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Temple of the Sacred Spiral
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Christianity is based on the belief that Jesus Christ who was born a man but represented divinity, died by crucifixion and in doing so took the whole sins of the world past, present and future upon his shoulders, as such freeing us from the necessity to pay for our own sinfulness with eternal death and torment. He then rose from the dead and will come again at the end of time to rule on Earth and on to Heaven. Those people that have been saved will spend the rest of Eternity in Heaven and those who have not will be consigned to Hell, a place of torment and separation from God.
The Christian myth begins with the birth of Christ to a young teenager, Mary, who is engaged to be married to a carpenter, Joseph, from the town of Nazareth which is now in the northern part of the West Bank of what used to be Jordan and is now part of the occupied territory by Israel in the Middle East. The archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary and said "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. You will bear a son and you will call his name Emanuel" (which means 'God with us'). Joseph was also warned by an angel not to break off the engagement with Mary, despite her being pregnant when he knew he wasn't the father, but to marry her. He, as her husband, then traveled to Bethlehem for the purposes of being counted for the Roman Empire census. Because there was no room at the inn they were forced to seek accommodation in stables and at this time Mary went into labour and gave birth to a son whom we now know as Jesus Christ. Various omens occurred at this time, for example; angels appearing in the sky to shepherds, a star appearing in the East bringing Wise Men (probably Persian Zoroastrian majors) to visit the new King of the World (which of course led to the extremely superstitious Herod, currently King of the Jewish Kingdom under Roman patronage, to become very paranoid and order the slaughter of every child under the age of two in Bethlehem). Of course the ubiquitous angel appeared once more to Joseph and Mary and told them to go to Egypt where Christ spent some of his early childhood. They then traveled back to Nazareth where he was brought up as a carpenter.
However as he got to the age of 30 Jesus felt the spiritual calling and went into the desert where he was tempted to spiritual and worldly glory. He resisted these temptations and returned to be baptized in the waters of the River Jordan by John The Baptist who saw himself as the forerunner or tiro of Christ coming into the world.
Thus commenced Christ's ministry which lasted from one to three years and in which most of his teachings which have come down to us in the Gospel such as 'Blessed is he who is poor in spirit believes in the Kingdom of God' has been distilled.
During this time he used phrases to describe himself such as 'Son of man' and, according to the Gospel of St John which was written in approximately 100AD, as 'Son of God'.
He referred to the divine God of the Jews, known as Yahweh, as Father, His Father and Our Father In Heaven and gave us the Lord's Prayer which is familiar even to non-Christians.
He then entered the city of Jerusalem in a triumphal march with the crowd hailing him as the King Of The Jews, hoping that he would drive out the hated Romans and re-establish the independent Jewish Kingdom that had existed before Israel was conquered by the Roman general, Pompeii. However he was arrested by the Jewish priesthood, who saw themselves in direct line from the Maccabean Kings, in an attempt to avert Roman wrath. Trumped up charges were brought against him and he was condemned to death. Because the final authority for the death sentence had to be proclaimed by the Roman Governor, at the time Pontius Pilate, he was brought before Pontius Pilate and condemned to death by crucifixion. This took place on what is now remembered as Good Friday. He was crucified just outside the city walls of Jerusalem called Golgotha alongside two common criminals, one of whom repented and acknowledged the sacredness of Christ who then turned to say to him "today I say you will meet me in paradise". Christ died that day and was taken down from the cross and buried in a cave-like tomb called a sepulchre belonging to one of his secret followings among the Jewish elders (called the Sanhedrin), Joseph of Arimathea.
On the Sunday morning he rose again from the dead and his followers who sought to offer memorial presents at his tomb were greeted with an empty tomb. Christ first appeared to one of his most famous followers, a woman, Mary Magdalene, and thereafter to his group of disciples later to be called apostles, of whom there were originally twelve in number (but one, Judas, had been instrumental in betraying Christ to the Jewish priesthood for arrest, and was later replaced after Christ's departure from Earth by a person called Matthias to bring the number of apostles back up to twelve). Christ appeared to many people in his risen form over the next fourty days and then was taken away to heaven, promising that he would both send the Holy Spirit upon his followers and would also return one day to bring truth, justice and the Christian way to the whole world. (A superman prototype?!)
Basically he stated that whosoever will believe in him will be saved and whosoever did not believe in him will not be saved. One of his greatest disciples who originally started as a persecutor of the early Christians, Paul of Parthos, a member of the Sanhedrin, of Greek parentage and an extremely educated person, wrote most of the rest of the New Testament, called the Epistles, in which he set out Christian doctrine. These are in fact the earliest Christian writings that are known, as many of the stories of the Gospels were passed on by old tradition and only later written down quite a number of years after Christ's death, though St Paul's Epistles were written within ten years of Christ's death.
St Paul was a tireless worker for the new religion and transformed it from a purely Jewish sect into one of world import, promising salvation to all comers - men, women, slaves, free, the educated, the ignorant, thus making it a very popular religion from those who were excluded from the so-called mystery religions which had a more 'elitist' attitude to membership (such as the mysteries of Isis, the mysteries of Mythras and the mysteries of the Euisinian right.
Basically St Paul's theme was that Christ was a manifestation of God himself and in fact represented the whole of Godhead in his one person so that he was both God and man, but as he was perfect and absolutely sinless because of his birth from a virgin he was freed from the 'curse of original sin' (which is related to the fact that we are born by the mechanism of sexual intercourse and of course a virgin birth avoided this 'dreadful' activity) and therefore this was the perfect sacrifice required so that we could be excused from the penalty of sin which is eternal death. He goes on further to say that man will be saved by faith alone, that good works without faith are not acceptable to God and will lead in no way to spiritual advancement i.e. spiritual advancement is totally dependent upon God having given us his grace so that we can recognize him and have faith in him. A further viewpoint elaborated on by the Protestant movement, particularly by John Calvin, is that in fact those who are destined to be 'saved' have already been numbered by God right before the beginning of creation, that is those who are pre-destined to be 'saved' and all the rest of us are pre-destined to 'eternal torment'. One of the major divides between the Catholic and Orthodox churches on one hand and most of the Protestant churches on the other is the concept of 'free will' and the place of 'good work'. Faith alone is seen as necessary for salvation by virtually all the Protestants and free will to choose God is limited by the fact that in fact it is God who chooses us. The Catholic and Orthodox churches on the other hand, while recognizing God's grace and the fact that faith is necessary for salvation, also claim that faith without good works is empty and that good work in itself can make up for a good deal of bad works such that people who have sinned can buy their way back into God's favour by, for example - building a church or two to his glory.
From a historical point of view Christianity is not as unique as many of it's adherents make out. The legend of a virgin birth, of a dying and rising God and most of Christ's reported miracles are mirrored in most mythologies of the Middle East and Europe and India. There was great cross-fertilization of religious ideas in the preceding 1-2000 years prior to Christ's birth. In particular a group of Jews called Essenes were greatly influenced by the Zoroastrian concept of good versus evil and the explanation that evil came into the world by the agent of either an evil God as in Zoroastrianism or a fallen angel as in Judaism. In addition, virtually all of Christ's teachings are present in the Essene scriptures as revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls whose teachings pre-date Christ by at least 100 years. Finally, the terminology 'Son of Man' and 'Son of God' are not meant to denote a specific relationship to God that is now understood by Christianity where Christ has been elevated to the status of God The Son, but that we all have within us that part of divinity that makes us sons and daughters of the divine. All the Essenes were seen as sons of God and sons of Man.
The absence of the feminine divine is also, unfortunately, not unique. Zoroastrianism had deleted the Goddess from its cosmogony as had Judaism. Indeed the act of sexual intercourse, the cause of original sin (the doctrine that says that we are all tainted with sin from the moment of birth onwards), spread to the concept that menstruating women were also evil and impure. This is a far cry from the Paleolithic and Neolithic viewpoint that menstruation was a sign of woman's 'specialness' in that they were able to bleed and not die whereas men, when they bled, usually did die. The attitude to women in St Paul's Epistles where woman must be in subjugation to her husband in all things and from which diatribe the Catholic Church justifies its current position that there is never a place for women in the priesthood, is just a logical extension of Zoroastrian, Essene and even mainstream Judaic thought.
