The Secret Tongues of Angels

In heaven, we are told, hosts of angels sing the praises of the Deity in never-ending glory and affirmation. If we could transcribe their mysterious words, how might they appear? I drew these characters to suggest something of this secret tongue of the angels to incorporate into a piece of [1]art which I was then creating. It was important for me that the characters credibly looked as if they might, just might, belong to a coherent written language.

Now look at this other example of unknown script below. It is a particular treasure of mine, and was found among the effects of my late great-uncle, who (so the story in our family goes) is said to have copied it from characters inscribed upon a small metallic disk which as a young man he found while hiking in the remote Yakima Reservation in Washington State. Convincing? Not really. It’s by me again, I’m afraid. As far as I am aware, my great-uncle never set foot on the Yakima reservation. I myself wrote out the characters in pencil on a sheet of paper, aged to suggest an earlier time frame.

An alien language? Or perhaps not..

My point is that, with a little flair and imagination, it is possible to devise such scripts. On a considerably grander scale than my own modest efforts, J.R.R. Tolkien did the same in his epic works of fantasy with the scripts which he called ‘Elvish’. The example below, stylishly calligraphed by Maciej Garbowski, is in an Elvish script known as [2]Tengwar, used initially by the author to write the language of angelic supernatural immortals. Tolkien’s sophisticated approach to these fictional tongues was based upon his scholarly knowledge of Runic and other proto-European languages, and with this academic grounding to back up his fantasy, he took the development of such fictional scripts far. There is even an [3]organization that studies and perpetuates what he began.

Tengwar script: the script of Tolkien's angels and elves.

But even such an adept as Tolkien must bow to what I personally consider to be the benchmark of such scripts: the modestly-sized volume which has been called ‘the most mysterious book in the world’: the [4]Voynich manuscript. Dated to the 15th-century, this book is filled with strange and whimsical illustrations of what appear to be botanical studies, astrological diagrams of stars and cavorting damsels. But it is the astonishingly confident script which is interspersed between these that arrests the attention. Calligraphic and elegant in appearance, the script flows effortlessly on for well over a hundred pages – and yet not so much as a single word has ever been deciphered.

The elaborate script in the Voynich manuscript remains undeciphered to this day.

Not that this lack of our ability to read the book has been for want of trying. Cryptographers and linguists, experts in their field, have all attempted to wrestle its secrets free, but without success. The Voynich manuscript remains almost as much of a mystery today as it was when it came to light in our contemporary era in 1912. It is a secret code. It is an elaborate hoax. Both options are possible. But the accomplishments of Tolkien and the unknown author of the Voynich manuscript in creating these seemingly-convincing though apparently fictitious languages are self-evident.

A diagram from the Voynich manuscript which suggests either a map of a celestial city, or even a plan of Eden with its flowing four rivers - or neither of these things.

With his Tengwar script Tolkien attempted to suggest the language of angels. But he made no claim to any authenticity in this direction. Not so with my next example. The characters on the document below are claimed to be the actual authentic tongue of angels. This photograph, which came to light as recently as [5]2012, is apparently the only evidence we have for the appearance of the characters on the gold plates alleged to have been unearthed from a Native American burial mound by Joseph Smith, the self-styled prophet and founder of the [6]Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known informally as the Mormons. No hard evidence for these plates has ever been produced, so this transcription purported to be from one of them, apparently written by Smith himself, is our only record of the appearance of the script which Smith translated as the Book of Mormon.

The only evidence for the appearance of Joseph Smith's angelic language is this photograph of a passage purportedly from one of the gold plates of the original Book of Mormon.

 Smith named the script ‘Reformed Egyptian’: a language unknown either to linguists or cryptographers. He might have been incautious in specifying the name of the purported language. To give it an Egyptian connection invites comparison with an existing script such as Coptic. But it bears no resemblance either to Coptic, Demotic, Syriac, or any other [7]regional written language. The devil is in the term 'reformed', which can mean anything and everything that one chooses it to mean.

Demotic text as a vernacular form of Egyptian hieroglyphs written beneath such hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone. Neither Demotic (which itself could be described as 'reformed Egyptian') nor any other regional language of the time bear any more than a superficial resemblance to the Mormon characters.

And so we must judge this script on this one surviving example – a photograph of an alleged transcription whose whereabouts are unknown of an original for which we have no evidence. Why, when the copyist presumably had the original before him, and knew therefore how much space he had at his disposal to write the passage, do the characters become squeezed for space towards the paper’s fold? These scrawled characters are, remember, purported to be the actual authentic language of angels: they literally are the [8]basis upon which a new religion has been founded.

A [9]detail of the transcript alleged by Joseph Smith to be the language of angels.

The alleged transcript seems intriguing, but when compared with the sophisticated mystery of the text in the undeciphered Voynich manuscript, or Tolkien’s elegant Tengwar, it appears clumsy and amateurish – bearing in mind that, if the script is genuine, the writer did not have to invent, but merely copy. Certainly when viewed alongside the superior accomplishments of Tolkien and the unknown author of the Voynich manuscript, and when considered objectively, outside of any context of religious belief, the characters in the transcript would appear to be a fabrication, and a mediocre one at that.

Perhaps it is to regret that our faith apparently needs foundations of some material evidence on which it can be built. For if that claimed material evidence cannot be produced, or seems for one reason or another not to hold up to scrutiny, where does that leave us? What we might consider to be the truth of faith is something which is experienced in our hearts, in our innermost being, and that is where the voices of angels are most clearly heard.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] The Ecstasy of Icarus.

