Prophets of Decline -

 The Global Histories of Brooks Adams, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee 

by P Kuokkanen - ‎2003 - ‎

WHAT HITLER'S SOCIALISM REALLY MEANS

The American right wing nuts like Dinesh De Souza and indeed its cabal of true believers elsewhere, likes to claim that the Nazi’s were socialist; because of course they had socialism in their name.

The fact is this was what at one time was called Prussian socialism by none other than that old national socialist himself Oswald Spengler.

And here is further evidence to the fact that the Nazi national socializmus (and the two have to go together) is outlined below by a propagandist for Hitler who published a glowing book about him in English for distribution from America around the world. Clearly it is a pseudonymous work by one so called Heinz A Heinz. This was in 1938 and it was popular amongst the German Bund in America and they distributed it widely at anti-war anti-interventionist AMERICA FIRST rallies that included the American Nazi Party.

 It is the kind of glowing bio Trump would love. 

EP

PS as I edited this copy for the site I had to correct a lot of spelling errors more than one would expect from a qualified printer on the other had it is what one would expect if the book was published in Germany and shipped to North America

GERMANY'S HITLER https://tinyurl.com/y98pfqgt

 

CHAPTER XIV 

WHAT THE "SOCIALISM" REALLY MEANS 

IT is scarcely necessary to enlarge, here, upon the " Nationalism " in Adolf Hitler's political creed . Enough has already been written about it. It has occupied so much space in the contemporary Press and been discussed in so many books it has come to be regarded with a certain degree of Chauvinism . 

I propose, therefore, to confine myself, in the conclusion of this work, to a few observations under the second heading of our double-barrelled title . It is so completely true that he who studies contemporary Germany with a view to forecasting the future of the country, must study it from inside and not from the outsider's point of view ." 

From outside one mainly perceives the nationalism . From the inside the drive and force of the socialism is most apparent . German Socialism-Adolf Hitler's Socialism-is a totally different thing from what is generally understood by this term, from the Socialism derived from Marxian and Communistic theory .

The first essential difference between the two consists in this, that the former is strictly national in aim, scope and limit ; the latter is international, without boundaries of race or land . The second vital distinction is that the first has been set up by the wish of the people concerned, the second is imposed .
Vide the period of the Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils in Munich 
AND THIS LATTER POINT THAT SOME HOW SOCIALISM IS IMPOSED RATHER THAN BEING ORGANIC AND OF THE PEOPLE  IS EXACTLY THE SAME THE RIGHT MAKES TODAY. THE GERMAN SOVIETS IN MUNICH AND OTHER CITIES WERE ORGANIC BUT THE RIGHT WING MILITARISTS CREATED ROVING BANDS OF THUGS WITH GUNS CALLED THE FREI CORPS AND THEY WERE ANYTHING BUT ATTACKING THE WORKERS IN THEIR BARRICADED FACTORIES AND COMMUNITIES 

Germany's political development has been along lines totally different from those in England, and has led to a type of political public opinion very different from that of the average Englishman . The latter make a great mistake to judge of affairs in another country as if they had happened in their own . This is the universal mistake of the onlooker and critic perhaps it accounts for two-thirds of the international misunderstanding in Europe to-day . 

A third contrast can be drawn inasmuch as German Socialism tends to draw all sections of the nation closely together, international socialism initiates class war. German Socialism is directed by the country's nationals ; international Socialism is an instrument of the Jews .' In the former it is the personality of the Leader which tells ; in the latter we have nothing but the inertia of the mass which is exploited by its organisers . 

By the above signs is German Socialism to be recognised and distinguished. When it has completely assimilated Germany to itself, it will extend and become the groundwork for the future development of other countries. Marxism and Communism are finished in Germany. They have played their part and their role is over . Long enough have they made their influence felt in every sphere of German life, intellectual, political and economic, to the suppression of the truer socialism . 

Socialism is not a thing to be apprehended through dreary theory only, but to be tested and proved in action . We have written enough, elsewhere, very fully to show that the present German Government is inspired in its legislation by the spirit of active philanthropy which it calls Socialism . This legislation incorporates the very essence of German Socialism .

 As Dr. Goebbels writes : " Socialism, as we understand it, does not reduce men to a dead level, but ranges them in order according to their individual capacity and leading . If I were to try and put our aims and objects in this direction in a nutshell, I should say that it is our endeavour to build up in Germany a people who all possess the same rights in life . We want everyone, high and low, to belong to such a people . We desire that the highest among them shall feel themselves more closely united with the last and lowest of their own kith and kin than with the highest of any other nation . We aim at this -that the highest of our people would rather be the  lowest of his own nation, than the highest of any other nation. Such an aspiration can only be the outcome of an absolutely unified national will ." 

It would lead us too far afield to instance the many measures in which Hitler has exemplified his conception of true Socialism . We must confine ourselves to a mere sketch of the most important and obvious incorporations of the ideas through which he has restored to the German worker his honour and self-respect 

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THE GERMAN LABOUR FRONT 

The law of April l0th, 1933, which arranged May 1st as a great Labour Day Holiday initiated the above named reorganization of labour in Germany . The first celebration of the new holiday was unanimous and universal : the Germans had never had anything like it before . Thousands of people gathered together at the same time, all over the country to listen to the Leader's speech, and then to make high holiday. All trades and callings and professions for the first time were assembled in common, symbolizing the unity which was henceforth to unite both types of labour-that of the head, and that of the hand, symbolizing the necessary equal value to the community of both. German Socialism recognizes no discriminating difference between the brain worker and the hand worker . 

Quick on the heels of May 1st and its celebrations, came action . The German Labour Front emerged . On May 2nd the premises of all Marxian Labour Unions were taken over and the contents sequestrated . Abroad, similar Marxist Unions described this action of Hitler's as a theft of the German workman's hardly earned pay, saved up for years and years in the Unions' funds . 

Such a charge could not be substantiated, since these moneys were not taken from the workmen, to whom they rightly belonged, but from the greedy grasp of union officials to whom they did not belong, but who administered them wastefully, or appropriated them in disproportionate salaries . With the workman himself went his money also, into the Labour Front . Here it could only be put to the best and most legitimate uses on his behalf. The great object of the Labour Front is to secure German industry from the incessant recurrence of strikes and all their disintegrating consequences . German Socialism utterly opposes itself to strife between employers and men. Here again it shows quite a different face from that of Marxian Socialism which seeks to foment such discord, whereby, moreover, it maintains its own sovereignty . 

In Germany to-day a strike is impossible for the reason that no employer dare pay less than the standardized daily wage, or the State would immediately take up the workers' grievance . On the other hand, were the workers to demand more than their due they themselves would bring about the collapse of the concern for which they worked . The standard of wages is arrived at by experts representing the men and concerned to secure their best interests . Together with wages, the question of hours has also been considered . 

In Marxist-Socialist Germany after the War,(WIEMAR REPUBLIC)very hard times set in for German working men. Their leaders had every opportunity to show what the theory could accomplish ; they had a majority in the Reichstag, a member of the Party was President of the Reich . Nevertheless, they were all either too lazy or too indifferent to carry out their programme . So long as the masses went hungry they were easy to inflame, and to excite against capitalism and the wealthy . 

While six and a half million unemployed hung about the streets while their wives and children were starving, selfish employers exploited this wretched state of things just because they were paying the dole, forsooth ! If a man grumbled he lost his job ; hundreds were only waiting to pounce upon it in his stead . If he sought the assistance of the Secretary of his Union he drew another blank. What cared the employer for the Unions ? Should a strike ensue all he had to do was to close shop or factory as the case might be, and say, " All right . We'll see who can stick it out the longest, you or I ." 

Days or even weeks might go by, but the result was always the same . The men came back with hangdog mien, glad of the work again at any cost ! This is where the German working man had lost in his own eyes . It was from this sort of victimisation and wretchedness that Hitler designed to rescue him, and give him back his self-respect. Hitherto he had been the prey of vicious circumstances, the slave of an unscrupulous class . All was altered in a twinkling when Adolf Hitler came to power. A cry of gratitude and relief went up from all ranks of German working men . 

The Brown Shirts were everywhere welcomed as they made their way into shop and factory and yard to enquire after the needs and circumstances of every employee in the place . Union secretaries were haled to account no less than unsocialistic minded employers . The German Labour Front was out to accomplish what it promised. With the exception of peasants and officials, who have their own organisations, the German Labour Front comprises workmen of all kinds, employees, employers and people working on their own account . 

Hitler is its patron, Dr . Ley is its Leader. The standards of wages are carefully regulated and observed by reliable workers themselves. The Reich is divided up, under this scheme, into Regions, these, in turn, into Districts, these into Circuits or Local Groups, and these latter again into Trade Communes, Cells and Blocks . 

STRENGTH THROUGH JOY 

Perforce of its iron will, its absolute refusal to compromise and its terrific onset, National Socialism wrenched itself suddenly into power . Long years before this happened its better ideas had attracted people away from those of the old system then in vogue, and so it is readily to be understood how, in March, 1933, the aforesaid old system simply collapsed . 

The first and greatest duty before National Socialism was to win the German people back to a sense of nationality, and in impressing its own principles upon them . A State that is to endure for centuries ahead must be built upon the very foundations of organic life, upon blood and soil, nationality and home . In order to replace one kind of State with another, and better one, it is not enough merely to do away with the former : the people themselves must be re-educated .

 In place of a system full of class enmity and distinctions and pride of place, there is now a commonwealth . The new State, organically designed, is founded upon the principle " The common good before that of the individual ." 

Under National Socialism the culture of an entire people must not be identified with any particular caste, class, or level : it must characterize and belong to the mass. Nor must aesthetic enjoyments be only for the few ; they must be common to all . Just as the creation of a united working people has been confided to the German Labour Front, so is it the business of another organisation, that of " Strength through joy," to make every member of the nation free of its cultural and artistic treasures and resources. The two endeavours are inter-related . 

By means of the latter every German working man can look to his free evening as a real opportunity for refreshment and " uplift " ; money which had formerly gone merely in organizing strikes, can now be spent far more profitably and agreeably . It is not the object of " Strength through joy " to educate the people politically . Few want to attend classes in civics after a hard day's work. Its aim is rather to bring the people together on a broad basis of enlightenment, an effort in which they, too, of course, must concur. 

The Director of " Strength through joy " is also Dr. Ley. His work is comprised under many headings . It is one of his principal endeavors to open up to worker and unemployed alike all the best sources of entertainment, opera, theatre and concert hall . 

For the fact that a workman in any German city can obtain admission to the finest operas for practically a nominal sum is Hitler himself directly to be thanked . Hitler often starved, in the old days, in order to buy the meanest standing room in the house, to hear Wagner . Now that he is Chancellor, no working man in Germany need be put to such shifts to gratify his artistic longings . 

The " Kulturant " has opened to the people all sorts of intellectual resorts hitherto sacred to the upper ten . It is a mistake to suppose that only such appreciate the best . In Germany Wagner takes precedence, even with the poorest people, over nigger minstrelsy and jazz .

Even the working man's week-ends are provided for . Previously he went for a bit of a walk in the park perhaps, on Sunday, or took a tram out of the suburbs to get a breath of air . If he were a single man he might spend the most part of his leisure in a beer hall, listening to the band. Although this sort of thing can still be observed everywhere, nowadays the workman looks to the sort of week-end right away which previously could only be enjoyed by the better to do . 

For a couple of marks, to-day, he can go thirty miles out of the city, follow a personally conducted tour around some beauty spots, and enjoy a good meal into the bargain . When his holiday comes round, it is provided for, lavishly as far as good things are concerned, at equally small cost . Workmen from Munich can now envisage holidays by the North Sea with all sorts of trips and bathing fun thrown in. Those from Berlin can go to the Alps, do a bit of mountaineering and try what hotel life is like . These are dreams come true which for whole generations past must have ever remained unrealisable. All thank ; to Adolf Hitler . 

The section of this activity which deals with " Volkstum and Heimat," seeks to revive, for urban populations, the knowledge of and delight in old peasant and traditional customs, songs, dances, costumes. This sort of thing reawakens love of the country and their origins in people long divorced from the land . It bridges the gull between the peasant and the townsman . 

Kraft durch Freude (" Strength through joy ") looks also to sport to give the working man zest and change in exercise . It is Hitler's keenest desire to see the worker, particularly the youthful worker (Hitler's Germany is all being built for the future-the past must now look after itself, " let the dead bury the dead " ) made " crisis resisting ." The young workman goes in for tennis and golf and every other vigorous game that's going . 

Through the instrumentality of innumerable exhibitions it is sought to rouse the worker's pride in his own achievements, in his niche in society, in the part he plays in the whole. His craft is displayed before him in its entire interest, or beauty, or significance . Prizes and competitions abound . Each man becomes conscious of the part he takes in the whole, and discovers fresh pride in his trade and in himself. 

Cheap classes are held for those who desire to advance in their particular calling, or to study more particularly the trade to which they belong, and for the acquisition of foreign languages . The best teachers are retained and the instruction is giver! in the buildings of the local University. People are assisted to acquire their own dwelling . houses. Loans for this purpose can be repaid by installments over a series of years . In this way it is hoped to promote a cheerful small villagedom beyond the limits of the greater cities . 

The department for propaganda aims at bringing all these activities and facilities before the people, to encourage them to make the utmost use of them . Only so will they be bringing about the National Socialist State envisaged by Adolf Hitler. There are still more departments in this one Movement alone, but space forbids their description . 

Much, indeed, has been written about the new Germany. In England and America so much attention has been directed to its political aspect, that these others have been neglected . Of that attention, moreover, by far the greater part is highly inimical, highly critical . Few outside Germany yet realize why Hitler is prepared to go to all lengths to save this new Germany from being torpedoed either from within or without . He saves it in his own way and from those he considers its enemies, whether his action is understood abroad or not . Let those disbelieve it who will, Adolf Hitler has done more for Germany since he came to power than any other statesman at any other time, and the wrecking of his work would not only spell the final ruin of Germany, but the ruin of Europe at large.

A Monument to Capitalism

As I wrote on face book after the throne speech:"So the Conservative government is going to build a monument to "the victims of communism" gee just to be fair and balanced they should build one to the "victims of Capitalism" too."

And I note that Rick Salutin in yesterdays Globe and Mail said the same thing.
"One size fits all: My favourite moment in Wednesday's Throne Speech was the promise to erect a monument to the victims of communism. As a monument-liker, that would be fine with me – if it were twinned with a monument to the victims of capitalism, which makes as much sense. Or maybe they could both be united by the need to cut spending, resulting in a single National Victims Monument, come one, come all."

Now I could point out that what the Harpocrites are talking about is Stalinism and its children; Mao and Pol Pot, but for the conservative right wing they go back to the Bolshevik revolution. In fact Jason Kenney the Minister of Immigration has gone as far as defending fascism in Spain because the republicans were socialists, anarchists and communists.

But of course as my regular readers know, the state capitalist regimes in the USSR, China, Cuba etc are not communist nor are they even socialist, they are public ownership under a one party state.

Sort of like Alberta.

And in WWI Alberta was home to concentration camps, called interment camps, for Ukrainians who built Banff and Jasper as forced labourers. During the great Depression internment camps were used for unemployed single men, since there was no welfare or unemployment insurance.

The right wing loves to talk about Stalinism as if it is equivalent to Hitler and the Nazi's. And in fact if push comes to shove, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel and Pol Pot are equated as one in the same, and worse than Hitler or Mussolini or even Franco.

Since fascism is a right wing movement that grows out of calls for law and order, along with appeals to a corporatist state, a form sometimes mistakenly called National Socialism, coined originally by Oswald Spengler, if you look in the conservative closet you will find a shiny pair of jack boots.

The conservative ruling classes during WWII in both England and the US found much admirable in Mussolini and Hitler, especially their self proclaimed war on Bolshevism. Conservative and right wing politicians lobbied for Hitler, promoted isolationism in the US and appeasement in England.

Our own former PM King favoured Hitler, when he wasn't talking to his deceased mother through his dog. He declared that the volunteers who fought in Spain against Franco were acting illegally. He refused entry into Canada to German Jews. And heck he was a Liberal.




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Is the world ready for the continued decline of the West?
By Song Luzheng

Published: Sep 12, 2021 

OPINION / VIEWPOINT

G7 Photo: VCG

What happened in Afghanistan last month has twice shocked the world - the Taliban's rapid victory and takeover of Afghanistan, and the US' chaotic withdrawal from the country.

Both events have proved the failure of the US. The country could no longer afford the war in Afghanistan and had no choice but make peace with the Taliban. This has kicked off unimaginable dominoes. The US' final withdrawal would have been an even greater calamity had the Taliban not kept their word.

The decline of the US-led alliance is not a new topic. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump's election as president, and Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, the West has shown one thing in common: It is ready to abdicate responsibility. What has happened in Afghanistan reinforces it.

The UK has turned its back on a troubled EU to fend for itself. Trump has turned its back on the world by quitting international groups to shore up his "America First," or even "US only." US President Joe Biden has categorically abandoned Afghanistan by insisting on the withdrawal.

Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the West scrambled for anti-epidemic materials around the world in the early stage by making use of their financial advantages. Later they rushed to stockpile vaccines. Some of them were found to have illegally intercepted masks that were planned to be transported to third countries. Canada ordered vaccines for more than twice its population. Now the West has begun to promote a third dose of vaccine despite the protests of the WHO. However, only around 3 percent of Africa's population is fully vaccinated.

During its decline, the US-led alliance has worried the world by abdicating its responsibility. More importantly, it has also been unwilling to share power with the vast number of developing countries. This is utter selfishness. More than that, it has even clamped down on high-performing emerging countries.

China's Huawei is a typical example of this. The US government has cracked down on Huawei baselessly. This seriously violates the principles of market and rule of law broadly advocated by the West.

The US' crackdown on Huawei is an assault on China's tech industry. Its attempt to lure and divide developing countries while playing geopolitical game with China has destabilized the world order and also endangered world peace. For example, the world has seen the US actively involved in the South China Sea. It has courted China's neighboring countries, but everyone knows that US' move is only to serve its own interests. It will abandon the region if needed, just as it did in Afghanistan.

The current West-dominated international order is unsustainable with the West's continuing move of shifting responsibility. It is refusing to share power with developing countries.

For that, the world needs to make some preparations.

The first thing for the developing countries is to give up the illusion of the West. They need to develop and improve the ability to solve problems on their own. Third world countries have rich natural resources, young populations and abundant labor forces. It is entirely possible for them to create a new economic miracle as long as they find a development path suitable for their own conditions.

China faced enormous difficulties at the beginning of reform and opening-up - backward economy, huge population and a planned economy. But it became the world's second largest economy in just four decades through peaceful development. If China can do it, other countries can do it as well.

Second, the developing countries need to join hands to cope with the challenges brought by the decline of the West. They need to urge the West to stop shifting responsibility, refusing to share power, and destroying the unity of developing countries. Only in this way can the world effectively transform the old international order into one that is as peaceful and secure as possible.

The author is a research fellow at the China Institute, Fudan University.

 opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

The Decline of the West - LibertyGalaxy.com

libertygalaxy.com/videos/DeclineOfTheWestSpengler.pdf · PDF file

the decline of the west form and actuality by oswald spengler authorized translation with notes by charles francis atkinson mcmxxvii: alfred • a • knopf: new york …

The Realm of the Devil and the Destroyers of Rome

How the north came into its allure and the south lost its glory

Bernd Brunner

World map prepared by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100-1165) for King of Sicily Roger II 

/ Universal History Archive / Getty Images

Where is “north”? Take, for example, the volcanic Bouvetøya or Bouvet Island. This ice-covered speck of Norway, about 19 square miles in area and inhabited by seals, penguins and seabirds, has been a nature preserve for half a century. In 1739, French mariner Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier and his companions sighted it, but forbidding glacial cliffs prevented them from landing. Britain first claimed this remote outpost, but after Norway’s Harald Horntvedt explored it more thoroughly and planted the Norwegian flag there in 1927, Britain eventually ceded its claim. In one sense, Bouvetøya lies in the North — but only from the perspective of the South Pole. The island is located between South Africa and Antarctica and is also known as “the last place on earth.”

The north begins where the south ends. But where is the border between them, how can we recognize it, and who has the right to define it? For the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brenner Pass in the Alps connecting Austria and Italy constituted the “dividing line between the South and the North.” His contemporary, historian August Ludwig von Schlözer took up this question and wrote: “We Germans do not consider ourselves to be part of the North; only the Frenchman views our land as his North, and he speaks of Berlin as we do of Stockholm. Spanish writers commonly understand the North as Great Britain, and it is of course natural that African geographers and historians refer to the Mediterranean as the North Sea and believe that all Europeans are northern peoples.”

The concept of “North” (and of “South” respectively) represents a space both real and imaginary. At the beginning of the 19th century, before the competing concepts of the “West” and the “East” became Europe’s dominant paradigm, Russia was commonly considered part of the North.

The center of the world for the Europeans of antiquity, for people like Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 BCE), was the extended Mediterranean. This is evident in a map of that era that depicts the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and their environs relatively realistically, whereas the northwest of the European continent is rendered as a single curved line that offers no intimation at all of the British Isles or Scandinavia. That wasn’t Herodotus’ or anyone else’s fault, of course. People could only depict on their maps what they knew from personal experience — or had at least read or heard about. The North was a phantasmagoric dark spot beyond the border of the Greco-Roman universe, on the other side of the Alps and the Black Sea. The ancient Greeks invented the legendary region of Hyperborea and located it in the European northeast, beyond the north wind Boreas, which was itself named after the god who brought winter. They imagined it as a land of plenty, populated by giants, wise, happy and immortal, who devoted themselves to music and dance and knew neither illness nor other human plagues. The catch was that there was no way for mortal men and women to get there. The Greek geographer Strabo, who came much later (c. 64 BCE-c. 24 CE), already had a far more concrete view of the North as encompassing northwestern Gaul, the British Isles, the Lower Rhineland and Scandinavia.

For a long time, in Europe, the North was considered the realm of the devil, the place from whence evil would come upon the world. By contrast, the Middle East was where the religions of the Old World had developed. The prophet Jeremiah further fleshed out the dichotomy, specifying that evil would take the form of invading northern hordes. In the superstitions of many cultures, northern peoples of various stripes have been considered harbingers of doom. Most famously the barbarian hordes from the North were blamed for the fall of Rome, while scholars now believe it collapsed under the weight of its own internal conflicts. Since antiquity, the North (as well as the West) was regarded as a region of cold and darkness, devoid of sunlight and inimical to life. This convenient interpretive system remained in place throughout the Middle Ages and continued in the speculations of 16th- and 17th-century alchemy.

The 12th-century medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen derived her world view from Adam’s turn to the East after his creation. To Adam’s right was the blessed South, and to his left was the dark North. According to Hildegard, the north was the direction from which the church was menaced, and a “threatening, angrily growling bear” was the origin of the “godless” North Wind, “divorced of any utility, felicity and holiness” and bringing only misfortune and storms. The perniciousness of the North Wind was the basis for the character of the other three winds, which blew in opposition to it. These vague ideas about the North became more concrete as contact, both hostile and friendly, was established with the people who lived there.

Forays by aggressive Scandinavian warriors from the north left many people in the south fearing for their lives. The commercial network of the Vikings was gigantic, stretching from the northern Atlantic to Russia, Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. In this sense, they were pioneers of globalization, dealing in honey, amber, dried meat and pelts. They also sold loot from the cities they sacked. Their boats were powered by the strength of human arms and the wind. When winds were favorable, they were even able to sail their vessels against river currents, having adopted the square-rig sail that had been used for centuries in the Mediterranean. In 860 CE, the Varangians, a Swedish subgroup of the Vikings in an extended sense of the term, attacked Constantinople, and in 885 CE, Danish Vikings invaded Paris. In subsequent centuries, the Normans conquered Normandy, southern Italy and England.

The Vikings weren’t the only ones sailing the seas of the High North and establishing connections. Irish monks are thought to have sailed to the Faroe Islands and Iceland as early as the seventh century — most likely they were looking for solitude rather than trying to convert the few heathens who had settled there. In 1136, a monastery was founded in Arkhangelsk in northern Russia, and a century after that, monasteries dotted the map in Scandinavia and Iceland. With the increasing activity of missionaries, Christianity would also remain an important bond connecting Europe’s North and South for centuries — until the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, which would pit northern and southern Europe against one another.

How did cartographers eventually decide to put the north exclusively at the top of their maps? And why did this mode of representation become the dominant one? The practice goes back to second-century Greco-Roman mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, if we are to believe the surviving copies of his works made by Byzantine monks more than 1,000 years later, in the 13th century. The cartographers who created the first mappa mundi — Gerardus Mercator, Henricus Martellus Germanus and Martin Waldseemüller — respected Ptolemy as a leading authority, took their cues from him and adopted his habit of putting the north at the top. Nonetheless, the Christian maps of the Middle Ages chose another perspective. A map of Europe and Africa made by Venetian seafarer and cartographer Andrea Bianco in the 15th century has the east on top and Jerusalem in the middle. Similarly, in maps from the Islamic world, north often appears at the bottom, as in Moroccan Muhammad al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana, made in 1154 for King Roger II of Sicily. The same is true of the 1459 mappa mundi of Fra Mauro, even if it is today usually reprinted in repolarized form (it just has to be flipped on its head to make sense to us). One possible reason is that 15th-century compasses pointed south. While it’s difficult to generalize about the sophisticated Chinese mapmaking tradition, the famous “Composite Map of the Ming Empire,” possibly created at the end of the 14th century, has north at the top. With the waning of Christian or Muslim views of the world that had put the east or south at the top, the north secured its fixed spot at the top of maps. But as self-evident as that shift might seem today, there was no strictly logical reason for the change.

Apart from Ptolemy’s precedent, there are at least two other potential reasons why north drifted to the top of maps. One is its use in navigation. Before the compass was imported from China via the Arab world around 1300, European seafarers used the stars to tell what direction they were headed in. The most useful one was the North Star, since it remained in one place, almost exactly at due north, while the other fixed stars seemed to move around the sky because of Earth’s rotation. The compass likewise pointed north (with the exception mentioned earlier).

Invented in China some 2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty, the compass was made of naturally magnetized lodestone and used for geomancy (a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed soil, rocks or sand) and fortunetelling. By the time it came to be used for navigation on the seas, during the Song dynasty, it already had the needles we associate with the compass today. Another plausible explanation may be that information on the upper margin of maps was more easily visible and thus made to seem more important. European mapmakers, of course, lived in the Northern Hemisphere, so they may simply have wanted to see their own homeland as occupying a privileged position in the world.

