passed our spiritual Know-Nothings have dedicated forty days in spring to this purpose; a time when nature is “bustin’ out all over”; a time when the sap runs wild and “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of” —sex. A fine time this for spiritual observance! But such again is Christian wisdom. The Catholics, particularly, demand rigid observance of the rules and threaten punishment to the indifferent. From one of their many pamphlets we quote the following: “Thus does our Savior go before us on the holy path of Lent. He has borne all its fatigues and hardships, so that we, when called upon to tread the narrow way of our Lenten Penance, might have his example wherewith to silence the excuses, and sophisms, and repugnances of self-love and pride. The lesson is here too plainly given not to be understood; the law of doing penance for sin is here too clearly shown, and we cannot plead ignorance; let us honestly accept the teaching and practice it . . . Let us not harden our hearts to this invitation, lest there be fulfilled in us the terrible threat contained in those words of our Redeemer: ‘Unless ye shall do penance, ye shall perish’ (Luke 13:3).” And the final shot: “Hence it is that the Church— the infallible interpreter of her Divine Master’s will —tells us that the repentance of our heart will not be accepted by God, unless it be accompanied by fasting and abstinence.” “Infallible interpreter!” when it has misinterpreted this entire book. Thus with threats of spiritual death these babblers force the physically starved poor to deny themselves food and the emotionally starved, the simplest pleasures—as if nature and society didn’t deny them enough already. This is ignorance torturing itself at the wrong time and to no purpose. Esoterically, it isn’t even following the alleged example for the Creator here is gathering strength to create a world. The time for all this is Christmas, but we have made it a time for glutting our physical appetites and grudgingly giving material trash.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  The white stone and the new name therefore symbolize the reward and status of life when it reaches the human plane, as yet but a promise. And now we must do violence to the text, for the proper sequence is broken here, perhaps intentionally, to conceal the true meaning. The fourth church is number seven, set away off by itself in the text. For these liberties we take with the Bible, we repeat, we offer no apologies whatever, for the compilers themselves have done likewise. The whole book is a hodgepodge of mythic excerpts, whose correlation is the work either of men less enlightened than the authors, trying hard but failing to achieve the proper sequence, or that of deliberate mischief-makers, confusing the sequence to hide its natural meaning. You may choose for yourself which you believe. Laodicea14. And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God (Chap. 3). Here the truth comes out—”the creation of God.” This is precisely what John is writing about, this time the evolutionary side of it. 15. I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. 16. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. 17. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked (Chap. 3). Is not this clearly our present worldly humanity? Neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual, believing itself rich because of its money and material gadgets, when all the while it is mentally, morally, and spiritually poor and wretched, blind and naked—economic man. And the same may be said of nations. All of them wrapped up in their pride and self-sufficiency when not one of them has done even the “first work.” Not one of them can properly feed, clothe and educate its people; not one of them can settle its foreign problems without recourse to war and conflict. We still glorify war and its warriors are our heroes; we spend so much of our wealth upon it there’s nothing left for worthier purposes. It’s time we forgot our stupid wars and did something to rid our nature of its cause. And here we are shown the way. 18. I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be (truly) rich; and white raiment (spirituality), that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy (material) nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see (Chap. 3). Now what is this eyesalve but enlightenment, a “new dimension of consciousness” by which we may see the error of our ways and the falseness of our faiths? With this we will know that truth that will set us free.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb (Chap. 14). 1. And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. 2. And the first went and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image (economic man). 3. And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea. 4. And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. 8. And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire (Chap. 16). 11. And the smoke of their torment ascended up for ever and ever: and they had no rest day nor night. . . (Chap. 14). 9. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues . . . (the plagues of Exodus; Chap. 16). And why shouldn’t they, if this be God?—an inhuman “beast” compared with which the . . . Dragons of the prime, That tear each other in their slime Were mellow music matched with him. Tennyson, In Memoriam LVI Where then is the God of love and mercy? There’s not a trace of him in Revelation (the New Testament), nor yet in Ezekiel (the Old Testament). Neither is there in the Pentateuch. The God of Joshua is but this same mad “beast” reveling in blood and battle. No, save for the Gospels, which are truth perverted for benefit of clergy, there are only savagery, cruelty, pain and death in the Bible. And this is what constitutes its truth; the rest is lies. Savagery, cruelty, pain and death are the way of life and therefore “the will of God.” When in outlining the creative process we spoke in similar terms, we were, no doubt, accused of blasphemy, but our indictment was purely negative; we only denied God divinity, whereas St. John writes a whole book to prove His diabolical savagery. Compared to his charges, we think ours are defensive and exonerative; we even said the Great First Cause is not responsible for its cruelty. The mystery of Revelation is no mystery at all, but only occult knowledge of Causation, Creation and Evolution—exactly as we wrote of them.