What Exactly Did the Ancient Mystics Experience, and Why?

The Cult of the Seer in the Ancient Middle East: A Contribution to Current Research on Hallucinations Drawn from Coptic and Other Texts – Violet MacDermot (1971)

            Sometimes I find myself drawn to read a reference work.  I really love reference materials, as they gather and explore a large amount of data into one cohesive book.  I have always enjoyed pouring information into my grey matter and seeing the connections made therein.  Having read quite a few books in the past two years dealing with the rise of worship, the human need for ritual, the neurophysiology of the human brain and how it affects what is called the mystical, and the development of mythology and the mythological basis for all of our religious belief systems, I figured that this book was indeed for me.  In this masterwork, Violet MacDermot has gathered together writings from the Egyptians, the Coptic Christians, the Gnostic Christians and the Hebrews, and seeks to understand the means by which these people enabled, experienced, and interpreted mystic visions/hallucinations.  It is an exhaustive book, and well worth going back to as a reference source.

            A book of this scope has many themes to explore.  One of the main ones is the change in mystical visions from the time of the Egyptian ascetics to the Hellenic/Greek times, to that of the early Hebrew mystics and then the Christian saints and martyr seers.  It explores the details of the ritual, religious life of an Egyptian believer, and then details how this differed from the life of the hermit mystic.  During and before the time of the Egyptian kingdoms, the role of ritual and religion was to help the individual understand their place in the larger scheme of things.  This included the general understanding that the divine was to be found in all things, both living and inanimate, and that to serve the greater community was the utmost goal.  The individual themselves is not of primal importance.  They are just a cog in the greater machine.  The gods depended upon the people’s rituals to ensure their endless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.  Without strict regulations on rituals and religious services, the whole fabric of human society would have crumbled (in their eyes), and the legitimacy of their divine rulers (kings or pharaohs) would be devalued.  MacDermot provides countless examples translated from original source materials to show that the Egyptian devout felt their participation integral to the orderliness of the world around them.  The mystics at this time would do everything the opposite of what was expected from society.  They would remove themselves from the towns and cities, living alone in the deserts.  They would avoid the ritual prayers and ceremonies of the regular folk, and instead focus their whole energies into meditation, fasting, and the attempt to have the soul be rid completely of the trappings of the normal Egyptian world.  Because of this they found divinity in themselves, the full realization of it coming only very near death, as one lets go of this world and the soul moves onto the next.  Instead of ensuring proper mummification so that their body would be reunited with their soul in the afterlife, they sought a total wasting away, allowing their soul to unify with the divine and avoid the endless repetition of birth/death/rebirth.  This would prove to be very influential to the Hellenic, Hebrew, and Christian mystics who came after them.

            It seems that every new culture strives to erase the ideas of the past, or at least refute them.  The Greek philosophers did not agree with the Egyptian mystics.  They saw the world as a quite different place, and their mystical visions changed accordingly.  Many of them came to believe that the material world was one of pure degradation, always rotting, always in a state of decline, and that the spiritual world, the world of ideal forms and of the spirit, was one of perfection.  The Hellenic mystics would use many of the same techniques as the Egyptian mystics to bring about ecstatic visions.  Everything from fasting, to physical deprivation, to ritual dance, to chanting, to a secluded desert hermit life was utilized.  Their end goals were different though.  They did not come from a society that demanded everyone adhere to a specific set of ritual. Instead, they lived in a world where the philosophers told them that the divine/ideal was to be reached through pure thought, through philosophy, as it were.  They would meditate on the ideal, seeking to eliminate all thought of the base natural world from their minds.  Even though their aims were different, the visions described and experiences claimed were very similar to those of their predecessors in Egypt.  This continues on through the Hebrew and the early Christian mystical tradition.