When Geneva historian Paul Henri Mallet published translations of Old Norse tales written down in the 13th century, including the Prose Edda and excerpts from the Poetic Edda from Iceland, this triggered a new perception of Scandinavia in the eyes of many European intellectuals, including German poet Johann Gottfried Herder. He developed a euphoric sense of belonging to an imagined homeland in the North. Old Norse mythology offered an alternative to a stale classicism that venerated Greco-Roman legends and myths. Many people at the time were sick of the South. While Herder was opposed to the idea of distinct races, he was convinced that one human race had diversified into different cultures: “In all the different forms in which the human race appears on earth, it is nonetheless everywhere one and the same human species.” However, this sort of “cultural pluralism” didn’t prevent Herder from thinking in racist categories; he asked his readers “to sympathize with the Negro, but not despise him, since the conditions of his climate could not grant him nobler gifts.” He had few sympathies with the Chinese, “who, in their own corner of the earth, refrained, like the Jews, from mixing with other peoples.”

Herder’s rejection of the genealogy of Noah was unambiguous: “The various efforts of people to make all nations of the earth, according to this genealogy, into descendants of the Hebrews and half-brothers of the Jews, contradicts not only chronology and the entire history of humanity but also the standpoint of this narrative itself. … Enough of it! The fixed center of the largest part of the world, the primeval mountains of Asia, provided the first place of residence for the human race.” For Herder there were two basic coordinates: the North and Asia.

Even beyond Germany, he was an important force in paving the way for the categories “Aryan” and “Semitic” that, as Maurice Olender stressed in “The Languages of Paradise” (1993), “would influence scholarship in the human sciences throughout the nineteenth century.” Herder found a spiritual ally in Friedrich Schlegel, who had learned some Sanskrit during a stay in Paris and who declared at an 1805 lecture, “Everything absolutely everything, comes from India!” Schlegel also revived the term Aryan as a combination of the Sanskrit name “Ari” (meaning, among other things, lion, brave, inner skin and eagle) with the German word “Ehre” (honor). The concept can be traced back to the 18h-century French Orientalist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who coined it in his translation of the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism. It was subsequently adopted by linguists in various countries.

However, at the turn of the 19th century, more and more people were no longer content to learn about the North from the comfort of their reading chairs and were willing to get their shoes a bit muddy to see it for themselves, both scientists and more romantic travelers. This was partly because the French Revolution made it more difficult and sometimes impossible to travel to central Europe, whereas English and German travelers could reach Scandinavia and Scotland without any great problem. Increasingly, tourists began visiting the North rather than the sites of antique culture in Italy and Greece. To stand in the Roman Forum as the first Caesar Augustus did or visit the ruins of Pompeii, one of the most dramatic natural disasters of antique Italy, had lost some of its appeal.

But how would the North of the mind materialize? While some of the travelers followed in the footsteps of the great Carl Linnaeus, who had undertaken a botanical-ethnographic trip to Lapland, among them were readers of the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who were hoping to find people in a “state of nature” — noble savages. Or they had heard about the wonders of the midnight sun and the majestic fjords of Norway. Journeying to Scotland, as to Scandinavia, didn’t present foreign visitors with a particularly stern test of courage. There, too, it was easier for women to travel than in the South or in the Middle East, particularly on their own. Emilie von Berlepsch, who visited in 1799, was a close acquaintance of Herder and, as she proudly described herself, “the first German woman who traveled to the fatherland of the bard [Ossian].” Having set off from Hamburg, she made landfall near Glasgow on the “classical ground of Ossian’s songs.” She believed that bagpipe music, which had “quite unpleasantly assaulted” her ears, must be a recent distortion of Scandinavian culture: “It is impossible to conceive of the beautiful, gentle emotions of Ossian arising during and being accompanied by this shrill bleating.”

In the summer of 1794, English author and women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft made a journey through southern Norway, western Sweden, Denmark and northern Germany with her 1-year-old daughter, Fanny, and her governess. This was hardly a vacation trip. Wollstonecraft was there on a mission. With England and France at war, she was trying to help the American business owner Gilbert Imlay, who had attempted to smuggle a large amount of silver from France to Scandinavia. According to Wollstonecraft’s “From Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,” she wanted to find a ship and retrieve the cargo.

Around the same time, naturalist Giuseppe Acerbi set off from Lombardy for the North. Why did he, a man of the South, “a native of Italy, a country abounding in all the beauties of nature, and the finest productions of art, voluntarily undergo the danger and fatigue of visiting the regions of the Arctic Circle?” His answer to his own question: “There is no people so advanced in civilization, or so highly cultivated, who may not be able to derive some advantage from being acquainted with arts and sciences of other nations, even of such as are the most barbarous.” The ultimate destination of his voyage was the North Cape: “Here everything is solitary, everything is sterile, everything sad and despondent. The shadowy forest no longer adorns the brow of the mountain; the singing of the birds, which enlivened even the woods of Lapland, is no longer heard in this scene of desolation; the ruggedness of the dark grey rock is not covered by a single shrub; the only music is the hoarse murmuring of the waves, ever and anon renewing their assaults on the huge masses that oppose them.”

Do cold north winds correspond with the mentality of the people living there? Does the lack of warmth mean that northern people lack passion? Is there a connection between their toughness and the harshness of the landscape? Speculations about how climatic conditions affect people’s mental and physical constitution began in antiquity and can be found across the ages.

A passage from the enormously popular polemic “Les Semaines” (The Weeks) by the 16th-century Huguenot writer Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas read:

The northern-man is fair, the southern foul:
That’s white, this black; that smiles and this doth scoul;
Th’one blithe & frolike, th’other dull & froward;
Th’one’s full of courage, th’other fearfull coward;
Th’one’s hair is harsh, big, curled, th’others slender;
Th’one loveth labour, th’other books doth tender;
Th’one’s hot and moist, the other’s hot and dry.

The French philosopher Montesquieu used the contrast between a cold cultural zone and a hot one as the basis for a cultural anthropology that privileged the man of the North, insofar as he remained on his home terrain, over the man of the extreme South. Crucially, Montesquieu disputed that there were any inherently northern or southern character traits, insisting instead that people were formed by their surrounding climate. In his 1748 essay “Of Laws in Relation to the Nature of the Climate,” he conflated climate and mentality in idiosyncratic fashion: “The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave. If we reflect on the late wars … we shall find that the northern people, transplanted into southern regions, did not perform such exploits as their countrymen who, fighting in their own climate, possessed their full vigor and courage.” Furthermore, Montesquieu made the remarkable observation: “I have been at the opera in England and in Italy, where I have seen the same pieces and the same performers: and yet the same music produces such different effects on the two nations: one is so cold and phlegmatic, and the other so lively and enraptured, that it seems almost inconceivable.” He also held that freedom, such as it existed in Europe, originated with the Scandinavian peoples, whereas he associated the South and the Orient with a distorted picture of despotism he believed still predominated there.

A few years later, in his lectures on physical geography, German philosopher Immanuel Kant assigned humanity to various “races” with differing characters. He proposed: “If one enquires as to the sources of the forms and temperament inherent in a people, then one need only consider the variations of animals in relation of form and behavior, for as soon as they are transported to a different climate, different air and food, etc., make them to be different from their descendants. A squirrel that is brown here will become grey in Siberia. A European dog taken to Guinea will become misshapen and bald, and so will its descendants.” Kant expanded this logic to human beings: “The descendants of the northern peoples who went to Spain not only have bodies that are not nearly as strong as they were originally, but also their temperament has changed into one very different from that of a Norwegian or Dane. The inhabitant of the temperate zone, especially in its central part, is more beautiful in body, harder working, more witty, more moderate in his passions, and more sensible than any other kind of people in the world. Consequently, these people have always taught the rest [of the world] and vanquished them by the use of weapons. The Romans, Greeks, the ancient Nordic peoples, Genghis Khan, the Turks, Tamburlaine, and the Europeans after Columbus’s discoveries, have astounded all the southern countries with their arts and their weapons.” Kant suggests a familiarity with circumstances in faraway places, which is ironic, because he spent nearly all his life in Königsberg (today, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad), in provincial East Prussia, and received much of his knowledge from often obscure travel accounts and from conversing with sailors at the harbor of his home city.

Another passionate participant in the discussion about northern and southern people was Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué, a Prussian officer from an aristocratic Huguenot family, whose most famous work, aside from the fairy tale “Undine,” was the Nibelungen trilogy “The Hero of the North,” in which he appropriated elements of Norse mythology. In 1828, he published a book responding to Alexander von Humboldt titled, “The Man of the South and of the North.” While he ascribed a great flexibility to both north and south, he wrote: “As it happens, people of the south are often found sunken in a certain external calm that almost resembles beatitude but that is anything but. If there’s disturbance making it undeniable clear that they reside not in the land of fulfillment but rather in the fundamentally impoverished one of privation, the rage that elicits resembles that of the lion or tiger. By contrast, the man of the north can be better compared with the eagle, which also prefers to live in that region. Wrathfully hard where there is battle, but also silently alert and scanning in the distance, he never lapses back into that deceptive comfort that views the outbreak of martial struggle as something monstrous and entirely unexpected.”

Ernst Moritz Arndt, who made several trips to Sweden and was one of the most important early 19th-century German nationalist writers of the Napoleonic Wars and beyond, came late to the discussions concerning people of the north and south. His thoughts were guided by the principle that people became like their land. In 1844 he wrote: “Much here in the North that seems born happy and triumphant remains undeveloped or semi-developed like a clump of substance, rotting away in the fullness of its germs and drives that never finds the necessary sun. In the south, everything finds its natural development easily. In the north, a lot decays because of overabundance that cannot gain proportion and form.”

As evenhanded as Arndt sounds here, he thought the halfway point between the Arctic and the Equator was the ideal soil for cultural development — not coincidentally this was where he himself called home. For Arndt, the Germans were the epitome of settledness despite admittedly being, “as Christians, roving pilgrims and foreigners on earth in all respects.” The antithesis of Germans, in Arndt’s eyes, were “the Jews and gypsies scattered and intimidated across the great world, who never had a place on earth where they had the right to lay their heads.”

Obsessed with all things German and preaching a philosophy of Nordic love of nature, Arndt wasn’t even slightly interested in the historical and cultural connections between Europe and India that many of his contemporaries were investigating. His world was divided along clear lines: on the one hand the Germanic tribes, on the other the Romans; on the one hand the Germans, on the other the Jews; on the one hand the forest, on the other the desert. He degraded the semi-nomadic Sámi people as “spoilers of the forest,” while on another occasion he berated Italy as the “land of lemons and bandits.”

A little later, the talk about North, South and East and the peoples and mentalities associated with these directions began to take a decidedly different turn. In 1853, the French diplomat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau published the first half of his study “The Inequality of the Human Races.” He broke humanity down into the “white, yellow, and black” races — intending them to be understood in precisely that hierarchical order. Gobineau had a romanticized fascination for all things Oriental, and the following year brought an opportunity to further develop his ideas in a place that suited his fancy when he was sent to Tehran as a secretary to the French diplomatic mission there. During his three-year stay, he threw himself into learning the Persian language and Persian history. Before he began working on his book, he had spent the preceding decade studying the leading philosophers of his time. In 1843, Alexis de Tocqueville, one of France’s major liberal intellectuals and the author of “Democracy in America,” engaged Gobineau’s services for a research project on the origins of customs and morals in modern Europe.

For Gobineau, humanity was in decline, and racial intermingling was the reason. He loathed democracy and revolution and considered the Germanic peoples to be the creators of modern European culture, calling the Baltic coast and the Scandinavian Peninsula the “maternal lap of nations.” He considered the Aryans — the “honorable men” — to be superior. Gobineau turned the term Aryan, which until that point had only been used in a linguistic sense, into an ideological cypher for “Indo-Germanic.” The basis of this shift in meaning was a fateful conflation of the supposed congenital nature of a person (“race”) and their culture (“language”).

While the use of the term “Nordic,” which is connected to the German “nordisch,” meaning belonging to the North of Europe, can be traced long back in time, Russian-French anthropologist Joseph Deniker, chief librarian at the Paris Natural History Museum from 1888, first applied the term “nordique” to the concept of “races.” Things gained further momentum during the early 20th century, when racial categories were linked with earlier mythic ideas about Northern and Southern mentality and the idea of “blood.”

One important work in this context was “The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History,” published in the United States in 1916 and still one of the most famous and notorious racist texts ever. Its author, Madison Grant, was the scion of a wealthy New York family who devoted himself to his racial obsessions. Grant promoted the “Nordic race” as superior and responsible for Western civilization’s greatest achievements. His book discussed the geographical migration of peoples and “races” and glorified light skin and blond hair. In Grant’s view, the “great race” had originated in the forests and plains of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia. He also advanced the strange notion that Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Dante must have had “Nordic blood.”

While German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, in his epochal work “The Decline of the West” (1918), didn’t lionize the North to the extent of many of his contemporaries, he nonetheless gave a decisive role in the course of world history to the people who lived there, writing that the “old Northern races, in whose primitive souls the Faustian [spirit] was already awakening, discovered in their grey dawn the art of sailing the seas which emancipated them. The Egyptians knew the sail, but only profited by it as a labor-saving device. They sailed, as they had done before in their oared ships, along the coast to Punt and Syria, but the idea of the high-seas voyage — what it meant as a liberation, a symbol — was not in them.” “Because of an internal reason,” Spengler wrote, the men of antiquity — and thus of the South — could not become conquerors, and “the Romans made no attempt to penetrate the interior of Africa.”

Intellectuals across Europe continued to glorify the North, reaching higher and higher levels of hyperbole. The South didn’t even enjoy its symbolic monopoly on the light anymore: Scandinavia as the realm of the midnight sun and bright light. The dark days and long nights of winter that weighed so heavily on the first European travelers to the region were hardly ever mentioned.

Speculative theories proliferating about “the North” and “the South” possessed an irresistible appeal to those who repeatedly tried to define those concepts. In 1929, Prussian Culture Minister and Orientalist Carl Heinrich Becker wrote: “The South is what we don’t have but desire. The North is very different. We feel the North present deep within our most personal life. We cannot escape it. It lives in our blood, in the mysterious depths of our personality as a people and as individuals. Our creative spirit somehow comes from the south, but the primeval creative power of our soul is of northern origin.”

After Adolf Hitler had come to power, the Nazis found like-minded allies in the nearby South, in Italy. And since Nazi ideologues understood the ancient Greeks as part of the “Aryan race,” there were no obstacles to enlisting them for the cause, especially as National Socialist visions of the ideal human body were borrowed from sculptures of ancient Greek athletes. This logic was extended to include the notions that “Aryans” had founded the antique culture of southern Europe during the migration of peoples and that the Greeks were “Aryan brothers” of the Germans, who, curiously, were also seen as having come down from the North. In a 1935 proclamation by Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister for science, education and popular training, this vacuous theory was declared a fact that was henceforth to be promoted without contradiction: “World history is to be presented as the history of racially determined ethnicities. Taking the place of the school of ‘ex oriente lux’ (meaning “from the East comes the light”) is the knowledge that at least all of the Occidental cultures — in Asia Minor, Greece, Rome and the rest of the European countries — are primarily the work of Nordic peoples, most of whom prevailed in battle with other races.” And the Nazis had no objection to depictions of Italian and Arcadian landscapes, and Roman virtues were proclaimed as German ones as well, since both groups were considered Indo-Germanic. The Germanic tribes were thus no longer seen as the antipode of the Romans, as they had been in previous simple North-South antitheses. The main line of conflict now ran between Germanic people and Semitic people, especially the Jews, with all the disastrous consequences that ensued.

Bernd Brunner is an author

May 6, 2022

Adapted from “Extreme North: A Cultural History,” W. W. Norton, 2022 (original translation by Jefferson Chase, a few paragraphs are not part of the English-language edition)

LONG READ DISCUSSION 2015-2018
FOR YOUR ELUCIDATION AND ENTERTAINMENT 

CHRISTIAN RESEARCH ON PAGANS, PAGANISM, HOMOSEXUALITY, ABNORMALITY, SEXUALITY AND SEX MAGICK,  ANCIENT SEX RITES IN EGYPT, ANCIENT SEX RITES OF HINDUISM, ITS ALWAYS FUN TO CROSS REFERENCE THEIR WORK WITH OCCULTISTS, FEMINISTS, AND ACADEMICS 

'' In order to make this connection, some attempt must be made to define paganism. The Lutheran theologian, Carl Braaten defines the contemporary revival of paganism- what he calls “neopaganism”- as:[QUOTE][the belief in] “a divine spark or seed [which] is innate in the individual human soul. [B]Salvation consists in liberating the divine essence from all that prevents true self-expression. [/B]The way of salvation is to turn inward and ‘get in touch with oneself.’In a different but complimentary way I would suggest that the essence of paganism can be usefully described as monism, the belief that one principle defines and unites all of reality. Thus all is one, humanity is one divine reality, and all religions are ultimately many expressions of the one monistic truth. At the heart of this theoretical religious paganism lies a particular and powerful mystical experience of oneness. Indeed it is often claimed in today’s syncretistic age that at the core of all religions, beyond and behind their distinctive doctrines, is the same mystical encounter. ''

View Full Version : Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal

Petr

06-20-2015, 12:40 PM

I really think that only traditionalist-minded, Bible-faithful Christians who keep these kind of archaic connections in their mind, and also the possibility that we might be entering the apocalyptic end times, can keep their heads straight nowadays. No matter how crazy and corrupt the world might get, those who follow the Scriptures know it has all been foretold, or been seen before:

https://truthxchange.com/articles/2000/09/01/androgyny-the-pagan-sexual-ideal/

Posted by Dr. Peter Jones on Sep 1, 2000

Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal


The material below was published in the January, 2000 Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. For footnote references, please refer to the printed version.

…being a gay man or lesbian entails far more than sexual behavior alone… a whole mode of being-in-the-world.

Paiens unt tort e Chrestianes unt dreit

- Chanson de Roland

1 Introduction

Like the ancient pagan Sodomites pounding on the door of Lot’s house millennia ago, the modern gay movement is gathering at the doors of our churches, our academies and our once traditionally “Christian” culture, demanding entrance and full recognition. Notable scholar, David A. J. Clines, professor of Old Testament at Sheffield University, for one, appears ready to lay down the welcome mat. He wrote in 1998: “…[though] queer theory has yet to show its face at the SBL [Society of Biblical Literature], gayness is challenging…all that we hold dear. When we begin to redraw the alterity map, the boundaries between same and different…we find ourselves having to think through everything, and not just sexuality, from scratch.” Clines, who not long ago was known for his conservative theological position, illustrates how far acceptance of the gay movement has come in recent years, even among those from strongly biblical backgrounds.

This movement has come a long way fast. It will not go away soon, I believe, because it is so intimately tied to deep changes in modern society, in particular, those associated philosophical Postmodernism. Because in the Postmodern hermeneutic all meaning is socially generated, queer commentary has little methodological difficulty finding a place in the contemporary religious and theological debate. In cooperation with feminist biblical interpretation, which has “destabilized normative heterosexuality” by alleging “sexist” bias, queer readings merely seek to take one more step in the hermeneutics of suspicion and expose the “heterosexist bias” of the Bible and Bible interpreters. Identifying exegesis as an exercise in social power, queer theorists reject the oppressive narrowness of the Bible’s male/female binary vision, and boldly generate textual meaning on the basis of the “inner erotic power” of the gay interpreter. What could be more Postmodern? Employing such a widely accepted methodology, and with “straight” Bible scholars now ready “to redraw the alterity map,” gay theology appears to have a bright future everywhere.

The theoretical progress is mirrored in popular society where resistance to the gay life-style is more and more impugned as anti-democratic and un-American. But the urgency of the situation for Bible-believing scholars is not merely the pressing need for a scholarly ethical response to an unfortunate moral aberration. The contemporary appearance of a homosexual movement says something about the particular times in which we live, granted both that pagan spirituality is enjoying a popular revival, and that throughout the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah have always served as the symbol for endtime pagan idolatry, ultimate moral disintegration and eschatological divine judgment. [B]The subject, in its spiritual, religious and even eschatological dimensions, needs to be treated and debated among us, not simply as an unfortunate social deviation or ephemeral social fad, but as a cutting-edge component of a rising, all-encompassing, religious world view that is diametrically opposed to the world view of Christian theism.[/B]

One fruitful way to approach this pressing issue is to consider the religious roots of homosexuality. The recent radical changes in our society, include, simultaneously, both the liberation of sex and the rediscovery of pagan mystical spirituality. Is such a pairing pure coincidence or is it the result of a necessary organic relationship? Has there always existed an ineluctable connection between pagan religion and pagan sex? For instance, while radical pagan feminists speak of the need of a “change of [religious] consciousness,” such spiritual transformation is always proposed by way of a radical recalibration of our perceptions of sexuality. In other words, sexuality appears central not peripheral to the spiritual quest. This, I believe, will become more and more evident in the homosexual movement, namely, that this particular sexual life style will be the promoter of a particular kind of religion. Thus, while sexual liberation in its popular, successful, government-financed versions, strategically associates itself with “civil rights,” with pro-choice civic values and with politically-correct tolerance, often studiously avoiding any obvious religious dimension, its ultimate legitimization [since all human beings are religious] proceeds from the age-old dogmas of paganism, which, unlike their modern equivalent, never tried to hide behind a thin veil of temple/state separation. If everything is indeed political, as the radicals often proclaim, everything is also spiritual, and thus the spiritual is also sexual. Charles Pickstone, a pagan believer in Anglican orders, affirms this in his recent book [I]The Divinity of Sex: “…sex is the spirituality that reveals the sacramental richness of matter.”

The thesis of this paper is that to understand the contemporary sexual revolution, we need to see the “new sexuality,” [particularly in this paper in its homosexual expression], as an integral expression of age-old religious paganism. In our response, we cannot follow Lot, who would have sacrificed his daughters to placate the aggressors. Nor can we claim personal moral superiority. We must always hear, in the clamor for acceptance and recognition, the cry of divine image-bearers, however marred and broken. [B]However, we must not shrink back from seeking to do justice to the whole Christian, biblical dimension of the problem. In a time of moral confusion and politically correct intimidating “tolerance,” we owe such clarity to our culture, to our sons and daughters, and to God, Creator and Redeemer, for whom all things exist.[/B]


[U]2 The Modern Revival of Paganism[/U]

In order to make this connection, some attempt must be made to define paganism. The Lutheran theologian, Carl Braaten defines the contemporary revival of paganism- what he calls “neopaganism”- as:

[QUOTE][the belief in] “a divine spark or seed [which] is innate in the individual human soul. [B]Salvation consists in liberating the divine essence from all that prevents true self-expression. [/B]The way of salvation is to turn inward and ‘get in touch with oneself.’
In a different but complimentary way I would suggest that the essence of paganism can be usefully described as monism, the belief that one principle defines and unites all of reality. Thus all is one, humanity is one divine reality, and all religions are ultimately many expressions of the one monistic truth. At the heart of this theoretical religious paganism lies a particular and powerful mystical experience of oneness. Indeed it is often claimed in today’s syncretistic age that at the core of all religions, beyond and behind their distinctive doctrines, is the same mystical encounter.

Louis Dupré, T. L. Riggs Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University does indeed make such a claim. After noting the universality of the “mystical drive” to union with the divine, Dupré wonders whether “all religions, which meet in this drive, are, at least in their mystical expression, identical.” He seems to have little doubt about the answer: “If different traditions share a state in which distinctions disappear [emphasis mine], should we not conclude that in its highest form all mysticism is identical.” This conclusion is affirmed in spite of major outward “doctrinal differences,” since beyond the level of doctrine is the spiritual unio mystica. Dupré determines that “…to the extent that the state of union is held to consist of an ecstatic, intrinsically transient experience, [then] the conclusion that mysticism is identical in all religions is indeed inescapable.” A leading history of religions “Christian” scholar, Huston Smith, believes that the present work of the Spirit is producing an “invisible geometry to shape the religions of the world into a single truth.” In a similar vein, the late Joseph Campbell combined Jungian psychology and New Age spirituality in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces to express the notion that all human civilizations have the same monomyth with only minor differences in details.

According to pagan esoterism, spiritual understanding through intuition and meditation is the only way to salvation. This comes through a non-rational, mystical experience of seeing oneself as the center of a circle that has no boundaries, where all distinctions are eliminated. As the great modern Gnostic, C. G. Jung said: “The self is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” From the center of one’s own limitless universe the self is sovereign. The unitive experience, essential to this worldview, is engendered through drugs, through time-honored (Hindu) meditation or otherwise induced trance. Meditation, rightly practiced, enables the mind/soul to be disconnected from the limitations of the body and to be in direct contact with cosmic spiritual unity. In the words of a leading neo-pagan mystic:

[B]The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare to state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe.[/B] Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two [illusion and reality].
This Eastern monism with a Western spin is in direct and total contradiction with Christian theism and the civilization it has engendered. There is here no neutral ground. This is true, as well, of sexuality. Both monism and theism have their particular views of sexuality, and here too there is no neutral ground. As one homosexual activist recently said: “Traditional family values suck.”

The vehemence of the above statement indicates how closely theology and sexuality are held, as well as the determination on the part of some to deconstruct heterosexuality as the norm of human society. Not surprisingly, this element of deconstruction, indeed, destruction of “traditional” sexuality, has accompanied the recent appearance of paganism and deconstructive Postmodernism in the West. That can be illustrated in the vertiginous increase in divorce, the phenomenal growth of pornography, the “liberation” of sex from monogamy, and the rising practice and public acceptance of homosexuality. This is all known and well documented. However, within the specific limits of this paper, I wish to describe the religious pagan sexual ideal as androgyny-which seems to be more and more proposed as the reconstructive model for our deconstructed world.

In what follows I will first provide a certain documentation and description of a phenomenon that consistently marks pagan spiritual practice-the association of the androgynous priest with the pagan cultus throughout time and space. I will present this evidence without any claim to complete or exhaustive systemization. In the second place, I will attempt a theological explanation.


3 The Androgynous Priest/Shaman as the Embodiment of Pagan Spirituality

Throughout time and across space, the pagan cultus consistently, though not exclusively, holds out as its sexual representative the emasculated, androgynous priest. Mircea Eliade, a respected expert in comparative religions, argues that androgyny as a religious universal or archetype appears virtually everywhere and at all times in the world’s religions. Much evidence exists to support this judgment.

