Date: Thu, 05 Aug 93 20:15:53 EDT From: "Daniel A. Foss" To: Leri@pyramid.com (Leri) Subject: morningstar from inanna to marjorie Errors-To: leri-request@pyramid.com Message-Id: <930805.201553.EDT.DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu> Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook The pentagram and the morning star are just a couple of those things which in the course of the syncretism which went into the final elaboration of a logically consistent scientific Demonology got fused in the iconography and sign-signifier relation. This kind of signification is slovenly. The logical rigor and technical precision of theology in all its branches (my favorites are eschatology and demonology but am long since rusty since when it was business i got paid for) is not. Theology is the most exact of the sciences. #DEFINE __theology = The science of the nature and powers of imaginary beings. The degree of precision which can be thus attained someone mentioned already I think on this thingie: It was critically important to calculate the precise number of demons and angels which could occupy a given volume of space or stand on an area of given length and width. This gives you the number of combatants on either side in the battle or battles of Armageddon. The Battle of Armageddon (= Mt. Megiddo) had to be where it was for reasons too obvious for St John to have to explain and go way way back to we have no idea but before there was the Jews or the monotheistic mistake or any such thing we call decent religion today. Thothmesse III, mid 15th centruy BC, smashed Canaanite princes and took Mgiddo in a huge battle which, from the internal evidence of the story, he got killed from lousy strategy or ran like hell if in fact he got home. (In the same war he took Jericho and broke down the walls which remained in this condtion in time for the fictitious Joshua to pull a nonoccurrent miracle in a war which never took place 250 years after the real tunbling-down.) King Josiah, who made the Book of Deuteronomy to get found in a broomcloset in the first Spring Cleaning ever allegedly given the Temple, 621 BC, got killed at Megiddo in 609, the reason given was messing in a war among the Great Powers with no help except stupid faith in the Lord, which not even the Prophets were convinced was sane. Or maybe he just had to get killed at Megiddo because it was the place to have your catastrophes. Which it remained for a long time. (The OT is one of the biggest packs of lies ever told by a committee. The NT was another. The notional committee had a lot of meetings. What Jesus Said was affected by what it was needed for Jesus Said at the particular point int the Upward Mobility of the Church and which kinds of ethnics were joining it and whether they were civilized people living in the civitates or hicks in the fields making them pagaini. What we know about the pre-Superpower Church about the Developing Church is what was allowed to survive by the job-hungry minions of that tough Albanian soldier Constantine who wanted things done the Army Way, the Stalin of Christianity. Later glorification of the Primitive Church is invented myth just like the rest of Church history; the "Real" primitive Church was a mess varying all over the place by geography and by fashion. Religon back then was faddish, not even you would believe it. I say that from what I read of what you do believe. Not very much Faith, the gods be praised.) The terrain of the usual battlefield at Mt. Megiddo is well mapped out. The next question is generalship, also known. That of Jesus was zilch. The Enemy Commander is Flavius Domitianus, 81-96, "the number of the Beast is 666," and is there anybody who doesn't know how to spell Domitianvs in Herew-Aramaic letters, diddle with the spelling, add up the numerological values +...+ = 666? Whose generalship was mediocre; experience mostly in defensive fortifications; poor leadership ability. By deductive logic the battle was gonna be won by weight of numbers. In 1204 Burchard of Worms, who was insane, believed demons were crawling all over him making him itch and fart; his answer was too large. Improvements in precision followed. By the late thirteenth century, the complete order of battle of the Satanic Host had been drawn up, with the names of the commanding officers on the demonic side known by name and the number dempms commanded by each in his unit know at full-strength complement. (The same had to be done with the angelic side, so ignorant people today laugh at the vast intellectual powers expended on the angel-dance problem.) Enter the pentagram. The pentragram was used in the empirical research done at Oxford University, notably, during the thriteenth century. It was but one, circles were allowed, of the geometric figure within which the *scientificus* (who in the class distinctions of the time did the grubby manual labor and practical detail work, like a lab assistant, whose results were delivered in religiously appropriate form to the *sciens*, or Knower, of the Knowledge. (Religiously negative findings may not have got found or, if found, got lost.) Knowledge not Known by the *sciens* was not Known. (Vestiges of this crap are still with us.) At the close of the Thirteenth Century the Church had qualms about scientific ethics, that is, who knew what was controlling whom or vice versa for sure? The magical practices for studying demons came from esoteric (*batin*) texts - known only to the selected fewo of course as opposed to the (*zahir*) stuff in the public domain - translated from technically difficult Arabic into stylistically fossilized Hebrew by Jews in Toledo, Spain; they turned right around and retranslated it into intricate Medieval Church Latin. Where the five-sided figure comes in is as the representation of the pentad representing the Five Human Exemplars of the Five Abstract Principles corresponding to the Five Ages of the World. Which had tricked down from Neoplatonism bakc in the Third Century; and which in turn hed earlier antecedents; but the Barbarous Lating Christians had lost the sources. This nails it down: "For al-Sijistani, the pentad consisting of the *aslan* (intellect and soul), *jadd*, *fath* and *khaykal*, in fact, comprise the spiritual *hudud* which together with