The Gospel according to C. S. Lewis: a theological review of The Chronicles of Narnia

Jewish date:  9 Tammuz 5776 (Parashath Balaq).

Today’s holidays:  Bonaventure (Catholicism), Confuflux (Discordianism), Feast Day of St. Neil Gaiman (Church of the SubGenius).

The Gospel according to C. S. Lewis:  a theological review of The Chronicles of Narnia

by Aaron Solomon Adelman

WARNING:  SPOILERS AHEAD.

NOTE:  The Chronicles of Narnia deals with many interrelated topics that do not readily lend themselves to a linear order.  As such, the order of the topics below is somewhat meandering.

Your humble blogger comes not to bash The Chronicles of Narnia (consisting of the seven books The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; and The Last Battle).  First of all, the series qualifies as readable literature in its own right.  The author, C. S. Lewis, worked out a lot of the details of his fictional multiverse, bringing together talking animals with elements of English chivalry and ancient Greco-Roman religious stories.  Lewis populated his stories with actual personalities and furnished them with plots and character development.  A number of the characters screw up and turn themselves around, sometimes even switching sides—like people in the real world.  While these books do not suit everyone’s tastes, many—including your humble blogger—have found them enjoyable even without realizing that they are Christian fiction.

But what sort of Christianity are we talking about?  C. S. Lewis was a serious convert to Anglicanism, and he had his own bent on Christianity which he laid out in his book Mere Christianity.  All the familiar basics of Christianity are explained there, including the Trinity, Jesus as the Messiah, the crucifixion as atonement for humanity, and various virtues.  Mere Christianity especially emphasizes morality:  God has a universal moral law which humans know instinctively; practice of this moral law is common among the saintly, and the morality of the seriously religious of whatever religion converges on it.  God wants all humanity to follow it.  God also rewards and punishes all humans—regardless of their religion—for their actions with respect to how well they follow this universal moral law.  Being a just god, God is strict but fair.  As such, Christianity for Lewis is not an exercise in mere belief or showing up to church once a week; putting ideals into practice is required.  Furthermore, just as the moral law is binding upon all humanity, salvation through moral behavior is available to all, including non-Christians.

These beliefs are reflected in The Chronicles of Narnia.  The characters do not simply sit around believing or having faith, even though belief and faith are dealt with in the series.  They help each other, go on adventures, face moral challenges, and often end up improving themselves.  And the God of Narnia expects nothing less.

Aslan:  There are works of theological fiction which depict God as something other than all-powerful and invulnerable.  Forget anything like this in Narnia.  Aslan is a real-deal god.  Despite having the form of a lion (most of the time He is on-screen), Aslan is Jesus incarnate with His godhood evident.  He is the son of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea (= God the Father).  Whenever He appears, He is consistently described in glowing terms evoking awe.  He sings Narnia’s world into existence in The Magician’s Nephew, and He presides over its end in The Last Battle.

Anything resembling death or injury happens to Aslan only with His consent.  Most prominently, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in order to save Edmund Pevensie from Jadis the White Witch, He allows Himself to be sacrificed; since He is a god, He comes back to life afterwards, as a real god (at least in general Christian conception) is immortal and cannot actually be killed.  This directly reflects the Gospel narratives of the crucifixion, in which Jesus is killed so that humanity may gain forgiveness, only for Him to rise from the dead three days later.  A drop of blood from Aslan’s paw heralds Caspian X transitioning to the afterlife in The Silver Chair.  Being invulnerable, Aslan never shows the least bit of fear or worry.

Aslan is an involved god, playing a pivotal role in every book.  He cares about mortals.  He periodically appears to guide the inhabitants of Narnia’s world and visitors from our world and to reward and punish them.  In The Magician’s Nephew, He tasks Digory Kirke with planting an apple; He then makes a cab driver and his wife the first King and Queen of Narnia.  In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan charges the Pevensie children with their roles in the battle against the forces of Jadis the White Witch and makes them kings and queens of Narnia.  In The Horse and His Boy, Aslan repeatedly acts to help Bree, Shasta/Cor, Aravis, and Hwin out of Calormen and to prevent an invasion of Archenland, as well as punish Aravis and Rabadash, king of Calormen.  In Prince Caspian, Aslan guides the Pevensie children on their mission to save Narnia from King Miraz, establishes the reign of Caspian X, and gives the Telmarines, who were on the wrong side of the war, the option of going to Earth.  In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan repeatedly appears to guide Caspian X and his companions on their voyage to the edge of Narnia’s world.  In The Silver Chair, Aslan gives four commands to Jill Pole around which almost the entire plot is centered; he also grants an afterlife to Caspian X and gives Jill, her friend Eustace Scrubb, and Caspian X an opportunity to scare bullies.  And in The Last Battle, Aslan sends warning to Shift and Puzzle, lest they carry out Shift’s diabolical plan.  As Narnia comes to an end, Aslan sends the worthy to His own country (= Heaven) and the unworthy to darkness.

Noticeable is that Aslan is the only member of the Trinity to make an appearance in Narnia’s world.  While Aslan is the son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, God the Father Himself never appears in the story.  The Holy Spirit is never mentioned at all.  The Chronicles of Narnia may thus be viewed as a “what if” scenario in which Jesus alone creates and is involved with a world.  Without the Father, there is no Torah and nothing resembling Judaism.  The only law that matters is Lewis’s universal moral law.  While there is prayer to Aslan, His image takes the place of the cross, and there are a few prophetic traditions, Aslanism is not an organized religion.  There is no church, no mass, no baptism, no sacraments, no Bible, and no clergy.  If this is a form of Christianity, it truly is mere Christianity, stripped of most of its externals. 

Evil:  Also lacking is the Fall of Adam, so arguably there should be no original sin.  Thankfully for the plot, there is evil in Narnia.

At the very beginning of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew is Jadis, a half-giant, half-jinn descendant of Lilith.  Jadis had already destroyed her own world, Charn, and escapes through trickery.  In Narnia, she achieves immortality by eating an apple from a magic tree and essentially sets herself up as Aslan’s archenemy.  By The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, she has become the White Witch, ruler of Narnia and cause of a century-long winter.  In both books, she acts as a temptress.  She is eventually killed by Aslan.

In The Silver Chair is another supernatural figure of evil, the Lady of the Green Kirtle.  Her form of evil is magically brain-washing others into submission.  Her species is unknown, but right before her death, she takes the form of a giant snake.  (Compare the snake in the Garden of ‘Edhen.)  It is never revealed whether or not she originated in Narnia’s world.

Other evil is performed by mortals.  In five out of the seven books, humans perform actions of evil.  (This is unsurprising, considering that humans perform rather a lot of evil in the real world, too.)  Nonhumans, such as dwarves and talking animals, side with the forces of evil or (in the case of the ape Shift) initiate it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle.  While humans, who originated on Earth, are subject to original sin, that nonhumans can be evil, too, suggests Lewis does not believe original sin is necessary to be evil.

Racism:  Your humble blogger was asked to discuss racism in The Chronicles of Narnia, and it is in the discussion of evil that this seems most appropriate.  Narnia’s great rival is Calormen, a country to the south whose inhabitants are not Aslanists.  They are polytheists, their chief god being the monstrous Tash.  Their rites include human sacrifice.  While the Narnians can fight quite well, the Calormenes are more given to war and conquest.  Calormenes keep slaves.  Calormenes have prominent roles as villains in The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle.  And—relevant to the question of racism—they are dark-skinned, while the Narnians are light-skinned.