            After the Egyptians and the Greeks, the mystics of the Hebrew and the early Christian faith were a bit different.  They did not see the world as divinity manifested (Egyptian) or as a shadow of the divine (Greeks), but instead they saw a strict duality of good versus evil.  Many tended to believe in the Manichean thought that the natural world is a wholly evil construct, one in which the body is purely a prison for the divine soul.  Because of this, any and all human activity was derided as either evil, or drawn from evil.  Of course, these activities were merely the residue of the earlier ages of religious thought.  Sex was evil, where before it was a personal experience of divinity.  Orgiastic feasts were evil, where before they allowed the community to share in the bounty that divinity had provided on the Earth.  To the mystic seers even the idea of organized religion was an evil, created on Earth to draw humans away from the truly divine, which could only be achieved by the total obliteration of the self, both physical and mental.  It really is insane how humanity creates its gods and means of worship, and then rails against it at a later time, only to then destroy and rail against the latest religious ideas.  

For modern Americans, a nice view from the balcony can be an ecstatic experience.

             If anything, books such as these that aggregate the religious literature over thousands of years and dozens of cultures go to show the deep schizophrenia that exists in the human mind when it is forced to believe something that is essentially a fairy tale explanation for the way the world appears to us.  Mystics to this day continue on with these self-mortification practices, starving themselves, ingesting hallucinogenic substances, enduring endless pain and discomfort, and separating themselves from the society at large, all to attempt to commune with a non-existent divinity.  So many people have died and suffered at the hands of those that believe their rituals are the true ones, and that any others must be stopped at any cost.  Currently there is a war going on in Islam, between different cults, each claiming they are the one true way to salvation and the divine.  The same thing goes on in Christianity, as the orthodox and the charismatic Pentecostals fight it out in the court of public opinion, as well as in our legislatures.  No one talks about this.  It is a hard subject to broach.  The more one learns about humanity’s religious history, the more one sees how it is all a very carefully constructed house of cards, ready to fall down at any moment, but taking up vast amounts of resources and time from millions of blindly faithful people that could be better served in the betterment of humanity at large.

            The best part of this book consists of the translations of source materials that Ms. MacDermot has gathered up.  It is quite amazing to see the literal plagiarism used to prop up the stories about saints and martyrs and mystics.  The people who wrote about the Christian martyrs used the writings about Hellenic mystics as source material, copying nearly every detail.  The Hellenic mystery cult writers did the same thing with the writings of the Egyptians.  So many things are accepted at face value because some learned wise man wrote it down thousands of years ago.  It is ridiculous.  Every new religion has to usurp the rituals and holidays of the ones that came before it, and by doing so, usually turn out to employ the exact same means that were deemed blasphemous or heretic.  The very early Christians followed the rules Jesus gave very strictly.  Jesus said to leave your family, to avoid sex, to not worship idols, to avoid working, to basically stop taking part in society and society’s rituals.  The Christian church however, created “sacraments” to ensure that the masses would still take care of their familial obligations, would still marry and have many children, would still pray to images of saints and martyrs, would still find employment to pay the 10% tithe required by the church, and would continue in their yearly rituals, disguised as Christian holidays (Easter = Ishtar, Christian Saint Feast days replacing those of previous religions, etc.).  In other words, the Church forced its followers to adhere to the very same things that their namesake, Jesus Christ, instructed them to avoid.  If that does not let you know it is all a crock of shit, then perhaps you should read this book and start the exploration for yourself.

(This book is out of print but can be purchased used here: AMAZON  )

Are you looking for the motherload? This is the motherload.

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion – James George Frazer (1890)

            There are very few books that truly qualify as seminal works.  These are books where the content is so original, insightful, and fresh that they create whole worlds of study and exploration in their wake.  Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (1859) is one.  Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) is another.  In the former, Charles Darwin proposed such well-reasoned and evidenced ideas that 150 years later they still scare the crap out of people whose world-view is barely above a fanciful children’s fable, even though most of the world has accepted Darwin’s conclusions.  The latter book shattered hundreds of years worth of stagnant thought about the nature of our Universe and allowed the development of our modern sciences and society, providing the mathematical tools to greatly expand humanity’s ability to understand and explain the physical nature of our existence.  James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) is of an equal importance, but in the world of comparative religion/mythology and anthropology.  This one book is the main reason that that these fields of study exist.  Without The Golden Bough our modern world would be a very different place. 