the five ranks of the terrestrial *da'wa* (*natiq*, *asas*, *imam*, *lahiq* and *janah*) make up what Paul Walker has designated as the normative or moral hierarchy, which is of specifically Isma'ili provenance." (Farhad Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrine, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 233-4.) With the circle, you could also scrawl on the inside of the edge, "a times x squared plus b times y-squared plus c times x plus d times y = 0." I don't know the Arabic original for "algebra," just that there was one; algorithm is from Muhammad ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi, ninth century. All this was very fortunate for image-management: In late Latin, *mathematicus* meant a caster of destruct- ive spells. The word *curse* derived from *cursus*, a set procedure to attain a desired result: bad magic then, education today (as in "course"), which never looked anything but an artificial distinction to me. (Was always better at disrupting a course from the back of the room than teaching from the front; but always left all the cursing to kids who knew the rules of the thing.) The morning star is everywhere the goddess of sex and fertility, Inanna, Ishtar-Ashtoreth, Asherah, Aphrodite, Venus, Freya. Just the thing the Church was going to semantically shift as far as it could; and as we are told, witches had carnal relations with the evil one. The vast elaboration of Christian study of the nature and habits of evil spirits and persecution of witches in the Late Middle Ages, what with Anti- christ under every bush, however you want to take that, has to do with the world having come to an end in 1347-1349, Bubonic Plague; and coming back again and again. Death wasn't the most important thing, it was the only thing. If you want to imagine the shattering effects of the plague and the wars it made look sensible, you have to think "full-scale thermonuclear exchange at MAD peak in Cold War Era." I still can't understnd those people back then. What do you do, how do you react, when the World Has Come To An End (but you still have to make a living and asking too many questions is more dangerous all the time). What do you think? The End Of The World actually happened; aliens are in this country a matter of debate. I've always said that the Shrink's Reality is enforced conventionl and nowhere else on the planet is this Reality, which is the deepest layer of "ideology," more ferociously enforced. So I say that Aliens park their UFOs in SmithHaven Mall and run in and buy undershirts. They need clean undershirts because on the world they came from the women wash the clothes, period. But you're inhibited from seeing 'em around here. In Canada or Mexico they're plain as day. That's why, if I were smuggling something in a UFO, I'd use this country exclusively to make my drop. And dispose of filthy undershirts after they've been stinking up my cabin long enough. - daniel ================================================================================ Received: from SBCCVM by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 3212; Fri, 06 Aug 93 15:22:48 EDT Received: from gossip.pyramid.com by CCVM.sunysb.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with TCP; Fri, 06 Aug 93 15:22:35 EDT Received: by gossip.pyramid.com (5.61/OSx5.1a Pyramid-Internet-Gateway) id AA00365; Fri, 6 Aug 93 12:24:01 -0700 Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1993 14:17:22 -0500 (CDT) From: "Jim Hawtree " To: Leri@pyramid.com (Leri) Cc: Leri@pyramid.com Subject: re:morningstar from inanna to marjorie Errors-To: leri-request@pyramid.com Message-Id: <930806141722.2041b13e@FNALV.FNAL.GOV> "Daniel A. Foss" writess: Subject: morningstar from inanna to marjorie > The pentagram and the morning star are just a couple of those things which >in the course of the syncretism which went into the final elaboration of a >logically consistent scientific Demonology got fused in the iconography and >sign-signifier relation. This kind of signification is slovenly. The logical >rigor and technical precision of theology in all its branches (my favorites >are eschatology and demonology but am long since rusty since when it was >business i got paid for) is not. Theology is the most exact of the sciences. Uh, I kinda got a bit tangled up in trying to decipher some of yer prose. I mean, it makes sense in some places, but other places it tends to lose cognitive resolution: the more I think I understand it, the more I deeply feel that I have lost it, sort of like chasing rainbows with a shovel to find the pot of gold buried there. Maybe it is a hall of mirrors with assuming what clauses refer to whose works, I dunno. But then I like roller-coaster rides... Uh, margorie? Eschatology? heh, heh, that's my point, Revelation *isn't* eschatology. >(The OT is one of the biggest packs of lies ever told by a committee. The NT >was another. The notional committee had a lot of meetings. What Jesus Said was >affected by what it was needed for Jesus Said at the particular point int the >Upward Mobility of the Church and which kinds of ethnics were joining it and One of the advantages is that it doesn't matter what was said in actuality; what is important is what I have that was said (correct or corrupted), and that is plenty. (The Four Horsemen don't have time to listen to long, drawn- out explanations). I can make plenty of hay out of what has survived as the OT and the NT. The committees have missed enough, and I have found it. :-) How about some more? What do you know about the life of John the Divine? I have a monumental paucity of info on him. More specifics on the 666 guy in the first century? and Mt. Megiddo? References ***very*** welcome. Want your name in print as a reference? May the minions of Abra Melin shine your shoes in the morning, Cordially, Jim Hawtree ________________________ "If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in." -- Bradley's Bromide A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. - Sir Barnett Cocks XX The good Christian should beware of Mathematicians and all those who XX XX make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the XX XX Mathematicians have made a covenant with the Devil to darken the XX XX spirit and confine man in the bonds of hell. XX XX --Augustine of Hippo XX XX XX XX - See mom, I can get a good job with a math degree XX ================================================================================ Received: from SBCCVM by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 3733; Fri, 06 Aug 93 16:44:08 EDT Received: from gossip.pyramid.com by CCVM.sunysb.