Contempt

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)

  There is but one other subject we would like to deal with here—the disciples. Who were they, and what were they? As presented, they were the few among millions spiritual enough to discern the divine nature of Christ, and this in spite of the recorded fact that they were “unlearned and ignorant men” (Acts 4:13). There’s a lesson for us in that, but not the chief one. If these constant companions of Jesus were historical characters, how is it St. Paul knew nothing about them? Concerning this, Robertson in his Christianity and Mythology has this to say: “On the face of all the gospels alike, the choosing of the Twelve Apostles is an unhistorical narrative; and in the documents from which all scientific study of Christian origins must proceed— the Epistles of Paul—there is no evidence of the existence of such a body. In only one instance is it mentioned, and that is demonstrably part of a late interpolation, whatever view we may take of the original authenticity of the Epistles.” Paul then knew nothing of a “twelve.” His Jesus was the mythic, pre-Christian symbol. The authors of the Gospels knew quite well who these twelve were but they had a professional reason for disguising them. They were thus like our professional detective story writers, in knowing something the reader doesn’t know, namely, “whodunit.” And so, like their modern counterparts they blind and deceive the reader by every trick of their trade. It is for us to see through this trick and thereby learn for ourselves “whodunit.” Had Western man done this in the beginning he would have saved himself two thousand years of spiritual madness. It’s rather late now, but suppose we apply it to this scriptural “whodunit.” Among occultists these twelve have ever been identified with the twelve signs of the zodiac, but only in its annual and solar sense. This is modern understanding and not enough. We must learn to see them in terms of the greater, cosmogonical zodiac. As such they are the New Testament’s Elohim, the twelve creative forces; they are Jacob’s twelve sons, and the twelve tribes of Israel. Among the Chinese they were the Tien Hoang, or “world creators”; among the Hindus, the twelve Aditya, the twelve Nidanas, or “causes of being.” In Greece they were the twelve Titans, and in Scandinavia the twelve Aesirs of Asgard. The gods Osiris and Marduk also had their twelve helpers. The twelve disciples are but the New Testament equivalent of these pagan deities, in other words, the dramatis personae in the drama of Creation. Now “in order of appearance” the first of these were fishermen or watermen, and the waters here are the same as in Genesis and Aquarius, the primordial sea. Chief of these was Peter, whom Jesus said was the son of Jonah the fishman. Calling Peter a son of Jonah, though figurative, is an occult hint of Peter’s original nature, the primordial waters.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth:. . . The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal (because it is a globe). 17. And he measured the wall thereof, a hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. The angel is the creative power and this and Man, capital m , are one. The number of cubits in the wall is the same as those who are saved, namely, 144. This and the number of the beast, 666, the number of the “woman clothed with the sun,” 1,260, and even Adam, spelt in Hebrew Adm , are numerically the same. And all are the earth entity. And it is this drab entity that St. John describes so glowingly: 18. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. 19. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; 20. The fifth, sardonyx; the six, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. The twelve zodiacal divisions with their birthstone symbology are shown in the list below. Jewish gem symbology based on the lesser zodiac is as follows: [image "image" file=Image00012.jpg] This is “the Holy City” on which we base our faith in a heaven hereafter. If it isn’t a hoax what is it? As an ideal, it is but a dream of the Zodiacal Night; now that that is passing we must wake and buckle down to the task of building this city on earth. 21. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. And this is our “pearly gates” and “streets of gold”! This is the city this saintly humbug saw “coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband”—gran-diloquent symbology of this old world in its radiant sun period. Yet on such bases religions are founded. Such is the power of words, particularly on fear and ignorance. Indeed, so powerful are they, anyone with sufficient command of them can rule the world. This was the priests’ original objective. Instead of visions of God and his holy city, Revelation is but the ancient Gnosis of the pagan mystics whom the Christian Fathers with inhuman cruelty exterminated. But this so-called saint, actually gnostic, was too smart for them; he wrote their “hated doctrine” up in such a way as to make them accept it as a cornerstone in their temple of lies. And there for two thousand years they have bowed in reverent awe before the thing they hated most.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  But Pilate answered them, saying, Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews?1 10. For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy. 11. But the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather release Barabbas unto them. 14. Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him (Mark 15). 24. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it (and if we were as wise as Pilate we, too, would wash our hands of it; Matt. 27). So much argument over the question, Who killed Jesus? yet do not the scriptures make it clear? Not the Romans, whose Governor sought to save him; not the whole Jewish people, for “many heard him gladly”; but the priests, the crucifiers then as now of truth and progress. And what hate and bigotry, persecution and war they have caused! Brother against brother and nation against nation, and all for what? A Creation myth mistaken for history. Roman and Jew, priest and apostle are but characters in the drama thereof. Jesus, the lead, is the Life Principle, His silence, its unconsciousness; His courage, its determined purpose. Throughout the Old Testament, the Jews represent the Life Principle, and the Gentiles its opponents; in the Gospels this is reversed, then John of Revelation reverts to the Old Testament symbolism—proof that he is not the John of the Gospels. Pilate, a historical figure, is here made to represent, as in Genesis, that which