As a footnote, it should be noted that feminine divine can never be totally deleted no matter how hard the doctrines of the male dominated church may try. In four hundred something or other the Church Council finally came to a conclusion of an extremely bitter debate over the role of Mary. She was designated as 'cheopokos' i.e. God bearer or Mother Of God, and her special position in the Orthodox and Catholic Church has been sustained throughout the centuries, such that for all practical purposes she is a 'de-facto' Goddess, albeit one which is flawed and incomplete, particularly from a sexual point of view. Subsequently with the rise of the Protestant …. the role of Mary was re-defined as that of an ordinary woman with emphasis on Christ's statement "woman, what have I to do with thee".
However there is one thing that I feel is unique about Christianity, and that is the dying and rising God was able to take all the sins of everyone - past, present and future - upon himself and that spiritual advancement is only possible by believing in this divine redemption. As Paul says "salvation is by faith alone". This is equivalent to saying that spiritual advancement is not possible unless you have God's grace and have faith. Like most other mainstream religions, Christianity also emphasizes spirituality over material manifestation and in fact, despite the fact that in Genesis God created the world and saw that it was good, they regard material pleasures and the birth itself as something to be subjugated, exploited and that is innately deleterious to achieving true spirituality. Therefore it is fair to regard Christianity, as far as its doctrines and teachings from the leaders of the churches, as 'world denying'. Its attitude that spiritual advancement is not possible unless there is faith can also be regarded as 'spirit denying'. It is interesting to note that this last arises from the sole unique factor of Christianity.
However as far as the practice of Christianity is concerned, many Christians in fact do practice a world affirming spirituality and quite a number of the Protestant churches have now admitted women to the priesthood and are now trying to emphasize the 'divine feminine' by stressing that the word 'God' is not meant to denote either masculine or feminine gender. Although there is little (but not zero) support from this from Christian scriptural doctrines, it nevertheless represents a positive stream of consciousness that is developing in Christian churches, and among ordinary Christian people, in reaction to the patriarchal life-denying, "put up with life on Earth so that you can get paradise in heaven" attitude of the previous and even some of the present leaders of the various churches.
What can we as Pagans gain from Christianity? Certainly their hierarchical establishment is very impressive in the way it has gained power but this has been at the detriment for development of true spirituality and a balance between the material and the physical, between Heaven and Earth. The commands of Christ to 'look after those less fortunate that ourselves' and that 'what we do to other people is in effect doing it to God' are positive values that in fact Pagans mainly incorporate in their own beliefs that because we are all part of the divine, what we do to others is done to the divine and to ourselves. Unfortunately Christians see these acts of kindness as storing up benefits in heaven rather than being part of an inter-connection with the rest of creation.
I have deliberately not dealt with fundamentalist Christian thought as I regard this as an aberration, particularly in Australia where, fortunately, fundamentalists are regarded as extreme and weirder than most Pagans.
The term 'Christian' was first used in 35-40CE in Antioch in Syria, to describe those who were attached to "Christos", the Greek translation of the Hebrew term 'Messiah'. The earliest Christians were Jews. They continued to read the Jewish Scriptures, seeing them as an authoritative source of teaching and debate - the Old Testament. The New Testament writings were a collection of Christian writings containing the ideas and images of Jesus held in early Christian communities that was deemed to be authoritative by the later church. Literally all these come from the within the first 100 years CE and some, mainly the letters of Paul come within the first 50 years CE.
From its origins Christianity had the ideas of shared life and community of which Christ is the head; that God is active in the church guiding it into truth; and the Church is therefore seen as one of the authorities of God's will.
But while some believe the Church to be entrusted with the tradition to transmit and develop doctrine through its accredited representatives and teachers (the successors of the Apostles), others deny the existence of any source of revelation independent of the scriptures. These differences relate to the interpretation of the role of the Apostles. Many Christian traditions state that that historic office has been perpetuated in the Church through a succession of bishops whose unanimity guarantees universal i.e. catholic truth. Other Christians hold that the office of Apostle was a 'once for all' institution for the establishment of the church and now the only reliable guide are the scriptures to which the church conform.
Finally there is the theme of Pentecostal and African Christianity where God still speaks through prophets and inspired people to apply the message of the scriptures to specific human conditions.
The Jewish phase of Christian History (30-70CE).
For a short period Christianity was entirely Jewish but with the distinguishing feature that Jesus of Nazareth was the true Messiah, Son of Man and the Suffering Servant. One of the signs of the age to come that the Messiah would bring, was that non-Jews would seek and find the salvation that God had given to Israel. So the conversion of Pagan Greeks in Antioch would cause no difficulty to even the most devout upholders of Jewish Law. Many expected that these Pagan Gentiles would be circumcised and keep the Jewish Law but under the influence of Paul of Tarsus, the Jerusalem Christians decided that Gentiles would be accepted on the ground of faith in Jesus as Messiah, without requiring circumcision or to keep the Jewish Law. Gentiles came flooding in and quickly became the majority of Christians. Following the Jewish revolt against the Romans and the destruction of the Jewish State in 70CE, the Jewish model of Christianity was ended for ever.
The Hellenistic/Roman Phase (70-500CE).
This commenced when unnamed Jewish Christians converted the Pagan Greeks in Antioch to believe in Jesus. The outstanding figure in this was Paul of Tarsus who, on the road to Damascus to persecute the Antiochan Jewish Christians received a vision and was converted by this vision into a life-time mission to serve the will of the new faith. It is through his writings that the nature of Jesus was raised to that of true divinity and the concept of the Holy Trinity, that is God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, being all one and part of the same God (a little like the Pagan Maiden Mother Crone being part of the same Goddess) was born.
The doctrine of resurrection was a constant stumbling block. Many Greek speaking people had grown up to think that matter was the seat of all evil both in the world and the personality and therefore wished to be free of the body; but the conviction that Christ had arisen and there was the resurrection of the body was too central to Christian preaching to be abandoned. So in theory, the "truth" of bodily resurrection was accepted as doctrine, but in practice, Christianity reviles "the way of the Flesh" as inferior and evil.
The developing Christian pattern of organization owed something to Greek civic organization. The corporate leadership of the Jewish model indicated in the Acts of the Apostles gave way to a system of linked local hierarchies, each under a bishop, which system helped to maintain orthodox tradition.
The Christians' insistence that their allegiance to Christ prevented their worshipping in the state cult which involved veneration of the emperor's genius or spirit and their frequent refusal to undertake military service contributed to suspicions about their loyalty to empire. There were at least two very serious outbreaks of persecution by the Pagan Emperors of Christians, that during the reign of Nero and that during the reign of Diocletian. All this changed, however, with Constantine's ascension to power in 313CE who first tolerated, then favoured, the Christian Church. Privilege replaced disability until it effectively became the State Religion of the Empire and, in turn, started to persecute non-Christians, even to the point of destroying most of the wonderful library of Alexandria under the commands of the Christian Emperor, Theodorus The Great.
Note that the Roman Empire was not the first Christian State, for the kingdom of Armenia anticipated it by some years and there were innumerable Christians in areas such as South India, South Arabia, the Nile Valley, Sudan, Horn of Africa and the Caucasus with substantial Christian minorities in the Persian empire.
The Barbarian Phase (500-1100CE)
With the Roman Empire as its principal base Christianity continued to expand among the tribal peoples north of the imperial frontiers, along the eastern trade routes and to parts of Eastern Africa. When the Barbarians destroyed the western half of the Roman Empire, the effect on the church was not what earlier writers had expected for most of these barbarians were already Christian, some of an archaic Arian type which had been banned in the Empire (Arias had insisted that the nature of the divinity of Jesus Christ was not the same as God the Father but like God the Father. This heresy, of course, led to the logical conclusion that there were two Gods not one). Rulers like the mighty Charlemagne (768-814CE) and King Olaf of Norway (died 1000CE) forcibly extended the numbers of Christians and their own powers simultaneously. ("Convert or die" - most chose the former). There were periods of return to the old Gods and places which resisted long: much of Sweden and most of Finland was unpenetrated until the twelfth century. Lithuanea remained as the last Pagan country in Europe till the sixteenth century. Nevertheless worship of the old Gods largely disappeared for many people were weary and disillusioned with them (and the social patterns they perpetuated - what a rude shock awaited them under the new "gentle" yoke of Christ!). Christianity helped the adjustment from the obsolete warrior life to that of settled farming, saints and martyrs replaced the local spirits, the symbols changed subtly but the directions and motives of religious practice remained (although never acknowledged and later forgotten by the Christian Churches).
