The Cosmic War is fought along other axes as well.

Kia Ora Koutou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

On March 15 2018 a far right terrorist with links to organizations in Australia and Europe opened fire on worshipers at the Al Nur mosque and then the Linwood Islamic Centre in my town of Otautahi Christchurch. 51 people were killed.

It was a terrible day. I was supposed to be working, heading out to clean someone’s house. The Police were warning everyone in my area, close to the Linwood Islamic Centre, to stay home and not go near windows. I phoned my employer and said I wasn’t going in. Then I alternated between crying and pacing and looking at my phone.

I had already been looking into far right ideology, especially the pipeline that went from gamergate into the far right among young people. As the terrorist’s livestream of his massacre hit social media, I tried to look for his manifesto before it was shut down. I read about 12 pages on Kiwifarms, and then figured I had the measure of it. It was very similar to that of Anders Breivik, and mentioned the usual stuff: the great replacement, immigration, eco-fascism, the weakness of western civilization.

This was the time when Facebook was a relatively genial presider over mainstream social media. Yesterday I looked at the “memories” section and saw exchanges on that day in 20218 between me and others, warnings, predictions, offers of help. I saw the terrorist’s last post on Kiwifarms about how he was sick of shitposting and planned to take action. I posted I AM ONE PISSED OFF LIBTARD. Meanwhile, people were dying.

During the months that followed, I was working interviewing bus patrons about the bus service. I got to interact with a large cross section of people. If I had extra time I would ask tourists about how they felt about the massacre, how awful it had been, how they must be appalled at us. They were much more sanguine. No, they said, where we come from this happens all the time.

This happens all the time.

Yesterday I went to a commemoration of the massacre at the Peace Bell in the botanical gardens. The Peace Bell was given to the city of Christchurch by the World Peace Bell Association, based in Japan. Here it is.

There were karakia (prayers, invocations) in te reo Maori and Arabic, and speeches, there was talk of forgiveness and unity, and then the bell was tolled once for each of the people who were killed. I cried. Meanwhile, people were dying.

A shooting at Virginia’s Old Dominion University late Thursday morning was committed by a veteran and convicted ISIS supporter. He killed one person and injured two others before a classroom of students subdued and killed him, the FBI said. Less than two hours later, an explosives-laden vehicle plowed into the Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, setting part of it ablaze while dozens of children were inside. Less than two weeks earlier in Austin, Texas, a shooter killed three people and injured more than a dozen others in the city’s bustling entertainment district. Underneath a hoodie, the shooter was wearing a T-shirt featuring an Iranian flag design. These acts of terrorism seem to have been motivated by the current Israel/US war in the middle east. This makes them more reactionary than the Christchurch terror attack, which was years in the planning, but nevertheless the cash value is the same: people dead. And a nasty uptick in antisemitism, that plague on the west since medieval times.

There is never one explanation for events, no matter how groovy that explanation is. However, because I write about the problem that is the Story of the Cosmic War, I am emphasizing that here. We would not be having these wars if they weren’t part of the Cosmic War. Sure, there would be wars that are not Cosmic. There would still be disputes over territory and resources and the means of production. Groups of people would still be prejudiced against each other and there would still be xenophobia. But wars become extra sticky and bloody when they have cosmic import. Let’s say, for fun, that the reality is pretty cynical, namely that warmongers tell us a war has cosmic import in order to justify it. But that is beside the point, for two reasons. Firstly, the cash value is that people are dead. Secondly, the Cosmic War is a Story regardless. People think they are fighting a Cosmic War whether they are told that, or whether they go to war thinking that in the first place. We are not talking about geopolitics here, we are talking about a very old pervasive Story that we have almost instant recourse to because it so backgrounded in our culture. An example of this is after 9/11 when George W Bush almost automatically resorted to the word “crusade” when describing the US response. Of course he did. He didn’t even think about it; it was just there. Islam, violence, threat, crusade, holy war, Cosmic War.

A good example is the Ukraine war from the Russian point of view. There are very obvious geopolitical things happening here. Near the beginning of the war, Putin got important buy-in from the Russian Orthodox Church. Archbishop Kiril, in a move that hurtles us back to Pope Urban and the first crusade, announced that any Russian soldier killed in battle would go straight to heaven. I presume the good Archbishop would have a word with his people and nods and winks would happen and the soldiers, regardless of their conduct otherwise, would just be sorted, just like that. All of this sounds pretty damned cynical and worldly, like the blessing of the Church turned the conflict into part of the Cosmic War. However, there is an element of this that is part of Russia’s deep structure, part of Mother Russia as it struggled into being in the early modern period. This semi-mythical, spiritualized Russia is the heart of Eurasia, as set against Europe and USA, and the Far East (I nearly said Oceania and Eastasia, how Orwellian, lol). Eurasia is unique, marked by its destiny, and blessed. Its chilly soil and febrile climate have given rise over the centuries to a singular dark mysticism and some eccentric and esoteric ideologies. Its destiny is Cosmic and so are its conflicts.

For the Christian Nationalists currently holding sway in parts of the West, the Cosmic War is clear and present. Of course Armageddon is just a shot away, as it has been since the book of Revelation. With Iran in the conflict, we are looking straight at the end times, if you have Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth. The Late Great Planet Earth has influenced the thinking of evangelicals since the 1970s. It was Hal Lindsay who mapped the end times onto geopolitical events recognizable today, with Israel, Russia and Iran all playing predestined parts. So anything that happens in these countries has a particular Cosmic War valence for anyone in the evangelical world.

For the rest of us, the Cosmic War is backgrounded. We receive the Story filtered through its characters, such as the saviour hero, and the small band of virtuous rebels, and Satan and the Antichrist, and the Last World Emperor. They function a bit like archetypes, accessible to us through smaller stories and pop culture. We don’t need to think about the Cosmic War to be recruited into it, and anyway it will take its predestined course without us. It will be fought by Christian nationalists, Muslim jihadists, far right terrorists, all of varying stripes, and people will die and die and die.

Thank you for reading this, if you got this far, and ma te wa.

Further:

https://ccc.govt.nz/parks-and-gardens/christchurch-botanic-gardens/attractions/world-peace-bell

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/589579/terror-attacks-at-michigan-synagogue-and-virginia-university-rattle-sense-of-safety-in-america

Lachman, Gary. The Return of Holy Russia: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World. Inner Traditions, 2020.

When I was young I read “The Lord of the Rings” about every two years. I was a conservative young’un, and an Anglophile. I also liked Arthurian mythos and Robert Anton Wilson and HP Lovecraft. In Tolkien I found deep nostalgia and luminous beauty. Middle Earth is our deep past: today, the Elves have become a matter of rural folklore and Hobbits almost invisible, but in the deep past there was glory. The end bits, where the main characters leave Middle Earth and go into the West, were almost too much for me. The glory of the past was just that, the glory of the past, for the characters of LOTR. They too sought deep nostalgia and even more luminous beauty. Glory is always in the past.

Then I didn’t read it for decades, and when I dipped into it again, I only read the bits I liked. Sometimes just the bits with action. Sometimes the poetry, but not always. Not the sad bits. About five years ago I read it all, and this time I marked a couple of new things. Tolkien lived in an age where social class was still carefully delineated: Sam calls Frodo “master” and sleeps at the foot of his bed. I also noticed that they did shitloads of walking. They would be like, it’s only ten miles to Weathertop or wherever. I felt weary just reading it, and definitely in need of a hot bath and a soft bed at some rustic inn.

Now I have read it again, this time guided by Genny Harrison and her work on lessons we can draw from Tolkien about social and political collapse. Also, I have considered the book from an animist perspective. For Tolkien it is not just the Ents, but the trees that are alive, and the birds are sentient sometimes too. Middle Earth is alive. One of his skills is being able to dig under the human things to sense this living of the land.

I so felt for the Orcs. It is not their fault they are Orcs. They just got made somehow by the Enemy and they are roundly exploited, living in squalor and never getting any breaks. They are what you get when you have an authoritarian state: cynical, capable of only temporary loyalties, out for fun while there is fun still to be had. They are the foot soldiers of any losing army, the ones who know the war is always going badly regardless of the constant propaganda. The are also the exhausted low paid workers doing the double shift. Tolkien may have known soldiers who talked like the Orcs, but they were also the steel workers in Birmingham factories. When you have terminal stage capitalism, you get Orcs.

More seriously, I asked myself if the LOTR story was part of the Story of the Cosmic War. It is a pretty pervasive Story and many of its iterations are not strictly religious. Some of those who appropriate Tolkien’s ideas and names are definitely Cosmic War types, Christian nationalists for example. LOTR is fiction and open to many interpretations. It is really good literature in that regard.

What is the Cosmic War? It is a very old and large Story. It is a war between absolute good, (God and his angels) and absolute evil (Satan, Iblis, Angra Mainyu) It is a war that is eternal, and it will end only with a final battle where evil will be vanquished and there will be paradise for the righteous, (or for everybody in some readings). It is fought in three places: the heavenly realm, the material world, and the human heart. We humans have an important role and make moral choices about what side we are on. Worldly events, such as geopolitics, are subsumed into the Cosmic War; it is how the Divine works in history.

In LOTR, the characters make vital moral choices, and history is affected by those choices. They are subject to temptations and weaknesses of personality. The enemy is irredeemably evil. Sauron is an ancient evil, the servant of an even more ancient and powerful evil. He works not only in the material world, but through corruption and the weakening of the heart. He twists desires. He messes with people’s heads and lies to them. He is a Satanic figure, but there is nothing about him that could be considered stylish, or edgy, or cool. He has no interesting back story. He’s just bad. This is the Cosmic War. Or not.

Arrayed against Sauron is not ultimate good, but a mixed crew of failing peoples. The main political forces are the Elves and Men. The Elves have become too otherworldly, too preoccupied with themselves and their glorious past. They used to have more dealings with other “races” but now they remain aloof and just protect what they have. They mourn for loss. They can’t quite come to grips with the situation. They are a people of the past. Men are the people of the future, but they also are in a state of collapse. The powerful Men of Numenor might have been the model of nobility and grace, but they were very flawed. They became hungry for power. Some of them served Sauron and a few became utterly under his sway. At the time the book is set, they have diminished in power and in life span, and few are as “high” as the old kings of the West.

As the Company travels, they pass through many lands that were once occupied by the Men of the West, or the Elves, but have been abandoned. Wars were lost. States failed. People left. The greatest state that is still extant, Gondor, is also failing due to population collapse and lack of political will. There is a lot more talk about the glorious past. The glorious past stuff in LOTR is attractive to the far right, who want to return to some approximation of the Medieval period or Christendom or pastoral paradise, but if you look at the story through the lens of collapse and systems failure, you see it as despair. The current age of Elves and Wizards and the Men of the West is ending. All of civilization may in fact fall to Mordor. The threat is genuinely existential. Even if Sauron is defeated, and there is a new age, it will still be the end of much that is good and beautiful. It will be an age of the small and the ordinary. Either way, those who are currently great, will lose.

Of course, the true heroes of the story are small and ordinary, the Hobbits. They are not perfect people either. They often don’t get the assignment, but their hearts are good and sturdy and they are blessed. There may be greater power at work here that even Wizards don’t understand. Frodo and Sam are guided in their purpose even when they are not up to the task. They grow into their purpose even as the systems around them are strained.

Lord of the Rings is not about the Cosmic War. It does have an ultimately evil antagonist, and it does take place on all three planes. It is about moral choices all along the way. But its good people are not ultimately good. Because this is a story about true moral choices, some of the good people fail or fall short or make mistakes. They are let down also by systems failure even among the best of them. The outcome is not inevitable. Sauron nearly wins. Victory is hugely costly because it results in the end of the age. Victory also comes at the cost of individual and environmental trauma. The book’s best characters are damaged by the war. So, we don’t have a Cosmic War figure like Jesus or Zarathustra, who is perfectly good and essentially does the cosmic ass kicking. We just have a bunch of awesome people doing their very best in the midst of collapse.

Now, that sounds familiar.

Further: Genny Harrison has a Substack about LOTR and other topics. For an animist perspective, Josh Schrei’s “The Emerald Podcast” mentions Tolkien a fair bit.

The video is for the Orcs! It is my favourite Motorhead track, “Get Back in Line”, which I think is about the eternal grunt, the foot soldier who know it’s all for nothing.

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

Of course I am most interested in this book as it relates to the Cosmic War, but first I will just give a brief outline and history.

This was a difficult read because the language is rough. It is peppered with terms I would actively eschew. Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, it all goes without saying. The violence is also rough. The body count is almost as high as in Left Behind. In The Turner Diaries most people in the world are killed, even white people. The only ones left are white men and women who are fascists.

I was not going to buy the cursed thing, so I read a version on Internet Archive. It is readily available, although Amazon has apparently banned it.

Some history: The Turner Diaries was written by William Pierce, under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald. Pierce was a Neo-Nazi from the beginning. He was also a physicist, working in academia and then in the aerospace industry, which is I guess why in the book he displayed his absolute boner for the technology of mass violence. So, not a loser then. He kept his beliefs throughout is life, which ended in a trailer on a compound that has now become a sort of place of pilgrimage for the fash.

The book is a fictional diary of Earl Turner, a “foot soldier” in the war against Woke. Ok not quite, the war against The System. The system is a liberal regime where men are vilified and whiteness is derided. Women and Blacks run everything, but behind them is the shadow of the powerful Jew. Violence and rape abound, and the economy is collapsing, with infrastructure in jeopardy and soaring prices. Turner belongs to a cell of activists working and living in secret. They are with the Organization, a loose network of right thinking white men and their women. They plan and execute an escalating series of violent attacks on Jews, Blacks and infrastructure. The instruments of violence are lovingly described in detail; I suspect they are Pierce’s true love. After proving worthy, Turner is initiated into The Order, an elite group of men who run The Organization. The initiation ceremony involves hooded figures, candles, circles ‘n shit, you know the sort of thing. After that the shit gets real, they take over California, and there is a forced migration of all the Blacks, and they kill the Jews. They nuke Florida, that bastion of liberalism, and they nuke Baltimore for some reason. They make a white ethnostate in some of the west of the United States. Then comes the famous Day of the Rope, where they hang many thousands of white race traitors. Turner regrets this slightly, even though it has to be done. In the end the only people left are the fash. Happy white youngsters now till the fields and everyone works hard but cheerfully to build a new world. But the task is not yet finished. Turner is chosen for a suicide mission, and dies flying a plane into the Pentagon. After his death, the author describes the further carnage lovingly as The Organization spreads over the western world and most of the population is killed.

As I said, a body count almost as big as in Left Behind.

In case I haven’t made this clear, this is a bad book. It is explicitly racist and anti-Semitic, and the language makes me squirm. It has influenced many killings, most famously The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 which killed 167 people. The “Day of the Rope” phrase is considered a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. I am reviewing it because of its influence in that very far right milieu that is becoming more mainstream and more powerful. Its language talks across to the language of Christian nationalism, and of the January 6 rioters, not just the actual fash. This is the shit in the water we all drink now. I think we have to reckon with it.

Here is a longish quote:

And is that not a key to the whole problem? The corruption of our

people by the Jewish-liberal-democratic-equalitarian plague which

afflicts us is more clearly manifested in our soft-mindedness, our

unwillingness to recognize the harder realities of life, than in

anything else.

Liberalism is an essentially feminine, submissive world view.

Perhaps a better adjective than feminine is infantile. It is the world

view of men who do not have the moral toughness, the spiritual

strength to stand up and do single combat with life, who cannot

adjust to the reality that the world is not a huge, pink-and-blue,

padded nursery in which the lions lie down with the lambs and

everyone lives happily ever after.

Nor should spiritually healthy men of our race even want the

world to be like that, if it could be so. That is an alien, essentially

Oriental approach to life, the world view of slaves rather than of

free men of the West.

But it has permeated our whole society. Even those who do not

consciously accept the liberal doctrines have been corrupted by

them. Decade after decade the race problem in America has

become worse. But the majority of those who wanted a solution,

who wanted to preserve a White America, were never able to

screw up the courage to look the obvious solutions in the face.

For the first time I understand the deepest meaning of what we

are doing. I understand now why we cannot fail, no matter what we

must do to win and no matter how many of us must perish in doing

it. Everything that has been and everything that is yet to be depend

on us. We are truly the instruments of God in the fulfillment of His

Grand Design.

My interest is in how The Turner Diaries relates to the Cosmic War.

Here are some Cosmic War tropes: we must be sacrificial in our fight for the true way. There is only one truth, ours, and we are the only ones who know it. Battle is inevitable. Winning is inevitable. Mass casualties are inevitable and thus not to be worried about. Mass destruction is desirable in order to make the world anew. Purity of thought and opinion must be retained. We are the future. Everything has led up to this. It will not last long. We will have our revenge. The enemy is irrevocably evil and must be totally destroyed. Society is irredeemable. We are a tiny band of virtuous rebels who hold the future in our hands. Our knowledge of the truth is esoteric and layered, with the whole of it known only to initiates. Our fight is total, with its own moral rules that transcend that of society’s.

Apocalyptic literature is just that, a form of literature. The Turner Diaries has many apocalyptic features of the sort I have written about previously. It is a revenge fantasy, as is the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and Revelation in the New Testament. It has its own eschatology, in that most of the world’s population is murdered, the planet is nuked, the infrastructure of civilization is destroyed. It describes its own version of collapse: society is collapsing because of liberalism, yet when the Organization takes over, they destroy the infrastructure and everyone they don’t like is murdered, expelled, or starved to death after the Organization takes control of the food supply. It is a revealing of greater truth, as Turner is initiated into the Order in an occult-style ceremony.

There are some traditional features of apocalyptic literature that The Turner Diaries lacks. There is no journey to heaven, no guide, no throne scene, nothing metaphysical about it. Nothing wondrous. The Cosmic War takes place in two spheres: the heavenly realm, and the material world. The Turner Diaries is about the material world only. Nevertheless, it has enough of the flavour of the Cosmic War to be useful for my purposes, and it influences those who believe they fight this war in the heavenly realm.

Now you don’t have to read it. I did it for you. Thank you Karen Effie for sniffing out the shit in the water. You’re welcome. Thank you for reading this, and ma te wa.

FURTHER:

Don’t go there. Just don’t. Just go stand in the rain.

Picture: Idaya the Devon Rex disapproves of this book.

This article has a soundtrack, I’m sorry to say. It is the song “Pagan Fears” by the rather sketchy Trv Norwegian Black Metal band Mayhem, with its superbly operatic vocals by Attila Csihar, from their classic “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” album. I have this blackest of all Black Metal earworms in my head as I write

Kia Ora Koutou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

Here is the best sentence in “Pagan Threat”.

“But more often than not, this diverse godless spectrum between mystic and scientific collides into an alchemical belief system driven by Leftist scientific propaganda and Luciferian religion. The glue, of course, that holds them together is Marxist ideology.”

I laughed and laughed.

Of course it is.

Even worse of course is Leftist religion and Luciferian scientific propaganda but let’s just not. And he forgot about Woke, but don’t worry, he makes up for that in spades elsewhere.

So, this gives the tone of the book and the writing style and so on and probably encapsulates what keeps Lucas Miles awake at night.

Lucas Miles is a pastor and media personality, who has been described by Charlie Kirk as “a fearless warrior for Christ”. He is senior director at Kirk’s Turning Point USA. His previous books include “Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity”, so I figure Pagan Threat is his sort of thing and I suspect he writes the same book over and over, pretty much.

Lucas Miles begins by talking about “Woke” which he sees as the “modern fruition of Paganism”. He does not define Woke, but assumes we understand him when he lists a cluster of things he dislikes such as critical race theory, gender identity and Earth worship. He uses the word parasite to reify Woke. Woke is a thing.

