Frontier Justice in the Promised Land

I recall attending enough church services whose sermons related various Biblical miracles and uplifting messages of hope. But how many ministers mount their pulpit and deliver a sermon on Moses’ instructions to his forces to execute a My Lai-style massacre, or relate to the listening congregation the scriptures' heartless treatment of women as victims of rape and spoils of war? And yet these and other dark themes are as much a part of the Bible as those stories which get all the attention, and rough and ruthless frontier-style justice is not in some mysterious way made more morally acceptable simply because it appears in scripture. And I, who have in my career illustrated such dark gothic classics as Frankenstein, Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera and others, am still somewhere struggling to get my head around the realization that it is the Bible, of all books, which reaches into darker places even than these. You doubt me? Then please read on...

This post grew out of the notes which I made for my previous post to reference specific Biblical passages. The more I buried my nose in my [1]Bible to double-check the accuracy of my references, the more surreal everything seemed to become. Was I really still reading canonical scripture? Was I still reading the presumed word of God? Well, yes I was, as anyone reading these cited texts can check for themselves. These passages are mostly either God speaking in the first person, dictating the various laws or Commandments to Moses (yes, there are considerably more than ten), or Moses speaking to the Israelites, and are intended as instructions for social conduct in the Promised Land.

Slaughter: In the Old Testament see the Book of [2]Numbers 31:7-18 for a graphic account of how, having massacred the Midianite army, the victorious Israelite forces nevertheless had mercifully spared the lives of the captive women and children - much to Moses' wrath. He then commanded his forces to put all the married women and boys to the sword as well, but the young virgin girls they 'could keep alive for themselves'. He seems quickly enough to have brushed aside the 13th Commandment ('Thou Shalt Not Kill') which God had so recently given to him personally. And so these captive women and 'young ones' were slain also. But even this brutal episode was not a one-off incident: see also Judges 21:10-24 for a very similar account. This time it was the women and young boys of Jabesh-gilead who were slain. In this case it even specifies the number of young virgins who were taken back to the Israelite camp: there were four hundred of them. Apparently even this many weren't enough to go around - or as the narrator ruefully puts it: 'they sufficed them not'. See other instances throughout the Bible of murder and massacre too numerous to cite here.

Slavery: See Exodus 21:6 and Deuteronomy 15:17, both of which describe the practice of driving an awl through the ear of a slave to mark that slave forever, while bracing him or her (it applied to both sexes) against a door. Incredibly, in both Books this act is described as a reward for loyalty. See Leviticus 25:44-47 for an exposition of slaves as inheritable possessions, and elsewhere regarding the keeping of slaves, and also in the New Testament, such as in Ephesians 6:5 (on obedience to one's master) and Timothy 6:1 (on honoring one's master). Slavery is dealt with in scripture in expositions of the various rules governing the owning of slaves, while never actually being condemned as a practice. Exodus 21:20-21 states that if you beat your servant (whether male or female) to incapacity, if the servant survives for 'a day or two', then you're off the hook because, well... after all, servants cost money. Yes, this is the actual reason given, as anyone reading this can check for themselves.

Rape: In the Old Testament see Deuteronomy 21:10-14 for a description of the treatment of women as spoils of war, which concludes that if a captive woman does not please you, and you show her the door, it is unlawful to sell her for money if you have raped her because she is then regarded as spoiled goods. See also Deuteronomy 22:28-29, which earnestly assures us that the rape victim must marry and remain with her rapist 'all his days'. I would challenge anyone to read these several chapters in Deuteronomy and other books in the Old Testament dealing with Biblical law and not feel revolted by their inhumanity, as anyone with a sense of moral human decency should.

Stoning: See Deuteronomy 21:18-21 for instructions on stoning to death your disobedient son. This particular law is just one of many such Biblical laws which break the 13th Commandment. Homosexuality, loss of virginity before marriage, blasphemy, adultery, fortune telling and swearing at or striking a parent were also among the various Biblical offences punishable by a gruesome and prolonged death by stoning. An exception is Leviticus 20:14, which specifies that if a man 'take a wife and her mother', then all three are to be burned alive. Deuteronomy 13:6-10 also specifies death by stoning for apostasy - in this case, turning away from the Israelites' God - and urges the listener that 'thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death'.

Sacrifice: Judges 11:29-40 relates the grim tale of Jephthah, who makes a pact with God. If God will grant him victory in a coming battle, Jephthah will sacrifice to God whatever is the first thing to come out of his house upon his return home. God keeps his side of the bargain, Jephthah returns triumphant – and is greeted by his daughter, his only child, who rushes joyfully to meet him. Jephthah in despair tells his daughter what he has promised to God. His daughter (whose name we never learn) is reconciled, but asks for two months reprieve. The period passes, and Jephthah then ‘did with her according to his vow’, as the Bible coyly phrases what is in reality a human sacrifice. The body is then burned so that the smoke may waft heavenwards and please the Almighty. God, being all-knowing, would of course have known at the time the pact was made who the victim would be, and being all-powerful, could presumably have arranged for a chicken or some other animal to rush outside instead. But God, as much as Jephthah – and the rest of us – made his choices.

