A BIT OF ALTERNATIVE HISTORY (reprise)

La Dompna del Aquae by Andrew Jones. 

The expectant Mary Magdalene arriving in Provence, AD 44

“Establishment history is largely based on recorded propaganda,” wrote the celebrated constitutional historian and genealogist, Sir Laurence Gardner. This certainly applies when one considers the complex cross-currents that have influenced the rise and growth of the Church.

Around 597 BCE, the Kingdom of Judah fell to Nebuchadnezzer II of Babylon who captured and destroyed Jerusalem, and deported the Hebrews to Babylon, where they remained in captivity for nearly fifty years. What we now know as the Old Testament was first written down by Hebrew scribes during their protracted sojourn in Babylon. This would account for the strong influence of Mesopotamian lore in Hebraic culture. Indeed, the Book of Genesis in its entirety is merely a brief summary of the Sumerian creation story recorded thousands of years earlier on cuneiform clay tablets.

A modern translation and interpretation of these long-neglected Mesopotamian artefacts by Zecharia Sitchin, the controversial Russian Jewish historian, has been published in seven volumes as The Earth Chronicles. Sitchin sheds an astonishingly heterodox light on all creation stories by introducing the taboo topic of extraterrestrial intervention (see previous posts on Earth as an Anunnaki colony by running a search on this blog).

The Hebrews had for generations been a colonized people. Around 300 BCE Palestine had become part of the Alexandrian Empire. Then, in 63 BCE, the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) marched into Judaea and seized Jerusalem, and Palestine became an annex of Rome. Hebrew resentment of Roman rule existed long before Jesus arrived on the scene. By the time he was born the priestly Pharisees and the mercantile Sadducees had comfortably adjusted to the political status quo, and were not in favor of rocking the boat of business-as-usual.

Outside of the New Testament there are hardly any records extant of the man called “Jesus of Nazareth.” Scholarly research has unearthed the fact that the town called Nazareth may not have even existed during the lifetime of Jesus. However, there was a Nazarite sect to which Jesus probably belonged, and early followers of his teachings were sometimes known as Nazarenes. Translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls (found in 1947 near Qumrān and dated between 200 BCE and 68 CE) reveal that a Master referred to in the documents as “the Teacher of Righteousness” was a high initiate of the Essene brotherhood.

Apocryphal scriptures locked from view in the Vatican Library may shed an entirely different light on the Palestinian passion play staged more than 2,000 years ago. The Gnostic gospels of Thomas and Mary, for instance, were deliberately excluded from the New Testament – even though they were allegedly written by two individuals dearest and closest to the Master Jesus. The apostle Thomas was, in fact, his brother; and Mary, his beloved companion and wife. But why would the Roman Church conceal this important information from its followers? Why, indeed, would the early clerics (specifically, Pope Gregory I in 591 CE) endeavor to portray Mary Magdalene as a prostitute when it can be established with a little independent research that she was in truth of noble descent, a fitting consort for a king?

In the old Hebrew tradition, a man was not considered a man – what more a Master or Rabbi – till he was married. Celibacy was considered neither a requirement nor a virtue in Judaism, except among certain ascetic sects like the Nazarites wherein sexual intercourse was sanctioned only at specific periods and essentially for procreative purposes.

Students of the Qabbala will inform you that the Anglicized form of the name “Jesus” robs it of numerological and mystical significance. The Aramaic form “Yeshua” or Hebraic “Yeheshuah” both yield rich qabbalistic meaning when rendered in Hebrew letters as YHShWH. The letter ש (Shin) represents “a triune essence” – the principle of 3 (the Paraclete or Holy Spirit); whilst YHWH is also known as Tetragrammaton, the principle of 4 (Physical Matter or Form). Thus we have in YH+Sh+WH an alphabetic expression of the fusion of Spirit and Matter: The Word Made Flesh. Note, too, that 3 + 4 = 7 (the universal number of Mystery); while 3 X 4 = 12 (base number of the duodecimal system of reckoning underpinning Western civilization).

When Jesus or Yeheshuah declares, “My Father and I are One,” he is simply stating that he embodies the divine in human form. In other words, he has successfully aligned and integrated his human ego-personality with his individual soul, as well as his cosmic oversoul. Or, in psychological parlance: his id, ego, and superego are in harmonious balance, qualifying him as a Self-Realized Master or Godman.