The clearest textual testimony in ancient times comes from nineteenth century BC Mesopotamia. Androgynous priests were associated with the worship of the goddess Istar from the Sumerian age (1800 BC). Their condition was due to their “devotion to Istar who herself had ‘transformed their masculinity into femininity.'” They functioned as occult shamans, who released the sick from the power of the demons just as, according to the cult myth, they had saved Istar from the devil’s lair. “…as human beings,” says a contemporary scholar, “…they seem to have engendered demonic abhorrence in others;…[U]the fearful respect they provoked is to be sought in their otherness[/U], their position between myth and reality, and their divine-demonic ability to trans-gress boundaries.”

The pagan religions of ancient Canaan appear to maintain a similar view of spirituality and sexuality. The goddess Anat preserves many of the characteristics of Istar. Like the Syrian goddess Cybele, Anat is headstrong and submits to no one. She is both young and nubile but also a bearded soldier, so that many commentators conclude that she is either androgynous or bi-sexual. She thus symbolizes the mystical union, which was celebrated by her worshipers as a ritual enactment of the hieros gamos [sacred spiritual marriage]. The Old Testament gives some indication that Canaanite religion included homosexual androgyny, against which Israel was constantly put on guard.

Livy describes initiation into the Bacchanalia of 186 BC as involving homosexual rape, [I]simillimi feminis mares[/I]. Walter Burkhart, professor of Classical Philology at the University of Zurich, comments upon this testimony: “Scholars at one time gave advice not to believe in slander of this sort, but we can hardly be sure. Parallels from initiations elsewhere are not difficult to find.” In other words, Burkhardt recognizes that there was something going on related to the cultic nature of the event, not simply a frenzied lack of control.

Examples of “religious” androgyny can be found in various forms in Syria and Asia Minor in the third century B.C., but its clearest and closest expression in that area comes from the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian era. It is well documented that the Great Mother under the names of Atargatis or Cybele had androgynous priests, called Galli, who cas-trated themselves as a permanent act of devotion to the goddess. A particular version of the goddess is worshipped under the name of Artemis at Ephesus where Paul established a church (Acts 19). In Syria, Cybele is called Rhea, whose effeminized itinerant priests imitated the deeds of the mythological Attis, in trance-like ecstasies. The rites of initiation into the Cybele or Rhea cults included baptism in the blood of a slaughtered bull or ram. This took place in a pit or taurobolium. At the end of the ceremony sometimes certain “powers” of the sacrificial bull, no doubt the animal’s genitals, were offered to the Mother of the gods, again a powerful symbol of male emasculation before the female divinity. The obvious intentions and results of such cultic mythology and practice were the feminization and emasculation of men under the occultic power of the goddess. Doubtless, the Cybele myth is reproducing the cult myth of Isis, where Osiris, the brother/lover of Isis, is killed by his brother who cuts his body in many pieces. Isis reassembles the pieces, except the phallus which was eaten by a crab, and magically restores him to life. In other words, even in death the ideal male is emasculated, like the Galli in life. Though there is no evidence of a specifically emasculated Isaic priesthood, the yearly festival to Isis included men dressing in women’s clothing. In this period, another example can be found in the worshipers of Aphrodite in Scythia. The ennares were hermaphrodite shamans who wore women’s clothes and received the gift of divination from the Goddess.

At the beginning of the fifth century AD the cult of the goddess Cybele continued to have success. Augustine in his [I]City of God [/I]vividly describes the “games” offered in honor of Tanit, the celestial “virgin” and mother of the gods, where obscene actors role-played disgusting acts “in the presence of an immense throng of spectators and listeners of both sexes.” He also describes the public display of homosexual priests ([I]galloi[/I]).

I have taken the time to include some of the more unsavory details of pagan worship in order to show the similarity of the sexual practices common to them. Even though separated by many centuries, a historical and “theological” connection between the Mesopotamian assinnus, the Canaanite qedeshim, the Scythian ennares, and the Syrian galli is not difficult to imagine. They took on the same androgynous appearance, engaged in the same ecstatic behavior, including self-mutilation, were associated with occultic spirituality, and so in many ways occupied a similar liminal relationship to “normal” society. Such parallels suggest a profound and necessary connection growing out of the same ideological pagan root.

Later in the second and third centuries of the Christian church, the Gnostics were credited by their adversaries with mystery celebrations involving carnal knowledge. The charge is credible because [U]“Christian” Gnosticism was the attempt to Christianize pagan spirituality[/U], even to the point of adopting some form of androgyny. Hippolytus (AD 170-236) reports that one particular Gnostic sect, the Naasenes, who worshipped the Serpent (Naas in Hebrew) of Genesis, attended the secret ceremonies of the mysteries of the Great Mother in order “to understand the ‘universal mystery.'” Like modern syncretists who are encouraged to cross over into other religions, the Gnostics believed religious truth was one, to be found everywhere, and so they crossed over into pagan spirituality as a matter of religious principle. The most explicit testimony is from Irenaeus who says: “They prepare a bridal chamber and celebrate mysteries.” A homosexual encounter is perhaps insinuated in the “Secret Gospel of Mark.” At the very least, the final logion 114 of the Gospel of Thomas appears to be an invitation to spiritual androgyny. [U]All this would justify the judgment of Burkhart that “certain Gnostic sects seem to have practiced mystery initiations, imitating or rather outdoing the pagans…”[/U][/QUOTE]

Petr

06-20-2015, 12:51 PM

continued:

There is good reason to believe that a form of ancient Gnosticism, namely Hermeticism, survived and influenced the Medieval West through the mystical spirituality of Alchemy. This variant Egyptian version of Gnosis saw in Hermes the divine interpreter whose secrets enable Man to pass through various levels of reality, thus making esoteric transmutations possible. The spiritual alchemist became an initiate, one “who knows,” as the ancient Gnostics “knew.” Like Hermes, the alchemical Mercurius was understood as a kind of divine “other” who would intervene by affecting the resolution of opposites. While no explicit sexual perversion is promoted, joining of the opposites or union was frequently imaged as a hieros gamos, a holy marriage, the fruit of which is called “the Philosopher’s Stone.” This “fruit” is sometimes called “the child of the work” which is presented as the Hermetic Androgyne, under the rubric “Two-in-One.” At the very least we have to reckon here with a spiritualized form of what ‘Eliade calls “ritual androgynisation.”

In the same “illuminist” tradition, Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) a great mystic and proto-theosophist, believed Adam was androgynous and that the sexes appeared as a result of the fall. For this monistic mystic, the ideal human state was androgyny. According to Eliade, Böhme derived these notions not from the Qaballah but from Alchemy, for he makes use of alchemical terms. One of spiritual successors, Franz von Baader (1765-1841) postulated that the androgyne had existed at the beginning (Adam) and would appear again at the end of time.

One notable inheritor of the esoteric movements of alchemy and hermeticism in the modern world is Theosophy. It is not without interest that Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society towards the end of the nineteenth century, may well have had a dominatrix lesbian relationship with her successor Annie Besant. Besant began public life as the wife of an Anglican minister, became first a birth-control propagandist, and then an occultist. Her possible lesbianism is suggested by the great authority on modern esotericism, James Webb who cites Besant’s “irreplaceable and fully authoritative biographer Arthur Nethercot.” Later theosophists such as Aleister Crowley, promoter of the occultist pagan Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as Charles Leadbeater, whom Blavatsky called her “bishop,” were noted homosexual pederasts. There is good reason to think that such activity was not the expression of personal weakness, but the consistent expression of pagan spirituality.

In 1923 Feder Mühle, a businessman who became involved in Spiritualism, founded the Gottesbund Tanatra in Görlitz, Silesia-home of Jacob Böhme. Members wore the God’s Eye badge and believed that homosexuals “were vocationally mediums.” They also, with a certain logical consistency, held that heterosexual intercourse impaired the mediumistic talent. This small detail of Germanic occultic history is significant, in this sense. Since leading contemporary homosexuals make the same claims, without any apparent dependence on the theories of Mühle, such parallel thinking would suggest an organic connection between homosexuality and shamanistic religious activity.

We do see such an organic connection in ancient religions that persists today. The Siberian shamans, known as Chukchi, and the shamans of Central Asian engage in ecstatic rituals and dress as androgynes. Among the Ngadju Dyak, a pagan people-group lost in the dense bush of southern Borneo, the basir, “asexual priest-shamans…true hermaphrodites, dressing and behaving like women,” have a priestly function.” This behavior also characterizes Amazonian shamans, Celtic priests [ancient and modern], and Indian hijras. The hijras, who go back into the mists of Hinduism, are a religious community of men who “dress and act like women and whose culture centers on the worship of Bahuchara Mata, one of the many versions of the Mother Goddess worshipped throughout India.” In another form of Hindu spirituality, Tantric Yoga, androgyny is also the goal, where the two contrary principles of Shiva and Shakti are joined. Eliade explains: “When Shakti, who sleeps in the shape of a serpent (kundalini), at the base of his body, is awoken by certain yogic techniques, she moves…by way of the chakras up to the top of the skull, where Shiva dwells, and unites with him.” The yogin, through powerful techniques of sexual-spiritual meditation, is thus transformed “into a kind of ‘androgyne.” In Buddhism also the true human, the archetype, called a bodhiasattva, is androgynous. These yogic practices and mystical teachings concerning androgyny are doubtless as old as the Mesopotamian and Syrian examples discussed above.

In American Indian religious practice homosexual transvestite males-berdaches-have always functioned as shamans. Amongst the Navajo, the nadle, a feminized male serves as reconciler of conflict. According to Navajo myth, the original hermaphrodite went to the underworld to be associated with the dead and the devils of the lower world. Among the Zuñi, Awonawilona (“he-she”) is a powerful, positive mythological figure. Similar figures are to be found in African, Australian Aboriginal cultic practice. “Some African societies,” observes an ethnographer, “have developed intermediary genders of men-women and women-men who, like their Native American counterparts, are seen as sacred and as spiritually powerful individuals.” Other examples of spiritual/physical androgyny include the homosexual priests of the Yoruba religion in Cuba and “young gay witches in Manhattan.” In light of the above, one would surely have to agree with the argument of a recent book tracing the history of gay male spirituality: “gender-variant men have fulfilled a sacred role throughout the millennia.”

Coming from a different angle, Harold Bloom would nevertheless agree with this judgment. He states: “Central to shamanism are its supposed mysteries: flight, levitation, gender-transformation, bilocation, and animal and bird incarnations. All these phenomena, however startling, are merely means to the single end of shamanism: restoring the undying self of the dead.”

Emily Culpepper, an Ex-Southern Baptist, now a lesbian pagan witch, teaching at the University of Redlands in Southern California, agrees. She sees gays and lesbians, in her words, as “shamans for a future age.” She reserves a spiritual role for homosexuals, for a shaman is “…a charged, potent, awe-inspiring, and even fear-inspiring person who takes true risks by crossing over into other worlds.” A fuller definition leaves little to the imagination: “The power and effectiveness of shamans-witches, sibyls, Druids-emerges from their ability to communicate with the non-human: extra-terrestrial and subterranean forces, and the spirit-world of the dead.” This, the reader will recall, is exactly the claim of the Mesopotamian assinnu/kurgarru and the Syrian galli-that they had contact with the spirit realm of the Underworld and of the Dead.

Culpepper left the Church and repudiated Christianity. Others stay in and say essentially the same thing. In more familiar but strangely comparable terms, Virginia Mollenkott, calling herself “an evangelical lesbian feminist,” speaks for gays and lesbians, when she says, “We are God’s Ambassadors.” Indeed, Mollenkott claims she “was told” by her “guardian angel, a Spirit Guide, the Holy Spirit or Jesus [she is not sure]: “A great shift is occurring in the world, and you are a part of that shift.” For Rosemary Radford Ruether, a leading “Christian” feminist theologian, “Androgyny is her model for a human species liberated from “dualistic” gender into “psychic wholeness.” Similarly, Judy Westerdorf, a United Methodist clergy-woman, triumphantly declared to the delegates at the pagano-“Christian” feminist RE-Imagining Conference in Minneapolis (1993) that “the Church has always been blessed by gays and lesbians,…witches…[and] shamans.”

No doubt without much awareness of these elitist theories and the deep, spiritual stakes involved, the media has shaped the sexual fantasy-world of America’s youth. The “gay” and mainstream presses are now documenting a disturbing trend. Young people are declaring themselves “homosexual” at earlier and earlier ages. Others are embracing bi-sexuality, as an expression of personal freedom and autonomy. Observers note “a growing trend [in contemporary youth culture]…to refuse to define their sexuality ….Youth today want more representations of a fluid sexuality that rejects definitions of ‘gay’ or ‘straight.'” The popular press documents the success of what it calls the “gender blur.”

Though promoted as an issue of civil rights, the homosexual/androgynous revival is not merely contemporary civics or chic theory. The close connection between pagan esoteric spirituality and androgynous sexuality, evident across time and space, demands that we not ignore the spiritual dimensions underlying the contemporary scene. Barbara Marx Hubbard’s spirit guide says that sexual identity confusion is a good thing; in the new age, “Your adolescence will be a joy. You will be androgynous.”

In the light of the above evidence, is should not be surprising to note that the revival of pagan religion in our day is accompanied by a powerful reappearance of pagan sexuality. In other words, homosexuality may be less a modern question of biological destiny or civil rights than a necessary practical outworking of age-old pagan spirituality. It is becoming more and more manifest that a particular religious commitment is always accompanied by a particular sexual theory and practice. But this is not to suggest some scarlet, conspiratorial thread connecting the dots. The connection is logical, theological, and inevitable. A monistic view of existence will work itself out in all the domains of human life, and especially in the domain of sexuality.

What then is the relationship?


4 The Religious Significance of Androgyny

Witing during the “student revolution” of the 1960s, the Christian apologist, Francis Schaeffer perceptively sensed the deep religious inspiration fueling the liberation of sexuality. Specifically, he noted:

“Some forms of homosexuality today…are a philosophic expression…a denial of the antithesis. It has led in this case to an obliteration of the distinction between man and woman. So the male and the female as complimentary partners are finished…In much of modern thinking, all antithesis and all the order of God’s creation is to be fought against-including the male-female distinctions. The pressure towards unisex is largely rooted here. But this is not an isolated problem; it is part of the world-spirit of the generation which surrounds us…the result of the death of absolutes.”
Schaeffer’s passing remark is surely correct. As we discussed above, at the heart of pagan monism is a mystical, unitive experience, a state in which distinctions disappear and opposites are joined. Androgyny, on the sexual level, reflects and confirms such an experience. Not everyone engaging in such activity thinks about the ultimate spiritual stakes. However, the link is explicitly established by influential pagan theorists in both the ancient and the modern world. Their explanations, though separated by vast distances and great periods of time, are strikingly similar and consistent, and thus independently testify to the coherent connection this paper seeks to clarify.

In the ancient Gnostic texts such connections can be detected. The Church Father Hippolytus, documents how and why the “spiritual” Gnostics did not hesitate to imitate pagan spirituality and sexuality in one form or another. He explains the Gnostic Naasene participation in the cult of the Goddess. “Because they claimed that everything is spiritual,” the Naasenes did not become Galli physically but rather spiritually: “they only perform the functions of those who are castrated” by abstaining from sexual intercourse. So, concludes Hippolytus, the Naasene Gnostics imitate the Galli, the castrated priests of Cybele. “For they urge most severely and carefully that one should abstain, as those men (the Galli) do, from intercourse with women; their behavior otherwise…is like that of the castrated.” The mythological story of the castration of Attis thus led the Naasenes to conclude that the image of emasculation was a symbol of salvation. Attis cut off his testicles in order ”break with the baser and material world and gain access to immortal life, where there is no longer either male or female.” These “Christian” Gnostics sought, through a deep form of spiritual androgyny, a close association with paganism’s understanding of salvation.

Of what does such “salvation” consist? The Gnostic Gospel of Truth enunciates the theory: “It is within Unity that each one will attain himself; within knowledge he will purify himself from multiplicity into Unity…” The Gospel of Thomas develops the practical consequences: “Simon Peter said to them: “Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said: “Lo, I shall lead her, so that I may make her a male, that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself a male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Though on the surface less radical, and thus promoted as a Gospel on a par with the four canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas is similarly driven by the androgynous pagan ideal. This Saying 114, being the last, doubtless represents the goal of the gospel, which is promised in the first-to “not experience death.” Here, apparently, is the road to salvation-the mystical attainment of an androgynous or sexless state. Saying 114 should be understood in the light of Saying 22: “And when you make the male and the female into a single one so that the male shall not be male and the female shall not be female…then you shall enter the kingdom.” Both these sayings suggest the “neutralization” of sexuality so that the ideal for Gnostics is to become, in this life, spiritually and ritually androgynous. Thomas is not a macho attack on women. It is a rejection of creational sexuality, a radical refusal of sexual differentiation, as presented in the Genesis account.

To become a true disciple, Mary must become a liberated Gnostic, untrammeled by the sexual distinctions of the original creation. She must become autonomous, and move beyond the bondage of her sex. As a spiritual androgyne, she attains mystical union with the All.

Having already noted the alchemical goal of a mystical/unitive hieros gamos, it is not difficult to follow the logic of a professor at a well-respected Catholic university who lends to the mystical pursuit of the alchemists a sexual twist. Professor Frederica Halligan perceives in the alchemists’ quest for “gold” a blueprint for the planet’s future. Halligan notes that the second of the seven stages of alchemistical meditation, called solutio, involves both a transformation of sexual energy and the destruction of the individual ego [the self]. This is a powerful mystical experience of pure monistic spirituality. For this Roman Catholic scholar, monism seems to present no problem. But the process is far from over.

The seventh stage, conjunctio, [“joining”] is a “new reality,” the final bringing together of all the opposites, producing “gold,” i.e., spiritual gold, i.e., “a tremendously deepened sense of the oneness of all….Unitive consciousness is awareness of the essential oneness with the Divine, that is, mystic consciousness….the unification of all the opposites within oneself.” Halligan’s final definition of the conjunctio is clear: “Beyond gender differences now, the mystics of both Eastern and Western traditions describe the bliss of abiding love.”

Don Quixote

06-20-2015, 12:59 PM

Interesting article.
A defining feature of Gnosticism ancient and modern is the abandonment of reason and rationality, often without any self-awareness of the abandonment. These people cheerfully babble on without any regard for the incoherence and contradictory nature of what is just plain nonsense.

Examples.

As the great modern Gnostic, C. G. Jung said: “The self is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” From the center of one’s own limitless universe the self is sovereign.
A circle is defined as "a round plane figure whose boundary (the circumference) consists of points equidistant from a fixed point (the centre)", Jung is just babbling contradiction.
Then this:
The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare to state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two [illusion and reality].
Universum means 'one whole', a complete something. A universe without limits is a contradiction. If they want to posit an unlimited spatio-temporality they can't call it a 'universe'. Furthermore, if limit belongs to thought only, a concept for organising experience - "map and edit reality" - how could this, as a real distinction, ever be known? Again, more contradiction.

To embrace gender and LGBTQLMFAO theory, one first needs to abandon reason - "throw off the tyranny of phallogocentrism". Without this crucial move, this stuff can only appear as it is: pure nonsense.

Don Quixote

06-20-2015, 01:08 PM

Having already noted the alchemical goal of a mystical/unitive hieros gamos, it is not difficult to follow the logic of a professor at a well-respected Catholic university who lends to the mystical pursuit of the alchemists a sexual twist. Professor Frederica Halligan perceives in the alchemists’ quest for “gold” a blueprint for the planet’s future. Halligan notes that the second of the seven stages of alchemistical meditation, called solutio, involves both a transformation of sexual energy and the destruction of the individual ego [the self]. This is a powerful mystical experience of pure monistic spirituality. For this Roman Catholic scholar, monism seems to present no problem. But the process is far from over.Rest assured, there is nothing remotely Catholic about any of this.

Petr

06-20-2015, 01:13 PM

continued:

Mircea Eliade, both a remarkable researcher of the phenomena of pagan spirituality, as well as one of the architects of the new spirituality, explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration of Chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.” The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, monistic quest, whether ancient or modern: “in mystical love and at death one completely integrates the spirit world: all contraries are collapsed. The distinctions between the sexes are erased: the two merge into an androgynous whole. In short, at the center one knows oneself, is known, and knows the nature of reality.” Or again, accordinging to Eliade, androgyny in many traditional religions functions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum…. symboliz… perfection…[and] ultimate being….

The androgyne is thus the physical symbol of the pagan spiritual goal, which is the merging of two seemingly distinct entities, the self and God, and a mystical return to the state of godhead prior to creation. The joining of the opposites is the dissolution of creational distinctions and thus the destruction of creation’s hold upon human identity. Such joining brings a “liberating” recognition that the real self is “uncreated.” The solution to our angst, according to a feminist author, is healing through the sacred marriage, the hieros gamos. This is the marriage of the ego and the self, which gives birth to “a divine child.” “A woman gives birth to herself as a divine androgynous being, autonomous, and in a state of perfection in the unity of the opposites. She is whole.”

This sacred marriage expresses what occurs, in particular, on the moral plane. The pagan monist assumes guiltless responsibility for all his actions whether “good” or “evil” and thus, in an exercise of personal, autonomous power, joins the opposites of good and evil. The early American monist, Ralph Waldo Emerson welcomed this spiritual option with enthusiasm. “‘If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to this or that.” The deliberate act of power which defiantly declares evil good and good evil flies in the face of the Creator’s designs and in so doing jumps into the waiting arms of the Tempter. One may well wonder if this joining of the opposites is a possible implication of the Serpent’s word, “…knowing good and evil.”

The psychoanalyst, C.G. Jung proposed a similar interpretation. Under the influence of Philemon, a familiar spirit, Jung wrote his famous “Seven Sermons to the Dead.” Using colorful imagery, Jung disavows Christianity and endorses pagan spirituality. Employing the pseudonym of Basilides, a famous second century Gnostic heretic, Jung addresses the spirits of dead Crusaders who had failed to find salvation in “Jerusalem.” He succeeds in converting them to the Gnostic god, Abraxas, who is “both good and evil,…a terrible hidden god that humans cannot perceive. Abraxas is behind the sun and night,…the creator and destroyer of the world, truth and evil, light and darkness,…the ‘hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning,’…the operation of all the gods and devils, and is ‘the world, its becoming and passing.'” Jung ends his sermon with a call to look to the god within rather than to the Christian God of the Bible. Later, he would represent this experience as a series of concentric circles within a larger circle, and for the rest of his life he “pointed to the Indian mandala (circle) as the best symbolic representation of wholeness or completeness in an individual, or as the supreme God in which all opposites are contained.” In this regard, it is appropriate to recall the definition of the mystical goal believed to be in all religions, given by Yale professor, Louis Dupré, -“a state in which all distinctions disappear.”

On the sexual plane, the homosexual androgyne, according to Jung, affirms his power by willingly assuming his physical proclivities and thus joining what God has put asunder. Indeed for Jung, spiritual androgyny symbolizes “the integration of the opposites or the state of the individuation of the autonomous individual.” Therefore, homosexuals are (though some unconsciously or only partially) true pagan monists, who have succeeded in translating spiritual theory into physical reality.

Jung himself suggested that homosexuality preserved an archetype of the androgynous original person. That is why homosexuals can propose themselves to society as “shamans.” In the monistic tradition, the same religious claim is made for homosexuality as is made for androgyny. Since both androgyny and homosexuality function religiously in traditional paganism, they are clearly related. The same emphasis is found in Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs (1825-1895), often considered the “grandfather” of the modern “gay rights” movement. Ulrichs rejected all psychological and behavioral explanations of homosexuality and adopted a psycho-spiritual one. He believed a homosexual was a man’s body inhabited by a woman’s soul (vice versa for a lesbian). Notice the “spiritual” terminology. He called homosexuality a “third sex,” that is, a true expression of androgyny.

The more theoretical explanation of the phenomenon finds popular expression in our contemporary culture. Recently a gay leader at a Pagan Spirit Gathering in 1985 made the spiritual claim: “We feel there is a power in our sexuality…[a] queer energy that most cultures consider magical. It is practically a requirement for certain kinds of medicine and magic.” Another gay pagan confirms the spiritual dynamic: “It is simply easier to blend with a nature spirit, or the spirit of a plant or an animal, if you are not concerned with a gender-specific role.” One is clearly not concerned with any of the other creational distinctions either. The separation between humans, animals and plants has been eliminated and, at that point, full-blown, monistic union ensues. “Blending” is another way of speaking of spiritual union with the All.

Eliade, in explaining the religious function of the asexual priest-shaman, true hermaphrodites, who dress and behave like women,” notes that is precisely because “they combine the two cosmological planes-earth and sky-and also from the fact that they combine in their own person the feminine element (earth) and the masculine element (sky). We here have ritual androgyny, a well-known archaic formula for the…coincidentia oppositorum.” This interpretation is confirmed via different terminology and conceptuality in the massive work on the Goddess by the Wiccan scholars, Monica Sjoo and Barbara Moor:

Creative women and men in all ages have found rigid heterosexuality in conflict with being fully alive and aware on all levels-sexual, psychic and spiritual [emphasis mine]…It is as if, on all levels of our being, we are split into one half, and forbidden the other. We are split against ourselves, and against the “self” in the other, by this moralistic opposition of natural polarities in the very depth of our souls.”
The physico-theological mechanism seems to function as follows: androgynous persons, whether homosexual or bi-sexual, are able to express within themselves both sexual roles and identities. In the sex act they engage both as male and female, equally as penetrator and penetrated, the “hard” and the “soft” -and thus taste in some form or other both physical and spiritual androgyny. As in classic monistic spirituality, they have, on the physical plane, joined the opposites, proving and experiencing that there are no distinctions. Just as the distinctions inherent in heterosexuality point to the fundamental theistic notion of the Creator/creature distinction, [U]so androgyny in its various forms eradicates distinction and elevates the spiritual blending of all things, including the idolatrous confusion of the human with the divine.[/U] This seems to be the very same logic that brings Paul to a similar conclusion already in Romans 1:18-27.

