Holy of Holies

Chimpanzees Throw Stones at a Tree

The gods are nature: trees, rocks, and places.

The gods inhabit trees, rocks, and places.

The distant gods communicate to men through trees and rocks and places and by signs in nature.

The gods communicate through statues that must be tended to by priests and their cult, but anyone can touch and talk to the statues.

The gods communicate through statues tended by priests, but only the right people can touch the statues, and the statues are otherwise veiled or hidden from public view.

There are no statues, even the name of God is taboo and secret, only known to priests. The secrets are kept in a little box that's hidden in the back room.

There's nothing divine; all is chaos and chance.

War Disease

A pattern that permeates almost all history is that ambitious warmongers are the real enemies of humanity even as they incite violence against imagined enemies abroad. Again and again, this type of human has managed to make average men and women believe that some external foe is a great threat or has sold war as a great tonic. Bloodthirsty figures like Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt are celebrated rather than excoriated.

In our recent history, the neocons, the heirs to the jingoists of late 19th century America managed to whip up a frenzy in the wake of 9/11 that enabled a disastrous string of wars that cost the United States trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, wrecked entire countries and killed or displaced millions of civilians throughout north Africa and the middle east. The cadre of pundits and political figures responsible for these disasters paid no price. They're barely challenged. The wreckage and carnage wrought by their folly is ignored.

Some think war is a civilization level problem that only has religious solutions. That is, stopping war is more like the problem of keeping weeds out of a garden than protecting a farm from a small pack of dangerous predators, but lately I'm thinking the predator analogy is a good description of the problem.

Variations on Ancient Themes

In ancient Babylon, gods of the provinces were local figures that were represented by elaborate idols. The god was tied to the province through the idol sort of like a high school mascot represents people in a school district in the United States. Just as a high school mascot might be stolen or defaced by a rival town, the Babylonian idols might be destroyed or stolen in war, or the god might be renamed and the cult realigned with the new ruler.

Another necessarily localized form of worship is ancestor veneration. A family can be more like a small polity complete with a priesthood and a ruler and a territory.

Local gods and local cults potentially disrupt imperial designs, and centralized authority. In the succession of imperial schemes that shaped the western world, local gods and ancestor worship transformed multiple times.

Sainthood in the catholic church seems a lot like a variation on the theme of deification of Caesars, which in turn, was a variation on ancestor worship plus aristocratic privilege. The imperial monotheist cults thoroughly erased the idea of local gods from the consciousness of people in the western world. Maybe the only thing similar to local gods are corporate icons, sports teams or cults of political figures.

Divide and Conquer and Religious Ideas

Femen leader Inna Shevchenko

Groups like Anonymous, Femen, WikiLeaks, or political movements like The Pirate Party, Occupy Wall Street, or Black Lives Matter are generally considered civic and secular organizations. I think a better way to understand them, though, is as different sects of an underlying religion.

One of the things they seem to have in common is a theatrical portrayal of individuals triumphant against some massive system or powerful political figures. (Similar to Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning). The Femen are nearly naked women staging splashy protests against authorities, for example, cutting down a Christian cross with a chainsaw. It's an inversion of Charlemagne's troops chopping down Irminsul.

A key word here is theater. Beliefs that atomize people destroy their ability to organize politically, or act as a coherent group on behalf of shared interests. Similarly, while the movements depict triumphant individuals in a global media production, they contain countless people chanting the same slogans, and wearing the same mass-produced masks.

All the Gods

The Abrahamic religions' idea of monotheism was baked into Enlightenment Science. The idea of an omnipotent and omniscient god was reflected in the belief that comprehensive understanding of the universe is available to man. The monotheist belief persists in the toxic philosophies of today, where higher consciousness only means one person is a better liar than another and the philosopher is like a priest or a prophet of a monotheist cult that's dedicated to an almost arbitrary cause. According to this model of man and his place in the universe, the blind prophet of the doomsday cult Aum Shin Rikio Chizuo Matsumoto represents an ideal. Similarly, his followers who helped build a billion dollar crime ring, are worthy of praise because of their commitment to the cause of destroying the world.

