Approaching Beltane Concluded: The Green Candle

If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there; drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked and tormented... so that you totally become his nature... You should be he himself, not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God.

-Carl Jung, The Red Book

Now I want to say a bit about the kindling of the new fire. One reason I am doing this is the accident of color. I purchased a green candle for the Easter altar, and am using a similar green pillar as the Beltane candle. Listening to wisdom today—and I don’t always get a change to read or to listen to as much wisdom as I would like—I learned from Mark Passio that green was the color of the heart chakra, of true love, of alchemical love, not the love that is seeking someone or something outside of itself, but the love that finds union within, and green is the middle color that joins all the things, the color at the center of the spectrum as well as the most prevalent color in nature, not just the color of spring, but the color we are always seeing. Even when you are seeing brown and almost barren earth, green is in this too. And this is the color I use for the flame of Beltane.

Going back to the simple pagan explanation, the fire kindled blesses crops and herds and gives light to the eyes and warmth to the body. It cooks the food and brings humanity, for we became human and our minds more intelligent, our lives longer, our faculties better when we learned the alchemical transformation of raw meat to cooked. This event is mythologized when Prometheus brings fire down from heaven to human beings. In kindling the Beltane fire we are remembering this gift of fire and all its use in the most practical and apparent ways, but also the inner fire, the inner spark it represents, the true and consistent alchemy which turns us from animal to human and joins the divided parts of us. In kindling the fire we are remember Agni, the Lord of Fire who carried the sacrifice and soul to the gods and joined earth to heaven. The fire is the spark of life. It is Lumen Christi at the Easter Vigil, the Risen Lord and the  Vision of the Risen Lord by Mary Magdalene. The kindling of the green fire is the moment of the Alchemical Wedding.

Another reason the kindling of the fire is the moment of the Alchemical Wedding is because the burning candle compliments something we have not yet discussed, and that is the darkness of the Vigil. At Easter this darkness and the accompanying flame is the reminder that Christ is the life of the world, but it is also just the natural circumstance of us having extinguished all lights so that we might kindle the spark again. Start all over. There is the irony of the eternal light needing to be born in time again, of the heavenly light, needing to be sparked on earth again. We are always in need or returning to that moment of first light. It is not only the light of a Christ we are spectators to in a Christian way, a Christ who will come and save us while we watch and believe on the sidelines. It is the light of Christ in us, our own birth as the anointed one, our own joining with the eternal nature to become daughters of God, and God’s sons. The spark in the darkness in the realization of the eternal God within.

The long darkness of the vigil palpably reminds us of what the dark is like. and how often we are in danger of slipping back into it, how often, in fact, we actually are in it. So often we are blind and need the light of grace to see again, to love again, to be warm and living again and denying this makes us like is the Pharisees in the Gospel of John.

Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”

 Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?”

Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.

At the Easter Vigil the Risen Jesus, Christ in all his fullness is most certainly this Light, and at Beltane this same light is attained in the Alchemical Wedding of the Beloveds, which is the moment of resurrection, recognition and return. It is the revelation of the parable, the moment Jesus calls to Mary Magdalene, the Supper at Emmaus. To ignore the state of our darkness, to be too proud to admit our coldness and even our ignorance is indeed to be left in the dark, to have our sin remain, and our sin is no good to us, not for the old Catholic reason that we will end up in hell, but because without change, without growth, without love, without light, hell is where we already are.

Approaching Beltane Two: Arriving at the Alchemical Wedding

Perhaps the woman who needs to be freed most is the woman inside of every man?

The Alchemical Wedding, Emily Balavet

We really had to break up our talk on the union of the Beloved and the Lover at Beltane. There was too much, and I can’t even claim to be covering it all in this post. Most of our associations with the Lover and the Beloved at Beltane come from Wicca and the marriage of the generic God and his equally generic Goddess. Pagans make much of this and you can see a heavy handed example of this in one of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s last books, Lady of Avalon where, at the Beltane orgy—there’s always an orgy—the Year King and Maiden come together (fuck), and as soon as the Gawen the year king, comes inside of his beloved’s vagina—I’m not kidding—everyone else feels a surge of power moving through the hills and the standing stones which “releases a tension” and then essentially enables everyone else to go out and, well, fuck in the fields all night. The next day we are told, they set up the Maypole, as an example of the joining of man and woman, God and Goddess.