This seems to make sense theologically and theoretically. It is confirmed by contemporary gay thinkers. “Something in our gay/lesbian being as an all-encompassing existential standpoint,” says J. Michael Clark, professor at Emory University and Georgian State University, and a gay spokesman, “…appears to heighten our spiritual capacities.” Clark claims gays share the same sentiments as radical feminist theologians whose “religious impulses are being killed by [traditional] Judeo-Christianity…” Clark seems to be saying that the problem lies not with “mean-spirited” or “hateful” Christians, failing to be true, loving Christians. For gays the problem lies rather with the whole biblical worldview and theological paradigm. For this reason, Clark turns to Native American animism for an acceptable spiritual model. As Janie Spahr, the Presbyterian lesbian activist, stated with great candor: “Maybe we’re talking about a different God.”

Specifically, for Clark, the berdache, an androgynous American Indian shaman, born as a male but as an adult, choosing to live as a female, constitutes a desirable gay spiritual model, for the berdache achieves “the reunion of the cosmic, sexual and moral polarities,” or the “joining of the opposites.” How interesting that the Berdaches were known as “sacred Balancers,” unifying the polarities to “nurture wholeness…” This powerful spirituality involves the denial of distinctions, and the conscious assumption of all one’s contradictions and perversions. It turns out that one reigns divinely supreme over creational distortions.

We surely must conclude that sexual perversion and, in particular, the elimination of sexual distinctions, is not an incidental footnote of pagan religious history, of mere passing interest, but represents one of its fundamental ideological commitments. That the pagan priesthood would be so identified, across space and time, with the blurring of sexual identity via homosexual androgyny indicates, beyond a doubt, the enormous priority paganism has given, and continues to give, to the undermining of God-ordained monogamous heterosexuality, and the enthusiastic promotion of androgyny in its varied forms.


[U]5 Conclusion[/U]

When, during the Sixties, theologians triumphantly declared the “death of God,” they fostered a rejection of the theism of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, as well as an abandonment of biblical sexuality. Theologian David Miller declared in 1974:

[QUOTE]…the announcement of the death of God was the obituary of a useless single-minded and one-dimensional norm of a civilization that has been predominantly monotheistic, not only in its religion, but also in its politics, its history, its social order, its ethics, and its psychology. When released from the tyrannical imperialism of monotheism by the death of God, man has the opportunity of discovering new dimensions hidden in the depths of reality’s history.
In this liberating list, Miller did not mention sexuality, but it is implicitly there-in the announcement, at the funeral of the God, of the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. At the time, this connection was not always obvious. The “Death of God” theologians were perceived as super-rationalist liberals intent on demonstrating that twentieth century Man had “come of age,” having outgrown the need of the “God hypothesis.” It took a generation for the implications of this to dawn. Mark C. Taylor, the postmodern philosopher, sees the implications with disarming clarity: “…the death of God the disappearance of self [no predetermined norms] and end of history [no meaningful events]…[it] unleashes the aberrant levity of free play…purposelessness.” He develops the implications of this new freedom: “The lawless land of erring, which is forever beyond good and evil, is the world of Dionysus, the Antichrist, who calls every wander[er] to carnival, comedy and carnality.”

During this same post-death-of-God generation, radical feminism, in an incredible show of power, made sure God would die. [B]In 1979 Naomi Goldenberg, a leading feminist, declared, (with no apparent conscious reference to the Death of God theology, as far as I can tell): “The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Jahweh.” [/B]Carol P. Christ announced one death-dealing method to bring about the undoing of God: “…using the titles Goddess and God the Mother is probably the only way to shatter the hold of [the] idolatrous male God on the psyche.” In other words, God and sex were inextricably linked even in death. Of course, in the same way, the resurrection of the pagan gods would give new life to sexual options. Radical feminist theology was read by many unsuspecting Church pluralists as a relatively innocuous religious version of the contemporary agenda of civil rights. On the contrary, it turns out that these theologians were proponents of a deep, pagan spirituality, which had nothing to do with rationalism, and very little to do with civil rights. [I]After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World’s Religions looks both like the “lawless land of [pansexual] erring,” and like one more element in the progress of global syncretism. The agenda is captured in the title of a recent book on theology by a Roman Catholic scholar-When God Becomes Goddess: The Transformation of American Religion. God does not have to die: he simply had to undergo a sex change. Unfortunately, he also had to change religion, and take up abode in the pagan pantheon.

At the beginning of a new millennium, we can begin to sense that such apostasy from God and from the biblical notions of gender is pagan to the core, and has produced in one generation, in “Christian” America, a torrential flood of the same spirituality and sexuality that has always characterized occult paganism. Understanding where such radical theology has always taken a society in its sexual practice will help us to see the necessarily close association between theology and sexuality, and the manner in which the one affects the other. In the last thirty years America has abandoned theism and embraced the spirituality of Eastern paganism. These same years that have produced the most radical social engineering in America’s history-the deconstruction of normative biblical heterosexuality and the revival and pagan idealization of homosexual androgyny.

There is a spiritual-sexual agenda in our Jungian, post-theistic, postmodern, pro-choice, non-judgmental culture. As we naively crossed the bridge into the third millennium to the tune of Lennon’s “Imagine,” full of hope for a new world “order” of unity and love, respect and democracy, we have brought across that bridge the agenda of the ideal, androgy-nous, sexually unfettered, New Man of pagan spirituality. At the very moment when the New Age gurus declare the imminent arrival of the Age of Aquarius, the eighteenth century theosophist Baader’s prophecy seems to be appearing-the return of the original androgyne. Might we be on the verge of witnessing the construction of an eschatological Sodom and Gomorrah, as the title of a recent pro-gay book, [I]Reclaiming Sodom, suggests? The masses are rendered insensate with a constant diet of sexual degradation, while, at the same time, reassured by the spiritual and moral liberation that spiritual paganism offers. Although only the radicals may understand and believe monistic theory in its purest form, the entire society is inevitably affected. While the elite sometimes fail, as did Julian the Apostate in the fourth century A.D., in their success, they can wreak havoc on a culture. The deconstruction of the biblical God and biblical sexuality as a philosophical and ideological program is already deeply embedded in our collective unconscious. Some powerful leaders see the future as the brave new global world of sexual and spiritual pluralism, where liberty of self-expression in these areas is the essence of human progress. One could even imagine a society of pagan religious syncretism where bi-sexuality and homosexual androgyny would be the spiritual and social ideal, the sexuality of choice for those in power, while heterosexuality would be tolerated, considered inferior, and strictly controlled-for it has happened before.

Clearly God is interested in sex, or Satan would not be so passionately committed to its deconstruction. To destroy God’s created structures, the Evil One rips from the body politic the sexual distinctions hard-wired into creation to recall the deep truth about existence-the absolute distinction between the Creator and creation. The attack on these structures succeeds in convincing many that they, in themselves, are a detestable oppression, the very cause of social and human dislocation. This is relatively easy to do because such structures are necessarily are marred by sin. The result is dramatic. As in ancient Gnosticism, the patriarchal God of Scripture is eliminated from respectable “cutting-edge” theology, and even from polite campus speech in some evangelical schools, all in the name of Christ. Such a trade-off prevents many well-meaning Christians from seeing the essential goal of the sexual revolution as the subtle destruction of a theistic worldview. In the place of sexual differentiation, we are offered monistic, egalitarian androgyny as a physical, social and spiritual ideal. Thus many, espousing gender liberation in the name of Christ and the Gospel, only, too late, discover a culture “liberated” from the God who, in Christ, both created and redeemed the world. What is often not seen in the debate on sexuality is that we are also in the presence of two “Gospels”: the one, pagan, preaches redemption as liberation from the Creator and repudiation of creation’s structures; the other, Christian, proclaims redemption as reconciliation with the Creator, and the proclamation of creation’s goodness. In a pagan world, a truncated Gospel of personal salvation will no longer do. Sexuality within the context of creation must be announced as an essential part of the Christian message of reconciliation with God and glad submission to his good will.

Firmly engaged on a wild path of sexual deconstruction and androgynous experimentation, our self-liberating culture is like a little child alone in a small boat on a big lake. As it giddily strikes out into the uncharted waters of the twenty-first century, lured by irrational hopes of human progress, and ignorant of the costly experiments of the pasts, our youth-obsessed culture is tragically adrift from its Christian roots and cut off from its life-sustaining creational moorings.

The theosophist Eliade, one of most doughty proponents of the “new humanism,” nevertheless felt obliged to give a serious warning before he died in 1986. In speaking about “ritual androgyny” as both a “source of power,” but also as a fearsome possibility of great loss, Eliade offered this sobering admonition:

Every attempt to transcend the opposites carries with it a certain danger. This is why the ideas of a coincidentia oppositorum always arouse ambivalent feelings: on the one side, man is haunted by the desire to escape from his particular situation and regain a transpersonal mode of life; on the other, he is paralyzed by the fear of losing his “identity” and “forgetting” himself.”[/QUOTE]

Petr

06-20-2015, 01:31 PM

Btw, the writer of this insightful piece was a childhood pal of John Lennon:

https://truthxchange.com/about/staff/dr-peter-jones/

Dr. Peter Jones

Executive Director

I was born in Liverpool, England, where I would buy fish and chips on Penny Lane with John Lennon, a high school friend with whom I shared a desk for five years. Not that we did much at those desks! I was too interested in football (soccer), while John spent his time messing around. We played music together at school, but I never became a Beatle, because my Christian parents wouldn’t allow me to go to clubs. When I got serious about my studies, I went to the University of Wales, then to Gordon Divinity School, near Boston. During my master’s year at Harvard Divinity School I met Francis Schaeffer (through his books) and a Wellesley College student, Rebecca Clowney, daughter of Edmund P. Clowney, president for many years of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Schaeffer’s analysis of his culture, and his expression of the Christian faith in a coherent system helped me to apply biblical understanding to all areas of life.
Peter Jones has specialized in studying the neo-pagan threat to Christianity.

Petr

06-20-2015, 02:03 PM

The clearest textual testimony in ancient times comes from nineteenth century BC Mesopotamia. Androgynous priests were associated with the worship of the goddess Istar from the Sumerian age (1800 BC). Their condition was due to their “devotion to Istar who herself had ‘transformed their masculinity into femininity.'” They functioned as occult shamans, who released the sick from the power of the demons just as, according to the cult myth, they had saved Istar from the devil’s lair. “…as human beings,” says a contemporary scholar, “…they seem to have engendered demonic abhorrence in others;…the fearful respect they provoked is to be sought in their otherness, their position between myth and reality, and their divine-demonic ability to transgress boundaries.”
We can see that it was not uncommon among pagans for homosexuals to enter priesthood. Even among manly Nordic warrior-peoples, this archetype showed up:

http://www.seidh.org/articles/sex-status-seidh/


Sex, Status, and Seiðr: Homosexuality and Germanic Religion

Jochens sees the involvement of men in seidh (however despised) as a devolution from ancient times. "Originally a monopoly of the goddesses, the magic seidhr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sei%C3%B0r) was needed by human sibyls to perform their predictions. This connection between women and goddesses suggests that not only divination, but also magic had originally been a female monopoly.... " (307)

I would rather suggest that it was not female physiology, but a female identity or social role which was the prerequisite for access to certain kinds of spiritual power. Certainly there is evidence that transexuality had a recognized place in the religion of the barbarian period.

Tacitus tells us that the Naharvali, a Suevian tribe, possessed a grove of ". . .immemorial sanctity. A priest in female attire (ornatus mulieribus) had the charge of it." (43) In this grove twin deities called the Alcis and identified with Castor and Pollux were worshipped. We must also cite the well-known passage from Saxo, describing how Starkad, having lived for some years with the Swedish royal family, returns to Denmark, "for, living at Uppsala in the period of sacrifices, he had become disgusted with the womanish body movements, the clatter of actors on the stage, and the soft tinkling of bells." (History of the Danes VI:154))

It was against such cults of sacred gender-bending (very common among pagan Canaanites) that this Mosaic law was given:


Deuteronomy 22:5 (http://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/22-5.htm)

A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the LORD your God.

Pitirim Sorokin

06-20-2015, 02:13 PM

This is interesting about homosexuals as shamans: in ancient myths trickster gods sometimes changes sex and engaged in copulation with males, sometimes even giving birth. Thinking Loki for example.

clefty

06-20-2015, 02:17 PM

It was against such cults of sacred gender-bending (very common among pagan Canaanites) that this Mosaic law was given:



but just to joos...

and plus...we are no longer under Law...right?

Blighter

06-20-2015, 04:02 PM

Interesting article.
A defining feature of Gnosticism ancient and modern is the abandonment of reason and rationality, often without any self-awareness of the abandonment. These people cheerfully babble on without any regard for the incoherence and contradictory nature of what is just plain nonsense.

Examples.

As the great modern Gnostic, C. G. Jung said: “The self is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” From the center of one’s own limitless universe the self is sovereign.

A circle is defined as "a round plane figure whose boundary (the circumference) consists of points equidistant from a fixed point (the centre)", Jung is just babbling contradiction.

Then this:

The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare to state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two [illusion and reality].

Universum means 'one whole', a complete something. A universe without limits is a contradiction. If they want to posit an unlimited spatio-temporality they can't call it a 'universe'. Furthermore, if limit belongs to thought only, a concept for organising experience - "map and edit reality" - how could this, as a real distinction, ever be known? Again, more contradiction.

With all due respect, I do not think you have entered into an interpretation of either of these examples in a suitable frame of mind. Your refutations are so obtuse that one cannot doubt that your intention from the outset was to justify an instinctive disapproval, without making any attempt to understand.

The former example, attributed to Jung although he is unquestionably not the originator of the concept, can be found echoed in the writings of other Christian thinkers -- not all of whom, one hopes, are deserving of the contempt you apparently have for Jung.

Alien Settler

06-20-2015, 05:11 PM

I would suggest the following:

http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/06/accommodate-this/


http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=1039


Also:

Hermaphrodites, Gynomorphs and Jesus: She-Male Gods and the Roots of Christianity by Hillman

As follows from the description:

Devotees of gynomorphic divinities were the first westerners to promote the religious practice known as necromancy. The first “baptists” were cross-dressing necromancers, who celebrated the Gynomorph. Eunuchs who served the same goddess were chemically castrated with scorpion venom. Ancient pre-Christian oracles declared that the messiah must be a hermaphrodite. Christianity tried to assimilate and employ the use of necromancy. The earliest Christians used designer sex drugs in their rituals in order to venerate a messiah given gynomorphic status by church bishops.

Don Quixote

06-20-2015, 06:17 PM

With all due respect, I do not think you have entered into an interpretation of either of these examples in a suitable frame of mind. Your refutations are so obtuse that one cannot doubt that your intention from the outset was to justify an instinctive disapproval, without making any attempt to understand.

The former example, attributed to Jung although he is unquestionably not the originator of the concept, can be found echoed in the writings of other Christian thinkers -- not all of whom, one hopes, are deserving of the contempt you apparently have for Jung.I identified objective contradictions, you, on the other hand, suggest I'm somehow wrong but offer no arguments in support of that claim. You go on to make claims about "other Christian thinkers", but offer no evidence. In other words, a content-free post, literally.

Petr

06-20-2015, 07:08 PM

Just as the distinctions inherent in heterosexuality point to the fundamental theistic notion of the Creator/creature distinction, so androgyny in its various forms eradicates distinction and elevates the spiritual blending of all things, including the idolatrous confusion of the human with the divine. This seems to be the very same logic that brings Paul to a similar conclusion already in Romans 1:18-27 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1%3A18-27&version=NIV).
This concept is very important to that school of fundamentalist Christian thinkers that Jones represents - here is explained why egalitarianism can be literally demonic doctrine:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=1089925&postcount=6

I submit Christians must enter into this great war that has been being waged since the garden. It was in the garden where the first successful salvo against Biblical Christianity was fired against the family as the Serpent attacked family ties, bypassing Adam’s authority to beguile Eve, in a successful attempt to sell the poison of man’s equality with God, which resulted in a collectivism against God. In point of fact the greatest need in the Church today is to realize the threat that egalitarianism is to Biblical Christianity. The drive to fuzz and deny all distinctions, to erase all notions of biblical hierarchies (Husbands w/ headship over wives, Parents w/ headship over children, women the weaker vessel compared to men, Employers w/ headship over employees,) and to flatten out all God ordained differences is the worldview that currently is the greatest threat to Biblical Christianity in the West.

Without Biblical distinctions regarding gender, roles, ethnic groups, and authority structure, we will be amalgamated into the herd reality that Dostoevsky warns about. It will be a herd reality where a few elite are, in essence, the Farmers over the undistinguished and undifferentiated mass herd. Those who advocate complete equality in terms of “equality of identity” are the enemy and they are the enemy because Scripture identifies them as such. They are the enemy who overthrow the 5th commandment where a distinction and hierarchy of parents is required before they can be honored. They are the enemy who overthrow the great commission where a distinction of nations is required before those nations can be baptized, discipled and taught to observe all things taught by Christ. They are the enemy who overthrow Galatians 3:28 where a existing distinction between Jews and Gentiles, Slave and Free, Men and Women, must exist before there can be comfort that all can be justified in Christ. They are the enemy who overthrow the 9th commandment where a distinction must exist between what is my property and what is not my property before any forbidding of theft can make sense. Egalitarianism is the enemy and egalitarians are the enemy precisely because their egalitarianism strikes at the heart of God’s revelation. Keep in mind that the ultimate goal of the Father of egalitarianism is to erase the distinction and hierarchy between the Creator and the creature. They desire to make God and man a common denominator. That is the ultimate distinction that is under attack in all of these penultimate battles.

Petr

06-20-2015, 07:33 PM

According to historian Michelet, Alexander the Great was seduced by the androgynous mysteries of Babylon:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?p=1316787

One fine morning this Achilles became Asiatic, and turned his back to Homer and Greece. Babylon, the great mistress in monarchical prostitutions, accomplished in one day upon Alexander those effects which it required a hundred years to produce on the Persians. Shameful and unforeseen spectacle! The conquered found themselves to be the vanquishers. Asia, that was at that moment worn out, stained, and in the cadaverous condition of Chaldean rottenness, — old Asia obtained her master for her lover. A gilded sepulchre, the sink of love, through which the world had passed, such was the passion of Alexander the Great. Modern writers, when they see in all this an admirable political sagacity, are insane. If the Greeks had to contract a little of the Asiatic manners and thinking, this certainly was not the way to do it.
...

The scenes which were exhibited on the return were extraordinary for madness and despair. Alexander had lost his senses, and was scarcely a man. He built a city in honor of his dog; another for the tomb of his horse. He played Bacchus, carrying the thyrsus, and crowned all his army with ivy, making Bacchantes of all those sunburnt old soldiers. From the height of his world-wide imperial throne, he taught and exemplified that which the kings of Asia hid in their seraglios. He was already an Heliogabalus, with all the infamies of Atys, and of Adonis of double sex, "the lover of Venus, and the fair beloved of Apollo." He wept over Hephaestion with the passion of a woman; he killed his physicians, burned the temple of Esculapius, and asked the oracle of Anion to make a demigod of the dead Hephaestion. The love-feast in honor of the child Bagoas, displayed before the army, was more astonishing still — an unique scene which is not to be found in the history of the Caesars.
NO-S0-jcwEY

It was against this kind of cultural-sexual seduction, practiced by the Canaanites (Semitic cousins of the Babylonians), that the stern laws of Moses were primarily intended to oppose.

Petr

06-20-2015, 07:49 PM

Like with the serpents and dragons, Christian culture has traditionally seen androgyny as creepy or evil, whereas pagan cultures can see it even as somehow holy. In his Passion of Christ, Mel Gibson made Satan look like sexually ambiguous drag-queen:

9kJFf6VDd6o

Petr

06-20-2015, 08:13 PM

This is interesting about homosexuals as shamans: in ancient myths trickster gods sometimes changes sex and engaged in copulation with males, sometimes even giving birth. Thinking Loki for example.
Queers are very over-represented in media and show business today, and what are media people, those wizards of semiotics, but modern shamans who are molding our psyches?

Blighter

06-20-2015, 09:51 PM

I identified objective contradictions, you, on the other hand, suggest I'm somehow wrong but offer no arguments in support of that claim. You go on to make claims about "other Christian thinkers", but offer no evidence. In other words, a content-free post, literally.

My post wasn't content-free; if it were, I wouldn't have bothered writing it. Even less so, the metaphor of the infinite sphere, alluded to in the Jung quote you dismissed as babbling contradiction, is not anything of the sort -- it may be paradoxical, but it is not without meaning. The issue is not lack of content, but your own refusal to look for it.

I didn't offer you any evidence that other Christian thinkers have referred to the circle/sphere whose centre is everywhere, circumference nowhere, because I imagined that you also have access to Google. In relation to this topic, you could look up Meister Eckhart, Nicolaus Cusanus, Giordano Bruno or Blaise Pascal, for example, who applied the same metaphor in various ways. I have also seen the same reference made by followers of Jacob Boehme.

You may find an interesting discussion in Chapter 23 of De Docta Ignorantia.

http://jasper-hopkins.info/DI-I-12-2000.pdf

I believe that the original source is Liber XXIV Philosophorum.

https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Liber_viginti_quattor_philosophorum/II

A short essay on the topic by Borges:

https://sites.google.com/site/jimeikner/home/borges/the-fearful-sphere-of-pascal

Don Quixote

06-20-2015, 11:41 PM

My post wasn't content-free; if it were, I wouldn't have bothered writing it. Even less so, the metaphor of the infinite sphere, alluded to in the Jung quote you dismissed as babbling contradiction, is not anything of the sort -- it may be paradoxical, but it is not without meaning.Contradictions are void of meaning by definition. The post was content free as you only said I was wrong and then referred vaguely to "other Christian thinkers".

The issue is not lack of content, but your own refusal to look for it.

I didn't offer you any evidence that other Christian thinkers have referred to the circle/sphere whose centre is everywhere, circumference nowhere, because I imagined that you also have access to Google. It's not my responsibility to make your case for you.

You are now adding the sphere where the cited quotes only refer to the circle. This is crucial as a point on the surface of a sphere is a whole other matter to that of the centre of a circle or a point on the circumference. Which is it to be?

In relation to this topic, you could look up Meister Eckhart, Nicolaus Cusanus, Giordano Bruno or Blaise Pascal, for example, who applied the same metaphor in various ways. I have also seen the same reference made by followers of Jacob Boehme. Look up what? You are referring to hundreds if not thousands of pages of material. Am I further expected to make your case for you by engaging in a massive research project to boot?
You may find an interesting discussion in Chapter 23 of De Docta Ignorantia.

http://jasper-hopkins.info/DI-I-12-2000.pdfCusanus is talking about the sphere which is irrelevant to my original analysis.

I believe that the original source is Liber XXIV Philosophorum.

https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Liber_viginti_quattor_philosophorum/II

A short essay on the topic by Borges:

https://sites.google.com/site/jimeikner/home/borges/the-fearful-sphere-of-pascalBorges is also talking about the sphere.

Blighter

06-21-2015, 11:17 AM

Contradictions are void of meaning by definition. The post was content free as you only said I was wrong and then referred vaguely to "other Christian thinkers".

I also explained why you have erred, and your subsequent posts have shared the same fault.

It's not my responsibility to make your case for you.

Look up what? You are referring to hundreds if not thousands of pages of material. Am I further expected to make your case for you by engaging in a massive research project to boot?

I'm not putting a formal case to you; you have slapped away a valuable metaphor and I am suggesting that you reconsider. If you don't want to, no harm.

You are now adding the sphere where the cited quotes only refer to the circle. This is crucial as a point on the surface of a sphere is a whole other matter to that of the centre of a circle or a point on the circumference. Which is it to be?

Cusanus is talking about the sphere which is irrelevant to my original analysis.

Borges is also talking about the sphere.

This is preposterous. What are you saying, that your intellectual objection to an infinite circle does not extend to an infinite sphere? I don't see how you can justify that. The metaphor and its meaning are absolutely the same.

The different choice of words might be due to context; if Jung, or anyone else, were making the connection with a drawing -- a mandala, for example -- it makes some sense to talk about a circle rather than a sphere, simply because a circle, like a piece of paper, is flat. The expectation is probably that the reader is capable of making the mental leap into the third dimension.

I have also seen the rendering: The centre of centres is everywhere, its circumference nowhere. Perhaps this wording would be more acceptable to you, since it doesn't involve quite the same problem with the definition of shapes.

Petr

06-21-2015, 06:12 PM

Here one can find the footnotes to Jones' essay - there are some interesting tidbits there as well:

http://www.piney.com/Worship.Androgyny.The.Pagan.Sexual.Ideal.html

17 Ibid., emphasis mine. Jennifer Woodhull, “Meditation, Prayer and the Still Point Within,” in The Meditation and Prayer Catalog (1999) 2, states that the 12 major religions and more than five hundred movements and sects are all born of the “same spark.” She describes this experience of unio mystica as “the soundless still point of the sacred.” The Theosophical Society pronounces valid the ideas about God in all the world’s religions—all but one, Biblical/Christian monotheism. As the Society’s brochure states: “Esoteric Philosophy [read proto-New Age thinking] reconciles all nations, strips every one of its outward human garments, and shows the root of each to be identical with that of every other great religion. It proves the necessity of a Divine Absolute Principle in Nature. It denies Deity no more than it does the sun. Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract End. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever Unknowable.”
34 Richard Seaford, “In the Mirror of Dionysus,” in The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece (ed. Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson; London/New York: Routledge, 1998) 133, shows that transvestism functions as a right of passage into the cult of Dionysus. In the cult “females may be like males and males like females” (131). This is because “liminal inversion of identity required for mystic initiation.” Such “confusion” is also seen not merely between male and female but also between “human (or god) and animal, and between living and dead” (132L).

137 Though Islam, a Christian heresy, maintains the structure of theism and disavows homosexuality, the monist variant, Sufism, is certainly growing in popularity in the West. A pro-gay Muslim makes this interesting observation: “Religious gays in the realm of Islam . . . would have to take recourse in the antinomian Sufism (mysticism) . . . (where) all that counts is union with the divine through mystic exaltation. On that level it becomes immaterial whether a believer is hetero- or homosexual” (Khalid Duran, “Homosexuality and Islam,” in Homosexuality and World Religions 196).

David "Spengler" Goldman observed the connections between Sufism, sodomy and narcissism here:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JH12Ak03.html

Sufism seeks one-ness with the universe through spiritual exercises that lead individual consciousness to dissolve into the cosmos. But nothing is more narcissistic than the contemplation of the cosmos, for if we become one with the cosmos, what we love in the cosmos is simply an idealized image of ourselves. An idealized self-image is also what attracts the aging lecher to the adolescent boy. That is the secret of Sufi as well as other pederasty, for pederasty is an extreme expression of self-love. That is the conventional psychiatric view; Freud for example wrote of the “basic narcissism of the vast majority of pederasts … proceeding as from narcissism, they seek their own image in young people.”