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  She was able to do this by proclaiming that relationships, like everything else in her version of how the world worked, were not matters of choice or feeling, but were instead vehicles to be used for higher learning, getting over ego positions and serving God. Initially there was a small measure of discomfort expressed by my peers about this element of Limori’s teaching, although she made sure the discomfort was short lived. In the early 1990s, Susan (she of the naked workshop) was invited to spend a summer living at Wolf’s Den. She and her husband (who did not belong to the group) owned an apple orchard in the interior of BC, but when Limori invited Susan to spend the summer living and working at Wolf’s Den, it was an offer too good to be refused. (Susan would have felt honoured by the invitation, just as I had when Limori asked me to move in with her.) I was peripherally aware that this had happened but didn’t think anything of it until one day in mid-summer when I received a call from Michael saying that he, Gary, Richard, Jessica and Karen were going over to Limori’s apartment in North Vancouver that evening to talk to her about something. He sounded angry and upset, and when he and Jessica picked me up for the drive over I found out why. Susan was having an affair with Brent, one of the permanent residents of Wolf’s Den. Gary, Richard and Michael were particularly upset because, as they put it, “You don’t sleep with another man’s wife.” They all knew Susan’s husband and, although he didn’t follow Limori, we had met him on occasion. Initially they were mostly angry with Brent for stepping in and violating this part of the male code of ethics. Limori welcomed six angry disciples into her apartment that evening, but she seemed amused by us rather than concerned about our disapproval. The men outlined why we were there, and Limori waited patiently while they did so. Then she dropped a bomb, explaining that not only did she know about the affair but that she, at God’s request, had instigated it. This served to further enrage the men in the room, and she let each man express his moral outrage (Jessica, Karen and I mostly just observed the confrontation) but did not engage with their anger or defend her actions or those of Susan and Brent. When the men had blown off enough steam, Limori pulled out all the stops with her particular brand of rhetoric and, over the next couple of hours, smoothed ruffled feathers, assuring everyone that this was God’s will and that, as ever, there was nothing more important than that.

• From Little Women (1868)

  But Jo frowned upon the whole project and would have nothing to do with it at first. "Why in the world should you spend your money, worry your family, and turn the house upside down for a parcel of girls who don't care a sixpence for you? I thought you had too much pride and sense to truckle to any mortal woman just because she wears French boots and rides in a coupe," said Jo, who, being called from the tragic climax of her novel, was not in the best mood for social enterprises. "I don't truckle, and I hate being patronized as much as you do!" returned Amy indignantly, for the two still jangled when such questions arose. "The girls do care for me, and I for them, and there's a great deal of kindness and sense and talent among them, in spite of what you call fashionable nonsense. You don't care to make people like you, to go into good society, and cultivate your manners and tastes. I do, and I mean to make the most of every chance that comes. You can go through the world with your elbows out and your nose in the air, and call it independence, if you like. That's not my way." When Amy had whetted her tongue and freed her mind she usually got the best of it, for she seldom failed to have common sense on her side, while Jo carried her love of liberty and hate of conventionalities to such an unlimited extent that she naturally found herself worsted in an argument. Amy's definition of Jo's idea of independence was such a good hit that both burst out laughing, and the discussion took a more amiable turn. Much against her will, Jo at length consented to sacrifice a day to Mrs. Grundy, and help her sister through what she regarded as 'a nonsensical business'. The invitations were sent, nearly all accepted, and the following Monday was set apart for the grand event. Hannah was out of humor because her week's work was deranged, and prophesied that "ef the washin' and ironin' warn't done reg'lar, nothin' would go well anywheres". This hitch in the mainspring of the domestic machinery had a bad effect upon the whole concern, but Amy's motto was 'Nil desperandum', and having made up her mind what to do, she proceeded to do it in spite of all obstacles. To begin with, Hannah's cooking didn't turn out well. The chicken was tough, the tongue too salty, and the chocolate wouldn't froth properly. Then the cake and ice cost more than Amy expected, so did the wagon, and various other expenses, which seemed trifling at the outset, counted up rather alarmingly afterward. Beth got a cold and took to her bed. Meg had an unusual number of callers to keep her at home, and Jo was in such a divided state of mind that her breakages, accidents, and mistakes were uncommonly numerous, serious, and trying.