TWO MILESTONES in my life happened this November.  Although I am thinking about the vast world issues going on beyond  the horizon of my small life, these milestones of a personal nature have given me great satisfaction.

The first is that I am celebrating my 8th anniversary of wandmaking and Bard Woodcrafts Wandry.  Today, I went through all the old e-mails from clients and the many people who sent me queries and questions about wands, wandmaking, and trees.  It was a delightful experience to re-read some of these notes.  So many of them begin with something like: “I just came upon your site…”  The serendipity involved in finding Bardwood is something to consider, for I do not spend money and time seducing the search engines into putting me at the top of the search terms.  You have to look past four or five more commercial wandmakers who sell much cheaper wands, and links to the band The Magic Wands, and other stories that include the term in a different sense.

So, those who have found Bardwood Wandry are among an elite of persevering seekers not deterred by the whims of Google and Bing.  I believe part of the reason my site doesn’t appear easily in search engines is because I have not updated it in quite a while.  I understand that is one of the criteria the robots use.  That I do not cater to the preferences of robots gives me some gratification, even if it deprives me of much business.

Yet, even among those who do find my Wandry, many turn away from the windows longingly unable to afford my prices.  I do really sympathize with this dilemma.  I couldn’t afford my own prices either.  I wish that there was a way to do the kind of work I do faster, but it just is not an art that can be easily subjected to scientific management.  Of course the big Harry Potter wandmakers like Alivans, spend a lot on marketing and they utilize an army of wood turners to produce their designs.  It may not be mass-production exactly.  As I understand it, the system is a sort of de-centralized factory where Alivans supplies the templates and the turners crank out the beautiful finished product.  I am sure someone at Alivans (Mr. Alivan?) does quality control on the finishes and the turning work itself.

However, in an effort to serve those magical folk who might want a top-line wand, I have put out an e-mail notice to past clients and correspondents about an End of the Year, 8th anniversary sale.  15% off the usual prices, plus FREE SHIPPING.  Huzzah!

It will be interesting to see if it draws in some business.

The second milestone this November is that I was elevated to the “most sublime” degree of Royal Arch Mason in the York Rite of Freemasonry.  There is a certain amount of competition between the hardcore York Rite Masons and the hardcore Scottish Rite Masons.  I don’t wish to pick sides in that argument about which is “better” or more “authentic” or whatever.

Taking the degree of the Holy Royal Arch makes me a full member of my local Royal Arch Chapter, St. John’s-Lake Harriet Chapter No. 9.  As with many of the Scottish Rite degrees, the Royal Arch degree purports to convey the true Master’s Word.  As in the Scottish Rite, this revealing of the Lost Word is a recurring theme and my feeling is that it must be taken as symbolic.  The whole degree ritual was highly symbolic and, as in the case of other Masonic rituals, it can be taken at face value as an exercise in storytelling creating stories that re-enact in ritual drama parts of the Biblical story of the Temple at Jerusalem.  This piece of the story addresses the destruction of Solomon’s temple, the Babylonian captivity of the people of Judah, and the ultimate return of some of them from Babylon to create a client principality under the Babylonians.

But, I need to study this story to internalize the facts, such as they are in history and such as they are presented in the story.  After that, or at the same time maybe, I want to tease out the symbolism.  Clearly, this is the ritual that Mozart used in his opera The Magic Flute.  It involves a symbolic journey through the trials of the four alchemical elements.  The journey from Bablylon to Jerusalem is presented as an alchemical journey of the soul – a transformation of the soul, and probably also points to a major transformation in the Jewish people.

Many druids and other pagans today turn away from the stories of the Bible, the mythic history of the Jews in the books of what the Christians call “The Old Testament.”  This has been the creation myth of the West for 2000 years.  Modern pagans tend to gaze past the Bible and be more interested in Babylon, Sumer, Egypt – those ancient cultures and their ancient religions based in polytheism.  There is a certain opinion among pagans today that monotheism was a big mistake.  I am not personally willing to make such a sweeping statement.  I see the wisdom and appeal in polytheism and the wisdom and appeal of monotheism, or Platonism with its monism.  I do not see religion as a matter of figuring out which approach or which culture is more “right.”  It is to learn as much as possible and to strive to see through all the different lenses at the cosmos (inner and outer).

It is a feeling of accomplishment to receive a Masonic degree.  But the feeling of excitement and accomplishment dissolves quickly into the realization that you have been given a charge to study and find the secrets of the degree.  You receive the “title” Royal Arch Mason or Master of the Royal Secret, but these titles mean nothing in themselves.  Their significance lies in the actions of the Mason who takes those degrees – afterwards.  Does he engage with the mysterious, symbolic material he has received in an attempt to learn from it?

So, now I sit before and contemplate those treasures brought forth from the hidden recesses of the Royal Arch.  I will mention that one of those treasures was of particular significance to me as a wandmaker, but I won’t tell you more than that.

OWL

Another Samhuinn has come and passed and the veils between the worlds have opened and closed, yet our ancestors remain a presence if only we do not close the veils in our minds.  In the druid calendar, the old year has ended with the passing of summer and the new year has begun in the gathering darkness of winter.  Why?  Because new life begins in the dark womb; new ideas begin in the darkness of the skull before being brought to light.  Death precedes rebirth, for there can be no regeneration of the old without death.  We live in the sublunary world of inertia and friction.  Machines and living organisms alike wear out.  The machine may be repaired; the organism may regenerate to some degree, but only to a point and then the machine must be scrapped and the organic body die and return to atoms, to be recycled.

The druid way presents this view of life.  It is Eternal, and yet our bodies are ephemeral and pass away.  Life lies not in the material organization of atoms, but in the spirit.  The organization of spiritual quanta into a soul is what we call the true life, the indwelling spritual organism which generates and emanates the body and the ego like a snail growing a shell.

Yes, a soul, if viewed without its body might indeed appear as a shapeless invertebrate with little eye-stems.

The question is, whether a soul is ever, in fact, naked.  For “ever” is a reference to time, and the soul lives beyond the mundane plane of time.  The soul is not “unchanging” — no, quite the contrary.  But it does not change and grow within the limitations of temporal space; it exists in the higher planes of the astral world and the mental world.  Or rather, let us say that our being — we as beings — exist within all these planes simultaneously (not “at the same time” but without regard to time).  Our being is Eternal and Eternity is a place, a place that is round, a limitless sphere.  It may be understood as the soul of God, or the soul of the Universe.

The Universe is something too vast for us to grasp — it seems cold and impersonal.  But let us consider the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world.  We are better able to conceive in our minds a soul of the Earth, a Mother Gaia.  The Soul of the Universe is like this, only on an inconceivably larger scale.  Presumably we may talk of the soul of a galaxy or a nebula too, or the soul of a star.

Some say that we are each a star.  Our soul is the soul of a star embodied in a frail and ephemeral garment of flesh and blood.  I rather like that idea.

A visitor to our grove on Samhuinn said that he was in favor of whatever religion or spiritual practice permitted one to engage with something “bigger than oneself.”  The expression is well-worn among definitions of religion.  But curiously, it made me think that on the first level, that thing “larger than oneself” to which druids connect is the Earth.  Without having to strain credulity or imagination to conceive invisible gods or goddesses, the druid way connects to that thing that is manifestly bigger than ourselves, our planet.  In another sense, the druid connects to the Land, to the land in which he or she lives.  A land which humans can internalize as they learn its landscapes, its food sources, its sacred places of beauty.  A land which the heart of humans invests with love and meaning.

Is a religion really good if it prevents people from seeing this all too obvious fact — that the Earth is that thing greater than ourselves?  If it instead substitutes an invisible, anthropomorphic God and embraces that bigger “thing” instead of the planet, the land?  As we have seen historically, the more a culture worships invisible or distant deities, the more it begins to drift away from loving and understanding the land.  When urban life leads one to never connect at all with the land, then one begins to think of the land as only a “resource” to be exploited and turned into cash.  When the animal mundi is no longer at the center of our beleifs, then all spirit quickly follows and what is left are urbane skeptics, agnostics, and atheists, without anything “bigger than themselves” at all.

If the land is that “bigger thing” then the culture is unlikely to produce agnostics or atheists, for how can one disbelieve in the EArth?  Only once the transition has been made to invisible gods, does the whole business of religion start down the road of disbelief, for it is in fact easy to disbelieve in the existence of invisible gods.  In this sense agnosticism and atheism, as we see it today, is a by-product of monotheism, but equally well a product of poly theism, once it becomes disconnected from the land around us.  When polytheist gods and goddesses become representations of social roles, types of knowledge or skill, or abstract ideas like Justice, Mercy, Truth, Goodness — at this point the door is opened to doubt and unbelief.

The stories woven of the land and the Earth are stories in which one can believe because they are rooted in the visible world.  Even spiritual experiences are discussed in visible terms — visions, voices, signs.

November is upon us.  Winter is the goddess Cailleach.  No abstraction.  No “pagan idol.”  She is the Winter herself

May your cromlech, round house, or wigwam be warm until Spring and the sun’s return.  Good night and sweet dreams.

OWL

I read The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s latest thriller not because I am one of his fans but because I am a Mason.  I did not care for the DaVinci Code because I was aware that Brown was really just fictionalizing the 1982 non-fiction exposé Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent et al.  I did not like the fact that Brown was getting credit for creating the story when actually he was basing it on someone else’s book.  Arguably, Holy Blood, Holy Grail contained so much speculation that it was already almost fiction.  Baigent and Leigh have published further books on their theory of the Merovingian kings descending from Mary Magdalene and Jesus.  But, in the weird world of publishing, a fictionalized presentation of the ideas caught everyone’s imagination.

The Lost Symbol is at least more original.  Brown has done some research on noetic science, freemasonry, and ceremonial magic, among other things, but when I hear the reviewers and readers complaining that he is not factually representing these things, I wonder what is wrong with readers today.  I don’t know anything about Brown.  I don’t think his writing is very good, but he does have that knack for writing a page-turner, and that is what sells.  What I find interesting is that he can pack so much thought-provoking stuff into that plot framework.  His stories almost collapse under the weight of exposition, but not quite.  He makes it just barely plausible by having his main character be a college professor, so the reader can accept the lecturing.  But why do readers mistakenly believe he is trying to represent the organizations in his stories factually?  They accept that the characters are fictitious; why not the organizations?

