The Serpent's Wisdom

A while ago i wrote about an idea i had, that perhaps economic necessity shaped the moral code of the Tanakh (aka the Old Testament) -- that pastoral societies have a need for maximum reproductive output from each person... hence mandatory marriage, polygamy, prohibitions on homosexuality and masturbation, and so on. I was quite proud of this theory; if i do say so myself, it's brilliant.

I also now think it's wrong.

At the time that i came up with this theory, i was not inclined to consider the likelihood that the people who devised these laws and wrote these texts had an agenda and were participants in a factional struggle for control of their society. This is because whoever opposed them no longer speaks to us across the millenia; the opposing voices in this debate were not recorded for posterity.

This is why i am now a proponent of what i've been calling (for lack of a better term i'm aware of) "embedded theology": because when you deliberately overlook the political agenda behind "spiritual" texts, when you don't examine religion through the lens of human power dynamics, you miss too much, and much of the real historical significance of a piece of "scripture" is obscured.

What makes me inclined to re-examine my previous hypothesis was a series of realizations about the militaristic and authoritarian imperialism of the modern USA. And what's going on now is not in any way new or unique, because it resembles too closely what happened in the last century.

It began in the early 20th Century with efforts to prevent 'undesirables' from having children -- eugenics boards, forced sterilization, etc. The Nazis took many of their ideas about sterilization from eugenics measures which were already being enacted in the US and Canada and elsewhere. (And actually, American proposals to euthanize people with disabilities helped inspire the Final Solution.) Alongside with eugenics, women of "desireable" races were encouraged or pushed towards having as many children as possible.

I cite this historical stuff not for hyperbole, but because i think most Americans are not aware of how deeply embedded these barbaric principles and practices are in our recent history, and to illustrate how potentially damaging the ideologies now being espoused by the American right-wing really are.

John Gibson of Fox News really tipped his hand when he told white women that they were neglecting their duty to have babies:

Do your duty. Make more babies. ...

Now, in this country, European ancestry people, white people, are having kids at the rate that does sustain the population. It grows a bit. That compares to Europe where the birth rate is in the negative zone. They are not having enough babies to sustain their population. Consequently, they are inviting in more and more immigrants every year to take care of things and those immigrants are having way more babies than the native population, hence Eurabia.

Why aren't they having babies? Because babies get in the way of a prosperous and comfortable modern life. ...

To put it bluntly, we need more babies. Forget about that zero population growth stuff that my poor generation was misled on. Why is this important? Because civilizations need population to survive. So far, we are doing our part here in America but Hispanics can't carry the whole load. The rest of you, get busy. Make babies, or put another way -- a slogan for our times: "procreation not recreation."

from Gibson: "Make more babies"

Behind this, we see exposed the nexus where sexism, racism, and homophobia swirl together into a single whole: a war over the nation's population. It doesn't matter to these reactionaries that America's population is still growing, it matters who that population consists of. And only someone hopelessly naive would think that this faction is not going to become more brazen and brutal in the coming decades.

Put this next to proposals to prevent the children of undocumented immigrants from having automatic US citizenship, and Pat Buchanan's crusade against Mexican immigration, and one part of the pattern comes into focus: they believe the US should have fewer non-white children.

Combine this with the new classification of all women of childbearing age as "pre-pregnant," efforts to deliberately make it harder for mothers to hold down a job, the ageless and ongoing efforts to stem abortion rights and make it more difficult for women to have access to any form of contraception, and another part of the pattern comes into focus: they believe white women should be forced to have more children.

A third part of this pattern comes into play with the right's program of mandatory heterosexual marriage, designed more than anything else to keep gay and lesbian people in the closet so they will reproduce, which is punctuated by the 'unintended' consequences of punishing unmarried cohabiting straight couples as well. The message, increasingly, is, "marry or else."

The babies you have better not be disabled, either. The right-wing, following ancient and historical precedent, is not too keen on protecting the self-sufficiency of people with disabilities, either. And the gateway to the Final Solution was the Tiergartenstrasse 4 project.

It was this comprehensive perspective on the modern "baby wars" that led me to re-consider my interpretation of ancient moral codes on reproduction. Efforts to encourage the upper class race to reproduce may prove to be a signature pattern of militaristic and expansionistic regimes.

This morning i had an idea for a new book project. It would actually be something of a companion to The Serpent's Wisdom, though would require several more years of research.