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Men benefit from this system. Donna Niles, an ex-prostitute, points out that men can sell pictures of women’s bodies to pleasure men, but women can’t sell their own bodies for the same reason. Man-made laws ensure that money made from women’s bodies will stay in male hands. Samantha Miller also agrees that there may be a semiconscious complicity in keeping prostitution illegal: “What’s going on right here, today, is men don’t want to take responsibility for their own sexuality, their own wants, desires, needs. So they set up this prostitute population as the scapegoat for all the bad things about their sexuality. It sets up a pool of women to be raped, because they have no rights—raped, battered, abused, because they’re sexual.” One prostitute describes trying to get used to the insults, cat calls, and presumptuous grabbing at her on the street, the screams and threats from men passing by. “Maybe,” she says, “it was because I looked men in their faces.” Women learn at an early age not to do this. When we take self-defense classes, we have to start from scratch, learning how to look at and talk back to men. Prostitutes must do this in order to be identified as a prostitute, and to size the customer up. In both cases the direct look carries a veiled threat, a message—“I am in control of my body.” People who believe sex work is by definition bad, because it must by definition be exploitive, can rationalize extremely punishing behavior to save sex workers from themselves. One of the strip clubs not far from my house is routinely picketed by people who copy down the license plate numbers of customers, find their home address and telephone numbers through the Department of Motor Vehicles, and then make harassing calls to their homes and their neighbors. The same tactic is used by the antiabortion protesters of Operation Rescue.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  1. And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth (Chap. 9). This is not a repetition of the command given to Adam; it is the same command in a parallel myth. Thus the replenishment here is not of the lost Adamic humanity, but of the involutionary archetypes and elements figuratively “lost” in matter. These are now to be replaced by their evolutionary antiscia, or planetary opposites. The command then is not to humanity, nor is it authority to breed by blind nature instead of human intelligence. It is not even a command by God, but only that of a mythologist observing a natural fact billions of years later. 18. And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. Ham represents the etheric element, at this point in the story, involutionary. And now we can see why Ham is the father of Canaan. Canaan is a mythic name for matter, the earth in toto, and we asserted that suns transmute the etheric into the chemical. And this is the meaning of the next step down, namely, Shem, or Chem. It’s all cunningly concealed, but by no means original. Even the names of Noah’s sons are copies. In Maurice’s history of Hindustan we find this: “It is related in Padmapooraun that Satyavrata, whose miraculous preservation from a general deluge is told at large in the Matsya, had three sons, the eldest of whom was named Jyapeti, or Lord of the Earth; the others were Charma and Sharma, which last words are in the vulgar dialects usually pronounced Cham and Sham. . . .” In The City of God , St. Augustine uses these same forms, also Chanaan for Canaan. There is more to this quotation but it is apropos of something else assumed to be original; later we will return to it. 19. These are the three sons of Noah (the violent forces of Creation): and of them was the whole earth overspread. And that explains everything, including the violence and savagery of Nature, a fact the Perfection concept and the Priestly account cannot explain. By such deception the priests hid from us the true nature of Causation, and at the same time established the idea the whole human race sprang from three Jews, and of course they were Jews, and so was Adam. Josephus, taking it all literally, says the descendants of these three spread over all the continents of Europe and Asia, founding nations and calling them after their own names. Then he berates the Greeks for subsequently changing the names and making these same claims. This, of course, was wrong for the Greeks but perfectly all right for the Jews.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Like Michael in Jude, he “durst not bring against him a railing accusation.” There is a story told of a heavenly messenger sent by God to bring report of man. Filled with zeal and prejudice against this mortal rebel, he came to earth, but there he learned a shocking truth—that man is God’s moral superior, and filled with zeal for man and prejudice against God, he too became a rebel—and “I do well to be angry,” said another of his kind. Now if the Gospels are literally true, Christ was also a messenger from God to man, but instead of recognizing the suffering of man and the cruel indifference of God, he widened the gulf between them: “None is good save one, that is God,” while we are sinners, all; the things of man are as nothing compared to the things of God, and so we must “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” The implication is, of course, that the things of Caesar (man) are vile and evil, whereas the things of God are divine and holy. Had this “Son of God” known His Father’s nature he would have realized that, morally at least, the things of Caesar are incalculably superior to the things of God. But having learned of God from Hebrew theology, man was to him a helpless creature wholly dependent upon a God of love for everything—with prayer as the logistic key. He has but to ask this loving God for peace, justice, health and prosperity and they will be given him. If these things come from God, and prayer be the modest price thereof, why is the world so devoid of them? Because