            Because of its deep primacy as a source text, The Golden Bough is a book I have seen and read referenced more times than I can imagine as I have read through the works of Joseph Campbell, Robert Anton Wilson, and the like.  In fact, any work of comparative mythology draws from the Golden Bough, if only to try and refute it.  Frazer originally published a one volume edition of this work, only to expand it to two volumes in a second printing a few years later.  For the third printing, Frazer went ahead and included as much of his anthropological and ethnographic research as he could, expanding the whole work to twelve volumes, creating the mother-load for any and all folklorists, mythologists, and comparative religion researchers to draw from.

The book was an immediate success, in part because it scandalized so many “learned” people in England due to its inclusion of the Christian church’s myths and rites and the parallels and origins of these rites that Frazer saw reflected worldwide in nearly every culture he researched.  Even though Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, and Judaism is a codification of Semitic nomad culture’s folklore and beliefs, the “true believers” cannot accept that their holy church is anything other than a brand new revelation, with no parallels or precursors in human history.  This led to The Golden Bough becoming the kind of book that one read and shared in secret, for the power of the church to destroy those it deemed heretics was still strong at the end of the 19^th century.  The devout cannot handle their belief system being called a “myth” for they believe their myths are factual truths.  This has been the truth as long as humans have deluded themselves into believing the lies religions feed them.  However, taking a step back and seeing how one’s beliefs share a common intellectual and “spiritual” thread with beliefs from around the world should in fact do the opposite, at least in an open mind.  It is nothing if not amazing how similar the paths of mythological thought and beliefs are for all people.  We are all one human race after all, regardless of the level of sophistication our culture may be at.

This book starts out as an exploration of a specific myth which relates the story of the King of the Wood, who was tasked with protecting a grove of trees sacred to the goddess Diana near the town of Nemi.  The folklore states that this King of the Wood was chosen to serve for a set amount of time, after which he was sacrificed to the goddess and a new King chosen.  This evolved over the decades and centuries to a situation where the King of the Wood had to fight off challengers to his position at a set time every year or two.  Frazer explores the origins of this myth and then realizes that throughout the cultures of the world similar rites have developed, and that they all draw from even more ancient myths and beliefs, all the way back to a pre-agricultural nomadic human existence.  Primitive man, and indeed many currently tribal peoples, worshipped the animals and vegetables as gods in their own right.  Over the centuries the idea that everything on Earth had its own spiritual existence evolved to where every similar thing was ruled by a specific god external to the object being worshipped.  All corn was ruled by the corn goddess.  All deer existed due to the whims of the deer god.  All of these gods had to be appeased.  Because of this, specific rites relating to life, death, and rebirth were crafted and utilized.  These rituals gave order to the cosmos, allowing man to think he could control the weather, the crop yields, or the bounty of wildlife purposefully through his actions and prayers (magic).  They were all self-consistent.  Eventually, after millennia, the idea developed that the gods were wholly separate from the matter of reality, and that their whims could not be directly controlled by human ritual and magic, but instead the gods must be supplicated and appeased so that they may bestow their favor upon the most worthy.  Once this became the norm humanity created a specific class of human that could intervene with the gods on behalf of the rest of us.  This became the shaman/priest class, and it was them that began codifying their culture’s belief systems.  This is the start of religion as opposed to magic.  Magic was understandable by all, and usable by all.  Religion is not usable by all, and definitely not understood by all, for the very shaman priests designated to aid instead made it more difficult for the individual to have a full picture of their own personal myths.  The “truth” had to be explained by the priest class.  This exists to this very day in all the churches of the world.

