IN CRED - Debut Novel by RXTT

IN CRED

A mystical experience or a death-time delusion. A journey to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, or a trip into the inner recesses of the mind.

Cred's day is not going well. Collapsing at the record store and finding himself face to face with the god he accidentally created unhinged him somewhat.

This new problem, however, completely terrifies him.
With the help of some friends, a desperate ploy to save our universe is put in motion.

If only Cred can figure out how.

♦

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IN CRED

The debut novel by RXTT.

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Charles-François Dupuis shared the truth with us over 200 years ago

 

The Origin of All Religious Worship - Charles-François Dupuis (1795)

 

            One of the very best things about books is that they can transport a reader anywhere and to any time.  Most people love old fiction works specifically for this reason.  I adore older non-fiction books, especially ones that deal with deep exploration of a given subject.  I especially enjoy finding and reading the old books used as references for the more modern works I read.  I have read widely in comparative religion and mythology over the past decade.  There are few seminal works, and Dupuis’ “The Origin of All Religious Worship” is one such masterwork.  It has taken me months to digest it all.

            People remember the French Revolution alongside the American one as a battle to usurp monarchy and instill democracy.  While this is technically correct, what they were fighting against was the power that the European monarchies and the Roman Catholic Church had consolidated in the 1500-1700’s.  For centuries, the super-rich aristocracy and the super-rich Papacy joined teams to control nations and to plunder their wealth for themselves. The scientific method along with obsessive rationality led French leaders to denounce the church, the evils they commit under the guise of “religion,” and everything they teach.  In order to have evidence against the church, to fight the centuries of lies and obfuscation, geniuses like Dupuis sought to study just why the church acts as it does, and where they got their theological ideas.  Before the modern study of comparative religion and mythology, Dupuis set out to explore the historical past of religious worship.  What follows in this book is a detailed excoriation detailing why everything taught by all priests from all religions is sadistic and willful untruth seeking to blind the eyes of the people.  It is awesome.

            Since truly ancient times, the only real concern of humanity has been to study the heavens.  Once the ancient humans understood that the seasons were cyclical, that around the same time each year the days would get longer, signaling the return of spring and summer, they began to understand the world around them and their place in it.  There was a large, overarching pattern to the world and humans lived in harmony with it.  One hundred thousand years ago, there was no thought of “rational” versus “spiritual,” or of “natural” versus “supernatural.”  These are all recent inventions.  The world of ancient humans was equal parts what they saw and experienced, what they dreamed, and what they imagined. 

Dupuis goes back as far as recorded history lets him, considering he lived in the late 1700’s.  While there existed civilizations before the ancient Egyptians, their culture amalgamated and absorbed the wisdom of all the previous millennia.  Ancient man would describe what they saw in the heavens through allusion, metaphor, and anthropomorphism.  They saw patterns in the stars, which, to their eye, never changed.  These became the constellations.  Initially meant purely as a visual code to describe the locations of the stars, the constellations helped mark the passage of the year.  The Sun would rise in the sky in front of a different constellation every month for a year, and then repeat itself.  During parts of the year, the daylight hours grew compared to the nighttime hours, and at the opposite end of the year, the nighttime hours grew while the daylight shrank.  At two specific points each year, the ancient sages noted that the hours of day and night were equal.  These are now referred to as the Spring and Autumnal Equinoxes.

The Spring equinox seemed a perfect time for ancient humanity to designate as the beginning of the yearly cycle.  It marks the day that the warmth and life-giving properties of the Sun start to increase in influence over the Earth (at least for the people in the Northern Hemisphere.  Throughout much of human history, most of our species has lived above the equator.  This includes the ancient cultures of Egypt, India, China, and Mesopotamia.  It is because of this that astrology and such things are north-biased.  The stars that are visible from the southern hemisphere are different from those that make up what most humans call the Zodiac and were one of the reasons ancient sea-faring humans understood the Earth is a sphere.)  Fall and Winter were times where the Sun’s living force diminished.  In Spring and Summer the Sun’s energies were in full power. 

Our recent ancestors did not know of the procession of the stars, something that occurs because our Earth is not only rotating, but also wobbling in space.  Our ancient forebears knew better.  Before around 14,000 years ago, the Spring equinox Sun would rise in the constellation of Taurus, or the Bull, and the Egyptians would sacrifice the apis Bull on that date, signaling the new year.   For the past few thousands of years, the Spring Sun rises in Aries, or the Ram.  On the Spring Equinox, Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, a stand-in for the Sun in its yearly journey.  Ancient Hebrews would sacrifice lambs, and the Christ is symbolized by the ‘Lamb” for this very reason.  In a few thousand years, the Spring Sun will rise in Aquarius and humanity’s gods will be altered to match.  Each human culture shared this information through their myths and legends.  Ancient stories of Heracles/Hercules were poetic representations of the Sun’s path through the constellations each year.   Each of his Labors correspond to a different constellation.  Dupuis describes this in depth, even explaining how the ancient poets included stars adjacent to the constellation in the epics, disguised but understandable to those with astronomical knowledge. 