This is not the time to be a prude. I am not going to lie and say I have never employed sex magic or offered my sex up as magic. I am not even going to say that it hasn’t been part of Beltane, but I am going to call nonsense on the Marion Zimmer Bradley Beltane orgy men- and-women-fucking-renews-the-earth business. It’s not her business. She adopted it from heavily heterosexists and sex obsessed neo pagans she lived among. Alexandrian witches practiced nude simulated sex for the Third Degree and the Building of the Altar. Maxine Sanders declared that the Alexandrians were “a fertility cult”. But this is bullshit. Not only is it bullshit for all modern witches who, unlike people who lived thousands of years ago, know full well that men and women fucking don’t make plants grow, it’s never been true for Cochranists and other occultists who are associations of the wise, not fertility cults. Before I leave this fertility cult shit—which has done a lot of damage—behind, I would say that even, no especially, in the distant past, those priests and priestesses of “fertility cults” did not think their fucking empowered the land or made plants grow. Those priests and priestesses knew they were entering into the mystery of growth and fertility inherent in creation, and so they also were seekers of wisdom.

So what is this business of the joining of the Beloved and the Lover, especially, in a queer context? John Passio in his podcast on the occult reminds us of the medieval concept of the Alchemical Marriage, a major part of the Western mysteries. The work of Alchemy is the joining not of opposites, but of ones complimentary sides. Passio is not the first to point out that is the reconciliation of the masculine and feminine inside of each of us, the yin and yang, man and woman, princess and princes, king and queen. Queer people, especially “effeminate” men and “butch” already have a leg up on this. This is why they are so often persecuted. They are a sign and a symbol, a powerful magical force that threatens the status quo.  In a way, this is why modern ideologies, especially religious ones and definitely mainstream pagan (I do mean white people recreating magical systems as opposed to African and Spanish and many other people who never forgot magic) don’t event know what to do with trans people.  I have criticized Marion Zimmer Bradley so here I will quote her: The woman who needs to be freed most, is the woman inside of every man. Here we are going toward the Alchemical Wedding. I’m only just touching upon this business of the Alchemical Wedding, as unfortunately, I only just briefly touched upon Alchemy last year, but Alchemy is the true word for what we who are called witches do, and it is the heart of our Work. It is our Work. That this Work is not simply drudgery, but lovework, not simply throwing things together, but gently bringing together the lost parts of ourselves, that this is not just putting together, but joining, is the very message of the Alchemical Wedding, and so much more important than orgies and Maypoles.

I’ve already said a lot, but I want to close on how I started, because in the old church readings and Catholic rituals, I’ve seen other ties between the Alchemical Wedding and Easter. The canticle sung in religious offices through Easter is

Alleluia.
Salvation, glory, and power to our God:
[alleluia]
his judgments are honest and true.
Alleluia, alleuia.

Alleluia.
Sing praise to our God, all you his servants,
[alleluia]
all you who worship him, great and small.
Alleluia, alleluia.

The Lord our all-powerful God is King;
[alleluia]
let us rejoice, sing praise, and give him glory.
Alleluia, alleluia.

The wedding feast of the Lamb has begun,
[alleluia]
and his bride is prepared to welcome him.
Alleluia, alleluia.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,
[alleluia]
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
Alleluia, alleluia.

This is adapted without much change from the end of the Book of Revelation, which is the end of the entire Bible. It is the culmination of all things. Many Christians think it is Jesus’ marriage to the Church (though they aren’t entirely sure what that means)  I agree, though Jesus and Church I think means something they never guessed. The Resurrection, the union, the Communion and the Wedding Feasts of the Lamb are the same, and Wedding Feast of the Lamb IS the Alchemical Wedding.

When we return, we will discuss the light of the sacred Beltane fire, and the color green..... what? Yeah.

Approaching Beltane One: Little Winters and Lost Beloveds

 Mary Magdalene: Goshka Datzov

Beltane has a strange relation to Easter, and contains several of the same elements in its rites.  