As for the appellation “Christ,” our etymological options begin with the Greek christos – usually defined as “anointed” (it was ancient practice to massage sacrificial victims or candidates for divine kingship with fragrant oils or unguents). Interestingly, the Greek word khrisma means unguent – and it is indeed tempting to associate it with another Greek word, kharisma, which suggests a favor, grace, or talent divinely conferred. Jesus the Christ was indisputably a charismatic personality.

In Latin the word crista - from which the English term “crest” derives – denotes a plume or tuft affixed on a helmet. Crest also means the top of a ridge or the highest point of a wave, and is used in heraldry to denote the family coat of arms or corporate emblem. In effect, the word “Christ” is not so much a name as a title – as in Anointed Chief or Divine King. The Hebrew word for messiah is masiah, derived from messeh, the fat of sacred crocodiles used in Egyptian anointment rites. This would explain why Gnostic texts refer to Yeheshuah in English as “Jesus the Christ” - and not “Jesus Christ” – to emphasize the distinction between the man and his status as the anointed king of a specific bloodline – the bloodline of the Holy Grail.

Leonardo Da Vinci: "Virgin of the Rocks"

The publication, in 1982, of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (authored by three BBC documentary producers - Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln) caused a ripple of controversy within the ranks of Christian orthodoxy. Messrs Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln had started out researching the history of the Knights Templar for a documentary on medieval Europe. What they unearthed was a mother lode of esoteric lore leading all the way back to Palestine, Egypt, and beyond – and it all concerned a life-and-death struggle over the future of humanity.

The secret brotherhoods that have proliferated throughout history – indeed, that have subtly influenced the course of history itself – have their origins in the mythical mists of antiquity. Some fraternities, like the Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross (AMORC) aka the Rosicrucians, claim the enigmatic pharaoh Akhnaton as their founder. Others hint that their initiatory roots reach even farther back to the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. In any case, the Knights Templar originated in the 11th Century after a small group of French nobles recaptured Jerusalem from the Saracens and established a base close by the ruins of Solomon’s Temple. The possibility that they may have found a hoard of buried treasure and sacred relics - including the famous Ark of the Covenant dating from the time of Moses – makes for a truly fascinating study.

From humble beginnings as a military religious order, the Knights Templar rapidly grew in economic and political influence until they were perceived as a direct threat to the Roman Catholic Church, and brutally destroyed. On Friday, October 13, 1307, hundreds of Templars were imprisoned by order of the French King Philip IV, with the blessing of Pope Clement V, and tortured till they confessed to sexual deviancy and blasphemy – and then mercilessly burnt at the stake. The superstitious who fear ill fortune every Friday the Thirteenth may be surprised to learn the historical origins of this particular phobia.

This was indeed a bloodstained period (which, shockingly, lasted from 1231 to 1834) in the annals of the Church - when millions of “heretics” were persecuted and cruelly executed by the barbaric Inquisition, instigated by a succession of popes and monarchs, to forcefully suppress all threats to the earthly power structure and protect the vested interests of the ruling elite.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail has as its central theme the long-suppressed genealogy of the Christic bloodline carried into the modern epoch by Miriam of Mygdala, better known as Mary Magdalene. A convincing case is made on behalf of a dynastic succession generated by the royal union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Obviously, this would negate Rome’s claims to any moral or spiritual authority over Christendom – and furthermore serve to anchor the life of Jesus the Christ in a radically (and intriguingly) different sociopolitical context.

Leonardo Da Vinci: "The Last Supper"

The early 1980s witnessed a feminist revolution of sorts among biblical scholars. Elaine Pagels published The Gnostic Gospels, an interpretation of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts which postulates the equal status between Father and Mother aspects of the Godhead. Other women academics like Karen King and Janet Schaberg popularized a fresh perspective of Mary Magdalene as a personage of considerable stature, power and authority in the early church. Margaret Starbird - an independent scholar and theologian with a Roman Catholic background - emerged as the best-known voice of the feminist restoration, with three impactful and impeccably referenced books: The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, The Goddess in the Gospels, and Magdalene’s Lost Legacy: Symbolic Number and Sacred Union in Christianity.