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with TCP; Fri, 06 Aug 93 16:44:07 EDT Received: by gossip.pyramid.com (5.61/OSx5.1a Pyramid-Internet-Gateway) id AA09542; Fri, 6 Aug 93 13:45:37 -0700 Date: Fri, 06 Aug 93 15:23:04 EDT From: "Daniel A. Foss" To: Leri@pyramid.com (Leri) Cc: Leri@pyramid.com Subject: revelation was not about inner experience Errors-To: leri-request@pyramid.com Message-Id: <930806.152304.EDT.DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu> Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook Revelation is not about "inner experience" but about the Good Side winning in the End despite the odds looking lousy for the present. This Domitian must have been a Nasty indeed to get at least some of the Christians to break with the hitherto-successful policy attributed to Jesus: Shut up, pay your taxes, put up with *anything*, and fixate on the Hereafter. The Gospel of John, for instance, represents the political situation after the failure of the Jewish War of 67-73, which rocked the Roman Empire to its socks but had the predicta- ble outcome. Jesus gets visited in Death Row by "Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader of the Jews," who is a fictitious character even if no Pharisee would have such a Western Imperialist Pagan name, that is, Greek. For "The People Victorious." Jesus tells him that anything political will flop, and this Gospel was written after the flop flopped. Revelation echoes the Book of Daniel, with was a revolutionary tract from 165 BC. The revioutionaries won that war, but they had the dregs of the Seleucid Empire to fight. The Beast is lifted from the Book of Daniel, for instance. Whoever imagined beating the Roman Empire under Domitian wasn't talking about Inner Experience; but was in Quite A State to envision it. The Ancients, anyway, didn't have Inner Experiences the way you do. The Inner Experience, as you know it, was invented by a few tubercular poets in the Nineteenth Century; and it wasn't until recent decades that it was standardized and universalized enough to mkae big money dependably. [Figure out what people do not want to know, tell them, and if it's True, where's the harm? One's own motives may be the worst, but that's another issue.] - daniel ================================================================================ Received: from SBCCVM by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 7066; Sun, 08 Aug 93 21:46:48 EDT Received: from gossip.pyramid.com by CCVM.sunysb.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with TCP; Sun, 08 Aug 93 21:46:47 EDT Received: by gossip.pyramid.com (5.61/OSx5.1a Pyramid-Internet-Gateway) id AA14742; Sun, 8 Aug 93 18:48:19 -0700 Date: Sun, 08 Aug 93 19:31:12 EDT From: "Daniel A. Foss" To: Leri@pyramid.com (Leri) Cc: Leri@pyramid.com Subject: from antichrist to the witch mania Errors-To: leri-request@pyramid.com Message-Id: <930808.193112.EDT.DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu> Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook Jim Hawtree was quite right to ask for explanations: Domitian (Flavius Domitianus) was Emperor, 81-96; assassinated; apparently so unpopular that for the first and only occasion since the end of the Republic the Senate was empowered to select his successor, Nerva. Marjorie Morningstar was a novel by Herman Wouk, circa 1956. About the terrible moral choice confronting a young woman who must sacrifice virginity to ensnare a husband. Terrible garbage, typical of the Eisenhower Administra- tion. Whether author knew that the Morning Star was the planet Venus is of no interest. That particular post was written in Wacko Shorthand, where I was trying to communicate a subtext of the incredibly complex and wonderfully bizarre shifts in meanings that come about through endless self-interested argumentation, group self-deception, expediency, opportunism, and, yes, inspiration and illumination. But whose? This is what I mean by, "pack of lies written by a committee" which "met repeatedly." The probability is, sometime in the next week a qualified Biblical Scholar will walk into this room prepared to tell *exactly how many*, by latest research, authors of the Book of Revelation there were. And how long a period separated the earliest from the latest. Right now, there's one guy in Pol Sci, one in Economics, and a woman in Linguistics who's leaving. Biblical scholars have immense controversies over detecting changes in styles and how valid the mdthodology is. St. John the Divine may turn out to have been an invention of necessity. Or not. Jim Hawtree is right: What is important is the book of Revelation as a cultural unit. And like any cultural unit it is going to change all the time. But one of the things a culture does is confer a sense of Time-Immemoriality or Immutability on things which actually are changing. That;s what a Revealed Scripture is "paid for," sort of. Revelation meant something different to Vernon Howell a.k.a. "David Koresh" than it meant back in Antiquity, when it was written down, obviously. And for obvious reasons we can never know exactly what either of those was. But it's been the fundamental text of Christian Eschatology for a very long time. Escha- tology is the Study of the End of the World. [Sorry, Wacko Shorthand is not working today.] In the twelfth century, if a peasant woman confessed to a village priest that she was a witch, she would get a light penance for believing in such a silly peasant superstition. In the same period, the doctrine that there was, in effect, a God of Evil with equal and coordinate powers with the Good God was the Manicheist Heresy and was pitilessly repressed. The Bulgarian sect of Bogomils, who had tendencies in that direction, became the Albigensians of France, who were exterminated without mercy; and their memory is preserved by the English word "bugger," from *bulgarus*. After 1450, Witchcraft and the Satanic Host were part of the Reality