Non est species ei neque decor, et vidimus eum et non erat aspectus et desideravimus eum. Despectum et novissimum virorum, virum dolorum et scientem infirmitatem. ...
Isaiah 53: 2-3
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Commentary on an Arabian Nights' Tale
A Commentary on a tale from The Arabian Nights, "The Tale of Hasan and the Persian Magician". In this commentary, I have used the Powys Mathers translation, as found in the book, Gay Tales and Verses from The Arabian Nights, compiled, edited, and with an introduction by Henry M. Christman (Banned Books, Austin, Texas: 1989)
_____________________________
Page thirty-six describes the main character, Hasan, as "a youth ... who was the most handsome, gracious, and dainty of his time." His "beauty drew the eyes of all passengers to-wards his shop [he was a very young and boyish shop-owner], and none crossed the market without stopping at the door to contemplate and marvel at this work of the Creator" [i.e., at the young man's remarkable beauty.] In other words, his outward physical appearance conformed especially closely to the common archetypal image of the beautiful young man--so much so that the majority of people, both male and female, were drawn to his beauty.
Also from page thirty-six we learn that "His father and mother loved him greatly, for he was the child of their old age ..."
This generation gap, together with the fact that his father had died while the boy was yet young, would seem to suggest--despite the weak inference--that the boy was deprived of some of his necessary emotional familial bonding as a child, and was therefore sending out sub-conscious signals to others advertising his need for such emotional bonding (i.e., "love" and "approval" from older authority-figures). The boy would thus be ripe, we would say, for the attentions of an older homosexual male. This is quite separate and apart from the notice the boy would attract simply because of his strong archetypal 'beauty'.
Also from page thirty-six:
"[H]e soon wasted his father's savings in feasting and dissipation with young men of his own age ..."
The implication here, of course, is that only relationships with those older (and wiser) than himself will help him--that congress with only more inexperienced youths such as himself will inevitably lead only to his ruin (cf. the Biblical story of the "Prodigal Son"). Perhaps (in passing) this lesson is appropriate for today's young men--enamoured of each other (in the form of gangs) as they are. ... But of course--at least as far as today's youth are concerned--the reverse can also be argued: that it is a failure of intergenerational bonding--due to fear of relating and expressing intergenerational emotions or sexuality--which precisely forces young men to bond with each other, instead of with their elders.
At page thirty-seven, the Persian Magus wishes to adopt the boy as his own son and teach him his art. For references to this ancient pedagogic tradition, see John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers.
Based also on page thirty-seven:
Whether from hope of riches, or from the sub-conscious realisation that his deepest needs for emotional bonding are (potentially) about to be met, the young man is already defending his growing relationship with the Persian Magus to his mother. One wonders to what degree the (admittedly fictional) youth was being knowingly and intentionally devious and complicitory in the matter. ... Note also, from page thirty-eight, that the youth is either ignorant of his own beauty (and its potential for attracting others to him), or intentionally glosses over and hides its power in front of his mother: "Mother, [he says] we are poor and have nothing to tempt the cupidity of any ..." In other words, "How could this old man ever possibly be interested in little old ME? ..."
Also at page thirty-eight, the magus demands a non-married status from the youth in exchange for the magus' knowledge. How convenient! This is actually because--following ancient practise--the youth becomes in effect the sexual partner of the older teacher in exchange for the love, guidance, and knowledge imparted. The youth essentially becomes a magus-in-training, and--as such--becomes the life-partner of the older teacher in every way (including the sexual). That is to say, the two must bond in all areas. Historically, such master-student relationships have sometimes been tolerated, occasionally even encouraged; today, however, this is obviously not the case. (This is what is known to some of us as the 'pedagogic' tradition.)
From page thirty-nine:
Irrespective of the actual form of the instruction, what the magus has actually been doing, in effect, is teaching the boy an alternative way of perceiving his reality, and since most different ways of 'perceiving reality' usually violate local taboo or custom (as in this example), strong resistance is usually encountered. Most people (as in the boy's mother) are usually timid sheep who dare not think of going against societal custom or thought, and as a result, they are almost always intolerant of attempts by those within their influence (relatives, neighbours, friends, etc.) to stray beyond those invisible mind-boundaries. Some of us more adventurous souls today encounter this same type of resistance and/or punishment for daring to think (and especially act) counter to the prevailing "wisdom".
But it should be especially noted that the price or prerequisite for higher knowledge (mystical awareness, esoteric knowledge, etc.) has ever been--first and foremost--the ability to see beyond one's own immediate cultural frontiers, or ways of thinking. In order to advance in knowledge and experience, therefore, cultural "norms" must first be challenged and shown to be relative--i.e., not by any means fixed and immutable. This is exactly what the magus has been doing: teaching the youth to see beyond his society's arbitrary restrictions. This is the first step on the path of knowledge, or "enlightenment". And since those with vested interests in societies usually do not like their privileged status to be challenged or threatened [would you, in a similar position? Would I?], they usually fiercely persecute these true teachers or "light-bringers" (Lucifers) of humanity--label them as "devils" or "witches" (etc.) so as to create fear in the minds of their potential field of candidates, thus crippling the passing of real saving knowledge and mystical illumination (which has ever been the goal of true alchemy or kabbalah) from potential master/teachers to their potential students.
October or November, 1995.
T.J. White
_____________________________
Page thirty-six describes the main character, Hasan, as "a youth ... who was the most handsome, gracious, and dainty of his time." His "beauty drew the eyes of all passengers to-wards his shop [he was a very young and boyish shop-owner], and none crossed the market without stopping at the door to contemplate and marvel at this work of the Creator" [i.e., at the young man's remarkable beauty.] In other words, his outward physical appearance conformed especially closely to the common archetypal image of the beautiful young man--so much so that the majority of people, both male and female, were drawn to his beauty.
Also from page thirty-six we learn that "His father and mother loved him greatly, for he was the child of their old age ..."
This generation gap, together with the fact that his father had died while the boy was yet young, would seem to suggest--despite the weak inference--that the boy was deprived of some of his necessary emotional familial bonding as a child, and was therefore sending out sub-conscious signals to others advertising his need for such emotional bonding (i.e., "love" and "approval" from older authority-figures). The boy would thus be ripe, we would say, for the attentions of an older homosexual male. This is quite separate and apart from the notice the boy would attract simply because of his strong archetypal 'beauty'.
Also from page thirty-six:
"[H]e soon wasted his father's savings in feasting and dissipation with young men of his own age ..."
The implication here, of course, is that only relationships with those older (and wiser) than himself will help him--that congress with only more inexperienced youths such as himself will inevitably lead only to his ruin (cf. the Biblical story of the "Prodigal Son"). Perhaps (in passing) this lesson is appropriate for today's young men--enamoured of each other (in the form of gangs) as they are. ... But of course--at least as far as today's youth are concerned--the reverse can also be argued: that it is a failure of intergenerational bonding--due to fear of relating and expressing intergenerational emotions or sexuality--which precisely forces young men to bond with each other, instead of with their elders.
At page thirty-seven, the Persian Magus wishes to adopt the boy as his own son and teach him his art. For references to this ancient pedagogic tradition, see John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers.
Based also on page thirty-seven:
Whether from hope of riches, or from the sub-conscious realisation that his deepest needs for emotional bonding are (potentially) about to be met, the young man is already defending his growing relationship with the Persian Magus to his mother. One wonders to what degree the (admittedly fictional) youth was being knowingly and intentionally devious and complicitory in the matter. ... Note also, from page thirty-eight, that the youth is either ignorant of his own beauty (and its potential for attracting others to him), or intentionally glosses over and hides its power in front of his mother: "Mother, [he says] we are poor and have nothing to tempt the cupidity of any ..." In other words, "How could this old man ever possibly be interested in little old ME? ..."
Also at page thirty-eight, the magus demands a non-married status from the youth in exchange for the magus' knowledge. How convenient! This is actually because--following ancient practise--the youth becomes in effect the sexual partner of the older teacher in exchange for the love, guidance, and knowledge imparted. The youth essentially becomes a magus-in-training, and--as such--becomes the life-partner of the older teacher in every way (including the sexual). That is to say, the two must bond in all areas. Historically, such master-student relationships have sometimes been tolerated, occasionally even encouraged; today, however, this is obviously not the case. (This is what is known to some of us as the 'pedagogic' tradition.)
From page thirty-nine:
Irrespective of the actual form of the instruction, what the magus has actually been doing, in effect, is teaching the boy an alternative way of perceiving his reality, and since most different ways of 'perceiving reality' usually violate local taboo or custom (as in this example), strong resistance is usually encountered. Most people (as in the boy's mother) are usually timid sheep who dare not think of going against societal custom or thought, and as a result, they are almost always intolerant of attempts by those within their influence (relatives, neighbours, friends, etc.) to stray beyond those invisible mind-boundaries. Some of us more adventurous souls today encounter this same type of resistance and/or punishment for daring to think (and especially act) counter to the prevailing "wisdom".
But it should be especially noted that the price or prerequisite for higher knowledge (mystical awareness, esoteric knowledge, etc.) has ever been--first and foremost--the ability to see beyond one's own immediate cultural frontiers, or ways of thinking. In order to advance in knowledge and experience, therefore, cultural "norms" must first be challenged and shown to be relative--i.e., not by any means fixed and immutable. This is exactly what the magus has been doing: teaching the youth to see beyond his society's arbitrary restrictions. This is the first step on the path of knowledge, or "enlightenment". And since those with vested interests in societies usually do not like their privileged status to be challenged or threatened [would you, in a similar position? Would I?], they usually fiercely persecute these true teachers or "light-bringers" (Lucifers) of humanity--label them as "devils" or "witches" (etc.) so as to create fear in the minds of their potential field of candidates, thus crippling the passing of real saving knowledge and mystical illumination (which has ever been the goal of true alchemy or kabbalah) from potential master/teachers to their potential students.
October or November, 1995.
T.J. White
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Reply To "Anonymous"
Have rec'd your comments. Very much appreciate your interest & time. Have not yet heard of 'Neoteny', but looked up the web site you indicated & will read & study with great interest. Will comment further when I process the info. Thanks! T.J. White.
Hi--Back again. I wonder if David Brin, ph.D. has heard of Elaine Morgan's "Aquatic Ape" theory..... For convenience, I am pasting
one of the web pages mentioning the same below. It is at the site http://www.primitivism.com/aquatic-ape.htm . This theory,
while mildly controversial (and when is any compelling theory not?) seems to me to offer the most sane reason and common sense.
All for now. More later.
T.J. White
______________________________________________
Elaine Morgan has done most of the writing in support of this interesting and mildly controversial hypothesis of Alistair Hardy. For those who feel a strong affinity for water--and considering the cost of lakefront and especially oceanfront property, that is a lot of us--I think the theory resonates in some respect, and it perhaps opens our perspective on what a life closer to nature might be like.--JF)
Aquatic Ape Theory
Elaine Morgan
"An aquatic Ape is a likely ancestor of humans in terms of primate behaviour, marine ecosystems and geophysical timing."
- Prof. Derek Ellis, Dept. of Biology, Uni. of Victoria, Canada
"All other theories about the origin of our species have reached an impasse."
- Dr. Michel Odent, author of 'Water and sexuality'
"An aquatic hypothesis offers far simpler explanations."
- Dr. Chris Knight, author of 'Blood Relations'
"It is difficult to see how all the points assembled to back the Aquatic Theory can be explained away."
- Dr. Desmond Morris, author of 'The Naked Ape'
"The aquatic hypothesis... cannot be eliminated yet."
- Prof. Glyn Isaac
"We believe that this proposal [AAT] should be taken seriously."
- Prof Michael Crawford, author of 'The Driving Force'
"[AAT] conforms to current theories of speciation better than the savannah origins model, and accounts for a number of diverse phenomena hitherto not seen as connected."
- Prof. Graham Richards, author of 'Human Evolution'
Why humans differ from apes
Scientists find it easy to explain why we resemble the African apes so closely by pointing out that gorillas, chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor.
It is much harder to explain why we differ from the gorilla and the chimpanzee much more markedly than they differ from one another. Something must have happened to cause one section of the ancestral ape population to proceed along an entirely different evolutionary path.
The most widely held theory, still taught in schools and universities, is that we are descended from apes which moved out of the forests onto the grasslands of the open savannah. The distinctly human features are thus supposed to be adaptations to a savannah environment.
In that case, we would expect to find at least some of these adaptations to be paralleled in other savannah mammals. But there is not a single instance of this, not even among species like baboons and vervets, which are descended from forest- dwelling ancestors.
This awkward fact has not caused savannah theorists to abandon their hypothesis, but it leaves a lot of problems unanswered. For example, on the question of why humans lost their body hair, it has been argued at various times that no explanation is called for, or that we may never know the reason, or even that there may not be a reason. These attitudes seem to be not merely defeatist, but fundamentally unscientific.
The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) offers an alternative scenario. It suggests that when our ancestors moved onto the savannah they were already different from the apes; that nakedness, bipedalism, and other modifications had begun to evolve much earlier, when the ape and human lines first diverged.
AAT points out that most of the "enigmatic" features of human physiology, though rare or even unique among land mammals, are common in aquatic ones. If we postulate that our earliest ancestors had found themselves living for a prolonged period in a flooded, semi-aquatic habitat, most of the unsolved problems become much easier to unravel.
There is powerful geological evidence to support this hypothesis, and nothing in the fossil record that is inconsistent with it. Some of the issues it raises are briefly outlined in the following pages.
The naked ape
Humans are classed anatomically among the primates, the order of which includes apes, monkeys and lemurs. Among the hundreds of living primate species, only humans are naked.
Two kinds of habitat are known to give rise to naked mammals - a subterranean one or a wet one. There is a naked Somalian mole rat which never ventures above ground. All other non-human mammals which have lost all or most of their fur are either swimmers like whales and dolphins and walruses and manatees, or wallowers like hippopotamuses and pigs and tapirs. The rhinoceros and the elephant, though found on land since Africa became drier, bear traces of a more watery past and seize every opportunity of wallowing in mud or water.
It has been suggested that humans became hairless "to prevent overheating in the savannah". But no other mammal has ever resorted to this strategy. A covering of hair acts as a defense against the heat of the sun: that is why even the desert- dwelling camel retains its fur. Another version is "to facilitate sweat-cooling". But again many species resort to sweat-cooling quite effectively without needing to lose their hair.
There is no known reason why an ape should suffer more from overheating than the savannah baboon. And, especially for a savannah primate, there would be a high price to pay for hairlessness. Primate infants are carried around clinging to their mothers' fur; the females would be severely hampered in their foraging when that no longer became possible.
One general conclusion seems undeniable from an overall survey of mammalian species: that while a coat of fur provides the best insulation for land mammals the best insulation in water is not fur, but a layer of fat.
Fat
Humans are by far the fattest primates; we have ten times as many fat cells in our bodies as would be expected in an animal of our size.
There are two kinds of animals which tend to acquire large deposits of fat - hibernating ones and aquatic ones. In hibernating mammals the fat is seasonal; in most aquatic ones, as in humans it is present all the year round. Also, in land mammals fat tends to be stored internally, especially around the kidneys and intestines; in aquatic mammals and in humans a higher proportion is deposited under the skin.
It is unlikely that early man would have evolved this feature after moving to the plains and becoming a hunter, because it would have slowed him down. No land-based predator can afford to get fat. Our tendency to put on fat is likelier to be an inheritance from an earlier aquatic phase of our evolution. It is true that some apes, especially in captivity, may put on weight, but we still differ from them in two important ways. One is that they are never born fat. All infant primates except our own are slender; their lives may depend on their ability to cling to their mothers and support their whole weight with their fingers. Our own babies accumulate fat even before birth and continue to grow fatter for several months afterwards. Some of this fat is white fat, and that is extremely rare in new-born mammals. White fat is not much good for supplying instant heat and energy. It is good for insulation in water, and for giving buoyancy.