The kindling of the new fire (in the case of Easter a year candle)

The vigil in the dark

The ritual promise of life (eternal or otherwise) and fertility (spiritual or otherwise)

The heralding of true spring and the turning of the year (more on the differences later) and:

The union of the Beloved and his Lady

In Jake Richard’s book, Backwood’s Witchcraft,  he points out that the Appalachians count two seasons most people don’t, called “little winters” In Tennessee they say there are up to five winters. Here in Indiana, you always run into people who, no matter how long they have lived her, become excited when the weather warms up in March or even Ferbruary and, despite the impossibility of such a thing—and the danger —trumpet that winter is over. And then, as snow and cold and ice return and retreat several times until May and, on some occasions, a little past May, these people affect to grumble, to despair, to even be angry. But this is an effect of a world where people are divorced from the seasons and reality. Most of us have forgotten the concept of “little winters”. Though Appalachians have names for them and expect them, we have them too, the occasional and to be expected returns of the cold from March into May. Much to say about this later on, but if you acknowledge these little seasons then the Equinox takes place at the close of one little winter and Easter takes place before the last little winter or even in it. In other words it does not herald summer or even true spring. It is Beltane that marks the end of the Little Winters.

It occurs to me that Beltane also marks the end of something a little eerier called the Season of Sacrifice. In the same way that Easter is not quite Beltane, the Season of Sacrifice is not quite Lent. There is a modern and not entirely unfounded desire to link it to disasters taking place around this time of the year that are scheduled by dark forces probably within our government, and without giving credence—or denial—to this idea, this time was, of old, seen as a time of sacrifice and preparation as we came to the planting season, and it does seem to end the night before Beltane. More or less.

Lastly, for now, let us address the reunion of the Beloved with his Lady, which we will return to at length in our next post. What’s that got to do with Easter, and why would I say that Easter shared this with Beltane? We are used to being patly told the God and the Goddess marry on Beltane, but may have forgotten older and truer stories: Adonis being restored either to Aphrodite or to Persephone, leaving behind the world of death. This myth is seen imperfectly in the story of Inanna and Damuzi and perhaps even in the story of the death of Absalom at the hands of Joab in the second book of Samuel. However, in our current era the restoration of the beloved is glimpsed in the story of Mary Magdalene seeking Jesus three days after his death and finding the tomb empty only to, in her despair over the lost body, be met by Jesus himself. Mary is the spiritual lover and Jesus the spiritual lost and found beloved. On Mary Magdalene’s feast day, the chant from the Song of Songs is:

By night on my bed,
I sought him whom my soul loves.
I sought him, but I didn’t find him.
I will get up now, and go about the city;
in the streets and in the squares I will seek him whom my soul loves.
I sought him, but I didn’t find him.
The watchmen who go about the city found me;
"Have you seen him whom my soul loves?"
I had scarcely passed from them,
when I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go,
until I had brought him into my mother’s house,
into the room of her who conceived me.

When we return, we will discuss the union of the Lover and the Beloved and its link to the kindling of the Beltane Candle, and the Alchemical Wedding!

Roots and Spirals

The Triple Hekate: William Blake

I was listening to Micheal Greer’s The Book of the Occult last night. It got me thinking about what a witch is, about what our mode of composing a religion is.  The ancestral train of the occult that leads back thousands of years is a broken one, un pristine, filled with villains and racists, megalomaniacs, misogynists and mad men. Maybe even later this year there will be time or necessity to detail a fuller history of the occult? There is no doubt that Aleister Crowley, from whom all modern witches get at least a few things was not well, was mad and miserable and died a wreck, and yet it does not matter. Many of his rituals and spells and insights still work, still inspire. It doesn’t matter that Gerald Gardner may have been a voyeuristic nudist mildly obsessed with sadomasochism who made his mythology up based on Margaret Murray’s semi—and only semi bogus research. It doesn’t matter that Alex Sanders was a confused and somewhat dishonest megalomaniac who ripped of Sanders to create his own version of Wicca and his own Book of Shadows, and we do not have to pretend that Robert Cochrane was not a disturbed thirty something year old who claimed to hate Wicca while restyling it into what he called Traditional, and then the poor man killed himself with belladonna before her was thirty-six. These are the people only in the last century who litter the craft as troubled ancestors, not to mention the stories, the stories, the stories, about how ancient what they were doing was, about miracles and wonders they may have never done, and get this, none of that makes the Craft less. None of that matters.

