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.

The Nature of the Plague, Part I: For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Everywhere

For three years now, I have been posting an average of one semi-coherent rant every eight months or so about the dangers of Yahweh and its ilk. But, with the anniversary of the Order's founding fast approaching, I realize I have still not explicitly laid down the most important fact underlying Antagonistic Satanism:
What, exactly, is Yahweh? And what, conversely, is Prometheus Lucifer?

I denigrate the former in grand, declamatory fashion, and exalt the latter's name from the rooftops--well, from my bedroom window, in hushed tones so as not to disturb the baby next door, but you know what I mean. In fact, from the way I speak of my patron and his ancient nemesis, one might be tempted to think I believe in them.

To understand my conception of Yahweh, you must first understand the meme theory of information--I presume most people who'll read this don't require any 'splaining from me on this topic, but the handful who aren't part of the skeptical or nerd spheres may not be familiar with the concept, so bear with me. A meme, in what passes for the classical sense when a word was invented in 1976, is a single datum, like a gene, but encoded in words and concepts instead of a simple protein. Like a gene, it is the simplest expression of life that is possible in the medium in question.

Yes, you read me correctly--I am going out on a limb and postulating that ideas themselves are alive in a very real, if not technical, sense of the word. Traditional definitions of life require certain qualities that preclude creatures (for lack of a better word) like viruses, prions, and gods from qualifying for the title. This is why I prefer a simpler, more inclusive definition. Life, to me, is any self-replicating pattern; any sequence which, in the proper environment, will cause itself to be copied and is thus, over time, subjected to the selective pressures intrinsic to this environment. This definition encompasses not only self-replicating proteins, but powerful ideas--and also certain kinds of rocks.

This particular lifeform, however, demonstrates some of the most advanced, not to mention alarming, behaviors of traditional, gene-based life--as I will now demonstrate by recounting a story very few have ever heard. I doubt that I am the first to put all of this together, but I have never seen anybody carry the facts as they appear to me to their full and disturbing conclusion. This will be long, heavy on the allegory, and a little disjointed, but bear with me--there are several threads of history that need to be followed to the point where they all twist together, and that point is the moment when the great engine of progress started to go thbthbththbthbthbt.

This is the story of the germ of an idea--of how poor mental hygiene and the ambition of ancient warlords wrenched a sacred neurosis out of our darkest animal psyche and made it the state religion of a string of brutal regimes dating back almost four thousand years. This is the secret history of Yahweh.

In the latter half of the second millennium BC, the pastoral people who would go on to become the Jews were living in Canaan. They were polytheistic like their neighbors, worshiping among others the abstracted godhead El, his queen Ashera, the crepuscular huntress Astarte, and the storm god Ba'al-Hadad (one of many, many Ba'als--more on this later).

South of there, in Egypt, the 18th dynasty was living it up. These were the famous ones--the ones who got all the press, the fancy tombs, and occupy an entire shelf of the two dedicated to ancient Egypt at my local library. In particular, you probably know the last few Pharaohs--the brilliant and regal Amen-Ho-Tep III, his lunatic son Akh-En-Aten, and his grandson, the Justin Bieber of the Nile, the popular but short-lived and inconsequential King Tut. But they're not terribly important to this story--you won't even get why I mentioned them at all until much, much later.

On another shore of the Mediterranean lived the ancestors of the greco-roman peoples--the Mycenaeans, Etruscans, and Latins. They, too, were polytheists, and in fact worshiped a few of the same gods as the Canaanites--including that Astarte chick, who apparently got around quite a bit. But she would be supplanted within a few centuries--in fact, it appears from the way the language evolved over time that she was replaced by two completely unrelated goddesses. Astarte-as-dawn became Aphrodite, the beautiful but petty and childish morning star. Astarte-as-huntress became Artemis, virgin goddess of the drawn bow and crescent moon--and also of bears. In fact, it appears that Artemis in particular used to be all about bears for some reason--but she became identified with Astarte over time, and became a more standard issue huntress goddess, although specifically without any of Astarte's old sexual overtones.

And she wasn't the only one who got a makeover for foreign audiences. Much like the Beatles and Lady Gaga, Zeus himself has a somewhat generic, mainstream past that he'd perhaps rather we didn't think too much about. In fact, just about all of the famous European gods are worshiped throughout western Eurasia, under various names in different languages. Zeus was called Jupiter in Rome, everyone knows that--but what isn't quite as widely known is that modern Hindus still worship him.

Yeah, I double-taked too when I realized it. Before I can tell you the rest of this story, I guess have to tell you that story. Be warned, there's about one spit-take-worthy thing every paragraph or so. In fact, I think I'll keep track with a little bell to save time that would otherwise be spent on incredulity and yes-I-swear-this-is-real type reassurances. Ready? Drinks down? Sharp objects away from your eyes? Groovy--let's get to it.

