Part One

It was Easter recently. When I was a kid, this was a time for eating, not to say pigging out. On Friday, there were hot cross buns. Nowadays you can buy hot cross buns all year round, but then they were a treat reserved for not-so-good Friday.

I would have recovered from the bun feast just in time for the main event: chocolate eggs on Sunday. This was the one and only day of the year when I would regularly and conspicuously overeat. I would make myself ill. It was bizarre: I never did it on any other day. Only on Easter egg Sunday.

The other thing about Easter, or hot cross bun Friday to be precise, was the Crucifixion. 'Good' Friday: for whom? Not for the guy on the cross. 

I could never make it out. By age eight, I guess, I had pretty much given up on Christianity in general. It appeared to be based upon belief in a bunch of weird and often not very pleasant stories about a load of people from the distant past, and from a place that I had no connection with. There was nothing properly uplifting or nourishing for spirit or soul in this Bible stuff, and nobody actually took the time to explain to me why I ought to believe in these stories any more than the Beano comic I read every week. The reason nobody explained this to me was, I eventually figured, because they couldn't.....

As far as the Bible went, the Crucifixion was pretty much the pits. I just couldn't get it. This was supposed to be the centre of religious belief for many many people - a guy dying a slow and agonising death, nails hammered into his feet and hands, blood spurting out of the wounds as his life slowly seeps away. Torture, essentially. Was this the best that organised religion had to offer? What kind of future for humans was being predicated here? I wasn't signing up for it, anyway.

From what I could make out, Jesus was apparently dying for our sins, to save us all. I found that funny. He never asked me if I wanted to be saved, to be saved by him. It all sounded a bit presumptuous. Imagine if I tell you over coffee one morning that I'm going to die for your sins, to save you. And then I go away and jump off the nearest bridge. How are you going to feel? Pretty bad, I guess. Guilty; irrational guilt. Traumatised. Ah, yes, now it's all beginning to make sense. What's this Christian lark all about anyway.....? Getting confused and messed up by this bloke-on-the-cross-to-save-the-world stuff. Got it. 

From those days of my youth I rejected the basic tenets of Christianity. Nevertheless, I was haunted by a small yet real voice telling me that maybe I'd missed something. This went on literally for decades. The voice whispering that there was something that other people had understood, and I hadn't. Maybe it was staring me in the face all the time, but I just wasn't getting it. It took a long long while before I felt totally convinced that I was not missing anything, and the whole thing really was as twisted and distorted as my instincts told me. It was the same as convid, human-induced global warming, the rest: tell people a story often enough, and sufficient will believe it. Simple as that...

Part Two

"Throughout human history, believers have waged war against one another. Gnostics and mystics have not. People are only too prepared to kill on behalf of a theology or a faith. They are less disposed to do so on behalf of knowledge. Those prepared to kill for faith will therefore have a vested interest in stifling the voice of knowledge." Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, 'The Inquisition'.

Just recently, many 'co-incidences' have led me to the subject of an alternative tradition in Christianity. Among other things, this tradition, or traditions, tends to be based rather less on belief, instead focussing more upon direct experience of the divine. Realising insight, wisdom, personal gnosis, is a more difficult and arduous task than simply deciding what you believe and disbelieve; whose camp you want to support and then beating the shit out of the opposition.

Neil Hague expresses one version clearly enough, in the following way. There is one church, based upon Peter and Paul, the Roman church (which divides into Protestantism etc on its merry way), the Beast, centred on the masculine power. And there is the other church, going through Joseph of Arimithrea, who some say was the uncle of Jesus, and which is based on the goddess, the Magdalene.

In terms of trying to find 'the real Jesus' - the real historical Jesus - I couldn't give a monkeys. Be it through the orthodox story or through other 'alternative' notions, we don't know, and we pretty much cannot know.

There is research out there which suggests that Isa, Yeshua, Jesus, actually comes from Scotland, and has relations to the ancient Druidic religion. I find this interesting insofar as it points to the ancient history of Scotland, a place which oozes ancientness - but that's about it.

There is abundant research demonstrating that Jesus as he is commonly portrayed did not exist. Maybe there was a real person who served to hang myths and stories on. But it seems clear that there is little original about the Jesus story, and that the basic skeleton is one that turns up time and again through different religions well before someone concocted the Jesus story to hold much of the western world in thrall.

As food for the imagination, I have no objection to these stories; read them as such, as myths and legends. But as soon as they are treated as 'historical facts' they join the club of beliefs as described in the quote above.

Part Three

The alternative traditions which hold more interest for me are those of the Gnostics (though there are some like John Lash who would claim that they are not Christian at all) and the Cathars.

Both emphasised gnosis rather than belief; and neither fared well in the face of orthodox Christians.

Co-existing as they did with Christianity in its early years, Gnostics were suppressed mainly through means of censorship and generally having their life made a misery. Christianity was yet to be organised into a single church with a single orthodoxy, from which you differed at your peril; this was to come in the 4th century CE with the diktats of the Council of Nicaea under the Roman Emperor Constantine 'the great'.

But the vast majority of the immense literature of the Gnostics was destroyed by the nice tolerant Christians; and until recently what was known about Gnostics was little more than a few scraps picked up from Christian commentators. And, as we know well, history is written by the victors.... It is only with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945 that a better idea of what Gnostics really thought, felt, believed, and did, came into being.

In 312 CE the Council of Nicaea brought together the disparate elements of Christianity and drew up what was the religion's orthodoxy. It was the moment when the screw was really turned: conform or else.... Thus, the culture of heresy was ingrained into the history of official Christianity.

The process had another 800 years to become woven into the fabric before the Cathars made their appearance; in Languedoc, southern France, above all, though elsewhere also, as in northern Italy. 

The disparate groups of early Christians had to be content with burning the texts of the Gnostics. With the Cathars, however, they were able to go the whole hog, and burn their bodies. The gruesome persecution of the Cathars is catalogued in 'The Cathars' by Sean Martin, which I read recently. Nothing less than a Crusade was launched against these peace-loving heretics, the Albigensian Crusade in 1209.

No stone was left unturned until every living Cathar was hunted down and burnt. In the sack of Beziers, a town suspected of providing shelter for Cathars, somewhere between 9000 and 20000 innocent people were murdered, including the woman and children. Nobody was spared. And so the massacre of Cathars proceeded over the following decades, all burnt, until the well-known siege of Monsegur in 1243-4. There remained a few Cathars on the loose, to be rounded up, tortured, and burnt, but that was essentially the end of the road for these particular heretics.

Part Four 

It is worth asking: why? What was so terrible about the Gnostics and Cathars, that they required such unthinkable treatment? It's not that they were of radically different religions or anything. What was so bad, or so dangerous, about them that they required eliminating, by the book or by the sword?

Beliefs. As the quote above states: "Those prepared to kill for faith will have a vested interest in stifling the voice of knowledge."

There are two things about Gnostic and Cathar beliefs (both with a basis in direct experience, in true gnosis, I suggest), which simply had to go:

First up, they did not buy into the physical crucifixion story. They regarded the crucifixion as an 'apparition'; Gnostics, in particular, seemed to take the story of Jesus in a ghostly way, nothing that happened literally to a human of flesh and blood. Thus, the story is more of a metaphor than something to take historically. This was to become known as Docetism.  

And secondly, they were both Dualists. The meaning of Dualism here is rather different to how I have sometimes used it in the context of Buddhist and Hindu systems. In the case of Gnostics and Cathars it means that not everything comes from one God, from the same single source. In particular, evil does not come from God. Within the jumble of -ists and -isms that constitute what some people refer to as Gnostic there is the notion of the true god on the one hand, and the false god, or fake god, or lesser god. There is the original creator, and there is the copycat, sometimes known as the demiurge. It is the latter who, devoid of originality, and jealous of the god-connected humans, is the origin of evil; an evil that is spread like poison around the world, the infecting agent being the archons.

So, in a nutshell, Gnostics and Cathars had to go. It was not merely a case of different beliefs. The Roman church took exception to specific beliefs of the heretics because they gave the game away. By rejecting the literal crucifixion, the heretics were calling out the mindfuck that this particular gory episode is designed to induce in human beings, an attitude of guilt, worthlessness, self-hatred, acceptance of the validity of tortured suffering, and the perceived need for salvation and a saviour.

Even more visceral is the Dualist position; it really is the great heresy. Evil does not come from the original god. And you, the established church, are part of that evil. Therefore you, the orthodox church do not come from god. You come from elsewhere.

The Gnostic realisation also puts paid to one of the questions that has vexed Christian theologians for the past 2000 years, and which they have been unable to answer in any simple way. If god is the creator of all, and if god is all-loving, how come he created and continues to put up with all the cruelty, the brutality, the sadism, which continue to be such a part of human life on planet Earth? On its own terms, the question is unanswerable. And this is because its premise, that all comes directly from the same creator, is false. In other words, the solution to the problem is provided by the metaphysics of the Gnostics and the Cathars. 

So the established Roman church was seen as a manifestation of the demiurge and the archons. It is not human in origin; it is extra-terrestrial, or at the least ultra-terrestrial. Thus is the big secret revealed. The papacy is not human; neither are the variants of religious authority in modern times - the archbishop of Canterbury and the rest. They are not manifestations of the true god at all, but avatars of the demiurge, the fake god. Their minds are a nest of archons. And the church, needless to say, is not going to permit truth to be revealed.....

Part Five

Nothing much has changed since the days of the Cathars and Gnostics. Lies cannot stand the bright light of truth; so truth must be banished by whatever means possible. Thankfully, modern-day heretics are at least not normally exposed to the physical tortures that befell the Cathars. They are subject to deletion and exclusion by mainstream media channels, be it Facebook, the Guardian or the BBC. They will sometimes be harassed and threatened, and just occasionally eliminated physically.

It is very very simple. If you are honestly the truth, why not invite your opponents onto the television for a debate, and sort it out once and for all? That would be persuasive and efficient; misinformation agents and conspiracy theorists dealt with in thirty minutes.

But it doesn't happen. Never. And it doesn't happen because, if certain people were given that public exposure, the whole pack of lies, from fake pandemics to false human-induced global warming, the transgender agenda, vaxxes that aren't vaxxes, and the rest, would come crashing down in an instant. So it doesn't happen. It cannot be allowed to happen. Truth can never be given its space.

Today's heretics speak out against the modern false gods, primarily those of scientism, 'rational materialism', and unfettered technology. The old religions are somewhat outdated, and we have newer replacements; ones which many people fail to realise are objects of religious veneration at all, but in which they place just as much blind faith as did the medieval Europeans in the words of the Bible. 

Images: Easter eggs; the crucifixion by Duccio; Gnosticism is for outsiders; Montsegur, final stronghold of Cathars; Gnostic dualism and the union of opposites.