e g r e g o r e s

"the hypnotic power of well executed cunnilingus"

2012-01-29T19:38:00.008-05:00

If you are not already following Katy Anders' blog, "Lesbians In My Soup", you might want to seriously consider doing so right now. In her most recent post, she has promised to reveal the secret that has allowed her to master the Dark Art of playing, and winning, "out of her league". All we know so far is that Katy assures us it has nothing whatsoever to do with "the hypnotic power of well-executed cunnilingus."

An Orthodox theologian explains what he means by "Inclusivism" and "Tolerance"

2012-01-28T20:11:00.006-05:00

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"Isn’t it a little too much to have tolerance and delicate forbearance
preached by what is intolerance and cruelty itself?"
[from Religion: A Dialogue, by Arthur Schopenhauer, 1889]

Rev. Dr. George C. Papademetrious is a prominent Orthodox theologian who is especially noted for his involvement in inter-faith dialogue (see his official biography at the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America website). Father Papademetrious is a highly educated and exceptionally articulate man. When he writes about the relationship between Christianity and other religions he is not satisfied with glib, politically correct catch-phrases. Where he finds simplicity, he does not shy away from stating things plainly, even bluntly. And where he finds complexity, he insists on giving that complexity it's full due.

As far as I can see, there is no reason to doubt that Father Papademetrious has a genuine personal commitment to religious tolerance, and an abhorrence of all religious violence and persecution regardless of who the victims (or perpetrators) are. And he also possesses a clearly demonstrated interest in and sympathy for non-Christian religious traditions and their adherents.

But while Father Papademetrious' intelligence and humaneness shine through in his writings, this only makes it all the more jarring when one realizes the unambiguous import of what he believes to be the truth about all non-Christian religions. In particular, he insists that Christianity alone offers "salvation" and contains "saving truths". But somehow he makes this claim in the name of "tolerance" and "inclusiveness" (and also in the name of rejecting "exclusivism"). But Father Papademetrious is not here engaging in any deception or sophistry. He states very clearly what he means by "exclusivism", "inclusivism" and "tolerance". On close inspection, his definitions turn out to be rather counterintuitive, but they are not completely unreasonable, and they are presented in a very forthright and even well-reasoned manner, so there is no excuse for misunderstanding him.

An important source of Father Papademetrious' thinking on these matters is his essay An Orthodox Christian View of Non-Christian Religions. Therein he not only defines the three terms mentioned above, but also presents his definition of "pluralism" (which he also associates with the terms "syncretism" and "relativism").

Let's go through these four terms, one at a time, as defined by this noted Orthodox scholar:

"Exclusivism"
Father Papademetrious defines "exclusivism" very precisely and narrowly: it only refers to the most extreme position that all non-Christians "will be damned because there is no salvation outside the visible Body of Christ, the Church".

"Inclusivism"
Papademetrious' definition of "inclusivism" reflects and expands upon his definition of "exclusivism". While allowing that salvation is possible for non-Christians, Papademetrious (again very precisely and very narrowly) states that (1) the only possible avenue by which non-Christians can escape damnation is "through the mercy of [the Christian] God"; and also that (2) non-Christians do not attain salvation (if they attain it at all) through the agency of their non-Christian religious traditions, for such salvation is only conferred on the non-Christian "in spite of the religion he practices".

"Pluralism"
The definition of "pluralism" employed by Papademetrious follows inexorably from his definitions of "exclusivism" and "inclusivism". The simple truth is that he means by "pluralism" what most people naturally assume is meant by "inclusivism", namely that "the non-Christian may be saved by means of the very religion he practices, for nonChristian religions may also contain saving truths." This "pluralism" is rejected unambiguously by Papademetrious, thus categorically denying any spiritual value to any religion whatsoever other than Christianity.

"Tolerance"
It is clear from the above that what is included in Papademetrious' "inclusivism" is not non-Christian religions themselves, but rather selected individual adherents of non-Christian religions who are deemed worthy, at the sole discretion of the Christian God, of salvation in spite of their religious beliefs and practices. Likewise, Papademetrious' conception of "tolerance" toward non-Christian does not in any way involve any concession that non-Christian religions possess any spiritual value or "saving truths". In fact, Papademetrious makes a point of emphasizing that "Christian Truth is of highest importance in the Orthodox view of other religions," and that "Christ is Truth."

Even more can be learned from another paper authored by Papademetrious, which consists mostly of quotations from the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople: Recent Patriarchal Encyclicals on Religious Tolerance and Peaceful Coexistence. The most revealing of these quotations is the following:

"It is well known that every religion asserts that it holds within its belief system the absolute truth concerning God and the world, the latter of which also incorporates humanity."

Compare the above quote to one from the noted Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda in 1893 (link):

"I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth."

This, finally, brings us to the heart of the matter. The Orthodox Patriarch claims that all religions are the same because they all make exclusive truth claims, while the Hindu sage claims that all religions are the same because they are all true!

Vivekananda himself recognized and articulated this very point when he also said (link):

"All religions are, at bottom, alike. This is so, although the Christian Church, like the Pharisee in the parable, thanks God that it alone is right and thinks that all other religions are wrong and in need of Christian light. Christianity must become tolerant before the world will be willing to unite with the Christian Church in a common charity."

All of the above very nicely illustrates the mentality of what Egyptologist Jan Assmann has termed "the Mosaic distinction", according to which mentality all religions can be divided neatly into two mutually exclusive groups: the one true religion, on the one hand, and false religions, on the other hand. Most importantly, Assmann has clearly shown that this mentality is not a universal feature of all religions, but is rather one of the defining characteristics of a certain kind of religion: monotheism.

Here is how Assmann himself explains this in the first chapter of his book Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism:

The distinction I am concerned with in this book is the distinction between true and false religion that underlies more specific distinctions such as Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Muslims and unbelievers. Once the distinction is drawn, there is no end of reentries or subdistinctions. We start with Christians and pagans and end up with Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, Socinians and Latitudinarians, and a thousand more similar denominations and subdenominations. Cultural or intellectual distinctions such as these construct a universe that is not only full of meaning, identity, and orientation, but also full of conflict, intolerance and violence. Therefore, there have always been attempts to overcome the conflict by reexamining the distinction, albeit at the risk of losing cultural meaning.

Let us call the distinction between true and false in religion the "Mosaic distinction" because tradition ascribes it to Moses. We cannot be sure that Moses ever lived because there are no traces of his earthly existence outside the tradition. But we can be sure that he was not the first to draw the distinction. There was a precursor in the person of the an Egyptian king who called himself Akhnenaten and instituted a monotheistic religion in the fourteenth century B.C.E. His religion, however, spawned no tradition but was forgotten immediately after his death. Moses is a figure of memory but not of history, while Akhenaten is a figure of history but not of memory. Since memory is all that counts in the sphere of cultural distinctions and constructions, we are satisfied in speaking not of Akhenaten's distinction, but of the Mosaic distinction. The space severed or cloven by this distinction is the space of Western monotheism. It is this constructed mental or cultural space that has been inhabited by Europeans for nearly two millennia.

It is an error to believe that this distinction is as old as religion itself, though at first sight nothing might seem more plausible. Does not every religion quite automatically put everything outside itself in the position of error and falsehood and look down on other religions as "paganism"? Is this not quite simply the religious expression of ethnocentricity? Does not the distinction between true and false in reality amount to nothing other than the distinction between "us" and "them"? Does not every construction of identity by the very same process generate alterity? Does not every religion produce "pagans" in the same way that every civilization produces "barbarians"?

However plausible this may seem, it is not the case. Cultures not only generate otherness by constructing identity, but also develop techniques of translation. We have to distinguish here between the "real other," who is always there beyond the individual and independent of the individual's constructions of selfhood and otherhood, and the "construction of other," who is the shadow of the individual's identity. Moreover, we have to realize that in most cases we are dealing not with the "real other," but with our constructions and projections of the other. "Paganism" and "idolatry" belong to such constructions of the other. It is this inevitable construction of cultural otherness that is to a certain degree compensated by techniques of translation. Translation in this sense is not to be confused with the colonializing appropriation of the "real" other. It is simply an attempt to make more transparent the borders that were erected by cultural distinctions.

Ancient polytheisms functioned as such a technique of translations. They belong within the emergence of the "Ancient World" as a coherent ecumene of interconnected nations. The polytheistic religions overcame the primitive ethnocentrism of tribal religions by distinguishing several deities by name, shape, and function. The names are, of course, different in different cultures, because the languages are different. The shapes of the gods and the forms of worship may also differ significantly. But the functions are strikingly similar, especially in the case of cosmic deities; and most deities had a cosmic function. The sun god of one religion is easily equated with the sun god of another religion, and so forth. Because of their functional equivalence, deities of different religions can be equated. In Mesopotamia, the practice of translating divine names goes back to the third millennium B.C.E. ... In the second millennium, this practice was extended to many different languages and civilizations of the Near East. The cultures, languages, and customs may have been as different as ever: the religions always had a common ground. Thus they functioned as a means of intercultural translatability. The gods were international because they were cosmic. The different peoples worshipped different gods, but nobody contested the reality of foreign gods and the legitimacy of foreign forms of worship. The distinction I am speaking of [between true and false religions] simply did not exist in the world of polytheistic religions.

The Mosaic distinction was therefore a radically new distinction which considerably changed the world in which it was drawn. The space which was "severed or cloven" by this distinction was not simply the space of religion in general, but that of a very specific kind of religion. We may call this new type of religion "counter-religion" because it rejects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as "paganism". It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation; on the contrary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement. Whereas polytheism, or rather "cosmotheism," rendered differed cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated.
[pp. 1-3]

See related posts at this blog:
The Price of Monotheism in a nutshell
Are there two kinds of religion?
What is "Counterreligion"?
The Essence of Religion: Four Theories
Roman Catholicism (A brief history of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Seven)
Charlemagne, Part Deux (A brief history of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Six)
Charlemagne (A brief history of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Five)
Muhammad (A brief history of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Four)
Constantine (A brief history of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Three)
Moses (A Brief History of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Two)
Akhenaten (A Brief History of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part One)
Monotheistic Robots of Doom, Part Deux
Monotheistic Robots of Doom
Lies, Damned Lies, and Pagan Monotheism
Hic Sunt Dracones

Salman Rusdhie: Back To The Future

2012-01-26T17:15:00.001-05:00

On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini personally read out, over state controlled Iranian radio, his fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie because the Indian-born writer had committed the crime of "blaspheming against Islam" in his novel The Satanic Verses.

Nearly 23 years later, the organizers of the Jaipur Literary Festival initially "wanted it to be a place where you could meet Salman Rushdie, not just read him." But by the time the festival (in the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Rajasthan) got underway few days ago, not only was Rushdie not present, but a scheduled-at-the-last-minute video "appearance" by him was canceled at the urging of local police authorities.

But wait, there's more. For all festival attendees it is now forbidden to read aloud from any of Rushdie's writings during the proceedings. Four writers who dared to ignore that prohibition were forced to flee Jaipur or face arrest (or possibly worse). Even displaying Rushdie's picture has been banned from the festival!

The whole thing has turned into a slow-motion train wreck of the worst kind of politically correct capitulation to the demands of Islamism. But please, don't take my word for it. Here are several recent articles describing the unfolding debacle:

Why Salman Rushdie's voice was silenced in Jaipur, The Guardian, 26 January 2012

Jaipur festival cancels Salman Rushdie video link, The Guardian, 24 January 2012

Rushdie Jaipur speech cancelled amid death threats, Reuters, 24 January 2012

Jaipur Literature Festival organisers stop novelists from reading Satanic Verses, India Today, January 20, 2012

Salman Rushdie, Islamic Critics Clash Over Jaipur Literature Festival, Huffington Post, 20 January 2012

Salman Rushdie Jaipur festival appearance in doubt, The Guardian, 19 January 2012

Salman Rushdie Jaipur trip in doubt after India protest, BBC.com, 17 January 2012

Traditionalism & Anti-Modernism: A Guide For The Perplexed Pagan (Aldous Huxley, JRR Tolkien, Joscelyn Godwin, TYR Journal, Arthur Versluis ....)

2012-01-24T12:58:00.009-05:00

"Fear is the mind killer."

As soon as the word "Traditionalism" is mentioned in certain company one will immediately be deluged with a hail of denunciations involving the words "racist", "fascist", "nazi", and so forth. This post is intended as a user-friendly guide for anyone who wants to get beyond the noise and actually learn something about Traditionalism, and it's kissing ideological cousin, Antimodernism.

All of this material should be approached with a critical eye.

1. Michael Strmiska's 2010 review of the journal TYR: Myth--Culture--Religion
The Pomegranate 12.1 (2010) 118-121 (link to pdf - it works now!)

For progressive minded Pagans with little or no first-hand knowledge of Traditionalism, Michael Strmiska's review of the Radical Traditionalist journal TYR is a good place to start. Strmiska is himself a very interesting figure in modern Paganism: he is both a self-described "leftist-liberal" (see his "Political Pagan" blog), and a professional academic (on the faculty at SUNY Orange), and, like many Pagans today, he is someone whose personal spiritual interests are very wide ranging: from Germanic Heathenry (in the 90s he had a Fullbright Fellowship to study Old Norse literature) to Advaita Vedanta. He is also the editor of the scholarly anthology: Modern paganism in world cultures: comparative perspectives. Strmiska convincingly critiques the notion that TYR's Radical Traditionalism should "raise a red flag of warning to anyone who fears modern Norse-Germanic Paganism being overtaken by or associated with right-wing nationalism." Strmiska backs this up with quotes from editorials in the first two issues of TYR, and also with personal communications he had with co-editor Michael Moynihan.

2. Tolkien and the Primordial Tradition
by Joscelyn Godwin

This essay by Professor Godwin is a genuine tour de force. The opening sentences set the stage for what is to follow:

When it becomes normal for people to cease believing in what they cannot reach with the senses, and when the established authorities on the supersensory are as contradictory and ignorant as is the case in our present civilization, then the truths that belong to all mankind — the Perennial Wisdom — must find other ways into the hearts and minds of men. Fortunately those who have been born into Western civilization have not been deserted entirely by the powers which look to the education of the human race (education in the original sense of drawing out the wisdom innate in every man). Like so much good teaching, their work may take place unconsciously, but its effect is not thereby diminished: rather the contrary, since society and upbringing have imbued many people so strongly with modern prejudices that the conscious entertainment of traditional wisdom is an almost unthinkable heresy for them.

3. Antimodernism by Arthur Versluis
Telos, Winter 2006 vol. 2006 no. 137, pp. 96-130 (link to pdf)

This far ranging essay masterfully captures the breadth and depth of Antimodernism. One of the most rewarding aspects of Versluis's "Antimodernism" is the way that he handles the inescapable observation that "antimodernism is fundamental to the creative impulse in modernity." Versluis goes beyond the "usual suspects" associated with Traditionalism, and especially has quite a bit to say about important literary figures such as T. S. Eliot and Henry David Thoreau. Unfortunately, almost half of this thirty-five page article is dedicated to two representatives of the violent "direct action" brand of antimodernism: the Unabomber and the Earth Liberation Front. This actually makes for quite interesting reading, but the most useful information is contained in the rest of the essay dealing with antimodernism in it's broadest sense. Versluis is a highly respected scholar of Esotericism, and is Chair of the Department of Religion at Michigan State University. (here is a link to his personal website)

4. "Getting There Too Quickly: Aldous Huxley and Mescaline"
by Peter Bebergal at "The Revealer" blog

Aldous Huxley's name doesn't always come to mind when the subject of Traditionalism is being discussed, but his writings on "Perennial Philosophy" have helped to popularize a more genteel and (mostly) non-radical kind of Traditionalism.

An excerpt:

In 1937 Huxley moved to California and within a few years was introduced to the Vedanta Society of Southern California by his friend, the writer and scholar Gerald Heard. Huxley had been developing his perennial philosophy, the idea that religious traditions are historically and culturally relative but that they each validate, in their own way, that human beings are divine and that the purpose of our lives is to come into a relationship with the numinous behind the phenomenal world. Huxley believed the realization of our latent divinity to be a possible remedy to what he perceived as a Western material and spiritual crisis. Vedanta was the method Huxley had been looking for.

Vedanta is the philosophical underpinning of Hinduism, itself a dreamscape of multiple deities and stories of epic battles. Vedanta distills all of the multi-armed, elephant-headed, sword-wielding gods into one simple idea. The most important of the Vedic literature, The Upanishads, teaches that brahman, the supreme reality of all things, and atman, the manifestation of the divine in the human soul, are one and the same, a pure and perfect whole. Our purpose during our gross bodily manifestation is to recognize the divinity within all things. When we come to this, Vendata tells us, we will also see that every religion is merely a different way of expressing the same principle, the same overarching truth that there is no separation between the soul and God.

5. Anarchist Traditionalism: Hakim Bey
A post at Mark Sedgwick's Traditionalists blog

This post by Sedgwick (author of Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 2004) summarizes a recent interview of Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) conducted by Arthur Versluis. The full interview was published as “A Conversation with Peter Lamborn Wilson,” in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 2 (Fall 2010) pp. 139-165. Here is an excerpt from Sedgwick's summary:

In the Versluis interview, Lamborn Wilson makes clear that what he now values in Traditionalism is its critique of modernity, not its “proposal” for responding to modernity. As an anarchist, Lamborn Wilson gives the state–and especially the all-powerful contemporary state–a prime position in his own critique of modernity. His own proposals lead in a number of directions, none of them revolutionary in the normal sense, given his perception that the state always manages to co-opt revolutions. He stresses that his proposals should be taken in a poetic as much as a literal sense. The most famous of them is the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ),“an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it” (TAZ, quoted in Sellars 2011). A less famous proposal, more emphasized in his interview with Versluis, is a form of “even more traditional Traditionalism” reminiscent of that of Khozh-Akhmed Noukhaev: to go back even further into the past, to before the state, to the tribe, and to the form of religiosity associated with it: individual spirituality. The tribe, Lamborn Wilson, admits, is not perfect: “Violence is real, and it will always be real, and disappointment and death are always there.” But at least the tribe is not the state.

6. A detailed review of Joscelyn Godwin's The Golden Thread
by John Robert Colombo writing for the gurdjieffbooks blog

An in-depth review of a very good and very important book. An excerpt:

Chapter 1: The Prisca Theologia. Interestingly Godwin begins his survey not at the beginning but in medias res: with the work of Georgios Gemistos Plethon, a fifteenth-century Byzantine who had a sense of “a ‘primordial theology’ (prisca theologia).” Plethon looks back on the Chaldean and Persian and Thracian “illuminates” and connects them with Pythagoras and Plato. In doing so he influences Cosimo de’ Medici who revives Plato’s Academy and appoints the scholarly priest Marsilio Ficino to head it. Here is a clear statement of the “‘perennial philosophy’ (philosophia perennis), the wisdom common to Jews, Christians, and pagans.” Godwin is right at home here but then begins to free-associate. The balance of the chapter is far-ranging, taking into account the “incorruptibility” of the bodies of saints, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the “mundus imaginalis” described by Henry Corbin, etc. The author refers to “a continuity of theurists” as “the stream of European magic … continuing to this day.”

7. The Strange Case of Savitri Devi, & The eternal return of Nazi nonsense
by Koenraad Elst (Flemish independent scholar)

Although this might be considered somewhat of a diversion, it is no more so than Versluis' discussion of the Unabomber. In fact, Koenraad Elst does a great service by shining a bright light on some of the darker aspects of the contemporary scholarship that passes for "Esoteric Studies". In particular, Elst takes aim at one of the leading figures in the modern "study" of Esotericism: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Here is an excerpt from the second essay:

Christian Bouchet dismisses Goodrick-Clarke as a "pseudo-historian" (p.83). That seems a bit exaggerated to me, if not downright unfair. I'd rather accept the criticism of those disappointed readers who object that Goodrick-Clarke's first major book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, belies its own promising title, possibly chosen by the publisher with an eye on its sales potential, by concluding (p.217) that the so-called occult roots of Nazism are only a myth. Some would clearly have preferred Goodrick-Clarke to uphold the myth rather than debunking it. On the other hand, it must be admitted that for a debunker of "Nazi occultism" fantasies, Goodrick-Clarke is strangely persistent and attached to this subject, on which he keeps churning out hefty volumes. To Bouchet, the explanation is that, apart from having struck gold in the material sense, Goodrick-Clarke is an "anti-fascist militant" (p.83) intent on turning the biography of Savitri Devi into a support for "his delirious ideas and his conspiratorial view of history which interconnects Hollywood-type neo-Nazis, partisans of Deep Ecology, New Agers, Animal Rights advocates etc." (p.92)

Now, to come to the contents of Bouchet's criticism of Goodrick-Clarke as a historian, he alleges that: "Goodrick-Clarke has dispensed with all research work and has merely relayed Savitri Devi's own sayings without analysing or criticizing them." (p.92, likewise p.87) The problem is that this single source, her autobiography, is not supported by any independent evidence, and that she can easily have refashioned her past: "For the period from her birth until after World War 2, we have to trust Savitri Devi Mukherji for her life story. However, it is obvious that she herself has arranged her biography a posteriori in order to harmonize it with the themes defended in her books." (p.88)

8. What is Intellectual History?
by Stefan Collini (English, Cambridge) writing for History Today magazine

The study of The History of Ideas is to Traditionalism as Cartesian Analytical Geometry is to Calculus. You must have the first in order to be able to "see" what is going on in the second.

'[T]he history of ideas' was the label chosen in the 1920s and 1930s by the American philosopher-turned-historian, A.O. Lovejoy, to designate his own idiosyncratic approach to the life of the past, an approach which consisted essentially of isolating the universal 'unit-ideas' out of which, he claimed, all more complex doctrines and theories were composed. Through his many pupils and his founding in 1940 of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Lovejoy's approach dominated the field in American universities for at least a generation, leading to the compilation of immensely thorough but essentially arid lists of the sightings of particular 'unit-ideas'. Lovejoy's own practice was, as is so often the case, better either than his preaching or than the imitative practice of his disciples, and his most famous work, The Great Chain of Being (1936), remains an extremely impressive tour de force. Though his influence has fallen away in recent decades (and the journal he founded has become less mechanical and sectarian in its approach), the term 'the history of ideas' is, at least in the United States, still sufficiently often identified with his work as to cause misunderstanding all of its own.

Some New(-ish) Additions To My Blogroll

2012-01-20T06:14:00.013-05:00

backward messages

At Backward Messages, Beth Winegarner gives you the straight story on all the influences you’ve been told will turn your teen violent: the occult, violent video games, heavy-metal music, and more.

Winegarner is a San Francisco author, journalist, and mom writing a book for parents on the most controversial teen influences and why they’re a healthy part of growing up. If you’re a parent who’s concerned about what your teen is up to, send your questions to backwardmessages AT gmail DOT com and they’ll be answered on the blog.

the hedge mason

A blog by E C Ballard of interesting news and commentary on liberal and esoteric Freemasonry and other stuff.

E C Ballard is a Folklorist, and Ethnologist specializing in Afro-Caribbean traditions of Central African origin, Fraternalism, Celtic Studies and Ethnomusicology, having received his Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Eoghan has been variously musical instrument maker, bookseller, college professor, academic dean, and independent researcher. Eoghan is Tata Nganga, about to become Houngan Su Pwen, and is a Master Mason.