The other difference is that in our case the subcutaneous fat is bonded to the skin. When an anatomist skins a cat or rabbit or chimpanzee, any superficial fat deposits remain attached to the underlying tissues. In the case of humans, the fat comes away with the skin, just as it does in aquatic species like dolphins, seals, hippos and manatees.
Walking on two legs
Human beings are the only mammals in the world that habitually walk on two legs. (The only other creature with a perpendicular gait is an aquatic bird, the penguin.)
It is not surprising bipedalism is so rare. Compared with running or walking on four legs it has many disadvantages. It is slower; it is relatively unstable; it is a skill that takes many years to learn, and it exposes vulnerable organs to attack.
We have been doing it for five million years and in that time our bodies have been drastically remoulded to make it easier, but it is still the direct cause of many discomforts and ailments such as back pains, varicose veins, haemorrhoids, hernias and problems in childbirth. It would have been far more difficult and laborious for our ape-like ancestors; only some powerful pressure could have induced them to adopt a way of walking for which they were initially so ill suited.
One hypothesis used to be that they first developed big brains and began to make tools, and finally walked on their hind legs to free their hands for carrying weapons. But we now know that it was bipedalism that came first, before the big brain and tool-making.
However, if their habitat had become flooded, they would have been forced to walk on their hind legs whenever they came down to the ground in order to keep their heads above water. The only animal which has ever evolved a pelvis like ours, suitable for bipedalism, was the long-extinct _Oreopithecus_, known as the swamp ape.
Today, two primates when on the ground stand and walk erect somewhat more readily than most other species. One, the proboscis monkey, lives in the mangrove swamps of Borneo. The other is the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee; its habitat includes a large tract of seasonally flooded forest, which would have covered an even more extensive area before the African climate became drier.
Both of these species enjoy the water. It is interesting that the bonobos often mate face-to-face as humans do; in our case it is explained as a consequence of bipedalism. This mode of mating is another characteristic very rare among land animals, which we share with a wide range of aquatic mammals such as dolphins, beavers and sea otters. What we have in common with them is a mode of locomotion in which the spine and the hind limbs are in a straight line, and that affects the position of the sex organs.
Breathing
The human respiratory system is unlike any other land mammal's in two respects.
The first is that we have conscious control of our breathing. In most mammals these actions are involuntary, like the heart beat or the processes of digestion.
Voluntary breath control appears to be an aquatic adaptation because, apart from ourselves, it is found only in aquatic mammals like seals and dolphins. When they decide how deep they are going to dive, they can estimate how much air they need to inhale. Without voluntary breath control it is very unlikely that we could have learned to speak.
The other human peculiarity is called "the descended larynx". A land mammal is normally obliged to breathe through its nose most of the time, because its windpipe passes up through the back of the throat and the top end of it (the larynx) is situated in the back of its nasal passages. A dog, for example, has to make a special effort to bring its larynx down into its throat in order to bark or to pant; when it relaxes, the larynx goes back up again. Even our own babies are born like that.
A few months after birth the human larynx descends into the throat, right down below the back of the tongue. Darwin found that very puzzling because it means that the opening to the lungs lies side by side with the opening to the stomach. That is why in our species food and drink may sometimes go "down the wrong way". If we had not evolved an elaborate swallowing mechanism it would happen every time.
This arrangement means that we can breathe through our mouths as easily as through our noses. It is probable that this is an aquatic adaptation, because a swimmer needing to gulp air quickly can inhale more of it through the mouth than through the nostrils. And we do know that the only birds which are obligatory mouth breathers are diving birds like penguins, pelicans and gannets. As for mammals, the only ones with a descended larynx, apart from ourselves, are aquatic ones - the sea lion and the dugong.
Other differences
It is impossible in a brief outline to discuss all the physical features distinguishing us from the apes, but a few are worth mentioning.
For example, we have a different way of sweating from other mammals, using different skin glands. It is very wasteful of the body's essential resources of water and salt. It is therefore unlikely that we acquired it on the savannah, where water and salt are both in short supply.
We weep tears of emotion, controlled by different nerves from the ones that cause our eyes to water in response to smoke or dust. No other land animal does this. There are marine birds, marine reptiles and marine mammals which shed water through their eyes, or through special nasal glands, when they have swallowed too much seawater. This process may also be triggered in them by an emotional excitement caused by feeding or fighting or frustration. Weeping animals, apart from ourselves, include the walrus, the seal and the sea otter.
We have millions of sebaceous glands which exude oil over head, face and torso, and in young adults often causes acne. The chimpanzee's sebaceous glands are described as "vestigial" whereas ours are described as "enormous". Their purpose is obscure. In other animals the only known function of sebum is that of waterproofing the skin or the fur.
The most widely discussed contrast between ourselves and the apes is that we have bigger brains. A bigger brain may well have been an advantage to early man, but it would have been equally of advantage to a chimpanzee: the question is why one of them acquired it.
One factor may have been nutritional. The building of brain tissue, unlike other body tissues, is dependent on an adequate supply of Omega-3 fatty acids, which are abundant in the marine food chain but relatively scarce in the land food chain.
AAT is the only theory which logically connects all these and other enigmatic features and relates them to a single well attested historical event.
The time and the place
It is now generally agreed that the man/ape split occurred in Africa between 7 and 5 million years ago, during a period known as the fossil gap.
Before it there was an animal which was the common ancestor of human and African apes. After it, there emerged a creature smaller than ourselves, but bearing the unmistakable hallmark of the first shift towards human status: it walked on two legs.
This poses two questions: "Where were the earliest fossils found?" and "Do we know of anything happening in that place at that time that might have caused apes and humans to evolve along separate lines?"
The oldest pre-human fossils (including the best known one, "Lucy") are called australopithecus afarensis because their bones were discovered in the afar triangle, and area of low lying land near the Red Sea. About 7 million years ago that area was flooded by the sea and became the Sea of
Afar.
Part of the ape population living there at the time would have found themselves living in a radically changed habitat. Some may have been marooned on off-shore islands - the present day Danakil Alps were once surrounded by water. Others may have lived in flooded forests, salt marshes, mangrove swamps, lagoons or on the shores of the new sea, and they would all have had to adapt or die.
AAT suggests that some of them survived, and began to adapt to their watery environment. Much later, when the Sea of Afar became landlocked and finally evaporated, their descendants returned to the mainland of Africa and began to migrate southwards, following the waterways of the Rift Valley upstream.
There is nothing in the fossil record to invalidate this scenario, and much to sustain it. Lucy's bones were found at Afar lying among crocodile and turtle eggs and crab claws at the edge of a flood plain near what would then have been the coast of Africa.
Other fossils of Australopithecus, dated later, were found further south, almost invariably in the immediate vicinity of ancient lakes and rivers.
We now know that the change from the ape into Australopithecus took place in a short space of time, by evolutionary standards. Such rapid speciation is almost invariably a sign that one population of a species has become isolated by a geographical barrier such as a stretch of water. ...
The Aquatic phase took place more than 5 million years ago. Since then, Homo has had five million years to re-adapt to terrestrial life. It is not surprising that the traces of aquatic adaptation have become partially obliterated and have gone unrecognized for so long. But the traces are still there as the table indicates. ...
Hi--Back again. I wonder if David Brin, ph.D. has heard of Elaine Morgan's "Aquatic Ape" theory..... For convenience, I am pasting
one of the web pages mentioning the same below. It is at the site http://www.primitivism.com/aquatic-ape.htm . This theory,
while mildly controversial (and when is any compelling theory not?) seems to me to offer the most sane reason and common sense.
All for now. More later.
T.J. White
______________________________________________
Elaine Morgan has done most of the writing in support of this interesting and mildly controversial hypothesis of Alistair Hardy. For those who feel a strong affinity for water--and considering the cost of lakefront and especially oceanfront property, that is a lot of us--I think the theory resonates in some respect, and it perhaps opens our perspective on what a life closer to nature might be like.--JF)
Aquatic Ape Theory
Elaine Morgan
"An aquatic Ape is a likely ancestor of humans in terms of primate behaviour, marine ecosystems and geophysical timing."
- Prof. Derek Ellis, Dept. of Biology, Uni. of Victoria, Canada
"All other theories about the origin of our species have reached an impasse."
- Dr. Michel Odent, author of 'Water and sexuality'
"An aquatic hypothesis offers far simpler explanations."
- Dr. Chris Knight, author of 'Blood Relations'
"It is difficult to see how all the points assembled to back the Aquatic Theory can be explained away."
- Dr. Desmond Morris, author of 'The Naked Ape'
"The aquatic hypothesis... cannot be eliminated yet."
- Prof. Glyn Isaac
"We believe that this proposal [AAT] should be taken seriously."
- Prof Michael Crawford, author of 'The Driving Force'
"[AAT] conforms to current theories of speciation better than the savannah origins model, and accounts for a number of diverse phenomena hitherto not seen as connected."
- Prof. Graham Richards, author of 'Human Evolution'
Why humans differ from apes
Scientists find it easy to explain why we resemble the African apes so closely by pointing out that gorillas, chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor.
It is much harder to explain why we differ from the gorilla and the chimpanzee much more markedly than they differ from one another. Something must have happened to cause one section of the ancestral ape population to proceed along an entirely different evolutionary path.
The most widely held theory, still taught in schools and universities, is that we are descended from apes which moved out of the forests onto the grasslands of the open savannah. The distinctly human features are thus supposed to be adaptations to a savannah environment.
In that case, we would expect to find at least some of these adaptations to be paralleled in other savannah mammals. But there is not a single instance of this, not even among species like baboons and vervets, which are descended from forest- dwelling ancestors.
This awkward fact has not caused savannah theorists to abandon their hypothesis, but it leaves a lot of problems unanswered. For example, on the question of why humans lost their body hair, it has been argued at various times that no explanation is called for, or that we may never know the reason, or even that there may not be a reason. These attitudes seem to be not merely defeatist, but fundamentally unscientific.
The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) offers an alternative scenario. It suggests that when our ancestors moved onto the savannah they were already different from the apes; that nakedness, bipedalism, and other modifications had begun to evolve much earlier, when the ape and human lines first diverged.
AAT points out that most of the "enigmatic" features of human physiology, though rare or even unique among land mammals, are common in aquatic ones. If we postulate that our earliest ancestors had found themselves living for a prolonged period in a flooded, semi-aquatic habitat, most of the unsolved problems become much easier to unravel.
There is powerful geological evidence to support this hypothesis, and nothing in the fossil record that is inconsistent with it. Some of the issues it raises are briefly outlined in the following pages.
The naked ape
Humans are classed anatomically among the primates, the order of which includes apes, monkeys and lemurs. Among the hundreds of living primate species, only humans are naked.
Two kinds of habitat are known to give rise to naked mammals - a subterranean one or a wet one. There is a naked Somalian mole rat which never ventures above ground. All other non-human mammals which have lost all or most of their fur are either swimmers like whales and dolphins and walruses and manatees, or wallowers like hippopotamuses and pigs and tapirs. The rhinoceros and the elephant, though found on land since Africa became drier, bear traces of a more watery past and seize every opportunity of wallowing in mud or water.
It has been suggested that humans became hairless "to prevent overheating in the savannah". But no other mammal has ever resorted to this strategy. A covering of hair acts as a defense against the heat of the sun: that is why even the desert- dwelling camel retains its fur. Another version is "to facilitate sweat-cooling". But again many species resort to sweat-cooling quite effectively without needing to lose their hair.
There is no known reason why an ape should suffer more from overheating than the savannah baboon. And, especially for a savannah primate, there would be a high price to pay for hairlessness. Primate infants are carried around clinging to their mothers' fur; the females would be severely hampered in their foraging when that no longer became possible.
One general conclusion seems undeniable from an overall survey of mammalian species: that while a coat of fur provides the best insulation for land mammals the best insulation in water is not fur, but a layer of fat.
Fat
Humans are by far the fattest primates; we have ten times as many fat cells in our bodies as would be expected in an animal of our size.
There are two kinds of animals which tend to acquire large deposits of fat - hibernating ones and aquatic ones. In hibernating mammals the fat is seasonal; in most aquatic ones, as in humans it is present all the year round. Also, in land mammals fat tends to be stored internally, especially around the kidneys and intestines; in aquatic mammals and in humans a higher proportion is deposited under the skin.
It is unlikely that early man would have evolved this feature after moving to the plains and becoming a hunter, because it would have slowed him down. No land-based predator can afford to get fat. Our tendency to put on fat is likelier to be an inheritance from an earlier aquatic phase of our evolution. It is true that some apes, especially in captivity, may put on weight, but we still differ from them in two important ways. One is that they are never born fat. All infant primates except our own are slender; their lives may depend on their ability to cling to their mothers and support their whole weight with their fingers. Our own babies accumulate fat even before birth and continue to grow fatter for several months afterwards. Some of this fat is white fat, and that is extremely rare in new-born mammals. White fat is not much good for supplying instant heat and energy. It is good for insulation in water, and for giving buoyancy.
The other difference is that in our case the subcutaneous fat is bonded to the skin. When an anatomist skins a cat or rabbit or chimpanzee, any superficial fat deposits remain attached to the underlying tissues. In the case of humans, the fat comes away with the skin, just as it does in aquatic species like dolphins, seals, hippos and manatees.
Walking on two legs
Human beings are the only mammals in the world that habitually walk on two legs. (The only other creature with a perpendicular gait is an aquatic bird, the penguin.)
It is not surprising bipedalism is so rare. Compared with running or walking on four legs it has many disadvantages. It is slower; it is relatively unstable; it is a skill that takes many years to learn, and it exposes vulnerable organs to attack.
We have been doing it for five million years and in that time our bodies have been drastically remoulded to make it easier, but it is still the direct cause of many discomforts and ailments such as back pains, varicose veins, haemorrhoids, hernias and problems in childbirth. It would have been far more difficult and laborious for our ape-like ancestors; only some powerful pressure could have induced them to adopt a way of walking for which they were initially so ill suited.
One hypothesis used to be that they first developed big brains and began to make tools, and finally walked on their hind legs to free their hands for carrying weapons. But we now know that it was bipedalism that came first, before the big brain and tool-making.
However, if their habitat had become flooded, they would have been forced to walk on their hind legs whenever they came down to the ground in order to keep their heads above water. The only animal which has ever evolved a pelvis like ours, suitable for bipedalism, was the long-extinct _Oreopithecus_, known as the swamp ape.
Today, two primates when on the ground stand and walk erect somewhat more readily than most other species. One, the proboscis monkey, lives in the mangrove swamps of Borneo. The other is the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee; its habitat includes a large tract of seasonally flooded forest, which would have covered an even more extensive area before the African climate became drier.
Both of these species enjoy the water. It is interesting that the bonobos often mate face-to-face as humans do; in our case it is explained as a consequence of bipedalism. This mode of mating is another characteristic very rare among land animals, which we share with a wide range of aquatic mammals such as dolphins, beavers and sea otters. What we have in common with them is a mode of locomotion in which the spine and the hind limbs are in a straight line, and that affects the position of the sex organs.
Breathing
The human respiratory system is unlike any other land mammal's in two respects.
The first is that we have conscious control of our breathing. In most mammals these actions are involuntary, like the heart beat or the processes of digestion.
Voluntary breath control appears to be an aquatic adaptation because, apart from ourselves, it is found only in aquatic mammals like seals and dolphins. When they decide how deep they are going to dive, they can estimate how much air they need to inhale. Without voluntary breath control it is very unlikely that we could have learned to speak.
The other human peculiarity is called "the descended larynx". A land mammal is normally obliged to breathe through its nose most of the time, because its windpipe passes up through the back of the throat and the top end of it (the larynx) is situated in the back of its nasal passages. A dog, for example, has to make a special effort to bring its larynx down into its throat in order to bark or to pant; when it relaxes, the larynx goes back up again. Even our own babies are born like that.