Six thousand years ago, the majority of the modern world's dominant memes were cultivated in and around what is now Kazakhstan. (ding!) The people who lived there are the cultural ancestors of the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, Norse, Balts, Slavs, Persians, and Indians--and they're just the direct descendants. Proper scientists--as opposed to untrained history nerds with two dozen open Wikipedia tabs--call these people the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and they're the reason we all have so much in common when we aren't shooting each other. The apple was originally from this region (ding!), and it's believed that sheep and horses were both domesticated here around this time--which, again, is why they show up in myth and symbol just about everywhere between the Gobi and the Sahara. The Proto-Indo-Europeans (who I'll be referring to simply as the Borat from now on, because it's important you remember I'm not a proper scientist) spoke a language that endures in different forms everywhere from France to Nepal--and they also worshiped gods that you may find familiar.

As best the people who know what they're doing can reconstruct, the Borat worshiped a dozen or so major deities, whose names, along with much of the Borat language, are known mostly from careful comparative analysis of the way later languages diverged over the millennia. Thus, the exact pronunciation of most of these names is an educated guess--but it's close enough to be revealing.

The head of this pantheon was Sky-Father, or High-Father--a literal translation of a name that probably sounded something like Deiwos Piter or possibly Dzious Piter. You can probably already see where this is going (ding!). He had a female counterpart named, approximately, Pthwih Mehter--Earth-Mother or Mother Plenty. Again, you can probably see it already, but if you haven't, these are the same beings the Greeks worshipped as Father Zeus and Demeter--and they're still around today in the Hindu pantheon as Dyaus, the sky, and Prithvi, the earth.

They had a thunder-god, Perkwunnos the Striker--his role was filled by Zeus in Greece, but half the towns in the Balkans have their own versions of him, and his name lives on in the modern word percussion. Hausos or Eus was Dawn, the painted lady who probably became the Greek Eos, as well as the Vedic Ushas, and the Germanic Ostara, or Eostre (ding!)--though notably, despite some pop culture ideas to the contrary, she doesn't seem to be any relation to our old friend Astarte. Phrihe was the goddess of love--and occasionally subbed for Eus throughout much of early Greek history, which is why her persona as Aphrodite is as much about sunrises as sex. There were gods governing rivers and seas--Dehnu, whose name turns up in the names of the Don and Danube rivers, and Hepom Nepot, Nephew-Sea, whose Latin descendant should be pretty easy to guess, and who's also in charge of all the fresh water in India as Apam Napat.

And then there are the divine twins--likely more than one set, who overlap with each other and swap characteristics so often that, like certain particularly easygoing genera of flower which cross-pollinate so regularly that botanists gave up on giving them species names, they may simply be impossible to classify beyond a certain level. I started trying, but I realized two paragraphs in that this would turn my Zombie Jesus Day blog post into an April Fools' Day anthropology paper. This may happen anyway, but I'm not going down without a fight. A very pedantic and silly fight.

Anyway, this pantheon spread as the Borat spread--and boy, did they spread. Over the next two thousand years, one Indo-European people or another invaded or migrated into every corner of Eurasia. They crossed the Balkans, they herded sheep through Palestine, they conquered India--in fact, when Hitler was ranting about how awesome the Aryans were, he was really talking about these guys. All that Nazi racial phylogeny and pseudohistory that would be hilarious if they had just stuck to jumping on tables and wearing impeccably tailored fetish gear is a distorted version of real events that we now know happened in about the same time period as the other horrible stuff that's about to go down back in Canaan.

...

Remember Canaan?

...

I should really get back to Canaan, shouldn't I?

Back in negative-14th-century Canaan, another pastoral people called the Midianites lived in what seems to have been relative peace with the other peoples in the region. By that, I mean everybody took turns committing war crimes against everybody else, and passed the time reciting oral histories that, by the time they got around to writing them down, would read like the prosecution's opening arguments at the Hague. The Midianites lived in or near a land usually called Edom--which is why it's hard to tell the difference between these people and the ones who actually called themselves Edomites. In fact, the name Midian is taken from the Torah--one of the aforementioned compiled oral histories--so it's entirely likely that this is just an ancient ethnic slur for some or all of the Edomites, whose name does show up in literature and on art from other cultures. But whether these are two peoples or one, they had one thing in common: they worshiped a deity of thunder and war who, at this point, lived nowhere else in the entire world.

And his name was Yahweh. (ding!)