A multitude of factors, historical and cultural, political and theological gave Rome and its bishop a unique place in the minds of western Christians. Eastern Christians, with their emperor still reigning in the new Rome at Constantinople with another language (Greek) and other ancient and Apostolic churches saw things differently. Greek Christianity expanded north to Russia in 988CE. The oriental Christians of Nestorian and Monophysite families, separated from both east and west, continued to spread their own forms of Christianity into Central Africa and Tang China. However, the rapid expansion of Islamic Arabs who conquered most of the Byzantine empire destroyed Christianity in North Africa and in most of the Middle East.
One institution which was born in this phase was the monastery, the close-knit band of men and women, celibate, dedicated to religion, living under one rule. They served as the task-force for religious operations, maintained learning and they were the focus for those who wished to be radically Christian. Of course, corruption, as always, set in and many sought to become equal to the powerful lords in the land.
The Western Phase (1100-1600CE)
In 1453 the Turks occupied Constantinople and the Christians of the east passed under Moslem rule; an historical adventure in China faded, the Mongols swamped Central Asian Christianity and Russia was still painfully acquiring its Christian rudiments. Western Europe became incontestably the centrepoint of Christianity. Politically this period shows the first signs of development of nation States and a return to Greek language studies following the fall of Constantinople influenced the different expositions of Christian belief - for example, by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274CE) and John Calvin (1509-1564CE). Printing increased the influence of religion and the resultant religion conflicts of this time. The nature and meaning of salvation came under intense discussion - by grace alone (a matter of divine initiative); through faith only (so human merit is excluded); and the source being from scripture only. This led to the rise of the Protestant formulation, with salvation by grace alone, faith alone and knowledge from scripture only. The role of humanity's ability to think rightly for itself and to spiritually advance by any of its own endeavour was given its final death knell. It challenged the assumption that the membership of the Christian Church and membership of the community of the State were synonymous. By taking the Protestant understanding of salvation to its logical conclusion and identifying the Church with those who had personal faith, the Anabaptists broke the link between Church and State and re-created the persecuted state of early Christianity.
The eastern Christianity became transformed with the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia successively became the seats of major new Christian populations. When the old Empire passed under Moslem rule Russia had already known two centuries of Mongol domination but the difference was that under the Mongols the Russian Church was protected and quietly throve, thus Moscow became Constantinople's successor - the third Rome.
The Phase Of Expanding Europe (1500-1920CE)
Europeans now occupied whole continents as 'settlers' and assumed control of vast areas. During this period Christianity moved from being a European phenomenon to a World Faith, with the signs of its approaching decline in Europe being evident just as it was expanding everywhere else. With the whole of the mid Eastern Mediterranean under Turkish rule by 1500CE the ancient centres of Christianity became concerned mainly with survival, but Russia as the centre of orthodox eastern Christian thought and spirituality developed an aesthetic and mystical style of its own where throne and church were closely linked, just as they had been in Constantinople. Russian Christianity followed the expansion of the Russian Empire across all North Asia into Alaska and even into North America. Western expansion was even more dramatic and the expansion of western Christianity thus more significant. By 1550 Spain had set up a vast empire in central and South America, by 1650 Portugal was established in Brazil, many African coastlands, India and South East Asia and England had occupied large tracts of North America, the Caribbean and India. Western treatment of the native American and African people was misguided and beastly.
A genuine desire for their conversion to Christianity led to tragic consequences for many but it did force Westerners to recognize the native's potential equality in faith. In many cases Christianity moderated the worst abuses of western tyranny and was almost the only source of self-criticism for the West; the principal source of challenge to Western rapacity. The status of the native peoples in their nations at present is, however, indicative of the general failure of this challenge.
The various schismatic traditions of Christianity competed with each other as they planted the Christian faith across Africa, Asia and the Pacific. In the social sphere, however, resentment at the frequent alignment of the Church with power, wealth and privilege alienated many from Christianity, particularly in industrial countries where urban development and a large increase in populations left multitudes without any regular contact with the Church.
Two features in this phase appear opposite in tendency. On one hand the intensive activism where the theatre of faith was the whole world of human activity and on the other the fact that Christianity became increasingly a matter of private choice. The idea of religion as transmitted custom, binding on the whole community was not accepted in more open plural societies of later times and countries - for example, the United States and Australia - acknowledged institutionalised no link between Church and State.
The Southern Phase (since 1920CE)
The present phase of Christianity saw another dramatic shift in its centre of gravity. It is now especially characteristic of the southern continents and is receding among peoples of European origin. This has accelerated in the last seventy years, first from the influence and tyranny of communism in the nations behind the Iron Curtain and subsequently in the reduced relevance to society of the values of authoritarian Christianity in a modern pluralistic and highly technological society. In addition the impact of technology has led to a wider spread of information about all various religions and in particular the abuses practised in many by various practitioners. This has caused many religious leaders who wished to maintain an authoritarian control over their followers to lose their authority as information became freely available in the privacy of one's own home to everybody. However, the Christian expansion outside Europe and the lands occupied by European peoples has continued unabated. It is Africa and the Pacific and Latin America which have become notable for their Christian populations. By the end of the twentieth century Africa will have by far the largest Christian profession of any of the continents and this will eventually influence the character of the religion. In Asia, however, the Old Religions have been revived and re-formulated as they came to term with modernizing forces, which is something that Christianity generally has not done in the First World countries. Only one Asian country, the Philippines, has a substantial Christian population although there are important Christian minorities in South Korea, Indonesia and India, although only a tiny percentage of those countrie populations.
There are certain features common to the various Christian perceptions of the significance of Jesus:
The practices include prayer, held to be an obligation on Christians, which can be both in the ritual form or in a meditative, contemplative, personal form.
Important days of observance are followed, particularly Sunday being recognized as the Holy Day, with various other holy days such as Good Friday and Easter (the death and resurrection of Christ) and Christmas (the birth of Christ). Note that these have actually been based on either the Jewish liturgical year or even older Pagan customs.
Giving in Christian communities is a requirement, particularly for the support of the church itself, the maintenance of the priests, the missions to extend the work of the church and to give to the poor (in that order!).
The consecration of bread and wine and its symbolic and magickal identification with the body and blood of Christ, the partaking of this in a ritual meal (the Eucharist) has been a centrepoint ritual of almost all Christians.
The other major ritual has been that of Baptism with the use of water as a cleansing mark and also oil, often used in rites of anointing prophets, priests and kings.
The 'laying on of hands' is no longer universal among Christians but still has application for appointment to various priestly officers, for confirmation of people who have been baptized as infants into the full participation in the Christian community and for healing.
Early Christian communities knew a heightened consciousness which they attributed to the gift of the Holy Spirit, one aspect was the capacity to utter fluently a range of sounds outside normal speech. St Paul seems to have thought this an over-valued capacity and insisted it be controlled and interpreted for the benefit of those without it. Following this the phenomenon (known as glossolalia) died out but it has been reappearing on an increasing scale since the nineteenth century to the extent that it is the sine qua non of authentic spirituality in some churches, while in others it is regarded with reserve or dislike, as a source of disorder or division.
The principal traditions of Christianity are:-
Christian history has seen a constant tension between the forces which localize and indigenize it and those which universalize it. Both forces belong to its earliest sources and its message. The universalizing forces are the same as they were in the beginning: the worship of Israel's God, the according of ultimate significance to Jesus, the use of scriptures and the consciousness of a time and space transcending community.
