[Previous entry: "GOD vs. Blair's Cardiovascular Epispasm"] [Next entry: "God (Part VI: Allah in the Family)"]
08/12/2005: "God (Part V: Irreversible Acts)"
Prolog:
A recent survey found that 12 percent of American adults believe that
Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.
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My chief gripe with today's cults, such as the Moonies, The Children of
God, and the Boy Scouts of America, isn't the accusations of kidnapping
or brainwashing but with the fact that these organizations are so damn
dull when compared to the "Mystery Cults" that flourished in antiquity.
A visitor to Rome during the first century CE would've found the city
teeming with the followers of the god Mithra, whose cult required initiates
to be baptized in a shower of blood issuing from a freshly slaughtered bull
laid out on a platform above their heads. If bathing in bull's blood wasn't
your thing (then be sure to skip my solo act), you always hook up with the
cult of Cybele, the Great Mother Goddess. Her followers would get them-
selves all worked up on a combination of booze and loud music (See
Professor Merle Haggard's classic The History of White Trash Volume 1),
after which many male worshippers, interested in being promoted into the
ranks of the priesthood, would perform "the irreversible act." And then
there was…
What? What's "the irreversible act"? It's a term coined by historian
Jocelyn Godwin for castration.
And then there was…
What? Yes, they hacked their own nut sacks off. OK? What is it with people
and the gory details? If you really need to satisfy your morbid curiosities
then I suggest that you read the following passage from James Frazer's
The Golden Bough:
Man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, flung his garments
from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which
stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran
through the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, 'till he threw
them into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The house-
hold thus honored had to furnish him with a suite of female attire and
female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life.
And they called themselves "The Aristocrats."
[Phun Phacts: During the 12th Century, the Catholic Church began to
encounter financial difficulties due to the fact that its priests were
bequeathing their property not to the Church but to their children. To
counter this alarming trend, the Church borrowed a page from the Cult of
Cybele's (now working under the name of "the Virgin Mary") rulebook and
introduced a form of "symbolic castration" for its priests - celibacy.
Hey, at least they didn't make their priests wear dresses…
Oh shit, I guess they did. Anyway, everything worked out just fine…that is
until, according to Rick Santorum, the pervasive Liberal influences of
modern society forced priests to start molesting children. So insidious was
this creeping Liberalism that it also forced Boston's Cardinal Law to cover
up the molestations and finally forced the late pope, John Paul Jr., to aid
Law in his escape from the authorities.]
Ubi eram? Oh yeah…
And then there was, for those few not interested in slicing off their balls
and tossing them through their neighbors' windows, the Cult of Isis, which
had been imported from Egypt into the Hellenistic world by Alexander the
Great, and which far greater popularity among the Romans than did a small
Jewish sect known as "the Christians".
So obscure a group were Rome's early Christians that the historian
Suetonius, author of The Twelve Caesars and The Lives of Famous
Whores was certain that their leader, a troublemaker by the name of
"Jesus", was alive and living among them. In fact, the only times when the
population of Roman ever seemed to take notice of the Christians was on
those occasions when the sect made a nuisance of themselves by engaging in
fisticuffs with other Jews over the touchy subject of rather or not they
worshiped the same god.
[Phun Phacts: The Talmud records that there were no fewer than twenty-
four splinter groups among the Jews at this time. It was also during
this period that the Romans, in a misguided attempt to appease the Jews,
suggested adding their god, Yahweh, to the Roman pantheon under the name
of "Iao".]
The Christians also spend most of their free time fighting each other over
just how Jewish they should be. Should Pagan converts to Christianity be
circumcised and refrain from eating lobster and pork? Jesus' brother, James
("Li'l Jimmy Christ"?) said, "Hey a rule's a rule" the Apostle Paul's think-
ing ran along the line of "Are you fuckin' nuts? We'll never get any new
recruits if we go around telling people that they can't eat ham and have
to mutilate their pee-pees." Today, theologians still debate this matter
while managing to agree that both men were absolute assholes.
