Friday, May 01, 2020

texts
Gnostic Prayers From The Lightworld. Mandaean Hymns



Ethel Stefana Drower née Stevens (1 December 1879 – 27 January 1972) was a British cultural anthropologist who studied the Middle East and its cultures. She was considered the primary specialist on the Mandaeans, and the chief collector of Mandaean manuscripts.
She was a daughter of a clergyman. In 1906 she was working for Curtis Brown, a London literary agency when she signed Arthur Ransome to write Bohemia in London.
In 1911, she married Edwin Drower and after his knighthood became Lady Drower. As E. S. Stevens, she wrote a series of romantic novels for Mills & Boon and other publishers. In 1921, she accompanied her husband to Iraq where Sir Edwin Drower was adviser to the Justice Minister from 1921 to 1946. Her works include The Prayer book of the Mandaeans (a translation of the Qolusta); The Secret Adam (Mandaeans); and The Peacock Angel (about the Yezidis).Among her grandchildren was the campaigning journalist Roly Drower.

 Jesus, John, And The Making Of A Messiah

https://archive.org/details/jesusjohnandthemakingofamessiah/page/n1/mode/2up


Preface

Church attendance in developed nations has been on a
downward spiral for the best part of a century. The strong
likelihood is that it will continue to decline. In the past, almost
everyone was a churchgoer. But today, irrespective of whether or
not they believe in God, the majority of the population regards
organized religion as an anachronism.
Increased levels of education since the end of World War II
brought with them a greater demand for intellectual satisfaction.
Now, most people will only accept something as ‘true’ if it can be
explained by reason or else resonates with their experience.
Absolute ‘truths’ must pertain to reality. Not reality as perception,
but reality which is the same for everyone. Doctrines that insist on
faith in the irrational and unfamiliar no longer have mass appeal,
because by implication, they are not true.
Formerly, the Church could withdraw some of its erroneous
tenets, for example, that the sun orbits the earth, because they
were incidental to its central theology. In the modern era, as
potential embarrassments cropped up with increasing regularity,
the Church adopted the position that religion and science were
mutually incompatible. Therefore, any attempts to reconcile them
were futile.
The idea that life allowed for the existence of contradictory laws
did not impress Einstein, who famously stated that “God does not
play dice with the universe.” His comment that “science would
provide a surer path to God than religion,” reflects a widely held
opinion that religious institutions are paralyzed by the instinct for
self-preservation and reluctance to acknowledge error. As far as
most people today are concerned, the Church has not only ceded
to science the ability to interpret the physical world, but also the
world unseen, and all that that implies.
Despite public skepticism toward the Christian Church, the
indisputable fact of history is that Western civilization is a 
Judeo Christian legacy. The predominant culture is actually based on a
complex synthesis of Hebraism and Hellenism, but its catalyst was
provided by events in the life of one man -- Jesus. And we simply
cannot understand the modern world without first understanding
our Judeo-Christian past.
The phenomenal success of the movies, The Passion of Christ and
The Da Vinci Code, prove that the desire to know what happened
two thousand years ago has not diminished. Still, from whatever
point of view Jesus is presented, we don’t know who he was. For
traditionalists, the focal point of ‘genuine’ Christianity is Christ,
the risen God. ‘Christ’ transcends human attributes, so in the
grand scheme of things, the historical man Jesus is incidental. At
the opposite end of the spectrum, liberal academics cite a lack of
documentation to prove much of anything about Jesus, and being
good scholars they only go where the ‘facts’ lead.
Making sense of Jesus then, is not easy. Apparently, he was
rejected by those ‘in charge of religion’ as an ordinary man with
blasphemous delusions of grandeur. But now that he is regarded
as God, or as a character to be defined only on the limited basis of
a few prose narratives, Jesus cannot be legitimately considered as
an actual human being with normal physical, spiritual, emotional
and intellectual needs.
The Virgin and The Priest does not directly address the issue of
Jesus’ marital status, or even if he had children. Researching the
possibility of a surviving bloodline without first identifying Jesus’
parents, not only puts the genealogical cart before the horse, it
perpetuates the confusion over his status. Jesus’ ‘divinity’ has been
the foundation of Christian theology ever since Church councils
began, and still conditions public perception of him today. For that
reason, Jesus’ ancestors, rather than his descendants, ought