Sufism enjoys a faddish ripple of interest in America, where self-admiration is the national pastime. As opposed to the Biblical God, the cosmos is an unthreatening thing to worship. The universe, after all, is no one in particular, and those who seek to merge their consciousness with no one in particular at the end are left alone with themselves. Worship the cosmos, and you worship yours truly; worship yourself, and it is not unusual to adore your own idealized image.

...

On the extreme opposite of the spiritual spectrum, we encounter pederasty as the foundational experience of Sufism. According to Wikipedia,

As a Sufi practice of spiritual realization and union with the godhead, the meditation known in Arabic as [I]Nazar ila'l-murd, "contemplation of the beardless," or Shahed-bazi, "witness play" in Persian has been practiced from the earliest years of Islam. It is seen as an act of worship intended to help one ascend to the absolute beauty that is God through the relative beauty that is a boy.

The medieval Persians were not the first to practice the higher sodomy. The Greeks of the 6th century BC preferred young boys, procreating out of patriotic habit while their women closed their eyes and thought of Athens. Adoration of youth is a very different way to capture from love a sense of immortality. In Greek legend the gods turned Narcissus into a flower to punish his pride in refusing male suitors. Pederasty thus was present at the origin of the concept of narcissism.

Don Quixote

06-22-2015, 06:23 PM

I also explained why you have erred, and your subsequent posts have shared the same fault.You didn't explain it, you repeated it.
I'm not putting a formal case to you; you have slapped away a valuable metaphor and I am suggesting that you reconsider. If you don't want to, no harm.I didn't ask for a formal case, I merely asked for some argument in rebuttal and some evidence to support a claim you made. Very normal round here and very reasonable in itself.
This is preposterous. What are you saying, that your intellectual objection to an infinite circle does not extend to an infinite sphere? I don't see how you can justify that. The metaphor and its meaning are absolutely the same. Except that in the original quotes I attacked, there was no indication of metaphor. Notwithstanding, such metaphors as infinite spheres rae unhelpful as such a thing is inconceivable since a sphere is, by definition, a determinate object, part of which is to have a limit, i.e. the outer surface.

The different choice of words might be due to context; if Jung, or anyone else, were making the connection with a drawing -- a mandala, for example -- it makes some sense to talk about a circle rather than a sphere, simply because a circle, like a piece of paper, is flat. The expectation is probably that the reader is capable of making the mental leap into the third dimension. Probably? You mean this is your interpretation. Fair enough, but then you would have to explain why your intepretation of Jung is better than mine.
I have also seen the rendering: The centre of centres is everywhere, its circumference nowhere. Perhaps this wording would be more acceptable to you, since it doesn't involve quite the same problem with the definition of shapes.Of course not. It would have been better to say "therefore it is without circumference" but then it would have made no sense to describe "it" as having a centre either.

I have no problem with metaphors, in fact I love them. What I (and all thinking beings) have a problem with is contradictions, even if they are presented in the form of metaphors. Aristotle observed that it is easy to speak contradictions but it is impossible to think them. A metaphor that relies on contradictions is no metaphor at all, it is just nonsense, literally.

Back to the thread topic, Gnosticism was nonsense in the 1st century and it remains nonsense in the 21st, whether packaged literally or metaphorically.

Alien Settler

06-22-2015, 06:41 PM

Aristokratia is not afraid of controversy and contention, even among themselves! Boris Rad delivers a spirited piece against “Androgyny,” which ultimately appears to be the root of all evils, from Adam to the modern world. Though derived from Evola and his sources, by the time even alchemy and the hermetic tradition are thrown under the bus along with Christianity, one wonders whether the author of The Hermetic Tradition would still recognize himself here. And did not Evola himself (or one of his pseudonyms, writing an appreciation of Taoism reprinted in his collection Introduction to Magic) mock the “myth of manhood based on muscles and metallic strength” and counsel instead absorbing “the ambiguous virtue of the female”?



http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/03/aristokratia-ii/

Hermetic

06-23-2015, 07:21 AM

Androgyny is also the core of Judaism. Its known in Judaism El the God of the Jews, is both male and female.

"And Elohim said, Let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness... So Elohim created Adam in his [own] image, in the image of Elohim created he him; male and female created he them. And Elohim blessed them, and Elohim said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it... And Elohim saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, [it was] very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. - Genesis 1

Hermetic

06-23-2015, 09:29 AM

The Zohar states the heart of Judaism is the esoteric meaning of the five books of the Torah. That the literalist meaning is a veil for the Goyim.

Right in the Zohar is what Judaism is based upon again the same in Tantra and every Pagan religion:

"And he asks: when does the Shekinah reside within him? And he said: when he marries, and this sign enters to its place, to the Shekinah. Then they are attached together, the male and the female, who are the sign of the covenant and the Shekinah, and are called by one name, and supernal Chesed rests upon them." - Zohar

Blighter

06-23-2015, 01:08 PM

You didn't explain it, you repeated it.

Remind yourself that you are talking about my first post. I did not repeat anything in my first post, because I made no previous post to repeat.

I didn't ask for a formal case, I merely asked for some argument in rebuttal and some evidence to support a claim you made. Very normal round here and very reasonable in itself.

My claims were, a) that you failed to understand Jung's point because you made no real effort to do so, and b) that the quote attributed to Jung is not conceptually original to him, having graced the pages of many previous texts, some of them explicitly Christian.

There is little point discussing a), because you can always deny your own motivations, but b) I have provided proof for, which you rejected on the spurious basis that the wording is slightly different.

Except that in the original quotes I attacked, there was no indication of metaphor.

Few authors ever explicitly indicate that they are using a metaphor, the reader is required to pick up on it for themselves. Defiance of literal interpretation would be an extremely strong clue that some other approach to understanding might be required.

Notwithstanding, such metaphors as infinite spheres rae unhelpful as such a thing is inconceivable since a sphere is, by definition, a determinate object, part of which is to have a limit, i.e. the outer surface.

I am aware that you do not appreciate the value of the metaphor, but your failure to appreciate it does not convince me that it is 'unhelpful'. Notwithstanding the fact that it helps me to understand, giving me direct proof of its value, it seems rather unlikely that it would have gained such traction with a range of intelligent men if it were patent nonsense.

Probably? You mean this is your interpretation. Fair enough, but then you would have to explain why your intepretation of Jung is better than mine.

Mine is better than yours, firstly, because I'm not determined to refute him right out of the gates, and secondly because I am familiar with the idea he is discussing, which you do not seem to be.

Of course not. It would have been better to say "therefore it is without circumference" but then it would have made no sense to describe "it" as having a centre either.

I don't see that describing an infinite circle as having neither circumference nor centre would dispel the element of paradox that you are opposed to. By the same token that you dismissed Jung, one could easily dismiss you.

I have no problem with metaphors, in fact I love them. What I (and all thinking beings) have a problem with is contradictions, even if they are presented in the form of metaphors. Aristotle observed that it is easy to speak contradictions but it is impossible to think them. A metaphor that relies on contradictions is no metaphor at all, it is just nonsense, literally.

In my experience, many religious and philosophical texts from both East and West are riddled with with paradoxical metaphors. I think that there is value in their contemplation, and quite clearly the men that devised them also thought so.

Petr

08-08-2015, 07:10 PM

More on Gnostic-pagan occultism and gender-bending:

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/3933/gnosticism_vs_the_incarnation_the_ancient_battle_renewed.aspx

Gnosticism vs. The Incarnation: The Ancient Battle Renewed

June 08, 2015

The contemporary sexual revolution is thoroughly Gnostic, attacking the institution of marriage, thwarting the conception of children, and denying the differences between men and women

John B. Buescher

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Content/Site140/Articles/06_01_2015/3933temptationo_00000003352.jpg

“Temptation of Jesus Christ” (1901-03) by Ilya Repin [WikiArt.org]


There is a tale, whose threads are too long to unravel here, of the meanderings of an idea through history—the idea that, as Nicolas Gómez-Davila parsed it, man is “a god imprisoned in the dull inertia of his flesh, or a god who elevates matter as his cry of victory.” This is the “knowledge” of both the old and the new Gnostics: We are not who we think we are, but gods imprisoned in matter. And knowing that we are gods is the condition for freedom, for it is only our wills that keep us from rising up divine.

If man is a god, then his essence is a will, exercised in purely unrestricted freedom. His sovereignty is expressed gratuitously. That sovereign will must be identical in everyone (or else it is not sovereign), and everything else about individuals exists as mere accidents, signs, or externalities. Indeed such things are impediments to which our wills are shackled.

The ancient form of the tale includes these basic propositions:

The prison in which we are shackled is matter. Yet matter does not matter. It is a dream into which we were born, and in which our spirits serve time in blind darkness, until death, or emancipation.

The creator of this world of matter was demented or malevolent. He is not the One who is the source of our spirit and our freedom.

Being born into this world is our problem. Exiting this world is the solution. Our bodies—and all the things that derive from being embodied and being pinned down into particularity—are features of our prison. That is most especially true of the most basic particularity of our bodies: the division into male and female. It is the primordial cleft, which ramifies throughout all other distinctions. In our highest form, we are androgynous.

Acting upon the sexual distinction, therefore, is the most basic sin. Above all, conceiving and bringing children into this fallen world of matter merely traps their free spirits and consigns them to bondage. When born, everyone has been conceived in the sin of his parents and is clothed in the prison uniform of his signifying flesh.

The ancient Gnostic responded by avoiding the generation of children. Some of them became extreme ascetics and totally celibate and even sacramentalized their fasting unto death. But some of them became “free spirits” who flouted all sexual taboos and customs—upon which the world’s prison bars were built—and engaged in every sort of sexual irregularity. It demonstrated the Gnostics’ contempt for the deep distinctions and features of the material world and how they were living purely in the spirit, and no longer bound by the world. It was a sign of contradiction to the fallen world, and was, in itself, a way to arise out of it, ringing the changes on what that world held to be sin, entering into it, but without being caught in it, and thereby wearing it out, exploding it from the inside, deconstructing it, turning the sexual act into something that would not result in the conception of children. Such acts too, for the Gnostic, could be sacramental.

Sexual activity engaged in by the unenlightened followed the logic of the prison world and resulted in its continuation into succeeding generations. Sexual activity that might be engaged in by the enlightened was done to arouse the “spirit,” but then to turn it to a purely spiritual purpose and away from the generation of children. The strategy was the uncoupling of the act from its worldly consequence, the generation of children.

At the very heart of this was the determination to undermine the foundation of this prison world. Whether the strategy was one of extreme asceticism or extreme licentiousness, the point was the same—the defeat of the material world by the freed spirit, whose essence was its own divine, sovereign will, unencumbered by any consequences that were not the expressions of its free choice.

...

The Gnostic Pose as True Christianity

The Gnostic idea mimics the Christian idea, and then, once inside the gates, throws off its disguise and destroys the city of the false god who created this prison world and entrapped free spirits within it. It presents the case for same-sex marriage, for example, as merely an extension of Christian charity to all, while hiding, until it is safe to unveil it, its animus for the procreative union of male and female. For the old Gnostics as well as the new ones, that demented god, the Patriarch, who created this world and who pretends to be the true God is the God of the Old Testament. And for them, the New Testament is precisely an outline that gives the strategy for overthrowing him.

The Gnostic idea is wholly opposed to the actual Christian idea, whose central pillar is the Incarnation of God in the person of a man, Jesus Christ. The Gnostic idea rejects the Incarnation, and replaces it with a narrative of disguised secrets and salvation via deception. It does not accept the reality of Christ’s true birth in the flesh, his true life as a man, fully embodied. Nor does it accept the reality of his true suffering and true death. It turns all this into a sham, a simulacrum of life and death, a show by a divine actor in disguise. For the good God could not embrace matter.

In short, it refuses the idea that the Creator of the world is good, and that the world He created is good, and that the body we have is good, and that it is good that we should go forth and multiply. It cannot allow that the natural world that God created is good and true and beautiful as it is, but only that it must be turned to the purposes of pure spirit, to our purposes, not to his. We must all strain to be “spiritual, but not religious.” We must look forward to the resurrection from the body. We all must become as angels, a process that proceeds through mimicking the Christian process of regeneration.

All of this makes the Gnostic idea a heresy. (Or, if it is not a heresy, then nothing is a heresy.) And its particular danger is its close resemblance to the Christian truth, so close that it has confused many Christians (lay and cleric both) into thinking that it is the Christian truth, rather than the anti-Christian “truth.” We are not gods. We are not pure spirits. We are not angels. We look forward to the resurrection of the body. Our wills are not the will of God. We enter into the most perilous territory when we try to redirect our own futures simply to suit our own wills. There is a tremendous cost in blood when we accept the “knowledge” of the serpent in Eden.

...

The Gnostic Ascent of Man

Everything about the sexual revolution flowed from this: all the encouragement of sex that had no consequences except the stirring of the passion and “vital energies,” the concern to prevent “unwanted” pregnancy, all the exotic physical techniques (for arousing but then withholding and “transmuting” the semen) and all the chemical and mechanical technologies to accomplish that, all the conviction that the mother’s “choice” turned a lifeless mass of tissue into a person of inestimable and divine value, all the segregation of the “breeding” of children from the spiritual (read: made materially inconsequential) act of sex. In general, one might say, the goal was for men to hold in their semen and transform it into spirit, and for women to generate children by sleeping with spirits. All children would then be “immaculate conceptions,” freed from what, today, is being referred to as the “rape culture.” Is this not, in allegedly “secular” and “progressive” terms, merely an aping of something else?

...

And who, today, are those convinced they have been regenerated in this way? It is not difficult to pick them out. They are the ones who, like one reporter who, when commenting on a couple who had a dozen children, snarked, “Don’t they know anything about sex?”—an absurd question on its face, but clearly one that attempted to place the couple as ignorant troglodytes and to place himself as “knowing” about sex, when, in fact, what he “knew” about sex was how to prevent conception. From his “raised consciousness,” he and his comrades will, if they get the chance, prevent those of “false consciousness” from multiplying. It is a eugenics and euthanasia club, with a program for breeding better babies, for taking our evolution into our own hands, for regenerating the human race. For they “know” that gender is merely an adventitious social construct of the oppressive and malevolent “Patriarchy.” They know that the world is shot through with injustice: it is the creation and continuation of a primordial rape by a deluded and lustful Patriarch. Having attended mandatory “sexual harassment orientations,” they know that every act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is, consciously or unconsciously, an echo of that rape.

They know that Jesus was a freedom fighter and social revolutionary, intent on “queering” the customs of the world, and thus healing and reconciling the evil effects of that rape. They know that he was a savior because he was a sign of contradiction and the stone that the builders of the world prison rejected, who shall be the cornerstone of the New Age.

This is the culture that has now arrived. Despite what some may think, it is not devoid of a deeply “religious conviction,” but the conviction is a Gnostic one. And it is not Christian. It is a most profoundly twisted Christian heresy. And Christianity cannot assimilate it or compromise with it, except with fatal results. But that is in fact the Gnostics’ goal.

Petr

01-18-2016, 12:47 AM

Here is more on how androgyny (among other abominations) connects to demonic deceptions and Biblical end times. This is another example of what I would call "smart Christian fundamentalism" (which is my personal goal as well); being well-read, sophisticated and aware of Satan's cunning devices (2 Corinthians 2:11 (http://biblehub.com/2_corinthians/2-11.htm)), while being determinedly opposed to them.

http://patriotsandliberty.com/lindas-latest/2016/1/14/new-age-spirituality-carl-jung-abraxas-and-baphomet-1

New Age Spirituality, Carl Jung, Abraxas, and Baphomet


It is no exaggeration to say that the highly respected psychologist, Dr. Carl Jung, is the Father of Neo-Gnosticism and the New Age movement, which is why Dr. Jeffrey Satinover comments that,

"One of the most powerful modern forms of Gnosticism is without question Jungian psychology, both within or without the Church". (Satinover, The Empty Self, p. 27)

This being the case and because of his great influence in propagating gnostic philosophy and morals in churches and synagogues,

"...Jung deserves a closer look. The moral relativism that released upon us the sexual revolution is rooted in an outlook of which (Jung) is the most brilliant contemporary expositor." Jung "blended psychological reductionism with gnostic spirituality to produce a modern variant of mystical, pagan polytheism in which the multiple ‘images of the instincts’ (his ‘archetypes’) are worshipped as gods." (Satinover, Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, p. 238)

Though many Christians mistakenly embrace Carl Jung the truth is that he rejected Jesus Christ in favor of the gnostic god Abraxas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraxas). Like all Gnostic magicians ancient and modern, Jung sought to combine good with evil and male with female, thus for Jung it was regrettable that Christ in his goodness and maleness lacked a shadowy feminized side, and God the Father, who is the Light, lacked darkness.

In his 1916 book, "The Seven Sermons to the Dead," the heavily demonized Jung, whose familiar spirit Philemon appeared to him as an old man with the horns of a bull and the wings of a fisher, called Abraxas a god higher than the Christian God  that combines all opposites into one Being. He said that Abraxas is a polymorphous world spirit, a coiled knot of winged serpents which permeates the very fabric of existence.

 Two primary characteristics of ancient and modern pagan Gnostic ideology revolve around two ideas.  The first is that this world is a horrible mistake.  The world and our bodies are places of suffering and evil that should never have existed.  The second is that the Creator God of Scripture is the malevolent being responsible for both this evil world and our evil bodies while the winged serpent Satan is the enlightener and liberator of man.

 Abraxas comes from ancient Egypt and Greece and is associated with the earliest beginnings of Gnosticism, which according to the Jewish Encyclopedia originated in ancient Chaldea with the Jews during their Babylonian exile.  It was then that certain Jews invented the mystical Babylonian Kabbalah which they modeled on the Babylonian Mystery Religion, the mother of all mystery religions throughout the history of the world.   According to modern occult Mason Albert Pike,

 "The Kabbalah is the key to the occult sciences; and the Gnostics were born of the Kabalists." (Morals and Dogma, p. 626)

The Gnostic Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit teaches that Abraxas is an Aeon dwelling with other Aeons of the Pleroma.  Pleroma generally refers to the totality of divine powers contained within and emanating (evolving) as energies from the Realm of Light (Ein Sof of the Kabbalah).  

In  "The Dictionary of Mind and Spirit" (1991), we learn that for the second-century Alexandrian Gnostic Basilides, Abraxas was the Supreme Being or Realm of Light from which emanated the following energies: Mind, Understanding, Wisdom, Power and a whole succession of powers, principalities and Aeons.  Basilides believed there were 365 Aeons, all of them personifications of the energies emanating from the Supreme Being.  The first of these Aeons was Christ, or Nous.   

 According to ancient Gnostic texts, Abraxas is the astral serpent (Satan) on the tree who gives the illumination of both good and evil to Adam and Eve whose eyes were then opened. The powerful occult symbol, the Oroboros (snake biting its' tail), signifies Abraxas, the king worm who rules this world. Abraxas is the maker of good and evil rolled into one persona described by the Gnostic Basilides as "the greatest God" (De vir. ill. 21), "the highest God" (Dial. adv. Lucif. 23), "the Almighty God" (Comm. in Amos iii. 9), and "the Lord the Creator" (Comm. in Nah. i. 11).

In modern Gnostic accounts such as the popular movie "The Matrix," Abraxas is the Cosmic Mind, a mysterious Divine One Substance, an "immeasurable light which is pure, holy and immaculate." (Apocryphon of John)  On the other hand, the Holy Trinity is represented by the evil Machine Overlords.  (Wake up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix, Frances Flannery-Daily and Rachel Wagner, Journal of Religion and Film)

Gnostic accounts generally demote the Holy Trinity to one of the lesser Aeons and portray Him as an evil, malformed, ignorant deity sometimes called Yaldabaoth who mistakenly believes he is the only god.  Although traditions vary, Yaldabaoth is said to have breathed the divine spark of his mother Sophia (another Aeon)  into the human being (Apoc. of John) resulting in the human dilemma: man is not fallen and in need of a Savior but rather a divine spark trapped by Yaldabaoth in an evil material body in a false world of matter. The astral Pleroma is his true home but he is in exile.

Rather than Yaldabaoth, modern Gnostic Transhumanists  such as Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association together with like-minded physicists suggest that the Holy Trinity is an evil alien supercomputer. In this account, the world we live in is a computer simulation in the minds of Robotic Overlords who are using humanity as playthings.  This is the "scientific" theory put forward by Bostrom and a number of physicists whose Gnostic account of the evil alien supercomputer is reminiscent of entities depicted in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey:

"It is perhaps a ripe coincidence, that the Coptic word for simulation found in Gnostic texts is hal, recalling HAL the rebellious computer in Kubrick's 2001." (3)

In Bostrom's account, the Holy Trinity is the expression of an ego-driven consciousness, the evil Lord Archon –  a counterfeit spirit (Apoc. John III, 36:17) who has entrapped humanity through deceit and parasitism in a simulated world of matter to prevent human beings from remembering that they are divine spirits whose real home is the Gnostic Pleroma.

Celebrated by the Satanic Temple as well as by Masons and Wiccans, the devilish goat-headed Baphomet, known as the phallic god Pan, the ancient hermaphrodite god of nature, is another representation of the Gnostic Abraxas. As Pan, the goat-headed deity is the first principle or essence of nature while in astrology,

"...Pan...is also equated with Satan and life...in its base aspects." (J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 1971)

In a Presentation at Norwood Lodge No. 90 in 1991, Master Mason Eugene Plawiuk revealed the Chaldean pedigree of Baphomet and its close connection to astrology's elemental spirits in 'Liber Capricornus: the Symbolism of the Goat.' Plawiuk explains that the goat is known to all of us through,

"....the ancient science of Astrology first developed by the Chaldeans, or as they are commonly known; Babylonians. The Goat symbolizes male fertility (and is represented by) the astrological sign of Capricorn...In fact the...Babylonians who gave us this symbol of Capricorn and the science of Astrology were the first Temple Builders, and the goat for them symbolized the essence of the Temple or Lodge...According to a research monograph on the Dionysian Artificers and Early Masonry edited by Manly P. Hall, the symbolism of the goat relates to the prechristian God Pan, Dionysius. The Goat-God was accepted by the later Greek Mystery Schools as the symbol of the Temple Builders." (Presentation at Norwood Lodge No. 90, A.F. &A.M.G.R.A., Sept. 3, 1991, Masonic World)

Today's New Age or what Dr. Peter Jones describes as neo-Gnostic pagan spirituality relies heavily on spirit revelations channeled through Helena Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, Neale Donald Walsh, and many other contemporary mediums (including Carl Jung) some of them occupying positions at the UN.  The Lord however, strongly condemns all forms of Spiritism:

"anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord." Deuteronomy 18:10-12

Satan is the great deceiver (Rev. 12:9). He uses his servants of deception to manipulate, confuse, and mislead (Ephesians 4:14), and one of his most important servants, the evangelical apostate Alice Bailey (1880-1949) is a major architect of today's rapidly spreading, morally relative, transgender embracing serpent-powered neo-Gnostic New Age movement, a spiritual juggernaut effecting a counter-conversion of consciousness that closes the soul to Jesus Christ while opening it to powers of darkness.

According to Bailey's contemporary apostles, a master 'Plan' telepathically revealed to Bailey for the coming New Age millennium can be traced back to the fall of Lucifer and his angels from heaven. Bailey's demon-master, the Tibetan, described the revolt of the angels against the Holy God as part of the "divine plan of evolution," by which angels,

"descended from their sinless and free state of existence in order to develop full divine awareness on earth." (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 224)

In this total reversal and inversion of the Revealed Word of God, the Fall of man was really an evolutionary ascent to liberating knowledge by which man's eyes were opened to good (Satan) and evil (the Holy God). Thus Helena Blavatsky, another important servant of Satan and architect of New Age spirituality concluded that it is but natural to view Satan, the Centrifugal Energy of the Universe,

"... the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it was he who was the 'Harbinger of Light,' bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah...Indeed, (mankind) was taught wisdom and the hidden knowledge by the 'Fallen Angel." (ibid, pp. 224-225)

As man's benefactor, Lucifer continues to assist man's evolution. In the words of the apostate evangelical, now New Age theologian David Spangler, a disciple of both Blavatsky and Bailey, Lucifer is 'the angel of man's evolution' and all who seek entry to the NWO must submit to the Luciferian initiation.

Satan's servants are out in the open today. They have successfully initiated a devastating assault upon the whole body of the Christian church and by extension, upon Western and American society in ways that to previous generations would have seemed unthinkable.

Therefore, "Put you on the armor of God that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil." Ephesians 6:11 and remember that "Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world." (1 John 4:4)

@Linda Kimball

Petr

01-18-2016, 01:28 AM

Kevin MacDonald has lately delved into some rather Freudian territory (for a Jew-critic), studying how pre-Christian pagan Norsemen understood sexuality and gender issues:

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/01/hyper-masculine-behavior-among-iron-age-scandinavian-men/

A recurring topic at TOO is what northwest Europeans were like before Christianity and before modernity. This excerpt us from Lotte Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archeology of Scandinavia, AD 400–1000 (http://atibook.ir/dl/en/Siences/Natural%20sciences/Archaeological/9780415606042_iron_age_myth_and_materiality_an_archaeology_of_scandinavia_ad_400_1000.pdf) (London: Routledge, 2011), 115ff. It paints a picture of a hyper-masculine, completely militarized society in which male sexual penetration was a marker of power, while being penetrated was, for a male, the ultimate insult. Accusing a man of having been sodomized was a grievous accusation, with the same penalty as for murder. Older males lacking the power or ability to penetrate took on the status of women and were even ridiculed by slaves. Women were spoils of warfare and raiding. The implication is that the social ties within the Mannerbunde did not involve homosexual sex, but Hedeager claims that there is evidence that, in some groups at least, attraction to young boys was common.

...

Old men became females because they no longer penetrated others:

As an old man living ‘innan stokks’ (the women’s domain), Egill was no longer part of the public world of his youth and manhood, and even the thrall [slave] women treated him with no respect, laughed at him, teased him, etc. Egill ends his life not only surrounded by women, but in a sense as one of them. In Sonatorrek (1) Egill himself complains about his weakness and the softness of his ‘bore (drill bit) of the foot/leg of taste/pleasure’. In Clover’s explanation the bore becomes a metaphor for the tongue, sword and penis — all three have softened and for that reason Egill ends far down the gender scale — as a powerless, effeminate geriatric. ‘Sooner or later, all of us end up alike in our softness – regardless of our past and regardless of our sex’ (Clover 1993: 385). Thus, sex changed progressively through life and was not a generalised category related to gender. To become argr was to become soft, impotent and powerless – including a man on whom a sexual act was performed.