[2] Tengwar is the name of the script itself. The language is called Valarin, after the Valar immortals: Tolkien’s angels. 

[3] The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, with the appropriate acronym of E.L.F.

[4] Catalogued as MS 408 in the Yale University Library.

[5] The top half of this image – the half which includes the transcript – was known earlier, but the whole uncropped photographic plate was discovered among the effects of the Hicks photographic collection in December, 2012. The title The Book of the Generations of Adam can just be read on the lower fold.

[6] Please see my previous post A Harvesting of Souls about the Church of Mormon archives.

[7] According to paragraph 64 of chapter 1 of Joseph Smith's 1838 History, the characters were identified as "Egyptian, Chaldaic (sic), Assyriac (sic), and Arabic" by a Professor Charles Anthon in New York. Two of these four terms - Chaldean and Syriac (or Assyrian?) - are incorrect, and Anthon later distanced himself from any involvement, denying that he had validated the script. In any event, the characters are unrelated to these four bona fide languages of the Levant recognized by scholars. The four specified languages all stem from Aramaic, which would fit Smith's time frame, and which therefore would be the most appropriate language for the script, but which strangely is the one language which Smith (or Anthon) did not name.

The right-to-left reading Aramaic-derived Syriac (left) bears no resemblance to Smith's script. One is left to wonder why Smith took the risk of specifying the four languages which he claimed comprised his characters. Perhaps he considered that such names might lend his document an aura of authenticity - but did he seriously imagine that no one would actually check what he claimed for his mysterious script? In this linguistic sense, the claimed authenticity of Smith's document is comparatively easy to disprove.

[8] This post focuses on the purported characters of the Mormon angel script. The textual content and linguistic style of the Book of Mormon I regard as a separate issue, but clearly if the characters themselves are open to doubt, then the entire book and the story of its alleged coming to light must also be reasonably called into question, as in turn must the whole foundation of Mormon belief.

[9] From my own experience of devising such imaginary scripts I know that one has to consciously resist lapsing into forms which are already familiar from one's own language. The letter forms of H,L,M,D,V,T and Z can all be seen in this detail, as can various numerals: 4,6,2,3, and even ½. Were these characters copied from a totally unknown language (that is: one that was unknown at the time to Smith), the chances of this happening would be reduced to a negligible coincidence.

The 'H' in particular (above), which is repeated no less than five times in just this detail, typically follows the form of the capital 'H' in 19th-century penmanship. Curiously, another character, seen at 9 o'clock in the detail, is identical to the astrological sign for the planet Saturn (right). Clearly this could be coincidental - but it is not the sort of coincidence that copying the characters of an unknown language should produce. 


Note added 9 January 2015: I have only recently discovered the remarkable work of Ian James, who has created, not just one or two, but many different language scripts, all with authentic historical and ethnic origins, and all of which can be written coherently. These scripts are of such a creative order that (it has to be said) their level of sophistication, and the fact that they actually can be written with a lingual coherence, surely leaves the example of Joseph Smith floundering in the world of crude fabrication.

A quatrain from Omar Khayyâm, written in Ian James' Bostani script which is derived from Ancient Persian and Arabic sources.

 Ian James' website: Sky Knowledge.

A Harvesting of Souls

If you who are reading this are Catholic, or Baptist, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Neo-pagan, or agnostic or atheist, whatever your belief or non-belief, the chances that one of your deceased relatives has recently converted to the Church of Mormon are actually quite high. Deep in the impregnable heart of Granite Mountain in Utah are the high-security archives of the [1]Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, informally known as the [2]Mormons. These ever-growing archives so far list the names of some ten billion individuals garnered from all histories, cultures and geographies, and are recorded with a conscientious attention to detail that could reasonably be described as obsessive. But what end does this gargantuan exercise in religious bureaucracy serve?

A corridor in the Granite Mountain vaults.

It’s to do with converts. In religion, it usually is. Joseph Smith, the self-styled prophet and founding father of the Mormon Church, realized that if the living could offer potential fertile ground for swelling the numbers of his new religious movement, what possibilities for doing this must exist among the legions of the departed? The dead were, after all, [3]compliantly unresisting to new persuasions. All that would be needed would be to know the specific name of the deceased, then use a living member of his movement to act as a temporary host to the name – and a new [4]convert to the faith was created.

And so this practice of the harvesting of souls has continued, and continues to this day. The moral question of actually asking the permission of that person’s surviving kin does not apparently figure in the Mormon scheme of things. What counts is eventually bringing the whole of the human race who have ever been a part of recorded history into the Church of Mormon. So far, the Church of Mormon is about a sixth of the way there. But before you object to this dubious practice (which, if you care about the moral rights and beliefs of your ancestors, you rightfully should), it might be worth looking at the viability of what is happening with all those billions of names in Granite Mountain, Utah.

The entrance to the Granite Mountain vaults, bored into the mountain itself.

The whole point of conversion, surely, is that the soul in question, whether living or dead, has undergone some sort of an epiphany which prompts the conversion. If such an experience has not taken place, then what does a conversion count for? A forced or unsolicited conversion is a mere hollow thing, a sham made under coercion. The current tragic and shameful plight of the abducted Nigerian schoolgirls is a case in point. Their captors claimed that the girls had converted to Islam – a claim which can only be treated with the scorn that it deserves, and yet another example of Islamists shooting themselves in the foot. In this sense, which is the only morally valid sense, the near-century-long Mormon practice of converting the dead by proxy has so far produced exactly zero new members to their faith.