enforced by the establishment all over Catholic Europe. If there was one point in history when it was pretty clearcut, it was the Bubonic Plague years, 1347-1349. The initial effect was to knock the stuffing out of the magical powers of the clergy. The parish priests did their job, consoled the sick and gave last rites to the dying; so they had a death rate *above* that of the population as a whole (45% vs 33% are guesstimates I've seen). Meanwhile, the prelates collected *heriot* or inheritance taxes on the Chirch estates from dead peasants and got a huge windfall of property donations from the wills of landlords. (The secular nobles' property also got concentrated into fewer hands by the law of primogeniture.) The Church was scandalously enriched while the papacy was already scandalously hijacked by the French kings in Avignon: This was the "Babylonian Captivity." And many peasants were infuriated all at once by having to make one-shot succession payments to their parents' holdings. The first outburst was a huge, chaotic mob which formed in the Rhineland, under the leadership of the Brethren of the Cross, or Flagellants. The latter would flagellate each other senseless as the horde approached a town. Jews would be massacred. The Flagellants, naked and bleeding, would seize the churches from the parish clergy and hold parodies of the Mass. Having made a mess of the Rhineland, the Flagellants led the horde in the general direction of Pope Clement VI at Avignon. The latter called upon the secular lords to slice the horde to bits, which was done. After this, there appeared two possible ways of looking at the situation. The moderate view was that of the university professors, the Doctors of the Church: It was obvious that the visible church was a stinking putrescent mess. This became plain to everyone in 1378, when there were two popes elected, one in Rome, the other back in Avignon. This was the Great Schism, and it lasted till 1415. Clerical offices were meanwhile bought and sold so blatantly that people would have been grossed out if they hadn't become hardened by cynisism. The moderates wanted an immediate cleanup of s8mony, the traffic in clerical offices. The cause of moral decay was worldy wealth. The Chruch must be divested of its material pomp, returned to the supposed purity of the supposed Primitive Church. This was sharply distinguished from the Church of Constantine. (What the Doctors of the Church would have been amused to know was that the Donation of Constantine, which gave the popes sovereignty over the Patrimony of St. Peter, was a forgery.) At any time or any point, moderate reform movements could spill out of the universities and engulf whole countries in revolutionary *chiliasm*. This said, one way or another, theat the Last Days were here already; that the Antichrist, the Beast of the Apocalypse was walking the earth; that the Beast was the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor or the King or the establishment as a whole. The Visible Church was the tool of the Antichrist; the Church was *mulier fornicaris*. The True Church, on the other hand, was comprised exclusively of the true believers who had abandoned this-worldly vanities (or better never had it to begin with). The True Church followed the Primitive Church, not the corrupt "Modern" Church. True Believers, in order to reject anything not of Scripture, read Scripture in the local vernacular, mot Latin. The biggest explosions were the English Peasant War, in which the Lollards figured (1381); and the Taborites, who fought the Hussite Wars (1419-1434). The connection was direct: Jan Hus, of the University of Prague, was a student of John Wyclif, professor at Oxford. (Richard II of England married Anne of Bohemia, sister of that lowdown skunk Wenceslas IV, turning the latter into Good King Wanceslas; he was one of history's worst alcoholics.) There was peasant war or revolution all over the map: France, 1357, 1402; Florence, 1378; Castile, 1379, Portugal, 1381; and in 1381 the Swiss defeated Leopold II of Austria. The establishment, busily fighting against itself all the time of course, since feudalism is by definition a system of war without end, got an indelible scare out of this period. Now, just try this out for size. The Witch Craze is the doctrine of the revolutionary chiliasts turned inside out: The Visible Church is the True Church, as before, except that there is a parallel Satanic Host, a mirror- image hierarchy of evil which can take possession of any person at any time. Peasant women were the weakest people, politically speaking, in society; so they were used as victims. But not exclusively.... - daniel ================================================================================ Received: from SBCCVM by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 9914; Mon, 09 Aug 93 17:21:06 EDT Received: from gossip.pyramid.com by CCVM.sunysb.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with TCP; Mon, 09 Aug 93 17:21:04 EDT Received: by gossip.pyramid.com (5.61/OSx5.1a Pyramid-Internet-Gateway) id AA21466; Mon, 9 Aug 93 14:22:34 -0700 Date: Mon, 9 Aug 93 12:47:57 PDT From: Gerold Firl To: Leri@pyramid.com (Leri) Cc: Leri@pyramid.com Subject: Re: from antichrist to the witch mania Errors-To: leri-request@pyramid.com Message-Id: <9308091947.AA01101@hpsdlm11.sdd.hp.com> In-Reply-To: <930808.193112.EDT.DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu>; from "Daniel A. Foss" at Aug 8, 93 7:31 pm Daniel writes: > In the twelfth century, if a peasant woman confessed to a village priest > that she was a witch, she would get a light penance for believing in such a > silly peasant superstition. In the same period, the doctrine that there was, > in effect, a God of Evil with equal and coordinate powers with the Good God > was the Manicheist Heresy and was pitilessly repressed. The Bulgarian sect of > Bogomils, who had tendencies in that direction, became the Albigensians of > France, who were exterminated without mercy; and their memory is preserved > by the English word "bugger," from *bulgarus*. I always thought it refered to buggery. It is often used as a verb (or was, I guess; it seems to be archaic), as in "bugger all!". > After 1450, Witchcraft and > the Satanic Host were part of the Reality