properly to be the starting point of any investigation of his life.
Officially, Protestant Churches do not insist on the virgin birth
doctrine as do Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Mary’s
miraculous conception, however, is taken for granted by most of
their membership, and by a large percentage of the general
population. Even non believers jump on the bandwagon when
Christmas comes around. Who can blame them? It is a beautiful
story. A young virgin conceives a child miraculously. She gives
birth to God’s only Son in a humble stable. Wise men travel from
afar to offer gifts to the newborn king. The word ‘miracle,’
however, can only be used legitimately when describing events
that lack a rational or scientific explanation, and as an absolute
principle, all forms of life are created by, and therefore preceded
by, a relationship or interaction between opposites: male/female or
positive/negative. So regardless of any theological claims, if Jesus
existed then he must have had biological parents. His birth,
therefore, was not a miracle. Moreover, if Jesus’ father were
identified it might help explain other aspects of his life, and inject a
dose of much-needed reality into the study of Christian origins.
To protect the early church, the gospel writers deliberately crafted
explanations of Jesus’ birth to mystify the uninformed and obscure
the truth from those deemed incapable of receiving it. To achieve
this, they used an ancient ‘messianic’ scribal code belonging to an
esoteric strand of Judaism. Later, as the church developed in the
Gentile nations, ignorance of this code proved disastrous.
Centuries of pointless and unnecessary theological argument
precipitated divisions in human society that led to centuries of
bloodshed, persecution, and suffering on a truly unimaginable
scale. In explaining the messianic code, The Virgin and The Priest
does not so much go where the facts lead, because hardly any exist.
The case presented is not one that would stand up in a modern
court of law. There are no sworn affidavits, no eye witness
testimonies, and no DNA paternity-test results. The argument
follows only where reason takes it, supported by a framework of
coherent and consistent logic, based on the Jewish traditions of the
biblical writers. Corroborative evidence is presented from
apocryphal gospels, writings of early Church Fathers, and the
Koran. The cryptic images of Renaissance masterpieces, so long a
source of confusion to ‘experts’ and bewilderment to the general
public, are deciphered to show that knowledge of Jesus’ biological
father was pivotal to an important and influential subversive
tradition.
That the name of Jesus’ father has never been publicly disclosed
attests to the existence of a controlling and pervasive conspiracy of
silence by those who knew it, both inside and outside the Church.
The perpetrators were aided and abetted by the suffocating power
of preconceived ideas, working hand in hand with history’s largest
ever propaganda campaign, incessantly and repeatedly broadcast
throughout the world for seventeen centuries. And, in common
with modern sales and marketing promotions, the message was
both deceptive and illusory, designed solely to benefit vested
interests. Deep down we knew it, but still bought the product.
Christianity’s sacred cows have been challenged many times
before, but never as comprehensively as in The Virgin and The
Priest. Perhaps above all else, the spotlight falls on the life of Saint
John the Baptist -- one of the most neglected areas of New
Testament studies and Dead Sea Scrolls research -- and the part he
played in Jesus’ tragic life. Hopefully, any errors along the way are
minor and thus peripheral to the book’s central arguments. For
readers raised on the tenets of traditional religious teaching, The
Virgin and The Priest will be a journey into unchartered waters. Bon
voyage!
Ubud, Bali November, 2007
Preliminary report on the findings of the Mountain-Complex city of Atlantis
https://archive.org/details/preliminaryreportonthefindingsofthemountaincomplexcityofatlantisr/mode/2up


Abstract
In the Peninsula of Khatiawar in West India at the geographical location with the
coordinates: 21° 31’ 40” 00 N 70° 31’ 40” 00 E, a mountain-complex presenting rare
geological features has been identified. [Fig. 1].

We believe that this mountain-complex, locally called Girnar or Girinagar Mountain
shows all the historical and geomorphological characteristics of the civilization
mentioned by the Greek philosopher Plato in 350 BCE, the so called: “Lost City of
Atlantis”.

The discovery that this site is Atlantis is still theoretical, a work in progress; therefore
we must find physical evidence of this ancestral civilization. However, the geological,
zoological, botanical, geographical, climatological, sociological and historical evidence
found in the region indicates that Girnar mountain-complex has all the characteristics of
the lost civilization of Atlantis. 

Keywords
Atlantis, Lost civilization, Egypt, Olmec, Maya, India, Sumerian, Rome, Greece, Vinca,
Glozel, Harappa
Loimographia : an account of the Great Plague of London in the year 1665

Topics Plague
Publisher London : Shaw and Sons

THE PLAGUE RESULTED IN THE GREAT FIRE AND CONFLAGRATION 



Conspirituality Reconsidered: How Surprising and How New is the Confluence of Spirituality and Conspiracy Theory?

Those who have followed the development of online new religiosity over the past decade will not have failed to notice that conspiracy theories and ‘New Age’ ideas are thriving together. But how new and how surprising is the phenomenon of ‘conspirituality’? In the present article, we challenge the thesis put forward by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in their article of 2011, published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, that a confluence of spirituality and conspiracism has emerged in the past two decades as a form of New Age theodicy. Instead, we argue, on theoretical grounds, that conspirituality can be viewed as a predictable result of structural elements in the cultic milieu and, on historical grounds, that its roots stretch deep into the history of Western esotericism. Together, these two considerations allow us not only to suggest that conspirituality is old and predictable, but also to identify a large potential for further research which will contribute to the study of conspiracy culture and enable a new line of comparative research in religious studies.

MAYDAY MAY1 STAY AT HOME GENERAL STRIKE MEMES










texts

DRAGGING DOWN HEAVEN

Jesus the Magician And Handler Of Spirits

HELEN INGRAM





The events of that Good Friday would remain dormant until an undergraduate lecture given by Prof. Mark Goodacre (who would later become my PhD thesis supervisor) during my final undergraduate years at Birmingham University in 2001. The two-year New Testament studies course consisted of a series of lectures intended to highlight the many roles applied to Jesus in Biblical Studies, each being inserted or removed like a set of optician’s slides to see whether the Gospel content became any clearer; Jesus the teacher, Jesus the prophet, Jesus the healer, Jesus the exorcist and so forth. One of these lectures introduced me to the character of ‘Jesus the magician’ and the work of Prof. Morton Smith, who claimed that Jesus’ conduct within the Gospel material constituted a ‘coherent, consistent and credible picture of a magician’s career.’ The theory that the historical Jesus was actively practicing magic and that this behaviour is reflected in the Gospel materials was a very intriguing proposal and immediately stimulated a personal interest in this field of research.


DSC00708.JPGThis curiosity culminated in the submission and acceptance of my PhD thesis Dragging Down Heaven: Jesus as Magician and Manipulator of Spirits in the Gospels at the University of Birmingham in April 2007, extracts of which can be found on this website. The thesis was highly praised by my contemporaries in the field of Biblical Studies but I have resisted publishing it for two main reasons. First, I want it to be widely read outside academia and committing to an academic publisher would prevent this. Second, my research (and I) often fall foul of much vitriol from religious communities who believe that the subject matter is blasphemous, which was never my intent, and my working relationship with these communities may suffer as a result. So I have taken the decision to upload extracts from the thesis in the hope that the reader may find it informative or at the very least entertaining. I have removed a great deal of referencing to make it ‘internet friendly’ and there is so much more to tell...but here are the basics for now....

http://wasjesusamagician.blogspot.com/

https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.446336
"THE LOST ATLANTIS"
THEOSOPHY, Vol. 42, No. 2, December, 1953
(Pages 76-81; Size: 17K)

MANY a time Atlantis is spoken of under another name, one unknown to modern commentators. It stands to reason that neither the name of Lemuria nor even of Atlantis are the real archaic names of the lost continents, but have been adopted for the sake of clarity. Most of the correct names of the countries and continents of both are given in the Puranas. The power of names is great, and was known since the first men were instructed by the divine masters. As Solon had studied Atlantis, he translated the "Atlantean" names into names devised by himself. In connection with the continent of Atlantis, it is desirable to bear in mind that the accounts which have come down to us from the old Greek writers contain a confusion of statements, some referring to the Great Continent, and others to Plato's "Atlantis," the small island of Poseidonis. It has become customary to take them all as referring to the latter only, but that this is incorrect is evident from the incompatibility of the various statements as to the size, etc., of Atlantis.
To make a difference between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient writers referred to the latter as the Northern or Hyperborean Atlantis, and to the former as the Southern. The Atlantic portion of Lemuria, which was a gigantic land, was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis. The latter, indeed, must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria, than as an entirely new land mass upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root Race. The Fourth Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third Race men, centered, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean. In those days, large portions of the future continent of Atlantis were yet part and parcel of the Ocean floors. Their continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and became ultimately the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. Hence the first Atlanteans, the earliest pioneers of the Fourth Race, were born on the Lemurian continent.
Atlantis produced the first physically human man, whose origin began with the last sub-races of the Third Root Race. With the Fourth Race we reach the first purely human period, the first progeny of semi-divine man after his separation into sexes -- hence the first-begotten and humanly born mortals. Those who were hitherto semi-divine beings, imprisoned in bodies which were human only in appearance, became physiologically changed. Herodotus recounts the tradition of the Atlantes -- a people of Western Africa which gave its name to Mount Atlas -- who were vegetarians, and "whose sleep was never disturbed by dreams." If the Atlanteans never had their sleep disturbed by dreams, it was because that particular tradition is concerned with the earliest Atlanteans, whose physical frame and brain were not yet sufficiently consolidated, in the physiological sense, to permit the nervous centers to act during sleep.
All ancient writings -- prose and poetry -- are full of the reminiscences of the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first physical races, though the Third and Fourth in number. Hesiod records the tradition about the men of the Age of Bronze, whom Jupiter had made out of ashwood, and who had hearts harder than diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot, they passed their lives in fighting. Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands descended from their shoulders, says the poet. Such were the giants of the first physical races. The "one-eyed" Cyclopes, the giants fabled as the sons of Coelus and Terra, were the last three sub-races of the Lemurians, the "one eye" referring to the Wisdom Eye; for the two front eyes were developed as organs only in the beginning of the Fourth Race. But we can easily believe that the Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the Hindu Puranas and the Greek Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans -- men of a superhuman, tremendous physical power, which enabled them to defend themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic times -- and of actual Cyclopes, three-eyed mortals.
The possession of a physical third eye, we are told, was enjoyed by the men of the Third Race down to nearly the middle period of the Third Sub-Race of the Fourth Root Race, when the consolidation and perfection of the human frame made it disappear from the outward anatomy of man. Psychically and spiritually, however, its mental and visual perceptions lasted till nearly the end of the Fourth Race, when its functions, owing to the materiality and depraved condition of mankind, died out altogether before the submersion of the bulk of the Atlantean continent. The "eye of Siva" did not become entirely atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race.
What was the Religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common acceptance of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Atlanteans, had any, as they knew no dogma, nor had they to believe on faith. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present as the ever to be unknown and invisible ALL, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his inner God, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom, a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower principles by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the "Sons of Light." Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of matter. From "Sons of Light and Wisdom" they ended by becoming the "Sons of Darkness." They had fallen in the battle of mortal life with Life Immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.
Thus the first Atlanteans, born on the Lemurian continent, separated from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous: into those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the ray of which man feels within himself -- or the Pantheists; and those who offered fanatical worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark Cosmic, anthropomorphic Powers, with whom they had made alliance. It was the Atlanteans who became the first "Sacrificers" to the god of matter. Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal god.
The Continent of Atlantis at its height covered the whole of the North and South Atlantic regions, as well as portions of the North and South Pacific, and had islands even in the Indian Ocean (relics of Lemuria). The India of the prehistoric ages was doubly connected with the two Americas, India being the center of the seven great continents before the submersion of the great continent of Atlantis. A traveler, starting from the South, could have at one time walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America. Again, a pedestrian from the North might then have reached, hardly wetting his feet, the Alaskan peninsula, through Manchuria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, thence into North America.
A Master wrote: "The Fourth Race had its period of the highest civilization." In the early part of the Tertiary age, the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known flourished. The civilization of the Atlanteans was greater even than that of the Egyptians.
The Sanskrit language, as now known, was not spoken by the Atlanteans. The predominating element in Atlantis was a language which has now survived but in the dialects of some American tribes, and in the Chinese speech of the inland Chinamen, the mountainous tribes of Kivang-ze -- a language which was an admixture of the agglutinative and the monosyllabic, as it would be called by modern philologists. It was, in fact, the language of the "Red-Yellow" second or middle geological stock. "What would you say to our affirmation that the Chinese -- the aborigines who belong in their unallied nationality wholly to the highest and last branch of the Fourth Race -- reached their highest civilization when the Fifth had hardly appeared in Asia?" Even the historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race. In Shoo-King, anyone can read in the French translation, "When the Mao-tse" -- that race, explains the Annotator -- "which had retired in days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be still found in the neighborhood of Canton...." The surviving handful of these inland Chinese are of very high stature.
The Atlanteans were giants, whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax, in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of the fourth sub-race. The records speak of their giant intellect and their giant size. They built great images, 27 feet high -- the size of their bodies. The statues found by Cook on Easter Island measured almost all 27 feet high and eight feet across the shoulders. The days when matter would be in its full sway on earth and man would reach the apex of physical development in stature and animality, came to pass during the period of the middle point of their race. Since then, man began decreasing in stature, strength and years.
Writing was perfectly known to the Atlanteans. It was invented by them, and not at all by the Phoenicians. It was from the Fourth Race that the early Aryans got their knowledge of the "bundle of wonderful things," the Sabha and Mayasabha, mentioned in the Mahabharata, the gift of Mayasur to the Pandavas. It is from them that they learned aeronautics, Viwan Vidya (the knowledge of flying in air-vehicles), and therefore their great arts in meteorography and meteorology.
The Secret Doctrine assigns from four to five million years between the incipient and the final evolution of the Fourth Root Race, on the Lemuro-Atlantean continent. In the Eocene age, even in its very first part, the great cycle of the Fourth Race men had already reached its highest point and the great continent, the father of nearly all the present continents, showed the first symptoms of sinking. Atlantis sank, and its chief portions had disappeared, before the end of the Miocene period.
(From Histoire des Vierges): "One of the most ancient legends of India, preserved in the temples by oral and written tradition, relates that several hundred thousand years ago, there existed in the Pacific Ocean an immense continent which was destroyed by geologic upheaval. The high plateaux of Hindustan and Asia. According to this hypothesis, would only have been represented in those days by great islands contiguous to the central continent. ... According to the Brahmans, this country had attained a high civilization, and the peninsula of Hindustan, enlarged by the displacement of the waters at the time of the grand cataclysm, has but continued the chain of the primitive traditions born in this place. These traditions give the name of Rutas to the people who inhabited this immense continent, and from their speech was derived the Sanskrit."
The Hindus possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the Aryans, historical memory. One million years are allowed for our present Aryan Fifth Race, the first sub-race of which witnessed the doom of the last of the populations of the giant Atlanteans, that which submerged the last portions of Atlantis, 850,000 years ago. The Secret Doctrine declares that most of the later island Atlanteans perished in this interval between 850,000 and 700,000 years ago, and that the Aryans were 200,000 years old when the first great island or continent was submerged. But the destruction of the famous island of Ruta, in the later Pliocene times, and the smaller one of Daitya, must not be confounded with the submersion of the main continent of Atlantis during the Miocene period.
After the submersion of Ruta (850,000 years ago) there was no great submersion until the day of Plato's Atlantis, or Poseidonis, which belongs to historical times. Plato's Atlantis perished between water below and fire above; its great mountain vomiting flames all the while. The "fire vomiting monster" (the peak of Teneriffe?) survived alone out of the ruins of the unfortunate island. A number of small islands scattered around Poseidonis had been vacated, in consequence of earthquakes, long before the final catastrophe. The last of the islands of the Great Atlantis -- Poseidonis, which lasted until about 12,000 years ago -- alone remained in the memory of man, thanks to some written records.

COMPILER'S NOTE: The following is a separate item which followed the above article but was on the same page. I felt it was useful to include it here:

MYTHOLOGY
By such slow aggregation has mythology grown from the first. The very nursery tales of this generation, were the nursery tales of primeval races. They migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the "tale divine" of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme. This is an approach to that universal language which men have sought in vain. This fond reiteration of the oldest expressions of truth by the latest posterity, content with slightly and religiously retouching the old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity.
The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear....
To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. 

--HENRY D. THOREAU

LOST RACE OF THE GIANTS

https://archive.org/details/PatrickChouinardLostRaceOfTheGiants.TheMysteryOfTheirCultureInfluenceAndDeclineT/mode/2up


A Judge Sided With Native American Tribes Challenging How The Trump Administration Is Handling Coronavirus Relief Money

A federal judge blocked the Treasury Department from sending coronavirus relief money meant to benefit Native American tribes to certain for-profit Native corporations.


Zoe TillmanBuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From Washington, DC Posted on April 27, 2020

Kristin Murphy / the Deseret News via AP
People line up to get tested for COVID-19 in Oljato-Monument Valley, Utah, April 16. The Navajo Nation has one of the highest per capita COVID-19 infection rates in the country.


WASHINGTON — The Trump administration cannot distribute coronavirus relief money intended to help Native American communities respond to the coronavirus pandemic to certain for-profit Native corporations, a federal judge ruled Monday evening.

It's the first loss in court for the government over how administration officials are managing the billions of dollars that Congress approved in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Dozens of tribal governments raced to court in the past two weeks to challenge the Treasury Department's decision to make Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) eligible for $8 billion in funding set aside to benefit Native American tribes.

The tribal governments that sued argued that they stood to lose out on potentially millions of dollars if they had to share the pool with ANCs. The ANCs, established by a 1971 law governing how Alaska Natives manage and benefit from their land, have shareholders — primarily members of Native American tribes — and boards of directors, and they serve as holding companies for businesses that range from construction and pipeline maintenance to janitorial and food services. There are 574 federally recognized Native American tribes and 237 ANCs across Alaska, according to court papers.

Tribal governments argued they needed the money to deliver services to communities hit hard by COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, including providing health care, buying personal protective equipment, and delivering meals to the elderly and children. They asked the court to enter an immediate injunction since the Treasury Department was set to begin sending the money as early as April 28.

US District Judge Amit Mehta, who heard arguments last week, agreed with the tribal governments that ANCs didn't qualify as the type of "tribal government" that Congress referenced in approving the relief money. Under the definition of "tribal government" that Congress relied on in the CARES Act, the judge wrote, a tribal government had to be eligible for special programs provided by the US government to Native Americans, and it had to be formally recognized by the US government as the governing body of a tribe. The ANCs don't fall into those categories, he wrote.

Mehta noted that Congress put the language about funding for tribal governments in a section of the CARES Act dealing with other "governments," including states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.

"Reading the CARES Act to allow the Secretary to disburse Title V dollars to for-profit corporations does not jibe with the Title’s general purpose of funding the emergency needs of 'governments,'" he wrote.

“The Chehalis Tribe is pleased that the court saw what was obvious to many of us. Corporations have no place taking dollars that were allocated for tribal governments, period!” said Harry Pickernell, senior chair of the Chehalis Tribe, one of the tribal governments that sued. “This ruling will ensure that tribes and tribal members will reap the intended benefits that Congress envisioned in the CARES Act. This ruling will help tribal governments to lead in the aid and recovery of their people.”


The administration and an ANC that filed a friend-of-court brief argued that the corporations were in a position to deliver services to communities, even if they didn't have the same government-to-government relationship that federally recognized tribes do with the US government. Mehta wrote that no one had offered any evidence that ANCs are actually providing public services during the pandemic, however.

Mehta also rejected the administration's argument that the court shouldn't get involved in the case at all. The judge wrote that federal courts had a role to play in resolving disputes over how agencies interpret laws passed by Congress — in this case, what exactly Congress meant by using the term "tribal government." He also didn't accept the government's argument that the fact that the money was intended as "emergency" relief meant the court couldn't intervene.

"Thus, while the Secretary’s decisions as to how much to disburse might not be reviewable, his decisions concerning to whom to disburse those funds most certainly is," Mehta wrote, adding in a footnote that he wasn't saying a court couldn't review how much money the Treasury Department paid out in the future, either.

Although the judge blocked the administration from sending relief money to the corporations, he did not order the government to distribute the entire $8 billion pool to the federally recognized tribes. The government could award money to ANCs and hold onto it until the legal fight is over; the judge entered a preliminary injunction on Monday, which is not a final order.

The Treasury Department and Justice Department did not immediately return requests for comment.

If you're someone who is seeing the impact of the coronavirus firsthand, we’d like to hear from you. Reach out to us via one of our tip line channels.

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