Naked Eye Observation of the Planet Mercury, Part One

You don't have to be a devotee of Hermes/Mercury to get excited about observing the planet named for the God. But it helps.

Mercury is very difficult to observe with the naked eye. But another good opportunity for such observation is approaching. Mercury will be at its "Greatest Eastern Elongation" on December 18, just two days after the Dark Moon on December 16. An "elongation" of Mercury is when the little bugger is at it's maximum separation from old Sol, and this is not just the "best" time for observing Mercury - somewhere close to a significant elongation is about the only time you really have a shot. "Eastern" elongation means that Mercury is trailing the Sun - so it is observable in the evening.

On the night of the December 18, 2009, Mercury will be slightly more than 20 degrees from the Sun. Which is still not very far, but is pretty good for Mercury. Mercury will begin to be visible under (very!) optimal conditions as early as November 25th. Optimal conditions means you have an absolutely clear view of the horizon, no light pollution, and no clouds.

January of this year was the first, and so far the only, time I have seen Mercury. I hope to get one more in before the end of this year!!

I will be posting a lot more about this in the coming weeks and days.

Hindus and Pagans: "A return to the time of the Gods"

The views of four prominent Hindu authors

Nota Bene: It almost, but perhaps not quite, goes without saying that no one person or group speaks on behalf of Hinduism. Nevertheless one sometimes hears blanket statements made to the effect that Hindus, as a group, are completely hostile to any suggestion of any association, real or imagined, between Hinduism and Paganism. The following excerpts are all from articulate (and at least somewhat influential) modern Hindus who, in contrast with what one sometimes hears, all express a rather more open and welcoming attitude concerning the relationship between Hinduism and Paganism.

Ram Swarup

"A Pagan renaissance is overdue. It is necessary for Europe to heal its psyche. Under Christianity, Europe learned to reject its ancestors, its past, which cannot be good for its future also. Europe became sick because it tore apart from its own heritage, it had to deny its very roots. If Europe is to be healed spiritually, it must recover its spiritual past -- at least, it should not hold it in such dishonor.

"There is a lot for European thinkers to do. The task won't be easy, and it will require decades of fervent dedication and a lot of introspection as well .... Europe shall have to rediscover its ancient sensibilities about its people, environment, animals, nature. Earlier, the European Renaissance of the 15th century was incomplete. It was revival of Greek and Roman literature and art-forms without Greek and Roman Gods. If the Renaissance had taken its full course, it would also have become aware of its Eastern, its Hindu, links, but it was soon aborted. In fact, an opposite movement started, an anti-renaissance movement, in the shape of Protestantism, a movement of 'back to the Bible,' 'back to the Apostles.'

"I hope that the Neopagan movement will understand the importance and the immensity of the task. In certain Western milieux, Paganism has been welcomed because it was supposed to usher in sensuality and hedonism, sexual freedom. But those Pagans must understand that the ancient Pagan philosophers were great mystics and great moralists, and the European Pagan movement will have to understand Paganism in this way.

"I believe that Hinduism has a very important role in the religious self-recovery of humanity, particularly of Europe. The reason is simple. Hinduism represents the most ancient tradition which is still alive. It has preserved in its bosom the whole spiritual past of humanity. For self-recovery, these countries have to revive their old Gods. But this is a task which cannot be done mechanically. They have to recapture the consciousness which expressed itself in the language of many Gods. Here, India can help them with its tradition of yoga.

"In my book, The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods, I spoke of a new kind of pilgrimage: a return to the time of the Gods. Meanwhile, European scholars can do a lot. They should write a history of Europe from the Pagan point of view, which would show how profoundly persecuted Paganism was. They should compile a directory of Pagan temples destroyed, Pagan groves and sacred spots desecrated. European Pagans should also revive some of these sites as their places of pilgrimage."
[From an interview with Antaios magazine in 1996, reprinted in Hinduism Today magazine in July, 1999]

Sita Ram Goel

"'Paganism' was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived though-categories constructed by Christianity's city-based manipulators of human minds.

"In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous culture of the world - Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native American.

'It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan.

"The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term 'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create confusion.

"I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'."
[from an interview in The Observer, Feb., 2003. The entire interview is in a previous post in this blog.]

Linda Johnsen

1. "[I]t was my Indian researches that led me back to Greece. I learned that a Greek magus named Apollonius of Tyana had visited India in the first century C.E. and that a fairly detailed account of his travels had actually survived. Reading Apollonius' story was a galvanizing experience, revealing astonishing connections between the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian cultures, which most modern historians neglect. My interest in Greek thinkers was piqued: how did it happen that many of their doctrines and religious practices matched the teachings of Indian sages so closely? Was Apollonius correct when he claimed that the Greeks had learned their doctrines from the Egyptians -- and the Egyptians learned them from India?

"So I returned to the Greeks, reading the portions of Plato my Jesuit professor had advised us students to skip. Sure enough, there was the juice, the living spirituality that so appall academics today but kept the greatest minds of the Western world enthralled for more than a thousand years.

"I went back to the original Greek historians, such as Herodotus, Diogenes Laertius, Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch, in an effort to learn what the ancients said about their own tradition before modern scholars reinterpreted it form them. I was continually amazed at how similar the long-lost Greek world was to the India I travel through today, where the persepective of the ancients still lives in Bengali villages and Varanasi enclaves and the palm jungles of Kerala. The type of spiritual practices that Plotinus -- perhaps the greatest of all the Hellenistic masters -- describes in his Enneads are as much alive in Himalayan caves today, where Plotinus is unknown, as they are moribund in American and European universities that claim to teach Plotinus."
[Lost Masters: Sages of Ancient Greece, pp. 2-3]

2. "Hinduism is the world's largest non-biblical tradition, with nearly a billion followers world-wide. It could be called the world's largest non-organized religion as it emphasizes individual spiritual experience, the realization of the higher Self over any religious institution, book, dogma, or savior. It's also the world's largest native or pagan tradition, reflecting the ancient spiritual traditions that once existed all over the world. Like native traditions everywhere, it honors God or the sacred throughout all of nature. It has many insights in harmony with the ecological age, as it affords reverence to the Earth as a conscious and loving presence and asks us to respect our environment."
[The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism, p. xvi]

3. "Hinduism appeals on so many levels. There is respect for nature and the communion with natural forces that was pervasive in ancient pagan religions but has been lost in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Goddess, whose worship was stamped out throughout the Western world, is still a living force in Hinduism where the depth and inner mysticism of her tradition has been lovingly preserved from prehistory. There is the singing and dancing and worshipping before the images of the Divine where one's love for God and Goddess find full expression. There are the physical and mental exercises that expand one's capacity to directly experience spirit."
[The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism, p. 366]

David Frawley

"This pursuit of finding one’s own dharma drew me to examine the pre-Christian traditions of Europe, notably the Celtic traditions from which my Irish ancestors derived. I don’t see any contradiction between their traditions and Hinduism. Fortunately, the core of their traditions has survived the many centuries of oppression and is flowering anew. With time and help from other native traditions, they may yet reclaim their full glory and splendor.