Hawkwood

[1] The Bible referred to is my own copy of the King James Version study edition, published by Zondervan. This is a copiously-annotated Apologist edition whose annotations at times make unintentionally chilling reading, such as excusing the Biblical condoning of slavery as 'situations that were divinely-given, practical ways of dealing with the morality of the day.' (annotation to Timothy 6:5). So in the actual words of this edition's editors, for one human being to own another is considered by them to be a 'divinely-given situation'.

[2] My chapter-and-verse citations throughout this post are for others to independently check these passages for themselves should they choose to do so. For those who do not have a Bible, the full text of the King James Version is available online from several websites, including: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/

The images for this post are adapted from Gustave Doré's illustrations for the Bible.

The Good Satanist

Once I was asked by someone what I considered to be the opposite of a good Christian. The obvious answer would seem to be: a bad Christian, which could be taken to mean someone who might nominally consider themselves to hold Christian beliefs, but who paid mere lip service to their faith by (for example) attending church once a year for the annual Christmas service, or by praying to the Almighty to grant them victory in some sporting event. But there is another possible answer.

The opposite of a good Christian might be: a good Satanist. Satan fills the Biblical role of the adversary, famously tempting Jesus in the wilderness. Looking out over all the world from an [1]‘exceeding high mountain’, Satan offers to grant Jesus dominion over all that he sees if Jesus will only perform an act of worship to him. I wonder if you can spot the curious contradiction in this proposition of Satan's? It implies either that Satan already had the world as his dominion, and it was therefore his to give, or that Jesus presumably would have known that Satan was offering him something that Satan did not truly own, and therefore no real 'temptation' as such took place because nothing was actually on offer. In lawyer's terms, it all hinges on the question of prior ownership. But Jesus in his response gives no indication of his awareness of this. Rather, he points out only that Satan should serve and worship God.

This curious conversation which took place high above the world between these two ultimate adversaries must have been an apocryphal exchange anyway, because there were no other witnesses present to record what was being said at the time. As for Jesus’ admonishing Satan to serve and worship God: had Satan done so, then one senses that the whole balance of the universe and the order of reality would have shifted – and not necessarily in a good way. Satan’s mere existence indicates that he had a crucial function in the proceedings – and that he was self-aware enough to realize this function. As with the extremes of all opposing forces, each to some extent defines itself by its relationship to the other, which in itself is a form of mutual dependence. I can imagine Satan laconically answering Jesus with: ‘Well, that’s not going to happen..’, perhaps not so much because of his nature, but because of an awareness of his essential role in the scheme of things.

There is a further possibility: maybe after all, Satan actually did – and does – have the world in his pocket. And that being so, how would he choose to play things? It’s not hard to imagine that he would work in various devious ways to trick others into thinking that they were opposing him, when all along they were in reality carrying out his master plan for him. He would allow others to create texts both cruel and contradictory, which would include the ideas that [2]slaughter and [3]slavery were okay things to do, that if you were the [4]victim of rape then you must marry your rapist, that if your unruly son was disobedient, then you should drag him outside and [5]have him stoned to death.

The Satanic triumph would be, not to closet these extreme and inhuman behaviours away in some dark and forbidden heretical text, but to have them accepted as scripture, so that others would uncritically follow his plan, because it would then be termed ‘defending one's faith’. And (a masterstroke on his part) he would ensure that these texts could be interpreted in so many subtly different ways that they would cause deep divisions of [6]doctrine – deep enough actually to cause major schisms of faith that would last for centuries.

Back on top that ‘exceeding high mountain’, maybe Jesus missed his chance. Maybe he should have called Satan’s bluff. Maybe he should have seen through the double blind. For that one brief moment in time, the world, literally and metaphorically, lay at his feet, and all might have taken a very different path. But Satan was Satan, and Jesus was Jesus, and their preordained roles were to resist each other.

Hawkwood  

[1]Matthew 4:9.

[2]Book of Numbers 31:7-18. See also other instances throughout the Bible of murder and massacre too numerous to cite here.

[3]Exodus 21:6 and Deuteronomy 15:17. Also Leviticus 25:44-47, and also in the New Testament, such as in Ephesians 6:5 and Timothy 6:1.

[4]Deuteronomy 22:28-29.

[5]Deuteronomy 21:18-21.

[6]According to the World Christian Encyclopedia (Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2001), estimates of the different and distinct Christian denominations worldwide vary from 33,000 to 38,000.


Painting: The Temptation of Christ, by Vasily Surikov.

The Lost Ark of Noah

Recently I was intrigued to learn that Kenneth Ham, the Christian fundamentalist founder and director of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, plans to extend the museum as a theme park, with a full-scale dry dock Noah's Ark as the main crowd-puller. A Biblical scale Ark! Wow! Or... maybe not? Not being sure just how do-able the original Ark could have been, and tending not to take things at face value, I decided to crunch the numbers. So this post is not about the feasibility of getting a mating pair of Argentinian giant anteaters to the Middle East in time to get aboard, or even about where a volume of water far greater than all the oceans of the world combined actually 'abated' to. It is about the Ark as a potentially seaworthy vessel.

Noah's Ark! The name alone has an extraordinary hold on the imagination. The story in Genesis is so familiar that it seems to stretch across boundaries of belief, and countless depictions and models of the vessel have been made. Could the actual vessel still be in existence somewhere, just waiting to be found? Some claim that it already has been, and using scripture as a sort of road map to guide their search, have headed for the famed Mount Ararat in present-day Turkey. The incentive to establish it's existence is not hard to understand, for it would provide the actual hands-on truth of the Genesis story. But is finding it really so straightforward?