enforced by the establishment > all over Catholic Europe. > Now, just try this out for size. The Witch Craze is the doctrine of the > revolutionary chiliasts turned inside out: The Visible Church is the True > Church, as before, except that there is a parallel Satanic Host, a mirror- > image hierarchy of evil which can take possession of any person at any time. > Peasant women were the weakest people, politically speaking, in society; so > they were used as victims. But not exclusively.... So, you're suggesting that the witch hunt was a self-defense mechanism employed by the church to ameliorate the threat posed by public acknowledgement of church corruption? The reformation does seem to have been largely a reaction to the corrupt indulgences and simony of the catholic church; perhaps the witch craze was a social hysteria engineered for the purpose of creating an evil worse than a luxurient and corrupt church, and a highly visable punishment for those who flouted or angered ecclesiastic authority .... plausible. It may have existed for the purpose of forestalling the rebellion of luther. Of course, luther was a filthy witch-hunter himself, but he was born after the witch hunts had begun. Evil has a way of echoing down the generations. > The first outburst was a huge, chaotic mob which formed in the Rhineland, > under the leadership of the Brethren of the Cross, or Flagellants. The latter > would flagellate each other senseless as the horde approached a town. Jews > would be massacred. The Flagellants, naked and bleeding, would seize the > churches from the parish clergy and hold parodies of the Mass. Having made > a mess of the Rhineland, the Flagellants led the horde in the general > direction of Pope Clement VI at Avignon. The latter called upon the secular > lords to slice the horde to bits, which was done. Interesting. Reminiscent of the ghost dance. > There was peasant war or revolution all over the map: France, 1357, 1402; > Florence, 1378; Castile, 1379, Portugal, 1381; and in 1381 the Swiss defeated > Leopold II of Austria. The establishment, busily fighting against itself all > the time of course, since feudalism is by definition a system of war without > end, got an indelible scare out of this period. Yet compare the response of the european establishment to that of the chinese. In china the rise of a mercantile class, with power co-equal to that of the military and the brahmins, was never allowed to occur. In europe, private commercial entities were allowed to eclipse first the church, and finally secular government, in power. It is a mistake to say that western democracy has its' roots in greece. All western culture is democratic, except in wartime. This is obscured by the fact that we've been at war throughout most of the historical period. A decreasing threat of war inevitably leads to increased democracy. Unfortunatly the converse is not necessarily true. - gerold ================================================================================ Received: from SBCCVM by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 0461; Mon, 09 Aug 93 21:40:58 EDT Received: from gossip.pyramid.com by CCVM.sunysb.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with TCP; Mon, 09 Aug 93 21:40:53 EDT Received: by gossip.pyramid.com (5.61/OSx5.1a Pyramid-Internet-Gateway) id AA13500; Mon, 9 Aug 93 18:42:26 -0700 Date: Mon, 09 Aug 93 19:49:16 EDT From: "Daniel A. Foss" To: Leri@pyramid.com (Leri) Cc: Leri@pyramid.com Subject: Errors-To: leri-request@pyramid.com Message-Id: <930809.194916.EDT.DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu> Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook Gerold Firl not unreasonably infers that I suppose a ruling elite was capable, prior to this century, of confecting a set of ideological wapons precisely in acoord with its own interests and *possessing genuine mass appeal*, as the Witch Craze, which we may consider fairly begun with the compilation of the witchhunters' handbook, *Malleus Maleficorum* in 1450 and as lasting to 1550 or 1600, undoubtedly did. This was not possible. It is not possible to specify general rules of ideological change, which is itself deeply embedded in cultural reproduction, that is, the reproduction of the mental life of society and the meaterial objects wherein that mental life is objectified. Which requires further self-clarification. (This post will tril off into confusion.) There is a cultural process I have called "cultural inversion," whereby, in the aftermath of a social upheaval, the reinterpretation of social reality as formulated by the dissidents becomes fragmented into a repressive and reaction- ary caricature of itself. This is apparently the case when the popular opinion of the Visible Church as a hierarchichy of Evil, to the theologians, *mulier fornicaris*, "fornicating woman" (Matthew of Janov, University of Prague, 1402) - which of course is the precedent fro Luther's more extreme "whore of Babylon" - and to the chiliasts (those who asssume they are living in the Last Days) the instrument of Antichrist, the veritable Beast walking the Earth, got turned to the service of the counterrevolution, which had to be situated in Germany: The most dnagerous of the revolutionary explosions had occurred in Bohemia, where the chiliast Taborites, a newly-created form of society comprising refugees from the established order, peasants, minor nobility, radical intellectual clergy, fought off German crusading armies for fifteen years. The Catholic leader had been the Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary, King of Germany, and as brother of Wenceslas IV who died in 1419, heir to the throne of Bohemia (and even formally crowned outside Prague). The Taborites were on ambivalent terms with the Utraquists of Prague, at times willing to compromise with the Catholics and the Royalists, whom they feared. But they likewise feared the Taborites, who were hostile to the favorite pursuites of the Prague bourgeoisie, luxury and usury. The Taborites had constituted themselves as the True Church, irreconcilably opposed to the Church of Antichrist which had burned John Hus (at the Council of Constance in 1415 (with the complicity of Emperor Sigismund). Germans, especially privileged Germans, were partly reacting