Return to Origins of the Specious
Scene: a town in medieval England, within the Mayor’s office Thomas Mendip, a soldier, returned from war in Flanders, has confessed to spurious murder: Thomas Mendip, soldier, whispers to the officious young court clerk.
Nicholas : That’s not funny ! I’ve heard it before ! (To the rest:) Now the prisoner says the Day of Judgment is set for tonight !
Nicholas’ mother : No... I’ve always thought that when it came, it would come in the Fall -- Heaven wouldn’t disappoint the bulbs !
Thomas Mendip : "Ah, consider Vastness, lusted Mother; A Hugh heaving Desire ... overwhelming solitude ! And the mountain belly of Time laboured and brought forth Man : the mouse! -- Well, the Spheres churned on, hoping to charm our ears with sufficient organ-music -- though sadly sent out on the wrong wave of sound -- But still they rolled on, fabulous and fine, a roundabout of doomed and golden notes.... And on beyond, profound with the thunder of Oceanic power -- lay the morose dynamics of our dumb friend -- Jehovah...‘Why should these omnipotent ’bombinations go on? --with a deadly human Anecdote, which from the first was never more than remotely funny ?’ No ! --- the time has come for tombs to tip their refuse !! -- Of the involving ivy, the briar, the convolutions of Convolvulus ... To disentangle and make way for the last great ascendancy of Dust --- ... Sucked into Judgment by a cosmic yawn of Boredom !!! The Last Trump Is timed for 22 : 40 hours -- precisely!! "
Christopher Frye, The Lady’s Not for Burning
In recent years there has been a resurgence of claims that the impending Apocalypse of History is close at hand. This may be an idea still to be considered, for we don’t know that this will not happen. But those who preach this sermon provoke a wonder in the minds of their listeners -- for we all wonder that the peace of the world could be easily torn apart by unforeseen events. But, as this wonder is much in the realm of the personal worry of the soul, the telling of these stories may purposefully be used as form of mind control. Just the simple awareness that the world can suddenly go cataclysmic can itself be the cause of significant disorder in our normal patterns of energy and thought. The day to day fear of immanent nuclear annihiliation that people lived with during the 45 years of the Cold War may have affected the collective psyches of each society on Earth in ways which may not yet have been recognized, and may not become conscious until a subsequent phase of time has passed. In present times, the effects of great storms such as the widespread loss of electrical power can sometimes cause the outbreak of primitive behaviors in which violence and looting erupt in the streets.
Emergency situations are often a catalyst for mindless, aggressive instincts to take over. But what are the social tendencies which leave these actions so latent and close beneath the surface? How can we address the whole question of our immanent "future," even now when so much literature, film and television drama from Jules Verne and HG Wells to Flash Gordon, Star Trek Voyager and Babylon 5 -- and technological development from steam engines to the Inter Net, MIR, and Mars Pathfinder -- seem to have the whole scenario of the future seemingly charted out in advance? What also is the psychological need for a kind of closure which would be obtained by the actual occur- rence of these foretold events? We each might wonder about the actual effects on the physical spaces which we inhabit and project whether that effect would alter our world in ways advantageous or disadvantageous to our living conditions, or to our religious, moral, or ethical standards.. These are especially psychological questions because, in our sense of linear cause and effect, even in our development of technology, we are continually revolving our point of view according to what has already come to happen. By going backward progressively in our memory we can determine at which point in time we began to have something, to know someone, or to remember before something was built, or discovered, or invented. Such an awareness in reverse of this closing-in of the present conditions composes the actual transition of the metaphysical into the physical.
Science fiction novels and television stories often suppose certain typical kinds of human interactions in a future scenario, and then set into motion plots where these scenes are successfully resolved by efforts of consideration and understanding. But even so, with these examples of action -- politically, religiously, and even quantum physically -- we still do not know what one year plus will mean to us when we arrive there. --- The shear implosion of digital information has already produced previously unimaginable juxta-positions, and still, the advances of medical science remain constant and unpredictable. Unforeseeable names appear on the scene of the world stage and are etched forever into the engrams of our memories, becoming associated mnemonics to the historical phenomenon each one represents.