Dan Brown does what most novelists do: creates a fictional world.  It isn’t real.  If a novelist successfully represents the real world and a story that seems as if it could have really happened, that is one sort of novel.  But Brown is not writing that sort of novel.  Possibly, he is just bumbling along, but if so, his stories still work.  His main character is a “symbologist” which is a made-up academic specialty.  He calls Langdon a symbologist because readers would probably close the book if he was called a semioticist.  In DaVinci Code he borrowed Opus Dei and the Catholic Church to be the antagonists, fighting to destroy the evidence of the “real” Holy Grail.  But why do readers think that Brown want’s us to believe that his fiction is literally true?  The uproar surrounding DaVinci Code seems to have been generated by this wierd inability to tell fiction from expository writing.   Arguably, Brown’s failing as a writer is that he does not inspire that “willing suspension of disbelief” required of readers.  Instead, quite a few readers reacted as if Brown’s intention was just to bash Catholicism or expose Opus Dei.  Maybe that was part of his agenda, but I rather doubt it because it is so obvious that he is creating a work of fiction that does not remotely pretend to be real (that is, if you step back from the roller coaster ride).

Brown appears to be giving you a history lesson, and some of his “facts” are actually real scholarly opinions or interpretations of historical facts, but for the most part he is drawing on fringe elements — conspiracy theorists, or writers who are not scholars at all.  Does he faithfully portray the real Catholic Church? No.  That would spoil his story.  It isn’t a realistic novel.  It is just fooling you into thinking it might be real because it includes so many details of building’s architecture, real places, real paintings, etc.  But that is just a device to allow the author to slip in his fictional creation.  Novel readers today expect realism.  Even in science fiction they want “gritty” realism.

Well, Brown’s novels should perhaps be categorized as fantasy-thrillers.

The Lost Symbol takes five major elements and weaves them together (a pentagram?).  They are:

1. The study of symbols in culture
2. Freemasonry
3. Noetic science
4. Ceremonial Magic
5. The architecture of Washington D.C.

I have some knowledge of all of these elements as they exist in real life. This knowledge, slight though it is, allows me to see quite clearly that Brown is fictionalizing all of them and not portraying them completely factually.  He adjusts the facts to suit the needs of his story.  Freemasonry is the one element that most interests me in this book, so let me take it up first.

Brown’s representation of Freemasonry is mostly accurate.  He borrows extensively from the writings of Masonic authors.  The saying that Freemasonry is “not a secret society; it is a society with secrets” has become widespread in the fraternity as a good comeback to anyone who calls Masonry a “secret society.”  Brown is right that Masonry is mostly about brotherly love and truth and acceptance.  He is correct that many civic leaders have been Masons, including presidents from Washington on.  He plays off some of the popular myths and conspiracy theories about Freemasonry in order to create creepy dramatic tension.   The opening scene of the initiation and the candidate drinking wine from a human skull is a good example of this.  On the surface it is playing right in to the folks who think Freemasons are creepy and that their rituals contain symbolism that smacks of “evil” or “dark magic” or whatever.

By the end of the novel, however, Brown shows very dramatically exactly how the anti-masonic exposé is made. The video that is used to blackmail Peter Solomon shows actual rituals, but it shows only the most sensational parts out of context in order to suggest that the participants are a bunch of weirdos.  Masonic rituals are all initiations.  Every one of the 33 degrees is an initiation ritual, and it is true that the American public understands very little about initiations.  It also has a very low tolerance for unfamiliar rituals of any kind. Many Americans today even consider church services weird.  Brown does not show the actual beauty of Masonic rituals.  How could he when he is not a Mason and has not experienced them?  But he seems to have talked to enough Masons and read enough Masonic writers to fairly represent the idea that Masonic rituals are symbolic and harmless and that they are intended to raise the moral consciousness of the initiate.  Masonic rituals are not intended to convey real history.  They too are symbolic fictions designed to teach deeper truths.

I was amazed at some of the newspaper reviews I read of The Lost Symbol.  They seem to have failed to see any deeper truths the fiction is trying to convey.  Most took the attitude that the book was nothing more than entertainment and that it was well-crafted but not especially well-written.  The British Daily Telegraph seems to hate Brown for the way he “misrepresented” European manners and customs in his earlier books, as well as for a prose style that is almost beneath contempt.  But again, no sense of value to the truths the book is trying to convey.

Of course, these same writers might tread Masonry with a sardonic smile as a quaint and silly institution for men who like to play act and dress up and learn secret handshakes.  That description might be accurate for some Masons but there are many others who take the study of Masonic symbolism and its philosophical lessons seriously; many who have devoted a lifetime of study to the complex web of symbols.

All of these broad aspects of Freemasonry and many details (such as the very real House of the Temple) are fair.  The places where Brown deviates from fact into fiction are telling and I do not think they were done either out of a malicious desire to promote negative beliefs about the Craft, or out of incompetence.  The changes were deliberate artistic decisions  Let me enumerate again:

1. Drinking wine from a human skull.  obviously, given U.S. law about the possession of human remains, this ritual could only be symbolic and the skull a plastic one.  Such a ritual does fit with the skull symbolism that appears in many Masonic drawings — it is, as it has always been in human cultures, a memento mori, a reminder of the reality of our own mortality.  Not the symbol of a murderous pact.  Brown doesn’t suggest it is, but a non-Mason reading the book might get that impression.
2. The oaths or “obligations” of the degrees do have symbolic “punishments” that sound gruesome, but they are just that: symbolic.  No Mason ever tells another that if they violate their oath a bunch of brothers are going to slit their throat in a dark alley.  The symbolic penalties allude to one of the stories dramatized in the degree rituals, they relate to the punishments three murderous conspirators called down on themselves in the story.  They are punishments suitable to the quasi-Biblical setting of the story and they are, again, symbolic even in that context.  Suffice to say that they symbolize the loss of speech (truth), heart (love), and bowels (integrity).  There is more to it than that interpretation, but you can get the idea.  The candidate calls those punishments down upon himself as a sign of the depth of his sincerity in his obligations to the craft.  Nobody else threatens him with them as literal punishments.  The confusion over this point has been perhaps the main aspect of the rituals that has been taken out of context by anti-masons and sensationalized in published exposures of the rituals.  The main point of all the obligations, moreover, is not simply to keep the secrets of the fraternity; the obligations taken are to aid other brothers in need and to otherwise behave morally and truthfully.  The obligation to “obedience” to the lodge is also easily blown out of proportion into some sinister intent to control the members of the fraternity.  In reality it means that members are swearing to do their best to attend meetings and participate in the organization.
3. The young man being raised to the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite. Unimaginable. Middle aged, maybe, but the 33rd degree is  awarded for many years of service in leadership positions within the several bodies of the Scottish Rite.  Obviously, it would not suit Dan Brown’s plot to have to try to explain the realities of the Scottish Rite.  His story hinges on the idea that a young man can fool his way into the Rite in a short time by giving a huge donation to charity.  I think that would be pretty much impossible.  The honor of the 33rd degree is treated very seriously by those who have earned it.  Moreover, the Supreme Council that is the highest administrative body of the Scottish Rite is composed of members elected from among the large number of men holding the 33rd degree as an “honorary” degree.  Those council members are called “active” to distinguish them.
4. The head of the Supreme Council is called “Worshipful Master” and oversees a “lodge.” Nope.  The Scottish Rite is organized very differently from a Masonic craft lodge (the first three degrees).  The head of the Scottish Rite is called the Supreme Grand Commander.  Why Brown made this particular change is unclear to me.  Possibly it fit his overall desire to make the Scottish Rite and blue lodge Masonry into one monolithic organization with a hierarchical organizational structure.  If he went so far in his research to read Freemasons for Dummies, he would know that this is not factually correct.  So, again, artistic license.
5. The degrees of Masonry are the administrative power structure of the Craft; that is, Masons move up in a power structure with each degree they take.  Absolutely untrue.  The degrees are not a power structure.  There are a few degrees that have to be attained before a brother can be a member of particular bodies of the Scottish Rite or the York Rite, and he cannot vote in the blue lodge until he has been raised to the degree of Master Mason.  But beyond these gateway degrees to full membership, the degrees are unrelated to the administrative or leadership positions.  Each lodge and body of Masonry has elected and appointed officers who act as leaders and decision makers for a specified term of office.  By ignoring the real organizational structure of Freemasonry and its decentralized and democratic character, Brown makes it seem more sinister and easier to grasp.
6. The symbol of the Scottish Rite is a double-headed phoenix.  A good example of artistic license.  Brown is not in error, he is deliberately changing the eagle to a more evocative bird, one that likewise fits his theme of death and resurrection.  The theme itself is one of those central mythological themes and at the root of the ancient mystery schools as it is rooted in Freemasonry’s symbolic language.
7. The claim that Masons swear to protect a brother Mason even over one’s country.  That claim is definitely made up.  Freemasons might wince at it because it feeds into a common anti-mason accusation that Masons serve their order over the civil or religious authorities, but Brown slips it in for no other purpose than to heighten dramatic tension.  In his story, the looming question of whether the Masons are working with or against the CIA is crucial to the suspense.
8. The Masons are guardians of the secret science of the ancient mysteries. This claim is one that is hard to judge true or false.  Many Masons would agree with the statement.  Others would say this is just the wishful thinking of nineteenth-century brothers who were heavily into comparative religion and the study of the place of magic in human culture.  The fictionalization comes in on a different level in this case.  Brown is creating a fiction about the ancient mysteries, one which suggests that they allowed practitioners in ancient times to perform miraculous wonders through the power of their minds (or as some might say, the power of faith).  Brown brings in noetic science as a term for what others call parapsychology.  It lies on the border between accepted science and the unknown.  Brown engages in science fiction when representing the work of Katherine Solomon.

These eight points are at least the major ones in which Brown fictionalizes Freemasonry.  As we can see in the final item above, these artistic choices to deviate from established facts spreads from his fictional representation of Masonry to his fictional representation of noetic science research, the ancient mysteries, the CIA, and ceremonial magic.  The CIA comes off smelling like roses.  Ceremonial magic comes off in very stereotypic form as evil demonology that involves blood sacrifices and megalomania.  Is what Brown says about the architecture and symbolism of the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument factual?  I do not personally know, but if Brown took artistic license there, I would not be surprised in the least.  Finally, is the author’s representation of the academic study of symbols accurate?  Certainly not.  It is based on actual academic work, but it is fictitious, just like everything else.

Are those representations fair?  No, of course not.  They are not intended to be fair.  They are intended to push our buttons, to create dramatic tension and suspense, to keep the reader off balance, not sure who is good and who is evil or what the earth-shattering secret is, until the very end.