I am listening to the poorly written, dull past chapter four Lady of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, now that I’ve made my way through her not quite as atrocious work, The Forest House. I listen to these books, and I read The Mists of Avalon long ago to return to what it means to be draoi, what it means to be priest and priestess, druid, witch, to return to Avalon.  They put me in touch also with the Gnostic Christianity I am always trying to reunite with. And of course, if you have any sense, you should be saying to me, uh, these books are fiction. She made this shit up. In addition, we now know that not only do we now know Bradley was a mediocre writer who prized making a buck over actual skill, was unable to develop the majority of her characters and recycled the same goddamned plots over and over again, we also know she was a child molester who made it possible for her husband and other neopagan fingerfuckers to molest not only other peoples’ children, but her own.

Anyone reading carefully will see that she got her rituals from those of modern witchcraft. And yet there is great power in her books, perhaps because her rituals were the rituals she performed with her own circles, perhaps because intentionally or unintentionally this wicked hag in the truest since of the word was working a magic when she wrote them.

And though it would be wrong to say the flaws and sins of these spiritual ancestors (more aunts and uncles than parents) don’t matter, what I can say is they don’t destroy the tradition. They do not kill the wisdom, and this is because ultimately we are not relying, as orthodox Christianity or Judaism or some other faiths do, on saints, on a perfect line of pristine transmission. We are not relying on those who received wisdom long ago from a God on high being perfectly right as they pass the wisdom to us. After all, while other paths delight in tracing straight unbroken lines, we witches use the labyrinth and the spiral. For us, the learning, the work, the transformation always occurs for the first time with us, in our hearts when we are meeting the divine. We are, after all, witches and not Girl Scouts or Unitarians, and we should never have expected the ancestral line to be straight, pure, or free of sin. We recognize the truth in others because we are recognizing it in ourselves, also flawed, often sometimes weak, maybe even a little bit mad.

Having had mercy on my own path, I can have mercy on others, perhaps more mercy than those who practice them. I don’t have to believe Judaism or Christianity’s stories about themselves to value them. I can see the two thousand years of misogynistic bullshit that have made them and still see a brilliant value underneath. May the Mistress of the Maze who leads us into darkness bring us out into the light. May we, who have compassion on our ancestors and on the path they walked that led to us, have compassion on others, and true compassion on ourselves.

The Easter Journals: Part One

                         

I wake up in a funk that I can only walk myself out of. I do not feel like Easter. I do not feel like resurrection. I feel like fear. The fear that I will get the call that says my mother is finally gone. The fear that COVID-19 is coming at last to kill me or kill us as it creeps rushes the world, the fear that we will be poor and on the streets, the fear that I’ll never be free from fear. The… What is this? The fear that I don’t know what to do with Easter the way I knew what to do with Lent.

I go out with scissors and a bag to cut flowers from around the neighborhood. It is four in the morning and sixty degrees. There are no cars driving, but many parked, and the air is that blue color of pre morning. I walk about looking for any flowers that don’t definitely belong to someone’s yard and can be placed on the altar. I am a cover snipper, kneeling and slipping things into my cloth bag, a strange Christian hedgewitch. I feel light and loose and unsafe, like something that will slip away. I don’t feel childlike,and I do not feel salvation. I feel confusion. Passing the parking garage that is darkened and shut down I see a wide dark opening before a shallow divet of grass and there is a blossoming tree. I go to it and pick the white blossoms and think, Is this how Mary Magdalene felt like as she approached the empty tomb?

I have never written an Easter story because I never understood Easter. I still don’t. I understand Lent. And mourning. We mourn every day, Dying and suffering, fear and betrayal I get. I do not get this resurrection.