Other of our collective human myths are analyzed by Dupuis, each one shown to be a poetic and allusion-filled description of the path of our Sun as it rises in front of a different constellation each month.  From the ancient Vedas of East Asia, to the Osiris myths of Egypt, to the Dionysian myths of the Mediterranean, to the Zoroastrian founding myths, all are shown to be, at their core, astronomical in nature.  He shows how every religion’s main stories come from an attempt to explain the workings of the Heavens, with each god, all the way up to Jesus, being a stand-in for our beneficent and all-powerful Sun, the true life-giver of our world.

It is this idea that is the basis for the main thrust of this work.  Charles-François Dupuis had grand goals when he set out to write this book.  He wanted to provide clear and irrefutable evidence that the many man-made religions and cults that exist in our history took as their basis either a willful or an ignorant misunderstanding of what the ancient poets wrote in the legends.  The genius of our ancient sages lay in the ability to describe the world around them in a way that could be transmitted and repeated by oral means.  These stories eventually became codified by scribes writing in clay or papyrus. 

Dupuis points out one thing that corrupts ancient wisdom.  As long as there have been humans, there have been some among us who seek to increase their wealth and/or power by using our collective knowledge to control and train the rest of us.  These are the sacerdotal classes; whether shamans, rabbis, magi, or priests, and their sole reason for existence is to create the illusion that they are the only ones capable to providing a lowly human with the divine truths.  Before priests, all humans were equally informed and aware of these universal truths.  The Sun provides warmth and life.  The Earth completes a full cycle every year.  Winter is followed by spring is followed by summer, etc.  We are all part of the whole.  The sun is divine.  We, like all life, contain a piece of the divine within us, and when we die, that energy will dissolve back into the universe.  This used to be basic wisdom, sacred wisdom, showing the interconnectedness of everything in creation.  The ancients did not differentiate between good things and bad things.  Anything and everything could be either, at any time, depending on how and who was utilizing it.  Our living spark comes from the Sun and returns to the Sun after death.

Before priests and the sacerdotal classes could use the old wisdom to control the people something else had to happen.  This is something that is hard to pin down, but Dupuis has done a masterful job of it.  The ancient oral wisdom, allegories meant to provide information about the heavens and the yearly cycles began then to be interpreted in non-allegorical ways.  Instead of understanding that the heroes of myth, Osiris, Heracles, were stand-ins for the mighty and all-powerful Sun, “wise men” began to postulate that they were real, actual people, humans who had lived and been so inspired as to become like gods themselves.  A second and critical jump was the dogmatic assertion that, since the Sun/God was all good, there are things in the universe that are all-bad.  They created polar enemies, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Jehovah and Satan, to foster the lie that the universe is a constant battle between that which is good, and that which is evil.  Of course, the priests/rabbis/cult leaders/shamans/gurus were the only ones among us all to know the “true path” to divinity, and to avoid eternal damnation.  It is the oldest grift in the world, to demand that someone behave as you ask in life, while promising riches and peace in death, promises they know they cannot deliver.  In this manner, all form of religion manages to leech the wealth and riches of the populace, continuing to this very day.  Most religions seem to think the living Earth is a pit of despair, abounding in horrors, and that the only true life is the “eternal” life that they promise after death.  This is a sick and twisted view, directly opposite of the wisdom our ancient ancestors tried to impart.

One of the beautiful things about this book is how Dupuis shows respect and admiration for the ancient sage poets that initially composed the solar myths we have all worshipped and fed off of for millennia. Their ability to describe, in poetic form, the passage of our Sun around the zodiac, is just one of the many bits of knowledge the ancients wished to pass down.  Many secret societies teach how to read these old myths, how to understand the scientific and natural wisdom the ancients hoped to pass on.  This was something of the reason why the Templars, Freemasons, and other such societies are viewed as a threat by the church. Who knows how much more the ancients knew?  Modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, have been around for somewhat over 100,000 years.  The genus Homo Sapiens itself, has been around for over 1,000,000 years.  The ancients seemed to understand this, many of them describing the great circumnavigations, whether labeled ages or Vedas that the world lives through, each covering tens of thousands of our years.  This was not idle fiction.  They wrote about it to share it with us, thousands of years later, the cyclical nature of existence.  It is Dupuis contention that these legends and myths have everything to offer us today, if only they could be divorced from the religions formed to use the ancient wisdom to take advantage of us, keeping them rich, fat, and comfortable, while they preach abstinence, austerity, and forgiveness.

This work was completed around the time when modern humans started to ignore myth and legend to instead focus on industrial and material matters.  The American Revolution had helped overthrow the ancient and false idea of the Divine Right of kings, and the French revolution tried to free the nation from the king and the powers of the Roman Catholic Church.  The Church has engaged in mass murder and genocide in France many times, seeking to exterminate any enclaves of what they termed “heretics.”  These were the initial freethinkers, dangerous to the status quo of a massive church, wealthier and more powerful than any single nation on Earth.  Dupuis stood for all of us when he wrote this work.  The Church has killed writers and philosophers for far less.