          For example, the idea of sacrifice, whether human, animal or plant, arose as a direct response to seeing the world’s vegetation and animals seemingly die every winter and be reborn every spring.  Death brings life.  All life survives by killing.  This was self-evident to primitive man.  Even before the use of agriculture humanity sacrificed to the spirits of nature for a return of the bounty of spring.  Once humanity developed agriculture, the seasonal sacrifices became ever more crucial to ensure that next year there would be rains and a proper harvest.  The rituals of sacrifice from around the world and throughout history share such common features that it is plainly obvious they share a common ground in the human mind.  After sacrificing virgins, first-born sons, captives, and animals, humanity started sacrificing the children of their kings, and their kings themselves.  What would please a god more than the soul of a lofty individual after all?  Frazer goes into great detail about all of this and it is amazing to see the parallels to the sacrifice of Jesus in the Bible.  For most, the sacrifice was the personification of their god.  Many cultures ate of the being they sacrificed in a ritual communion much like Christians eat what they are taught to believe is the actual blood and flesh of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion.  Nearly all ancient civilizations had religions that spoke of a redeemer god, who died and was resurrected, who was the son of a virgin and who by his sacrifice saved humanity.  Old ritual magic is transformed over time into codified religion, and most of the followers have no idea this is the case. 

          I have wanted to read this book for nearly twenty years, but I was intimidated.  Only after exploring the world of folklore and mythology have I been able to fully absorb what Mr. Frazer is writing about.  One of my goals is purchasing the full twelve volume set of The Golden Bough for my own personal library. For many people who benefit from keeping masses of us ignorant and devout, this book is still very dangerous.  It challenges their right to lord their beliefs over us, and to force us to comply.  There is so much insight and information in The Golden Bough that I know I will enjoy revisiting this book in the future.  Sometimes supposedly seminal works are disappointing, but not this time.  What an amazing piece of intellectual work this is.

(To download or read this book in .PDF format, click here: 
www.templeofearth.com/books/goldenbough.pdf )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

The development of humanity's myths continues!

Masks of God: Occidental Mythology – Joseph Campbell (1958)

This book is the third in a series of four books in which Joseph Campbell created and crystallized the modern science of comparative religion and ethnographic mythology.  The vast amount of research and scholarship involved in this is staggering to imagine, but it reflects upon Mr. Campbell’s lifelong fascination with humanity’s belief systems and the shared themes found within all of these mythologies.  The first two books in this Masks of God series, Primitive Mythology, and Oriental Mythology, explore the deep mythological source materials from humanity’s earliest tribal times in the former, and then investigates the development of these primal themes and ideas as they coalesced into organized religion during humanity’s first great civilizations in the latter.  This volume, Occidental Mythology, details the evolution of these myths as the Eastern (Vedic and early Buddhist) and Western (Greek and Hebrew) ideas combined to form what were the first "World” religions, such as Christianity and Islam.

Early mythology created tribal cults, mainly concerned with worshiping the life impulse evident all around in the cycles of birth, death, and regeneration seen by all humans in the past.  The waxing and waning Moon, the rising and setting Sun, the coming of life in Spring and Summer and the decline of it in the Fall and Winter, all became signs which humanity saw fit to sacrifice to, and worship as divine.  Death brought Life.  Life brought Death.  It was a never-ending cycle which is reflected in the oldest religions still around in our modern world.  These are mainly found in the Eastern religious thought, where life/existence has no beginning and no end, instead cycling endlessly from high to low and back again.  The end goal of these religions is to remove the trappings of self, of placing value in things which are transient at best and illusory at worst.  This leaves the devotee to experience a unity with the divine which is in all, surrounds all, and is ever-lasting.

