The Nature of the Plague, Part II: A Quick Rewind; Jeeeeeeeeeews; In Memoriam

There's something wrong with Jewish people.

Now, I don't mean that in a mustache-and-combover kind of way. What I mean is that, when somebody identifies himself (and it is always a dude) with the protagonists of the Old Testament, it never seems to end well--it's like The Catcher in the Rye on a demographic scale. When you're conflating yourself with the Moses character, it opens doors for you psychologically--prepares you to do the things he did, and gives you all the justifications you need to do them on cue.

The reason for this, I believe, is bound up in what the Old Testament is, and how closely the mindset of the people who wrote it mirrors that of many embittered, resentful groups of people throughout subsequent history. To illustrate this, I'll introduce the originators of this weird little cultural glitch, elaborate on the conditions they faced that contributed to their cultivation of the idea and what I think is the central thesis behind the ensuing hilarity, and continue pointing out examples of what I'm talking about throughout the rest of this (maddeningly long) series of essays. The people I'm going to introduce to you (or likely reintroduce, in many cases) come from many different historical periods, and some would hardly be considered disenfranchised by any reasonable standard--but it's also important to note that some of them truly are down on their luck. That's the beauty of what I've come to call the Babylon Complex--it appeals deeply both to people who've been beaten down by life and desperately want a way to punch up, and to those who simply want to imagine they are so they can punch down harder in defense of their privileges.

First, let's start with the actual Jews themselves, who at this point are somewhere in between. Remember where we left these guys?

It's 500 BC, and the religious elite of the Jewish nations have been carted off as hostages to the city-state of Babylon. This is Iron Age SOP for conquering powers the world over, and dozens of other nations are doing the same thing and having it done in turn to them--but the Jews are odd birds even now. They're undergoing the rough transition from worshipping the traditional Canaanite pantheon to praying solely to the syncretic godhead Yahweh--an amalgamation of their original allfather concept, El, and the Edomite blitzkrieg god who had already displaced Ba'al-Hadad a few centuries earlier.

And this has screwed them up a little.

See, when you have multiple gods, and accept that your enemies have gods of their own that might be awfully handy in a fight, losing in war isn't such a huge deal psychologically. But when you serve the One True God, and nobody else serves the One True God, that changes your worldview radically--to the point that actually failing at anything is a tremendous psychological stressor. How could you have gotten your ass whupped this badly? Why didn't the all-powerful creator of the universe help you out? For that matter, all your myths say you've always had the One True God--so how did your ancestors, who must have been so much more pious than you, wind up in Egypt like your histories say they did? How could God abandon his children? How could your champions fail? How could such a mighty, virtuous nation be brought so low?

And when you ask questions like that, you always get the same answer.

Of course it wasn't the high priest or the king's fault. Your elites didn't fail. We can't fail. No, we were betrayed.  Let down. You failed us, because of that pernicious doubt in your heart, that last sliver of scrap metal you didn't donate to the war effort. But don't be too hard on yourself--to err is merely human, and we forgive you your failings, because we know you won't do it again, will you?

Besides... look at those other people who failed us even harder. The ones who didn't fight at all, the ones who questioned whether we were even in the right in the first place--aren't they even more to blame? Of course--it was their disloyalty, their iniquity, that brought us to ruin! They led us astray, turned us away from the One True God with their false idols and their insidious, foreign ways, didn't they? It had to be them, because otherwise it would have to be you.

Prove your loyalty and purge the unclean.

And with that kind of rhetoric floating around, it's no wonder that, as I mentioned in our last thrilling episode, half the names in European books of demonology are various manglings of the Semitic, Mesopotamian, and sometimes even North African pantheons. Moloch, Beelzebub, Dagon, Asmodeus, Lilith, Astaroth... basically every end boss from every 90s FPS and hack n' slash video game ever made is actually a god who was worshiped by crazy desert people until they decided that even these baby-eating psychos weren't quite hardcore enough for them. And that happened right here, in Babylon, over just a few generations of bitter, privileged exiles. That self-recrimination, festering resentment and righteous paranoia probably led to a culture of escalating backstabbing and fanaticism, as people desperate to square their magical worldviews with geopolitical reality tore themselves apart in search of scapegoats.