Paul eventually won the argument and began to roam about the Hellenistic
world preaching the new and improved faith (now featuring lobster and
foreskins). In time, Paul ended up in Rome, where the historian Tacitus
claimed that "all degraded and shameful practices" collected and where
Paul's tendency to inform the populace that the gods to whom they prayed
where actually daemons earned him a death sentence. Oddly, Paul invoked
his right, as a Roman citizen to be beheaded instead of crucified.
Anyhoo, things might have just gone on this way, living in obscurity;
fighting with each other and the occasional Jew, forever for the Christ-
ians had it not been for the emperor Nero.
In 64 CE, a large chunk of Rome burned to the ground. Then it burned into
the topsoil. Finally it reached the earth's chewy, caramel center. A rumor
soon spread that the fire had been started by Nero in order to clear space
for one of his pet building projects. Nero's PR people needed someone to
blame the fire on: some tiny, strange, powerless group. In a move that
would make Karl Rove proud, they settled upon the Christians. So Nero
condemned the Christians to death for arson and set about having hem killed
in some very interesting ways: sure, most of them were (yawn) crucified but
others were taken to the Coliseum where they were torn apart by packs of
wild dogs. A select few got to attend one of Nero's garden parties, which
they might've enjoyed more had they not been doused with pitch, hanged from
crosses, and set ablaze to serve as human torches.
[Phun Phacts:After three failed attempts (including one which involved
sending her to sea in a collapsible boat), Nero finally succeeded at
bumping off his mother, prompting the following graphiti to appear on a
Roman wall:
Count the numerical values
of the letters of Nero's name,
and in "murdered his own mother"
you'll find the same
Interestingly (or maybe not), the numerical value of Nero's name is 666,
causing many (your humble friend and narrator, included) to speculate that
"the beast' referred to in the Book of Revelations was, indeed, Nero.]
If he accomplished nothing else, Nero succeeded in ushering in an exciting
new era of persecuting Christians, culminating in the "Great Persecution",
under the emperor Diocletian, in the early fourth century CE.
The Romans' main beef with the Christians was, naturally, that they refused
to play along with the whole "more than one god" thing. The Roman's even
came up with a word for the staunchly monotheistic Christians: they called
them "atheists". Look at the situation from the perspective of the
Romans: the respect for all the beliefs of the empire's citizenry, the Pax
Deorum, was one of the lynchpins which held the Roman world together. Shit
Luther, some Romans even begged the Christians just to go through the
motions of Polytheism. If the Christians couldn't bring themselves to
burn a little incense on the alter of Poseidon, maybe they could pay one
of their Pagan neighbors to do it for them. Many Christians, faced with
the choice of playing along or becoming the half-time show during the
gladiatorial games, made the smart choice. Others insisted on becoming
martyrs, prompting on Roman official to lament, "If you are thus weary of
your lives, is it so difficult for you to find ropes and precipices?"
OK, so why aren't Christians still an oppressed minority (instead of them
just believing that they're an oppressed minority)? Why is there a church
on every street corner and strange men hollering in Southern accents about
Jeeebuz on television every Sunday morning? The answer is, of course, Keanu
Reeves…er, I mean Constantine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah we've all heard that story about how Constantine was
gearing up for a big battle when he looked up at the sun (what kind of
ancient 'tard would actually stare at the sun?), saw the image of a
cross, and heard a voice say (conveniently, the voice spoke in Latin as
Constantine had a notoriously poor command of the Greek language. Const-
antine was never the smartest guy at the vomitorium: Remember; his hobbies
included staring at the motherfuckin' sun!) "In hoc signo vinces".
Constantine then had his troops paint this new and excitingly simple
Christian symbol on their shields and went on the butcher his way to vic-
tory! Constantine would go forward not only to be the sole emperor of the
Roman Empire and a devout Christian.