The Family History Library in Salt Lake City.

On the plain below Granite Mountain in the Mormon-founded Salt Lake City is the more accessible Family History Library. Here members of the public can seek out their own ancestral lines, and perhaps discover (which seems to provide a strong motivation) that they might have a family connection with the aristocracy, or even with royalty. But is such a discovered blue blood connection really so remarkable? Not really, as it turns out. Because of the exponential growth of human populations, as long as you go back far enough in time, you almost certainly can turn up some famous name in your lineage. A considerable proportion of the western world apparently can genetically claim the Emperor Nero as an ancestor. Ah, but who would want to? But even this claiming of ancestors is not quite as cut-and-dried as it seems.

We predominantly inherit our DNA through the mitochondrial DNA of our mothers. It makes considerably more sense to trace our lineages through our maternal side than, as is the common practice at least in Western society, through our paternal parentage. A paternal family tree is a thing on paper, a mere compiling of male heirs. When it comes to inherited information, however, it makes little sense to science. But even this is not quite the end of the story.

The towering genius of William Shakespeare or the dark ruthlessness of Cesare Borgia: fragments of both might be contained in who you are.

Although they might not be inherited in a genetic sense, because matter in nature is not destroyed but transformed and recycled, we all have atoms in our bodies that once were a part of Shakespeare or Darwin or Emily Dickenson – or on the downside, one or other of the Borgias. It is a part of our human heritage, and it falls to us to balance these forces within us that make us what we are. And what we truly are cannot be determined by the religious beliefs of someone if those beliefs are not our own, however fervently they might imagine it to be so.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Joseph Smith, the Church’s founder (the anonymous portrait, left), claims to have discovered the Book of Mormon in 1823 in the form of a series of bound gold plates which he alleged that he unearthed from a Native American burial mound. The plates apparently were inscribed with characters in an unknown language, but having been given a device in the form of a special stone by an angel called Moroni, Smith found that he could read the text, which he then dictated as the Book of Mormon. Smith alleged that the angel then claimed the plates back, and no hard evidence for their existence has ever been produced. Having ordered a printing press establishment destroyed that was critical of both his beliefs and his polygamy, Smith, then in jail over the incident, was shot and killed when an angry mob stormed his place of incarceration. He was 38.

[2] Two Angels: Mormon and Moroni were the names of two father-son angels/ancient prophets alleged by Joseph Smith to have been involved in the production of the gold plates that were the original Book of Mormon. In an apparent attempt to imbue the New World with some Old World respectability, Smith claimed a New World scenario for the ancient events related in the Book of Mormon, which claims are unsupported either by the archaeological record or by contemporary DNA mapping.

[3] Baptizing the Dead: This practice of baptizing the dead, known as ‘baptism by proxy’ or ‘vicarious baptism’ has been performed by the Church of Mormon since 1840. The Church claims that the departed are given an option to decline the ceremony, but in all honesty, how can those performing the ceremony possibly know this? Are they communing with the dead to determine this? Such practices are forbidden under Biblical Mosaic law, so an inherent Christian doctrinal contradiction would seem to be present in the ceremony. The entire basis for the practice probably stems from a mistranslation from the Greek of the Old Testament Septuagint, where the term does not actually mean 'baptism' as such, but 'ritual washing', which would be entirely appropriate for the recently deceased. So it seems that the tradition is another example of a religious practice which has been founded upon a misunderstanding.  

[4] A Puzzle for Islamic Law: If your forebear happened to be an adherent of Islam, the curious situation now exists in which, although in Islamic law the prescribed penalty for apostasy is death, your forebear, being already dead, is beyond sentence. What are you going to do? 

Sources:

Steve Jones: In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny. Harper Collins, 1996. The substance of this post is drawn from the first chapter of Professor Jones’ book, in which the geneticist relates his own experience of his visit to the Family History Library.

Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything. Doubleday, 2003. At over 600 pages, this particular history is not as short as its whimsically ironic title suggests, but it is a generous gold mine of information, discussing each discipline of science with an entertaining accessibility of language which makes its hefty length flash by. It is the source of the statements in my post’s last paragraph.

The top three photographs are from official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints websites. The Voynich Manuscript is catalogued as MS 408 in the Yale University Library.

It's Real! It's Fake!

It's real! It's fake! No, it's... etc. The heated academic discussion grinds on about whether the papyrus fragment which makes mention of Jesus' wife is a forgery or not. The fragment (below) has Jesus referring to his wife who also is his disciple, mentioning a ‘Mary’ who presumably is Mary Magdalene, and is written in [1]Coptic on Papyrus which has been dated to the 7th-8th-centuries.

Validation of the source of the fragment, and the dating of the text itself, has been contentious since the fragment surfaced two years ago, and the debate about its authenticity rumbles on. I think I’ll let it. For me, the issue is not so much whether or not this particular fragment is authentic, but about what actually constitutes 'real' or 'fake' in the first place.

Paul as portrayed by Rembrandt. But which 'Paul' is the real one? Seven of the thirteen letters which carry his name in scripture are now known to be later forgeries.

Is a text 'real' because it is canonical, because it contains orthodox-approved ideas? Hardly. The seven 'pastoral' letters of Paul which appear in his name in the New Testament are now known to have been written decades later by an unknown hand with the intent to put an anti-Gnostic, pro-orthodox spin on a man who, as we now know, actually held Gnostic views, and might well have been Gnostic himself. In its rise to power, the orthodox Church sought to re-create Paul in its own [2]image, as a model of all the religious values which the historical Paul in his life abjured. And so, several decades after his death, these seven letters, which contain anti-female, anti-Gnostic statements, were written and signed in his name. These letters are as fake as the papyrus fragment might yet turn out to be - but I don't see anyone rushing to drop them from the canon.