In the classical and even prehistorical world, polytheism and animism ruled the minds of men, where the Gods were of nature, that is, a poetic understanding of nature that was reflected in stories and myths. Polytheism or animism seem like a rational, or moderate choice for limited beings like men. Why would there be an eternal, omnipotent being in a universe of limitations? Why would the pattern of relationships between creatures we observe daily in the natural world: symbiosis, parasitism, predator, and prey be different for the supernatural or metaphysical world?

All the gods of the classical pantheon represent the whole of the world, a whole that's beyond the ability of the human mind to represent in terms of either a formal language like mathematics, or in scriptures.

It is a really good question if a polytheist mind is more likely to lead to political moderation or even religious moderation.

RR Part Three -- The People Who Know Things

Wendy Tremayne, author of The Good Life Lab bailed out of the corporate world to live like a pioneer, basically, but with all the advantages of technology. One of the concepts she elaborates in her book is what she calls acculturated knowledge. That's the knowledge of navigating society, having a job, being a citizen. In other words, it's not actual practical knowledge.

Many people--really billions all over the west--are several degrees removed from producing anything at all that's needed for their own survival. They don't have a garden or animals that they use for food. They couldn't get clean water, etc... Their survival depends on the corporate, commercial culture, and more subtly on the system of incentives, i.e. money, that keep its cogs and treadmills turning.

In the West, the people who dole out the incentives and maintain the system (i.e. the corporate state) generally reap the (very greedy) lion's share of rewards, even though it's the people who have actual knowledge who add value to materials, produce goods, and perform vital services. The knowers are quite rare. Consider, for example, if you use very broad terms to define "scientists and engineers", that category of knowers (many of whom have no practical knowledge), they amount to less than 2% of the population of the United States.

The knowers are an ideal fulcrum for a new Reformation because the knowers are civilization. They're a potential real fault line between the parasitic imperial system of the Western world and the people. Why haven't the knowers asserted their power within this current debt & death system, as they did in the medieval Guild system? (Look at the Grange as a great example of a group of knowers who avoided their power.)

In one of my previous posts, I wrote about Conan the Barbarian and "the riddle of steel", which provides some answers. From the perspective of an individual that's struggling against "the system", society, civilization is a game, it's a trick a con game. Accepting it at face value in our time, means plodding along the treadmill as a consumer or an employee, or it means running and owning a business, which really means keeping your enterprise plugged into the financial and tax systems.

A quest for truth, and for the good, reconnecting with the gods makes the civilization game apparent. It renders the incentives of the game ridiculous. It could kill the Empire one person at a time, but even a quest for truth, a higher consciousness could go awry.

Consider the reaction of two different groups to this quest: the Hutterites and the Neocons. The Hutterites left Western society and its customs to live in their version of a Christian commune. The Neocons became grifters, predators and manipulators. These choices are reflected in mythology in the story of Cain and Abel, or of the perpetual struggle between the Sky God and Saturn, or the philosophical struggle between being and seeming, or conflicts between the people of the land and the people of the sea, producers and traders.

Reformation Recipe Part Two

A lot of the material in this blog is making a subtle argument that the Gods are real.

The current gods of the West are the gods of a clockwork, deist Universe. I've given a couple examples in my posts: the History God and the Disembodied Math god. The western priests are the technocrats and academics of its institutions of government and higher learning. These gods of the west are kept in the holy of holies. They're secret gods who can only be entreated by the priests who've gone through the appropriate initiation ceremonies.

The next gods are, in fact, the ancient gods of an animist universe. Entities that live in symbiosis, or in some cases parasitism with man and nature. In a living, conscious universe, the gods can be bargained with, fought against, or praised and entreated. There's nothing resembling the priesthood of the Catholic church, or the academics and technocrats of today in such a world. In such a world, a Shaman, maybe your next door neighbor, or someone from your town can help reach across to such an entity.

Perhaps people are going full circle, back to their roots. In the case of European people in the Americas, maybe you will have more in common with pre-settlement Native Americans, than you do with your Empire citizen ancestors.

When the gods are everywhere and anyone can talk to them, then what's the authority of a politician or a technocrat worth? The old gods were gods of places, of plains, forests, mountains, and were the gods of the people of those places.