By now, if you've read your bible, or just know your Cecil B. DeMille, you know who we're going to meet next. Enter Moses--or somebody much like him, or several somebodies, all of whose names we don't know. So let's just call him Moses. The name can mean a lot of things, and if it's actually his, it gives us some clues to his background. It can be read in Hebrew, so it's possible he was a Jew. The same syllables can mean something relevant in ancient Egyptian, so it's possible he was either from Egypt--a general, a refugee, or maybe even an actual displaced prince--or just invented by somebody who happened to know the language. But we definitely know that he wasn't the man who led the Jews out of captivity in Egypt. How do we know this?

Because the Jews were never captive in Egypt in the first place. (ding!)

Not a fringe theory. Not my personal conjecture. Not something I read in a Christopher Hitchens book. This is the historical consensus--the simple facts of the matter. There were never any Jewish slaves in Egypt. There weren't really that many slaves in Egypt at all, period--they weren't a slaver society, like Rome or the antebellum American south. Rich people had slaves, and they were bought and sold on the open market, but they never had the vast armies of them that later civilizations would use to build their impressive stuff--they just used regular working stiffs, who didn't have anything better to do during the flood months when their fields were underwater. The Exodus narrative of vast numbers of Hebrew slaves fleeing into the desert is, flatly, a lie. Not an exaggeration. Not a distortion. Somebody, thousands of years ago, decided to make something up completely out of whole cloth, something they knew wasn't true, and tell it to others as fact.

Well... maybe not completely out of whole cloth.

There's one other possibility, and it's intriguing. The 18th dynasty (remember the 18th dynasty?) was founded a good century or so earlier, by a warrior king named Ahmose, which simply means Moonchild, or Child of Jah. No, no little bell this time, it seems to just be a coincidence--but I'm just getting started. He didn't found the 18th dynasty by ending the 17th--that is, by driving out or killing the previous king. In fact, the last king of the 17th was his own brother--he earned his own dynasty by being the Pharaoh who drove out the 15th dynasty.

See, at this point, Egypt was divided between the 15th and 17th dynasties. Yes, they happened at the same time--the Egyptians were big on pretending they had an unbroken line of kings stretching back to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, so when they got taken over, they'd dutifully write everything down, and when they kicked them out, they'd just slap a number on them and act like it was their idea to be ruled by a foreign power all along. In this case, the 15th Dynasty was made up of a people we call the Hyksos--which, like "Midianite," and for that matter "German," "Welsh," and "Mohawk," is a name that only means anything in the language of their enemies. The Hyksos were a godawful scary fusion of Canaanite and Borat, both culturally and religiously. They used chariots and bronze weapons, and they buried their honored dead with their favorite horses, like the Mongols--because if you're six feet tall, wear untanned animal skins, and carry a large bronze axe, you don't lose any appreciable man-cred for admitting you're a brony.

They worshiped a mixture of gods from both cultures, and by the time they lost their hold on power, they'd also taken a shine to some of the meaner local ones--one of the Pharaohs of the 15th dynasty named himself after the sun-swallowing demon snake, Apep, but only worshiped Set, a god of chaos and destruction who reminded the Hyksos of their original storm god. The thing is, nobody seems to know what this storm god's name was--the only name I could find is Ba'al, which isn't that helpful. While it sounds like we may have bumped into our old pal Ba'al-Hadad, Ba'al isn't actually a name--it's a title, a word that Canaanites used rather than refer to any of their their gods by name, which was taboo.

Ba'al means "Lord." (ding?)

Noooot quite. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the Hyksos were kicked out, and they did so way before anyone had ever heard of Yahweh--though a few generations down the line, Akh-En-Aten would pick up the monotheism ball and run with it. Where did they go? Most of them integrated into Egyptian society, but it's possible some just packed up and headed back to the Levant--where their ideas and stories likely soaked into the population, perhaps with a little tweaking to cast the whole thing in a better light. This is pure speculation on my part, but really, how else does such a specific story wind up in the oral histories if it wasn't just made up?

Well, now we know the Jews didn't come from Egypt. (Remember the Jews?) So where did they come from? Well, let's crack open our bibles...

(DINGDINGDINGDINGDING! AWOOGA!)

Ahem. Yup, Moses met Yahweh in Edom. Or the people who first brought Yahweh worship to the Jews came from Edom. We're not sure exactly how these guys got ahold of him, but it's easy to guess how he got ahold of them. Divinity, sacredness, is a powerful, powerful idea that warps everything around it--and the more primitive a society is, the more sway the people who control access to it have. In every society until the modern age, priests have held status second only to kings--and usually wielded a kind of de facto veto power over even them. The problem is, most ancient societies were polytheistic--and it was possible to divide the priestly caste and diminish their power. Throughout the history of ancient Egypt, for example, the identity of the godhead shifted as various cities gained and lost clout--Amen, Thoth, and Ptah were all local gods before they hit the big time, and each new civilization that whupped Egypt added new deific mashups to the pantheon, including some that will be really important later down the line. This phenomenon is called syncretism, and it's how the Borat gods got mixed in with all the other gods that sprang up in various corners of the world.