The working title would be something like As Above, So Below: The Politics of Mysticism, and the book would trace the role of economics, politics, and struggle against oppression in the formation of mystical practice and teaching. My rough idea is that in antiquity many mystical movements sprung up in response to the encroaching dehumanization of urban society, imperialism, and oppression; and that this commonality of experience can explain certain parallels between various movements. I want to examine the Jewish prophetic movement in this light, as well as the Cynics, the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Hermetists, the Kabbalists, the early Christians, and the early Buddhists, and probably others to be added as my research progresses.

To give an example of what i have in mind, i want to explore the notion that vegetarianism among the encratite Jewish/Christian sects may have been a form of protest against the monopoly on salted meat held by the Temple in Jerusalem. In the Tanakh we can read about several centuries of struggle between classes of priests, one of whom sought to establish in Jerusalem a nationwide monopoly on slaughtering sacrificial animals, and others who sought to establish temples in the countryside where sacrifice could be practiced -- these are called in the Tanakh ("Old Testament") the "high places." One king would tolerate the high places, the next would side with the Aaronide priests and abolish them.

(Along similar lines, there's some controversy over the work of a historian who claims that beef-eating and cow-sacrifice was widespread among the upper classes of ancient India. If this is the case -- i still have to examine the evidence -- then perhaps vegetarianism in India could be explained as a similar radical response. But this is even more speculative than the above.)

Another example of the interplay between mysticism and oppression which i've mentioned before is dystheism.

Yet another dimension is the competition, mentioned in the Tanakh, between the priests of Yahweh and the qedeshim, who were proponents of the cult of Asherah in the same region. This would be competition to establish what Pascal Boyer called a monopoly on religious services. Since the priests of Yahweh won, they were able to immortalize their version of the conflict in written history.

I want to also further explore a counter-notion that the development of religious doctrine and edifice is a cultural misappropriation of radical mysticism by the upper classes. Historically, radical movements are either successfully suppressed, or they grow widely enough that they begin to affect the shape of society. The privileged classes respond by adopting the imagery of the radical movement while sanitizing it of its socially-transformative elements -- thus creating a "religion" that deals only with "spiritual" matters.

This is to compile in one place a liturgy of arguments I've seen or made that "Biblical teachings against homosexuality" do not refer to modern homosexual life or experience. I have varying degrees of confidence in these arguments, as I will indicate below.

First, there is the general argument that the environment in which the Bible was written reflects ancient moral, social, and economic needs. The question of how relevant the Bible is today is meaningful and must be addressed in a comprehensive way. That is, the burden of proof to demonstrate its relevance as a moral guide in the modern environment falls on those who promote it as such. A strong argument can be made that it fails in this regard, since it reflects the economic needs and social organization of a pre-urban, pre-industrial, pre-overcrowded world.

A similar view takes the Bible as demonstrating the evolution of belief over time, as a reflection of a nation's circumstance. Again, this raises the question of how much specific moral guidance we can realistically take from a 2000 year old document.

In Christ, those who are Christian "died to the old law," and were reborn in the spirit of newness. So in Christian thought, the legal proscriptions of the "Old" Testament do not apply to Christians. Therefore in the Christian context it is not necessary, strictly speaking, to address passages in Leviticus that specifically prohibit men from sleeping with other men as they would with a woman. Many Christians cite them anyway, arguing that that these old laws reflect the attitude of God even if the law itself doesn't apply anymore. This makes me wonder why they would knowingly anger God by eating cheeseburgers and shrimp?

But even if these passages apply, there is reason to consider that they apply only to Jews, and even then only in a particular way. An influential rabbi has argued that the proscription against homosexuality is a rule of ritual cleanliness, a "religious sin" and not a moral or ethical sin.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/195526.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sophiaserpentia/215135.html

There are two passages about homosexuality in the New Testament, both in the Pauline literature. The first, in I Corinthians 6, is probably the most "ironclad." But it depends on precisely what the Greek words "malakos" and "arsenokoite" actually mean. As near as I can tell, the word "malakos" refers to catamites, effeminite boys who were kept as sex slaves by the wealthy. The word "arsenokoite" may (I suspect) refer to men who hire male prostitutes.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/193586.html

I've seen several approaches to the passage in Romans 1. A common observation is that Paul was focusing on the pagan sexual practices of the Romans and Greeks, not homosexuality in general.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/196751.html

Or, alternately, he was decrying the moral bankruptcy of the Roman emperors Caligula and Tiberias.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sophiaserpentia/495591.html?thread=3503847#t3503847

Another possibility that I have been considering, is that Paul may have been molested or sexually abused as a boy. He was possibly a student at the Greek gymnasium in Tarsus, where he would have been exposed to the common Greek practice of paederasty. It was not uncommon for boys to be expected to withstand sexual use by their instructors. If Paul was speaking out against the ancient practice of paederasty, which is distinct from homosexuality, then I can't disagree with him, because this is a treacherous cycle of abuse.