This photo (above) was taken on the lower slopes of Mount Ararat in Turkey; the place where Genesis tells us the Ark came to rest after the Flood receded. It seems to show the remains of a huge boat-shaped vessel, and the dimensions of the formation do more-or-less tally with those given in Genesis - and some intriguing artifacts have been found around the formation. It seems compelling evidence indeed, although the structure does match surrounding geology. And yet another strange prow-shaped formation known as the Ararat Anomaly has been spotted on the very slopes of snowy Ararat. There's just one snag with the remains of these supposed Arks: the location of the Ark, if it ever existed, is probably not the Biblical Ararat at all.

Were it not for the fact that I had been reading a *book on a different subject (the Biblical Nephilim), I might not have chanced across this nugget of information. But apparently the Biblical phrase 'mountains of Ararat' (note the plural) is translated from the Assyrian 'mountains of Urartu', a sprawling kingdom that then lay between present Turkish Kurdistan and Russian Armenia (the map above) - a far less specific and more vast  location. As both Urartu and Ararat originally would have been written as RRT (without vowels), there originally was no difference between the names 'Ararat' and 'Urartu'. So it seems that our popular notion of the Ark coming to rest on the top of Mount Ararat needs some impartial revision. But is it anywhere to be found at all? Just how feasible in the first place is the Ark in terms of being a built structure?

Willem Vos is a name to conjour with here in Holland. He is a master-shipbuilder whose stunning achievement has been to recreate a full-scale replica of the wooden 17th century Dutch East Indiaman, the Batavia (above). This is no theme park attraction, but a museum-standard research project; a faithful and seaworthy reconstruction built using only the original tools and methods. Working with the assistance of a small army of student volunteers and maritime archaeologists (one of whom I have worked with, but that - and the fate of the original Batavia - is another story!), the project took ten long years to complete - and the reborn Batavia has been under full sail on the open seas.

So with the *claim by Mr. Ham that the Ark which Noah built would have been 'eminently seaworthy', and with the achievement of Willem Vos in mind, I set about doing the math. The Batavia is 56½ meters (186 feet) long. Converting Biblical cubits to contemporary measure, the Ark would have been (conservatively) some 137 to 140 meters long – almost three times the Batavia’s length. So what about other large wooden ships known from history? There was the U.S.S. ironclad Dunderberg, launched in 1865, purchased by France and renamed the Rochambeau. At 115 meters long, it is one of the largest documented wooden-hulled vessels known. Alas, it was considered 'neither stable nor seaworthy' because of it’s size, and after serving only briefly in the Baltic was decommissioned and scrapped. And there was the similarly-sized six-masted schooner Wyoming, launched in 1909. At 100 meters long, it needed iron cross-bracing to counter warping in its timbers caused by wave motion, and a steam pump to handle constant serious leakage. Having run from a storm, it sank in sheltered waters with the loss of all hands.

But what was the problem with these floating wooden giants? Why can't we just build a wooden vessel as large as we please? Well, that’s where the engineering factor comes in, because this equation states simply enough that the greater the wooden structure, the more the structural integrity is compromised. In other words: the larger a wooden vessel is, the weaker it becomes. Calculating in this factor means that an 80-90 meter keel is probably the safe outer limit for a wooden vessel – and the Ark was half as long again as this. But what was the source of the Ark’s building material? The ‘gopher wood’ (‘gopher’ could have meant a method of treatment, rather than a type of tree) could have been the large cedar of Lebanon, whose maximum height is about 40 meters. The Ark’s keel would therefore have required at least four separate trunks laid end-to-end – and any shipwright will tell you that a ship’s weakness lies in the joins of its keel. But to be frank about it, in all his long life 'shipbuilder' Noah probably had not built so much as a rowing boat before - and was building the Ark with the most ominous deadline in human history looming over his head.

So it seems that Kenneth Ham's proposed land-locked Ark is driven more by a flair for showmanship than by daring faith. But if I remain unconvinced, what, then, might sway me? How about: once the creationist Ark is completed, fill it to capacity with assorted [1]fauna both wild and domestic (I'm being generous in not insisting that those Argentinian anteaters are aboard), get it waterborne, crew it with eight hands who between them have zero experience of seamanship (I'm sure that Mr. Ham will confidently volunteer to captain the vessel), and tow it down to the latitude of the Roaring Forties to simulate [2]sea conditions during the Flood. Then cut it loose to ride out the monster waves for a period of seven months (as specified in Genesis), with no means of turning the craft into the weather. If I could stand on the coast and watch the Ark sail safely back to port, then I might - just might - start to believe. Until then, my conclusion will be that such an overly-massive wooden structure as Noah's Ark, had it ever existed, would have broken its back as soon as it hit the water.

Long ago, a man built a *great wooden vessel to escape a deluge sent as divine retribution to destroy all humankind, except for this chosen man and his family and the beasts of the field which he took on board with him. When the terrible destroying waters at last abated, he released in turn a dove and a raven to help him find signs of dry land. Sound familiar? This man’s name was Ut-napishtim, and his story was recorded on Babylonian clay tablets several centuries before the story of Noah was written.