Now, this is not a totally novel concept to the Jews--as I also mentioned before, their official history up to this point, if not their actual history for the last few centuries, is a cyclical narrative centering around the spiritual pollution that God's elect risk whenever they stop waging constant, genocidal war on everyone else on the planet. But the captivity adds new elements to the mix, both because this is the first time the Yahweh cult has really gotten knocked on its ass and sent back to its corner, and because of where that corner is.

Because now, the Babylonian Jews begin to listen, not just to the traditional voices in their wild-eyed prophets' heads... but to what spake Zarathustra.

In pre-Babylonian Yahwism, God is absolute and inscrutable, the alpha and omega--but even he has servants. Angels (as they're called in modern English) are vaguely anthropic beings that mortals can relate to, but they ultimately have no will of their own--they're impossibly complex automatons, arrangements of nested functions in the vast program of the cosmos. Each angel has a particular role--and one in particular sits at the foot of God's throne like a medieval thyle, tasked exclusively with tearing down the righteous and showing the wickedness in men's hearts.

And his name is the Accuser--or in Hebrew, ha-Satan.

This character is the central antagonist of the Book of Job, and as this is the earliest characterization of him that appears in the Bible, it tells us a lot about the original nature of the being. The Accuser taunts Job, hypes up his sinful heart, and advises Yahweh in his increasingly disturbing attempts to get a lifelong abuse victim to say a bad word about his all-powerful abuser--but he has no agency in the acts, and is ultimately a loyal servant of God. Yahweh is omnipotent, if not yet omniscient, and is the sole cosmic-scale actor in the religion.

Babylon, however, has a different take on cosmology--the classical Persians were some of the first dualists, and subscribed to a faith called Zoroastrianism. If you took your basic World Religions class in college--which I think should be mandatory--you know this part of the story already: Zarathustra preached that the cosmos was a battleground between the lord of light, Ahura Mazda, and the dark power Angra Manyu, and after their extended vacay in Iraq the Jews suddenly became a lot more dualistic, retooling the Accuser to become an active evil power. And then the computer turns evil and there's a giant baby or something.

What you might not know is that Ahura Mazda, as I briefly alluded to in the Letters from Amenti Solstice Special(tm), is a syncretic power just like Yahweh, who ate his siblings in the ancient Iranian pantheon to become the all-father figure of a new religion. This sort of thing happens all the time to varying degrees--both the ancient Germanic and classical Hindu pantheons, for example, have shifted significantly from their common Indo-European roots. Sky-Father was probably the creator and head of the Borat pantheon alongside Mother Plenty--but his Germanic counterpart Teiwaz (or Tyr) is a B-list war god, totally eclipsed by Wodunaz (Odin), and the Vedic Dyaus is a primordial god, but one fairly marginal in everyday life.

Syncretic portfolio creep is very normal for deities--what's not is for a god to go all Highlander on his entire pantheon. But that's exactly what happened first to the Persians, then to the Jews--and when they return to the Levant after Cyrus sets them free (becoming one of the first gentiles to be referred to as messiah in the process), they'll bring this new take on theology with them. But the concept won't make it up into Europe until Persian and Semitic culture are introduced there by the actions of power-mad warlord number two, whose leg of the great memetic relay race begins in 334 BC.

Meet Alexandros of Makedon.

Alexandros is a little younger than I am, and just as much of an asshole. Alexandros is a spoiled rich kid whose daddy left him the greatest army the world had ever seen. And Alexandros really, really wants to be a god. So Alexandros takes his army and brutally conquers the entire civilized world--which, because Alexandros is a primitive screwhead, consists of whatever's between Athens and Kabul--because he's just so awesome that he deserves it. You might notice that this means he never even notices our little buddies, the Romans--which is one of the biggest, luckiest breaks anybody has ever caught in the history of lucky breaks.  But he sure as Tartarus notices Babylon, and he annexes not only Persia and the 'stans, but everything west of Tibet, and then starts planning to conquer India, too.