Lastly, there is the argument that our society's enforcement of prohibitions against homosexuality result in the needless pain and suffering of queer people. Queer children suffer in particular, experiencing larger rates of suicide, depression, and family censure than straight children. It can be argued that enforcing the prohibition against homosexuality creates a greater sin than homosexuality itself might be. Christians are charged in the Bible to treat gays and lesbians with compassion and without judgment, because this is how they are told to act towards everyone. Therefore singling out homosexuals for persecution is against Christian teaching.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/379572.html


A large three-part post addressing the issue starts here:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/387124.html

This is modified from a comment I just posted in challenging_god.

Elaine Pagels, in The Gnostic Gospels, argued that there was at one time talk of divine femininity in Christianity, but that early-on it became associated with the schools of thought later known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics did have many things to say about divine femininity. As Gnosticism was cut from the Christian community, so too was the idea of the divine feminine.

In Pagels's analysis, the theological debate was intertwined with a political debate about the role of women in the church. A vivid account of this debate was recorded in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

Some remnants of divine femininity can be found in the Bible, primarily pieces and bits of the Jewish Sophia tradition (from Hellenic Alexandria): Proverbs 8 contains a monologue from the viewpoint of Sophia, and the books "Wisdom of Solomon" and "Wisdom of Jesus Son of Baruch" (both in the Catholic Bible) contain bits about Sophia as well. In this scripture, Sophia (Wisdom) is portrayed as a goddess-figure who played a role in the creation of the cosmos.

I have been re-reading Elaine Pagels' book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, and this stood out to me:

Justin, like many Jews and many of his fellow [contemporary] Christians, tended to interpret the difficulties of human life less in terms of the fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2-3) than in terms of the fall of the angels (Genesis 6:1-4). According to Genesis 6, the great and famous men of ancient times -- those called giants -- were the result of a hybrid union between God's angels and human women:

The sons of God [angels] saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose... There were giants on the earth in those days... when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the mighty men of renown. (Genesis 6:2-4)

Justin explained that some of the angels whom God had entrusted to administer the universe betrayed their trust by seducing women and corrupting boys (so Justin amplified the story of Genesis 6), they "begot children, who are called demons."

... The majority of humankind fell under their power, and only an exceptional few, like Socrates and Jesus, escaped demonically induced mental slavery. This invisible network of supernatural energies proceeded, then, to promote the fortunes of their henchmen. "Taking as their ally the desire for evil in everyone," Justin explained, the demons became the patrons of powerful and ruthless men, and "instituted private and public rites in honor of those who are most powerful."

Justin saw the result at every turn -- above all in the vast panoply of imperial propaganda, which claimed for the Roman emperors and their governors, magistrates, and armies the power and protection of the gods. The injustice that dominated the law courts indisputably proved, according to Justin, that they were controlled by demons, who manipulated the judges to destroy anyone, from Socrates to Jesus to the present-day Christians [sic], who opposed the demons or threatened to expose them....

As I was reading this, it struck me that Justin's interpretation of the Pagan gods as demons, related to fallen angels, is strongly reminiscent of the Gnostic account of the Archons. Compare the above, for example, to this, from the Hypostasis of the Archons:

Then the authorities came up to their Adam. And when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great agitation; and they became enamored of her. They said to one another, "Come, let us sow our seed in her," and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their clutches she became a tree, and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully. - And they defiled the stamp of her voice, so that by the form they had modeled, together with their (own) image, they made themselves liable to condemnation.

Later in the account we see that Cain, the firstborn to Eve, is the descendant of the Archons. So, structurally, the myth is different from the Genesis account in its details. However, the Gnostics understood their version of the myth as related to the existence of human evildoers.

They also understood the Archons as "rulers of this world" in a sense that is very similar to Justin's description of the Pagan gods and the imperial authorities associated with them: Gnosticism and Christianity both represented, at this stage, a radical revolt against the imperial order in every way -- in religious, political, economic, and cultural terms.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to gnosticism

There are many reasons why I chose to take esoteric initiation under the name Sophia Serpentia. Here's one of them, to which I have alluded from time to time. (These comments taken in part from a reply just posted in challenging_god.)

This will be a companion to the post I made in March titled "The Author of Our Religion".

In the Apocryphon of John, we find the following:

The archons took [Adam] and placed him in paradise. And they said to him, 'Eat, that is at leisure,' for their luxury is bitter and their beauty is depraved. And their luxury is deception and their trees are godlessness and their fruit is deadly poison and their promise is death. And the tree of their life they had placed in the midst of paradise.