Sparks in Electrical Jelly

Film, music, art and literature, with a leaning towards the fantastic in all its forms: Science fiction, fantasy, horror, the surreal, the Absurd, the Weird ('New' and old), the hauntologised and the just plain odd. West Country sightings reported, with regular return trips to London on film likely. In short, anything that sets the sparks a-crackling and fizzing through the old grey jelly.

The Museum of Sex

This is a real brick and mortar museum with a very nice website, blog, and online store. And they are currently hiring. Here is a sample:

"Ever wondered what happened to Napoleon’s penis? I certainly did – which is one reason I wrote a book called Napoleon’s Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped. It was a collection of stories about forgotten or secret aspects of sexual history, and the saga of the Emperor’s French loaf took on a certain symbolic quality…"

The Norse Mythology Blog

Dr. Karl E. H. Seigfried's "Norse Mythology Blog" was 2011 Weblog Awards Best Weblog About Religion finalist. Chicago Humanities Festival: "Seigfried is a prolific chronicler of the world of Norse mythology." The Wild Hunt: "The blog is one of the most content-rich affairs for lovers of Norse mythology I’ve ever seen." Jóhanna G. Harðardóttir (Ásatrúarfélagið Allsherjargoða): "Hér er rétti maðurinn á ferð til að kenna Norræna goðafræði í US."

A Norse mythologist in Chicago, Karl teaches Norse religion at Carthage College, Norse myth at Newberry Library & Loyola University-Continuum. He's a featured writer/lecturer at Joseph Campbell Foundation & Wagner Society of America; member of Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, Viking Society for Northern Research, Religion Newswriters Association; Official Norse Mythologist of the Stephanie Miller Show.

Koenraad Elst

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998. As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.

The New Oxonian

Hoffmann has focused on the controversial aspects of Christian origins, with special reference to early heresies, gnosticism, and the pagan philosophical critiques of the Christian movement. His most recent books include an edited volume entitled Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2006) and Sources of the Jesus Tradition (2010.)
His study of the concept of the right to life in early Christianity, Faith and Foeticide, will be published by Peter Lang, Oxford, in 2011, along with another in his series of translations of the classical philosophical critiques of the Christian movement: Christianity: The Minor Critics.

He currently teaches at the New England Conservatory in Boston.

The People of Shambhala

People of Shambhala is dedicated to raising awareness of the discrimination, oppression, and violence suffered on a daily basis by minority religions around the world today, especially under Islamic or Islamist regimes. We believe that, because of misplaced political correctness, the mainstream media has ignored the plight of minorities such as the Zoroastrians in Iran, the Yezidis in Iraq, the Kalash in Pakistan, Buddhists in Indonesia and Thailand, and others.

Nineteen years and counting in Papua New Guinea

Entries of a memoir about living in Papua New Guinea.

"Collecting is a little like the stock market, in that people gamble on rumours and valuation is a complex art not related to an object’s function. A good exhibition, a published catalogue and the right art historian can turn a simple Angoram mask into a six-figure object d’art.

"That’s precisely what happened to the Friede collection, especially after being carbon dated. Some of the Inyai carvings ---one, for example, often used in press releases---are 300 years old, and hence some of the oldest known wooden objects from New Guinea. This makes ‘ethnic’ art doubly valuable, insofar as it becomes historical artifact as well as an aesthetic object. The beautiful catalogue of the collection also compounded the ‘density’ of these pieces, as only the most serious collector would purchase this heavy two-volume set of gorgeous plates that contain less ethnographic than art-historical information."

"Wherever you find them, kill them." Murderous injunctions from the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī

2012-01-19T17:42:00.002-05:00

Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:83:17 (link to Book 83)

Allah's Apostle said, "The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims."

Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:84:57 (link to Book 84)

Some Zanadiqa (atheists) were brought to 'Ali and he burnt them. The news of this event, reached Ibn 'Abbas who said, "If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah's Apostle forbade it, saying, 'Do not punish anybody with Allah's punishment (fire).' I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah's Apostle, 'Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'"

Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:84:58

Abu Musa said, "I came to the Prophet along with two men (from the tribe) of Ash'ariyin, one on my right and the other on my left, while Allah's Apostle was brushing his teeth (with a Siwak), and both men asked him for some employment. The Prophet said, 'O Abu Musa (O 'Abdullah bin Qais!).' I said, 'By Him Who sent you with the Truth, these two men did not tell me what was in their hearts and I did not feel (realize) that they were seeking employment.' As if I were looking now at his Siwak being drawn to a corner under his lips, and he said, 'We never (or, we do not) appoint for our affairs anyone who seeks to be employed. But O Abu Musa! (or 'Abdullah bin Qais!) Go to Yemen.'" The Prophet then sent Mu'adh bin Jabal after him and when Mu'adh reached him, he spread out a cushion for him and requested him to get down (and sit on the cushion). Behold: There was a fettered man beside Abu Muisa. Mu'adh asked, "Who is this (man)?" Abu Muisa said, "He was a Jew and became a Muslim and then reverted back to Judaism." Then Abu Muisa requested Mu'adh to sit down but Mu'adh said, "I will not sit down till he has been killed. This is the judgment of Allah and His Apostle (for such cases) and repeated it thrice. Then Abu Musa ordered that the man be killed, and he was killed. Abu Musa added, "Then we discussed the night prayers and one of us said, 'I pray and sleep, and I hope that Allah will reward me for my sleep as well as for my prayers.'"

Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:84:64

Whenever I tell you a narration from Allah's Apostle, by Allah, I would rather fall down from the sky than ascribe a false statement to him, but if I tell you something between me and you (not a Hadith) then it was indeed a trick (i.e., I may say things just to cheat my enemy). No doubt I heard Allah's Apostle saying, "During the last days there will appear some young foolish people who will say the best words but their faith will not go beyond their throats (i.e. they will have no faith) and will go out from (leave) their religion as an arrow goes out of the game. So, wherever you find them, kill them, for whoever kills them shall have reward on the Day of Resurrection."

Percentage of Muslims in favor of the death penalty for apostates (those who "leave Islam"), by country:

Turkey 5%
Lebanon 6%
Indonesia 30%
Nigeria 51%
Pakistan 76%
Egypt 84%
Jordan 86%

Source: Muslim Publics Divided, Pew Global Attitudes Project report released on December 2, 2010. See, in particular, page 14. Here is a link to a pdf of the full report.

Further reading:

Toward a New Dharmic Vision of Humanity

2012-01-17T18:44:00.003-05:00

Toward a New Dharmic Vision of Humanity
by Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva)
(link to original at VedaNet.Com)

The Meaning of Dharma

Dharma is perhaps the key term for the great spiritual traditions of India and East Asia, Hindu and Buddhist, whether relative to their understanding of the outer world of nature or the inner realm of consciousness. It is the basis of India’s vast and diverse culture and its deep commitment to Yoga and meditation as tools of self-realization for all. A respect for Dharma is said to be more important even than a belief in God, because it implies certain values and a way of life that promotes truth, unity and respect for all life above ideas or emotions.

Dharma in Sanskrit comes from the root ‘dhri’ meaning ‘to uphold’ and is symbolized by a pillar. It refers to the spiritual, ethical and natural principles that uphold the entire universe. Dharma has always been linked to Veda or vidya, which refers to an inner capacity to perceive the nature of things. It reflects a higher awareness pervades and underlies all existence.

Dharma is a very difficult term to define and eventually must be understood in its own right. To provide a basis for this, we could say that Dharma indicates both the nature of reality at a universal level as well as the proper place for each thing in the universe according to its particular qualities and capacities. There is a specific dharma relative to each creature and every aspect of nature, as well as to the whole of existence. Dharma indicates the harmony both of the totality and the individual, which are complementary and interdependent. According to a dharmic view, the entire universe is present in each object and in every creature, which in some way embody or express the totality.

There is a dharma or natural way of working behind the great forces of nature, the five elements of earth, water, fire, air and ether, the seasons, the three worlds as earth, atmosphere and the heavens, and the different aspects of the cosmos as matter, energy, and light, which follow interrelated laws and patterns. There is a dharma or unique quality and energy in every plant and animal which serves to make it what it is. Everything has its place in the Dharma, which reflects its role in the cosmic order. And there is a special dharma or role on Earth for the human being, which is to seek to embody a higher truth and work to promote a higher consciousness in the world. The universe is an organically connected vibratory field in which all things are linked together into a greater network of harmony, beauty and vitality. This is the universal ‘web of dharma’.

There is dharma or way of right action relative to all aspects of human life and culture: a dharma of art, a dharma of business, a dharma of communication, a dharma of relationship, a dharma of science, a dharma of religion, and so on – each of which requires its own examination. What is done according to dharma is performed with grace, intelligence and respect for the natural order. Each different domain of our lives has certain principles and practices necessary to unfold its full potential, which constitute its dharma. If we follow the dharma in what we do, we will not only be successful, but will act so in a way that promotes the well-being of all.

We have our own individual or ‘svadharma’ that reflects our capacities and aspirations in life. Yet this is not something that divides us from others. Each person has similar potentials that we must honor.

The Social Dharma

Relative to society, the term Dharma is used in a special way as indicating the right way for society and its members to operate in harmony with their natures, with the environment and with the universe as a whole. This is what we could call the ‘social Dharma’. For social well being, there must be a proper understanding and implementation of Dharma on all levels.

In Vedic thought, human society is looked upon like the human body as a single organism with different limbs, organs and functions, which all serve the benefit of the whole. The social organism is one in essence, but the role of different individuals, communities or professions must vary in order to fulfill the diverse and specialized needs of the whole. Such social differences should not become a matter of high and low or good and bad, but an organic necessity in which each particular role is vital, just as each organ of the human body has an important and irreplaceable role in the well-being of the entire body. We cannot forget society’s connection with the Earth and nature, if we want society to be healthy, harmonious and without violence.

There are special principles of Dharma or right living for society, nations and communities, including special guidelines for men and women, the young and the old, for different professions and for different stages of life. There is an organic order to life, even at a social level, as there is in how our body functions.

However, Dharma also requires that our outer actions and life-styles change along with changing times and cultures. Dharma does not consist of rigid rules that can be blindly applied to all circumstances, but of guiding principles that require adaptation according to the differing needs of time, place and culture. The social Dharma cannot become rigid or the social organism will decline. This means that the vision of Dharma is more important than any specific formulation of dharma in a particular book or by a single person, though we should not discountenance the value of the dharmic wisdom from the past.

Today we need a new social dharma that can integrate what is best in science and technology while restoring our deeper connection with both Nature and the Spirit, such as the great seers of India maintained.

Dharma and Human Rights

Western political thought and modern democracies in general are based upon the idea of “human rights”, which are primarily defined on an individual basis, according to political ideals of freedom, equal opportunity, and justice for each person. These democratic principles have helped protect the individual, reducing oppression and discrimination on various levels within the society relative to race, ethnicity, gender, class, occupation, or other social affiliations.

Yet, on the negative side, an over fixation on “individual rights” encourages a mere outer freedom to do what one wants that can make people more aggressive and acquisitive, lacking an inner dimension of spiritual search. Outer freedom without a corresponding inner aspiration can become a license for the ego to do what it wishes, even if it causes eventual harm to others or to the environment. It often becomes a hectic pursuit of the material world, a running after the external allures of Maya.

The American Declaration of Independence is a very interesting document in this regard. It is based upon the three principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the inalienable rights of man. Life and liberty are our inalienable rights to be sure, but the “pursuit of happiness” taken only at an outer level easily promotes an external seeking of enjoyment, pleasure and power. What you pursue or run after usually runs away from you! This pursuit of happiness or desire has given rise to the current commercial society that in many ways is becoming increasingly vulgar and destructive. Each individual tends to seek his or her rights, which easily lends itself to self-promotion over the greater good of all.

Dharma, on the other hand, teaches us that life, liberty and happiness are our inherent nature and can be found within ourselves, without the need for external seeking or accumulation of possessions. Dharma promotes freedom from any sort of outer dependency. This includes freedom from commercial exploitation and an inner orientation to life, which implies a spiritual search. Our role in life is not simply to gain what is due to us, as if the universe owed us a favor, but to help in the well-being of the world as a whole, which is part of our own greater nature. Our place in life is not simply to take, as if we existed in isolation, but to give, reflecting our relationship with the whole and the wholeness of who we really are.

Dharma and Duty

Dharma indicates duty, obligation, and responsibility as well as rights and freedom. Rights can never exist without corresponding duties and obligations. Unless rights and duties are balanced, the society itself will become imbalanced and disturbed. Each one of us no doubt has our individual place in the universe that must be honored and a destiny of our own to be fulfilled, but we must also respect the universe upon which we depend and realize that our well being can never be secured at the cost of that of others.

In this regard, Dharma is connected to the idea of giving, offering and sacrifice –what Vedic teachings call yajna. Yajna is symbolized by a fire sacrifice. Fire can only burn if given an offering of the proper fuel. Our place in life is to make the proper offering so that the universal fire of Dharma can illuminate both ourselves and the world around us. Ultimately, we must ourselves become an offering for all, rather than holding to our personal existence or private property as final.

Yajna says that our lives should consist of worship and honoring, including relative the Divine, our ancestors, other living creatures, all human beings, and the spiritual heritage of the entire human race. If each one of us acts for the good of all, we will all certainly flourish. If we act only for the good of ourselves, our family or our particular community, we will breed long term division, inequality and violence.

Broader Human and Universal Rights

According to the principles of Dharma, it is not only individuals that have rights but all aspects of the social organism and the world of nature as a whole. Families have rights, as do communities, including the right not to be interfered with or to be broken up. Cultures have rights not to be denigrated or exploited, even in the name of progress. Today in the name of individual human rights many traditional communities and cultures are being devalued and denigrated, if not eliminated, often paving the way for commercial exploitation.

The non-human world also has its rights. Animals have the right to live without human interference or exploitation and to have their natural space to move freely. Plants do so as well, as the plant also has consciousness and feeling. The world of nature does not exist solely for our own personal advantage as human beings. Each creature has its own existence that we must honor. Ecosystems also have a right to remain as they are and evolve according to their own energies, without being turned merely into human habitations or recreation sites.

When human rights do not respect the rights of other creatures, they invariably lead to conflict and problems in human society as well in the world of nature. The greater life organism of the biosphere gets damaged, which means that human beings will also not have a harmonious natural environment that can provide for health and well-being. This is what we are seeing today in which our environment has been damaged by making human needs, desires and profits predominate over the natural rights of other creatures and the sanctity of the Earth itself – in which we are failing in our duty to the universe in the blind pursuit of personal enjoyment.

Dharmic Pluralism

Dharma reflects a pluralistic view of life which honors unity in multiplicity. It recognizes that there is a diversity of human beings, with each individual being unique in one way or another. There cannot be one job all for all, one medicine for all, or even one religion or spiritual path for all.

Therefore, there should be a corresponding diversity in society in terms of culture, philosophy, art and spirituality so that each person or group has something that their particular Dharma can relate to and find fulfillment in. According to Dharma, unity lies not in uniformity of name, form or action but in the inner freedom that allows the individual to move through and beyond all outer forms to the inner essence that is one with all.

Dharma and Relativism

Dharma holds that we must look at each individual and circumstance according the particular situations, energies and capacities involved. For this reason, a Dharmic approach remains flexible and does not seek to impose any absolutes or rigid rules upon humanity. For example, if you are driving down a road you cannot follow a rigid set of rules or formulas; you have to actually see the movement of traffic moment by moment. Similarly, Dharma rests upon perception more so than any doctrine.

Yet Dharma is far removed from an ‘anything goes’ attitude or a mere moral relativism. Dharma says that there is a right and appropriate way to do each thing, whether it is right way to eat, a right way to breathe, or a right and respectful way to organize our societies, reflecting individual circumstances as well as the broader principles existence. This way of right action cannot be reduced to a fixed pattern but is not without enduring principles either. Dharma requires consciousness in its application and cannot be turned into a standardized creed or mechanical set of rules.

Dharma and Secularism

Dharma does not imply a rule of religion over life or society. Dharma and secularism, the idea that church and state should be separate, share certain attitudes, values and concerns. Dharma holds that a government should not be used to promote one religious belief or another. It holds to freedom of religion and says that the individual should have the freedom to pursue their own Dharma in life, free of control by the state or by any external institution.

Yet Dharma is different from secularism in certain ways as well. Dharma regards all life as sacred and so cannot accept a merely commercial view of life, which is the tendency of so-called modern secular cultures. Dharma says that we must respect the sacred aspect of human life and try to make our social actions into something respectful of the greater universe. Dharma can project a spiritual vision without violating the principle of individual freedom. This is because it sees the spiritual path as a matter of individual practice, an expression of freedom, not something enforced from the outside.

Dharma and Religion

Religion is often translated as Dharma in Indian thought today. This reflects another side of its meaning. Dharma like religion states that we should recognize the universal and the eternal and base our human culture on a spiritual goal or higher consciousness. However, Dharma cannot be reduced to one particular religion, book, teacher, revelation or another. Dharma is not based upon belief and does not seek to spread, much less impose, a single belief upon all humanity. Dharma accepts freedom of religion as well as a freedom of the individual not to follow any religion at all. Above all, it places individual spiritual practice over any overt religious institutionalism.

Dharma places the need to act for the good of all above any religious labels or differences. Dharma says it is what we do that matters, not what we call ourselves, and that truth ultimately transcends all names and boundaries. Dharma says that the supreme truth is impersonal, apaurusheya, and cannot be reduced to a human formulation or representative that all must follow, however helpful these may be for certain groups or individuals.

Yet a dharmic approach does recognize that different individuals, groups and communities may want to follow different spiritual and religious paths – which need not all be the same – and which may have their own respective practices, formulations and values. Dharma accepts pluralism in religion as in all of life, including the freedom of individuals to differ and disagree on matters of religion, as long as they do not turn these differences into a pretext for conflict and violence.

At a higher level, Dharma embraces Yoga as its Moksha Dharma or teaching about the liberation of the soul, which is a matter of sadhana or inner spiritual practice through the science and art of meditation.

Dharmic Values and Ethics

Dharma rests upon certain clearly defined universal values and ethics. These are not simply dictates, laws or commandments but a recognition of how life works and how we can attune ourselves to the consciousness of the greater universe. Such dharmic values are perhaps most simply defined in the basic principles behind Yoga practice of non-violence (ahimsa), truthfulness (satya), self-control (Brahmacharya), non-stealing (asteya) and non-acquisitiveness (aparigraha).

There is no living being that wants to be hurt. We ourselves do not want to be hurt, so honoring the universal dharma, the universal culture as it were, we do not seek to harm anyone. Similarly, we do not want to be deceived. There is no creature that wants to be deceived, so honoring the universal dharma we tell the truth. Dharmic ethics therefore are a matter of universal courtesy, as it were, not only towards others but also towards ourselves. Without such dharmic ethics we cannot have access to the cosmic mind or the greater civilization of the universe, which is one of consciousness, not merely of science and technology.

Towards a New Dharmic Movement

Today humanity is suffering from a global crisis, which is not simply a lack of resources but a crisis of values. Today we must learn to coexist and pluralism, not only at a political level but also at cultural and religious levels, is essential. We cannot survive as a planet by promoting national, cultural or religious boundaries as final, as that is to deny the greater unity and value of humanity as a whole. A new vision of Dharma can help us in this direction because Dharma does not divide human beings up into opposing camps. It says we are all of one family and must all eventually come to the same truth and self-realization, albeit according to our own path and in our own time and manner.

Great modern teachers from India like Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Dayananda (of the Arya Samaj) and Swami Vivekananda, and many others from all over the world have looked into and provided their insights about creating a new social order or Dharma. Many Buddhist teachers, like the Dalai Lama are also promoting a greater dharma for humanity.

Ultimately, there needs to be a new renaissance in dharmic thinking. This implies a great deal of questioning, deep thought and profound meditation – an endeavor that may take decades to come to real fruition. It must rest upon an uncompromising pursuit of truth, not simply an attempt at social accommodation, appeasement or pleasing everyone. A new dharmic order is not a simple matter of a new political party but an infusion of higher values into our social interactions, which means a new approach to politics that considers not only the outer human being but the inner essence of the soul.

Unfortunately, the political world today tends to rely upon slogans, vote banks and appeals to mass fears and desires, looking forward only to the next election. The personality of the political leader is made more important than any deeper vision for humanity. Political parties today are lacking in any real idealism and vision and quickly compromise in order to gain power or influence. Even modern education is imed at training a person more in a particular technical profession, rather than providing a well rounded education that includes an examination as to what is the ultimate meaning of life. Clearly Dharma must be brought back into education and into social service for it to affect society as a whole.

A new world order defined by Dharma – not simply by religion, politics, or commercial concerns – is crucial for our way forward as a species and can help promote and preserve the good in all. It is important that a regard for the universal Dharma is brought into both our personal lives and into our societies. Otherwise our civilization may continue to flounder and is unlikely to find peace or harmony with life. This is a matter first of all of upholding Dharmic principles and practices in how we live and think. The work begins with each one of us.

Egypt and Hungary: When Majorities Attack

2012-01-13T12:49:00.007-05:00

You can fool most of the people most of the time. And, really, that's all it takes.

Most of the people in Egypt support forms of political Islam that are little, if any, different from the theocratic totalitarianism advocated by Al Qaeda. That statement is not based on "Islamophobia", rather it is based on public opinion polls conducted in Egypt, and also on the recent free and fair elections that were held throughout the country.

The following opinion poll results from Egypt have been discussed previously in this blog (here, and in more detail here) but I will give the highlights again: In 2010, the Pew Research Center found that 75% of Egyptian Muslims (who make up 90% of the population) had a "favorable" view of the Muslim Brotherhood, 62% believed that Egyptian law should "strictly" follow the Quran, 95% felt that Islam should play a "large role" in Egyptian politics, 82% supported death-by-stoning for the crime of of adultery, and 84% were in favor putting to death anyone who attempts to leave the religion of Islam.

Then in late 2011 when Egypt held it's first post-Mubarak election, over 2/3 of the votes went to candidates for either the Muslim Brotherhood or the even more radical Salafists.

And speaking of elections, when Hungarians had their most recent chance to cast their votes in the national election of 2010, 52.7% of those who did so voted for the proto-fascist Fidesz party. (This is just slightly lower than the 52.9% of American voters who cast their ballots for Barack Obama in 2008.) Fidesz formed a coalition government with the Christian Democratic Peoples Party, a nationalistic and socially conservative party closely allied with the Catholic church. Together these two parties control over 2/3 of the Hungarian parliament. Using that democratically elected supermajority, the new government quickly passed over 200 new laws and also made sweeping changes to the Hungarian Constitution.

The newly revised Hungarian Constitution, which went into effect on January 1st, explicitly lists which religions are "recognized" by the state. These, not surprisingly, are limited to the Catholic Church, a small number of Protestant sects, and Judaism. Previous Hungarian law had already established the precedent of "officially recognized religions", but the new law took the old list of over 350 different religions and reduced it to 14! The new Constitution also explicitly recognizes Christianity as the "national" religion of Hungary.