The current major controversies within Christianity at present are the women's entrance to ministry and the role of women and the rites of women, particularly as far as contraception and abortion are concerned; the attitudes to marriage, particularly divorce and legal versus non-legal marriage; and attitudes to sexuality, particularly homosexuality and sex outside marriage. In some churches there is the added issue of the celibacy of the priesthood and in others the authority of the church hierarchy over individual conscience.
"The Christian church has left a legacy, a world view, that permeates every aspect of western society, both secular and religious. It is a legacy that fosters sexism, racism, the intolerance of difference in the desecration of the natural environment and a deep suspicion of mystical, spiritual experiences. The church, throughout much of it's history has demonstrated a disregard to human freedom, dignity and self-determination. It has attempted to control, contain and confine spirituality, the relationship between an individual and God and as a result Christianity has helped to create a society in which people are alienated not only from each other but also from the Divine.
This Christianity - called "orthodox Christianity" here - is embedded in the belief of a singular, solely masculine, authoritarian God who demands unquestioning obedience and who mercilessly punishes dissent. Orthodox Christians believe that fear is essential to sustain what they perceive to be a divinely ordained, hierarchical order in which a celestial God reigns singularly at a pinnacle, far removed from the earth and all human kind.
While orthodox Christianity originally represented but one of many sets of earlier Christian beliefs, it is these Christians who came to wield political power. By adapting their Christianity to appeal to the Roman government they won unprecedented authority and privilege, their church became known as 'the' church. This newly acquired power enabled them to enforce conformity to their practices. Persecuting those who did not conform, however, required the church to clarify it's own doctrine and ideology, to define exactly what was and what was not heresy. In doing so the Church consistently chose tenets and ideology as the best support of it's control over the individual and society.
As it took over leadership in Europe and the Roman Empire collapsed the church all but wiped out education, technology, science, medicine, history, art and commerce. The church amassed enormous wealth as the rest of society languished in the Dark Ages. When dramatic social changes came after the turn of the millenium and brought an end to the isolation of the era, the church fought to maintain it's supremacy and control. It rallied an increasingly dissident society against perceived enemies, instigating attacks upon Moslem, Eastern Orthodox Christians and Jews. When these crusades failed to subdue dissent the church turned it's force against European society itself, launching a brutal assault upon Southern France and instituting inquisition.
The Crusades and even the early centuries of inquisition did little to teach people a true understanding of Orthodox Christianity; it was the Protestant reformation and the Catholic counter-reformation that accomplished this. Only during the reformation did the populace of Europe adopt more than a veneer of Christianity. The reformation terrified people with threats of the devil and witchcraft. The common perception of the physical world was imbued with God's presence and with magic. It was replaced during the reformation with a new belief that divine assistance was no longer possible and that the physical world belonged only to the devil; it was a three hundred year holocaust against all who dared believe in divine assistance and magic that finally secured the conversion of Europe to Orthodox Christianity.
By convincing people that God was separate from the physical world, Orthodox Christianity - perhaps unwittingly - laid the foundation for the modern world, a world believed to be mechanical and determined, a world in which God is at most remote and impersonal creator. People came to attribute their sense of powerlessness not so much to their sinful human nature, but to their insignificance in such a world. The theories of scientists and philosophers such as Isaac Newton, Renee DeCarte and Charles Darwin, reinforced Orthodox Christian beliefs such as the inevitability of struggle and the necessity for domination. Such beliefs now, however, are proving not only to have serious drawbacks but also to be scientifically limited.
Orthodox Christianity has also had devastating impact on humanity's relationship with nature. As people began to believe that God was removed from and disdainful of the physical world, they lost their reverence for nature. Holidays which had helped people integrate the seasons with their lives were changed into solemn commemorations of biblical events, bearing no connection to the earth's cycles. The perception of time changed so that it no longer seemed related to seasonal cycles. Newtonian science seemed to confirm that the earth was no more than the inevitable result of the mechanistic operation of inanimate components; it confirmed that the earth lacked sanctity.
The dark side of Christian history can help us understand the severing of our connection with the sacred. It can teach us that the most insidious and damaging slavery of all: the control of people through dictating and containing their spirituality. This ignored side of history can eliminate the ideas and beliefs which foster the denigration of human rights, the intolerance of difference and the desecration of the natural environment. Once recognised we can prevent such beliefs from ever wreaking such destruction again. When we understand how we have come to be separated from the divine, we can begin to heal not only the scars but the very alienation itself".
From "The Dark Side Of Christian History" by Helen Ellerbe 1995.
The most pivotal belief was that in a singular supremacy divinity is manifest in only one image, radically different to the widespread belief at the time of the first century CE that divinity could be manifest in a multiplicity of forms and images. As people believe that God can have but one face, so they believe that worth or godliness among humans can also have but one face; therefore different genders, races, classes or beliefs are all ordered as better than or less than another. Within such a belief structure God reigns singularly from the pinnacle of a hierarchy based not on love and support but on fear; the Bible repeatedly exhorts people to fear God "fear God and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man" (Ecclesiastes 12:13), "fear Him which after He hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yay I say unto you fear Him" (Luke 12:5). Tatoolian stated "but how are you going to love without some fear that you do not love; surely such a God is neither your father towards whom your love for duty's sake should be consistent with fear because of His power, nor your proper Lord whom you should love for His humanity and fear as your teacher."
Orthodox Christians also place great importance upon the singular authority of the bishops and rankings within the clergy and distinction upon the clergy and laity.
Not all Christians accepted that belief in a singular supremacy, Gnostic Christians understood God to be multifaceted having both masculine and feminine aspects. In the Gnostic Apocryphyn of John a vision of God appears saying "I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Child". It is not surprising that during the second century Orthodox Christian were abjured to root out Gnostic Christians from the community; indeed not all Christian women accepted subservient roles, several Gnostics referred to Mary Magdalene as one of the most important leaders of the Christian movement, some seeing her as the first to see Christ resurrected and challenging Peter's authority of the emerging church hierarchy; there has been recent evidence to suggest that she may in fact have been Christ's concubine or even wife. However from very early on in the first four hundred years of Christian history, Orthodox Christians sought to control truth and have strict control over who could dispense that truth. Clement, the bishop of Rome from 900-100CE, argued that God alone rules all things, that He lays down the law punishing rebels and rewarding the obedient and that His authority is delegated to church leaders; whoever disobeys these divinely ordained authorities has disobeyed God himself and should receive the death penalty. Their belief in singular supremacy limited the way one could understand God and encouraged a fear-based authoritarian structure segregating people into positions of superiority or inferiority, restricting personal empowerment and demanding unquestioning obedience. Within a few centuries Orthodox Christians had effectively suppressed the diversity of early beliefs and ideas and become synonymous with Christianity itself.
Christianity owes its large membership to the political maneuvering of Orthodox Christians who succeeded in turning Christianity from an abhorred minor cult into the official religion of the Roman Empire. To that end they used nearly any means; they revised Christian writings and adapted their principles to make Christianity more acceptable, they pandered to Roman authorities, they incorporated elements of Paganism, they appealed to the government - not as a religion that would encourage enlightenment or spirituality, but one which would bring order and conformity to the faltering Empire, in turn for the government granting them unprecedented privilege enabling the church to become the very sort of authoritarian power that Jesus had resisted.
Romans had easily incorporated new Gods and Goddesses into their pantheon with the hope of adding to their own protection and security. Christians, however, believed theirs to be the one and only God and refused to allow him to be worshipped alongside others. When they refused to profess loyalty to the Roman pantheon of Gods, Christians were seen as likely traitors to the Roman State and were regarded as atheists for refusal to believe in the existence of these Gods.
The Orthodox Christians used politically expedient means to accomplish such ends, they designed an organization, not to encourage spirituality but to manage large numbers of people; they simplified their criteria for membership, those who confessed the creed, accepted baptism, participated in worship and obeyed the church hierarchy were Christian; they ignored the argument that a true Christian could only be identified by their behaviour and maturity, not by simply going through the motions of a ritual; some Gnostic Christians insisted that Jesus had said "by their fruits ye shall know them"; baptism did not necessarily make one a Christian, but the simple standards of the Orthodox made it easier to garner a larger following.