A few months after birth the human larynx descends into the throat, right down below the back of the tongue. Darwin found that very puzzling because it means that the opening to the lungs lies side by side with the opening to the stomach. That is why in our species food and drink may sometimes go "down the wrong way". If we had not evolved an elaborate swallowing mechanism it would happen every time.
This arrangement means that we can breathe through our mouths as easily as through our noses. It is probable that this is an aquatic adaptation, because a swimmer needing to gulp air quickly can inhale more of it through the mouth than through the nostrils. And we do know that the only birds which are obligatory mouth breathers are diving birds like penguins, pelicans and gannets. As for mammals, the only ones with a descended larynx, apart from ourselves, are aquatic ones - the sea lion and the dugong.
Other differences
It is impossible in a brief outline to discuss all the physical features distinguishing us from the apes, but a few are worth mentioning.
For example, we have a different way of sweating from other mammals, using different skin glands. It is very wasteful of the body's essential resources of water and salt. It is therefore unlikely that we acquired it on the savannah, where water and salt are both in short supply.
We weep tears of emotion, controlled by different nerves from the ones that cause our eyes to water in response to smoke or dust. No other land animal does this. There are marine birds, marine reptiles and marine mammals which shed water through their eyes, or through special nasal glands, when they have swallowed too much seawater. This process may also be triggered in them by an emotional excitement caused by feeding or fighting or frustration. Weeping animals, apart from ourselves, include the walrus, the seal and the sea otter.
We have millions of sebaceous glands which exude oil over head, face and torso, and in young adults often causes acne. The chimpanzee's sebaceous glands are described as "vestigial" whereas ours are described as "enormous". Their purpose is obscure. In other animals the only known function of sebum is that of waterproofing the skin or the fur.
The most widely discussed contrast between ourselves and the apes is that we have bigger brains. A bigger brain may well have been an advantage to early man, but it would have been equally of advantage to a chimpanzee: the question is why one of them acquired it.
One factor may have been nutritional. The building of brain tissue, unlike other body tissues, is dependent on an adequate supply of Omega-3 fatty acids, which are abundant in the marine food chain but relatively scarce in the land food chain.
AAT is the only theory which logically connects all these and other enigmatic features and relates them to a single well attested historical event.
The time and the place
It is now generally agreed that the man/ape split occurred in Africa between 7 and 5 million years ago, during a period known as the fossil gap.
Before it there was an animal which was the common ancestor of human and African apes. After it, there emerged a creature smaller than ourselves, but bearing the unmistakable hallmark of the first shift towards human status: it walked on two legs.
This poses two questions: "Where were the earliest fossils found?" and "Do we know of anything happening in that place at that time that might have caused apes and humans to evolve along separate lines?"
The oldest pre-human fossils (including the best known one, "Lucy") are called australopithecus afarensis because their bones were discovered in the afar triangle, and area of low lying land near the Red Sea. About 7 million years ago that area was flooded by the sea and became the Sea of
Afar.
Part of the ape population living there at the time would have found themselves living in a radically changed habitat. Some may have been marooned on off-shore islands - the present day Danakil Alps were once surrounded by water. Others may have lived in flooded forests, salt marshes, mangrove swamps, lagoons or on the shores of the new sea, and they would all have had to adapt or die.
AAT suggests that some of them survived, and began to adapt to their watery environment. Much later, when the Sea of Afar became landlocked and finally evaporated, their descendants returned to the mainland of Africa and began to migrate southwards, following the waterways of the Rift Valley upstream.
There is nothing in the fossil record to invalidate this scenario, and much to sustain it. Lucy's bones were found at Afar lying among crocodile and turtle eggs and crab claws at the edge of a flood plain near what would then have been the coast of Africa.
Other fossils of Australopithecus, dated later, were found further south, almost invariably in the immediate vicinity of ancient lakes and rivers.
We now know that the change from the ape into Australopithecus took place in a short space of time, by evolutionary standards. Such rapid speciation is almost invariably a sign that one population of a species has become isolated by a geographical barrier such as a stretch of water. ...
The Aquatic phase took place more than 5 million years ago. Since then, Homo has had five million years to re-adapt to terrestrial life. It is not surprising that the traces of aquatic adaptation have become partially obliterated and have gone unrecognized for so long. But the traces are still there as the table indicates. ...
Monday, August 08, 2005
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Thruster Holding Me Tight
I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.
Press close barebosomed night! Press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of the south winds! Night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night! Mad naked summer night! ...
Prodigal! you have given me love! .... therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love!
Thruster holding me tight and that I hold tight!
We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other. ...
Walt Whitman,
from Song of Myself
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.
Press close barebosomed night! Press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of the south winds! Night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night! Mad naked summer night! ...
Prodigal! you have given me love! .... therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love!
Thruster holding me tight and that I hold tight!
We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other. ...
Walt Whitman,
from Song of Myself
Friday, July 15, 2005
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Peaks of Western Culture
Excerpts from a recent e-mail to Fred Child, Programme Director of NPR's "Performance Today" radio broadcast:
.... [T]hanks for including the new Bach aria discovery last week (old business). Any new addition to the Bach repertoire is always welcome (and interest-provoking).
I wonder, in passing, however (and this is a general comment, not directed to you personally), whether we are not sometimes guilty of over-emphasizing every tiny jot and tittle of the music of Bach at the expense of many another, perhaps equally-worthy composer of the period. Examples of these would be Locatelli, Marcello, the Scarlattis (pere et fils), Corrette, Pergolesi, Gluck, the Benda brothers, Quantz, Boccherini, Soler, and even some of Bach's own sons--Emmanuel and Johann Christian, for example--some of these composers dating from the latter half of that century. Bach was unquestionably a giant in 18th-Century music--indeed, of all music (from our standpoint, anyway)--both intellectually and aesthetically, but if we want to be intellectually honest, we must admit that the world of such music did not begin or end with him (nor with the likes of Handel, Mozart, or Haydn--great as they admittedly were). As you will probably know (and agree), there were many others (at that time) who were far better-known and better-liked than Bach. Proper historical perspective requires that we at least acknowledge this fact.
I don't want this attempt at criticism to sound like I'm trying to devalue Bach. I actually admire and respect most, if not all, of his endeavours--even if and when I may not always find them as aesthetically-pleasing as works by other composers. Let me say, rather, that I'm only attempting to place him in proper perspective.
As to this morning's programme (about time I actually got around to the real order of business)--thanks once again, this time for the Vivaldi e-minor Violin Concerto, performed by the Venice Baroque Orchestra. I have heard this work before, from a recording by the Moscow Virtuosi, so I was familiar with it.
A word concerning this particular work, if I may:
There are from time to time moments, in the world of the fine arts, when a particular balance, harmony, and seeming-bliss of perfection is achieved. Such a moment of perfection may not always be apparent to observers at the precise instant it is revealed, but later generations (with a discerning eye) can look back and see the glorious moment of radiant perfection that was. (Schopenhauer once said something along these lines ...) Robert Schumann once described Mozart's 'great' g-minor symphony (K.550) as possessing a "Grecian lightness and grace"
(per Marc Vignal), or, as Neal Zaslaw once wrote, "the classical balance, proportions and repose of a Greek vase." This is what I'm talking about here.
The Vivaldi concerto in question here, is (in my opinion) just such a moment of perfection as I describe. I'm not a proper musicologist, so I cannot state with authority just when the work dates from, but I would guess, based on its style, that it dates from late in Vivaldi's career--i.e., the 1730s. Even if it may not, it still bears the marks of that style--a harbinger, therefore, of things to come. This work, to me, seems to be infused with the 'spiritoso' style of the 'galant' Roccoco age; it breathes a softer, more serene and contemplative air than the vigorous, virtuoso 'Baroque' Vivaldi we are accustomed to. To sum up, it is quite possibly the most sublime and elegant work I have yet heard from Vivaldi--very much worthy to be placed alongside anything by Boccherini (my true Arbiter of Elegance--even more than Haydn).
Other works I place in this same category (and not always musical examples, either) include the Parthenon in Athens, the "Winged Victory" statue of Samothrace, the "David" statue of Verrocchio (even more than the one by Michelangelo), certain poems by Keats (his "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and "To Autumn", for example), and Franz Benda's Flute Concerto in e-minor, Corrette's Flute and Keyboard Concerto (Op.26, No.6), Gluck's Reigen Seliger Geister (Dance of the Blessed Spirits) from his Orfeo ed Euridyce, Locatelli's Violin Concerto in c-minor (Op.3, No.2), Handel's Concerto Grosso in g-minor (Op.6, No.12), Marcello's Oboe Concerto in d-minor, Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony (No.6), and several of Boccherini's works (too numerous to mention individually). All of these (and there are others) I consider to be profound 'high points' in our Western tradition of the arts and culture, which we have inherited from Greece and Rome. It is sad and much to be regretted, I think, that these (and other) important examples of cultural excellence in our history and tradition are so much ignored, devalued, and neglected as they are today by so many people--particularly the young, who are our future [i.e., the 'hip-hop' generation]. Mine is almost a lone voice "crying in the wilderness," I think;
a modern-day Boethius regretting the passing and loss of so much excellence, beauty and wisdom from his day and age. [Sic transit gloria mundi .... thus passes the glory of the world.]
.... [T]hanks for including the new Bach aria discovery last week (old business). Any new addition to the Bach repertoire is always welcome (and interest-provoking).
I wonder, in passing, however (and this is a general comment, not directed to you personally), whether we are not sometimes guilty of over-emphasizing every tiny jot and tittle of the music of Bach at the expense of many another, perhaps equally-worthy composer of the period. Examples of these would be Locatelli, Marcello, the Scarlattis (pere et fils), Corrette, Pergolesi, Gluck, the Benda brothers, Quantz, Boccherini, Soler, and even some of Bach's own sons--Emmanuel and Johann Christian, for example--some of these composers dating from the latter half of that century. Bach was unquestionably a giant in 18th-Century music--indeed, of all music (from our standpoint, anyway)--both intellectually and aesthetically, but if we want to be intellectually honest, we must admit that the world of such music did not begin or end with him (nor with the likes of Handel, Mozart, or Haydn--great as they admittedly were). As you will probably know (and agree), there were many others (at that time) who were far better-known and better-liked than Bach. Proper historical perspective requires that we at least acknowledge this fact.
I don't want this attempt at criticism to sound like I'm trying to devalue Bach. I actually admire and respect most, if not all, of his endeavours--even if and when I may not always find them as aesthetically-pleasing as works by other composers. Let me say, rather, that I'm only attempting to place him in proper perspective.
As to this morning's programme (about time I actually got around to the real order of business)--thanks once again, this time for the Vivaldi e-minor Violin Concerto, performed by the Venice Baroque Orchestra. I have heard this work before, from a recording by the Moscow Virtuosi, so I was familiar with it.
A word concerning this particular work, if I may:
There are from time to time moments, in the world of the fine arts, when a particular balance, harmony, and seeming-bliss of perfection is achieved. Such a moment of perfection may not always be apparent to observers at the precise instant it is revealed, but later generations (with a discerning eye) can look back and see the glorious moment of radiant perfection that was. (Schopenhauer once said something along these lines ...) Robert Schumann once described Mozart's 'great' g-minor symphony (K.550) as possessing a "Grecian lightness and grace"
(per Marc Vignal), or, as Neal Zaslaw once wrote, "the classical balance, proportions and repose of a Greek vase." This is what I'm talking about here.
The Vivaldi concerto in question here, is (in my opinion) just such a moment of perfection as I describe. I'm not a proper musicologist, so I cannot state with authority just when the work dates from, but I would guess, based on its style, that it dates from late in Vivaldi's career--i.e., the 1730s. Even if it may not, it still bears the marks of that style--a harbinger, therefore, of things to come. This work, to me, seems to be infused with the 'spiritoso' style of the 'galant' Roccoco age; it breathes a softer, more serene and contemplative air than the vigorous, virtuoso 'Baroque' Vivaldi we are accustomed to. To sum up, it is quite possibly the most sublime and elegant work I have yet heard from Vivaldi--very much worthy to be placed alongside anything by Boccherini (my true Arbiter of Elegance--even more than Haydn).
Other works I place in this same category (and not always musical examples, either) include the Parthenon in Athens, the "Winged Victory" statue of Samothrace, the "David" statue of Verrocchio (even more than the one by Michelangelo), certain poems by Keats (his "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and "To Autumn", for example), and Franz Benda's Flute Concerto in e-minor, Corrette's Flute and Keyboard Concerto (Op.26, No.6), Gluck's Reigen Seliger Geister (Dance of the Blessed Spirits) from his Orfeo ed Euridyce, Locatelli's Violin Concerto in c-minor (Op.3, No.2), Handel's Concerto Grosso in g-minor (Op.6, No.12), Marcello's Oboe Concerto in d-minor, Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony (No.6), and several of Boccherini's works (too numerous to mention individually). All of these (and there are others) I consider to be profound 'high points' in our Western tradition of the arts and culture, which we have inherited from Greece and Rome. It is sad and much to be regretted, I think, that these (and other) important examples of cultural excellence in our history and tradition are so much ignored, devalued, and neglected as they are today by so many people--particularly the young, who are our future [i.e., the 'hip-hop' generation]. Mine is almost a lone voice "crying in the wilderness," I think;
a modern-day Boethius regretting the passing and loss of so much excellence, beauty and wisdom from his day and age. [Sic transit gloria mundi .... thus passes the glory of the world.]
Friday, June 10, 2005
On the Subject of Christian Denominations
Unlike many people nowadays who call themselves "Christian," I take a very laid-back and relaxed attitude toward denominations: to me one denomination versus another is much like preferring 'this' flavour of ice-cream over 'that' flavour. Some people prefer
'Chocolate' over 'Plain Vanilla', whereas others like 'French Vanilla' instead of 'Plain Vanilla'. (Oo-La-La!!!....) Some people are really 'out there' and want 'Raspberry Truffle', or even
'Licorice' (these I compare to denominations such as the 'hard-shell' Evangelicals, or the 'Jehovah's Witnesses'). I myself can tolerate and find myself at home in just about any denomination of "Christianity" except the 'licorice' varieties--they are just too extreme, too doctrinaire, too dogmatic and intolerant for me.
And as far as these denominations (generally-speaking) go--it seems to me that 'Plain Vanilla' will fill one's belly (and provide about the same degree of nutrition) as any other, more exotic flavour. In other words, they can all of them (just about) get you to 'Heaven'--if (big if) you know how to let them do so. That is the real trick--discovering how to see through these different denominations and their respective doctrines to the essential, underlying truths they all contain to one degree or another.
Let me give you a big clue or hint: read Joseph Campbell. And then go back and re-read Joseph Campbell. And then dwell and ponder for a good long time on what it is he is saying. And then ponder some more--perhaps even several years' worth of this. For it is not until you have fully and deeply understood what it was that he was trying to teach us, that you will begin to approach 'the Truth'. For a general introduction, try the site: www.jcf.org (The web-site of the Joseph Campbell Foundation).
'Chocolate' over 'Plain Vanilla', whereas others like 'French Vanilla' instead of 'Plain Vanilla'. (Oo-La-La!!!....) Some people are really 'out there' and want 'Raspberry Truffle', or even
'Licorice' (these I compare to denominations such as the 'hard-shell' Evangelicals, or the 'Jehovah's Witnesses'). I myself can tolerate and find myself at home in just about any denomination of "Christianity" except the 'licorice' varieties--they are just too extreme, too doctrinaire, too dogmatic and intolerant for me.