I am so glad I found this book.  It came at the right time, which is one of the magical things about books.  Sometimes, the exact book you need to read will come into your life.  Twenty years ago I would not have managed to complete this book, much less grok the immensity of its scope.  Dupuis truly is one of the greats, a hero to freethinkers and a bright guidepost to anyone seeking understanding of our deep mythical past.

(This book can be downloaded as a PDF here: http://iapsop.com/ssoc/1872__dupuis___origin_of_all_religious_worship.pdf )

C.F. Volney Shared the Truth With Us Over Two Centuries Ago

 

The Ruins: Or, Meditation on the Revolution of Empires and the Law of Nature – C.F. Volney (1890)

SUN RA Reading List

            Every once in a while I come across a book that not only explores specific topics I am very interested in, but whose author has already processed the information available and reached conclusions that mirror my very own, even if it is an author writing almost a century before I was born.  I love the magic of literature!  Such is the case with Constantin-Francois Chassebeuf De Volney’s The Ruins, a dense and insightful work.

            Count Volney was a lifelong learner, seeking to find the truth.  He spent his youth learning classic languages, reading, and studying.  Once he entered adulthood, he learned Arabic and proceeded to travel to the parts of the world which, at the time, were forgotten and ignored.  He gazed upon the ancient marvels, mostly covered by desert sands, and thought hard about the cultures and people that created such wonders.  It led him to insights that are as valuable today as ever.

            Volney’s journey began in the Ottoman Empire, through areas that are now Syria and Egypt.  Everywhere he went he saw desolation, ruin, and human suffering.  He noted people living barely better than ancient tribal man did.  Upon exploring the ancient sepulchers of Egypt, a revelation occurred, and he asked himself questions that led to the creation of this work. 

“How has so much glory been eclipsed?” 

“How have so many labors been annihilated?”

            Volney asked himself how the works of man perish, empires vanish, and cultures and empires become lost into the mists of time.  Every ancient kingdom and culture he had studied was gone, with many of them forgotten by the world at large.  One large thought that occurred to him, living in the time of Christian nations, was that every one of these ancient and magnificent empires were peopled with what his contemporaries would describe as heretics, infidels, heathens of the worst type.  None of them followed the tenets of Christianity, yet their splendor outshone modern Christian nations.  It made little sense to him that, in the same lands that heathens created high culture and architecture, modern Muslims, Christians and Hebrews barely eked a subsistence. 

            Volney then spends time remembering his France, and Europe, which at the time considered themselves the heights of culture and sophistication.  He remembered the beauty of Parisian streets, and then thought about the far future, where the wonders of his age would be but dust-filled ruins, and all the beauty would be lost forever.  This is a sobering thought, and something that most people never consider.  Most people live their lives as if the present world will remain unchanging for all time, and are then shocked when the changes come.

            The bulk of The Ruins proceeds like a conversation between Volney himself, and an apparition that speaks to him, which Volney calls the Genius, as he gazes on the destroyed temples and buildings of ancient cultures.  This Genius hears Volney’s anguish about humanity’s past and proceeds to explain exactly how man has fallen low and the reasons why.   The Genius patiently explains the ancient history of humanity, the rise from base animal nature to consciousness.   He talks about how humanity first understood the world, Nature, as a thing external to himself.  He then proceeds to detail how this leads to every single theological idea we are all still fighting and killing each other over.

            Each chapter title describes the contents therein, such as The Primitive State of Man, The Sources of Evil in Society, The Origin of Government and Laws, The General Causes of the Revolutions and Ruins of Ancient States, to The Lessons of Times Past Repeated on The Present.  These topics are explored as the Genius describes the development of humanity.

            The second half of The Ruins is even more mind-blowing, as the Genius lifts Volney up and away, to heights where he can see the whole Earth both past and future.  He describes the various religious groups and sects gathering from all the world to listen to the Genius.  The Genius proceeds to question each group as to their beliefs.  It points out the many ways that the core beliefs of each religion get quickly buried under dogma, priesthoods, and the endless bickering of mortal man.  Each religion ends up in actuality directly opposite of the tenets they claim to preach.  One example, which applies to most religions, is this – God is unknowable, and all encompassing.  Instead of acting upon this Truth, every single Religion constantly seeks to tell their followers exactly what “god” is thinking, what “god” likes, what “god” does not like, etc., all in an effort to control the people.  They seek to diminish their “all-knowing” god with every proclamation and decree of dogma their followers must subscribe to, or else the “god” will send them to hell for eternal punishment.

            After doing so, the Genius then starts to get to basics, asking how the humans determine truth, and how, most of their religious beliefs are not based on truth but on human extrapolation and assumptions, all leading down a path away from the actual truth.  The way that religions warp their initial truths is near universal, especially once a governing power sees how easily religion can be used to control the actions of the populace.  The initial, ancient human “religions” were nothing more than the then-current descriptions of the natural world around them, especially the heavens which were cyclical, and whose close study allowed early humans to understand the coming of the seasons, the path of our Sun through the sky, and the cycles that are created.  These ancient humans did not have telescopes or scientific instruments as we possess today, but their observations alone were invaluable.  These observations, written in the poetic language of their time, were then misinterpreted by later generations who read their symbolism and, like simple-mined folk everywhere, took them literally.  This section of The Ruins is perfect for a student of comparative religion like myself.