A fragment from the Gospel of Judas. Considered heretical by the orthodox Church, it was excluded from the canon. From an orthodox point of view it turns the story of Jesus' betrayal on its head, making it clear that Jesus considered Judas to be the most selfless and courageous of his disciples for ensuring that his destiny would be fulfilled, knowing that this act would damn Judas' reputation forever. 

Are the Gospels of Thomas, or Judas, or Mary 'fake' because they appear nowhere in scripture? Of course they are not. The actual texts have been authenticated, as have many such ex-scriptural texts. Whether a text makes it into scripture or not has not depended upon whether it is ‘real' or ‘fake’, but often-enough upon the capricious personal opinion of a single individual. I can only conclude that those who consider scriptural texts to be the revealed word of God simply have not investigated the history of how those texts ended up between the covers of the Bible, and just how alarmingly arbitrary such keep-it-in, leave-it-out choices have at times been. But even all these fake-or-real criteria fade into moderate insignificance beside one sobering fact.

A section of the Dead Sea scroll which describes the building of the temple in Jerusalem. These ancient texts, whether they are canonical or whether they are excluded from scripture, come to us as fragments rescued from obscurity. It is only after-the-fact decisions which have determined that one text should be approved for inclusion in scripture and another rejected. But all such texts were once considered as sacred by one belief or another. 

Not a single scriptural text is known to be original. Instead what we have either are copies of copies, or translations from one language into another, with all the built-in hazards which such translating involves - as anyone who has [3]tried their hand at this will know. But even this is not just what is at issue. In almost all cases, we simply do not know who wrote these texts. A name is tagged onto a text, or a compilation of texts, at times long after the text was written, and we become familiar with such a text as [4]'The Gospel According to St. Mark', or 'The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah’.

But the reality on the ground is that we simply do not know, and have no way of conclusively confirming, who actually wrote these and other texts, or even the circumstances under which they were written. The term used for such texts is [5]pseudepigrapha – the assigning of authorship to a text when the true author is unknown or cannot be confirmed. In this sense, the whole of scripture (with the exception of the six authenticated letters of Paul) consists solely of pseudepigraphic writings.

The above text describes the building of the Jerusalem temple, and here Rembrandt depicts the prophet Jeremiah lamenting its later destruction. 

This is not to say that ascribing such authorship would necessarily have been a deliberate subterfuge. It is more that the mindset of those distant times, and the literary forms which that mindset produced, would not have thought it untoward to attach the name of some big-gun prophet or apostle to a text which one might have written oneself, perhaps with the intention of granting such a text an aura of authority or even of authenticity. Copyright laws, plagiarism and spurious authorship claims were still notions of the distant future, and the line between what we might consider to be real or fake had yet to be drawn.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] The Coptic text is itself probably a translation from Greek, which carries the implication (which holds true for many texts) that even if this particular fragment is a falsification in the sense that its dating does not conform to the historical context, it might well be a copy of an earlier authentic original. So proving this fragment to be falsified would not in itself prove that the text which it carries, and what that text says, is also false. That the text of the fragment could have been copied and translated from a now-lost Greek original is therefore entirely plausible.

[2] The same process of posthumously turning someone who held Gnostic values into a champion of orthodoxy was also exercised by Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria. This time it was Anthony whose life and values became rewritten in a fictitious biography penned by Athanasius that for centuries was regarded as fact. Please see my post Anthony of the Desert: Life as Fiction for more about this curious episode.  

[3] Please see my post A Simple Misunderstanding for some of the results of these hazards of translation and mistranslation in scripture.

[4] Please see my post The Gospel According to Somebody for a further investigation of Gospel authorship.

[5] For more about such pseudepigraphic writings - and a questionable contemporary Christian view of Gnosticism - please see my post Leaving the Cult.

Sources:

Hans-Josef Klauck: Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis. Baylor University Press, 2006. This study contains a complete chapter on all the letters attributed to Paul, also mentioning those not included in the New Testament. It places the letters in the historical and social context in which they were written, and examines both their writing style and their possible authorship in a rigorous depth of detail which my post here only outlines. The author points out that even in the letters which we reasonably can attribute to Paul himself, various additions and amendments to his text by later unknown others have been made which change the original context. The 'pastoral' letters appearing in the New Testament as 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus not only are conclusively not by Paul, they apparently are not to Timothy or Titus either, making them what Dr. Klauck describes as 'doubly pseudonomous'. Message, apparently, is a more important criterion than authenticity for a text's inclusion in scripture.



Elaine Pagels: The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters. Trinity Press International.

An academic review of the fragment can be read at: The Gospel of Jesus's Wife

Updated conclusions can be read at: The Gospel of Jesus's Wife: Introduction 

Further Q&A detailed discussion regarding current results of and conclusions about the fragment can be read via the task bar menu of this website (Harvard Divinity School). The conclusions at the time of the writing of this post are that the fragment is authentic to its time, and its text reflects genuine issues of doctrine being discussed at that time. These issues were concerned with whether or not wives could also become disciples, which Jesus appears to confirm.