That story, like the ones about Columbus discovering America, Marie
Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake", and Kurt Cobain being a talented
lyricist, is filled with more shit than a batch of Lisa "Let them eat
poop" Welchel's brownies.
First (assuming that Constantine actually did see a sign in the sky, which
is possibly since continually staring at the sun will do strange things to
the human mind) the symbol which he had his troops paint on their shields
was not a cross but a compination of an X and a P: the chi-rho. Sure, the
chi-rho (the first two letters of the Greek word Christos, form
where we get the word Christ) has long been used as a Christian
symbol but, at the time when Constantine adopted it, Pagans recognized it
as the abbreviation for the Greek word chrestos, meaning "good".
Pagans also recognized the chi-rho as the symbol of the Pagan god Sol
Invictus.
A few words about Sol Invictus…
As time moved on and the population of Rome became more sophisticated, they
began to take a skeptical approach to their gods. As the poet Juvenal wrote:
That there is a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman with a long pole , and
black frogs in the whirlpool of the Styx, that so many thousand men could
cross the waves in a single day, today even children refuse to believe.
Even Plato was ashamed of Homer's belief in the gods. According to histor-
ian Robin Lane, Plato saw the entire pantheon as "the particular delusion
of women." This tells us two things: the first is that as Hellenistic
society became more sophisticated their spiritual needs evolved. The second
thing is that Plato hated women and was Gayer than Tom Cruise giving a
piggyback ride to Ricky Martin.
Some Romans who lost faith in the old gods and goddesses turned to the
aforementioned "Mystery Cults" while other latched on to a new idea being
touted by philosophers throughout the empire. This new idea was that the
many gods were just aspects of a single, highest god. Remember our ol buddy
Akhenaton from Part I? Well he should've copyrighted his idea of one
supreme Sun God because the Pagan philosophers reworked his theology into
Sol Invictus: The Unconquered Sun.
Why the sun? Well they reasoned that since the sun was brighter than any
other light in the sky, it must be the ruler of the heavens. Makes about
as much sense as anything else I've hear today.
So when Constantine had his soldiers paint the symbol of Jesus and
Sol Invictus on their shields he was simply hedging his bets by attempting
to appeal to both the Christians and the Pagans. That's the kind of guy
that Constantine was. You've probably heard Constantine referred to as "the
first Christian emperor of Rome"; well that's only technically
correct: Constantine only converted to Christianity on his death bed. Why
wait so long? It's entirely possible that Constantine wanted to get as much
sinning in as possible before he asked for absolution. You see, not only
was Constantine the kind of guy who liked to hedge his bets; he was also
the kind of guy who could - and did - have his eldest son executed.
While we're on the subject of what a major asstard Constantine was, I
should list just a few of the bat-shit crazy laws that Constantine
cooked up in his bony, little skull:
Rule Number One: Sons Must Take Up Their Father's Profession
I can see how this rule would appeal to Constantine as his father had
been an emperor but I sure-as-shittin' wouldn't want to do my dad's job;
would you want to do yours? This law helped to ensure a steady supply of
recruits for the army since the sons of soldiers were now forced to enlist.
One thing about Constantine, he loved tradition and consistency: but his
mother and first wife had been prostitutes.
[Phun Phact: Constantine's second wife, Fausta, committed suicide after
being accused of having an affair with his son.]
Rule Number Two: Any young girl caught attempting to run away with her
lover will be burned alive
And any woman caught helping the young lovers will end up with a
mouth full of molten lead.
Rule Number Three: Rapists shall be burned at the stake.
Before you say "Hey, that's almost sane: I mean for a raging psychopath
like Constantine", I should out that rape victims, if they had been
violated outside their homes, were likewise punished. Constantine's
"reasoning" was that woman no business outside the safety of their own
homes.