These religions detailed in Primitive Mythology did not focus on good versus evil, for those were just two poles of an ever-varied existence.  The religions that developed out of and after these original family religions were different in that they explored the source of Evil in the world.  Many, like Zoroastrianism, proposed a Universe in which the personification of Good and of Evil are constantly at odds, and that only through the good works of humanity would Evil finally be vanquished by Good, leading to everlasting peace on Earth.  Many religions followed this example.  Others, like the religion of the tribal peoples that became the Hebrews, posited that the world is full of sin, due to Man’s disobeying God/Yahweh, but that only God’s Chosen People (of course it is the Hebrews) would be able to bring about an end to evil when they finally are able to join all together and worship their god in unity.  This was drawn from the idea that God created the world but is not immanent in the world, that not everything is divine, and that this world we currently live in is but a shadow of the true existence of divinity.  That is a big difference from the earlier tribal, and current Eastern, belief that one can find god by looking within themselves just as easily as one can find god by looking without.  The Hebrew Messiah is described as someone who would be a political, as well as spiritual leader, who would finally unite all the Hebrew nation and bring about God’s will.  This was still a “national/tribal” religion, not meant to include the world population at large.  Yahweh was specifically the god of the Hebrews, proclaiming himself the mightiest of gods.

The Western world developed what are termed “World” religions, Christianity and Islam, out of the basis provided by the original Hebrew faith.  Christianity slowly moved away from the vengeful, petty, nationalistic god of the Bible’s Old Testament that required constant sacrifices to appease, towards a conception of god as love, whereas all the evil in the world was caused by Satan, who sought to destroy and ruin God’s perfect creation, Man.  To do this, the example of Jesus of Nazareth was used, and mythologized, to be able to spread this idea to all corners of the Earth.  The New Testament speaks of Jesus teaching his followers that any and all are to be welcomed into the “flock,” even those who religion normally turned away, such as the very poor, the sick, the leprous, the prostitutes, basically the lowliest of the low.  It brought a dignity in being human that was to be respected by all.  At its core, Islam also teaches this.  All humans are capable of being good Muslims, or good Christians.  Your membership in these belief systems are not dependent on your birth, nationality, race, etc., but solely upon your personal desire and dedication to live the Christian/Muslim life.  This has been codified into widely differing dogma by religious groups, but the core message is the same.

The Eastern system of Buddhism does the same thing, in terms of being a World religion, and seeks to instruct all mankind in the ways of living a proper life, so that anyone can be one with the divine, which is in us, around us, and always available.  In this sense it is different from Christianity and Islam, for the Buddhist is not taught that the Buddha was the only son of god, or that the Buddha is the only prophet that is valid, or that only by worshiping the Buddha will you attain Heaven/union with the divinity.  Anyone can, through good works, good thoughts, and good living, become an enlightened one, a Buddha.  The focus in the East is never on the tribe or the nation or the group, but on the individual mind/soul and its connection to the divine.

You can never go too deep

It is amazing how Mr. Campbell draws in the seemingly infinite threads of world myth and shows how the basic core ideas are transformed from one era to the next.  He details how the Trinity in Christianity has endless predecessors in the nature cults and early religions of the Middle East.  He describes how the concept of worshiping the Female aspect of Life as Life’s very creator was twisted around to benefit a patriarchal society, to the point where in Christianity, God is the Father, Son and Holy Ghost all himself, with no feminine entity to provide Life.  This is something that changed even the very early story of Adam and Eve, as can be seen in the Bible’s two different versions of creation, where in one God creates Adam and Eve together, and in the later addition, God creates Adam, and then, from Adam, creates Eve.  This is essentially a denial of the life power of the Female, and it is still used to this day to keep women down, in both Christianity and Islam, for they seem Woman as the cause of the Fall of mankind.  Horrible huh?  It seems inherently anti-nature.

(Within Catholicism, the cult of the Virgin Mary has essentially refocused humanity’s original worship of the Female as the giver of all Life into the worship of one perfect Female who was used by God to bring humanity’s savior into existence.)