The Fall of Saint Peter's

It begins with a single ominous crack which appears high overhead in the arched roof. For a few moments all is still, and it seems as if nothing further will happen, and that this negligible damage will be confined to nothing that a plasterer could not fix. But these few silent moments are the calm before the storm. Another snaking crack appears, and another, as the monolithic building is hastily evacuated. Then with a noise like gunshots most of the roof gives way, sliding in a welter of dust and crumbling masonry to the cold marble floor below…

The Fall of Saint Peter's

Supposing that there was an institution whose influence was as wide as the world. Supposing that, to achieve that influence and to consolidate its dominance on the stage of history, this institution had slaughtered [1]millions. Supposing that to further silence any dissenting voices, it had initiated a [2]body drawn from its own ranks which imprisoned and tortured both men, women and children, and that this body had continued its practices, not for months, nor even for years, but for long centuries. And supposing that those within its hierarchy had been, and continue to be, responsible through sexual abuse for ruining thousands of the young lives of those entrusted to its care, and that these perpetrators enjoy the [3]tacit protection of the very hierarchy to which they themselves belong. Now suppose that this institution presumes to found itself upon the rock of religious moral values, and continues to flourish even today.

“Though the mills of God grind slowly;

Yet they grind exceeding small;

Though with patience he stands waiting,

With exactness grinds he all.” 

…wrote Henry Wordsworth Longfellow in his poem Retribution. My above painting is not so much a fanciful prophesy as what I see as a future inevitability. But the painting is also a metaphor, an image of justice come home, and in that sense is real enough. And if the Sistine Chapel with its iconic writhing frescoes of plodding scriptural literalism is destroyed along with it, then you will see a smile on my face.

Hawkwood 

Notes:

[1] The Record of History: Do not think to protest that this is an exaggeration. This total collectively includes Gnostics, Cathars (Cathar mortality at the hands of Papal forces accounts for one million deaths alone), Waldensians, Manichaeans, Paulicians, Templars and those of any denominational faith or any individuals which the Papal office perceived as a threat to its own power base. There can be no denying what already has happened, what already is a part of recorded history.

[2] The Inquisition: Originally founded in the 12th-century and run by the Dominican brotherhood, the Inquisition (left), which was little more than repressed sexual sadism and pseudo-pious sanctimony masquerading as a watchdog of the faith, persisted in one form or another up until as late as the 18th-century, making any belief which it decided was a heresy punishable by death - and at times even beyond death, with the Inquisition even exhuming the bodies of the accused and putting the corpses on trial: a grim legal ploy which allowed the assets of their surviving family to be seized by the Church authorities. The Inquisition as an institutionalized Church body survives even today under the pretentiously-titled Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. As Voltaire dryly observed, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

[3] Targets for Excommunication: Archbishop Desmond Tutu has stated that tacit inaction in the presence of injustice is to participate actively in that injustice. Were the Papal office to assert its moral authority (assuming that it has any) and vigorously excommunicate the offending pedophile priests, it would send a clear message to others. It does not do so, being content in many such cases merely to shuffle the offenders from diocese to diocese, which only relocates the crime and offers potential new victims to the perpetrators. Rather, it targets for excommunication such individuals as Father Roy Bourgeois (right), who already had devoted over four decades of his life to his church. Father Bourgeois’ unforgivable offence? Proposing the ordination of women as priests.

How Saint Peter's was built: It is worth noting that the building of Saint Peter's was originally paid for by the sale of indulgences: the corrupt buying-off of worldly sins by individuals making payments to priests and others in the Church hierarchy. Source: The Role of Indulgences in the Building of New Saint Peter’s Basilica (2011): Ginny Justice, Master of Liberal Studies thesis, Rollins College.

Stop Press: Today's news carries the announcement that, having been fast-tracked with near-breakneck haste to sainthood, John Paul II (left) is due to be canonized on 27th of this month. This is the man who during his papacy refused to sign a document formally pardoning Giordano Bruno, and who also during the same term of office wrote an apostolic letter denying women the right to hold any positions of rank within the Church hierarchy: a judgement which the letter concludes is to be 'definitively held'. In other words: forever.


Note added April 28, 2014: Now that the event mentioned in my stop press has taken place, I'll add that the Church body named in note [2] above as being the contemporary equivalent of the Inquisition was run during John Paul II's term of office by... yes... Cardinal Ratzinger, who succeeded him as Pope Benedict XVI. 

Lilith: Spirit of the Night

She is a demon. She is a monster, a wraith, a vampire. She is everything you fear when the sun dips down below the horizon and your world slides into darkness. Both scorned and feared by men, her name is Lilith, the spirit of the night.

Lilith: Spirit of the Night

This is the way in which Lilith has traditionally been portrayed in folklore, and it is an image which endures into popular culture even today. Goth, metal and post-rock bands continue to get mileage out of referencing her in lyrics, and she has reached our own age via the Romantics of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, who were happy-enough to turn her into an alluring Victorian femme fatale. At times her identity has been blended with that of Lamia, that other predatory being of legend, half serpent, half female. But how did this legend begin?

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Book of Genesis is that, in just its first two chapters, it relates two separate and conflicting accounts of the creation of the first humans. Chapter Two is the familiar version of God forming Eve from a rib of the comatose Adam. But in the previous chapter the first couple, who now remain unnamed, are created at the same time, and from the same prima materia. It might at first seem like a minor adjustment to this story, for such stories already were an inherited oral tradition, and must have varied with subsequent retellings. But this difference has impacted folklore, and spawned a legend.

This Babylonian relief carving of a winged and bird-footed female is a reminder that Hebrew texts were influenced by the lands of Hebrew exile. In Babylonian beliefs lilitu were a class of female demons.