            One of the coolest anecdotes about The Ruins is that, as the original is in French, the English translation came from the hand of Thomas Jefferson, that eminent Freethinker and U.S.A. “Founding Father.”  He managed to translate around 4/5 of it, and it must have been truly a dangerous proposition to do so.  In the late 1700’s the Roman Catholic Church still controlled much of the western world’s religious ideas, and to have this book available in English must have been a threat.  Parts of it were left untranslated for this very reason.  For every truth any religion claims, they force upon their followers a thousand lies.  These lies take over, and force the various Christian factions to war against each other, or the various Muslim factions to war against each other.  They especially force one Religion to fight against the others, as all of them claim they are the One True Faith, instead of recognizing that the core tenets and foundations of all religious belief are simple, common to all, and universal in every sense.  I highly recommend this book.

(This book can be read or downloaded for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1397/1397-h/1397-h.htm )

Humanity Creates Gods and Demons Alike

 

Demonology and Devil-Lore – Moncure Daniel Conway (1879)

           

            For someone like me who loves to read older books the Project Gutenberg website is a gold mine.  It allows me to discover thinkers and writers otherwise lost to me.  Sometimes I have heard mention of the authors or their works.  Oftentimes I have not.  Either way I love digging through their archives.  This is how I came across Moncure Daniel Conway’s “Demonology and Devil-Lore,” an amazingly rich book that has captured my mind for the past weeks.  This book traces the development of the demons and devils that have plagued human religious thought since before the advent of writing.  In doing so, it explores much of our past, our collective fears, and the many ways that gods become demons as one culture/religion usurps another.

            Initially, humanity feared everything.  Mother Nature was brutal, harsh, unsparing, and sought to destroy early man at every turn.  Humanity sought to placate Nature, even before we invented gods.  The tribe reinforced personal rites and superstitions.  In this ancient estimation of Nature, there was no “Good” or “Evil” as we think of them today.  The earliest revelation of humanity was the knowledge that to stay alive means killing other living things.  Primitive man saw evidence of this constantly.  There was no favored species.  All things suffered the wrath of a hurricane, or a wildfire, or a volcano's eruption.  All creatures had to kill to stay alive.  Conway shows how this initial metaphysical idea is found in the early passages of Genesis, in the parable of man gaining the knowledge of Good and Evil.  Before humans had that knowledge, they existed in the state I described above.  It was a huge metaphysical leap for early humans to understand that some things can be seen as only Good and some seen as only Evil.  From there, it was a small step to imagine that offerings or sacrifices would appease the Evil and please the Good.  It was in this stage of humanity that we began to codify specific things as Demons.

            Conway describes Demons as initially being personifications of destructive force in the world around us.  They were the flip-side of the wonder that humans felt when they looked at the beautiful Earth and the heavens above.  The very earliest religious texts we have, the Vedas of Southeast Asia, speak in simple terms of how the Creator brought forth all that is good and all that is evil.  The Creator brought forth all that is joyful as well as all that is painful.  It took a long time, and a period of intellectual maturation, for humanity to split evil from the Creator, and to assign the source of evil to an entirely malicious entity.  Zoroastrian belief, a very ancient religion, shows the next step.  In Zoroastrian thought, there are two equal and opposing forces created at the beginning of time.  Light eternally battles Darkness.  Good eternally battles Evil.  Only later did these personifications receive proper names, and humans given their role in the entire process, which is to strive for Good to defeat eventually the forces of Evil in the world, creating everlasting peace and harmony.  This is the next level of theological thought humans achieved.

            Once humans saw the Universe around them as a battleground between the forces of Light and the forces of Darkness, as stated in the text by Conway, “Man found that in the earth good things came with difficulty, while thorns and weeds sprang up everywhere.  The Evil powers seemed to be the strongest.”  Even the greatest deity, the Sun itself, could burn you, kill you, and wither your life away.  The whole world was divided into realms controlled by individual malicious entities, whence came storm gods, water gods, mountain gods, etc.  Early sacrifices and offerings were not given to the “good” spirits” but to the “bad” ones.  It was the bad spirits that needed placating, whether this was in the form of an offering meant to keep evil away, or a sacrifice intended to send evil to an enemy instead of one’s family/tribe.  One tribe’s gods became another tribe’s demons.  This has continued until the present day.

            For example, one of the earliest names for the glory of the Sun was Baal.  Once sun-worship became outdated, and prayers to the Sun forbidden, the god Baal was converted into the demon Baal-zebub, a personification of the power of the Sun to rot things, and bring forth clouds of maggots and flies.  In the interim, Baal-zebub combined both of these traits.   As most old religions, including the Hebrew faith, did not have a need for an Evil One, their gods embodied both Good and Evil traits, such as the Jehovah of the Old Testament who not only saves the Jews, but kills thousands of first-born children, drowns Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, destroys whole cities (Sodom, Gomorrah), etc. The Hebrew Jehovah is an old god, raised to primacy by the Hebrews from a pantheon of pre-existing deities.