And as far as these denominations (generally-speaking) go--it seems to me that 'Plain Vanilla' will fill one's belly (and provide about the same degree of nutrition) as any other, more exotic flavour. In other words, they can all of them (just about) get you to 'Heaven'--if (big if) you know how to let them do so. That is the real trick--discovering how to see through these different denominations and their respective doctrines to the essential, underlying truths they all contain to one degree or another.
Let me give you a big clue or hint: read Joseph Campbell. And then go back and re-read Joseph Campbell. And then dwell and ponder for a good long time on what it is he is saying. And then ponder some more--perhaps even several years' worth of this. For it is not until you have fully and deeply understood what it was that he was trying to teach us, that you will begin to approach 'the Truth'. For a general introduction, try the site: www.jcf.org (The web-site of the Joseph Campbell Foundation).
Thursday, June 09, 2005
A Translation From the Old English I Made at the Age of Twenty-Five
It is "Pope Gregory and the English Slave Boys," from an Anglo-Saxon version of the Venerable Bede's original Latin version of Book II, Chapter 1 of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. After my translation, I will include another English translation (not by me) for comparison, and then the Latin original. I was unfortunately unable to easily find an online text of the Anglo-Saxon version from which I made my translation, or I would have included it here also.
In 1988, when I first made my translation, I used the Anglo-Saxon version because Latin at that time was too difficult for me to be able to attempt a translation. I was at that time more familiar with the Anglo-Saxon language. I will not now vouch for the complete accuracy of my translation; indeed, I have not even looked at it for many years, until now, nor compared it with either the Latin original, the Anglo-Saxon gloss, nor even any other English translations. So I presently have really no idea how well or poorly a job I did then. You be the judge.
________________________________
My own translation (dated Nov. 6, 1988):
It is not for us, then, to try to silence the fame and notoriety of the story which is told us by our elders concerning the blessed Gregory [and his encounter with the English slave boys]. For this cause did men greatly wonder at him, that he displayed such an eager interest in these boys, who were slaves taken from among our own kindred.
They say that on a certain day, there came to Rome new traders from Britain, who also brought with them many and various slaves and chattels for to sell in the markets. There also came at that time many to buy of the things which were brought. It then happened that Pope Gregory (among the many others) also went thither, and chanced to see, among the many other goods and chattels for sale, several beautiful boys--boys with noble, pure hair, and fair and white bodies.
As soon as he saw and beheld them, he immediately stopped and asked where they were from. A man answered and said that they were brought from Britain's island, and also informed the Pope that the rest of the people of that far-off island looked like these particular boys. After which, Pope Gregory inquired whether those same people were Christian--they who, unbeknownst to him, were yet Pagan. A man answered him and said that they were still heathen. At that reply, Pope Gregory swore strongly in his heart, and exclaimed: "Welaway! That is very sad--that such wondrously fair lives and such light and beautiful boys should be the property of the Dark Prince!"
Then he asked what the name of the people was from whom they came. A man answered and said that they were called 'Angles'. Whereupon Pope Gregory immediately remarked: "It is meet that they should be called so, for they certainly have the most angel-like of visages, and also such forms as would befit wards of heaven."
Then he questioned still further, and said: "What are the particular tribe called from whom these boys were taken?" Then answered him a man and said that they were named 'Dere'. Quoth Pope Gregory: "Well it is that they are called Dere--that is: 'de ira eruti' [from wrath saved]; they should be saved from the destruction of God's wrath, and called to Christ's mercy."
Then he went on, and asked what their king was called. And a man answered him and said that he was called 'Alle'. And then the Pope continued his game of sporting with his words by making puns on the names, and said: "Alle--Alleluia! That name is well-befitting a king of such people as these--that thus the praise and glory of God our Creator should be sung in those parts."
______________________________
(Here follows another English translation for comparison:)
Nor is the account of St. Gregory, which has been handed down to us by the tradition of our ancestors, to be passed by in silence, in relation to his motives for taking such interest in the salvation of our nation. It is reported, that some merchants, having just arrived at Rome on a certain day, exposed many things for sale in the marketplace, and abundance of people resorted thither to buy: Gregory himself went with the rest, and, among other things, some boys were set to sale, their bodies white, their countenances beautiful, and their hair very fine. Having viewed them, he asked, as is said, from what country or nation they were brought? and was told, from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants were of such personal appearance. He again inquired whether those islanders were Christians, or still involved in the errors of paganism? and was informed that they were pagans. Then fetching a deep sigh from the bottom of his heart, "Alas! what pity," said he, "that the author of darkness is possessed of men of such fair countenances; and that being remarkable for such graceful aspects, their minds should be void of inward grace." He therefore again asked, what was the name of that nation? and was answered, that they were called Angles. "Right," said he, for they have an Angelic face, and it becomes such to be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven. What is the name," proceeded he, "of the province from which they are brought?" It was replied, that the natives of that province were called Deiri. "Truly are they De ira," said he, "withdrawn from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the king of that province called?" They told him his name was Ælla: and he, alluding to the name said, "Hallelujah, the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts."
From ORB's Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Paul Halsall, editor
(at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html )
_________________________________
(And here is Bede's Latin original:)
Nec silentio praetereunda opinio, quae de beato Gregorio traditione maiorum ad nos usque perlata est; qua uidelicet ex causa admonitus tam sedulam erga salutem nostrae gentis curam gesserit. Dicunt, quia die quadam cum, aduenientibus nuper mercatoribus, multa uenalia in forum fuissent conlata, multi ad emendum confluxissent, et ipsum Gregorium inter alios aduenisse, ac uidisse inter alia pueros uenales positos candidi corporis, ac uenusti uultus, capillorum quoque forma egregia. Quos cum aspiceret, interrogauit, ut aiunt, de qua regione uel terra essent adlati. Dictumque est, quia de Brittania insula, cuius incolae talis essent aspectus. Rursus interrogauit, utrum idem insulani Christiani, an paganis adhuc erroribus essent inplicati. Dictum est, quod essent pagani. At ille, intimo ex corde longa trahens suspiria: ‘Heu, pro dolor!’ inquit, ‘quod tam lucidi uultus homines tenebrarum auctor possidet, tantaque gratia frontispicii mentem ab interna gratia uacuam gestat!’ Rursus ergo interrogauit, quod esset uocabulum gentis illius. Responsum est, quod Angli uocarentur. At ille: ‘Bene,’ inquit; ‘nam et angelicam habent faciem, et tales angelorum in caelis decet esse coheredes. Quod habet nomen ipsa prouincia, de qua isti sunt adlati?’ Responsum est, quod Deiri uocarentur idem prouinciales. At ille: ‘Bene,’ inquit, ‘Deiri; de ira eruti, et ad misericordiam Christi uocati. Rex prouinciae illius quomodo appellatur?’ Responsum est, quod Aelli diceretur. At ille adludens ad nomen ait: ‘Alleluia, laudem Dei Creatoris illis in partibus oportet cantari.’
From the web-site http://thelatinlibrary.com/bede.html
In 1988, when I first made my translation, I used the Anglo-Saxon version because Latin at that time was too difficult for me to be able to attempt a translation. I was at that time more familiar with the Anglo-Saxon language. I will not now vouch for the complete accuracy of my translation; indeed, I have not even looked at it for many years, until now, nor compared it with either the Latin original, the Anglo-Saxon gloss, nor even any other English translations. So I presently have really no idea how well or poorly a job I did then. You be the judge.
________________________________
My own translation (dated Nov. 6, 1988):
It is not for us, then, to try to silence the fame and notoriety of the story which is told us by our elders concerning the blessed Gregory [and his encounter with the English slave boys]. For this cause did men greatly wonder at him, that he displayed such an eager interest in these boys, who were slaves taken from among our own kindred.
They say that on a certain day, there came to Rome new traders from Britain, who also brought with them many and various slaves and chattels for to sell in the markets. There also came at that time many to buy of the things which were brought. It then happened that Pope Gregory (among the many others) also went thither, and chanced to see, among the many other goods and chattels for sale, several beautiful boys--boys with noble, pure hair, and fair and white bodies.
As soon as he saw and beheld them, he immediately stopped and asked where they were from. A man answered and said that they were brought from Britain's island, and also informed the Pope that the rest of the people of that far-off island looked like these particular boys. After which, Pope Gregory inquired whether those same people were Christian--they who, unbeknownst to him, were yet Pagan. A man answered him and said that they were still heathen. At that reply, Pope Gregory swore strongly in his heart, and exclaimed: "Welaway! That is very sad--that such wondrously fair lives and such light and beautiful boys should be the property of the Dark Prince!"
Then he asked what the name of the people was from whom they came. A man answered and said that they were called 'Angles'. Whereupon Pope Gregory immediately remarked: "It is meet that they should be called so, for they certainly have the most angel-like of visages, and also such forms as would befit wards of heaven."
Then he questioned still further, and said: "What are the particular tribe called from whom these boys were taken?" Then answered him a man and said that they were named 'Dere'. Quoth Pope Gregory: "Well it is that they are called Dere--that is: 'de ira eruti' [from wrath saved]; they should be saved from the destruction of God's wrath, and called to Christ's mercy."
Then he went on, and asked what their king was called. And a man answered him and said that he was called 'Alle'. And then the Pope continued his game of sporting with his words by making puns on the names, and said: "Alle--Alleluia! That name is well-befitting a king of such people as these--that thus the praise and glory of God our Creator should be sung in those parts."
______________________________
(Here follows another English translation for comparison:)
Nor is the account of St. Gregory, which has been handed down to us by the tradition of our ancestors, to be passed by in silence, in relation to his motives for taking such interest in the salvation of our nation. It is reported, that some merchants, having just arrived at Rome on a certain day, exposed many things for sale in the marketplace, and abundance of people resorted thither to buy: Gregory himself went with the rest, and, among other things, some boys were set to sale, their bodies white, their countenances beautiful, and their hair very fine. Having viewed them, he asked, as is said, from what country or nation they were brought? and was told, from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants were of such personal appearance. He again inquired whether those islanders were Christians, or still involved in the errors of paganism? and was informed that they were pagans. Then fetching a deep sigh from the bottom of his heart, "Alas! what pity," said he, "that the author of darkness is possessed of men of such fair countenances; and that being remarkable for such graceful aspects, their minds should be void of inward grace." He therefore again asked, what was the name of that nation? and was answered, that they were called Angles. "Right," said he, for they have an Angelic face, and it becomes such to be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven. What is the name," proceeded he, "of the province from which they are brought?" It was replied, that the natives of that province were called Deiri. "Truly are they De ira," said he, "withdrawn from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the king of that province called?" They told him his name was Ælla: and he, alluding to the name said, "Hallelujah, the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts."
From ORB's Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Paul Halsall, editor
(at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html )
_________________________________
(And here is Bede's Latin original:)
Nec silentio praetereunda opinio, quae de beato Gregorio traditione maiorum ad nos usque perlata est; qua uidelicet ex causa admonitus tam sedulam erga salutem nostrae gentis curam gesserit. Dicunt, quia die quadam cum, aduenientibus nuper mercatoribus, multa uenalia in forum fuissent conlata, multi ad emendum confluxissent, et ipsum Gregorium inter alios aduenisse, ac uidisse inter alia pueros uenales positos candidi corporis, ac uenusti uultus, capillorum quoque forma egregia. Quos cum aspiceret, interrogauit, ut aiunt, de qua regione uel terra essent adlati. Dictumque est, quia de Brittania insula, cuius incolae talis essent aspectus. Rursus interrogauit, utrum idem insulani Christiani, an paganis adhuc erroribus essent inplicati. Dictum est, quod essent pagani. At ille, intimo ex corde longa trahens suspiria: ‘Heu, pro dolor!’ inquit, ‘quod tam lucidi uultus homines tenebrarum auctor possidet, tantaque gratia frontispicii mentem ab interna gratia uacuam gestat!’ Rursus ergo interrogauit, quod esset uocabulum gentis illius. Responsum est, quod Angli uocarentur. At ille: ‘Bene,’ inquit; ‘nam et angelicam habent faciem, et tales angelorum in caelis decet esse coheredes. Quod habet nomen ipsa prouincia, de qua isti sunt adlati?’ Responsum est, quod Deiri uocarentur idem prouinciales. At ille: ‘Bene,’ inquit, ‘Deiri; de ira eruti, et ad misericordiam Christi uocati. Rex prouinciae illius quomodo appellatur?’ Responsum est, quod Aelli diceretur. At ille adludens ad nomen ait: ‘Alleluia, laudem Dei Creatoris illis in partibus oportet cantari.’
From the web-site http://thelatinlibrary.com/bede.html
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Recent e-mails to and from NPR's "Performance Today" programme
Subject:
RE: Programme of Tuesday, June 7th, 2005
Date:
Wed, 8 Jun 2005 11:08:44 -0400
From:
"Fred Child" Add to Address Book
To:
revenant1963@yahoo.com
Dear Mr. White,
Thanks for your thoughtful note about Bach and period performance
practice. We're big fans of that approach -- we were hoping to get the
Akademie fur Alte Musik from Berlin to join us in the NPR studios during
their American tour, but they couldn't quite squeeze us into their
schedule. We're always on the lookout for top-notch performances of Baroque
music, and we'll get as many as we can on the air.
All the best,
Fred Child
Host of NPR's Performance Today
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: terrence White <revenant1963@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 08:41:43 -0700 (PDT)
Hi--
You asked for the opinions of your listeners, so here is mine:
I definitely agree that no work from the 18th century (or earlier)
even begins to approach true 'authenticity' unless some serious
efforts are made along the lines of what is popularly
called "period performance" practices.
It is, of course, true (and almost goes without saying) that we
can never really know exactly how any piece of 'old' music truly
sounded. The recording of music, after all, didn't really begin
in earnest until the early 20th century. But this by no means
decides that performers (and conductors!) should simply 'throw in
the towel' and lazily content themselves with modern instruments
and modern performance techniques. Far from it! A great deal is
actually known today about how music was performed in earlier
centuries, and to ignore this sound (and widely-available)
scholarship is nothing but pure, willful blindness and ignorance--
similar to the proverbial 'ostrich burying its head in the sand'.
There is currently a whole world of 'period' music performances,
broadcasts, and recordings existing in Europe, which the vast
majority of (willfully?) ignorant Americans have barely, scarcely
begun to appreciate or explore. (Perhaps this is an example of
continuing colonialism, in that American tastes--or those of any
colony or former colony--lag behind those of the 'mother
countries' by several decades.) American tastes in 'classical'
music, it is plainly obvious, are still in the 1950s (to the
discomfiture of those of us who appreciate and prefer to hear real
music from the earlier centuries--or the closest modern performers
can get to it).
Let us please hear more of this 'period' or 'authentic' early
music! You cannot possibly broadcast enough of it to suit someone
like myself! (Even mid-nineteenth century music can benefit
from 'period performance' practice.)
I only wish Georgia Public Broadcasting would do this as well
(sigh).
Sincerely,
T.J. White
Thomaston, Georgia
e-mail at revenant1963@yahoo.com
RE: Programme of Tuesday, June 7th, 2005
Date:
Wed, 8 Jun 2005 11:08:44 -0400
From:
"Fred Child"
To:
revenant1963@yahoo.com
Dear Mr. White,
Thanks for your thoughtful note about Bach and period performance
practice. We're big fans of that approach -- we were hoping to get the
Akademie fur Alte Musik from Berlin to join us in the NPR studios during
their American tour, but they couldn't quite squeeze us into their
schedule. We're always on the lookout for top-notch performances of Baroque
music, and we'll get as many as we can on the air.
All the best,
Fred Child
Host of NPR's Performance Today
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: terrence White <revenant1963@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 08:41:43 -0700 (PDT)
Hi--
You asked for the opinions of your listeners, so here is mine:
I definitely agree that no work from the 18th century (or earlier)
even begins to approach true 'authenticity' unless some serious
efforts are made along the lines of what is popularly
called "period performance" practices.