More recently, Dan Brown’s phenomenal best-seller – The Da Vinci Code – reiterates the Magdalenian theme in a modern Grail quest presented as a thrill-a-minute whodunit. The esoteric motifs of Brown’s murder-mystery masterpiece will be familiar to millions around the world by the time the movie version completes its circuit of the cinemas and gets recirculated on television. It is too early yet to gauge what effect this information, so brilliantly researched and packaged, will have on Christianity’s pet beliefs. Is the global popularity of The Da Vinci Code (more than 70 million copies sold at this writing) an indication that humanity has finally outgrown its fear of examining skeletons long concealed in the closets of establishment history?

In the original Hebrew version of Genesis, the name of God always appears in its plural form as Elohim. When God is quoted as saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” it implies that a group of creator gods is being addressed. Jehovah is a relatively recent Anglicization of Yahweh, the monotheistic Adonai (Lord) of the Hebrews, who alternately appears as YHWH.

According to Laurence Gardner, YHWH originally represented the four members of the heavenly family: Father, Mother, Son, and Daughter. The Mother Aspect or Sacred Feminine was revered as Shekinah, sister and spouse to the Father Aspect of the Godhead. Somewhere down the line, a creeping misogyny infected the male priesthood and effectively supplanted the nurturing Goddess (Mother Nature or Gaia) with a punitive, patriarchal, militantly vengeful monotheism.

The Book Religions (particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) which emphasized the “infallible” authority of their official scriptures, turned their adherents into ideologues, disconnected from the natural flow and ecstatic dance of Life itself. Instead of revering the miraculous physical reality of their own bodies – and, by extension, that of the natural environment and, ultimately, the entire living cosmos – believers were required to hold as sacred an ecclesiastically sanctioned set of written rules and regulations - purportedly channeled from on high, but expediently inscribed, modified, misinterpreted and perverted by those intent on institutionalizing belief systems as an effective means of social engineering.

It doesn’t take long for a handful of professional scribes and clerics, operating within a largely illiterate populace, to degenerate into a secretive cabal of power brokers, manipulating public opinion and behavior to its own diabolical ends.

[Extracted from an unpublished manuscript, THE UNFINISHED BOOK OF JOHN: Confessions of a former Christian fundamentalist. First posted 2 January 2007, reposted 29 January 2017 & 14 August 2020]

Uninstalling Sexual Guilt & Shame (reprise)

I may well be one of a tiny handful of humans who somehow managed to escape the all-pervasive systematic programming that has instilled a hardwired sense of sexual guilt and shame in the collective human psyche.

None of that occurs among animals, insects or plants. What makes humans so different? I would venture that it’s our capacity to abstract general ideas from everyday experience and convert them into language. The power to name and objectify and be programmed by words; to be encoded from birth by alphanumeric, auditory and visual symbols – that same power is also our greatest weakness.

A long time ago I wrote an essay titled “The Fig Leaf Syndrome” which discussed the ostensible erotophobia common to the Abrahamic Agenda (“ostensible” because it more often than not serves as a camouflage for a perverse species of ego-driven erotomania). Those who publicly preach modesty and abstinence are invariably sexual predators of the most loathsome kind, personifications of false piety and genuine hypocrisy.

But what about me? Am I not also a “sexual predator”? No, I’m a dator, not a pre-dator; I love the dating game, especially if it leads to mating, which doesn’t necessarily have to result in progeny, only a bit of harmless erogeny.

Sex is nature’s way to encourage procreation, but many animals (including humans) have discovered sex as recreation, an intensely pleasurable use of leisure, which facilitates intimacy and deep bonding (when conducted without deceit or guile, and with childlike innocence and purity of feeling).

However, it must be played on a level field, with mutual consent and without coercion, intimidation, unfair advantage. Otherwise, sex becomes a game of power, of domination and submission, master and slave. This loveless species of eroticism leads to a reality construct populated with (and to a large extent controlled by) energy vampires, hungry ghouls, fiendish appeasers of their own bloodthirsty demons who derive atavistic pleasure from reliving carnivore (and even cannibal) cellular memories.