Constantine's unstable mind was a pretty good reflection of the state of
Christianity at the time. Secure in their new, privileged position under
Constantine, Christians had abandoned fighting with Jews over rather or not
they worshipped the same god, and began fighting with each other in the
streets over the exact nature of Christ. Orthodox Christians beloved that
Jesus and God were, to use the Greek word (because Greek words are
always better) homoousion: which translates, roughly as "made of
the same stuff", while Arian Christians thought that Jesus and God
were homoiousin: made of similar stuff" (And a few Christians, the
Gnostics, thought that Jesus was some sort of spooky ghost and that God was
really Satan, and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce,
they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does). Since homoousion and
homoiousin only differ by an iota (literally), Edward Gibbon described that
iota as "the important diphthong." He probably thought this was really
cleaver in prissy sort of way and most likely said it -over-and-over again
at parties until someone finally got sick of hearing it and punched the
foppish dandy square in his ugly puss.
To settle this matter of what Jesus was composed of, Constantine convened
the Council of Nicaea, and invited (ordered) both Orthodox and Arian Bishops
to attend. He even invited the founder of the Arian movement, Bishop Arius
and ordered the orthodox Bishop of Constantinople to greet him.
The bishop was exactly thrilled with the prospect of rolling out the red
carpet for a man whom he considered a heretic so the good bishop prayed
for a miracle: If Arius was right, god would let him live. If Arius was
wrong, God would kill him.
Just one day before the big welcoming ceremony, Arius was seized with
violent stomach cramps. Ducking into a nearby public latrine, Arius
squatted and prepared to "birth a Texas" as today's scholars would say.
Much to Arius' surprise (and, no doubt, the surprise of the guy sitting
next to him) his bowls shot out his ass in an explosion of blood and gore
(Remember; the next time you hear someone complains that RATYHTL is noth-
ing but toilet humor, just tell them, "yes; but it's the most
historically accurate toilet humor on the web.") Edward Gibbon, once
again sounding like a giant fem, once quipped "Those who press the literal
narrative of the death of Arius must make their opinion between poison and
miracle." And then someone punched the foppish dandy square in his ugly
puss again. By the way, not only did the council end up branding Arianism
as heresy, they also excommunicated Arius.
Now many people might think that since Constantine was known as "The first
Christian Roman emperor" every emperor who came after him was a Christian.
That's because both modern people and Tennesseans have come to accept the
"Politics are like High School" model of history in which the captain of
the football team always gets elected class president. While this is more-
often-than-not the case, every-now-and-again the class clown manages to
win an election or two.
After Constantine's death [Phun Phact: For reasons that defy all logic, the
Roman Senate voted to deify Constantine after his death.] the reins of the
empire passed to his three Christian sons, Constantine II, Constantius II
and Constans, who almost immediately set about slaughtering each other
until only Constantius II was left. When Constantius II keeled over, he was
replaced by his cousin, Julian. Julian was a brilliant, well read
intellectual who possessed a razor-sharp wit and a wonderful self-
deprecating sense of humor. In short, he was everything that Constantine
wasn't. Oh, and he was also a Pagan.
Had Julian been an autocratic ass-monkey like Constantine, he might have
used his imperial powers to kick a mud-hole in Christianity and then stomp
it dry. But Julian thought that all religions should enjoy the
freedom to be practiced openly. Although the Christians annoyed Julian with
their insistence that they were right and everybody else (including several
sects of Christianity) was wrong, in Julian's eyes they still had to be
tolerated. As Julian himself said, "I declare by the gods that I do not
want the [Christians] to be put to death, or unjustly beaten, or to suffer
anything else."
So, instead of putting thousands of Christians to death, Julian amused his
fertile mind by inventing new ways to piss off the followers of Jesus
Christ (whom Julian, in his hilarious anti-Christian pamphlets, referred to
as "The Galileans" because the Galilee was the boondocks of Palestine.