"Starting in 1996 I came into a contact with Celtic groups and began to discuss issues of history and religion with them. Most of them honor Hinduism and feel a kinship with it. They are looking to Hindu India as a new model of resurgent paganism in the world. They are discovering in the Hindu tradition for what has been lost in their own traditions.

"In contact with my Celtic friends and by their advice this year (1999) I reclaimed my Irish family line for the Celtic religion and its Vedic connections. While I am not specifically doing Celtic practices, I have added a Celtic slant on my Hindu practices. One can see Lord Shiva in the Celtic God Cernunos, who is also the Lord of the Animals. The Celtic Green Man shows the Purusha or Divine Spirit in nature, which in plants is the Vedic God Soma. In time I hope to incorporate a greater understanding the Celtic ways into my work and into my communion with nature.

"This revival of native religions is gaining ground worldwide and is bound to become much more significant in the future. Major conferences of pagan, native or ethnic religions are occurring to coordinate this interest. The Catholic Church in Europe now sees neo-paganism as a real threat to its survival. It has tried for two thousand years to eliminate paganism and has not succeeded. This is because the pagan traditions reflect integral aspects of our eternal spirituality that can never be eliminated, any more than we can live without breathing.

"Such neo-pagan movements exist throughout Europe and America. They are complemented by a revived interest in Native American, Native African, Hawaiian, and Australian traditions. All these groups are discovering an affinity with Hinduism. Hinduism as the best surviving of the pagan or native traditions gives a sense of their great depth and power. Hindu Dharma can be an excellent friend and ally in reclaiming and reuniting all native traditions, which still suffer much oppression and are remain under siege by missionary influences.

"May the pagans return, along with their many Gods and Goddesses, free to reintegrate the Earth once more with the Divine, without any church or dogma to prevent them!"
[From Return of the Pagans, which is a chapter in David Frawley's book How I Became a Hindu]

Three Atheists, One Agnostic, a Christian, and a Rabbi Walk Into a Bar ......

In one corner: (1) Christopher Hitchens, (2) Sam Harris and (3) Dennis Dennett.

In the other corner: (4) self described agnostic and would-be reconciler of science with monotheism, Robert Wright, (5) rabid wing-nut evangelical Christian (and rumored former lover of both Laura Ingraham AND Ann Coulter) Dinesh D’Souza, and (6) Shmuley Boteach (Orthodox Rabbi and author of Kosher Sex).



Thanks to santitafarella, whose Prometheus Unbound blog alerted me to this!

Luck on Warburton on Vergil on Eleusis (AND Luck on Gibbon on Warburton on Vergil on Eleusis)

Both Macrobius in his Saturnalia, and Servius in his Commentaries on the Aeneid (both from ~400 AD) referred to Vergil as pontifex maximus. And perhaps not without reason. Sixteen centuries later, contemporary scholar of late antiquity, Peter Brown, refers to the writings of Vergil as an "inexaustible source of precise religious information", the mere existence of which posed a real threat to Christendom (see his biography of Augustine).

Here is how George Luck begins his Vergil and the Mystery Religions, a chapter in his book Ancient Pathways and Hidden Pursuits:

In his Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (2 vols [1737-1741]) Bishop Warburton proposed an interpretation of the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid which seems to be almost completely forgotten today. None of the handbooks, none of the recent books on Virgil, none of the commentaries (not even Norden) seem to know of it, and yet this theory may provide the key to the understanding of Aeneas' descent into the underworld. One of the reasons for this curious damnatio memoriae could be the character of Warburton's book. It is full of bold and controversial ideas which are presented with considerable learning, but also in a dogmatic and sometimes presumptuous way manner. This manner obviously annoyed Gibbon, the historian, who published in his youth a scathing review which he did not care to sign with his name. It must have made a certain impression on the scholars of that time, for C.G. Heyne, the well-known editor and commentator of Virgil praises the anonymous author as doctor ... et elegantissimus Britannus. In later years Gibbon himself admitted that he had treated a man who deserved his esteem with contempt and regretted the "cowardly concealment" of his name in a personal attack.

The time has come for a fresh examination of Warburton's views. It should be said that he seems to have taken most of his material from the Eleusinia of Ioannes Meursius (1579-1639), and this was held against him at the time. But the idea which electrified the whole mass of evidence was his own, and we are concerned with the idea. It is also true that many of his arguments are specious. On the other hand, material which he could not have known seems to support his view.

In the sixth book of the Aeneid Virgil's hero, led by the Sibyl of Cumae, descends into the underworld to consult his father, Anchises. The ceremonial of his entrance is elaborate, and as we follow him on his path the geography of Hades with its inhabitants unfolds before our eyes ....

At this point Luck introduces what I consider to be a rather clumsy contrasting comparison between Homer and Vergil, claiming that "in six or seven centuries Homer's dreary panorama [in the Odysseus' famous Nekyia ritual in Book XI of the Odyssey] of hell has been brightened."

The reason I find this "contrast" so clumsy is that Luck himself, as will be seen in his own words below, denotes Plato and the Mystery Religions as the two main sources of this supposed "brightening". But Plato's chronological position in that span of "six or seven centuries" between Homer and Vergil is no closer to the latter than the former. And the Mystery Religions are older still, for they were already well established in the time of Socrates.

But let's now return to George Luck:

There were two main sources of light: Platonism and the mystery religions. Both forces are so complex that they cannot be defined here. Even in Virgil's time there was no general agreement as to what Plato said, and central message as well as the ritual of the various mystery religions was still a well-kept secret, though certain allusions which would mean nothing to ordinary people were apparently tolerated. We find such allusions in Pindar, in Sophocles, in Isocrates, in Cicero, in Apuleius, and though they are deliberately obscure and ambiguous, they all seem to point to a message of hope beyond extinction and a promise of life everlasting. Such a message can also be found in the sixth book of the Aeneid.

Pindar, for instance, praises in a famous fragment (137 Snell) the man who has "seen those things" before he descends into the underworld, for he "knows the end of life, and he knows its beginning, given by Zeus."

.... A passage from one of Sophocles' lost plays (fr. 719 Dindorf = 837 Pearson) provides a parallel and a commentary: "Thrice happy are those mortals who, having seen these rites, go to Hades; for they alone are allowed to live there; to the rest all there is bad."

Several pages later, Luck gets back to Warburton:

Warburton wrote, "The descent of Virgil's hero into the infernal regions, I presume, was no other than a figurative description of an initiation, and particularly a very exact picture of the spectacles in the Eleusinian mysteries, where everything was done in show and machinery, and where a representation of the history of Ceres afforded opportunity to bring in the scenes of heaven, hell, purgatory and whatever related to the future state of men and heroes ...."

.... I shall not list all of Warburton's arguments, only those that seem plausible or significant, but I shall present them in modern terms and support them with new evidence, wherever possible. In doing this it would have been awkward to separate his thoughts from my own in every single instance. I have therefore decided to state his case as he might do it today, with all the tools of modern scholarship and the research of two hundred years at his disposal. At the same time I should like to refer readers to Warburton's book, which, for all it's eccentricities and prolixity, still makes excellent reading.

Want to know more? Well here's a link to Warburton's book (The Divine Legation), the whole thing is available free online! And here is a link to a detailed analysis of Warburton's thesis written by Thomas Taylor (a contemporary of Warburton and Gibbon), who mostly concurs, but hardly uncritically, with Warburton's main conclusion. And here is a link to Luck's book containing the essay Virgil and the Mystery Religions.

The Essence of Religion: Four Theories

All religions are essentially the same

One very commonly held theory about religion is that all religions ultimately have the same basic source, call it "God", or whatever. According to this theory all religions teach more or less the same basic truths, and these truths teach us (and actually can and do help us) to be better persons. In practice, therefore, it doesn't really matter what religion you were born into, or what religion you may have chosen to adopt, so long as you practice it sincerely, it's all good.

Karen Armstrong is a well known and articulate proponent of the theory that all religions are essentially true (theory 1) Here is an excerpt from her Charter for Compassion:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect ....

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

Another commonly held theory is that all religions have the same ultimate source, but this time the source is considered to be not 'God', or anything of the sort, but rather ignorance and/or fear, or possibly a desire to fool the masses in order to oppress and exploit them more efficiently. According to this theory all religions require belief in things that are not only patently false, but downright harmful, and all religions are inherently irrational and intolerant. In practice, therefore, it doesn't really matter what religion you were born into, or what religion you may have chosen to adopt, it's all just superstitious nonsense and a very big mistake.

Richard Dawkins is a well known and articulate spokesperson for the theory that all religions are essentially false (theory 2). Here is an excerpt from his book The God Delusion:

How did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with ... polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite, or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a manifestation of Wotan, or a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many .... For brevity I shall refer to all deities, whether poly- or monotheistic, as simply 'God' .... I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.
[pp. 35-36]

As different as Armstrong's and Dawkins' theories might appear, they are both specific examples of a single, much more general, theory of religion: all religions are essentially the same.

All religions are not essentially the same

The two most widely adhered to religions on earth, Christianity and Islam, are (and quite obviously and explicitly so) both predicated on a very different theory of religion from the two theories discussed above.

Specifically, Christianity and Islam both assume a clear distinction between true and false religion, and both have based themselves, from their inceptions, on a full-throated rejection of all other religions, which they have historically denounced in no uncertain terms as not only false, but also idolatrous, superstitious, demonic, and pagan. This is the theory that there is One True Religion, and all other religions are false (theory 3).

Egyptologist Jan Assmann has proposed that the division of religions into two categories, those that are true and those that are false, can be referred to as "the Mosaic distinction". It should be noted that not only does Assmann not claim that Moses was the first to make this "distinction", he (to put it mildly) seriously questions the historicity of Moses altogether: "because there are no traces of his earthly existence outside the [Biblical] tradition".

While it may have been Pharaoh Akhenaten who first made the true/false distinction with respect to religion, our conception of this distinction today is inextricably intertwined with the Biblical story of Moses, and:

Since memory is all that counts in the sphere of cultural distinctions, we are justified 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.
[Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, p.2]

Moreover, according to Assmann:

It is an error to believe that this distinction is as old as religion itself, though at first sight nothing might seem more plausible .... However plausible this might seem, it is not the case. Cultures not only generate otherness by constructing identity, but also develop techniques of translation ... Translation in this sense is not to be confused with 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 translation. They belong within the emergence of the "Ancient World" as a coherent ecumene of interconnected nations .... 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 .... 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 simply did not exist in the world of polytheistic religions.
[Moses the Egyptian, pp. 2-3]

While the Mosaic distinction posits its own subjective division between true and false religions, it thereby automatically creates an objective division according to which there are two kinds of religion: (1) those religions that make the Mosaic distinction, and (2) those that don't (theory 4). As Assmann states above, "the world of polythestic religions" is a world in which the Mosaic distinction is not made.

The question of tolerance

Religions that make the "Mosaic distinction" have an inherent tendency toward intolerance, for their followers are compelled to seek the extirpation of all false religions in order to replace them with the One True Religion. On the other hand, in "the world of polytheistic religions" tolerance and diversity are the general rule, and intolerance the rare exception.

That just such a clear, objective distinction with respect to the question of tolerance can be made between monotheism and polytheism, has been widely recognized by many of those who have studied the ancient religions of Greece and Rome (that is, the religions that preceded the rise of Christianity, and that were largely displaced by that rise). Among these are two of the most famous historians of Rome, Edward Gibbon and J.B. Bury.

Here is a passage from Gibbon's Enlightenment era classic (and literary masterpiece in its own right), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire illustrating his view:

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true .... toleration produced not only mutual indulgence but even religious concord.

The devout polytheist, though fondly attached to his national rites, admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth .... As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country were exalted to a state of power and immortality, it was universally confessed that they deserved, if not the adoration, at least the reverence of all mankind. The deities of a thousand groves and thousand streams possessed in peace their local and respective influence; nor could the Roman who deprecated the wrath of the Tiber deride the Egyptian, who presented his offering to the beneficent genius of the Nile. The visible powers of Nature, the planets, and the elements were the same throughout the universe. The invisible governors of the moral world were inevitably cast in a similar mold of fiction and allegory. Every virtue, and even vice, acquired its divine representative; every art and profession, its patron, whose attributes in the most distant ages and countries were uniformly derived from the character of their peculiar votaries .... The Greek, the Roman, and the Barbarian as they met before their respective altars easily persuaded themselves that under various names and with various ceremonies they adored the same deities. The elegant mythology of Homer gave a beautiful and almost a regular form to the polytheism of the ancient world.
[from Chapter II, excerpt available online here]

In stark contrast to the above laudatory judgment of the natural and instinctive tolerance of "the Greek, the Roman, and the Barbarian" Pagans, when assessing the reasons for Christianity's triumph over these easy-going Pagans, Gibbon identified the five most important factors, and first among these he considered to be "the inflexible, and, if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians." Gibbon explicitly counterposes this "intolerant zeal of the Christians" with the "religious harmony of the ancient world [that is, prior to the rise of Christianity], and the facility with which the most different and even hostile nations embraced, or at least respected, each other's superstitions." [Decline and Fall, Chapter XV]

For J.B. Bury's part, the following is illustrative of what he had to say on this matter:

The purpose of the official cults in the pagan State was to secure the protection of the deities; these were liberal and tolerant lords who raised no objection to other forms of worship; and toleration was therefore a principle of the State. But the god of the new official religion [Christianity] was a jealous master; he had said, "thou shalt have none other gods before me," and idolatry was an offence to him; how could his protection and favour be expected in a state in which idolatry was permitted? Intolerance was a duty, and the first business of a patriotic ruler was to take measures to extirpate the errors of paganism.
[History of the Later Roman Empire, p. 366]

Gibbon died over two centuries ago, in 1794, while Bury died in 1927. But their view that the polytheism of the Greco-Roman world was characterized by not merely toleration, but mutual recognition and respect for the religions of others, is also found in the writings of contemporary historian Ramsay MacMullen (who was born the year after Bury died) who wrote in 1997:

On the one hand was paganism, no more than a spongy mass of tolerance and tradition, so it might seem, confronting a growing number of people determined to do away with that mass utterly, so as to replace it with what was enjoined upon them by the tremendous will of the one God -- such were the opposites making up the religious world of Late Antiquity.
[Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, p. 5]

And James B. Rives states much the same view in his 2006 Religion in the Roman Empire:

[O]n a fundamental level the various religious traditions of the [Roman] empire had more similarities than differences. As a result, when people from one tradition were confronted with another, they often found much that was familiar and immediately understandable, and tended to treat what was unfamiliar simply as a local peculiarity. In short, the impression we get from the sources is that people thought not so much in terms of "different religions," as we might today, but simply of varying local customs with regard to the gods.
[p. 6]

Primary versus Secondary Religions

Jan Assmann has proposed calling those religions that do not make the Mosaic distinction "primary" religions, and those that do, "secondary" religions, a terminology that he has borrowed from Heidelberg University Theology Professor Theo Sundermeier. But Assmann goes further than Sundermeier, and also proposes that secondary religions should be viewed as "counter-religions" a point to which I will return below.

Two features found in all religions that make the Mosaic distinction are (1) they arise at a specific place and time in history, when other ("primary") religions are already in existence, and (2) the new "secondary" religion necessarily defines itself explicitly in terms of a rejection of these pre-existing primary religions. It goes without saying that if there are any secondary religions that are also around already, the new secondary religion rejects these as well, and is, in turn, rejected by them. Perhaps the most extreme and comical example of this is the emergence of one Protestant sect after another after another during the so-called Reformation, each one dutifully condemning all the other Protestants to Hell, along with, of course, the Catholics, the Muslims, the Jews and, naturally, all Pagans and Atheists:

Where are we to find that Church which has but one faith? Is it possible to discover it among Protestant sects, divided as they are into different bodies; refusing to be joined in communion; agreeing in scarce one point of doctrine, and mutually excommunicating each other?
[Authenticated Report of the Discussion Which Took Place At Londonderry, Between Six Roman Catholic Priests, and Six Clergymen of the Established Church; In the Diocese of Derry, March 1828, Section Three, p. 8]

These two features of secondary religions are mirrored by their opposites in primary religions, which (1) have no clear starting point in human history, and (2) do not reject other primary religions, but rather, see them, as James B. Rives states above, simply as "varying local customs with regard to the gods." These two feature are the diachronic and synchronic manifestations of the inherent tolerance of primary religions. Diachronically, primary religions accept all previous religious traditions, while, synchronically, also accepting all contemporaneous "other" religious traditions. On the other hand, the attitude of secondary religions with respect to all perceived competitors in all of space-time (past, present and future -- here, there, everywhere) is always that of uncompromising hostility.

Embedded in the above discussion is another important aspect of the primary/secondary religion divide, and one that bears at least passing mention: primary religions chronologically preceded secondary religions in human history. In other words we can speak of a time in the past during which, and before which, all religions were primary religions. There is actually a kind of macabre symmetry here, since the mental universe of secondary religions eagerly envisions a future in which there are no longer any primary religions left, because they have all been successfully extirpated in the name of ridding humanity of the scourge of idolatry and devil-worship.

According to both Jan Assmann and his fellow Egyptologist Erik Hornung, we can say with some precision when secondary religion first arose: the Amarna period (mid 14th century BC) of ancient Egypt. Here is Erik Hornung:

It was only around the middle of the nineteenth century that Wilkinson and Lepsius laid the foundation for our knowledge of the Amarna period, when ancient Egyptian culture and religion were fundamentally transformed for several years, and which even witnessed the introduction of a new literary language, and during which a religion was founded for the first time in the history of the world. To the best of our knowledge, this had never happened before, either in Egypt or elsewhere.
[Akhenaten and the Religion of Light, p. 2, emphasis in the original]

And here is an excerpt from Jan Assmann's new book The Price of Monotheism

Primary religions evolve historically over hundreds and thousands of years .... Religions of this kind include the cultic and divine worlds of Egyptian, Babylonian and Greco-Roman antiquity, among many others. Secondary religions, by contrast, are those that owe their existence to an act of revelation and foundation, build on primary religions, and typically differentiate themselves from the latter by denouncing them as pagan, idolatry and superstition. All secondary religions ... look down on the primary religions as pagan .... These religions can therefore perhaps be characterized most adequately by the term "counterreligion." For these religions, and for these religions alone, the truth to be proclaimed comes with an enemy to be fought.
[pp. 3-4]

Now let's look at how Theo Sundermeier, whom Assmann credits (as mentioned already) with originally proposing the "primary versus secondary" terminology. Sundermeier uses this distinction in his book The Individual and Community in African Traditional Religion:

The validity of secondary religious experience is not confined to the small group; it lays claim to universal validity. That is the basic reason why it is designed for expansion. Weight is attached to the notion of truth, which is not at issue in primary religious experience. The latter is immediately credible and can be experienced at first hand in society. It is non-missionary, whereas secondary religious experienced forces its way onto the world stage as 'true religion'.
[p. 236]

Sundermeier's use of the terms primary/secondary religion must be approached with some caution. He obviously wishes to give the impression that "primary" religion is synonymous with both "primitive" religion and "traditional" religion, and that in general primary religion is by definition unreflective, unsophisticated, and only compatible with relatively small and isolated societies, while he privileges "secondary" religion with being a natural by-product of the development of more complex cultures and civilizations:

The larger society gives people greater scope for decisions and choice. The individual gains space and freedom, as we have seen. This likewise means that religion no longer covers all spheres of life, that the realm of the profane grows and secularism becomes possible. Secondary religious experience is therefore characterised by individualism. The mythical, analogous way of thinking is expanded by conceptual rationality and the symbol is interpreted according to individual inclination. What has been experienced through sensation and intuition is now pervaded by theoretical ideas; religion is reduced to a system, and can be handed down as a doctrine. Ritual enactment is no longer sufficient; secondary experience appeals to the intellect, demanding disbelief.
[p. 236]

The problem with the above is that it is completely wrong. The classical polytheisms of the great civilizations of Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome were decidedly primary religions. A very nice explanation of this is to be found in Jan Assmann's essay Monotheism and Polytheism, which appears as a chapter in the volume Ancient Religions, edited by Sarah Isles Johnston. It is nevertheless the case that Sundermeier is right to think that primary religions historically preceded secondary religions, it is just that he is wrong in imposing a "progressive" paradigm on the transition from primary to secondary religion.

Monotheism as Counter-Religion:
"Positive religions imply negated traditions"

Theo Sundermeier's point of view is really quite startling in its Kipling-esque arrogance toward "primitive" religions (and we should not forget that Kipling considered himself a very liberal minded man, and very well and kindly disposed toward inferior/darker peoples for whom he seriously believed that he had nothing but respect and compassion). This demonstrates that the distinction between primary and secondary religions is not sufficient in itself, because it all too easily becomes just another vehicle for masking the biases of whoever is making use of the terms.

The real issue is that there is still something missing, yet another basic feature that distinguishes one broad class of religion from another, without which the real, objective differences are not sharp enough to ensure that other, "projected" differences are not "seen" by mistake.

Another way of putting this more bluntly is that Sundermeier is seeing what he wants to see. Sundermeier obviously thinks of himself, and rightly so I have no doubt, as a good-hearted, liberal, open minded person. And so he insists that he is not, heavens forbid, suggesting that there is anything at all wrong with those cute little "primary" religions. Of course they inhibit individualism, are incompatible with reason, do not appeal to the intellect, and view the empty, rote enactment of ritual as "sufficient", but what did you expect? You see, those people live in their little, isolated, "primitive" "traditional" worlds, and they don't know what they are missing -- and, well, as soon as they do find out what they are missing, that is, when they come into contact with "larger society", they will learn to add "theoretical ideas" to their religion, etc., like all civilized people do.

Fortunately, Jan Assmann provides the missing piece to the puzzle by his introduction of the term "counter-religion" (although Assmann also, albeit to a far lesser extent, falls into the same "progressive" trap as Sundermeier, a problem that I will have to address at a later time), which he describes here:

The sun god of one religion is easily equated to 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 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 ... rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated.
[Moses the Egyptian, p. 3]

According to Assmann (and also Erik Horning, although Hornung does not adopt the same terminology) the first such "counter-religion" was the "revolutionary monotheism" introduced by Akhenaten during the Amarna period in Egypt:

The defining difference between the old and new, "tradition" and "truth", is created not so much by verbal means as by practical means. The latter were indeed drastic .... The traditional cults and feasts were discontinued, the temples were closed, the names and images of the gods (above all those of Amun) were destroyed, the capital was transfered, a new style was introduced into language and representational art, and so forth. These radical measures of persecution and innovation show beyond any doubt that the Amarna movement viewed itself as a new religion that was absolutely incompatible with the continuation of traditional forms of religious life.
[Moses the Egyptian, pp. 170-171]

Compare the above description of the acts of the Pharaoh Akhenaten with this description of the acts of the Emperor Constantine seventeen centuries later:

ALL these things the emperor diligently performed to the praise of the saving power of Christ, and thus made it his constant aim to glorify his Saviour God. On the other hand he used every means to rebuke the superstitious errors of the heathen. Hence the entrances of their temples in the several cities were left exposed to the weather, being stripped of their doors at his command; the tiling of others was removed, and their roofs destroyed. From others again the venerable statues of brass, of which the superstition of antiquity had boasted for a long series of years, were exposed to view in all the public places of the imperial city: so that here a Pythian, there a Sminthian Apollo, excited the contempt of the beholder: while the Delphic tripods were deposited in the hippodrome and the Muses of Helicon in the palace itself. In short, the city which bore his name was everywhere filled with brazen statues of the most exquisite workmanship, which had been dedicated in every province, and which the deluded victims of superstition had long vainly honored as gods with numberless victims and burnt sacrifices, though now at length they learnt to renounce their error, when the emperor held up the very objects of their worship to be the ridicule and sport of all beholders.
[Eusebius' Vita Constantini, from Chapter LIV]

In The Price of Monotheism, Assmann expands on just how systemic and even paranoiac the proclivity toward violence is in monotheistic counterreligion:

I have already mentioned that the antagonism characteristic of monotheism as a counterreligion, the exclusive and exclusionary negation by which it defines itself -- "No other gods!" -- is not just directed outwards, but also and especially inwards. Far more worrying than the paganism of others is the falsehood to which one's own co-religionists are forever in danger of succumbing. The conflict between truth and untruth and the shift from primary religion to counterreligion is played out in the Bible itself. Monotheism relates the story of its own establishment as a history of violence punctuated by a series of massacres. I have in mind the massacre following the scene with the Golden Calf (Exod. 32-34), the slaughter of the priests of Baal after the sacrificial contest with Elijah (I Kings 18), the bloody implementation of the reforms of Josiah (2 Kings 23:1-27) .... Through this power of negation, monotheism acquires the character of a counterreligion that determines its truth by expelling whatever cannot be reconciled with it.
[pp. 21-23]

Assmann also makes use of the term "revolutionary monotheism" in order to emphasize the fact that the monotheism introduced by "counter-religion" is incapable of living in peace with any other religious traditions that it comes into contact with:

It seems evident that all founded or, to use the eighteenth century term, "positive" religions are counter-religions. This is so because all of them had to confront and to reject a tradition. None of them was founded within a religious void. Therefore, they may be termed "secondary religions" becuase tehy always presuppose the preceding and/or parallel existence of "primary religions". We have no evidence of evolutionary steps leading from primary to secondary religion. Wherever secondary religions occur, they always seem to to have to have been established by foundational acts such as revolution or revelation. Such positive acts often have their negative complements in rejection and persecution. "Positive" religions imply negated traditions.
[Moses the Egyptian, p. 169]

Conclusion

In sum, then, we have four different theories of religion, which fall into two broad categories like this:

1. All Religions are essentially the same.
1.a. All Religions are essentially true. (Karen Armstrong)
1.a. All Religions are essentially false. (Richard Dawkins)

2. All Religions are not essentially the same.
2.a. There is One True Religion and all other religions are false. (Akhenaten/Moses)
2.b. There are Primary Religions and Secondary Religions. (Jan Assmann)

It is worth noting that the proponents of the first three theories all accept the monotheistic concept of a single 'God' as the defining principle for religion in general. This is immediately obvious if we look at the titles of Karen Armstrong's books The Battle for God and A History of God, and also Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (especially the passage quoted above from Dawkins' book). On the other hand, the fourth theory explicitly recognizes that there is a fundamental difference between secondary, revolutionary monotheistic religions that insist on one and only one God, and primary, polytheistic religions that allow for a great, possibly infinite, variety of Divine Beings.

The Eleusinian Mysteries and The Sixth Book of the Aeneid

Many people suspect that Book Six of Vergil's Aeneid contains a great deal of information about the Eleusinian Mysteries. See, for example, Thomas Taylor's essay on "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries":
http://www.sacred- texts.com/ cla/ebm/ebm05. htm:

Dr. Warburton, in his Divine Legation of Moses, has ingeniously proved, that the sixth book of Virgil’s Æneid represents some of the dramatic exhibitions of the Eleusinian Mysteries; but, at the same time, has utterly failed in attempting to unfold their latent meaning, and obscure though important end. By the assistance, however, of the Platonic philosophy, I have been enabled to correct his errors, and to vindicate the wisdom of antiquity from his aspersionsby a genuine account of this sublime institution; of which the following observations are designed as a comprehensive view.

The famous Sixth Book contains one of the more humorous passages in all of epic poetry. When Aeneas pleads for the Sibyl to help him to visit his dead father in Hades:

Grant me to see the face, and hear the voice
Of my loved sire once more; point me the way,
Unbar the sacred portals!

The Priestess of Hecate replies:

Descent to Hell is easy -- day and night
Wide open stands the gate of darksome Dis,
But to retrace your steps, and mount again
Into the upper air is hard indeed.

But of course, as everyone knows the Sibyl grants to Aeneas what he needs both to go and visit Anchises, and to "mount again into the upper air".

Veterans Day Thoughts

My grandfather was wounded in WWI. My father served in the Air Force during the early years of the Cold War. And my Zen grand-teacher served in the South Korean Army during the Korean War.

The tradition of Korean Buddhist monks serving in the military goes back at least to the time of Sosan Taesa, a 16th century Zen Master. At that time the official religion of the Chosun Dynasty in Korea was Confucianism, and Buddhism was (very mildly by western standards) persecuted by the government. For the most part this "persecution" consisted of ending the generous financial subsidies that Buddhism had previously enjoyed during the Koryo Dynasty, and the closing of the large urban temples. Buddhist monks and nuns were forced to leave the cities and fend for themselves in the countryside, among the people.

When the Japanese invasion occurred in 1592, Master Sosan requested, and received permission to raise an army to help defend Korea. Ironically, the Confucianist Emperor was fleeing in the face of the invasion as he granted permission to this Buddhist priest to stay behind and fight. Master Sosan's four most senior students became his lieutenants, and one of those students, Samyong, participated in negotiating the peace treaty to end the war. The invasion had been repelled. While the Chosun Dynastry would continue to favor Confucianism for the next three hundred years, there was less real persecution of Buddhism from the time of Sosan Taesa onward, in large part due to the undeniable contribution Buddhists had made, under his leadership, in the defense of Korea.

During the Korean War, Buddhists once again participated in the defense of Korea against a different kind of foreign invasion. Throughout Asia, Communist ideologues have insisted on misapplying Enlightenment era critiques of Christianity to such religions as Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shamanism, Shinto, etc. Never mind the fact that contacts with Eastern philosophies and religions played an important role in the European Enlightenment! In North Korea the suppression of Buddhism by the Communists was far more brutal, sweeping and effective than anything that occurred during the Chosun Dynasty.

Today Buddhism in North Korea maintains the same kind of ghostly existence as Buddhism in Tibet. Meanwhile in the South Buddhism continues to thrive as one among many religions (in fact there are a great many different forms of Buddhism, for that matter!) that Koreans are free to practice and espouse as they wish, in part thanks to the sacrifices made by Buddhist monks such as Zen Master Seung Sahn.

For more on Sosan Taesa and his exploits both as a Zen Master and as a guerilla fighter, see the book Thousand Peaks: Korean Zen: Traditions and Teachers, by Mu Soeng Sunim, especially Chapter Ten. The cool picture of Zen Master Seung Sahn as a young soldier was found over at Paul Lynch's blog, Zen Mirror.

Preparing the Way for Genocide in Rwanda (Heart of Darkness, Part Five)

Heart of Darkness:
Part One: "By This Sign We Prosper"
Part Two: Christian Demographics Fun Facts
Part Three: Doing the Lord's Work In Rwanda
Part Four: Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from Rwanda
Part Five: Preparing the Way for Genocide in Rwanda


"Racial Thinking"

A quarter of all Christians today live in Africa. Moreover, the vast majority of these African Christians are either themselves recent converts, or are the descendants of those who have converted over the last 125 years. These conversions were the handiwork of modern missionaries, from modern, industrialized western nations. The Christianity that these missionaries spread was also modern, bearing the stamp of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

The conversion of half the population of an entire continent in the span of just over a century is, obviously, considered a great success by those who see the spread of Christianity as a good thing. But is it a good thing? What can we learn about the nature of Christianity by looking at Africa, arguably the place on earth that has been the most dramatically influenced by that religion in modern times?

Throughout sub-saharan Africa, Christian missionaries have played a central role in a process that has been described, by Tor Sellström and Lennart Wohlgemuth of the Nordic Africa Institute in a report they prepared on the 1994 Rwandan Genocide (for more details see this previous post and links and references therein), as "the disintegration, distortion or bastardization of indigenous social and political structures". The Church was not only involved in the destruction of "indigenous social and political structures", but also in their replacement with modern, western, European, and Christian values and institutions.

One modern European Christian value in particular played a key role in the civilizing mission of the Church in Rwanda and throughout Africa: scientific racism. Specifically, Christian missionaries promulgated what was known as the "Hamitic hypothesis", according to which some Africans were viewed as inherently superior to other Africans on the basis of their supposedly greater "racial" proximity to Europeans. Here is how Mahmood Mamdani describes the systematic dissemination of "racial thinking" in Africa by missionaries and other emissaries of western civilization, in his When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda:

The racialization of the Tutsi/Hutu was not simply an intellectual construct, one which later and more enlightened generations of intellectuals could deconstruct and discard at will. More to the point, racialization was also an institutional construct. Racial ideology was embedded in institutions, which in turn undergirded racial privilege and reproduced racial ideology. It is this political-institutional fact that intellectuals alone would not be able to alter. Rather, it would take a political-social movement to be dismantled.

As a process both ideological and institutional, the racialization of the Tutsi was the creation of a joint enterprise between the colonial state and the Catholic Church. Missionaries were "the first ethnologists" of colonial Rwanda. As such, they were the primary ideologues of colonization. For Father Leon Classe, the future bishop of Rwanda and the key architect of missionary policy, the Tutsi were already in 1902 "superb humans" combining traits both Aryan and Semitic, just as for Father Francois Menard, writing in 1917, a Tutsi was "a European under a black skin." If the Church heralded the Tutsi as "supreme humans" in 1902, the same Church would turn into a prime site for the slaughter of Tutsi in 1994.

The colonial state called upon missionary knowledge from early on. Soon after colonization, the Belgian state ordered a reflection on Rwanda from the White Fathers. The purpose was to elaborate and implement "race policies." In response, Fathers Arnoux, Hurel, Pages, and Schumacher -- Church fathers with expertise -- prepared anthropological treatises. A consolidated document was then drawn up by Leon Classe, the head of the Catholic Church in Rwanda, and then presented to government authorities. This 1916 document had a wide readership. Not surprisingly, it gave vent to the kind of race thinking that the Church hierarchy had come to hold as a deeply felt conviction. "Race policy" became such a preoccupation with the colonial power that from 1925 on, annual colonial administration reports included an extensive description of the "races" in a chapter called "race policy." By then, the Church had become integral to the workings of the state: since 1925, annual colonial reports included sections devoted exclusively to reports written by the heads of the Catholic Societe Belge de Missions Protestantes au Congo (SBMPC, former Bethel mission), Chuch Missionary Society (CMS), and Adventist missions.

It took Belgian rule a little over a decade translate its vision of a civilizational mission in Rwanda into an institutional imprint. Central to that translation was the Hamitic hypothesis. Summed up in Kinyarwanda as other than Rubanda Nyamwinshi -- meaning the majority, ordinary folk -- Belgian power turned the Hamitic racial supremacy from an ideology into an institutional fact by making it the basis of changes in political, social, and cultural relations. The institutions underpinning racial ideology were created in the decade from 1927 to 1936. These administrative reforms were comprehensive. Key institutions -- starting with education, then state administration, taxation, and finally the Church -- were organized (or reorganized as the case may be) around an active acknowledgment of these identities. The reform was capped with a census that classified the entire population as Tutis, Hutu, or Twa, and issued each person a card proclaiming his or her identity.
[pp. 87-88]

'additional services of common concern'

The process of decolonization after WWII was a complex, protracted and violent business. The French, British, Belgians, Dutch and Portuguese were prepared to fight, and did fight, to try to keep "their" colonies, from Indochina to India to Palestine to Africa. For example, Angola and Mozambique did not win their independence from Portugal until 1979, and even as late as 1982 the British did not hesitate to go to war to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina. The Americans weren't about to miss out on the fun, as the seamless hand-off of the Indochinese conflict from the French to Uncle Sam demonstrated only too clearly.

Covert operations played an important, and very revealing, role in the western world's determined efforts to perpetuate it's global dominance, even (or especially) as former colonies were able to gain de-facto "independence." The fact that the Cold War picked up right where WWII had left off greatly exacerbated the urge of western nations to maintain political control of what came to be called the "third world." Here is how Philip Agee describes "action operations" as they were carried out by the CIA around the world in the 1960's and early 70's:

Psychological and paramilitary, known as PP or KUCAGE, operations differ from those of PI or CI because they are action rather than collection activities. Collection operations should be invisible so that the target will be unaware of them. Action operations, on the other hand, always produce a visible effect. This, however, should never be attributable to the CIA or to the US government, but rather to some other person or organization. These operations, which received their Congressional charter in the National Security Act of 1947 under 'additional services of common concern', are in some ways more sensitive than collection operations.

They are usually approved by the PP staff of the DDP, but when very large amounts of money are required or especially sensitive methods are used approval may be required of the OCB (Undersecretary level), the NSC or the President himself.

PP operations are, of course, risky because they nearly always mean intervention in the affairs of another country with whom the US enjoys normal diplomatic relations. If their true sponsorship were found out the diplomatic consequences could be serious. This is in contrast to collection operations, for if these are discovered foreign politicians are often prepared to turn a blind eye - they are a traditional part of every nation's intelligence activity.
Thus the cardinal rule in planning all PP operations is 'plausible denial', only possible if care has been taken in the first place to ensure that someone other than the US government can be made to take the blame.

PP programmes are to be found in almost every CIA station and emphasis on the kinds of PP operations will depend very much on local conditions. Psychological warfare includes propaganda (also known simply as 'media'), work in youth and student organizations, work in labour organizations (trade unions, etc.), work in professional and cultural groups and in political parties. Paramilitary operations include infiltration into denied areas, sabotage, economic warfare, personal harassment, air and maritime support, weaponry, training and support for small armies.
[Excerpt taken from thirdworldtraveler.com]

Agee also describes in detail how the CIA manipulated foreign media, infiltrated youth groups and political parties, recruited foreign military leaders, sought to influence the outcome of elections, engaged in both paramilitary operations and "economic warfare", and he also discusses the complex ways in which the money to fund all of these activities was distributed around the globe, whether to agents working in downtown Moscow or to "friendly" guerilla forces fighting in African jungles.

Here is an excerpt from the US Senate "Church Committee" report specifically on CIA plans to assassinate Congo president Patrice Lumumba:

In the Summer of 1960, DDP Richard Bissell asked the Chief of the Africa Division, Bronson Tweedy, to explore the feasibility of assassinated Patrice Lumumba. Bissell also asked a CIA scientist, Joseph Scheider, to make preparations to assassinate or incapacitate an unspecified "African leader." According to Scheider, Bissell said the assignment had the "highest authority." Scheider procured toxic biological materials in response to Bissell's request, and was then ordered by Tweedy to take these materials to the Station Officer in Leopoldville. According to Scheider, there was no explicit requirement that the Station check back with Headquarters for final approval before proceeding to assassinate Lumumba. Tweedy maintained, however, that whether or not he had explicitly levied such a requirement, the Station Officer was not authorized to move from exploring means of assassinate to actually attempting to kill Lumumba without referring the matter to Headquarters for a policy decision.

It ended up that the Belgians and their proxies got to Lumumba first, saving the Americans the trouble of killing him. Over 40 years after Lumumba's assassination, the Belgian government officially admitted "that certain members of the Belgian government and other Belgian participants were morally responsible for the circumstances leading to the death of Lumumba." Here are the Conclusions, in full, of the 2001 Belgian Commission of Inquiry:

With regard to the exact circumstances of the murder of Patrice Lumumba: after a
thorough analysis, it is highly probable that Lumumba was executed in the jungle on 17 January 1961 between 9.40 pm and 9.43 pm, within 5 hours after his arrival in Katanga (for a more detailed description, the commission refers to the experts’ report).

Regarding the possible involvement of Belgian politicians:

The transfer of Lumumba to Katanga was organised by the Congolese authorities in Leopoldstad, supported by Belgian government authorities, especially the Ministers of Foreign and African Affairs and their colleagues.

Belgian advisors in Leopoldstad collaborated with the organisation of the transfer.

No single document, of which the commission is aware, indicates that the Belgian
government or a member thereof gave the order to physically eliminate Lumumba.

The investigation does not show that the Belgian authorities premeditated the murder of Lumumba when it attempted to transfer him to Katanga.

It is very clear, though, that the physical safety of Lumumba was of no concern to
the Belgian government. It deemed the safety of Lumumba less important than other interests.

By not considering the possible risks of the transfer, not asking guarantees for his
physical safety or insisting on humane treatment and a trial, the Belgian government and especially the Minister of African Affairs showed a lack of forethought and a lack of respect for the constitutional state.

After hearing about the events of 17 January, the government, or at least certain
members of it, acted irresponsibly by opting to spread lies to the public and all its allies.

This attitude inevitably raised doubts about the role of the Belgian authorities.
Considering the preceding, the current norms regarding public morality and, without considering the personal and moral considerations of that time, the commission concludes that certain members of the Belgian government and other Belgian participants were morally responsible for the circumstances leading to the death of Lumumba.

The "Liberation" of the "Hutus"

In 1959, while the Belgians and Americans were beginning to plan the murder of the leader of the anti-colonialist struggle in Congo, next door, in Rwanda (which is directly adjacent to Congo, and which had also been ruled by Belgium ever since the end of WWI), a group of (mostly but not exclusively) Tutsis formed the first western style political party in Rwanda, the UNAR (Rwandese National Union). The UNAR sought to kick out the Belgians and restore what they called "traditional" Rwandese society. The UNAR formed an alliance with Lumumba (while he still lived) and also with Communist countries, including the People's Republic of China. A group of Hutus (exclusively) formed a counter organization that did not identify itself as "Rwandese" at all, but rather as "Bahutu": the "Movement for the Emancipation of the Bahutu", which claimed that "the conflict [was] between Hutu and Hamite -- i.e., foreign-Tutsi" and they called for a revolution to liberate the Hutus "from both the 'Hamites' and 'Bazungu' (whites)". [see Mamdani's book, p. 103-104 and references cited there]

According to Mahmood Mamdani, "Unsurprisingly, most of the leading personalities of the Hutu movement were former [Catholic] seminarians." On the other hand, "Because [the predominately Tutsi] UNAR began to receive money and diplomatic backing from Communist countries ... the antagonism between Tutsi and the Belgian authorities deepened ...."

So, basically, the Belgian colonialists and the Church decided to switch sides. Instead of supporting the "Hamitic" Tutsis, they now lent their support to the Hutu groups that explicitly called for nothing short of ethnic cleansing. The Belgians thus succeeded in helping to shape a faux "anti-colonialist" struggle that not only left the "ethnic" division of Hutus and Tutsis in place, but greatly exacerbated that division. And while the Church and the colonial officials claimed to have abandoned the "racial" ideas that were now, with the defeat of Nazism, an embarrassment, they managed a seamless transition in which the language of "democracy" and "equality" was used to strengthen the hatred of Hutus for Tutsis, just as the language of scientific racism had been used to encourage the denigration of Hutus by Tutsis.

That's the great thing about "divide and conquer" - both sides always lose. It doesn't really matter at all whether the Tutsis come out on top or the Hutus. When Rwanda was an outright colony it proved convenient to support the Tutsis in order to strengthen the hold of colonialists, but it later proved just as convenient to support the Hutus in order to weaken Rwanda as an independent nation, and to thus perpetuate the dependence of Rwandans on their former colonial masters.

Of course any attempt to describe the situation in Rwanda in 1959 in a few sentences, or even a few pages, will be an oversimplification. But what is not in any way an oversimplification is the simple fact that the colonialists and the missionaries systematically encouraged the deep divisions that grew ever wider between Hutu and Tutsi. The result was that the so-called "social revolution" that occurred in 1959 was marked by the massacre of tens of thousands of Tutsis, and by the expulsion of over 100,000 Tutsis from Rwanda.

So by the time Rwanda gained formal independence in 1962, the nation had already experienced its first wave of mass killings, and it was also embroiled in an ongoing armed conflict between Hutus and Tutsis. That same military conflict would provide the pretext, in the 80's and 90's for systematically creating the infrastructure for genocide, just as it would, in 1994, provide the pretext for finally unleashing that infrastructure. That genocide merely sought to implement what had been called for in 1959 under the guise of "liberating" the "Hutus".

Here is how another author, Gerard Prunier, characterized the events of 1959 in his book The Rwanda Crisis:

But this was a very strange 'revolution' indeed. The break between the Belgian authorities and their long-coddled Tutsi elite had come about only because the colonial administrators felt betrayed by their erstwhile proteges. They now considered them a mixture of backward traditionalists and revolutionary communists, an unlikely combination which was not dissimilar from how the British then regarded the Mau Mau movement in neighboring Kenya. What would later be touted as a 'social revolution' resembled more an ethnic transfer of power .... In fact, under the banner of 'democratic majority rule' on one side and 'immediate independence' on the other, it was a fight between two competing elites, the newly developed Hutu counter-elite produced by the church and the older neo-traditionalist elite which the colonial authorities had promoted since the 1920's ....

In January of 1960 Colonel Logiest (in command of Belgian military forces in Rwanda) declared: 'Because of the force of circumstances, we have to take sides. We cannot remain neutral and passive.' So forward he went. Sporadic fighting continued and houses were burned down. The Tutsi were getting the worst of it .... Starting in early 1960, the colonial government began to replace most of the Tutsi chiefs with new Hutu ones. These immediately organized the persecution of the Tutsi in the hills they now controlled, which started a mass exodus of refugees abroad, which eventually took some 130,000 Rwandese Tutsi refugees to the Belgian Congo, Burundi and Uganda by late 1963.
[pp. 50-52]

The Hutu regime that came to power by this 'social revolution' backed by the former colonialists and led by former seminarians was -- surprise! -- very friendly to the West, as Prunier describes here

At a time when the African continent was talking about socialism, revolution and development, Rwanda was strangely silent. Anticolonialism was out of the question, since after their help during the 1959-61 'democratic revolution' the Belgians were seen as heroes. The only values that were repeatedly emphasised were the intrinsic worth of being Hutu, the total congruence between demographic majority and democracy, and the need to follow a moral Christian life and the uselessness of politics, which should be replaced by hard work .... Rwanda was a land of virtue where prostitutes were punished, attendance at mass was high, and hard working peasants toiled on the land without asking too many questions. An egalitarian racial ideology buttressed an elitist and secretive authoritarian government in ways which echoed those of Vichy France or Salazar's Portugal. This created an atmosphere much approved by Christian Democrats, who in Belgium and Germany were the regime's most steadfast supporters.
[pp. 58-59]

In the next post in this series I'll write about the direct role of Christians in the systematic preparation for, and execution of, the Genocide in 1994. But the 'social revolution' of 1959 was when the stage for genocide was really set. Jesus is reported to have said, "By their fruits shall ye know them." The fruit born by the "joint enterprise" of colonialism and Christianity in Rwanda was summed up by a soldier who participated in the liberation of Kigali in 1994:

When we captured Kigali we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead we faced a criminal population.