There is the temptation to make resurrection smaller, handle-able. I resist this. I do not metaphorize it, or cut it down. There is the temptation to ignore it. Or maybe to sing the songs and ring the bell too loud to think and look at the white and gold altar and the floors. There is even the temptation of disbelief. What a comfort it must be to turn your back on the incomprehensible, the unreachable, to not live in this strange space. There is the temptation to do anything but look at the empty tomb, but resurrection is a different country. Resurrection is a hungry goose on her next of eggs waiting for the hatching. Resurrection is fragile buds waiting to come. Resurrection is the memory of  a spear in your side and five half healed bloody wounds. It is not the certainty that everything will be alright, not in the general every day since of the word alright. What is resurrection but the certainty that from now on the rules have changed and everything will be quite different?

I am heterodox but I a not no- odox. I am a heretic, but not an unbeliever. I have been full of feeling for the week of the two Lord’s Passion, for Palm Sunday and for the heavy, heavy mysteries of the Triduum. Right now, at five in the mourning I am not sure how to feel.

On Easter Monday I’m feeling a lot better than very early Easter Sunday. Going out into the world, seeing the flowers blossom, the daffodils strong and tall in the coolness of spring air, the little buds on great trees, the little trees covered in white blossoms like spring brides gently communicates the message I could not receive all at once. It is not so much a message as an invitation. Jesus tells Mary not to touch him. I wonder what this is all about. I wonder if this was added by men to downgrade her. Because the message of the empty tomb is not do not touch me. We naturally shrink away from it. We do not entirely understand it. The message is take my hand. Take my hand, do not be unbelieving but believe. It comes to me that the reason for the Octave of Easter, the reason for a Gloria every single day is because unlike Good Friday, it takes several days to even begin to understand not only resurrection, but transformation, renovation. The son of the widow of Nain is brought back to life, as is Jairus’ daughter, as is Lazarus. But the resurrection of Jesus is something different. He will never die again. This is life of another order. This is not only renewal but recreation. The flowers come again and that is beautiful, but this hints at something beyond the perennial round of seasons. This is the round of the soul, not only that we will rise from the dead, not only that we will go to heaven, whatever that means, but that having put our hands in the hand of the Risen Beloved, we will remember our lost state, return to our original state, come back to the blinding brilliance from which we were born, not mistake the daily grinding round and the common lack of vision for what should be. This is the invitation to see anew, live in a different way. It can only be done through grace.

The Telling: Considering Jesus of Nazareth Part Two

 from Jesus of Nazareth, 1977

In a part of Jesus of Nazareth, which works for the movie and works for thinking of the Gospel in one’s personal life, Peter is blustering about his complaining wife and saying, “I told her I’d be back when it was fishing season. I’d be back in a few months.” Matthew turns to Peter sagely and says, “Don’t lie to her. You’ll never go back. You’ll never get drunk, you’ll never fish again.” Zeferelli’s vaguely homoerotic and deeply irresponsible portrait of a Jesus who tells his disciples to let the dead bury their dead and apparently their wives and children to hang out with each other and him is actually part of the religious iconography aof Jesus movies. It’s a very Catholic fantasy, and the Catholic church has very often called men into its service at the great pain, abandonment and suffering of women and children. As stated before, this portrait of thirteen men snuggled with each other is also very homosexual. But aside from if it is moral, is it true? Saint Paul himself notes that Peter and the other apostles traveled with their wives and children. Protestants love this revelation because it supports Protestant ministry models, but it’s also just practical and true. After all, though Jesus was peripatetic, many people were, and though he does travel a lot, he does not travel to the ends of the earth, just to the ends of Palestine, and then only once it seems. Most of what Jesus does is circle the Sea of Galilee, and lest you be deceived by the word “Sea” it is a fresh water lake also called the Lake of Gennesaret. I do not know if the disciples traveled with their wives in the early days, but certainly they didn’t abandon them. Peter does not stop fishing and it is doubtful he stops drinking. He’s always fishing. Even later on at the end of the Gospel of John, that’s how Jesus finds him.

And while we’re still up north and around the Sea or Lake of Galilee or Gennesaret, one last thing: Just what is a Gadarene? I’ve looked it up and the answer in confusing. The Gadarenes are Gerasenes, or they aren’t. They live in the Ten Cities. Or they don’t. Their realm is modern day Jordan. Or it isn’t.  They are culturally and racially Greek—which accounts for the pig farms—or they aren’t. Once again it doesn’t do to think of different groups of people the way we do in the twenty first century or look for the same signifiers.  And when it comes to religions and peoples which are very distinct now, they may not have been so in the past. When we get to the people of Judea, called in John the Jews, these are the people who are, so to speak “properly Jews” in the heartland of the religion. Things are more diffuse in Galilee. I am imagining the Gadarenes are even more so. A Jewish comic once said of himself, describing his lack of practice or religiosity by saying. “I’m not really a Jew. I’m Jew…ish.” It is possible that the Gadarenes, like the Samaritans and like many other people in the surrounds might have said the same thing.