Subtle circuits of time yet continue to work -- beneath our fingers -- and beneath our feet... We seldom notice that the Earth itself moves sideways to the left beneath us if we stand facing south, and at least this mechanism is predictable if not wholly reliable. Still though, we like to fix our gaze and think we watch the sun rising in the east and setting in the west and attempt to design the best possible arrangement of chairs and furniture to compliment this light... Aye, there’s the rub, for when we arrive at this point of view and neglect to consider the beauty of our actual orbit about the sun, we begin to panic that the furniture we are working so hard to rearrange are those deck chairs aboard the doomed Titanic. --- A real fear of the Unknown is suddenly unmasked. We must arrange tomorrow or its requirements will surely overwhelm us. The needs of the future become increasingly unpredictable and accelerated. Surveying the immensity of this work, we are persuadedof the total impossibility of its accomplishment -- and thereby decide to rely upon divine intervention.
The idea of a Cataclysmic Reality is a truly fascinating thing. The coming apart of the seams of the world is a visual splendor, though a hard place to walk. Were the forces of gravity and magnetism to simply switch their dominions, human beings would be instantaneously stood on end and sucked to the north.
If early Christian accounts such as John the Divine’s Book of Revelations and Peter’s Apocalypse are at all reliable there are very few contingencies at this time, the seas will boil and rain blood, the mountains and cities fall, and the streets will be filled with throngs of people ready to repent of their sins if it is not too late, while the Four Great Horsemen of retribution swoop lower and lower down over head. Those not favored by the force of divine judgment will be crashed into vast dungeons with "bars of steel"; while those favored will rise up in their bodies to become the throngs of the blissful...
Examining the visual imagery imbued in the various apocalypses of ancient Judaic scripture and the Old testament reveals a pattern of symbols and subsumed attitudes which hardly can be considered an example of pure Justice, universal, divine, or intimate: In pre-Christian times, these writings were widely studied by all young Jews and later set the background for the writing of the Revelation of John. The books of Isaiah, Baruch, and Daniel, and midrash and pseudigraphia such as the Book and Secrets of Enoch persist in the imagery of the male deity of God seated on a crystaline throne in glorious splendor, in view of young men seated in their deep concentration of study. These students are continually admonished to carefully avoid the society of women who await any possible opportunity to tempt and distract them into the evils of "fornication", a term spanning in meaning from the mindless excesses of the pagan orgy to the act of procreation in the marital bed for the purpose of childbirth. In this fornication the woman was considered to deliberately contaminate the man’s mind and body by exposure to the menstruum. But psychically, this menstruum represents the subterranean aquafer system and springs which bubble up from beneath mountain rocks and continually flow out through streams to reach the river Khubur, which in the mythos of the pre-Abrahamic Semites of Mesopotamia, was the primordial sea surrounding and supporting the flat table of the Earth itself. How does this pattern of visionary prurience stack up against the egalitarianism of pre-Bronze Age farming cultures and the consciousness of the movements for Peace, Civil Rights and Democracy which have hastened the end of wars in Vietnam, and Afganistan, and the transition of dysfunctional social systems such as Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia, and apartheid South Africa; or the movement at Tiennamen Square in 1989 which pointed up the clear fallacies in the Maoist Cultural Revolution?
-- What would be then the Rationalistic criteria and the meaning of Justice as it would be applied by such a seated Deity ? Is is really possible to divine an historically positive meaning of "Justice" out of the laisez-faire point of view resulting in the vastness of the Holocaust or the decimation during Stalin’s consolidation of soviet power-- that is to say, how does the "Justice Programmer" express a second-guess to himself after having been napping at the monitor of his Simulacrum during the unspeakable stalemate of "the front" from 1914 to 1918, and then (totally) out to an early lunch from 1934 to 1945 --- At the end of the Millennium, do we not consider ourselves like the rats trapped in the cargo hold of the sinking Titanic, gasping for the last pockets of air as icy sea water rapidly fills up to the top of the bulkhead -- ? Such apocalyptic scenarios are both visionary and told to instill fright and guilt in the emotions of the listeners... But taken as seemingly objective conjecture, there is nothing left to the choices of the natural imagination nor to the principles of energy physics. The syllogism here is that all people are subjects to this so-called "Power" -- a power that will exhibit a finality of its own Will in the guise of Justice, but will be righteously lacking in mercy for its fallen believers and apostates of the faith.