Then he dies. Thank providence.

Yeah, I don't like Alexandros. I realize he's usually regarded as the greatest thing since sliced colonialism, but frankly, the only difference between him and Genghis Khan is that he's white. Oh, and Temujin wasn't a fucking trust fund baby. People loooooove talking about how he spread Hellenistic culture all over the subcontinent, and what a mighty conqueror he was with Daddy's enormous army--they don't linger on all the cultures he subjugated, the massive death toll of his campaigns (which he waged for no reason beyond his own ego), or the time he burned down the capital of the Persian Empire in a drunken stupor. The man's entire life was one long exercise in heavily armed self-gratification--which quite appropriately splattered his native culture all over the Mediterranean and beyond. And when he finally croaked, the brilliant generals who had actually done all the conquering for him divided up the world into personal fiefdoms--most notably founding what would become the Seleucid Dynasty in Persia and the Ptolemaic Pharaohs in Egypt, only the last of whom would even speak Egyptian.

And now that I'm done ranting about what a dick Alexandros was, I can start ranting about how his dickishness helped doom us all to a thousand years of darkness and insanity.

See, that cosmopolitan Hellenic/Macedonian culture was not only incidentally, but knowingly and intentionally syncretic--by this point, they believed, as many new agey modern Christians do, that all faiths have some grain of philosophical truth, and saw no problem with mixing and matching gods from all over the known world. Alexandros himself loved to associate himself with a fellow named Zeus-Ammon--a ram-horned mashup of Sky-Father and his North-African/Levantine counterpart, a similar but apparently unrelated deity who the Egyptians called Amen and the Lebanese called Ba'al-Hammon.

Is it time to break out the dinger again?

So now, everything begins to Hellenize and run together a bit--which isn't such a bad thing in and of itself. This new pan-Mediterranean meta-culture is almost literally a cocktail of ideas--the Greek lingua franca and the common Hellenic background of the intellectual and political elite acts like the water and alcohol content in a mixed drink, allowing the disparate flavors to meld together. Unfortunately, this also allows gods to leap effortlessly from culture to culture, mutating at an incredible rate--essentially turning the entire Mediterranean into a giant agar plate. Perhaps worse in an immediate sense for the societies along its shores, this also makes lasting conquest much easier--when Rome begins to expand into the decaying husks of Alexandros's successor states, their task is simplified by merely having to plug themselves into the grecophone infrastructure and culture that already exists. By the middle of the first century BC, not only will Greece (er, I mean Magna Graecia) and Makedon (ahem, Macedonia) be under Roman control, but with the fall of Carthage, almost all of North Africa will be theirs as well.

Meanwhile, the Jews have returned to their ancient hobby: genocide. Again.

Remember Goliath, of David And? The very tall man who was inexplicably killed by one of the deadliest ranged weapons in the ancient world, thus proving that even at a young age, our glorious leader was guided by the divine? Well, like the good book says, Goliath was a Philistine--and that doesn't just mean he didn't appreciate art. In fact, you could make an argument for that turn of phrase being hate speech, on par with "gypped" and "indian giver"--because the Philistines were the native inhabitants of what's now Jerusalem, and their distant descendants, the Arameans and other Arab peoples, were still being slowly extirpated from the region in the first century, when the Romans came along.

Meet Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. He's pretty cool.

Pompey's distinguished himself even as a very young man--well off, but not a prince like Alexandros, and not able to simply fake competency. And also unlike Alexandros, he isn't a raging, out of control douchewagon. He's showy, but likeable, and he's relentlessly made fun of by his peers for being one of the few Roman men to actually like his wife--Romans being so misogynistic that even though they find buttsex effeminate, they do it anyway because it's more manly to rape little boys than admit you're in love with a woman. The paragons of Western civilization, folks!