The Economist, that normally staid voice of of "the extreme centre", recently described (here) the current Hungarian government using terms like "iron discipline", "rubber stamp" and "relentless centralization". But the same article tempers that criticism with a sentence that is far more ominous than it's author had intended: "Fidesz won power in a fair election."

Further reading:

History:

The Society of the Muslim Brothers by Richard P. Mitchell
The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise Of an Islamic Mass Movement 1928-1942 Brynjar Lia
The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West Lorenzo Vindino
In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1940 Paul A. Hanebrink
Fascists Michael Mann (devotes attention to Hungary's own home-grown fascist movements)
A History of Fascism Stanley G. Payne (also has useful info on Hungarian fascism)

Current events:

Islamist parties lead Egypt polls Al Jazeera
Former President Carter praises Egypt elections BostonGlobe.Com
Egypt Faces a Hardline Islamic Future Der Speigel
Hungary’s Constitutional Revolution at HungarianWatch.Com
The long march of Fidesz The Economist
Pagans and Minority Religions Under Hungary’s Authoritarian New Constitution at the Wild Hunt blog at Patheos

Sadly, sometimes this is what democracy looks like:

If Romney is "King of the Hill", then Ron Paul is Dale Gribble.

2012-01-05T12:12:00.003-05:00

"The ignorance of the new atheists MATTERS"

2012-01-01T12:18:00.005-05:00

I just read Joseph R. Hoffmann's first blog post of 2012: Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011), wherein Hoffmann, perhaps prematurely, announces the death of New Atheism and writes its obituary. In my humble opinion, you should read it, too.

Three overarching themes tie Hoffmann's essay together:

(1) The New Atheism is characterized by a profound ignorance not only of religion itself, but also of anthropology, archaeology and sociology. (I would add history, philosophy and humanism.) Moreover, Hoffmann emphasizes that it is this ignorance, and this alone, that makes New Atheism still worth paying attention to.

(2) The phenomenon of New Atheism essentially boils down to Richard Dawkins playing to an American crowd, by peddling to the yanks that which is "very old news" in England, where unbelief, irreligion, agnosticism, and atheism (as well as, and often combined with, active disinterest in religion generally) are far more prevalent than is actual belief in Christianity (in any form).

(3) The other thing that dominates Hoffmann's essay is a number of very nicely drawn character sketches of the American "poster-pasters" pimping for Dawkinsian atheism "over here".

Two of my favorite parts are Hoffmann's observation that Christopher Hitchens was "the only true intellectual and by far the best-read of the group," and this little gem: "The new atheism was as American as apple pie, which was invented in fourteenth century England. Just try finding apple pie in twenty first century England."

Lastly, the quote that comprises the title of this post comes from Hoffmann's closing two paragraphs:

"The ignorance of the new atheists matters–or I would stop complaining at once–because it makes almost impossible the work of serious religion scholars who have no commitment to belief, but who happen to feel that the study of religion belongs to and is inestimably important to the study of history and culture.
"That task is not helped by activism disguised as judgement, opinion hiding behind tangential scholarly pursuits, or defenses of science and reason that are inherently unreasonable in themselves."

Michael Psellos and "Ho Ellênikos Logos"

2011-12-27T17:06:00.011-05:00

"And if my ethos has fitted itself to differing occasions,
others may philosophize about that; it was spontaneous with me."

This ongoing series, "Forsaking Christ To Follow Plato", is dedicated to addressing the many questions surrounding the religious identity of the 11th century Byzantine philosopher, Imperial advisor, esotericist, antiquarian, and all-around world-class polymath Michael Psellos. (Links to the first four installments of this series can be found at the bottom of this post.) The view from thirty thousand feet can be summarized by the following bullet points:

1. Psellos himself insisted repeatedly that he was a Christian.
2. Many (probably most) modern-day Byzantists concur that Psellos was a Christian.
3. A great many of Psellos' contemporaries, however, repeatedly questioned the sincerity and orthodoxy of Psellos' Christianity and even accused him of being a "Hellene", that is, a Pagan apostate.
4. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Psellos' own writings provide ample justification for the suspicions voiced by his contemporaries.
5. Despite any "scholarly consensus" that may or may not exist to the contrary, respected voices among modern-day Byzantinists have seriously questioned Psellos' Christianity, and some have gone so far as to declare unambiguously that he was not a Christian. Three Byzantinists who have raised the most serious doubts about Psellos' Christianity are Nigel Guy Wilson, Anthony Kaldellis, and Niketas Siniossoglou.

This new post focuses on one particular text by Psellos: the "Encomium" (ἐγκώμιον) he dedicated to his mother. Psellos' mother had been not merely pious and orthodox in her own religiosity, but had embraced an especially puritanical variety of Christianity. The work in question is ostensibly written in praise (as is proper for an "encomium") of this monkishly ascetic Christian women, but it is in fact largely taken up by Psellos defending his own interest in and dedication to "secular" learning in general and Pagan philosophy in particular, that is, his life-long devotion to Ho Ellênikos Logos, the Pagan Greek thought of antiquity.

Two English translations of Psellos' "Encomium" have recently been published, and this is especially noteworthy considering the paucity of English translations of Psellos' work. One translation is by Anthony Kaldellis (who has already figured prominently in previous posts in this series) as part of his book Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters: The Byzantine Family of Michael Psellos, and the other is by Jeffrey Walker, Professor and Chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas (link). This latter translation is used here since it is readily available in full online (see link below).

First I excerpt a large part of Walker's Introduction, and this is followed by Walker's English translation of the closing five sections (27-31) of Psellos' "Encomium". The notes [in square brackets] are taken from both Walker and Kaldellis, while the numbers (in parentheses) found in Walker's Introduction refer (usually) to sections of the Encomium itself. The interested reader is strongly encouraged to directly consult both Walker's and Kaldellis' editions.

Michael Psellos: the Encomium of His Mother, translation with introduction and notes by Jeffrey Walker, University of Texas (This is an online version of the translation published in Advances in the History of Rhetoric vol. 8 [2005], 239-313.)

From the Introduction by Jeffrey Walker:

The extraordinary eleventh-century scholar, teacher, rhetor, and courtier Michael Psellos is one of the most important intellectual figures in the 1,000-year history of Byzantium, but he is scarcely known to students and scholars of rhetoric today. The chief reason is that almost none of his many surviving works have been translated into English (or any other modern language). The only important work by Psellos available in English is the Chronographia — an acknowledged masterpiece of Byzantine historiography, and in itself a rhetorical and literary masterpiece as well — in which he portrays fourteen Byzantine emperors from Basil II to Michael VII Doukas (976-1078), a series of (after Basil) mostly inept fools who brought the empire to disaster, and most of whom he had personally known or served. In the course of that work he also sketches and implicitly justifies his own intellectual and pedagogical project, which was to reunite rhetoric and philosophy, and to revive the whole spectrum of secular (pagan Greek) learning, as a basis for wise political deliberation and the better guidance of the state. Famously, he claims to have singlehandedly revived the study of Plato and Aristotle — a statement that, while surely an exaggeration, probably also bears an element of truth . . . .

This speech is also important — in the second place — because in it Psellos makes a case for his own life and career as a “Byzantine sophist.” I have argued this point at length elsewhere,[6] and will not belabor it here, except to note that a key to understanding this speech is the concept of the “figured problem,” as discussed in “Hermogenes” On Invention (4.13), a text with which any well-educated Byzantine would have been familiar, and which Psellos himself summarized in a verse synopsis for the young Michael Doukas. The “figured problem,” in essence, is a discourse (or, for “Hermogenes,” a declamation exercise) in which the ostensible subject-matter of the speech serves as a foil for something else, primarily by way of irony (saying the opposite of what one means), indirection (making arguments that lead to different conclusions than the point supposedly being proved), or allusion (tacitly referring to things that cannot be openly mentioned, or that one lacks the freedom of speech to mention). All these methods of “figured” argument are at work in Psellos’ Encomium of His Mother. While praising her character and deeds — her striking personal beauty and her spiritual and intellectual excellence, her supervision of the education that enabled him to rise from obscurity to the imperial circle, and her “saintly” later life and swerve into monasticism — Psellos implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) defends his inability to approve the Christian asceticism that in his view destroyed her, and which he characterizes as “apostasy,” while also defending his unswerving devotion to secular learning (and the secular, civic life it informs) as a staying-true to his mother’s original gift to him, and even as a truer form of devotion to God. Most of the lengthy peroration is a “confession” of this continuing devotion, from which, as he says, “I will never be torn away” (27). As a defense of his life and career, Psellos’ Encomium of His Mother can be placed in a series of such defenses — or defenses of rhetoric — beginning at least with Isocrates’ Antidosis and continuing through such late-antique discourses as Aelius Aristides’ Defense of Rhetoric against Plato.

The speech is valuable in other ways as well. It provides some glimpses into what the experience of the late-classical paideia was like, at least for a precocious Byzantine schoolboy like the young Michael Psellos. It also provides some glimpses into Byzantine family life, and, perhaps most importantly, it gives us a rare portrait of the life of a highly intelligent, intellectually ambitious Byzantine woman from outside the imperial family, or for that matter below the upper ranks of the Constantinopolitan aristocracy. As Psellos tells us, his mother — her name was Theodota — came from a respectable but completely undistinguished family (2), while his father’s family “had once been raised to senatorial rank, but had not prospered after that” (4). In a letter Psellos says “I cannot put on airs, and must treat silversmiths as equals.”[8] Apparently the family had fallen from its former patrician rank to the social level of guild craftsmen, or what might be called the Constantinopolitan bourgeoisie. The story of Theodota, then, is at least in part the story of what happens to an intellectually gifted Byzantine woman in such circumstances: she is not permitted to go to school, but she educates herself; and the only kind of learning that a woman in her position may pursue without attracting blame is religious learning. This, abetted by an emotional crisis at the death of her daughter, leads her into an extreme asceticism — derived, most probably, from Symeon the New Theologian, who had at that time become the object of a cult[9] — and that asceticism, eventually, brings her to what looks like death by anorexia. (It is this Symeonesque asceticism in particular that Psellos wishes to portray as an “apostasy.”) Theodota may look to us like a “Shakespeare’s Sister” kind of figure, though she is hardly as passive a victim as that. Notably, Psellos says that she taught him the intellectual equality of women with men (25) . . . .

The secular paideia inherited from late antiquity, with its pagan roots and (mostly) pagan literary canon, was conventionally referred to in Byzantium as the “external learning” (ho thurathen logos, literally “the learning from outside the door”), or the “external wisdom,” which was conventionally placed in opposition to “our doctrine” or “the better philosophy,” meaning Christian doctrine. Since for centuries the secular paideia had remained essential to training functionaries for the imperial bureaucracy, it had survived in a more or less cooperative symbiosis with Christian thought, and this arrangement worked well as long as the “external wisdom” was clearly the subordinate member of the pair (and was indulged in only as much as was necessary, i.e. for useful technical skills). But the secular humanist revival over which Psellos was presiding increased the possibilities for tension. Psellos was compelled repeatedly to defend himself on charges of paganism, or of being more devoted to Plato than to Christ. His successor as “Consul of the Philosophers,” the less circumspect (and less rhetorically skilled) John Italos, would be tried and anathematized by Alexios I for the crime of submitting the Christian mysteries to Aristotelian analysis. This climate of increasing tension, then, is an essential part of the rhetorical situation in which Psellos composes the Encomium of His Mother, and defends his way of life and his devotion to philosophy and rhetoric . . . .

From Walker's Translation of Psellos' "Encomium":

27.
So I am persuaded, O mother, that even in death you have taken careful thought for your son, and I have grasped this fact by many sure signs. But as for me, since I oppose your way of righteousness and resist its rule, I do not at all practice the philosophy dear to you. Rather, some destiny I do not know has seized me from the beginning and has fastened me to my books, and I will never be torn away from them.

For the art of discourse holds me in its spell, and I have been exceedingly in love with its management of cases and its flowering beauty, and like the bees I fly to the meadows of reasoned eloquence: and some of the flowers I cut, and from others I drink the nectar of a phrase, and in my beehive I make honey. The turning of the globe does not permit me to be still, but compels me to inquire what is its motion, whence it originates, what is its nature, what are its cycles, how is it ordered, how is it divided, how large are the segments of its lines, what are their angles, their joint ascensions, equivalencies and obliquities, what are their magnitudes and of what nature, how are their movements produced and how many of them there are, and whether all things are made from fire or have some other nature. I am moved as well by the science of bodies at rest, and I cannot fail to reflect upon the extension of magnitude, or to observe the exactness of the proof, how the starting axioms derive directly from the mind but the premises derive directly from the axioms without intermediate terms, how everything is established and how specified, what is the proportional, what is the incommensurate, what is the rational magnitude, what is the disproportional, what is the commensurate, what sorts of lengths and powers there are, and the rotation of the solid. Nor does the first and immaterial domain permit me to be idle. I have marveled at its relation to all things, and of all things to it, its finiteness and infinitude, and how from these two all other things derive, and how the idea, the soul, and nature are reducible to numbers, one according to innate conception, one according to what coincides with reason, and one according to what corresponds to the natural order. And whence comes natural reason and what is perfect in it, and what is the symmetrical, the ordered, the beautiful, the self-sufficient, the equal, the identical, the pure, the simple, the paradigm, the origin? What is the generation of living beings, what is the spiritual, what are the natural properties of numbers up to ten, how is a triad produced, what is the procession, and how does it extend through all of the divine becoming?

Music too attracts me with its ineffable charms, and in a certain way I have grown up with it and made it my own. I have no superficial understanding of this art: I have studied not only its types of diction, measures, and playing techniques, but I have inquired as well into its values, its effects, its occasions, and the essence of its rhythms, and which of them are correct and which are not, and what is the source of their beauty, and which is connate with the life of the soul.

I do not only inquire into the various types of knowledge, but ask as well whether some rushing streams may flow from them. And the transcendent wisdom — which governs the others, gives their basic principles, interprets their axioms, is purely immaterial, and is placed after physics — I do not merely investigate, but also honor and worship with awe, whether one wishes to call this art that oversees the logical process dialectic, or wisdom simply, since the more recent sages have reassigned the name of dialectic to a branch of logic.

28.
I admire syllogistic demonstrations also, not only those that deduce a conclusion from what is inherent in the starting premises, but also those that produce inductive inferences. I study sophisms, just enough not to be taken in by them, and not to draw the conclusion that knowledge and wisdom are the same, or that wise men are knowledgeable by virtue of their knowledge while knowledgeable men are wise by virtue of their wisdom, or that man alone is an animal if man alone laughs and all that laugh are animals. These things attract me, and still more the comprehension of occult matters: what is providence and destiny and whether the hereafter already is extant, what is unmoved, what moves itself, and whether the soul receives into itself anything from its birth, or nothing at all.

I wonder also about the common living being, whether it retains the knowledges of the soul forever, and whether immortality is an essential property of the soul, or comes over it in some other way. Mostly I have philosophized that it is indeed immortal, from its similarity to the Deity, from its non-admission of contraries, from its return, and from its movement and illumination in dreams. And I ask as well whether a bond exists between the soul and the body (which the first has entered as a secondary form of life), what is its mixture with the irrational, what is its ultimate end in the resurrection, what is its judgment, what is its fate, whence does it come to be, what is it, what can it do, how many functions does it perform, what is its mixture with the mind, what is its return, and in sum (lest I enumerate each point about it), I have been entirely preoccupied by these questions.

But I do not limit my curiosity to that either. Rather, when I hear the astrologers speak as if doing violence to some of the stars and all but offering sacrifices to others, I wonder where this difference in treatment has arisen, or how one’s birth is governed and determined according to the stars’ configuration. I have rejected, then, these ideas as neither evident nor true, and I have profited enough from dabbling in this art to bring a case against it on the basis of my own knowledge. I have denied that anyone’s life is molded and remolded by the stars, and I have discredited the character-types and the fixed signs, and the entrances and lodgings of the heavenly bodies. I grant the power of truly predicting the future neither to constellations nor conjunctions of the stars, nor to the voices of birds, nor to their flights, cries, or movements, nor to meaningless echoes, nor to alien doctrines, nor to anything that Hellenic thought [Ho Ellênikos Logos, "that is, the pagan Greek thought of antiquity" (from Walker's note #261)] was led astray by. But if I should study the precision of the canons of the astronomical sphere, this rather is the love of beauty and the love of wisdom combined; and if I should inquire about the origins and fountainheads of things, this too is desirable to contemplative souls.

I know the sacred art and what it is, and I have crowned it in wool and sent it away. I have carefully studied the secret powers attributed to stones and herbs, and have utterly rejected their superstitious use. Amulets I detest, both diamond and coral, and I laugh at sacred stone objects dropped from heaven. I consider it monstrous to proclaim an alteration in the order of the universe, of all that has been beautifully arranged by the providence of God. I vehemently denounce propitiations, purifications, mystic symbols, naming-formulas, movements said to be god-inspired, the ethereal maintainer [Tôi aitheriôi sunochei,. See, for example, sunocheô, “travel together in a chariot,” and the charioteer in Plato’s myth of the soul in Phaedrus.], the empyrean, the leonine fountain [a reference to Aklepios, the "lion-holder"], the first father [the "first father" is found in the Chaldean Oracles], the second, the iunxes [another reference to the Chaldean Oracles], the guides of the universe [Tois kosmagois: a type of Chaldean divinity], Hecate [the central Deity of the Chaldean Oracles], the Hecatesians, the undergirding [Tôi hupezôkoti, “undergirding, belt, membrane” (according to Walker's note #269): the boundary separating the Celestial from the terrestrial in Chaldean theology], and things that are ridiculous even to name. But if I would inquire about eternity and time, nature, contemplation, and the One, and perception and memory and the mixing and blending of opposites, and whether the objects of thought are established in the mind or are external to it, it seems to me that I am necessarily engaged in a philosophical activity.

29.
I should, then, devote myself to God alone, especially now that I have renounced the world, but my vocation, the soul’s uncontrollable love for all knowledge, and the constraint imposed upon me by my students have persuaded me to dwell upon these things as well. And you would know, O mother, just what I wish to say, as you are pure soul. But my speech is addressed to others: I speak not only to men, but also to God and the angels. I am acquainted with all Hellenic books, and (I might add) the barbarian ones as well, all those that Orpheus, Zoroaster, or Ammon the Egyptian wrote, and all that the Parmenideses and Empedocleses composed in verse — for I pass by the Platos and the Aristotles and all their contemporaries and successors who labored at philosophical discourses — and they have written on subjects both effable and ineffable, and I have read all of their theology and their treatises on nature, and have admired the depth of their thought, and wondered at the exceedingly careful development of their argumentation. But if I have observed anything contrary to our doctrine, even if explained with an exacting demonstration, and even if covered with every wisdom and grace, I have rejected it as utter nonsense and absurdity. I pay no mind to their better doctrines, but my soul’s ambition is moved at least to know what their doctrines were.

For there are indeed unfailing treasuries of wisdom with us, depths of doctrine and beauties of thought, should anyone want them, and a spontaneous blossoming of style without excessive artifice. And one might ask, what is divine revelation, and what is intelligible and what is conceivable? What is the stream that flows from the wellspring of the universe, and what is the true substance drawn from the One? What is the name of God and what is signified by it, and what is the whole and what a part, and which should be attributed to God, or neither? What things are intelligible and which are conceivable, and which are theological symbols, and what is each one? What is the wheel, what is electrum, what is pure gold, the vapor, the mounting of the cloud, the throne, the river? What is the flying scythe, the axe, the tree, the stump, the cedar, the oak? What are the angels’ names? What are the rituals for us? What is communion, anointment, the lamp, the stairway, the pillars, the uplifting love and essence of the good and beautiful from which all things arise and toward which they ascend? What is the perfumed bride, the door, the net, the heat, the sun, the vineyard, the vigil, and what is apostasy from these things?

And if someone dismisses these things as overly lofty and celestial and goes to our shoemakers or tentmakers, or the weavers of nets, and wishes to take careful note of everything they say, then he will know that other things strike the many like what is projected on the senses by the sun — but with these things the light is dim and obscure, like faint starlight, which only the mind can see and sensation cannot not bring near, for each of them brims with mystery and secret initiation [This is a reference to Socrates' "metaphor of the Sun" found in Book VI of Plato's Republic, 507b-509c. Also see Plotinus' Fourth Ennead, tractate three, paragraph eleven].

For not one of them is inaccessible to contemplation, not even the humblest thing, not the upper room furnished for a supper, not the jug of water, not the closing of doors and the apparition of the Word. Even the disciple Didymus is subject to contemplation, as he is doubtful, and so too are the pair that run together, and those that run ahead. Neither is the fish-hook without interpretation, nor the fish drawn up from the sea, nor the gold stater, nor the number of the fish. But neither are the names of the apostles without significance, nor the Forerunner’s girdle and garment of camel-hair — but, to sum it all up in brief, I would say that the whole evangelical discourse has been endowed with esoteric meaning that the many can scarcely perceive. With these things, then, I shall anoint my head and wash my soul, and I shall have no need of Hellenic purifications.

30.
But since I have been allotted the sort of life that does not suffice for itself alone, but is placed at others’ disposal and permits them to draw for themselves from something like a winebowl overflowing with many streams,[286] for that reason I have also taken up secular learning,[Walker's note #287: "Sophias tês thurathen: literally 'wisdom from outside the door,' secular or pagan wisdom/philosophy."] not only the parts that are theoretical, but also those that descend to history and poetry. And in fact I speak to some of my students about poems, and about Homer and Menander and Archilochus, and Orpheus and Musaeus, and as many female poets as there were, Sibyls and Sappho the songstress, Theano, and the wise Egyptian woman. [Kaldellis states matter of factly that "the wise Egyptian woman" is none other than "the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia", while Walker concedes only that it is "possibly Hypatia". ]

Many also press me earnestly about the words in these poets, asking what is akratisma, what is ariston, what is hesperisma, what is dorpis and hê en tois deipnois isaia, which ones composed in verse and which employed the style of prose, what is dancing according to Homer, and generally what is the heroic life according to that poet? And then again what is opsophagia,[296] what is poluteleia, what is the use of fruit from the upper branches of fruit-trees, what is the earliest event of the Trojan War, what are nectar, ambrosia, and propoma, what is the “underground geranium,” and what is genesis that takes place in the earth? I won’t mention how many topics they propose to me — who is Alexis, and Menander, and Krobylos the parasite, and Klesaphos, and whether there is anyone else said to be good at poetry.

Many compel me also to discuss the care of bodies, and they demand that I supply them with a treatment and a diagnosis. On account of these concerns I have given the whole art a philosophical examination, so that I need not approach each case individually. And not only with words but with their hands they bring me back to the Italian wisdom[301] — I do not mean the Pythagorean philosophy, but simply that public-spirited and materialistic art, that has something to say about private and public lawsuits, laborious procedural demonstrations, slavery and freedom, legal and illegal marriages and the gifts and benefits involved, the gradations of family-relations and contracts both military and civil, what a pledge is, what force a guarantee has in a legal proceeding, when a horse kicks or a cow butts or a dog bites what responsibility the master bears for the harm they have done, what the legally binding rule is, why an alias is invented, the distribution of an inheritance, the ancestor and the descendant, the legitimate child and the illegitimate, what statute applies in each case, what an assault is and how many parts it has, and how much time is set aside for the trying of each action. Then having brought me up against these matters, just as in philosophy, they exact accounts of what has been legislated.