Later Jewish folklore names the nameless woman in Chapter One (which also is the first chapter in the Jewish Torah) as Lilith, the first wife of Adam. Since Lilith is created in the same moment as Adam, she is not, as Eve was, formed from a part of Adam’s flesh. Eve, who was Woman, already was a second-generation product. Lilith contrastingly is an autonomous being, and as such is in every way Adam’s equal. Adam expects his new mate to be subservient, also in her sexual role. Lilith has other ideas, and protests mightily both to God and to Adam that she also has rights and expectations. Having scorned both man and deity, Lilith storms off into the night. Unlike Eve, Lilith is not ejected from Eden. Instead she keeps the power to herself, and leaves of her own volition.

Two Victorian lamias (left, by John William Waterhouse, and right, by Herbert Draper) both draped in the shed skins of their serpent selves.

In her wanderings and in legend, Lilith becomes a creature of the darkness associated with vampires, monsters and night spirits: associations which have endured into contemporary popular culture. But whatever she has become since, in folklore she originally was Adam’s equal partner – a state of affairs about which both God and Adam apparently had regretful second thoughts. The all-too-masculine deity did not make that mistake twice, and with the feisty and assertive Lilith out of the picture, Eve was created to be subservient to the man.

This serpent-entwined version of Lilith by John Collier would seem to be little more than an excuse for some exotic Victorian titillation.

Lilith’s punishment for doing nothing more than assert her equal gender rights was to be transformed in folklore into a predator of the darkness. It seems that what men feel threatened by, what invokes male insecurity, is not so much a woman’s sexuality, as a woman’s sexual autonomy. What also seems to be underscored by Lilith’s story is another simple but stark reality: that although we might not know the identities of the writers of these ancient texts of scripture and folklore, their pro-male story lines are in themselves enough to persuade us that they were written by men.

Hawkwood

Sources:

Lilith: Spirit of the Night painted for this post by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio, All Rights Reserved. For those interested in the sources of such things: the geomantic symbols which are painted on the body of my model are those meaning 'great good fortune' - a visual statement which I feel in itself redresses in some small measure the gender injustice of these pro-male stories which have become so entrenched in our culture, whether or not we are 'believers'.

Babylonian carving: British Museum, London. The blue on the manes of the two beasts is the original surviving pigment with which this carving was painted. Lamia, by John William Waterhouse, 1909 (collection untraced). Lamia, by Herbert Draper, 1910 (collection untraced). Lilith, by John Collier, 1892, in the Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, England.

What The Fire Said

An Arrow already in Flight

From our distant past to mysterious futures, from sirens of the seas to contemporary sorcery: the silence of abandoned cities, echoes of ancient myths, prophesies and oracles – and even my own portrayal of Dracula - can all be found on my new weblog What The Fire Said, the online portal which features my own art and writing. For those interested, the site also includes articles on the techniques which I use to create my art. You are welcome to visit, and if you enjoy what you see, you are of course always welcome to become a follower and return to view the new work which I shall be adding.
Hawkwood

whathefiresaid.blogspot.com

A Fragment of Love

Please read the following short passage of church doctrine, and see if you find it sympathetic:

“It does not exist in a fixed form, but only by the mutual agreement of persons. It has no members except for those who feel that they belong to it. It has no rivals because it does not nourish the spirit of competition. It has no ambition because it only wishes to serve. It does not have any national boundaries because love does not act in this way. It does not close itself off, as it tries to enrich all groups and religions. It respects all the great teachers of all times who revealed the truth of love. All who belong to it practice the truth of love with their whole being. He who belongs to it knows that.

“It does not try to teach others but only tries to be, and by being, to give. It lives in the knowledge that the whole earth is a living being and that we are part of it. It knows that the time of the last return has arrived; the way of self-surrender, in free will to return to unity. It does not make itself known by loud words, but works in the free domain of being. It salutes all those who have enlightened the path of love and gave their lives for it. It does not create any ranks in its midst and no elevation of anybody, because the one is no greater than the other. It does not promise reward, neither in this nor in another life, yet only the joy of being in that love.

“Its members recognise each other by their behaviour, their way of being, by the look in their eyes and by no other external act than to embrace each other in a brotherly and sisterly way. They know neither fear nor shame and their witness will always be truthful in good as in bad times. The church of love has no secret, has neither mystery nor initiation except for the deep knowledge of the power of love, as the world must change, if we as persons wish it so; but only if first we change ourselves. All those who feel that they belong to it do indeed belong. They belong to the church of love.”

************

Perhaps you agree with me that you would have to be a hard soul indeed not to find this declaration sympathetic. Indeed, in its intentions it sounds remarkably contemporary, and we recognize in it the holistic views of our own world. It is certainly compassionate and tolerant of the views and beliefs of others in a ‘live and let live’ way. It displays humility, taking a stance more of service to others than showing any worldly ambitions of its own. Can you belong to this church of love? Of course you can, in your heart and in your being, if you find its declaration sympathetic. But there is no church as such: there is no building which you can enter and join the congregation. And there is no doctrine to follow, other than what you have read above. But who are its members? Perhaps more to the point: where are they?

What you have read above is one of the few surviving fragments of Cathar writing, and it dates, not from our own times, but from the middle of the 12th-century – the year 1148, to be exact. That Cathar beliefs, more by default than by design, sidelined the authority of the Papal offices proved to be their undoing. The Pope, alarmed at this perceived threat to his [1]power, and concerned by the ever-growing popularity of the Cathars, instigated the Christian-against-Christian [2]Albigensian Crusade.