            Conway discusses how early humans saw the world as haunted by demons way before they assigned specific moral qualities to those very demons.  Early demons behaved like a ravenous tiger, who kills and eats because it is in his nature, not because he is “bad.”  They were not judged in the manner that modern Christians seek to judge what they see as demons.  Instead, these demons were appeased, praised, and sacrificed to but never ignored.  The history of humanity shows evidence that one generation’s gods become degraded until they are seen as the next generation’s demons. 

            For example, In the Old Testament the Hebrews are spoken of as setting an offering to a deity named Azazel (meaning “Strength of God”) as well as to Jehovah.  Jehovah was just one of a pantheon of gods back then.  Only through endless repetition and the “refinement” of religion by priests did Jehovah become THE GOD, the one and only that exists (at least for the Hebrews.)  As time passed, Azazel was seen as a powerful Demon, an enemy of Jehovah.  In fact, the Hebrew myths mention four arch-demons, Azazel, Samael, Asael, and Maccathiel, which originally represented four aspects of the divine Creator.  As stated above, Azazel was the “strength of god,” Samael meant “the left hand of god,” Asael was god’s reproductive force, and Maccathiel was god’s retributive power.   For the past few thousand years, these four have been seen as some of the mightiest of demons.  This is how gods, or the personifications of a god, degrade and eventually turn into demons.

            Conway explores so much that it is difficult to discuss it all.  One of the critical points he makes is the difference between the idea of Demons, and the idea of a Devil.  Demons are the personification of malevolent forces that assail humans and animals alike.  They are not moral, and they are countered by proper sacrifice or incantation.  Conway details the earliest demons, those of Hunger, Heat, Cold, the Elements, and Animals, as those were the very first deep fears in early man.  As we developed socially and intellectually, the demons became more specific, such as those of Illusion, Darkness, Disease, and Death itself.  Conway explores each type and their development in their own chapter.  Very cool.

The Devil however, is a much later development in the theological life of humanity.  The Devil is specifically an adversary to the Creator, who actively seeks to undermine and destroy the Creator’s good work (i.e. the divine soul of humans).  In many cases, humans ascribe the Devil more power than that of the Creator, at least on Earth itself.  Once the idea of a Devil was loosed upon the world, humans began to imagine the world itself as a fully evil, sinful, corrupt place.  The Earth and everything on it, ruled by the Devil himself, exists solely to test whether humans can survive with their divine souls intact.  If successful, when they die, they end up joining all that is good in heaven and leaving behind the carnal, sinful world of flesh and bone.  Many humans today live in this theological world.  From this came the idea that detachment from worldly pleasures is a good thing, instead of worldly pleasures being something gifted to us by the Creator.  All the good and beautiful in the world, from food to sex to beauty itself, is a temptation used by the devil to corrupt our souls.  Once the Devil was in charge of the Earth, his powers grew exponentially, until every manner of bad luck and evil was blamed on Satan himself.

            Moncure Daniel Conway details everything he discusses.  He delves into the way that spiritual/religious beliefs of the populace tend to help everyone get along, and provide them with purpose and meaning, until a priest/sacerdotal group decides to take over and dictate what the tribe/group is supposed to believe.  This has occurred through all of our time on this planet.  Whether it was the shaman who relied on handouts from the village to procure his services, the rabbi who dictated who was Hebrew and worthy of Jehovah and who was not, or the priest that “explained” exactly what the Bible stated whether or not the congregation felt or believed otherwise.  Those same people gained incredible power, luxury, and prestige from their subjugation of our collective human beliefs.  They still sit in the lap of luxury, castigating us for being sinners; all the while, they commit the most heinous acts of torture, sexual abuse, outright theft, and moral degradation imaginable.  They claim to know who the demons and the Devils are, always hiding their own flawed humanity behind the veil of organized religion.  Conway hated those bastards so much.  I am eternally thankful that I found this book and this author, another intellectual hero to add to my ever-growing list.  I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand how humans have created their gods and demons, and how we continue to do so today.

(This book can be downloaded here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40686 )

Over 100 years ago, Dr. Otto Rank explored the commonalities found in the world's Hero myths

 

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology – Dr. Otto Rank (1914)

            When looking at the list of books I have read and reviewed here on the Intellectual Journey, I find that many of them deal with the topics of Myth and the influence of these myths on human culture through the ages.  This is a topic that has always fascinated me, but which requires extensive background reading.  Comparative Religion studies is a relatively new area of research, having only truly begun in the last 150 years or so.  Before then, the idea of studying religions and myths to see the similarities and common sources for both was heretical, and all people who sought to study this field were dissuaded from it by the church on penalty of blasphemy.  (This makes me wonder how many amazing works of world literature, history and myth sit locked away in the Vatican archives, solely to keep the knowledge from disturbing their very elaborate and lucrative pyramid scheme.)