we do not pray enough? No, but because in that vast preponderance of time not spent in prayer, we let their vicious opposite grow up in our hearts, and there they become the disposing factors in our lives, and neither prayers below nor God above can overrule them. It is for us to create these things, not beg them from alleged divinity. For thousands of years we have been begging this divinity for peace, and only now are we realizing that we ourselves must establish it, hence the United Nations. Had Christ known the nature of Reality he would not have taught the love of God for man or its reverse. Yet the Gospels have him say: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment” (Mark 12:30). It is not the first of an enlightened Christ but only of a priesthood that needed it professionally. God being but the ruthless creative power, man has no right to love it, since from it spring all his pain and suffering, his savagery and war.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  “It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous that there are as many doctrines as inclinations, and as many sources of blasphemy as there are faults among us, because we make creeds arbitrarily and explain them as arbitrarily. Every year, nay every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries; we repent of what we have done; we defend those who repent; we anathematize those whom we defend; we condemn either the doctrines of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; and reciprocally tearing each other to pieces, we have been the cause of each other’s ruin.” Here we have the source of our sacred doctrines. Where they are not the work of ignorance trying to explain what it does not understand, they are the result of priestly endeavor to control the human mind. According to their teaching “the blood of Christ washed away the sins of the world,” still with us. What it actually washed away was the sanity of the world. In due time its doctrines so bedeviled the Western mind that Agobard of Lyons wrote thus: “The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe.” Should the skeptical reader wish a sample, we offer another tale of Christian martyrdom, this time about the precursor of the curse, John of the Gospels. According to the saints, John, when very old, incurred the anger of the Emperor Domitian. To punish him, the latter had this holy man thrown into a caldron of oil and resin. A fire was lit, and when the liquid began to boil the jeering crowd heard a voice singing in the flames—the Christian Shad-rach, etc. When the caldron boiled dry, there was John still alive and quite unharmed. Jerome, Eusebius, Tertullian all relate this miracle and practically all hagiographies contain it. And now, if these eminent Christians could believe this absurdity, they could believe anything, even the Gospels. And do you realize that what they believed was that “faith once delivered to the saints”? It was, and for fifteen hundred years their word was law, and men were burned at the stake for doubting it. It would seem that these saints were the most ignorant men who ever left their mark on human thought. Of Causation and Creation they knew nothing; of Evolution and its qualities they knew no more, yet their substitute “superstition” still dominates the religious mind. Anyone dominated by religious thought is under the influence of a reason-perverting power. Such were Christianity’s Confounding Fathers. Today we honor these misbegotten for their courage without realizing the crime they committed—the complete destruction of ancient science and philosophy. This resulted in fifteen hundred years of darkness, in which the Christian people did not even know the earth is round.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  The naked earth, however, was a cosmogonical offense, as it was intended to be covered. Now actually Ham did the covering, but as the author wanted to “show cause” why the plant kingdom is subject to the other two, he made Shem and Japheth the virtuous ones. Japheth being the oldest son (see 21:10) was first in Involution, therefore last in Evolution. 24. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 25. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren (as Abel was to his brother Cain). Exoterically, this is the third curse pronounced thus far— Adam, Cain, and Ham—but esoterically, it is the same curse, the curse of life, of being as compared to nonbeing. This is “the original sin” and its consequence, but behold, what ignorance has done with it. It has made a religion out of it; it has built a parasitic church and priesthood upon it; it has wasted millennia in saving us instead of civilizing us. The only salvation that we need is salvation from this ignorance; this is our curse and the cause of all our troubles. Therefore we should make all other things secondary to the removal of this curse. As an aid in escaping the curse of scriptural history, we will now conclude the Hindustani source of this part of it. “The royal patriarch for such is his character in the Pooraun—was particularly fond of Jyapeti, to whom he gave all the regions to the north of Himalaya, or the snowy mountains, which extend from sea to sea, and of which Caucasus is a part; to Sharma he alloted the countries to the south of these mountains; but he cursed Charma because when the old monarch was accidentally inebriated with strong liquor made of fermented rice, Charma laughed; and it was in consequence of his father’s execration that he became a slave to the slaves of his brothers.” And such is the “revealed” history of Israel. It is curious what devils these divine beings, straight from the hand of God, become—Adam, Cain, Lamech, and now Noah, a great mystery to our “Bible students.” Concerning Noah, one of them, C. A. Hawley, had this to say: “The second Noah seems to have been as much a reprobate as any of the descendants of the illicit union of the divine beings and mortal woman. He was the first to plant the vine, thereby identifying himself with the hated Baal religion, so violently condemned by the prophets. He was the first to become drunk with wine, again violating all the prophetic commands and injunctions. He was the first mortal to curse his fellow man. He was the originator of slavery. This could never be the same Noah who was named to be the savior of his people and the second father of the human race.” This is commentary without knowledge, learning without understanding.