It is, of course, true (and almost goes without saying) that we
can never really know exactly how any piece of 'old' music truly
sounded. The recording of music, after all, didn't really begin
in earnest until the early 20th century. But this by no means
decides that performers (and conductors!) should simply 'throw in
the towel' and lazily content themselves with modern instruments
and modern performance techniques. Far from it! A great deal is
actually known today about how music was performed in earlier
centuries, and to ignore this sound (and widely-available)
scholarship is nothing but pure, willful blindness and ignorance--
similar to the proverbial 'ostrich burying its head in the sand'.
There is currently a whole world of 'period' music performances,
broadcasts, and recordings existing in Europe, which the vast
majority of (willfully?) ignorant Americans have barely, scarcely
begun to appreciate or explore. (Perhaps this is an example of
continuing colonialism, in that American tastes--or those of any
colony or former colony--lag behind those of the 'mother
countries' by several decades.) American tastes in 'classical'
music, it is plainly obvious, are still in the 1950s (to the
discomfiture of those of us who appreciate and prefer to hear real
music from the earlier centuries--or the closest modern performers
can get to it).
Let us please hear more of this 'period' or 'authentic' early
music! You cannot possibly broadcast enough of it to suit someone
like myself! (Even mid-nineteenth century music can benefit
from 'period performance' practice.)
I only wish Georgia Public Broadcasting would do this as well
(sigh).
Sincerely,
T.J. White
Thomaston, Georgia
e-mail at revenant1963@yahoo.com
Some of my Favourite Thoreau
Note: Since I consider Thoreau to be one of the most important and formative influences on my life and thinking, it is only right that I include some of my favourite passages of his here.
_________________________
There are from time to time mornings, both in summer and in winter, when especially the world seems to begin anew ... The world has visibly been recreated in the night. Mornings of creation, I call them. In the midst of these marks of a creative energy recently active, while the sun is rising with more than usual splendor, I look back ... for the era of this creation, not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough. A morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted. It is the poet's hour. Mornings when men are new born, men who have the seeds of life in them.
Journal, January 26, 1853
But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sproutlands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by church-going and prayer. I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. ... I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplfied. I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself. ... This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.
Journal, January 7, 1857
It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days. We live in a grosser element. We [are] getting deeper into the mists of earth. Even the birds sing with less vigor and vivacity. The season of hope and promise is past; already the season of small fruits has arrived. The Indian marked the midsummer as the season when berries were ripe. We are a little saddened, because we begin to see the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment. The prospect of the heavens is taken away, and we are presented only with a few small berries.
Journal, June 17, 1854
Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he had ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like;--so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him,--him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore, who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow,--there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes,--and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruit, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
Walden, 1854
(Note: I have always preferred to restate that last phrase as: "Give me the true wealth that poverty brings"--it seems so much more in the spirit of Thoreau's personality and life. TJW)
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which gives a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
Walden, 1854
Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court-house, or any curacy or living any where else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.
Walden, 1854
What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn , when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.
Walden, 1854
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such,--This whole earth we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put to me seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the gorcery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. ...
Walden, 1854
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,--of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,--such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
Walden, 1854
After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what--how--when--where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an unanswered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. "O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether."
Walden, 1854
[In the last days of Thoreau's life, when he was already an invalid confined indoors,] ... Edmund Hosmer told him of seeing a spring robin, Thoreau replied, "Yes, This is a beautiful world; but I shall see a fairer." He was greatly moved by the attentions of his friends and neighbors. He "came to feel very differently toward people," one of them reported, "and said if he had known he wouldn't have been so offish."
The devotion of his friends [said his sister Sophia] was most rare and touching; his room was made fragrant by the gift of flowers from young and old; fruit of every kind which the season afforded, and game of all sorts was sent him. It was really pathetic [i.e., greatly moving] the way in which the town was moved to minister to his comfort. Total strangers sent grateful messages, remembering the good he had done for them. All this attention was fully appreciated and very gratifying to Henry; he would sometimes say, "I should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much had been done for me, I could never repay my friends." ...
When he learned that some boys in the neighborhood had been robbing birds' nests, he requested that they be called into his sickroom and asked them if they knew "what a wail of sorrow and anguish their cruelty had sent all over the fields and through the woods." ...
[Yet,] When Thoreau learned that some of the boys of the neighborhood had brought him some game to eat, he asked, "Why did you not invite them in? I want to thank them for so much they are bringing me," ...
In his last illness [recalled a child of the neighborhood] it did not occur to us that he would care to see us, but his sister told my mother that he watched us from the window as we passed, and said: "Why don't they come to see me? I love them as if they were my own." After that we went often, and he always made us so welcome that we liked to go. I remember our last meetings with as much pleasure as the old playdays. ...
During his long illness [said Sophia] I never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish expressed to remain with us; his perfect contentment was truly wonderful. None of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem. One friend, as if by way of consolation, said to him, "Well, Mr. Thoreau, we must all go." Henry replied, "When I was a very little boy I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so of course I am not disappointed now. Death is as near to you as it is to me."
Some of his more orthodox friends and relatives tried to prepare him for death, with but little satisfaction to themselves. When an old friend of the family asked "how he stood affected toward Christ," he replied that "a snow-storm was more to him than Christ." When his aunt asked him if he had made his peace with God, he answered, "I did not know that we had ever quarrelled, Aunt." ...
He did not lose his sense of humor. He told Sanborn that whenever his corpulent, full-faced aunt came to his chamber door to inquire about his welfare, he thought her to be "the rising full moon." When someone commented how little his hair had grayed, even in his illness, he replied: "I have never had any trouble in all my life, or only when I was about fourteen; then I felt pretty bad a little while on account of my sins, but no trouble since that I know of. That must be the reason why my hair doesn't turn gray faster. But there is Blake; he is gray as a rat." ...
[When his time to leave finally came] his mother, sister, and his Aunt Louisa watched, his breathing grew fainter and fainter, and without the slightest struggle he died at nine o'clock. Sophia said, "I feel as if something very beautiful had happened,--not death."
From American Heritage, Vol. XIV, No.1 (Dec. 1962), pp.106-112
_________________________
There are from time to time mornings, both in summer and in winter, when especially the world seems to begin anew ... The world has visibly been recreated in the night. Mornings of creation, I call them. In the midst of these marks of a creative energy recently active, while the sun is rising with more than usual splendor, I look back ... for the era of this creation, not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough. A morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted. It is the poet's hour. Mornings when men are new born, men who have the seeds of life in them.
Journal, January 26, 1853
But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sproutlands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by church-going and prayer. I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. ... I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplfied. I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself. ... This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.
Journal, January 7, 1857
It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days. We live in a grosser element. We [are] getting deeper into the mists of earth. Even the birds sing with less vigor and vivacity. The season of hope and promise is past; already the season of small fruits has arrived. The Indian marked the midsummer as the season when berries were ripe. We are a little saddened, because we begin to see the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment. The prospect of the heavens is taken away, and we are presented only with a few small berries.
Journal, June 17, 1854
Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he had ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like;--so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him,--him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore, who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow,--there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes,--and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruit, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
Walden, 1854
(Note: I have always preferred to restate that last phrase as: "Give me the true wealth that poverty brings"--it seems so much more in the spirit of Thoreau's personality and life. TJW)
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which gives a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
Walden, 1854
Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court-house, or any curacy or living any where else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.
Walden, 1854
What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn , when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.
Walden, 1854
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such,--This whole earth we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put to me seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the gorcery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. ...
Walden, 1854
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,--of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,--such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?
Walden, 1854
After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what--how--when--where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an unanswered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. "O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether."
Walden, 1854
[In the last days of Thoreau's life, when he was already an invalid confined indoors,] ... Edmund Hosmer told him of seeing a spring robin, Thoreau replied, "Yes, This is a beautiful world; but I shall see a fairer." He was greatly moved by the attentions of his friends and neighbors. He "came to feel very differently toward people," one of them reported, "and said if he had known he wouldn't have been so offish."
The devotion of his friends [said his sister Sophia] was most rare and touching; his room was made fragrant by the gift of flowers from young and old; fruit of every kind which the season afforded, and game of all sorts was sent him. It was really pathetic [i.e., greatly moving] the way in which the town was moved to minister to his comfort. Total strangers sent grateful messages, remembering the good he had done for them. All this attention was fully appreciated and very gratifying to Henry; he would sometimes say, "I should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much had been done for me, I could never repay my friends." ...
When he learned that some boys in the neighborhood had been robbing birds' nests, he requested that they be called into his sickroom and asked them if they knew "what a wail of sorrow and anguish their cruelty had sent all over the fields and through the woods." ...
[Yet,] When Thoreau learned that some of the boys of the neighborhood had brought him some game to eat, he asked, "Why did you not invite them in? I want to thank them for so much they are bringing me," ...
In his last illness [recalled a child of the neighborhood] it did not occur to us that he would care to see us, but his sister told my mother that he watched us from the window as we passed, and said: "Why don't they come to see me? I love them as if they were my own." After that we went often, and he always made us so welcome that we liked to go. I remember our last meetings with as much pleasure as the old playdays. ...
During his long illness [said Sophia] I never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish expressed to remain with us; his perfect contentment was truly wonderful. None of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem. One friend, as if by way of consolation, said to him, "Well, Mr. Thoreau, we must all go." Henry replied, "When I was a very little boy I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so of course I am not disappointed now. Death is as near to you as it is to me."
Some of his more orthodox friends and relatives tried to prepare him for death, with but little satisfaction to themselves. When an old friend of the family asked "how he stood affected toward Christ," he replied that "a snow-storm was more to him than Christ." When his aunt asked him if he had made his peace with God, he answered, "I did not know that we had ever quarrelled, Aunt." ...
He did not lose his sense of humor. He told Sanborn that whenever his corpulent, full-faced aunt came to his chamber door to inquire about his welfare, he thought her to be "the rising full moon." When someone commented how little his hair had grayed, even in his illness, he replied: "I have never had any trouble in all my life, or only when I was about fourteen; then I felt pretty bad a little while on account of my sins, but no trouble since that I know of. That must be the reason why my hair doesn't turn gray faster. But there is Blake; he is gray as a rat." ...
[When his time to leave finally came] his mother, sister, and his Aunt Louisa watched, his breathing grew fainter and fainter, and without the slightest struggle he died at nine o'clock. Sophia said, "I feel as if something very beautiful had happened,--not death."
From American Heritage, Vol. XIV, No.1 (Dec. 1962), pp.106-112
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Walt Whitman's Self-Describ'd Philosophy
(As cull'd from several of his 'songs'):
__________________________
"I believe in the flesh and the appetities ... Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. ..."
[Song of Myself, 24]
"[I am] turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding ..."
[ibid.]
"Through me forbidden voices,/Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,/
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured. ..."
[ibid.]
"Voices of ... wombs and of the father-stuff. ..."
[ibid.]
"O admirers, praise not me--compliment not me--you make me wince,/I see what you do not--I know what you do not./Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch'd and choked,/Beneath this face that appears so impassive hell's tides continually run,/Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me,/I walk with delinquents with passionate love,/I feel I am of them--I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself,/And henceforth I will not deny them--for how can I deny myself?"
["You Felons on Trial in Courts," from Autumn Rivulets]
"The soldier camp'd or upon the march is mine,/on the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them, ..."
[Song of Myself, 47, emphasis supplied]
"My lovers ... coming naked to me at night. ..."
[ibid., 45]
"The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived/power, but in his own right, ... [He is] wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear. ..."
[ibid., 47]
"I do not envy the generals,/Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house,/But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers ... How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging,/long and long,/Through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,/Then I am pensive--I hastily walk away fill'd with the bitterest envy."
[from Calamus]
"I am he that aches with amorous love;/Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?/So the body of me to all I meet or know."
["I Am He That Aches With Love," from Children of Adam]
"O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you,/As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,/Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me."
["O You Whom I Often And Silently Come," from Calamus]
"A glimpse through an interstice caught,/Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove/late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner,/Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching,/and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,/A long while amid the noises of coming and going,/of drinking and oath and smutty jest,/There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word."
["A Glimpse," from Calamus]
"O tan-faced prairie-boy,/Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift,/Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among the recruits,/You came, taciturn, with nothing to give--we but look'd on each other,/When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me."
["O Tan-Faced Prairie-Boy," from Drum-Taps]
"Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse/unreturn'd love,/But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one way/or another, (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd,/Yet out of that I have written these songs.)"
["Sometimes With One I Love," from Calamus]
"Recorders ages hence,/Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior,/I will tell you what to say of me,/Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover, ... Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him, and freely pour'd it forth. ..."
["Recorders Ages Hence," from Calamus; emphasis supplied]
"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,/I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. ..."
[Song of Myself, 52]
"I know I am restless, and make others so,/I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,/For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws,/to unsettle them,/I am more resolute because all have denied me than I could/ever have been had all accepted me,/I heed not and have never heeded either experience, cautions, majorities, nor ridicule,/And the threat of what is call'd hell is little or nothing to me,/And the lure of what is call'd heaven is little or nothing to me./Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our/destination, or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and/defeated."
["As I Lay with my Head in Your Lap Camerado," from Drum Taps]
"Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more. ..."
["Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," from Calamus]
________________________
"Divine am I inside and out .../If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my/own body, or any part of it. ..."
[Song of Myself, 24]
"My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,/The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,/The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there. ..."
[ibid., 45]
"I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms ..."
[ibid., 24]
"Whoever degrades another degrades me,/And whatever is done or said returns at last to me ..."
[ibid.]
"the soul is not more than the body, ... And ... the body is not more than the soul. ..."
[ibid., 48]
"And nothing, not [even] God, is greater to me than one's self is. ..."
[ibid.]
"And you or I pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth ..."
[ibid.]
"And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it/may become a hero. ..."
[ibid.]
"And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. ..."
[ibid.]
"All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me. ..."
[ibid., 44]
___________________________
"No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,/I have no chair, no church, no philosophy. ..."
[Song of Myself, 46]
"He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. ..."
[ibid., 47]
"I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me? ..."
[ibid.]
"If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,/The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,/The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words. ..."
[ibid.]
"My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, ..."
[ibid., 46]
"The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,/The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with/him all day,/The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my/voice,/In vessels that sail my words sail. I go with fishermen and seamen and/love them, ..."
[ibid., 47]
"I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,/And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who/privately stays with me in the open air. ..."
[ibid.]
"No shutter'd room or school can commune with me,/But roughs and little children better than they. ..."
[ibid.]
__________________________
"Let judges and criminals be transposed--let the prison-keepers be/put in prison--let those that were prisoners take the keys. ..."
["Transpositions," from Autumn Rivulets]
"This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem."
[Preface, Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition; emphasis supplied]
___________________________
Editorial comment by T.J. White:
Do you understand what he is saying here? Do you UNDERSTAND WHAT HE IS SAYING HERE????!!!!! If you think you do, the chances are good that you do not.
You should go back and re-read, not just the excerpts I have included here, but his entire corpus, until you can contact me via this web-site, and say to me: "Yes, I finally know. ..."
THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT--CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT!!!
There is nobody in this life--living or dead--who can teach you more than Whitman can, if you will let him. (Not even Nietzsche, though he, too, comes very close: Nietzsche is simply too obfuscating, though he can be comprehended by one whose mind has been prepared.)
But in order for Whitman to succeed in this teaching endeavour, you must first free your mind of all previous prejudices and opinions; you must be free to follow his mind wherever he goes. And if you do, you will be amazed and astounded where he leads you--through himself and the entire world and the whole universe, indeed--right back to yourself (which is really his own self also; or in other words--"God").