Well, bro, I hear you, because I could never be woke. I don’t have the history or the culture. According to Dr Neal Curtis:

…‘woke’ is a term rooted in the experience of African-Americans. Early in the 20th Century, the idea of staying ‘woke’ appeared in songs, most notably ones like Lead Belly’s Scottsboro Boys recorded in 1938 about a series of events in 1931 that saw a group of young black men accused of rape. It became a simple warning to black people travelling through deeply racist states in the US that they needed to be very careful and mindful; to ‘stay woke’.

So, I don’t get to do that. I don’t get to be woke. I am an older Pakeha (white) woman, and I have never had the need to stay awake and aware of danger in the way that Black Americans have. I have never been automatically discriminated against, and I have never had racism against me. I cannot claim that brave title of woke.

Lucas Miles does define Paganism: as “those who have abandoned mainstream forms of religion for esoteric practices, often rooted in polytheism, ancient rituals, worship of nature, spell casting, sexual acts, and altered states of consciousness”. Then he gives many examples. Most of these are described fairly accurately. He has done a bit more than watch WitchTok. He has done some reading. Interestingly, his examples of Paganism include Theosophy, Thelema, New Thought and Shamanism. It’s a definition he works with throughout the parts of the book that actually talk about Paganism, but it is weirdly broad. New Thought, for example, is loosely the idea that we can change reality by thinking about it, particularly thinking positive thoughts. Like attracts like. We can heal ourselves and better our lives by thinking in the right way. New Thought is behind some of the wellness movement, and some of the prosperity “Think and Grow Rich” idea that has influenced Christians as much as it has influenced anyone. Theosophy and Thelema are esoteric groups, but I am not sure that esotericism maps onto Paganism. Members of such groups may not describe themselves as Pagan. Thelemites are magickal practitioners and magic is not necessarily Pagan; it owes a lot to the mainstream religions it hangs off, as well as early science and classical philosophy. Shamanism is not exactly Pagan either, being associated with particular indigenous practices. Even Taoism, which is a whole religion, gets chucked in here, via yin/yang. Lucas Miles is doing what is easy, which is lumping together a lot of ideas and practices that seem intuitively to relate to each other because they occupy similar marginal spaces in our society. But New Age and New Thought and esotericism and Paganism are not quite the same, although they are kind of like fellow travellers in cultural space.

There is also a bit of a problem with how Lucas Miles sees Paganism as an abandoning of mainstream forms of religion. While many modern Pagans may have abandoned Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism or Christianity, many come from the “nones” category of religious belief. And, historically, Paganism came first, surely, so Paganism was the religion that was abandoned. Even looking over the history of modern Paganism, it seems to have had a complicated relationship with Christianity throughout. Modern Paganism is often seen as being an expression of anti-Enlightenment Romanticism that developed its own rituals and systems only in the twentieth century, but it is hard to say where it came from. Pre-Christian Paganism never quite went away, but it intertwined itself into Christian practice and survived in pockets all the way through the last two thousand years.

Lucas Miles expounds on Paganism. Paganism is bespoke, flexible, and individualistic. It treats people as divine; most particularly it invokes the divine feminine in the form of the Goddess. It is revolutionary: Lucas correctly identifies that Pagan strand of Romantic thought of Shelley and Swinburne as potentially upending society. For modern Pagans, “everything is sacred” and this inevitably leads to the sanctioning of abortion, because if everything is sacred, so is every action. Pagans worship the Earth, and value the earth more than humans, leading to an anti-human, Malthusian, even eugenicist devaluing of human life. Paganism is also somehow Marxist. I don’t quite get the connection here, but it seems to be that Paganism is Woke and Woke is Marxist therefore Paganism is Marxist. Marxism is never defined, and Miles assumes we understand its badness in our very bones. Miles does not engage with Paganism much, but he engages not at all with Marxism. It is a way of saying Boo.

Worse, Paganism has infiltrated Christianity. Lucas Miles gives a long list of practices he considers to be Pagan, including yoga and crystals and even some forms of intercessory prayer. Miles also has a chapter on how the idea of yin and yang leads to “transgenderism”, when yin and yang are Taoist ideas, and I don’t think Taoists would agree they are Pagans. He also goes into UFOs as angels, claiming that in fact UFOs are Nephilim. (More bloody Nephilim! I can’t get over how I keep running across these damn things, and I will NOT explain all over again how non-Biblical this Nephilim stuff is). My point here is that UFO culture is kind of New Age adjacent and Pagan adjacent, but not really Pagan. He is wandering around a bit. He also expresses concern about other things that aren’t about Paganism at all, such as “directed evolution”, “emerging global tyranny”, “evolutionary leaders” and “tech advocates”. Here I suspect he is writing what he always writes; I can imagine him saying “and another thing that grinds my gears is….”

Another point worth making is that not all Pagans are Woke libtards. While it is true that Pagan communities have more than the usual number of LGTBTI+ people, people with disabilities and those who are not neurotypical, and differences are more likely to be welcomed, this is not always the case. Consider the influence of Julius Evola, the uber-Fascist, or Stephen Flowers and Stephen McNallen with their white racist form of Heathenism. Eco-fascism is Pagan adjacent. When navigating Pagan spaces, it pays to ask questions. Lucas Miles does not mention these strands of Pagan thought. He does not see Paganism as monolithic, but he also is unaware of the breadth of it. Because he has not really engaged with it.

The book’s main themes are:

1. Paganism is about apotheosis, becoming gods or godlike, or thinking we can do better than God. For Christians, this is part of the original sin. Right at the start, when Eve ate the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, humans set themselves up as godlike. It’s been downhill ever since. Pagan practices encourage us to rely on ourselves, rather than God. I think Lucas Miles should study Islam. Islam is more monotheistic than Christianity and teaches more strongly about the problems when humans try to “join partners with God.”

2. Christianity is eternal, univocal, inerrant, and so on. Only by becoming what he calls “traditional” (conservative, high-demand) Christians can we understand this. Christianity provides moral absolutes and the submission to Christ that brings true freedom. The Church has also given us human rights and rationalism (while somehow remaining unchanging). This contrasts with the eclectic, flexible, individualistic Paganism, with its moral relativism. Often, Miles disapproves of ideas just because they are not Christian, and therefore not salvific. Christianity also gives us order, the proper social and moral order under God, and order is good and Godly, whereas differences and pluralism lead to chaos, and chaos is not just the fertile crucible of life prior to the creation, and not just the raw stuff of the universe as expressed at the beginning of the book of John: chaos is evil (as well as feminized), and evil is everywhere, and evil comes from outside of us, from dark forces. Or I should say, Dark Forces.

3. The Church must remain pure. A good third of the book is devoted to the need for a new apologetics, based on the Apostles Creed, and general conservative American-ness. True Christianity does not change, does not borrow, and is not syncretic. The result of syncretism is apostasy – and you know where that leads us. Yup, LGBTI+. Seriously, folks.

There is a lot of ignoring Christianity’s syncretic history here. I would only slightly be joking if I said to Lucas Miles that Christianity is merely Hellenism plus Judaism. All religions are syncretic.

4. We are in a state of spiritual warfare. Lucas Miles is kind. He acknowledges that many of those he calls Pagan are well-meaning with their Etsy spells and general woo. But the Church is under attack by dark forces. These are Marxism, Woke, Deconstructionism, Post-Modernism, and don’t talk to me about Hegel. Or Kant and his undermining of the Enlightenment. It is interesting that Miles seldom mentions Satan or the classical good vs evil Cosmic War, but he reifies the above ideas as if they are demons. He accuses environmentalists of wanting to end the world, but he hints at how Pagan practices signal “that we are in the Bible’s final chapter”.

Some in the Pagan community have responded to the book with alarm. “Pagan Threat” is not the only book of its kind, but recent events have given it more legs. We do not want another Satanic Panic. We do not want another QAnon. Real people genuinely suffer when these things happen, and most of them are not even Pagan. Conservative Christianity is in the ascendant right now. It continues to have a disproportionate influence considering its numbers. Persecution is baked into it. It needs its martyrs and its warriors and all the usual tropes from the Cosmic War which it has made its own. I just hope that for a while at least it leaves the rest of us alone.

Thank you for reading, and please read some of my other posts, because this one will make much more sense. Remember that the Cosmic War is 4,000 years old, that it permeates all the West Asian religions, and while it finds its fulfilment in Christianity, there are other places to look, other Stories to tell, and that we can do better. Ma te wa!

FURTHER

In no particular order:

- Ronald Hutton’s “Triumph of the Moon” about the history of Paganism and Witchcraft in the UK, and his newer book “The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present”.

- Joseph Laycock “New Religious Movements: The Basics”.

- Ryan Smith “The Wayward Wanderer” podcast where he and Elizabeth Sandifer unpack the book from a Heathen perspective.

- Manny Moreno’s article in The Wild Hunt “Pagan Threat is Talking About Us” is the start of the Pagan response to the book.

- Brent Nongbri’s most interesting “Before Religion”. Pre-Christians did not have religions as we would talk about the word. Religion in Greek was a word for duty or social obligation. The idea of religion emerges out of medieval Europe, when Christian thinkers worked to distinguish themselves from others.

Kia Ora koutou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

So, here we all are, things are moving faster, and the Cosmic War Story seems much more obvious. This is partly because that strand of Christianity that is conservative, nationalistic, and dualistic is so much noisier and in the political ascendant, despite what they say about being oppressed and discriminated against. People like Pete Hegseth and Mike Johnson speak openly about spiritual warfare.

In the history of Christianity, it is not just the pagans or Muslims who have been the enemy: it is the enemy within. It is obvious in the world there are people who believe things that are plainly wrong-headed, such as atheism or other religions or whatever. But heretics are worse: they present something that looks like the truth but isn’t, and that is more monstrous. Thus, conservative Christians reserve much of their ire for the libs. The libs are not true Christians or true Americans; they sound reasonable but underneath that is the Devil at work in his kingdom that is this earth. It has been this way since Paul, whose most strident criticisms were for his fellow religionists.

Three years ago, I imagined myself saying to people they think they are in a Cosmic War and most of the people I know saying we are? Who knew? Yeah nah, as we say here in Aotearoa New Zealand. And I would say, the Cosmic War is backgrounded. It is pervasive in popular culture. It is in our mythical bones. It is a Story. When we set ourselves up for ultimate good fighting ultimate evil, we just know how it plays out. So we don’t really have to do anything about the fact that we are all superfucked right now. A saviour hero will arise. The rapture will happen. A new world will arise from the ashes of the old one. The Cosmic War can be a call to action and virtue for believers, but for the rest of us it just makes for passivity.

Now, things are moving faster. I did not predict the course of events. Particularly I did not predict the near takeover of influence of the tech bros, the amount of surveillance we are under, and the rise of obvious fascism in the North world. At least not so soon and so thoroughgoing. My reading and thinking have struggled to keep up. We clearly can’t wait for a saviour hero or for Armageddon to sort it all out for us. We are all we have.

I am asking myself if the Cosmic War is still worth writing about. My concern is also based on various family issues and health issues that have stopped me in my tracks at times and left me little energy for writing. And, well, I don’t have a lot of readers, and Substack has changed a lot and become a lot less friendly to small accounts like mine. However, in all my wanderings, I have never found anyone who has quite my approach. There are many good thinkers writing about the future and today’s urgent issues. There are many critiquing evangelical Christian nationalism and its emphasis on spiritual warfare and eschatology. But I am the only one I know who takes it right back to the start, to four thousand years ago, who sees it as a Story embedded in our cultural identities and histories. My view of it may not be the best, but it is still seemingly unique and that counts for something.

I was brought up knowing I was weak. I am female, very small and now getting older and a bit sicker. My hands have never worked properly. I am a slow runner and a slow thinker. As a child I was taught I would not, in fact should not, survive a catastrophe. I think that teaching was supposed to make me feel helpless or something or maybe induce me to seek out a man for protection. What it did do, was make me aware of our interdependence. Human and non-human and more-than-human communities: we all depend on them even if we believe we are big and strong and don’t need anyone.

I love the world very much. All its realities, it is all there for us. I don’t want it to end. I want no harm to come to it. I don’t want a world where elite white men upload themselves into posthuman eternities. I don’t want to save the environment for a white ethnostate. I don’t believe it needs to be made anew for a new race of men, or anyone for that matter. It is as it is, alive, imperfect, frightening, joyous, indifferent, real. We are part of it. We belong.

Thank you for reading, if you got this far, and for your forbearance. Ma te wa.

The link is to the Robert Fripp version of Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood”. This is an unusual choice for me as I am usually an absolute metal head, but it is a beautiful song and the Fripp version has such restraint. There is the refrain: “If again, the seas are silent, in any still alive, it’ll be those who gave their island who survive”.

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

On 15 September, Peter Thiel will start a four-part series of lectures “exploring the biblical figure of the Antichrist—through the lenses of science, theology, history, politics, and literature”. The hosts are Michelle Stephens and Michele Chinn Fahey from the new group Acts 17 Collective. Acts 17 Collective aims to bring Christianity to the tech community of the Bay Area San Francisco. The very perky Stephens is interviewed in Christianity Today, where she states that many people didn’t know about Peter Thiel’s Christian Faith, how rigorous and intellectually stimulating it is. My first reaction was to consider that Thiel would reveal at the end of the lecture series that he is in fact the Antichrist and thus bring on the end times. Lol lol lol. But life is not that simple a narrative, and we have been living in the end times for nearly four thousand years, since Zoroastrianism came into being. You’d think we’d be used to it by now.

So, let’s have a brief look at the Antichrist. Firstly, in 1 John and 2 John in the New Testament, antichrists are presented as those who oppose Christ, and who are deceivers. Paul in Thessalonians talks about a lawless one, who became identifies with one Antichrist, and also about some restraining force or person. The idea of one person who is the Antichrist evolves over time, and becomes a part of prophecy. Now, the Antichrist is the opposite of Christ, a perfectly evil person, controlled by Satan who indwells in him, as God indwells in Christ. Speculation about the identity of the Antichrist has been around since Irenaeus, who tried to calculate who it might be using numerology. Many Popes have been accused of being Antichrists, as have many US presidents (including the present one). Sometimes women are accused of being the Antichrist: Hillary Rodham Clinton, of course, Oprah Winfrey, and Kamala Harris. And, while we are cherchez-ing la femme, the Antichrist has a mother. Just as Christ’s mother was a virgin, the mother of the Antichrist is a whore. (Poor old sex workers, not only precariously employed in a dangerous and under-appreciated profession, but thought of as totally evil as well.)

Philip C Almond, in his article for the Conversation “Five Things to Know About the Antichrist” gives a useful potted history:

By the year 1000, the main outlines of the first of two narratives about the Antichrist was in place thanks to a noble-born Benedictine monk and abbot named Adso of Montier-en-Der (c. 920-92) who wrote a treatise on the subject.

According to him, the Antichrist would be a Jew from the tribe of Dan and born in Babylon. He would be brought up in all forms of wickedness by magicians and wizards. He would be accepted as the Messiah and ruler by the Jews in Jerusalem. Those Christians whom he could not convert to his cause, he would torture and kill.

He would then rule for seven years before being defeated by the angel Gabriel or Christ and the divine armies, prior to the resurrection of the dead and the Final Judgement.

The idea of the Antichrist has become more prominent as conservative Evangelical Christianity dominates Christian thought and gains political traction. Nowadays, he is a figure within the Christian fold, rather than an outsider like Osama Bin Laden. Sometimes the Antichrist is also seen as a trend or idea. He is also supposed to be a world leader with supernatural powers: proponents of this idea were Jerry Falwell the televangelist, and the LaHayes in the Left Behind series of novels, where he was a politician called Nicolae Carpathia (seriously!) who took over the United Nations. This ties into conservative conspiracy theory-style fears about the UN, about world government and the undermining of national sovereignty, by which we read US sovereignty.

Donald Trump is variously thought of as the Antichrist, but also a character called the Last World Emperor. I hinted previously at a personage who is an obstacle to the Antichrist, and the Last World Emperor is possibly that personage. The idea is a ruler, who is not necessarily a good person or a good Christian, is used by God to prepare the way for the final days, with the rapture, the seven years of tribulation, and the triumphant return of Christ. Here is Thomas Lecaque, writing for the Washington Post back in 2019:

The Last World Emperor originates in the apocalyptic sermon known as “Pseudo-Methodius,” written in Syriac between 685 and 690 after the Arab conquest of the Middle East. The prophecy speaks of a Byzantine or Roman king who would lead a successful war against the forces of Islam and establish a new era of peace. That calm would hold for a decade, at which point the forces of “Gog and Magog” would attack. Instead of resisting them, the king would travel to Mount Golgotha to lay down his crown, fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel and setting the stage for the Second Coming and a final apocalyptic battle between good and evil. The Last World Emperor and Daniel differ most notably in that the former demands a flawed secular hero as the champion. It therefore offers a model that allows the religious to cast secular political leaders as apocalyptic heroes, regardless of their personal failings.

Donald Trump has been regarded, especially by the QAnon set, as a figure similar to the Last World Emperor: God chooses a man, who may especially be immoral or compromised, to be a cosmic tool, a sign of God’s power in that God can work through whomever God likes, and proof that God works directly through history and political events. Trump’s advent is divinely inspired, a sign that the end times are upon us. Trump is more than human; he is the man of his times in Traditionalist terms, he is a cipher for the workings of destiny. He is inevitable.

Adso of Montier-en-Der, who wrote a popular book about the Antichrist in the tenth century CE, also mentioned the Last World Emperor as being Frankish. That chimes quite nicely with the role of the Crusaders as holy warriors in the Cosmic War, and resonates even now as far right writers invoke the Crusades and Crusader-adjacent ideas and characters in their dreams of conquering Islamists and saving white Europe. All these ideas are not logically connected, exactly, but they chime and rhyme and vibe. Oh my god! It’s all connected!

So, there we have it, and unlike Peter Thiel, I will charge you nothing at all. I don’t know what he charges for his lecture series, but I suspect I am not invited, so I won’t speculate too much.

Actually September is a busy month for the Cosmic War. The Velocirapture is due to take place on 23 or 24 September, according to numerous TikToks and YouTube videos and even bits of r/Christian. This seems to relate to the yearly Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah, which some eschatologically-minded Christians have appropriated as the Feast of Trumpets, and related it to the return of Christ and the beginning of the seven-year Tribulation.

We will see.

Thank you for reading this small piece of nonsense. I have pressing family issues currently, and while I am still reading a bit, I don’t have the mental bandwidth for writing much. I will write when I can. Ma te wa!

Further: I am indebted to Marco Visconti for alerting me to this lecture. He writes about Thelema and other forms of magic, a thinker worth following. The picture is Pope XXII the Papal Antichrist.

Possibly this happened in 70 CE.

Possibly it happened, but it wasn’t a temporal event, in the material world, in history. It was a spiritual event of fulfilment of the word of God, and we missed it. It would be easy to miss, if you weren’t spiritually attuned.

This is not the denial of prophecy. All the prophecies were true; they have just already happened. There is a type of Christian theology called pretorism, which claims exactly this. It has had its moments, over time, especially for Roman Catholics. So if we are pretorists, how do we remain good and faithful Christians, if we are not expecting the end of days? We are just building God’s kingdom, here on earth, for ever.

Another whole religion has a pretoristic bent. Its followers believe the prophecies of all the previous religions were true, but all of them had their fulfilment in the coming of their founder. The world has ended; Christ has returned. There is no more Cosmic War. This is a new world. These are the Baha’is.

Kia ora tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

I will begin with a quote from Baha’u’llah, the founder and prophet of the Baha’i Faith. It is long, but it gives you an idea of how Baha’is feel about this topic. It also gives you the language of the Baha’i writings and hints at the roots of the faith in Shi’ite Islam.