against, partly infected by, the Hussites: There were German Hussites, such as Nicholas of Dresden, who was martyred by showing himself in Germany. There were also other heretics and unruly peasants; the latter were hunted by vigilantes called the Wehmgericht. Serious government in Germany had been in abeyance since 1250 at least; and the Emperor ruled little more than political garbage. The most seriously threatened interests were those of the Church, however, which had as its disposal the Dominican friars who were rank and file Inquisitors and Witchhunters. The Witch Craze assumption is of a Church of Evil which differs most strikingly from that of the revolutionary chiliasts in that its social locus was shifted from the elite to the village populations; also, that it fully mobilized the sickness of Christian misogyny. Let's just say that the Witch Craze was something that for determinate but not precisely understood reasons then or now was something that made sens in context, had the requisite muscle behind it, and caught on. Compare that to the Red Scares which have disgraced US history along with the periodic waves of racist and religious persecutory mania. There need not necessarily have been any significant number of Reds to persecute, as there most certainly was not in the last big one, which spanned the period 1945-1860 but peaked in the years 1948-1954; and is associated indelibly with the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy. See David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower, which I just read. Illuminati fans will find the author's historical precedents for McCarthyism interesting, including: The myth of the secret order of Illuminati sprang up, fanned by John Robinson's Proofs of a Conspiracy, a conspiracy apparently dedicated to the overthrow not only of all government but also of Christianity itself. In a style all too familiar to students of McCarthy, the New England Congregationalist minister Jedidiah Morse thundered in 1799: "I have now in my possession complete and indubitable proof...an official, authenticated list of names, ages, places of nativity, prfessions, etc., of the officers and members of a Society of *Illuminati*...instituted in Virginia, by the *Grand Orient* of FRANCE." (p. 19) There were no Illuminati at all, although there always have been Europeans living in primitive conditions, as well as Africans, etc., who believed themselves in all honesty to have been witches and there may still be. There were no objectively existing members of a subversive conspiracy in the USSR in the 1930s called the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, but half a million to two million people may have died from executions to prison camp deprivations for belonging to it. Ideology, whereof the efficacious part is the *assumed* and the *taken for granted*, is enforced at the intersection of top-down enforcement with social convention enforced horizontally: Implying, that is, that sufficient terror can make the most empirically falsifiable figment Real (the capital R indicates, when I use it, the ideological sense as opposed to the empirically observable-in-principle, for which I use lower case as in real). Ideology need only be objectively real enough to make itself look good. Consider it something like the definition of the imaginary number, which has a real part and an imaginary part, where the real part is allowed to be zero. Now that you mention Martin Luther: The fact that reaction triumphed in the fifteenth century and the social order reconsolidated itself did not require or even make probable that the Church would reform its outstanding abuses nor that it would refrain from wallowing in scandalous pagan luxury by 1500. There were therefore two critical diffences between Luther and his Hussite precursors. First, he learned the lessons of social policy of the Czech precedent. Under no circumstances would Luther have anything to do with social radicalism; and he violently denounced German chiliastic revolt, the German Peasant War of 1525-1526, led by Thomas Muenzer, in the pamphlet, "Against The Murdering Thieving Hordes of Peasants." Second, Luther had the printing press available, which made his Reformation amenable to central doctrinal control in a way that people who depended on making copies by hand could not. Luther, as a social conservative, *of course* would share the Reality of socially conservative Catholics, conseling witchburning with the worst of them! Gerold, I am afraid that you got China wrong in a way which is much too complicated to go into here, and I have already gone over my linecount limit. At the time of the Bubonic Plague, which broke out in China in 1342 and spread over the country and back again until at least 1351, China had a 200-plus year lead over Europe in the development of protocapitalist institutions and in the level of scientific and technological development. It is precisely that it was so *backward* that Europe survived economically and China underwent regression and then stagnation. China's population declined from 125 million in 1327 to 65 million in 1391; compare Europe's decline, from 80 million to 55 million. Also, it had an extremely violent social revolution, touched off by Buddhist chiliasts, which lasted from 1351 to 1368. Before the Plague, the Chinese were using printed paper money, which did not catch on in Europe till 500 years later.... Been working on this for 3 years. One cannot infer a society's past from its present, especially relative to another one. When it comes to our onw ideology, "Facticity is teleology." - daniel ================================================================================ Received: from SBCCVM by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 3462; Tue, 10 Aug 93 16:27:51 EDT Received: from gossip.pyramid.com by CCVM.sunysb.