There is so much more in this book, so much I wish I could get into, but it would make this review exceedingly long.  One thing that is evident from Mr. Campbell’s writing is that he feels that while there is evidence that Jesus of Nazareth, the Buddha, and other “saviors” like Osiris in Egypt were actual historical people, their ideas and lives were elaborated and developed into cosmological mythologies.  Joseph Campbell states that this MUST be so, in order to progress from tribal ideas to truly universal ideas with the power to change the entire world.  That is the beauty and power of myth, that it touches upon something deep within all of us, allowing our consciousness to comprehend and appreciate the resonance between us and every other aspect of creation.  That is a very valuable thing, and will go on whether or not individual religions come and go.

(You can read or download this book as a .pdf here: http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_13907.pdf )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

Sometimes the truth is so murky that the lies overwhelm it

The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and their Myth – Peter Partner (1982)

            If there is one group of people in history that have had the most fanciful stories told about them and their influence, it is the Knights Templar.  Everything from Freemasonry to Illuminism to Satanism has been attributed to them and claimed to be derived from them.  The actual historical accounts of this order are so few and so scrubbed by later theologians and church historians that to find the truth one has to dig through a mountain of poorly researched and ornately embellished writings hoping to eek out the small kernels of actual fact.  Mr. Partner spends the first half of this book discussing the facts as can be deduced from church and Templar documents and contemporary accounts, and the second half of the book discussing the many ways the myth of the Templars was created a grew in the centuries after their dissolution.

            To begin, the Templar Knights were one of two military orders of the Roman Catholic Church, the other being the Order of the Hospitalers.  The Templar Knights were originally an order of what were then “middle-class” type people, merchants, soldiers, etc., who joined the Order to do religious duty, much like people join convents or monasteries.  They were frugal by decree, living only on what was supplied to them by the local churches and benefactors, and using their arms to protect pilgrims heading to the Holy Land.  Over time, they grew in influence and wealth and were used by the Catholic Church as an armed force in the early Crusades to the Holy Land.  After a while the Knights Templar began to act as an independent arm of the Catholic Church, with all the bureaucracy expected of that, and controlled many towns and cities in the Holy Land.  With their increase in power and prestige lords and kings sought to align themselves with them and therefore deeded many properties, castles, and land holdings to the Order in exchange for protection and military favors.  Eventually the Order became so prosperous and powerful that they began to draw the jealous eye of the King of France, under whom they were supposed to serve, especially after the Crusades were over and done with.  Leaders of religions always fight with leaders of nations for power and this was no different.

Using every trick and lie that governments and religions have always used against their perceived enemies, they brought down the hammer on the Templar Knights.  Torture was used to extract ridiculous confessions.  These included things like renouncing Christ, forcing members to commit sodomy, requiring new members to kiss the butthole of the brother who is initiating them, endless blasphemes against the church, the denial of God’s divinity, black magic, witchcraft etc.  These were all base lies, but they served to end the Order of the Knights Templar, especially after their leaders were burned alive on November 22 in front of the public.  Every bit of treasure and property that the Templar knights had been granted was stolen by the French King and the Catholic Church.  The full might of the Catholic Inquisition stomped the Templars into oblivion.  For some reason, it seems that churches heap their most virulent scorn not upon pagans who do not believe as they do, but upon heretics, who believe slightly differently than they do.  It is all about controlling the message, which is the priority of any cult.  The same claims made against the Templars were used to torture and destroy the church’s enemies for centuries.

Do not make enemies with deluded fools who think they are infallible.  It never ends well.

This is the extent of the historical facts of the Templars, but almost as soon as their end people started crafting lies about them, demonizing them and their activities.  The myth grew instantly.  Several hundred years after this, when the Middle Ages were seen very romantically, writers came claiming that the reason the Templar Knights were destroyed was because they had renounced Christianity and instead worshiped a false idol named “Baphomet.”  This was developed into a lie saying they were full on devil worshipers.  Most believe that “Baphomet” is a mangling of Mohammed, but instead of claiming that the Templars were Muslims, the ignorant bastards of the 1700’s claimed they worshiped Satan himself, in the guise of Baphomet.  The sad part is that Baphomet is actually the Old French word for Mohammed.  You figure historians would not fall prey to such stupidity but they certainly do.  It makes no sense to think that a group of illiterate, devout soldiers would ever contemplate any of the evils that their opponents claimed of them.