`Have the verses been sent down?' Say: `Yea, by Him Who is the Lord of the heavens!' `Hath the Hour come?' `Nay, more; it hath passed, by Him Who is the Revealer of clear tokens! Verily, the Inevitable is come, and He, the True One, hath appeared with proof and testimony. The Plain is disclosed, and mankind is sore vexed and fearful. Earthquakes have broken loose, and the tribes have lamented, for fear of God, the Lord of Strength, the All-Compelling.' Say: `The stunning trumpet blast hath been loudly raised, and the Day is God's, the One, the Unconstrained.' `Hath the Catastrophe come to pass?' Say: `Yea, by the Lord of Lords!' `Is the Resurrection come?' `Nay, more; He Who is the Self-Subsisting hath appeared with the Kingdom of His signs.' `Seest thou men laid low?' `Yea, by my Lord, the Exalted, the Most High!' `Have the tree-stumps been uprooted?' `Yea, more; the mountains have been scattered in dust; by Him the Lord of attributes!' They say: `Where is Paradise, and where is Hell?' Say: `The one is reunion with Me; the other thine own self, O thou who dost associate a partner with God and doubtest.' They say: `We see not the Balance.' Say: `Surely, by my Lord, the God of Mercy! None can see it except such as are endued with insight.' `Have the stars fallen?' Say: `Yea, when He Who is the Self-Subsisting dwelt in the Land of Mystery (Adrianople). Take heed, ye who are endued with discernment!' All the signs appeared when We drew forth the Hand of Power from the bosom of majesty and might. Verily, the Crier hath cried out, when the promised time came, and they that have recognized the splendors of Sinai have swooned away in the wilderness of hesitation, before the awful majesty of thy Lord, the Lord of creation. The trumpet asketh: `Hath the Bugle been sounded?' Say: `Yea, by the King of Revelation!, when He mounted the throne of His Name, the All-Merciful.' Darkness hath been chased away by the dawning-light of the mercy of thy Lord, the Source of all light. The breeze of the All-Merciful hath wafted, and the souls have been quickened in the tombs of their bodies. Thus hath the decree been fulfilled by God, the Mighty, the Beneficent. They that have gone astray have said: `When were the heavens cleft asunder?' Say: `While ye lay in the graves of waywardness and error.' Among the heedless is he who rubbeth his eyes, and looketh to the right and to the left. Say: `Blinded art thou. No refuge hast thou to flee to.' And among them is he who saith: `Have men been gathered together?' Say: `Yea, by my Lord!, whilst thou didst lie in the cradle of idle fancies.' And among them is he who saith: `Hath the Book been sent down through the power of the true Faith?' Say: `The true Faith itself is astounded. Fear ye, O ye men of understanding heart!' And among them is he who saith: `Have I been assembled with others, blind?' Say: `Yea, by Him that rideth upon the clouds!' Paradise is decked with mystic roses, and hell hath been made to blaze with the fire of the impious. Say: `The light hath shone forth from the horizon of Revelation, and the whole earth hath been illumined at the coming of Him Who is the Lord of the Day of the Covenant!' The doubters have perished, whilst he that turned, guided by the light of assurance, unto the Dayspring of Certitude hath prospered. Blessed art thou, who hast fixed thy gaze upon Me, for this Tablet which hath been sent down for thee--a Tablet which causeth the souls of men to soar. Commit it to memory, and recite it. By My life! It is a door to the mercy of thy Lord. Well is it with him that reciteth it at eventide and at dawn. We, verily, hear thy praise of this Cause, through which the mountain of knowledge was crushed, and men's feet have slipped. My glory be upon thee and upon whomsoever hath turned unto the Almighty, the All-Bounteous. The Tablet is ended, but the theme is unexhausted. Be patient, for thy Lord is patient."

I hope you indulged me there. I know that was way too long, and you probably skipped much of it, but it is gorgeous stuff and so rich in imagery. Full disclosure: I was very involved with the Baha’i Faith for about fifteen years, in much younger days, and I still have some affection for it. So this was the sort of language I was steeped in, and it still resonates with me today. Now, here is the important bit, Baha’is don’t do the Cosmic War. Here is a whole world religion that does not have the Cosmic War.

They sort of did at the start, at least they began as a dynamic movement steeped in millennialism. Firstly, it helps to know about the Shi’ite branch of Islam, which has tended to be more mystical, more passionate, more spiritually experimental, and more millennialist than the majority Sunni branch. Shi’itism developed out of a succession crisis. Shi’ites supported ‘Ali, the nephew of the Prophet Muhammad, to be the leader of the spiritual community, and the lineage of ‘Ali and his wife Fatimih. These leaders were called Imams. They were political leaders, but they were also considered to be spiritual and esoteric leaders. For most Shi’ites, called Twelvers, there were twelve Imams. The last Imam, the Imam Mahdi, was occulted, alive but hidden, and would appear shortly before the last judgment, to fight the Muslim version of Antichrist and usher in a new age. By the nineteenth century, Persian mystical thinkers were awaiting the Mahdi as they sought relief from the corrupt Qajar regime.

Relief came in the form of the Bab, which means gate. In 1844 young ‘Ali Muhammad declared himself to be the Gate to the Twelfth Imam, and he began to develop a rapidly evolving theology, emphasising the single unknowable essence of God, who sends manifestations of God to humanity in an evolving universal faith. The Bab eventually declared himself to be one of these manifestations of God, and also the Mahdi, but he also prophesied a greater one who would come soon. At that point, the old world would end. The new manifestation of God would usher in a whole new world. The Bab went further than other heterodox Shi’ite schools; he promulgated new teachings and broke away from Islam altogether in the end. His teachings were mystical, millennialist, and socially liberal. Many Persians became followers of the Bab, and persecution followed. The massacres of Babis caught the attention of European orientalists. It was a captivating story, but it was also bloody and divisive. The Bab was killed by firing squad in 1850. That story is worth reading about. It certainly did not stop there.

Mirza Husayn ‘Ali, one of the Bab’s most outspoken disciples, declared himself to be the one the Bab foretold. He took the name Baha’u’llah, the glory of God. This was it, the old world had ended, and the new world had begun, like an old carpet being rolled up and a new one spread out in its stead. No Armageddon, no final battle, no apocalypse. The Cosmic War had ended. There was no Satan, no spiritual battle between absolute good and absolute evil, and no hell. All that was for a previous era, when humanity was less developed. Now, humanity was ready for a leap in spiritual understanding.

The authorities disagreed, and Baha’is were persecuted all over again. Baha’u’llah himself was imprisoned, banished, and ended up in Haifa in Israel. It is hard to express how spiritually charged this period of time was, for a small, persecuted community. But the Baha’is spread throughout the world, and the community grew, and now it is a proper world religion, although relatively small in number.

Here is what Baha’is believe, with regard to the ideas behind the Cosmic War. Firstly, we are not looking for the end of the world, because it has already happened. We are here to worship God and carry forward an ever-advancing civilization, guided by Baha’u’llah’s teachings and the rich spiritual history we have inherited through all the previous religions. All religions are from God, in an endless line of Manifestations, great prophet-founders who have revealed to humankind teachings progressively over time. Islamophobia and antisemitism just make no sense to Baha’is, as both Islam and Judaism are divinely revealed religions. The Baha’i teaching emphasise the oneness of humanity, that we are all one people and we need to unite to solve our problems. Baha’is have a fairly weak concept of evil, believing Satan is the evil whisperer who whispers in our breasts – our bad thoughts, personified, not a real being at all. Evil is what human people think and do; Baha’is have a negative perception of evil along the lines of Augustine: evil is what you do when you are lazy or ignorant or uncaring and goodness is a positive thing, taking effort and understanding. There is no heaven or hell, except that heaven is being close to God and hell is being far away from God. When we die, we all go to a wonderful place, so wonderful we cannot perceive it in this life. If we have done a lot of wrong, and failed to acquire virtues, we will perceive it only dimly when we get there, while if we have lived a good and virtuous life, we will perceive it more fully and rejoice more in being closer to God. We all get there in the end. Being a Baha’i does not automatically make a person close to God; Baha’is are not “saved” as such. Baha’is have a peaceful reputation; they are not interested in holy wars or any wars for that matter.

The Baha’i Faith is monotheistic, owing much to the Islam it arose from. There is only one God, who is both immanent and transcendent. There is no divine council, or other deities as there are in the Hebrew Bible. Humans, as created beings, are contingent on God’s will and cannot approach God directly. They require the Manifestations of God, prophets such as Muhammad or Gautama Buddha, to impart teachings directly revealed to them. But there is also a mystical streak in the Baha’i writings: Baha’u’llah’s revelation in the depths of Qajar Persia’s worst prison echoes the Merkhabah mysticism of the Hebrew prophets, and he uses Sufi language and ideas to speak of spiritual mysteries.

In my second entry here, I talked about Zoroastrianism and the deep history of the Cosmic War. https://www.kareneffie.com/p/ending-the-cosmic-war?r=7g32w Zarathustra edged his way towards monotheism, with the good God Ahura Mazda in a Cosmic War with the bad God Angra Mainyu. It has seemed like the more monotheistic a religion became, the more the Cosmic War was emphasised. Christianity is the apotheosis of this. The Cosmic War is baked into Christianity, even in the Gospels, much as I would like to avoid it. But here we have a properly monotheistic religion with no Cosmic War. Why? Because the Cosmic War was a thing of an earlier dispensation. It was spiritually useful then, but it is over now. Now that the old world has ended, we know better.

If you got through that long read, thank you. You can see hopefully how my ideas about the Cosmic War are interwoven. Ma te wa!

Further: The best introductory book about the Baha’i Faith is still Peter Smith: Smith, Peter (1987). The Bábí and Baháʼí Religions: From Messianic Shiʻism to a World Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-30128-9. I have read several introductory works, and they are all a bit bland by comparison. Smith has some ideas and sets them out clearly, and he does not shy away from the Babi millennial impulse.

Many of the Baha’i writings are in the public domain and available on the official website. Some of the more mystical writings are translated only unofficially, and are available here: https://alisonelizabethmarshall.com/windflower-translations-library/

The photo is of the prison at Akka in Israel, where Baha’u’llah was imprisoned. Courtesy of the Baha’i Media Bank where I can download photos provided they are not for commercial use.

I want to go right outside my lane and talk about Indigenous people. Because I have no sense. And comments welcome, although I am aware I have overstepped, I hope to be respectful at least.

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

Many people have experienced the end of the world, or at least the part of it that mattered to them and theirs. In 1945, writer Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden slaughterhouse when the Allies firebombed the ancient city. Deep in the chill of the slaughterhouse, he survived when 25,000 human people were killed. He emerged to discover the city devastated, looking like Gaza does today. Kurt Vonnegut was one of many who sought bodies in the rubble; when the amount of bodies became unmanageable, they took to them with flamethrowers. Fire upon fire. It wasn’t the end of the world, like, the World, but it was the end of the world for Dresden. The experience influenced Vonnegurt’s attitude to life as well as his writing; what do you do when you have witnessed the end of the world? You write “Slaughterhouse 5”, named after the place that saved your life.

What if I told you, as the ancient meme suggests, that the end of the world has already happened? We have had the lot – Armageddon, the destruction of much of the earth, the last judgment. It’s over. We are what’s left, and it’s time we got on with it.

I want to go right outside my lane and talk about Indigenous people. Because I have no sense. And comments welcome, although I am aware I have overstepped, I hope to be respectful at least.

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

Many people have experienced the end of the world, or at least the part of it that mattered to them and theirs. In 1945, writer Kurt Vonnegurt was working in a Dresden slaughterhouse when the Allies firebombed the ancient city. Deep in the chill of the slaughterhouse, he survived when 25,000 human people were killed. He emerged to discover the city devastated, looking like Gaza does today. Kurt Vonnegurt was one of many who sought bodies in the rubble; when the amount of bodies became unmanageable, they took to them with flamethrowers. Fire upon fire. It wasn’t the end of the world, like, the World, but it was the end of the world for Dresden. The experience influenced Vonnegurt’s attitude to life as well as his writing; what do you do when you have witnessed the end of the world? You write “Slaughterhouse 5”, named after the place that saved your life.

To the Genoese, in 1347, it must have seemed like the end of the world when the Black Plague first hit their city and people died and died and died. The “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918 killed more people than World War One, and quickly and gruesomely, hard on the heels of war, when a young person could die while crossing the road. The Black Plague, the fire of London, so many apocalypses. For many of us, it has felt like the end of the world.

But I want to talk about genocide, that horribly common monstrosity, which has been around since Jericho in the Hebrew Bible. (Archaeological records show it never happened, whew, it was harrowing enough just to read about it).

“To be indigenous to North America is to be part of a postapocalyptic community and experience”, states Julian Brave Noisecat. And “knowledge of the apocalypse caused by colonialism helps make Indigenous peoples aware of ongoing tragedies”. Julian Brave Noisecat is not using apocalypse in its literary sense, meaning an unveiling or a revelation; he means that for his community the world ended, and this is what is left. He talks about “survivance”, an idea that Indigenous people have internalised survival, and that this with its attendant skills can help us face the climate crisis.

So, can it be the end of the world if there are any of us left? And if we know our history, and understand who we are, and thrive and learn?

In answer, I want to talk about the Pequot war. I mean the Pequot massacre. I mean the Pequot actual fucking genocide of 1637, in what is now called Connecticut.

It started as a war, the Puritan colonists and their Indigenous allies vs the powerful Pequot tribe, over lands and the fur trade. The precipitating incident was the attack of the Pequots on a Puritan village, where they killed adult non-combatants and took two children. This provided the excuse the Puritans needed to punish the Pequot nation and take the land. The massacre was surprising and thorough, and gory enough for a Cormac McCarthy novel. First, the Puritan soldiers put the Pequots to the sword, and then burned all who were left. Pequot people ran from the soldiers into the flames. Those who broke through the palisades were massacred. Numbers vary as to how many escaped further, but of them, the women and children were enslaved and the men killed. The Pequots themselves burned other villages and fled, pursued by colonial soldiers. A further attack ensued, and again the Puritans won. The remaining Pequots were scattered, and the land effectively abandoned.

The Puritans invoked God, of course. Captain John Underhill justified the killing of the elderly, women, children, and the infirm by stating that "sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents [...] We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.” They prayed before they attacked. Manifest destiny indeed. For that, we go all the way back to Christopher Columbus, who was a firm believer in the Cosmic War. He believed that finding America would provide gold for the Spanish Emperor to conquer Jerusalem and bring on the end times.

The intent might have been genocidal, but there were survivors. I think it must be hard to destroy a cultural group completely. About a quarter of the Pequot nation died. The survivors were assimilated into other tribes and forbidden to call themselves Pequots. This has the feel of genocide: when you survive but are completely subjugated and are no longer allowed to say who you are. Only in the late twentieth century were Pequot descendants able to seek redress, and the tribe has been revived.

I think this is what Julian Brave Noisecat is talking about. Indigenous people have genocide in their histories. By the end of the nineteenth century, the whole Indian nation faced apocalypse. You don’t survive that without post-apocalypse trauma.

I said genocide was common. As the seventeenth century opened, The Dutch East India Company very forcibly conquered the Banda Islands. They massacred the people of the island of Lontor, torturing their elders to death and capturing women and children in order to enslave them. It took some months to eliminate the Bandanese. Many of them fled to the mountains where they died of hunger and a thing called “the sword”. The Dutch then replaced the population with enslaved people who could alter the land and harvest the mace and nutmeg so prized by Europe. That was the thing. The prize. The most expensive spice in the world.

They did it because they ran out of patience. For some years, they had tried to get a trade monopoly, with Indigenous people who were perfectly skilled traders, who wanted none of the goods the Dutch could offer, and who had no leader to negotiate with. And the English were nipping at their heels. Jan Coen, leader of the Dutch conquest, was known for his rigidity and his strong Calvinism. He believed his mission of conquest was divinely inspired. It seems he meant to bring the world of the Bandanese to an end, by killing people outright, starving them and disrupting their means of life and destroying their relationship with the land. When I studied the history of European seaborne empires at University back in the – well, a long time ago, I was encouraged to look at the economic impetus behind exploration and imperialism. I was not encouraged to consider what historical figures said and thought. But Coen, Columbus, Cortez, they believed in a divine mission against savage populations. They did. We can’t think of genocide as an anomaly. It has happened often.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand Māori have been through the same apocalyptic wringer. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, states:

“The Māori population continued its downward spiral in the wake of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, reaching a low of about 42,000 in 1896. Population decline and racist ideologies combined to fuel forewarnings about Māori extinction. In 1856 physician and politician Dr Isaac Featherston said it was the duty of Europeans to ‘smooth down … [the] dying pillow’ of the Māori race.

The belief that Māori would eventually die out reflected colonial sentiment that indigenous peoples would not survive European conquest and disease. In 1881 the prominent scientist Alfred Newman pronounced that ‘the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.”

Thing is, while there were fierce wars over land, and conquest was often decisive, there was no attempt at violent genocide. Aotearoa was colonised by the British in the latter days of empire, when imperial impetus had run out of puff (and money). The colonizers just expected the Māori to become extinguished out of sheer inferiority. Racist policies and settler overwhelm had nothing to do with it. But the result was the same. The world ended for the Māori. They have struggled through a post-apocalyptic landscape ever since. Even now, when Māori make up 20% of the population, and are increasingly influential culturally and politically, there is a vocal vanguard of absolute racism that blights everyday life. The new world is not being born easily. Nadine Hura, in her beautiful book of essays “Slowing the Sun” talks about her climate change work in the wake of the past. She states that Māori don’t talk about climate change, but they talk about whakapapa ( ancestry) and they talk about whenua (the land, and the placenta, we are the land). She knows how past colonial pressures bleed into the present:

“But we know from an intersectional view of climate change that for millions of people, from the Pacific to Palestine, the genocidal lust for land, fuelled by carbon-intensive economies, has already resulted in catastrophe and death. Climate change is the result of a system that incentivizes and profits from the disconnection between people and land, promising that the free marked can do a better job than the placenta. In Aotearoa, the storms and floods and landslides and fires are just an intensification of an already intimately known crisis. For Māori, climate change is the second blow in a one-two punch. Colonisation has left many communities living on the most vulnerable land, in the poorest conditions, relilant on the most precarious industries, and now the sea is rising to claim what remains”.

To wrap up, sort of, I am not saying “Indigenous people have the answers to the climate catastrophe because they have survived the apocalypse” because I can’t claim that, and I don’t think anyone else is. Nor do I want to put a further burden on Indigenous folk to go around saving everyone when they might be just trying to save themselves. I am suggesting that the end of the world comes in different ways. For people whose way of life has been destroyed so completely that they are reviving it from scant sources, and through a tangled psychosocial web of trauma and loss, their world ended. Our world is about to end too, and it already has done for those who have died of climate related problems, or have been driven from their homes, or are outright refugees. Where I stand, all of this is happening to someone else. Here, we still have seasons. Snow came early this winter. Sure, council authorities are considering abandoning South Dunedin, there is talk of managed retreat from the increasingly fractious sea, North Island ski fields are suffering commercially, unprecedented flooding destroys farmland in large parts of Canterbury. But I have power and water and food. Nobody I know talks about the climate catastrophe. When it does begin to bite us, which it will, I will want to talk to people who know their shit. Some of those will be people with a stronger sense of survival than I have. They might be able to say “We know what it is like to survive the end of the world. When we nearly got wiped out, we learned this about ourselves, we used these traditions to survive and understand, we adopted these new practices, we learned about loss and how to grieve, and if you are respectful and open, we can teach you”.

And… none of these Indigenous groups for whom the world has ended believe in the Cosmic War. This is a Cosmic War free zone! These peoples have had their world end without recourse to some big old story about ultimate good vs ultimate evil. Their spiritualities are bigger than that.

Thank you for being with me here, on the edge of things! Ma te wa.

Further: Julian Brave Noisecat has a website with links to his writings. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/11/james-mooney-recordings-ghost-dance-songs/ is the link for James Mooney’s 1894 recordings of Ghost Dance songs, and a useful article. Do read Amitav Ghosh, “The Nutmeg’s Curse”; it is an exquisite and humane work. You write best when you love the world!

The photo is “The view from the tower of the City Hall (Rathaus) southwards over the destroyed city of Dresden with the “Bonitas” sculpture (Allegory of Goodness)”. It is by Richard Peter.