Orthodox Christians assembled the Bible, not to bring all the gospels together, but to encourage uniformity. In fact they prohibited and burned other writings so as to give the impression that the New Testament and it's four gospels represented the only original Christian view, despite the fact that there were at least two hundred different gospels circulating at any one time. Furthermore scholars have shown that all four canonized gospels have themselves been doctored and revised; and even the four canonized gospels contradict one another.
But it was the church's insistence upon uniformity that appealed to the Roman Emperor, Constantine, - a man who had his own son executed and boiled alive - who saw in Christianity a pragmatic means of bolstering his own military power and uniting the vast and troubled Roman Empire. He recognised Christianity as a means of conquering dissention within the Roman Empire, and so began the reign of Christianity as the Empire's official religion. It was at the Council of Nycea, under the chairmanship of Constantine, that Jesus was incorporated into the image of God as an aspect of divinity, not a mortal man at all.
The Nicene Creed however established a trinity that extolled sameness and singularity; it eliminated the image of father, mother and child of the Gnostic Christians, replacing it with the Greek neuter term "pneuma" for spirit was now comprised of father, son and a sexless spirit, depicted as three young men of identical shape and appearance, Neuman. Mythra was closely tied to the sun Gods Helios and Apollo, Mythra's birthday was on 25th December, close to the Winter Solstice, and this became Jesus' birthday; shepherds who had witnessed Mythra's birth and partook in a last supper with Mythra before he returned to Heaven obviously have parallel in the Christian myth.
With no initial support from the church, the figure of Mary became revered as an image of the feminine aspect of God and worship of Mary resembled the worship of the various faces of the Goddess, particularly the Mother/Son traditions as Isis/Horas, Juno/Mars, Cybele/Attas, Neath/Rah. Mary was perceived to be a more accessible, approachable and humane figure than the judgmental Almighty God. But neither the Bible nor the early church encouraged Mary in worship or even recognised her as a saint. When a council at Effasis in 431 implied that Mary could be safely worshipped, crowds burst into delirious celebrations, accompanied by torchlight processions and shouts of "praise be to the Theotokos" (Mother of God). The church had not subdued veneration for feminine divinity, it had simply renamed it, even though to an extent it had also mutilated it; Mary being seen as embodying the virgin and Mother but not the Crone, the culmination of feminine power and wisdom or the Dark Goddess.
In 319 Constantine passed a law excusing the clergy from paying taxes or serving in the army. In 355 bishops were exempted from ever being tried in secular courts. In 380 the Emperor Theodoseus made it illegal to disagree with the church. In 388 there was prohibition on any public discussion of religious topics and in 392 the ancient multi-dimensional Pagan worship was prohibited and considered a criminal activity. In 410 the Emperor Honorius legalized the pillaging and destruction of Pagan temples. In 435 a law threatened any heretic in the Roman Empire with death, apart from Judaism. The church had triumphed, the belief in but one face of God led to the legal enforcement of but one religion. As they perceived God to control in an authoritarian manner, so Christians set about finding a way in which they, in God's name, could exercise similar authoritarian control; building an organization which appealed to the government of the Roman Empire by promoting uniformity and obedience. They established criteria which made it easy to recruit large numbers of people, compromised its ideology to accommodate contemporary beliefs and through political maneuvering won its standing as the official religion of the Roman Empire with accompanying secular power and privilege.
The Pelagian controversy brought about church doctrine regarding human free-will and sexuality. Pelagius, an Irish monk, believed that a person had freedom of will and responsibility for his or her actions and that that persons own efforts played a part in determining whether they were 'saved' or not. His most vehement opposition came from St Augustine who stated that salvation was entirely in God's hand and there was nothing an individual could do; it is for the few chosen that Christ came into the world and all others are dammed for eternity, it is only God's grace and not any action or willingness on the part of the individual that leads to salvation. Human sexuality, St Augustine clearly illustrated a human inability to choose good over evil. Augustine based this belief on his own promiscuous life where he fathered and abandoned an illegitimate child; he complained of sexual desire and said that human will is powerless to either indulge sexual desire or to suppress it. This excitement of the genitals was evidence of Adam's original sin transmitted from one mothers womb. These views concerning sexuality differ sharply from Pagan views which consider sex an integral part of the sacredness of life, but they did represent those of many Christians and are in fact backed up by the Epistles of St Paul. Denying human free-will and condemning sexual pleasure made it easier to control and contain people. In 1418 the Pope ex-communicated Pelagius and ever since the Catholic church has officially embraced the doctrine of hereditary transmission of original sin.
Origen thought the human soul existed before it was incarnated into a physical body and passed from one body to another until re-united with God and that all souls would eventually return to God. Although Christ could greatly speed the reconciliation with God, such reconciliation would not take place without effort by the individual. The orthodox Christian opposed these theories, insisting that they depended too heavily upon individual self-determination and that reincarnation minimized the role of Jesus Christ, downplaying the necessity for salvation in this lifetime and therefore diminishing the unique nature of Christ's resurrection. It also challenged the church's' control of intellectual and spiritual pursuit. Oregon continued to see cancers outside the scriptures and in platonic philosophy and in his own imagination; whereas continued to contemplate and explore such questions, Augustine wrote "seek not the things that are too high for thee and search not into the things that are above thy ability, but the things that God hath commanded think of them always and in many of his works be not curious".
Although Oregon died in 284 debate over his theories continued until 553 when he was initially cast out and his doctrines of reincarnation condemned.
With the Donatist Heresy the church set a precedent to suppress dissent. When the Donatists demanded higher standards of the clergy than the Catholic church their movements spread like wildfire. Initially Augustine tried to bring them back into the Catholic fold during discussion, but when talks failed he resorted to force and stated that "to love with sternness is better than to deceive with gentleness" and, even at the beginning of the 20th century Pope Leo XIII argued that the ends justified the means saying: "the death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the church to attain its end when rebels act against it and disturbers of the Ecclesiastical unity, especially obstinate heretics, cannot be restrained by any other penalty from continuing to range the Ecclesiastical Order and impelling others to all other sorts of crime".
The Manichaean Heresy demonstrated the church's willingness to deny it's own ideology when it was unpopular and unprofitable. Manichaean theology is the logical consequence of the belief in a singular supremacy. Why is there pain and evil in the world? The most common answer is that there must be a conflicting force or God creating evil; there must be a devil, and a dualistic theology arises. The concept of a devil is exclusive to monotheism for evil is easier to understand and does not pose the need for a devil when there are many faces of God. The belief in a singular supremacy creates a hierarchy that separates its components, creating a division between heaven and earth, spirit and matter; the components higher up on the hierarchy are considered good, the components lower down are considered evil. Manichaeans advocated stringent asceticism and withdrawal from the world; women, tempting men with earthly pleasures, were considered part of the devil's forces. Even though the church itself would adopt such a Manichaean theology centuries later, in the early years it could not politically afford to fully embrace such monotheism as it was struggling to incorporate vast numbers of people who still understood the world in a Pagan, pantheistic and polytheistic context. Most people thought that everything within the physical world was imbued with the sense of divine and there was little separation between spirit and matter. To advocate a complete renunciation of the physical world as Satan's realm and to abolish all but one divine persona would have led to certain failure in the church's' efforts to spread Christianity, so although it maintained the belief in a singular supremacy the church also allowed worship of not only the Virgin Mary but also a multitude of angels and saints. Manichaeaism was more consistent with orthodox ideology but politically imprudent and so they were labeled as heretics.