Yet, in the early days of Christianity the Last Judgement meant the end of all oppression and persecution! But since the time when the Church became the state religion of Rome, this thinking has completely reversed -- and from then on it would be those individuals who were not in conformance with the moral consensus of the Christian faithful who would be the doomed...
By appropriating certain principals of Hellenic culture (such as Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle), the tables were turned by the Christian majority to become the persecutors of all other religious faiths and beliefs as "heresy." Thus, just as specific Jewish "Holy Scriptures" had previously been selected and canonized at the Synod of Jamnia (C.E. 90-100), the Council of Nicea set out in 325 to establish which texts and gospels would be accepted into one unified Christian Bible in two books: the Old Testament and the New Testament which was composed exclusively of the "synoptic gospels" of the personal apostles of Jesus, the later Epistles of Paul, and the Revelation of John the Evangelist. Promotion of archetypal prophesy has been a recurrent theme for millennia, reaching back into many recorded societies, especially the patriarchal of the known western worlds since Assyria and Canaan, and has been the cause of outbreaks many times in history of hysteria, witch hunts, political and literary repression, the Holy Inquisition., and modern police states on all continents. A similar trepidation awaited the coming of the new millennium among the superstitious in the 990’s AD, and even in the 1490’s throughout Europe. These anxieties, however, were never truly synchronized with anniversaries of the actual astronomical phenomenon which heralded the birth of Christ : The portentous event which inspired three Zoroastrian astronomers, the Persian Magi, to journey to Israel and visit the court of Herod the Great, according to Matthew (Ch.2) and the Nestorian Infancy Gospels, is almost certainly the supernova recorded and described by Chinese astronomers in their year 2695, corresponding to 4 B.C. Josephus, the contemporary Jewish court historian, notes the edict of Herod, one year before his death in the Roman year 750 (3 B.C.E), to slay all male children under the age of two years in the vicinities of Bethlehem. Indeed, it is generally acknowledged by historians that Dionysius Areaopagite, the papal astronomer who in the 580’s AD attempted to realign previously rounded-off periods of lunar and solar cycles of the Roman calendar which had brought the seasons so badly out of phase with the cycle the months, reset the year reckoning to number from the birth of Christ, but under-calculated the year Zero by four years.
The Reformation movements in northern Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries came about in climates of political and religious tolerance, such as that of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who made his capital in the Prague of Bohemia. The quest for new knowledge, alchemical and astronomical, the greater recovery of the knowledge of classical antiquity, and the accelerated development of the cultures of literature and art, and the tolerance of religious diversity outpaced the sympathies for the narrow thought lines of the previous twelve hundred years. In light of the ideological unraveling taken place in the 1900’s in Eastern Europe, in South Africa, in Nicargua, and Chile, we may now actually begin to speculate that the installation of any enormous political philosophy -- left, right, or "center" -- eventually collapses of its own weight, either by the sheer magnitude of monetary expense incurred by the enforcement of its moral values, or by the immense boredom eventually encountered by a successful plutocracy, or by the intoxication of power which carries human degradation to its outer limits. Either way, as we have seen sufficiently in the 20th century, the inevitable "price-tag" political issue of any novel form of social programming or social expenditure eventually swamps the high moral ground of "virtue" of the uncorrupted official, but also, slowly but surely crumbles the middle-ground of hypocritical postu ring. Where there is a lack of restraint, coupled with the greed of power, this negative energy is applied more obviously from the "Dark Side" as the outright oppression of the police state mentality or the use of death-squads to instill fear into the forum of political diversity. Where the propaganda of fear has succeeded already, the result is the social hysteria of witch-hunt episodes. Where social restraint has been effective, the target of deliberate demolition becomes the "safety-net" and educational programs of many socialist and humanitarian democratic governments. Meanwhile, in many societies, aristocratic infrastructures, historically surviving the feudal system, remain in control of vast properties, manufacturing and shipping enterprises, and have long since extended their holdings into ownership of the physical information media, such as newspaper, magazine, and book publishing, as well as television production and broadcasting, effectively narrowing the channel of structural ideas admitted into the mainstream of mass consciousness. Especially with the national spirit of defeat in the US following the end of the Vietnam War, a profusion of crime-drama television programming depicting maximized violence and brutality, and concerted programs in the elementary school systems of America, trained children to moralize over their parents mores, and conditioned young boys to be intolerant, isolationist, and war-ready for the eventuality of such conflicts as the invasions of Grenada, Panama, and Iraq. However, since the martialing of vast numbers of young men is no longer required to wage effective wa r strategies in a cyber-mechanized age of smart-bombs and cruise missiles operated by remote control, the generation of young boys conditioned to be inurred the violence of war instead have formed into sub-cultures of skinheads, ethnocentric street gangs, and heavily-armed drug gangsters.