19th century erotic art by Aubrey Beardsley

Unfortunately, humans who fall prey to infestation by astral parasites (you may have heard of them as Archons or Jinns) often serve as agents (witting or unwitting) of cruelty, inflicting pain and terror on others deemed disadvantaged or powerless, especially women and children.

Their total disconnect from their hearts and complete lack of empathy makes them ruthlessly manipulative – which fuels their egoic ambitions to dominate everyone around them and claw their way to the top of the proverbial food chain. This explains why the so-called elite bloodlines are almost always predatory, pedophilic and vampiric, addicted to tyrannical power over others and greedily feasting off negative emotional discharge in the form of grief, pain, misery, despair and terror.

When we consciously uninstall sexual guilt and shame from our neural circuitry, we effectively delete any ideological implants we may have inherited from our own ancestors or acquired through cultural and religious imprinting. Implants that undermine our sense of self-esteem, that mark us as “sinners,” “fornicators,” “libertines,” “sluts,” “dirty-minded” or “unclean.”

For countless generations, we were insidiously programmed to believe that pleasure was sinful - and pain somehow, perversely, virtuous. 

Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898)

Well, even a single-celled organism like an amoeba has the good sense to be attracted to pleasure and repelled by pain. Only mind-controlled humans are crazy enough to believe that the more we suffer, the more we qualify for a reward in the afterlife.

Once we reclaim and embrace our right to experience pleasure guiltlessly and shamelessly, we stand a good chance of also freeing ourselves from any martyr complex we may have unconsciously acquired as children, listening to insidious tales of famous martyrs like Jesus, Saint Stephen, Joan of Arc, Mahsuri of Langkawi, the Báb of Persia, or any number of poor, misguided jihadists who blew themselves (and others) to pieces believing they would find themselves in a halal version of the Playboy Mansion, surrounded by nubile nymphs, all virginal. (I wonder if female jihadists entertain erotic fantasies of waking up in paradise to a bukkake and gangbang orgy with members of the Vienna Boys’ Choir.)

Look at how the Roman Church glorifies suffering as virtue, by choosing as its symbol the crucified Christ. Can you imagine anything more BDSM than that? (Well, if you lift up the loincloth, you might find that his royal scrotum has also been nailed to the cross).

Be like the cat, the dog, indeed any creature that lives, and openly enjoys being caressed, hugged, kissed, licked, sucked and fucked (without any hidden agenda). Then all humans will finally be released from the pain-follows-pleasure cycle and will no longer experience so much suppression of the libido (or kundalini energy) that their passion erupts in destructive, invasive, exploitative ways.

Don’t just have sex, make slow and tender love. But do so as consciously as possible, with heart wide open and a totally clear conscience. Feel the emotional bond with whomsoever you are intimate with, and allow it to deepen as much as it can. By all means swear undying love in the heat of excitement, but never promise exclusivity, (unless you’re a sucker for guilty pleasures and the embarrassment of being eventually shown up as a liar and hypocrite).

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Postscript: The only other activity I have found as gratifying as (if not more than) making love, is making music, so it’s easy to understand why the opening line of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night describes music as “the food of love.” But alas, the nexus between food and love often manifests in mildly cynical songs (written in my youth) like Strange Flesh and Black Widow.

[First posted 4 June 2020]

The Holy Trinity of My Mental Health (revisited)

Mr Wong, Booboots and my beloved Bunyip have an immense therapeutic effect on me, thank heaven!

Today was one of those days when I went to bed as Vishnu (the Preserver) and woke up as Shiva (the Destroyer). What happened? NOTHING! But the silly season approaches and, as usual, it brings out the worst in me. If I had my finger on a Red Button I'd be sorely tempted to press it and let the whole shebang be blown to smithereens like some unnamed Mongolian woman (who, Imigresen insists, never visited Malaysia). On days like this I tend to view the entire human experiment as an abysmal failure - Homo sapiens, my foot! More like a nest of contentious lice with all their stupid conflicts over primitive belief systems.