The painting is Paul Nash “We Are Making a New World”, 1918.

To the Genoese, in 1347, it must have seemed like the end of the world when the Black Plague first hit their city and people died and died and died. The “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918 killed more people than World War One, and quickly and gruesomely, hard on the heels of war, when a young person could die while crossing the road. The Black Plague, the fire of London, so many apocalypses. For many of us, it has felt like the end of the world.

But I want to talk about genocide, that horribly common monstrosity, which has been around since Jericho in the Hebrew Bible. (Archaeological records show it never happened, whew, it was harrowing enough just to read about it).

“To be indigenous to North America is to be part of a postapocalyptic community and experience”, states Julian Brave Noisecat. And “knowledge of the apocalypse caused by colonialism helps make Indigenous peoples aware of ongoing tragedies”. Julian Brave Noisecat is not using apocalypse in its literary sense, meaning an unveiling or a revelation; he means that for his community the world ended, and this is what is left. He talks about “survivance”, an idea that Indigenous people have internalised survival, and that this with its attendant skills can help us face the climate crisis.

So, can it be the end of the world if there are any of us left? And if we know our history, and understand who we are, and thrive and learn?

In answer, I want to talk about the Pequot war. I mean the Pequot massacre. I mean the Pequot actual fucking genocide of 1637, in what is now called Connecticut.

It started as a war, the Puritan colonists and their Indigenous allies vs the powerful Pequot tribe, over lands and the fur trade. The precipitating incident was the attack of the Pequots on a Puritan village, where they killed adult non-combatants and took two children. This provided the excuse the Puritans needed to punish the Pequot nation and take the land. The massacre was surprising and thorough, and gory enough for a Cormac McCarthy novel. First, the Puritan soldiers put the Pequots to the sword, and then burned all who were left. Pequot people ran from the soldiers into the flames. Those who broke through the palisades were massacred. Numbers vary as to how many escaped further, but of them, the women and children were enslaved and the men killed. The Pequots themselves burned other villages and fled, pursued by colonial soldiers. A further attack ensued, and again the Puritans won. The remaining Pequots were scattered, and the land effectively abandoned.

The Puritans invoked God, of course. Captain John Underhill justified the killing of the elderly, women, children, and the infirm by stating that "sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents [...] We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.” They prayed before they attacked. Manifest destiny indeed. For that, we go all the way back to Christopher Columbus, who was a firm believer in the Cosmic War. He believed that finding America would provide gold for the Spanish Emperor to conquer Jerusalem and bring on the end times.

The intent might have been genocidal, but there were survivors. I think it must be hard to destroy a cultural group completely. About a quarter of the Pequot nation died. The survivors were assimilated into other tribes and forbidden to call themselves Pequots. This has the feel of genocide: when you survive but are completely subjugated and are no longer allowed to say who you are. Only in the late twentieth century were Pequot descendants able to seek redress, and the tribe has been revived.

I think this is what Julian Brave Noisecat is talking about. Indigenous people have genocide in their histories. By the end of the nineteenth century, the whole Indian nation faced apocalypse. You don’t survive that without post-apocalypse trauma.

I said genocide was common. As the seventeenth century opened, The Dutch East India Company very forcibly conquered the Banda Islands. They massacred the people of the island of Lontor, torturing their elders to death and capturing women and children in order to enslave them. It took some months to eliminate the Bandanese. Many of them fled to the mountains where they died of hunger and a thing called “the sword”. The Dutch then replaced the population with enslaved people who could alter the land and harvest the mace and nutmeg so prized by Europe. That was the thing. The prize. The most expensive spice in the world.

They did it because they ran out of patience. For some years, they had tried to get a trade monopoly, with Indigenous people who were perfectly skilled traders, who wanted none of the goods the Dutch could offer, and who had no leader to negotiate with. And the English were nipping at their heels. Jan Coen, leader of the Dutch conquest, was known for his rigidity and his strong Calvinism. He believed his mission of conquest was divinely inspired. It seems he meant to bring the world of the Bandanese to an end, by killing people outright, starving them and disrupting their means of life and destroying their relationship with the land. When I studied the history of European seaborne empires at University back in the – well, a long time ago, I was encouraged to look at the economic impetus behind exploration and imperialism. I was not encouraged to consider what historical figures said and thought. But Coen, Columbus, Cortez, they believed in a divine mission against savage populations. They did. We can’t think of genocide as an anomaly. It has happened often.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand Māori have been through the same apocalyptic wringer. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, states:

“The Māori population continued its downward spiral in the wake of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, reaching a low of about 42,000 in 1896. Population decline and racist ideologies combined to fuel forewarnings about Māori extinction. In 1856 physician and politician Dr Isaac Featherston said it was the duty of Europeans to ‘smooth down … [the] dying pillow’ of the Māori race.

The belief that Māori would eventually die out reflected colonial sentiment that indigenous peoples would not survive European conquest and disease. In 1881 the prominent scientist Alfred Newman pronounced that ‘the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.”

Thing is, while there were fierce wars over land, and conquest was often decisive, there was no attempt at violent genocide. Aotearoa was colonised by the British in the latter days of empire, when imperial impetus had run out of puff (and money). The colonizers just expected the Māori to become extinguished out of sheer inferiority. Racist policies and settler overwhelm had nothing to do with it. But the result was the same. The world ended for the Māori. They have struggled through a post-apocalyptic landscape ever since. Even now, when Māori make up 20% of the population, and are increasingly influential culturally and politically, there is a vocal vanguard of absolute racism that blights everyday life. The new world is not being born easily. Nadine Hura, in her beautiful book of essays “Slowing the Sun” talks about her climate change work in the wake of the past. She states that Māori don’t talk about climate change, but they talk about whakapapa ( ancestry) and they talk about whenua (the land, and the placenta, we are the land). She knows how past colonial pressures bleed into the present:

“But we know from an intersectional view of climate change that for millions of people, from the Pacific to Palestine, the genocidal lust for land, fuelled by carbon-intensive economies, has already resulted in catastrophe and death. Climate change is the result of a system that incentivizes and profits from the disconnection between people and land, promising that the free marked can do a better job than the placenta. In Aotearoa, the storms and floods and landslides and fires are just an intensification of an already intimately known crisis. For Māori, climate change is the second blow in a one-two punch. Colonisation has left many communities living on the most vulnerable land, in the poorest conditions, relilant on the most precarious industries, and now the sea is rising to claim what remains”.

To wrap up, sort of, I am not saying “Indigenous people have the answers to the climate catastrophe because they have survived the apocalypse” because I can’t claim that, and I don’t think anyone else is. Nor do I want to put a further burden on Indigenous folk to go around saving everyone when they might be just trying to save themselves. I am suggesting that the end of the world comes in different ways. For people whose way of life has been destroyed so completely that they are reviving it from scant sources, and through a tangled psychosocial web of trauma and loss, their world ended. Our world is about to end too, and it already has done for those who have died of climate related problems, or have been driven from their homes, or are outright refugees. Where I stand, all of this is happening to someone else. Here, we still have seasons. Snow came early this winter. Sure, council authorities are considering abandoning South Dunedin, there is talk of managed retreat from the increasingly fractious sea, North Island ski fields are suffering commercially, unprecedented flooding destroys farmland in large parts of Canterbury. But I have power and water and food. Nobody I know talks about the climate catastrophe. When it does begin to bite us, which it will, I will want to talk to people who know their shit. Some of those will be people with a stronger sense of survival than I have. They might be able to say “We know what it is like to survive the end of the world. When we nearly got wiped out, we learned this about ourselves, we used these traditions to survive and understand, we adopted these new practices, we learned about loss and how to grieve, and if you are respectful and open, we can teach you”.

And… none of these Indigenous groups for whom the world has ended believe in the Cosmic War. This is a Cosmic War free zone! These peoples have had their world end without recourse to some big old story about ultimate good vs ultimate evil. Their spiritualities are bigger than that.

Thank you for being with me here, on the edge of things! Ma te wa.

Further: Julian Brave Noisecat has a website with links to his writings. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/11/james-mooney-recordings-ghost-dance-songs/ is the link for James Mooney’s 1894 recordings of Ghost Dance songs, and a useful article. Do read Amitav Ghosh, “The Nutmeg’s Curse”; it is an exquisite and humane work. You write best when you love the world!

The photo is “The view from the tower of the City Hall (Rathaus) southwards over the destroyed city of Dresden with the “Bonitas” sculpture (Allegory of Goodness)”. It is by Richard Peter.

The painting is Paul Nash “We Are Making a New World”, 1918.

CW: Rolling Stones joke

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An extra special welcome back to the Prince of Darkness, Lord of the Material World, Ruler of Hell and all-time fun guy: SATAANN!!! (\m/ \m/ horns are thrown, dry ice fills the room, Black Metal music plays, and Satan appears).

Me: Kia Ora Koutou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie. And a hellishly warm welcome back to you, Satan. Today I want to cover modern and contemporary Satanisms, talk about who actually follows you, and raise a serious issue with regard to the Cosmic War.

Satan: Some would say it is in the modern era that I really come into my own. Rationalism, humanism and Enlightenment values did not get rid of me. I got fatter on folk beliefs, Romanticism and eventually actual Satanists worshiping me, which was a twist I had not expected.

Me: Haven’t people always worshiped you then? What about the old image of the sorcerer, the magician treating with unholy powers to gain power for themselves? The Faustian bargain?

Satan: Do your homework. Those magicians were high-minded. They were prepared to work with demons, or beings that were considered to be demons by those who misunderstood them. But their aims weren’t Satanic. They were technicians of power. They knew if you got the stars right and said the right things using all the right tools, you got what you wanted. Mostly they wanted wisdom. They were the descendants of those Zoroastrian magi you like so much. They would have been horrified to think of themselves as Satanists. And on the dark side, if you like, if you look at the grimoires, the spell books from the early modern period, they are spells for manipulating people or harming people. But this is farmhouse magic. Folk magic. It is no worse than fighting or stealing or any of the other non-magical things people do.

Me: Fair enough. I have before me my copy of The Grimorium Verum, supposedly written in 1517, is notoriously evil. It contains spells for things that to me seem trivial, like “Secret for travelling twenty miles an hour”, and how to win at dice, and stop a dog from barking, and not be afraid of fire. Along with the more serious things like resuscitating the dead, and calling up demons, much of it done in the name of God. It is bad magic; the methods are gory and violent and often unnecessary. It is worldly stuff, as you say. But it could kill people or mess them up, if you tried it.

Satan: It could mess up the person trying it, you mean! But murder kills people, obviously, and straightforward murder and theft and assault and fraud and so on are much more common. You don’t need the blood of six different animals and a prayer to a saint and a talisman when a blunt instrument would do the trick. Traditionally I am in the magic spell, OK, but I am also in the weapon and the fists. I am in the bad things people do. I really began during the early days of Christianity by tempting saints and the holy. Then I was everywhere, tempting everyone to licentiousness and vice, and also to heresy. And I became a king, the ruler of hell, in medieval times, with hosts of lesser demons beneath me, a parody of heaven.

Me: This brings me to whether or not people believed in you and worshiped you. As opposed to people saying that other people worshiped you. It was the poor and marginalised who were accused of worshiping you. It was always other people, not good folks like us, whoever we are. I am back to Norman Cohn and his books about medieval nocturnal ritual fantasies and Jews and witches and people out of place. Then we come to the early modern period, and the birth of science, which was also weirdly the renaissance of magick among the ruling classes, and also the beginnings of humanism and rationalism. How did you deal with that, then?

Satan: Hah! That was a good time to be the master of chaos. The Black Plague was fun. The breaking up of Christianity was fun, with those old Protestants fighting among themselves. Martin Luther was one of my favourites: he famously threw his ink well at one of my demons. I was everywhere! Sowing discord. Preying on the grieving and the resentful. And the witch hunts, great stuff. All the rubbish people said about each other, all the betrayal and the accusations, such fun. Hundreds of people were killed for it. For nothing. It might have been the birth of the Enlightenment, but for me it was the birth of new ideas about how I might work in the world, not through temptation of holy people into sin or heresy, but through messing with the fabric of society, making scandals and accusations spread, causing social madness.

Me: Were there any actual Satanists, though? We know that people were tortured into confessing to witchcraft, but were they Satanists? Heretics, and you have to remember how seriously people took heresy on all sides, how they were accused of being satanic by their enemies, but none of them said they were Satanists, quite the opposite. And then there are the genuine magical practitioners. Even into the modern period, cunning folk had a neutral role in Britain, for example. They could heal and harm. They were magicians for hire. They were not quite society, but not aside from it either. And none of them claimed to be Satanists.

Satan: Well, no, but as I pointed out, if you had bothered to listen, belief in me is not necessary and sometimes not even desirable.

But here I am reminiscing again, an old prince of darkness having a little fun hre and there. So, the Enlightenment. I stopped appearing in the world, at about the same time that God stopped appearing in the world, and I became a part of the human psyche. You could say we both set up residence in the human heart. That is where I thrive now. I am in all the petty vices, because most people are incapable of the big vices. And in the big vices and the big events too. Someone wise said a long time ago, that I drove a tank with a general’s rank, while the blitzkrieg rained, and the bodies stank. Don’t know who said that, presumably a virtuous and abstemious soul. But they got it right, whoever they were.

Me: Whoever they are. That virtuous and abstemious soul is still miraculously alive.

Satan: (nods head sagely) Ah, due to all the virtue and abstemiousness probably. Damn me, I hate those people.

Me: Are you driving the tank? Are you behind great world events as the conservative Christians, and The Zoroastrians and the Muslims too for that matter, would say? Are you manipulating world leaders and so on? Are you a puppet master pulling the strings? Or are you more in our hearts tempting us and leading us astray? Or both? I watched this program called “Evil” on TV. The idea is a priest, a psychologist and a technician, who is of course the sceptic, investigate strange and unworldly events on behalf of the Catholic Church to find out if there are demons behind them. It starts out as a monster of the week thing, where sometimes there are no demons, but it ends up with demons and Satan worshippers everywhere and layers of demonic evil within the Catholic Church and society, and at that point I gave up because it got ridiculous.

Satan: That is amusing! You know in early Southwest Asia, the answer was always demons. Mesopotamian literature is full of the little buggers. Got sick? Demons. Fallen out with your best friend? Demons. Died? The demons really got you good. Demons were everywhere, and the little buggers needed to be constantly contained and placated and just generally taken into account. Demons were kind of natural forces, just hostile to humans, like germs. They were not yet freighted with the idea of a grand evil. That came with Zoroastrianism, and I was born as Angra Mainyu, later to be called Ahriman. I have never been an aggregate of demons, I developed as my own entity, and by the medieval period I came into my own as king of Hell, with demons arrayed beneath me. As for being behind world events, you know there are people who see me everywhere. Everywhere! I think you call them Republicans, but I have also heard them called fundamentalists and evangelicals and so on. People like the lovely Paula White, senior advisor to the White House and Donald Trump’s personal spiritual advisor, whom I don’t doubt he sorely needs. Damn me I love Paula! And I love all of those guys, they just magnify my name and insert me into every goddam narrative. I am perfectly happy with that. The chaos goblin in me loves it. You could argue that I am more important than Jesus! Why am I saying that? Not just because I want to blaspheme. Think about it: these guys can get by without someone to worship, they could unbolt Jesus from the schema, or just put anyone else in there, but they can’t get by without someone to hate. Back in the day it was communists. Communists were literally demonised. Then it became liberals. They don’t see liberals as just the opposition or even the enemy, but as the ultimate enemy, the demonic enemy, who must be totally vanquished. Kamala Harris is a Jezebel spirit, and so on. You know I am behind the woke left?

Me: No!! I am appalled! After all I am your favourite libtard! You can’t tell me that!

Satan: (snickers evilly) That’s not what I say, it’s what they say. Was Jesus king of the Jews? Jesus never said that. It was not what Jesus said, it was what they said. I just stand back and hold their beers.

Me: Ok I get it. You really are a piece of shit.

Satan: Thank you, I do my best.

Me: I want to talk about how you exist in this secular age. Because it is a secular age, in the west, even in the USA. If you aren’t behind world events, if you are in fact fighting the Cosmic War mostly in the hearts of human people, then I suppose you do it by messing with people’s moral decisions. CS Lewis is often referred to here, because he was a Christian writer responding to increased secularisation in the middle of the twentieth century. He wrote a book called “The Screwtape Letters” which you really should read. It is written as a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his noob nephew. Here is a quote:

“You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy (God). It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

So here is the issue. What is going on here is that people fall into your sway not by worshiping you, just by being weak and lazy and boring and pathetic, or just being unaware. It’s a secular age. People don’t even believe in you. It is like you are nowhere and everywhere at once. But I would have it that as belief in God declined, belief in you declined also. It is hard to fight the Cosmic War in hearts that are not troubled by the need for theological consolation.

Satan: So, show me some souls that do worship me. They won’t be measly things like the ones in the quote above. They will be grand souls, worthy of what it takes to be mine.

Me: Ok, let’s start with actual Satanists. Firstly, I will deliberately and maliciously conflate Satan and Lucifer even though I understand there are differences, because they are functionally the same here. Most importantly, I am going to set aside the Satanic Panic, and the QAnon movement. If anyone sees you everywhere, it’s that lot. But we can agree that there were no groups of Satanists sexually abusing them and eating them in the 1980s, and we can also agree that there are no Satanists among politicians and celebrities who drink the blood of kidnapped children now. That is one of the “So they say” things, right? It doesn’t happen, but because some people think it happens, it makes you look more important. Right?

Satan: (sniggers evilly).

Me: (With side eye) I will take that as a concession. Ok, the biggest two Satanic organisations in the world are the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple. The former is the organisation formed by Anon Lavey in the 1960’s. He wrote the Satanic Bible, which I actually found in my public library recently, bless them. His Church of Satan used the aesthetics of horror movies along with the ideas of Ayn Rand quoted wholesale. So, the Church leans right politically, towards a sort of hard libertarianism and lots of individual responsibility and hyperindividuality. It is still going today. Now, the Satanic Temple is essentially a leftie civil rights agitprop group. They protest in fun ways against Christian teaching in schools and Christians being exclusive in public places, and they support survivors of the repressed memory school of therapy, and ex addicts. They also have an abortion clinic. They are always in litigation of some sort, fighting for the separation of church and state.

Neither of these Satanist organisations believe in Satan. They both see Satan as a figure of liberation and transgression, and they reinterpret the stories about Satan in a way where Satan is the benefactor of humanity. They are worldly sorts. They are happy materialists. This kind of Satanism has its history in the romantic Satanism of the early nineteenth century. Poets and writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley saw Satan as a liberatory character, especially for women. You could say some of the earliest feminists were Satanists. And they of course were influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Lucifer, who is basically Satan, is humanised. He represents our drive towards pride and independence and individuality – and power! Romantic Satanism asks what would happen if we gave these impulses their due. If we pretended Satan was real and then took the pretence seriously. What would happen if women took power seriously? What if Eve did the right thing, eating the fruit and bringing humanity to consciousness? It’s not an uncommon belief.

We can thus establish that romantic Satanists didn’t believe in you, and neither do these others who use Satan as a figure of transgression and liberation, such as the Laveyan Satanists. Satan is a name for the id, perhaps, or our secret desires. They might hold elaborate ceremonies and develop the right sort of aesthetic, but they are not worshiping you. They are worshiping themselves.

Then there are Satanists who are theistic or traditional Satanists. They believe in Satan in that they see Satan as an objective entity outside of themselves. It is hard to determine the extent to which they actually worship Satan. They might see Satan as a kind of psychic role model. They might also have Satan as part of a generally pagan pantheon. They might practise demonolatry and work with demons. I think the relationship tends to be transactional; they ask the powerful entity for something and give something in return. Often what they want is the same thing magicians have always wanted. Wisdom, knowledge, power to affect the world Anyway, to the issue of theistic or traditional Satanists, there are some organisations around. The Temple of Set are a proper offspring of the Church of Satan. and they are theistic, although they see Satan as the Egyptian god Set. There are many other small groups, mostly online; the internet has done its usual thing and become a source of the most wondrous diversity. There are also tragic examples of lone young men doing very nasty things because they want to be Satanists. And there are lone practitioners.