It is a profound mistake to think of Whitman's writings as "just poetry." The person who does so entirely misses the point. Yes, Whitman expresses his thoughts in a most sublime, beautiful, poetic manner, but that is only his means--not his purpose. Whitman was really the first and greatest of our cosmologists--if you can understand the true depth of that term--he was a shuffling, unshaven, disshevelled, wandering man we today would basically call "homeless", and yet a man who somehow had the wisdom of Socrates and the knowledge of the secrets of the Universe.
"He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear. ..."
__________________________
"I believe in the flesh and the appetities ... Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. ..."
[Song of Myself, 24]
"[I am] turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding ..."
[ibid.]
"Through me forbidden voices,/Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,/
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured. ..."
[ibid.]
"Voices of ... wombs and of the father-stuff. ..."
[ibid.]
"O admirers, praise not me--compliment not me--you make me wince,/I see what you do not--I know what you do not./Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch'd and choked,/Beneath this face that appears so impassive hell's tides continually run,/Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me,/I walk with delinquents with passionate love,/I feel I am of them--I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself,/And henceforth I will not deny them--for how can I deny myself?"
["You Felons on Trial in Courts," from Autumn Rivulets]
"The soldier camp'd or upon the march is mine,/on the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them, ..."
[Song of Myself, 47, emphasis supplied]
"My lovers ... coming naked to me at night. ..."
[ibid., 45]
"The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived/power, but in his own right, ... [He is] wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear. ..."
[ibid., 47]
"I do not envy the generals,/Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house,/But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers ... How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging,/long and long,/Through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,/Then I am pensive--I hastily walk away fill'd with the bitterest envy."
[from Calamus]
"I am he that aches with amorous love;/Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?/So the body of me to all I meet or know."
["I Am He That Aches With Love," from Children of Adam]
"O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you,/As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,/Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me."
["O You Whom I Often And Silently Come," from Calamus]
"A glimpse through an interstice caught,/Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove/late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner,/Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching,/and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,/A long while amid the noises of coming and going,/of drinking and oath and smutty jest,/There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word."
["A Glimpse," from Calamus]
"O tan-faced prairie-boy,/Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift,/Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among the recruits,/You came, taciturn, with nothing to give--we but look'd on each other,/When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me."
["O Tan-Faced Prairie-Boy," from Drum-Taps]
"Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse/unreturn'd love,/But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one way/or another, (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd,/Yet out of that I have written these songs.)"
["Sometimes With One I Love," from Calamus]
"Recorders ages hence,/Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior,/I will tell you what to say of me,/Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover, ... Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him, and freely pour'd it forth. ..."
["Recorders Ages Hence," from Calamus; emphasis supplied]
"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,/I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. ..."
[Song of Myself, 52]
"I know I am restless, and make others so,/I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,/For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws,/to unsettle them,/I am more resolute because all have denied me than I could/ever have been had all accepted me,/I heed not and have never heeded either experience, cautions, majorities, nor ridicule,/And the threat of what is call'd hell is little or nothing to me,/And the lure of what is call'd heaven is little or nothing to me./Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our/destination, or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell'd and/defeated."
["As I Lay with my Head in Your Lap Camerado," from Drum Taps]
"Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more. ..."
["Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," from Calamus]
________________________
"Divine am I inside and out .../If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my/own body, or any part of it. ..."
[Song of Myself, 24]
"My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,/The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,/The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there. ..."
[ibid., 45]
"I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms ..."
[ibid., 24]
"Whoever degrades another degrades me,/And whatever is done or said returns at last to me ..."
[ibid.]
"the soul is not more than the body, ... And ... the body is not more than the soul. ..."
[ibid., 48]
"And nothing, not [even] God, is greater to me than one's self is. ..."
[ibid.]
"And you or I pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth ..."
[ibid.]
"And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it/may become a hero. ..."
[ibid.]
"And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. ..."
[ibid.]
"All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me. ..."
[ibid., 44]
___________________________
"No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,/I have no chair, no church, no philosophy. ..."
[Song of Myself, 46]
"He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. ..."
[ibid., 47]
"I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me? ..."
[ibid.]
"If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,/The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key,/The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words. ..."
[ibid.]
"My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, ..."
[ibid., 46]
"The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,/The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with/him all day,/The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my/voice,/In vessels that sail my words sail. I go with fishermen and seamen and/love them, ..."
[ibid., 47]
"I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,/And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who/privately stays with me in the open air. ..."
[ibid.]
"No shutter'd room or school can commune with me,/But roughs and little children better than they. ..."
[ibid.]
__________________________
"Let judges and criminals be transposed--let the prison-keepers be/put in prison--let those that were prisoners take the keys. ..."
["Transpositions," from Autumn Rivulets]
"This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem."
[Preface, Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition; emphasis supplied]
___________________________
Editorial comment by T.J. White:
Do you understand what he is saying here? Do you UNDERSTAND WHAT HE IS SAYING HERE????!!!!! If you think you do, the chances are good that you do not.
You should go back and re-read, not just the excerpts I have included here, but his entire corpus, until you can contact me via this web-site, and say to me: "Yes, I finally know. ..."
THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT--CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT!!!
There is nobody in this life--living or dead--who can teach you more than Whitman can, if you will let him. (Not even Nietzsche, though he, too, comes very close: Nietzsche is simply too obfuscating, though he can be comprehended by one whose mind has been prepared.)
But in order for Whitman to succeed in this teaching endeavour, you must first free your mind of all previous prejudices and opinions; you must be free to follow his mind wherever he goes. And if you do, you will be amazed and astounded where he leads you--through himself and the entire world and the whole universe, indeed--right back to yourself (which is really his own self also; or in other words--"God").
It is a profound mistake to think of Whitman's writings as "just poetry." The person who does so entirely misses the point. Yes, Whitman expresses his thoughts in a most sublime, beautiful, poetic manner, but that is only his means--not his purpose. Whitman was really the first and greatest of our cosmologists--if you can understand the true depth of that term--he was a shuffling, unshaven, disshevelled, wandering man we today would basically call "homeless", and yet a man who somehow had the wisdom of Socrates and the knowledge of the secrets of the Universe.
"He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear. ..."
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Campbell on Society's "Outsiders"
The following excerpt is included here because of its deep relevance for myself and the overall theme and purpose of this web-site. It is Joseph Campbell [1904-1987] in The Power of Myth, in conversation with journalist Bill Moyers:
_________________________
Moyers: Why is a myth different from a dream?
Campbell: Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
Moyers: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I'm more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public--
Campbell: --you'll be in trouble. If you're forced to live in that system, you'll be a neurotic.
Moyers: But aren't many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism?
Campbell: Yes, they are.
Moyers: How do you explain that?
Campbell: They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience--that is the hero's deed. ...
[pages 40-41]
_________________________
Editorial commentary by T.J. White:
What Campbell was referring to here (the visionary human being who, being forced to live in a society which either does not accept him or his radically-different view of the world, or vastly undervalues or discounts the same, is thus forced to become neurotic in the expression of his central, core being) was already discussed by both Nietzsche and Fromm--in excerpts already included in this very web-site. For reference, these originals can be found at "Twilight of the Idols", 45, [for the Nietzsche; also, less directly, at "Beyond Good and Evil", 212, and "The Antichrist", preface, "Revaluation of All Values"], and "Escape From Freedom" [for the Fromm].
Suffice it for me to say that I know very well, from personal experience, exactly what Campbell, Nietzsche, and Fromm were referring to. I am just such a person as the type they were discussing (for better or worse).
_________________________
Moyers: Why is a myth different from a dream?
Campbell: Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
Moyers: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I'm more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public--
Campbell: --you'll be in trouble. If you're forced to live in that system, you'll be a neurotic.
Moyers: But aren't many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism?
Campbell: Yes, they are.
Moyers: How do you explain that?
Campbell: They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience--that is the hero's deed. ...
[pages 40-41]
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Editorial commentary by T.J. White:
What Campbell was referring to here (the visionary human being who, being forced to live in a society which either does not accept him or his radically-different view of the world, or vastly undervalues or discounts the same, is thus forced to become neurotic in the expression of his central, core being) was already discussed by both Nietzsche and Fromm--in excerpts already included in this very web-site. For reference, these originals can be found at "Twilight of the Idols", 45, [for the Nietzsche; also, less directly, at "Beyond Good and Evil", 212, and "The Antichrist", preface, "Revaluation of All Values"], and "Escape From Freedom" [for the Fromm].
Suffice it for me to say that I know very well, from personal experience, exactly what Campbell, Nietzsche, and Fromm were referring to. I am just such a person as the type they were discussing (for better or worse).
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Excerpts from some e-mails to a Professor of Biblical Studies (a friend of mine)
Note: portions in italics and within brackets are later editorial additions.
May 2nd, 2005
Greetings:
Unfortunately I haven't much time right now, but I did want to acknowledge receipt of the [Derek Prince] tape you were kind enough to send, and to say that I have already listened to it. The earlier parts thereof, in which he discusses his childhood and youth in England, I found quite interesting, but more from a biographical standpoint, as I myself had two maternal grandparents from that place. The parts toward the end, where he discusses his views on 'religion' I found (I must confess) rather tedious, since I have heard similar things most of my life, and have long since either discounted, or accounted for, the same.
Do I consider him my intellectual equal (to re-state your question to me)? More than that; I would hasten to say that he is probably my intellectual superior. And I would say that the same may even be true about yourself as well. Would I be qualified to hold (or capable of competently exercising) the jobs which he has held? Or the jobs which you hold? Perhaps, and again, perhaps not. I have never yet been in any such position, and I therefore do not feel that I am in any position to competently answer such questions (though I would like to know); and I am not, in any event, in the business of comparisons, nor do I think it meet to so be. My main response or criticism to this line of questioning is that however intellectual a person may be (or despite ever so many degrees he may proudly possess) he does not necessarily have a monopoly on truth or correctness in opinions, any more than the rest of "labouring humanity" (James Allen's words).
Nor do the 'uneducated' (or more precisely, the 'self-educated'; I must needs correct myself there) necessarily or always fare worse than their sheepskin-adorned brethren; one need only think of the example of self-educated (and positively brilliant) men such as Abraham Lincoln, or, more recently, famed mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell, to refute that thesis. And (as you will surely know as well as I) there are many more such examples we may draw.
It would be easy for the wider world to quickly and tidily dismiss me because of my relative lack of formal education or academic position (without having actually read what I have to say). But this, I believe, would be a profound mistake, and a disservice, not just to myself, but to themselves as well (to borrow a similar train of thought from John Stuart Mill), in that they would be depriving themselves of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth," should I happen to prove correct in any of my points.
And in any case, most of the points I make were not even my own to begin with. Mostly I have only learned from others far wiser and more knowledgable than me. If I possess any great virtue, I believe, it is that I have been a good, thorough, and attentive a student. And that is where any native intelligence I possess will have come into good service.
It was good to see you in person again yesterday, though under sad and regrettable circumstances. I wish we had had greater opportunity to really converse, which is my ever-continuing delight and pleasure.
Remember, in any case, the parting words I left you with yesterday: that "Amor vincit omnia" [Love conquers all]. "Love never faileth ..." (1 Cor.13, et al.) My favourite verse from scripture is undoubtedly 1 John 4:7-8, a verse you will no doubt know. The Bible is still one of my most favourite books to read and study--even now. And I try to be (and like to think of myself as) a spiritual human being--filled with God's Divine and Holy LOVE. But I think Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to be of at least equal importance to the Bible. Ditto for the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas.
As we agreed yesterday, we are both busy with careers, and this discussion may take some time. Nevertheless, I look forward to future opportunities (including perhaps sitting in on classes and/or corresponding with your students). Who will learn the more--I or they? (I speak honestly here, not capriciously.) I think in any case the learning will certainly occur on all sides. But I also think (and hope) that they will definitely sharpen their minds against my foil.
Finally, is it a sin to be self-possessed or self-confident?--provided it does not cross the border into real lack of humility? I think not.
With great respect ...
T.J. White
_______________________________
May 20th, 2005
Dear [name withheld],
You have indeed given me a lot to chew on. Probably I could spend the next year or more trying to adequately respond to it all. I will answer honestly right away that most of what you refer to I have not yet had the pleasure of actually reading first-hand (though I would truly love such an opportunity)--remember, I have had to mostly educate myself, due to my inability to get my foot in the door of any academic institutions lately. I have at least HEARD of most of it, however, so I'm not completely ignorant.
As to the finer points of most of the "isms" you mention, again, I have to admit that I presently lack the scholar's (or specialist's) knowledge of most of them.
You will surely (and rightly) say that, that being the case, how can I possibly maintain the position I do? How can I claim to know that the traditional "Christian" version of facts is false, and a radical new, reinterpretation of the historical evidence is somehow correct? To put it in blunter terms: how do I seriously believe that 99% of the Christian world can be mistaken, and only 1% of historians and scholars correct?
Well, without getting into specific detail RIGHT NOW (which would indeed take a lot of time) I will say this:
I readily perceive that the world at large is mostly made up of blind fools--the blind leading the blind, as it were. I put no faith or trust in the opinions or beliefs of majorities, simply by virtue of the fact that they ARE the majority. I require greater proofs than that. History amply demonstrates, it seems to me, that on many past occasions, the majority have simply been dead wrong about some very important matters--the roundness of the earth, the earth (or even the sun) being the center of the universe, for example. They are quite capable of being equally wrong about other matters which are now commonly accepted as fact. This is at least a logical or theoretical possibility, which I believe you also admitted to me when we first met.
I put much greater weight or credence on the studies and honest integrity of objective SCHOLARSHIP (as much as it is possible to BE objective) than I do on masses of largely under-educated (or even uneducated) AVERAGE JOES. And that is precisely what the vast, overwhelming majority of "Christians" are. (Or any large group of human beings, for that matter.) Their opinions and beliefs are no more to be relied on than a lunatic's, because no more AUTOMATICALLY subject to being correct in every important detail.
[There are simply far too many unchallenged, unexamined assumptions inherent in traditional "Christianity"--far too many for any true PHILOSOPHER (or lover of truth) to let them pass unnoticed or unchallenged, anyway. Well, many years ago, I set myself the task of particularly examining those automatic assumptions. And upon closer scrutiny--lo and behold!--most of them turned out to be false and groundless--i.e., no longer worthy of being believed or followed. Traditional "Christianity" then--as I have expressed elsewhere--is, in my view, merely a fragile house of cards awaiting the faintest breath of wind to knock it down forever. The truly amazing miracle is that it has lasted as long as it has (and that it moreover kept the mind of Western man enslaved in the darkness of ignorance for nearly two thousand years!)]
And it seems to me (though there is by no means unanimous agreement yet) that a general concensus is emerging in the world of Christian scholarship concerning the existence or "reality" of Jesus, and "his" and Christianity's relationship to GENERIC "Gnosticism" and "Neo-Platonism" and the whole "Mystery Religion Tradition". (And I stress that word "generic") As you know much better than I, there were many branches or offshoots within "Gnosticism" itself, which perverted (for lack of a better word) the original doctrine away from its roots (which were really Neo-Platonism).
I am an intelligent, rational thinker (an empiricist, really). You yourself have admitted this. Unquestionably, [however,] I lack much of the finer detail of education which you and many others possess (and I would like to acquire it, too).
In other words, there are many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which I do not possess. But I believe I do possess a fairly accurate idea of the bigger, broader picture of things, based on extrapolating from those few pieces I do possess. And I believe such an extrapolation is not only possible (to an intelligent mind), but not necessarily or automatically subject to complete or grave error. I believe the intelligence God gave me has enabled me to piece together those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of life that HAVE managed to fall within my grasp, and moreover to form with them an astonishing and unexpected picture (a picture almost completely at odds with what I previously thought, and yet a picture which does not at all deny reason or violate or ignore real historical evidence).