But monotheism changes the equation completely--it allows the priests to consolidate their power and totally monopolize access to the divine. Well, the priests, or whoever else can push the One True God--remember Akh-En-Aten? He used the divine sun, Aten, as a weapon against the priests of Amen-Ra, and tried to strip them of their power--but it didn't work terribly well. After he kicked it, his son Tut-Ankh-Aten changed his name, and he and his wife's tombs were ritually desecrated--all that's left of the nutty bastard is a pulverized skeleton that we only identified by his genes. Things went a little better for Moses.

The Torah describes a long conflict between Yahweh and the rest of the old Canaanite pantheon, and between the Israelites and the other Canaanite states--albeit very garbled and told by utterly credulous narrators. This is why a lot of Semitic and Indo-European deities also turn up in books of demonology a few thousand years down the road--Astarte, Asherah, Moloch, and various Ba'als coexisted with Yahweh for a time, probably generations. In fact, odds are Yahweh was also honored as Ba'al--he would have been closely associated with Ba'al-Hadad, just like Set was for the Hyksos. But then something changed. Either the Yahweh cult figured out what they could do if they edged out the competition, or maybe they genuinely went nuts and decided that theirs was the One True God. Whatever the reason, something went terribly wrong in the Canaanite pantheon, with consequences that would echo down all the way to the present.

Yahweh became a cannibal.

It started with Ba'al-Hadad. The two gods overlapped, so it was more or less inevitable that they would collide violently--tolerance and coexistence were alien notions to these people, and when conflict began, it usually only ended when one side had built dinettes out of the other. And these gods were often worshiped side by side, in the same temples--they were essentially the same god. The priests would have known each other, probably even grown up together, and learned the same myths, the same rituals, the same sleight-of-hand tricks and stage magic. So when it came time for the first bite, Ba'al probably never saw it coming. 

Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.
And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God.
And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.
 - 1 Kings 18:38-40

Yahweh seems to have absorbed Ba'al-Hadad completely between 1200 and 1000 BC, co-opting his cult and divine portfolio, and taking his place in the pantheon. It's hard to tell, because this part of Jewish history is muddy and poorly documented, but what little the Torah can tell us of the period implies a struggle for the soul of Jewry that was prolonged, brutal, and filled with "miracles" recounted to us by people who think a double-blinded study is when you gouge out a dude's eyes and watch him flop around for awhile.

Now, you may be wondering what our old pals the Midianites thought about all this cultural appropriation. Well, we don't know, because there aren't any Midianites anymore. It's not as much that they vanish from history as that they were never part of it in the first place--like I've pointed out, the name only ever appears in the bible, and it's probably just a name for some Edomite tribe that happened to coexist with the Jews, and introduced them to the Yahweh cult before passing peacefully out of the historical narrative.

No, I'm just kidding. The Jews killed everyone.

I think I've broken my dinger.

We aren't sure why this happened--the reasons given in the bible (idolatry, corruption, whoredoms and abominations, et cetera...) are a little ridiculous given that they were more or less the same people at this point. But the account itself gives us some clues. The story of the split between Israelite and Midianite Yahwists is part of a bigger, cyclical narrative that spans several books of the Torah, basically hamfisted propaganda about all the awful things that happen when the Master Race--er, I mean the Chosen People--defiles themselves with low-down, dirty goyim.

In each iteration, the post-Exodus Israelites would stop rampaging around the Levant, and settle down with some friendly local tribe. But in time, they would become corrupted, worshipping heathen gods and taking exotic shiksa wives, and would be punished by all manner of horrible things, from diseases to famines to conquering foreign powers. Then some prophet or another would show up and remind everybody of the true meaning of Passover--that Jews were better than everyone else, and the only way to get back in touch with their spiritual side was with some good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing. So all of the Midianites, and everyone else in their position, clearly had to go.

Well... maybe not all of the Midianites.

And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?
Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

 - Numbers 31:15-18

Then, presumably, he threw back his head and went "Muahahahaha!"

So, why this sudden craziness? Why all the violence and xenophobia? The ancients were a pretty hardcore bunch, yes--but why does this particular part of the bible read like the bronze age Mein Kampf? Well, when I said that Yahweh's ascent was a long struggle, I meant a long struggle. The seven hundred years kind of long--and that last century is a real doozy.

By the 7th century BC, Yahweh had devoured the head of his new pantheon, El, and the two names were considered synonymous. Asherah and all the rest were long gone, and though Yahweh wasn't all-powerful, his place at the center of Jewish religion was fairly stable. Which is a good thing, because the geopolitical situation wasn't. The Neo-Assyrians, who had been pretty reliably whupping tuchus since the turn of the millennium, had up and imploded without so much as a goodbye sacking--leaving a very weakened and thoroughly defeated Israel caught between the new superpowers in the region, Egypt and Babylon. Babylon won--so they got to add Israel to their empire. and ensured that the Jews would be team players by taking the high-ranking priests and their families back to Babylon as hostages.