The magical work required to be a practising Satanist is hard. It is often a slog and it requires real discipline over years, and it is usually done alone. It is not for everybody and it’s not supposed to be. I don’t think theistic Satanists usually worship Satan exactly. Their influences are really diverse: Wicca, Enochian magic, Kabbalah, Gnosticism. They might consider Satan as part of a pantheon of demons or higher entities. Or as a demiurge, in Gnosticism. Satan might be a real entity, but what do you do with Satan? Respect, negotiate, request favours, ask advice, dedicate magical work to – it’s not worship, it’s theurgy. Satan is what you want to be when you grow up. If you act like Satan, free and powerful, you become like Satan.

Satan: What about Aleister Crowley? He was my guy, if anyone was.

Me: I don’t know. He seldom mentioned Satan. He certainly lived a life you would expect a Satanist to live, however, his aim was different. In the end he wanted to merge with the divine, a mystical aim, whereas the theistic Satanist aims to be a free cosmic individual outside of any influence of the divine. What do you think?

Satan: He was my guy, because his aim does not interest me or benefit me. His methods and his effect on the world around him were mine. He lived like he was mine even if he wanted something else. Conflicted desires are my bread and butter.

Me: I am getting the picture. You are the evil in the human heart. You are studied ignorance and cynicism and selfishness, and you cause death to the human spirit. It is debatable where or not you made evil, or you are just its personification. But who thinks they are evil? I think this is a really serious question. Satanists don’t think they are evil. They might think they are spiritual edgelords. They want to be transgressive and push the bounds of individual morality in order to know themselves better, and they want to be free from the constraints of others whom they consider to be inferior to them, but I don’t think they think of themselves as evil, unless they are psychopaths.

Satan: You don’t need to be a Satanist to be a psychopath. My point is always, why magic someone to death when a good blow to the head will usually do it.

Me: True, and I have met a few psychopaths and none of them are Satanists. There are a few people in this world whose intent I think is evil. By evil I don’t mean just very wrong or badly mistaken. Evil is a special category. I think it is quite rare. There are people in this world who I believe are fundamentally wrong and who behave very badly and want to harm others. But those people don’t think of themselves as evil. Often, they think they are the good ones. Today, we have hugely destructive billionaires who somehow identify with Luke Skywalker. Without taking the piss, they think of themselves as part of the small band of virtuous rebels. Presumably, everyone else in the world is Stormtroopers. Often, they think they are victims, even. I have had many people before me who have done very bad things, and they blame their childhoods, or try to say their intentions were good, or that they didn’t know what they were doing. Nobody has ever said to me, I did it because I am evil. So, and I am working up to a question here, what is the use of you? So far in human history you have not persuaded any but the very tiniest few that evil is desirable.

Satan: Some people have flirted with the idea, at least. They have a fascination with evil. The French philosopher and economist George Battaile had a thing for the Chinese form of death by torture known as slow slicing, or ling chi. He displayed a photo of a victim undergoing this on his wall. True story. Have you seen it, you might like it. Also, think of all the true crime stories and the police procedurals and serial killer nasties. Humans love them! You love this stuff. You may not be evil, but you love evil. You love me.

Me: I have seen that photo. I do not recommend it. Battaile had a thing for limit experiences, as he called them. He believed that severe pain led to transcendence. You can replicate that by ultra distance running or fasting. Limit experiences open you up to self-knowledge. Lethal pain, transcended, leads the sufferer to an ecstatic state. I think some of the early Christian church saints would understand that perfectly. They sought out the most terrible privations to become truly holy – and they tell us they fought you, Satan, and your minions, every step of the way. So, weird shit, but nothing to do with evil. As for the true crime stuff, I can’t watch it. I asked someone who watched a lot of it what they get out of it. They said they like to watch justice done. There’s that, but there are also the moral lessons, like don’t step out of line, especially if you are female, so the message is conservative. Order is restored at the end, once the perp is caught. Same message as the old slasher movies, I guess, or the urban myths about staying in your lane. So yes, I suppose we are excited by the thought of evil, but we other evil people. We see evil people as monsters. They are not like us, not at all. We could never do that, oh my gosh no, and so on. We are the good ones. We pay our taxes. So really, old friend, you have no leg to stand on. Very few people actually worship you, hardly anyone thinks of themselves as evil even if they do awful things, and all you can do is mess with people’s heads.

Satan: Well, that is damning, if you like. Except I have the last laugh, as always. Because you are trying to end the Cosmic War, is that right? And the Cosmic War goes on and on. Most end-of-the-world scenarios are secular these days. They are about climate catastrophe or the end of civilization or nuclear war. I am invisible there, and I like it. I can sit back and hold everybody’s coats while they fight to the death. It won’t be long now until the whole earth is turned into hell, with no effort from me, and I get to rule over it all. With that, I think we can end this conversation, can’t we? It’s been a delight, as usual, not.

(Satan swirls his cloak over himself and disappears in the puff of black greasy smoke, accompanied by snivelling minions, Black Metal music, demonic laughter etc etc.)

Me: (sighs) Well, folks, that was the prince of darkness, shoring up the fragments of his ruins, as TS Eliot would say. This is the major adversary, without whom we would not have the Cosmic War. If there is any further reason to abandon this old, messy, toxic Story, getting rid of Satan should do it.

Thank you for hanging in there, some of it was a bit sticky I am afraid. I hope to have you on board next time, ma te wa.

Further:

- For fun, Dr Angela Puca in her video interview with Dr Per Faxneld is great on the history of modern Satanism.

- Dyrendal, Asbjørn, James R. Lewis, and Jesper Aagaard Petersen. The Invention of Satanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Dyrendal is always good on new religions and conspiracy theories.

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie. I have ongoing family issues which keep me from writing, but I will attempt to continue when I have the space. So: on to The Action Bible.

I found The Action Bible when looking for actual Bibles, in the Christian Superstore near my home. Of course I was immediately captivated by the cover. The battle begins!

This is volume one of a set, and you can buy the whole thing in hardback. I don’t intend to do that. I think I have the tone of the thing right here.

The front matter includes the statement “This story was based on Scripture passages, including, but not limited to….” And then it lists a series of Bible references. Then we begin. Lucifer, who is already miserable, and Michael are in Heaven, pondering the impending creation of the universe. Lucifer is worried that He (not sure if He is God, or Jesus here) will stop loving him once he has this new creation. Both angels are swole as, and wearing a lot of very cool armour for some reason. Michael looks Latino, which I rather like, his swarthy handsomeness contrasting with Lucifer’s blond-gold, slightly haughty look. Lucifer remains disgruntled as Jesus creates everything, (yes Jesus, for which there is some evidence in John 1:1-5, but maybe not conclusive), and Jesus’ offer to Lucifer of being the guardian of this new world just irritates him, as it seems Jesus has put the human Adam in charge, giving him all the important powers like naming things and running the show. Then Eve is created, and she is hot. The age range for The Action Bible is 8-12 but some of it shows the artist’s background in Marvel and DC because the relationship between Adam and Eve is more M than PG. Meanwhile, in heaven, the Cosmic War really kicks off as Lucifer rebels and takes a bunch of angels with him. A fight takes place between Michael and Lucifer, and their followers, where weapons are drawn, and I don’t know why everyone was armed for bear in the original heaven before the war even started, but never mind, they all look pretty good slashing and thrusting, and they are all definitely blokes. No DEI in heaven. Then God intervenes, and banishes Lucifer and his followers to the nether regions. A great fissure in heaven opens up, and they plunge into it, where they change from their handsome angel selves into monsters. Lucifer declares he is now named Beezelbul. He sets out to corrupt Adam and Eve. He takes the form of a rather cute dragon, and persuades Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. I hate to say this, kids, but the forbidden fruit looks a lot like a ball sac. And inside it’s like pomegranate, which some people though the forbidden fruit actually was. Anyway, Eve starts to be mean to Adam, showing that the effects of the fruit has begun, and then Jesus discovers what has happened. He is wrathful, but he is also helpful. He sews them clothes, which Eve displays coquettishly, and then gently shows them the exit, and tells them he loves them and that they can always find him in their hearts. Adam and Eve make their way into a world of travail and difficulty, make a house and till the land, and have a baby, and the book ends with them worshipping the Lord, while cuddling their baby, in a demon-invested night. That was a typo, I meant demon-infested, but I rather liked the typo so I will include it. The final Bible quotes include:

“Revelation 12:12 King James Version (KJV) Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

Thus, we have well and truly begun the Cosmic War. And even at that very start of humanity, seemingly we are nearing its end, because the devil’s time is short. We are in the same place we always are, the eternal end.

So, I am reading this and apart from loving the artwork I am going “Nooo! Not in the Bible! This is rehashed Milton, this is not the Bible! This is a medieval fantasy, this is not the Bible!” Also, it jumps around from Genesis to John to Revelation, which is a common way of arguing about the Bible, but it is not the Bible. This is not the Bible. It is based on an idea of the Bible. It is not even apologetics, it is just based on an idea of the Bible filtered through many cultural, post-Biblical sources. I think you get my point. Not the Bible. On the back cover it says “Experience the creation story as you’ve never seen it before” – and that particular claim is the most accurate thing about it.

How influential is this gorgeous piece of trash? The Wikipedia entry is brief, but states “The Action Bible has been translated into 29 languages and is distributed in 32 countries by David C. Cook. An excerpt from the Bible, The Story of Jesus, is available in more than 50 languages and has been distributed in more than 51 million copies in 97 countries. It is also available as a mobile app from Youth for Christ”. Amazon rates it No. 4 in Christian devotional books for children, and No. 8 in Educational and Non-fictional books for children. So it is out there. A lot. And the graphics are great, and Eve is cute, and all the angels are ripped. (You can probably tell I am not an expert on graphic novels, although I adore Grant Morrison’s “Invisibles” series with its high strangeness and its low paranoia.)

So, does it matter that it is Not The Bible?

Yes, it does matter, because it claims to be The Action Bible, which I at first thought was a version of the Bible like the KJV or the NIV. You shouldn’t claim to be something you’re not. Also, it is squarely aimed at young people, and it is a shitty way of teaching the Bible. It means that future Bible reading may be skewed as readers try to find The Action Bible in actual Bible versions. And if they ever meet a theologian, they will be laughed at. Also, if you are a young person introduced to Christianity by The Action Bible you will be confused when you start to read the real thing. If the Bible is to be taken seriously, this is not the way to do it.

And, no it doesn’t matter, because modern Christian thought is a glorious accretion of ideas from so-called heretical sources, and Greek philosophy, and the development of theology throughout the ages, and folklore from the cultures that Christians came from and encountered. Here is an example, straight from the book. When God casts Lucifer and his followers out of heaven, they change on the way down. During the descent, they start off looking as they did, beautiful angelic winged men, and gradually they become monsters on the way down. Where they end up is not particularly well-defined; it just looks like the bottom of a pit. Presumably hell with the pitchforks and so on come later. But this scene is based beautifully, if not consciously, on a painting, “The Fall of the Rebel Angels” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in 1562. I don’t know if the artist, Sergio Cariello, was aware of the painting, but the idea is there, and it makes sense. It is in the history, along with Lucifer himself, and the Archangel Michael, and heaven and hell, none of which are exactly Biblical.

Of course, the reason I am reviewing this book is that from the cover onwards we are introduced to the Cosmic War. “The battle begins”. I think this is just unfortunate. There is a lot more to the Abrahamic religions than the Cosmic War. We need to stop it. We need better ideas, and fortunately there are many around. Thank you for being here, if you got this far. Ma te wa.

In the near future, an underground group makes tiny nano-drones, too small to be detected. They use them to bring down private jets. As we all know, private jets use a disproportionate amount of the world’s fossil fuels. For the billionaire class, there is maybe a one in fifty chance that their jet will be taken out. Is it worth flying?

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with Karen Effie.

Cli-fi is generally pretty doomy, as you can imagine, but not always. Here I talk about four books by three authors, that express hope for the future, hope for humans in a degraded future world. The example above is from Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future”, written in 2020. Cory Doctorow’s “The Lost Cause”, from 2023, is set in a future where climate disaster has been very destructive, but humans act heroically when they join together. Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents”, written in the 1990’s, appears precognizant now, and is set in a post-apocalyptic USA. Also of interest is “The Fifth Sacred Thing” by Starhawk (1993). And I do recommend reading Amitov Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement” alongside any of these books; while it is non-fiction it is a beautiful introduction to the issue of why we can’t think properly about climate catastrophe.

Let’s start with Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Ministry for the Future”. The book begins with a harrowing description of a heatwave in India which reaches wet-bulb temperatures. Frank, an aid worker, finds himself the only survivor in his town. This is not so futuristic. We are there already. As reported on 15 April, the heatwaves in India and Pakistan started early this year. Parts of Baluchistan are expected to reach 49 degrees Celsius. That’s like living in Death Valley. This will test the limits of human survivability in a country where tens of thousands of people have died of heat-related conditions over the last few decades. The heat wave season started early in Europe, with temperatures in Spain at 47 degrees. These are killing temperatures.

Back to the book. In response to this obviously climate-driven disaster, The Ministry for the Future is formed by the United Nations, and the story moves between its head, Mary Murphy, and Frank, now traumatised and frustrated by the world’s inaction. Much of the action takes place around the tables of the world’s decision-makers, but there is also an underground element, like the illegal group that designs the nano-drones. In the end, industries are controlled, tech is developed, economies are changed, and complete collapse is mitigated by human ingenuity. Technology plays a part. India goes against international law and opinion, and uses its air force to add particles to the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. After the disaster at the beginning of the book, nobody blames the government of India. Much of the book is set in Switzerland, where the Ministry for the Future has its headquarters. Switzerland uses public transport and new housing techniques to lower its carbon emissions. It is a remnant from before the catastrophe, where humans can still climb the mountains and experience proper seasons. The refugee crisis features prominently. Robinson does not shy away from the difficulties, both for the refugees and their European host countries. I liked how this book is not America-centric. Robinson is one of few left wing science fiction writers. This is a worthwhile book, even with Barack Obama’s recommendation. And: a mention is made of Hinewai, a wonderful nature reserve near where I live!

Now to Cory Doctorow and his “The Lost Cause”. Doctorow is a prolific writer and cultural critic. Most popularly, he is known for the idea of “enshittification”, where social media begin by pleasing everyone, then they please their advertisers, and then they please no one, and then they die. Anyone remember Facebook?

This novel is named for the “lost cause” of the Confederates, being the American Civil War. The cover has a version of the “Don’t tread on me” Gadsden flag. But the lost cause is also the world. The tale is told by Brooks, an enthusiastic nineteen-year-old who lives in Burbank California with his Maga-loving Gramps. Brooks thrives with the Green New Deal that was passed a few years ago. Most paid work is guaranteed and is involved in good causes, such as caring for the elderly and building houses for the unhoused. Gramps belongs to an aging cadre of angry men, who want to turn the clock back. The Magas are stockpiling weapons and plotting performative violence, but they really want to take back the culture and the government. Gramps dies, leaving Brooks his house. Brooks wants to turn the house into an apartment block, in order to house more people. Meanwhile a caravan of refugees from parts of the United States that have become unliveable is heading to Burbank. They are made welcome, by all except the Maga crowd. These old guys resort to violence at times to further their ends; Gramps has a secret cache of gold, Krugerrands and weapons waiting for the coming civil war. The presence of the refugees sharpens this divide between the young, multicultural libs and the old Maga men. Wildfires break out, and Brooks decides to demolish Gramps’ old house and build his apartment block, essentially under the cover of the fires. He is helped by able refugees and his friends, who have all been involved in rescuing and restoration after climate emergencies. So really, this book is about how to build an apartment building in three days, in the middle of a wildfire. It is as wild and heroic as Brooks himself. It has a sunny, solarpunk feel.

So, gender minorities are widely accepted, food is multi-ethnic and local and vego and lovingly described, sexual relationships are carefully and consensually negotiated, weed is legal, local democracy involves the whole population. It is a bit like permanent Occupy Wall Street as I remember wanting it to be. People cycle and walk. Telehealth is the norm. Young folks are arranged into “affinity groups”. Working for the good of the community is high status. It is also a polycrisis. The climate catastrophe is seldom mentioned as such, partly because it is not yet politically acceptable to do so, or it is taken for granted. But it is hot as hell, and parts of the USA are unliveable. There is also the Flotilla, a group of blockchain inspired (anyone remember blockchain?) billionaires who defy any national laws by sailing around the world proselytising their particular brand of uber capitalism. But the immediate threat is the Maga guys, who at one stage try to take over the government.

Whereas “The Ministry for the Future” is about the international picture, “The Lost Cause” is very local. It is about how much change a place can take, and how people cope with that. It is exuberant and sweet, a bit like its protagonist.

Finally, the magisterial Octavia Butler. Her two books “The Parable of the Sower” and “The Parable of the Talents” are best read together. Octavia is nowadays famous for her prescience. These books were written in the 1990s, and “Sower” starts in 2025. Like, now. The main character is Lauren Olamina, who lives in a Californian gated community that seems impoverished to me, but is safer and richer than the absolute degradation and grind taking place outside the walls. Olamina turns away from her father’s Baptist faith and gradually develops her own: Earthseed. Earthseed has a God of change. God is change. God shapes everything, and we shape God.

“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”

The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. Olamina sees the earth as spent by climate catastrophe. The dream of space travel provides purpose, a future to work towards, and an escape.

Octavia Butler did not see Earthseed as a viable religion. But some do; there exists at least one small community living by Earthseed principles.

In “Sower”, Lauren Olamina, now aged 18, suffers through the catastrophic destruction of her community and is cast upon the roadside. She heads north, like most refugees. The context is not happy. United States politics is weak and divided. Corporate towns are springing up, where people can go to work for housing and food, but no wages. Children are trafficked. Slavery and indentured labour are becoming common as the rich get richer and the poor get much, much poorer. Social norms are changing too; even within Olamina’s gated community teenagers marry very early and have babies very young. Outside, different drugs ravage and kill. Gangs are violent and fluid. You report crime to the police, and they will charge you money and then maybe rob or arrest you. Cannibalism is sometimes the only option in places where there is no food. On the road, Olamina develops Earthseed further as she grows in experience. She picks up other kindred spirits along the way, including her love Taylor Bankole, a much older man. Bankole has his own land, in the north of California. The group travels there and settles in a new place where it sometimes even rains. They call the new place Acorn.

The sequel, “The Parable of the Talents” is written from the point of view of Larkin, the daughter of Lauren Olamina. It also draws on the notes of Olamina and Bankole. Acorn develops into a homesteading community, keeping away from the mainstream. A new president is elected. He is a white Christian nationalist with a preaching background, and his motto is “Make America Great Again”. His political speeches are sermons of fire and brimstone. The corporate towns grow in size and influence. “Crusading” bands of thugs wearing white crosses burn farms and kill families they consider heathens; Jarrett denies responsibility but does not condemn them. They capture children and send them to be adopted into Christian households. They enslave adults, with electronic collars that induce enough pain to kill. Acorn is raided by such a brutal group of men. They take the children away, enslave the adults and abuse them. Some die, including Bankole, Larkin’s father. Acorn becomes a prison. After nearly two years of this, Olamina and what is left of her community escape. She starts again, and makes converts to Earthseed on the road. Eventually she attracts the attention of wealthy patrons. Meanwhile, Larkin is raised by a Christian couple who do not love her or engage with her, but she is at least more or less safe. As a young woman, she meets up with Olamina’s brother, now a charismatic preacher with the Make America Great organization. He tells her that her mother is dead. Larkin lives a creative life, and then she discovers Olamina is alive and meets up with her. The two do not get along. The latter part of the book is less realized. Somehow the political and ecological disasters seem to have become resolved, and Olamina’s Earthseed becomes influential and wealthy. The book ends with the first humans beginning the long journey to the stars.