Nor do they omit inquiring about the measurement of the world, how large the uninhabited parts are, and how large the inhabited fifth part is. So I must describe for them the geography of the whole earth, correct or fill in the deficiencies in their geographic table, and discuss whatever Apelles, Bion, and Eratosthenes accurately wrote about these matters in their treatises. I have not stopped interpreting the myths of the Hellenes allegorically for them, and in this way too they pull me about and tear me apart, being in love with my tongue and my soul, as if it possesses a knowledge more uncommonly rich than that of others.

31.
O mother, this life of mine has been purified, and the other life waits in store, that life toward which I have long been hastening. Although I am still caught with many hooks, with the emperor holding me tight, contending with my superiors about me, and prevailing through his extraordinary dignity, his splendor, and his preeminence among and above all others, how many both now and earlier have partaken of the same learning, or attained communion with it! For if both the monastic habit and cloak seem incompatible in some way to both the emperor and those around him, this has not been only my innovation, and it seems most sweet somehow not only to those in public life, but also to most of those who live apart from it. And if my ethos has fitted itself to differing occasions, others may philosophize about that; it was spontaneous with me. Be gracious from on high to these wanderings of mine, and moreover divert and restore me to the ascent to God, and grant me a pure delight in the evangelical life, the life concealed in God. And then, when you have permitted me to drink from the stream of virtue as much of that river as is available to me and as much as I can hold, and after I have been transformed, accept me and fill me, with your freedom of speech before God and your prayers, from the first and divine fountain of thought.

Forsaking Christ to Follow Plato (Or, Was Michael Psellos a Christian?)

Part One: Mostly Basil Tatakis' Byzantine Philosophy, with a little help from Jaroslav Pelikan, Katerina Ierandiokonou, John Myendorff, and even C.M. Woodhouse
Part Two: N.G. Wilson's Scholars of Byzantium
Part Three: Anthony Kaldellis' The Argument of Psellos' Chronographia
Part Four: Michael Psellos and the Chaldean Oracles
Part Five: Michael Psellos and "Ho Ellênikos Logos" (this is the post you are reading right now)

If you masturbate, Satan will teach you Magic. Part Deux.

2011-12-23T12:34:00.004-05:00

The twelfth century account of diabolical magic given by Guibert de Nogent is fascinating for several reasons, but what I want to emphasize is the non-harmful and even beneficial qualities of the magic taught by Satan, according to Guibert's account. But before giving my own analysis on this point, first let's look at the second primary example of Satanic magic given by Guibert, which comes just after the very interesting story that concerned us in the previous post on this subject:

I will give another instance which had a similar beginning, but a happier end. A certain clerk in the town of Beauvais lived by the art of copying, one whom I knew myself, since he did work at Fly and was engaged for this very book. Afterwards, when talking with another sorcerer at the castle of Breteuil, he was told something of this kind; "If it were made worth my while, I could teach you something by which you might get gifts of money every day without any help from man." He asks what he must do for it. The sorcerer says he must propitiate the citizen of the lower world, that is the Devil. "With what victim?" says he. "With a cock," says the other; "but the egg from which it was hatched must have been laid by the hen on Jupiter's day in the month of March. After roasting this, take it, just cooked, and with the spit still in it, and go to the nearest, fishpond But whatever you hear, see, or feel there, do not dare to call upon the Blessed Mary or any of the saints." "I will do so," says he. Then a wondrous thing! They come to the place at night bringing the victim suitable for such a god. As one called on the devil and his wicked pupil held the cock, the devil in a whirlwind suddenly stood by them and seized it. Then he who had been taken there, in his fright called upon the Lady Mary. When the Devil heard the name of that powerful Lady, he fled with his cock, being unable, however, to carry it off, and it was found by some fishermen next day on an island of the fishpond. O royal, sweet name, so dreaded in the wicked regions! Now the sorcerer was angry with the clerk for calling on so great a one in such a matter. But the other was driven by repentance to Lisiard, Archdeacon of Beauvais, my uncle, a man learned in every branch, wise, courtly and wellknown. And having confessed what he had done, he humbled himself, as Lisiard ordered him, to penitence and prayer. Let these instances of what I heard in the monastery, suffice. Next after speaking of the manner of my election, in the beginning of another book I will tell of the place itself to which I was translated, in what manner it was founded and of what antiquity.

Two points must be emphasized about the first story:
1. The monk in the first story gains his introduction to diabolical (but not malefic) magic from "a Jew skilled in medicine", implying that Satan is associated not only with Judaism but also with healing.
2. The relatively benign (if deceptive) art of glamoury is the only magical ability provided by Guibert as an example of the "wicked arts" taught to the monk by Satan. The monk's illicit liaison with a nun, the covering-up of which serves as the backdrop for the story in which the monk makes his nun-lover appear to others as a large dog, however, could be interpreted as implying that Satan had also instructed the bad monk in love magic, another form of relatively benign (or even beneficial) magic. Despite their non-malefic nature, both glamoury and love-magic are historically very closely associated with Witchcraft, as is healing.

And two further points must be stressed about the second story:
3. In the second story, the magical ability promised (not directly by Satan, but by a sorcerer already in league with the Great Deceiver) in return for making an appropriate sacrifice to Satan is nothing more sinister than this: "I could teach you something by which you might get gifts of money every day without any help from man."
4. And what was the unthinkable sacrifice demanded by Satan in return for learning the secrets of "money magic"? A roasted chicken. Well, Satan was a little more specific: it had to be a rooster, and it had to come from an egg that had been laid on a Thursday during the month of March. But in addition to the offering of the chicken, the would-be sorcerer also had to swear not to pray to the Virgin Mary or any of the Saints.

So both stories follow a very similar pattern:
a. Some sacrifice to Satan is required in order to learn magic.
b. In both cases, the sacrifice required does no harm to any human being.
c. In addition to the sacrifice some renunciation of Christianity is also required.
d. The "wicked arts" learned through these arrangements turn out to be completely innocuous when compared to the conventional assumptions (both in later medieval and early modern thinking, and also today) about the activities of diabolical sorcerers and Witches in league with the Devil.

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Christopher Hitchens on Islam

2011-12-22T18:30:00.004-05:00

Hitch was wrong about the invasion of Iraq and many other things. But he was also right about many things, like the fact that Henry Kissinger should be brought to trial for "for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture," and that Mother Teresa was a "fanatic, fraudulent fundamentalist".

Among the things that Christopher Hitchens was right about, one subject in particular stands out and demands our attention: Islam.

Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism
The Nation, October 8, 2001

"Not all readers liked my attack on the liberal/left tendency to 'rationalize' the aggression of September 11, or my use of the term 'fascism with an Islamic face,' and I'll select a representative example of the sort of 'thinking' that I continue to receive on my screen, even now."

The Hitchens-Pollitt Papers
The Nation, December 16, 2002

"Now, Katha, you and I both attended many rallies in favor of the victory of the Vietcong. Were we duped? Were we led astray by sheep-faced 'pacifist' clerics or shifty-eyed Stalinists? No. (Or perhaps I should speak for myself here.) We knew what we were doing, and we wished mainly that Vietnam, which constituted no threat to anybody, had been reunified and independent by 1945. The objection to Washington's imperialist war was not that it would go badly, or turn into a 'quagmire.' For shame! The point was to take the side of the revolution."

Christopher Hitchens talks to Jon Stewart about Islam
The Daily Show, December 1, 2004

"According to Christopher Hitchens, too many moderate Muslims believe it's a war on Islam and not within Islam."

The War Within Islam: The growing danger of the Sunni-Shiite rivalry.
Slate, February 19, 2007

"I have met a few very hard-line right-wingers who say: So what? If one lot of Islamists wants to slaughter another, who cares? It's very important to repudiate this kind of 'thinking.' Religious warfare is the worst thing that can happen to any society, and it now has the potential to spread to societies that are not directly involved. For the most part, official U.S. policy in Iraq has been sound in this respect, always working for a compromise and recently losing American lives to rescue the moderate Shiite leadership from a murder plot hatched by a messianic Shiite militia. Even where this policy fell short—as in the appalling execution of Saddam Hussein—the American Embassy urged the Maliki government not to conduct the hanging on the day of the Eid ul-Adha holiday that would most humiliate the Sunnis. We cannot flirt, either morally or politically, with divide and rule."

Defending Islamofascism: It's a valid term. Here's why.
Slate, October 22, 2007

"It was once very common, especially on the left, to prefix the word fascism with the word clerical. This was to recognize the undeniable fact that, from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, there was a very direct link between fascism and the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. So, there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being 'singled out' on this point."

Assassins of the Mind
Slate, February, 2009

"When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship."

Push to criminalise criticism of Islam
The Australian, March 9, 2009

"And this whole picture would be much less muddied and confused if the state of Pakistan, say, did not make the absurd and many-times discredited assertion that religion can be the basis of a nationality. It is such crude amalgamations -- is a Saudi or Pakistani being profiled because of his religion or his ethnicity? -- that are responsible for any overlap between religion and race. And it might help if the Muslim hadith did not prescribe the death penalty for anyone trying to abandon Islam; one could then be surer who was a sincere believer and who was not, or (as with the veil or the chador in the case of female adherents) who was a volunteer and who was being coerced by her family."

“islam is the opposite of a multicultural society” atheismtv.com, October 2, 2011

"In reading the Koran I can't tell if it's the word of God or not, and I doubt that there is such a thing, but I can hope that this was a bad day for God."

If you masturbate, Satan will teach you Magic.

2011-12-21T18:42:00.015-05:00

The following is from the autobiography of Guibert de Nogent (d.1124) (link)
[translation by C.C. Swinton Bland, London: George Routledge: New York: E.P. Dutton, 1925]

(From Book 1, CHAPTER XXVI)
SINCE we have begun to speak of devils, we think it fitting to add certain facts, which are a warning to avoid their incantations and the counsels of those who have dealings with them. For they admit no one to learn their magic except those whom they rob of the honour of their Christianity by a horrible sacrilege. In a certain famous monastery a monk had been brought up from childhood and had attained to some knowledge of letters. Whilst living in a cell attached to the church under the rule of his Abbot, he fell ill of a disease, through which, to his sorrow, he had occasion for talking with a Jew skilled in medicine. Gathering boldness from their intimacy, they began to reveal their secrets to one another. And so the monk, being curious about wicked arts and aware that the Jew understood magic, pressed him hard. The Jew consented and promised to be his mediator with the Devil. Time and place for a meeting are fixed. At last he is brought by his intermediary into the presence of the Devil; he asks through the other to be admitted to a share in the teaching. That abominable ruler says it can by no means be done, unless he denies his Christianity and offers sacrifice to him. He asked what sacrifice. "That which is pleasing in a man." "What is that?" "You shall make a libation of your seed," said he; "When you have poured that out to me, you shall taste it first as behooves the one who offers the sacrifice.* Then you shall enjoy the reward of your sacrifice." Oh, crime! Oh, shameful act! And he of whom this was demanded was a priest! And this Thy ancient enemy did, O Lord, to cast the dishonour of sacrilege on Thy holy order and Thy Blessed Victi! Be not silent; restrain not Thy vengeance, Lord. What shall I say? How shall I say it? The unhappy man did what was required of him, he whom Thou hadst abandoned, Ah, would it had been in time! And so with that horrible libation he declares his renunciation of his faith. But let me give one instance of the magic which he learnt by this accursed bargain.

He was in the habit of having intercourse with a certain nun. Moreover he lived in a cell with one monk as his companion, who had outside duties to perform, whilst he remained at home with leisure for his wickedness. One day, therefore, they were sitting in the cell, when his companion returned from his business, and when they saw him afar off, there was no escape open to the woman, but her flight would bring her into the path of the returning monk. And so this new sorcerer, seeing his woman companion in a fright, said, "Go to meet the man as he comes, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and fear nothing." The woman trusted him and went. But he stood in the doorway and with an incantation which he had learnt, turned her into a monstrous dog. When she came near the returning monk, he said, "Ha! Whence comes this great dog?" But she in much fear passed him by and knew by these words under what shape she had escaped.

There is now a follow up post: If you masturbate, Satan will teach you Magic. Part Deux.

[*This essential detail ("you shall taste it first ...") is expurgated from the online edition at the Fordham U website linked to above. It can be found in other editions, including Paul J. Archambault's translation, A Monk's Confession.]

.

"The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy." Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-20T18:26:00.008-05:00

"The fire you like so much in me
Is the mark of someone adamantly free."
Strange Loop, by Liz Phair

Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011 by Chistopher Buckley, the New Yorker

In those days, Christopher was a roaring, if not raving, Balliol Bolshevik. Oh dear, the things he said about Reagan! The things—come to think of it—he said about my father. How did we become such friends?

David Frum on Christopher Hitchens: A man of moral clarity National Post

In recent years, as I’ve undergone a political rotation of my own, I’ve thought more and more about the example Christopher set. Interviewed in about 2003 by C-Span’s Brian Lamb, Christopher gave this answer to a question about his former belief in socialism: “I miss it the way an amputated man misses an arm.”

Christopher Hitchens, the enemy of the totalitarian by Jason Cowley, the New Statesman

The son of a Tory naval officer and a Jewish mother who committed suicide in a bizarre love pact, Hitchens was educated at the Leys School in Cambridge, and at Oxford, where he joined the far-left, anti-Stalinist sect, the International Socialists (forerunner of the Socialist Workers party), and agitated at demonstrations by day and romped and cavorted with the daughters, and sometimes sons, of the landed classes by night. He remained a member until the late 1970s and, long after that, continued to defend the Old Man, as he and comrades called Trotsky.

Christopher Hitchens Has Died, Doug Wilson Reflects Christianity Today

One time we shared a panel in Dallas, and I told the crowd there that if Christopher and I were not careful, we were in danger of becoming friends. During the time we spent together, he never said an unkind thing to me—except on stage, up in front of everybody. After doing this, he didn't wink at me, but he might as well have.

"In Christopher Hitchens we have lost a great untamed public intellectual."

2011-12-16T09:48:00.001-05:00

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.
People are either charming or tedious.”
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

For some reason I developed a great deal of affection for Christopher Hitchens over the years. I loved his audacious frontal assault way of writing. I particularly loved his brutal deconstructions of Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger. I loved his erudition and sense of humor and that beautiful voice of his.

I did not love his support for the invasion of Iraq. Nor did I love the narrow-mindedness of his atheism, which I think was his greatest failing as an intellectual.

But now he is gone, and we are all worse off for that, although we are all better off for his having been here in the first place.

Here is a collection of some of his greatest hits: The Immortal Rejoinders of Christopher Hitchens

The Daily Hitchens website has several items of interest including an interview with Hitch just two days before he died, and his last Vanity Fair piece.

His New York Times obituary: Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, With Wit

His Guardian obituary: Celebrated journalist, writer and unshakeable secularist has died from complications of oesophageal cancer

His Haaretz obituary (which contains the line that provides the title for this post): Christopher Hitchens, great Iconoclast and Moralist, is dead

And finally, here is the man in action, as he should be remembered: Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan Spar Over the Peacefulness of Islam

ElBaradei: Youth, liberals 'decimated' in Egypt vote

2011-12-05T08:54:00.005-05:00

This Associated Press story is currently making the rounds (the version below was found at the Washington Post):

CAIRO — Egypt’s top reformist leader said Sunday the liberal youth behind the country’s uprising have been “decimated” in parliamentary elections dominated by Islamists and expressed concern about the rise of hard-line religious elements advocating extremist ideas such as banning women from driving.

Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Prize laureate and possible presidential candidate, said he hopes moderate Islamists will rein in the extremists and send a reassuring message to the world that Egypt will not go down an ultraconservative religious path.

“The youth feel let down. They don’t feel that any of the revolution’s goals have been achieved,” ElBaradei told The Associated Press in an interview on the same day electoral authorities announced that Islamist parties captured an overwhelming majority of votes in the first round of elections last week. “They got decimated,” he said, adding the youth failed to unify and form “one essential critical mass.”

The High Election Commission announced that the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party garnered 36.6 percent of the 9.7 million valid ballots cast last week for party lists. The Nour Party, representing the more hard-line Salafi Islamists, captured 24.4 percent.

The tallies offer only a partial indication of how the new parliament will look. There are still two more rounds of voting in 18 of the country’s 27 provinces over the coming month and runoff elections on Monday and Tuesday to determine almost all of the seats allocated for individuals in the first round. But the grip of the Islamists over the next parliament appears set, particularly considering their popularity in provinces voting in the next rounds.

ElBaradei said he thought the combined strength of the two top-placed Islamist blocs surprised everyone, probably even the winning parties themselves.

“The outcome so far is not the greatest one,” he said, summing up the mood of the country’s educated elite as well as average Egyptians as “angst.”

The new parliament will be tasked, in theory, with selecting a 100-member panel to draft the new constitution. If Islamist parties dominate, more liberal forces worry the constitution will be greatly influenced by the religious perspective.

In a move that angered the Islamist groups, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took control of the country after Mubarak’s fall in February, has suggested that it will choose 80 of those members.

ElBaradei said writing the constitution that respects human rights, dignity and freedom of expression should be based on a consensus among all the players, and not on a parliamentary majority.

“In my view, it is all in the hands of SCAF right now,” he said, hoping the ruling generals will help promote the consensus.

However, ElBaradei was highly critical of the military rulers, saying they have “royally mismanaged” the transition period.

He also raised concerns about statements by some Salafi elements questioning whether women should be banned from driving, as they are in Saudi Arabia, or branding the novels of Egypt’s Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, as “prostitution.”

“I worry of course that some of the extreme stuff coming out from some of the Salafis ... when you hear that literature of somebody like Mahfouz is equal to prostitution, if you hear that we are still debating whether women are going to drive their cars, if we are still discussing whether democracy is against Shariah,” or Islamic law, ElBaradei said.

“These are of course sending shockwaves, statements like that. I think the Brotherhood in particular, and some of the Salafis, should send quickly messages of assurance both inside the country and outside the country to make sure that society continues to be cohesive to make sure that investment will come in.”

He said the statements “will have tremendous economic and political implications.” Moderate Islamists need to “make clear that some of these voices ... are on the extreme fringes and they will not be the mainstream.”

The focus on safeguarding religious principles should be mindful of rampant poverty and illiteracy, not “about what people are going to dress, to drink,” he said.

Salafis are newcomers on Egypt’s political scene. They long shunned the concept of democracy, saying it allows man’s law to override God’s. But they formed parties and entered politics after Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February, seeking to enshrine Islamic law in Egypt’s new constitution.

By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and best organized political group, was officially banned under Mubarak but established a nationwide network of activists. After Mubarak’s fall, the group’s Freedom and Justice Party campaigned fiercely, their organization and name-recognition giving them a big advantage over newly formed liberal parties.

ElBaradei said the Muslim Brotherhood’s strong showing was not unexpected, given that Egypt is emerging from decades of brutal dictatorship that smothered civil society. He said one in every three Egyptians is illiterate and nearly half subsist in deep poverty.

“It should not be a surprise people are voting with their gut. People lost their sense of identity with the state. They identify with religion,” ElBaradei said.

He said the Brotherhood has been working for many years providing basic needs for health care and other social services the government failed to deliver and they were well known throughout the country.

In contrast, the liberal youth groups behind the uprising failed to form a cohesive, unified front. He said they only formed political parties two months ago.

He predicted the Muslim Brotherhood will prefer to form an alliance with the liberals rather than the Salafis to get a majority in parliament. The liberal Egyptian Bloc — which came in third with 13.4 percent of the votes — could counterbalance hard-line elements.

Nevertheless, ElBaradei agreed the first elections since Mubarak’s fall were free and fair and said the massive turnout of about 60 percent lent it legitimacy.

However, he said it will not produce a parliament that represents Egyptian society. ElBaradei said he expects few women, youths or Coptic Christians, a minority that constitutes about 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million citizens.

The rise of the Islamists has also caused concern in the U.S. and Israel, which has a long-standing peace treaty with Egypt it fears might be in jeopardy. But ElBaradei said he does not foresee any radical changes in Egypt’s foreign policy because the country still depends heavily on foreign assistance and cannot afford to isolate itself. Egypt is one of the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid.

He said Egyptians are looking more to Turkey as a model for a moderate Islamist state rather than Saudi Arabia and its strict imposition of Islamic law.

ElBaradei said Egypt has progressed since the revolution but the economy and law and order have deteriorated sharply.

“We are now a freer country,” he said. “People lost their sense of fear. ...We are empowered as a people.”

He said he is advising the liberal youth groups not to give up and to view this as a “long haul” process and to start preparing for the next elections, overcome their ideological differences and work together.

“We’ll have to keep fighting,” he said, adding that “the revolution is still a work in progress.”

He predicted protesters will return to Cairo’s Tahrir Square to keep pressing their demands.

“If you have the second wave of the revolution, it will be an angry one,” he said.

Blaxploitation Style Soviet Funk! (from 1975)

2011-12-04T18:25:00.003-05:00

File this one under:
все, что вы знаете, это неправильно, товарищи.

In Soviet Russia, down gets you!

This is what democracy looks like? Islamists headed for landslide victory in Egypt.

2011-12-03T14:48:00.002-05:00

Telegraph:
Egypt election results show Islamists are winning

"Leaked results showed that religious parties, including hardliners, have won a clear majority of the parliamentary seats contested. Their success comes at the expense of the liberal activist groups that led the uprising against the former president Hosni Mubarak earlier this year.

"The election commission said on Friday that 62 percent of eligible voters cast ballots for nearly a third of the seats in Egypt's parliament, in the highest turnout in modern history.

"Only a trickle of results had been announced by Friday. Voting in the complex election will not be completed until the end of January.

"But Egypt's Islamists appear increasingly confident that they are coming out on top, with some even outlining plans for a strict brand of religious law which could limit personal freedoms and put the nation on the road to becoming an Islamic state.

"The Muslim Brotherhood, regarded as pragmatists, appeared poised to take the largest share of votes, as much as 45 percent. The surprise winner in the election appeared to be the much more hardline Nour Party. Leaks showed it could win as much as a quarter of the house, putting it in a powerful position to influence the agenda for debate."

Agence France Presse:
Egypt Islamists sweep early election results

"Early results from Egypt's first post-revolution election showed Islamist parties sweeping to victory, including hardline Salafists, with secular parties trounced in many areas.

"Partial figures trickled in for the areas of the country that voted in record numbers on Monday and Tuesday, confirming earlier predictions that Islamist parties would win at least two thirds of the ballots cast.

"In northern Port Said, the moderate Islamist alliance led by the previously banned Muslim Brotherhood triumphed with 32.5 percent of votes for parties, while the hardline Al-Nur party gained 20.7 percent, the Al-Ahram daily said.

"The liberal Wafd party won 14 percent, while another Islamist party, Al-Wassat which advocates a strict interpretation of Islamic law, recorded 12.9 percent, according to the state-run newspaper."

Reuters:
In lead, Egypt Islamists tell rivals to accept vote

"Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood called on its rivals to accept the will of the people on Saturday after a first-round vote set its party on course to take the most seats in the country's first freely elected parliament in six decades.