Ahknaton

01-18-2016, 04:19 AM

David Bowie was probably the most famous "androgynous" celebrity in popular culture, and his androgyny has been celebrated by liberal media like Slate following his death:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/01/11/why_david_bowie_s_androgyny_was_a_rare_precious_gift.html

Petr

01-18-2016, 06:01 AM

According to ancient Gnostic texts, Abraxas is the astral serpent (Satan) on the tree who gives the illumination of both good and evil to Adam and Eve whose eyes were then opened. The powerful occult symbol, the Oroboros (snake biting its' tail), signifies Abraxas, the king worm who rules this world.
I was reminded here of this poem by G.K. Chesterton:

http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/the_wise_men.html

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all the labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And serve the made gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.

Norse mythology also knows the idea of a malicious serpent who is devouring the world tree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%AD%C3%B0h%C3%B6ggr

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Nidhogg.png

Níðhöggr gnaws the roots of Yggdrasill in this illustration from a 17th-century Icelandic manuscript.

In Norse mythology, Níðhöggr (Malice Striker, often anglicized Nidhogg[1]) is a dragon who gnaws at a root of the world tree, Yggdrasil.

...

Níðhöggr is also mentioned at the end of Völuspá, where he is identified as a dragon and a serpent.

From below the dragon
dark comes forth,
Nithhogg flying
from Nithafjoll;
The bodies of men
on his wings he bears,
The serpent bright:
but now must I sink.

Petr

01-19-2016, 01:17 AM

The Zohar states the heart of Judaism is the esoteric meaning of the five books of the Torah. That the literalist meaning is a veil for the Goyim.
The Zohar was composed even much later than the Talmud, and it hasn't got any legitimate connection to the Old Testament, any more than the Koran does.

In any case, early Christians recognized that there was shady occult lore going on among the Jews of their own times, and clearly repudiated it:

http://biblehub.com/titus/1-14.htm

Titus 1:13-14

This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith; Not giving heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth.
Nesta Webster adds:

http://iamthewitness.com/books/Nesta.H.Webster/Secret.Societies.and.Subversive.Movements.htm#fna110

The prevalence of sorcery amongst the Jews during the first century of the Christian era is shown by other passages in the Acts of the Apostles; in Paphos the "false prophet," a Jew, whose surname was Bar-Jesus, otherwise known as "Elymas the sorcerer," opposed the teaching of St. Paul and brought on himself the imprecation: "O full of all subtlety and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?"

Petr

03-10-2016, 01:20 PM

I do not consider myself obsessed with homosexuality, or sexual issues in general, but whether I liked it or not, it seems that they are becoming one of the clearest dividing lines between true Christians and the reprobate "children of this world":

http://patriotsandliberty.com/lindas-latest/2016/3/8/the-men

This upside-down view leads to a philosophy of moral relativism because if men were once something else, a genderless blob of matter, and still later, lizards, and later still, some kind of ape-like creature, then not only are humans going to become something else--maybe divine supermen or super robots---but nothing can be said about homosexuality, transgender, and lesbianism since all life forms arose from a genderless blob of matter generated by a Big Bang.

With the triumph of evolutionary science and the satanically-energized will of Gnostic pagans over the Revealed Word of God, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni brazenly demands that church leaders be forced to take "homosexuality off the sin list." (Christians 'Must Be Made' to Bow, Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, Apr. 4, 2015)

...

In other words, by forsaking our Creator, the fountain of life, in favor of non-life-bearing matter and energy, men destroy themselves. In effect they make themselves into walking dead bodies whose ‘new’ reality is non-self, meaning that by the logic of their choice there is no one home.

In short, if all that exists is matter and energy then it logically follows that there is no source for life, mind, conscience and will, the two sexes, human dignity and worth, or for that matter the much bragged about "reason of scientifically enlightened progressives." Without the Holy Trinity, meaning drains into meaninglessness and man is less than nothing, a conclusion Buddha reached long before the stupidity and depravity of Enlightenment Deists and fellow travelers paved the way for the West and then America to plunge into the void where man is no longer a person. Nor is he or she either male or female but rather a soulless, sexless aggregate of matter or psychic energy in motion while the powers and abilities of his mind are nothing more than energies and chemicals acting on grey matter. In short, within the closed-system of "new" paganism, man is nothing but an evolved hominid or bio-machine, a conscious product of energy acting on matter over millions of years, a process called evolution.

The disintegration of man’s dignity as a creature of the Holy God of creation is not the result of science, as Western evolution worshippers falsely claim, but rather the product of a depraved mind, evil conscience, and will turned toward evil that justifies the depersonalization and abuse of others as the exercise of sovereign freedom. It is hostility toward and outright hatred of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit and His image-bearers disguised behind magic science and linguistic sophistry.

Androgyny: the Pagan Ideal

Following hard on the heels of the disintegration of man's inner person is the rapid loss of male and female distinctions, which quickly drain away into androgyny. This in its' turn necessitates the radical recasting of marriage, family, Scripture, and orthodox Christianity and the use of toddlers, older children and even babies for the sexual satisfaction of depraved pan-sexual and omni-gendered bio-machines. This hideous evil will not only be tolerated but declared a sign of enlightened progress because with the Holy Triune God dead in their hearts, then so too is the entire structure of Biblically grounded presuppositions, norms, standards, principles, moral law, sexual ethics, social institutions and society built thereon. In the resulting void, everything—no matter how evil– is now possible (Psalm 36:1-4).

In an article entitled, "Hundred Years of Pedophilia," Olavo de Carvalho (born 29 April 1947), a Brazilian essayist and historian warns of evils just over our horizon:

"In Greece and in the Roman Empire, the use of minors for the sexual satisfaction of adults was a tolerated and even prized costume. (sic) In China, castrating young boys to sell them to rich pederasts was legitimate commerce during millennia. In the Islamic world, the rigid morals that ordain the relationships between men and women was not rarely compensated by the tolerance with homosexual pedophilia. In some countries this lasted at least until the beginning of the 20th century, making Algeria, for example, a garden of delights for depraved travelers (read the memoirs of André Gide, "Si le grain ne meurt"). ....In all the places where the practice of pedophilia receded, it was the influence of Christianism — practically alone — that freed the children from this awful rule. .....But this had a price. It is as if an undercurrent of hate and resentment had gone through two millennia of history, waiting for the moment of revenge. This moment has arrived." (olavodecarvalho.org)

...

Despite the hideous depravity of Sodom and Gomorrah the practice of homosexual marriage was unknown there. Not since the pre-flood time of Noah has there been a nation that sanctioned homosexual marriage, that is, not until the United States of America, which under the leadership of ‘rainbow’ Obama, has been trying to force homosexuality on the rest of the world.

Thus today, godless paganized America stands guilty before the Lord of committing the crime that equates to the last step in the downward spiral that caused God’s judgment to fall upon the pre-flood world. Preceding the last step however, was the original pre-flood idolatry wherein, according to early Church Father Tertullian, people believed that after death they would magically change (evolve) into gods (Tertullian Treatise on the soul (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0310.htm) 57). Today the original idolatry has been recast and made palatable to modern Westerners by being dressed up as reincarnation, evolution, and science. With respect to the last step, according to ancient rabbis,

“The generation of the Flood was not wiped out until they wrote marriage documents for the union of a man to a male or to an animal.” Genesis Rabbah 26:4-5; Leviticus Rabbah 23:9

“And what did they do? A man…married…a man, and a woman a woman, a man married a woman and her daughter, and a woman was married to two (men). Therefore it is said, “And you shall not walk in their statutes.” Sifra Acharei Mot, Parashah 9:8 (Commentary on Leviticus 18:3)

By the logic of their choice, idolatrous Gnostics have destroyed themselves, and in the end, their choice inevitably lands them in Hell.

Petr

03-10-2016, 03:33 PM

For they “know” that gender is merely an adventitious social construct of the oppressive and malevolent “Patriarchy.” They know that the world is shot through with injustice: it is the creation and continuation of a primordial rape by a deluded and lustful Patriarch. Having attended mandatory “sexual harassment orientations,” they know that every act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is, consciously or unconsciously, an echo of that rape.

They know that Jesus was a freedom fighter and social revolutionary, intent on “queering” the customs of the world, and thus healing and reconciling the evil effects of that rape. They know that he was a savior because he was a sign of contradiction and the stone that the builders of the world prison rejected, who shall be the cornerstone of the New Age.
Thus the neo-Gnostic heretics will eventually present us with full-blown "False Christ." I am reminded of this poem by William Blake (who himself was a quite wild antinomian mystic) when I contemplate the fraudulent image of SJW Jesus:

http://www.bartleby.com/236/58.html

THE VISION OF CHRIST that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine;
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates;
Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.
Socrates taught what Meletus
Loath’d as a nation’s bitterest curse,
And Caiaphas was in his own mind
A benefactor to mankind.
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read’st black where I read white.
The fundamental division of sheeps and goats is inevitable, that far I can agree with Blake. Although I might well ultimately be on the other side than he was.

Petr

05-14-2016, 10:34 AM

The ancient Gnostic responded by avoiding the generation of children. Some of them became extreme ascetics and totally celibate and even sacramentalized their fasting unto death. But some of them became “free spirits” who flouted all sexual taboos and customs—upon which the world’s prison bars were built—and engaged in every sort of sexual irregularity. It demonstrated the Gnostics’ contempt for the deep distinctions and features of the material world and how they were living purely in the spirit, and no longer bound by the world.
R.J. Rushdoony also noted this connection between perverse asceticism and perverse sexuality (the unity of opposites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_of_opposites)):

https://bible.org/article/rushdoony-neoplatonism-and-biblical-view-sex

Listen again to Rushdoony:

On hippies (the book was written in 1973):

“This attitude is very much like that of the modern hippy, who despises the flesh and shows contempt for the body and its dress. The hippy, in his sexuality, expresses contempt for the body, either by treating sexual acts as of no account in casual promiscuity, or by a bored denial of sex. There is far more abstention from sex among hippies than is generally recognized. Either in abstention or in casual, unemotional promiscuity, it is a contempt of the flesh which is manifested. Dirty bodies and dirty clothing are other means of manifesting the same faith.” (p. 5)
Many Manosphere writers have complained that Christianity has contributed to the "pedestalization" of women, seeing them as better or more "spiritual" than they truly are. In my opinion, the modern churchians who are doing that cannot find much support for their position in either the Bible or church history (many church fathers, as sour ascetics, wrote some of the most women-despising material ever). They can, however, find support in the ideas of Gnostic underworld:

Finally, neoplatonism has infected radical feminism:

“Much of what has been condemned as a product of Catholic and Protestant teaching has been the continuing influence of neoplatonism and best exemplified in its original form among Greeks and Romans.

“Neoplatonism was very powerful in the feminist movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, however, the roles were reversed. Woman was seen as pure and spiritual, and man as coarse and material. Women, it was thus held, are more ‘spiritual’ and therefore superior beings. . . . Virginia Leblick in The New Era: Woman’s Era; or Transformation from Barbaric to Humane Civilization (1910) said that the lowest prostitute was better than the best of men.” (p. 65)

Petr

01-22-2017, 10:54 PM

Here is some esoteric Alt-Right speculation about Europe's mysterious prehistory:

http://www.tradyouth.org/2016/12/white-turan-against-gay-atlantis-polarity-plurality-and-ancient-sexuality/

It was thus that Oswald Spengler, in his unfinished posthumous work, could refer to the original Aryan homeland and horse-driven culture complex as “Turan.” (He called Old Europe “Atlantis” and argued that it was the first maritime culture.)

Spengler wrote that the Indo-Europeans emphasized “sky instead of sun” and “did not think of the sun as a star, but rather the light, the redness, brightness, heat of the heavens…” The gods of this “Turan” were elemental “expressions of polarity,” not the southern “colorful image of a set of figures.” They were “weaving powers, not concrete figures… No personal gods.”

The most interesting and convincing aspect of this portrait of the Indo-Europeans is that their spirituality was fundamentally [I]anti-humanistic. It can arguably be seen as a pagan anticipation of St. John Chrysostom’s doctrine that God has nothing in common with man, or at least somewhat analogous to it. It is far removed from later cabalist-infused revisionist Renaissance and Masonic attempts to supposedly revive Europe’s pre-Christian heritage.

The conquering Indo-Europeans smashed the by-then-degenerated fertility goddess of Old Europe, who had most likely become a pornographic “fag hag” anti-matriarch—the appropriate and rightful mistress of any culture based on homosexuality.[v] She partially survived into the Classical civilization, but was virulently opposed by everything that was truly Indo-European in it, until finally being crushed by Christianity. Nothing is more humanistic at its essence than homosexual sodomy, so the Indo-European spirituality could not have been based on it in any way.


[vii] The Mongols, who actually give us the clearest picture of what the original Indo-European culture-complex of the steppe had been like, punished homosexuality with death. The Mongolian and “Turanian” beliefs—as Mircea Eliade, like posthumous Spengler, argued—are accurate reflections of the Indo-Europeans who had initially invented that horse-driven lifestyle. Furthermore, according to Tacitus, the ancient Germanic tribes had similar anti-homosexual laws.

The Indo-European heritage of the family-centered Romans reflected Aristotle’s heterosexual vision of the family and the state, and Christ was still a child when Augustus enacted anti-homosexual measures in Rome. The rampant homosexuality of the Classical world was already frowned upon by the Romans, at least in theory. Plutarch, for example, treats it as a vice at best. We can therefore conclude that Christianity answered what the Romans already saw as a social problem.

The Aryan-Turanic steppe’s emphasis on polarity over plurality can also be noticed in Virgil’s work, which Spengler, like Houston Stewart Chamberlain before him, wrongly dismissed as “servile” and inferior to Homer. (“Servile” compared to what? Homer’s unbridled artistic freedom?) [I]The Aeneid, that “Godfather Part II” of Classical literature, replaces the pluralistic chaos and other residually Old European elements of The Illiad with heterosexual, celestial polarity.

[On the Mongolian anti-homosexual laws see Onon, Urgunge, The Secret History of the Mongols, p. 11. For the best example of Eliade’s argument that the Indo-European outlook was dualistic, see his Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God.]

Petr

01-28-2017, 02:39 AM

The degenerate dirtbag Marquis de Sade was one of the pioneers of queer emancipation - this is from his 1795 book Philosophy in the Bedroom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_in_the_Bedroom), one of de Sade's most "Apollonian" works, as he indulges in it in some intellectual theorizing, instead of his usual sickening Dionysian excesses:

http://www.slideshare.net/crift1/marquis-de-sadephilosophyinthebedroom

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/marquisdesade-philosophyinthebedroom-140415005942-phpapp02/95/yet-another-effort-frenchmen-if-you-would-become-republicans-22-638.jpg

Petr

10-12-2017, 03:13 PM

An interesting tidbit found at the Sedevacantist blog "Call Me Jorge":

http://callmejorgebergoglio.blogspot.fi/2017/10/francis-latest-defender-is-wladimiro.html

Kabbalists see ‘gender’ as fluid

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzm0eA2jROFKRnOMloSyFsKuNdOn7Rtkbj2LcgEuOOH-Ijxxf-OEDq8FlsUE59dajKyVtha-ndrOdQWHp3cSIXzd421t2CNr_OoFd73LD58_j-sELayLX8v_4KO3VL30x9rPzq/s1600/fluid.png

source: Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern, p. 97 (https://books.google.com/books?id=XE5IBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=Kabbalah:+gender+is+a+fluid+category+that+is+arguably+more+performative+than+essential.&source=bl&ots=wh-KDDgiJS&sig=4-HXZ0VMg81pUmYXiGrgEnf60bA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNh4qt_63WAhVJRyYKHVLJD00Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Petr

11-28-2017, 02:34 AM

It's a bit depressing to see how much "moral support" the queers can find in pagan mythologies, but it's not terribly surprising; after all, Apostle Paul says in Romans 1 that the prevalence of this perversion is a proof of the fallen state of whole mankind, connecting sodomy closely with idolatry. Christian polemicists ofted said that those pagans who lived in a decent manner were behaving better than their own gods did.

This piece contains loads of homoerotic (classical) art - I left most of it out:

https://www.pride.com/entertainment/2017/9/11/52-queer-gods-who-ruled-ancient-history

52 Queer Gods Who Ruled Ancient History

You didn't know we were so divine.

https://www.pride.com/sites/www.pride.com/files/2017/02/24/lgbt-gods.jpg

By Jacob Ogles

September 11 2017 1:54 PM EDT


People have worshiped queer gods and deities for millennia. Mortals throughout history looked to the gods for guidance, love, and acceptance regardless of sexuality. In this dive through history, we explore 52 immortals who enjoyed same-sex relationships.


Greek Mythology


A gay cupbearer on Mount Olympus? Male lovers in the Trojan War? While tolerance is often presented as a sign of civilization’s advancement, a reading of Greek mythology reveals greater acceptance of homosexuality in ancient Athens than can be boasted within today’s world religions. These LGBT Greek gods and demigods prove gay culture is no modern invention.


1. Achilles

The Greek hero Achilles was invulnerable excepting his famous weak heel, but a male shieldbearer broke through the warrior’s romantic defenses. While Homer never explicitly states a gay relationship between Achilles and sidekick Patroclus, many scholars read a romantic connection between the two, as only Patroclus ever drew out a compassionate side to the famously arrogant warrior. Patroclus’s death at the hands of Trojan Prince Hector sent Achilles into a rage in which he killed Hector and dragged his body around Troy. Other myths also disclose Achilles was struck by the beauty of Troilus, a Trojan prince.


2. Zeus

While a famous philanderer who sired countless demigods by every peasant girl in need of an explanation to her parents, Zeus famously selected the young mortal Ganymede to serve as his cupbearer on Mount Olympus. The relationship provided the foundation of the custom of paiderastia, the practice of Greek men at the time maintaining erotic relationships with adolescent boys on the side. Above: Zeus and Ganymede, artist and date unknown.


3. Narcissus

A figure mostly known for his obsessive vanity, this son of a nymph and a river god would spend his last days gazing at his own reflection, but the first man he showed affection for was not himself. A myth traced in origin to the Boeotia region mentions a relationship between Narcissus and the smitten Ameinias, whom Narcissus would eventually grow tired of before sending him a sword as a kiss-off. Ameinias, desperately depressed over the rejection, killed himself.


4. Apollo

The sun god, one of the most important in all literature, was also quite the libertine. Besides dalliances with numerous nymphs, Apollo was also lover to Macedonian Prince Hyakinthos, who died catching a thrown discus, then turned by the god into the hyacinth flower. The Pseudo-Apollodorus also said Apollo had been with Thracian singer Thamyris in the first man-on-man relationship in history. And for those who think same-sex nuptials are a 21st-century invention, Apollo also was in a relationship with Hymen, the god of marriage. Above: Alexander Kiselev, Apollo and Hyacinth (1884).


5. Chrysippus

Euripedes wrote that this divine Peloponnesian hero was on the way to compete in the Nemean Games when his Theban tutorLaius ran off with him and raped him. The incident drew a curse upon the city of Thebes. Above: Chrysippus, kidnapped by Laius, looks for his father Pelops running behind the chariot; Volute Krater image (320 B.C.).


6. Hermes

The wing-heeled messenger of the gods was said in multiple myths to have male lovers. In a variation of the Hyacinth myth, it was Hermes’ lover Crocus who was killed by a discus thrown by a god before being turned into a flower. Some myths suggest a romantic relationship between Hermes and the hero Perseus. And while some stories list Daphnis, the inventor of pastoral poetry, as the son of Hermes, other sources claim him to be the god of speed’s favorite lover.


7. Pan

Of course, many mythological texts and artworks connect Daphnis to the satyr Pan, god of music. Pan frequently was depicted in sculpture chasing both women and men around with his always-erect penis and oversized scrotum. Half man. Half goat. Bisexual. Size queen. Above: Rossi Domenico, Pan and Apollo (circa 1704), engraving.


8. Dionysus

http://www.advocate.com/sites/advocate.com/files/2016/08/24/dionysus_prosymnus.jpg

Best known as the Greek god of wine, Dionysus was also the god of intersex and transgender people. Male lovers of the god included the satyr Ampelos and the famously handsome Adonis. He also once made a journey to Hades and was guided by the shepherd Prosymnus, who led the way in exchange for the chance to make love to the party god. When Prosymnus died before that deal would be consummated, the god created a wood phallus to ritually fulfill the promise, according to research by a number of Christian historians, including Hyginus and Arnobius. Above: Diego Velázquez, The Triumph of Bacchus, a.k.a. Dionysus (1629).


9. Heracles

The famous hero had a number of male companions (http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/art/2013/08/14/golden-age-denial-hercules-bisexual-demigod) through his many trials. Among them: Abderos, who kept the mares of Diomedes for Heracles but was eaten by the beasts; Hylas, Heracles' companion when he sailed on the Argo, who was eventually kidnapped by nymphs in Mysia; and Iolaus, who help cauterize the necks of the hydra when Heracles famously chopped off the beast’s many heads. Indeed, the relationship with Iolaus was enshrined in Thebes, where male couples of the day could be found “exchanging vows and pledges with their beloved at his tomb,” according to historian Louis Crompton (https://books.google.com/books?id=TfBYd9xVaXcC&lpg=PA123&ots=OqsKTukskQ&dq=exchanging%20vows%20and%20pledges%20with%20their%20beloved%20at%20his%20tomb%20luois%20crompton&pg=PA123#v=onepage&q=exchanging%20vows%20and%20pledges%20with%20their%20beloved%20at%20his%20tomb%20luois%20crompton&f=false). Above: Hans Sebald Beham, Heracles and Iolaus dispatching the hydra with club and fire.


10. Poseidon

According to Pindar’s First Olympian Ode, Pelops, the king of Pisa, once shared “Aphrodite’s sweet gifts” with the ocean god himself. Pelops for a time was taken to Olympus by Poseidon and trained to drive the divine chariot. Above: Felice Giani, The Marriage of Poseidon and Amphitrite (1802-1805).


11. Orpheus

The legendary poet and musician may be best known for the story of his journey to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice; he failed to do so when he succumbed to temptation and looked at her before both had returned to the world of the living. According to Ovid (http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Metamorph10.htm), he never took another female lover after that — but did love other young men in Thrace. Spurned, Ciconian women would eventually tear Orpheus apart during a Bacchic orgy. Above: John Macallan Swan, Orpheus (1896).


12. Hermaphroditus

Perhaps the earliest literary reference to an intersex person concerns this child of Hermes and love goddess Aphrodite who as a youth encountered the nymph Salmacis, who attempted to seduce the youth and asked the gods that their forms be permanently joined. The creature of both sexes was frequently depicted in classical art as a figure with womanly breasts and form but with male genitalia.


13. Callisto

This nymph follower of Artemis took a vow to remain a virgin and could not be tempted even by Zeus, at least in male form. But when Zeus disguised himself as Artemis, she was lured into the goddess’s embrace. Hesiod wrote that after this tryst was discovered, Callisto was turned into a bear before she gave birth to son Arcas. Callisto and Arcas were later put in the stars as the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.


14. Artemis

Twin sister to Apollo, the goddess was by differing accounts a nearly asexual virgin or a lesbian with many nymph lovers, including Cyrene, Atalanta, and Anticleia as well as moon goddess Dictynna. By some accounts, she was Callisto’s lover before the nymph was raped by Zeus. Researcher Johanna Hypatia-Cybelaia writes that lesbian and gay devotees worshipped her as Artemis Orthia, and that lesbian port Pamphilia referred to the goddess in hymn as Artemis Pergaea.


15. The Amazons

The original race of warrior women, the Amazons of myth lived in a society free of men, one where the powerful women would only have heterosexual sex once or twice a year — for reproductive purposes only — with male slaves abducted from neighboring villages or taken prisoner during wars, according to Strabo (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0099,001:11). So what happened the rest of the year? Well, many scholars suggest the idea of a lesbian culture is just modern fantasy, though there is art from the time (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141029-amazons-scythians-hunger-games-herodotus-ice-princess-tattoo-cannabis) that depicts Amazonian Queen Penthesilia accepting a love gift from a Thracian huntress. Above: Johann Georg Platzer, The Amazon Queen Thalestris in the Camp of Alexander the Great.


16. Teiresias

The blind prophet of Apollo was most famous in Greek myth for being transformed from a man into a woman for seven years. During his female years, Teiresias became a priestess of Hera, married, and even had children, according to Hesiod (http://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodMiscellany.html). Call him mythology’s original transgender person. After the gods changed him back, Zeus asked who enjoyed sex more, men or women. Teiresias revealed the ladies had it roughly 10 times better than the lads. Reporting this earned him a blinding by Hera. Above: Pentheus Scorns The Prophecies of Tiresias.


17. Athena

The goddess of wisdom and patron of Athens was a virgin by nearly every mythological account but did express a romantic attraction to the Attic maiden Myrmex. However, that ended poorly when Myrmex pretended to have invented the plow, one of Athena’s creations, and Athena turned the girl into an ant. Above: Athena, center, in a mural by John Singer Sargent.


18. Aphrodite

While the goddess of love is not identified prominently as lesbian herself, the Greek poet Sappho (as in sapphic) of Lesbos (yes, as in lesbian) told many homoerotic tales and named Aphrodite as the greatest patron and ally (http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Translations/Sappho.html) of lesbians and homosexuals within the Greek pantheon of gods. Above: Enrique Simonet, El Juicio de Paris (1904).


19. Eros

While the best-known myths of Eros depict the son of Aphrodite as a fertility god — the version that proved inspirational to the popularized Roman god Cupid — later Greek myths portrayed Eros as one of several winged erotes, and the one regarded as a protector of homosexual culture, according to research in the scholarly book Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3704522?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents).