The truly remarkable thing, I believe, is that I have been able to accomplish so much, and go so far, with really so little to start with. This is really, as I've said, an incredible, daring feat of logical, intelligent extrapolation (but based on sound historical evidence and sound scholarship, however). And I realize that, based on this fact alone--the fact that I, a man of limited education and limited scholarship--have dared to challenge one of Western Civilization's most sacred tenets, and say that I am right and the other 99% is wrong, will set me up for serious challenges and criticism, not to mention ridicule. I know all of this. Many of the scholars--"Christian" or otherwise--who are presently saying the same thing as I, but with much greater scholarly weight than I, are also facing the same denial, ridicule, and abuse. I consider it an honor to be placed in their company. I had rather be correct than popular, any day.
My agreement with Gnosticism is on a general, non-specific level mostly. If you get down to the level of specific, minute beliefs or doctrines, I probably would disagree with most of them. Where I do agree is in their general thrust and agreements with one another, and with the main argument of "Christianity" itself (which is "Love God" and "Love thy neighbour as thyself," etc.)
I do own the Gospel of Thomas, and a few other such texts--but not nearly as many as I would wish.
I do consider myself a (sort of) "pneumatikos". (As you will know much better than I, the "oi" ending is plural. I'm just letting you know that I know.) By this I mean one who has inhaled the Breath of Spirit, which brings enlightenment, or "Gnosis".
I affirm neither the deity nor the humanity of "Jesus". From the historical evidence I've seen, I consider "him" to have been an ancient, perennial MYTHOLOGICAL figure or personality (in the same vein as Zeus or Apollo) appearing in different cultures and places under various names and/or guises (such as Mithras, Bacchus, Orpheos, Osiris, etc.) but underneath all the various masks, basically the same general god-man who dies and is resurrected. (See Joseph Campbell's "The Masks of God", for example.) The "Christians" simply came along and gave "him" a new name, which they borrowed from the Hebrews (via the Greeks): "Jesus" "Christ".
The "Jesus" name (as you will know) is simply a Greek form (and a contrived one at that) of the Hebrew name "Joshua" or "Yeshua"; whereas the "Christ" name or title is merely a literal Greek translation of the Hebrew word which we know as "Messiah" ("the Annointed One"). But I'm not telling you anything new there, am I?
"Have [I] given thought to what is at stake in [my] quest for truth?" Oh yes, indeed I have. Quite a lot. There were many years at first when I kept on wanting to deny the evidence of my senses (the historical record, that is) simply because it meant that I would be forced to deny my previous beliefs (and I was raised a "Christian"). But ultimately my love of logic and truth, and the weight of undeniable historical evidence won me over.
You call my beliefs "heretical". But I remind you that "Christianity" itself was once considered heresy (and by intelligent people, too).
With respect,
T.J. White
____________________________
May 21st, 2005
Hi--
After thinking much on the matters you presented the other day, some additional thoughts or responses have occurred to me. I hope you will indulge me.
In order for you (or anyone so disposed) to better understand me and how I arrived at the beliefs I now hold, you must first understand a few basic aspects of how I think, or in other words, how I perceive reality or the world.
First of all, my thought processes are most likely a little unusual--i.e., different from most people's. Although an 'official' diagnosis is still lacking (but I'm working on that, though), I now believe that there's a very strong likelihood that I have what is known as Asperger's Syndrome, or High Functioning Autism--i.e., a less-severe form of classic Autism. There is much literature on the subject, easily available on the internet, so I won't rehearse it here. You can easily look it up if you desire. Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University in England, has devised two separate tests, which, when taken together, provide a pretty good indicator of whether or not a person has Asperger's. These two tests are his "Empathy Quotient Test" and his "Systematizing Quotient Test". I took them both recently. "On average," he says, "most women score about 47 [on the "Empathy Quotient Test"] and most men about 42..."; whereas, says he, "most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 20." My score on this test was 6.
As for his "Systematizing Quotient Test", the average scores were 24 for women and about 30 for men. People with Asperger Syndrome (etc.) usually score in a range from 51 to 80. My score on this test was 67. That sounds pretty conclusive to me. (These tests, by the way, are found at the web-site http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/ .)
One central aspect of people with Autism, including Asperger's, is that they tend to be very good at systems--i.e., recognizing patterns, relationships, or systems within what would otherwise appear to most people as either random, unrelated data, or even apparent chaos.
Dr. Michael Fitzgerald, a child psychiatrist at Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland), and author of the recent book, The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger Syndrome and the Arts, says (in this book) that in all likelihood, some very famous and influential people in the fields of the arts, sciences (and even government and politics) had Asperger Syndrome. Among these people (Dr. Fitzgerald claims) are Michelangelo, Lewis Carroll, and Thomas Jefferson. Other famous current or former Asperger 'sufferers' proposed (by other researchers besides Fitzgerald) include Albert Einstein and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. (From the web-site http://www.lcmedia.com/mind374.htm .) So you can see (if nothing else) that having Asperger Syndrome, and viewing the world slightly differently from the majority, is certainly nothing to sneeze at.
Now, why do I mention this business here, to you?
It relates to how I was able to develop a radically-different view on the subject of religion, I believe. I have always been good at perceiving relationships, patterns, or discrepancies in, among, and between various belief-systems. This has, I believe, helped me to weed my way through the various errors, half-truths, misunderstandings, and even outright falsehoods, so prevalent in most human belief 'systems'. And, partly because of my limited education (as mentioned in my previous letter), I have studied all these matters from a generalist's perspective, rather than a specialist's. And this is crucially important, I think--not only for perceiving truth generally (for anyone so inclined), but also for accounting for how I was able, despite my lack of specialized knowledge of the literature, to nonetheless 'leapfrog' around or beyond so many well-educated specialists in the fields of theology, philosophy, or comparative religions (to take just a few), and arrive at my present radical revisionist understanding of religion and spirituality.
Famed mythologist, scholar, teacher and writer Joseph Campbell [1904-1987]--one of my most cherished and influential mentors, by the way (though I was never priveleged to meet him personally)--addressed this subject at one point in his 1985-1986 conversations with journalist Bill Moyers (published in their 1988 book, The Power of Myth):
Specialization tends to limit the field of problems that the specialist is concerned with. Now, the person who isn't a specialist, but a generalist like myself, sees something over here that he has learned from one specialist, something over there that he has learned from another specialist--and neither of them has considered the problem of why this occurs here and also there. So the generalist--and that's a derogatory term, by the way, for academics, gets into a range of other problems that are more genuinely human, you might say, than specifically cultural. [page 9]
What Campbell did not say, but which logically follows from what he does say, is that generalists are more likely to see the 'bigger picture', and a more accurate one at that.
I would add that this is because most specialists, by virtue of being burdened with too much specific detail, miss many opportunities of seeing important contributions or parallels from other fields or disciplines which would better enable them to grasp the 'bigger (and more accurate) picture' of reality, or whatever it is that they are studying. I don't for a minute claim that, simply because I happen to disagree with them, most specialists in the subjects of religion (etc.)are therefore dishonest or disingenuous. No! I merely say that not only are they simply mistaken, but that their very specialization itself in their one and only field, their very narrowness of focus, as it were, has in a real sense handicapped and thwarted their very search for truth itself. My disagreement is thus not with them personally (even though I may challenge some of their premises or conclusions), but rather with the very structure of the educational and/or academic system which produced and encourages their commonly-used methods of arriving at truth (or understanding of fact).
__________________
Now, on to a somewhat different topic:
In your recent letter you brought up several specific points, or questions, one of which I would now like to attempt to answer somewhat:
You said, "[m]ost Gnostics embrace either extreme licentiousness or radical ascetism ...[Which is your worldview?]" (I was already aware of this fact), and you then asked a few related questions.
Many would probably call me 'licentious', though I would take issue with this label[ling of ] myself. Many of Spinoza's detractors called him an atheist, but he hotly denied this charge. Yet from his Ethics, we see that his views on 'God' or deity were, at the very least, daringly close to classic atheism. So, was he an atheist or not? I think the answer lies in how he (or we) define the term 'God'. Likewise, am I 'licentious', or not? Again, the answer will lie in how the term is defined. (I address this issue in one of the postings in my web-site, entitled "Spiritual Journey Part Six: The Avatar Speaks", by the way, and I would encourage you to read it if you have the time, because it goes into much greater detail on this topic than I will attempt here.) As for whether or not I think matter to be 'evil'--my answer is basically "no", though this question, too, is addressed in the same article mentioned above (the web-site, for your convenience, is at http://nonconformistsbible.blogspot.com ). Do I believe that there will be a bodily resurrection? No, probably not. But I do believe in the generic form of reincarnation as taught by most Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, Buddhists, and even early Christians such as Origen.
You further ask what it is that I find unacceptable about the Biblical record. My best answer to this question has already been expressed in my web-site, but it is small enough that I will quote it here:
And what is "the Bible"? The "Bible" is nothing other than a scattering of brilliant, priceless diamonds, embedded and hidden in an overwhelming sea of mud and filth; in order to perceive the diamonds, one must first laboriously sift through a great deal of mud, and how many ordinary people ever have the time or mental faculty to do this? (From the posting entitled "Spiritual Journey Part One".)
The Bible contains much that I would classify as folk tales, tribal mythology, morality fables or tales (intended to teach life lessons)--among which are the creation myths in Genesis. (I am certainly not alone in this assessment, either.) Much of it is also quite pointless, useless, and even distracting and misleading.
In The Age of Napoleon (1975), Chapter XIX "English Philosophy", pages 395-6, the Durants had the following to say regarding Thomas Paine's 1794 book The Age of Reason:
At the outset Paine gave an unexpected reason why he had written the book: not to destroy religion, but to prevent the decay of its irrational forms [i.e., 'fundamentalist' varieties] from undermining social order, "lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true." And he added, reassuringly: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."
Then he drew his Occam's razor:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches ... appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. [This sounds much like Nietzsche a hundred years later. ...]
He admired Christ as "a virtuous and an amiable man," and "the morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind"; but the story of his being fathered by a god was just a variation of a myth common among the pagans [Celsus had argued this point as long ago as the second century!].
Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of ... gods ... The intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds. The story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene [once again, almost Celsus' exact words]; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, ... and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God and no more, and had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited [i.e., 'believed' or 'accepted'] the story.
So the Christian mythology was merely the pagan mythology in a new form.
The trinity of the gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand; the statue of Mary succeeded that of Diane of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian mythologists had saints for everything; the Church had become as crowded with one as the pantheon had been with the other. ... The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet [i.e., 'still'] remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious ['crawling'?? 'ambitious'??] fraud.
Paine then played his searchlight of reason upon the Book of Genesis, and, having no patience with parables, fell heavily upon Eve and the apple. Like Milton, he was fascinated by Satan, the first of all rebels. Here was an angel who, for trying to depose a monarch, had been plunged into hell, there to suffer time without end. Nevertheless he must have escaped those inextinguishable fires now and then, for he had found his way into the Garden of Eden, and could tempt most sinuously; he could promise knowledge to Eve and half the world to Christ. The Christian mythology, Paine marveled, did Satan wondrous honor; it assumed he could compel the Almighty to send his son down to Judea and be crucified to recover for him at least part of a planet obviously in love with Satan; and despite that crucifixion, the Devil still retained all non-Christian realms, and had millions of servitors in Christendom itself.
All this, said our doubting Thomas, was offered us most solemnly, on the word of the Almighty himself, through a series of amanuenses from Moses to Saint Paul. Paine rejected it as a tale fit for nurseries, and for adults too busy with bread and butter, sickness and mortality, to question the promisory notes sold to them by the theologians. To stronger souls he offered a God not fashioned like man, but conceived as the life of the universe.
I don't think that I myself could have possibly stated the case better than that. That is exactly what I also think. I completely agree with Thomas Paine (as digested by Will and Ariel Durant); and this is why I have included this rather lengthy excerpt here.
But as I have also stated above, the Bible contains much of great worth (in my opinion). The difficulty (as I've said) is disentangling that which is good and profitable from that which is useless and even distracting in our search for truth and for things of real spiritual value for our lives. Many of the other postings on my web-site explore these things of value I see in the Bible, so I will not go into all of that here.
Well, I could probably say much more, but I will let this suffice for now.
Once again, I thank you for your gentle indulgence and for your time and thought.
Respectfully,
T.J. White.
May 2nd, 2005
Greetings:
Unfortunately I haven't much time right now, but I did want to acknowledge receipt of the [Derek Prince] tape you were kind enough to send, and to say that I have already listened to it. The earlier parts thereof, in which he discusses his childhood and youth in England, I found quite interesting, but more from a biographical standpoint, as I myself had two maternal grandparents from that place. The parts toward the end, where he discusses his views on 'religion' I found (I must confess) rather tedious, since I have heard similar things most of my life, and have long since either discounted, or accounted for, the same.
Do I consider him my intellectual equal (to re-state your question to me)? More than that; I would hasten to say that he is probably my intellectual superior. And I would say that the same may even be true about yourself as well. Would I be qualified to hold (or capable of competently exercising) the jobs which he has held? Or the jobs which you hold? Perhaps, and again, perhaps not. I have never yet been in any such position, and I therefore do not feel that I am in any position to competently answer such questions (though I would like to know); and I am not, in any event, in the business of comparisons, nor do I think it meet to so be. My main response or criticism to this line of questioning is that however intellectual a person may be (or despite ever so many degrees he may proudly possess) he does not necessarily have a monopoly on truth or correctness in opinions, any more than the rest of "labouring humanity" (James Allen's words).
Nor do the 'uneducated' (or more precisely, the 'self-educated'; I must needs correct myself there) necessarily or always fare worse than their sheepskin-adorned brethren; one need only think of the example of self-educated (and positively brilliant) men such as Abraham Lincoln, or, more recently, famed mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell, to refute that thesis. And (as you will surely know as well as I) there are many more such examples we may draw.
It would be easy for the wider world to quickly and tidily dismiss me because of my relative lack of formal education or academic position (without having actually read what I have to say). But this, I believe, would be a profound mistake, and a disservice, not just to myself, but to themselves as well (to borrow a similar train of thought from John Stuart Mill), in that they would be depriving themselves of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth," should I happen to prove correct in any of my points.
And in any case, most of the points I make were not even my own to begin with. Mostly I have only learned from others far wiser and more knowledgable than me. If I possess any great virtue, I believe, it is that I have been a good, thorough, and attentive a student. And that is where any native intelligence I possess will have come into good service.
It was good to see you in person again yesterday, though under sad and regrettable circumstances. I wish we had had greater opportunity to really converse, which is my ever-continuing delight and pleasure.
Remember, in any case, the parting words I left you with yesterday: that "Amor vincit omnia" [Love conquers all]. "Love never faileth ..." (1 Cor.13, et al.) My favourite verse from scripture is undoubtedly 1 John 4:7-8, a verse you will no doubt know. The Bible is still one of my most favourite books to read and study--even now. And I try to be (and like to think of myself as) a spiritual human being--filled with God's Divine and Holy LOVE. But I think Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to be of at least equal importance to the Bible. Ditto for the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas.
As we agreed yesterday, we are both busy with careers, and this discussion may take some time. Nevertheless, I look forward to future opportunities (including perhaps sitting in on classes and/or corresponding with your students). Who will learn the more--I or they? (I speak honestly here, not capriciously.) I think in any case the learning will certainly occur on all sides. But I also think (and hope) that they will definitely sharpen their minds against my foil.
Finally, is it a sin to be self-possessed or self-confident?--provided it does not cross the border into real lack of humility? I think not.
With great respect ...
T.J. White
_______________________________
May 20th, 2005
Dear [name withheld],
You have indeed given me a lot to chew on. Probably I could spend the next year or more trying to adequately respond to it all. I will answer honestly right away that most of what you refer to I have not yet had the pleasure of actually reading first-hand (though I would truly love such an opportunity)--remember, I have had to mostly educate myself, due to my inability to get my foot in the door of any academic institutions lately. I have at least HEARD of most of it, however, so I'm not completely ignorant.