Hawkwood

[1]Having written the above, after some thought I've decided to offer Mr. Ham a more-than-generous concession. In place of all those animals, I'll allow him to substitute sandbags to approximate the collective faunal weight. You'll guess my reason. I just don't like the thought of all those animals going under.

[2]When discussing this subject it's a usually overlooked factor that with no land masses to cause barometric differences and deflect them, storm-force winds would have raged continuously around the flooded planet, as they do for the same reason on planets such as Jupiter and Neptune. My depiction of the Ark in such weather conditions (top image), is for more than mere dramatic effect. The seas of the Flood would have been an unrelenting succession of perfect storms.

Sources:

*www.answersingenesis.org

*Andrew Collins: From the Ashes of Angels, pub. Michael Joseph

*Andrew George: The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated with an introduction, pub. Penguin Classics

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The Ark's true proportions
Note added 26 October, 2012: I like to get things right if I can - and it's also important to me that others can rely on what they read and see here. Since I posted it, my painting of Noah's Ark (top image) has bothered me. I based the Ark upon the commercial model produced by Minicraft Models, whose manufacturers assure us that it is 'produced to cubit scale'. As it turns out, it's not! What bothered me about my painting is that the Ark actually looks credibly seaworthy. It makes you believe that it just might ride out those monster waves after all.

But there are two issues here. The first is the term 'Ark'. The actual Hebrew word used is tebah, which indicates some kind of unspecified container or vessel: something that will sustain and protect the life within it. For this reason this same word tebah is also aptly used to describe the basket in which the infant Moses was found. No mention of any boat shape - or even box shape, as some Ark depictions show.

The second point is that the dimensions given in Genesis (300 cubits long, 30 high, and 50 wide) produce a very different proportion to the Minicraft Ark. These scriptural proportions produce a shape more resembling the proportions of large steel container ships of today - that is: of extreme length in proportion to the narrowness of their beam. As a wooden hull, it would have been more shockingly vulnerable even than my description in this post. The timbers of a hull of such extended length and slender width would have been under constant lateral stress from wave action even in moderate seas. There is also the factor that a vessel without steering tends to turn beam-on to the weather (that is: the waves would be hitting it side-on). This effect, known as broaching, would have caused ever-greater instability and the constant threat of a rollover. Serious leakage and an eventual hull breach would have been inevitable - and even this is assuming that a wooden hull of such massive weight and vulnerably slim length could manage to get fully waterborne in the first place. The stress points along the extended length of the keel - if indeed it had one - would have been compromised to the point of collapse from the collective weight of its cargo plus the weight of the timber of the vessel itself.

The Chinese Treasure Ships

Note added 13 October 2013: What has so far been omitted from this post is mention of the early 15th-century Chinese baochuan treasure ships, which written accounts claim to have been up to 137 meters (450ft) long and 55 meters (180ft wide). If these accounts are trustworthy, then they would have been the same length as the conservative estimate for the Ark in my diagram above. The difficulty with these accounts is that the ships themselves do not exist, and (with the exception of an excavated possible large rudder board) there is no actual physical evidence for them. Had they existed, they might have been of comparable length to the Ark, but their beam was proportionally far wider than the Ark’s Biblical dimensions, which would have provided considerably greater stability. Scholars nevertheless are skeptical – for the very engineering reasons which I have cited above. Being constructed entirely of wood, the flexibility of the structure on the open ocean would have been dangerously compromised even in moderate weather. It is possible that wooden vessels of this size were constructed – but would have been used primarily for show, and would not have left the safety of the Yangtze river. The diagram above is from the July 2005 National Geographic.

The Ark Encounter exhibit opens under leaden skies.
Note that the main door on this 'reconstruction' would actually have been below the vessel's waterline.

The Ark Encounter exhibit
Note added 15 September 2016: The Ark Encounter attraction is now open to the public, and you can visit the website here. The website describes the Ark as 'amazingly seaworthy' - a determinedly optimistic assertion which all that is said in this post continues to refute. If you go to the 'About the Ark' topic on the website you'll see a close-up of the hull timbers. The timbers are not even clinker-built, but are laid flush with each other: a recipe for disaster for such a large wooden structure in any waterborne situation.

The exhibit's organizers also claim that it is the most accurate version of the Ark ever built. But how can they determine this? The scriptural description gives the bare measurements and nothing more - and we do not even conclusively know how long a 'cubit' was, or even what 'gopher wood' was. So what are the criteria for such claims of 'accuracy'? When it comes to creationist claims, showmanship, apparently, counts for more than intellectual honesty.

Apparently Kentucky was hit by torrential rains and floods at the time the exhibit opened. It's tempting to conclude that the Almighty was signalling to those responsible for the exhibit finally to put their money (or rather: their painfully literalist beliefs) where their mouth is and actually get the thing to sea (to be realistic: in a powerful storm). But they won't, of course. Not now, not ever. No-one wants to watch their dearly-held beliefs capsize and sink like a stone.

Dinosaurs in their enclosures on board the Ark. Really??