The church had a devastating impact on modern society. As it assumed leadership activity in the fields of medicine, technology, science, education, history, art and commerce all collapsed. Europe entered the Dark Ages and although the church amassed immense wealth during these centuries, most of what defines civilisation disappeared. But the Eastern Roman Empire fared better. There was a revival of literature, art, architecture and codification of Roman Law under Justinian. But the flourishing culture was cut short by the Bubonic Plague, striking with a virulence unknown at any other time in human history. This sixth century plague is thought to have taken one hundred million lives and the Roman Empire east and west never recovered. People flocked to the church in terror and the church explained that this plague was an act of God and disease a punishment for the sin of not obeying the church authority; while the plague assured the downfall of the Roman Empire, its strength and the Christian church. Technology disappeared as the church became the most cohesive power in western society. The extensive aqueduct and plumbing systems vanished. Orthodox Christians taught that all aspects of the flesh should be reviled and therefore discouraged washing, toilets and indoor plumbing disappeared, disease became common place as sanitation and hygiene deteriorated; the vast network of roads fell into neglect. In some places the Christian church's' burning of books and repression of intellectual pursuits set humanity back as much as two millenia in its scientific understanding. In the sixth century BCE Pythagoras had come up with the idea that the earth revolved around the sun, by the third century Aristarcus had outlined the heliocentric theory and Eratosthenes had measured the circumference of the earth. By the second century BCE Hipparchus invented longitude and latitude but it was not until the sixteenth century CE that Copernicus would introduce the theory that the earth revolves around the sun and when Galileo attempted to promote it in the seventeenth century he was tried by the inquisition in Rome; only in 1965 did the Roman Church revoke its condemnation of Galileo. Blind faith replaced the spirit of historical investigation.
The church burned enormous amounts of literature. In 391 Christians burnt down one of the worlds greatest libraries in Alexandra, said to have housed seven hundred thousand rolls; ancient academies of learning were closed and education for anyone outside the church came to an end. In 398 bishops were forbidden to even read the books of Gentiles, Jerome rejoiced that the classical authors were being forgotten. St John Chrysostom proudly declared that every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world had vanished from the face of the earth.
Although the medieval church wrought havoc in most arenas of life, it did not reflect real change in the way common people perceived God. The church's continual admonishments against Pagan practices indicate how insubstantial most conversions to Christianity were. It constantly warned against customs relating to trees, nature and the belief in magick.
The spirit of the Middle Ages challenged the church's now established authority however; the church responded by bolstering it's authoritarian structure, asserting the Pope's supremacy over all imperial powers, rallying Europe against Moslems, Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians. When the Crusades failed to unify Europe under its control the church attacked whomever it perceived as an enemy: money lenders, supporters of nation states and the Cathars. However, the church was fighting a rearguard action. Lay schools were created to provide elementary education to merchant and artisan classes and universities were formed in urban areas. Art, literature, philosophy and architecture all began to flourish again during the high Middle Ages, despite people prohibitions. Savonarola carried out his moral reforms in Florence using techniques characteristic of a police state; controlling personal morality through the spying of servants and organizing bands of young men to raid homes of items inconsistent with orthodox Christian ideals. Books, particularly those of Latin and Italian poets, illuminated manuscripts, women's ornaments, musical instruments and paintings were burned in a huge bonfire in 1497, destroying much of the work of Renaissance Florence.
Yet medieval society bounded with dissent; many began to seek a relationship with God outside the church, common people in the Middle Ages found little in the church to which they could relate; churches had become grander and more formal; a choir screen segregated the congregation from the altar; the language of the mass in Latin was, by the end of the seventh century, totally incomprehensible to most people and the church interested itself more in collecting money than relating to its members. Many heretics insisted upon a direct relationship with God and, despite the danger, they translated the Bible into common languages which people could understand. The simple possession of such a Bible was punishable by death.
The Virgin Mary cult blossomed in the Middle Ages, for she was a figure to whom one could turn for forgiveness and who could protest God's judgement and unrelenting law. The church responded by strengthening its own authoritarian structure, developing its own judicial system and forcefully asserting its supremacy over all; drawing up its own system called Canon Law. In the roughly two hundred years of crusades millions were killed, invading crusaders destroyed in much the same way as the church had at the onset of the Dark Ages, burning books, looting, pillaging and perpetrating great cruelty upon their enemies, particularly European Jews.
The climax was reached in the crusade against the Cathars, launched by Pope Innocent III (1198-1216CE). In the south of France Catharism, incorporating much of Muslim Sufi and Jewish Kabalistic traditions, flourished. Women served as priests and could even administer their most important Rites, they were associated with the troubadours, often called the Albigensians.
In 1204 Pope Innocent III renewed the war against the Cathars of southern France. He offered the lands and property of the heretics and their supporters to any who would take up arms and so the Albigensian Crusade began. At the Cathedral of Nazair alone twelve thousand people were killed. At the town of Beziers the commanding Legate Arnaud was asked how to distinguish Catholic from Cathar and he replied: "kill them all for God knows his own", not even a child was spared. The Albigensian Crusade killed an estimated one million people, much of the population of southern France. Entrenched in its own authoritarian structure and consumed by the belief in its own supremacy the Catholic church was unable to respond to the rapid growth and changes to medieval society, demanding instead obedience to the Pope's dictates; and when the crusades against the Moslem, Greek and Jewish infidel failed to bring lasting European unity under the banner of Christianity, the church struck at home, taking any who threatened its power or disobeyed its commands. Its thirty year long Albigensian Crusade ushered in a five hundred year long period of brutal repression. The inquisition was commenced and the inquisitor presided over inquisitional procedure as both prosecutor and judge. Inquisitors grew very rich, they received bribes and annual fines from the wealthy who paid to escape accusation. Unlike Roman Law which preserved a portion of the property for the convicted nearest heirs, Inquisitional Law left nothing. Pope Innocent III explained that God punished children for the sins of their parents.
The Inquisition had devastating economic impact; aside from directly seizing the property of successful merchants by accusing them of heresy, inquisitors crippled commerce by holding certain operations suspect e.g. maps and map makers, the printed word. The printed word itself was seen as a channel of heresy and so the communication produced by the fifteenth century invention of the printing press was hampered.
The Inquisition targeted members of other religions as severely as it did heretics. It leant its authority to the longstanding Christian persecution of Jews. It demanded absolute submission of the individual to authority, a demand rooted in the orthodox conviction that God similarly requires unquestioning obedience. This dreadful belief, accompanied explorers and missionaries throughout the New World.
Both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation attempted to purge Christianity of pre-Christian and Pagan elements. While the Medieval church had embraced orthodox ideology and theory, in practice it had concerned itself far more with amassing wealth and enforcing social obedience than with directing the spirituality of common people. Reformers now set about teaching the European populace a better understanding of orthodox Christianity. By frightening people with stories of the devil and the dangers of magick, they convinced people to believe in an authoritarian God, demanded discipline, struggle and the renunciation of physical pleasure. Martin Luther ignited the Protestant Reformation by protesting against a church more concerned with collecting money than teaching scripture. Protestants advocated stricter adherence to the scripture and the printing press aided this crusade. The harsher tenets of the Old Testament took on greater prominence. They fervently embraced St Augustine's ideas about free will and predestination: Adam's fall from grace had left humanity inherently flawed, incapable of acting correctly and thus entirely dependant upon God's mercy, salvation was now possible only through the grace of God, not through individual determination. But even Protestants continued to rank human beings. Martin Luther wrote in 1533 "girls begin to talk and stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops". But as Protestants fragmented, each new denomination laid claim to the sole divine truth, denouncing all others.
While orthodox Christians had long considered sex for any purpose other than procreation to be sinful, it was only during the Reformation that most common people learned this. Pleasure in fact, in any form, was now repudiated. Physical beauty and esthetics were similarly disparaged. Clothing which revealed the female body was illegal. Self-loathing and a great sense of shame because of the perceived separation of humanity from a strictly heavenly transcendental God was produced. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits declared: "I am mere dung; I must ask our Lord that when I am dead my body be thrown on the dung heap to be devoured by the birds and dogs". Calvin said: "we are all made of mud and this mud is not just on the hem of our gown, but we are full of it, we are nothing but mud and filth, both inside and outside". One had to cope with one's intrinsically evil nature through discipline, chastisement and struggle. Magick, or the belief that God could intervene and make physical life easier became a sure sign of ungodliness during the Reformation. God reigned above and demanded hard work and suffering below. Magick was an arrogant attempt to impersonate God. God could no longer be called upon to assist in everyday life. The Protestants, in fact, fervently rebelled against the magick force in the sacraments of the Catholic Church saying they were confirmation as nothing but plain sorcery, devilry, witchcraft, juggling, legerdemain and all that nought is.