Over half a century some one million Cathars and their regional Catholic sympathisers were slaughtered. Since strict Cathars were non-combative, most of the so-called military campaigns against them were of the siege-and-massacre type. Those not put to the sword by the Papal crusaders were rounded up and burned alive. And when the military campaign exhausted itself, the Papal Inquisition run by the Dominican order was established to take care of the rest. Whole areas of the Cathar heartlands in the Languedoc region of the south of France were emptied of their populations, and their lands and property were handed over to the Papal offices.

This is why the Cathar church no longer exists: it was exterminated by the will of the Papacy. What survives are these few scraps of Cathar doctrine to tell us how their faith expressed itself: fragments of love for their fellows and tolerance for the beliefs of others. The rest has long blown away on the winds of history, scattered with the ashes of the victims into the still air above the Languedoc.

Hawkwood  

Notes:

[1] I have previously made the point on this blog that there is no such thing as ‘orthodox’ (implying 'correct' or 'right') in religious belief, since all beliefs have their own value. What exists in reality is a power base which allows one to call one’s beliefs ‘orthodox’, and from that power base to then brand other beliefs as ‘heretical’, ‘false’, ‘evil’ – or just plain wrong.

[2] For an account of the Papal campaign and its aftermath please see my post A Dark Crusade. In that post I undertook to write a future post about Cathar beliefs. Allowing the Cathars to express themselves in their own words seemed to be a way to do that. Thanks to Emma for providing me with the Cathar text for this post.

The replica Cathar cross pendant is in my collection.

Odyssey and Exodus: the Long Journey Home

Homer’s heroic tale The Odyssey recounts the adventures of the brave and sharp-witted Odysseus as he voyages home from the Trojan War to his native island of Ithaca across ‘the wine-dark sea’. Some of the incidents in the story have become so familiar that you might know of them even if you have not read the narrative.

During his protracted ten years-long journey, Odysseus must face the alluring but deadly song of the sirens, is forced to confront the sorceress Circe who turns his crew into swine, must  [1]outwit the one-eyed rock-hurling giant cyclops [2]Polyphemus, and at one stage even journeys down to the very Underworld. In another episode, the travelling hero and his crew are cast onto an enchanted isle where they must face a powerful sorcerer who demonstrates his powers by turning his magician’s staff into a writhing snake. Or does he?

Well, you might recognise all of the above incidents as being from The Odyssey – except the last. To have encountered this particular ‘sorcerer’ Odysseus would have had to journey to Egypt and another culture. And Homer would have had to have written, not The Odyssey, but the Book of Exodus, in which Moses’ brother [3]Aaron demonstrates the powers of his Deity to the Pharaoh by turning his staff into a serpent. If (as I have just done) we give this scriptural incident a non-scriptural setting, we have no hesitation in recognizing it as a fantasy element in an adventure story. Not for a moment would we seriously consider that it actually happened.

So why is it that we can be entertained by (but do not for a moment seriously believe in) the spell-casting of the bewitching Circe and the sirens and other supernatural and fantasy elements in Homer, while (if we are believers) we uncritically accept the veracity of such supernatural scriptural incidents as the parting of the Red Sea, the [4]burning bush, and even a [5]talking donkey. All these incidents in scripture (and others like them) clearly defy the natural order. They are as fantastic as the crew-devouring sea monster Scylla, whom brave Odysseus also encounters. In short: what makes the scriptural sea monster [6]Leviathan so fundamentally different from the Homeric sea monster Scylla?

The simple answer is of course: context. As soon as something crosses that crucial line into scripture, different rules apply. Faith, not entertainment, is what willingly suspends our disbelief. Faith, for reasons which I’m writing this blog to try and figure out, makes a rational mind accept irrational things. And context is the simple answer, yes. But if we dig a little deeper, the apparent gap between the scriptural and the secular proves not to be as wide as we might have thought. Homer’s first book, The Iliad, covers the events of the Trojan War which, like Odysseus’ voyage home, lasted ten long years, and almost ended in a grinding [7]stalemate.

The first two books of the Bible (and of the Torah) are Genesis and Exodus. The two Homeric books are The Iliad and The Odyssey. The author of the first two is traditionally Moses, although ‘Moses’ turns out to be as elusive an historical figure as Homer himself. Both of these sources originally belonged to a Bronze Age oral tradition, and were passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation before finally being committed to writing in the Iron Age – hundreds of years after the events which they relate, which purportedly took place in the Late Bronze Age: historical novels of a sort, if you will.

If we extract suitable tag words from The Iliad we might choose: transgression, forced detention and exile (of Helen of Troy, who is rightfully Helen, queen of Sparta). If we do the same for Genesis we might have: transgression, forced expulsion and exile (of Eve from Eden). Doing the same for The Odyssey we could choose: long voyage home, full of trials. And for Exodus: long journey home, full of trials.

The pattern is clear. But is the pattern more than coincidence? That the ancient Mystery Schools of Greece and Egypt had contact with each other can be established readily enough. Sacred proportions used by both cultures can be found both in the [8]Great Pyramid and in the Parthenon. But did these teachings find their way into scripture? The very [9]name of Moses (who traditionally was an initiate of the Egyptian temple mysteries) is Egyptian, and various of our earliest surviving Biblical texts are in Ancient Greek. The teachings of the Mystery Schools of Pythagoras can even now be found in [10]scripture – and these extant examples are only those which slipped between the fingers of those church fathers who were all too eager to expunge them.