Respect

In this week’s [1]newspaper the Dutch philosopher and columnist Martin Slagter questions the assumed right of religious beliefs to command automatic respect. Our very laws are slanted in favour of this, both socially and politically. But, Slagter wonders, just how justified is such a stance really? I weighed Slagter’s words against my own experiences. Right here in Holland, in my own neighbourhood, Christian Calvinists have averted their eyes and turned their backs on me when I have walked past them, apparently for no other reason than that my appearance is fairly goth (how ironic, then, that both they and myself favour wearing black!). When considered simply as preferred lifestyles, there is no reason whatever that my Calvinist neighbours should not give me as much social acceptance as I would give to them. And yet in some mysterious way, because their own lifestyle is belief-driven, they apparently assume the moral high ground, and their actions leave me feeling judged by them accordingly.

On various Internet forums I have had much experience debating the case for science (drawn from my own professional experience) with numerous Fundamentalist Christian creationists who clearly considered that Charles Darwin is almost interchangeable with the Prince of Darkness himself, and who regarded the theory of evolution as the ultimate heresy. The sheer toxic invective directed at the theory of evolution in general, and Darwin in particular, actually took me aback the first time I encountered it. And it was not so long ago that a furore broke out here in Holland when it was discovered that the Christian Evangelical channel was broadcasting David Attenborough’s commendable Life of Mammals nature series with the scenes which referred directly to evolution discreetly edited out.

To encounter minds right here in the 21st century which sincerely believe that dinosaurs were on board Noah’s Ark (which they had to be, if one also believes that all animals were created within one extremely busy week), and that the Earth is no more than [2]6,000 years old, was an experience for me almost akin to culture shock. I don’t go toe-to-toe with creationists any more (these days I’d sooner more fruitfully spend my time writing my blogs!), but in the two years which I did so, I encountered some very strange minds indeed in the anti-evolution camp. ‘Strange’ in the sense of apparently being willfully misshapen by the very religious beliefs which they sought to uphold.

Borders inside ourselves can be slipped over without our even noticing, and these include borders of human decency: of a sense of moral worth in what we believe as religious faith, and the acts which we perform in the name of such faith. Inevitably, this now includes those acts of social violence and terror which are committed in the name of Islam. To physically attack another – even to take a life - in the name of ‘upholding’ one’s faith is to diminish both oneself and, inevitably, one’s faith as well. And how bitterly ironic is it that you exultantly proclaim that ‘God is great!’ at the very moment that you take the lives of those (as someone doing so surely must believe) who are the creations of that same God?

I personally see no reason why religious belief as such should be granted respect as part of any privileged package deal simply because it is religious belief, and not some other form of moral code or ethical principle. Sure, we should respect the worldviews of others, but that respect should have more to do with a deeply-driven sense of human decency, of ‘doing the right thing’. And in religion, alas, that is not always present. Should I respect a religion whose ultimate authority on this Earth throws a mantle of tacit inaction - even protection - over the systematic and long-term pedophiliac activities of those answerable to it, instead of firmly establishing its own moral authority by conducting a rigorous and sweeping root-and-branch excision from their holy offices of the offending priests who have been responsible for ruining so many young lives?

Steven Weinberg said: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things… that takes religion.” Everything in me wishes that it were not so. Desperate experience shows that it is.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Martin Slagter: Geloofsovertuiging is ook maar een mening (‘Religious conviction is also just an opinion’), in De Volkskrant, 3 October, 2012.

[2] For those unfamiliar with the arcane logic of creationists, they rely for this particular bit of reasoning on the calculations of Archbishop James Ussher, who in the 17th century totted up all those Biblical ‘begattings’ to conclude that the creation of the Earth took place on the evening before 24 October, 4004 BC. I try to be tolerant of others, I really do. But truth to tell, inside a creationist’s head is not a place that a sane, well-balanced person would wish to be.

Sources:

Top image: Alberta Human Services. 2nd image: AnimalPhotos! 3rd image: Associated Press.

The Stone from Satan’s Crown

Central America in the 16th century. The empire of the Aztecs and their allies is being overrun by the forces of Hernán Cortez. Conquistadores plunder while Catholic priests turn hundreds of sacred books into towering bonfires. In the Mixtec capital of Achiotlan the resident priest, Father Benito Hernández, comes into the possession of a sacred stone much revered by the Mixtec, known as the People's Heart. The stone is a wondrous thing. Father Burgoa, an eyewitness to the events, described the stone as being an emerald as large as a capsicum, “upon which a small bird was engraved with the greatest skill, and, with the same skill, a small serpent coiled ready to strike. The stone was so transparent that it shone from its interior with the brightness of a candle flame.”

We are lucky to have this preserved description, for it is all that remains to tell us of this remarkable stone’s appearance. Another Spaniard present offered the priest three thousand ducats for it. But Hernández did more than merely turn down the handsome offer. He carried his priestly destructive zeal to the extreme: first he had the priceless gem ground down to powder, then mixed the pulverised mass with water, poured it out upon the Mixtec earth, and trampled it underfoot.

Even given the wholesale destruction of such cultural artefacts which took place during this period, Father Hernández’ obliteration of this particular treasure seems to have gone that extra mile in terms of its finality - an indication of the priest’s drive, not merely to destroy the stone, but to erase its actual presence from the world. I wondered why this might be so. Could the priest perhaps have thought that he had chanced upon the fabled emerald said to have fallen to earth from the crown of Satan during the war in heaven? This fabulous jewel is said to be as legendary and as mystical as the Holy Grail. Stronger yet: for some, it actually is the Grail, with the Grail’s miraculous ability to confer enlightenment upon its possessor.