            In 1914, Otto Rank published a monograph where he explored the specific sources and intent of the Hero myth common to all cultures.  Specifically, Dr. Rank focuses on the parts of the Hero myths that detail the Hero’s birth.  From Sargon and Oedipus to Hercules and Jesus, Dr. Rank details their specific birth myths, working from the most ancient antiquity forwards.  In his introduction, Dr. Rank describes how “prominent civilized nations…all began at an early age to glorify their heroes, mythical princes and kings, founders of religions, dynasties, empires or cities…in a number of poetic tales and legends.”  Initially based on actual events, these stories were embellished and invested with fantastic features as they were passed on from generation to generation.  What struck Dr. Rank, and many others who study such things, is the improbable similarities that arose in each of these Hero’s birth stories.  It is these similarities, analyzed with a psychological view in mind, which Otto Rank explores in this monograph.

            Dr. Otto Rank details the three separate theories that researchers of his time offered to explain why there are so many similarities in the various civilization’s Hero birth myths.  One was the theory that there exists elementary thoughts, universally sourced from our human brain, which manifest themselves as details of our Hero myths.  A second was that of original community, meaning that one ancient civilization first created the details that have become universal, purely through the influence of the civilizations that arose from the initial one.  The third explanation offered, migration, expands on the second one, stating that an original civilization created the myths, and then when they expanded their territory, their myths were adopted by the people with whom they came into close contact.  Dr. Rank disagrees with these theories.  Using psychology, specifically the work of Dr.’s Freud and Jung, he proposes that the source of these myths lays in the human mind and it’s psychological constructs, specifically those that relate to our own birth and the processes of growth into adulthood.  As we are all humans with human psychology, it makes sense that our myths would seem to be of a similar character with similar details.

            It is not possible to go into everything that Dr. Rank discusses, but one detail in particular stands out.  In most of the classic Hero myths, the birth of the hero is followed by the abandonment/exposure of the baby hero in order that it may die, so as not to fulfil prophecy.  Invariably, the hero is placed in a container, which is then put into a river or body of water.  Fortunately, the child is rescued by someone who then raises him or her to adulthood.  Dr. Rank provides ample evidence that these various water stories are actually mythological descriptions of the Hero’s birth.  This is especially evident in the fact that in most of these myths the Hero is born of royalty or a god, and then after being ditched, is raised by simple folk such as shepherds, wet-nurses, slaves, etc.  The second birth helps separate the Hero from his true family and his true societal obligations.  This is necessary as it allows the Hero to seek the Hero’s path, eventually to usurp or replace his original royal parent.

            The creation of myths by humanity is an on-going process.  One of the founding heroes of the United States is the first President, George Washington, who as a General led the forces that defeated the British in the New World.  It has been almost 250 years since that time.  Already, a vast catalogue of fabrications exists that seek to portray President Washington in the heroic light that myth does.  The biggest one is the story where Washington cut down a tree, and when confronted about it, told his parents “I cannot tell a lie.”  This small, apocryphal story has gone on to become the basis of most everyone’s idea about George Washington.  It remains to be seen whether his myth tale will continue to grow.   I think Dr. Otto Rank may be correct in stating that the sources of Myth lie in our very own subconscious minds.  The stories that move us as human have not really changed since the dawn of history.  We all love a Hero.  We all love a story about someone who was taken from lofty heights, brought down to the lowliest of lows, and then re-emerges, like the Phoenix, to greater glory that ever before.  It is truly our human nature.

(This book can be read or downloaded here:  https://ia802205.us.archive.org/12/items/mythofbirthofher1914rank/mythofbirthofher1914rank_bw.pdf )

Alexander Hislop wants to Chant Down Babylon, and So Do I

The Two Babylons: or, the Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife – Alexander Hislop (1916)

            (Recently I came across a Reading List for a University lecture course taught by the great Sun Ra back in the day.  Fascinating stuff.  This is my review of the first book on the Sun Ra Reading List.  I hope to make it through them all this year. - RXTT)

            This one is heavy.  First, a little background.  I am the son of an Episcopal Priest.  Because of this, I grew up in church, and because of my curiosity, I was always reading the Bible, or any theology that came my way.  I wanted to know what in this collection of books (BIBLIA means a collection of separate books, hence our Bible) was the source for the seemingly infinite variety of denominations and sects that claimed to be following the teachings of Jesus the Christ.  In all my study as a youth, and in the decades since, I have never found any of what Jesus the Christ taught, preached, or espoused, to be complex.  His teachings are exceedingly basic, and applicable to all humans in all lands.  The many religions/sects/cults (they are all the same thing) that sprung up in Jesus’ wake, however, have conflated his teachings, and obscured the simple message behind walls of ritual, baroque language, and the seemingly impenetrable man-made creation of the priesthood.  The worst one seems to be the Roman Catholic Church.