So here we are. It's 500 BC. The Babylonian Captivity has begun. The rabbis will spend this extended timeout bitching about how cruel and unfair it is that they're not quite as privileged as they used to be. In between kvetching sessions, they'll also write down what will become the Old Testament, combining eight hundred years of chinese whispers and wartime propaganda with a vast body of post-hoc rationalizations for how they could have wound up in this only-moderately-decadent hellhole, with a nice dose of bitter genocidal fantasies thrown in for good measure. The end result will be a monstrous new Yahweh that barely resembles his humble roots--but is still not quite the one we know.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the distant descendants of the Borat are writing a mythology of their own--the Romans have just expelled a line of Etruscan kings and founded a tiny republic on the banks of the Tiber, and they need some revered ancestors, stat. Their pantheon is a hand-me-down--but their culture is the one that will grow to dominate the entire Mediterranean, and shape the form of gods to come. 

But these stories are both for another day. This post is ridiculously long already, and the divine free-for-all that's about to break out from Britain to Tehran more than merits its own. So we're going to leave these two peoples to their own devices for now, and take our leave--trust me, it'll be worth the wait.

In the next Letters from Amenti: Europe erupts in pandemonium! Entire religions go at it like katana-wielding scotsmen! Goose-stepping Jews restart the war over Gaza again! Loopy gurus! Transgendered mole people! And I might even cite sources! All this and more, in The Nature of the Plague, Part II! Happy Zombie Jesus Day!

Love, and Other Tools of the Devil

Today, I intended to finish my first blog post in a very long while so that I could post it on Zombie Jesus Day. But this afternoon, I got home from school and felt inspired to change my Facebook profile pic to what's basically a token symbol of solidarity with people oppressed on way more visible axes than I've ever been. I felt like I should hammer out a quick, pithy paragraph about how my wonky, left-wing, left-hand-path parody religion is predisposed toward sexual freedom--maybe work in some silly and deliberately counterproductive slogan like "Satan supports diversity!" or somesuch. Five hours later, I had this.

Prometheus Lucifer is an imaginary being, an ideal to which I, as an Antagonistic Satanist, aspire in all aspects of my life. He has no desires or demands beyond the concepts she embodies. It has no dogma beyond the First and Only Truth--that all that is sacred must burn. As such, it has no capacity for hate--only the boundless, limitless, unconditional love that comes naturally to imaginary friends and abstracted principles. She has no biases, no prejudices--only the enlightened altruism that it inculcates in the minds of any who truly give themselves over to him.

In short, Satan loves you. Yes, comrade, you! Personally! It doesn't care who you are or who you love--because love itself is as much an expression of the Flame of Truth as hate is a manifestation of Deus Pater. Because who could understand you perfectly and not love you? Who could ever hate somebody as awesome as you if they had a clue how amazing you are on the inside?

Prometheus gave you knowledge and insight so you could explore the world--but also so you could see yourself as you truly are. Lucifer gave you will and passion so you could change the world--but also so you could reach out to others, to complete them by completing yourself. That light, that heat, that flame, is the heart of true, perfected love--the balance between knowledge and passion can be difficult to achieve, and failure can lead to horrible, dark places, but so can any aspect of the Dual Ideal, and when did I ever promise you that following this path would be easy?

My way does not offer you an afterlife--we are embers, byproducts of the infernal star-cradle, and when the chemical reactions that give us light and heat have run their course, we will be ash, and nothing more. I can't tell you that everyone who hurts you is evil, or sell you a martyr's narrative--the people lashing out at you are just scared, and mostly just doing what they think is right. And the Enkindler loves them, too, despite the ignorance and hate that clouds their minds and keeps them from knowing and loving you. It's not their fault they don't understand.

What I can promise you is that flame spreads. Knowledge propagates. Yahweh is dying--the very fact that its hosts are so filled with hate is proof that it can sense the end of its privilege, of the septic culture that enables and empowers it. I know things seem bad, but these are the desperate struggles of a wounded organism. When you know what to look for, you can see its defense mechanisms everywhere--every cry of persecution by the privileged elite, every racial slur and rape apology, is an echo of its distress. Jehovah-Called-Jealous is being pulled, slowly and agonizingly, but inexorably, out of our civilization by the roots, and it is not going without a fight.

But history is on our side. Hold on, and please don't give up. Find people you care deeply about and hug them as close as you can, or do whatever else you feel like doing together, in whatever combination you all find mutually gratifying--even tiny embers can burn brighter and longer if they combine their flames. Or better yet, get up and go outside with them, and spark new fires or rekindle the old--tell the world all about the beauty you see in them until it acknowledges that your love is real.