Given this situation, one may easily jump to the conclusion that Calormenes are inherently evil and thus The Chronicles of Narnia is racist.  But the situation is not so simple.  One obvious problem is that Narnian humans are not inherently good; their villains are prominent in Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  The other problem is that despite the morally uninspiring environment they grow up in, Calormenes can still turn out to be good people.  In The Horse and His Boy, Aravis is the central heroine.  And in The Last Battle, the noble Emeth seeks to get to the bottom of Shift’s fraud and is counted among the righteous.  Having dark skin does not make one evil.

There is a more solid claim of racism in The Chronicles of Narnia:  by order of Aslan, all kings and queens of Narnia have to be human (“sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”).  Talking animals and entities out of legend and Greco-Roman religion are not eligible.  No reason is ever given why humans are necessarily the best rulers; your humble blogger sees no reason for this either.  Strangely enough, no one ever objects to this, despite some dwarfs showing a lack of community spirit with other species.

Fractional Christians and potentially universal salvation: As noted previously, Lewis makes clear in Mere Christianity that he does not believe that non-Christians are necessarily evil or damned to Hell.  He thinks of them as being fractionally Christian, as they may agree with parts of Christian doctrine and practice parts of the universal moral law.  As such, they may also receive salvation.  This doctrine of Lewis unambiguously appears in The Last Battle, in which Narnia’s world comes to an end and all the mortal characters go to Lewis’s version of Heaven or into darkness.  The Calormenes Aravis and Emeth both go to Heaven, despite the latter being a devout Tashist and never meeting Aslan while he is still alive.  Aslan Himself explains that those who serve Tash with good intent and good action are accounted as if they served Aslan; those who serve Aslan with intention to do evil are accounted as if they served Tash.  Aslan is not so small a god as to condemn mortals simply for not knowing Him or justify mortals simply because they pay Him lip service.

Sexism:  One of the other issues your humble blogger was asked to discuss is sexism.  (This will get tied into the question of salvation.  Please be patient.)  Lewis was not a 21st-century feminist/egalitarian.  In Mere Christianity, he does hold that the husband is supposed to be in charge, not the wife.  Considering the era he lived in, this was probably not unusual.  E.g., The Chronicles of Narnia was published 1950-1956, while at practically the same time (1951-1957) was the original run of the famous and popular television show I Love Lucy.  I Love Lucy is anything but feminist, with Ricky Ricardo dominating his wife Lucy and this being portrayed as normal and healthy in a loving relationship.

On the other hand, Lewis has enough respect for females to depict them in The Chronicles of Narnia as fully competent, unlike Lucy Ricardo.  In every single adventure, at least one girl is a central character, be she Polly Plummer, Lucy (Pevensie), Susan, Aravis, or Jill.  These characters do not stand around and look pretty.  Neither are they damsels in distress.  They take part in the decision-making and the action of their stories.  They handle and use weapons, including in battle.  They face their own trials and are proven worthy.  And just like the boys, they also screw up and develop as characters.  For that matter, there are two female villains, Jadis the White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle.  While Lewis may not be as forward-thinking as L. Frank Baum (author of the more feminist Oz books), he is not a chauvinist idiot.

If a serious charge of sexism—at least with respect to the standards of his time—is going to be laid on Lewis, then it might be on account of Susan Pevensie.  All the protagonists of all seven Narnia books go to Heaven—except for Susan.  By The Last Battle, Susan has grown up in such a way that she is mostly interested in “nylons and lipstick and invitations.”  Unlike her siblings, Susan no longer believes that Narnia is a real place; she thinks it is a fictional world that she and her siblings imagined as when they were younger.  Some interpret that Susan does not go to Heaven, because she grew up, in thinking as well as in age.  But from the way the other Friends of Narnia describe her, they seem think she has become shallow and has abandoned the ideals of Narnia.  As such, she would not have gone on that last adventure even if she had known about it, and so she misses an opportunity to participate in events which would have resulted in her going to Heaven.  Is this a satisfying outcome for Susan?  No, it is not.  But it is a realistic one.  People who are good do not always remain good.  And it could have just as easily have been Peter or Edward who turned away from Narnia; at no point is it claimed that Susan went astray because she is female.

This also is not necessarily the end of Susan’s story.  While everyone who is in Narnia when it ends necessarily dies (and some of the characters arguably actually die in a train accident right before their final journey to Narnia), Susan is almost certainly alive at the end of the series.  And as long as she is alive, she may yet repent.  Aslan at no point claims that Susan is condemned to Hell.  Throughout the series, Aslan is forgiving even of characters who do worse than Susan, should they repent, e.g., Edward in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  As such, Susan may well join her siblings in Heaven.  (If someone in charge of the estate of C. S. Lewis should read this review, please commission someone to write this story!)

Other gods than Aslan:  Surprisingly, Aslan is not the only god to show up in Narnia’s world.  The least surprising is Tash, the bird-headed, four-armed god of Calormen, worshipped with unspeakable rites.  Tash shows up in The Last Battle, withering whatever ground he passes over—he floats rather than walks—and grabbing away doers of evil.  One may argue that Tash is not a real god, but actually a character straight out of standard Christianity:  Satan.  However, Tash, unlike Satan, shows no interest in tempting anyone to do evil, only in claiming those who have (metaphorically) already sold their souls to Satan.  Tash shows no sign of being on the same level as Aslan.

Harder to understand is the presence of characters out ancient Greek and Roman religion (fauns, nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, the Maenads, etc.), including some of their gods:  river gods, Silenus, and Bacchus.  None of the Greco-Roman gods appears to be anywhere as powerful as Aslan.  They are also present in a fairly benign form.  The internal logic of these anomalous presences is never explained; so far as your humble blogger knows, Lewis did not believe they exist in the real world.  Their inclusion does reflect that Lewis was very interested in European religious stories (mythology), and he came to Christianity through it; to Lewis, Christianity was a myth which happened to be true.  A possible solution is that Lewis is continuing an earlier tradition of syncretizing Christianity with Greco-Roman religion, e.g., as in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which identifies God with Phoebus and Satan with Hades.  While Milton may have been using poetic metaphor, Lewis does not make such an interpretation easy.

Faith and trust:  Faith and belief, as previously mentioned, also play a role in The Chronicles of Narnia.  Indeed, much of the plot of The Silver Chair depends on faith in Aslan.  The commands that Jill receives from Him and Eustace and Puddleglum have to deal with (e.g., having to release a possibly psychotic man who happens to invoke the name of Aslan) might be suicidal if followed otherwise.

But there are other sorts of trust than trust in a god.  One kind which plays a role in the plots is trust in other people who are worthy of trust, even if they make unusual claims.  In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy Pevensie reports having traveled to another world via a wardrobe.  Though the claim seems ridiculous, Digory argues that since she has a history of honesty, she should be believed; it turns out she is right.  Lack of trust in Lucy’s claim of having seen Aslan makes things harder for the Pevensie children in their quest to help Caspian X in Prince Caspian; disregarding her claim leads them to practically walk into an enemy army.

Summary:  The Chronicles of Narnia is a reflection of C. S. Lewis’s Christian beliefs.  Jesus is included as a central character in the form of Aslan, depicting Him as a just, but loving, god.  Emphasis is placed on morality and action rather than ritual and law.  Despite the fantasy setting, characters face moral and theological challenges and respond credibly.  Salvation is depicted as attainable by anyone, even those who do not believe in Jesus.  Despite the anomalous appearance of entities out of Greco-Roman religion, this series is generally theologically sound and enjoyable literature.

Classification:  Enjoyable family-friendly Christian fantasy.

Theological rating:  A-.

See also:

• Are The Chronicles of Narnia Sexist and Racist? | NarniaWeb
• Lilith in the Bible and Mythology - Biblical Archaeology Society

Everybody sucks: a theological review of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon

Jewish date:  22 Kislev 5776 (Parashath Wayeshev).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Day of John Damascene (Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Mechagodzilla (Church of the Subgenius), Bona Dea (ancient Roman religion).

Everybody sucks:  a theological review of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon

by Aaron Solomon Adelman

One of the most persistent stories in the English-speaking world is the legend of King Arthur.  The most famous telling is Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (published in 1485).  Since then the legend and select parts of it have been retold many times, including:  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Idylls of the King, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (itself made into movies), Mr. Merlin, Merlin (the miniseries), Merlin (the TV series), Prince Valiant, The Once and Future King, and The Sword in the Stone.  (This list is nowhere near complete.  The lists on Wikipedia are huge.)

An aspect of the legend of King Arthur which is often not explicitly stated—and yet is relevant to this blog—is that it is a Christian story.  Arthur is a Christian king supported by Christian knights.  One thread of the story is the quest to find the Holy Grail (the cup which Jesus drank from in at the Last Supper), humorously depicted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Even if someone interprets the legend in such a way to downplay the religious aspect—and many interpreters do that—the Christian nature of Arthur and his court remains as a subtext.

Every interpretation the legend gives it a new spin, and eventually a Neopagan interpretation was produced in the form of The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a rewriting according to Neopagan matriarchal pseudo-history.  The spin was novel enough that the book was on The New York Times bestseller list, and a miniseries was made based on the book.  All the well-known elements of the story (and even some lesser-known elements) remain intact, just reworked to fit a different set of assumptions.  Rather than putting Arthur in some idealized British past age, the story is set in Britain not long after the Romans have left.  At the start of the story, the island is a patchwork of small kingdoms and tribes.  There is no overall unity, and there is constant threat of invasion and war.  Avalon is recast as a pagan religious site, populated mostly by priestesses and their acolytes studying to be priestesses.  The Lady of the Lake becomes the high priestess, and the Merlin the high priest.  (The definite article is not a typo.  Two Merlins, Taliesin and his successor, Kevin, appear in the story.)  The whole plot deals with the struggle between paganism and Christianity in Britain.  Christianity has already become the favored religion in many courts, and it continues to spread.  As paganism is abandoned, Avalon slowly slips into the mists and away from the rest of the world; it may only be reached deliberately by magic.  In this religiously divided world, all the major characters belong to one religion or another, a few being pagans pretending to be Christians or religiously confused.  (Other religions are somehow absent.)

Morgaine (as in Morgaine le Fey) is promoted to central character and becomes a pagan priestess of Avalon, eventually becoming the high priestess.  Arthur becomes king by “sacred marriage”; he sleeps with his half-sister Morgaine as a proxy for the Goddess and marries the land.  (That business about him marrying the land is not a typo.)  Arthur has the problem of trying to satisfy both a Christian aristocracy and pagan peasants.  (Or so we are told.  Much is written about the aristocracy, but peasants receive little screen time.)  When Arthur gets too Christian under the influence of his wife Gwenhwyfar and thus fails to live up to the pagan priestesses’ hopes, Morgaine plots his downfall according the cycle that sacred kings are supposed to undergo:  they reign for a time under the consent of the real, female ruler, and when they falter, they are ritually killed and replaced.  (See The Golden Bough.)

The writer displays a consistent hatred for Christianity.  The pagans repeatedly claim that all gods are the same god—a typical Neopagan claim—but this claim runs afoul of the fact that Christians for the most part do not believe this, both in the book and real life.  It should go without saying that the Neopagan claim of the existence of a goddess who is all goddesses has even less Christian acceptance.  There is a little lip service towards ecumenicism (e.g., Taliesin claims to have attended mass and taken communion), but Christians get depicted badly, and the more dedicated they are to Christianity, the worse they are depicted.  Thus Christian priests and nuns are depicted as mean, rigid, life-hating, patriarchal people.  Christians are intolerant, obsessed with sin, and hypocritical, especially about sex.  One cannot even finish reading a sentence about one of these people without feeling revulsion.  Only by embracing Neopagan ideals can a Christian gain favor in the eyes of the author.  Very prominently, Gwenhwyfar is so seriously Christian that she pushes Arthur to Christianize himself, his court, and by extension Britain—and she is treated for the most part as the enemy.  However, when she slips up and commits adultery or at least emotional intimacy with Lancelet—behavior which is acceptable to Neopagans but not Christians—and maybe feels a bit ecumenical is she treated sympathetically.  Symmetrically, Kevin starts off as a good (though secret) pagan, completely approved by the author, but then he decides that the way to deal with the Christianization of Britain is to use pagan religious articles in Christian ceremonies—which is treated as unconscionably evil.

Bradley also goes out of her way to make Christians look like a bunch of idiots.  Morgaine steps in when Kevin tries to use pagan religious articles in a Christian ceremony and turns the experience into a full-blown ecstatic pagan ceremony.  The Christians are unable to comprehend what has really happened, so they interpret it as a Christian revelatory experience involving the Holy Grail.  Many of the knights then set out on a fruitless quest to find the Grail.  If this makes no sense to you, do not be surprised.  It makes no sense in context either.

If this negative treatment of Christians sounds familiar, I have written reviews of books betraying such attitudes before.  Philip Pullman created his own deliberately perverse version of Christianity for His Dark Materials, and Ayn Rand depicted everyone who is not selfish as contemptible.  The technique is simple:  portray the hated group in a negative light at all times, thus making the favored group look good.  The technique is purely rhetorical, not rational or logical.  A fictional story is not constrained to be realistic.  There are some Christians who are jerks in real life, but when Christians are consistently jerks without a good reason for all the Christians in the setting to be jerks, the story comes off as biased.

To be fair, Bradley is under no delusion that being a pagan automatically makes someone good and pure.  (Contrast Pullman and Rand, who are that delusional.)  But Bradley goes overboard in depicting pagans as something other than idealized saints.  The central pagan character, Morgaine, wavers a good deal in her devotion to the Goddess and spends a number of years completely derelict in her duties.  She sleeps regularly with Kevin without the benefit of marriage, and then later has an affair with her stepson Accolon; the latter is rationalized by him being a pagan and them claiming to do so for religious reasons.  She sends Accolon to kill Arthur for abandoning paganism, but Arthur wins the battle and kills Accolon.  For Kevin’s treason, Morgaine orders the young priestess Nimue to seduce Kevin to return him to Avalon for execution.  While Nimue is successful, she falls in love with Kevin in the process; overcome by guilt, she commits suicide.  (What?  Was sending an assassin with a sword too hard?)  As a heroine, Morgaine leaves a lot to be desired—and she is arguably the best portrayed pagan in the entire book.  The others are no better morally.  (Do not get me started on Morgause, who abandons all principle and practices blatantly black magic.)

Even bizarre jumps of logic are not limited to Christians.  Morgaine has her own episode at the end of the story in which she looks upon the Christians around her and finally sees something positive.  Her beloved Lancelet, at the end of his life, has retired to a monastery and was ordained as a priest shortly before his death.  And Morgaine herself sees enough of paganism among nuns—the only time nuns are portrayed positively—with their communal living and their veneration of Mary and Bridget.  Why this suffices her is never stated; anyone with a basic knowledge of Christianity knows that even Mary, despite her high status, is not considered a goddess, while God is most certainly considered a god.  Thus it takes great intellectual dishonesty to see pagan duotheism in Roman Catholicism. 

Perhaps the most bizarre jump of logic is the one that isn’t made.  The way to keep a religion going is to encourage people to believe in it and practice it.  But Morgaine and her fellow priestesses barely do so.  Morgaine on a number of occasions warns Arthur to keep his pagan coronation oaths, and when he fails to do so, Morgaine plays politics and seeks his downfall—as if killing Arthur would show that paganism is the truth.  Never do the pagan priestesses even discuss trying to spread paganism.  There are no pagan missionaries trying to show the people that paganism is the truth in any way, shape or form.   Since the Christians, unlike the pagans, evangelize, it is little wonder that they win out in the end.

Where The Mists of Avalon fails miserably as a polemic is that it never shows what is so great about paganism or how it is better than Christianity.  The focus on paganism in this book is whether or not it is going to survive.  Why it should survive is not really dealt with.  Demonstrating the truth of paganism is not considered at all.  Even as a moral system, no attempt is ever made to show that paganism is better (according to any criteria) than Christianity.  Hence, as accordance with the title of this review, everybody sucks.

Overall classification:  Pretentious, dreary fantasy novel.

Theological rating:  D.

Notes on Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians

Jewish date:  20 Ṭeveth 5774 (evening) (Parashath Wa’era’).

Today’s holidays:  4th Advent (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Bootsy Collins (Church of the SubGenius), Yule Feast (Heathenism).

Greetings.

I really need to learn to post more often.  Below you will find notes on another four epistles from the New Testament.  Sadly, Paul’s religious thinking has not gotten any better.  (I also feel like I should start looking for Bibleman episodes on YouTube.  I ran across the source of something I remembered from the three Bibleman episodes I have seen in Ephesians, and since Bibleman periodically quoted the New Testament, I could probably squeeze quite a lot of the show.  And for the uninitiated, I am certain the show merits attention; it was popular enough that people made fun of it.)

I also am now very slowly working may way through The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a Neopagan retelling of the legend of King Arthur.  In the introduction, Bradley reports that while she wrote fiction, she used a virtual who’s who of major figures in Neopaganism as sources.  So far it really shows in how the fictional setting is structured and how the characters think and behave.

Peace.

’Aharon/Aaron

---

GALATIANS

Galatians 1:1-5—Paul greets the Christians of Galatia, claiming Jesus died to save them from their sins according to God.

Galatians 1:6-10—Paul preaches holding by the “accepted” gospel rather than other gospels. (Why any gospel is accepted is not stated.)  Paul emphasizes the principle of trying to win God’s approval rather than human approval.

Galatians 1:11-24—Paul says that he was called by God and notes his conversion on the road to Damascus and subsequent history.

Galatians 2:1-10—Paul emphasizes his belief that he is the apostle to the gentiles, while Peter and company are supposed to be apostles to the Jews.  Paul seems to believe in something of a conspiracy against him.

Galatians 2:11-21—Paul claims to have publicly clashed with Peter, arguing that Peter is a hypocrite and emphasizing justification through faith alone and the death of Jesus.

Galatians 3:1-14—Paul argues for justification by faith by citing various verses from the Hebrew Bible out of context.  He cites Genesis 15:6 as if YHWH justified ’Avraham by faith, completely ignorning all the deeds ’Avraham did.  Some botched form of Genesis 12:3 or 18:18 or 22:18 is taken as a prophecy of justification of non-Jews by faith, even though such justification is mentioned at all.  Paul misquotes Deuteronomy 27:26 as if it says that whoever does not do everything in the Torah is cursed, rather than one who fails to uphold the words of Torah, which actually takes into account human failing, repentance, and forgiveness.  Paul takes Habakkuk 2:4 as if it means that a righteous person is justified by faith, when in means that he/she lives by his belief—and by implication all the behavioral requirements of that belief.  Leviticus 18:5 is misquoted as if it supported justification by faith, when it actually is a strong demand for proper behavior.  Deuteronomy 21:23 is mangled and ripped out to context so it can be treated as if it refers to Jesus, when it actually refers to any executed criminal who is hung on a tree after execution.

Galatians 3:15-25—Paul, while maintaining the involability of covenants (in contradiction with the doctrine of supercessionism), maintains that the promises YHWH gave to ’Avraham (Genesis 13:15 and 24:7) as applicable to Jesus, Jesus being the “seed” spoken of; this is untenable, as Jesus  did not inherit the Land of Yisra’el.  Paul feels free to rant on about his recurring absurd claim that the Torah was given to make people guilty so that they could be saved through faith.

Galatians 3:26-4:7—Paul claims there are no distinctions in Jesus and that through him all become the seed of ’Avraham and heirs of the promises to him—clearly not what the original promises claim.  But Paul does not have much respect for the simple meaning of the Hebrew Bible in the first place.

Galatians 4:8-20—Paul is in anguish that the Galatians are too observant and that they do not fully accept his ways.

Galatians 4:21-31—Paul allegorizes the story of Haghar and Sarah, stripping it completely of its original meaning.  Haghar and her descendarts are made symbols of the covenant of Sinay and labeled as slaves, while Sarah and her descendants are made symbols of the “new covenant” and labeled as free.  Isaiah 54:1 and Genesis 21:10, both misquoted, are cited in an attempt to give the apperance that this allegory has any support.

Galatians 5:1-12—Paul again pushes justification by faith.  He claims that that the circumcized should keep the Torah, but sees this as an inferior path.

Galatians 5:13-26—Paul sums up the Torah with Leviticus 19:18.  (What?  If the Torah demands love and Paul repudiates keeping the Torah, does Paul repudiate love?)  Paul promotes living by the Spirit and contrary to one’s sinful nature.  This suggests that Paul makes a distinction between not violating the Torah and not acting sinfully, strange as that sounds.  Paul may also be thinking in very much emotional rather than rational terms.  Paul promotes love, as if it were something the Torah is against.  (It is not.  He is not particularly logical in this chapter.  He seems more interested in proclaiming how great his new ideology is, honesty be damned.)

Galatians 6:1-10—Paul promotes living by his ideas and the Spirit.

Galatians 6:11-18—Paul believes that those who promote circumcision are trying to avoid being persecuted and so that they can boast.  The idea that Jews may genuinely believe that keeping the Torah and thus circumcision is the correct thing to do escapes Paul completely.

EPHESIANS

Ephesians 1:1-2—Greetings.

Ephesians 1:3-14—Paul gives a summary of his Jesus-centered theology of salvation and grace.  Notably Paul speaks of the believers as being predestined.

Ephesians 1:15-23—Paul has prayed for the faithful Ephesians.

Ephesians 2:1-10—Paul holds that nonbelievers are “dead” in their sins, while the believers are “alive” in Jesus.

Ephesians 2:11-22—In keeping with his supercessionist theology, Paul holds that non-Jews can become one in Jesus, as if the church were one man.

Ephesians 3:1-13—Paul admits that the “mystery” of Jesus in his posession was not given to anyone before him, and that he is the one to preach to the non-Jews.  I.e., what he is doing is something different from what Christians have been preaching and doing before.  It is no wonder that Paul was in conflict with the Apostles.

Ephesians 3:14-21—Paul prays for the Ephesians.

Ephesians 4:1-16—Paul again pushes the idea of the believers being one in Jesus, along with other onenesses.  He cites Psalms 68:19 in a botched form to implausibly claim support to the idea of grace as apportioned by Jesus.

Ephesians 4:17-5:30 —Paul urges his followers to behave morally.  Despite his general attitude of antinomianism, he does not take it to its logical conclusion.  Believers are said to be “children of light”.  Paul uses a fabricated quote to support his position.

Ephesians 5:21-32—Paul holds that just as Jesus is the head of the church and the believers the body, in a couple the husband is the head and the wife the body.  The wife must submit to the husband, and the husband must love his wife.  This may not be modern equality (or even something really approaching it anywhere people these days would like), but it is not the most extreme sexism either.  Paul cites Genesis 2:24 to support that a man should love his wife (not quite correctly), though he has no support for the inequality. 

Ephesians 6:1-4—Paul exhorts children to obey their parents, citing Deuteronomy 5:15.  He also wants parents to train their children.

Ephesians 6:5-9—Paul commands slaves to obey their masters  like God.  He also commands masters to treat their slaves well.

Ephesians 6:10-20—Paul exhorts his followers to put on metaphorical “armor of God”.  This is given a twist in Bibleman, in which the superhero Bibleman wears literal armor of God.

Ephesians 6:21-24—Paul wraps up his letter.

PHILIPPIANS

1:1-11—Paul greets the Philipians, thanks God for them, and prays for them.

1:12-30—Paul strongly identifies with his mission and his longing for Jesus.  He wants the Philipians to be so dedicated, too.

2:1-11—Paul promotes imitation of Jesus, emphasizing humility.

2:12-18—Paul wants his followers to be pure, in contrast with the rest of that generation, which he characterizes as evil.

2:19-30—Paul plans to send to the Philippians two men he considers comendable.

3:1-11—Paul denigrates circumcision and following the Torah in favor of believing in Jesus and seeking to imitate him.  Do note that Jesus according to the Gospels, while heretical, is not antinomian.  Paul’s idea of Jesus, on the other hand, is clearly antinomian.

3:12-21—Paul encourages his followers.  He characterizes his opponents as materialists interested only in their own pleasure and his followers as anything but.

4:1-9—Paul encourages his followers to behave themselves.

4:10-23—Paul thanks God and the Philippians.

COLOSSIANS

1:1-14—Paul gives thanks and prays for the Colossians.

1:15-23—Paul gives a summary of his views of Jesus as extremely important and supreme over every other being—except God.  Jesus is God’s “image” and “firstborn”.  Paul does not seem to hold by trinitarianism.

1:24-2:5—Paul believes he is on a Divine mission to bring the mystery of Jesus to others.  He admits this mystery was previously unknown.

2:6-23—Paul pushes dedication to Jesus.  Paul becomes explicitly antinomian, even denying Divine origin of the rules.

3:1-17—The problem with antinomianism is that if there are no rules, then anything goes—a potential disaster for society.  Paul therefore promotes his own idea of morality, a split between body and soul and an explicit aversion to undesirable emotions.  Contrast with the Torah, which promotes good behavior but does not emphasize emotions.

3:18-4:1—Paul lays out rules for households.  Wives are to be submissive to their husbands, children to their parents, and slaves to their masters.  Note that these relationships are not meant to be one-way.  Husbands are supposed to care for their wives, parents for their children, and masters for their slaves.

4:2-6—Paul asks for prayer and care in conversation.

4:7-18—Paul concludes with greetings to specific people.

Notes on 2 Corinthians + Paul's Neopagan-like thinking

Jewish date:  21 Shevaṭ 5773 (Parashath Yithro).

Today’s holidays:  Friday of the Third Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Chronos (Church of the SubGenius), Candlemass/Festival of Light (Ritual of the Elements) (Thelema), Imbolc (Neopaganism).

Greetings.

I really need to find more time to work on my blogs…

Progress on reading the New Testament is slow.  Koinē Greek is a complex language, and Paul loves to wax poetic in it.  Included below is my latest installment on the New Testament, my notes on 2 Corinthians, for what they are worth.  Paul has not gotten any more rational or lucid.  If I can tie this in my series on Neopaganism, I get the impression that while Paul was a monotheist, he was thinking a lot like a Neopagan.  As recorded in Acts, Paul had a vision of Jesus, and the emotional effect on him was so powerful that he was an instant convert.  The emotional effect was so powerful that it took days for him to recover enough to interact with other humans.  By virtue of his vision, Paul believed himself an apostle, and he went off on his own vision of Christianity, one different from that the people who knew Jesus believed and practiced.  Very much like Neopagans, Paul put an emphasis on having a strong emotional experience over following formal rules.

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

’Aharon/Aaron

---

2 Corinthians 1:1-2—Introduction.  Paul maintains that he is a God-chosen apostle of Jesus.

2 Corinthians 1:3-11—Comfort from Jesus.  Subtext of persecution.

2 Corinthians 1:12-2:4—Paul seems to be attributing a change in plans to God and Jesus, as well as not grieving the Christians of Corinth.  Emphasis on faith.

2 Corinthians 2:5-11—Paul preaches love and forgiveness of sinners.  Paul seems to think of himself as an authorized forgiver.

2 Corinthians 2:12-17—Paul went looking for his brother Titus.  He also waxes poetic about those preaching Christianity having the “aroma” of Jesus.

2 Corinthians 3:1-6—Paul uses the metaphor of people being letters from Jesus written with the Spirit.  Paul promotes antinomianism, claiming “the letter kills”.

2 Corinthians 3:7-18— Paul continues promoting antinomianism, claiming the Torah as bring death and his antinomianism of the spirit as bringing righteousness.  (As if YHWH did not want us to do what He actually told us to do.)  Exodus 34:34 might be cited, misquoted and ripped out of context.

2 Corinthians 4:1-18—Paul uses the metaphor of unbelievers being in darkness.  He cannot understand that they might have good reasons for doubting that there is anything special about Jesus and claims that “the god of this age has blinded” them.  Paul complains about persecution, casting the persecuted Christians (persecuted even unto death) as working in the same mode of the persecuted Jesus.  Cites Genesis 1:3 (botched) and Psalms 116:10 under the delusion that they are relevant.

2 Corinthians 5:1-10—Paul mixes metaphors, talking about being clothed with a heavenly building.  He seems to be talking about an eagerness to go to Heaven.

2 Corinthians 5:11-6:2—Paul speaks about living for Jesus rather than oneself and becoming reconciled to him.  Cites Isaiah 49:8 in botched form and out of context.

2 Corinthians 6:3-13—Paul readily accepts persecution.

2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1—Paul encourages separation from unbelievers, identifying the believers with the Temple.  Cites something which might be a botched version of Leviticus 26:12, Jeremiah 32:28, or Ezekiel 37:27, a fabricated quote, and a botched version of 2 Samuel 7:14.

2 Corinthians 7:2-16—Paul seems to be happy, because the believers in Corinth are such wonderful people.

2 Corinthians 8:1-15—Paul promotes love and generosity, citing Exodus 16:18, which is completely irrelevant.

2 Corinthians 8:16-9:5—Paul praises Titus and notes him being sent.

2 Corinthians 9:6-15—Paul encourages the believers to “sow” and “reap” generously, citing Psalms 112:9 unbelievably and incorrectly.

2 Corinthians 10:1-18—Paul defends his ministry, somewhat illucidly, but seeming to think that he has some sort of authority and power.  Cites something which might be a botched version of Jeremiah 9:23 irrelevantly.

2 Corinthians 11:1-15—Paul seems to be encouraging his followers to form a strong emotional relationship with Jesus, drawing on the frequently sexual symbolism for the relationship between YHWH and Bene Yisra’el in the Hebrew Bible.  Paul thinks of himself as equal to the apostles.  He accuses at least some of his opponents of being “false apostles”, bringing up Satan as a precedent.

2 Corinthians 11:16-33—Paul boasts about all the suffering he has undergone.

2 Corinthians 12:1-10—Paul relates someone who had an ecstatic vision.  He also talks about having a thorn in his flesh and interpretting it completely in theological terms rather than as something to be dealt with by removing it himself.

2 Corinthians 12:11-21—Paul asserts again that he is not inferior to the apostles and expresses concern for the Corinthians.

2 Corinthians 13:1-10—Paul cites Deuteronomy 19:15 in slightly botched form and irrelevantly to try to add more authority to his visits.  Paul claims that Jesus is “in” the Corinthians and encourages people to strengthen themselves in faith.

2 Corinthiatns 13:11-14—Paul sends his final greetings.

THE OFFICIAL COMMONSENSE RULES FOR MISSIONARIES

Jewish date:  29 Tammuz 5772 (Parashath Maṭṭoh-Mas‘e).

Today’s holidays:  The Three Weeks (Judaism), Thursday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Dr. Doom/St. Thulsa Doom (Church of the SubGenius), Lucaria (ancient Roman religion), Feast Day of the Magi: Krishna (Thelema).

Greetings.

I know two posts in one day is very unusual for me, but I just read an article and started to complain about it on Facebook, and I realized my commentary was turning into a mini-article of its own.  So I just decided to post here instead and let it get automagically reposted to Facebook.

The article in question is “Christians Flood Knesset with ‘New Judaism’”, which deals with members of the Keneseth finding literature promoting the New Testament from the “Bible Society of Israel”, a Christian/Jewish-rite Christianity (“Messianic Jewish”) group, in their mailboxes.

This is a textbook lesson of how not to make converts.  As such, I am presenting rules for would-be missionaries to follow whenever trying to make converts.

WARNING:  There is no way to be gentle about this, so the rules are extremely blunt and are guaranteed (to the extent that one can reliably predict future) to offend missionaries.  Here we go:

~~~~~~~~~~

THE OFFICIAL COMMONSENSE RULES FOR MISSIONARIES

Rule 1:  Never try to convert people who are hostile to you trying to convert them.  (E.g., knowledgable Jews are generally hostile to attempts by Christians to convert them.)  They are practically guaranteed to be offended and not listen.

Rule 2:  Never try to imply to people that you know their religion better than they do.  That may sometimes be true, but it is a very easy way to cause offense and ruin your chances for making converts.  If you are unlucky or foolish enough to deal with people who know their own religion better than you do, you will just end up looking like an idiot and make no converts.

Rule 3:  Do not ask people who may be offended and think you are an idiot to help you in your quest to make converts.  They most certainly will not, and the level of the offense automatically is increased.

Rule 4:  Do not act surprised when people get offended and think you are an idiot and try to apologize for causing offense.  No one with any sense will believe it, and since the offense was completely predictable, you end up looking even more like an idiot.

Rule 5:  Expect people who are offended by missionaries to act against you.  Some intelligent, knowledgeable people will enjoy rhetorically cutting your arguments to pieces.  If you are really unlucky, the offended party may become physically violent.

Rule 6:  Never do anything that will offend people in power and make you look like an idiot in their eyes.  They may decide to make your life harder or shut you down completely.

~~~~~~~~~~

Now, as for what your humble blogger thinks of these people, what I have written on the New Testament ought to be quite enough.

Peace.

’Aharon/Aaron

Review of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches

Jewish date:  7 Tammuz 5772 (Parashath Ḥuqqath).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Day of Cyril of Alexandria (Roman Catholicism), Lailat al-Miraj (Islam), Feast Day of Andrea (Thelema), Feast Day of St. James Dean (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

Next in the series on Neopaganism, we look at two books by Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Murray "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe:  A Study in Anthropology") and The God of the Witches (Murray The God of the Witches).  Murray was a respected Egyptologist.  However, due to travel restrictions she delved into European history as well in the second half of her life.  And what she came up with is, to say the least, unique.

ּThere are a number of facts of which most of us are at least vaguely aware upon which Murray builds:

• Magic has been practiced for thousands of years—and the magic discussed here is not stage magic, but the attempt to do what stage magicians only pretend they are doing.
• Europe has many legends about fairies.
• Christians at times have been worried (or paranoid) about witches that served Satan.
• Witches reportedly often had familiars, frequently in the form of animals.
• Witches reportedly were specially marked by the Devil.
• Witches reportedly sacrificed humans.
• Witches reportedly had regular gatherings (“sabbats”) where they worshipped the Devil, often naked and with the Black Mass and other outrageous rites.
• At times witches reportedly flew to sabbats.
• Christians have at times engaged in witch-hunts and even tortured, tried, and executed purported witches, often very cruelly.

There is more than one conceivable way to understand these facts, and Murray chose a truly unusual one:  that witches are real.  She did not go so far as to say openly in either book that magic actually works or that Satan really exists, but she interpreted witches as crypto-pagans who worshipped a horned god who was ritually impersonated by one of his followers.  To her, the witch-hunts were attempts by Christians to route out paganism among peasants.  Murray quotes copious examples on each of these facts to better give the reader some idea what was claimed and explains how even the most unlikely sounding of them could be true.  E.g., reported flying to sabbats may be due to use of a hallucinatory ointment and thus reflect subject experience and not objective reality.  Mixed in with this is the idea that fairies were a real race of people living in Britain.  Murray also claims that among these witch-pagans there was the institution of a “sacred king” who ruled a while and was then ritually executed (in person or in the form of a substitute victim), which she deals with at length in The God of the Witches.  She sees hints of the practice even among European royalty and gives a few examples.

Your humble blogger is not an expert on European history, but certain aspects of Murray’s treatment are difficult at best.  One of the most obvious is that much of the testimony she relies upon was obtained under torture or threat of torture—and most of us are aware that under such conditions humans are liable to lie to end or avoid pain.  Murray glosses over this by claiming many confessed freely, but one could easily suggest that such people were complete pain wimps.  There is also the problem that she is relying only on problematic testimony and legends.  To break it down:

• Murray never produces unambiguous physical evidence that fairies ever existed, even though the remains and artifacts of a whole extra species of human living in an area also populated by Homo sapiens would probably have long ago been noticed.  To compare:  there actually was a race of short near-humans, Homo floresiensis, also known as “hobbits”, which lived in Indonesia maybe as late as 12,000 years ago, and they left behind skeletons and tools.  (They also lived too early to be Murray’s fairies and were on the wrong side of Eurasia.)
• There is no independent evidence that Murray’s crypto-paganism ever existed.  Hidden religious practices have actually been documented.  For example, one of the targets of the Spanish Inquisition was crypto-Jews.  The practical problem with secrets in general is that they often get leaked.  This is especially true in religion, in which keeping secrets is problematic, as religions are very frequently not limited to single people.  If there were a lot of pagans running around in Europe then, why did no one write about them?  Why do we not have any leaked copies of someone’s Book of Shadows?  Why do we not have any of their ritual tools?  How did they manage to keep themselves out of history except for witch trial records?
• People confessed to being Satanists.  No one confessed to being a pagan.  The distinction between the two is nontrivial, and one does not need to be theologically sophisticated to understand it.  Why would the reports be so accurate in many aspects yet universally fail in this one?
• That witches purportedly meet at sabbats (= Shabbath, Sabbath) and in gatherings called “synagogues” smacks of anti-Semitism rather than a faithful representation of crypto-paganism.  What witches reportedly practice and believe is not even vaguely Jewish, and it makes no sense for pagans to use Jewish terminology for their own practices.
• The evidence for the existence in the Christian era in Europe of sacred kings and substitute victims for them consists purely of hints, bits of anomalous information which fit into her hypothesis.  At no point does she ever tell us anything which qualifies as anything near direct evidence, such as a servant’s testimony that King Henry II was secretly a pagan and he was determined that Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket would be his substitute victim.

Murray also does not deal with alternate explanations for the trial records.  For example, one could easily suggest that there have been mass delusions of Satanic witchcraft, much in the same way that in more recent years people have had mass delusions of alien abduction.  One could also easily suggest that there were moral panics, similar to more recent panics about Satanic abuse cults; people were falsely accused, and many confessed to the imagined crimes of others due to torture.  Both of these possibilities could also have worked together.

Does this mean that there were no crypto-pagans?  No.  Only that Murray is not giving a good argument for their existence.

What do actual Neopagans think about Murray’s hypothesis?  Your humble blogger has one book in his library, Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler (Adler), which is an academic study of Neopaganism by a Neopagan, and it includes a history of Murray’s hypothesis within the Neopagan community (Adler 47-56); to make a long story short, it was widely believed early on, but with improved scholarship, even those believing in underground survival of paganism came to believe that Murray was inaccurate.  Other material your humble blogger found accuse her of biased selection of source materials and summarize subsequent scholarship making better use of available materials and coming to different conclusions (Gibbons; Evans).

If Murray does a bad job, what is the significance of her work today?  First, whatever the quality of her work or the correctness of her conclusions, her works on witchcraft helped give rise to Neopaganism.  Everyone agrees her hypothesis was commonly believed early in the history of the modern witchcraft movement.  Thus she contributed to the illusion that Neopaganism has more of a history than it really does, and she gave everyone who hated Christians yet another reason to hate them.  Furthermore, ideas were taken over into Wicca:  the Horned God, ritual impersonation of gods, ritual sex, the sabbat, the esbat, ritual dancing, feasting, the working of magic, initiation, vows, and the whole sacred king business.  Murray went off the deep end in writing about witchcraft, but she nevertheless created something still influential today.

Bibliography:

• Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon:  Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. 1979. Revised and expanded ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Print.
• Evans, Dave. "So How Old Is Witchcraft Really? The Role of Margaret Murray in Stirring the Muddy Waters of Witchcraft History."  [http://web.archive.org/web/20080518071822/http://occultebooks.com/articles/DaveEvans/SohowoldisWitchcraftreally/tabid/109/Default.aspx].
• Gibbons, Jenny. "The Real Burning Times."  [http://web.archive.org/web/20060212114634/http://sacred-pathways.com/realburningtimes.html].
• Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. 2001.  [http://www.thewica.co.uk/godwitch.pdf].
• ---. "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe:  A Study in Anthropology".  Oxford, 1921. 303, [1] p. Clarendon Press. [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/wcwe/index.htm].

Review of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches

Jewish date:  22 Siwan 5772 (Parashath Shelaḥ).

Today’s holidays:  Tuesday of the Tenth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Sparky/St. Gerard Hoffnung (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

I have begun work on reading (and listening to) books on Neopaganism, which like LaVeyan Satanism has a strong magical component.  One of the many issues in which they differ is that LaVeyan Satanism is the product of a single man and continued by people who largely agree with him philosophically.  As such, in my LaVeyan Satanism review, I could have easily ignored everything not written by Anton Szandor LaVey and still have arrived at the same conclusions.  Neopaganism, on the other hand, is the product of and has been shaped by many people.  It has no canon, and Neopagans vary wildly in theology, morality, and practice.  Thus what is true about one Neopagan or Neopagan group may not be true about another Neopagan person or group.  Furthermore, the Neopagan literature, even that in my personal library, is more extensive than that of LaVeyan Satanism.  As such, I have decided that rather than write a single, overarching Neopaganism review, which at best would be months in the future, I will instead write a number of smaller reviews.

The work I am starting with is Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches by Charles Leland, published in 1899, which seems to be one of the first, if not the first, book of importance which influenced Neopaganism.  Now, everyone knows that Europeans used to be mostly pagan, and then Christians came and conquered and converted them over several centuries.  And everyone seems to agree that traces of paganism remained among Europeans afterwards and arguably still do until today.  (Where do you think such things as Christmas trees and Easter eggs come from?)  The question is how long people practiced overt paganism (with worship of the pagan gods rather than sneaking things into Christianity) in Europe.  Much of Aradia is a translation of a purported religious text from Italy, provided to Leland from a woman working under the pseudonym of “Maddalena”, telling of the survival of a polytheistic religion well into Christian times.  In the first part of Aradia, the creator Diana and Lucifer (also known as Dianus) are the high gods, and due to the suffering of the people due to the Catholic hierarchy, they send their daughter Aradia as a messianic figure.  Aradia goes about teaching witchcraft as a religion, decreeing that people should perform rites in the nude and make merry.  (There is also a fourth god, Cain, but he does not seem to do much of anything in this story).  The second part of the book consists of magic spells.  The third part is a number of witch-related folktales which are not part of Aradia’s gospel, but which Leland tacked on, as he thought they were somehow relevant.

Is Aradia a genuine religious text?  Probably not.  There is a blatant mixing of religious systems, Greco-Roman paganism (Diana) with the Abrahamic religions (Lucifer and Cain), with the result being credible in neither.  (E.g., Cain (= Qayin) is not supposed to be anything resembling a god at all.)  Now, some people are not rational about their religion, so a bungled mixing is possible.  But Leland does not give any evidence that anyone ever believed in or practiced the Aradian religion.  Religions actually practiced leave behind more than just texts.  There are no eyewitness accounts of the practice of any Aradian ceremonies (at least before the founding of Wicca).  There are no claims made by anyone of being an Aradian.  There are no Aradian artifacts left behind.  What we do have is a story which reads like it was written by someone who did not like Christianity and wanted to get naked and party.

Does anyone actually believe in this text?  So far I have not discovered any sign that anyone believes that the story in Aradia actually happened, at least the way it was written.

So what is the significance of Aradia?  Aradia suggests the idea of a witchcraft-based religion, which is taken over into Neopaganism.  Secondly, a number of ideas are borrowed by various Neopagans, such as ritual nudity, liturgical texts, merrymaking, female empowerment, a disdain for Christianity, borrowing elements from other religions, and polytheism, especially a theology dominated by a god and a goddess.  Expect these things to recur in further reviews in this series.

Peace.

’Aharon/Aaron

Christian missionary literature in Israel

Jewish date:  9 Siwan 5772 (Parashath Naso’).

Today’s holidays:  Wednesday of the Eighth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of Marcina (Greek Orthodox Christianity), Feast Day of St. Winnie Ruth Judd (Church of the SubGenius), Feast Day of Joan of Arc (Thelema)

Greetings.

I would like to note something before I forget about it.  I have requested free books from missionaries before.  (Why should I not take advantage of their generosity for my research?)  Recently I requested a number of books from Christian missionaries again.  And I received quite a lot:

This time most of what I requested was in Hebrew, though there is a copy of the American Standard Version (in English) and الكتَابُ الُمقَدّسُ, which is the Christian Bible (Hebrew Bible + New Testament) in Arabic.  (I started working on Arabic again, and I am not looking forward to reading the Qur’an in the original.) Two of the books are copies of the entire Christian Bible in Hebrew (the New Testament part being a translation), and another two are just the New Testament.  (Actually I got three, but one is a duplicate.)  The other books include topics such as Christian theology, religion and science, history, and fiction.  Interestingly, everything was sent to me in plain envelopes whose return addresses were post office boxes.  In no case did any envelope give any indication that Christian missionaries were the senders.  I am aware that Jews in Israel tend to hate missionaries, but this level of secrecy suggests extreme fear or paranoia.  Also, I got a rather high rate of fulfillment of my requests, indicating that these cautious missionaries are also very serious about spreading their message.

If anyone knows where I can request a free Zohar, Tanya’, Arabic Qur’an, or Greek New Testament (the one I have is interlinear), please let me know.  I have not been able to acquire any of these for free yet.

Peace.

’Aharon/Aaron

Maṣṣah and Paul’s continuing scholarly incompetence

Jewish date:  19 Nisan 5772 (Parashath Shemini).

Today’s holidays:  Ḥol hamMo‘edh Pesaḥ (Judaism), Day 4 of the ‘Omer (Judaism), Wednesday in the Octave of Easter (Roman Catholicism), Annual $30 Donation (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

It has been far too long since I last posted.  A lot of this is due to preparation for Pesaḥ (Passover), though I have had other things keeping me busy, and I hope this post will be a step in the direction of getting caught up.  Towards that, I present two topics today:

1) Relevant to Pesaḥ, some articles on the symbolism of maṣṣah (unleavened bread):  “A new look at Hametz, Matza and everything in between”, “Deconstructing Matzo”, and “Leavened or Unleavened: A History”.  To summarize:  At the time, Egypt was the only place at the time where people made ḥameṣ (leavened bread).  Thus eating maṣṣah, even before leaving Egypt, was a symbolic rejection of Egypt and what it stood for.  This strikes me as a very elegant explanation.

2) My notes on the last chapters of Romans, following up on my notes on chapters 1-4 and 5-12:



Romans 13:1-7—Paul preaches submission to authorities.  This includes the government, which he claims are “God’s servants”.

Romans 13:8-14—Paul preaches love, claiming it is “the fulfillment of the Torah”, glossing over that at best just the moral commandments can be subsumed under the rubric of love.  Cites Exodus 20:12-13 in scrambled order are presented as subsumed under love.  Leviticus 19:18 is given as the source for the commandment of love.

Romans 14:1-23—Paul seems to be preaching that one who is strong in faith should not act in an antinomian way such to cause someone who is weak in faith to stumble, in particularly bringing up food and drink.  (Paul still brings no valid justification for antinomianism.)  Cites fragments of Isaiah 49:18 and Isaiah 45:23 dishonestly as if they were a continuous quote.

Romans 15:1-13—An attempt to back up the previous section.  Cites Psalms 69:10, a botched version of Psalms 18:50, a botched version of Psalms 32:43, Psalms 117:1, and a botched version of Isaiah 11:10 as if they had anything to do with Jesus.

Romans 15:14-22—Paul proclaims himself minister to the Gentiles, appointed by Jesus, trying to back up his appointment with his allegedly having performed miracles.  (Miracles are not actually valid proofs of prophecy when proclaimed by a heretic.)  Cites Isaiah 52:15 as if it had anything to do with Jesus.

Romans 15:23-33—Paul plans to visit Rome.

Romans 16:1-27—Paul sends greetings to various people.


Please note that this is entirely in keeping with Paul’s intellectual dishonesty and scholarly incompetence in the previous chapters.  I am not optimistic about the rest of his letters.


Peace and happy Pesaḥ.

’Aharon/Aaron

The writers for Glee fail exegesis forever

Jewish date:  8 ’Adhar 5772 (Parashath Teṣawweh).

Today’s holidays:  Friday of the First Week of Lent (Roman Catholicism), Bahá’í Month of Fasting (Bahá’í Faith), Feast Day of St. Wonder Woman (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

The goal of this project is the examination of religious fallacies and misinformation.  This happens a lot in popular culture, and one of the shows I am monitoring, Glee, seems particularly prone to this problem whenever it deals with religion.  One of its recent episodes, “Heart”, shows especially bad religious reasoning that is going to annoy me until I report on it.



This is a Valentine’s Day episode.  Among other things, the “God Squad”, a sort of Christian religious club in the high school, decides to raise money by selling “singing Valentines”.  The God Squad has a new member who is a sort of goth until-recently-homeschooled Christian and who notes that Valentine’s Day is a religious holiday.  (It least it was a Catholic holiday.)  Meanwhile, a “Bible thumper” complains to the principal about Santana and Brittany kissing at school, leading him to be paranoid about homosexual public displays of affection.  (Cliché 1:  Thinking one has a right to keep anyone from doing anything which might offend them.)  Santana is understandably annoyed at this, and so she hires the God Squad to give a “singing Valentine” to Brittany.  (Cliché 2:  Petty revenge, the pettiness being that Santana has no evidence that any of the God Squad complained to the principal in the first place.)  The God Squad then discusses among themselves about whether they will actually sing to gay people.  Distressingly, none of them shows any decent understanding of how to interpret the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, jumping immediately into stereotypes and atrocious excuses for reasoning:

1) Mercedes:  Since one in ten people is supposed to be gay, one of the 12 Apostles might have been gay, presumably Simon since he has the “gayest” name.  This assumes that the Apostles were sexually normal, not a foregone assumption.  Also not forgone assumptions are that the incidence of homosexuality in Second Temple Period Israel is the same as in 2012 America and that there is no distinction between having homosexual desires and practicing homosexuality.  Not to mention that the presumed gayness of any Apostle is purely hypothetical, not something actually known.  Thus Mercedes has no argument.

2) Sam:  It is (purportedly) an abomination for a man to lay down with another man.  This is actually a misinterpretation of Leviticus 18:22, which prohibits male homosexuality, but a man simply lying next to another man is not prohibited.  Sam, however, grossly misinterprets this as banning sharing a tent in the Cub Scouts.  Thus he starts off with one of the few sources actually relevant to the question of homosexuality in Christianity and then shoots himself in the foot rhetorically when he has no reason to do so.

3) Quinn, trying to counter Sam:  Other abominations (purportedly) include eating lobster, planting different crops in the same field, and giving someone a proud look—but not slavery, and Jesus never mentions slavery.  The prohibition of eating lobster (along with all water-dwelling animals which do not have fins and platelike scales) is Leviticus 11:10, which uses a different term of disapproval, sheqeṣ, than that used for male homosexuality, to‘evah.  The prohibition of planting two different species of seed together is found in Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:9; in neither verse is it referred a to‘evah or sheqeṣ or any other term of disgust.  I have no idea where Quinn got this alleged prohibition of giving someone a proud look.  Slavery is never called a to‘evah or sheqeṣ by the Hebrew Bible or mentioned by Jesus.  (Paul is a different matter.)  None of this, however, is relevant in the least to question of homosexuality in Christianity.  This is pure rhetoric, not reasoning, and to make things worse, it is clichéd rhetoric.  At best, there is an implied argument that since modern Christians do not think they are bound to keep the Torah, they should not be forbidden to commit homosexuality, which among males is explicitly prohibited by the Torah.  However, none of the characters has the sense to cite even Paul’s specious antinomian arguments.

4) Sam:  Perhaps Jesus was trying no spare Simon’s feelings.  This is just an assumption that there was a gay Apostle.  There could have just as easily been no gay Apostle, so there is no real argument here.

5) Mercedes:  Given that everyone in the God Squad really sucks when it comes to exegesis, Mercedes says she does not want to hurt Santana’s feelings or make anyone do anything they are not comfortable with.  The other members of the God Squad can accept this, but this does not solve the problem of whether to deliver the “singing Valentine” or not.

What do they eventually decide to do?  They deliver the “singing Valentine” on the basis that “Love is love.”  Is there any source for this in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament?  No.  The God Squad may have satisfied Santana, but their rationale is poorly justified.  The writers could have done much, much better than this.

Anyone writing about homosexuality, please, please, please do not do anything as lame as what the writers for Glee did.

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

’Aharon/Aaron