would stay the descent of spirit into matter. Because of Pilate’s effort, taken literally, the Coptic Church made him a saint and celebrates his day in May. In both the Coptic and the Greek Orthodox Church, his wife Claudia Procla is also a saint, October 27 being St. Procla’s Day. Saint in one country, devil in another, and all for want of knowledge. In the Barabbas incident there’s an occult touch that is indeed revealing. In his effort to save Jesus, Pilate offered the crowd a murderer, but they rejected him. What an indictment of the Jews, we say, demanding that the Son of God be crucified instead of a criminal. The real indictment, however, is of ourselves, for it proves we are spiritually benighted. The Son ōf God and the murderous Barabbas are one. The full name of the latter was Jesus Barabbas, the first name being dropped only after the name Jesus became sacred. Bar-abbas means “son of the fathers”; therefore Jesus Barabbas, son of the Father(s), and Jesus Christ, Son of God, are one and the same. The only possible difference is that between creative consciousness and its violent energy, the Cain of this story. In other myths it’s the murderous Set of Egypt, and the ruthless Romulus of Rome.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  This Passover was observed in an “upper room,” the still prephysical part of the new world; and here this Sun of God and his twelve aspects ate their “last supper” in Involution, a supper of bread and wine—the nectar and ambrosia of the gods. Here Jesus declares that one of these aspects will betray Him, as later another denied Him—Judas, matter, and Peter, rock. Thus Judas and Peter are the Delilah and Medusa of this myth. Now compare this cosmic picture with Christian art and custom—Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and the sacrament. As they partook of this meal Jesus instituted the latter. As he ate and drank the bread and wine, he said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” and ever since deluded people have been doing it, not because they understand it, but because they don’t. Here perhaps they can find out. The wine and bread are symbols of the two aspects, consciousness and energy, changed or transubstantiated in the creative process. This is the transubstantiation symbolized by the “holy eucharist.” The involutionary elements are different on the evolutionary side; they become isosmeric, that is, same in substance but different in quality. Indeed they undergo two changes: first, in the sun-earth organism, second, in the plant-animal organism. Thus transubstantiation is a significant factor in Creation, hence also in mythology. The ancients, as we said, knew much more about these things than we do; they evidently studied nature, not divinity, and left their knowledge in esoteric allegory. This we have interpreted literally, and so become the victims of one of the most baseless and superstitious forms of religion in all the annals of theomania. The Aztecs may have been crueler, but not more credulous. Anyone who thinks that ordinary bread and wine are actually “transubstantiated” into the flesh and blood of Christ by the mumbled words of an ignorant priest should put a little arsenic in them first. He will find then that the flesh and blood of Christ are deadly poison. This ignorant Christian custom of eating and drinking commonplace bread and wine in the hope of gaining some Christlike virtue is but a relic of the savage rite of omophagia—the eating and drinking of another person’s or animal’s flesh and blood to acquire his or its qualities, strength, courage, and so on. But the civilized, so-called, have gone the savage one better; they eat a god instead of a man, and so the savage’s anthropophagy is now theanthropóphagy. It is on this and the crucifixion that the Catholics base their Mass, a pious mumbo-jumbo to which nature answers, “Me no understand.” Every word and gesture is supposed to have profound significance, yet what significance can they have when the whole ritual is based on something that never happened? How educated and supposedly intelligent men can believe such antics important can be explained only by the spiritual ignorance of Western man.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Friendship is sweet. Brotherhood is sustaining. But pay attention to the tenor of those all-male groups: under certain circumstances, they can feed aggression, antipathy toward women, and assault. When looking at colleges, inquire about options, aside from Greek life, for nighttime and weekend socializing. Boys who are thinking of joining fraternities should do their due diligence on various houses’ reputations, talking not only to current members, but to unaffiliated students on campus, including girls who’ve attended their parties. Have student publications or local news outlets revealed incidents of sexual misconduct, racial slurs, hazing, hazardous drinking? Is sexual conquest prioritized over female dignity (a freshman at a Southern California college told me he dropped out of his frat after his pledge class was paired with a “lower-tier” sorority, so that, unbeknownst to the girls, the guys could practice their hookup technique before meeting more desirable prospects)? What programming has been put in place to educate about consent, irresponsible drinking, gender inequity, positive sexuality? How are parties made safe and comfortable for everyone, including students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and women (of any ethnicity or orientation)? These are not trivial concerns: as I previously said, fraternity members are more likely than other boys to commit assault—as much as three times more likely, according to some research. It’s unclear whether a given fraternity’s disregard for women and greater tolerance for sexual misconduct is itself enough to transform otherwise nonviolent young men. What does seem to be true, though, is that high school boys who are interested in going Greek already score higher than others on proclivities for sexual aggression as well as belief in certain rape myths, such as that assault only involves physical violence or that inebriation is a reasonable excuse for male misconduct. Fraternity life validates those tendencies, makes them acceptable. That’s an argument not only for ongoing, mandatory educational interventions in frat houses, but for programming geared toward boys long before college.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all. 42. And they did all eat, and were filled. 