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with TCP; Tue, 10 Aug 93 16:27:51 EDT Received: by gossip.pyramid.com (5.61/OSx5.1a Pyramid-Internet-Gateway) id AA17098; Tue, 10 Aug 93 13:29:25 -0700 Date: Tue, 10 Aug 93 15:35:36 EDT From: "Daniel A. Foss" To: Leri@pyramid.com (Leri) Cc: Leri@pyramid.com Subject: albigensian buggers Errors-To: leri-request@pyramid.com Message-Id: <930810.153536.EDT.DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu> Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook Gerold Firl is being a bit too complicated. Heresy was just about the worst possible kind of deviance in the Middle Ages, unless of course it swept the whole country, in which case they still had the option of declaring a Crusade to harry the whole country with Fire and Sword, reducing it to a depopulated wasteland; which is exactly what Innocent III did to the Albigne- sians. In 1205-6 a Crudsade led by Simon de Montfort was dispatched to wipe out the heretics in the County of Toulouse; the backing came from King Philip Augustus of France, who stood to gain politically. Simon de Montfort was killed in the siege, head bashed in by a rock from the walls; but the massacre duly took place. The last open Albigensians were wiped out at Montsegur in 1214. Clandestine activity by the sect continued for another century, at least, as was revealed by an Inquisition conducted by the Bishop of Foix in the village of Montaillou (Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou). Single heretics, or small groups of them, could always be burned at the stake, or killed by some other creatively horrible form of execution. The stake was so fearsome that, in excahange for recantation or repentance, they would be merciful and strangle you. Now that we have established how serious an offense we are talking about, the transformation of *bulgarus* -> *bougre* -> *bugger*, with the secondary meaning of "sodomite" (which survived when there no longer remained any reason to fear and loathe the name of Bulgarian) becomes straightforward. Deviant-category labels tend to agglomorate. (What, by the way, I have, for weeks or months now, I have meant by "Normal" is an unmarked social category counterposed in binary opposition to some stigmatized deviant category. You don't have to be deviant to be marked, either: Men are unmarked, for example; women are marked. This is a complicated mess which runs through all of consciousness: the claiming of pride of place of the implicit non-Other. There's always a more inclusive non-Other in terms of which you are not an Other if you are Otherwise an Other but that may not be much of a comfort to you.) An exact parallel to the agglomeration of thoght-criminals with homosexuals is quite recent. In the 1950s there were allegations that the State Department, for example, was full of Commie Perverts. Nobody that I know of who was both a Communist and gay was ever found; but as I've said before, just because something is wholly imaginary does not necessarily make it less Real or dangerous. We do, of course, have this all purpose category Degenerate, by which any specific form of the Nasty or Wicked may be accused and all the others suggested. The most lurid fantasies of deviants of whatever category are of course found among Normals who have never met one and do not know anyone who has. I can't for the life of me understand why some people go off and actually commit acts which try to outdo these fantasies. Anyway, it was routine in the Middle Ages to accuse religious enemies of either sodomy or indiscriminate sex orgies. Fringe elements of the Cathars or Waldensians would from time to time evolve doctrines whereby indiscriminate sex orgies were permitted. It went like this: If only the Spirit is of consequence, and mere matter is both inconsequential and corrupt, by becoming Pure Spirit, you ennoble matter, rendering whatever you did with your body a Good Thing, however trivial and inconsequential it was. - daniel ================================================================================ Received: from SBCCVM by ccvm.sunysb.edu (Mailer R2.10 ptf000) with BSMTP id 4128; Tue, 10 Aug 93 19:58:54 EDT Received: from gossip.pyramid.com by CCVM.sunysb.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with TCP; Tue, 10 Aug 93 19:58:51 EDT Received: by gossip.pyramid.com (5.61/OSx5.1a Pyramid-Internet-Gateway) id AA12035; Tue, 10 Aug 93 17:00:26 -0700 Date: Tue, 10 Aug 93 17:49:42 EDT From: "Daniel A. Foss" To: Leri@pyramid.com (Leri) Cc: Leri@pyramid.com Subject: cultural inversions of the arly 70s/china Errors-To: leri-request@pyramid.com Message-Id: <930810.174942.EDT.DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu> Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook Gerold Firl wanted to know whether there were "cultural inversions," that is, reassemblages of cultural aspects of a social movement in a repressive and reactionary form, following the 1960s. There certainly were, during the period 1971-1974; and they were conspicuous. They offered one of the objectives of the youth movement of the 1960s, expanded consciousness or revolution, but never both; and by other means. That is, those groups offering expanded consciousnes tabooed Drugs. Those which offered prospects of Revolution tabooed anarchic messiness. All featured hierarchical authoritarianism of one sort or another. All imposed dogmatism and rigid conformity. All enforced one of: sexual abstinence; sexual restrict- iveness and prudery; or subordination of couple-bonds to organizational necessities where the latter were arbitrarily dictated. Short hair requirements for males and dress codes were ubiquitous. Some groups permitted a species of denatured rock & roll where the content of song lyrics was devotional. Others tabooed rock & roll altogether: these permitted only religious hymns or, for example, in the Revolutionary Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist, country music exclusively. All the groups fostered hard work and habits of obedience. The groups offering expanded consciousness were religions or psycho- therapies. The religions included the Divine Light Mission (Guru Maharaj Ji), International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), Nichiren Shoshu, Unification Church (Moonies), and all kinds of gnostic and fundamentalist Jesus People. Psychotherapies included Erhard Seminars Training; Arica, and the Sullivanians (who imposed idiosyncratic and bizarre sex practices). The groups proferring Revolution included the earliest version of the following of Lyndon Larouche, then avowedly Left-wing under the name of National Caucus of Labor Committees, but quite as strange as they later became