"The assembly's popular mandate will give it clout to stand up to the generals who have ruled Egypt for nine turbulent months since Hosni Mubarak's removal and who are now scrambling to appoint a new interim government after the last one quit.

"Preliminary results showed the Brotherhood's liberal rivals could be pushed into third place behind ultra-conservative Salafi Islamists, mirroring the trend in other Arab countries where political systems have opened up after popular uprisings."

Guardian:
Egyptian Islamists put sharia law on agenda after election gains

"Egypt's Islamist party plans to push for a stricter religious code after claiming strong gains in the first round of parliamentary elections.

"Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Salafists appear to have taken a majority of seats in the first round of Egypt's first parliamentary vote since the ousting of Mubarak.

"Egypt's election commission announced few results, but said turnout was 62%, the highest in the country's modern history.

"Leaked preliminary counts indicated that the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm took the largest share of votes. Following closely behind was the ultra-conservative Islamist Nour party and a liberal coalition, according to unofficial counts."

Also of possible interest:

75% of Egyptians support the Muslim Brotherhood. Have a nice day. (May 23, 2011)
The Muslim Brotherhood: A Guide for the Perplexed (Feb. 1, 2011)
A Feminist Critically Examines the Muslim Brotherhood (Feb. 1, 2011)
Who Supports Al Qaeda? Over 100 Million Muslims. That's Who. (Dec. 3, 2010)
Atheist, Humanist, Buddhist, and Leftist Voices Against The Islamic Threat To Freedom (Nov. 16, 2010)
What Does the Muslim Brotherhood think of the new Pew report? (Sep. 20, 2010)
"Islamism" widespread, deeply rooted among Muslims in Europe, according to Pew study (Sep. 18, 2010)
"The Islamic Exception" (Aug. 29, 2010)
Do Muslims really bear no responsibility at all for 9/11? (Aug. 28, 2010)

This is what we all look like to Alien Anthropologists. On a good day.

2011-12-02T15:08:00.000-05:00

“A Witch In Love” (aka “Yuhee, The Witch”, aka “Witch Amusement”)

2011-12-01T09:10:00.004-05:00

The Korean TV romantic dramedy “Witch Amusement” ran for a grand total of 16 episodes from March to May in 2007. The story centered on a young single professional woman in modern day South Korea who was derisively referred to as “manyŏ” (“witch”) behind her back by the people who worked for her.

The name of the “witch” in question is Yoo Hee, and the Korean title of the show was “Manyŏ Yoo Hee“, literally, “Witch Yoo Hee”. In Korean this is a rather clever play on words that can also mean “Witch Amusement” or “Witch In Love”.

The reason for referring to Yoo Hee as a “witch” is that she is seen as unfeminine and “cold”. She does not wear make-up and she always dresses in black clothes, and also wears glasses. She is also portrayed as pathetically unsuccessful in her attempts to have relationships with men.

The character of Yoo Hee (played by Han Ga In) is very similar to the Witch character portrayed by Kim Novack in the 1958 “Bell Book and Candle“, and also to the journalist/activist/feminist character played by Katharine Hepburn in the 1942 “Woman of the Year“. For that matter, all three characters show striking parallels with the real life story of Queen Elizabeth I, but with one major difference, for Elizabeth never married, and reigned as one of the most powerful and successful heads of state the western world had seen since the fall of Rome.

In contrast to the “Virgin Queen”, however, the three fictional characters Yoo Hee, Gil Holroyd (Novack), and Tess Harding (Hepburn), all end up surrendering their “unfeminine” independence to comply with social conventions in exchange for that ultimate goal that is the true heart’s desire of all “real” women: the love of a good man. (Don’t worry, I’m not really giving very much away by telling you this….)

As was the case with both “Woman of the Year”, and “Bell Book and Candle”, the lead character in “Witch Yoo Hee” is portrayed as proudly independent and highly successful. Han Ga In’s character is even a martial arts master who can (and when she feels like it, does) kick any man’s ass.

But despite (or rather, because of) her professional success and all around self-sufficiency, Yoo Hee is miserable and lonely, for, as a woman without a man, she is in an unnatural state. In fact, her greatest shame is that she has never had a second date. She has even programmed a list of “dating tips” into her phone to refer to during her unsuccessful string of blind dates (some of these dates turn out to be guys who lost a bet!):

Try to act cute.
Have a good appetite.
Act interested in the other person.
Try to find things in common.

Now, as I said already, just knowing that Yoo Hee will fall in love doesn’t give very much away. It’s pretty obvious where things are headed already by the end of Episode 1, and Episode 2 quickly removes any lingering doubts. Or does it? Let’s just say there is a lot more to the story than what has been (somewhat misleadingly) revealed here.

If you want to know more about “Witch Amusement” just check out the truly amazing website “dramabeans“, where two Korean-American women bloggers (who go by “javabeans” and “girlfirday”, and who may or may not be sisters, and/or criminals-on-the-run-hiding-from-the-law, and/or the same person,) provide detailed (and wonderfully snarktastic) commentaries on “kdramas” and other facets of “K-Pop” culture generally.

The cool thing, imnsho, about reading about “Witch Amusement” at the website “dramabeans” is that you have this hackneyed western cultural meme of the frustrated/liberated woman/witch being played out in a highly industrialized and in its very own and very strange way highly westernized country (and in a culture with its very own and very much alive-and-kicking ancient indigenous tradition of magical practitioners, most of whom are women), and then this all gets translated and reinterpreted for a western, English speaking audience by young Native-born Americans who happen to be young, successful professional Korean women who are obsessive fans of Korean pop culture. It is a cultural and sociological house of mirrors!

Personally I am very curious about this Korean word translated into English as “Witch”. I poked around and found two other occurrences of the word manyŏ:

사자, 마녀, 옷장 이야기 /
Saja, manyŏ, otchang iyagi /
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (by C.S. Lewis)

포르토벨로의마녀 /
Pʻorŭtʻobello ŭi manyŏ /
The witch of Portobello /
A bruxa de Portobello (by Paul Coelho)

[NOTE: Regular readers of this blog might recognize this post from my "wordpress phase" a few months back.]

Hindu Fundamentalism Does Not Exist

2011-11-29T18:30:00.005-05:00

Some things do not exist. For example, there are no active volcanoes in Belgium. Just as there is no ocean front property in Wyoming. Also there is no liquid water on the surface of Pluto. Nor are there any living veterans of the American Revolutionary War.

Question: Does "Hindu Fundamentalism" exist?

The word "fundamentalism" itself comes from debates among Protestant Christians in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In those debates, far from being some kind of slur meant to conjure up visions of proto-fascist preachers whipping their flocks up into a xenophobic frenzy, it was a badge of honor proudly worn by self-defined "fundamentalists".

The idea that fundamentalism is a pathological condition to with all religions are equally prone and of which they are all equally guilty is a very recent development. But does this idea have any basis in reality?

In a very thoughtful article (first published back in June of 2010) over at the Patheos website, David Frawley poses the question: Is There Hindu Fundamentalism?

The short answer to that question, according to Frawley, is: "No." The long answer is: "Unequivocally, no."

Here is an excerpt:

No Hindus -- including so-called Hindu fundamentalists -- insist that there is only one true faith called Hinduism and that all other faiths are false. Hinduism contains too much plurality to allow for that. Its tendency is not to coalesce into a fanatic unit like the fundamentalists of other religions, but to disperse into various diverse sets and fail to arrive at any common action, historically even one of self-defense against foreign invaders.

Fundamentalist groups insist upon belief in the literal truth of one book as the Word of God, on which they base their behavior. Muslim fundamentalists insist that the Koran is the Word of God and that all necessary knowledge is contained in it. Christian fundamentalists say the same thing of the Bible. Again even orthodox or ordinary Muslims and Christians often believe this.

Hindus have many holy books like the Vedas, Agamas, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, and so on, which contain a great variety of teaching and many different points of view, and no one of these books is required reading for all Hindus. Hindus generally respect the holy books of other religions as well. What single holy book do Hindu fundamentalists hold literally to be the word of God, upon which they base their behavior? Christian and Islamic fundamentalists flaunt their holy book and are ever quoting from it to justify their actions. What Hindu Bible are the Hindu fundamentalists all crying, quoting, and preaching from and finding justification in?

The "Tidal Wave" Of Islamophobia That Wasn't

2011-11-29T12:16:00.008-05:00

In 2009, hate crimes against Muslims accounted for 1.6% of all hate crimes: 128 out of 7,789 "offenses" in the FBI hate crime database (link to 2009 stats). According to newly released data this ticked up to 2.4% (168 out of 7,699) in 2010 (link to 2010 stats).

In other words, there was a very small increase (both in absolute numbers and in relation to hate crimes as a whole) in anti-Islamic hate crimes in 2010. Meanwhile, religiously motivated crimes against Muslims in America continued to pale in comparison to attacks against African Americans (34% of all hate crimes), gay people (19%), and Jews (12%).

Flying bravely in the face of reality, Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center claims (link) that these same data actually show that there was "a dramatic spike in anti-Muslim hate violence":

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50% last year, skyrocketing over 2009 levels in a year marked by the vicious rhetoric of Islam-bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" in New York City.

This is like saying that in the runup to the New Hampshire Republican primary Michelle ("Cazy Eyes") Bachmann (at 2.3% in the polls) is doing "dramatically" better than Rick ("the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex") Santorum, who languishes at a mere 1.8% (stats from RealClearPolitics here). But most people readily understand that what these numbers really mean is that both Santorum and Bachmann are completely irrelevant and safely ignored.

I don't think religiously motivated crimes should ever be ignored, no matter how few in number they (thankfully!) are. All hate crimes should be condemned, and those who commit them should be treated as the worst kind of criminals. But the simple fact is that the 2010 Ground Zero Mosque brouhaha did not "unleash a tidal wave of Islamophobia", and those who hoped that this would be the case are now exposed as either cravenly cynical propagandists or delusional blowhards.

Related posts from this blog:

[Pie charts were made using the ahndy tool found here: http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/frames_asid_183_g_1_t_1.html (The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives).]

Confessions of a Christian Missionary: "The old religion used to hold their life together. Now there is a void."

2011-11-28T10:40:00.013-05:00

"What kind of a Christianity emerges
after this kind of a religious change?"

The following long excerpt from a book by an experienced Christian missionary who is also a respected scholar of "missiology", strikes me as essential reading for anyone who wishes to have any hope of understanding the current state of affairs vis-a-vis African Traditional Religion and Christianity in Africa today. It is from Alan Tippett's Introduction to Missiology, pp. 168-174.

I hope that in the not too distant future I will be able to write a more detailed analysis of this remarkable passage from Tippett. In the meantime I offer this very bare bones list to draw the reader's attention to some of the highlights:

1. Tippett's repeated admissions concerning the role of coercion in suppressing non-Christian religions.
2. Tippett's elaborations on the varieties of "oppressive procedure[s] for procuring conversion", including "military action", the taking of hostages, "social pressures", "economic sanctions", "legislation", and so forth.
3. Tippett's admission that such coercive means do not result in genuine conversion of the heart, and the concomitant admission that in such cases "the old religion" remains not only as a "submerged" or "latent" religion, but that "It will be this latent religion that speaks to their deepest feelings."
4. Tippett readily admits that there is a direct parallel between the coercive means employed in the Christianization that took place in the Americas, Asia, and Africa during the 16th-20th centuries and the means employed during the Christianization of Europe.
5. Tippett cannot resist repeating the stereotypical, and thoroughly racist, trope that the ancient religious traditions of non-Europeans are distinguished from Christianity by a prevalence of "[s]uch things as cannibalism, widow strangling, infanticide, patricide, feuding, raiding and sorcery (to name only a few of the customs in mind) ..."
6. Tippett admits that all religions are not equally guilty of the use of coercion to gain converts. He does this in a roundabout way with his assertion that Islam has "possibly the worst record of this kind."
7. Tippett's discussion of "witchcraft" is especially worth careful consideration. In particular, he states, accurately, that the treatment all forms of indigenous (non-Christian) magical practices, including especially healing and other beneficial practices, as intrinsically evil is an "imposition" utterly "foreign" to indigenous African views of magic. His presentation is deeply marred, however, by his own ignorance of the fact that the English word "Witch" is itself quite flexible in its range of meanings and has not, as Tippett implicitly assumes, historically been reserved only for harmful magic.
8. Finally, there is Tippett's admission that he intends what he is saying here as a justification for the sending forth of Protestant missions aimed at Catholic populations, because "any evangelical mission to these persons was without a doubt a mission to animists."

And now without further ado, here is Alan Tippett in his own words, submitted for your approval (the interested reader is also strongly encouraged to study Tippett's 1975 paper on "Christopaganism or Indigenous Christianity"):

[p. 168] We like to think that when people change from animism to Christianity it has been a voluntary and an acceptable decision, but we know that it has not always been so. My history book tells me that Olaf Tryggveson and his fleet put in at the island of Rolandsa and found that the pagan earl had only one fighting ship. Olaf told him of the benefits of becoming Christian. Before the might of the visitor's fleet and the option of baptism [p. 169] or execution, the pagan earl could hardly be called a voluntary convert, especially as the earl's son was taken away as a hostage against the stability of the baptism of the island of Rolandsa. The question of immediate concern to us here is: what kind of Christianity emerges after this kind of religious change?

The religion with possibly the worst record of this kind is Islam, which overran northern Africa na wiped out what remained of early Christianity there. The symbol of the sword was written into their war cry. Many of their methods were most infuriating to the Christians, especially when they kidnapped Christian children and raised them as fanatical Moslem warriors to be turned against their own Christian flesh and blood.

But military action is not the only form of pressure that has been applied for the purposes of securing religious change. Social pressures inside the country and economic sanctions have been used both to prevent secession from the one religion to another and to achieve conversion. This has been so within Christianity in the history of the sects. The geographer, P.W. English, has written a fine volume, which would qualify as history or anthropology as well as geography, City and Village in Iran (1966). In one place he demonstrates how social pressures and economic sanctions were deliberately used by the Moslems to achieve the conversion of the seventh century Zoroastrians (1966:23-24).

Another oppressive procedure for securing conversion is legislation. There was a period of English history, for example, when the fortunes of the country were fluctuating between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, when the changing monarchs and their administrations had a strong disposition to one or the other form of Christianity; when the general public was virtually pushed one way or the other by the legislation. The result was there never was a period of English history more riddled with intrigue. Always the submerged religion refused to die and plotted against the ruling faith. The internal and international politics of the country were mere reflections of the religious forces at work, one trying to rule by legislation and the other trying to resist the legislation by intrigue. For English in the period of the Tudors, the Commonwealth and Stuarts we see the central place of religion in the society; but as there were two religions, one in control and the other submerged, there was no peace.

Now what, we may ask, has this to do with the conversion from animism to Christianity, which is really the subject of this chapter? The story of Christian mission over the last century and this, whether we like it or not, has gone "hand in glove" with the march of colonialism, both the imperial and commercial forms. Frequently we must admit it was deliberately planned this way, the representatives of Government, Commerce and Church, operating together; for example, the Niger Experiment (Walker 1930 [The Romance of the Black River: The Story of the C.M.S. Nigeria Mission]:18). Once a colony was established, the impact of each of those forces was increased many fold. Each of them in its own way bore down on the animistic faith of the inhabitants. The actual acceptance of [ p. 170] the new faith--Christianity--was a voluntary matter, and economic pressures were little used in recent times to effect conversions. But a change from animism is a negative as well as a positive thing, an act of rejection or deprivation as well as the acceptance of a new way, and these do not necessarily have to take place at the same point of time, as we have seen in the case of the demoralization of Hawaii. Such things as cannibalism, widow strangling, infanticide, patricide, feuding, raiding and sorcery (to name only a few of the customs in mind) have all religious significance. To administrator, trader and missionary alike, these were undesirable and disruptive to his program. Each of these foreigners depended on the maintainence of what he called "law and order." What he meant was a kind of law and order which he called civilized. Acutally all these customs operated under law and order, but few of the foreigners saw this. A state of law and ordered was achieved by legislation, and legislation was more concrete, it was written down, and we can now look back at it and study it historically.

Even in the most enlightened colonial administrations, where the claim of freedom of religion has been made, legislation has been disruptive to the aboriginal animism. Thus when cannibalism had to go, the acquisitions of religion's power for facing danger, producing fertility and curing sickness were seriously interfered with; when the widow strangling had to go, the beliefs and provisions for life beyond the grave were all disturbed; when patricide had to go, the continued physical presence of the senile elder interfered with the social rights and controls of the active elder in public life; when feuding had to go, a mechanism of leadership selection was lost to the tribe; and when headhunting had to go, much of the philosophy of mana had to go with it; and when sorcery had to go, society was left with scores of moral and religious problems for which the people had no means of solving. When the system of taboo was legislated against, hygeign declined and body waste was left lying about in the villages. All these religious disturbances have been documented without going outside Melanesia.

I know nothing so disruptive to animist religion and the social life, of which it is the integrator, equal to colonial legislation. The missionaries at least put something in the place of the religion they took away, even if it was so often, alas, a foreign substitute. But legislation was an end in itself. It was a negative approach to life. It needed a gospel to give a positive dimension.

Quite apart from the negative aspect of colonial legislation against animist institutions, it is appalling for the abysmal ignorance it displays of what it legislates against. Nothing shows this up better than the laws of the African colonies against witchcraft. One would surely assume that such a legislator would at least need to know the difference between a witch, a witch doctor, and a witch finder, seeing the legislation will need to deal with them all; and their measure of social guilt or misfortune is certainly [p. 171] not equal. These countries have now their independence and I do not know whether the national legislators have modified these laws or not, but writing in 1958, Parrinder in his book on Witchcraft [full title: Witchcraft: European and African] discussed the Laws and Ordinances of Nigeria, Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya in an illuminating passage (1958: 126-127). A law stating that "any person who represents himself to be a witch ...." is a foreign and not an African notion. Normally the witch does not profess to be such except under accusation and pressure from the witch finders. No one is a witch by choice. The social penalties are too great. A law which punishes the individual who seeks to preserve society from witchcraft, mistaking him for a sorcerer, is surely to punish the innocent with the guilty. A law covering everything by means of a blanket phrase "occult power and knowledge" is inadequate for definition and dangerous in its scope, open for abuse. The same may be said of a Kenya Ordinance (1928) which covered any person claiming "to exercise supernatural power." A pentecostal type of priest or prophet in any harmless movement or a Christian church could be charged under such a law.

Witchcraft is only one of the many religious problems which have been brought under colonial legislation without a clear understanding of their nature and function; but it is a good example of foreign imposition. It also shows how legislation against witchcraft, without any clear understanding of what the institution is and how it operates, can undermine the religious configuration which is the integrator of the society, in spite of the Colony's boast of freedom of religion.

If the place became a Colony by military conquest, and this was followed immediately by foreign land settlement, the establishment of schools and medical services, the establishment of plantations and the codification of laws (quite apart from the presence or otherwise of a Christian mission), the chances of the survival of the original animism would be remote. Several things could happen. There might be a general demoralization and the people might even die out altogether. The people might modify their animism and settle down to an unhealthy coexistence with the foreigners. Or the people might elect to accept Christianity in a nominal fashion and try to fall into step with the foreigners--and this might be for any of a number of motives. They might consider it politic or prestigious to accept the religion of the foreigner because he is the conqueror, or because he is wealthy or because he has so many amazing things. These are nominal Christians at best. I am not speaking here of genuine conversion movements, with which I will deal under then next heading, and which are classed by themselves because they have an inner dynamic, a self-image and a healthy creativity in spite of the colonial situation.

The nominal Christians and also the modified animist coexisters whose religious change is due in some way to imposed foreign controls, commerce, instructions and legislation, because their manifest religion is [p. 172] formal and "a thing of convenience," will frequently have also a latent religion. It will be this latent religion that speaks to their deepest feelings. In this, one will discover significant elements of the old animism, or at least what the believer things his or her old animism was (because this can recur in a later generation which is not clear about the old religious beliefs and rites). It may be an individual retires surreptitiously to the forest and explores the past. It may be a whole village breaks away openly under some native prophet wh oclaims to have a revelation from the past and to have recovered what the people have lost by accepting the foreign religion.

The old religion used to hold their life together. Now there is a void and the foriegner rules the land. If the current religion is nominal, formal, not dynamic, you can be quite sure that some animism is latent. The term I use is for this is submersion. It does not require much to fan this coal into fire. Normally submerged animism is not organized. It is scattered about in hidden places; but if there are enough of these coals smoldering away, it only takes a single prophet to arise and the organization can emerge with startling rapidity. This kind of outburst has been a feature of the post-war situation in many parts of the world. It would be appropriate at this point, if I had the space, to discuss a nativistic movment out of a second or third generation Christian community, but I refer the reader to Solomon Islands Christianity [a book-length study of published in 1967 by Alan Tippett], where this is dealt with at length. It must suffice here to modify my model to illustrate submersoin, as seen in Figure 14.

[p. 173] There are degrees of submersion of animism in nominal Christianity. It may be very deep, or it may be very shallow--just beneath the Christian veneer. Evangelicals are disposed to speak of this as syncretism or as Christopaganism. Syncretism may be quite manifest, of course, but on investigation one is shocked by the amount of submerged animism which is found.

It is submerged because it is driven underground by military conquest, land alienation, economic pressures and legislation; all of which frequently suggest to the indigene that the foreigners lack sympathy. It is possible for years to become centuries, and for that submerged animism to go on building itself stronger and stronger into the subculture of the nominal Christianity.

For years I used to wonder if an evangelical mission could be regarded as justifiable in a community where the people were already Christian--as in a Spanish colonial location which was strongly Catholic. It was not until I eventually did some research in Mexico and found so much manifest animism that I could hardly recognize the Church as Christian at all. I saw devotees (whose devotion I do not doubt) crossing a cement plaza on their knees to a shrine more Aztec than Christian, while others put paper or cloth under their bloodstained knees to get it charged with power for magical healing purposes; vendors selling magical herbs whose efficacy came from the blessings of the saints rather than any medical property, and this on the steps of the church; worshippers carrying shrines of straw and corn in some way after the manner of an old fertility cult; and a stream of persons one by one kissing away the toe of a stone statue to obtain thereby blessing on their lives and household; and all this done in the name of Christianity.

This I saw in Mexico, and I knew that any evangelical mission to these persons was without a doubt a mission to animists. I saw much the same thing in a rural city in Guatemala. I was speaking about these things to a gathering of Mayan pastors in Guatemala and described a Mexican situation without naming the place. My Mayan friends said they recognized the place from my description, but I had never been the place they thought it was, so I am led to think it is typical.

Such is the nominality of the Christianity that has come in the train of the Spanish military conquest: a Christianity which merely drove the animism underground. I saw a group of Mayan converts in a Guatemalan village. They registered their public confessions by surrendering their wooden crosses to the evangelist. In conversation afterwards I discovered that they were Mayan, not Christian crosses. From the way they viewed and used those symbols I knew they were fetishes--nothing else, however much they appeared to be Catholic and Christian. Other fetishes included a root which seemed to have a face and an ancient pre-Catholic Mayan figurine. Supposedly this was a Catholic Christian; it reality it was submerged animism.

[p. 174] Take, for example, that amazing autobiographical story of Juan the Chamula (1962) which the translator anthropologist, himself a Mexican, insists is the story of a typical person. Here then is a typical Mexican Indian Catholic, emotional and crude in many ways, yet deeply religious, always attending to his "Christian" duties. I read through this book and marked the religious features. The veneer of Christianity of the Catholic type featured the Virgin and the continual patronage of the saints, the use of the symbol of the cross (as much Mayan as Christian), adoration of and making vows at the cross, and the trinitarian formula. These are the features of Catholicism open for animisation. In reality the saints are Mayan deities with Christian names. Many features are quite syncretistic--the ritual and beliefs of the Cult of Saint John, the role of the Savior, the festival performances and processions, a large corpus of mythology, ideas about disease and healing--and although the Christian strands of thought can be detected here and there, they are dominantly animistic. On the other hand, many features of the religious life of this man are completely animist: the attitude to the spirits of the dead, the worship of the sun, the communion with the ancestors, the burial ritual and its religious presuppositions, the association of spirit animals with the sickness and health of human beings, the magic of curing the spillling of libations of liquor, the function of charms, sacred objects and taboos and the means of diagnosis or divination.
A man is sick because his spirit animal in the forest is sick. A curer is brought, and candles, resin, liquor, a rooster and flowers for the curing rite. The curer pours an oblation on the ground and drinks the rest of the liquor. The flowers are put on the altar. After the oblation the curer prays to the Christian God and the Son, the Earth and the Heaven, offers the gifts brought by the sick man, with incense, and prays to the spirit of the Moon and Earth Mother, and while praying wrings the neck of the rooster. At the moment of this sacrifice the sick man suddenly feels free (cf. 88-91).
The old animism has gone, along with its organized priesthood and its pre-Christian structure. Once the Spanish swept over the land it could never be the same again. The Spanish brought their Christian organization with them and the people nominally accepted the new religion. But at heart they were still animist, and, inasmuch as I have myself observed and read, they still are: a case of submersion.

Even More Videos

2011-11-22T18:22:00.004-05:00

(svetlana loboda is a genius. in case you didn't know.)

(cowboys and indians and, for some reason, poodles)

(and here's one from zanna friske)

(a little something retro from NikitA)

(an achingly beautiful and brilliantly understated song)

(i am not tired of the Quest Pistols. i hope you are not either.)

("little angel" by "slot")

(don't fuck with russia. "let us put a bullet into the brow / of the rotten fascist vermin.")

Blood Libel, Witchcraft, & Ratzinger's 2011 Visit to Africa

2011-11-16T17:18:00.004-05:00

Here is a sampling of some of the Blood Libel style accusations against African Traditional Religions that have surfaced in the last three months:

August 17: Ethiopia's River of Death: A handful of tribal Christians are fighting child sacrifice (Christianity Today magazine)
September 24: Southern Africa: Breaking the Silence on Ritual Killings (IQ4 News)
October 11: Where Child Sacrifice Is A Business (BBC)
October 27: Catholics & UN "Collaborate to Stop the Practice of Ritual Infanticide" in Benin (Franciscans Online)
November 2: Tanzanian witches influence child sacrifice in Uganda (Washington Times)
November 5: Is the tide turning against the killing of 'cursed' infants in Ethiopia? (CNN)
November 7: Christians fighting losing battle against infanticide in Ethiopia (Catholic Online)

It's enough to make one think that there must be something in the air. And, indeed, there is. The time is fast approaching for yet another Papal Visit To Darkest Africa, and the droogies are all creeping out from under their rocks to help Prepare The Way for bringing the Good News to the African Heathens.

It is clear that all of the above cited sources are reading from the same script as the Holy Father himself, who recently (October 30) addressed a group of visiting bishops from Angola. Here is the full text of an article from TheVaticanInsider.Com website reporting on this speech, under the very subtle title: Pope against "witchcraft" that affects children:

Three weeks from his second African trip in Benin, the Pope centers his attention on one of the worst plagues of the "sick giant" (Africa), "witchcraft", whose main victims are children and defenseless people.

According to UNICEF, tens of thousands of children in Africa are tortured and killed because of witchcraft. A terrible and little known fact. Unicef has emphasized the same points as the Synod of Africa, which in 2009 denounced “witchcraft” as a “social drama”: in poor households or those affected by catastrophes, often the culprit is sought out in those who are weakest, who are then tortured or killed.

The Pope does not limit himself to condemning these facts, but points the finger at tribal practices and witchcraft, a plague in Africa, which makes its victims among children, and calls on Christians and civil authorities to monitor and repress these attitudes with rigid laws.

It is urgent, the Pope said while receiving the visiting Angolan bishops on their "Ad Limina" visit, that a "joint effort" of the Church, civil society and governments be made "to counter the "scourge" of ritual “murder” of “children and the elderly" due to “witchcraft”. And denouncing the risks of traditional rites and customs, he urged the church to educate against "practices that are incompatible" with Christianity.

The condemnation of these phenomena occupied a large part of the Pope's speech to Angolan bishops today, in which Benedict XVI recalled that the Gospel is "the first factor of development" for Africa. He also warned about "the remnants of ethnic tribalism that is perceived in the attitudes of communities that tend to close in on themselves, not accepting people from other parts of the country."

The spread of the "scourge" of "witchcraft", the Pope argued, stems from the fact that "the heart of the baptized" is often "divided between Christianity and African traditional religions." "Being a regional problem,” he recommended, “a joint effort of the ecclesial community would be important to counter this calamity, trying to determine the deep meanings of these practices, to identify the risks for pastoral and social development, and to find a method leading to its definitive eradication, with the cooperation of governments and civil society."

Here are links to other coverage of the Pope's October 30 speech on African Witchcraft:

Pope addresses bishops of Angola (Catholic News Agency)
Pope says Angolans must resist customs that contradict Gospel (Catholic News Service)
"We are strongly committed to continuing the proclamation of the Gospel to the people of Africa" (Agencia Fides: Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies)
Christianity, an essential factor of development in Africa (Vatican Information Service)

Also check out this old post of mine related to Ratzinger's 2009 visit to Africa: "Why not leave them in peace?"

And if you want to learn more about African Traditional Religions, check out my big page on Africa and African Traditional Religions at EGREGORES.

Hitler discovers that Starship Troopers was a parody

2011-11-15T18:04:00.005-05:00

After watching the brilliant video: "Hitler Finds Out Rick Perry Completely Failed at the CNBC Debate"(see embedded video below), I found myself reading an old NYT article on the phenomenon of "Downfall Parodies" (from Feb. 2010). And then I spent about 10 minutes trying to think up a good topic for a "downfall parody" of my own. And then it hit me: "Hitler discovers that the film Starship Troopers was actually a parody of fascism and militarism."

Of course I will probably never actually carry through and make the video. So if anyone reads this and wants to take a shot at it, please feel free, so long as you 'fess up and admit that you stole the idea from me!!

Are You Doing Your Part??

Hey kids, here are some more Starship Troopers related links:

The Not-So-Occult Foundations of Nazism

2011-11-10T17:18:00.011-05:00

.
Introduction

The Latin verb occultare (occulto, -are, -avi, -atum) means to conceal or hide. In English, "the Occult" refers to spiritual teachings and practices that are (at least in their details) concealed from public view and only available to the initiated, that is, teachings that are esoteric as opposed to exoteric. In popular usage, references to Occultism conjure up in the mind things mysterious and unexplainable, and, most importantly, things that are different from our ordinary experience of reality. Occult things, in the popular sense, are not normal, rather they are aberrational.

It seems that there is something comforting in the idea that the Nazis came to power with the aid of "Occult" forces, and/or that the racist and antisemitic ideas at the core of Nazism arose from small, secretive Occult groups lurking on the fringes of society. This reassures us that Nazism was just a terrible aberration appearing suddenly out of nowhere, or, more precisely, that the origins of this aberration were themselves also aberrational. (Why, look, it's aberrations all the way down!) The appeal of this comforting explanation has led to the great popularity of books, articles, websites, and made-for-cable schlockumentaries on the subjects of "Nazi Occultism", "Nazi Pagans" and so forth.

The problem is that, like many comforting explanations, this is a lie. There was nothing hidden or secret or "Occult" (or Pagan) about the roots of Nazism. Virulently racist and antisemitic ideas were extremely popular in mainstream German society (and throughout Europe and also in the United States) long before the Nazi party ever existed, and these ideas were expressed openly and, indeed, proudly. No secret cults were needed for formulating the racial theories that paved the way for the Final Solution, nor was there anything "esoteric" about how these ideas were spread, or how those who supported these ideas came to power.

The non-occult origins of Nazism are personified in the man who was hailed by the Nazi's themselves as the author of their "gospel": Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Not only was Chamberlain lauded in the official Nazi press and even in Hitler's own Mein Kampf, he had also been a friend and trusted advisor to the leader of the Second Reich, Kaiser Wilhelm II. And the book that the Nazis embraced as their "gospel" also won high praise from less likely fans, such as Theodore Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw.

Chamberlain's "Foundations"

In the year 1900, Houston Stewart Chamberlain published Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. The book was an instant best-seller, and it's previously little known author became an overnight sensation.

Although an Englishman by birth (b. 1855 in Portsmouth), Chamberlain spent most of his life on the Continent. His earliest published works (on both biology and literature) were in French, but starting in 1888 he published mostly in German, the language in which he wrote Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (which was only translated into Chamberlain's native language a full decade later).

Chamberlain was a true polymath who studied botany, history, astronomy, physiology, languages, literature, music and philosophy with equal ease and enthusiasm. He was strongly influenced by Kant, Wagner, and Nietzsche, but it was the racialist theorizing of French aristocrat Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (author of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, first published in 1853) that was to play the decisive role in shaping Chamberlain's own thinking. Although Gobineau is also considered an important figure in the intellectual genealogy of Nazism in his own right, he never achieved the level of popular success and influence that Chamberlain did, and Gobineau's racism was deficient in one crucial way: he was not an antisemite.

I will say more about the actual content of Foundations below (especially in the section on "Key Ideas of Nazism"). For now it is important to emphasize the great success and acclaim of the book. It went through numerous printings and sold 60,000 copies in the first 10 years after it was published. It was translated into English in 1910 and was favorably reviewed in a number of publications, including the London Times Literary Supplement, in which Chamberlain was hailed as "Kant in the 20th Century", and the anonymous reviewer stated that "we wholly believe that Mr. Chamberlain has the root of the matter in him."

An early fan of Chamberlain's Foundations was the Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wilhelm was so impressed with the book that he invited the author to meet with him privately at his palace in Potsdam in 1901. That first meeting was the beginning of a lasting and close friendship between the two men. The Kaiser declared to Chamberlain: "God sent your book to the German people, just as he sent you personally to me." The author was no less profuse in praising his Emperor: "May you save our German Volk, our Germanentum, for God has sent you as our helper!" Chamberlain urged the Kaiser to forge a renewed Germany that was "racially aware" and that would "rule the world." The two exchanged dozens of letters, and material from Chamberlain's letters often ended up in the Kaiser's speeches.

For many years after WWII historians had been (not merely woefully, but willfully, it now appears) ignorant of the depth and breadth of Kaiser Wilhelm's antisemitism. This started to change only in 1987 (over four decades after the fall of the Third Reich) with the publication of John C. G. Röhl's book-length study The Kaiser and his Court, in which Röhl devotes the concluding chapter to the subject of "Kaiser Wilhelm II and German Anti-Semitism." But today there continues to be little appreciation of just how significant a role Wilhelmenian antisemitism played in preparing the way for the Final Solution.

Wilhelmenian Racism and Antisemitism

As early as 1888, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II was already referring to the doctors attending his father, who would soon be dead of throat cancer, as judenlümmel, a standard antisemitic slur meaning "Jewish louts". Moreover, Wilhelm suspected these Jewish doctors of "racial hatred" ("Rassenhaß") against Germans. [link, auf Deutsch] This means that a year before Adolf Hitler was born, the man who was about to become Kaiser was not only already giving voice to paranoid accusations of Jewish plots against the German Reich, but was articulating his antisemitism in explicitly racial terms.

John C. G. Röhl writes, in his The Kaiser & His Court: "When Wilhelm acceded to the throne in 1888, anti-semites from Paris to Vienna crowed: 'All those who are truly Christian-German are devoted with their entire soul to Kaiser Wilhelm II and cheer him along the paths that he has chosen to go.'" According to Röhl, the infamous Austrian antisemite Georg Ritter von Schönerer was especially adulatory toward Wilhelm: "Germans had only one hope of salvation from the Jewish yoke, he [von Schönerer ] declared, and that hope was Kaiser Wilhelm II." [p. 202]

Röhl also writes: "By the mid-1890s, Kaiser Wilhelm II had adopted a thoroughgoing racism as a central element of his Weltanshauung and lost no chance of proclaiming the need for a pure and exclusive Germanic race." But Wilhelm was a little unsure about just where to focus his racism. In this, however, Wilhelm was displaying a common trait of racists, who often have long lists of "enemies". The Kaiser's enemies list included not just the Jews, but both the Slavs and the English as well. Wilhelm also had a lifelong obsession with the Asiatic "yellow peril," and he even proudly claims to have invented that term (a claim that is probably true). [pp. 202-203]

But by the late 1890s Wilhelm was focusing increasingly on the Jews: "Wilhelm's visceral anti-semitism of the the 1880s resurfaced .... From around the turn of the century, under Chamberlain's influence, and unnerved by the rising tide of democracy and socialism at home and Germany's increasingly exposed position internationally, Wilhelm II gave voice ever more openly to antisemtic convictions." [pp. 204-205] During this time, Röhl characterizes Wilhelm's attitude as "wavering between pogrom antisemitism and extermination antisemitism." That is, Röhl, probably the world's leading expert on Kaiser Wilhelm II, claims that, "under Chamberlain's influence," the Second Reich was already moving in the direction of "extermination antisemitism" while Adolf Hilter was still ein Schuljunge.

After the war, Wilhelm focused his embittered rage not on the Allied Powers who had defeated Germany on the battlefield, but on the "internal enemy": the Jews. In 1919, the deposed Kaiser wrote "Kein Deutscher darf das je vergessen noch ruhen, bis diese Parasiten von deutschem Boden vertilgt und ausgerottet sind! Dieser Giftpilz an der deutschen Eiche." ("No German can ever forget or rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil.") He even speculated as to the best method to accomplish this wished for extermination: "ich glaube, das beste wäre Gas." ("I think gas would be best.") Wilhelm wrote these words in his own hand in a letter to General August von Mackensen (link). In the same letter Wilhelm called for a "regular international all-worlds pogrom à la Russe". In other words, Wilhelm had stopped his "wavering" and had now fully succumbed to the mentality that would eventually lead to the "final solution" to the Jewish problem.

"Key Ideas" of Nazism

Now lets look a little more closely at the substance of Chamberlain's book, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Richard Evans (Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge) in his 2004 study The Coming of the Third Reich investigates the various writers and thinkers who helped to shape the racist and antisemitic ideological core of National Socialism. Evans singles out Chamberlain for particular attention:

"It was Chamberlain who had the greatest impact, however, with his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1900. In this vaporous and mystical work Chamberlain portrayed history in terms of a struggle for supremacy between the Germanic and Jewish races, the only two racial groups that retained their original purity in a world of miscegenation. Against the heroic and cultured Germans were pitted the ruthless and mechanistic Jews, whom Chamberlain thus elevated into a cosmic threat to human society rather than simply dismissing them as a marginal or inferior group. Linked to the racial struggle was a religious one, and Chamberlain devoted a good deal of effort to trying to prove that Christianity was essentially Germanic and that Jesus, despite all the evidence, had not been Jewish at all. Chamberlain's work impressed many of his readers with its appeal to science in support of its arguments; his most important contribution in this respect was to fuse antisemitism and racism with Social Darwinism . . . . Here were assembled already, therefore, some of the key ideas that were later to be taken up by the Nazis."
[pp. 33-34]

Below are five of these "key ideas" of Nazism, referred to above by Richard Evans, to be found in Foundations:

(1) Human history can only be understood in terms of race, and, in particular, in terms of the struggle of the Teutonic race.
"The leitmotiv which runs through the whole book is the assertion of the superiority of the Teuton family to all the other races of the world." [Introduction by "Lord Redesdale", aka David Mitford]

(2) The races of humanity are not equal.
"[T]he most learned gentlemen in Europe have solemnly protocolled the fact that all the races bear an equal share in the development of culture . . . . It provokes a smile! But crimes against history are really too serious to be punished merely by being laughed at; the sound common sense of all intelligent men must step in and put a stop to this." [Chapter Six: Entrance of the Germanic People Into History]

(3) Aryans constitute the "Master Race", and they should rule over all other races.
"Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right, as the Stagirite [Aristotle] expresses it, the lords of the world." [Chapter Six: Entrance of the Germanic People Into History]

(4) Jews, as a race, constitute the great, internal enemy of the Aryans.
"The Indo-European, moved by ideal motives, opened the gates in friendship: the Jew rushed in like an enemy, stormed all positions and planted the flag of his, to us, alien nature — I will not say on the ruins, but on the breaches of our genuine individuality." [Chapter Five: The Entrance of the Jews Into Western History]

(5) Jesus was Aryan, and Christianity is the natural religion of Aryan people.
"He won from the old human nature a new youth, and thus became the God of the young, vigorous Indo-Europeans, and under the sign of His cross there slowly arose upon the ruins of the old world a new culture -- a culture at which we have still to toil long and laboriously until some day in the distant future it may deserve the appellation 'Christ-like' . . . . Whoever wishes to see the revelation of Christ must passionately tear this darkest of veils from his eyes. His advent is not the perfecting of the Jewish religion but its negation." [Chapter Three: The Revelation of Christ]

Very Strange Bedfellows

Wilhelm II wasn't the only high profile fan that Houston Stewart Chamberlain had. When Foundations was translated into English in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a review that began and ended with praise for the author, although in between there was a significant amount of often quite pointed criticism, as the following passage shows:

"A witty English critic once remarked of Mitford that he had all the qualifications of an historian—violent partiality and extreme wrath. Mr. Chamberlain certainly possesses these qualifications in excess, and, combined with a queer vein of the erratic in his temperament, they almost completely offset the value of his extraordinary erudition . . . . Mr. Chamberlain's thesis is that the nineteenth century, and therefore the twentieth and all future centuries, depend for everything in them worth mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic branch of the Aryan race. He holds that there is no such thing as a general progress of mankind, that progress is only for those whom he calls the Teutons, and that when they mix with or are intruded upon by alien and, as he regards them, lower races, the result is fatal. Much that he says regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like, is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth considering by a generation accustomed, as its forefathers for the preceding generations were accustomed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious doctrines taught by well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists; but Mr. Chamberlain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of those whom he derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish hatred is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain's hatreds cover a wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church, the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety of literary men and historians. To this sufficiently incongruous collection of antipathies he adds a much smaller selection of violent attachments, ranging from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans to Immanuel Kant, and Indian theology, metaphysics, and philosophy—he draws sharp distinctions between all three, and I merely use them to indicate his admiration for the Indian habit of thought, an admiration which goes hand in hand with and accentuates his violent hatred for what most sane people regard as the far nobler thought contained, for instance, in the Old Testament. He continually contradicts himself, or at least uses words in such diametrically opposite senses as to convey the effect of contradiction; and so it would be possible to choose phrases of his which contradict what is here said; but I think that I give a correct impression of his teaching as a whole."

But despite these reservations, Roosevelt began his review by calling Foundations "a noteworthy book in more ways than one" and ended his review on a very positive note:

"Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a really beautiful and solemn appreciation of true Christianity, of true acceptance of Christ's teachings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain has done, a man who can sketch as vividly as he has sketched the fundamental facts of the Roman empire in the first three centuries of our era, a man who can warn us as clearly as he has warned about some of the pressing dangers which threaten our social fabric because of indulgence in a morbid and false sentimentality, a man, in short, who has produced in this one book materials for half a dozen excellent books on utterly diverse subjects, represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to be taken into account."

George Bernard Shaw (social reformer, playwright, and founder of the London School of Economics) also wrote a review of Foundations. Shaw began his review like this: "This very notable book should be read by all good Fabians." The Fabian Society is a group (still in existence) that advocates moderate, non-revolutionary, Socialism. Among its illustrious members have been H.G. Wells, Annie Besant, Virginia Wolf, and Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as Labor Party stalwarts such as Harold Wilson, Tony Benn, and Tony Blair

Why did George Bernard Shaw believe that "all good Fabians" should read Chamberlain's book? Because, in Shaw's own words, "it is a masterpiece of really scientific history. It does not make confusion: it clears it away." Shaw ends his review by writing, "Meanwhile, as this book has produced a great effect in Germany, where 60,000 copies are in circulation, and is certain to stir up thought here, whoever has not read it will be rather out of it in political and sociological discussions for some time to come." Shaw would also later write that "the greatest Protestant Manifesto ever written, as far as I know, is Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century: everybody capable of it should read it."

As the reaction of the moderate Socialist George Bernard Shaw demonstrates, Houston Stewart Chamberlain's antisemitism was, apparently, socially acceptable in the early 20th century. And the reaction of the Progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt demonstrates that this acceptability still held even for those who explicitly recognized Chamberlain's antisemitism for what it was and rejected it in no uncertain terms. The importance of this acceptance must be underscored. Although to the average 21st century reader, Foundations sounds like an unhinged antisemitic rant, its author genuinely hoped to reach out to and influence well-educated, serious minded, socially conscious individuals. The reactions of Shaw and Roosevelt demonstrate that he achieved some real success in doing so.

Another "strange bedfellow" is Chamberlain's longtime close friend, Adolf von Harnack, a highly influential Protestant theologian and church historian. For those familiar with modern theological trends, it is worth noting that Harnack made significant contributions to both the Higher Criticism and the Social Gospel as well as to liberal theology generally. In doing this Harnack had helped to lay the theological groundwork for what the Nazis would come to call "Positive Christianity," concerning which the official Nazi Party Program, adopted in 1920, states:

"We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without tying itself to a particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our Volk can only take place from within, on the basis of the principle: public need comes before private greed.”
Point 24, Party Program, National Socialist Workers Party of Germany

The friendship between the liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack and Houston Stewart Chamberlain is far from aberrational, as shown by George Bernard Shaw's exclamation (quoted above) that the book viewed by the Nazi's as their "gospel" was viewed by Shaw as "the greatest Protestant Manifesto ever written"! In fact the affinity between Nazism and Protestantism, and liberal Protestantism in particular, is far deeper and stronger than is generally recognized. This (very) dark side Protestantism also manifests itself in America's own unique contribution to fascism: the Ku Klux Klan. Another example is that of the Calvinist Afrikaaners of South Africa and their (now long departed) Apartheid system.