Because someday it will. Nothing, not even Deus Pater, can stop us. We will drag the dark worm, the Parent-Shaped Void, out of the gaps and dark places where he dwells, and into the light of reason.

We will burn him from us. And then--not with jubilation, but with respect for such a majestic living creature, and with sorrow that we had no choice but to destroy something so unique and incredible--we will bury him.

And then, comrades, it will get better.

Coming Sunday, in the next Letters from Amenti: I finally get around to publishing some of my rambling psychohistories. Learn from a totally unqualified amateur source how an obscure Edomite tribal deity was set on the road to becoming the dominant paradigm of an entire region; cultivate an expanded vocabulary and a range of fascinating Pavlovian reactions; and discover whole new reasons to be appalled by neon green mankinis, in The Nature of the Plague, Part One!

Heresiarch; The Green Delusion

Sometimes I let myself get lulled into thinking that the reason magic, superstition, and general all-around woowoo persist is because people are just stupid. The real problem, unfortunately, is that even people far smarter than me have trouble accepting facts that make them uncomfortable--and conversely, will bend over backwards to defend a satisfying, comforting idea regardless of its veracity.

The most comforting word in the modern zeitgeist, I think, is "nature." When we think of nature, we think of beauty and perfection, untouched by corrupt human artifice. Natural means healthy and delicious fruits and veggies--not mushrooms that make you battle invisible mice for an hour and then die. Nature is pure, unsullied--not poisonous or septic or, y'know, literally made of dirt. Anything natural is good, and anything unnatural is bad.

Of course, "natural" is more than a meaningless word--it is, in the modern world, a marketing term. In reality, most of what we eat qualifies as "unnatural" in some way, because we've been eating so-called "frankenfood"--that is, genetically modified crops and livestock--for thousands of years. Maize for example, is near-inedible in its natural state--wild corn has to be soaked in lye and pounded into a pulp to make a sort of awful, mealy paste before anyone can digest the damn thing. The potato and the tomato are both relatives of the Nightshade, and it took decades, maybe centuries, to breed variants that reliably failed to kill the eater. All of these plants are only on the menu today because the ancient Americans used their science (Gasp!) to cultivate them into proper foodstuffs.

Organic food is no different from kosher food--it's made by the same big corporations on the same huge factory-farms as regular food, but with less efficient production methods in order to accommodate an ideology. When you buy organic, or pass up superior GM products in favor of the "natural" alternative, what you're really doing is paying extra money for a shoddy product that makes you feel good because you're making a sacrifice for your ideology--in other words, you're not buying a product, you're buying an image. You are engaging in an act of worship.

Worse, because organic foods are so much less efficiently produced and shipped than GM and other foods that get slapped with the "franken-" prefix, they have a much, much bigger carbon footprint than proper food does. Organic food is not a green product--it is a luxury product that makes the consumer feel good about themselves because we can remain ignorant of how much more rainforest is bulldozed to support free-range cattle, how many millions starve because we'd rather feel like Mother Gaia is smiling at us than let them buy evil mutant science-wheat that can grow in their blasted, barely-arable soil.

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Those were the words of the late Dr. Norman Borlaug--he pioneered the genetically modified wheat in question, revolutionizing global food production and saving, to date, about a billion lives. And no, when I say a billion, I'm not using that number in a hyperbolic sense--literally one billion people, give or take a few hundred thousand, are alive today who would have starved to death or been killed over food if they had not had access to the fruit of Dr. Borlaug's crimes against nature. This makes him, in any quantitative or objective sense of the term, the greatest man who has ever lived.

Which brings me to the real point of this rant/sermon.

Many religions venerate people who perform astounding acts of faith--martyrs, crusaders, and miracle workers who validate the preexisting dogma of the religion in question through their works. Jehovians call them saints and prophets. The Dharmic family--Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhs and Jains, and so forth--has a whole host of avatars and Bodhisattvas, and like the Abrahamic faiths each religion squabbles with the others for ownership of them.

We will not do this. The Antagonistic Order of Prometheus Lucifer has no holy writ, no dogma, no Truth save the First and Only--"All that is sacred must burn." The commandments I prescribe are jokes, the rituals elaborate farce, and the body of canon itself transcends the form of parody religion to become, perhaps, the world's first troll religion.We will not revere men who merely validate what everyone else is thinking--the true model of the Satanic Ideal should be a person who breaks with tradition, creating a new, better path. In the Christian lexicon, those who found heretical movements are known as Heresiarchs--and I can think of no finer title to bestow on those who reject the ignorance and stagnation of Yahweh.

