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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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September 1, 2007
by Eugene E. Narrett, Ph.D.
This essay explores multi-layered policies, ideology and aesthetics -- cultural history that link the War on Terror to the War on Jewish Jerusalem. The War on Terror is not only a means and rationale for breaking down and offering up Israel to jihad as the Iraq Study Group's report might suggest. The wars or war noted above has much to do with the West's enduring fascination with new Synoptic religions for a world state. In this urge, the works of Percy Shelley, William Blake, Gothicism, Mt. Meru and the theosophists are as significant as world diplomacy and finance. Thus this work is simply a prolegomena to what could be a book-length study… The military phase of the War on Terror began in Afghanistan before winter 2001-02. Perhaps it began with the Russian re-entry into that shaky and new-coined state in the 1970s only to be taken down by jihadist fighters trained and funded in part by Anglo-American agencies. After this success and the effulgence of global jihad, during the Bush administrations soldiers of Western nations, led by America have been chasing our man in Afghanistan. That's the plot line one hears about most... This contest includes a complex, acrimonious and high stakes relationship between forces led by America, Russia and Iran. These maneuvers, including long periods of occupation by Russian, British and American troops spanned 1921-50. Much of this concerns control of oil, especially in northern Iran, many believe, and this has been going on for more than a century though initially it was British groups not Americans as the main Western presence and the Turks as the 'swing man' between them and Russia. British colonization of the Indian subcontinent had earlier led their forces into Afghanistan to pursue and suppress Islamic rivals and bar the Czar from south central Asia. Still earlier, in the early decades of the 19th century, Russia, Persia ("Iran" since 1935), the Ottoman Turkish and British Empires battled for control of the Caucasus mountain area where the first three states converge near the center of the world's land mass. But the battles now are as much or more about matters of spiritual power as resources and profit. This spiritual substrate may help explain why so much energy, if less media attention centers on Afghanistan due east of Persia, specifically on eastern Afghanistan where it, Pakistan, Russian, China and northern Kashmir (India) meet. Here, in what long was known as "the Hindu Kush," the Karakoram Range and towering K2 is the site of Mt. Meru, the lotus and "top" or pole of the world and legendary source of the four great rivers that define the compass directions and vie, in myth with Eden as the site and source of the world and humanity, -- at least post-diluvium ("after the flood") humanity. Since the Renaissance some mythographers place the Biblical Mt. Ararat in the Indian Kush; Sir Walter Raleigh may have been the first writer in English to do so -- or to identify Ararat with Mt. Meru, the holy phallus rooted in the holy yoni of the earth to form the lotus of creation. Thomas Maurice in Indian Antiquities (1800) argued that Zoroaster had received his inspiration for the Zend-Avesta in a cave there. Like Maurice, George Stanley Faber located the cave of Mithra, a martyred, murdered and reborn avatar to Meru. Faber's thesis that the primal religious symbols of humankind are types of the primal phallus and vulva may be seen in Mt. Doom and the vertical "eye," dark with wavy flaming halo in The Lord of the Rings whose temporal siting at the end of the "fourth age" and incipient age of man brings theosophy to scores of millions in the West. The epic's almost sexless, highly "evolved" elves whose hooded cloaks, tense serenity and runes link to the paganism within the church as well as to the historical fantasies and racial doctrines of Ariosophy which posited the origin of the Aryans in gods of air and was otherwise preached that war and disorder resulted from Aryan miscegenation from the time of the Assyrians (ancient Khumri). Similarly, in Tolkien the kings of Gondor (like Aragorn son of Arathorn) are descended from both elves and humans. It is the nearly sexless, feminized elves who give "religion" to all of Middle Earth while the hermaphroditic icons of Sauron have as their antithesis the marriage of Sam the essential human who cannot be 'savior' but who saves Frodo repeatedly while the "ring bearer" goes into the West, to Atlantis like Arthur and their model, Hesos-Krishna too 'good' for this world and too wounded by it to remain. The inhabitants of Atlantis, French scholar J.S. Bailly believed originally came from this top and center of the world and its nourishing rivers. Mt. Meru also is the supposed home of Dionysus, another god-man with rites of blood-drinking and sharing of fresh-torn flesh to bind the worshippers in communion that blots out individual consciousness and limited strength (Euripides, the Bacchae). Such beliefs reach into the present with Gothicism like that of Nicholas de Vere and the thesis that "Satanism, Vampirism and Witchcraft" are the true basis of all true religions; that Jesus was "a Dragon King of the Grail" (see also Genesis of the Grail Kings, Laurence Gardner). So English, French and other European seekers for a single world religion and holy mountain in central Asia imbues the apocalyptic fictions, secret societies and perhaps the geopolitics of our day with their focus on eastern Afghanistan and the roof of the world. These mythographers believe that it is on Mt. Meru that all the descendants of Noah, the entire human race dispersed carrying traces of the "one true religion" with them. Why then the Western and Islamic focus on Jerusalem which is not mentioned once in the Koran? Perhaps for many in the director class, the elves and wizards of our day, this war of Edom and Ishmael "to blot Israel out from nationhood that its name not be remembered anymore" (Psalm 83) is in part a distraction for the masses east and west, even if it is a tragedy for the Jews whose Scriptures, teachings and practices have been tabled for appropriation and burial since Hadrian renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and termed Judea, "Palestina." The arrogance of the imperial imposture stemmed in part from the word's root Hebrew meaning, "trespasser" or "invader." Hadrian boasted of his invasion and alien status and sought to alienate the Jewish heartland with consequences that dominate the past century. Words mean things; lies breed lies; and ancient Empires don't just fade away but mutate and take new forms. Perhaps this obsessive drive to bury the precursor explains the fascination with death, sterility and things ethereal of the hierarchs striving to establish a World Religion. Since this spiritual imperialism and monoculture is the drive of both Christianity and Islam, more so the former it makes sense that their lengthy clash should produce a synthesis containing significant portions of each. Perhaps that is what much of the "War on Terror" is meant to achieve; perhaps that it is underlying logic and dynamism. Many years ago I wrote my doctoral thesis on the poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelly. His greatest work, Prometheus Unbound, uses pagan Greek myths, Gnostic views and dabs of Zoroastrian symbolism, a major component of the Christianity he still hated, to establish a syncretic religion for all humankind based on forgiveness, Eros and goddess worship. As often in Romantic - Modernist writings the Redeemer is a woman, the goddess Asia whose name a form of the proto-Semitic words for fire (given a female ending) and for "woman." Shelley's Asia is the "Child of Light" and "Light of Life" who walks on water, infuses love throughout creation and transforms all beings into spirits who chant harmoniously in a universal "Orphic song" and language. Her recognition and assumption of her own godhead and her instant incandescent revelation is simultaneous with and the flip side of the dethroning of Jupiter (Act II. v - III. i). Jupiter, or Jove as Shelley also calls his lonely, scared tyrant, hinting at Jeh-vah, as one vocalized form of the tetragrammaton is mispronounced is the patriarchal tyrant who like Blake's Urizen ("your reason") and "Nobodaddy" (nobody's daddy) is Gnosticism's vicious view of the Creator and Compassionate Father of Judaism. A brief excursus on the intense and overt hatred of Judaism and inversion of Torah values shown in Blake's formulation of this Romantic-Modern Gnosticism: Blake's epic poem Milton (1804) devoted to the supposed struggle of that great poet's imagination ("the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity," viz. Aragorn, the "son," etc) against his internalized Judeo-Christian tyrant father, Urizen who keeps the "divine humanity," the fallen giant, Albion (England) "bound upon the Rock of Ages, deadly pale, outstretched and snowy cold," killing his "perfect beauty" in a "storm" of law, "the Sea of Time and Space." This is the radical inversion or transvaluation of values in Gnosticism which has broken through to dominate the West: the creation becomes a constriction and death for the god-man and his infinite humanity, unbound by imagination. As the above verses show, the fallen Albion is like Prometheus; when his internal 'suffering servant' or Los strangles the white-bearded tyrant-father as he clutches the two tablets of law, on which garbled Hebrew can be seen it is "to annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit and False Forgiveness" (Milton plate 15 cf. Exodus 20:2-14). Thus "the Bard" liberates within himself and, by example all men from moral doctrine so he can stand, in pentacle form as the radiant avatar of "the Poetic Genius…to whom be Glory & Power & Dominion Evermore Amen" (ibid. plate 12-13). They battle "among the streams of Arnon even to Mahanayim" (Plate 17 cf. Genesis 31:4-32:3). But at the end, "the twenty-four cities of Albion arise upon their Thrones to judge the Nations… in the great harvest and vintage" (plates 44-5 on Isaiah 62). The geopolitical aspects of this appropriation resonate today. Blake, critic of imperialism was "a prophet of Empire" as David Erdman called him. At the end of his magnum opus, Jerusalem, the Giant Albion embraces and integrates his "emanation," Jerusalem, testament to Blake's post-Machiavellian egoism and essence of British claims on, and even to be, Israel. Thus Blake re-writes Milton and Scripture and deifies man almost a century before Nietzsche in works that inspired the theosophists and still inspire the various followers of a Luciferian world religion in which the Creator and Compassionate Father of Judaism becomes an anxious, frozen tyrant and the redeemer becomes the imagination. Every man and woman, like his Enitharmon and Daughters of Albion becomes an avatar of divine genius come to make heaven on earth by casting off all law but "genius." It sounds like a road to the state of nature; let's follow it a bit further as it elucidates the enthusiastic regression to primitivism and pagan values that distinguish Modernism. In Prometheus Unbound Shelley identifies Asia with Venus -- Aphrodite, the goddess of love, as well as Cybele, the mountain-mother and triple goddess archetype of "the queen of heaven" (Ashteroth, Ishtar, Isis Omnia, Isa, Artemis, Ceres, etc) crowned with a crescent moon and shaking a thimbrel. In the epic, one of Asia's younger sisters is Ione (yoni). As often in Medieval and Renaissance iconography, Prometheus, tortured by the tyrant's eagle becomes the crucified savior who needs, as does Blake's Los and Albion reunion with his female emanation to be healed as the redemptive human imagination; to leave the hard rock of punitive law and hatred and take up new residence in the vale of Kashmir, in the "destined cave" in the foot of Mt. Meron (III. iii - iv) from which goes forth the healing song and clarion call of integrated consciousness and a religion of love. (Note Shelley's appropriation of Meron, also in his Witch of Atlas, site of the burial cave of Rav Shimon bar Yochai in the upper Galilee as he conflates it with Mt. Meru). In the Return of the King, as in Ariosophist symbolism the eagles are saviors; many people from England and Italy to the Philippines saw the American eagle this way though now it is an image of popular revulsion, as in Blake and Shelley; but perhaps not to the emerging hierarchy who celebrate the eagle of aristocracy, in German, adlig from Adler. And so we have Operation Enduring Freedom for Iraq and a new Middle East; we have the drawn out crisis with Iran reorganizing the pivot of the "world island," from Jerusalem to the Hindu Kush to establish a new world religion such as many modern philosophes have championed. But perhaps, like Gondor's march on the black gates the "peace process" is partly a feint or necessary first step and equal or greater attention is being paid to the center of the world's mountain ranges where the Dalai Lama, Mr. Gorbachev, the Pangaeists and hierophants of Luciferian light can found their world cult. As Blake has shown us, the degradation, re-definition and absorption of Judaism is part of this process; it's been done before. But why must they degrade, disempower and kill so many people first? Perhaps there is something morbid in their wish to be as gods; perhaps all concerned should read and absorb the real John Milton's account of Adam's explanation to Eve of the terrors and webs that fancy and the deified imagination can weave from our appetites (Paradise Lost V. 35-128); "monsters from the id…" The Age of the Aryans will not come without "that last dim battle in the west" from which there are very few survivors and in which the entire realm reels back into the beast. The Age of Aquarius may be a picnic for a few but most of us will be morlocks or Eloi (another mocking take-down of two of the Creator's Names and divine powers). The attempt to establish a modern cult of Horus is the road back to Egypt, rapture, insanity and slavery. "God made the two great luminaries" with the letter that indicates water and masculine wisdom, the wisdom and "enduring kindness" of the Hebrew Scriptures (mem, Sefer Yetzirah) of which all can drink without money, without having to convert to gain sustenance (Isaiah 55, interestingly, this is the prophetic reading [haftora] for Torah portion Noah basis of New Age appropriation of Jewish Scripture). The Torah is water but now Aquarius is to negate the promise of sanctified, dignified humanity with its lust for power. All our lives are in the balance as the hierarchs push for hegemony in a world state of androgynous resources; in the balance of man and woman with the letter denoting the Unity of the Creator, yud, the smallest letter to the eye, essential to keep them both from falling into "fire" as the roots of the holy tongue show: aish, ish, isha... True peace, shalom, comes only from shaleim, not least the shleimut or integrity and wholeness of Israel. The peace process toward the "Religion of World Peace" is a 'peace' of fragmentation, shalom kerua that negates Israel and is the dominion of Esau whether figured as Elves or orcs, Elrond or Sauron. The choice is now as Gog ("roof," synonym of "arrogance") drives toward the roof of the world. Dr. Eugene Narrett is a writer and teacher in Massachusetts and is the author of Gathered Against Jerusalem: Essays on a False Peace (Dec. 2000). His book, Israel Awakened: A Chronicle of the Oslo War (2001), is currently available at www.1stbooks.com/bookview/7421. His latest book, WW III: the War on the Jews and the Rise of the World Security State (2007), is available at www.lightcatcherbooks.com. Visit his website at www.israelendtimes.com.
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