That’s an odd thing as well. Though there is some notion of the Church beginning in Jerusalem and some Gospel accounts have Jesus saying “stay here in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes,” that’s really just a dangerous idea if we are to believe anything about the crucifixion and the way Jesus was received in Judea. Jesus says to the women after his resurrection that he will appear to his brothers in Galilee, and later, in John, this is exactly where he appears. Living under a worldwide quarantine, it is hard to believe that twelve disciples growing into one hundred twenty were locked in an upper room hiding from Jewish authorities for forty days. It is not entirely impossible, though, to think that if they had traveled down for Passover, they might travel down, again, for Shavuot, that is: Pentecost, and that things might have begun not in Jerusalem, but in Galilee., safely away from the authorities who had killed Jesus. Is it possible that the Holy Spirit that appeared on Pentecost had a little help, that the fearful and small group of Judean followers were boosted by multilingual and thriving Galileans?

Whatever Jesus faced in Galilee it was his home, and it was Jerusalem which is represented as the place of danger. It is the place of his birth where Herod nearly slew him, and the place of his execution.  From his standpoint it is hard to believe that the Jerusalem church was ever the center of Christianity, though Acts tells us it was, for a time at least.

The Telling: Considering Jesus of Nazareth Part One

Enrique Simonet: He Wept Over It, 1892

I didn’t know if I would do it or not because I don’t like to do things over and over from perceived tradition, but once again, as Lent ends, I am watching the long film Jesus of Nazareth. It is a Telling, and one of the best Tellings of the Gospel. Unlike most Bible movies which I flatly have a hard time watching, I believe in this one, and so because I believe in it, it opens up questions worse movies don’t create. Jesus of Nazareth is a piece of art. It is not a window onto what actually happened. It is not even how things “ought to have happened” And there are things that seem improbable or left out which make me wonder about the mystery of Christian origins. I am an occultist and a heretic, and as an occultist raised in Catholicism who still finds Catholicism deeply valuable, I must look at this story and see what is hidden and what is left out, for the occult is not outside or separated from the last two thousand years of Christianity, but interwoven with it as it was interwoven with the religions before.

We all know that the Church began—well, it began many times if you read the Scriptures, but the official date is Pentecost. The church began on Pentecost in the Upper Room when the Holy Spirit descended and yet, as I watched the movie and remembered the Bible, I wondered about the exclusive truth of this Jerusalem Church. This was a church where the one hundred twenty disciples, most of whom are never mentioned in the Gospels and certainly not in this or any other movie, receive the power to speak to the crowd in Jerusalem in every language making the Church international and centered in Jerusalem from the beginning. Though later it is a matter of Jew and Gentile, from the very beginning, the whole business is an international one. And we mustn’t imagine that Judaism was then as it is now. It was at its heart and origin Mediterranean with no long history or persecution at the hands of European Christians.

The land of Israel was primarily divided in Jesus’ time into Galilee, Samaria and Judea. Judea was the heart of the Jewish world though it could not have been exclusively Jewish. Samaria was Samaritan (for our purposes, Samaritans are a type of hybrid Jew) though one wonders if it was wholly Samaritan and Galilee was defined as being Greek, meaning it was Hellenistic in culture and would have the most mixed multitude. It would have been international. Far from Jesus growing up in backwater, he would have come from a fairly integrated place. His followers in Galilee would not have needed a holy spirit Pentecost wind to understand multiple languages.

Watching Jesus preach and teach to the crowds in this movie, something occurs to me that doesn’t occur in just reading the bible, which is that, rather like now, the question of who is a “real follower” is quite open. How many of those hundreds or maybe thousands of disciples listening to Jesus stayed, and how many turned away, and what does turning away and staying mean? Was the line as clear as we would like it to be? In the Gospel of John, when Jesus feeds the five thousand and says they must eat his body and drink his blood, many turn away in a very clear cut away, but I imagine many were just simply confused.