This twist on the Genesis myth has the creator as a deceiver of humankind, the crafter of a false paradise which is in reality a spiritual prison. This could be thought of as the illusions we weave around ourselves for numerous reasons. They may appear to be safe and inviting, but they are preventing us from being truly alive.

"But what they call the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which is the Epinoia of the light, they stayed in front of it in order that [Adam] might not look up to his fullness and recognize the nakedness of his shamefulness. But it was I who brought about that they ate."

And to I [John] said to the savior, "Lord, was it not the serpent that taught Adam to eat?"

The savior smiled and said, "The serpent taught them to eat from wickedness of begetting, lust, and destruction, that [Adam] might be useful to him. And [Adam] knew that he was disobedient to [the chief archon Yaldabaoth] due to light of the Epinoia which is in him, which made him more correct in his thinking than the chief archon. And (the latter) wanted to bring about the power which he himself had given him. And he brought a forgetfulness over Adam."

The hint here is that the serpent of Genesis is not Satan, but is instead Christ, or perhaps Sophia (if they are not in fact two facets of the same being), or at least an agent of theirs.

The Hypostasis of the Archons says of this incident,

Then the female spiritual principle came in the snake, the instructor; and it taught them, saying, "What did he say to you? Was it, 'From every tree in the garden shall you eat; yet - from the tree of recognizing good and evil do not eat'?"

The carnal woman said, "Not only did he say 'Do not eat', but even 'Do not touch it; for the day you eat from it, with death you are going to die.'"

And the snake, the instructor, said, "With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good." And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth.

This seems a radical re-reading of the Genesis myth, completely askew from what we are led to believe in the Revelation to John, where Satan is called "the ancient serpent." It is reasonable to assume that this phrase, which can be found twice in the Revelation to John, is a response to ophite (serpent-centric) Gnostic myth describing the serpent as Sophia or even Christ.

But when you exclude this allusion, we find that it is entirely possible that the Gnostic interpretation may be akin to the original meaning. In Genesis, the serpent makes two statements to Eve: "You will not surely die [when you eat of the fruit], for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:4-5)

When Adam and Eve have eaten of the fruit, the Elohim say amongst themselves, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever" (Gen. 3:22).

This affirms the truth of the second statement the serpent made to Eve. But what about the first, "you will not surely die"? According to the statement of the Elohim, if Adam and Eve had managed to eat from the tree of life, they would not have faced death at all. So while Adam and Eve are in the end consigned to death, the statement of the Elohim makes it clear that this was not at first a certain thing. Until they were banished from the garden, there was the possibility that they could have attained immortality.

Therefore even in the original Genesis version, everything the serpent said was in fact true.

Unlike the Jewish and Christian traditions with which the Gnostic tradition is historically associated, the Gnostics placed a strong emphasis on the female aspects of divine presence. In fact, it is not unreasonable to imagine that the Gnostic emphasis on divine femininity is in part a response to the lack thereof in the Jewish and Christian tradition. It also reflects the influence on Gnosticism of Hellenic and Egyptian mythology and mysticism.

It is not quite accurate to call divine female figures in Gnostic myths "goddesses," since they do not appear to have been specifically the object of worship. Nor is there much to demonstrate that the Gnostics thought of them as anything but mythical or metaphorical figures. They shall herein be refered to as aions, since they were apparently thought of as infinite facets of a multifaceted godhead.

( Read more... )

crossposting to my journal and crossposting to gnosticism

Richard Elliott Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible? on the golden calf story and what it signifies in the cultural conflicts between Judah and Israel. This book receives my highest possible recommendation to any lay reader who is interested in Biblical scholarship.

This analysis presupposes a cursory familiarity with the "Graf-Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis".

The story of the golden calf is from the "E" text.

( Read more... )

A few days ago I posed the question in questionofgod how we should interpret Proverbs 8, a passage that depicts Wisdom/Sophia as a "co-creator."

Here is what I just wrote as a reply (I think on a different thread actually), to explain my own thoughts.

I interpret the Wisdom passages in Proverbs figuratively, as an indication of the relationship between Mind (Nous/Logos) and the universe. The idea was expressed in Stoic and Alexandrian Jewish (and, later, Gnostic, Hermetic, and some Christian) philosophy that the cosmos was arranged like a mind, or indeed WAS the mind of God, and furthermore, that the person who achieved alignment with that Mind -- "marrying Wisdom," as it was expressed in the late Solomonic literature -- achieved righteousness or salvation.

The word used in the gospels frequently translated as "repent" in most Bibles -- metanoeo -- more accurately means "I align my mind/thoughts."