The myth of the Templars grew and grew and became entangled with every single conspiracy you can imagine, as more and more fanciful extrapolations were made over the centuries.  Eventually the Knights Templar were supposed to have discovered the Ark of the Covenant, discovered the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, hidden in secret for centuries controlling secret societies from within, etc. etc.  The bullshit just grows and grows.  It is cool to read such a well-researched account of what is a very murky subject.  All I know is that the Catholic Church seems to be a pox on humanity and will turn on its own the moment there is something to gain.  Shit don’t change.

(Another review of this book can be read here http://adsmithlor1949.org/Transactions/Volume%204/PDF%20Files/80A%20-%20The%20Murdered%20Magicians%20review.pdf )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

The more I learn about these con-artist quacks the more I hate them!

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science – Martin Gardner (1957)

            Martin Gardner is a name I recognized referenced in many of the books I read about pseudo-science, quackery, and delusions.  This book, Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, was the first work of the past 100 years that sought to include all the major nonsensical, seemingly scientific claims that many people at the time believed in.  Sadly, there are still many slightly-educated fools that believe these things up to today.

            The book is divided into chapters, each dealing with a specific subset of quackery.  One of the first topics explored are the claims that the Earth is not a spheroid, but flat.  Another of these pseudo-scientific fads which still has followers, and which had many more in the past, is the claim that the Earth is hollow, and that mysterious creatures and entities reside there.  Mr. Gardner does a great job describing the claims put forth and explaining just what the many logical and intellectual fallacies the proponents of this nonsense fall into, fooling themselves into certitude.

            There are chapters on the “flying saucer” nonsense, and chapters on the many medical quackeries that fleeced so much money from so many sick and suffering people between 1880-1950.  One of the ways in which these beliefs and ideas are kept alive is by removing some of the older verbiage and replacing it with seemingly well-researched scientific-esque language.  This is what allowed the full on lie that is chiropractic “medicine” to be practiced in the USA to this day.  Originally, the quack that invented the chiropractic claimed that all the body’s diseases and ailments were caused by “sublimations” of the spinal vertebrae, and that by manipulating them and applying heat or massage treatments, all manner of disease could be cured.  Of course, the wacko that created this flim-flam denied the existence of germs, and never accepted the germ-theory of disease.  These days the chiropractors in the USA hide their quackery under the words of physical therapy, and rehabilitation.  It is all bullshit, and chiropractic “care” is as effective as a sit in a hot tub.  Temporary “relief,” followed by renewed pain and symptoms.  The crooks in chiropractic care have survived to this day, milking the American health insurance cartels for millions of dollars in worthless care.

"Wait outside by the slender tree.  Your treatment will soon begin."

            Other parts of the book discuss the lies of homeopathy, acupuncture, phrenology, and more.  It may seem sad that people fall for this stuff, but the real sadness lies in the hearts and minds of the assholes who sell the sick, infirm, and suffering quackery as medicine.  Those bastards are just as bad as the asshole that created Scientology once his science fiction books did not sell (because they sucked).  It seems if you couch any crazy idea in seemingly scientific wording, unsuspecting people will eat it up.  That is why it is important for everyone everywhere to have at least a working knowledge of science and the scientific method, and of logic and reasoning.  A desperate person will turn to anyone offering answers.  The assholes that prey on these desperate people deserve to suffer every possible pain imaginable.  This book, or this one by James Randi (http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-masterful-reference-for-those-of-us.html ), or this one by Harry Houdini (http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2014/09/houdini-was-trying-to-school-us-about.html ) , should be required reading in all public schools.  It would create a better educated citizenry, but then again, our political leaders may not want that!