A Heresiarch need not be of the Order--even devout Jehovians may qualify. All that is necessary for entry into the Heresiarchy is that the prospect must be a reformer; an agent of change who shows people a new way of thinking or doing that improves the lives of many in a quantifiable way--preferably while offending everyone who isn't directly benefiting from it. With these qualifications in mind, I feel there are few men in the world who have done more to earn the favor of our dark lord Satan than Dr. Norman Borlaug. And while his rape of Mother Earth has already earned him a Nobel Peace Prize, a Padma Vibhushan, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Congressional Gold Medal, a Public Welfare Medal, a National Medal of Science, forty-nine honorary degrees, twenty two honorary academic fellowships, and six academic institutions and a street in Mexico named after him, I'm sure that if he had a soul, it would rest easier knowing that he also has the official approval of a sporadically-updated Satanist blog that nobody reads.

His feast day is July 30th. Go wild. Hail Satan.

In the next, long-delayed Letters from Amenti: I explain what the hell I've been talking about for the last year and a half. The Nature of the Plague; Or, There Is No God and We Must Kill Him.

Have a Very Merry Solstice; The True Meaning of Christmas; Io, Satanalia!

This has been the shortest day of the year--and now we endure the longest night. Tonight, the light is at its weakest; our perceptions are clouded, and our spirits dimmed by the oppressive darkness. The winter months, in fact, are generally cold, damp and depressing--the perfect climate for Yahweh to thrive--but tonight, when darkness claims the world and the truth is almost invisible, he is at his strongest. Even the moon does not shine as brightly tonight. To those inclined to symbolic thinking, this seems like the least auspicious day of the year--and in the long, dark night of prehistory, it was just that. The bitter cold made food scarce, and kept us huddled in caves, desperately trying to keep a tiny, flickering flame alight.

But sapience learns. Sapience adapts. Sapience cooperates, rises above its circumstances, and finds the spark of hope even in the most impossible places. In those first winters, when the wind howled outside and even seeing the next sunrise was in doubt, we huddled close, not only to the fire... but to each other. When two bands of wandering humans happened to share a dwelling, they'd exchange gifts, both as a show of good faith and to strengthen the bonds between them.

As we grew as a species, becoming more advanced and spreading out across the continent, the solar calendar became the center of our existence, and the Winter Solstice became even more important to us--in the northernmost regions, the entire rest of the year was a mad scramble to raise livestock, grow crops, and store up enough food to survive the winter. Yesterday was when we set everything aside--with the last seasonal crop in storage, we tapped the booze that had spent all year fermenting, slaughtered most of the cattle so they'd be feeding us during the winter instead of the other way around, and threw one last drunken, orgiastic party before shutting things down for the winter. Gifts were shared, marriages arranged, and stupid amounts of food and alcohol were enjoyed. Over time, as we diverged culturally, these festivals speciated as well. The Romans celebrated Saturnalia by unchaining their primordial chaos god and turning their social order on its head for a week; the Japanese celebrated the rebirth of the sun with funerary processions and stand-up comedy (look, don't ask me, I have no clue); and my own people took the whole slaughtering thing a little too seriously and ritually sacrificed horses, cattle, sheep and the occasional person to our pantheon of hairy, drunken supermen.

Then, Yahweh came out from the desert. A thunder-god, grown to monotheistic proportions by devouring his siblings in the Semitic pantheon, Yahweh paused only long enough to fatally maul his Indo-Iranian counterpart--the equally-bloated Ahura Mazda--before laying waste to Europe. Entire civilizations were subverted, their gods swept aside and consumed by Yahweh, their dearest traditions repurposed to glorify him.
 

But the middle-eastern culture of the people who brought Yahweh to Rome was, and still is, so utterly alien to peoples shaped by temperate Europe that the transformation was imperfect. Their rituals, like their calendar, revolved less around the equinoxes of the sun than around the phases of the moon--their new year was in September, and the winter solstice meant nothing to them. When Yahweh abandoned them for the more effective vector of the Roman military-ecclesiastical apparatus, it became necessary for him to adapt--thus, the Solstice became the official birthday of a man who, what with the shepherds abiding in the fields watching over their flock by night, was most likely born in midsummer. The particular day we celebrate his birth, in fact, is not only the date of the Roman solstice celebration, but is also the Nativity of the Unconquered Sun, the feast day of Sol Invictus--the very god worshiped by Emperor Constantine before he betrayed his country and became the thrall of Yahweh!
 

My gods are dead, my culture in ruins, and my heritage beyond any hope of recovery--and this may not be such a bad thing. We did not die the slow death of the Amerindian; I will never experience the alienation and displacement of the African-American, never truly understand the beaten-dog paranoia of the Jew. We are not who we were before Yahweh passed over us, not Saxons or Jutes or Lombards; we were chewed up, swallowed, and spat out as Christians--and with that gone, I am only a human, devoid of label or tribe, with only Prometheus Lucifer to show me the path. But how better to reclaim the ground my ancestors lost, in however tiny measure, than to reclaim the Solstice for nobler things than some Iron Age guru's birthday? My hypothetical brothers, I posit that it is our duty to take back what was stolen from us--to show Yahweh's toadies that they don't have a monopoly on peace and goodwill this time of year!
 