Octavia Butler’s works are not precisely cli-fi; she earned her chops as a science fiction writer, and she wrote before we had the common understanding we have now of the climate catastrophe we face. The degraded environment plays a part in her writing; it is hot, parts of the southern USA have become unsustainable, there is a flow of refugees heading north. The political situation is more prominent. But her writing is undergoing a resurgence as her prescience is more apparent. For me, it had never occurred to me to look at slavery (outright chattel slavery or indentured labour) as a flow-on effect of the polycrisis, but of course it is. Slavery is not in my historical bones as it is Butler’s. The first book begins in 2025: Octavia’s view of 2025 is of the remnants of civil society under siege, rampant privatisation, extreme poverty and violence. The sequel ends in the mid 2030’s, with the situation calmed and the first attempt to launch humans into space permanently under way. She did not predict that space flight would be the preserve of ego-struck tech billionaires who don’t actually care about humanity or the earth. It’s called space flight as in fleeing as well as flying!

Me, I don’t care for it. I love the earth dearly, I love ordinary reality and its gifts, I love the bellbird I hear outside in the rain and the chilly breeze moving the kowhai tree at my window, and the brave spinach I planted from seed in a pot, and I know all of these are doors to wisdom. I also know that when Jeff Bezos and co talk about humanity they don’t mean me, any more than Curtis Yarvin means me. Or anyone I know and care about. What Octavia Butler did not predict was that in 2025 the world would be run by 12-year-old boys who have not developed empathy.

So yes, there is positive, optimistic cli-fi and some of it is well respected and popular. I think this is important. We need to think about options beyond what the mainstream presents to us, and cli-fi provides us with some of these. We need other stories to tell if we are trying not to tell the old ones. We need other ways of thinking about the future apart from the terrible old Cosmic War and its troubling implications.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you will have a go at the books above. Ma te wa!

Further: Adam Becker, “More Everything For Ever”, about AI and the tech future and how the tech bros want to control humanity. Adam is an astrophysicist, which helps. Also Gil Duran’s blog “The Nerd Reich” is interesting on this and related topics. Also Brian Merchant “Blood in the Machine” on Substack. Hammers up!

I have also had enough space to be able to consider one hopeful thing. Here is is, fairly roughly, to begin with.

A person has a fight with their partner and the partner leaves. They watch, crying, as the car pulls away, and then they fling themselves into the traffic. Someone calls the police about them, because they are thrashing about on the road, and the police bring them to see me. What else could I do, the person says. I had no choice. Another person can only find quiet from their distress while fully restrained in a cell. Another pretends to have a seizure in the doorway of the emergency department waiting room. Now, this one is telling. Another person in a similar plight says to me, but what do you do when you are upset? I tell them, I cry a bit, and I eat chips, and I sit on the bed for a while. They think about this. But, they reply, it’s not enough.

When is it enough? When is there finally congruence, when the distress, outrage, despair, and grief, is finally matched by the response of the world? This need for congruence can be endless. No, it’s not enough.

A couple of things. I have not mentioned mental illness, gender or diagnosis because this is not that. The stories are real. By “the response of the world” is often directly meant particular people or particular situations. A person texted their ex-partner “the shottie’s locked and loaded” and was very upset when the ex-partner called the police, because they thought this text would elicit a reconciliation. That was weirdly specific. But I think behind this is a deep desire for a congruent response from THE WORLD. People. Everyone. Society. The environment. The situation. The weather. The World.

Surely, when I cry it could at least rain.

Here is WH Auden’s famous poem.

'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone'

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W H Auden

Auden is right! The World should mourn with me! When I cry, shouldn’t it at least rain?

When I had my first sexual experience, I thought the next day that it would show. People would know. Not just the girls at school, but people in the street would somehow know. It should have been obvious. I had nudged the world somehow, and it had nudged back. The lack of response from The World taught me about that clumsy term, mentalization. The World does not respond, because it does not know. If I wanted it to know, I would have to tell it.

When I cry, this is why it doesn’t rain.

Magicians know better. They can make it rain by an effort of magical Will. They can nudge the rainy bits of The World and the rain comes. They can Speak to the rain spirits and the rain comes. They can slide into the spaces where the rain lives and coax it by probability into existence. We love this stuff. When a service magician does this work, we love it, because they are working in congruence. The community needs rain, the rain can save lives and crops. It is a kind of community congruence. The need is great, the desire is great, it is congruent with the magical action, which is difficult and involves a considerable spending of magical energy, and the World responds in kind. I have not been taught weather magic. It is not ethical for me. There are always consequences, damnable things.

What I have been taught is that all this is very childish. It is the way children think at about five or six. It is a monumental failure of mentalization. That’s a clunky term that roughly means being able to think about the thoughts and feelings of oneself and others, and being able to balance the self and others, external and internal thinking, and feelings of others and oneself. To mentalize well, we need to be able to imagine our own thoughts and feelings and those of others. We need to “read the room” of life. Failures of mentalization are caused by stymied upbringings or stress or mental illness. Small failures happen all the time, with misunderstandings, but we can usually set them right. Bigger failures include thinking others can, or should, know our thoughts, or that we can influence others by thinking. All the examples given above are failures of mentalization, where people could not navigate misunderstandings and could not mange their feelings, and where feelings became overwhelming needs for congruence.

Auden’s poem is a monumental failure of mentalization, a grandiose, childlike demand that the World see and know his pain. We know better, as adults. We know that nobody can see and know our feelings. We cannot nudge the World with magic. We are small minds, and the World does not care and does not respond to our distress. The drive for congruence, for a response that matches our distress, leads us nowhere and is endless and destructive.

In the faith tradition I came out of, I was taught that detachment was a vital virtue. We should not be reactive to the world, because the world is worth as little as the black in the eye of a dead ant. We should not attend to the problem of congruence. The world does not respond to our distress because it is not worthy of us. We belong to God’s kingdom. Therefore, we need not get distressed about the world, but trust God instead. Our thoughts and emotions are petty things, and we are contingent beings.

I want to meet the problem of congruence in a different way. Let us consider that we are all part of the World and the World is part of us, and that we belong here just as we are, loved and loving, in a perpetual call and response with the World. And by the World I mean all realities, ordinary and non-ordinary, and all the spirits in them, and all the life in death and death in life. Except as we are small and the World is big, our call and the response of the World is never even; we always receive more than we can give. Thus our proper response should be one of gratitude and amazement. And our giving should be inspired.

When I am feeling this kind of divine entanglement with the World, I am very porous. I can stand in a place, I have such an enhanced sense of place at these times, and I can feel the lives of those who have gone before me, and the Story the buildings and the land are telling me. All these lives pass through me and leave something with me as they do so. It’s not pure. I have been known to give offerings to the stranger urban spirits, the spirits of ally ways and the warped trees that grow in the gutters and the drains. Such small rites contain the sense of porousness and stop me getting too full, and also honour it.

What can possibly be wrong with gratitude and amazement? For a start, gratitude and amazement are hardest to access when most needed. I cannot expect someone in the depths of a mental crisis even to begin. Other work needs to be done first. This is what you think about when you are out of the hole of despair. Moreover, it is entirely apolitical. It does not make any account of injustice. It is plainly trite to expect children who are victims of war or disaster to do gratitude exercises. We clearly need a hefty dose of justice and the politics of inclusion. I agree that an injury to one is an injury to all. I suspect privilege is a diminishing thing, however, over the next fifty years it will mean less to most of us. The very useful concept of kyriarchy has points of oppression harming all of us, just some a lot more than others. Within our difficult and terrible situation, I am still not wrong. We can be held, we can have our pain met where it is and healed, we can fulfil our righteous outrage, we can find comfort in grief, all without damaging ourselves mentally. We can engage in this wondrous call and response with the World.

The photo is of an ally way off Cuba St in Wellington. It is a place of power. There are many such places. Be amazed!

Protecting our children is a basic impulse. When we perceive a threat to our children, we respond viscerally and from our deep beings. We also lose our sense of perspective sometimes. And sometimes we are manipulated. Sometimes, it is the children who find themselves on the front line of the Cosmic War.

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with Karen Effie.

This article includes historical and current information about antisemitism.

Last year, my work colleague was greatly enthused about a movie she had seen. Her son had told her the movie had been censored because powerful people didn’t want it shown. Movie theatres wouldn’t show it because of - consequences. (She was vague about this). The makers of the movie had been persecuted. Nevertheless, she was able to see it at a local movie theatre. Like it was an ordinary movie, really. Turns out it was a box office hit, received 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was quite popular really.

The movie was The Sound of Freedom, a movie about a maverick ex US government agent turned child rescuer. It is based on the life of a guy called Tim Ballard, who was a bit controversial with his methods of saving children, and who may have not been quite as effective as he said, but whatever, lots of heroes turn out to be not so much. The movie is described by Rolling Stone as “a superhero movies for dads with brainworms, and the byline goes on:

The QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer

Dearie me. So it was a right wing Christian movie about saving children from evil, and it was strongly supported by conservative churches, who bulk-bought tickets to it, and claimed it was somehow being suppressed. A conspiracy of suppression, saving the children, here we go.

As I have said, the Cosmic War takes place in three places: the metaphysical realm, the physical world, and the human heart. Often, aspects of the Cosmic War happen across all three places. Those who believe in the Cosmic War, fight it through their religious practices, and through their behaviour in this world, and also how they feel, how they make moral decisions and what they prioritize. While God and the devil are duking it out in heaven, individual human people are playing their parts. Remember that the end times are coming very soon, and they have been coming very soon for a few thousand years now, so wherever we are in history, the need for action on behalf of God is urgent.

There is nothing worse than the torture and killing of children. Even back in medieval times, when children were treated like adults much earlier, the torture and killing of children was always the worst thing. Children have always been seen as blameless, even by those who believe we are all born in sin.

This brings us to the nocturnal ritual fantasy, and that is almost as weird as you think it is. Norman Cohn who literally wrote the book on the Cosmic War, (although not from my perspective) wrote about this recurrent conspiracy theory, that the Romans said it about the Christians, and the later Christians said it about heretics, Jews, and “witches”. It is the claim that a secret cabal of marginalized people, who are yet somehow also sometimes quite powerful, meet, usually at night, to plot to overthrow society. As a part of this plot, these members of the cabal abuse, kill and eat children. French writer Guibert of Nogent wrote in 1114 about his local heretics:

Some loose woman lies down for all to watch, and so it is said, uncovers her buttocks, and they present their candles at her from behind; and as soon as the candles are put out, they shout “Chaos” from all sides, and everyone fornicates with whatever person comes first to hand.

After that, if a woman becomes pregnant, the child is killed by being tossed through a fire, and then – remember this bit – bread is made from the ashes. This bread becomes a parody of communion.

The horrible “Malleus Maleficarum” from 1486 also reported that witches would kill and eat children or use their body parts for magic, as part of their orgiastic rituals. This book has a lot to answer for.

Now we come to the notion of Jewish blood libel. This is an interesting example of an obscure and unpleasant idea that has had longstanding reach, and that starts with one particular incident, which we can pinpoint. Here is Michael Barbezat, in “The Public Medievalist”:

These tales began in England with the fabricated story of the kidnap, ritual abuse and murder of the Christian boy William of Norwich, written and elaborated by Thomas of Monmouth between the early 1150s and 1174. In the middle of his imagining of William’s ritual crucifixion, Thomas has the Jews of Norwich pause to remark upon the fact that in the torture and murder of little William they are, finally, just as wicked as Christians expect them to be, saying: “That which they ascribe to us we will inflict on them.” In his write up, Thomas manifested his own negative opinions of Jews by putting them into the very mouths of imaginary Jews he presented as real. This is a circular logic that provides justification for prejudice based upon evidence generated by prejudice.

The belief that Jews tortured Christian children, which has come to be known as the “blood libel”, often featured a sexual component as well. In some versions of the blood libel accusation, kidnapped Christian boys were reportedly circumcised against their wills as depicted in a woodcut of the martyrdom of Simon of Trent in 1475. The Jews supposedly used the blood from this circumcision and other tortures to make the matzos for Passover.

The fact that this never happened did not deter the nocturnal ritual fantasy from having its effects in actual life. Real women died because men in power thought they were witches. Real Jews were further marginalised and persecuted. Bad ideas – well, we live in a world full of the things. They grow.

Let’s move on forward, past the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, past the stories I was told as a child about the Hun spearing babies on their bayonets in World War One, past the Nazi death camps, and we will see how our contemporary examples developed.

Back in the early 1990s, I was a newbie working in child protection. A special event was about to take place. An American police officer and a psychologist were giving a training session about a vast and terrifying network of Satanists in the USA who were kidnapping children and abusing them in bizarre ways. It was the most salacious thing I had ever heard. Some of my more senior colleagues were going to this training. The next day, I asked about it. My colleague told me that the police officer had incontrovertible evidence that this Satanic ritual abuse was taking place. However, the night before the talk, the Satanists had broken into the hotel where he and the psychologist were staying, and destroyed the evidence. My colleague was sincere. She believed this was what had happened. It must have turned the training session into a bit of a squib. Even now I would love to see incontrovertible evidence of Satanic ritual child abuse. (Actually, no, I wouldn’t).

That was the end of my flirtation with Satanic ritual child abuse. Firstly, I did not believe that Satanists had broken into the hotel and stolen the only extant piece of incontrovertible evidence of their heinous activities. I have met a fair few Satanists in my time. They are either way too disorganised, or they would consider it to be beneath them. Secondly, it was a conspiracy too baroque and unlikely to be true. This is a known cost of conspiracism. The more elaborate the conspiracy, the more costly the commitment. The moon landing and 9/11 conspiracies are good examples of this. The number of people who would have to be sworn to secrecy, the number of levels of cover-up, makes the conspiracy less likely.

It was, however, the heyday of the Satanic Panic. It was on TV and everything. Satanists were in heavy metal music (well, true, occasionally, but they don’t bother civilians). Satanists were in everyday communities, and in running daycare centres. Their forms of ritual child abuse weren’t ordinary. Children were disclosing gruesome and frankly unlikely forms of torture to evidential interviewers, social workers and police. Teal Swan, a well-known spiritual influencer and author, now specialises in trauma healing and runs retreats and courses. She claims to have been part of a Satanic cult as a small child, where among other horrors, she was sewn into the carcass of an animal. Swan is interesting in that she bridges the gap between the ritual abuse scare, and the internet age of spiritual and wellness influencing. The Satanic Panic was a recurring conspiracy, the nocturnal ritual fantasy in our daycare centres. At a time when daycare for children was relatively new, conservative commenters were concerned about the changing roles of women and that parenting was losing its grip.

We had our own Satanic Panic here in Aotearoa New Zealand, in 1993. Several staff members of the Civic Creche in Christchurch were accused of sexually abusing children there in bizarre and ritualistic ways, most of which could not have happened. Peter Ellis, one of the creche workers, was the first to be accused. Children were evidentially interviewed, and disclosed that Peter Ellis had sexually abused them in various locations, the he had cut off a boy’s penis and reattached it with Sellotape, that he owned a real giraffe, that he killed children with an axe. He was found guilty based solely on the children’s testimonies and imprisoned, where he died before he was finally exonerated. None of the creche workers were accused of being Satanists or part of a network of abusers. However, the alleged abuse had ritualistic elements, and it occurred at the height of the Satanic Panic. You don’t have to be religious, you see, to be involved in parts of the Cosmic War. The child protection workers were good solid feminists who started with the idea that you believe the children. It was practice wisdom in those days, that children don’t lie about important things. The Satanic Panic became a weird alliance between secular feminists and conservative Christians.

Further back, in the 1970s, movies like The Exorcist and The Omen portrayed a perversion of childhood by Satan. Regan in The Exorcist was vulnerable because she was an innocent child. Damien in The Exorcist had his whole destiny perverted by Satan. The perversion of childhood is especially terrifying. We do not want to be afraid of our children. They must remain innocent.

From the 1970’s onward, the conservative Christian church struggled with liberatory trends, especially for middle class white women. Women were using contraception, exercising their reproductive rights, working outside the home in increasing numbers, filing for divorce. I keep wanting to say the Satanic Panic was a reaction to rapid social change, but so were the Hollywood Catholic horrors, and the cultic milieu of the 1970’s, and the growing conspiracism and cynicism. We have had a lot of change and an increasing sense of precarity, and we hang on to what we know, and that is God, and the family, and our precious children.

Moving along, we come to the Hampstead hoax. This provides a kind of bridge between the Satanic Panic and the more recent panics we call Pizzagate and the QAnon conspiracies. In 2014, the mother of two school children in Hampstead, North London, accused her ex-husband of being the ringleader of a large Satanic paedophile cult, that involved teachers at her children’s school, church figures, and child protection workers. Her children disclosed ritual sexual abuse to the Police, who investigated, but found their elaborate and gruesome disclosures to be entirely untrue. However the audio of the children went out into the internet, which did what it does best. Paedophile hunters came from as far as the USA, and the parents and others in this rather staid community who had been accused by name received credible death threats. Their children were also named as victims. The online and in person persecution of the Hampstead parent community continued until 2022. The mother of the two original children, a wellness influencer, and her partner, who was also complicit in the accusations, had by this time fled the country. They were supported by a computer scientist called Sabine McNeill, who made public the names of the alleged paedophiles and their children. McNeill also fled the country, but was eventually sentenced to nine years in prison. McNeill is interesting to watch. She is very forceful and passionate and often almost tearful when interviewed or testifying in court. She has claimed she speaks for the thousand children kidnapped by paedophiles every month. When confronted by the lack of evidence, she becomes emotional and resorts to her sense of compassion for the children. Compassion for children is all you need, apparently.

2016 saw the Pizzagate conspiracy, where Hillary and Bill Clinton and other top Democrats were accused of trafficking and abusing children out of a pizza restaurant. This is often seen as a precursor to QAnon, which is was a gamified movement that continued to see Hillary Clinton as an evil child trafficker, and most of the “global elite” and the “deep state” trafficking and bleeding children and consuming parts of them. We are back to medieval times here, to witches and the blood libel. QAnon has been so well studied, I will not go into it here, but it has since metastasized into a much more diffuse supermarket of ideas, similar to the spiritual community’s spiritual supermarket, and sometimes overlaps it. Child trafficking conspiracies are part of the general vibe now, but they are joined by vaccine conspiracies and conspiracies about what is here called relationships and sexuality education in schools. Today while walking I saw two signs next to each other, handmade: “Protect Our Children”, and RSE =” Paedophilia”.

My final point is that this part of the Cosmic War is harmful in the real world to real people. Real Jews and real women were persecuted in medieval times. During the Satanic Panic, daycare workers were prosecuted and some were convicted, despite lack of evidence. Children were deeply affected by the interviews and court cases. The Satanic Panic also harmed those who were a bit different, those who were outsiders, like the West Memphis Three. The West Memphis Three were three teenage boys who were convicted of murdering three small boys, despite lack of evidence. They have now been freed, but they all spent a long time in jail and one of them, Damien Echols, was on death row for years. At the time of the murders, they were misfits, metalheads, and Damien Echols practised Wicca. All of this made investigators think they were Satanists. More recently, Pizzagate led a man to break into the pizza restaurant and shoot a lock off a storage cupboard, because he thought there were children in the basement. And QAnon itself has been hugely damaging: it has been divisive of friends and families, folded itself into anti vax movements which have endangered public health, and inspired the Jan 6 Capitol riot. It has also led people like my work colleague who watched The Sound of Freedom, and whoever wrote the signs I saw today, to be fooled and manipulated.

If you think you have an ultimate mission, if you think only you can do it, if you think you have special knowledge, if you think you are in a Cosmic War, you are in a toxic Story.

Thank you for reading this, and what a whistle stop tour it was. I may go into the sub-topics, such as QAnon, further, but things are moving so fast in the world I have to keep up with what is relevant as well as teasing out points in ancient history. I hope you come back! Ma te wa.

FURTHER EXPLORATION:

https://publicmedievalist.com/pizzagate-cults/ is Michael Barzebat’s article on the Nocturnal Ritual Fantasy

Van Badham”s “Qanon and On” is a good history of this movement

“Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax” by Channel 4 is a documentary that sets out how it happened and what the accused parents did about it.

If you can say yes to any of these things, then contact me today and for a small energy exchange I can help you journey to your soul’s divine purpose.

Ok, if you have read my earlier article on how Gnosticism is the ancestor of today’s new age movement, and the bricolage of spiritual ideas that followed it, you will get how the language above chimes. Gnosticism, allied with later Platonism, filtered through early modern esotericism, spiritualism and new thought, gives us the spiritual or conscious community we have now. They are worthy ancestors. The spiritual community are worthy inheritors.

And now I get to talk a bit about my own background.

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

I have been involved in many spiritual and activist groups over my long life. I have also kind of lived in the cracks of these groups. I have seldom been settled or in the mainstream. I say I have seen them from underneath. This is a great position to be in. Over the last ten years or so some of my practice has been adjacent to the spiritual community, although not quite part of it. The pandemic changed my status. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand we had a pandemic of two halves. For the first half, we had a strict lockdown, and many New Zealanders living abroad tried to get back in, because it was seen as a safe place with good policies. Then came the vaccine. The vaccine became mandated for almost everybody in the workforce, partly because businesses did not want to make the decision for their own workspaces. They wanted the government to make it for them. Most of those in the spiritual community did not agree with the vaccine. There was a large and disruptive protest that camped outside parliament for months. Some of the protesters were in the spiritual, wellness, alternative spirituality group; some were libertarians or just health contrarians, and some were downright fashy.

I was working in the health system, doing home help and personal care in people’s homes. It was precarious and poorly paid. Our clients were among society’s most vulnerable. Their homes were hardly hospital level clean. They were often unvaccinated. So, I got vaccinated early. It seemed a strange stance to take, to do what the government wanted me to do. I weighed up the evidence I had and did what I thought was best. At the time I wrote this piece below, because I was aware I was essentially seeing myself out of the alt health/wellness/spiritual room

“For those who are resisting the vaccine, I just want to say please be careful about your fellow travellers. There are people alongside you who do not care about human rights and social justice, and I use those terms thoughtfully I hope. I have done as much reading and thinking as I reasonably can without being obsessed with the damn thing. So: if it looks a bit fashy it probably is. If it looks like it is glomming onto your cause it probably is. If it looks opportunistic or like plain old grift it probably is. We all know how to follow the money and there is some influencer culture that needs to be burned to the ground. If you think your cause is worth hanging out with bad actors, then, well, gosh.

As for some of the things I hear people say, I just don’t believe them. I don’t believe that there is a microchip in me or that the admittedly execrable Mr Gates wants to control our minds or that I will harm you spiritually by leaking vaccine. Yes, I will see myself out now, but before I do:

Here is why I took the vaccine:

I work with vulnerable people in a poorly regulated and poorly resourced part of the health system. The people I work with did not want to be vaccinated themselves. It seemed sensible to get vaccinated myself, so I did.

The drug companies are not our friends. Pfizer has a terrible history and its only redeeming feature is that it is not Purdue (the maker of Oxycontin). They have the governments of the world over a barrel, and I imagine they are laughing all the way to the bank.

Nevertheless, it made sense to get the vaccine for myself and others and so I did. I don’t have to like the drug companies to do what I think is right.

I don’t ‘trust the science’. There is no ‘the science’; that is a chimera. I respect science, the scientific method, and honest scientists doing their best under difficult circumstances. And so I took the vaccine.

Endless enquiry is a fruitless exercise. At some point with any decision we need to use our own sound judgment and act. If something is being subjected to endless enquiry, enquiry that has meaningless questions or sets a deliberately unobtainable level of proof, that enquiry is at worst naïve and at best disingenuous. Watch the arguments about climate change for an example of this. No argument will convince those with vested interests, or those who weaponize irony, or engage in moral outrage porn. These people are acting in bad faith. So I used my own sound judgment as best I could and took the vaccine.

The main context of taking the vaccine for me was

COLLECTIVISM

And no I am not shouting, this is a heading.

Collectivism is people using their freedom to act for and care about everyone. It is more than community. Community means any lobby group these days. Collectivism means you don’t have to be like minded or part of the ‘tribe’. What we have in common is oppression on multiple intersectional points in our lives, some of us more than others of course. That goes for all of us in this terminal stage of totalled capitalism. Acting for others is acting for all. An injury to one is an injury to all. Collectivism thus has no time for ideas of individual sovereignty or purity or cultural atavism. It takes all people as they are.

I don’t have much time for governments actually, tending anarchist, and to the left rather than towards libertarianism. I think if we had more collectivism, we would not have vaccine mandates. Our communities would be really commun-ist and they would take care of people in their own best way. I don’t blame this government any more than any other government, because I think problems are far more systemic. Many, many years of colonialism and abuse have passed and here we are being cajoled and bullied and bribed and patronised and monitored. Because under terminal stage capitalism….. etc etc etc.

There are few examples of anarchist states historically, and in our times Rojava might be a worthy attempt, if it survives the next few months. We have lived in a shitty system for so long that we don’t know any different. We need to unlearn many superficial and pernicious ideas. The fact that collectivism is difficult, and we have few models, does not mean we should not attempt it. The way this system has handled Covid augurs poorly for the next crisis, which will be bigger and more clearly climate related. Those who survive will not necessarily be with the ones they love, the ones who think like they do, their own clan or kin. Finding better ways to be together may be essential.”

For the references: Raimond Gaita, the Australian philosopher, expounded the idea of sound judgment. Tyson Yunkaporta on the fact there is no such thing as “the science”. The aforementioned Behrooz Boochani on kyriarchy.

After the pandemic calmed a little, I realized I had in fact seen myself out of the wellness/spiritual community. I began to notice how apocalyptic they were. It was when someone I had once respected, who had taken to sharing stories from Natural News on Facebook, posted something really out there, that I thought “They think they are in a Cosmic War”. Because this person does. The Cosmic War features in a lot of spiritual thinking and the spiritual community finds itself much closer to the Christian nationalists and the far right than I could cope with, How does this happen?

We need to wipe out our ideas of left-wing and and right-wing and get with the times. One idea is diagonalism. This attempts to explain why characters such as Russell Brand, Naomi Wolf, and even Robert F Kennedy Jnr pivoted from seeming leftist stances, straight to the conspiratorial right.

William Callison and Quinn Slobodian describe the phenomenon as ‘Diagonalism’, as quoted in Mike Small’s article in Bella Caledonia:

“Taking a cue from one of the movements itself—Querdenken in Germany, in particular—we call the strategy behind the diverse movements “diagonal thinking” and the broader phenomenon they represent “diagonalism.” Bridging the more familiar concept Querfront and the more recent term Querdenken, the idea of “diagonalism” exceeds the German context of its coinage, where it means something like out-of-the-box thinking. Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.”

Here is Naomi Klein, who is very clear she is not Naomi Wolf, quoted in the same article:

“Despite claims of post-partisanship, it is right-wing, often far-right political parties around the world that have managed to absorb the unruly passions and energy of diagonalism. folding its Covid-era grievances into preexisting projects opposing ‘wokeness’ and drumming up fears of migrant ‘invasions’. Still, it is important for these movements to present themselves (and believe themselves to be) ruptures with politics-as-usual; to claim to be something new, beyond traditional left-right poles.”

“That’s why having a few prominent self-identified progressives and/or liberals is so critical. Importantly, the role of these progressives is not to renounce the goals of social justice and embrace a hard-right worldview. On the contrary, they must continue to identify as proud members of the left…while claiming that it is the movements and tendencies of which they were once part that have betrayed their own ideals, leaving these uniquely courageous individuals politically homeless and in search of new alliances.”

I think I can get this, having spoken to many who have sort of “conspiracy smoothie” (Klein’s term) going on. Back in the New Age days, before the 1990’s, people in the spiritual community were not necessarily left wing, but their interests coincided with the left. Their spirituality, however, pointed them in the direction of a studied individualism. Having given up on changing the world, they wanted to change themselves.

This transformation of the self is tough. It involves ego death. It sometimes involves huge financial outlay and travel. It involves turning yourself inside out over and over, doing your shadow work. It involves careful choosing from the supermarket of spiritual ideas. It can involve rejecting the people around you who don’t share your special knowledge. Here we go again with the special knowledge. This stuff is very Gnostic. It is leaving behind the ordinary souls watching the wall in Plato’s cave. It can involve immersion in nature, but more prominent than that is a drive to transcend. There is a plethora of being who can help or harm this. There are angels, and there are dark entities with very low vibrations as well. There is a Luciferian cabal running the political system (or though this may have changed since Trump took power). Aliens can help or harm. There is a multitude of worlds, and it is possible to ascend through them by raising vibrations. The world, Gaia, seen as a spiritualized being, is struggling to ascend into the next dimension and it is the job of lightworkers or starseeds to help her. There is a battle in heaven. Dark and light entities are duking it out, and by raising vibrations, special souls can help. Soon this Cosmic War will end, and Gaia will be able to ascend. She is ready, all the angels and ascended masters and spirit guides are ready, it just needs the final battle to take place. It is the Cosmic War, yet again, and the narrative runs parallel, and occasionally entwined, with the Christian version.

The thing is, it’s dark stuff, and occasionally violent. The Cosmic War is like that.

Dr Christiane Northrup practised as a gynaecologist and obstetrician in the USA and was a populariser of women’s health empowerment. She looks lovely, the grandmother you’d like to have, really sparkly and sweet. Her website is all the usual stuff about natural health and anti-aging, and you can do courses, and buy products. It is very pastel and light and soft-edged. Back in 2015, Northrup had a YouTube channel about wellness, the standard fare from the spiritual community. However, nowadays there is a more problematic side. For this, I need to go to the unmoderated sites such as Rumble and Telegram. There, Christiane Northrup is a different creature. It is not so much a conspiracy smoothie: you can drink a smoothie. On Telegram, Christiane Northrup offers her podcast where she can give us “the uncensored truth about what’s really going on, how we get through it, and how it all ends. This is where I can be me and do what I do best: Continue to awaken humanity.” She supports Pete Hegseth. And RFK of course. She reposts a picture of a guard outside Guantanamo Bay with “Stay Tuned” as a caption. She reposts anti-trans and homophobic posts. She supports a conspiracy theory that the LA fires were aimed at clearing land for high speed rail. Or this beauty: “ The world makes more sense when you realize everyone in power is either a satanist, a pedophile, a satanist pedophile, or being blackmailed by satanists, pedophiles, or satanist pedophiles”. There are hints of violence. In the last couple of years, she has spoken more explicitly about how lightworkers need to go to war against the satanist cabal. She shares a video by Lee Merritt, of Medicalrebel.com, on how “God is restoring his army’, so the language is martial. On Substack, Northrup tells us earnestly that now that starting from the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the conspiracies of the Nephilim, Nimrod and Elijah, those interdimensional entities that have parasitized humanity for centuries, will be vanquished, and she shares a prayer for the new republic of the USA.

Ok this is a natural health and wellness to what I would once have called the far-right pipeline. Via the anti vax campaign, and Christian Nationalism. It’s diagonalism, I guess. It starts with these things:

- Individualism, freedom, sovereignty for individuals

- The specialness of the feminine

- Natural things are better and more inherently trustworthy than human made things

- Against corporatism, the deep state, big pharma, globalism

- Purity of the body

- Contrarianism and distrust of the official narrative, adoption of counter-cultural and rebellion narratives

- Nothing is safe except what I advocate and practise

- Esotericism: special knowledge, history is illumined by hidden spiritual forces

And it ends with:

- All of the above

Back in my Occupy Wall Street days, our model for long-term protest was the colourful messy rather glorious anti-globalist protests of the ‘90s. It was then that the idea of distrust of international agendas became a part of the counterculture. I realized, watching the anti vax protesters outside parliament in my own country, that they were singing songs of freedom and rebellion just as I had done.

What is different is the dark stuff. The conspiracy cess pit, the paranoia, the sense that nothing is safe, that the mainstream of society is against us, that people who are not like us are evil, anti gay, anti trans, anti DEI. Oh, and Donald Trump is a lightworker. He may not realize it, but he is here to save us, and now he has done it.

What is also becoming more sharply in focus, is the Cosmic War.

Whew, that was a lot. If you are still with me, thank you, and let’s box on. Ma te wa!

Further exploration:

The Conspirituality Podcast with Matthew Remski, Derek Beres and Julian Walker. I have gained so much from these guys. Listen while you clean your house with your all-natural locally produced cleaners.

https://www.salon.com/2021/03/04/why-some-new-age-influencers-believe-trump-is-a-lightworker/. A fun piece from Salon about Lori Ladd and lightworkers.

Things are changing so fast, much of my years of reading seem less reference-worthy than they used to.

Today I want to talk about a really useful concept. It is one of those concepts that we use a lot without thinking about. Once we have a name for it, it becomes even more useful. Don’t get put off by the word. The word is not the concept; you will understand the concept even if you don’t like the word.

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, by Karen Effie.

The mnemo- part of the word means memory, like a mnemonic is trick for remembering things. The historiography part of the word is the name for the study of how history as a discipline is made. When you study history, you study events and people, say, and facts about the same. Historiography takes a step back and studies how history is studied. It looks at such things as how much we can really know, how we know what we know, what facts do we privilege and why. Is history as a discipline just the facts, or is it ideas about facts? If we find our ideas about the facts creeping into our study, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Can we be entirely free of bias? These are historiographical problems. Mnemohistoriography studies history but in terms of how that history affects later events and ideas. In short, it is about how we remember history.

If you are my age or older, you may have read “1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates” by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman. It was written in 1930, and it is about – well, what the title says. The point is that history is not what happened, it is what is memorable. The book is thought to be an early post-modernist text, but its date of publication is important too. It came out between the world wars, that difficult time when empires were crumbling and World War One had shattered many illusions about the order of things. It satirized the kind of history I was taught, which was all kings and wars. This is called “Great Man” history, the idea that there is progress, that societies have evolved, that larger and more complex societies are superior to small, simpler ones, that conquest is legitimate and a sign of superiority, and that it is all thanks to Great Men, literally men in most cases. At the end of each chapter of “1066 and All That” there were pretend exams, with instructions like “Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once”. I was lucky as a child, to be read to at night well into middle school age, by my father. He read 1066 to me, and I remember sitting in bed laughing and laughing. An almost direct successor is the wonderful Philomena Cunk; if you don’t know her oeuvre, try the recent documentary “Cunk on Life”.

So, there is the history of facts and events, and then there is mnemohistory, what we remember, what we think is important, how we read history, and how that reading itself becomes part of history. When I wrote earlier about the far right and their view of the Crusades, that is mnemohistory. It is not just that the facts aren’t the facts, it is that the believers in these facts have acted as if they are true. I think most mnemohistory is not nearly so cynical. History writers are mostly genuine about their agendas. Their influence can be great. Great Man history probably kept the British Empire going way past its due date, while everyone else gets a chapter at the end of the book.

The Story of the Cosmic War is full of mnemohistory. My best example is the thought of Alexsandr Dugin, Russian traditionalist, mystic, and far right influencer. You have to start with an idea of Russia, as a founding myth. Not just Russia the county but the Russian soul, Damp Mother Russia, and the deep sense that there is a way of living and thinking and spiritualizing that is endemically Russian, and that Russia is big, it is really Eurasia, all of the Slavic and Tartaric lands, set up in a natural union against the equally mythic lands of Western Europe and the USA. Russian thinkers have toggled between looking west, to superior technology and liberalism, vs looking inwards, to what is uniquely Russian, for centuries. For Dugin, who rejects modernity, the decision is easy. You can be spiritually Eurasian as, for Evola, you can be spiritually White. Dugin has a view of history which is quite consciously about memory, about conscious mythmaking. It is also a view of history illumined by a long study of the occult, which is common among traditionalists. Here is a well-known quote by Dugin, which illustrates how he does the Cosmic War to the max. It is from Wikipedia, I’m afraid, from a Russian source I don’t know.

"It is impossible to do without the mobilization of the Russian people, without explaining to them its historical mission, without awakening its deepest beginning, without these words "brothers and sisters". Get up, Russian people, wake up, you are called to accomplish great deeds... All your ancestors, all generations were moving towards this moment, towards this clash with our ontological enemy... We are fighting absolute Evil, embodied in Western civilization, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism. We were created for this mission. That's what is needed now - a call is needed."

Something a bit like mnemohistory happens with myth, lore, and the juicier parts of Biblical scripture. A good example is the Books of Enoch. The Books of Enoch are not part of the Bible. They are a kind of fan fiction. Enoch is such a fabulous character. When you read about him in the Hebrew Bible, it says that Enoch “walked with God, and then he was no more, for God took him” (Gen 5:21-24). Wow. What does that mean? You need to know more; it definitely feels like Enoch has not been given his due as a character. So people wrote the Books of Enoch, as fan fic. When the Bible was put together, the theologians of the time rejected the Books of Enoch (too weird, too inconsistent with everything else), but this has not stopped Enoch becoming an important part of apocalyptic literature. Nowadays, some conservative evangelical Christians refer to Enoch as if it was scripture. They incorporate the books into prophecy and their views on the impending end times. There is Enoch, and then there is the subsequent history of what happened to the books of Enoch.

The most popular story in Enoch 1 is the story of the Nephilim. In Genesis 6 in the actual Hebrew Bible, the sons of God came down to earth and had sex with the daughters of men. Their offspring were assumed to be the Nephilim. Now in Enoch, the fan fic begins. The Nephilim were giants. They taught humans evil skills, such as metalwork and cosmetics. They encouraged humans to be unnatural, to be above themselves. God punished the Nephilim.

Now we leave Enoch and enter the world of evangelical Christian YouTube.

Somehow the Nephilim survived the Flood and their offspring survive today in the form of anything or anyone who might be a giant or a monster. Bigfoot is a Nephilim (somehow the singular of Nephilim is Nephilim). Any especially big person is part Nephilim. Aliens are Nephilim. Dead Nephilim are demons. These demonic forces are ubiquitous. They cause all the evils in the world including anything unnatural or occult. They are behind all the conspiracies such as the Illuminati and the Freemasons. They want humans to be godlike. Becoming godlike is the greatest insult to God. The only escape from the machinations of the Nephilim is to give yourself to Jesus, so your eyes can be opened to this enormous web of conspiracy and evil. Then you can be saved when he returns, which of course will be very soon.

I know far more about the Nephilim than I want to, because I studied them last year when I did a university paper on conspiracy theories. What is interesting for the purpose of this article is how we move from the Hebrew Bible, to Enoch, to subsequent material. The Christians who propagate this material on YouTube and in their books, such as Tom Horn and Steve Quayle, do not distinguish. For them, it is all the Bible, inerrant, univocal, eternal. I think this is a kind of mnemohistory, because the proponents of Nephilim theory have an interpretation that passes through several iterations of memory and interpretation, before it gets to them. They situate themselves right square in the field of conservative Christianity, as if this is how it has always been.

I would not like to have a beer with Steve Quayle or Tom Horn, after watching them for hours and reading their books, but they are perfectly sincere. Even less would I have a beer with the author of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. This is a Zionist tract which purports to be the notes of a meeting held by Jewish elders plotting to take over the world. It was plagiarized from earlier works of racist fiction. Published in 1903, in Russia, it has been shown to be the worst kind of hoax. It has had a massive influence, on Nazi Germany, and subsequent fascist thinking. Even now, if you look at common far right conspiracies, they are often about how weak liberals support the rights of Black people, who are not intelligent enough to fight for their own rights, and rely on a hidden conspiracy of Jewish intellectuals who manipulate everyone. That’s the Protocols still echoing down the ages. The publication of the Protocols has had its effects in mnemohistory, what people remember and assume about the past.

Mnemohistorical narratives often have great power to influence real historical events. It is not the point whether or not they are true, it is that they are widely believed, or believed by influential people, who push the narrative forward. Meanwhile, other strands of narrative are forgotten.

All of the examples I have given relate to the Cosmic War. Aleksandr Dugin and the Nephilim enthusiasts are explicit about this. Fascist support of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” has also driven the kind of meta-othering that occurs when absolute good fights absolute evil to the point of extinction. The Cosmic War abounds in mnemohistory. So often I am talking not about what happened, but about what people believe happened. And sometimes just what they conveniently say they believe happened. It is the mnemohistory that drives actual history. Looking back at real events only sometimes helps us do better.

If you got this far, thank you, and I hope you come back. Ma te wa

The photo is not of a Nephilim. It is of Carl McCoy, of the Fields of the Nephilim, my favourite Goth band. Their Elysium album is nearly perfect. Carl is also very beautiful.

Further exploration:

- You can read a free PDF of “1066 and All That online”. And Philomena Cunk videos are on YouTube.

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/12/dugin-russia-ukraine-putin/ is a semi OK article about Dugin, from back when WaPo was something.

- Teitelbaum, Benjamin R. War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right has some interesting material on Dugin and Steve Bannon.

- If you have several hours, watch Steve Quayle “Prophecy Watchers” videos on YouTube. Or don’t.

Kia Ora Tatou and Welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

My teenage daughter went to a local Baptist youth group for a couple of years. It was a close-knit group, and she enjoyed it. One evening, they played a game where they paired up and ran around the streets pretending to be persecuted Christians. They sneaked around outside the houses hiding in bushes and pretending they would be killed unless they found the safe places where Christians were welcome. It was super fun, pretending your neighbourhood is dangerous, that everyone is out to get you, just the two of you against the world, until you find your safe house. My daughter put her own spin on things, as usual. She pretended she and her friend were persecuted lesbians.

I was generally cool with the youth group, despite their conservatism. They seemed like nice people who cared about each other. I thought the running around the streets in the evening was cool too. What I didn’t know at the time, was that this is a common thing, apparently; it is called “persecution games”. These are common among evangelical Christian youth groups, according to Talia Lavin in her new book “Wild Faith”, which has some harrowing material about Christian parenting. In my daughter’s case, the young people were not expected to identify with persecuted Christians here in Aotearoa New Zealand. We are a secular bunch here, for sure, but you’d be hard pressed to find Christians being persecuted. This youth group was learning about Christians in China. However, in the USA, Christians believe they are persecuted at home, and this has ramifications for politics and social policy.

Persecution is baked into Christianity. And persecution is important in the Cosmic War. Persecution is how we know we are on the right side. Persecution is a sign that the end times are upon us. It is also a sign of the degeneracy of the society around us. They hate us because they hate the truth, and they hate what we stand for, what we model, and they hate those things because they are degenerate. Because - and here we go, here we go again - they are evil. They are Satanic, even.

If you went to Sunday School, you were taught that Christians were systematically persecuted throughout the Roman Empire, that the persecution was driven from the top of pagan society, that martyrdom was common, and gory as. Christians were thrown to lions, right, and tortured, and they had to hide in catacombs (I loved that word!) and worship in secret. Becoming a Christian carried great risk. You were throwing in your lot with that small band of virtuous rebels I keep going on about.

Except there is not the evidence to prove that kind of persecution in the early days of the Christian community. Prof. Candida Moss, in her book “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom”, trawls the evidence. As usual, it’s complicated. There was a period of systematic persecution under the Emperor Decius, from 249CE to 251. Decius, as insecure as any Roman emperor, made an edict that everyone in the empire must make a sacrifice for the safety of the empire. This created a crisis of authority among Christians, and many prominent Christians refused and were killed. What is important here is that they were killed not for being Christians, but for refusing to make a sacrifice. Christians were a difficult lot, back then. They would refuse to give even their names in court, saying only that they were Christians. They were at times punished not for being Christians, but for being ornery and secretive and just bloody annoying. This was a time when the penalty for just about everything was death. Pissing off the emperor, or his representatives, most definitely meant death. It seemed as if Christians were being irrational, refusing to do simple things that could exonerate them, almost seeking death. And sometimes they were seeking death. There is a case of a group of Christians turning up at the office of the governor, demanding to be martyred. The governor sent them away, disappointed.

In the New Testament, Matthew 5:10–12 promises blessings to those who are persecuted for righteousness. The verse states, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. Revelation 2:10 states “Don't be afraid of what you are going to suffer. Look! The devil is going to throw some of you into prison so that you may be tested. For ten days you will undergo suffering. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the victor's crown of life”. (ISV). The New Testament sees persecution as inevitable. To be truly Christian you need to be persecuted. No wonder early Christians sought it out. They knew they were promised the victor’s crown of life.

A couple of centuries later, when there was a lot of conflict among different Christian groups, heretics were considered to be the persecutors of the Church. This is interesting, because now it was the mainstream institution that was claiming to be persecuted, by people who claimed to be Christian but who were heretics. Persecution was happening within Christian society. Also, martyrdom stories were very spicy and interesting. Later martyrdom stories were gorier and more baroque and outrageous than earlier ones. It was a good idea to have a few martyr stories on hand, and even better were some relics, so that people would visit your church. Very few of these stories can even be considered as factual. However, the belief in systematic, violent persecution became embedded into the Christian identity. It is a Story: a part of the founding myth, an explanation for suffering and difficulty – and it leads to another Story, that of revenge fantasy.

Apocalyptic literature is often revenge fantasy. Not all of it, but the bits that predict the future often are. That’ll learn you, king of Babylon! Says Daniel. And especially, that’ll learn you, Nero! Says John of Patmos. The Book of Revelation is punishment for Rome, and also for those in the Church of whom John disapproves. Right from the get-go, right from the seven letters John writes at the beginning of Revelation. John has Jesus speaking to him, the only time Jesus speaks since the resurrection. Jesus threatens a female church leader who has been prophesying. Jesus says he will throw her onto a bed, and those who (presumably) then rape her will be punished, and then he will kill her children. It is hard to read Revelation for lots of reasons, but the sheer violence of John’s retaliation is one of them. So, the Cosmic War ends in a massive revenge fantasy, with everyone dead except the few who are on your side. The only way this can avoid seeming petty, is to provide a rationale of extreme persecution. There is no doubt that John felt persecuted.

Feeling persecuted does not completely map onto being persecuted. The fear of loss can feel like loss. Not having what you expected to have can feel as bad as never having had it in the first place.

Religious extremists, conspiracy theorists, and political extremists can feel persecuted beyond what is actually happening to them. There are examples outside of Christianity, such as Hindutva in India and Islamic jihadists, but for now I want to talk only about conservative and evangelical Protestant Christians in the United States.

Talia Lavin’s book mentioned above describes how conservative evangelical Christianity is a kind of closed world. Everything mainstream is there, but it’s Christian. Movies. Rock music. Art. Therapy. Education. Other ex-Christians I follow, such as Brad Onishi of the “Straight White American Jesus” podcast, Chrissy Stroop of “The Bugbear Dispatch”, and David Farrier of “Webworm” seem to confirm this. It is not exactly a cult, because it is so big, and has some diversity, but it has the high demand of a cult. It must feel like it is all you need. The world outside must be pretty scary, all that sinning and so on. You wouldn’t want to go there. In a previous article I wrote about special knowledge, how it sets up the problem of what to do with people who don’t have the special knowledge you do. In this case, it seems like the people who don’t have the special knowledge are doomed. But meanwhile, you are persecuted.

About 67% of the United States population is Christian. This is a small decline from ten years ago. 48.5% of the population are Protestant. About 26% of Christians are Evangelical. The largest single denomination is Southern Baptist. That is a lot of Christians. Only two congresspeople are not affiliated to a religion. In 2021, 88% of congresspeople were Christian’ higher than the general population. Religious affiliation is highly normative, despite the proud US history of the separation of church and state. I think it is fair to say that the 26% of Evangelical Christians have a fair amount of influence, compared to their size.

“The time has come to prepare ourselves for persecution. Our identity has put us at odds with the culture, which is now going to do everything in its power to punish us. Our commitment to living authentically is going to cost us — perhaps everything — because we refuse to compromise what we believe to be the truth. The dominant voices in our culture hate us, and will stop at nothing to eliminate us. Our jobs, our families, even our lives are now in jeopardy because of who we are.”

This is pastor Derek Penwell, responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage in 2015. This is persecution: that LGBT+ rights are one of many existential threats to Christians. Abortion is an existential threat. Liberal culture is an existential threat. The separation of church and state is especially a threat, for Christians who are dominionists, which means they believe Christians should prepare for the return of Christ by taking over all aspects of politics and society. The main threat is thus internal, within American society, from non-Christians, especially Muslims, and from the wrong sorts of Christians, like Mormons and Roman Catholics, and liberal theologians. It has also, relatively recently, been external, as the sense of persecution increased after 9/11 and fear of Muslims became widespread in American society generally.

Let’s go back to the New Testament, that shows us to be Christian is to be persecuted. Remember that these early Christians believed that Christ would return very soon, and the Cosmic War would end. We are always in the end times. Christ is always about to return, and persecution is a sign of his return. T It is a necessary part of being Christian – not for many Christians, but for some, and some of those are the ones with power.

I want to leave the last word to Candida Moss:

The myth of persecution is theologically grounded in the division of the world into two parties, one backed by God and the other by Satan...And everyone knows you cannot reason with the devil. Even when the devil is not explicitly invoked, the rhetoric of persecution suggests that the persecutors are irrational and immoral and the persecuted are innocent and brave. In a world filled with persecution, efforts to negotiate or even reason with one's persecutors are interpreted as collaboration and moral compromise. We should not attempt to understand the other party, because to do so would be to cede ground to injustice and hatred

I think this describes the Cosmic War pretty clearly.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you come back! Ma te wa.

About the picture: please note that this did not really happen. Not a real lion.Here is the link for the artwork though.

By Jean-Léon Gérôme - Walters Art Museum: Home page  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18824108

Further exploration:

The “exvangelicals” I mention above are all useful here.

Candida Moss is interviewed by Jacob Berman on History Valley on YouTube if you want to chill to a video instead of all the flat out reading I do

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

Actually, the rapture is not so fun when you believe in it. When I did my history honours degree, I interviewed an older woman who had been raised Plymouth Brethren. She was taught as a child that the rapture could come any minute. She would wake in the middle of the night, and her parents would have vanished. Freeing herself from the Plymouth Brethren was one of the main themes in her life. It is not a happy way to bring up a child.

We will return to the Plymouth Brethren later on.

Now, have fun guessing these two facts about history:

What was the best-selling non-fiction book in the US in the 1970s?

No, silly, it was not “The Joy of Sex”, which gently nudged a generation of straight white westerners in the direction of sex positivity. It was Hal Lindsay’s “The Late Great Planet Earth”. This book is an awful read, but it is worth it when you know how influential it was. The ideas we have about the rapture today come mostly from this book. Lindsay writes about how true Christians are raptured up into heaven suddenly, leaving behind even their clothes. This causes major chaos on earth. Many who thought they were truly Christian discover they can’t be, because they are still here. The rapture signifies the beginning of the end times; it is followed by seven years of tribulation and the rise of Antichrist. Lindsay also popularized the idea that current political events can be read into the Bible: that we are watching Bible prophecy unfold.

Next question: Who is the most well-known and well-read Christian thinker of the twentieth century?

No, silly, it is not Rudolf Bultmann, Professor of Theology at Marburg University, who criticized liberal theology in favour of an existential interpretation of the New Testament. It is Jack Chick. Jack Chick was the maker of Chick Tracts, tiny, cheaply produced comic pamphlets on the theme of hell and salvation. Chick Tracts were often left lying around or given out in the street. I have not seen one in the wild, because they never got much traction here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jack Chick was firmly against evolution, homosexuality, Roman Catholicism, paganism and witchcraft, Bible Translations after the King James Version, and Islam. He espoused many conspiracy theories, including the belief that the Illuminati is running everything. He was a staunch climate change denialist. Chick died in 2016, but his tracts are still being produced. The end times was a common topic for the tracts. They take their cue directly from Hal Lindsay. Several of the tracts address the rapture directly. I won’t link directly to them here, but you can read them online from their website by their titles. “What Next?”, “The Only Hope”, “The Beast”, “The Last Generation”, “Where did they Go?” “Things to Come”. All of the dislike of difference, and the conspiracism, feature in these tracts. They are gory as a death metal album cover, and less sophisticated.

Honourable mention must go to the “Left Behind” series, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins. LaHaye was a megapastor in his day. There are twelve books in the series, and I read volumes 1, 3 and 12 in the interests of research. The books begin with Rayford Steele (seriously), an airline pilot. He is flying his plane and having lustful thoughts about a female cabin crew member. Then the crisis happens; a large proportion of the passengers have vanished. All over the world, people have vanished. Then the seven years of tribulation begin. Rayford Steele becomes a born again Christian and helps to found the Tribulation Force, a paramilitary group which infiltrates the ranks of the Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia (seriously!), and plays a part in the final battle. These folks are properly a small band of virtuous rebels, that Cosmic War trope I described earlier. The books read like airport bookshop thrillers. There are real blokey blokes doing a fair bit of fighting and driving around in big vehicles. The characters are cartoonish. There is mass violence all the way through; the violence is justified because it is of course the Cosmic War, and it often acts as a background to the spiritual message. But if you foreground the violence as you read, it is very violent. Each book is updated at the end, to show how prescient it was when it was first published in the 1990s in terms of political events that show the truth of Bible prophecy, as interpreted by dispensationalists like LaHaye and Jenkins. There have been movies, a young adult version of the books, and a video game. The books have been described as Manichean, with an exaggerated and totalized sense of good and evil. That is the point! It’s not subtle. It is a great example of the kind of parallel world that evangelical Christians live in, with pop music, movies, books and videos that look like mainstream versions, but are all for Christians.

How Biblical is the velocirapture? Well, velociraptors were so loved by their creator that the creator raptured them up into heaven so they weren’t wiped out by the comet, like all the other dinosaurs. Velociraptors are that cool. So, not at all, really.

The rapture is not at all, really. It comes from two passages in the New Testament. 1Thessalonians was written by Paul in order to comfort the Christians who were concerned that Christ had not returned, and yet some of them had already died. Here is 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18:

For we tell you this by a word of the Lord: we who are living, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not go before those who sleep For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God – and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are living, who remain, will be taken up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord

Bart D. Ehrman, in “Armageddon, What the Bible Really Says about the End” (11-13) explains this clearly, in concert with all other scholars I have read. Meeting “in the air” expressed an image that would have been well understood by the Thessalonians. When a ruler or high-ranking official arrived for a visit to a city, the citizens would send out their leaders to meet and greet the official and escort them back to the city. Jesus is described as coming with his angels from heaven, and his believers are taken up to meet him in the air, before accompanying him down to earth where he will vanquish his enemies. This is not the rapture.

Here is the other verse, the one that scared the woman I interviewed back in my uni days. It is Matthew 24:39-40.

So, too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day the Lord is coming.

This sounds pretty clear. Except it is taken out of context. This is Jesus talking. Just before this verse, Jesus is talking about how the coming of the Lord is like the days of Noah, when everyone was taken by the flood, and only Noah and his family were left behind. It is the opposite of the rapture. Note that Paul and his group of proto-Christians really believed the Christ would return any day. They were already trying to explain why it hadn’t happened yet.

So, who interpreted the Bible in this way? Who read the Bible like this?

The early modern period was the time of science. Academics and experimenters were measuring and weighing things and crunching numbers and making observations using technology. Laws were being discovered. These laws explained a lot. There were laws of nature, and laws that made hierarchies and taxonomies. Christian thinkers were as beguiled by this as they were disturbed. So, they did the same. They crunched numbers. Sometimes they even did it to disprove science. They used scientific ideas along with the Bible. This is how we get such quaint oddities as Bishop Ussher’s 1650 dating of the beginning of the universe as 4004 BC (BCE). Ussher was a serious scholar and a serious Christian. He used Biblical chronologies to come to his conclusion. It would never have occurred to our medieval ancestors to think about the Bible in this way. There were some chronologies, for sure, like that of the Venerable Bede, but those were more for mythical purposes; wanting to show historicity or legitimate ancestors or historical figures.

This kind of study of the Bible was also a Protestant preoccupation. Protestantism rejected the way in Roman Catholicism, Biblical exegesis was for the priestly class. For Protestants, everyone could read the Bible. The Bible itself was the source of Christian truth. Protestantism also emphasized sola fide, by faith alone. Good works and obeying the priests did not get you to heaven. Faith got you to heaven. You needed to be saved.

The Bible is not a book to be read from cover to cover, like a novel. It is not in chronological order. It was written by many different people, some of them pretending to be other people. We have fragments of text in different languages. The Bible as we know it developed over time and after fierce debate. Throughout the history of theology, the best Christian thinkers of their time did not have the issue of taking the Bible literally. Extracting theology from the text in the way evangelicals have done since the nineteenth century, using a mix of number crunching and ideology and sometimes visions from divine figures, is a modern preoccupation. Taking small amounts of text from disparate places in order to put together a story only works if you see the Bible as a single thing that is inerrant. But this is what began to happen, because people began to seek proof of the truth of the Bible, and truth within the Bible, in a way that made no account of myth or culture, but looked at the Bible in the way a scientist might look at a flower.

The nineteenth century saw rising secularism, outright atheism, and on the other hand, millennialism. It was as if the devoutly religious were beginning to pull away from the mainstream. This was nowhere so apparent as with the development of end times thought, and its most enduring product, dispensational premillennialism. And we are back with the Plymouth Brethren.

John Nelson Darby, a former Anglican priest, established a new religious community in Plymouth, England. Darby put forward a new idea, that Christ would return twice, once before the catastrophes of Revelation, and once again to set up his new kingdom on earth. The pre- bit means that Christ comes before the millennium. Darby also developed a chronology of all of history, with distinct periods related to times talked about in the Bible. There were seven of these periods, called dispensations. The last dispensation, Kingdom, is when God cleanses the earth in judgment, removing all evil, and condemning all those who do not obey him. If the end is at hand, and of course it always is, this is not an optimistic view. Even those obedient Christians will witness the onslaught described in Revelation. That is hardly fair. So, Darby came up with another new idea. The velocirapture! In order to save the obedient Christians from suffering during the end times, there would be a rapture before the coming tribulation. After the true believers had vanished, there would be chaos, and Antichrist would begin his evil reign. For Darby this was a secret rapture, because no one knew the date or time, but that did not stop subsequent Christian prophets and pastors a-calculatin’ and a-speculatin’. As you do.

Nowadays, there are variations on this theme, and probably only historians and Bible scholars have heard about Darby and the Plymouth Brethren. But the idea of dispensational premillennialism took hold among conservative Christians, it spoke to the increasing pessimism about human progress as the twentieth century kicked in, and now it is a central tenet among many (not all) of today’s evangelical Christians, especially in the USA. It is a great example of what seems to many like a natural born idea, that has a specific and recent origin, tailored for the times. No previous Christian thinker interpreted those bits in the Bible in that way. It was the confluence of science, Protestantism, thwarted millennialism and pessimism that gave us the rapture we have today.

If you got this far, with the bad dino joke, and the forbidding business of nineteenth century conservative theology, thank you for sticking with me. Let’s do it again. Ma te wa!

(Not the Rapture, but the song by Blondie)

Further exploration:

Bart Ehrman “Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End” is a very recent and readable book.

If you read some of the Chick Tracts mentioned above, you will get an idea about why some of the people around you believe what they do. You can read them in full on the Chick.com website.

If you like podcasts, Data Over Dogma have a great episode on the Velocirapture