(This book is available in .pdf format here: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Martin-Gardner-Fads-and-Fallacies-in-the-Name-of-Science.pdf )

The evil that men do is hard to explain sometimes

Invisible Eagle: The Hidden History of Nazi Occultism – Alan Baker (2000)

            It is very difficult for normal humans to understand what can drive a group of people to commit unspeakable atrocities and horrors against other humans.  When such twisted and malicious ideas become national governmental policy?  Even worse.  The National Socialist government of Germany engaged in such atrociously clinical and rigorous genocide and mass murder that even today, 60-plus years later, people still seek the reasons behind such actions.  How could this happen?  How could a country that has always been at the forefront of rational science and philosophy get taken over by a megalomaniac whose inner circle drove all of Germany to some of the most insane acts ever committed?  It is a question that people will grapple with for a long time.  Many people, however, are convinced that the pure evil on Nazi ideology and actions had to come from something more sinister than the human mind.  This book explores the many claims laid out by people over the past decades seeking to explain this evil.

            One of the most common claims about Nazi Germany is that from the top down, it was a fully satanic endeavor.  Others claim that the Nazis were involved with deeply Occult matters that fueled their insanity.     Still others assert that Hitler did not kill himself, and instead escaped to a secret base in Antarctica where the Nazis had discovered some mystical secret.  Each of these things, while implausible, seems to help those who claim them as real to rationalize away the evil perpetrated by Hitler and his assholes.  It is too scary to imagine that a roomful of supposedly well-educated governmental leaders could just come up with the horrors of the Holocaust while sipping tea and enjoying some classical music. 

Aleister Crowley could come up with those horrors while chillin' at the Starbucks!

            It is indeed true that certain members of Hitler’s inner circle, especially Heinrich Himmler, were deeply obsessed with certain occult and esoteric ideas such as Theosophy, the Ice World Theory, and other crack pot ideas that were all the rage in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.  These bastards used these borrowed ideas to shore up their claims of an ancient Aryan master race that was diluted and “mongrelized” by interbreeding with the “lesser” races of the Earth.  They also shared a deep anti-Semitism which condensed itself into the most horrific attempted genocide of recent times.  Hitler himself did not believe in these occult things, but he was perfectly willing to use their ideas in shaping his propaganda.  He even mentioned how pathetic Himmler was in his devout beliefs in the more outlandish of these pseudo-theological ideas.  No matter, for he knew exactly how to utilize them to his own ends. 

            This book does a great job of explaining exactly what these influences were, and how they were put into action by the Nazi Party.  It also shows the ease with which an evil idea is rationalized by those who think themselves to be better than others.  It is a slippery slope that leads from racist ideas to the notion that the “lesser” races need to be wiped out for the good of the “Master” race.  It is also easy to forget that the Nazis not only sought to exterminate the Jewish people, but to cull the homosexuals, the infirm, the mentally and physically disabled, the “mixed races,” etc., not to mention any intellectuals that did not agree with the Nazis and any person opposed to their rule.  Their evil came straight from their own hearts, and to lay blame for it on the Occult or on Satan or on some sort of vague idea is a disservice to those that suffered and died under these fucking assholes.  It also keeps us from seeing this as it happens in our own day today.  Atrocities are caused by humans, against humans.  When such racist and evil ideology is used as a governmental platform, it strikes fear in me.  It is also important to note that many high ranking and powerful members of the UK and the USA wholeheartedly supported the Nazi party with money and arms and fully agreed with their racist bullshit. We have not yet rid ourselves of the evil of racism, and we may never do so.  However, we must remain ever vigilant against racist ideas being implemented as official state policy.  That is when a small evil turns into a big EVIL.

(This book can be downloaded in .pdf format here: http://www.germanophobia.net/books/IE.pdf )