In Roman times, following the great persecution of Christians under Domatian and Diocletian throughout the empire, and the inter-family struggle for imperial Roman power, Constantine gave thanks to the Christian god for the military victory accomplished by his largely Christian legions, and upon becoming Emperor proclaimed it the state religion, awarding civil honors and great properties to Christian leaders formerly persecuted. The removal of the imperial capital to Byzantium purposefully left the parish of Rome under the dominance of its bishops.
During the advance of Christianity in the early 4th century, many religious beliefs coexisted in the Roman Empire with many cosmologies and divine families, indeed coexisting in such a public world of the people that the popular familiarity was akin to the way the public in the 20th century are familiar with the plots of the most widely read novels and stories of literature; the cosmology of so many plausible dimensions which seemed to layer themselves into specific spheres around the Earth, the center of the universe. In the common sensibility, each religion had separate domains of thought, influence, fetish, and psychological or social importance. Though some were involved with power, such as Sol Invictus, the exclusive religion of the imperial family that worshiped the divine right of kings, Christianity was the only one to supersede Judaism in seriousness -- until the advent and spread of Christianity from the Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, into the centers of Roman urban life and the Roman countryside, and much later Islam.
The mythology of the Roman Pantheon, with the prominence of the planetary gods : Mercury, Venus, Mars, Vesta, Jupiter who succeeded Saturn; the three Graces, the sisterhood of Muses, based on the legends of Luna, the origins of Rome with Aeneas, even before Romulus and Remus; the worship of Mithras, adopted as the votive mascot of the Roman legions, probably representing the enormous power of a deity who could physically shift the previous timing of the vernal equinox, and therefore the known universe.
Plotinus, in the 3rd century, while a proponent of the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle, had added a strong overtone Christian moralism directed at Patrician class hedonism in order to modernize their relevance to the literary audience of his own time, creating a system of numerological enneads as a form of self-healing of the psyche. This theme of self-healing was perceived later in the public awareness of alchemy, where gold is to be produced from any base material, as a sought-for remedy to produce "light from darkness," to cure melancholia or gloom, today’s "depression."
The Council of Nicea, in 325, sought to rigidify the bewildering diversity of Christian belief and writings by creating a "New Testament" consisting only of certain synoptic gospels written by the personal apostles of Jesus, and also including the epistles of Paul, a converted Jewish magistrate with a history of severe judgements in cases involving religious disobedience and political sedition, whose "Christian" moral codes were extremely more anti-conjugal and homophobic than the personal standard of self-isolation practiced by Jesus himself.
Many sublime and mystical texts were excluded from the New Testament as inconsistent in point of view, while they were often extremely profound in depth. The writings of Valentinius in the mid-second century, such as The Pleroma ("The Full-ness"), and the Pistis-Sophia, containing strains of dark dualism and the "gnostic" pneumatic philosophy, had already been attacked for hundreds of years by prominent bishops such as Iraneus and Tertullian.
The apocalyptic, nearly indecipherable vision called "The Revelation," was written around the end of the 1st century by John, a child with the apostle group left with Jesus’ mother Mary after the crucifixion. Inclusion of this horrifying book in the New Testament culminates the bible with a fearful, cautionary question mark to the future of history. Indeed this breakdown later did take place, with the breakdown of peaceful order in the Western dominions of the Roman Empire by AD 500. The Church itself was then left as the sole preserver of knowledge and the remnants of culture in those regions through periods of dominance by warlord clans, such as the Franks and the Lombards. The advent of Charlemagne, and his coronation on Christmas Day 800, brought about a renewal of the cultures of learning and consciousness of style. This consciousness led to latter movements towards beneficent political unitie and dominances in Normandy, Germany, and the north countries.