Anyway, Pompey is an old pal of Caesar--patience, we'll get to him in a minute. Pompey's not quite the man Caesar is, but frankly, he's probably a better human being. He's the closest any of the Great Men of ancient Rome come to being a genuinely nice guy--and all he seems to want from life is to be loved. He spends all of it chasing the approval of his peers and the people through military honors and great public works, but the Roman aristocracy fears and hates him because he's so good at it that he overshadows everyone else. The harder he tries, the more he alienates everyone around him, which just makes him crave their affirmations and praise even more. It's a vicious cycle that sends him rampaging out east, conquering everything in his path--doing exactly what Alexandros did for the exact opposite reasons.

And on this warpath, he comes to Judea--and finds that the Jews have taken a break from genocide to start a violent internal purge of dissident priests, which has blossomed into full blown civil war. Again.

Pompey takes a side, ends the war in three months, and strolls into the Holy of Holies like it isn't even the seat of ultimate cosmic power. Then he makes everyone promise to play nice. It doesn't take.

Pompey continues his string of conquests, and returns to Rome one of the richest people who ever lived, after setting up a sprawling network of client states that still form some of the political foundations of the modern Balkan and Middle Eastern states--but he never gets the approval he so desperately wants.

Poor Pompey.

And now--I did promise, didn't I?--it's time to introduce Gaius of the gens Julii.

That's right.

Fucking Caesar.

He plays nearly no role in the actual events of the great pandemonium that's brewing in the Levant, but he does set the stage for the geopolitical backdrop against which that dreadful strain will grow. Plus, he's another strong contender for the title of greatest person who ever lived, and I can't resist fanboying a little. I freaking love Julius Caesar.

Like Pompey, he spent his whole life chasing glory--in fact, he once collapsed weeping in front of a statue of Alexandros, realizing he was so over the hill by imperialist warmonger standards that he felt he had no hope of ever rivaling the stupid dead fuck. But unlike Pompey, Caesar was motivated not by a puppylike desire for approval, but by radical politics. All Caesar did--and he did a hell of a lot--he did for the people. He wanted power so he could tear down the corrupt, oligarchical power structure of the late Republic--and as always, thuggish aristocrats incapable of thinking in anything but the language of force and power cast him as a tyrant and did everything they could to stymie him. Nothing that was done to him was novel--it's all the same repertoire of smears and obstruction and misdirection that make up the toolbox of broken states throughout history.

What was novel was the man they tried to do it to.

They called him a queer, and he laughed it off. They called him a power-crazed autocrat, and he bragged about how many people he'd bribed and threatened to start naming names. They tried to rig the elections to keep him out of high office, and he rigged them even better. They had his co-consul declare every day for the rest of their term a national holiday--the government shutdown of 59 BC, ladies and gentlemen--to try and keep him from passing a public housing bill, and he just flipped them the hell off and kept on stamping documents. Oh, and an angry mob hunted down the guy responsible for the shutdown and dumped manure on him. He wouldn't leave his house for months.

Then Caesar's term ran out, and the senate tried to shove him behind a desk until his legal immunity ran out--so he took a little vacation in the Alps, and conquered France.

Okay, I'm going to stop talking about Gaius Julius Fucking Caesar now, because A) it's time to move on to the next generation of Deus Pater's pedigree, B) my bro-crush on this man is already obvious enough without actually dry-humping Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, C) the stuff that happens next could be an entire book or, say, series of podcasts in and of itself, and D) those have already been made by smart, smart people who have already done the late Roman Republic more than enough justice. Seriously, go listen to those people if I've managed to make this sound half as interesting as it is to me. They are amazing.