I think they're back, and their world's a decentralized world.

A Recipe for Reformation

The cartoon version of the story of the Reformation is that it started with Martin Luther in 1517. I think this version of history is similar to the claim that Columbus "discovered" the New World in 1492. Just as Europeans were traveling to the new world centuries before Columbus, the Catholic church never really had a true monopoly on European religion, so the Reformation really had no starting point on a timeline.

As late as 900 AD, people in Northern Europe were still venerating the ancient gods. In the 12th Century, the French King and the Pope waged war against the Cathars in southern France. Similarly, complaints about corruption in the Church sparked forerunners of the Reformation as early as 1170.

I think the present day alt-movement is really very similar to the Reformation. It stems from a general dissatisfaction with the corrupt status quo. The status quo institutions are always and everywhere corrupt, but most of the time people put up with it because they see the institutions as necessary. The institutions' parasitism is regarded, perhaps, as symbiosis, or at least, as tolerable. However, just as the Catholic indulgence industry and the blatant corruption of the Popes and Rome forced many people in Europe to see the Church as a tapeworm that needed purging, people today identify the institutions of the Enlightenment, for example, the central bank system as parasitic.

Today, the cronyism and nepotism of governments, financiers, and their lackeys in academia and the media are on full display. Financial crimes, sex crimes, and a two tiered system of justice are features of "the establishment". The systems of daily financial life are parasitic, constantly draining wealth from the peoples of the West. For many, the bank bailouts of 2008 were a jolt. They felt the parasite dig into their necks.

It's my belief that it's not just some aspects of "the system" that are problematic, rather it's a whole way of life--a religion, a philosophy--just as the Protestant Reformation was not really a quarrel about the Catholic church, or nonsense like crackers and wine, rather it was a struggle against the medieval status quo. It was also a struggle against institutions and concepts that were made defunct by new technology, e.g. the printing press.

Over the next few posts, I'll elaborate a recipe for reformation. How do you do it? How do you do something this big?

In most respects, the Protestant Reformation serves as a negative example. It was only nominally "the people" versus the medieval status quo. It was probably hijacked from the start, and perhaps became a social engineering project to further the interests of despots like Henry VIII or banking families. The leading men of the movement were probably agents of the oligarchy of the day. Also, the Reformation was an enormous bloodbath and many thousands of men, women, and children died over the most trivial arguments about religion.

Genetics and Ideas and Ethnic Nationalism

Jakob Ammann

What's ethnicity?

Perhaps people don't think in terms of race or ethnicity unless they're forced to by political conflict. Then their race or ethnicity is actually just a means of sorting people onto sides, or being on a side, rather than an expression of their DNA. Maybe it is entirely arbitrary.

In the case of the Amish, though, their distinct ethnic identity is intertwined with ideas that created a self-selected population bottleneck. They were Swiss-Alsatian German Mennonites that followed the teachings of Jakob Ammann. A population that goes off by itself to pursue specific ideas of the good can form a tribe around those ideas, and eventually transform into a genetically distinct group. That's the reverse of the historical examples I can think of where families merge together into one large extended family and become a tribe. Perhaps nucleating around ideas to form tribes is the only way to do it in a world dominated by nation states, and now, by corporate entities.

Here's a really nice article on this topic from the Mennonites: http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Ethnicity.

The Grange

If you live in a relatively rural part of the USA, there might be a local Grange Hall in your area. The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry is a fraternal organization patterned after the Masons that promoted the interests of farmers and rural Americans from just after the Civil War through today.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Grange is its stunning success and subsequent inability to act on that success. The organization membership exploded shortly after its founding, and managed to create an alternate economic and market infrastructure of cooperatives, however, it seems the organization veered away from its economic role in favor of advocacy of progressive legislative themes. The organization was founded to be something like an advocate for the yeomanry, but then stepped away from that role as it succeeded. It neutered itself.

The Grange is a great example of how a secret society or fraternal organizations can be engines of political organization. It is also a unique case of intentional moderation, or from another perspective, the Grange is a negative example. The elements missing from its structure, e.g. counter-intelligence to name one, put severe limits on its ability to promote members interests and failed to protect the land people against the sea people.