As to the finer points of most of the "isms" you mention, again, I have to admit that I presently lack the scholar's (or specialist's) knowledge of most of them.
You will surely (and rightly) say that, that being the case, how can I possibly maintain the position I do? How can I claim to know that the traditional "Christian" version of facts is false, and a radical new, reinterpretation of the historical evidence is somehow correct? To put it in blunter terms: how do I seriously believe that 99% of the Christian world can be mistaken, and only 1% of historians and scholars correct?
Well, without getting into specific detail RIGHT NOW (which would indeed take a lot of time) I will say this:
I readily perceive that the world at large is mostly made up of blind fools--the blind leading the blind, as it were. I put no faith or trust in the opinions or beliefs of majorities, simply by virtue of the fact that they ARE the majority. I require greater proofs than that. History amply demonstrates, it seems to me, that on many past occasions, the majority have simply been dead wrong about some very important matters--the roundness of the earth, the earth (or even the sun) being the center of the universe, for example. They are quite capable of being equally wrong about other matters which are now commonly accepted as fact. This is at least a logical or theoretical possibility, which I believe you also admitted to me when we first met.
I put much greater weight or credence on the studies and honest integrity of objective SCHOLARSHIP (as much as it is possible to BE objective) than I do on masses of largely under-educated (or even uneducated) AVERAGE JOES. And that is precisely what the vast, overwhelming majority of "Christians" are. (Or any large group of human beings, for that matter.) Their opinions and beliefs are no more to be relied on than a lunatic's, because no more AUTOMATICALLY subject to being correct in every important detail.
[There are simply far too many unchallenged, unexamined assumptions inherent in traditional "Christianity"--far too many for any true PHILOSOPHER (or lover of truth) to let them pass unnoticed or unchallenged, anyway. Well, many years ago, I set myself the task of particularly examining those automatic assumptions. And upon closer scrutiny--lo and behold!--most of them turned out to be false and groundless--i.e., no longer worthy of being believed or followed. Traditional "Christianity" then--as I have expressed elsewhere--is, in my view, merely a fragile house of cards awaiting the faintest breath of wind to knock it down forever. The truly amazing miracle is that it has lasted as long as it has (and that it moreover kept the mind of Western man enslaved in the darkness of ignorance for nearly two thousand years!)]
And it seems to me (though there is by no means unanimous agreement yet) that a general concensus is emerging in the world of Christian scholarship concerning the existence or "reality" of Jesus, and "his" and Christianity's relationship to GENERIC "Gnosticism" and "Neo-Platonism" and the whole "Mystery Religion Tradition". (And I stress that word "generic") As you know much better than I, there were many branches or offshoots within "Gnosticism" itself, which perverted (for lack of a better word) the original doctrine away from its roots (which were really Neo-Platonism).
I am an intelligent, rational thinker (an empiricist, really). You yourself have admitted this. Unquestionably, [however,] I lack much of the finer detail of education which you and many others possess (and I would like to acquire it, too).
In other words, there are many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which I do not possess. But I believe I do possess a fairly accurate idea of the bigger, broader picture of things, based on extrapolating from those few pieces I do possess. And I believe such an extrapolation is not only possible (to an intelligent mind), but not necessarily or automatically subject to complete or grave error. I believe the intelligence God gave me has enabled me to piece together those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of life that HAVE managed to fall within my grasp, and moreover to form with them an astonishing and unexpected picture (a picture almost completely at odds with what I previously thought, and yet a picture which does not at all deny reason or violate or ignore real historical evidence).
The truly remarkable thing, I believe, is that I have been able to accomplish so much, and go so far, with really so little to start with. This is really, as I've said, an incredible, daring feat of logical, intelligent extrapolation (but based on sound historical evidence and sound scholarship, however). And I realize that, based on this fact alone--the fact that I, a man of limited education and limited scholarship--have dared to challenge one of Western Civilization's most sacred tenets, and say that I am right and the other 99% is wrong, will set me up for serious challenges and criticism, not to mention ridicule. I know all of this. Many of the scholars--"Christian" or otherwise--who are presently saying the same thing as I, but with much greater scholarly weight than I, are also facing the same denial, ridicule, and abuse. I consider it an honor to be placed in their company. I had rather be correct than popular, any day.
My agreement with Gnosticism is on a general, non-specific level mostly. If you get down to the level of specific, minute beliefs or doctrines, I probably would disagree with most of them. Where I do agree is in their general thrust and agreements with one another, and with the main argument of "Christianity" itself (which is "Love God" and "Love thy neighbour as thyself," etc.)
I do own the Gospel of Thomas, and a few other such texts--but not nearly as many as I would wish.
I do consider myself a (sort of) "pneumatikos". (As you will know much better than I, the "oi" ending is plural. I'm just letting you know that I know.) By this I mean one who has inhaled the Breath of Spirit, which brings enlightenment, or "Gnosis".
I affirm neither the deity nor the humanity of "Jesus". From the historical evidence I've seen, I consider "him" to have been an ancient, perennial MYTHOLOGICAL figure or personality (in the same vein as Zeus or Apollo) appearing in different cultures and places under various names and/or guises (such as Mithras, Bacchus, Orpheos, Osiris, etc.) but underneath all the various masks, basically the same general god-man who dies and is resurrected. (See Joseph Campbell's "The Masks of God", for example.) The "Christians" simply came along and gave "him" a new name, which they borrowed from the Hebrews (via the Greeks): "Jesus" "Christ".
The "Jesus" name (as you will know) is simply a Greek form (and a contrived one at that) of the Hebrew name "Joshua" or "Yeshua"; whereas the "Christ" name or title is merely a literal Greek translation of the Hebrew word which we know as "Messiah" ("the Annointed One"). But I'm not telling you anything new there, am I?
"Have [I] given thought to what is at stake in [my] quest for truth?" Oh yes, indeed I have. Quite a lot. There were many years at first when I kept on wanting to deny the evidence of my senses (the historical record, that is) simply because it meant that I would be forced to deny my previous beliefs (and I was raised a "Christian"). But ultimately my love of logic and truth, and the weight of undeniable historical evidence won me over.
You call my beliefs "heretical". But I remind you that "Christianity" itself was once considered heresy (and by intelligent people, too).
With respect,
T.J. White
____________________________
May 21st, 2005
Hi--
After thinking much on the matters you presented the other day, some additional thoughts or responses have occurred to me. I hope you will indulge me.
In order for you (or anyone so disposed) to better understand me and how I arrived at the beliefs I now hold, you must first understand a few basic aspects of how I think, or in other words, how I perceive reality or the world.
First of all, my thought processes are most likely a little unusual--i.e., different from most people's. Although an 'official' diagnosis is still lacking (but I'm working on that, though), I now believe that there's a very strong likelihood that I have what is known as Asperger's Syndrome, or High Functioning Autism--i.e., a less-severe form of classic Autism. There is much literature on the subject, easily available on the internet, so I won't rehearse it here. You can easily look it up if you desire. Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University in England, has devised two separate tests, which, when taken together, provide a pretty good indicator of whether or not a person has Asperger's. These two tests are his "Empathy Quotient Test" and his "Systematizing Quotient Test". I took them both recently. "On average," he says, "most women score about 47 [on the "Empathy Quotient Test"] and most men about 42..."; whereas, says he, "most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 20." My score on this test was 6.
As for his "Systematizing Quotient Test", the average scores were 24 for women and about 30 for men. People with Asperger Syndrome (etc.) usually score in a range from 51 to 80. My score on this test was 67. That sounds pretty conclusive to me. (These tests, by the way, are found at the web-site http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/ .)
One central aspect of people with Autism, including Asperger's, is that they tend to be very good at systems--i.e., recognizing patterns, relationships, or systems within what would otherwise appear to most people as either random, unrelated data, or even apparent chaos.
Dr. Michael Fitzgerald, a child psychiatrist at Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland), and author of the recent book, The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger Syndrome and the Arts, says (in this book) that in all likelihood, some very famous and influential people in the fields of the arts, sciences (and even government and politics) had Asperger Syndrome. Among these people (Dr. Fitzgerald claims) are Michelangelo, Lewis Carroll, and Thomas Jefferson. Other famous current or former Asperger 'sufferers' proposed (by other researchers besides Fitzgerald) include Albert Einstein and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. (From the web-site http://www.lcmedia.com/mind374.htm .) So you can see (if nothing else) that having Asperger Syndrome, and viewing the world slightly differently from the majority, is certainly nothing to sneeze at.
Now, why do I mention this business here, to you?
It relates to how I was able to develop a radically-different view on the subject of religion, I believe. I have always been good at perceiving relationships, patterns, or discrepancies in, among, and between various belief-systems. This has, I believe, helped me to weed my way through the various errors, half-truths, misunderstandings, and even outright falsehoods, so prevalent in most human belief 'systems'. And, partly because of my limited education (as mentioned in my previous letter), I have studied all these matters from a generalist's perspective, rather than a specialist's. And this is crucially important, I think--not only for perceiving truth generally (for anyone so inclined), but also for accounting for how I was able, despite my lack of specialized knowledge of the literature, to nonetheless 'leapfrog' around or beyond so many well-educated specialists in the fields of theology, philosophy, or comparative religions (to take just a few), and arrive at my present radical revisionist understanding of religion and spirituality.
Famed mythologist, scholar, teacher and writer Joseph Campbell [1904-1987]--one of my most cherished and influential mentors, by the way (though I was never priveleged to meet him personally)--addressed this subject at one point in his 1985-1986 conversations with journalist Bill Moyers (published in their 1988 book, The Power of Myth):
Specialization tends to limit the field of problems that the specialist is concerned with. Now, the person who isn't a specialist, but a generalist like myself, sees something over here that he has learned from one specialist, something over there that he has learned from another specialist--and neither of them has considered the problem of why this occurs here and also there. So the generalist--and that's a derogatory term, by the way, for academics, gets into a range of other problems that are more genuinely human, you might say, than specifically cultural. [page 9]
What Campbell did not say, but which logically follows from what he does say, is that generalists are more likely to see the 'bigger picture', and a more accurate one at that.
I would add that this is because most specialists, by virtue of being burdened with too much specific detail, miss many opportunities of seeing important contributions or parallels from other fields or disciplines which would better enable them to grasp the 'bigger (and more accurate) picture' of reality, or whatever it is that they are studying. I don't for a minute claim that, simply because I happen to disagree with them, most specialists in the subjects of religion (etc.)are therefore dishonest or disingenuous. No! I merely say that not only are they simply mistaken, but that their very specialization itself in their one and only field, their very narrowness of focus, as it were, has in a real sense handicapped and thwarted their very search for truth itself. My disagreement is thus not with them personally (even though I may challenge some of their premises or conclusions), but rather with the very structure of the educational and/or academic system which produced and encourages their commonly-used methods of arriving at truth (or understanding of fact).
__________________
Now, on to a somewhat different topic:
In your recent letter you brought up several specific points, or questions, one of which I would now like to attempt to answer somewhat:
You said, "[m]ost Gnostics embrace either extreme licentiousness or radical ascetism ...[Which is your worldview?]" (I was already aware of this fact), and you then asked a few related questions.
Many would probably call me 'licentious', though I would take issue with this label[ling of ] myself. Many of Spinoza's detractors called him an atheist, but he hotly denied this charge. Yet from his Ethics, we see that his views on 'God' or deity were, at the very least, daringly close to classic atheism. So, was he an atheist or not? I think the answer lies in how he (or we) define the term 'God'. Likewise, am I 'licentious', or not? Again, the answer will lie in how the term is defined. (I address this issue in one of the postings in my web-site, entitled "Spiritual Journey Part Six: The Avatar Speaks", by the way, and I would encourage you to read it if you have the time, because it goes into much greater detail on this topic than I will attempt here.) As for whether or not I think matter to be 'evil'--my answer is basically "no", though this question, too, is addressed in the same article mentioned above (the web-site, for your convenience, is at http://nonconformistsbible.blogspot.com ). Do I believe that there will be a bodily resurrection? No, probably not. But I do believe in the generic form of reincarnation as taught by most Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, Buddhists, and even early Christians such as Origen.
You further ask what it is that I find unacceptable about the Biblical record. My best answer to this question has already been expressed in my web-site, but it is small enough that I will quote it here:
And what is "the Bible"? The "Bible" is nothing other than a scattering of brilliant, priceless diamonds, embedded and hidden in an overwhelming sea of mud and filth; in order to perceive the diamonds, one must first laboriously sift through a great deal of mud, and how many ordinary people ever have the time or mental faculty to do this? (From the posting entitled "Spiritual Journey Part One".)
The Bible contains much that I would classify as folk tales, tribal mythology, morality fables or tales (intended to teach life lessons)--among which are the creation myths in Genesis. (I am certainly not alone in this assessment, either.) Much of it is also quite pointless, useless, and even distracting and misleading.
In The Age of Napoleon (1975), Chapter XIX "English Philosophy", pages 395-6, the Durants had the following to say regarding Thomas Paine's 1794 book The Age of Reason:
At the outset Paine gave an unexpected reason why he had written the book: not to destroy religion, but to prevent the decay of its irrational forms [i.e., 'fundamentalist' varieties] from undermining social order, "lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true." And he added, reassuringly: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."
Then he drew his Occam's razor:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches ... appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. [This sounds much like Nietzsche a hundred years later. ...]
He admired Christ as "a virtuous and an amiable man," and "the morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind"; but the story of his being fathered by a god was just a variation of a myth common among the pagans [Celsus had argued this point as long ago as the second century!].
Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of ... gods ... The intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds. The story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene [once again, almost Celsus' exact words]; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, ... and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God and no more, and had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited [i.e., 'believed' or 'accepted'] the story.
So the Christian mythology was merely the pagan mythology in a new form.
The trinity of the gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand; the statue of Mary succeeded that of Diane of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian mythologists had saints for everything; the Church had become as crowded with one as the pantheon had been with the other. ... The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet [i.e., 'still'] remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious ['crawling'?? 'ambitious'??] fraud.
Paine then played his searchlight of reason upon the Book of Genesis, and, having no patience with parables, fell heavily upon Eve and the apple. Like Milton, he was fascinated by Satan, the first of all rebels. Here was an angel who, for trying to depose a monarch, had been plunged into hell, there to suffer time without end. Nevertheless he must have escaped those inextinguishable fires now and then, for he had found his way into the Garden of Eden, and could tempt most sinuously; he could promise knowledge to Eve and half the world to Christ. The Christian mythology, Paine marveled, did Satan wondrous honor; it assumed he could compel the Almighty to send his son down to Judea and be crucified to recover for him at least part of a planet obviously in love with Satan; and despite that crucifixion, the Devil still retained all non-Christian realms, and had millions of servitors in Christendom itself.
All this, said our doubting Thomas, was offered us most solemnly, on the word of the Almighty himself, through a series of amanuenses from Moses to Saint Paul. Paine rejected it as a tale fit for nurseries, and for adults too busy with bread and butter, sickness and mortality, to question the promisory notes sold to them by the theologians. To stronger souls he offered a God not fashioned like man, but conceived as the life of the universe.
I don't think that I myself could have possibly stated the case better than that. That is exactly what I also think. I completely agree with Thomas Paine (as digested by Will and Ariel Durant); and this is why I have included this rather lengthy excerpt here.
But as I have also stated above, the Bible contains much of great worth (in my opinion). The difficulty (as I've said) is disentangling that which is good and profitable from that which is useless and even distracting in our search for truth and for things of real spiritual value for our lives. Many of the other postings on my web-site explore these things of value I see in the Bible, so I will not go into all of that here.
Well, I could probably say much more, but I will let this suffice for now.
Once again, I thank you for your gentle indulgence and for your time and thought.
Respectfully,
T.J. White.
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