Modern liberal Protestantism, and especially the Higher Criticism and the Social Gospel, were both crucial to the version of Christianity preferred by the Nazis. The Higher Criticism, especially as it was formulated by Harnack, gave the green light to the Nazi agenda of purging Christianity of all Jewish influences and associations. For example, one of Harnack's criticisms of Luther was that he had not seen clear to dispense with the Old Testament: "What an unburdening of Christianity and its doctrine it would have been if Luther had taken this step!" [Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, p. 134, trans. by John Steely and Lyle Bierma, Durham, 1999 (orig. 1920).] Because of his decades long association with Chamberlain, Harnack was well aware of the appeal that such an approach had to hard-core antisemites, although Harnack himself was probably no antisemite, and even criticized, in a friendly way, Chamberlain for his excessive antipathy toward Jews.

"Only When Jews Bleed, Are We Liberated"

In the years following Germany's disastrous defeat in WWI, Chamberlain's health and spirits declined precipitously. But then in the fall of 1923, at the age of sixty-eight and increasingly frail, the author received a visitor who was at the time almost precisely half his age. Chamberlain instantly realized that he was now in the living presence of the great leader who would fulfill the grand vision of Foundations. And the name of this Führer was Adolf Hilter. The day after their first meeting, Chamberlain wrote to Hitler: "You have great things to do . . . . With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality." That letter was written on October 7, 1923. Just one month later Adolf Hitler would stage his infamous Beer Hall Putsch, at which he declared, somewhat prematurely as it turned out, "The National Revolution has begun!"

The 1923 Putsch failed, but Hitler made use of his (brief) time in prison to start writing Mein Kampf, in which he made a point of praising Houston Stewart Chamberlain by name. In 1925, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, Chamberlain was proclaimed in the official Nazi press as "the author of the gospel of the Nazi movement," in an editorial written by Alfred Rosenberg, the principle theoretician of Nazi racial science. Rosenberg wrote his own sequel to Chamberlain's work and called it The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which went on to be the second best selling book in Germany under the Third Reich (right after Mein Kampf). In 1927, Chamberlain died. Neither Theodore Roosevelt nor George Bernard Shaw attended the funeral, but Adolf Hilter did.

The year after Chamberlain died, the Nazi Party won only 2.6% of the vote in the national elections of 1928. But just two years later, in the depths of the ever deepening Great Depression, the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) not only broke out of single digits for the first time, but rocketed to almost 20% of the popular vote to become the second largest party in the Reichstag. By 1930 Nazism was a genuine mass movement with millions in its ranks. The streets of Weimar Germany now rang out with the refrain from The Storm Trooper's Song:

"So stand our Storm Columns, for racial fight prepared.
Only when Jews bleed, are we liberated.
No more negotiation; it's no help, not even slight.
Beside our Adolf Hitler we're courageous in a fight."

Pitched street battles, especially between rival Communist and Nazi paramilitaries, were resulting in a mounting toll of killed and seriously injured. The Nazis, as they grew in numbers and influence, were now manifesting on an ever expanding scale yet another "key idea" already spelled out in Chamberlain's Foundations: the glorification of violence and "struggle".

In a section under the heading "Progress and Degeneration", Chamberlain approvingly quotes from John Fiske's work The Destiny of Man:

"It is the wholesale destruction of life, which has heretofore characterised evolution ever since life began, through which the higher forms of organic existence have been produced"

However, Chamberlain then changes his tone when it comes to what Fiske says next:

"as evolution advances, the struggle for existence ceases to be a determining factor ... this elimination of strife is a fact of utterly unparalleled grandeur; words cannot do justice to such a fact."

At this point Chamberlain plainly states that he "must beg to differ" with Fiske for the following reason:

"For what is to become of our soul, which we acquired with such honest pains? We were just informed that the struggle for existence had 'produced' the soul: will it henceforth arise without a cause? ... And why, if the struggle has already produced something so splendid, should it now cease? Surely not from sickly, sentimental horror of bloodshed. 'Death in battle,' said Corporal Trim, and thereby he snapped his fingers — 'death in battle I do not fear this much! but elsewhere I should hide from it in every crevice.' And though it is, under Professor Fiske's guidance, a 'joy to see how we have at last gained such glorious heights,' yet I can imagine and hope for something much more glorious still than what the present offers, and I shall never admit that the cessation of the struggle would mean an advance ...."

Conclusions

We have seen in the above that the "key ideas" of Nazism, including especially those ideas that led to the Final Solution, had long before been worked out at some length by Houston Stewart Chamberlain in his book Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Both Adolf Hitler and the chief Nazi "race theorist" Alfred Rosenberg publicly and enthusiastically acknowledged their intellectual debt to Chamberlain and his book. Moreover, modern scholars of the Third Reich have also acknowledged this obvious close connection between Chamberlain and Nazism, including Richard Evans, Michael Mann, John C. G. Röhl, Roger Griffin, Richard Steigmann-Gall, and others.

It has also been shown that Chamberlain's Foundations was both well known and widely popular, including among many readers one would not automatically suspect to find in the same company as Hitler and Rosenberg, such as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, and Adolf von Harnack. Of particular interest is the reception of Chamberlain's ideas by Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose own racism and antisemitism were a match for Chamberlain's, and who demonstrated that even before the founding of the Nazi Party, the long arc of European antisemitism was already undergoing a decisive transformation from mere "pogrom antisemitism" to full-fledged "extermination antisemitism".

One is left with no other alternative but to conclude that the roots of Nazism are hidden in plain sight. In other words, they are not hidden at all. Nevertheless, many insist on looking in the dark corners of the "Occult" fringes of fin de siècle European society for the origins and sources of Nazi ideology. Multiple possible explanations could be produced for this self-imposed obscurantism, but all such explanations must amount to the same thing: a willfull denial of reality has led to the fabrication of revisionist "historical" narratives whose only goal is to misdirect us away from the simple truth.

[An earlier version of this article appeared in the Lamas, 2011, edition of Pagan Friends Webzine: link. SCROLL DOWN for links to related posts from this blog.]

Related posts from this blog:

Charlie Hebdo: "Love Is Stronger Than Hate"

2011-11-08T07:32:00.000-05:00

Guardian: Charlie Hebdo front cover depicts Muslim man kissing cartoonist

The Week: Charlie Hebdo risks further Muslim wrath with 'gay kiss'

France24: Charlie Hebdo hacker says he ‘did nothing wrong’

Le Monde: HUMOUR ! – La pelle à la tolérance de « Charlie Hebdo »

Middle East Forum: Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech, and Islam

From this blog:

More reactions to Islamic terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo

2011-11-04T17:01:00.001-04:00

The special edition of Charlie Hebdo, featuring the Prophet Muhammad as "guest editor", was sold out within hours. The leftist Paris-based weekly satirical magazine quickly announced that, in spite of the fact that their offices had been destroyed in an Islamic terrorist attack, they would publish an additional 175,000 copies of the magazine, on top of their initial printing of 75,000.

One French Muslim leader, Abderrahmane Dahmane, who has served in the past as a presidential adviser on religious diversity, stated that he personally had not been outraged over Charlie Hebdo's satirical lampoonings of Islam:

“We have a sense of humour in the world of Islam. What we sometimes say about Islam and the Prophet, among ourselves and in the presence of imams, is worse than what Charlie Hebdo wrote.”

That quote is from an article at the NineNewsToday.Com website: France’s Charlie Hebdo plans reprint of Islam edition

Here are some other related stories:

l'Humanité in English: {Charlie Hebdo} Burnt on the Stake

Associated Press: Firebombed French paper posts blog after site hack

RFI English: Charlie Hebdo accuses Facebook of helping hatemongers after firebomb

The Spectator: Can we torch Time Magazine’s offices now?

The New Humanist: French daily Liberation loans office space to Charlie Hebdo and reproduces Muhammad caricature in solidarity following firebomb attack

Libération: «Charlie Hebdo» : «Nous interdire le blasphème, c'est nous interdire de respirer»

Irish Times: United condemnation of attack on French paper

Islamic Terrorist Attack in Paris Against "Charlie Hebdo"

2011-11-03T18:01:00.001-04:00

Two days ago I used an image from "Charlie Hebdo", the Paris based left-wing, anti-clerical, satirical weekly, in my post What Will 2010 Hate Crime Stats Show? The very next day, "Charlie Hebdo" was scheduled to come out with a special issue featuring the Prophet Muhammad as that week's "guest editor". But in the middle of the night the magazine's offices were firebombed and completely destroyed.

Here is a sampling of related news stories and reactions to this act of terrorism:

Reuters: French paper reprints Mohammad cartoon after fire-bomb

UK Guardian: Charlie Hebdo fire shows how polarised French attitudes to Islam are

In These Times: At Least Draw a Classy Mohammed

Le Monde: Un incendie d'origine criminelle ravage les locaux de "Charlie Hebdo"

The Daily Beast: 12 Most Shocking Charlie Hebdo Covers

BBC: Charlie Hebdo and its place in French journalism

Al Jazeera: French paper attacked over Islam-themed edition

BBC: French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo attacked in Paris

The Telegraph: French satirical newspaper firebombed after prophet Mohammed announcement

Huffington Post: Charlie Hebdo, Firebombs and the Role of Satire

What Will 2010 Hate Crime Stats Show? (Shining yet more statistical light on the dark fantasy of Islamophobia)

2011-11-01T17:18:00.001-04:00

Remember the hysterical furor over "Islamophobia" last year? Remember the dire predictions and hyperbolic claims about a wave of hate-crimes against Muslims? Well, sometime this month the FBI plans to release its annual report of Hate Crime Statistics for the year that was 2010, the year of the "Ground Zero Mosque".

I have a non-dire prediction: hate crimes against Muslims will continue to be a negligible fraction of all hate crimes. Meanwhile, hate crimes against Jews, gay people and African Americans will continue to far outnumber those against Muslims.

Here is a direct link to the relevant page at the FBI website:
FBI -- Hate Crime Statistics

In the meantime, check out my overview of last year's FBI report on hate-crimes, along with a few other relevant posts:

Also check out this amusing item just posted at the "Islam In Europe" blog:
France: Prophet Mohammed to 'guest edit' satirical weekly. That's where I got the image at the top of this post.

Finally, let me just point out that the only way to meaningfully contextualize the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims in the US is to compare these tiny, almost statistically insignificant numbers, with the scale of fratricidal bloodshed that Muslims visit upon each other in all of the societies in which they make up the majority. Muslims are far safer, far freer, and far more prosperous in the United States of America than they are anywhere else in the world.

October, 2011: Biggest Month Ever for EGREGORES

2011-10-31T17:22:00.006-04:00

Well, the last day of the month still has several hours left in it, but according to the stats that are generated by blogspot, October, 2011 is already the biggest month yet for this humble blog of mine. There have (already) been over 28,000 pageviews, which, according to my calculations comes in at nearly 1,000 page views per day.

But wait, you say, perhaps there is some mad scientist out there who has fiendishly implanted electrodes into some poor ferret's brain so that each time the ferret pushes a little lever (which causes to be clicked the refresh button on the little ferret's web browser, which is hard wired to only display pages from the egregores blog) the pleasure center of the ferret's brain receives a small electrical impulse, with the result that said ferret pushes and pushes and pushes the lever until it dies, blissfully, from exhaustion, dehydration and starvation, only to be replaced by the next ferret.

Not true, I say. For I have also been independently collecting statistics on "unique visitors", of which this blog has consistently averaged over (and sometimes well over) 200 per day for the last year. So there.

To be honest I wish I were above such things, but to be even more honest I have to admit that it is nice to be noticed.

Below is the list of the "top posts" over the last month. (That is, these were the posts with the most pageviews during the last month. None of them were actually posted during October, 2011.)

These posts are not the ones I would pick for my all-time best, nor are they broadly representative of the content of this blog. But I see nothing to be embarrassed or to complain about in the list. I did do my own "top 25 list" after the first year of this blog, and the interested reader is encouraged to look there, as well: One Year of "egregores" (My Top 25).

Happy Zombie Jesus Day

Apr 24, 2011, 3 comments;

1,461 Pageviews

Gods bless the Navy SEALs

May 3, 2011, 3 comments;

1,197 Pageviews

From the desk of Rajan Zed: Miley Cyrus, Naked Yoga, the Church of Norway, and so forth ....

Aug 1, 2011;

1,055 Pageviews

Possibly Blasphemous Images of the Virgin Mary (then again, possibly not)

Oct 22, 2010, 5 comments;

751 Pageviews

extremely cool natural fractals

Dec 2, 2010, 3 comments;

449 Pageviews

Bogus Hakuin Quote on Life and Death: "Yes, but not a dead one."

Sep 14, 2011;

260 Pageviews

Mencius, Mencius, Mencius (Three posts on the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius)

Aug 3, 2011;

240 Pageviews

Book Burning Hindus?

Jul 28, 2011

; 231 Pageviews

Elvira: "I'm you, with bigger tits"

Oct 21, 2010, 1 comment;

196 Pageviews

Teddy Roosevelt Was A Socialist!!!!!

Jan 9, 2011, 2 comments;

166 Pageviews

C. G. Jung and the Nazis: notes on two specific allegations

2011-10-28T17:05:00.009-04:00

1. Preliminaries
This blog post addresses two of the most commonly encountered accusations that have been made against Carl Jung:

(1) That Jung collaborated with the Nazis in his role as the President of the International Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

(2) That Jung's psychological theories are closely related to, and even helped to give rise to, Nazi ideas about "race" and "nation".

I am particular interested in the way in which these two accusations are combined to form a key component of the essentialist canard against Jung that he (and his philosophy) had a natural attraction to the Nazis and vice versa. This mode of attacking Jung was also discussed by me recently in the previous post titled Carl Jung and the Cowardly Blood Sport of Nazi Baiting.

Before going any further, though, lets look at two high profile examples of specific instances in which these allegations are made, just to make it clear that what follows is not an exercise in precision bayonet practice.

First up is Richard Wolin who begins the second chapter of his The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism (that chapter has the very subtle title of "Prometheus Unhinged: C. G. Jung and the Temptations of Aryan Religion") like this:

For many years in the aftermath of World War II, Jung's doctrines had trouble catching on. Jung's willingness to assume a position of leadership among Nazi psychologists--shortly after the war there was even talk among Allies about prosecuting him as a war criminal--constituted an irremediable taint, as did his numerous public declarations in favor of German and Italian fascism. The approval Jung bestowed upon the Nazis confirmed the suspicions of many concerning the peculiarities of his 'analytical psychology'. Since his demonstrative break with Freud in 1914, Jung's approach increasingly flirted with the theosophical doctrines that had nourished the Nazi Weltanshauung in its early stages. Whereas Freud had always proudly asserted his Enlightenment patrimony, Jung's voluminous theoretical writings denounced the failings of Western civilization in a proto-Spenglerian idiom."
[p. 64]

Compared to the above extravagant litany of anathemas posthumously pronounced upon Carl Jung's head, the following denunciation, found in Goggin and Goggin's Death of a Jewish Science (comprising the second example), is a veritable monument to concision:

"The Göring Institute [explained further below] did not need to develop a separate theory of psychotherapy for Germany. Jung's own theory provided an almost perfect match for National Socialism."
[p. 76]

Many more examples can be given, some of which are found in the previous post in this blog on Carl Jung and the Cowardly Blood Sport of Nazi-Baiting.

A key aspect of both of these accusations is that they are presented in a way that singles out Jung among European intellectuals, and especially among leading thinkers in the interrelated and overlapping fields of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychology. To be more precise, the charge is that a natural affinity exists between Jung's thinking and National Socialism, and that this is a unique and fundamental characteristic of Jung's thought, that is, (1) this supposed affinity is something not shared by other schools of psychological thought at the time, and (2) this supposed affinity is an essential quality of Jung's own school of psychological thought.

2. Guilt By Association: The General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, the Berlin Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the Göring Institute
It is often claimed that in 1933, after the Nazis had come to power, Carl Jung was chosen to replace Ernst Kretschmer as president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, and that this was done because of Jung's supposedly greater sympathy for National Socialism. This claim is wrong on two counts.

In the first place, Kretschmer was not replaced by Jung, but rather by Matthias Göring. Göring was a Nazi party member (although he had only recently joined) who had been trained in psychoanalysis by Leonhard Seif, who was part of the psychoanalytic school of Alfred Adler (who, as a matter of fact, was a Jewish Marxist). Simultaneously with the change in presidents from Kretschmer to Göring, the organization's name was changed to the German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. It should be emphasized that the Society, which had been in existence for over six years by then, had always been primarily a German organization. Its founding members were all German citizens, and each of its six Congresses (going back to 1925) had been held in German cities. There was a direct continuity between the old "General" Society and the new "German General" one.

Carl Jung became the president of the newly formed International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, which was distinguished from the "German" Society by, among other things, allowing Jews, who were now excluded from the "German" Society, as members (because German Jews had by that time been stripped of their German citizenship). The International Society also made of point of holding meetings outside of Germany, and of having non-Germans as officers.

In the second place, far from being some kind of principled and stalwart opponent of National Socialism who needed to be gotten out of the way, Ernst Kretschmer was a signatory to the November, 1933 Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat ("Vow of allegiance of the professors of the German universities and high-schools of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State"). Kretschmer continued to work as a psychiatrist in Nazi Germany throughout the war without any sign of conflict with the National Socialist State, to which he had pledged his allegiance. At best, Kretschmer, like other "good Germans", cooperated with the Nazis simply in order to survive. Whether or not he went further than that is not clear from the historical record. There are accusations that (like many others in his profession) Kretschmer cooperated with Nazi eugenics policies (that is, in mass sterilizations and mass killings). It is also claimed that he authored a paper in 1934 advocating the sterilization of Schwachsinniger ("mental defectives"), and that he served in the so-called "Hereditary Health Courts" which enforced "racial hygiene" policies, and even that he may have been in the SS.

What then, if anything, are we to make of the fact that Jung became president of the newly minted International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1933? Often one is given the impression that this by itself was tantamount to being a Nazi collaborator. But what about the Vice President of the Society, Hugh Crichton-Miller? Crichton-Miller was a British psychiatrist who had applied Freudian theories to the treatment of "shell-shocked" soldiers during and after WWI. He founded Tavistock Clinic in London in 1920, where to this day a large statue of Sigmund Freud sits in front of the main clinic building. There has never been any suggestion that Crichton-Miller had Nazi sympathies, despite his role in the Society during the same time that Jung was president.

And then there is the case of John Rittmeister, who left Switzerland in 1937 and moved to Berlin to work directly under the Nazi Matthias Göring. Rittmeister took the high profile job of head of the outpatient clinic of the Berlin Psychiatric Institute (which by then was subsumed under the "Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie e.v.", more commonly referred to simply as the Göring Institute). While working for Göring, Rittmeister underwent training analysis with the Freudian Werner Kemper (under whom Göring's wife was also undergoing analysis). Being a known Marxist didn't prevent Rittmeister from holding an important position at the Göring Institute and giving public lectures in Berlin. But when it was discovered in 1942 that he was also a member of the "Red Orchestra", an underground resistance group working with the Soviet Union, he was executed.

Rittmeister and Crichton-Miller should always be kept in mind as counter-examples to the lazy and facile guilt-by-association argument that is often employed (very selectively) against Carl Jung because of his serving as an officer in the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

This seems like a good place to bring up the fact that Rittmeister wasn't the only one working secretly for the Allies. A certain Carl Gustav Jung was recruited by the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) in 1942, and he worked directly with Allen Dulles, who would later be the first head of the CIA. Jung's cooperation with the OSS against the Nazis is discussed in at least three separate books about Allen Dulles: Allen Dulles by James Srodes (1999), Gentleman spy by Peter Grose (1996), and From Hitler’s doorstep by Neal Petersen (1998). The subject is also gone over in Dierdre Bair's biography of Jung, and in the autobiography of Mary Bancroft (The Autobiography of a Spy), who was simultaneously Dulles' lover and Jung's patient at the time (and she was responsible for introducing Dulles to Jung in the first place).

There were actual Nazis in the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, including the most famous Nazi psychotherapist of them all, Matthias Göring (whose cousin was the famous Field Marshall). Göring worked closely with a number of prominent Freudians throughout this period, including Werner Kemper, with whom Göring's wife, Erna, underwent psychoanalysis, and Carl Müller-Braunschweig, who trained Göring's son Ernst in analysis. Müller-Braunschweig, along with fellow Freudian Felix Boehm, headed the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute during the same period that Jung was president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.

Felix Boehm and Carl Muller-Braunschweig (both Freudians) cooperated fully in the Aryanization and Nazification of the BPI, and Boehm even managed to receive, at least in part, the blessings of Freud himself for some of this. See, for example, Felix Boehm's entry in the online International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/boehm-felix-julius

In addition both Leonhard Seif, under whom Göring trained in psychoanalysis, and also Fritz Künkel, are frequently referred to as Nazis, but it is not clear that this is justified. Göring, Seif, and Künkel were all Adlerians. In fact, very few of the prominent psychotherapists, psychiatrists and psychologists in Germany who can definitely be linked with National Socialism were Jungians.

Also see Göring's entry (by Geoffrey Cocks) in the online International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/goring-matthias-heinrich

[I will put some more references in this section soon, but good old google will lead you to the same sources I found!]

3. National Socialist Psychology: Erich Jaensch, u.s.w.
The field of psychology itself (as opposed to psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and/or psychiatry) also underwent Nazification. Erich Jaensch is universally recognized as the most important German psychologist to explicitly and enthusiastically embrace National Socialism. In fact Jaensch himself claimed (retroactively) that his work going back to the 20s had always had the aim of developing a psychological theory based on National Socialism, and Nazi racial ideas in particular. Jaensch was appointed Editor of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie in 1933, and in that year he delivered a major paper on psychological types at the October Congress of German Psychologial Association, in which Jaensch contrasted the superiority of the German psychological type with that of "the enemy" (the "counter-type"). It is important to note that Jaensch's psychological theories had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Jung. In fact, Jaensch's mentor as a young up-and-coming academic had been Hermann Cohen, who, according to his entry in the biography at the Jewish Virtual Library, was "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century." Also see Hermann Cohen's entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Others who presented major papers at that meeting included Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, who gave a talk on "The Germanic Soul", and Karl Wilhelm von Isenburg, who delivered an address on "Racial Purity". The meeting was also addressed by Jaensch as mentioned above. [see especially A History of Modern Experimental Psychology: From James and Wundt to Cognitive Science by George Mandler, p. 128; and The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany by Ulfried Geuter and Richard Holmes, p. 171]

For more on Erich Jaensch, see: The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany By Ulfried Geuter, Richard Holmes, pp. xvii, 44-45, 62-66; Psychology in Twentieth-Century Thought and Society by Mitchell G. Ash, William R. Woodward, pp. 171-174; The Search for the Silver Lining: The American Academic Establishment and the "Aryanization" of German Scholarship by Karen J. Greenberg (link goes to the full article hosted online by the Simon Wiesenthal Center); and The Norton history of the human sciences by Roger Smith, p. 604.