            A quick history lesson: the times in which Jesus the Christ lived are estimated to be between 2,000 and 2,100 years ago.  No one can be sure. There is no record anywhere of the date of his birth, the date of his mitzvah (Jesus was a Jew, you know), or of the date of his death.  There are no Roman or old Israelite records showing Jesus specifically being tried and executed.  All we have are the words of Scripture, in which very little of Jesus’ life is actually discussed.  There is nothing in the Bible between his birth and the time he came of age, and very little between that and his rise as a prophet and leader of men.  You can find Bibles that mark all of the words claimed to be spoken by Jesus the Christ in red letters, and let me tell you, it is barely two pages of text collectively.  That is, two pages of text, out of a collection of books running thousands of pages long.

            The initial Christians, in the three to four-hundred years after his passing, maintained for the most part the teachings he gave.  People today talk constantly about Jesus’ calls to be humble, to turn the other cheek to your enemy, to not use violence, for violence is an evil method.  These are all great teachings and deeply valuable, as evident in the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent protest, and in India’s Revolt from the yoke of the British Empire, with Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent protest tactics.  They were also central to the early Christians.  However, if you actually read the Gospels instead of accepting your local cult leader’s (priest’s) interpretation, you will see that Jesus preached against many things which, today, are not so commonly discussed.  Jesus preached against all organized religion of any type, and the idea that any intermediary can or should come between a human and his divinity (God).  He saw first-hand the corruption Rabbinical “leaders” caused in his Jewish faith.  He saw how those people get assigned power over the rest of us, power which only leads to evil and ill.  Jesus also preached heavily for the personal dissolution of the family.  He states many times that a good person values god more than their family.  Jesus lived in a time where one’s family dictated everything about your life.  If you were born to a rich landowner, you were to be a rich landowner.  If you were born to a destitute family, you deserved it and you were going to stay destitute.  The modern ideal of a human being making something out of themselves, regardless of their familial status or where they come from, is a very recent phenomenon, and for most of human history this has not been the case.

            Jesus also preached separation from the concerns of the state.  He witnessed the corruption inherent when a powerful religion (concerned primarily with men’s souls) comingled and eventually entrenched themselves into local (Roman) politics.  What is the old saying?  “Power tends to corrupt.  Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”  Jesus preached against the old codes in the Bible, stating that, as he had come to redeem the world of all sin, past and present, the old Abrahamaic and Mosaic laws of the Hebrews were null and void, and there was but one way to salvation, faith in the teachings of Jesus.  This may have been his greatest act of rebellion, and is most definitely the teaching that caused him to be executed by religions leaders using the Roman courts as their proxy.  (Many claim that Jesus was put to death for preaching to non-Jews.  In fact, many of the apostles were against Jesus teaching his lessons to non-Jews.  Jesus did not see the difference, for we are all human, and his teachings applied to all.  He began preaching to “gentiles,” the non-Jews such as Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians, etc. who happened to live in or near Israel.  It is easy to see how this would piss off some rich bastard priesthood/rabbis whose sole claim to power was being able to guide Hebrews to God.)

            In other words, Jesus’ teachings amounted to a direct and absolute threat to all established powers in his world.  “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” as Jesus stated so famously when asked about money and taxes.  Jesus did not care about money.  The early Christians followed his teachings, abstaining from blind obedience to families, the state or any organized religion, and not seeking to hoard riches or wealth.  They met in un-decorated rooms, and humbly prayed, quietly, as Jesus taught.  It only took three to four hundred years for these good teachings to be overrun by an organization seeking to regain their power, both religious and political, and for them to claim to be the sole and only source for true salvation.  That group of evil bastards is, according to Mr. Hislop, what is currently known as the Roman Catholic Church, home of endless nun-rapes, pedophiles, bastard children, and the most exquisite blasphemies and idolatries ever, all the while telling the millions of Christians worldwide that they are the sinners, that they are born evil, and that only through the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) and their priests can humans hope to achieve redemption.

            It is this organization, at one point so powerful that the Pope actually ruled an entire empire (Papal States - edit, thanks to !@#$#%$), that Alexander Hislop has put squarely in his sights.  His disdain for the evils of the RCC is so great that he spent a great part of his life in research, reading, learning, and understanding exactly how the RCC has managed to enslave much of the world in a deeply Pagan and un-Christian religion.  Hislop goes into extravagant detail about pretty much every single aspect of what we call today Roman Catholicism, and how it is all just a subversion of Christian tropes in service of a more ancient pagan belief, the worship of the god/godman called Baal, Cyrus, or Nimrod.  This individual, Hislop claims, was the son of Noah, the first creator of a large walled city after the Biblical Flood (Babylon), who, after his death in a violent manner, was deified as having been resurrected as the God of all Men.  His wife, Semiramis, gave birth to a son, Tammuz, in a virgin birth.  The Babylonian religion coalesced these two entities, the father and the son, as being the same person, essentially having Nimrod father himself and be reborn as Tammuz.  They also ended up worshiping Semiramis as a goddess who had a miraculous “Virgin” birth.  She became so very powerful as a goddess object of worship that Tammuz was infantilized, and both of them were portrayed just as Mary and Jesus are now portrayed, a virgin mother saint holding her sainted son, reborn of the Father.