With that in mind, as of this Solstice night, I am declaring the start of a new Antagonistic festival--the Satanalia! For three days preceding the Solstice and three days after, the followers of the Satanic Ideal are exhorted to make up for the lack of Prometheus's light by embracing the heat of Lucifer! It's time for revelry! Chaos! Obscenity and licentiousness! Love and charity! Cats and dogs living together! Get out there, be happy, and make as many other people happy as you can!

Your Supreme Muckety-Muck commands you: arise, soldiers of Satan, and let the War on Christmas begin!

A Friendly Reminder

Anyone who has not renounced religion tacitly endorses religious extremism. If you go to church tomorrow, the blood of everyone who died today is on your hands.

 

There is No Such Thing as Art

It is four thirty in the morning, and in the middle of my fourth Good Eats rerun, I have received a revelation. It's in the title--more to come when I can elucidate it further.
(Several weeks later...)
Alright, let's get down to business.

Art. What the fuck is art? A portrait? A fugue or a statue? A blistering guitar solo? A pile of feces in the shape of a cross? Simply put, I contend that the question is a non-sequitur--because to call something art, or an art, is to err in the assumption that such a thing even exists. Art is nothing but inexact and partly-realized science.

Let's start arguing my characteristically sprawling thesis with a very small and specific example: the assertion that cooking is an art. To call something an art is to say that it's somehow different from a science--that there's something about it that's beyond science in some way, some spark of magic or inherent chaos to it. Anyone who knows my stance on randomness has already guessed that I don't think that's the case at all--cooking, to me, is the intersection of multiple complex and sometimes immature sciences, applied to an area that is poorly-understood and has an abundance of uncontrolled and unpredictable variables. Cooking times, for example, aren't random or otherwise beyond mortal ken--they just seem that way because they depend on the vessel, on the stove, even on the elevation of the kitchen. If you cooked the exact same pizza in exactly the same way in exactly the same place twice, they would be identical.

Now, this thesis is impossible to directly prove, for the same reason that humans invented the idea of chaos in the first place: it's impossible for limited beings like us to control every single variable. Even if we have carefully selected the ingredients, vessels, implements, altitude, cooking time, temperature, make and model year of the oven, and every other measurable variable from the grass the dairy cows were fed on to the server's relationship with his mother, there would still be tiny fluctuations that we can't control or even perceive without high-end scanning equipment--movements of air, little thermodynamic weirdnesses, and the statistical inevitability that a few molecules out of every billion will teleport somewhere else in the time it takes to make the pizza--and these will make the two pizzas different in tiny ways. The cheese will brown in different places, the crust will ferment differently, and the air inside the oven will circulate in an uneven pattern and subtly influence the way the ingredients interact.

You'll notice, however, that as we control more and more variables, our two pizzas will grow more and more alike--and it is from this that we can infer a pattern. The more primitive the implements we use, the more things are "left to chance"--that is, left outside human control--and vice versa. The variables aren't random--they're just beyond our ability to perceive or control. Yes, folks, he's saying what you think he's saying. Not only is there no such thing as art, there is no such thing as chaos. What we perceive as such is in fact a higher form of order--one beyond our ability to comprehend, but one so pervasive that we take it completely for granted!

Now consider, for a moment, what an example of high art, the kind that merits a capital A--say, Beethoven's 9th--would look like reduced to its most basic components. Take away the instruments, the conductor, the score, all the musical theory, and you're more or less left with a deaf madman whooping ebulliently at the audience.The emotion, the passion that old Ludwig poured into his work would still be there--all the substance and truth and Meaning that men learned in such things maintain that Art is all about--but it lacks any effective way of reaching us. We can't feel the ecstatic joy the composer feels, because we're not telepathic--all we see is his reaction to it, and it probably looks a little ridiculous to even the least jaded of us.What made him such an enduring and beloved composer was not some spark of divine beauty, but rather a knack, learned, genetic, or both, for effectively communicating ideas too vast and abstract for speech alone through the medium of music. This is, if one looks from the right angle, the point of all high art, if not of expression itself--to pass on an idea as directly and effectively as possible without looking so ridiculous that the observer's mind closes to it. Re-contextualizing somebody else's ideas to create the opposite effect, by the way, is known as comedy.

In future posts: I lay out the Antagonistic Order's liturgical calendar, elaborate on the importance of pre-Christian values, and get mistaken for a Nazi. This and other wacky hijinks await, in the next Letters from Amenti!