In the 12th and 13th centuries the Papal League of States was formed to create a military alliance of city-states and consolidate the orthodoxy advocated by the Vatican.Following the Great Crusades and the Great Plague on the Continent, figures such as John Wycliff, Jan Huss, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and many other groups had substantially broken up the glacier of Church authoritarianism heralded with the appointment of the Inquisition in the 13th century to seek out and forcibly reform or exterminate heresy. Henry VIII of England clearly broke with the political dominance of the Vatican, and set the stage for an array of Protestant alliances in northern and central Europe..
While Catholic worship was forbidden in England, on the Continent, non-Christian and Protestant groups still were watched suspiciously by the Catholic families ruling the Empire. Following the passing of the enlightened, alchemical Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf in 1611, headquartered in Prague, the Spanish they finally seized on the opportunity to re-Catholicize the liberalized duchies of central Europe, beginning the Thirty Years War in 1620, an anti-Enlightenment "Cultural Revolution" of the bloody proportions of Cambodia in 1975.
In an effort to draw back the Protestant movements into their fold, the Church heavily supported and appropriated the fledgling Baroque Art movement, with their grand-scale paintings of attractive and dynamic imagery of religious heroism of the ages of both the Old and New Testaments.
The efforts which were imposed by the Roman Church following the Renaissance and religious reformations of the 15th and 16th centuries have now reappeared following the social evolution of the Post-World War decades that we went too far . But the voices of these forces, as in the waning stages of the Reformation, and without the power backing of dictatorial religious institutions, must employ more subtle methods of intimidation. An agenda has long been set against modern culture by the rhetoric of the American fundamentalist movement, in its many congregations, to use property rights, by ownership of the conservative media, to forcibly advocate an interpretation of anti-egalitarian "family values" in order to reassert the dominance of the father figure in the re-nuclearized family. Taxpayer revolts across America stripped the funding of public school curricula for the teaching music and art, and diminished the effective teaching of history and language skills.The pejorative term "secular humanism" preceded the vitriolic attacks on the general art world and creative culture, culminating with the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997, by focusing the Congressional and media attention on the 1% of art grants which had been distributed to strident gay and lesbian exvb pressions. The budget of the NEA was never greater than the total budget allocated to the US Army Marching Band, but had been of great assistance to scores of struggling artists in the US, the vast majority of whom had no form of anti-social agenda. The "Sixties" have also been a notable target for political attacks as a period of free sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and anti-government protests, even though that era was widely participated by the young and older public at large as a casting off of the sexual repression and war-making political mentality demonstrated by world governments since the ambitions of Napoleon in Europe, the colonial merchantile ambitions of 19th century Europe and America, and the divisions of the American Civil War. Indeed, it was the Negro Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and ‘60’s which led directly to the practice of political demonstrations in the effort to end the unsubstantiated war effort against the anti-colonial partisan movements of Southeast Asia. The statistics speak for themselves, that thousands of millions of soldiers and civilians lost their lives in such conflicts as the conquest of the American West, World War I, the Nazi Holocaust, the Stalinist agrarian revolution, the Vietnamese, and Afghanistan Wars, based more on political policies and economic disparities than on any realistic threats of territorial invasion. The petering out of the "evil Sixties generation" was followed by the mentality of a different generation in the late Seventies characterized by the frenzied "disco-craze," urban and suburban tax revolts resolved by severe cuts in local education budgets and the loss of educational leadership by the US. The patent "voodoo economics" of the Reagan Administration with its limitless armaments build-up in competition with the Soviet Union broke the Russian bank and charged up $5 Trillion on the US National Debt credit-card, and an emphatic shift of wealth away from the middle-class.
Yet the rhetoric of guilt and repentance is sermonized and imposed for the so-called excesses of love and shared affection, psychedelic experimentation, war protests, and resistance to the anti-thought of mob-rule.
To the scientific and mystical mind, there is the cycle of change shown by the annual path of the Earth in its orbit -- the return of the sun on the morning of the summer Solstice to its most easterly point of rising over the horizon.... Revelation as the eventuality of "Salvation" can only occur in the linear time of the sin and guilt of the psychological overview of the ego.
But Eventuality as the unfolding of the potentialities and subtleties of this world, regarded in the eternal time of essence and energy -- and in the real-time of genetic evolution -- is a process of the divine manifestation of the specific qualities of the Oneness, the Unity of the universe.