43. And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes. 44. And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men (not a woman among them; Mark, Chap. 6). And Christians believe that! It seems the author here was trying to shock credulity into doubting, but he did not reckon with the spiritual obtuseness of Piscean man. This fellow can see nothing but the literal word, not because he lacks intelligence but because he is so materialistic the spiritual and cosmic are quite beyond him. Were he made aware of this fact he would not be so sure of his convictions or hard on those who differ with him. As suggested elsewhere, he should read other races’ literature. The Judean place where this miracle took place was called Bethany, and in an Egyptian similitude it is Bethanu. And they called it “the place of multiplying bread.” If this miracle by Jesus was a one-and-only-time event, how did it get into the Egyptian scriptures thousands of years earlier? The raising of Lazarus also occurred here, and that too is copied from Egyptian mythology, see page 338. So near-contemporary a writer as Origen (second century) said he could find no trace of “Bethany beyond Jordan.” What then of the miracle that happened there? The feeding of five thousand with enough for five was never done by God or man. This is but the law of increase in nature, and applies to Involution as well as Evolution. In our outline we said that on this fourth plane primordial substance greatly increased and became partite, that is, infinitely divided into the monadic host. The nature of this miracle then is the division of planetary substance. This is the bread of that “house of bread,” Bethlehem, the source; it is also the “bread that cometh down from heaven; not as your fathers did eat manna and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever” (John 6:58). Apparently John did not fully understand his subject either, for this bread and this manna are the same; the only difference is that the one is involutionary, the other evolutionary. It was of this John spoke thus: “Whosoever eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day”—of Creation. And on such impersonal promises is our hope of immortality based. You see, the Bible is not speaking of us at all, but of the Life Principle. This, we repeat again, is “the worm that never dies,” not the human soul or spirit.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As far as I could see, certainty made people heartless, cruel, and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities; it made them complacent and pleased with themselves. It also did not work. The new regime in Iran seemed just as oppressive as that of the shah, the murder of Sadat did not lead to a new era in Egypt, and Thatcherism too would prove to be an expensive mistake. This type of certainty was unrealistic, and out of step with the way things really worked. Religious people seemed particularly prone to this dogmatism, and even though there was nothing remotely religious or Christian about Mrs. Thatcher’s regime, the experience of living in “Maggie’s Britain” made me even more leery of faith, dogmatism, and orthodoxy, which so often—even in a good cause—made people ride roughshod over other people’s sensitivities. That kind of certainty had damaged me in the past, and I wanted no more of it. Sally was one of the first people I had met in my own generation who had been totally untouched by religion. Unlike the Harts or Susan, my former housemate, she did not recoil from religion in principled disgust, but regarded it as a strange, incomprehensible eccentricity, like swimming in the Serpentine on Christmas Day. Why would anybody want to do anything so bizarre! The basic doctrines of Christianity had passed her by. When she was having difficulty in her classes on Milton’s Paradise Lost, I tried to explain the concept of original sin. Sally was appalled. “You’re not serious!” she exclaimed. “All that fuss over eating a piece of fruit. What a system!” I could see her point. What kind of God would damn the whole human race because of one momentary lapse? Only one that I wanted nothing to do with. In fact, the more I thought about God these days, the more I realized how much I had probably always, subconsciously, disliked him. These days it seemed that he had lurked in my life like Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-four, spying on everything I did, thought, and felt, endlessly dissatisfied, and doling out favors and punishments indiscriminately. Sally was quite right. What a system!

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As far as I could see, certainty made people heartless, cruel, and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities; it made them complacent and pleased with themselves. It also did not work. The new regime in Iran seemed just as oppressive as that of the shah, the murder of Sadat did not lead to a new era in Egypt, and Thatcherism too would prove to be an expensive mistake. This type of certainty was unrealistic, and out of step with the way things really worked. Religious people seemed particularly prone to this dogmatism, and even though there was nothing remotely religious or Christian about Mrs. Thatcher’s regime, the experience of living in “Maggie’s Britain” made me even more leery of faith, dogmatism, and orthodoxy, which so often—even in a good cause—made people ride roughshod over other people’s sensitivities. That kind of certainty had damaged me in the past, and I wanted no more of it. Sally was one of the first people I had met in my own generation who had been totally untouched by religion. Unlike the Harts or Susan, my former housemate, she did not recoil from religion in principled disgust, but regarded it as a strange, incomprehensible eccentricity, like swimming in the Serpentine on Christmas Day. Why would anybody want to do anything so bizarre! The basic doctrines of Christianity had passed her by. When she was having difficulty in her classes on Milton’s Paradise Lost, I tried to explain the concept of original sin. Sally was appalled. “You’re not serious!” she exclaimed. “All that fuss over eating a piece of fruit. What a system!” I could see her point. What kind of God would damn the whole human race because of one momentary lapse? Only one that I wanted nothing to do with. In fact, the more I thought about God these days, the more I realized how much I had probably always, subconsciously, disliked him. These days it seemed that he had lurked in my life like Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-four, spying on everything I did, thought, and felt, endlessly dissatisfied, and doling out favors and punishments indiscriminately. Sally was quite right. What a system!