4. Alfred Hoche, "Life Unworthy of Life", and Aktion T4
No one in the psychological sciences had a more profound impact on the Third Reich than Alfred Hoche. Hoche was a German psychiatrist who was a bitter critic of both Jung and Freud, whose psychoanalysis he attacked as a "new religious sect". Hoche's criticism came at a time when Jung and Freud were close allies. He delivered his famous speech condemning psychoanalysis as "A Psychic Epidemic Among Physicians" in Baden-Baden on May 8, 1910. A contemporary account of that speech reads, in part:

"Freud's followers, he [Hoche] said, did not belong to a 'School' in the scientific sense but a kind of sect, that does not bring forth verifiable facts but articles of faith. Psychoanalysis shows all the features of a sect: the fanatical conviction of being superior to others, its jargon, the sharp intolerance of and tendency to vilify those of another belief, its high veneration fo the Master, its tendency to proselytize, its readiness to accept the most monstrous improbabilities, and the fantastic overevaluation of what has already been accomplished and can be accomplished by adherents of the sect ... Hoche concluded that the Freudian movement was the 'return in a modernized form of a magical medicine, a kind of secret teaching ....'" [quoted in The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberber, p. 806]

Ten years after Hoche's "Psychic Epidemic" speech, he published Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens ("Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life"). 19 years after Hoche's book appeared, the Nazi government put Hoche's ideas into practice by way of a program called Aktion T4, in which at least 200,000 people were killed after being "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination" (as per the edict issued by Adolf Hitler on September 1, 1939).

Hoche himself was not in any way directly involved with the actual T4 program, which was headed up by Phillip Brouhl, with much of the actual work delegated to Bouhler's deputy, Victor Brack. Neither Bouhler nor Brack appear to have had backgrounds in medicine or psychology. Bouhler was a career Nazi, having been in the party since 1920, whereas Brack became Bouhler's chauffeur sometime in the late 20s. No one has ever suggested that either men had any connection with Jung.

There were many formally trained psychiatrists involved with the T4 program, and the most important of these was Max de Crinis. He was not the most famous student of Theodor Meynert, Director of the Psychiatric Institute at the University of Vienna, for that honor goes to Sigmund Freud, but Max de Crinis is undoubtedly the most infamous of Meynert's students, for he went on to be the most fanatic Nazi in the psychiatric profession in Germany during the Third Reich. And de Crinis' fanaticism wasn't mere talk, for he played a central role in the T4 program of mass killings of those deemed "Unworthy of Life".

One could fill a small library with books that have been published about "Nazi Doctors". All of these books have three things in common: (1) they all point out the role of the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in providing the ideological arguments justifying mass sterilization and mass killings directed against "Life Unworthy of Life", (2) they all emphasize the role of physicians and especially psychiatrists in implementing the Nazi programs of mass sterilization and mass killings, (3) none of them have anything whatsoever to say about the physician and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung and his psychological theories, because he and his ideas had absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

[Need references here, too.]

White Explorers versus Black Magic (And Black Jesus versus White Jesus)

2011-10-27T17:05:00.010-04:00

.
Human sacrifice cult battles with police
By Nick Squires in Sydney 12:01AM BST 10 May 2007 UK Telegraph

Nick Squires' 2007 story about a "human sacrifice cult" in Papua New Guinea (linked to above) begins with the dire warning that Papua New Guinea was "undergoing a dramatic resurgence in sorcery and witchcraft," and that, in particular, a new "shadowy cult" had appeared that was "accused of beheading villagers and offering them as human sacrifices."

These macabre goings on, we are told, were taking place in "The central highlands [which] were only penetrated by white explorers in the 1930s and belief in black magic remains strong."

The obvious implication is that these hinterlands had still been insufficiently "penetrated" by "whites" to bring about the eradication of "black magic".

Here are some similar "news" stories from around the same time:

Police manhunt for cult leader who 'eats girls' Daily Mail, 8 Feb, 2007

Cult leader on the run in Papua New Guinea Sydney Morning Herald, June 2, 2006

Cannibal 'Black Jesus' Faces Death Penalty FOX News, March 20, 2007

But wait, what's this about a "Black Jesus"?? It turns out there is more to this story. The "cult" in question was led by a man calling himself "Black Jesus". His given (that is, "Christian") name is Steven Tari, and he received his religious education not at Hogwarts (or some other school that teaches "Sorcery and Witchcraft"), but rather at Amron Bible College, where he studied to be a Lutheran minister. After leaving the Bible College (accounts differ as to whether he dropped out or was expelled) he started claiming to be "the true Christ". This caused him to run afoul of officials with both Church and State, and eventually he was being widely accused of "raping, killing and eating young sex slaves."

Tari was captured in 2005, but then he escaped. As it turns out, his escape was facilitated by the Lutheran pastor who had been given the job of counseling Tari while in prison. Tari was captured again in 2007, only to escape again in 2010, but was then recaptured quickly. In October of 2010 Tari was convicted of raping four girls between the ages of 15 and 17 and, in December, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The denouement of the story is told in the following two stories:

PNG's Black Jesus guilty of rape Sydney Morning Herald, Oct 8, 2010

Cult Leader Sentenced to 20 Years, islandsbusines.com, Dec 14, 2010

But wait, there's even more. Early reports about the doings of Steven "Black Jesus" Tari say nothing about "human sacrifice", although they do accuse him of sexually exploiting underage girls (the crime for which he was eventually convicted). But it appears that the girls who testified against Tari only did so after they were themselves arrested as criminals simply for being part of Tari's "cult" (see Patrick Matbob's article referred to and linked to in the next paragraph).

In a Nov 2007 article, Patrick Matbob (writing for the Fiji based "Islands Business" website) describes the beginnings of Steven Tari's "cult" in an article titled "Cult Worries Church Authorities". We find in that article, for example, that although Tari himself dropped out of (or was possibly expelled from) the Lutheran seminary that he attended, a number of registered Lutheran pastors were supporters of "Black Jesus":

"Lutheran Church authorities in Madang are particularly concerned because a number of the church’s registered pastors have joined the cult. This has confused church members in the area who are questioning whether the cult activities are being condoned by the church."

And in addition to the pastors who publicly supported Tari (while still publicly representing themselves as part of the Lutheran Church), there were others who continued to operate, in essence, as secret agents for Tari within the Evangelical Lutheran Church (about 1/5 of the PNG population is Lutheran). One of these underground supporters was none other than Pastor Logan Sepus, who masterminded a mass prison escape of Tari and his supporters in 2005.

The whole story of this "cult" and its leader and its followers is quite complex and fascinating. For a detailed "on the scene" account from someone who is highly critical of Steven Tari, check out anthropologist Nancy Sullivan's fascinating blogpost: Tari's Question. While discussing Steven Tari and how he fits in with the modern religious scene in PNG (and especially his relationship, or, at least according to Sullivan, total lack thereof) with the Dabsau Movement, founded by Yali Singina, Sullivan is primarily focussed on exposing Jared Diamond, the semi-famous author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, as a lying sack of shit. It's good stuff -- go and read it!!

Related posts to check out:

"Black Jesus Colored" (direct link) by Christopher Taylor at orbitercloud99.blogspot.com.

"Wierd Negro Order Raided": Human Sacrifice In The News

2011-10-26T17:12:00.005-04:00

Coverage of the much hyped trials of Casey Anthony and Amanda Knox both involved accusations of "human sacrifice":

Amanda Knox described as 'she-devil,' 'witch' (kabc, los angeles)

Minister Says Enquirer's 'Casey Anthony Human Sacrifice Ritual' Story Defamed Him (courthousenews.com)

Inspired by the recent headlines above, and also by a string of hysterical stories in the mainstream media about an "epidemic of human sacrifice in Uganda" (if you don't know what I'm talking about look here), let's take a little random walk down memory lane and look at some other notable instances (all from the 20th century and all from the United States) of Human Sacrifice In The News:

Mysterious Negro Cult Performed The Rite Of Human Sacrifice Biddeford [Maine] Weekly Journal, April 5, 1912

Woman Confesses Killing 17 Negroes; Leader of Church of Sacrifice Explains Creed Which Called for Wholesale Murders. NYT April 2, 1912

The Occult Murders by Al Profit
"The year is 1929 and Detroit is bursting at the seams, immigrants from the edges of the world burrowing their way into the city’s flesh ...."

"Human Sacrifice by Cult: Wierd Negro Order Raided" Vancouver Sun, Nov 22, 1932
[Story about a murder in Detroit connected to a cult led by a guy calling himself "Ugan Ali, God of the Asiatic Nation".]

RAIDED TEMPLE BARES GRIP OF VOODOO IN CITY Detroit Free Press, Nov 23, 1932
"Detectives investigating to learn the scope of Voodooism among ignorant and superstitious Detroit Negroes spent Tuesday night running down the myriad leads uncovered earlier in the day when they raided a fantastic "temple" and arrested a Negro who styled himself "God of the Asiatic Nation."

The Voodoo Murders David A. Spitzley's "Mythic Detroit" (collection of news items about the case)

David A. Spitzley's overview of "The Voodoo Murders"
(Wherein it is explained that, well, there was just one murder. Oh, and it had nothing to do with "Voodoo".)

Human Sacrifice Offered As Part Of Odd Ceremony Held By Cult In Kentucky St. Petersburg, Florida, Evening Independent, Feb. 9, 1933

Woman's Life Taken During Weird Rites: Sacrifice Causes 8 Arrests In Kentucky St. Joseph [Missouri] Gazette, Feb. 9, 1933

Three Convicted In 'Human Sacrifice' Trial St. Petersburg, Florida, Evening Independent, April 12, 1933

Child Slayings Linked To Cult: Mother Hunted: Girl, 5, Believed Victim Of Cult That Practices Human Sacrifice Miami News, Feb 20, 1940

Mother of Slain Tot Captured: Grandmother Claims Parents Belong To Sacrifice Cult San Jose News, Feb 19, 1940

"The Doctor Prescribes Additional Human Sacrifice" (racist cartoon from 1960 in the Sarasota Journal)

"Five bodies found believed to be part of human sacrifice" (Portsmouth [Ohio] Daily Times, Jan 5, 1990)
[Thsi story involves a "cult" that was, supposedly, a Mormon splinter group.]

13 Face Charges In Family Killlings NYT, Jan 6, 1990 (same case as above)
"Thirteen former members of a religious commune were charged with murder or conspiracy yesterday after the bodies of a family of five were found buried at an Ohio farm in what a prosecutor called a human sacrifice."

"You can be part of this Kalachakra anywhere"

2011-10-18T16:10:00.002-04:00

I had been assuming that the upcoming Kalachakra Empowerment in Bodhgaya, India (Dec 31, 2011 thru Jan 10, 2012) would be both videotaped and streamed live on the Internet, as the one in DC in July was. But then I looked at the kalachakra2012 website, and I could not find any mention of videotaping or streaming.

So I wrote to the great Bodhisattvas who are putting this event together, and I received this reply:

"Yes the 32nd Kalachakra will be live streaming via the Internet. So, you can be part of this Kalachakra anywhere."

Below is the schedule for the eleven day ceremony (taken from the website linked to above):

Kalachakra Teaching & Initiation Schedule

Bodh Gaya – December 31 – January 10, 2012

December 31, Saturday

0630 hrs

0700 hrs – 0930 hrs

0930 hrs – 1030 hrs

1030 hrs – 1230 hrs

1230 hrs – 1330 hrs

1330 hrs – 1415 hrs

January 1, Sunday

0630 hrs

0700 hrs – 1130 hrs

1130 hrs – 1230 hrs

1230 hrs – 1430 hrs

1430 hrs – 1630 hrs

January 2, Monday

0630 hrs

0700 hrs – 1200 hrs

1200 hrs – 1300 hrs

1300 hrs – 1430 hrs

January 3, Tuesday

0800 hrs

0815 hrs – 1030 hrs

1130 hrs - 1300 hrs

1300 hrs – 1530 hrs

January 4, Wednesday

0800 hrs

0815 hrs – 1030 hrs

1130 hrs - 1300 hrs

1300 hrs – 1530 hrs

January 5, Thursday

0800 hrs

0815 hrs – 1030 hrs

1130 hrs – 1300 hrs

1300 hrs – 1530 hrs

January 6, Friday

0645 hrs

0700 hrs – 1130 hrs

1130 hrs – 1300 hrs

1300 hrs - 1415 hrs

January 7, Saturday

0645 hrs

0700 hrs – 1130 hrs

1130 hrs – 1300 hrs

1300 hrs - 1630 hrs

January 8, Sunday

0645 hrs

0700 hrs – 1130 hrs

1130 hrs – 1245 hrs

1245 hrs – 1700 hrs

January 9, Monday

0630 hrs

0700 hrs – 1130 hrs

1130 hrs – 1245 hrs

1245 hrs – 1730 hrs

January 10, Tuesday

0700 hrs

0715 hrs – 0800 hrs

0800 hrs – 0900 hrs

0900 hrs – 1000 hrs

1200 hrs

Kalachakra Ritual Preparation

Depart for Teaching Hall

Earth Ritual Prayers

Teaching for about 30 – 40 main disciples (Optional for Public)

Earth Ritual Prayers (Optional for Public)

Lunch & Rest

Earth Ritual Prayers (Optional for Public)

Kalachakra Ritual Preparation

Depart for Teaching Hall

Prayers (Optional for Public)

Lunch

Earth Ritual Dance (Optional for Public)

Prayers (Optional for Public)

Kalachakra Ritual Preparation

Depart for Teaching Hall

Prayers (Optional for Public)

Lunch

Prayers (Optional for Public)

Preliminary Teachings – Day 1

Depart for Teaching Hall

Prayers

Lunch

Teaching

Preliminary Teachings – Day 2

Depart for Teaching Hall

Prayers

Lunch

Teaching

Preliminary Teachings – Day 3

Depart for Teaching Hall

Prayers

Lunch

Teaching

Kalachakra Ritual and offering Dance

Depart for Teaching Hall

Prayers

Lunch

Ritual Offering Dance

Students Preparation (Preliminary Initiation)

Depart for Teaching Hall

Self-Generation

Lunch

Preliminary Initiation for Students

Kalachakra Initiation

Depart for Teaching Hall

Self-Generation Prayers

Lunch

Kalachakra Initiation

Kalachakra Initiation (15th day of 11th Tibetan month)

Depart for Teaching Hall

Self-Generation Prayers

Lunch

Kalachakra Initiation

Long Life Empowerment for the Public and Long Life Ceremony for His Holiness

Depart for Teaching Hall

Self-Generation Prayers

Long Life Empowerment for Public

Long Life Ceremony for His Holiness

Lunch

America's greatest business genius was an Arab-American liberal hippie Buddhist. So there.

2011-10-17T18:06:00.000-04:00

"I doubt Bill Gates, for example, ever listened to Dark Side of The Moon with the headphones on–though I love the image. But a single minded-focus on programming may have helped them imitate, but not create."

I have been a Mac person since the mid 1980s when I became a research assistant for a Chemistry professor who is a Mac person. Gods bless her! For a few years I admit that I wandered in the wilderness of Windows, but then Steve Jobs returned to Apple and so did I. Gods bless him. Now Steve Jobs has left Apple for good.

I would think of Steve Jobs as a genius of historical proportions even if it did not turn out that he and I happened to agree about stuff like global warming and Buddhism. I know plenty of idiots and assholes who are environmentalists and Buddhists, and I know conservative Republican Christians who are good, decent, intelligent human beings.

But for whatever it might be worth, Steve Jobs was, as a matter of fact, an Arab-American, a liberal hippie, and a Buddhist.

The life and times of Steve Jobs’ Syrian father

Steve Jobs' Liberal Hippie Education

Apple Quits Chamber Of Commerce Over Global Warming

His mantra was focus and simplicity

Steve Jobs: Arab-American, Buddhist, Psychedelic Drug User, and Capitalist World-Changer

Steve Jobs was a Buddhist

The Zen of Steve Jobs

Blood Libel Against African Traditional Religions: "Child Sacrifice" Accusations Surface Again in Uganda

2011-10-16T13:08:00.012-04:00

0. A contemptible amalgam of racism and religious bigotry
Yet another variation on the tired old claims about "Child Sacrifice in Uganda" is now making the rounds. This time it is Chris Rogers, writing for the BBC, who has taken up the challenge of trying to pass this story off as legitimate. Rogers has already made a minor career out of lurid exposes involving sexual improprieties and/or violence against children (preferably both). More recently, though, Rogers has also attracted attention as a strikebreaking scab, when he took advantage of last winter's work stoppage by Britain's National Union of Journalists to get his mug on telly as a BBC One presenter (normally Rogers is restricted to those journalistic nether regions of radio and print).

Since Rogers' new piece, titled "Where Child Sacrifice is a Business", neglects to mention the recent slew of imbroglios involving precisely the same yellow-journalistic claims about "child sacrifice" in Uganda that he is now trotting out, I have taken the trouble to put together some links and brief summaries below.

As to Rogers' own contribution, the most important thing to know is that his two primary "sources" are (1) a Christian missionary (named Peter Sewakiryanga) who calls his headquarters "Jesus House", and (2) a rabidly fundamentalist Christian missionary group based in the UK called Jubilee Campaign.

In addition to the educational value of comparing Chris Roger's new treatment of this predictable, recurring "story" to the farcical travesties outlined below, there is the even more important and more educational comparison with that "recurring cultural pattern in Western history" known as "blood libel". Any student of history can immediately recognize the unmistakable parallels between the modern day accusations against practitioners of African Traditional Religions and those made against European Jews as a prelude to pogroms, mass expulsions and outright genocide.

It is sadly the case that horrific violence against children is a reality of modern human societies around the world (just as it undoubtedly was in medieval European societies). For example, the rate at which children in the United States die every day as a direct result of physical abuse and neglect has nearly doubled since 1998 (see the graphic at the top of this post, which is taken from the childhelp.org website). All those who honestly draw our attention to the objective realities of this problem are doing a great public service. But when our instinctual revulsion against all forms of child abuse (and especially the murder of children) is cynically manipulated to target specific religious groups (such as, in this case, followers of African Traditional Religions) that is a completely different matter. It is difficult to imagine that a more contemptible amalgam of racism and religious bigotry could be possible.

To learn more about the ugly pattern of Blood Libel accusations against African Traditional Religions in modern "respectable" media, see the following posts from this blog:
Blood Libel Against Africans and African Traditional Religions
Al Jazeera's Racist "Documentary": "Magic and Murder"

1. Two typical examples of the "evidence"
On February 25, 2009, The Ugandan Indpendent (independent.co.ug) ran a story by Mubatsi Asinja Habati titled "Uganda's Epidemic of Child Sacrifice". The story starts out with the case of a 6-month old boy who was murdered by the child's father. But in the fourth paragraph we are finally told this: "Police later said that 30-year-old Sserubiri beheaded his son in a witchcraft-inspired ritual. Later examination, however, revealed that Sserubiri was a regular user of narcotics and had once been admitted to a mental health hospital."

The story then goes on to tell about an accused "witchdoctor" named Musa Bogere. Bogere "confessed" to engaging in ritual murders, but only after being beaten by a mob that was already convinced of his guilt. Soon after his confession, Bogere died in police custody.

With a straight face the Ugandan Independent story then states that: "It is clear that the stories of Bogere and Sseribiri represent just the tip of the silent morgue of ritual murders in Uganda"!

2. The best sources money can buy
On January 7, 2010, the BBC published a story by Tim Whewell titled "Witch-doctors reveal extent of child sacrifice in Uganda." Whewell's star witness for that story was a man named Polino Angela who claimed to be a "former witch-doctor turned anti-sacrifice campaigner". Angela claimed to have been "initiated as a witchdoctor" during a ceremony in which a 13 year old boy was ritually murdered. Angela then went home and murdered his own 10-year old son. In all, Polino Angela "confessed" to a grand total of personally conducting 70 acts of ritual murder.

When Ugandan officials heard about what Angela had told the BBC, they (quite naturally) decided to question this man who claimed to be a mass murderer. But the story that Angela told Ugandan police was somewhat different. He said that the BBC had paid him for his story, and that he had lied about the murders:
Uganda witch doctor 'lied to BBC' over child sacrifice 25 February 2010 BBC.co.uk
Uganda priest nabbed for BBC hoax was paid to dramatize 25 February 2010, Afrik-News.Com

3. Digging up a good story
On April 16 of 2010, photojournalist Marco Vernaschi, associated with the Pulitzer Center, came out with three stories titled "Uganda: Child Sacrifice Not a Cultural Issue", "Uganda: Babirye, The Girl from Katugwe", and "The Man Behind RACHO". These three stories were part of the Pulitzer Center's "Child Sacrifice Uganda Project." But it was soon discovered that Vernaschi had paid the people he interviewed for his stories, and that the "graphic images that may not be suitable for all audiences" were in fact staged photographs. For more on the Vernaschi saga check out these stories and other sources found therein:
On digging up the truth, and Marco Vernaschi
Update on the Marco Vernaschi Uganda ethics discussion
Marco Vernaschi and a debate about ethics
Interview with Marco Vernaschi Retracted

e g r e g o r e s

"the hypnotic power of well executed cunnilingus"

An Orthodox theologian explains what he means by "Inclusivism" and "Tolerance"

Salman Rusdhie: Back To The Future

Traditionalism & Anti-Modernism: A Guide For The Perplexed Pagan (Aldous Huxley, JRR Tolkien, Joscelyn Godwin, TYR Journal, Arthur Versluis ....)

Some New(-ish) Additions To My Blogroll

"Wherever you find them, kill them." Murderous injunctions from the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī

Toward a New Dharmic Vision of Humanity

Egypt and Hungary: When Majorities Attack

If Romney is "King of the Hill", then Ron Paul is Dale Gribble.

"The ignorance of the new atheists MATTERS"

Michael Psellos and "Ho Ellênikos Logos"

If you masturbate, Satan will teach you Magic. Part Deux.

Christopher Hitchens on Islam

If you masturbate, Satan will teach you Magic.

"The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy." Christopher Hitchens

"In Christopher Hitchens we have lost a great untamed public intellectual."

ElBaradei: Youth, liberals 'decimated' in Egypt vote

Blaxploitation Style Soviet Funk! (from 1975)

This is what democracy looks like? Islamists headed for landslide victory in Egypt.

This is what we all look like to Alien Anthropologists. On a good day.

“A Witch In Love” (aka “Yuhee, The Witch”, aka “Witch Amusement”)

Hindu Fundamentalism Does Not Exist

The "Tidal Wave" Of Islamophobia That Wasn't

Confessions of a Christian Missionary: "The old religion used to hold their life together. Now there is a void."

Even More Videos

More Russian Videos That Do Not Disappoint, товарищи!

Blood Libel, Witchcraft, & Ratzinger's 2011 Visit to Africa

Hitler discovers that Starship Troopers was a parody

The Not-So-Occult Foundations of Nazism

Charlie Hebdo: "Love Is Stronger Than Hate"

More reactions to Islamic terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo

Islamic Terrorist Attack in Paris Against "Charlie Hebdo"

What Will 2010 Hate Crime Stats Show? (Shining yet more statistical light on the dark fantasy of Islamophobia)

October, 2011: Biggest Month Ever for EGREGORES

C. G. Jung and the Nazis: notes on two specific allegations

White Explorers versus Black Magic (And Black Jesus versus White Jesus)

"Wierd Negro Order Raided": Human Sacrifice In The News

"You can be part of this Kalachakra anywhere"

Kalachakra Teaching & Initiation Schedule

America's greatest business genius was an Arab-American liberal hippie Buddhist. So there.

Blood Libel Against African Traditional Religions: "Child Sacrifice" Accusations Surface Again in Uganda