But it's time to fast forward just a bit--so Caesar is brutally stabbed, καὶ σὺ τέκνον, everyone is very very sad, and now Octavian is in charge. And Octavian is a little fink. Octavian usurps all the powers Caesar was using to reshape the Republic into a safe place for his notions of democracy and social justice, and uses them to destroy it completely, gutting the Senate, eliminating the vote, and murdering every interesting person left alive from Caesar's era. And then, because this is the part of history where Rome stops resembling modern-day America and begins resembling 1980s Latin America, he starts giving himself new names--one of them being Augustus.

Which means that we are now officially in those days.

Those poor Jews, they've gone and gotten themselves conquered again--which means that clearly they've fallen out of touch with their spiritual sides, because how else could they lose? That, coupled with this great Hellenic cultural solvent that they're being exposed to, has turned Palestine into a truly scary theoreactor. Like a CDC facility that's done nothing but shoot monkeys full of smallpox since J. Edgar Hoover told them to find a strain that only kills black people, the Yahwist population of Palestine produces one deranged new cult after another--self-proclaimed saviors and gurus with magical powers and hotlines to the true creator sprout up like ranting, dreadlocked kudzu, each one proclaiming that Rome is Babylon reborn, and only they, the Messiah, can save their people. But they have to shout awfully loud to be heard over the ravings of the even crazier occidental mystics and priests that have set up shop since Pompey passed through, praying to gods like Mithra and Zagreus and offering esoteric knowledge that's just as tempting and exotic to the disaffected Jews as the middle eastern teachings are to Romans.

And into this mess comes the fucker himself.

You don't even need a link, do you?

Maybe he's crazy. Maybe he's just a fraud. Maybe he's a little of both. There are arguments for many characterizations of the man we now call Jesus--but one argument that you won't be hearing from me is the ahistoricity hypothesis. Please quote this out of context to my grandmother so she can die without worrying about me: I believe in Jesus Christ. Not just in a vague sense that there was once a guy by that name who may have said things kinda like that and got offed by the Romans for being such a groovy dude--I believe that at least the earlier of the gospels are reasonably accurate, if credulous, biographical accounts of a man named Yeshua ben Josef who lived in first century Palestine and had a small number of people convinced he was magic.

What I do not believe is that he was even a terribly nice person. In fact, to my mind, one of the most potent arguments for the authenticity of the gospels is that the portrait they paint of a charismatic, but manipulative and quite insane cult leader is simply too realistic to have been fabricated. The tropes acted out by ben Yosef are echoed by figures through history, from Simon bar Kokhba (we'll get to him next time!) to Jan van Leiden to Shoko Asahara--and he is the first time these behaviors are known to have been recorded. That leaves two possibilities: either somebody with a grasp of psychology millennia ahead of their time went to great care to create a character out of whole cloth and subtly weave in behaviors and traits that nobody else at the time could have known were symptoms of a raging narcissistic personality, with marked tendencies toward suicidal histrionics that ultimately evaporate completely in the face of legitimate authority--and a nice big racist streak to boot--or several people actually lived with a real person with these symptoms for several years, and passed on the stories of what they thought was his divine wisdom to the people who eventually wrote the New Testament, trying their best to relate their experiences faithfully and passing on little details that they never realized were tells to the latent psychopathology of Jesus Christ.

To maybe try and phrase it in a less cumbersome way: The gospels are a profile of a person through the eyes of first century Palestinian Jews. When the same character shows up in a modern setting and delivers these lines, the result is still my favorite musical. I watch the '73 version every Easter while the rest of the family is at church.

The typical cult leader is, as I said, charismatic, often educated when those around him aren't--Christ was probably an itinerant laborer (possibly a carpenter, but we're not sure what exact craft the actual Greek word used to describe him specifically refers to), but would have been exposed to any number of zany local cults by the time he was in his thirties, and may have hung out with the folks who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, which would neatly explain why he had it in for the Pharisees. Of course, by the 30s AD, he had ditched them, and hung out with Jewish nationalists, sex workers, and disaffected proletarians of all stripes. He preached a perfect cocktail of apocalyptic nonsense, blending national mythology with anti-Italian racism and playing into the loony eschatology of John the Baptist. Long story short, the world is ending and the enemies of Israel will be destroyed--but he took pains never to say exactly which enemies he's talking about, and was cordial to Roman military and civil authority.