One way in which these Mystery Schools sought to instruct was to use a [11]female character to represent the soul, and to follow that soul’s journey from the innocence of a heavenly ‘home’ through transgression into the incarnation (represented by some sort of exile or incarceration) of a material earthly existence (that is: a human life) to an eventual return (a homecoming) to a heavenly state once that life is over. All of human existence was – and is – bound up in these stories, and even those who did not know of their deeper meanings would still feel the powerful tug of their true intentions. Many hundreds of years later they still do – which is why these timeless stories continue to speak to us.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Although possessing great physical strength, Odysseus tends to use his cunning and sharp wits to win through in these encounters: attributes which clearly appealed to Homer’s audience.

[2] The historian Robin Lane Fox has persuasively suggested that Homer’s cyclops could have been based upon the folk memory of a Mediterranean volcanic eruption. The description of a one-eyed giant (the huge volcanic crater) hurling rocks at shipping (the ejected lava bombs and pumice) certainly seems to fit the job description.

[3] Exodus 7:10. In a secular context this episode would read as a typical duel between two sorcerers to see who commands the most power. 

[4] Please see my post The Burning Bush.

[5] Numbers 22:28. Even for those who read their Bible it sometimes comes as a surprise that it contains a story with a talking donkey. For me the most charming aspect of this story is the way in which, when his own donkey suddenly begins to talk to him, not only is Balaam totally unphased, but he engages the animal in conversation as if it's the most normal thing in the world. The inevitable secular comparison is the talking donkey in the animated film franchise Shrek (right). With the latter, we happily suspend disbelief in the name of entertainment. With the former, we seem equally happy to suspend it in the name of faith.

[6] Job 41:1-34 contains a stirring and detailed description of the monster. Isaiah 27:1 chronicles its destruction by the Lord’s ‘sore and great and strong sword’.

[7] If you read The Iliad expecting to thrill to the episode of the wooden horse, you’ll be disappointed. Contrary to what Hollywood might have led you to believe, the famed wooden horse does not appear in The Iliad, but in the later writings of the Roman poet Virgil, although Homer briefly mentions it in The Odyssey.

[8 and 10] Please see my post Vesica Piscis: The Tale of a Fish.

[9] Please see my post The Amarna Heresies.

[11] Please see my post Eve’s Story. The story of Sophia (‘Wisdom’) is another example.

Sources:

Homer: The Iliad, translated by E.V. Rieu. Penguin Classics.

Homer: The Odyssey, translated by E.V. Rieu. Penguin Classics. 

Homer: The Odyssey, translated by T.E. Lawrence. Wordsworth Classics.

Robin Lane Fox: Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer. Allen Lane/Penguin.

Zondervan King James Study Bible.

The Paintings:

David Bergen: The Siren, 21st-century. So often the sirens are portrayed as winsome damsels, although it is not their physical beauty but their song which lures sailors to their deaths. When I read in Homer that the sirens' isle is strewn with the bones and decaying corpses of their victims then I knew that the way to go with my own siren was dark, dangerous and very predatory.

J.M.W. Turner: Odysseus Deriding Polyphemus, 19th-century. This master of light wisely reduces the rock-hurling giant to a half-glimpsed figure wreathed in clouds and mist. The sun’s gold on the water, the billowing sails… the artist might not have snagged it with the historical accuracy of the Greek ships, but when art gets this good who really cares?

J.W. Waterhouse: Circe offering the Cup to Odysseus, 19th-century. The sorceress is here comfortably transformed into the quintessential Victorian femme fatale. Behind her the large circular mirror allows us to glimpse what we cannot see directly: cunning Odysseus who will succeed in turning the powerful sorceress into his ally. 

Gustave Doré: Leviathan, 19th-century. Inset: a 5th-century b.c.e. Greek carving of Scylla. These two writhing sea monsters, the one scriptural, the other Homeric, bring us to the threshold of what it is that divides a Biblical monster from a mythic one. Since both are equally fantastic, it falls to the faith of the individual to untangle any difference – if indeed one exists.

Herbert Draper: Odysseus and the Sirens, 19th-century. The ears of his crew having been stopped with beeswax, Odysseus struggles to free himself from his willing bonds to leap overboard and follow the sirens’ irresistible call. But the ropes hold, and he becomes the only man to have heard the sirens and live, although perhaps always to hear them forever echo in his dreams.

David Roberts: The Israelites leaving Egypt, 19th-century. The beginning of the Exodus and the journey through the wilderness to the land promised by God. Roberts had a thorough grounding in architecture, visiting and painting many of the ruins in Egypt and the Levant, from Karnak to Petra. It shows. This single painting has inspired more than one Biblical film epic.

W-A. Bouguereau: Homer and his Guide, 20th-century. Age accepting the guiding hand of youth. That Homer was blind is a tradition as impossible to establish as his actual appearance. What we do know is that the lyre slung across his back would have been used to accompany the recitations of his epic verse, with the performance seamlessly blending the sacred and the secular.

PLEASE NOTE: I have produced the timeline here with some misgivings: the dating of these events is so contentious that sources can at times wildly disagree. It nevertheless seemed worthwhile to make the attempt, because producing such a graphic is a way of underscoring the centuries-long gaps between the recording of the events and when those events were supposed to have taken place. Archaeology has established the existence of Troy, but the siege of Troy as described by Homer hovers between history and possible fiction. Even with the best of intentions, virtually no evidence for the Exodus exists outside of scripture, and even dating it remains as speculative as the pharaoh whom scripture leaves unnamed, and whose identity otherwise would provide us with a time frame for the event.