Petr

11-28-2017, 02:35 AM

continued:

Egyptian Mythology


20. Isis

http://www.advocate.com/sites/advocate.com/files/2016/08/24/pompeii_-_temple_of_isis_-_io_and_isis_-_man.jpg

The Egyptian goddess, also worshipped by Greeks, is known for solving a gender identity issue of yore. Iphis was born female but raised male by his mother, who concealed the truth because her husband wanted a male heir. Ultimately, Iphis fell in love with Ianthe, a woman, and was betrothed to her. Before the wedding, Iphis prayed in the Temple of Isis for a solution, and voila! she became a he. As noted on Owlcation (https://owlcation.com/humanities/Gay-Themes-in-Ancient-Mythology), this may have been a heterosexual ending, but the love story was laced with LGBT themes. Above: Isis (seated right) welcoming the Greek heroine Io as she is borne into Egypt on the shoulders of the personified Nile, as depicted in a Roman wall painting from Pompeii.

https://www.advocate.com/sites/advocate.com/files/2016/09/15/lgbt-egyptian-gods-x750_0.jpg

While the level of tolerance for LGBT people in ancient Egypt remains subject to debate, the truth can be found in the ostraca. Mythology depicted in hieroglyphics and history revealed on pyramid walls confirms same-sex relationships existed within the culture and lore along the Nile. Many scholars today suggest that while all matters of sex were treated as somewhat taboo, intolerance of homosexuality seemed such a foreign concept that no records show the practice as forbidden. In addition, several intersex figures were not only recorded but celebrated. Here is a review of their stories as well as the other Egyptian deities who fall within the LGBT spectrum.


21. Seth

The storm god associated with many natural disasters, Seth was among the more colorful figures in the Egyptian pantheon. Researcher Mark Brustman says Seth (http://www.well.com/~aquarius/egypt.htm), while married to his sister Nephthys, is depicted as engaging in sexual activities with other male deities such as Horus. Seth is also described as having impotent testicles, and he never had a child. This may not be a sign of great tolerance in the culture; Seth was cast in a terribly negative light in many stories. And while his childbearing siblings Osiris and Isis represent life, he represents the desert. This may indicate a certain negative sentiment about gay identity. But many stories show that while Seth could be called a villainous figure, his homosexuality was not what made him so.


22. Horus

Many tales about Seth focus on his envy of his nephew Horus, the child of Isis and Orisis. In one tale documented well in Richard Parkinson’s Homosexual Desire and Middle Kingdom Literature (https://rainbowsudan.wordpress.com/tag/richard-parkinson-homosexual-desire-and-middle-kingdom-literature-in-the-journal-of-egyptian-archaeology-jea/), Horus is either raped or seduced into a sexual encounter. Seth intends to embarrass Horus by showing others Horus was the receptive partner in the act. But Horus gets the upper hand, because he secretly captured Seth’s semen, then had his mother Isis feed it back to Seth in his lettuce. When the semen is called forth by Seth in an attempt to humiliate Horus, it comes from Seth instead. Interestingly, the tale shows that ancient Egyptian culture didn’t look down on homosexuality — something heroic Horus engaged in himself — so much as it held being subjugated in low esteem.


23. Antinous

This resurrection figure holds ties to ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures. Antinous was a real historical figure and the male companion of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The pair would take journeys around the Mediterranean. And on one trip, Antinous drowned in the Nile on the same day that Egyptians commemorated the watery death of Osiris. Deeply affected by the death of his lover, Hadrian encouraged the deification of Antinous (http://www.antinopolis.org/index.htm), and cults sprung up around the Mediterranean honoring him. In some tellings, Antinous rose from the Nile after his death and was then revered as a form of Osiris reborn. Indeed, the god and the Roman cult that followed him still have devotees today.


24. Atum

In the creation story for the Egyptian gods, the first deity, Atum, was both male and female, according to studies by researcher Mark Burstman. The ancestor to all self-produced two offspring, Shu and Tefnut, through either a sneeze or his own semen, and it wasn’t for a few generations that the archetypal male and female gods of Isis and Osiris were born.


25. Nephthys

While there are fewer tales in Egyptian history and mythology about female than male homosexuality, many considered the goddess Nephthys to be a lesbian. The sister and constant companion of Isis, she married brother Seth but bore him no children. Scholars have debated (http://www.kingtutone.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=950&p=13419) whether the stories of Nephthys, who did bear one son by Osiris, show that the culture held lesbians in greater esteem than gay men, because they could still be fertile despite their sexual orientation. Then again, others express skepticism (http://anthropology.msu.edu/anp455-fs14/2014/10/23/ancient-egyptian-sexuality/) about her lesbianism altogether.


26. Isis

Isis was among the few goddesses worshipped both by the Egyptians and their Mediterranean neighbors in Greece. (http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/2016/8/25/20-gay-greek-gods?pg=19#article-content) The mother goddess and a protector of children, she also cared for society’s downtrodden, which may be why gay priests in ancient Egypt worshipped the deity. In one tale documented at Isiopolis (https://isiopolis.com/2012/07/28/iphis-ianthe-and-isis-the-lgbt-friendly-goddess/), Isis appeared in a dream accompanied by an Egyptian retinue to calm the pregnant Telethusa, who feared she would deliver a girl against her husband’s wishes. Isis told the mother to carry the child, Iphis, who was born a girl but raised as a boy. Later in life, Iphis called on Isis to change his gender to male, an ancient gender affirmation granted by divine means.


27. Ra/Rat

While the sun god Ra in most mythological accounts was regarded as the father to the major gods, Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge wrote (https://books.google.com/books?id=xBtLAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA328&lpg=PA328&dq=ra+or+rat+egyptian+god&source=bl&ots=ZQOi_ZcVJi&sig=_3stne20mJCw22y3vNOjB8nUUJ0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiNrfrexZDPAhUJMyYKHauPAF8Q6AEITjAN#v=onepage&q=ra%20or%20rat%20egyptian%20god&f=false) of clear indications of a double-gender nature to the deity. As early as the fifth dynasty, Budge wrote of Ra’s female counterpart Rat, who was considered the mother of the gods.


28. Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep

The clearest evidence that bisexuality was acceptable in ancient Egypt may be the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, two men laid to rest in the necropolis of Saqqara. Hieroglyphics indicate (http://www.egyptology.com/niankhkhnum_khnumhotep/) that the men were married with children but also show them in intimate embrace. The two men apparently worked as overseers to manicurists in the palace of King Nuiserre. There is some scholarly debate as to whether the men were brothers, but virtually all depictions of the pair show a commitment that looks far more than fraternal.


29. Hatshepsut

The first documented transgender figure in history may have been the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. Deidra Ramsey McIntyre of Red Ibis Publishing (https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any-gay-pharaohs-in-ancient-Egypt-Who) notes that unlike other female Egyptian rulers, Hatshepsut was always depicted in ancient art wearing men’s clothing, and she frequently was drawn with a male body. Her descendant Thutmose III would later try to eradicate nearly all historic reference to her.


30. Neferkare and Sasenet

The Egyptian King Neferkare, who many scholars believe rose to become Pharoah Pepi II (https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any-gay-pharaohs-in-ancient-Egypt-Who), would make conspicuous midnight visits to his favorite general, Sasenet, according to tales dating to the era of the Middle Kingdom. According to German scholars Gunter Burkard and Heinz Thissen, some ancient texts state Neferkare would do to the military leader “what his majesty desired,” a phrase they interpret as clear innuendo of sexual congress.


31. Hapi

Hapi, the god of the Nile, is depicted in hieroglyphics as an intersex person with a ceremonial false beard and breasts. While generally referred to as male, the god also was also considered a symbol of fertility. According to Richard Parkinson’s Homosexual Desire and Middle Kingdom Literature, the deity was portrayed to suggest both male and female reproductive power, a topic that has incited debate among scholars (http://epistle.us/hbarticles/ancientegypt1.html).


32. Wadj-Wer

Another male god widely associated with fertility was Wadj-Wer, a deity depicted at a pyramid site in Abusir. Sometimes referred to as the "pregnant god," Wadj-Wer held the same type of station as river gods in Greek mythology, representing the Mediterranean Sea in some accounts or rivers and lagoons of the northern Nile Delta in others. An association with water seems the greatest distinguishing feature separating iconography of Wadj-Wer from that of Hapi.


33. Shai/Renenutet

The Egyptian god of fate Shai sometimes was depicted in male form, and other times presented as the female Shait. Related to both birth in the world and rebirth in the afterlife, Shai was born with each individual, constantly starting life anew but also an immortal god (http://www.thekeep.org/~kunoichi/kunoichi/themestream/shai.html#.V9qic5MrLrk), according to ancient Egyptian belief. Wallis Budge suggests the deity was viewed in parts of Egypt as combining the facets of a male Shai, decreeing what should happen to man, and a female Renenutet, the goddess of good fortune. “Subsequently no distinction was made between these deities and the abstract ideas which they represented,” Budge wrote in The Egyptian Book of the Dead.



Hindu mythology


The notion of gender as a spectrum may feel to some a modern revelation, but Hindu literature and mythology for centuries has taught of the figures who defied the binary. And while the reproductive connection between man and woman has always been revered in the faith, Hinduism, unlike most Western faiths, historically treats homosexuality as a natural behavior, one documented in folk tale and religious text alike. Behold, this incomplete list of Hindu deities and divine descendants who defied gender and sexual norms back in the day.

https://www.advocate.com/sites/advocate.com/files/2016/09/01/01-shiva-and-parvati_0.jpg


34. Shiva and Parvati

The supreme god of Shaivism, Shiva has often been held as the ultimate embodiment of masculinity, but as far back as the Kushan era, there have also been depictions of Shiva in the Ardhanarishvara form (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardhanarishvara), an androgynous composite of Shiva and his wife, Parvoti. The form originated when Parvoti, desiring to share Shiva’s experiences, asked for their forms to literally be joined. “What is being said is that if the inner masculine and feminine meet, you are in a perpetual state of ecstasy,” explains Hindu scholar Sadhguru. Most often, the Ardhanarishvara is depicted with the female form of Parvoti on the left and the masculine attributes of Shiva on the right.


35. Vishnu/Mohini

https://www.advocate.com/sites/advocate.com/files/2016/09/01/02-vishnu.jpg

A major deity of the religion regarded as protector of the world, Vishnu is clearly depicted in the faith as gender-fluid. This major Hindu deity frequently took on the female avatar of Mohini (http://www.dailyo.in/politics/why-all-good-indians-must-embrace-their-homosexual-heritage/story/1/4704.html). Vishnu even procreated with Shiva in the Mohini form, resulting in the birth of Ayyappa, a major figure still worshipped by millions who make pilgrimages to shrines in India. The avatar Mohini frequently gets describes as an enchantress who maddens lovers.


36. Krishna

An incarnation of Vishnu, the popular deity Krishna also took the form of Mohini in order to marry Aravan to satisfy one of the hero’s last requests, according to the Mahabharata (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_themes_in_Hindu_mythology#cite_note-17). After Aravan’s passing, Krishna stayed in the form as the hero’s widow for a significant period of mourning.


37. Shikhandi

This warrior in the Kurukshetra war in most tellings of the Mahabharata was female at birth but changed gender later in life. Born Shikhandini, the girl in one version of the story was raised as a male by King Drupada, the girl's father. The king even had her married to the princess of Dasharna. Upon complaints from the new bride, Shikhandini fled into the forest and met a Yaksha (http://www.mahabharataonline.com/stories/mahabharata_character.php?id=94) and exchanged genders. Now taking the name Shikhandi, he remained a man until his death at the battle of Mahabharat.


38. Bahuchara Mata

Bahuchara Mata was traveling with her sisters and threatened by the marauder Bapiya. After she and her sisters self-immolated their own breasts, Bapiya was cursed with impotence until he began to dress and act as a woman (http://bahucharajitemple.org/). Today, the Hindu goddess is worshipped as the originator and patron of the hijras, trans and intersex Bangladeshis considered (https://www.linktv.org/shows/prism/being-hijra-transgender-in-bangladesh?gclid=COKGopjD5M4CFQRehgodL5EEuw) in the faith to be of a “third gender.”


39. Rama

Another origin story for the hijras comes from the Ramayana, which tells the tale of Rama gathering his subjects in the forest before his 14-year adventure. He tells the men and women to return to their appropriate places in Ayodhya, but upon his return from his epic journey, Rama finds some have not left the place of that speech and instead merged together (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBfNNYbdCMk) in an intersex fashion. He grants hijras the ability to confer certain blessings, the beginning of the badhai tradition.


40. The Khajuraho Temples

These medieval temples famously include depictions of people in sexual congress, a demonstration of the importance of sexual interaction within the Hindu faith. Included in the carvings are a number of depictions (https://www.flickr.com/photos/dalbera/8504108618/in/photostream/) of gay sex, sometimes in orgy situations where several women are involved in intercourse with a single man, but there also are images of men (http://www.gay-art-history.org/gay-history/gay-art/gay-india-art/khajuraho-oral-sex-gay.html) having sex and engaging in fellatio with one another.


41. Agni

The god of fire, creativity, and wealth is depicted in the Hindu faith (http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/tt_lingam.html) as married both to the goddess and Svaha and with the male moon god Soma. Connor and Sparks relate that Agni importantly received Soma’s semen orally. British scholar Phil Hine says Agni gave a divine blow job to Shiva as well, resulting in the birth of Skanda, the god of war.


42. Mitra and Varuna

These sons of Aditi from Vedic literature are depicted frequently as icons for brotherly affection and intimate friendship between men, according to the Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava Association (http://www.galva108.org/#!Hindu-Deities-and-the-Third-Sex-2/cu6k/1). Ancient texts of the Brahmana in fact depict the two as alternate phases of the moon who join in same-sex relations. On nights of the new moon, Mitra injects his semen into Varuna to start the moon cycle, with the favor returned upon the full moon.


43. Budha Graha

In addition to providing a pivotal role in Hindu astrology as one of the planets, specifically Mercury, Budh Graha also represented a huge blow to the paradigm of gender roles millennia before the current vogue. Raised as the child of Sage Brihaspati and Tara, Budha was actually the product of adultery (http://www.hindu-blog.com/2011/04/story-of-birth-of-budh-graha.html) between Tara and the moon god Chandra. Sage Brihaspati, angered at this revelation during Tara’s pregnancy, cursed that the child would be born neither male nor female, and established the tradition that the husband of a child’s mother would be considered its father.


44. Ila

The chief progenitor of the lunar dynasty, Ila appears in many stories alternately as female or male. In the Ramayana, a meeting with Shiva and Parvati results in Ila alternating between genders every month. Ila ultimately marries Budha, producing the offspring Pururavas during one of the months when anatomy allowed, thus producing a lunar dynasty. In the Vishnu Parana, it is said Ila’s manhood was ultimately made permanent, upon which he took the name Sudyumma.


45. Narada

A Vedic sage and a Job-like figure in Hindu myth, this devotee of Vishnu once boasted (http://www.kamakoti.org/kamakoti/details/devibhagvatpurana49.html) he was above being a victim of maya. Vishnu encouraged Narada then to take a dip in a pool, which erased the sage’s memories and turned him into a woman. In that state, Narada would marry a king and produce several sons and grandsons doomed to die in war. While Narada was in mourning, the sage’s gender was restored to male, and he had a greater understanding of the power of maya.


46. Nammallvar

One of the 12 alwar saints of Tamil Nadu, this mystic poet often expressed as female (https://history-of-hinduism.blogspot.com/p/homosexuality-and-hinduism.html) and wrote as many as 1,000 devotional songs in the persona of a woman pining for her lover, Lord Vishnu. Indeed, at an annual festival, an icon of Nammallvar in drag is brought into a sanctum of Vishnu to unite to the literary lover with her lord.


47. Radha

The Radha Krishna are collectively known within the Hindu faith as the aspects of the male and female facets of God. Radha is regarded as the supreme goddess in control of the god Krishna, and members of a Vaishnava sahajiya sect of the faith that identified with Radha dressed and lived as women as a way of perfecting their love of Krishna, according to Vedan literature (https://history-of-hinduism.blogspot.com/p/homosexuality-and-hinduism.html). In fact, a 15th-century leader, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, claimed to be a manifestation of Krishna in union with Radha. As in, “I am Chait”? OK, maybe that’s a stretch.


48. The Kama Sutra

Want proof to show your homophobic uncle that same-sex unions have been recognized by faith leaders for thousands of years? Tell him to grab that copy of the Kama Sutra he keeps in a dresser drawer and read Chapter 9 (http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/kama/kama209.htm), which in addition to offering instruction on fellatio makes clear that this skill can also be used acceptably in homosexual interactions. It’s even been cited by the Human Rights Campaign. Of note, the Kama Sutra existed as a religious text celebrating the union of individuals in sexual interaction.


49. Arjuna

A protagonist in the Mahabharata, Arjuna spent a year in exile, cursed by a rejected Urvashi to live as a eunuch. But on the request of King Indra, that sentence was reduced and Arjuna lived just a year as a woman, taking the name Brihannala and teaching princesses to dance.


50. Samba

The son of Krishna today is considered the patron of eunuchs and transgender people, but his history sounds like modern myths about Target bathrooms. Connor and Sparks write that Samba, or Shamba, would dress in women’s clothes to more easily sneak into the company of women in order to seduce them.


51. The mothers of Bhagiratha

https://www.advocate.com/sites/advocate.com/files/2016/09/01/18-the-mothers-of-bhagiratha.jpg

The Hindu king Bhagiratha was credited with bringing the Ganges River to Earth, but his arrival on Earth originated in the sapphic and the divine. Historians Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kiswai note the king’s name indicates he was born of two vulvas, and discovered a story of Maharaja Dilipa, the king of the Sun Dynasty, dying with no heir. Shiva declared the king’s two widows could make love to one another to produce a true offspring, and Bhagiratha was conceived.


52. Bhagavati-devi

Bhagavati-devi is considered today to be the goddess of cross-dressing, and more than 5,000 male worshippers dress as women each year for the ritual Chamayavilakku festival in Kollam (http://www.deccanchronicle.com/140326/nation-current-affairs/article/cross-dressing-please-devi-kollam). Temple leaders say the tradition has been in place for hundreds of years.

Petr

11-28-2017, 01:43 PM

When you think about it, it is no wonder that orthodox, Biblical Christianity is the most anti-"gay" of all religions - including even Islam, which had a quite relaxed wink-and-nod attitude towards sodomy until recently, before the rise of modern Muslim fundamentalism.

This antipathy to genderbending is structural - unlike the above-mentioned pagan cults, Christianity simply does not have sexually ambiguous deities, but unmistakably patriarchal role models of Father and Son (Holy Spirit might have some female elements, but nothing certain can be said about that). Whereas Islam, with its insistence on the non-human nature of its deity, cannot even argue with good conscience that Allah is "male," which easily leads to the conclusion (as it did among Sufi mystics (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showpost.php?p=1337705&postcount=20)) that true divinity is beyond sex and gender roles.

So modern fag activists are indeed "justified" in their anti-Christian hatred, in the sense that no other religion has so systematically taught homosexuality to be a very evil perversion as Christian faith. It is almost unique trait, similar to Christianity's opposition to abortion and euthanasia (no other religion has been so consistently against those things as well).

Abbé Dubois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Antoine_Dubois), the RC missionary in India in the early 19th century, specifically took pride in Christianity being more anti-queer than any other religion, comparing this righteous stand to the laissez-faire attitude of the Indians:

http://www.archive.org/stream/hindumannerscust1906dubo#page/310/mode/2up

http://www.payer.de/quellenkunde/quellen1690.jpg

But the depravity of the Hindus does not end here. There are depths of wickedness a thousand times more horrible to which the greater number of them are not ashamed to descend.

In Europe, where the Christian religion has inspired a salutary horror for certain unnatural offences, one would find it difficult to believe the stories which show to what lengths these disgusting vices are carried by the greater number of heathens and Mahomedans, to whom they have become a sort of second nature. We all know how greatly the Arabs and their neighbouring tribes are addicted to them. Kaempfer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbert_Kaempfer) says that in Japan there are public establishments for this purpose which are tolerated by Government; and very much the same thing is done in China.

The facility with which the Hindu can gratify his passions in a natural manner in a country where courtesans abound renders these disgusting practices less common; but it by no means prevents them altogether. In the larger towns in India there are generally houses to be found given over to this odious form of vice. One sometimes meets in the streets the degraded beings who adopt this infamous profession. They dress like women, let their hair grow in the same way, pluck out the hair on their faces, and copy the walk, gestures, manner of speaking, tone of voice, demeanour, and affectations of prostitutes. Other secret crimes are also carried on in India, and especially among the Mahomedans; but decency will not allow me to speak of them. They are the same as those which are mentioned in the Bible (Leviticus xviii and xx), and which brought down such terrible punishments on the inhabitants of Canaan who had been guilty of them.

Being hardly able to believe in the possibility of such abominable wickedness, I asked a Brahmin one day whether there was any truth in what I had heard. Far from denying the stories, he smilingly confirmed them; nor did he appear to be even shocked at such iniquity. Indeed he seemed to be quite amused at the confusion and embarrassment that I felt in asking him such questions. At last I said to him: "How is it possible for one to believe that such depraved tastes exist, degrading men as they do to a far lower level than the beasts of the field, in a country where the union of the two sexes is so easy?" "On that point there is no accounting for tastes," he replied, bursting out into a laugh. Disgusted with this reply, and filled with contempt for the man who was not ashamed to speak thus, I turned on my heel and left him without another word.

From the earliest ages these unnatural offences have been common in the East amongst heathen nations. In the laws that God gave the Israelites, He warns them to be on their guard against these detestable vices, which were known to be very prevalent amongst the inhabitants of the countries they were going to take possession of, and which were one of the chief reasons for their total extermination.

If the Christian religion had done nothing more than render these iniquities revolting and execrable, that alone would be sufficient to ensure our love and respect for it.
I think Dubois might have hinted at bestiality too there, but in any case, no other religion has considered opposition to sodomy such "serious business." And thus we can understand why the modern pro-gay movement is such an insult to Christianity, since it is undoing the moral attitudes the church worked so hard to establish. Willfully rebelling against the light.

Christianity consciously made sodomy the calling-card of the devil - that is, not merely a sign of bad taste or lack of proper manliness, like conservative heathen might have thought - and the society that embraces fags must inevitably scorn true Christianity. Those two cannot fit in the same room together, one of them has to go.

JJ Cale

11-28-2017, 05:21 PM

Something like 52% of young people today would not describe themselves as heterosexual. I think we spent too much time merely thinking the media was too goofy to take seriously, when it was not us they were targeting.

Avvakum

11-28-2017, 07:15 PM

Something like 52% of young people today would not describe themselves as heterosexual. I think we spent too much time merely thinking the media was too goofy to take seriously, when it was not us they were targeting.

Yes, and if this is not changed, it will be the doom of civilizaton if nothing else will. You are absolutely correct; too many parents 'parented' by exposing their children to TV, the Movies, and frankly, public schools. It had it's desired effect.

Petr

11-29-2017, 12:57 AM

Those shitlibs who actually know some history can point out the startling change that took place in the Roman criminal law after Christians took over:

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/21319


Why the Romans Are Important in the Debate About Gay Marriage

While the world of the ancient Greeks seems to have tolerated homosexuality (as seen in the poems of Sappho and the dialogues of Plato), that of the Romans was more cautious. Romans in the period of the Roman Republic and early empire tended to perceive the Greek acceptance of male homosexuality as less than male and, thus, literally unvirtuous (Vir being the Latin word for man). Indeed, a Roman term for effeminacy was “Graeculus”—“a little Greek!”

The earliest Roman law regarding homosexuality appears to have been the Lex Scantinia that was passed by the Roman assembly at some point in the Roman Republic (perhaps in the second century BC). Although the text of this law itself has not survived, later Roman jurists of the second and third century AD describe how it outlawed the homosexual rape of young male Roman citizens. Consensual male or female homosexual unions apparently were not legislated against. Although there is scholarly debate, Roman literature of the republic and early empire suggests that men who engaged in consensual liaisons were often mocked as unmanly, but consensual homosexual sex itself was not illegal.

This would change in the later Roman Empire. While the first three centuries of the empire saw no legislation as far as we can tell regarding homosexuality, aside from the continuation of the Lex Scantinia as marked by its citation by the Roman jurists, in the fourth century there would be dramatic new laws condemning male homosexuality. Most scholars interpret a convoluted law from the year 342 AD surviving in both the Theodosian Code and the Code of Justinian as a decree from the emperors Constantius II and Constans that marriage based on unnatural sex should be punished meticulously. Although Constans himself was later denounced as having male lovers, this trend of the emperors in condemning male homosexuality in laws would continue. In a law of 390, surviving in the Theodosian Code and the Lex Dei (‘Law of God’), the emperors Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius ordained that any man taking the role of a woman in sex would be publicly burned to death.

These laws certainly demonstrate a change from the Roman Republic where, to be sure, homosexual rape of male citizens was condemned but consensual homosexual sex was tolerated, even if sometimes mocked. Why did this change occur? The answer is fairly straightforward and lies ultimately in the results of the actions of the famous Roman emperor Constantine. In 312, this father of the emperors Constantius II and Constans had reached out to Christianity as the basis for his authority. Throughout the next 25 years of his reign, Constantine supported Christianity and gave financial help to the Church and legal sanction to some of the bishops’ powers. As his sons came of age in an increasingly Christian society, they and many of their advisors would have grown up with Biblical strictures. Thus, the pronouncements of the Book of Leviticus (18.22, 20.13) against male homosexuality as an abomination punishable by death in God’s eyes would logically have influenced writers of imperial law. Such strictures were reinforced in the New Testament (Romans 1.24-27). So, it would appear that the growing influence of the Bible in an increasingly Christian Roman empire led emperors to condemn homosexual unions.

When we look at the current attempts in the United States to ban homosexual marriage, we must clarify what the premises for such measures are. If the drive to stop homosexual marriage ultimately derives from the Hebrew Bible, and its acceptance as religious truth by Christians, would not laws banning homosexual marriage be thus derived from religion? If so, such new legislation may well be an attempt to break down the “Wall of Separation” between Church and State that Thomas Jefferson described as an integral aspect of American government.
This may be a banal argument, but it is quite logical, if you accept the liberal premise of secularism. Anti-homosexual laws do indeed have “superstitious” origins, as the revolutionary French national assembly noted already back in 1791. We can see that as soon as Christianity lost its political power, laws against faggotry began to be dismantled:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Code#Criminal_code

In 1791, Louis Michel le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau presented a new criminal code to the national Constituent Assembly.[7] He explained that it outlawed only “true crimes”, and not “phony offenses created by superstition, feudalism, the tax system, and [royal] despotism”.[8] He did not list the crimes "created by superstition". The new penal code did not mention blasphemy, heresy, sacrilege, witchcraft or homosexuality, which led to these former offences being swiftly decriminalized. In 1810, a new criminal code was issued under Napoleon. As with the Penal Code of 1791, it did not contain provisions against religious crimes.
For a long time, pious Christians relied on silent “gentlemen’s agreement” with more secular elements of Western societies to prevent moral outrages like “Gay Pride” being brought up, but that unspoken agreement is no longer in force, as modern liberals no longer have any vestigial respect for Christian morality. It was pretty much inevitable that sooner or later, most unbelievers would reach the position of Jacobin radicals and consider anti-queer views as nothing more than pernicious superstition (especially when continuing the family line is no longer, in this age of contraception, seen as a pressing moral imperative).

The classical scholar J.B. Bury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._Bury), writing in the early 20th century, was still forced (by the public opinion influenced by Christianity) to talk about “unnatural vice,” but he clearly expressed his liberal views by scorning the clerical power that had imposed such hard laws against sodomy, viewing Biblical sexual morals as irrational despotism:

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/BURLAT/23*.html#ref64

Unnatural vice was pursued by the Christian monarchs with the utmost severity. Constantius imposed the death penalty on both culprits, and Theodosius the Great condemned persons guilty of this enormity to death by fire.65 Justinian, inspired by the example of the chastisement which befell "those who formerly lived in Sodom," and firmly believing that such crimes were the immediate causes of famines, plagues, and earthquakes, was particularly active and cruel in dealing with this vice. In his laws,66 he contented himself with imposing the penalty of death, but in practice he did not scruple to resort to extraordinary punishments. It is recorded that senators and bishops who were found guilty were shamefully mutilated, or exquisitely tortured, and paraded through the streets of the capital before their execution.67

The disproportion and cruelty of the punishments, which mark the legislation of the autocracy in regard to sexual crimes, and are eminently unworthy of the legal reason of Rome, were due to ecclesiastical influence and the prevalence of extravagant ascetic ideals.
It is a fact, although not advertised by cowardly churchians these days, that Christians used to consider the suppression of homosexuality a glorious moral victory over pagan corruption, similar to the abolition of gladiatorial games, or the ban on infanticide (but even that Christian accomplishment is now being challenged, in these days of abortion-on-demand).

It seems clear that on their own, ancient pagans would not have been able to perform any determined moral reform. They just did not have the fanatical willpower that such a task would have required – only Christians could come up with it.

Sir Richard Burton, in his infamous essay on pederasty, agreed that the modest measures that pagan Romans made against the vice were nowhere near effective enough:

http://www.jrbooksonline.com/DOCs/PartD_pederasty.doc

Pederastia had in Greece, I have shown, its noble and ideal side: Rome, however, borrowed her malpractices, like her religion and polity, from those ultra-material Etruscans and debauched with a brazen face. Even under the Republic Plautus (Casin. ii. 21) makes one of his characters exclaim, in the utmost sang-froid, "Ultro te, amator, apage te a dorso meo!" With increased luxury the evil grew and Livy notices (xxxix. 13), at the Bacchanalia, plura virorum inter sese quam fœminarum stupra.

There were individual protests; for instance, S.Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus (Consul U.C. 612) punished his son for dubia castitas; and a private soldier, C. Plotius, killed his military Tribune, Q. Luscius, for unchaste proposals. The Lex Scantinia (Scatinia?), popularly derived from Scantinius the Tribune and of doubtful date (B.C. 226?), attempted to abate the scandal by fine and the Lex Julia by death; but they were trifling obstacles to the flood of infamy which surged in with the Empire.

We can see in this satire of Juvenal, written around 100 AD, that the basic attitude of Roman "ordinary Joes" to sodomy might have been contemptuous mockery, like most modern guys still consider "that is so gay" as an insult, but beyond few verbal barbs, there would be no further sanctions on the sodomites - the above-mentioned Lex Scantinia (whatever its actual content might have been) was a dead letter, as pagan authorities clearly lacked political will and spiritual motivation to strictly implement it, and the queers were good at networking:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/juvenal_satires_02.htm

Laronia could not contain herself when one of these sour-faced worthies cried out, "What of your Julian Law?11 Has it gone to sleep?" To which she answered smilingly, "O happy times to have you for a censor of our morals! Once more may Rome regain her modesty; a third Cato has come down to us from the skies! But tell me, where did you buy that balsam juice that exhales from your hairy neck? Don't be ashamed to point out to me the shopman! If laws and statutes are to be raked up, you should cite first of all the Scantinian12: inquire first into the things that are done by men; men do more wicked things than we do, but they are protected by their numbers, and the tight-locked shields of their phalanx. Male effeminates agree wondrously well among themselves; never in our sex will you find such loathsome examples of evil.

11. In reference to the law passed by Augustus for encouraging marriage (Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus).
12. A law against unnatural crime.
And the morals of Roman elites could have been even worse than those of common Romans. Juvenal seems to be clearly implying that decadent Roman nobles were actually performing some kind of "homosexual marriages":

Gracchus has presented to a cornet player----or perhaps it was a player on the straight horn----a dowry of four hundred thousand sesterces. The contract has been signed; the benedictions have been pronounced; the banqueters are seated, the new made bride is reclining on the bosom of her husband. O ye nobles of Rome! is it a soothsayer that we need, or a Censor? Would you be more aghast, would you deem it a greater portent, if a woman gave birth to a calf, or an ox to a lamb? The man who is now arraying himself in the flounces and train and veil of a bride once carried the quivering shields21 of Mars by the sacred thongs and sweated under the sacred burden!

21. Gracchus was one of the Salii, priests of Mars who had to carry the sacred shields of Mars (ancilia) in procession through the city.

O Father of our city, whence came such wickedness among thy Latin shepherds? How did such a lust possess thy grandchildren, O Gradivus? Behold! Here you have a man of high birth and wealth being handed over in marriage to a man, and yet neither shakest thy helmet, nor smitest the earth with thy spear, nor yet protestest to thy Father? Away with thee then; begone from that broad Martial Plain22 which thou hast forgotten!

22. i.e. the Campus Martius.

"I have a ceremony to attend," quoth one, "at dawn to-morrow, in the Quirinal valley." "What is the occasion?" "No need to ask: a friend is taking to himself a husband; quite a small affair." Yes, and if we only live long enough, we shall see these things done openly: people will wish to see them reported among the news of the day. Meanwhile these would-be brides have one great trouble: they can bear no children wherewith to keep the affection of their husbands; well has nature done in granting to their desires no power over their bodies. They die infertile; naught avails them the medicine-chest of the bloated Lyde, or to hold out their hands to the blows of the swift-footed Luperci!23

23. The Luperci were a mysterious priesthood who on certain days ran round the pomoerium clad in goat-skins and struck at any woman they met with goat-skin thongs in order to produce fertility.
But like some bitter unbelieving Alt-Right blogger today, Juvenal could not do much more than sink into nihilistic resentment when observing contemporary corruption - here he declares his lack of faith in life after death (as understood by the ancient Roman religion) in the very passage where he wonders in dismay how ancient Roman heroes would react if they could see such effeminate faggotry among their descendants:

That there are such things as Manes, and kingdoms below ground, and punt-poles, and Stygian pools black with frogs, and all those thousands crossing over in a single bark----these things not even boys believe, except such as have not yet had their penny bath. But just imagine them to be true----what would Curius and the two Scipios think? or Fabricius and the spirit of Camillus? What would the legion that fought at the Cremera26 think, or the young manhood that fell at Cannae; what would all those gallant hearts feel when a shade of this sort came down to them from here? They would wish to be purified; if only sulphur and torches and damp laurel-branches were to be had. Such is the degradation to which we have come! Our arms indeed we have pushed beyond Juverna's27 shores, to the new-conquered Orcades and the short-nighted Britons; but the things which we do in our victorious city will never be done by the men whom we have conquered.

26. The battle in which 300 Fabii were killed.
27. Ireland.

And we can see how Juvenal himself did not have the moral backbone required to consistently criticize “effeminacy,” since in another ranting satire of his, that was aimed against women, he sarcastically recommends having a boy-lover instead of a troublesome wife:

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/juvenal_satires_06.htm

What! Postumus, are you, you who once had your wits, taking to yourself a wife? Tell me what Tisiphone, what snakes are driving you mad? Can you submit to a she-tyrant when there is so much rope to be had, so many dizzy heights of windows standing open, and when the Aemilian bridge offers itself to hand? Or if none of all these modes of exit hit your fancy, how much better to take some boy-bedfellow, who would never wrangle with you o' nights, never ask presents of you when in bed, and never complain that you took your ease and were indifferent to his solicitations!
“Men going their own way” (MGTOW), Roman style.

Raspail

11-29-2017, 04:13 AM

Something like 52% of young people today would not describe themselves as heterosexual. I think we spent too much time merely thinking the media was too goofy to take seriously, when it was not us they were targeting.

Do you have any stats on this? Not that I'm doubting you, but while there has undoubtedly been an increase in bisexuality/homosexuality [most certainly in excess in our young women, thanks in no small part to the saturation of pornography] it seems like there's still a very strong straight majority out there. Then again, every single time I think it can't possibly get any worse, I'm always proven wrong (in spades.)

EDIT: Never mind, I found it -- although this is from our favorite repository of "jolly good" sodomy, Brokeback Island:
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/16/half-young-not-heterosexual/

Here's one that's claiming a solid third:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/4557858/a-third-of-16-22-year-olds-say-they-are-gay-or-bisexual-compared-to-88-per-cent-of-baby-boomers/

I don't know how seriously to take these sorts of things and what the sampling is. I highly doubt it's a true cross-section of the average British y00f these days, who is probably a good 1 in 3 chance of being some sort of mud person. If this is a true cross section, though, then we know that the average Muslim isn't admitting to being a latent homosexual, and it's highly doubtful that Africans would be either. Could we be truly reaching a tipping point where 50%+ of the White youth thinks of themselves as "not exclusively straight?"

EDIT #2: Here's another "one third" metric thrown out there from a pro-faggot site here in the 'Kwa:
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/08/21/a-third-of-young-americans-arent-100-straight/

[Again] I don't know how seriously to take this. It's certainly not good news in any case, but this has all of the veracity of a "Mythic Number", like next thing it'll be some "six million" type figure out there relating to gay statistics.

Those of you who grew up in the 80's in America might remember some bullshit statistics that was thrown out there about gays being 10% of the population. It was one of those "facts", like how "everyone" knows that Rupert Murdoch is NOT Jewish, that Adolf Hitler practiced the "big lie", or that the national debt went down under Bill Clinton, that was inserted to the aether [most likely intentionally] and then repeated via trickle-down mimesis through all of the normies via their Therapeutic State enforcement agents (schoolteachers, media hacks, and liberal-arts grad "feeling professions" like counselors and psychologists) and viewed unequivocally as "truth" -- when in fact, it came out in the wash later that only about 2-3% of the population was truly homosexual.

So, look for "everyone" to "just know" that "one third" of everyone is gay from here on out. Thank God we have the Internet and can swiftly debunk these sorts of things these days, but the vast majority of people will never read an alternative media website (much less a book) so there's still only so far we can go in refuting these sorts of "facts". In short order, though, you can look forward to the likes of some TED Talk where an "expert on the neuroscience of sexuality" opens a monologue with a gay version of the contrived "washout talk" that was mythically given to MIT undergraduates: "look to the left of you; now look to the right of you; statistically, one of you is gay."

Petr

12-19-2017, 03:55 PM

Here is what the famous Enlightenment writer Pierre Bayle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bayle) wrote about sodomy among Japanese Buddhist monks ("bonzes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhikkhu#Historical_terms_in_Western_literature)"), who apparently regarded it as a higher form of sexuality. (Buddhism considers being born into this world, or actually any kind of birth, to be a bad thing, and is thus implicitly hostile towards the kind of sex that can lead to childbirth.) Bayle was relying on information provided by Roman Catholic missionaries, citing here the Jesuit author Possevino (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Possevino):

https://books.google.fi/books?id=yKJklkMaoCYC&lpg=PP1&dq=bayle%20political%20writings&hl=nl&pg=PA133#v=onepage&q&f=false

(F) Father Possevin has ... condemned the decrees of the Japanese legislature.]
...

The second fault of those laws is that though they strictly forbid the bonzes to have recourse to women, they permit pederasty. They forbid the former practice as something vile and abominable, yet they approve the latter practice as something decent and holy. ‘In bonziis omnem...’ [‘Among the bonzes, copulation with a woman is utterly condemned as vile, base, and abominable. But the enjoyment of boys is allowed. In fact, among these same men, sex with boys is considered honourable and sacred.’]

The famous Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Xavier) had expressed righteous indignation towards this attitude:

http://www.theropps.com/papers/Winter1997/FrancisXavier.htm#Interaction with Buddhism

Francis Xavier had a large amount of interaction with his Japanese counterparts, the Buddhist bonzes. At different times he was both their friend and their enemy, their unknowing advocate and a denouncer of their lifestyle and teachings. In Kagoshima especially, Xavier spent a great deal of time visiting the monasteries and engaging in discussion (through Yajiro's interpretation) with the bonzes (Cary 1994: vol. 1,36). Some of the monks he respected highly for both their learning and nobility of life. He was, however, horrified by the widespread homosexuality among them and attacked this practice as well as Buddhist doctrines (Drummond 1971: 39). "Some of the bonzes received his attacks with non-committal silence, some with shrugs of the shoulder or mocking laughter."
...

On his journey to Kyoto, Francis and his companions stopped at one Zen monastery where the bonzes were happy to receive and converse with him. The superior welcomed them and served them some fruit. At the end of a long day's journey, the travelers were no doubt tired and hungry. Xavier had learned that the bonzes were educating many boys in the monastery, however, and that they committed "unnatural sins" with them. "In a loud voice he reproached them for committing such ugly and shameful sins without remorse, and for letting it be secretly known that there was no future existence in another life, though they openly ordered the people to have feasts celebrated for their dead from their own desire for gain." (Schurhammer 1982:vol. 4,143-144) However well they understood his speech, the message of his "blazing eyes and burning cheeks" left no mistakes. The bonzes were generally stupefied by Francis' unexpected lecture, and some broke out in laughter. Francis turned on his heel and left, with his companions following. "'We continued our journey,' says Fernandez briefly." (Yeo 1932:252)

Petr

01-27-2018, 06:00 PM

Here is another example of how surpassing sexual differences is one of the goals of pagan mysticism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Jainism#Siddhas

Ultimately all arihantas become siddhas, or liberated souls, at the time of their nirvana. A siddha is a soul who is permanently liberated from the transmigratory cycle of birth and death. Such a soul, having realized its true self, is free from all the Karmas and embodiment. They are formless and dwell in Siddhashila (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhashila) (the realm of the liberated beings) at the apex of the universe in infinite bliss, infinite perception, infinite knowledge and infinite energy.

The Acharanga Sutra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acharanga_Sutra) 1.197 describes siddhas in this way:

The liberated soul is not long nor small nor round nor triangular nor quadrangular nor circular; it is not black nor blue nor red nor green nor white; neither of good nor bad smell; not bitter nor pungent nor astringent nor sweet; neither rough nor soft; neither heavy nor light; neither cold nor hot; neither harsh nor smooth; it is without body, without resurrection, without contact (of matter), it is not feminine nor masculine nor neuter. The siddha perceives and knows all, yet is beyond comparison. Its essence is without form; there is no condition of the unconditioned. It is not sound, not colour, not smell, not taste, not touch or anything of that kind. Thus I say.[12]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Siddha_idol.jpg

Although the siddhas (the liberated beings) are formless and without a body, this is how the Jain temples often depict them.

bardamu

01-27-2018, 06:24 PM

Here is another example of how surpassing sexual differences is one of the goals of pagan mysticism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Jainism#Siddhas

It is not difficult to comprehend the idea that mystical formlessness would also be genderless. There undoubtedly existed some weird sexual practices in certain cults of paganism but such does not characterize paganism as a whole. Take northern paganism, for example, iirc there is one recorded instance of transgenderism with Thor wearing a dress for reasons I forget. I think Hercules at one point also donned a dress for purpose of warfare. Several loose instances do not equal a trend, unless you need it to do so for sophistical reasons. Roman paganism had none of this in its original form. Eastern cultus flooding into decadent Hellenized Rome introduced much, but once again not a dominant trend.

Petr

01-27-2018, 08:40 PM

It is not difficult to comprehend the idea that mystical formlessness would also be genderless. There undoubtedly existed some weird sexual practices in certain cults of paganism but such does not characterize paganism as a whole. Take northern paganism, for example, iirc there is one recorded instance of transgenderism with Thor wearing a dress for reasons I forget. I think Hercules at one point also donned a dress for purpose of warfare. Several loose instances do not equal a trend, unless you need it to do so for sophistical reasons. Roman paganism had none of this in its original form. Eastern cultus flooding into decadent Hellenized Rome introduced much, but once again not a dominant trend.
NAPALT = not all pagans are like that.

But all religions that do not have proper Creator God must believe, inevitably, that the world came out of chaos, Ordo ab Chao. And that chaos includes sexual roles as well:

http://ironink.org/?p=7299

3.) Wherever you find the doctrine of the chain of being (continuous being) there you find the religion of chaos. Chain of Being thinking does not allow a creator God who has distinct unshared being and who is responsible for bringing order out of Chaos so Being and order must arise out of chaos. Chaos gives birth to order and being. As such, those social orders who embrace continuous being (and Evolutionary thinking is the very nard of chain of being thinking), also embrace the religion of revolution. This religion insists that in order for a utopian order to come to pass that can only happen by returning to chaos that order may be birthed. You find this kind of thinking exemplified in celebrations of Mardi Gras, ancient rites of bacchanalia, and of course the post-Endarkenment blood-drenched Revolutions (1789 — French / 1848 — Europe / 1861 — America / 1914 — Europe / 1918 — Bolshevik / 1948 — China etc.). This thinking teaches that destruction has the capacity to bring Utopia. Order out of Chaos reflects a dialectical thinking of one step back in order to gain two steps forward.
This is the "logical" pagan basis for gender-bending cults. Return to the original chaos.

bardamu

01-27-2018, 08:56 PM

NAPALT = not all pagans are like that.

How about NEMPWLT = not even most pagans were like that

But all religions that do not have proper Creator God must believe, inevitably, that the world came out of chaos, Ordo ab Chao. And that chaos includes sexual roles as well:

This is the "logical" pagan basis for gender-bending cults. Return to the original chaos.

Lol. Okay, that proves it! /s. First, Judaism is not the inventor of "proper Creator Gods", unless you wish to define "proper" as Judaism, which you probably do, but I surely don't. And second, the idea that gender bending cults are necessarily connected logically to the chaos of pre-creation is autistic as can be. This is poetry you are coming up with here, Petr, similar to the fantasies of the very paganisms you are attacking. Poetry, not being rational, is not something rational argument can put to bed. So we are talking past each other here.

Petr

01-27-2018, 09:02 PM

First, Judaism is not the inventor of "proper Creator Gods", unless you wish to define "proper" as Judaism, which you probably do, but I surely don't.
I do not believe that Creator God is the "invention" of any body, but that we are His inventions. I do not accept the secularist premise that men just invented religion.

bardamu

01-27-2018, 11:53 PM

I do not believe that Creator God is the "invention" of any body, but that we are His inventions. I do not accept the secularist premise that men just invented religion.

And that is your prerogative. For my part I don't believe in either a creation event or pre creation chaos, per se. I believe force and matter have been here forever. To my way of thinking the types of concepts you are invoking can be poetically or religiously true. Religious narratives are necessary. We will have them one way or the other.

Avvakum

01-28-2018, 11:32 PM

And that is your prerogative. For my part I don't believe in either a creation event or pre creation chaos, per se. I believe force and matter have been here forever. To my way of thinking the types of concepts you are invoking can be poetically or religiously true. Religious narratives are necessary. We will have them one way or the other.

Well Bard, that's where you and I have to agree to disagree as well, not just Petr. I will at least say that there's nothing inconsistent internally with what is a Pagan worldview. But you'll have to excuse me if I fail to make common cause with one sort of ''Pagan'' to oust another sort of ''Pagan''. You see, I too have to be internally consistent.

Petr

02-01-2018, 03:07 PM

Part of the reason why I made this thread was to show that as repulsive as homosexuality and genderbending can feel to us, we should not underestimate it, so to speak, and think it is just silly modern decadence and nothing more. It would be easy to think that tranny faggots today, in their screaming outfits, are nothing but totally unnatural aberrations, that were unknown in the past times of stern conservative purity.

This thread shows that opposition of rigidly hetero sex roles has much deeper roots than that. Romans 1 makes it clear that homosexuality is one major calling card, or emblem, of fallen human nature, and thus to many fallen humans, it can indeed feel "natural" in a certain twisted sense. The queers can claim quite a "respectable" pedigree in pagan mysticism, and even in heretical Christian-Gnostic ideology, in their quest to oppose heteronormativity. Many, many heathen have believed that surpassing the limitations of sex is a holy experience.

Knowing your enemy properly is the first step to defeating him. Christians especially should be aware that maintaining proper heterosexual ethics is not so easy - you cannot just passively rely on cozy old customs (that are now crumbling), you must actively strive for sexual purity and order to be able to survive. In this day and age, you cannot take old sexual certainties for granted; in that sense fag activists are correct. True Christian view of sexuality in now a non-mainstream, radical position, and must necessarily be contra mundum:

Or like this guy put it:

Princeton’s Robert George: Are you ready to pay the price? The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over (https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/princetons-robert-george-are-you-ready-to-pay-the-price-the-days-of-sociall)

Petr

05-24-2018, 12:58 PM

A Christian article on the subject of "The Fleshpots of Egypt" observes:

https://rcg.org/pillar/1202pp-tdoyfe.html

The book Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt explains: “From the archeological and iconographic date it appeared that…‘sexuality’ pervaded so many aspects of Egyptian social and ritual life that it was a truly embedded concept, free of…moralistic connotations…”

Sex in any form in ancient Egypt was considered acceptable and was woven into almost all religious rituals. Statues and wall carvings of women’s bodies—and sometimes men’s—showed that they were scantily dressed, often wearing tight-fighting or see-through material, and wore heavy makeup on their faces. Prostitutes tattooed themselves on their breasts and thighs, and were even said to have walked through the city naked.

Many believed the gods themselves had sex with mortals and that intercourse could occur in the afterlife. Practices such as committing adultery, incest, homosexuality, masturbation, bestiality and necrophilia were both common and accepted. These practices formed part of the hedonistic mindset that existed before Israel left Egypt.

Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian-era explorer who certainly was not a Christian moralist, largely confirmed such accusations in his infamous essay, added to his translation of The Arabian Nights, on the prevalence of pederasty around the world:

https://archive.org/stream/plainliteraltran10burtuoft#page/224/mode/2up

Proceeding East-ward we reach Egypt, that classical region of all abominations which, marvellous to relate, flourished in closest contact with men leading the purest of lives, models of moderation and morality, of religion and virtue.
https://archive.org/stream/arabiantranslat04burtuoft#page/298/mode/2up

* Bestiality, very rare in Arabia is fatally common amongst those most debauched of debauched races, the Egyptian proper and the Sindis. Hence the Pentateuch, whose object was to breed a larger population of fighting men, made death the penalty for lying with a beast (Deut. xxvii. 21).

Aleister Crowley was also interested in Egyptian religious rituals; he liked to offend Christian sensibilities. The Satanist symbol known as "The Goat of Mendes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baphomet#Goat_of_Mendes)," connected to Baphomet, originates from an ancient Egyptian cult where women copulated with sacred goats in the city of Mendes.

Petr

12-17-2018, 12:51 AM

The connection between Gnosticism and abnormal sexuality:

https://www.counter-currents.com/2018/12/eraserhead-a-gnostic-anti-sex-film/

David Lynch’s first movie Eraserhead (1977) combines surrealism, low-budget horror, and black comedy. It rapidly became a staple of the midnight movie circuit and provided endless fodder for coffee-house intellectuals and academic film theorists.

Eraserhead is quite simply a gnostic anti-sex film. The film is premised on a gnostic dualism, which holds that the material world—including sex and childbearing—is fundamentally evil, a prison in which the spirit suffers. The solution to suffering is to free ourselves from the trammels of matter, including sexual desire.

Nyx

12-17-2018, 04:54 AM

You are muddling the distinction between two opposing "ideals", one devilish and the other divine:

(1) the "Divine Androgene", in which the two sexes are perfectly harmonised (in Biblical terms: the original "Adam" before the split into "Adam and Eve" that lead to the Fall of Man; it was the original man, before the bifurcation of Adam into "Adam and Eve", that was "made in the image of god"; Christ is of this same androgenous nature--and instructs his disciples to be "as childen", that is to say, be androgenous, as Adam was before the Fall).

(2) the "Hermaphrodite": a satanic counterfeit of the Androgene. Effeminate men, homosexuals, lesbians and transsexuals are all the devil-spawn of the Hermaphdrodite. This is the opposite of the Divine Androgene. It includes any disorderly or unnatural intermixing of male and female elements in the same being. Wherever femaleness presents itself as a negation of the manliness of the male, that is Hermaphroditism and not Androgeneity.

Put simply: Androgeneity is the harmonisation of the sexes in the same being, while Hermphrodatism is the disharmony of male and female. Anything that negates what ought by nature to be dominant in the person, or is destructive to the maleness of a man or femaleness of a woman, and anything that produces internal disharmony - this is Hermpharoditism, not Androgenism.

So Androgeneity, as the ancients rightly understood it, is the opposite of what we is nowadays called "androgeneity", i.e. effeminacy, unmanliness, homosexualism, etc. The Androgene is the original state of Man--the true man. As recounted in Genesis: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God crteated he him; male and female created he them." Later, Eve was divided from Adam - and this division was the cause of the Fall of Man.

In the Androgene, the masculine element dominates the feminine, making the female element fully subservient to the male will; for the reverse of this would be disharmonious and unnatural. Both the male and female are contained in the Androgene, but the male element is always the ruler. And this was the original state of man; man as made in the "image of God". And we ought to become like that again. The Hebrews, Christians and Pagans are all in agreement on this.

Christ has rightly been called the "Divine Androgene". Angels have also been recognised as essentially androgenous beings.

Petr

12-31-2018, 09:47 AM

https://twitter.com/PaglianAroma/status/1079476345493696512
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DvsSAsuV4AAxxen.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DvtYrseVYAEhF-S.jpg

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