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He hated her—therefore?—far more than Ida could, and was far more at the mercy of his hatred; which, from ceaseless trampling down, yearned to go upward, blowing up the world. But he could not afford to know this. She said, smiling, with stiff lips, “Thank you very much.” Mrs. Barry said, “You must be very proud of your husband.” Cass and Ida glanced briefly at each other, and Cass smiled and said, “Well, I’ve always been proud of him, really; none of this comes as any surprise to me.” Ida laughed. “That’s the truth. Cass thinks Richard can do no wrong.” “Not even when she catches him at it,” Ellis grinned. Then, “We’ve been together quite a lot lately, and he often speaks of what a happy man he is.” For some reason, this frightened her. She wondered when, and how often, Richard and Ellis met and what Richard really had to say. She swallowed her fear. “Blind faith,” she said, inanely, “I’ve got it,” and thought, God . She looked toward the dance floor. But that particular couple had vanished. “Your husband’s a lucky man,” said Mr. Barry. He looked at his wife, and reached for her hand. “So am I.” “Mr. Barry’s just become a part of our publicity department,” Ellis said. “We’re awfully proud to have him on board. And I’m sorry if I sound like I’m bragging—hell, I’m not sorry, I am bragging—but I think it represents a tremendous breakthrough in our pussyfooting, hidebound industry.” He grinned, and Mr. Barry smiled. “And hidebound so soon!” “It was hidebound the instant it was born,” said Mr. Nash, “just as your cinema industry was hidebound, and for the same reason. It immediately became the property of the banks—part of what you people quaintly call free enterprise, though God knows there’s nothing free about it, and nothing even remotely enterprising about the lot of you. ” Cass and Ida stared at him. “Where are you from?” Cass demanded. He smiled at her from a great, tolerant distance. “Belfast,” he said. “Oh,” cried Ida, “I have a friend whose father was born in Dublin! Do you know Dublin? Is it very far from Belfast?” “Geographically? Yes, some distance. Otherwise, the distance is negligible—though the population of either city would hang me if they heard me say so.” And he laughed his cheerful, lubricated laugh. “What have you got against us?” Cass asked. “I? Why, nothing,” said Mr. Nash, laughing, “I make a great deal of money out of you.” “Mr. Nash,” said Ellis, “is an impresario who no longer lives in Belfast.” “Free enterprise, you see,” said Mr. Nash, and winked at Mr. Barry. Mr. Barry laughed. He leaned toward Mr. Nash. “Well, I’m on the side of Mrs. Silenski.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  It’s like he’s describing a rattlesnake to someone who’s never seen one: “It’s long and thin and has scales.” He neglects to mention the sharp fangs or the venomous, life-threatening bite. His only concession to that side of his guru is, as I’ve said, to mention once or twice that she’s a “tough teacher.” The swath of destruction Limori left in her wake is never discussed. There is zero mention of the families and relationships that were ripped apart, or of the psychological and emotional abuse those around her had to endure. He doesn’t discuss the manipulation we withstood for Limori’s own benefit. Or the way she, as every cult leader does, was able to teach those following her to blame ourselves for everything bad that occurred, and give her credit for anything positive. He talks about her global lifestyle and the elegance with which she presented herself in order to point out how special she was, but fails to mention that she lived that lifestyle off the backs of her followers, who gave her many hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, and also very often worked for her for free. He mentions that, early on, dozens of people came to her meditation circles, pointing out that people were magically drawn to her presence, but fails to share that this period was short-lived and that at her death there were almost no followers left. Michael neglects to mention the way Limori controlled our lives and demanded that her every wish and whim be satisfied, despite the fact that Lisa, the woman he’s currently in a relationship with, had her three very young children ripped from her and sent away to be raised by their grandparents, a familial rupture so devastating that those children are still living with the effects, more than 25 years later. Here’s a perfect example that shows how Michael shares the portions of events that are complimentary to Limori and then leaves out the more unsavoury facts, sharing only 20 percent of the picture instead of the full story. He spends part of the chapter called The Resort explaining how Matthew found and purchased the piece of land that I call Wolf’s Den on a lake in the Chilcotin Plateau. He describes how Matthew “fell in love” with the parcel, and how it “felt like home” to him. However, what he doesn’t mention is that while I was following Limori, she got Matthew, who was then her husband, to sign the deed for Wolf’s Den over to her. This part of the story is simply left out, as is the fact that when Limori died, she willed the resort not back to Matthew, but to her son (a man not related to Matthew). So Matthew, who struggled to raise the money to buy the land, and finally did, and nearly lost it to the banks several times, but persevered, ultimately lost the slice of paradise he worked so hard to hold onto.