Imagine the effect, today, if you started referring to Baptists as "The
Trentonians". ). One of his first acts as emperor was to revoke the
financial privileges the Christian church had enjoyed under Constantine
and Constantius II.
Julian then banned Christian teachers from including the works of Pagan
authors in their curriculums. Since the works of Pagans like Homer and
Herodotus formed the backbone of a classic education, this rule essentially
barred Christian teachers from the classroom. Julian defended his actions
in classic Julian-speak by saying, "Did [they] not receive all their learn-
ing from the gods? I think it absurd that men who explain the works of
these writers should dishonor the gods whom they honored. If [Christians]
feel that they have gone astray concerning the gods, then let them go to
the churches of the Galileans, and expound Matthew and Luke."
This is exactly how I feel about Concerned Women for America. Since
it was a Liberals who fought to win woman the right to vote as well as
the ability to organize and speak their minds, this conservative cows need
to shut their gaping mouths, get into that kitchen and make me a fuckin'
chicken pot pie! Chop, chop! Move it fat-ass!
But, without a doubt, the stunt of Julian's which pissed the Galileans off
the most was his decision to help the Jews rebuild the temple in Jerusalem
which had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.
In the New Testament, Jesus allegedly prophesized the destruction of the
temple saying, "Verily I say on to you, there shall not be left here one
stone upon another." Julian knew that rebuilding the temple would be a
double slap to the Christians: ruining Jesus' prophecy and aiding the Jews,
whom the Christians now regarded as mortal enemies.
Oddly, it was the only plan of Julian's which backfired.
The work on the temple was interrupted first by a flood and then by an
earthquake. OK, those are easy phenomena to explain. Next, and this is a
little odd, balls of flame began bursting forth from the temple's found-
ation burning several workmen to death. That's a little tougher to find a
logical explanation for - other than Christian zealot pyromaniacs. Either
way, miracle or arson, work on the temple ground to a halt. Go ahead,
Christians, whoop it up.
In Julian's defense it should be pointed out that he was an equal-oppor-
tunity smartass. It wasn't just the Christians; he fucked with everybody's
heads. Shortly after becoming emperor, Julian dismissed the court eunuchs,
who had been getting rich working as sort of a shadow government, saying
that , because his wife was dead an he had no intention of ever
re-marrying, he no longer needed the services for which they'd uniquely
equipped (or unequipped) themselves.
One day, Julian summed his cook and discovered that the man was incredibly
well dressed: it seems that he's been making extra money by presenting
petitions to the imperial court. Julian then sent for one of the field
cooks from his army and had him stand next to the imperial cook. "Which on
of these men looks more like a cook?" Julian asked one of his one of his
courtiers. The imperial cook was fired on the spot.
And then there's the incident of the man caught in possession of a purple
robe. Under Roman law, it was considered an act of treason for anyone other
than the emperor to own a purple robe: purple being the color of royalty…
and the artist formerly known as Prince…and then know as Prince again.
Instead of having the guy fed to the lions, Julian sent him a pair of
matching purple slippers "to complete the magnificence of his Imperial
habit."
"If Emperor Julian was terrific", you might ask, "then why isn't my local
Methodist church wedged between a shrine to Mithra and a temple of Isis?
Riddle me that, Batshit Man."
First there was the problem of fewer people being as gung ho about the re-
turn of the old gods as Julian was. In all honesty, Julian would've been a
lot happier had he been born a few centuries earlier. Having been raised in
seclusion (which explains how he managed to survive the wholesale slaughter
of his immediate family) with only the works of Plato and Aristotle for
friends, Julian was completely unaware of the public's growing dissatis-
faction with the old pantheon which lead to both the rise of the Mystery
Cults and Christianity. His entire life he had looked for to attending a
Pagan festival at the Temple of Apollo. As Julian told it, "I pictured to
myself the procession, as if seeing visions in a dream, sacrificial victims
and libations and choruses in honor of the god, and incense, and the youths
of the city gathered 'round the shrine, their souls arrayed with all holi-
ness and they themselves decked out in white and splendid raiment."