And then he ran afoul of the Romans anyway by pissing off the priests--and he caved completely. I never said I was a king, that was all them! I swear, you guys, my imminent kingdom is purely spiritual! My E-Meter is a religious instrument and is not intended to diagnose or prevent any medical condition!

Of course, this doesn't help him much--Pontius Pilate has seen messiahs come and go, and all his public breakdown does is make the crowd realize what a total charlatan he is, at which point they go nuts. Pilate's hands are pretty much tied--so the fucker is nailed to a plank and dies raving as he drowns in his own fluids like the common crook he is. Not an uncommon fate for traitors to the state, or even for obscure wannabe prophets--in fact, there are hundreds of such people in the Levant alone, with the same general background and upbringing, who were exposed to radically different ideas. And one wonders a little how the world might be different today if the one loopy guru from Palestine who lucked into a Roman cult had been, say, a snake-handler of Min-Mithra who paraded solemnly around in a giant penis hat. But ultimately, none of them matter much--what they believed is more or less immaterial, because nothing ever came of them.

The thing that matters is that ben Yosef is the only one of these psychos that we actually remember--and because of him, dozens of other gods are now dead.

To be honest, I don't know that this changed that much. The cultural pathogen I call Yahweh isn't really tied to a particular faith--if my family had been Germanic pagans, I would still probably be an atheist, just one who doesn't believe in Odin, and I might have founded a silly cult worshiping Surtr. But these beings were unique, amazing living creatures that nobody has even begun to really study--and now that they're gone, we may never get to.

And that's why I, as Supreme Illuminated Muckety-Muck of the Order, am declaring today--there's still a few minutes left--to be Dead Gods' Day.

As you eat your leftover candy tomorrow, think about why November 1st is All Saints' Day. These two holidays are syncretic bandages slapped over my--probably our, if you're white--lost heritage. Halloween is a combination of a handful of Equinox holidays from Europe's polytheistic past--days when the shadows are growing longer, the trees turn skeletal, and it feels like the boundary between the possible and the unspeakable is very, very thin. So this is a perfect time to be thinking a little about death and mortality--and realizing that all lifeforms die eventually, even gods. This is also a time when Yahweh waxes within us--all this stress and fear building up in an atmosphere of ever-increasing darkness--so now is the perfect time to throw a party just for a party's sake. Why not try and recreate a festival from your own heritage?

But think on your past, wherever you come from. Think about the gods of your people--do some genealogy building, and learn the names you might have whispered at your bedside if history had been different. Think about where they came from, and where they went. About what it means for your identity if they've never been a part of you. And if you're one of the rare few peoples who never lost their faith to a foreign conquest, think about how lucky you are, at least in this, to be able to choose not to pray in your own native language. To be able to deconvert purely because your religion is wrong--not because it has a demonstrable habit of turning people into monsters.

And think about Yahweh. About his roots, and what he's done to you and those close to you. And most importantly on this day, as you toast the memory of Thunor or Belabog or Hermes-Thoth, think about what we'll do to Yahweh when we finally catch him--when we find the place in our psyche where he hides, and drag him out into the light. After all that work, what would you do? If you held the last Bible in your hands, like a vial of smallpox, would you be able to destroy it?

Could you kill God? Because someone sure has to.

In the next Letters from Amenti: Ayn Rand destroys the Roman Empire, Jon Nödtveidt saves Christmas (with special guest Hajji Firuz), Saul of Tarsus sings "Thrift Shop," and yes, the transgender mole people arrive at last. All this, and much, much, MUCH more, in The Nature of the Plague, Part III. Please don't get diabetes while I'm writing this one.