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  According to the Greeks, Zeus gave the Hesperides a tree that bore golden apples. As they could not resist the temptation to eat of them, Zeus placed Ladon, a serpent, in the garden to watch the trees. Finally, Hercules, a personification of evolutionary life, slew the serpent, matter, and gave the apples freely to the Hesperides. Thus the Greeks did not put the blame on the serpent; they merely made Evolution reverse the law of Involution. Such is the Bible’s “revealed truth”—other races’ mythology, the basis of which is cosmology. Its literal interpretation that this fruit is sex has branded women with the scarlet letter for nearly three thousand years. Here again, a little knowledge erases that stigma also. It should also erase our belief in this entire book. Its account of the world’s creation and man’s estate is false. Man is not evil because he “fell” from perfection but because he has not risen to it. But never having been taught the nature and purpose of Evolution he does not know where he is or why he is what he is. Knowledge of Evolution would enlighten him: he is what he is because he is where he is—only the middle point of the first human plane, with billions of years to follow. Since it was the Creator that determined this process, man is not to blame for where he is but only for what he does. But since what he does is due to where he is, he is not, basically, to blame at all. He is, however, responsible for his own human world, another fact he has never been taught, and so acts regardless of it. He has never been taught the “law of cycles” either, and so he does not know he is at the nadir of a materialistic cycle or how to counteract its influence. Here too he acts regardless of the whole—blindly carrying his material achievements to the danger point. With no vision of the future, he proudly calls this “civilization.” It is not civilization at all but only mechanized barbarism, his purely material wonders but ant and spider technology carried to the human plane. If this be civilization we’ll have to coin another name for the real thing. Would you call a humanity civilized that has a hundred wars in as many years? that spends a trillion dollars on murder weapons while its schools and hospitals close for want of funds? that lets half its people starve while the other half sickens from overeating? Would you call a humanity enlightened that poisons the air, the water and the soil? that doesn’t know mythology from history, or even what it exists for? This is the animal estate. Today it may be doing something even worse than poisoning its physical environment. It may be destroying the biologic aspect of the ether. Science calls this element “the nervous ether,” the Hindus call it prana , or the source of it.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Forty wars in one generation should convince any intelligent person of these facts, but for lack of such intelligence, war only magnifies the illusion. Its helpless victims cry out to God because they know not what else to do. The Church is quick to capitalize on this, and so we have a revival of faith—the public’s extremity is the priests’ opportunity. During the Second World War they told us repeatedly, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” If so, it was only because there was no wisdom or understanding either; there was only that religion-born ignorance that produces foxholes. From these the tortured souls of men may cry to God as an instinctual reflex, but if they could reason from war to cause, their “Prayer from a Foxhole” would read like this: Now I lay me down to sleep Where bullets fly and vermin creep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the human race will take The measure of a God whose will For moral man is Kill and Kill. “The fool saith in his heart, There is no God”—and another fool saith there is; but for two thousand years the affirmative fools have run the world and so they branded all who differ with them as atheists, infidels, social outcasts, etc. Yet what other attitude is there for the enlightened? Strip the theists of their mythological authority and you see the atheists have been right, not in denying a Creator, which they do not, but in denying the God of religion, which they do and rightly so. It is from these that all enlightened government comes, including that of our founding fathers, most of them atheists and we could fill pages with their atheism. In spite of this fact no avowed atheist can hold a government position. This too is due to religion. The Church fears atheism, not because it is inimical to human welfare but because it is inimical to its welfare. The churchmen want their mythical God because in him they live and move and have their cake and eat it too. The Church has thus become an institution for the care and maintenance of God, not man. You can say anything about man, and the Church will do nothing, but speak one word against its God and the whole benighted crew will rise in wrath against you. They should read Joshua again, then ask themselves which is the true God, the God of Joshua or the God of Jesus? They cannot both be right, yet Joshua was written before the darkness fell completely. That darkness is still upon the churchmen and while they sleep nature’s savage forces kill and kill; compare them with Joshua’s God and you find they agree completely. If this God is the father of Jesus Christ, then this book is blasphemy, and the Jews have libeled God as well as Pharaoh. It makes him the complete antithesis of his son.