            When the Roman Emperors’ began to attempt to control Christianity, they essentially couched the old paganism in Christian symbolism, turning the ancient festival of Saturnalia (celebrating the Virgin birth of Tammuz/Mithra) into Christmas, turning the spring festivals to Ishtar (a goddess Hislop shows to be just an inversion of the worship of Semiramis) into the High festival of Easter, supposedly commemorating Jesus’ reincarnation after his crucifixion, but celebrated with Pagan symbols such as eggs, rabbits, and other ancient stand-ins for fertility.  They declared formally that they were the only true Christian religion, that no others are valid, and that redemption and salvation do not come from faith in Jesus the Christ and following his teachings, but in endless cycles of pagan bullshit such as flagellation, contrition, the paying of tithes, suffering for suffering’s sake, and the constant reminder of the horrors that the human body of Jesus endured by the fetish of the Roman execution device of the cross.  This is essentially religious horror-porn.  Christ never mentioned any of these things as divine and in fact, actually denounced most of them.

            One of the biggest areas that Hislop explores is the method by which the Roman Catholic Church has ingrained the cardinal sin of idolatry into its very essence.  The very first of the Mosaic Commandments states thus, “I am the Lord, thy God.  Thou shall have no other gods before me.  Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”  Jesus, in his Gospels, states that this Commandment takes precedence above all others.  However, this is exactly the opposite of what the Roman Catholic Babylon Church has forced upon the devout.  Their houses of worship are covered in idols, images, and statues that are MEANT to be prayed to.  Instead of praying quietly to god, as commanded by Jesus, Roman Catholics are expected to supplicate to dead saints (many of them converted Pagan gods or ideas), and Mary and the priests to plead to God on their behalf.  Nowhere is Jesus mentioned.  The pagan worship of a Virgin Mother has so corrupted the Roman Catholic Church that even the Popes exclaim that Mary is the redeemer, the one who makes Jesus save us.  That is deep blasphemy.

            I have not even scratched the surface of what Hislop exposes.  In the Gospels, Jesus states that we are all to confess our sins to each other, including religious leaders.  This keeps everyone humble, and human, and understanding of our failings, and better able to accept the faults of others (a very Christian thing to do), but the Roman Catholic Church does not follow Jesus’ teachings on this.  They demand that all subjects confess their sins to a Priest, who remains anonymous, and then the priest will give them some rote bullshit to do to be “absolved,” such as reciting countless prayers to Mary (more blasphemy). Never, ever, do the Priests confess their sins to the people in their care.  In fact, when the people come out and inform authorities that many of the Roman Catholic priests/monks/nuns are pedophiles, rapists, abusers, inveterate drunks, gamblers, and all-around professional sinners, there is never any accountability!   Rapist pedophile priests are slightly chastised and sent to a different parish, where their evil can continue unabated.  Recently a comprehensive list of priests accused of credible sexual rape and abuse, has been published.  It runs over THREE THOUSAND NAMES LONG.  None of these assholes will be jailed.  None will even be prosecuted in court.  The Roman Catholic Church treats their priest’s crimes as “sins” to be dealt with internally, regardless of the horror and trauma they cause to countless generations of people.  This has been the case for hundreds of years.  If anyone does come to trial, it is always some ancient old priest who raped kids for decades, but now looks so feeble and old that people feel pity for the rapist!

            Religion is, to me, the last great superstition left in humanity.  It is the single largest source of pain, suffering, and outright evil in the world.  The biggest crimes against humanity have been done in the name of religion, or attempting to stop one specific religion.  It is all a crock of shit.  As soon as we all rid ourselves of the idea that cryptic and debased belief systems are truth and the key to happiness once we are dead, then humanity will reach a deeper closeness with the true teachings that Jesus the Christ died to impart.  Mr. Hislop, as a Christian in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, is a devout believer in Jesus.  He deeply believes that Jesus and his sacrifice were, as Jesus stated, the final redemption of mankind, and that no other redemption is required, which is the exact opposite of what the Roman Catholic Church preaches.  I do not feel this way.  I do not “believe” in anything.  I am purely a human being, living my life as best I see fit, and trying my hardest to help others when I can, and not hurt others when I am able to stop myself from doing so.  I have had many people in my life, people very close to me, tell me that in my day to day living, I am the closest thing to a Christian they know.  I take it as a compliment.  Jesus was a REBEL.  Jesus knew his teachings were important enough to die for.  Jesus whupped some money-lender ass when they defiled his father’s house. 

            This is not an easy book to read.  The work is dense, and Mr. Hislop gives you everything he can find to prove his point.  There are so many examples, so many unavoidable truths within, that I can see why this book is not more widely known.  The Wizard of Oz does NOT want you to see how he makes the magic happen.

(EDITED for clarity - 2/5/2020 - RXTT)

(This book can be downloaded as a PDF here: http://www.ldolphin.org/PDFs/The_Two_Babylons-Alexander_Hislop.pdf )