The end has evidently disappointed some of Brown’s readers.  They were hoping for some juicy, controversial accusations against some big organization. Some, naturally, thought the book would suggest that the Freemasons are, after all, running a secret world government, the puppet-masters whose existence would.  Or maybe the readers were hoping that he was, at last, going to reveal the secrets of the ancient mysteries –  the secret to immortality and magical powers.

The irony, and I think the strength of The Lost Symbol is that Brown does reveal the mysteries.  His narrative and the symbolism in his story points right at it for those with eyes to see.  But it is deliberately (I suggest) different from the denouement of the film National Treasure.  Readers who have seen the film, which also features Masonic secrets, cannot fail to notice the resemblance.  Both stories (like DaVinci Code) are riddle plots.  The protagonist must solve the riddle before the antagonist heads him off.  But in The Lost Symbol there is no fabulous, fantasy treasure.  There is not magical device that will unlock a sci-fi doorway into superpowers.  In fact, right toward the end of the plot, Langdon realizes that there are actually two riddles: the riddle of the pyramid, and the riddle of what Mal’akh is doing and where he is doing it.  They turn out to be two separate riddles, only connected by Mal’akh’s belief that he needs the “lost symbol” to write on his Fontanelle so that he can become a demon.

In the resolution at the end of the story, the reader, with Langdon, is shown that what is lost is not a “symbol” in the sense of a glyph, but is the Lost Word, the knowledge and understanding of the Logos, that divine light which resides in each of us.  The “lost symbol” is merely a symbol for “that which was lost” once upon a time.  The ancient mysteries told the same tale. The story of the Garden of Eden does likewise.  Somewhere in the mists of the past, the myth says, human beings lost their connection to the Divine.

That’s it.  Boom.  Anticlimax?

Every brother Mason who has knocked on the door of the lodge and been raised to the degree of Master Mason has asked himself that question.  Every Master Mason who has gone on to achieve the 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite asks it.  After all of this drama, symbolism, and apparent teasing with the Lost Word, is that it?  But this is how Freemasonry works.  It is not an elaborate succession of initiations in which a brother must prove himself worthy to receive the secret.  It is a series of rituals that lead him onwards, ever onward, to discover the secret for himself.

Dan Brown makes the “secret” of the mysteries sound a bit like “The Secret” — that other best-selling book in the past few years.  The power of intention, the power of prayer, the magic of visualization and repeated affirmations — that is the big “secret.”  But students of the mysteries and of magic have known that secret for generations, and probably back to the dawn of civilization among cultures outside of Europe — Tibet, India, China, and many tribal cultures.

So, do Freemasons practice “The Secret” ?  Actually they do, even if they might not make the connection with that popular book and the New Age cosmic consciousness movements.  They practice focused intention in prayer and in rituals devoted to symbolizing virtues and so, if the noetic theories be true, send out into the world good vibrations of love, truth, charity, and respect — the brotherhood of men.  Whether you believe in good vibrations or not, it is undoubtedly true that whenever a lodge meets the men who come out of its doors at the close of the lodge are filled with the love of virtue, kindness, and hope for humanity.  There is Light out of Darkness, and Order out of Chaos.

The figure of Pelagius has long interested me.  He came from Britain, lived in the 5th century A.D. and I have often wondered if some druid teachings had not persisted in the culture of Britain that influenced his view of life.  In college, I read the “Confessions” of St. Augustine and I have felt since then that the Western Church was founded on the ideas of a man who, however brilliant, was plagued with guilt and shame and projected this onto the whole of humanity.

The issue between Pelagius and Augustine centered on the concept of Grace.  This concept interests me partly because  of the way it is used in The Lord of the Rings where (in the films at least) the “Grace of the Eldar” is shown as the ability to give part of one’s own life to another when they are dying.  As Immortals, the Eldar could give freely of their life force because they had an infinite amount of it.

Grace, at root, is the gift of life.  For Augustine and Pelagius and the 5th century Churchmen, the question was whether “original sin” — i.e., Adam’s disobedience in Eden — was transmissible through the human species, and if it was, could humans overcome it by themselves or did they need to rely on being “redeemed” or rescued by God.  This was an important issue because in the four centuries since the death of Rabbi Yeshua ben Yoseph, the great teacher, he had been transformed into a rather more abstract sort of archetypal person — not an earthly messiah but “the Christ” a Greek idea of a god-man, or “son” of  the One God who came to earth and was crucified unjustly so that he could serve magically as a sacrifice — the sacrificial lamb or scapegoat — dying in place of all humanity.

This Greek myth took the Platonic idea of the One as the ultimate Divine power above all the personified gods and goddesses of the old Greek pantheon, and it combined this idea with the Jewish theology of One True God the Father, who was not only supreme over all other deities, but was the only one that should be worshiped.  One practical advantage of monotheism that must have appealed to kings with budgets to set, was that one god and one temple and one divinity to make sacrifices to was a great deal cheaper than having a dozen gods and goddesses to support and placate.  Philosophically, the Platonic idea of the One was very appealing because it seemed much neater and more mathematical.  The Jewish God Yahweh was the Creator-god, and combined with the abstract idea of the One, allowed philosophers to contemplate a universe of diversity and multiplicity that had originated in simplicity and unity.

Another advantage of this way of thinking, for the spiritual  philosopher was that if everything was One, then all men were One, and so brotherhood and brotherly love was a force that was not only right and moral, but was part of the very fabric of creation. (I am bracketing the significant problem of patriarchy and the male-dominated society that increasingly included women from all of these benefits, thus speaking in terms of “brotherhood” a gendered term.)

These ideas combined to give the evolving new religion of Christianity that focused on the One God characterized by omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.  Since such a god could do anything and was inherently in all places at once, He could beget himself a Son who was Himself (being omnipresent) and offer that Son as a human sacrifice to placate Himself  and so save humans from the doom of death He Himself had pronounced upon them after Adam and Eve’s disobedience in eating of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Confused yet? Just wait.

Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (in other words, we are talking about Moral Knowledge, not science and technology here), the original humans were expelled from their life of leisure in the Garden and so denied access to the Tree of Life, which was the other tree in the garden, one from which, apparently they were not forbidden to eat.  If this is a correct interpretation of the myth, then Adam and Eve were immortal so long as they stayed in God’s employ as his gardeners and didn’t mess about with moral philosophy.

It all sounds a bit silly if you take it literally, so I don’t.  I interpret this myth to be about human evolution.  Humans lived in a state of bliss.  They could talk but were very close to the animals and to Nature.  Didn’t need clothes, didn’t have shame, and got along just fine.  Then they began to think about good and evil — in other words they came up with those words and concepts.  That was the end of bliss because it introduced the possibility of doing wrong, hurting others, or hurting oneself, and so feeling guilt and shame.  And indeed, if we consider Adam and Eve to be representative of all of primitive tribal humanity and the junction between pre-linguistic rules and language with abstract thought, then their expulsion from the garden can be  read as a representation of the point when humans cast people out of the tribe as punishment for wrongdoing.  Chimps certainly will ostracize a member of the clan or tribe as punishment (though it is usually a simple matter of defying the reigning patriarch).  Well, defying the patriarch is the main reason for expulsion or arrest in human society too.

This first instance of “Sin” helps define the concept in Christianity.  I understand that in the Jewish faith and in the Hebrew language the word for “sin” means something like “missing the mark.”  In other words, it is not so much about disobedience and defiance of the law as it is about making mistakes.  We might interpret sinfulness to be the human state of being imperfect and making errors in judgment or behavior.

No one would argue that this description fits humans.  But the chaps like Augustine thought there was something far more sinister about sin.  By the fifth century, the idea of “sin” had gotten firmly connected with “sex.”  Moreover, the frustration and guilt this produced in Augustine and his ilk, caused them to deduce that their own inability to stop thinking about sex and women was driven by an ingrained depravity.  Not wishing to think that he was the only one who was depraved (who would?), Augustine posited that all men were inherently depraved because of Original Sin (i.e., Adam’s depravity, which presumably had something to do with listening to Eve, or failing to question where she had been doing the grocery shopping.)

Eve tasted of the fruit — that is, she came up with the idea of good and evil and was the first human to understand moral philosophy.  I think it is important to remember that it is not only “sin” in the story that originates with women (or women listening to serpents), but it is moral philosophy that originates with women.  And it seems worth considering the implication that moral understanding originates by ignoring God’s prohibition and thinking for yourself.  Eve exercised her own free will and wanted to “be like God”.  That is usually seen as a terrible thing to want.  Yet, is not the whole teaching of the theologians and Jesus particularly focused on the idea that we must strive to be like God?

Well, all of this long tale, leads up to the theological conundrum of Grace.  If God condemned us to death (taking away our immortality), then clearly he is the only one who can issue a reprieve.  That way of thinking makes us all prisoners, condemned to die.  The doctrine of Heaven and Hell contemplates the problem of death, however, because it really re-introduces immortality into the picture.  Humans, it turns out, still have immortal souls — spiritual parts which remain immortal even when the body dies.  This teaching permitted the religious leaders to introduce the idea of eternal reward and eternal punishment.  Heaven is the paradise of eternal bliss.  Hell is the place of eternal pain and punishment.

This myth has served parents and kings well for many centuries.  Actually, we see the same idea in ancient Egypt and Greece.  For the Greeks and Romans one died and went to an Otherworld which was divided into a place of torment for the wicked (Hades) and relatively happy eternal life with the great heroes and philosophers of the past (the Elysian Fields).  So, death was the issue, not because we were to be saved from dying at all (as the Eldar), but because we would be sent to heaven or hell based upon the state of our soul at death.  Thus we needed God’s Grace if we were to get to Heaven because, according to Augustine everyone was totally depraved and no amount of good deeds could make up for that deadly taint.

I will quote at length from the Wikipedia article on Pelagianism in relation to Grace.

Pelagius vs. Augustine of Hippo

In the fifth century, a debate that affected the understanding of grace in Western Christianity, and that was to have long reaching effects on subsequent developments in the doctrine, took place between Pelagius and St Augustine of Hippo.

Pelagius, an ascetic who is said to have come from Britain, was concerned about the retention of man’s moral accountability in the face of God’s omnipotence. He strongly affirmed that men had free will and were able to choose good as well as evil. Pelagius denied that original sin had extinguished God’s grace in Adam’s heirs, and that consequently mankind had the power to do good, to convert themselves from sin by their own power, and the ability to work out their own salvation. Religion’s purpose is to teach us virtue, from which we can expect reward from God. By great efforts, it is possible for those in the flesh to achieve moral perfection.

So, Pelagius wanted humans to be morally accountable.  The idea that we are saved by Grace alone and not good works, gets humans off the hook for their behavior.  The Christian could say, “Well, I may have done a lot of bad things in life, but I believe in Christ as my personal savior and so I will go to Heaven anyway, saved by His Grace.”  This interpretation makes perfect sense if we think the point of the death of the Divine Son (the “death” of God) was to redeem us from Sin and Death.  If you could save yourself by being good, then that makes a mockery of the big sacrifice that saves us.  But if you cannot save yourself by being good, what is the point of being good?  You see the problem.  Some in the Church, even after Augustine, persisted in asserting that you had to store up merit in Heaven to get to paradise when you died.  A third Otherworld had to be created to fix the inherent contradictions of the system — Purgatory.  A place where you had to work off your bad deeds if you had not stored up enough merit during your lifetime.

Pelagius avoided this bizarre complexity and the commodification of merit by stating that humans were not totally depraved and had not been deprived of God’s Grace.  Indeed, the point of Jesus’s dying on the cross was to demonstrate to sinful humanity that they too had the Grace of God within their souls.  The implication is one of far more sophisticated moral philosophy.  In stead of using the old pagan and old Jewish idea that the Divine had to be propitiated by sacrifices, and that human sacrifices were the highest form of magic in this regard, the moral philosophy of Pelagius makes the crucifixion as symbolic act meant to teach us dramatically that each of us has immortality, if we only believe in it and can nurture our souls through good works — compassion, helping others, connecting, moving closer to the ideal of Unity, the One.

Well, the Wikipedia article also gives Augustine’s rebuttal.  Permit me to quote and dissect.

Pelagius’s seemingly optimistic creed in fact burdens weak mortals with a burden too great to bear; or at least this was part of the response of St Augustine…

Who says it is “too great to bear”?  That is merely circular reasoning. Only God can say whether asking mortals to raise themselves to the level of the Divine is a “burden” at all.  Pelagius’s  understanding of Grace is that God gave it to us (Gratia means “gift”).  Even if we accept the validity of the myth of expulsion from paradise, the myth does not say that God took back the gift of life from us.  If he had, Adam and Eve would simply have dropped dead.  What the myth says is that Adam and Eve were sent out into a world less hospitable than the Garden and had to work for their living.  Now, for an upper class Roman like Augustine, having to work for your living, might seem like eternal damnation, or and unbearable burden, but the rest of humanity knows quite well it is possible to grow your own food by the sweat of your brown and suffer the travails of childbirth and still be a good person,loving and helpful to others, and not too selfish.

The burden “too great to bear” is Augustine’s ridiculously extreme standard of perfection.  He says, paraphrased by Wikipedia:

The taint of original sin did extinguish God’s grace in men’s souls; no matter how righteously they conducted themselves, their virtues could never make them worthy of the infinite holiness of God. Men are massa peccati, a mass of sin; they can no more endow themselves with grace than an empty glass can fill itself.

Can humans be “perfect” ?  Perhaps not. But can they be good enough to be loved by God and taken to live with him to complete their moral education in Heaven?  I think so.  By positing that God’s “infinite holiness” requires humans to become infinitely holy in order to be “worthy” of Him, Augustinian thought makes it impossible for anyone to ever by worthy.  But this is a deliberate fabrication of Augustine.  It presumes to know God’s mind.  And why, I wonder, would God, the omnipresent spirit of the universe who, by definition of “omnipresent,” resides in each one of us, think that we are unworthy of Him.  We ARE Him.  Augustine’s argument (as presented) is the equivalent of a person saying that his red blood cells are not worthy of being a part of him because they are not his whole body.  The logic is ludicrous, and is made infinitely more ludicrous when we are talking about a Person whose “body” is infinite.  Obviously no part of that body can ever equal the infinite whole.  Yet, presumably it is not too far-fetched to posit that part of something infinite partakes by nature of that whole infinity in some way.

Augustine’s characterization of humankind as “a mass of sin” or an “empty glass” comes from no logical premise at all.  These are merely statements that, since I have read his Confessions, I believe come from his own self-loathing.  The man was pathological and it is sad that there were no psychoanalysts around to help him work through his guilt about sex and his mother-complex.  Augustine’s boyhood debauchery haunted him as an old man, and that self-loathing was turned into theology.  It is almost mind-bogglingly sad.  The man passed on his self-hatred and the feeling that he himself was nothing more than a mass of sin to generations of Christians who believed him to be a wise saint.

The writer of the Wikipedia article on Grace makes another point which I have already addressed, but the point as stated shows the kind of blindness to logic and premises that characterize Augustinian thought.

…More importantly, it does not clearly explain why Jesus Christ had to die for anyone’s sins; if men can redeem themselves by their own efforts, atonement by Jesus on the Cross was at best a vague sort of moral example…

As I pointed out above, the theology of Pelagius invites us to cast off the ancient pagan basis for this bit of theological theory.  Jesus overthrew the tables of the money changers in the temple and condemned the temple sacrifices not to foreshadow his own sacrifice as the “real thing.” He condemned the practice of offering sacrifices because it was so archaic and because it had become big business.  It was not only old-fashioned magic; it was not necessary.  Admittedly, I am a bit fuzzy about where the idea of “atonement” comes into the Biblical accounts.  I suspect, however, that it was not something Jesus said, but rather an interpretation of his death, an attempt to make sense out of it in the archaic logic of temple sacrifices.

Greek philosophy eventually could do better than that.  Possibly Pelagius teaches us that Druid philosophy could do better than that too.  The mechanistic notion that human sacrifice was necessary to perform acts of salvation for the whole people goes back to the most primitive state of human mental development.  The idea of blood sacrifice atoning for some evil deed is a stock part of ancient pre-Christian religions and the fact that Christian theologians should think they had to perpetuate this idea rather than refute it, is one of those queer puzzles in history.  One can only suppose that either the religious leaders were incapable of thinking in other terms,or that they felt they could better sell their new religion to the masses by talking in terms of blood sacrifice and atonement. But was this following Jesus’s teaching?  I think quite the contrary.

Augustine and his ilk believed they were adding a kind of Roman sophistication to blood sacrifice by sacrificing one Son of God once and for all for all time.  A blood sacrifice so great it would atone for every sin past, present, and future.  It is perhaps worth noticing that this idea of blood sacrifices had become a sport and form of entertainment among Romans.  Augustine writes of attending the Arena as a young man.  It was one of the things that disgusted him and started his personal reformation and turn to Christianity, his mother’s religion.  But blood sacrifice was deeply ingrained in Roman culture at that time, and it may come as no surprise that Augustine and his fellows decided to turn Jesus into the ultimate sacrificial victim.

The Romans of Jesus’s time, however, did not see his crucifiction as either entertainment or magico-religious blood sacrifice.  They saw it as an execution of a person tried and condemned for sedition.

Finally, the Wikipedia article offers the following rebuttal to Pelagius and the question of human free will in relation to the empty glass filing itself.

… While we may have “free will” (liberum arbitrium) in the sense that we can choose our course of conduct, we nevertheless lack true freedom (libertas) to avoid sin, for sin is inherent in each choice we make. It is only by God’s sovereign choice to extend His grace to us that salvation is possible.

This, alas, is a straw man argument.  Pelagius, I believe, did not suggest that humans could completely avoid sin — that is that they could become so perfect they would never make a mistake.  But on the moral plane, he believed that one could choose perfectibility.  That is, one could make the choice to improve oneself morally, mentally, and physically.  The claim that “sin is inherent in each choice we make” is unwarranted.  There is no reason to believe this except because you believe Augustine’s premise that humans are a “mass of sin.”  That assertion is predicated on the premise that in Eden God removed his Grace from Adam and Eve and so from the whole human race.  That particular premise is the one Pelagius refuses to accept.  He does so wisely because it is a hypothesis that is unproven and against which there seems to be plentiful evidence.

If God’s Grace had been “removed” from our being, then how could we ever choose to do good?  How could we even live?  Because we presume God to be omnipotent, He could presumably do the deed.  He could withdraw his Grace from us, if he chose to do so.  But doing so, he would be withdrawing his Grace from part of himself, since he is also omnipresent.  It would be a lapse of Divine Love, which we suppose to be infinite.  It hardly remedies the logical contradiction to say that God thought better of his choice and offered up this very convoluted plan to eventually (thousands of years later) send a Savior who was Himself in human form.  What, one may well ask, is the point of that?  It seems preposterous.  The idea of Atonement instead of Teaching as the point of the life of Rabbi Yeshua ben Yoseph is a travesty.  Jesus was a man who was trying to get us to see that we all live by means of Grace and contain the presence of God.  In saying that he was a Son of God, he hoped to break through the notion that humans are mere “creatures” and God the “Creator” who fashioned them from clay thousands of years before and gave them life.  The dichotomy between Creator and creature is what separates us from the Divine and fills us with fear and guilt.  To realize that the Creator is not only our Father, but dwells in us in his omnipresence, is to realize the perfectibility of our nature.  And by perfectibility, I mean, the ability to strive toward those three qualities — power, knowledge, and presence — that characterize the Divine One.  The mystery of the meaning of those three terms is what the good Rabbi, and so many other moral teachers, have continued to teach.  Continued, because  all humankind had not learned the lesson yet.

Pelagianism was repudiated by the Council of Carthage in 417, largely at Augustine’s insistence. The Eastern Orthodox Church, as expressed in the teachings of John Cassian, holds that though grace is required for men to save themselves at the beginning; there is no such thing as total depravity, but there remains a moral or noetic ability within men that is unaffected by original sin, and that men must work together (synergism) with divine grace to be saved.

– OWL

August is one of my favorite times of year.  Here in Minneapolis, MN, the rowan tree in my back garden is full of brilliant orange berries. My hawthorn tree is laden with haws, the fruit of the whitethorn, turning from green to pink on their way to deep crimson.  The bees are ecstatically harvesting the nectar from my hissop flowers.  I have a few tomatoes ripening on the vines amid the other curious plants in my herb patch.  I am nurturing a Scarlet Firethorn and a variety of winter-hardy holly which, in a few years, I hope will take over that space beside the patio.  My two hazel trees are doing well.  The male, which started as a contorted hazel, but was smashed by some workers taking down a neighbor’s elm, is now about twelve feet tall.  The little female is bearing lovely plump nuts again this year.  Of course the squirrels always whisk them away before I can see the matured nuts, but that’s all right.  My garden fruits are mostly for the benefit of the little creatures.

This morning we had a beautiful crashing thunderstorm roll through just at sunrise and it is still quite dark and drippy.  But that did not stop my wee cat Minerva from begging to go out and hunt.  So many chipmunks, so little time!  Among the dead bodies buried in my garden, I  now number a crow.  A very large and handsome fellow, all in shining black.  I do not know how he died.  Perhaps just passed away i his sleep perched in the ash trees and fell beside my drive.  No signs of a fight.  No reason to suspect fowl play.  I gave him a burial and laid a large flagstone over his grave.  A worthy familiar of Bran the Blessed and the Great Queen Maeve.  Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

This year we have had uncommonly cool dry weather.  It has only decided to be rainy this past month and we have had a few hot days.  Beautiful weather on the whole.  Because of the lack of heat and humidity, it has not been a good summer for tornadoes. However, we did have the excitement of a couple of small tornadoes that went right through downtown Minneapolis.  Little damage, but quite amazing.  Of course, here at home we saw nothing except on the telly.  It was perhaps thirty blocks away from us, so all we had was the rain.  Personally, I think the presence of a convention of Lutheran ministers trying to decide whether they would allow openly gay ministers had something to do with the tornado passing directly over the convention center.  Just a little reminder of who is boss?

I prefer to sit and watch the growing things and the beauty of the natural world, rather than to listen to all the troubling news on the radio.  The idea that people are mounting threatening and abusive protests to disrupt the “own hall” meetings of their congressional delegates is in itself appalling, but the fact that they are protesting the attempt to reform the healthcare and health insurance system is horrifying and disgusting.  Once again, I am ashamed of my fellow Americans.  Why do we have to be this way?  Why do humans resort to verbal abuse and conflict instead of coming together to solve problems?  More especially problems that have the capacity to destroy our entire economy.

It is particularly perplexing to me that so many of these people who do not wish to do anything to help the poor and disadvantaged call themselves Christians.  What Jesus do they think they are following?

I do have at least a little sense of history, and to watch an element in our society rise up and call the liberal government “fascists” and compare it to the Nazi party of Germany strikes fear into my heart.  Because these people seem to me to be just like Hitler’s “brownshirts.”  They are rabble-rousers playing on the emotions of the mob and working them with lies to create a climate of hysterical fear.  Hitler rose to power by whipping up the fear of communists in the German people.  It was a real fear for Germany with the Russian Revolution on the other side of Poland.  But these people today, who presumably also call themselves Republicans, are raising boogey men, a straw man they call “Socialism” and “Big Government” which have nothing at all to do with party politics.  Both of the major parties in America have continuously increased the size and power of the federal government.  And no one has demonstrated that doing so is intrinsically bad.

Instead, there is this loud and violent faction in our country who promulgate the myth that government officials are the ultimate evil, that “bureaucracy” is always bad.  It is thinking that is strikingly similar to the black and white ethics of certain religions — a myth which people embrace thoughtlessly and believe as if it were an absolute truth.  One finds, sadly, that it is the so-called “conservatives” who tend to believe in the possibility of absolute, unchanging truths.  But this way of thinking is also nothing more than a matter of blind faith.

Homo sapiens.  The “sapiens” aspect which is supposed to be about reason, language, and the use of tools, all too seldom rises above the level of low cunning, rationalization of selfishness, and superstition.  The news does not do much credit to the species.  The result for me is that I feel all the more alienated.  How is it that there can be such enormous differences among members of the same species?  Does one find Bengal tigers polarized into those who like to hunt and kill and abuse other tigers, and those who try to help their fellow felines (not to mention all the other animals of the wild)?  No, it is almost as if some members of the species Homo sapiens are predators and some are cooperative, gentle, herd animals.  The latter too often  becoming the prey of the former.

A wise Masonic brother of mine last night remarked that Capitalism as a system could not do anything other than advance to the state of its own collapse.  Its own logic perpetuates scarcity and so cannot possibly be used to create a stable, sustainable economy in which our species can be at peace and those with wealth take care of those without, compassionately.  I am not sure if this is an intrinsic systemic structure within Capitalism or whether it is a matter of Capitalism combined with a religious and philosophical culture of conquest and conversion, a philosophy of “enlightened self-interest” that never actually became enlightened.

I haven’t the cranial capacity to figure out such large problems, but it does seem unlikely that we are going to be able to extricate ourselves from this mess.  Capitalism has become dependent upon cheap energy during the Age of Oil, and that is coming to an end.  If our social order and democratic institutions of government have not evolved beyond shouting and name-calling and partizan politics, then we will not be able to solve these problems and America’s demise is certain.  Of course, some of us will remain and make a new life.  But will we be overrun by religious fanatics?  War lords?  Roving bands of pirates and brigands?  Will we be overwhelmed by the rising oceans and the collapse of commerce and governments.  Where then will our liberal  belief in the power of education to enlighten be?  When the vandals are at the gates and the halls of learning lie abandoned along with the halls of government?

The prospect of a new Dark Age is too frightening and even those who can see its approach must turn away from it.  I can derive no hope from technology or “American ingenuity.”  I derive hope only from the brilliant rowan berries and the bees gathering the hyssop nectar.

OWL

I have gone several weeks without an Owl.  Partly this is because I have been writing in a new blog called Emily Glass Notes. Not a very exciting title, but I wanted to dedicate a separate log to my writing thoughts. And since most of my time is consumed with writing thoughts (or at least the interesting thoughts), there is less of a general nature to write here.

Let me, as I listen to the rain outside the window of my basement study, meditate on the death of Frank McCourt.  I confess that I have not read “Angela’s Ashes” or his other works, but his life is interesting and inspiring to a writer.  He worked as a high school teacher much of his life, and only took up writing at the end of his life.  That in itself is encouraging.  At my age, I begin to look ahead and think: How am I going to possibly get everything done before my body wears out.

Frank McCourt wrote out of a childhood of terrible poverty, and I sometimes feel that a writer like myself, born to privilege and affluence, cannot hope to write as well as someone who has struggled and suffered.  But maybe that’s my Christian upbringing.  Suffering builds character and all that.  I can’t escape believing that truism.  Yet I also cannot escape my life as it is.

So, I just follow the muse.

Recently I watched the TV miniseries “The Flame Trees of Thika”  it was originally aired in the ’70s (I think) and I remember it being quite highly praised.  I came on it now because of my Hailey Mills obsession.  The adult Haley Mills plays the mother, Tilly in the screen adaptation of Elspeth Huxley’s memoir.  I liked the mini-series so well that I bought a lovely old hardcover copy of the book and am reading it.  The evocation of Africa in 1913 is marvelous.  That is the sort of world I like to escape into when reading a book.  Both sad and wonderful.

What is interesting in comparing book and screen is that in the former the young girl Elspeth is the narrator, but she narrates as an adultl looking back so that she is not the main character.  Her mother is.  In the screen version, naturally, the young girl who plays Elspeth is the main character, which shifts the emphasis subtly.  I can enthusiastically recommend both book and series.  As always, I notice what the author is doing as I read.  Huxley’s craft is remarkable.  Some of her descriptive passages are sublime.  Africa, after all, is a pretty sublime place.  I’ve seen only South Africa.  Maybe someday we will have the money to visit Kenya.

The vivid creation of a world that is wholly alien to the Western mind is what I enjoy, and the fact that it was a real world, historically, and is stll a real place one could travel to — that adds to the pleasure of the read.

July has been remarkably cool this year.  I’m glad that the rain came tonight.  Our poor garden needed it.

As I wait for my daughter to come home from school on the penultimate day of fifth grade, my cat Minerva has sprawled herself on my lap and is trying to subtly push my laptop off.  Her tail keeps straying onto the trackpad to make the cursor go bananas.  This seems to me to be a metaphor for life.  Are you going to devote yourself to knowledge and the pursuit of self-expression on the newest medium, the Internet?  Or are you going to shut up with your fingers and pet your cat?

I need novelist’s career counseling or some nice group of other writers in Minneapolis who can sit around with a cup of tea and talk shop.  The very unpleasant thing about being a practicing novelist (that is practicing as apposed to actually published) is that you haven’t anyone with whom you can talk shop.  You can read helpful books about how to become a successful writer, which is nice, but not the same as real human beings encouraging you.

On the other hand I cringe at the idea of “sharing” my first drafts with anyone.  As Hemingway (or somebody of that ilk) said, “First drafts are always crap.”  Maybe it was F.Scott Fitzgerald.  Maybe I should make my pen name F.Scott Fitzmarten.  I am dragging myself around today with the effects of bad living again.  I think I have to give up whiskey and smoking as well as everything else.  Must adopt a proper ape lifestyle, eating fruits and vegetables and nuts and so forth.  I still eat meat and fish and they don’t bother me, but really, I don’t think it is good for one.  Still, I am sure I haven’t the virtue to give up meat.

Anyway, in this melancholy state, under cloudy skies, I really only want to lie down.  However, I have managed to think about my plot.  I have half a first draft and all sorts of threads.  But now I am getting anxious that the threads are not going to pull themselves together for the resolution.  I’m still really in the Middle — the complication stage, where the protagonist encounters problems in her movement towards he goal.

One problem is that I need to define her goal.  Is she going to pursue hidden knowledge and try to understand her world?  Or is she going to pet the cat?  That is such a great metaphor that I have no idea what it means.

Choices.  Moral choices, and choices of action that lead to reaction and new knowledge.  Ladedahdodah.

You know the thing is that it is more fun to work out the neat plot of a novel with a nice resolution, or even a clif-hanger ending that leads to the next book in the series is so much more pleasant than dealing with the absolutely unpredictable business of one’s mundane life.  What is my life?  Non-fiction?  Why are we stuck having to have a non-fiction life?  Where is the fun of that.  I object!

Rollo May wrote a book about finding your own Myth in life and living it.  I rather like that idea.  I’m not sure that I like the myth I am in, however.  The dragon of dispepsia and the hydra of sleep apnea do not seem like very good monsters to have to slay.  And I am not having much luck slaying them.  It is more like, “Well, you have to learn to live with them and just bear up.”  How heroic is that?

No, really, I’m in the dish-washing, laundry, vacuuming, and making bag lunches myth.  Thankfully that does include petting the cat and napping as well, but it is really really super unheroic with knobs on.  What I would like is to be in a Romance.  You know the sort with a happy ending.  But I feel quite too old for that now.  Sweeping damsels off there feet is frowned upon by society once you are yourself a father of a young damsel.  You are just considered a villain then.

On the other hand, being the villain in the myth might be preferable to just being the helpful peasant dish-washer.  Yes, indeed.  But I don’t think I am really villain material.

Why must I live my life in prose?  Why not poetry?  Or better still: song!

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, says Hamlet.  He is so obscure.  But if we are talking about my dreams, I would rather be made of something else.  Aluminium perhaps.  No, silver.  No, cake.  Wait –

Oh, never mind.

There was a brief article in the magazine “The Week” which prompted this entry in the Weekly Owl.  We in the U.S. and the rest of the English-speaking post-colonial world have arrived at an odd cultural point.  I hazard the guess that most Americans today have at least heard of Wicca.  Many know that it is a “witchcraft” religion.  Fundamentalists undoubtedly reject it as the work of their Devil using the simple logic that reality is divided into two warring camps: The true faithful, and those whose souls are under the influence of the Great Adversary.

We are rather used to that situation and Western pagans have learned to deal with it.  There are still many states in the U.S. where pagans live a closeted existence, but Wicca can adapt to that quite easily since part of its structure emulates the medieval folklore of witches meeting secretly in covens.  They are not very often functioning as cunning folk or healers in their village, much less doing juju for their neighbors.

In Africa, on the other hand, in countries such as Liberia, Ghana, and Congo the cultural situation regarding witchcraft is just as bad as it was in medieval Europe.  Even heads of state have believed in the efficacy of “juju” and have both employed it to try to increase their personal power or launched witch hunts to apprehend and kill witches.  Many people practice witchcraft (or as some anthopologists would prefer to say, “sorcery.”).  Many others hire witches or sorcerers to help them get rich, find love, get revenge, and all the usual things witches have been employed to do.

This stuff is, at least in part, what the thousands of Harry Potter fans would call “the Dark Arts.”  One practice mentioned in the article in “The Week” is using the body parts of albinos for magic.  This practice has resulted in the murder of albino people and has left the entire substantial albino population living in fear.  This sort of magic is the real old magic.  It is not  self-improvement through candle magic or creative visualization.  it is not even raising “demons” using formulas from medieval ceremonial magic.  Those practices seem merely stupid, but not violent and socially pernicious.

I wonder how many modern Western pagans or witches know about how witchcraft has been practiced in the past and is being practiced in the present.  The belief in magic can be nothing more than a type of stupidity, that bane of the human condition.  It is a mistake, a lapse in reason, that can make even highly educated people do things that others would consider bizarre if not criminal, and certainly nothing more than idiocy.

I have been  reading  Paul Tabori’s 1959 book The Natural Science of Stupidity (re-issued by Barnes and Noble as The Natural History of Stupidity in 1993).  The book is, in part, a study of the ability (or even tendency) of humans to believe things that seem utterly absurd and have no basis in actual facts.  There are certain fears and desires instinctive in human beings that can override the capacity to reason, suspend the critical faculty of judgment, and lead all of us into acting stupidly.

Curiously, in American society (at least where I live in Minnesota) calling someone “stupid” is considered a grave insult.  Certainly it may be that.  But what we are rather stupidly ignoring is that we are all stupid at some time or other.  Some people become chronically stupid as some irrational belief takes over their mind to such an extent that they constantly make errors in handling facts.

What we also lose in trying to remove the word “stupid” from polite conversation is the ability to understand the horrifically destructive capacity of human stupidity.  When humans believe that witches are cursing people, or that children who have serious illnesses are “witches” who must be killed, or when they believe such groundless ideas as that another country is hiding weapons of mass destruction, or that our country has the moral right to invade anyone, or that war is an effective way to resolve differences of opinion — these sort of acts of stupidity result in enormous death and suffering.

Tabori notes that among the many kinds of stupidity is prejudice.  A belief founded regardless of fact, and often built upon wild stories passed on from parent to child.  Conspiracy theories are the more serious pathological version of prejudice.  But as Tabori points out, prejudice by itself is more or less passive.  It is intolerance that is the active form, acts of hatred against individuals or groups of people who have been labeled “the Other” and who are imagined to be dangerous.

Antisemitism has been a long-standing historically pervasive form of prejudice and souce of intolerance.  Hitler elevated it to the point of being a touchstone against which every other act of intolerance is measured.  You cannot carry intolerance much farther than genocide.  But what we may fail to stop and consider is that the root of all this horror is stupidity, belief in things that are clearly idiocy to any dispassionate observer who is not caught up in the mass delusion.

Pause to consider the followering proposals:

“Let’s kill all the Jews and that will restore peace and order to our society.”

or,

“Let’s kill all the witches… or, …all the heretics… or all the Westerners…  or all the homosexuals…”

“Kill them!  Bomb them!”

This basic idea that killing off some group of people is going to make things better for us, make us safer, restore our culture to its past righteousness or glory.  This idea has been the thing motivated not only every war and street fight, but also such huge endeavors as imperialism, slavery, the subjection of wives and daughters to male authority, and the subjection of sons to adult male authority.

The latter enterprises have consumed an enormous amount of human energy and resources over the past several thousand years.  Men do not kill women or boys, unless they are incorrigible in their rebellion.  The killing is most often simply killing their independent thought.  It is the use of beatings and the threat of death to subjugate, but more than that to indoctrinate this particular sort of stupidity.  Namely the belief that adult males are smarter, wiser, and more dependable than women, girls, or boys.

Feminist critics have identified this particular naked emperor as Patriarchy, the belief that old men know best and shouild enforce their rule by violence.  So, boys in school are caned, wives beaten, daughters forced to marry who their father chooses, and other women subjected to rape, all on the grounds that men are superior and priviledged — usually bolstered with some religious story.

The willingness of humans to swallow religious stories in place of facts and empirical knowledge is such a vast field of stupidity that one can hardly begin to describe it.  Nearly everyone who believes the stories of their own religion as true also adds the stupid mistake of thinkning that everyone else’s religious stories are false and pernicious.

Now, you may be asking how a self-professed wizard and modern druid can call magic “stupid.”  This is something that, for me, is at the very center of the Bardic system of life.  The bard understands what is story and what is fact.  The druids of old guarded the facts and the bards made sure that the people understood how stories worked.  Now, I have no evidence that this was true in days of yore.  Probably not.  Most likely Celts in the Iron Age and the Middle Ages were just as prone to stupidity as anyone else.  Anthropologists call the belief that religious stories (myths) are actually true “superstition.”  Similarly, belief in the efficacy of magical charms and spells based on “tradition” rather than experience, is another sort of superstition.  But both of these types of superstition are at base human stupidity.

Some historians have viewed religion and magic both as ways to keep the ignorant common folk under control.  Ignorance certainly doesn’t help one to avoid stupidity, but it is not at all the same thing.  The supposed ruling classes of priests were being just as stupid as anyone else.  Once a belief has been embraced, however improbable, fantastical, or idiotic, education only makes the mistake worse.  Occasionally, nowadays, education does prompt young people to recognize beliefs that they have taken as true by nothing more than blind obedience to some authority, be it priest, pastor, mullah, high priestess, or parent.

Modern paganism is founded on the idea that Christian myths are a bunch of baloney, but I wonder how many pagans shine the same critical light of reason on the stories that have become traditional among modern pagans.  The idea, for example, that magical acts (even if disguised as New Age techniques) can cause one to find one’s soul mate, grow rich, and so forth.  The fact that the book “The Secret” was such a best-seller testifies to the fact that we as humans have not overcome this sort of stupidity.

For me, being a wizard means seeking wisdom and loving it.  Wisdom is the opposite of stupidity.  It involves learning from your experiences.  Inner experiences or outer experiences, but not other people’s experiences.  That is, other people’s claims cannot be taken as fact until they have been thoroughly investigated and tested.  The use of sorcery to kill other people is clearly evil, but using it to convince others that what you believe is true instead of teaching them to think clearly for themselves, is practically as bad.  It can destroy a life too, only more slowly.

That is one reason I do not like to “teach magic” — Passing off one’s own beliefs to other people who willingly accept them as authoritative, is never wise and never courteous to the pupil. The human desire to love authorities comes from human stupidity, a kind of laziness that longs to abdicate the work of truth to other people, usually people in the past, or who claim to be passing on amazing magical traditions that have been preserved for thousands of years.

The true wizard must never encourage stupidity in his or her pupils.  Having “followers” is itself an act of stupidity, a mistake of reasonable thinking.  Believing in one’s own super-powers to the point of wishing to gather up students and admirers crosses the divide between wisdom and stupidity.  Why?  Because your experience, and your interpretation of your experience are not the same as “facts.”  Until someone else experiences the same or similar phenomena themselves, and does the work of collecting facts and interpreting them for themselves, they cannot be a wizard.

This criticism could be applied to all education, of course, but in the realm of magic and spirituality, the offenses are far more egregious than in other fields.  There are certainly examples, of course in which teachers taught things that were completely untrue based on authorities.  This was a big problem in the medieval universities and the system that evolved out of it up until well into the 20th century.  A few examples must suffice.  The age of the Earth and humankind was not taught correctly until well into the 19th century.  In physics, Newtonian laws of motion and thermodynamics were taught as if they could explain all natural phenomena until Einstein developed new ideas.  Historians taught that the Roman historians were reliable sources of factual information, and also acepted the idea that the Bible was a historical account of true facts.  Some still want to teach that.  Biologists promulgated the notion that humanity was divided into distinct races with particular characteristics and that white Europeans were just naturally smarter than others.  This teaching ironically proved just the opposite.

In the arts also one can find stupidity.  Until quite recently, professors of literature beleived devoutly that there was a sacred “canon” of English literature that everyone should learn and that teaching students to read books outside of that canon was wrong-headed.  Literature professors still sometimes embrace the idea that interpreting books or poems in the light of sexism or racism is completely illegitimate.  Up until the 19th century many art critics believed that there were established natural laws of painting or drawing, natural laws of what could be called “beauty.”

Today, in a world that has become dominated by advertising as the pervasive form of thinking, people are encouraged to believe that the health and welfare of our culture depends on our buying more things, accumulating stuff.  Advertising and motion pictures also promote the idea that physically beautiful people are the only ones worth consideration.  They promote the idea that infatuation will lead to lasting “true love” even if a girl has fallen head-over-heals for a handsome vampire.

I feel sorry about the situation of witchcraft in Africa, and I know that similar problems exist all around the world.  Our naive belief that magic is benign and harmless is dangerous not because the sorcerer’s apprentice is likely to release powers he cannot control.  It is dangerous because it encourages human stupidity.  And human stupidity kills.  Let us teach wisdom instead, for the stupidity of humans is the number one problem threatening us and our planet.  How?  By questioning any popular beliefs rigorously, especially if we are inclined to accept them on authority.  We should question the belief that the global climate is changing because of greenhouse gasses with exactly the same rigor that we wish our ancestors had questioned the belief that building cars and internal combustion engines was nothing but good for us and harmless to the planet.  Or as we wish our ancestors had questioned the belief that forcing the American Indians off their land was not only good for us white folks but good for them.

The Wizard asks questions. Any wizard who offers you answers should be met with rigorous critical suspicion, not superstitious awe.

OWL

It is fair to speculate that modern Druidry was influenced by the ideas of Deism current in the 17th and 18th centuries when the seeds of the modern druid orders were planted.  I have suggested elsewhere in these pages that Druidry and Freemasonry are related, probably cousins although each might lay a certain claim to being the “father” of the other.  I say this because some Freemasons in that early period and in the nineteenth century as well, have suggested that Freemasonry the revival of the ancient wisdom of the Druids.

The claim may sound curious without the logic upon which it is built.  The first premise is that Masonry is a mystery tradition, not just a fraternity, and that it is the vehicle by means of which the old spiritual wisdom and initiatic current was transmitted to the modern age in Europe.  The second premise is that there was a unified and universal religion practiced by our prehistoric ancestors and from this religion descended all modern religions.  Corrollary to the second premise is the idea that the descent of religion involved it moving away from its pure roots and becoming corrupted by priesthoods that desired to use it a a tool for politics and power.  The initiatice tradition of individual enlightenment was replaced with various social forms of mediation, placing priesthoods between God and ordinary people.

W. L. Wilmshurst in his classic book The Meaning of Masonry suggests this kind of devolution of spiritual insight into priestly mediation.  Now, of course, such a thing is highly conjectural and as a generalization will probably not stand to scrutiny, but it is one of the beliefs upon which much Enlightenment religious thinking was based.  Another key idea related to the idea of devolution of spirituality from its pure source is that of Natural Religion.  This idea, developed by Deists among others, maintained that morality could be reduced to logical and rational principles without reference to any particular religious sect.  This Natural Religion, was in fact the essence of the pure religion before it was added to with needless accretions of pomp and ritual apparatus and hierarchies.

At the same time, we find that these thinkers looked back to ancient India and Egypt as sources for the great mystery schools of initiation that passed on the Secret Doctrine (as Blavatsky called it).  The belief was that this Secret Doctrine had been passed down though secret organizations from master to pupil since the dawn of time.  This was a central tenet of Theosophy.  But Natural Religion is simpler even that that and it will, I believe, do modern Druids good to think about its six moral precepts.  I paraphrase loosely from an article by Chris Impens called “The First Charge Revisited.” in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (Vol. 120 for 2007), a paper to which I do not have immediate access but which has been quoted by one of my correspondents. Impens himself is, I believe, quoting another author named Clarke, though I lack the full reference.  I will offer the paraphrase of each precept and then my own commentary.

ONE
All created rational Beings, depend continually upon God.  Therefore, they are rationally  bound to adore, worship and obey God; to praise him for all things they enjoy, and to pray him for every thing they want.  This, of course, begs the question What is God? But we may easily turn around the statement to discover the answer.  God is a word we use to denote that spiritual invisible power within every rational being that is the source of its reason, its being, and all the good fortune of life.  God is a power for Good and for Reason and each human being derives its ability to do good things and to reason from that source.  For this reason it is metaphorically called The Father, or even The Allfather.  We “depend” on God in the sense that our Being comes from that source, the word “depend” in its Latin root (dependare) meaning “to hang down from.”

TWO
All are bound to promote, in their proportion, and according to the extent of their several powers and abilities, the general good and welfare of those parts of the world, wherein they are placed, especially to make it their business by an universal Benevolence, to promote the happiness of all others.  The logic of this is that by the first moral law, all humans are brothers and sisters, ultimately emanating or proceeding from the same single source denoted by the word God.

THREE
In order to do this, every human being is bound always to behave himself towards others, as in reason he would desire they should in like circumstances deal with him.  This law is, of course, the Golden Rule.  It proceeds logically from the first law in that this is the way we may rationally judge how to behave from a mental attitude of empathy and compassion.

FOUR
Therefore, we are obliged triply:
A.  To obey and submit to our superiors in all just things, for the preservation of Society, and the Peace and benefit of the Public

B.  To be just and honest, equitable and sincere, in all our dealings with our equals, for the keeping inviolable the everlasting Rule of Righteousness, and maintaining an universal confidence, friendship, and affection amongst Men

C.  To our Inferiors to be gentle and kind, easy and affable, charitable and willing to assist as many as may be in need our help, for the preservation of universal Love and Benevolence in Mankind.

In these three parts of the Fourth Law we find imbedded social and economic distinctions, not because these are Divinely ordained, but because they are facts of life in human society.  This law is about how we are to act within that social order and boils down to treating everyone equitably and respecting social authorities who have power over us, so long as they are just in their actions.

FIVE
In respect of ourselves we are bound to preserve our own Being and the right use of all our faculties, so long as it shall please God, who appointed him his Station in this World, to continue therein.  Which is to say that we are obliged by this interdependency and descent from God to take care of ourselves and developed ourselves in all our mental faculties, spiritual faculties, and physical faculties until such time as we pass away into another existence.

SIX
We are bound to have an exact Government of our Passions, and to abstain from all Debaucheries and Abuses of ourselves, which tend either to Destruction of our own Being, or to the disordering our Faculties, and disabling us from performing our Duty, of hurrying ourselves into the practice of unreasonable and unjust things.  This law is also a corollary following  on the other premises; namely, that bound together and emanating from the same source, if we destroy ourselves or hurt others through ungoverned passions such as lust, violence, anger, greed, or jealousy, we harm the whole body of Humanity and God.

These laws or obligations may be summarized by ‘the three great and principal Branches, from which al! other and smaller instances of duty do naturally flow, or may without difficulty  be derived’,  these ‘principal Moral Obligations’ being the following three:
Piety or our duty towards God (Rule One); Righteousness or our duty towards each another (Rules Two, Three, and Four); and Sobriety or Our Duty towards Ourselves (Rules Five and Six).

This last formulation could almost be a Druid triad.

So, modern druids, believing that that ancient druids practiced something much closer to Natural Religion than the elaborate priestly religions of Egypt, India, Jerusalem, and Rome, may do well to embrace these six precepts as a guide to Natural Morality.  For the root of all of these is the realization that all beings emanate into this world of forms from a single source.  This is not “monotheism” but simply the idea of the Divine Monad, that all things form a Whole and that there is a source of Being.  Few modern scientists would be likely to disagree with the hypothesis, even though it cannot practically be proven.  Modern scientific thinking has endeavored to keep itself separate from religious thinking, but even so, it accepts as a working hypothesis that all living creatures on Earth descended from the same primordial source of life.  Life, that peculiar and mysterious organization of organisms, must have some Source.  It may be thought that lightning playing upon the primordial soup created life.  But to take that as an hypothesis is almost to step off into the language of myth and it may come as no surprise that the Sky Father or God of Lightning is often the mythic figure identified with this One God who created all beings.

There are, of course, many other creation myths that do not represent the process as the act of an anthropomorphized Source, and many that do not represent creation as something that happened sometime in the past, but rather as something which is always happening.  Still, even modern science seems to think that there is some sort of origin of organic organization on Earth and that this organization advanced in complexity up to the emergence of the human species.  Likewise, many mystical traditions carry this logic further to suggest that the human species is continuing its evolution, not on a material plane so much as on the invisible, spiritual plane.

Modern scientific schools, as a matter of course, identify and describe the actions of many invisible forces and complex systems.  It is not, therefore, too much to ask the modern druid to think of the Spiritual plane of existence as that conglomeration of invisible forces, including the invisible organization and power of the human mind.  If the First Law is accepted as a working hypothesis, then it follows that this universal Source of All is in fact inclusive of All Things, and that it also must include a universal Source of Mind which is manifest in our species, and to a less complicated degree in other species as well.

We observe this concept of Mind in the beehive, the dolphins, the penguins, dogs, cats, and by some extention of the concept even in plant life.  It is an invisible source of action and Will.  In humans it is also a self-aware source.  In a sense, we might say that to believe in God, the One Source of All Things, is to believe that there is a universal unifying ecology which connects All Things.

Those who argue against “monotheism” and in favor of “polytheism” consider the two ideas mutually exclusive.  Why not have many “sources”?  One answer to this question is simply that if we follow that hypothesis, then the whole edifice of this morality collapses.  There is no reason for the Golden Rule, if in fact we are not all connected in some sense, if we are not all brothers and sisters.  It seems safe to say that historically polytheism without the addition of an Allfather of the gods and goddesses logically breeds division and tribalism and pits one group of humans against another.  Nor does it offer any logical reason for respecting other forms of life.  I will not claim it is the “only way” but it is certainly one way to achieve an end to this division and selfishness to adopt the belief in the One as the Source of All.

In the Irish druidic pantheon I believe this One God is the Daghda, whose name is usually translated as simply “The Good God.”  He is noted for his invincible cudgel and his cauldron of infinite food.  Some have identified Daghda’s pot with the Holy Grail because of its limitless powers of fecundity, prosperity, and healing.  In other words, what comes from that cauldron is Goodness.

It will be noticed that the One is the First Law.  As in the Jewish Ten Commandments, the first is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” which does not say, you shall have no other gods. It in fact implies that there are plenty of other gods.  It just says that the speaker is the Allfather, from whom all other gods and all other beings emanates in the act of creation.  In the druid Awen symbol – three rays descending from three points of light and encircled, the three fundamental moral principles may be seen – as stated by Clarke and Impens above:  Piety, Rightousness, and Sobriety.  In other words:  Right Action towards the Source of All; Right Action to All beings; Right action to our own Being.

This concept of Right Action is not only Rational it is also the foundation of the Doctrine of Love.  The Christian “Love thy neighbor as thyself” or the Buddhist’s compassion and right living are only two doctrines in major religions which express this fundamental idea, which is the recognition of the absolute Good of brotherly love.

I’ve been reading Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Humanum Genus which condemns Freemasonry.  Although it dates from 1884, I suspect that the opinions expressed in it have lingered on.  Once a Pope proclaims something it is pretty hard for Catholics to ignore it later and admit that it was founded on mistaken assumptions or bad information.  If I may be permitted to summarize, Pope Leo essentially claims that Freemasons are in league with socialists and communists and have virtually take over all the governments of Europe (or at any rate in several predominantly Catholic countries).  He asserts that Freemasons are also “naturalists” who believe that morality and truth can be based on the observation of Nature without regard for a deity of any sort, or divine revelation.

There are two lines of objection to these claims.  One is that the radical, anti-clerical element among Freemasons has always been a limited group and very often condemned by regular Masons.  The other is that the rejection of Naturalism as a philosophic stance depends on logical premises that the modern world has largely rejected.

A glance at the history of European Masonry in the nineteenth century (as I have taken) reveals that Masons were involved with the infamous Carbonari and with various other political groups of the period whose aim was indeed the destruction of the Ancien Regime, as the French called it.  In the early part of the century (when Pope Leo XIII was growing up and working his way upward through the church hierarchy in Italy) such groups were working for the secular unification of Italy and the aboliton of the temporal power of the Popes as rulers over the Papal States in central Italy.  Popes were essentially theocrats with lands of their own, operating as a government.

It is not surprising therefore that cardinals and popes of the period would be aghast at the notion, then emerging, of the separation of Church and State.  In countries that had long been dominated by Catholicism, the state and the church worked hand in hand, the aristocrats often becoming the priests, bishops and potentates of the church.  Indeed, Pope Leo himself was the son of an Italian nobleman, Count Pecci.  It is hard for Americans today to quite imagine how thoroughly interwoven church and state were in Catholic countries and how ancient this system was.  In brief, the alliance between noble families and the Catholic Church had been instrumental in preserving what civilization there was after the collapse of the Roman Empire around the year 500.

So, the 1800’s were, in fact, the very tail end of a long process of untangling the power of the popes and the Catholic institution from government in Europe.  Americans have not experienced this process because the British had extricated themselves from Catholicism in the time of Henry VIII (that is the 16th century).  Those religious protestors (the Protestants) who wanted to go even further and break from the state Church of England, were taking this same movement to its next logical step.  The English kings and queens had localized church-state power within their own domain, separating from what they considered to be foreign influence when they created their own state church.  The Church of England was modeled on the Catholic church but turned to the use of English and the elimination of many Catholic doctrines.  Most important among these was the idea of papal infallibility.

English culture, before America was even formed, had turned away from supernaturalism to naturalism, and Pope Leo XIII is correct to some extent in noting that Freemasonry emerged in the full flower of the 18th century, this Age of Reason, in which the philosophy of naturalism was fully in the accendent among intellectuals.  It is important to realize that such ideas were planted in America at its beginning and have been taken for granted, written into our Constitution, making the United States almost unique among nations for adopting the idea of the separation of church and state.  At the beginning of the 21st century, people have forgotten what a big deal this was and why.  But we need only look to the theocracies that still thrive in other parts of the world to imagine what Catholic Europe was like.

I do not mean by such remarks to condemn any of the religions involved but I do personally believe that the union of church and state is an evil.  Pope Leo XIII thought quite the reverse.  To unite the Catholic Church with state governments was the only way to ensure the morality of those governments.  Only the teaching and pressure provided by the Papacy could prevent the return of the sort of monstrous evil that Europe saw in its rulers in earlier ages.  It was taken as obvious that pagan princes and emperors of the Greco-Roman world were the worst kind of perverse tyrants and that society was awash in sinful behavior.  Leo complains about the return of licentiousness and luxury in the Europe of his time and blames it on the radicals, naturalists, and Freemason who have eroded respect for clerical rule.  We can see exactly the same complaints being made today in Afghanistan and Iran and other theocratic states.

“Naturalism” becomes the boogey man just as Westernization, Americanism, or Capitalism have been used as boogey men by various regimes.  Indeed in the Capitalist West “Communism” was the boogey man which had to be destroyed because it was the radical enemy of Us.  Pope Leo evokes the Us versus Them mentality that has been taught by Christian leaders for so many centuries at the beginning of Humanum Genus.There he follows St. Augustine’s idea of the universe divided into two camps, one founded by God and one by Satan; the former is founded on love of God and that latter on hatred for Him.  This model of the universe lies at the center of Christian thinking and is a real bugbear.  It prevents any middle ground, any subtlety of reasoning, and indeed any doubt.  You are either Us or Them, the Catholic Church (the only true religion) or else you are in league with Satan, whether you know it or not.  You don’t have to believe in Satan or even in supernaturalism.  In fact if you deny the existence of either of these things in reality, that just goes to prove how deluded you are by the wily arts of the great Enemy.

As a writer of Fantasy, I find this bugbear particularly annoying because it seeps into the genre of Fantasy to the point of being hackneyed.  How many books or movies can you count that are predicated on Good versus Evil in which these two vague forces are personified by a Hero and an Antihero. Once could almost say that this structure is the foundation of Western literature.  And that is because it is the foundation of Western Thought since the birth of Christian doctrine.  Indeed, two literary works did more to promote this idea as Truth than any number of papal bulls.  Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost developed the personificaton of absolute Evil into a stock character of Romance.

So, this great imaginary battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil militarizes our whole way of thinking and causes many to think of the world in terms of this great cosmic battle.  Every other activity, idea, or freedom is put aside in the name of the War on Evil.  When someone comes along and suggests that we are talking about a myth and that War, in fact, is rather evil in its very nature, that person typically gets shouted down and called a lunatic.  But it is our whole culture that has been in the grips of this lunacy, I am afraid.  Druid of old understood that war was a bad idea, a stupid, destructive, and vain way to try to solve differences between peoples or factions.  Popes on the other hand have made a business out of promoting war.  Even when they embrace the idea of peace in a modern world, as some popes have done, the deep structure of they mythos is based on the War between God and Satan — what we might very easily call “The War on Terror.”

Such a cosmology, especially when a religon insists that it is factually true and not a myth at all, is insidious in shaping the minds of everyone who is exposed to it.  Ironically, the Protestant Reformation, while it broke from the temporal powers of the pope-kings and removed much of the pomp and glamour of Catholicism, only raised the myth of the War between God and the Devil as a central dogma to a fever pitch.  The Devil was everywhere, the reformers said, even in the papacy, so that constant vigillance was required to prevent temptation from entering one’s heart and planting there the seeds of vice.

Freemasonry responded to these irrational and supernatural ways of thinking by questioning their premises.  When whole institutions take as a premise that (a) there is only one true God, and (b) He has revealed all truth and right thinking to Man through the Bible and his chosen Apostles, including the Papacy, and (c) that the whole cosmos is divided into two warring camps whose war will not end until the End Times; then one will arrive at long strings of logic that are utterly untenable to anyone who does not accept those premises.  And those three statements above are exactly that: logical premises, postulates if you will, that are simply taken on authority as a starting point for all rational thought within Catholicism and many other branches of Christian churchdom.

Freemasonry, while trying to maintain the utmost respect for individual conscience in the matter of supernatural beiefs, and while actually requiring that a man profess a belief in some sort of God or Supreme Being, does not accept any of the above postulates.  Instead, under the influence of Naturalism and Rationalism during the 18th century, it takes as a postulate that we learn about God (however we imagine that Being) through the mediation of our five senses and the cultivation of our minds through the seven liberal arts.  I am sometimes unsure whether my Christian brothers in the Fraternity fully grasp how this stance differs from that implicit in most branches of Christianity.  For those latter institutions demand from their adherents obedience to church authorities and a belief in divine Revelation through the Biblical scriptures.  Moreover, even when they actively encourage their adherents to study those scriptures they seldom provide the framework necessary to understand them as historical documents written by men.

Pope Leo XIII in 1884 was surrounded by radicals demanding an end to Vatican power and the separation of religion from politics.  They were not demanding the separation of morality from politics but it is not surprising that Leo thought that was ultimately what would result.  Take the Church out of politics and morality goes with it, because one of the pope’s logical premises is that the Mother Church is the only soure of morality and that left to themselves in their “natural” state, Men are sinful and immoral.  It is a good point.  But Freemasons believed that morality could come from other sources and be taught without reference to supernatural dogmas and authorities.  Some even questioned whether God was a necessary element to inspire men to be moral.  And that, of course, was what got Pope Leo so mad.

But most regular Freemasons do not go that far.  They do not toss out God entirely.  Instead they recognize God as a key idea, a key premise, if you will, upon which morality is founded.  Not because moral behavior is founded on obedience to divine laws and commandments or a personification of some supreme Ruler, King of Kings, etc.  Rather because God is the postulated source of moral goodness, personified not as a King but as a loving Father who teaches his sons to be good men and the methods of self improvement within a view of the world that is fundamentally naturalist rather than supernaturalist.

There is, I believe, nothing in Freemasonry’s rituals and teachings that requires a belief in supernaturalism and indeed most of its lessons are drawn from the metaphorical or allegorical interpretation of men’s lives as workmen, managers, or government officials.  Even King Solomon of myth is shown as a Grandmaster of stonemasons and Geometers, not in the usual autocratic role of “King.”  Even when acting as judge over criminals, Solomon acts as the instrument by which they are punished by their own self-condemnation and guilty consciences.

Radicalism has perhaps not gone out of Freemasonry entirely.  One can only presume there are individual Masons who harbor radical ideas when faced with tyrants in the government of their respective nations, but for the most part Masons are admonished within the craft to be good and peaceful citizens.  This charge is no doubt a response to the hysteria of the nineteenth century in which Freemasonry and the lodge was accused of being a “cover” for illegal and subversive activities — subversive of kings and subversive of clericalism.  The hysteria was to some degree justified in that time and in Europe especially.  It spread to America and was sparked into an explosion in the Morgan affair, but there is no evidence that I have ever seen that such subversive or manipulative or illegal activities were ever a part of American Masonry.

In the Italy and France of Pope Leo XIII, things were quite different.  Social movements were indeed working to topple all the old monarchies and the power of the Papacy and by the end of World War I that had been achieved, mostly through the self-immolation of those power elites.  Of course there will always be those among those aristocratic cirlces who are convinced that Freemasons engineered the whole thing.  What they really mean is that the Devil engineered the whole thing and that Freemasons were his instrument.  The habit of calling all your political adversaries “Devil-worshippers” is a great evil, in my way of thinking.  It dehumanizes them and cuts off any possibility of mutual understanding or negotiaton between different social groups.  To the mentality of aristocrats and popes social groups were ordained by God and everyone should learn to be happy where they are, not strive for such ungodly notions as “freedom” or “equality” or “brotherhood.”

But so it goes.

Owl