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  This is the curse of Ireland, but sunk in the depths of their Christian ignorance its people cannot see it. It is tragic indeed that a people so potentially fine should be literally damned by their religion. If, as has been said, they are not mature emotionally and politically, the reason is obvious: two thousand years of religious error plus seven hundred of racial hatred. If the Irish would overcome this, they must bring back to Erin the ancient wisdom. With this, they would realize that the thing that’s bedivilin’ them now is not the Satan of religion but the religion of Satan, Catholicism. See p. 438. Its teachers need this wisdom-knowledge that they may understand the book they preach from. According to that book Satan is one of the “Sons of God,” “Lucifer, bright star of the morning,” and as Virgil tells us, “Lucifer antevolent” leads on ahead. He is the actor, the doer, the primum mobile . It was he who, “in the beginning,” aroused the genetic consciousness asleep in the Absolute, and eons later aroused it from sleep in the earth. All this the Jhwhist saw clearly and stated it plainly for those who can read occult literature. He described its nature as bloodthirsty Jehovah, murderous Joshua and dishonest Jacob, all Causation symbols. Perhaps he thought it not in the interest of the common people to openly attribute such qualities to its rightful source, and so used personification. He also made a distinction between consciousness, God, and energy, Satan, the one to warn, the other to disobey. He knew quite well the spiritually wise would see through the subterfuge, but what he did not know was that there would come a time when there are no spiritually wise, an age of materialism in which mankind could not distinguish truth from error or mythology from history. But now, having acquired some knowledge of Causation and Creation, let us see what the Jhwhist is trying to tell us. 1 Not in letters but in numbers, see p. 154. 2 There are two Zodiacs: (1) The Zodiac of Signs, beginning with Aries. This is the Zodiac of astrology. (2) The Zodiac of Constellations, a symbol of the Creative Process. This begins with Aquarius, pouring out the primordial waters and returning to Aquarius at the end of Evolution. This is the Zodiac of occult cosmology, the concealed theme of the Bible. 4Genesis: Third Chapter1. Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? W e assume that the word subtil here means morally evil, cunning, crafty, etc., but is not the word for this subtle? Our dictionary defines the latter word as evil, cunning, deceptive, but it defines subtil as “that which is fine drawn, ethereal, rarefied,” and subtilize, to make less gross or coarse; in other words, to refine.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  The first incident happened just before Xavier’s freshman year of high school. I could corroborate some, though not all, of the details, but the specifics are, perhaps, less important than the aftermath, the impact it had on Xavier and his black male classmates. A senior guy, who was also black, got drunk at a party and groped a white girl. The next day, he texted her to apologize, or maybe he wrote her a letter, and somehow that admission of guilt made its way onto social media, incriminating rather than exonerating him. The school administration found out—some say she was reluctant to report him, but her parents insisted—and after an investigation, the boy was expelled. The second case occurred at the end of the following summer, at another party. A white girl had fallen asleep in a bedroom, allegedly waking up to find a boy of color on top of her attempting to remove her clothes. Several months later, she reported the incident to the school’s administration, and, again, after an investigation, that boy, too, was expelled. Later, at a school-wide meeting in which students were invited to speak on any topic, the girl read a prepared statement about the assault, claiming the only reason the perpetrator wasn’t in jail was because he was black. Xavier was stunned by her insensitivity, plus, he said, no adult intervened. Some of the students of color, including him, walked out of the auditorium in tears. “It was a shit show,” Xavier recalled. “I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard in a public area. I felt attacked—this was supposed to be a place where I feel comfortable and nurtured, and I was just being torn down to my basic identity. After she was done, it was hard for me to look at my peers and teachers and the head of school, who were supposed to be there for me. I was like, ‘In this moment, you all failed me.’”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  “Prostitution is much, much, much, much—I can’t tell you how much bigger and how much more underground prostitution is than anybody knows about or seems to have been willing to talk about.” Samantha Miller is thirty-seven years old, a cheerful woman with a master’s degree in counseling. Samantha used to run the National VD Hotline. Now she runs COYOTE, the oldest prostitutes’ union in the United States. (COYOTE stands for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.) I had asked her about the streetwalker, the downtrodden woman so frequently seen in fiction and film, so little heard from. “What you see, what is portrayed in the media, is about ten percent of what’s really going on,” Samantha told me. “And that really down-and-out, do-anything-for money kind is about five percent of the ten percent. That’s what most people think of when they think of prostitution. But these women don’t identify as prostitutes, or only very rarely. They just did this because they had to feed their baby, or whatever.” There are few statistics on prostitution, and COYOTE is one of the only organizations that has attempted to define the scope of the work. COYOTE’s statistics indicate most prostitutes work privately and independently, far outside the view of the public. One problem COYOTE has identified time and again is the universal racism at work in stereotypes of prostitution. Black prostitutes are arrested and convicted far out of proportion to their numbers in the profession; about eighty-five percent of the prostitutes who do jail time are women of color. But racism works both ways; black and Hispanic women are far more likely to be harassed as though they were prostitutes in the first place, as are foreign and working-class women, as black men are far more likely to be presumed to be pimps than white men, though again, what statistics are available show this to be a false presumption. But the most enduring stereotype of the prostitute that Samantha Miller and her coworkers face is the belief that they don’t really want to be prostitutes when they do.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  In February 1992 I published an essay in Harper’s about my interest in pornography. It was the first time I’d written transparently about sex and its complicated, layered meanings. Pornography is a hall of mirrors, a central symbol of the societywide confusion over sex. By its existence, porn defines us as sexual animals; its only function is to arouse our primal sexual response. The urge (which I certainly felt) to discuss pornography in solely cerebral or political terms seemed, in the end, to be useless as well as silly. Pornography is designed to bypass the brain as much as possible. I was interested in the discomfort pornography brings up, both for others and for myself; no matter what else I could say about it, I had to admit that I found a lot of pornography exciting. It got me, down deep, and I could think of no better unifying metaphor for the impact of sex on my life. Sex has eternal charm for the body—a perpetual, organic hold. Porn is sex off the leash. I received a lot of letters in response to that essay—a few dozen canceled subscriptions, a lot of thoughtful letters from women and men who had struggled to understand their own interest in pornography, a few huzzahs, a few mash notes, a few bare confessions. One woman wrote to say I should not be allowed to have children, failing to explain where her own children had come from. It’s difficult for any of us to talk honestly and seriously about sex, and it may be especially hard for men to listen to anyone, male or female, talk about sex. One man wrote offering to cut his penis off and mail it to me. A radio interviewer in Canada asked me to describe what I was wearing, and then, please, to “talk dirty” to him. Several letter writers who identified themselves as conservative feminists relied more on epithet than analysis; their insults were graphic and vile. I was struck by their rage, their venom, which was so much greater than the reservations I had expressed in the essay about the conservative feminist position on pornography. Their rage, in fact, was considerably greater and more personally expressed than that of the subscription-cancelers. That group was interesting largely because they equated my frank discussion of pornography with pornography itself. (Censorship, legal and otherwise, makes it impossible not only to talk about the censored object, but about censorship.) There was clearly something much deeper than a political disagreement going on.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  We don’t approve of killing, yet we train millions to kill, and if one kills sufficiently he becomes a national hero, and we are proud of him. We are proud of our armies and navies never realizing that if we were civilized there would be no such things. We are proud of the size and efficiency of our police force when this is due only to the number of criminals in our society. We are proud only because we haven’t sense enough to be ashamed. We would rid the world of religious bigotry and prejudice, then passionately defend their source, religion. This, we’ve been told, is the one great binding force, when it is the most divisive force in all the world—Catholic against Protestant, Arab against Israeli, Mohammedan against Hindu. Thus instead of binding us together it makes killers of us. Throughout its history it has caused the death of untold millions. See page 463. For two thousand years rationalists have tried to destroy the source of all this—Christ and his false God-concept. They failed because they lacked the knowledge necessary to see the errors in his knowledge. So let us see how knowledgeable this Christ was. 1 Philipp August Bockh, 1785-1867. 2 The quote is from Higgins. 3 From the Taittirya Aranyaka . 25Christianity: Its False DoctrinesSalvation is not begged or bought; Too long this selfish hope sufficed; Too long man reeked with lawless thought, And leaned upon a tortured Christ. ELLA WHEELER WILCOX B efore we attribute authority to anyone we should ask this question: What does he know of his subject? Thus far, no one has asked this question of Christ; no one has pronounced Him ignorant, and this because no one has had sufficient knowledge to see the errors in His teachings. Yet this will be the basis of our proof that this God and Savior is but a creation of an ignorant priesthood. Those priestly scribes were ignorant of Causation and Creation, Evolution and the origin of qualities and so they made their creature likewise. They were ignorant even of the meaning of Genesis and so made their Son of God believe in its literal word; in fact, His whole salvation purpose is based on that literalism. According to these literalists Christ was the Creator of the world, yet he accepted the absurd account of creation as given in Genesis. He believed in a historical Noe, a Moses, a David, a Solomon and even a Jonah for it was he who told us the fish was a whale. He believed in a historical Adam, his sin and his fall. But Adam was not a man; therefore it wasn’t man that sinned. And if man didn’t sin he is not lost. And if he is not lost he does not need a Savior. Thus Christ’s whole salvation mission was based on a misunderstanding of Genesis. In fact, the entire New Testament is based on a misinterpretation of the Old Testament.