Unfortunately, what Julian actually found when he arrived at the temple was
a lone, decrepit priest attempting to strangle a sickly goose. "when I
began to enquire what sacrifice the city intended to make in celebration of
the annual festival in honor of the god," wrote Julian, "the priest said,
'I have brought with me from my house a goose as an offering to the god,
but the city has made no preparations."
And, of course, there was the death of Julian: only eighteen months into
his reign.
On the 26th of June in 363 CE, while bravely engaging in a battle against
the Persians, Julian was killed either by a an arrow from a Persian archer
or a stab wound from a Christian soldier - who happened to be serving in
Julian's army. With Julian dead and childless, the army elected Jovian, a
Christian as the new emperor.
Where's the justice? Why does an ignorant sociopath, Constantine, get to
be known as "the Great" while a truly great man, Julian, ends up being know
as "the Apostate"? Godmotherfukingdamnit, where is the justice?
Fuckermotherfuckfuckshit! There was none for Julian and there was none
certainly for Gawdamn sure none for Hypatia of Alexandria.
I hadn't thought about Hypatia of Alexandria (Circa 370-415 CE) in at
least ten year when I happen to come across references to her twice with
the space of a few hours. The first was in a piece in The Guardian wherein
Camille Paglia was asked to write about ten great female Philosophers. She
put Hypatia in the Number One spot. The second was in the last chapter of
the book that served as the main source for this piece: Jonathan Kirsch's
God Against The Gods.
Who was Hypatia of Alexandria? I thought you'd never ask. The daughter of
the famous mathematician philosopher Theon of Alexandria (under whom she
also studied), Hypatia, remarkably for a woman of that era, rose to become
head of the Platonist school at Alexandria. This, along with Hypatia's
insistence on wearing a short tunic (the garb of men) and the fact that,
despite having many Christian students and admirers (Including Synesius of
Cyrene, who was later to be ordained as the Bishop of Ptolemais: wherever
the fuck that is.), she was an unashamed Pagan didn't sit well with
Alexandria's Christian community.
[Phun and disturbing Phact: Hypatia, despite being a woman of stunning
beauty, was disgusted by the human body, which she considered "a pile of
garbage. When on of her students told Hypatia that he was in love with her,
she removed her bloody menstrual pad, waved it in the poor guy's face and
screamed, "That, young man, is what you have fallen in love with and there
is nothing beautiful about it."]
Sadly, Hypatia was caught up in a bitter church vs. state power struggle
between the patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril, and the Roman prefect of
Alexandria, Orestes. This culminated with a group of monks, at the behest
of Cyril, dragging Hypatia into a church where they spent hours torturing
her to death with razor-sharp shards of pottery.
Today, Cyril is better known as St. Cyril. Where is the justice in that?
In 390 CE, Christian zealots burned the library of Alexandria to the
ground. No fewer than 700,000 scrolls went u in flames. For the next 200
plus years the Christians would be the single greatest religious force on
the planet: until, in 610 CE, and Arab merchant by the name of Muhammad
ibn Abdallah would go on vacation and return with an idea he called
"Islam". We'll talk about that in Part VI.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Godscore:
Placebo (No Deity Used) * 0
Zeus 1
Ashera 0
Yahweh 1
Hera 1
Emperor Claudius 1
Sekhmet 0
Hecate 0
Hephaestus 0
Dionysus 0
Jesus Christ 0
Athena 0
Mithra 1
Sol Invictus 1
Poseidon 2
Hades 1
* In place of not using a deity you could always substitute Ben Schumin.
Recommended reading:
God Against The Gods by Jonathan Kirsch
A History of God by Karen Armstrong
Secret Origins of the Bible by Tim Callahan
The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein
Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Friedman
The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius
