Theosophy, freemasonry, and the blazing star

Oh, you've made a good beginning. But you have a long, long way to go. And I care less about your ego than I do about your feelings. Let alone your opinion of "me." Never, ever fool yourself about that.

Now, back to the Topic at hand: the history, as we can deduce it, from the surviving sources, and I'll repeat myself just this once, the GENERAL idea of something that has historically been called "gnosticism."

"Pythagoras was an initiate [supposedly. According to whatever scant "sources" we have] of the Greek mystery schools" which is pretty much the definition of gnosticism (and, again, I am NOT talking about any textbook's definition of "Gnosticism" with a capital G) I have been using--that is, the belief (and yes, I use the word with full intention if highlighting the irony) in the notion that revealed "knowledge" ("gnosis") will save the gnostic from dying. And, using YOUR example for example, this notion pre-dates "Christianity" by several centuries. As you yourself pointed out. Some mystery religions (to the extent that we know jack fucking shit at all about the details) merely required the acting out of various episodes from the life of the man/god. There was no need to "learn" anything, let alone "expand your consciousness;" just do what the god did and experience what the god experienced, and you'll become a god, too. This is the part that Pythagoras felt insufficient for his lofty "intelligence." Hence all that math. Studying math (and whether he learned his metempsychosis in India or not, his math sure as hell--get it?--came from there, possibly via Babylon, where some traditions claim he studied) "expanded his consciousness" (in the parlance of our times) so that he could see that death was merely an illusion, blah, blah, blah. Thus sayeth (as far as we can tell) the [neo] Pythagoreans. Was "Pythagoras" even a real person? Who the fuck knows (once I start, I can't stop)? Again, it's a tad suspicious that he, "Buddha," and "Zarathustra" all supposedly lived about the same time.

Now, to split yet another hair, technically, and by technically, I mean, this is how I have and will use the term, "mystery" religions involve ACTING OUT certain key episodes in the life of the "man-who-became-a-god" in order to achieve the same results. In gnosticish (happy?) mystery cults, these episodes, properly re-enacted, reveal "gnowledge" (better? Are you getting the picture AT ALL?) that again, is believed will save the initiate from having to go through all that scary death business. One famous (I see you have, indeed, read a book two written by "experts" on the subject, so I will assume you've heard of this particular ancient culture) example is the "Egyptian Book of the Dead [pharaoh.]" Even Pharaoh couldn't just get up out of his grave and walk into the world of the gods and order a Golden Big Mac. He had to learn HOW to "be" a "god." In order to maintain their power over him and his administration, the priests kept this knowledge a secret, only writing the Book on the walls of his tomb, so he could read it AFTER HE DIED. Naturally, the priests (well, a select few) new the "secret," and even more naturally, they could SELL it. Over the centuries, this life-after-death religion became more and more "democratized," with even the poorest slave able to partake in the Afterlife. So long as he/she served the King faithfully in this life, then he/she would enjoy the privilege of alo emptying the latrines in the NEXT life. Hooray. This is apparently the basis of the "Pharisees" (again, I'm using the term broadly. There is zero evidence I'm wrong, since the only source for the "standard" definition of the word comes via Josephus, who himself is not necessarily a real, historical person) belief that that the Dead will be physically resurrected (although in THIS world, not another one) on Judgment Day, and those who were "good" will be rewarded with good land, etc, and those who were "evil" or "sinful" will be dispossessed and end up as the lepers and the beggars, etc. The "Pharisee" afterlife is in the same place as this one, just in a different Time, the time after the Final Judgment fixes the World Order once and for all.

The "Saduccees," on the other hand, seem to have been more or less neo-Platonist, in the sense that they did NOT believe in the PHYSICAL resurrection of the body on Judgment Day, but rather, they seem to have believed in the "Platonist" version (not necessarily Plato's) of metempsychosis, insofar as the "soul" (that hair will be split another time) leaves the physical body upon death. But, unlike the "Platonists," who apparently believed in vaguely (if not downright suspiciously) Buddhist ideas about re-incarnation, the neo-Platonists seem to have believed that said soul goes to some kind of "heaven," (or "hell.") That is, another quasi-Egyptian afterlife in another "place," but unlike the Egyptians, who seem to have believed that the Afterlife was pretty much like this life, but maybe better, the neo-Platonists saw this afterlife world in what science fiction idiots call "a higher dimension" or "higher plane of existence." And again, that's your good old-fashioned gnosticism. (As opposed to "Buddhism," which basically teaches that the only way to escape the hell of endless reincarnation is to cease to exist as a "mind" at all. But they use "koan" mindblower exercises for a similar purpose to that as Pythagoras--to slap the mind into thinking outside the box. Blah, blah, blah.) And the Sadduccees seem to have been a Jew-ish version of this "neo-Platonism." Hence their ideas of the Bible as "allegory," etc. 

Was the penultimate period (well, colon [:], but I'm sure YOU get my point. Right?) of the first complete copy of the "Septuagint" dribbled onto the page on Friday, the 13th of Shevat 231 BC? Or Monday the 0th of Bullshit, 351 AD? Who the fuck cares? I'm talking about the evolution of basic religious and philosophical ideas as traced (to whatever extent possible) through the surviving literature. Or, that's all I'm going to talk about on THIS website and podcast. I'm not getting into the fact that the people who wrote the New Testament had zero first-hand knowledge of Judaism. "Paul" is a Type, a character, a literary device. Whether he actually existed to any extent, or not. His "dialogues" and his "epistles" clearly show that character had NEVER been an "orthodox" ("Nazorean," or whatever) Jew. The authors of those texts clearly have no first-hand knowledge of "Judaism." They are only familiar with standard stereotypes and misconceptions of their day. And so on and on and on and on and on.

When I use the words "gnostic" and "gnosticism" on MY website and MY podcast, I'm talking about the broader idea outlined above. So, get used to it. I don't have time to do for Tischendorff, et al what I did for Graysmith. But long story short, "Christianity," as codified (get it? I'll be impressed if you do) by the early Imperial Catholic Ecclesia in their collection of canonical texts we ignorant Germanic types quaintly call The Bible in the 4th and early 5th centuries, appears to be what it obviously is--a rock soup of Mithraism, Egyptian gnosticism (largely by way of Isis/Horus/Osiris cult, but also with a dash of pepper from the "Pharisees,") Greek gnosticism (mostly "neo-Platonism") by way of the "Sadduccees," Roman "Herculesism" (yet ANOTHER demigod who uses his powers for Good, instead of for Evil, and a champion of the poor and oppressed,) and let's not forget ChrEstianity (source of the "Good Shepherd" blah, blah, blah) which may or not be the same "ChrEstianity" (and that is a direct quote [XRHSTIANOI] from both Sinaiticus) supposedly established at Antioch. Something from Everybody, for Everybody. And Constantine the "Great" propagandized himself (in many forms) as the Soter/Christos/Apollo/Heracles/Blah, Blah, Blah of this new meatloaf of religions. 

Except, even this new all-inclusive state "religion" feared, loathed, and generally lost their cookies (I KNOW you got that one) over one particularly nightmarish cult that just wouldn't die out, no matter how many of them they killed--the "Gnostics." Who had infiltrated the Ecclesia (you do know what THAT word MEANS, right?) near the highest levels. Perhaps the highest. What interests me about that controversy is, it sounds a lot like a modern "conspiracy theory." A LOT like one. A SPECIFIC one. Because we seem to be up to our third eyeballs in these assholes, now. And the more we learn about said assholes, the scarier they get. 

And here's one more thing--if even someone as educated on the topic as YOU don't (yet) see it, then how could anyone else MAKE IT UP? How could somebody--even Blavatsky and Crowley--accidentally dream up the exact same horseshit? That's like a million monkeys typing Hamlet on a million typewriters. That's one hell of a coincidence to be nothing more than a coincidence. They--and a lot of other assholes--must have learned it. And son of a bitch (that's a catholic joke from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) if those assholes didn't just happen to study the exact same book(s) (I'm looking at YOU, Tibetan BooK of the Dead) from the exact same monasteries as...well, you get my point. God willing.

That's my point.

This and the following post have a lot of interesting info. Are there any good contemporary biographies on the Bible from a strictly historical standpoint?

"Are there any good contemporary biographies on the Bible from a strictly historical standpoint?" Not really. The Jesuits have done excellent work, but when they publish a book, it's still pretty much the standard story--Jesus was a real historical person who lived ca 1 AD to ca 33 AD, etc etc etc. You have to read their obscure journal articles to get any real information. Joseph Smith did some interesting work, but again, it's all filtered through Mormonism. And you have to read every scrap of surviving ancient material from four empires to get an idea of the context. And so on.

If you do with the history of religion what I've done with the history of Zodiac, etc, if you throw out EVERYTHING you "know" about the history of religion, if you separate what you KNOW from what you DON'T know, and start over...that takes about 40 years and counting. I believe in God. I believe that the people who wrote the Bible, and other books, believed in God. I believe they wrote what they really believed. But that doesn't make any of it literally "true," let alone any one particular interpretation of what they wrote.

For example, "Saint" "Paul's" "Epistle" to the "Galations" is clearly a based on a text from the Maccabbee period, which someone has "updated" to the 2nd Century AD. For starters, the "Galations" didn't "exist" yet in the 60s and 70s AD. For another thing, it's NOT an epistle. It's a collection of dialogues. And it has nothing to do with any "risen Jewish Christ." It's based on a Hellenistic book about neo-Platonist theories of the "nous" that uses--rather hilariously, if brilliantly--the penis as a metaphor for the person and the foreskin as a metaphor for the soul/mind. According to this text, the person (remember, women in those days were NOT persons) must shed, by intellectual surgery, his atavistic psyche--that is, must have his animal mind circumcised away--so that he can grow a NEW foreskin; that is, a nous, a rational, enlightened, expanded consciousness. The Author has used common stereotypes of his day--the Hellenized "Jew," called "Sadducees" by Josephus (who may not have existed, either) and the new, militant, "Pharisaic" Taliban-like Maccabees, who use "sicarii," daggermen (terrorists) to go around the Near East terrorizing "Jews" into getting circumcised, and otherwise returning to the old "true" faith, blah, blah, blah. Many of these "Jews" regrew their foreskins after the Romans put down the Maccabees (or, earlier, after the Greeks conquered their locality and they wanted to fit in, politically, by being able to go to the public baths without being spotted as Jews) and reestablished Romanized Hellenistic culture and politics. Later, this (again, if you read it in Greek...) satirical dialogue between these two sages is turned into a treatise on the development of the nous in place of the psyche. And then, later still, someone tried to pass it off as a "Christian" "epistle" (again, there was no such thing yet as an "epistle" in the 1st century AD) on whether new Gentile converts to Christianity needed to be circumcised in order to become Christians, and some of the more hilarious characters become "Christian" hypocrites who go through the motions of being circumcised (who the fuck would do THAT?) in order to become Christians (why would anyone in the 1st century do THAT?) and then turn around a regrow their foreskins for...Well, you get the point.

You see, in that world at that time, IF you were a "Jew" living in a city like Antioch or Ephesus or Alexandria, you were entitled to certain privileges, like serving as a magistrate, or lawyer, or accountant, or tax collector, etc. This was because, in even earlier times, "Jews" were the ones with the education to DO those jobs. So, "foreign" Jews living in cities all across Asia Minor had certain status. After the Persians took over that part of the world, they in turn forced certain Persian cultural blah, blah, blah, onto these "Jews" and others. How? Well, in order to maintain your legal status as a "Jew," you had to be certified "kosher" by the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem and Alexandria. These people make the world operate smoothly, so, to the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans, "Judaism" was of vital economic and political importance.

So, if you controlled those two temples and their ruling priests, you could control the definition of "Jew" and thereby, influence to a great extent the makeup and attitudes of your precious bourgeoisie. When the militantly orthodox Maccabees and Pharisees gained control of the Jerusalem Temple, they sent out terrorists to force "Jews" in other cities to conform to the newly-established ultra-orthodoxy. This did not bode well for the ruling Hellenists, who had created and supported the Sadducees in the Alexandria Temple. When the Romans crushed the Maccabees, they appeased the LOCAL population around Jerusalem by putting Herod (who had a Pharisee wife) in charge of keeping them appeased. But outside Jerusalem, they organized efforts for "apostoloi" from Alexandria to go around re-Hellenizing the Jews of Everywhere Else. This new wave of Hellenized Judaism gets mixed up with other revolutions to become "Christianity." Eventually. And we see some of that taking place in the pages of some of these "New" Testament texts.