And we, two thousand years later can also be confused because the temptation is to dig through all this story, history, history specials, conflicting Gospels and conflicting churches for the real Jesus, the true story. I have said it before and will say again. That is all hidden from us because the true story in veiled in mystery. The true story, the heart of the labyrinth is not on a hill outside of Jerusalem, but in our midst, which is just was Jesus was trying to tell us, and is telling us still.

I imagine many were simply confused about the crucifixion and the resurrection. The land of Israel is not a large one, but it is full of mountains and hills and valleys, so there is very little travel as the crow flies, and in the time of Jesus there was certainly no telegraph, no internet or television, nothing to tell one what had happened quickly. Surely there were people who considered themselves followers of Jesus who simply saw him travel for Jerusalem, not entirely sure of what was going to happen to him and received, in one foul swoop as most young Christians do, the entire news of his death, resurrection and possibly ascension and the beginning of his church. Is it possible that even before Jesus departed for Jerusalem there were those living as the Church? There is an odd passage in Matthew where Jesus is giving advice to the disciples about how the Church is to be run. He mentions the Church, seemingly anachronistically, and though I have counted it as a mistake to think of Jesus as the founder and not the inciting spark of Christianity, though many people including me have pointed to Jesus’s mentions of the Church as rewrites placed in his mouth by those who came after, could there have been some nascent churches existing in Jesus’ lifetime?  The Bible tells us that it was Peter’s baptizing Cornelius and the council of Jerusalem later in the Book of Acts that opened up the Church to Gentiles, but the Gospels also tell us that Jesus went across the sea to the Gadarenes, who herded pigs, and cured a man of demons by sending them into the pigs, and that this same man (or men in some Gospels) went off and preached Jesus. Who were these Gadarenes? They don’t seem like Jews.

 But what was first century Judaism? I don’t think it resembled modern Judaism any more than first century Christianity resembles a Southern Baptist barbecue. Biologically we all climbed out of the same soup and our ancestral microbes resemble each other more than they resemble us or we resemble the things we spread from, and this is true of religion and ethnicity as well.  Modern Judaism came into existence as the bloody rival of Christianity for three centuries until Christianity won and the fight became very, very…. very one sided. Judaism grew to reflect  1. the absence of a temple, 2. the presence of deep persecution as a minority and a scapegoat in a story not of their invention, 3. a new central home in a very white Europe and 4.  decidedly being NOT Christianity and strictly having a theology which could never allow for the possibility of Christianity.

 The Judaism of Jesus’s day would not have had any of those points.

Christians and Jews like to pretend that the ancient people of Israel were strictly monotheistic and strictly monolithic, but neither one of these things could have been true. We know ancient Israelites worshiped the same gods as their neighbors and actually were their neighbors. Canaanite, Judaen, Israelite are not so much different ethnicities as different modalities of the same thing, and the first century people of Palestine, especially of Galilee, would have known very well about Greek thought and religion and culture. The fact that Christianity would take on more pagan aspects or that Jesus immediately takes on pagan myth aspects needs not have been something occurring from the outside slapped on by later Gentile Chrisitans, and it is only a bad thing if you are an Orthodox Christian who believes there was ever a pure Judaism and these two things were holy and right while everything else is pagan, mistaken, deficient and wrong.

The emergence of Christianity as mythic, mystery based and distinctly different from any Judaism we know today could have been quite natural and from the beginning. Mount Carmel, where Jesus was Transfigured and where he also reveals himself to the disciples as the Messiah before going south to Jerusalem, was also the shrine to the Great God Pan. Rather than imagining the disciples like rigid yeshiva boys or country Amish who knew nothing of Greek culture and completely despised it, what if they were rather sophisticated and naturally absorbed it? John’s Jesus speaks in almost Gnostic terms, and in his version of the triumphal entry, where Jesus gives the speech about how a grain must died to become wheat, we are told that Philip speaks Greek and brings Greek disciples to Jesus. What if this was at the heart of the irreconcilable difference between nascent Christianity and what would become rabbinic Judaism?