According to the legend, Adam possessed the stone in Eden, but left it behind after his expulsion. Seth, the son of Adam, briefly returned to the earthly paradise to retrieve it, and from that time it has been in the world, its whereabouts unknown. Perhaps the priest who stood frenziedly trampling the conquered soil imagined that his act of obliteration was in some tangible way a triumph over Satan - an act which would forever deny the Prince of Darkness any possibility of restoring his crown to completeness and glory. But evil does not reside in a stone: it is within ourselves. Father Hernández destroyed nothing except what would now be viewed as a priceless cultural treasure, and his own dark shadow remained behind in its place.

Hawkwood

Sources:

The images for this post are adapted from Gustave Doré's depictions of the fall of Satan. An account of the destruction of the Mixtec emerald can be found in Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods. The possible connection between Father Hernández' motive for destroying the stone and the legend of the stone from Satan's crown is my own.

Renaissance Snuff

The city of Tournai (Doornik), not far from what is now the border between Belgium and France, in the year 1547. In a theatre a performance is being given which portrays the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, and her fearless beheading of the mighty Assyrian general in a bid to save her beleaguered town. The drama-charged moment of the actual beheading scene arrives. The audience is silent. With a single sure blow the sword falls, and the audience recoils in horror as the head of the actor playing Holofernes drops to the stage with bloody finality. Then the audience erupts, some shouting in appalled indignation while as many others cheer wildly. They have witnessed an actual death.

Or have they? No incident that I can think of brings the line between art and life, between illusion and reality, so shockingly into sharp focus as this one. Is this story a Renaissance urban legend? Did the audience in that theatre witness an early snuff drama in which someone actually dies? The forest of hearsay surrounding the story seems impenetrable, but some details emerge:

The 'actor' playing the part of Holofernes for the evening was actually a serial murderer who, when presented with the ghastly choice, opted for the role as an alternative to a more prolonged and agonising death by torture. Perhaps also he had hoped that the young actor (for we are still in an era when women were not permitted a stage presence) would balk at delivering the blow. In the event, it seems that the organizers of the drama were already a step ahead of him, and had persuaded a youth condemned to banishment to take over the role for the evening, the carrot on this particular stick being that his sentence would then be revoked upon the successful completion of his task.

And so all was in place for the performance. But did it actually happen? The town records were destroyed in a fire in 1940, and we are left looking down a long tunnel of circumstantial suggestion. For me, the odds tend to tip on the side of factual. There are just too many persuasive details, and the story must have come from somewhere. So let's say that it actually happened. And if it did, then we find ourselves at another shocking interface.

You can search the Bible for the story of Judith and Holofernes, but you won't find it. The Book of Judith, for so many centuries an accepted part of the canon, was dropped from the Old Testament as late as the 1880's, apparently mostly on the grounds that it was just too historically suspect. Puzzling enough when you consider that so much of scripture is actually historically [1]unverifiable. But it seems that the [2]Book of Judith was viewed as more of a novel, a work of fiction. Which in turn means that we now have the grimly bizarre situation in which a performance in the arts was more real than the event which it purported to portray. Art, it seems, can not only be more real than life: at times it can even supersede it, and the illusion becomes the terrible reality.

Hawkwood

Notes:
[1] My post The Butcher of Canaan is an in-depth scrutiny of the Old Testament's Book of Joshua, which concludes from all the historical evidence that the Israelites' conquest of Canaan under the command of Joshua never actually happened, and this book in scripture, as with the Book of Judith, is therefore largely a work of fiction. This being so (and it is, according to the weight of contemporary academic conclusions), it seems reasonable to ask: why is this book still canonical scripture, when The Book of Judith was omitted from the canon for exactly this reason?

[2] These scriptural texts were often written many centuries after the events which they purported to describe. Their unknown writers did not have the perspective on history which we now have, and ancient stories which finally were committed to text had already been interwoven with considerable embellishments as a heritage stemming from an oral tradition.  


Sources:
Jody Enders: Medieval Snuff Drama, published by the University of North Carolina (the author uses the term 'Medieval' in her title and article for stylistic reasons, as the period is actually the Renaissance).
Louis Goosen: Van Abraham tot Zacheüs, published by Sun, Amsterdam.

The images for this post are details of the statue in alabaster of Judith by Conrat Meit, in the Bavarian National Museum. The statue was created in the late 1520's - just two decades before the events related here. This statue and other works of art portraying Judith are now featured as a post on my blog: On Being the Opposite of a Moth. You are welcome to visit and see them here: Judith: The Woman with a Sword

Martin Luther's Final Solution

In a city in Germany a man sits writing. The article which he writes urges the indiscriminate killing of the entire agrarian class of his country - some one hundred thousand individuals. In another article written eight years later he advocates the forced expulsion from Germany of all Jews, and the burning of their books and places of worship. Who is this man? Some jackbooted official risen through the ranks of the Third Reich, eager to expand upon Der Führer's Final Solution? In fact, we are in the Germany of the sixteenth century, and the man is Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism.