This year (2007) it was compounded by the fact that yesterday was a public holiday (Hari Raya Haji) and the banks were closed - which meant some money deposited in my account on Thursday won't clear till Christmas Eve or maybe even after Boxing Day, leaving me with exactly RM111.70 in my wallet plus a residue of RM9.12 in my Maybank account. Of course, I wouldn't be quite so cheesed off if this pathetic country called Bolehland believed in paying freelancers on time.

Wrote a feature for a national daily back in August and I'm still waiting for the measly payment of - what, RM250? It's absolutely indefensible and outrageous - and Malaysians have the gall to publicly lament the dearth of full-time writers. Where are all the great novelists? Well, you'll find a pile of skeletal remains on Desolation Row with notably large skulls who all perished waiting for checks in the post.

What is it about Christmas - or Kerismas (as Dean Johns recently called it in a barbed piece he wrote for Malaysiakini) - that brings out the Beast, if not the Scrooge, in me? When I asked myself many, many years ago why people living in the tropics would send each other greeting cards with images of reindeer, wintry landscapes, pine forests, and white-bearded fat men in red suits, I realized that most folks are totally unoriginal - and, what's more alarming, they hardly ever think, except perhaps in pre-programmed loops with default settings. After 130 years of British rule, many Anglophile middle-class Malaysians have adopted "Xmas" as their own celebration, without researching the origins of what once was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. December 21 or 22 marks the longest night of the year in the north and the mid-point of winter (in the southern hemisphere it would be the peak of summer). To cheer themselves up after weeks of dreary weather, folks celebrated the symbolic renewal of life after a period of hibernation with a big feast and lots of wine. Sometimes these parties would get a little orgiastic, especially with guys carrying mistletoe sprigs around just so they could kiss any girl they chanced upon. People sure knew how to have fun back then.

Then the reptilian Roman Church came along and co-opted the pagan festival, declaring it to be a celebration of the birth of Christ Jesus (whose actual birthday, according to some scholars, was October 4th). It was all a matter of political expediency and mass mind control. Centuries later, December 25th was hijacked by the retail business and turned into a paean to gross consumerism.

Flashing lights, sparkly baubles, and plastic pine trees became a billion-dollar industry - along with gift wrapping, fancy ribbons, frozen turkeys and imported Christmas pudding. Knowing all this, I found it hard to go along with the fake jolliness and greed-driven bonhomie of this aggressively marketed consumerist festival. Okay, so it was an excuse for far-flung families to get together - well and fine - but the pressure of exchanging gifts invariably gets to me. I enjoy giving presents spontaneously, when so inspired - not because it's expected. Five decades after I discovered the truth about Christmas, the tradition rages on undiminished - with the same old mindless carols and silly Santa songs blaring from every department store p.a. and vaguely Christian household.

Most folks say they love the cheery atmosphere around Christmas. Something must be wrong with me, I'm more likely to feel depressed. But then I've always been one of those misfits who absolutely detests campfire songs. Guess I'd never make the grade as a populist politico. I despise the Lowest Common Denominator far too much. People who subscribe to the Lowest Common Denominator know how to write hit tunes according to formulas decreed by market surveys; they know precisely what the public wants - and unabashedly dish it to them. Sensational tabloid headlines, mindless slogans like "Malaysia Boleh!"... wrestling videos... T-shirts emblazoned with popular football club insignia... great stuff, it sells like hot cakes!

Well, I allow myself to rant and rave and turn my nose up at the great unwashed one day out of every year - the other 364 days I'm a pretty upbeat and positive-thinking sort of fellow. In any case, those who spout idiocies like the Bottom Line and capitalize on the Lowest Common Denominator will probably end up in the Lowest Consciousness Domains come Non-Judgment Day.

Anyway, Happy Solstice, folks! I'm okay now. My mood lifted as soon as I saw Mr Wong smiling at me like the Dog of Dogs he truly is. Then I went down to the river with Ahau and Anoora (escorted by the canine corps) and after a minute under the best jacuzzi in the universe, my grumpy feelings were washed clean away. There was an Indian family picnicking at our usual spot and I felt my heart chakra expand as I silently blessed them all on this sacred day - and I realized I don't have what it takes to be a Great Dictator or Evil Emperor, since I can't stay angry with humans for more than a few minutes.

[First posted 21 December 2007, reposted 25 December 2016]