However the Reformation did not convert the people of Europe to Orthodox Christianity through preaching and catechisms alone. There was a three hundred year period of witch hunting from the 15th to the 18th century that ensured the European abandonment of the belief in magick. The church created the elaborate concept of devil worship and then used the persecution of it to wipe out dissent, subordinate the individual to authoritarian control and to openly denigrate women.
The witchhunts were the eruption of Orthodox Christianity's vilification of women, the 'weaker vessel' in St Paul's word; there was even a debate in the 6th century as to whether women had souls. St Thomas Aquinas suggested that God had made a mistake creating women; nothing defective should have been produced in the first establishment of things, so women ought not to have been produced then. The Lutherans debated whether women were really human beings at all. It took a long time for the church to persuade society that women were inclined towards evil, witchcraft and devil worship. It first had to reverse it's policy of denying the existence of witches and then depicted the witch as a slave of the devil; however the devil worship was an astoundingly simplistic reversal of Christian rites and practices as developed by the church. Communion was parried by the black mass, Christian prayers were recited backwards, indeed the very concept of devil worship was exclusive to monotheism and had no importance within the Pagan or Wiccan tradition.
Pope John XXII formalized the persecution of witchcraft in 1320 when he authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcery. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued a ball authorizing two Inquisitors, Kramer and Sprenger, to systematize the persecution of witches under their manual Malleus Maleficarum. Witches were held accountable for nearly every problem, any threat to social uniformity, any questioning of authority, any act of rebellion was now attributed to and prosecuted as witchcraft. Not surprisingly areas of political turmoil and religious strife experienced the most intense witch-hunts which were more severe in Germany, Switzerland, France, Poland and Scotland than in more homogeneously Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain. Protestants and reformed Catholics taught that any magic was sinful since it indicated a belief in divine assistance in the physical world; the only supernatural energy in the physical world was to be of the devil. Without magic to counter evil or misfortune people were left with no form of protection other than to kill the devil's agent, the witch.
The climate of fear created by churchmen of the Reformation led to countless deaths of accused witches quite independently of Inquisitional Courts or procedure. The social turmoil created by the Reformation intensified witch-hunting. The Reformation had diminished the important role of the community and placed a greater demand for personal moral perfection. As the communal tradition of mutual help broke down and the Minorial System, which had provided more generously for widows, disappeared many people were left in need of charity. The guilt one felt after refusing to help a needy person could be easily transferred on to that needy person by accusing her of witchcraft. Old, wise, healing women were particularly targets for witch-hunters, in fact the most common victims were those women who resembled the image of the ancient Crones. The church had never tolerated the image of the Crone, even in the first centuries when it assimilated the Maiden and Mother in the figure of Mary. In the eyes of orthodox Christians however, such healing empowered people to determine the course of their lives instead of submitting helplessly to the will of God. Preachers and church-licensed male physicians tried to fill the function of healer, yet their ministrations were often ineffective compared to those of a Wise Woman, consisting mainly of 'bleeding' which in most cases was harmful. Midwives were also targeted by witch-hunters. Orthodox Christians believed that the act of giving birth defiled both mother and child; in order to be re-admitted to the church the mother underwent a custom of "churching" consisting of a 'quarantine' period of fourty days if a baby was a boy and eighty days if a baby was a girl, during which both she and her baby were considered heathen. Midwives were deemed necessary to take care of what was regarded as "the nasty business of giving birth", a dishonorable profession best left in the hands of women. But in the Reformation midwives became suspected of possessing the skill to abort a foetus, to educate women about techniques of birth control and to mitigate a woman's labour pains.
How many lives were lost during the centuries of witch-hunting will never be known. Some members of the clergy proudly reported the number of witches they condemned such as the Bishop of Wurtzburg who claimed nineteen hundred lives in five years, or the Lutheran prelate Carpzov claimed to have sentenced twenty thousand 'devil worshippers'. Contemporary accounts hint at the extent of the holocaust. While the formal persecution of witches raged from about 1450-1750, sporadic killing of women on the account of suspect witchcraft has continued into recent times. In 1976 a spinster, Elizabeth Hahn, suspected of witchcraft was threatened with death and her house burnt, badly injuring her and killing her animals, in Germany. In 1981 a mob in Mexico stoned a woman to death for her apparent witchcraft which they believed had incited the attack on Pope John Paul II.
By now Christianity had distanced humanity from nature. People came to perceive God as a singular supremacy detached from the physical world and they lost their reverence for nature which had instead become the realm of the devil. A society that had once celebrated nature through seasonal festivals commemorated Biblical events, having no connection to the earth. Holidays lost their celebratory spirit and took on a tone of penance and sorrow. Time, once cyclical was now perceived to be linear and Orthodox Christians finally focussed more on death than on life and its cyclical nature. The church chose the image of Pan, the Greek God of Nature, to portray the devil, the horned, hoofed and goat-legged man had been associated with a number of fertility figures who had been deemed essential to rural welbeing. His name 'Pan' meant all, bread, but after the turn of the millenium the vilified Pan came to evoke terror or panic as the image of Satan. In the attempt to break down the Pagan festivals the church claimed them as Christian and while the traditional meaning of most of these holidays had nothing to do with Orthodox Christianity, the church usually had tolerated the older rituals as it tried to teach a new biblical meaning. It was only during the Reformation that Orthodox Christians insisted that the older nature-oriented significance of holidays be abolished.
Orthodox Christianity fostered humanity's shift towards a world view that paid little heed to the idea of divinity. By teaching that the earthly realm is devoid of sanctity, Christians built the ideological foundation for modern society. Modern thinkers perpetuated the concepts of Orthodox Christianity, providing scientific validation for their belief in hierarchy, domination and struggle. After the belief that God no longer wielded supernatural power in the physical world it became common among the educated to believe that the devil also exercised no such power. Once the idea of divine magic had been rejected it was easy to accept that no magic, divine or evil, operated in the physical realm, which was instead seen as a mechanistic operation of inanimate components functioning entirely upon rational and definable laws similar to that of a huge clock. This new perception and world view characterized the Age of Enlightenment, inspired by seventeenth century figures such as Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, Francis Bacon, Spinoza and Locke. They now thought that the universe functioned according to comprehensive laws requiring no intervention on Gods part, who was relegated to the role of 'setting things up in the first place'. Newton based all his work upon experimental evidence as testimony to the belief that matter was devoid of supernatural influence and consciousness. Since the thoughts of the person conducting the experiment would have no impact upon matter, every experiment's results should be able to be duplicated. Modern thinkers concurred that human consciousness similarly did not influence physical phenomena. Scientists and philosophers also embraced the concept of hierarchy and applied it to their work; hierarchical order requires all components to be separated and ranked according to their superiority or inferiority; it focuses upon a components difference rather than its supportive relationship in connection to the whole. Scientists similarly focused upon the separation, isolation and analysis of increasingly smaller particles and little attention was given to the relationship connecting a component to its surrounding elements or environment.
However these beliefs and concepts are now being called into question, not only because of their practical drawbacks but because of their limited scientific accuracy, with the growth of the branches of science of quantum mechanics and ecology.
As dark as the moments of Christian history have been, awareness of them need not lead to complete rejection of Christianity per se. There have been Christians throughout its history which have fought against the tyranny of orthodox beliefs and behaviour. There have been countless Christians who have valued love and forgiveness over fear and punishment, and encouraged personal empowerment over submission and blind faith. However, in my opinion, these people would have taken the same action regardless of whether they were Christian or not.
On the other hand the dark side of Christian history was not an unavoidable result of human nature, it was instead the result of very specific ideology and belief structure. If we ignore the horror of Christian history and ignore the scrutiny of Christian beliefs and their pervasiveness in our seemingly Godless modern world, the destructive patterns will continue to alienate people from God, the natural environment and each other. By recognizing that efforts to convince us that God demands our fear and unquestioning submission are in fact efforts to control us and contain our spirituality we can move towards a world that values diversity, freedom and human dignity instead of with a belief in singular supremacy moving towards further chauvinism, racism and totalitarianism which is the path which Christianity has adopted whenever it has been "in control".
Most Christian sects recognize various customs many of which have been derived from an amalgam of pre-existing Pagan festivals and rites and the needs of the new religion.
Some Christian sects insist that this only be done as adults, most confer this on infant children and it is later followed by a confirmation of the baptism or promises made on behalf of the child by the godparents, when the new adult confirms himself or herself to be a member of the Christian church.
The first partaking of this rite by an adult varies once more from sect to sect and in fact some sects downplay the importance of this compared to others; e.g. the Catholic church places this at the centre of it's rites (the mass), whereas various Protestant sects such as the Presbyterians and Baptists place this as an optional extra and instead place more emphasis on the sermon and bible study.
Unlike Pagan festivals, these are not cyclical nor in attune with nature, but rather commemorate biblical events. However, they have been grafted on to the back of pre-existing Pagan rites, not doubt in an attempt, vastly successful, to turn people's mind away from the rhythm of nature and into instead the obedience authority of the church.
Initially each of the eight great Sabbats practised to a greater or lesser extent by Pagans throughout Europe were replaced with church festivals.
| Pagan Festival | Christian Festival |
| Yule (Midwinter) | Christmas (Christ's birth) |
| Imbolc | Candlemas i.e. the purification of Mary the Virgin following the birth of her child |
| Ostara (Spring Equinox) | Easter (Christ's return) |
| Beltane | Mayday or Whitsunday (the coming of the Holy Spirit) |
| Litha (Midsummer) | St John the Baptist's birthday |
| Lughnassadh | Harvest Home and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary |
| Mabon (Autumn Equinox) | Michaelmas (victory of St Michael over the devil) |
| Samhain | All Saints Day (Hallowe'en) |
However today few of these festivals are celebrated at all; the main ones being Christmas on 25th December; Eastertide with Good Friday being the Friday before Easter Sunday Easter Sunday following on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring Equinox; and in some churches All Saints Day (All Hallows Day) with the evening before, Halloween, becoming a commercialized fun day for 'trick and treat' for many people in America and to a lesser extent Britain and Australia.
The absurdity of such festivals can be seen with the Christmas cards in Australia picturing snow, a fat man in a red cloak distributing presents from a sleigh pulled by reindeer and hot Christmas dinners. It is because of this absurdity that in the southern hemisphere and in Australia in particular, such feasts have become virtually totally commercialized and have adopted their own particular character devoid of any spiritual or religious meaning.
Gnosticism embraces several religious doctrines of a secret character embodying certain mysteries which, in a broad sense are common to religious systems in many parts of the world. Strictly speaking, however, Gnosticism is a post-Christian phenomenon and can only be understood in a Christian context for Christ in fundamental to the Gnostic doctrine of salvation. Its chief diffusion centre was Alexandra.
The Gnostics salvaged much of the scrap from the wreckage of the Pagan world around them and added to it their own versions of the Christianity that was being propagated in their midst. Fundamental to all is a belief in a transcendent God merciful and good, he is God the Father who belongs to the upper World of Light but is utterly remote from our cosmos and is indeed a strange to it. Associated with Him is His Son, the Logos. The cosmos itself is intrinsically evil and is not the work of the true God but of an opposing entity known as the demiurge or creator. There is a pantheon of sorts, a hierarchy of celestial beings roughly divided into two classes: good angels working for the upper World of Light and evil archons working for the inferior world in which we live.
Pan is involved in the primordial duality that pervades the universe. He fell from the World of Light where he had his origin and is now entrapped in matter and in the clutches of the demiurge; salvation from this predicament has nothing to do with morality, good works or faith, but depends on a kind of transcendent knowledge (gnosis) of God's redemptive purpose through the logos. The world and it's laws, religious, moral and social are of little relevance to the plan of salvation.
Gnosticism was born at the crossroads of many ancient cultures at a time in history that marked the end of the Pagan antiquity. It owed its strength to the fusion of past and present, old and new, east and west and became heir both to the rational tradition of the classical world and the mysticism of the oriental cults with their antiquity. Among these sources we find Egyptian mythology, Helenistic speculation, Zoroastrian dualism and Jewish apocalypticism. While certain of its practices are directly traceable to Sumerian astrology, Phrygian sensuality and the baptising sects of Palestine. Such ideas as the emanation or emergence of Gods ones from another and the pairing of Gods and the arrangements of deities in groups are taken by the Gnostics from the Egyptian tradition. From the Babylonian and Sumerian civilizations of Mesopotamia came the Star Law and Number Law that were to play a prominent part in Gnostic thinking and also the legend of the Life of Ishtar for the young Tammuz and her descent to the Underworld to seek him after his death. Zoroastrianism provided the continuing struggle between two cosmic powers, the Ruler of Light and the Ruler of Evil, with many good and evil spiritual ranking below them and the Iranian figure of Gayomart, a primordial Adam, and Mythra, the victorious God.
One of the archetypal figures of Gnostic mythology, Sophia, is an ambivalent character with both a mystical and heretritious side, good and evil. For trying to be better than the angels she was punished by being imprisoned in a material body and it is in this that she is the lewd and lustful one. In contrast to Christ of the right hand, she is of the left and in this respect she has the qualities of the Jewish Shekinahs. In some texts Sophia is spoken of as the sister and in others as the bride of Christ and is clothed by Christ in his light vesture. Together they enter the bridal chamber, the Lamb and the Lamb's bride and rejoice in the mystical marriage (Revelations 21:9).
The most striking assertion made by the Gnostics is that the demiurge, the evil God, the God who created the world out of coarse matter is identical to Jehovah who was hostile to the supreme being. They point out that unlike the heavenly Father who was a loving God, Jehovah - by his own admission - is jealous, wrathful and full of vengeance, exacting retribution to the third and fourth generation. He enforces legal severity and imposition of the full rigor of the law unmitigated by any implement of clemency or love; he drowns the whole world in a flood; he burns cities of Sodom and Gomorrah; he orders through his prophets the execution of thousands of people (Moses, Elijah, Elisha).
Man is seen as a dual being, possessing an immortal soul incarcerated in a physical body. He belongs to the abode of light and bliss but is involved in the impurities of matter as a result of the fall and since he is composed of this mixture of spirit and clay he is a great miracle and can make himself familiar equally with the divine and the diabolical. He alone has been entrusted with the possession of the divine light, the soul, which is not made by the demiurge and is not native to this world but rather it's origin is the sphere of the kingdom of God the Father, which is the vehicle of the divine soul, and the spirit, or pneuma, regarded as male, and which derives from the realm of light. The body is reduced through sexual intercourse of its parents with the soul is made by God alone.
In the Gnostic scheme not all people are saved or even are capable of attaining salvation. In certain schools the redemption of some and the damnation of others is already known and is fore-ordained. However various other Gnostic groups advocated total avoidance of sexual activity, even going so far as to perform castration.
Christ is the cosmic Son of man, sing the vision of the prophet Daniel, he shows the way by which man may ascend to heaven. Satan, Sophia and Adam descended but their descent was a fall. Christ alone descended voluntarily and all things that are put down can only ascend through him.
Wherever it went Gnosticism left a vast legacy, the full extent of which is only now coming to light. Orthodox Christianity itself, as well as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism received their portion of the Gnostic bequest and gave impetus to mystical schools like the hermetics, philosophical schools like the neoplatinists and religious movements like the manicheans. Perhaps the most famous sect was the Cathars or Albygisinians against whom Pope Innocent III launched his infamous Crusade.
In the modern day the Gnostic influence has been felt through the various sects of the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians and in the Golden Dawn Magickal Movement. William Blake gave vivid and rapturous expressions of opinions which are nothing if not Gnostic; and scientists such as Wolfgang Pauli and psychiatrists such as C J Jung were heavily drawn into the Gnostic ambit.
Blessed be and Never Thirst from Kim and Quenten.
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