Discovering this about Luther was shocking enough for me, but the more so because I coincidentally learned of it shortly after reading in some detail in another book about the debauchery of the Renaissance popes. This decades-long era of papal degeneracy began with Alexander VI, whose idea of partying was apparently to watch while naked whores scrambled around on their hands and knees to retrieve chestnuts tossed by his dinner guests. Prizes of fine apparel were then awarded to those guests who could couple (successfully) the most times with the chestnut-chasing courtesans. These decidedly secular and morally bankrupt papacies finally came to an end over sixty years later when Clement VII died - but there was plenty of time in those misspent decades to party along in the style for which Alexander had set the precedent.

Luther's triumph was to nail his historic ninety five theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg, each blow of his hammer a cry of defiance against the misdeeds of Rome. My own mistake was to romanticise Luther's gesture and to perceive him as being the 'good guy' whose personal moral compass compelled him to reject the wrong turn which Christianity had taken at that time. What is historical fact is that Luther's stand against the papacy created the first great rift with universal Catholicism in that era, and in the process Protestantism was born. The other less comfortable facts about Luther's own moral stance are equally historically documented, but seldom aired, and even less commonly known. And yet all these historical documents exist to establish them as known facts.

So what happened? Tragedy. The ruling class in Germany took Luther at his word, and those 100,000 upstart peasants were slain. Luther had urged genocide, and genocide was what took place. That the founder of Protestantism turned out to be an anti-semitic advocate of mass slaughter is something I'm still trying to get my head around. And when set alongside such human darkness, Pope Alexander's capering naked courtesans seem almost forgiveable. Almost.

Hawkwood

Image:

Detail from 'Luther posting his 95 theses in 1517', painted in 1872 by Ferdinand Pauwels.

Sources:

The two articles by Luther cited in this post are: 'Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants', published as a pamphlet in 1525, and 'On the Jews and Their Lies', published as a pamphlet in 1543. The six chapters about the Renaissance popes can be read in 'The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam', by Barbara W. Tuchman. The essay 'The Diet of Worms and the Defenestration of Prague' can be found in the collection of essays: 'Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms', by Stephen J. Gould.

Lemuria: The Land Before Atlantis

Just over one hundred years ago, the visionary William Scott-Elliott drew a map of the world. But the unfamiliar continents on Scott-Elliott's map looked very different from those found on our own maps. What he had drawn were the mystic coastlines of Lemuria. But what was Lemuria, and where had the idea come from? 

Earlier in the 19th century society was abuzz with the then-revelutionary ideas of Charles Darwin, and when it was noted that Madagascan lemurs were as widespread as Africa and India, a reason had to be found for how they crossed the oceans. Nowadays we know that the great drift of the continents can provide much of the explanation, but with no other evidence available, the 19th century provided its own answer: there must have been a huge landmass between the oceans which later sank beneath the waves. An English zoologist suggested a name for this ill-fated land: Lemuria, after the lemurs.

But what had begun as a scientifically motivated idea drifted into other very different waters. The Russian occultist Madame Blavatsky took up the idea of the lost land, and her writings (most of which were claimed to have been written in trance) tell of seven mysterious 'root races' which existed before humans as we know them today. Not all of these root races were material beings, and the third were the Lemurians, whom she described as 'giant, ape-like beings', who had no written language, but who could communicate telepathically. After the destruction of Lemuria it was the turn of Atlantis, and as the fourth root race was the first to have material bodies, the Lemurians presumably were somewhere between the first two (named the astral and etheric) and the material Atlanteans, so presumably were able to slip between both the ethereal and the material worlds.

After Madame Blavatsky, William Scott-Elliott stepped onto the stage to carry the idea forward, but the story of Lemuria had yet another twist. In 1932 a Los Angeles reporter visiting the Mount Shasta region in northern California saw unexplained lights swirling around the mountain (my reconstruction above). A local told him that these strange lights were 'Lemurians holding ceremonials', and so the whole aura of Mount Shasta being the last refuge for these semi-visible beings took hold, and was further enhanced by fictional works that cast the location and its mysterious inhabitants as a refuge for a priestly community charged with guarding ancient wisdom.

Hawkwood

POSTSCRIPT: When I began writing this post, I had no idea that it might contain a possible connection with the Bigfoot phenomenon. But one thing is clear: at the time that she was writing (or being 'dictated' to?), Blavatsky could have had no knowledge of the later Bigfoot reports. A mysterious race of 'giant, ape-like beings', able to communicate telepathically and perhaps dematerialise at will? Several witnesses report inexplicable feelings that a sighted Bigfoot creature had gotten 'into their mind'. One witness, a veteran of several encounters with a specific individual, even described the sensation as a 'mind grab' - as unpleasant as it was unwelcome. And the idea that Bigfoot can slip in and out of our material world is also supported by the experiences of several witnesses. More questions than answers - but maybe on my first image for this post, instead of painting a mystic 'Mount Shasta' guardian being, it would have been more appropriate - and closer to Blavatsky's own description - had I shown Bigfoot! And curiously enough, northern California is replete with reports of the Bigfoot phenomenon.

Sources:

Jennifer Westwood: 'Lemuria: The Elusive Continent', in The Atlas of Mysterious Places

B. Ann Slate and Alan Berry: 'Bigfoot'. Whether you give credence to the phenomenon or not, Slate and Berry's book, as unputdownable as any thriller and at times genuinely chilling, makes for compelling reading. I first read it back in the '70's, and am gratified to learn from recent reviews that it is now regarded as a classic in its field. Alan Berry was the first researcher to record purported Bigfoot vocalizations. When on his website I listened to one of them with my headphones innocently turned to max volume, I so shocked that I involuntarily tore off my headset. Whatever made those sounds, it certainly wasn't mere human mimicry. And to forestall the obvious next question: no, it sure wasn't a bear either! An original edition is now worth around $70.oo, but reprints should still be available.