on the Right. Also, there were self-syled "communist parties of a new type," including the Revolutionary Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist; the Communist League; and the October League. Some older organizations like the Progresive Labor Party and a couple of Trotkyist splinter groups joined the trend. Basically, except for a number of sad cases, these organizations were revolving doors by means of which people got themselves scraped up off the streets, reconventionalized themselves following periods of anarchic living in the 1960s, and rejoined the conventional occupational-competitive struggle many had dropped out of or shunned in the late 1960s. Having flfilled this function, however unintentionally, the "post-movement groups," which is what I called them at the time, folded up and disappeared because their membership pools dried up. The Moonies were the notable exception. The only way to prevent cultural inversions is, I think, to have a culture too complex and confusing to be inverted. Which raises the question of how to have any kind of cohesion, of course: What is "us" and what is "them"? Maybe better never to know. **** Gerold Firl also doesn't agree with what I said about China having been more progressive and dynamic than Europe before the mid-fourteenth century, or something like that. (I have consistently refused to learn how to duplicate huge slabs of other people's posts, since the practice has no discernible impact upon misinterpretation, while on the other hand it hugely increases the length of posts. Sorry.) The merchant classes of Europe and their towns were most iunimpressive by comparison to their Chinese counterparts before the mid-fourteenth century. They cowered, in most places in Europe, in the shadow of the warrior class. Their cities were pitifully small, and the magnitude of the trade and manufacturing industry they controlled was correspondingly puny. The largest city in Europe was Paris, population 200,000; Florence and Venice had over 100,000 each. But Hangzhou, capital of the Southern Song Dunasty (to 1275) had a minimum of a million and a quarter; and in the next centruy there were several cities in central and south China with populations of several hundred thousand each. The volume of trade and industry was comparable. If you look closely at the European scene in the *first* half of the fourteenth century, you will find the whole continent overpopulated, a heavy pressure of population on land, periodic famines, technical stagnation, and the beginnings of intellectual stultification. After the Bubonic Plague, the tempo of change picks up remarkably: The End of the World was in effect the best thing that happened to Europe, and set it once again on the rapid upgrade after it had stalled. China, by contrast, had a huge economic boom, which ended only with the Bubonic Plague. The Mongols had, among other things, eliminated the civil service examinations (with brief revivals) on which the Confucian literati had depended for certification for official careers, and the more talented were compelled to turn to business and commerce for a living. Also, by unifying the country, they made it possible for a single printed paper currency to circulate throughout the Empire, rather than two. The burden of the Song Dynasty's ineffectual standing army, which had always conspicuously failed to defend the country, was removed. Taxes on trade were low. A very much larger percentage of agricultural output was for the market than was true of Europe. There was a centralized, unified state with a disciplined military command structure, in impressive contrast to the political garbage of Europe. The first third of the fourteenth century marks the culmination of the Chinese "Medieval Economic Revolution." Then ca,e the Bubonic Plauge, the social revolution which expelled the Mongols and wiped out the serf-owning ruling class which had collaborated with them. Folliwing this, the destruction of the market economy had proved so great that coercive means had to be used by the new Ming Dynasty to restore both demand and supply. The regimentation induced the more commercially active population to escape to Southeast Asia; and this last fact induced the government in turn to attempt to seal off the country by declaring foreign trade illegal, which it remained, at least nominally, from 1371 to 1568. Here The End of the World was something from which China never recovered. The Bubonic Plague was an exogeneous catastrophe which impacted differen- tially on societies at different stages of development. The European was less advanced, but by this same token, harder to disrupt, and with fewer highly specialized personnel to get killed by disease or war in the citties. For instance, the Chinese lost all their mathematicians. The table of the binomial coefficients was printed in a Chinese book called The Precious Mirror of the Five Phases in 1305, along with other knowledge which did not become current in Europe for another 300 years. But by, say, 1405 this knowledge was no longer comprehensible. Same in astronomy, chemistry, and so on. The Europeans had less to lose, also more to gain when they finally got around to inventing printing. The relative development of Europe and China wby the nineteenth century was not determined by some deep-seated essential features which had been present from the remote past. Rather, it was the differential causal chains set off by something very analogous to a sheer-dumb-luck event like Contact With Aliens. No society ever develops by having made provision for the unimaginable. On the contrary, the consequences of adaptation to the Unimaginable, which we are always reeling from, actually, are represented later as having existed from Time AImmemorial, as built-in, as essential, as the genius of the white race, as historically inevitable, and so on: "Facticity is teleology." History and social evolution are crap-shoots in the long tern and the big picture even more than they are in the fortunes of some particular event or conflict. A very great deal more. The certainties of the present are fantasies. Which sometimes escape exposure forever. Which is what I think we are dealing with here: Where the White Man just lucked out and got a swelled head. - daniel