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But there are other doctors out there prescribing other remedies. There are other shepherds (the word was often used, as we saw in Chapter 5, to designate Israel’s kings or other rulers), and they are failing in their tasks, or worse. The idea of Herod Antipas, the debauched and degenerate son of a warlord father, as the true shepherd of Israel is laughable. The same could be said for the fake “aristocracy” in Jerusalem, the “chief priests” and “Sadducees,” who were kept in power by the Romans because they were rich and successful (the Romans preferred to rule through existing “elites”) rather than because they really represented or taught the true, ancient traditions of Israel. Jesus was up against it. If God was to become king it would be—it could only be—by some kind of a confrontation with these forces, or rather with the forces that stood behind them. Jesus’s campaign was never going to be a smooth, easy ride to power. He knew that only too well, even if his followers were hoping that he would wave a magic wand and do to their political and social arrangements what he was doing for people’s bodies, minds, and spirits. Which is all the more relevant, because what Jesus was doing at that level was itself extremely challenging. Jesus had grasped that, if God was to become king on earth as in heaven, something deeper than outward reformation would be required. It wouldn’t do simply to tighten up existing laws and regulations and enforce them more strictly. That’s what the Pharisees wanted to do; they were a popular pressure group urging a moral reformation as part of their own vision of how God might become king. But Jesus had a different sort of “moral reformation” in mind. Hearts Transformed In two remarkable passages, Mark 7:1–23 and 10:1–12 (with parallels in Matt. 15:1–20 and 19:1–12), Jesus picks up another of the themes of Israel’s ancient promises. What will it look like when God becomes king? Hearts will be transformed. So it is with the first of the relevant passages: The Pharisees gathered around Jesus, together with some legal experts from Jerusalem. They saw that some of his disciples were eating their food with unclean (that is, unwashed) hands. (The Pharisees, you see—and indeed all the Jews—don’t eat unless they first carefully wash their hands. This is to maintain the tradition of the elders. When they come in from the market, they never eat without washing. There are many other traditions which they keep: washings of cups, pots, and bronze dishes.) Anyway, the Pharisees and legal experts asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples follow the tradition of the elders? Why do they eat their food with unwashed hands?” “Isaiah summed you up just right,” Jesus replied. “Hypocrites, the lot of you! What he said was this: ‘With their lips this people honor me, But with their hearts they turn away from me; All in vain they think to worship me;

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Its numerous excerpts are dovetailed together regardless of chronology; at one time we are reading about Evolution, at another, Involution. Indeed, we cannot even trust it when it is supposedly dealing with history. As an immediate instance of this, the second chapter of Joshua tells us this man of war killed Jabin, king of Hazor, but the fourth chapter of Judges says Barak killed him. According to the Jhwhist account, Saul committed suicide, but the Elohist says an Amalekite killed him. Daniel is assumed to be contemporary with Nebuchadnezzar, yet part of his story was written in Aramaic, a language not adopted by the Jews until centuries later. The scriptures call Belshazzar a king, but the historical Belshazzar was never king but only regent for Nabonidus. Thus we cannot trust the Bible even historically. Like all the rest, Judges is mythology, and its authors use a mythic formula that, according to our Bible students, runs like this: Israel sins; Jehovah is angry; Jehovah punishes Israel; Israel repents and all is well—until the next time. The punishment is bondage to some other nation, and the extent of it belies their other historical claims. They are in bondage in Egypt 430 years, in Babylon, 70. These alone make 500 years. Add to this 40 years to the Philistines, to Hazor 20, to Eglon 18, to the Midians 7, and in Mesopotamia, 8. Add to this several others scattered throughout the Bible and it makes nearly 700 years, practically their entire authentic B.C. history. If this is racial history, the Jews should be ashamed of it instead of proud. And again, if it is racial history what becomes of their B.C. claim to Palestine? They never owned it, save mythologically. Judges is not post-Mosaic history but pre-Mosaic cosmology; in other words, we are back in Involution again. The revolution is too long to treat in detail, and so we will select just a few highlights that reveal most clearly the mythological nature of scriptural history. SamsonOne of the most interesting characters in Judges is the great man Samson, the misnamed Hebrew Hercules. Like all the rest, his story has been accepted as true and historical, when all the while it is just a sun myth. The name itself means “man of the sun” or “sun man.” But please understand that a sun myth is not about our sun; it is about our own world when it was a sun. Every world or planet was once a sun and therefore has a past quite different from its present mundane lot. Now the ancients knew this, if we do not, and so their solar myths are allegories about this glorious stage and the mighty works accomplished in it. Its hero is a personification of this, but in the Samson myth the tale is not complete. Like that of Jesus, it tells only of his parentage and birth, then skips to his manhood. 2.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  We are all too prone to forget the brilliancy of this period, yet this was the age of Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, the latter living till Christ, if real, would have been twenty-two. These were all men of great intellect, and deeply interested in the doctrines and morals of their day. Why then did they not record this wonder-working Savior of the race? Because like all Saviors, he belongs to mythology, not history. Livy was born too soon to record Christ’s works, but not too soon to report the most sensational and unnatural events in human history—immaculate conception and virgin birth. Plutarch lived from about 46 to 120 A.D. but apparently never heard of Christ. Had he but written a life of this sixteenth Savior and paralleled it with any one of the others, Christianity would not be the superstition it is today. Pliny the Elder, 22-79 A.D., was Christ’s contemporary, yet makes no mention of him. The younger Pliny, 62-110 A.D., speaks of the Christians of Pontus and Bithnia but refers to Christ only as the object of their worship. Tacitus, a moralistic historian, produced his greatest work while the New Testament was allegedly written, yet he, like the younger Pliny, mentions Christ only in terms of the Christians and their beliefs; in other words, these men were speaking of a new religion not of a historical founder, and for this new religion they had nothing but contempt, see page 443. Then there was Juvenal, the moral critic of his age; one would think he would cite this paragon of virtue in his attack upon decadent Rome. And the stoic, Epictetus, and the mystics, Plotinus and Porphyry, why did they not make good use of this mystical Christ? Porphyry, instead of accepting Christianity, called it “a blasphemy barbarously bold,” for which thirty-six of his books were burned. The truth is there is not a single word about Christ, divine or otherwise, in secular literature dating from the first century. And what of those preceding it? What of the Torah, that most revered part of the Old Testament? It is a revelation from God we are told, yet this God never told His “chosen” that He had a son. Yet this son is the “word,” the Logos, the creator of the world. Would this God have kept so vital a fact from such an intimate as Moses? to whom He said “the Lord, thy God is one”? The answer is very simple: This son of God had not then been invented. Christ lives, moves and has his being in just one book and that, a book of mythology. “It has always been an unfailing source of astonishment to the historical investigator of Christian beginnings that there is not one single word from the pen of any pagan writer of the first century of our era which can in any fashion be referred to the marvelous story recounted by the Gospel writers. The very existence of Jesus seems unknown.” G. R.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And in a Hindu book two thousand years older than the Bible, The Prophecies , by Ramutsariar, the Hebrew story is given almost word for word, and there the first man is Adama and the first woman Heva. It is obvious then that Adam is not a personal name, but a generic term for the Life Principle. Indeed the Kabbalah confirms this. Its Adam, that is, Adam Kadmon, is the “only begotten,” or first emanation from the source. Whose “sin” then was “Adam’s sin”? and who responsible? What Adam did was wholly impersonal, nonmoral and nonhuman, and yet it is upon this “sin” our whole salvation madness rests. “What fools we mortals be!” In our Preface we said that Western man was not capable of metaphysical thought or perception; this, we think, should prove it. 21. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. This “deep sleep” is that period of complete inactivity the Life Principle suffered when completely involved in matter— four planes and trillions of years removed from humanity. Thus Adam’s “sleep” is identical with God’s “rest.” It’s nothing new in mythology. According to the Egyptians, their God caused a cloud to pass over the first men, “and while they slept he gave them wives.” And the Tahitans tell us that their God, Taaroa, “put men to sleep for long ages,” during which he pulled a bone, Ivi (Eve), from one of them and it became a woman. The Creator pulled a bone, but our translators pulled a boner, for we have here, perhaps, the most tragicomic mistake a translator ever made. 22. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. A translator should understand the subject as well as the words he is translating. This is a good example of what happens when he does not. The subject here is the cosmic Man, but believing it was our first human parent, the translator made woman a “spare rib” and her creation a clinical operation. 23. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. In all biologic life man is taken out of woman. How is it then that the first woman was taken out of man? Because the Bible is not speaking of biologic or evolutionary man but of involutionary Man, the Life Principle. This was first and it subsequently generated matter, personified by woman. But how did the “rib” get into it? The word from which rib was translated is tzala and means side as well as rib. With this, and the subject, understood, the meaning becomes clear. The rib is one side of the, as yet, androgynous Life Principle.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Ida had said that she did not want Vivaldo “bugged” by any of the musicians; but she had not come to meet any musicians. She had come to meet Ellis. And she had brought Cass along as a kind of smoke screen—and she and Ellis could not have met often in public before. In private then? And she wondered about this as she watched them. Their dance, which was slow and should have been fluid, was awkward and dry and full of hesitations. She was holding him at bay, he could not lead her; yet, she was holding him fast. “I wonder if his wife knows where he is.” Mrs. Nash again, sotto voce , to her husband, with a small, smug smile. Cass thought of Vivaldo, then thought of Richard, and immediately hated Mrs. Nash. You evil-minded whore , she thought, and broke the table’s uneasy silence by saying, “Mrs. Ellis and Miss Scott have known each other for quite a long time, long before Mrs. Ellis’s marriage.” Why did I say that? she wondered. She can easily find out if I’m lying . She looked steadily at Mrs. Nash, making no attempt to hide her dislike. She won’t, though. She hasn’t got the wit or the guts . Mrs. Nash looked at Cass with that absolutely infuriating superciliousness achieved only by chambermaids who have lately become great ladies. “How strange that is,” she murmured. “Not at all,” Cass said, recklessly, “they both worked in the same factory.” Mrs. Nash watched her, the faintest tremor occurring somewhere around her upper lip. Cass smiled and looked briefly at Mr. Nash. “Did you and your wife meet in Belfast?” “No,” said Mr. Nash, smiling—and Cass felt, with a surge of amusement and horror, how much his wife despised him at that moment—“we met in Dublin, while I was there on a business trip.” He took his wife’s limp hand. Her pale eyes did not move, her pale face did not change. “The most important trip I ever made.” Ah, yes , thought Cass, I don’t doubt it, for both of you . But suddenly she felt weary and inexplicably sad. What in the world was she doing here, and why was she needling this absurd little woman? The music changed, becoming louder and swifter and more raucous; and all their attention returned, with relief, to the dance floor. Ida and Ellis had begun a new dance; or, rather, Ida had begun a new cruelty. Ida was suddenly dancing as she had probably not danced since her adolescence, and Ellis was attempting to match her—he could certainly not be said to be leading her now, either. He tried, of course, his square figure swooping and breaking, and his little boy’s face trying hard to seem abandoned.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Only such mental impoverishment could accept such things as immaculate conception, virgin birth, transfiguration, and resurrection as applicable to man. These are mythical terms applicable only to the Creative Principle. Yet what time and effort we have wasted on these unnatural and unprovable things! Books by the thousands, sermons by the millions, and all for want of knowledge of Reality. Until this is attained, the intelligent thing to do with an unprovable is question the necessity of its existence. Once this attitude is taken we may be led to knowledge that does not require it at all; accept it as a hypothesis and you are compelled to accept its preposterous corollaries. If, for instance, you accept religion’s God-hypothesis, you must accept its miracles, divine source, condemnation and revelation; if you accept its Christ-hypothesis, you must accept its salvation, damnation, resurrection and Second Coming. Throw them both out and you don’t have to accept any of these; you are free to roam the whole realm of Being and perhaps arrive at truth—truth they cannot supply and knowledge that doesn’t need them. This is the way of logic, reason and sense, and we shall apply it to the Gospels. 1 A Greek name for the planetary creativity, without personality. 2 Seepage 352. 20The Gospel StoryBelieve not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, believe not because you have been made to believe from your childhood, but reason truth out, and after you have analyzed it, then if you find it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it and help others to live up to it. BUDDHA W e said the New Testament was of the same nature, age and race as the Old. We should therefore expect to find in it the same theology, methodology and formula. And such is the Gospel of St. Luke, a physician, we are told. This begins with the parentage of John, and here again we find a barren woman lamenting her fate, an angel promising her husband a son who “shall drink neither wine nor strong drink” (1:15). And so it was said of Samson, Samuel, and others. Is this the normal process in reproduction? No, it is either rank superstition and ignorance of nature or mythic symbolism. As we can’t believe a physician could be that naive about babies, we’ll assume he was using symbolic language. If so, then it is not history, and if it is not history with John, it is not history with Jesus. The angel was Gabriel, and having corrected barrenness, virginity was easy, “For with God nothing shall be impossible” (1:37). 26. And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, 27. To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David: and the virgin’s name was Mary. 30.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He pushed her drink toward her, but she did not touch it. “I knew there wasn’t any hope uptown. A lot of those men, they got their little deals going and all that, but they don’t really have anything, Mr. Charlie’s not going to let them get but so far. Those that really do have something would never have any use for me; I’m too dark for them, they see girls like me on Seventh Avenue every day. I knew what they would do to me.” And now he knew that he did not want to hear the rest of her story. He thought of himself on Seventh Avenue; perhaps he had never left. He thought of the day behind him, of Eric and Cass and Richard, and felt himself now being sucked into the rapids of a mysterious defeat. “There was only one thing for me to do, as Rufus used to say, and that was to hit the A train. So I hit it. Nothing was clear in my mind at first. I used to see the way white men watched me, like dogs. And I thought about what I could do to them. How I hated them, the way they looked, and the things they’d say, all dressed up in their damn white skin, and their clothes just so, and their little weak, white pricks jumping in their drawers. You could do any damn thing with them if you just led them along, because they wanted to do something dirty and they knew that you knew how. All black people knew that. Only, the polite ones didn’t say dirty. They said real. I used to wonder what in the world they did in bed, white people I mean, between themselves, to get them so sick. Because they are sick, and I’m telling you something that I know. I had a couple of girl friends and we used to go out every once in a while with some of these shitheads. But they were smart, too, they knew that they were white, and they could always go back home, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. I thought to myself, Shit, this scene is not for me. Because I didn’t want their little change, I didn’t want to be at their mercy. I wanted them to be at mine.” She sipped her drink. “Well, you were calling me all the time about that time, but I didn’t really think about you very much, not seriously anyway. I liked you, but I certainly hadn’t planned to get hung up on a white boy who didn’t have any money—in fact, I hadn’t planned to get hung up on anybody. But I liked you, and the few times I saw you it was a kind of— relief —from all those other, horrible people. You were really nice to me.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This point of view has had a huge boost, over the last two centuries, by the latent Whig view of history, according to which things are moving inexorably toward a more “open,” freedom-loving, Western, democratic kind of society. People even talk of being “on the wrong side of history,” as though they knew not only what the last twenty years had produced, but what the next twenty years were going to produce as well. The idolization of “progress,” of “moving with the times,” is part of the same movement. “Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . .” people begin, as though it were obvious that one’s ethics or theology ought to change with the calendar. All this is a form of creeping pantheism, of looking at certain trends in the wider world and deducing that they are what “God” is doing. (It’s also very selective; it cheerfully screens out all the inventions of modernism, such as guillotines and gas chambers, which do not exactly fit the picture of an upward journey into light.) Just as we must not be triumphalistic or complacent about what Jesus is doing in and through the church, so we ought not to be complacent about how “wonderfully” God is at work in the world outside the church. But we must give full weight to the difficult but important biblical vision of God’s sovereignty over the nations and his determination to shape their fortunes to serve his larger purposes. This belief is so important for any vision of what it means to speak of Jesus’s kingship in the present time that we must spell it out slightly more fully before drawing the threads together. Once again, three things need to be said very clearly. The first is that God’s principle of operation (his intention to run his world through human beings) applies just as much here as elsewhere. God wants the world to be ordered, not chaotic. He intends to bring that order to the world through the work, the thought, the planning, and the wisdom of human beings. Human rulers were God’s idea in the first place. The Bible insists that this was a good and wise plan. This is so whether or not the human beings in question have any thought of God or any desire to serve him. If they have, so much the better, though that will by no means guarantee that all their decisions are either wise, good, or correct. To be a Christian and to be a ruler does not mean that one can claim an infallibility that Christians believe belongs only to God (and that Roman Catholics believe that God shares, on certain occasions, with the pope).

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord YHWH: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with no one to search or seek for them. . . . For thus says the Lord YHWH: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. . . . I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord YHWH. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice. (Ezek. 34:2–6, 11–12, 14–16) This could hardly be clearer. The human “shepherds” have been a dismal failure; only YHWH himself will now do. He and he alone will give the “sheep”—the people of Israel—what they need and what the other shepherds have so obviously not given them. There is a radical break between the way Israel’s rulers have been telling and living the national story and the way God wants to tell it. But then comes the shock, sending us all the way back to 2 Samuel to revisit the strange long-term relationship between the kingship of God and the kingship of David: I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, YHWH, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, YHWH, have spoken. (Ezek. 34:23–24) The result is that Israel will be YHWH’s sheep indeed:

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  True, he needed Roman backing to gain and maintain power, but he was good at fancy political footwork and got the authorization he wanted. This launched him on a great career of public building works, which is why tourists see so many signs of him to this day. He was constantly drumming up support from Jewish communities around the world. And, at the heart of the whole project, he began to rebuild the Temple itself. Now, at last, it would regain the glory it had had in the days of Solomon, a thousand years before! And now, at last, this would legitimate Herod and his family as the true kings of the Jews. Not merely Roman puppets, but the real thing. Herod the Great had no family tree to back up this claim. He wasn’t descended from David. He wasn’t even fully Jewish, being half Idumaean. But he married into the (then) royal family, taking as one of his many wives Mariamne, a princess from the Hasmonean house. And he maintained his rule—no mean feat in itself—for over thirty years. Judah the Hammer managed seven years; Simon the Star, only three. Herod’s career, which began brilliantly, gradually went into decline. Our sources tell a sad but typical tale of a man who, having gained absolute power, used it increasingly not to make life better for his subjects, but to make life safer for himself. He killed several members of his own family, including his beloved Mariamne, on suspicion of plotting against him. On his own deathbed, guessing that nobody would mourn his passing, he gave orders for leading citizens to be killed at the same time, to guarantee weeping and wailing at his funeral. Fortunately, the order was not carried out. Herod the Great is important for our story not just because he provides a backdrop to the life of Jesus, but because he shows, admittedly in an almost caricatured fashion, what it might have meant for someone at the time to be “king of the Jews.” It meant victory; it meant Temple; it meant establishing the Jewish people in peace and prosperity.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Patience is a Christian virtue.) The second myth, prevalent in the skeptical “western wind” of our perfect storm, is the new classic modernist myth, which is widely believed in secular society and in several mainline churches too. In this new myth of Christian origins, Jesus was just an ordinary man, a good first-century Jew, conceived and born in the ordinary way. He was a remarkable preacher and teacher, but he probably didn’t do all those “miracles.” Some people seem to have felt better after meeting him, but that was about it. He certainly didn’t think he would die for the sins of the world. He was simply trying to teach people to live differently, to love one another, to be kind to old ladies, small children, and (that blessed postmodern category) the “marginalized.” He was talking about God, not about himself. The idea of being a supernatural “son of God” never occurred to him; he’d have been horrified to hear such a thing and even more to have had a “church” founded in his memory. He certainly didn’t rise from the dead; yes, his followers, feeling that his work would continue, used careless language that seemed to imply that that’s what had happened, but of course it didn’t. Then these followers began to tell stories about him that snowballed into legends, which then sprouted fresh interpretations. The “gospels” we now have in the Bible are the product of that free-floating—and perhaps self-serving—inventive process. They tell us a lot about the new aims and agendas of the early “Christians” and about how they settled down and adapted the original message of Jesus to different circumstances. But if we want to find out about Jesus himself, we have to work our way back through the fog of subsequent hero worship and, above all, through the process by which he was “divinized.” We might even need to call on some of the “other gospels,” the ones that boring old “orthodox” Christianity left out of its “canon.” (At this point I hear the other wind rattling the window panes. “And you don’t believe that? Don’t you realize that the gospels are full of later invention and interpretation? Are you one of those right-wing fundamentalist fanatics who think that all of that stuff just happened the way it says in the gospels? Which stone have you been living under for the last two hundred years?” All right, all right, I hear you too. If you’re representing the world of sweet reasonableness, then calm down and take the argument one step at a time.) When I say that these two stories are “myths,” I mean it in the following way.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  In my own country things are a bit different. Few people in Britain today have had that kind of strict upbringing. But skepticism still thrives. Those same atheistic books denouncing the church, Christianity, and religion in general sell by the cartload. Two generations after most people stopped sending their children to Sunday school, it seems that people still want to strike out at the religion they haven’t got. Do they suspect that God, or someone, is still out there and might be dangerous? In any case, such rumors need to be stifled. The general public wants them to be stifled. We have our dreams of being free, grown-up humans, and we don’t want to bend the knee to anyone, especially that fussy old God or that strange character Jesus! Actually, the skeptics, who take grim comfort from the apparent decline of many mainline churches, don’t often focus on Jesus himself. They have far softer targets to aim at (badly behaved clergy, for a start). But if they do mention Jesus, they tend to dismiss him with a wave of the hand. Just a first-century fanatic whose wild-eyed followers turned him into a god. Or, damning him with faint praise, just a mild-mannered first-century moralist, one of many great teachers down through the ages. Those are the internal dynamics of the western wind, the howling gale of contemporary skepticism. Meanwhile, however, millions around the world, and tens of thousands in Britain and the United States too, tell a different story. They claim to have discovered Jesus as a living, challenging, healing presence. Stories abound of changed lives, of physical and emotional healing. New churches have sprung up, full of eager and excited people, often young people. Addicts are cured. Dysfunctional families are reunited. Real help is given to the sick, the poor, the prisoners. Failing schools are turned around. New energy is found for creative social and cultural projects. For such people, the whole thing is real enough. It’s hard to argue with a radically changed life or, indeed, with still being alive when the doctors had given you up for dead. That’s why there is such energy behind the northern high-pressure system, the powerful force of a newly energized, but often very “conservative” Christian faith. Many skeptics simply ignore these current Christian phenomena. Many of these newer, high-octane Jesus-followers simply return the compliment. That’s unhealthy—on both sides. We need to think things through. Jesus himself was open to all comers. He told his followers to love God with their minds as well as every other part of themselves. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain by proper inquiry.