Hawkwood and Divine Retribution

"For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book."

Stern words indeed. These are almost the very last words spoken in the book of Revelation, and therefore in the Bible itself. They read like a sort of 1st century notice of copyright, reinforced with the threat of terrible divine retribution. And they apply to me.

For awhile now I have been working on a video which is my own interpretation of the book of Revelation, and in the course of creating that video I have indeed been 'adding unto' and 'taking away from' the words which are written there. I have shaped and changed the visions of John of Patmos to suit my own creative ends, following wherever my own vision of things led me.

This has included a necessary pushing beyond the limiting dualities of the scriptures (God=good, Devil=bad) to portray a perceived mystic connection between The Woman Clothed with the Sun, who in John's writings is presented as all that is virtuous, and the Whore of Babylon, who is portrayed as being vile beyond redemption - a connection so extreme that the description of mere heresy hardly covers it.

So am I holding my breath waiting for assorted plagues to strike me down, and for my impending banishment from the holy city to take effect? Hardly. It is an easy matter to start thinking along the lines of: 'if I do (or don't do) such-and-such, then bad things will happen to me', and the line between faith and fear-driven superstition can be crossed without our even being aware of it.

Hawkwood

My video REVELATIONS has since been uploaded to YouTube and can be viewed here:
REVELATIONS: The End of Time

Anthony of the Desert: Life as Fiction

"Not all true things are the truth" cautioned [1]Clement of Alexandria. He had in mind those writings which he considered to be heretical, but which are now perceived as orthodox. His very orthodox fellow Alexandrian, the bishop Athanasius, earned his own place in history by ordering the destruction of all texts which he personally considered fell outside what was right and proper for Christians to accept as The Truth.

History, as we know, is full of grand ironies. It was the fear of Athanasius' destructive edicts which led a group of unknown monks to remove over fifty volumes from their precious library in the nearby monastery and seal them in a large earthenware jar. The jar they then buried in the Egyptian desert sands. That jar would lay silent and undiscovered for the following sixteen centuries, its contents safely preserved within. When it was rediscovered in 1945 those contents would become known as the Gnostic gospels, and would at last give the writers of these early texts their own place in history. Some voices, it seems, are just not meant to be silenced.

The secrets which those recovered texts tell is a post on this blog for another time. What is relevant here is another claim to fame by Athanasius (the engraving, below): as the author of what became a hugely popular biography of Saint Anthony - Anthony of the Desert, as he became known. One Christian history [2]website which I am currently viewing claims that Athanasius is "ranked, even today, among the greatest exponents of Christian doctrine". The article unsurprisingly fails to mention the bishop's destructive zeal, which went beyond the burning of books to include his annexing of the churches and monasteries where these books were accepted spiritual texts.

But in Athanasius' drive to silence any dissenting voices, the widely-popular Anthony (Albrecht Dürer's engraving, below) presented the bishop with a problem. Anthony's whole life had been an expression of all which the bishop disagreed with: an intensely personal quest for an experience of the divine, which was itself an expression of gnostic values which involved the sidelining of any hierarchical Church authority - including that of a bishop. Ah, what to do, then, about Anthony?

The canny bishop seems to have approached the problem of Anthony with the shrewdness of a spin doctor. Instead of attacking the popular visionary, and so risking disfavour among the populace, Athanasius decided to reinvent him. In the supposedly biographical 'Life of Anthony', the articulate and erudite saint is transformed into an illiterate and humble monk, who rejects the personal values which the real Anthony held, and whose life is the very paragon of all the doctrines which the bishop advocated. Athanasius even tacked on a wholly fictitious ending to his story, in which the saint bequeaths his humble hermit's cloak to the author as his worthy successor. Perhaps predictably, the so-called biography was a huge and influential success. More than that, it came to be viewed as a true account of the saint's life, and the effectiveness of Athanasius' rewriting of reality is seen even today in the catholic acceptance of this most gnostic of visionaries as one of their own.

It is only through the discovered letters, now accepted by scholars as being written by Anthony himself, that we know the true picture. And it seems that without any gainsaying documents, history - even someone's life - can be turned into a work of fiction.

Hawkwood

This post is complementary to my current post about Anthony of the Desert on my other blog, which portrays Anthony's visions. You are welcome to visit and read my post Temptations.



Notes:

[1] Clement would himself suffer the same fictionalizing process as Anthony: a Gnostic who was reinvented by the church as a pillar of Catholic orthodoxy - as also was Paul. In his own lifetime a Gnostic, Paul's writings were later amended to give them an orthodox bias, and several of his letters were forged by other hands to become the scriptural writings now in the New Testament. 'Saint Paul' is therefore also an invention of the Church of Rome.

  
[2] Athanasius: Pugnacious Defender of Orthodoxy


Sources:
Elaine Pagels: 'Revelations: Visions, Prophesy and Politics in the Book of Revelation'
Samuel Rubenson: 'The Letters of Anthony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint'