They once were rebels

Ranters, Diggers & mystics who challenged church authority

by Bill Weinberg

Fifth Estate # 415, Summer 2024

a review of
Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century by Raoul Vaneigem, translation by Bill Brown. ERIS, 2023

While evangelical Protestantism has for generations overwhelmingly been a force of deep reaction in this country and is poised, if Donald Trump regains the White House this November, to instate a situation such as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (and its screen and TV adaptations).

This potential recently made a media splash when Trump posted to his Truth Social platform an ultra-creepy video entitled “God Made Trump,” portraying a personification of him as Redeemer and Avenger sent by the Almighty. Ralph Reed, founder of the Christian Coalition, is hawking his new book, For God and Country:: The Christian Case For Trump.

Under a restored Trump regime, evangelical Protestantism could play the same role that reactionary Catholicism did in the clerical-fascist regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain, Ante Pavelic in Croatia and, to an extent, Benito Mussolini in Italy, in which the state and the ultimate leader are sanctified, labor suppressed, harsh and repressive interpretation of Christian morality made law, and enemies of the state eliminated.

A contemporary example of such a clerical-fascist regime is Putin’s Russia, in which rights for women and sexual non-conformists are being rapidly repealed, even very indirect expressions of disagreement with the regime are severely punished, with the Russian Orthodox Church of Patriarch Kirill, a key propaganda pillar of the aggressive war in Ukraine. The church promotes a narrative of protecting Russian traditional values against Western liberal assault, and is in explicit alliance with the evangelical right in the U.S., despite the denominational gulf.

However, beside the usual role of Christianity functioning as a handmaiden of repressive state authority, heresies have emerged under its rule that have a long history of birthing rebellious groups. They are chronicled by Situationist Raoul Vaneigem in this comprehensive account of rebels, ranters, and millenarians.

In Resistance to Christianity, he traces a chronology from the heresies of the ancient and medieval periods, especially those in the Gnostic tradition that rejected the Church and worldly authority as inherently corrupt, through the millenarian movements that ultimately prefigured the Protestant Reformation, a heresy that succeeded.

A key episode was the German Peasants’ War of 1524, which had a spiritual and millennial aspect in the person of the revolutionary priest Thomas Müntzer. He was a contemporary of Martin Luther, who disavowed Müntzer as being far too radical with his call for expropriation of the aristocracy by the commoners. The peasant army flew a rainbow flag as a symbol of solidarity and hope, but were ultimately defeated by armed forces of the lords.

This spirit was also present in the revolutionary movements of the English Civil War of the 1640s. This period famously saw the Diggers, who in 1649 at St George’s Hill pulled off what the historian George Woodcock called the world’s first anarchist direct action, reclaiming land from the aristocracy for their collective farms, with a vision of the earth as a “common treasury for all.” The Ranters of the same period were fiery mystical anarchists who rejected all worldly authority and Christian morality.

Both the Puritans and the Quakers also came out of this ferment, and have had a significant influence on our side of the Atlantic. The Quakers were deeply involved in slavery abolitionism, aiding escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad, and in later struggles for social justice, especially war resistance based on their pacifism.

The more militant abolitionism of the armed insurrectionist John Brown in the 1850s, of Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas fame, was steeped in Puritan millenarianism. And, there is a stamp of this a century later in the Baptist and pacifist Martin Luther King, Jr., seen in his famous invocation of the Old Testament: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

So, how did this trajectory warp into its opposite?

A turning point can be seen in the late 19th century with the rise of Biblical literalism in reaction to the rise of science, characterized by the application of a strict literal interpretation to scripture.

In the 1890s, the fundamentalist and populist politician William Jennings Bryan was a fighter for small farmers and laborers who sought to abolish the gold standard in the interest of working people. But he was on the wrong side in the 1925 Scopes trial, opposing the teaching of evolution in the schools. Battles still going on today a century later strongly echo such religiously-inspired themes.

The 1920s saw the formal, doctrinal establishment of fundamentalism. But the critical turning point was the weaponizing of the abortion issue by the Republican Party after the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. This culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, concomitant with the founding of the Moral Majority, comprised of conservative Christian political action committees.

This sealed the pact between the GOP and Protestant fundamentalism, with the fundis abandoning any remnant of economic populism to close ranks with neoliberalism and Reaganomics as the price for mainstreaming of their cultural-conservative agenda.

The surviving millenarian stamp in this new ultra-reactionary and Biblical-literalist form is particularly ominous. In the Book of Revelations, with which evangelicals are so obsessed, the foretold Apocalypse for John the Revelator, writing in the first century CE, was the fall of Rome. Jumping forward a millennium and a half to the English Civil War era, the prophecy was reconceived as overthrow of the aristocracy and lords of property, exemplified by the execution of the king.

For contemporary evangelicals and fundamentalists, the Apocalypse can be seen as a literal rain of fire and brimstone which state rulers now have the power to bring about through modern military weapons technology. The notion of believers in an imminent and literal Apocalypse getting anywhere near the U.S. nuclear arsenal is terrifying.

Despite his supposed love affair with Putin, the blustering, erratic Trump taking power in what is, after Ukraine and Gaza, a world at war, holds unprecedented risk of escalation to the unthinkable despite those sectors of the left who view Trump as the less dangerous candidate because he would be less likely to get into a war with Russia.

Vaneigem’s title, Resistance to Christianity, is in some ways more relevant and in other ways less than the author himself anticipated when he first wrote the book in 1994. Vaneigem ends his story with the 1789 French Revolution, saying that it brought about the “fall of god”—after which liberatory movements no longer had to resort to the vocabulary and iconography of religion. In an afterword for the new English edition, Vaneigem doesn’t really rethink that, seeing the world as moving “beyond religion.” This is, especially at this moment, entirely too optimistic.

On the other hand, secularism isn’t sufficient to resist the MAGA variant of clerical fascism on its own. Resistance is going to have to come, in part at least, from within elements of Christianity, and others who view the struggle in spiritual rather than rationalist terms.

Hopefully, the contradiction will be too blatant for some of those rallying around the obviously irreligious Trump in the name of religion. Some lonely figures have indeed broken ranks, such as Russell Moore, once a top official in the Southern Baptist Convention and now author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call For Evangelical America, warning that evangelism is becoming the antithesis of everything it supposedly stands for by embracing MAGA.

There are also pastors in the Black church who are keeping the MLK tradition alive, such as Rev. William Barber in North Carolina, who led the Moral Mondays campaign in that state against the overturn of civil rights protections and imposition of restrictions on abortion rights. And, there are Christians who are risking their freedom to assist desperate migrants in the southern borderlands. These are a reminder that there are other currents in the Christian tradition, broadly defined, than its most reactionary exponents now preparing a bid for total power.

The history chronicled in Vaneigem’s book, as obscure as much of it may seem for contemporary readers, is well worth grappling with at this moment.

Bill Weinberg rants weekly on his podcast CounterVortex.

1,600-year-old fragment identified as oldest written account of Jesus Christ's childhood

NO MENTION OF TRUMP

Sheri Walsh

UPI
Wed, June 12, 2024 

A papyrus fragment, dating from the 4th to 5th century, was recently deciphered after being stored for decades in a university library in Hamburg, Germany. It has been identified by researchers as the earliest surviving writings about Jesus Christ's childhood. Photo courtesy of Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg/Public Domain Mark 1.0


June 12 (UPI) -- A recently deciphered manuscript, dating back to the 4th or 5th century and stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, has been identified by researchers as the earliest surviving account of Jesus Christ's childhood.

"Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the 'Infancy Gospel of Thomas' was originally written in Greek," said papyrologist Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from the University of Liège in Belgium.

The papyrus fragment, dating back more than 1,600 years, had gone unnoticed for decades at the Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library, until Macedo and Dr. Lajos Berkes from the Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin identified its true origin.

The small fragment, which measures just over 4 inches by 2 inches, contains thirteen lines of Greek letters from late antique Egypt. The content was originally thought to be part of "an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting is so clumsy," said Berkes. "Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized it could not be an everyday document."

The researchers believe the copy of the Gospel was created as a writing exercise -- given the clumsy handwriting and irregular lines -- in a school or monastery, which would make it a much earlier surviving copy of the gospel than the 'Infancy Gospel of Thomas' manuscript from the 11th century.

"The fragment is of extraordinary interest for research," said Berkes. "On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the 4th to 5th century, making it the earliest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text."

While the words in the document are not from the Bible, they describe a "miracle," according to the Gospel of Thomas, that Jesus performed as a 5-year-old child as he moulded soft clay from a river into sparrows and then brought them to life.

Newly deciphered manuscript is oldest written record of Jesus’ childhood: ‘Extraordinary’

Andrew Court

NY POST
Tue, June 11, 2024 




A newly deciphered manuscript dating back more than 1,600 years has been identified as the earliest known account of Jesus Christ’s childhood.

The manuscript, written on papyrus in either the 4th or 5th century, had been stored at a library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades and was long believed to be an insignificant document.

However, two experts have now decoded the text and say it is the earliest surviving copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

“The papyrus fragment is of extraordinary interest for research,” Lajos Berkes, a theology lecturer and one of the two men who deciphered the document, declared in a press release.

“It was thought to be part of an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting seems so clumsy,” the expert explained. “We first noticed the word Jesus in the text. Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document.”

The papyrus manuscript had been stored at a library in Hamburg, Germany. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg / PD

The piece of papyrus contains a total of 13 lines in Greek letters and originates from late antique Egypt, which was a Christian society at that time.

The manuscript describes the beginning of the “vivification of the sparrows” — a story from Jesus’ childhood in which he turns 12 clay sparrows into live birds.

According to the text, Jesus was playing beside a rushing stream where he molded the sparrows from soft clay. When rebuked by his father, Joseph, the 5-year-old Jesus clapped his hands and brought the clay figures to life.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas describes Jesus’ childhood, but it is not included in the Bible. 

That story, described as Jesus’ second miracle, is a well-known part of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT).

The IGT describes Christ’s childhood, and its stories were both popular and widespread in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

However, the apocryphal text was not officially included in the Bible as some early Christian writers were doubtful of its accuracy.

The IGT is believed to have been first written down during the 2nd century; however, until now, a codex from the 11th century was the oldest known Greek version of the text.

“Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the Infancy Gospel according to Thomas was originally written in Greek,” Gabriel Nocchi Macedo, the other expert who helped decode the papyrus fragment, said. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg / PD

The newly deciphered papyrus fragment predates that document by an astonishing 600 years.

“Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the Infancy Gospel according to Thomas was originally written in Greek,” Gabriel Nocchi Macedo, the other expert who helped decode the papyrus fragment, declared.

Both Macedo and Berkes believe the manuscript was written onto the papyrus fragment as a writing exercise at either a school or a monastery.

“From the comparison with already known manuscripts of this Gospel, we know that our text is the earliest,” Berkes stated.

German researchers decode earliest known written record of Jesus' childhood

Anders Hagstrom

FOX  NEWS

Wed, June 12, 2024 

German researchers decode earliest known written record of Jesus' childhood


Researchers in Germany have decoded what they say is the oldest-ever manuscript detailing Jesus Christ's life as a child.

The papyrus manuscript dates back more than 1,600 years old to the 4th or 5th century. The document had been stored at a library in Hamburg, Germany, as no one believed the document was of any significance.

"The fragment is of extraordinary interest for research," Lajos Berkes, a professor and one of the researchers who decoded the document said in a press release. "On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the 4th to 5th century, making it the earliest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text."

"It was thought to be part of an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting seems so clumsy," he continued. "We first noticed the word Jesus in the text. Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document."


Researchers in Germany have decoded what they say is the oldest-ever manuscript detailing Jesus Christ's life as a child.

Berkes said the document is a fragment of the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal book that was not included in the Bible. The gospel offers details about Jesus' life as a child before his ministry.

The poor handwriting in the document led Berkes to believe the manuscript was made as part of a writing exercise in a monastery or a school.

While there are only a handful of words in the manuscript, the researchers were able to determine that it is retelling the apocryphal story of the "vivication of the sparrows."

"Jesus plays at the ford of a rushing stream and molds twelve sparrows from the soft clay he finds in the mud. When his father Joseph rebukes him and asks why he is doing such things on the holy Sabbath, the five-year-old Jesus claps his hands and brings the clay figures to life," the press release stated.

While there are only a handful of words in the manuscript, the researchers were able to determine that it is retelling the apocryphal story of the "vivication of the sparrows."

Original article source: German researchers decode earliest known written record of Jesus' childhood


SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for JUDAS 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for GNOSTIC JESUS 

GNOSTIC    ANTINOMIANISM 

‘Bad Faith’ sounds the alarm on the past and future of Christian nationalism

Filmmakers Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones trace the origins of Christian nationalism from the Ku Klux Klan to the election of Donald Trump.

In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo, a man holds a Bible as supporters of Donald Trump gather outside the Capitol in Washington. The Christian imagery and rhetoric on view during the Capitol insurrection sparked renewed debate about the societal effects of melding Christian faith with an exclusionary breed of nationalism. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

May 30, 2024

By Jim McDermott

(RNS) — In 1980, conservative political operative Paul Weyrich approached evangelical Christian leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson with a proposal: If they would mobilize their believers to begin voting Republican, he would help them in their quest to roll back many of the civil rights protections they chafed against. Over the next 40 years, Weyrich and his Council for National Policy would guide these groups to greater and greater political success while slowly radicalizing them into a potent force — the Moral Majority — whose particular ideas of Christianity and Christian values drove nearly all their voting decisions.

Weyrich was not subtle in his motivations for a reigning political class, telling a group of evangelical leaders in 1980 that “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

In “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” filmmakers Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones trace the origins of Christian nationalism from the Ku Klux Klan in the 19th century through the creation of the Moral Majority, the sudden rise of the tea party and the election of Donald Trump. What they uncover is an essential aspect of our current political situation, one that puts evangelical Christianity in new light.

Where many liberals have long dismissed evangelical Christians and their fundamentalist beliefs as ridiculous and absurd, Ujlaki and Brown work to understand them on their own terms — and discover not hypocrisy but a deeply consistent, radically dualistic theology that, for many, is worth defending, even to the point of violence.

Religion News Service spoke with Ujlaki by phone in Los Angeles about the making of “Bad Faith” and the story it tells of how a large swath of religious voters came to believe that President Joe Biden is in league with the devil while Trump is essential to the spiritual salvation of America. The film is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Tubi and other platforms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What initially made you want to tell this story?

When Trump got elected, I was shocked. Nobody thought he had a chance. He was obviously a joke. It was never going to happen. When he got elected, I realized I didn’t really know anything about what was going on. I was in a bubble.

Stephen Ujlaki. (Photo by Jon Rou/courtesy of Loyola Marymount University)

More than anything, my wanting to make the film was just to find out: How did he do it, how did he win, and who were the Christian evangelicals (who supported him)? But then I discovered all of this plotting, all of these deals, and the fact that those behind them were anti-democratic from the beginning.

The heart of the film is the story of Paul Weyrich and the deal he made with evangelical Christian leaders to use abortion to motivate their people to begin to vote for Republicans. How did that all work?

There were a couple of congressional elections in which the people who were running for office were very anti-abortion. And Weyrich, who had been a Catholic, found that they were successful campaigns, more so than they should have been. Abortion was very successful in ringing people’s bell.

Evangelicals had nothing against abortion. Frankly, they thought it was a good way to keep the Black population down. The Southern Baptist Convention applauded Roe v. Wade in 1973. But Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson agreed to start telling people this is bad, in return for which they were going to get help turning back all the progressive things they hated that the Supreme Court had done and that Lyndon Johnson had done. The Great Society, all of those progressive things that gave a lot of us hope in the 1960s and ’70s were anathema to them, and they were determined to turn that back. So they would faithfully help elect Republicans, and they would get rewarded.

It (abortion) was a great way to cover the fact that they were really trying to stop integration. It’s much better to say that we’re trying to defend the rights of the unborn.
I was surprised to learn that Christian evangelicals were not always so politically engaged.

For many, many years they were completely opposed to political involvement. The public square was the devil’s playground. To convince them to get involved and to vote Republican, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson applied the Manichaeanism of their theology. There’s a good and bad; there’s evil, and there’s God. The Republican Party is the party of God, and the Democratic Party is the party of the devil. They got that.

But this has nothing to do with theology, nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with God or with Jesus. I don’t even consider Christian nationalism as a religion. What is its ethos? What is its morality? It’s actually amoral, which is why it uses the church. The church lends it that moral, ethical authority that it doesn’t have otherwise.

Jesus is anti-democratic and God likes authoritarian governments? It’s the antithesis of anything Christian.

Would it be fair to say Christian nationalism’s goal is fascism?

“Bad Faith” poster. (Courtesy image)

Yes. It’s pure fascism. It’s pure power. They have been wanting and plotting the same thing for 40-plus years. They were incredibly adept at concealing what their motives were. You had to decode what they were saying. When they were talking about re-creating the kingdom of God on Earth, if you thought they were talking about something theological and spiritual, you would be mistaken. They were talking about replacing democracy with theocracy.

The one exception, and this to me is like the smoking gun in the film, was the Weyrich Manifesto (“The Integration of Theory and Practice,” 2001). Born of his complete frustration with the knowledge that his followers were never going to be the majority, Weyrich argued the only way they were going to create a Christian nation was to bypass democracy. They had to weaken and destroy it, creating a vacuum, which leaves room for the strongman to appear.

If you look around you at the divisiveness and the distrust of institutions that exist today in this country, you will realize how incredibly successful they have been in executing their plan. It’s been like a slow-motion revolution in a way, happening bit by bit all over the place.

And yet even so, Donald Trump seemed like such a reach for people concerned about goodness and morality.

Everything he stood for was against what they believed in. A number of people were saying they would do it but they would be holding their noses, because they didn’t really believe in it.

Then you had his spiritual adviser, a charismatic, Paula White, who had befriended Trump a year or so earlier and was his sort of secret adviser. She started the ball rolling by telling her group that Trump had become a Christian. That was one attempt to deal with the thing. But more was needed.

Then, looking in the Bible, another charismatic Christian came up with the idea that God sometimes uses pagans to accomplish good works on behalf of the Jews. King Cyrus was this horrible pagan who did all kinds of bad things, but he was very good for the Jews.
And so Trump becomes reinterpreted as, in a sense, part of salvation history?

The notion was that looking at the Bible, we see that what was really happening was God using Trump in order to redeem America and bring it back to God. And as (evangelical Christian and former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security) Elizabeth Neumann says in the film, the notion that they could be living out the prophesies got evangelical Christians so excited they all got behind this notion of Trump as King Cyrus. That’s what God was doing. That was the answer. They figured it out.

There comes a point in the film where you interview a man who seems very thoughtful about Biden’s desire to unify the country. But then his conclusion is that it’s impossible because good and evil cannot work together.

That’s one of the scarier parts of the film. Because he seems like a reasonable, intelligent person, and yet he’s deeply convinced of this, even sad about it, not triumphant. It’s simply a fact, good cannot unify with evil.

The notion that over half the country is in fact demonic and evil, and evangelical Christians are the holy ones and should be allowed to do whatever they need to do in order to take control from the devil, it’s incredible when you think about it.

Watching the film, it certainly sounds like the leaders of the Christian nationalist movement see civil war, or something like it, as the path to power.

That’s right. That’s the only way they’re going to get it. They’re not going to get it through democracy, they’re never going to be the majority. They are going to weaken and destroy and then conquer. That’s the game plan.

It’s so hard, people aren’t willing to accept the fact there are sizable numbers of people in this country who don’t believe in democracy. And the national media doesn’t know how to deal with it. They’re constantly accommodating, normalizing, and not fulfilling what I would take to be the mandate of proper newsgathering. They call them “conservative” in The New York Times. They’re not conservative. These are seditionists, treasonous, anti-democratic.

People with this kind of liberal notion of fair and balanced think we’re not going to be over the top like them. But the thing is, one is following the rules and the other isn’t.

It’s so difficult, because you don’t want people to be so terrified that they think it’s hopeless. You don’t want to have to think “I better stay out of this.”

On the contrary, what it should show you is that you need to fight for your democracy if you want to keep it.

RNS is the recipient of an ongoing grant from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, founded and led by Todd Stiefel, who is an executive producer of “Bad Faith.”

Come For the Satanic Eclipse, Stay For the Commie Earthquake, Illegal Invaders and Bootlegged Baby Parts


A Swiss student in faux spacesuit flies a paper rocket during a Mission to Mars project
(Photo by STEFAN WERMUTH/AFP via Getty Images)

ABBY ZIMET
Apr 09, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

Lordy. Our apocalyptic circus of bigots, morons, loudmouths and clowns has stayed in town too long. To wit: a ceaseless GOP House "shit show," racists freaking out at too-tanned NCAA players "invading," pastors cancelling autism awareness as "demonic," Klan Mom decrying black market harvesting of baby organs - thanks Dr. Fauci! - and now, from God or the Gazpacho police, an earthquake and end-of-the-world eclipse telling us to "repent." First, maybe repent for an electoral college that gave us this lunacy.

The seedy grandstand for the mayhem is the (barely) GOP-controlled House, which for a while has been "imploding in plain sight." After skipping town for Easter, they left behind yet more flops earning yet more declarations of "Republicans in disarray." Amidst a "Great Resignation" that's seen the highest number of lawmakers quitting in 40 years, two more Reps - Gallagher and Buck - are bowing out, leaving the GOP a paltry one-seat majority. The showboats of what Raskin calls the "chaos-and- cannibalism caucus" still don't like their Speaker for (five months late) keeping the government open with a $1.2 trillion spending bill, Comer's Biden impeachment effort has crashed and burned like his other "investigations," the sole accomplishments of the shortest and least productive House session since the Great Depression are re-naming some Veterans Affairs clinics and authorizing a coin to mark the Marine Corps' 250th anniversary, and even George Santos says he's (inexplicably) running again as an Independent 'cause the GOP is too "embarrassing."

For once, he has a point. Self-righteous blowhards venting ignorance and hate, they seem to do nothing but voice imaginary grievances when grownups do things they don't like. When the effort to remove Fani Willis from Trump's election interference case failed, they shrieked, "It's all rigged!" and "There is no justice in America today." When Kamala Harris touted an effort to keep guns away from dangerous people, yahoos who send out Christmas cards of their kids cradling AR-15's bayed, "What the hell is this evil?" When a Transgender Day of Visibility coincidentally fell on Easter, they ranted it was part of a "years-long assault on the Christian faith" and the Catholic Biden - to Trump, one of "MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA," would now "commandeer" Christmas with a Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing and say what? When a Florida school planned Autism Awareness Week, the pastor cancelled it as "demonic" (like "Santa Clause") because "anything that exalts itself above the name of Christ should be brought down."

And when racist moron and Michigan state rep Matt Maddock - who boasts he's America's "Most Conservative" pol, tried to imprison "war criminal" Gretchen Whitmer for requiring masks during COVID, got kicked out of the House GOP Caucus as too conspiracy-y even for them, posts things like "the left hates farmers," "government controls your air conditioning," "bail reform kills people," "communists are lonely, bitter, angry cowards with sad kids," and whose wife is under indictment as one of Michigan's fake electors - saw three buses at Detroit Airport and some scary dark guys alight, squawked they were "illegal invaders" and "everyone knows" Whitmer is "bussing in illegals and asking (us) to shack them up in their homes for $6,000 a year." Except they were the Gonzaga Bulldogs basketball team there to play in the NCAA Mens Sweet 16 March Madness against Purdue. Confronted with his "spectacular stupidity" and the facts, even by supporters, he snarled back - “Sure kommie. Good talking point" - and doubled down with replacement theory: "How long till the #HostileMedia calls the invaders homesteaders?" He seems nice.

The implausible queen of this GOP rabble is grandstanding, hate-mongering, self-promoting "purveyor of political pageantry" Marjorie Taylor Greene, a useless, performative troll most recently appointed to chair the "useless, performative impeachment" of Homeland Security's Alejandro Mayorkas by Mike Johnson in hopes of shutting her up as she tries to oust him for keeping the government running, or something. Among other memorable ventures since her Jewish Space Laser and school-shooting-survivor-harassing days: Inventing an Antifa plan for a "Trans Day of Vengeance," arguing 8-to-10-year-old Uvalde victims should've been armed with JR-15 rifles, spreading a replacement theory video about "the Democrat (sic) open border plan to entrench single party rule," and after Mexico's president proposed several U.S. actions to ease border crossings, refuting them with a "Declaration of War" against Mexican cartels for fentanyl trafficking, even though it's mostly produced in China and smuggled into this country not by migrants but U.S. citizens or other legal visitors.

Last month she also hosted, with live stream, a "Hearing Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting" to explore "the "aborrent (sic) truth of the industrial abortion complex (to) profit off the murder of unborn babies." She'd announced the event, based on repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit - including grafting "the scalps of unborn babies onto the backs of rodents in a study funded by Anthony Fauci under the NIH" - with a beaming photo of herself that, noted one observer, "looked oddly bubbly for a hearing on dead babies." Her two speakers were David Daleiden, who in 2015 released heavily edited videos of himself as a fake biomedical researcher trying to buy fetal tissue, after which Planned Parenthood successfully sued him for $2 million; and Terrisa Bukovinac, who in 2022 was convicted with another anti-abortion activist of blocking access to a health clinic, stealing 115 aborted fetuses from a medical waste truck, burying most of them, and keeping five they claimed without evidence were "born alive and then murdered."

Greene said she wanted the hearing, attended by five people though she invited every member of Congress, to be a graphic, gory, in-your-face rebuttal to genteel talk of "women's health care." And so it was, with her use of pointedly incendiary language and images: "abortionists," not doctors, "babies sucked out while still alive" by an instrument "more powerful than a household vacuum," "tiny brains and hearts," "over 63 million people murdered in the womb" - misinformation so prevalent House Dems created a website to refute it - and no mention of vital medical advances facilitated by fetal tissue research. Still, wise-acres weren't buying it: "Baby Organ Harvesting is my Norwegian Death Metal cover band," "Marge hungry," "Do you know how many fetus livers it would take to make a single kabob?", "Curious how she'll tie it into Hunter's dick pics," "She should do her genealogy - she would have led lots of witch trials if she was alive back then," and, "This is absolutely ridiculous. No one harvests baby organs. Infants are only run through hydraulic presses to make baby oil, and THAT'S IT!"

But not even abortion, or terrorists collapsing Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, or earthquakes in what Rudy Giuliani called "the communist states" of New York and New Jersey - with its epicenter at Trump's Bedminster golf course deemed "Ivana's revenge" -come close to the "Super Bowl for Conspiracists" that is an eclipse. Marge was on it: "God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent." So was her squinty-eyed, right-wing boyfriend Brian Glenn - Wonkette calls him "the dude she has been having what we assume is very sweaty, pale, Godly white-person sex with" - who very scientifically "explains astronomy" and eclipses with, “I think we're going to see where the largest kind of a spiritual awakening in this country that people are realizing how much evil has creeped (sic) into (our) lives." He also warned of its fallout, "combined with earthquakes, and this infestation of locusts that have been dormant for years that all of a sudden will attack mankind, and oh then throw in Joe Biden trying to get into a war with eye-ran." He seems nice too, also smart.

There are about three, mathematically predictable solar eclipses a year, and many unpredictable earthquakes caused by shifting tectonic plates, not God being mad about gay marriage; both have occurred since creation, and you can read about them here and here. Regardless, news of these events made the right wing lose whatever's left of their minds. Alex Jones - not much left there - called the eclipse "a dress rehearsal" for declaring martial law if Trump wins the election. He cited “Major Events" like "Masonic rituals (to) usher in a New World Order," noting the eclipse trajectory in the U.S. forms an “Aleph” and “Tav,” the first and last Hebrew letters, signaling end times. Another genius saw a "perfect cover story if our terrorist government wanted to take down the power grid and cause mass chaos while blocking citizen communications (to) unleash a dictatorship" before Trump can win. And to ensure "no Satanic forces come through" during the eclipse, Steve Bannon hosted a live Mass with newly fired, financially sketchy, MAGA Bishop Joseph Strickland "in prayer and penance for our country."

It didn't help that a nerdy NASA project in Virginia measuring changes in electric and magnetic fields - Project APEP, short for Atmospheric Perturbations Around the Eclipse Path, referencing the snake god of darkness - planned to shoot rockets at the moon during the eclipse. To one wise wingnut, that meant there would be "rituals performed by Masonic, Satanic, Esoteric, Gnostic, Brotherhood of the Snake and other occult-like groups." And because if it's Monday, it must be the frog-raining end of days, several red states, Oklahoma and Texas among them, issued various disaster warnings and executive orders because when in doubt or fear just go totalitarian. In Arkansas, "out of an abundance of caution," lying Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency over a possible "backlog of deliveries by commercial vehicles transporting essential items of commerce" during maybe four minutes of darkness. In truth, noted one of her constituents, "The real emergency is that "the governor of an entire state is a fucking moron."

In honor of the fraught occasion, Fox News took its usual, balanced, erudite approach and went with racist paranoia on the subject of the dangers of an eclipse at the border even though it was so cloudy it wouldn't have much effect. Host Dana Perino: "A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground." Host Bill Hemmer: Officials bracing for higher traffic under cover of darkness "means a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in..." Vile correspondent Bill Melugin: "While everybody is gonna be looking up, if you're looking down here at the border, here's some of what you're gonna see." He offers video of "a surge of illegal alien evaders" (two poor guys scrambling through brush) with, "You'll see illegal immigrants dressed in dark clothing, sometimes camouflage...And you'll see outnumbered border agents trying to respond as these guys flood in" (one sad guy gets caught) "as they're trying to sneak into the United States." Cruelty, as usual, is the point here, and the eclipse gives us one more ugly, feckless chance to flaunt it.

Four years ago, amidst a pandemic needlessly killing hundreds of thousands, the "leader" of all these loathsome, inept people was showing them how it's done, sputtering nobody's thanking him for the great job he's doing, yet more tests bring more cases: "So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'" Somehow, now it's worse. For the eclipse, he released a deeply weird, insanely narcissistic ad declaring, to the soaring music of 2001, "The Most Important Moment In Human History." As awe-struck crowds watch, we see the sun slowly eclipsed by....his wattled, blubbery, grotesque silhouette. Comments: "The most accidentally honest ad Trump's team ever put out," "this fucking moron won't even let himself be upstaged by the solar system," "what a freak," "not a cult," "how can I make this about me?," "going all in with the anti-Christ thing," "Stephen Miller is no Leni Riefenstahl," "fat boy ate the sun," "total eclipse of the brain," "dark side of the buffoon," "totalitarian eclipse." For a laugh, someone added light passing ear to ear. Not a laugh: "So, Trump will bring darkness to us. Got it."


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ABBY ZIMET has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com
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Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

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Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Paschal Beverly Randolph (P.B. Randolph) was a 19th Century magickian, a spiritualist and founder of the Rosicrucian movement in the United Sates.

Like Paul Lafargue he was a mulatto but one who initially denied his Negro roots.

( 8 Oct. 1825 - 29 July 1875 ), physician, philosopher, and author, was born in New York City , the son of William Beverly Randolph, a plantation owner, and Flora Beverly, a barmaid. At the age of five or seven Randolph lost his mother to smallpox, and with her the only love he had known. Randolph later stated, "I was born in love, of a loving mother, and what she felt, that I lived." His father's devotion is questionable. In 1873 Randolph hinted at his own illegitimacy, stating that his parents "did not stop to pay fees to the justice or to the priest."

Randolph 's mother possessed a strong temperament, unusual physical beauty, and intense passions, characteristics that Randolph inherited. Later many, especially his enemies, perceived Randolph as being of "Negro descent," which he denied. Sent to live with his half-sister, Randolph was ignored, unloved, and abused and eventually turned to begging on the streets.

Being born in New York to a 'free black' woman, his reluctance to be considered a Negro at the time is understandable. And since his upbringing was in the time and area of the Gangs of New York, plagued by nativism as it was, it is also understandable.

But by the time of the Civil War he was an outspoken advocate of Negro Rights.

Born poor and of mixed race in 1825 and raised (more or less) by prostitutes in the Five Points slum of New York, Randolph was self-educated and prickly proud. Creating himself, he picked and chose just how "black " to be. He could de-emphasize his African heritage in the face of prejudice--after his suicide, a newspaper said he was "part Spaniard, and inherited all the suspicious distrusting qualities of the people of that nationality. " At other times, he emphasized it, as during his Civil War Black Nationalist phase, when he worked briefly as a teacher for the short-lived Freedman 's Bureau, an agency designed to educate freed slaves but only halfheartedly supported by the federal government.

Yet when some Northerners advocated a scheme to ship freed slaves to Africa, Randolph, speaking for the slaves, emphasized "American: " "We men of color were born here; so were our fathers and mothers down a long line of ancestry....Are all our sufferings to be rewarded by our removal to African deserts and barbaric climes and places?...No! Never! Here is our home, and here we mean to stay, and on this soil will die, and in it be buried. "

And like Lafargue he was an internationalist, traveling and training as well as lecturing in Europe. As with many in the occult movement of the 19th Century he was a social reformer. And like his contemporary Virginia Woodhull, Mrs. Satan, he was an advocate of womens rights and Free Love.

Randolph is to be remembered for his philosophical works on love, marriage, and womanhood. He provided new and unique insight into the then taboo world of sexual love. He aided the education, rights, and equality of both women and blacks. He foresaw the evils of tobacco and drug abuse. Finally, Randolph, through his position as the Americas' first Supreme Grand Master of the Fraternitas Rosæ Crucis, directly or indirectly touched the lives of more than 200,000 neophytes (students) comprising the Fraternitas and other Rosicrucian orders.

P.B. Randolph 's life story demonstrates also how reform-minded American Spiritualism turned into "occultism. " Spiritualism was well-intentioned, "scientific " but also passive, linked to social reform (early feminism, the abolition of slavery) but also to faddishness, most notably "free love, " which could, depending on who was talking, mean anything from a partnership of equals to mere spouse-swapping. ( "You and I were meant to be soul mates. ") Occultism, on the other hand, is individualistic, rooted in personal development and self-improvement, and generally not connected to any social or political philosophy.

With the democratic decline in Europe after the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune secret societies were formed for the purposes of pursuing democratic as well as socialist revolution. In England and the Commonwealth they were formed for the purposes of pursuing trade unionism which had been banned as an illegal combination.

That secret societies should form for finding and revealing secret knowledge, was thus a natural outgrowth of this period and was coincidental with the growth and popularity of fraternal orders after the Civil War in America and across Europe.

His patron both in Spiritualism as well as getting him work with Lincoln was Colonel Ethan A. Hitchcock, a noted military officer as well as practicing alchemist. Like other occultists, John Dee comes to mind, he too was also a spy. The secrecy of the occult overlaps with the secret society of intelligence gathering. They share a similar cosmological outlook that is the search for hidden or secret knowledge.

As happens in the Occult community, as in the political one, sectarian differences are frequent and lead to rivalries and mutual denunciations. Such was the case with P. B. Randolph, who is credited with founding the Rosicrucian movement in the United States.

He faced attack by rivals for hegemony over the occult movement in America denouncing him for his Luciferian ideas from the likes of Madam Blavatsky and her Theosophists and from the white supremacist founder of the American Scottish Right of Freemasonry; Albert Pike. Ironic because both of them are also accused of being Luciferians.

Such is the case of 19th Century occult wars not only in America but in Europe where again competing orders of Rosicrucian's charged and counter charged each other as being in league with Lucifer.

The Luciferian charge comes about from Randolph's advocacy of free love, which was also embraced by American Anarchists at the time. His theories were outlined in his book Eulis and in his other famous treatise; Magia Sexualis

Today we would call his practices sex therapy, where he discussed sexual dysfunction with his patients, and as a Doctor he practiced mesermism, the passing of hands over the body to affect the magnetic energies. He also advocated the tantra practice of heightened sensuality by controlling the male orgasm and ejaculation.

 In 1870 he founded the Order of Eulis, which kept its teachings
secret because of the sex and drugs.  Some people must've talked,
though: H. P. Blavatsky denounced Randolph as immoral, a charge also
leveled at the Luciferian Freemason Sir Albert Pike.  An occult war
followed.  In 1872 his "Rosicrucian Rooms" were raided by police and
he was jailed for distributing "Free Love" literature.  Fires,
robberies, and disease followed, and on July 29, 1975, he shot
himself.  His friends and followers claimed that Blavatsky's curses
had nailed him.  Blavatsky founded the philosophical society the same
year.

By the 1870s many of Randolph's writings dealt with 
occult aspects of  love and sexuality.

Randolph, as a physician, also counseled many of his patients on matters of
family relations, marital bliss and the art of love. These acts of kindness and
concern were sometimes taken as conduct condoning "free love."

In February 1872, he was arrested and imprisoned for promoting
"free love" or immorality. Although acquitted of all charges, as it was discovered in
court that the indictment was merely a clever attempt by former
business partners (now enemies) to obtain his book copyrights, Randolph
never recovered from the humiliation of the proceeding.

Although dying at age 49, Randolph was a prolific writer, producing many books
and pamphlets on love, health, mysticism and the occult.

And further confusion was sown with his initiation into a mystical Gnostic cult from Syria/Iraq which mistakenly has been associated with the Yezedi.

The Yezedi created a sensation amongst some 19th Century scholars who had finally discovered a genuine devil worshiping cult. And the devil they worshiped was Lucifer.

Despite my best googling efforts the only references I could find to Ansaireh is that referred back to the region in Syria/Iraq which is named after a Mountain.

Gertrude Bell in her diary refers to visiting the region and the Yezedi who dwelled there. Which may have been the reason the author of the introduction to Magica Sexualis thought Randolph had been initiated into their religious teachings.

During his journeys to Paris, Pascal became aware of several works which were being published in France and Germany dealing with the Ansaireth or Nusairis of Syria. 25 There was much discussion, in the Rosicrucian circles that Randolph traveled in, of the purity and sublimity of the teachings of the Ansaireh. Books by Niebuhr, M. Catafago, Victor Langlois and others told of these mysterious hill dwellers in Northern Syria who were neither Jews, Christians or Muslims. They may well have been the people that modern anthropology has identified as the Yezidi, the devotees of the Peucock god, Melek Ta'aus.

PBR tells how the chief of the Ansaireth, Narek El Gebel, arrived at the Rosicrucian Third Dome in Paris with letters of introduction and then, recognizing Randolph's abilities and character, invited him to come to Syria and to study with the Ansaireth. Randolph went to Syria and was initiated into the Ansairetic Brotherhood. Upon his return to America, he established the Priesthood of Aeth based on the Ansairetic Mysteries

There were a variety of Christian and Islamic sects in the region. Including the Druze and Nusairis and one of the last surviving gnostic sects the Mandaens. As well as Kurds and Yezedi, Sabians all of whom faced persecution from the Turks for being dhimmis.

In another part of this Consular District there seems to have been little change from the old times of rapine and bloodshed in Turkey. I allude to the Ansaireh mountains, stretching from the valley of the Orontes to Mount Lebanon. On a late occasion a member of the Medjlis of Tripoli, passing through a Christian village in pursuit of the revolted Ansaireh, set fire to it, and, when the inhabitants conveyed their moveable property of value into their Church (…), it was broken open and plundered. This case, with many others equally abominable, of simultaneous occurrence, was laid before Her Majesty’s Consul General for Syria, the perpetrators of the outrages being under the jurisdiction of the Pasha of Beyrouth, and will thus have already come under Your Excellency’s notice. (Aleppo, 31st March, 1859; FO 78/1452 (No. 11), Skene to Bulwer, Constantinople)

The author of the introduction to Magica Sexualis is mistaken in associating the Ansairth with the Yezedi. As I said the Yezedi at the time had become somewhat of a sensation amongst certain Christian religious and historical scholars. And the Nusairis refer to an Islamic Shi'a Sunni sect.

Randolphs Rosicrucian Order and his fellow occultists of the time were fascinated with the recent discoveries of Gnosticism and the Gnostic's. Finding a living Gnostic religion which offered initiation would have been more in keeping with their occult traditions.

I suspect Randolph had been initiated into the the mystery religion of the Mandaens. Whose followers were in the same region of Syria at the time.

Within the Middle East, but outside of their community, the Mandaeans are more commonly known as the Ṣubba (singular Ṣubbī). Likewise, their Muslim neighbors will refer to them collectively as the Sabians (Arabic al-Ṣābiʾūn), in reference to the Ṣabians of the Qur'an. Occasionally, the Mandaeans are also called the "Christians of St. John" (a misnomer, since they are not Christians by any standard), based upon preliminary reports made by members of the Barefoot Carmelite mission in Basra during the 16th century.

Other groups which have been identified with the Mandaeans include the "Nasoraeans" described by Epiphanius and the Dositheans mentioned by Theodore Bar Kōnī in his Scholion. Ibn al-Nadim also mentions a group called the Mughtasila, "the self-ablutionists," who may be identified with one or the other of these groups. The members of this sect, like the Mandaeans, wore white and performed baptisms.

The similarity of beliefs about healthy living, not eating meat, avoiding tobacco, reincarnation and sexuality strike me as Mandaean rather than Yezedi.

According to E.S. Drower in the introduction to The Secret Adam, Mandaeans believe in marriage and procreation, and in the importance of leading an ethical and moral lifestyle in this world, placing a high priority upon family life. Consequently, Mandaeans do not practice celibacy or asceticism. Mandaeans will, however, abstain from strong drink and red meat. While they agree with other gnostic sects that the world is a prison governed by the planetary archons, they do not view it as a cruel and inhospitable one.

The Rosicrucian movement he founded still exists today publishing his works;

SEERSHIP; Guide to Soul Sight


The importance of Randolph cannot be underestimated. His works influenced later magickal and occult practitioners including Eliphas Levi as well as the Ordo Templi Orientis in particular Theodore Reuss and Aleister Crowley.