False shores and false securities ye were taught by the good. In the lies of the good ye were born and hidden; through the good everything has become crooked and deceitful from the bottom.
ZARATHUSTRA
T he Catholic Church asserts it was founded by Christ and on the apostle Peter. Let us see just what this claim amounts to.
In one of its many pamphlets we find this claim set forth. Under the heading “St. Peter’s Supremacy—Can it be proven from the Bible?” it begins thus: “There are three texts in the Bible for which Anglicans seem unable to assign satisfactory place in their system, viz., Matthew 16:13-20, Luke 22:31-32, and John 21:15-17.” After a lengthy exposition of these texts, in true Catholic fashion, the writer concludes by saying there is no escape from the Catholic position.
There is no escape for those who cannot see beyond the literal word, and such is the pamphlet’s author. Reversing his selections that we may deal with the most important last, they read as follows:
15. So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He said unto him, Feed my lambs (John 21).
As already explained, Peter is the earth, and this it is that must feed its lambs, the life upon it. As the statement is repeated three times it implies the three biologic kingdoms. The text then has nothing to do with the Catholic Church—save to refute it. As Jonah is purely mythological, calling Peter his son makes Peter also mythological. Today intelligent people do not swallow Jonah, yet they do swallow this similitude.
31. And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat:
32. But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren (Luke 22).
Now this text has something to do with the Catholic Church; its close identification of Peter with Satan is very revealing to those who understand occult literature, but of this more in a moment. Of the last text, verses 18 and 19 will suffice.
18. And I say also unto thee, That thou are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
19. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Matt. 16).
Thus the Catholic Church is founded on Peter whom, four verses later, Jesus openly calls Satan.
23. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me . . .
Thus if the Catholic Church is founded on Peter, it is founded on Satan—a fact we have long suspected. Satan means matter, and so does Peter the rock; therefore the two are one. Peter is but the New Testament Esau who founded, or rather was, the city called Petra, rock, and also édom, atom, earth. This it is that binds and looses according to its laws—St. Peter’s keys— and what it binds and looses is the Life Principle. The seven churches of Revelation are an outline of this. This binding and loosing Peter is also the New Testament Pharaoh; he too bound and loosed the life force. Moses’ warfare with him represents this, and Paul’s quarrel with Peter has the same meaning, cosmologically. As this binding and loosing is of nature, that of the Church is utterly false and pretentious. And this includes its blessings and its cursings; its excommunication, so dreaded by its people, has no moral or spiritual effect whatever; its results are political and social only and so but another means to power. And such also is Peter.
Aside from its cosmological meaning, Peter’s story is the veriest nonsense—one mortal man endowed with the power over all humanity for all eternity; we thought that only God had this authority. In things religious, Catholics are indeed credulous but can they be so credulous as to believe that pre-Christian sages like Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, and even Buddha require this ignorant Jewish fisherman to bind and loose their souls? And what of those pre-Christian Initiates from whom these ignorant religionists got their knowledge? Are they too bound and loosed by Peter? No, and neither are we.
Such a man as Peter never existed; what then of the Catholic claim that he founded the Papacy of Rome? It is one with Romulus founding Rome itself; thus Peter is but an eponym. Yet the Catholic Encyclopedia says his founding of the Roman bishopric is “among the best ascertained facts of history,” and “no scholar now dares contradict it.” This is just a sample of Catholic scholarship. With its capacity for intellectual dishonesty, anything can be proved. And if no scholar dares contradict it, it is only because no scholar has sufficient knowledge to do so, thanks to two thousand years of Catholic scholarship.
Concerning Peter, Catholic apologists pretend to examine his position fairly and honestly, then present us with statements now known to be forgeries; they offer us documents dating back to the Dark Ages and ask us to accept the words of its benighted people. Then, to cap it all, quote from the source that deceived them. Of course the Bible proves “Peter’s Supremacy”—but the Bible is a book of mythology. That it does not provide a successor to Peter is a difficult point for the priestly sophists, yet they argue, and ably, that a successor is implied. When once they realize that Peter is the earth, they will see why no successor was provided. We trust they will also see the dishonesty of their arguments. They are not sincere examinations of the evidence, but only efforts of frightened little souls to defend a commitment, a refuge and a job.
Now what applies to Peter applies to the whole mythic per-sonae. The twelve disciples were but the twelve planetary forces in Involution, later appearing as the twelve apostles with their “glad tidings” of life’s evolutionary resurrection. As such, they are the twelve sons of Jacob and the twelve tribes of Israel, of the New Testament. What part then did they play in the founding of the Church? None whatever; this was the work of priests three centries later. What the mythic twelve founded was the earth, and not by love but by violence. What then of their martyrdom? Why this was it; the violent death of the spirit principle. James and John were its thunderers. Peter was hung head downward, but so was the Tree of Life, and the pyramid “built from the top downward.” James was thrown from the top of the temple, but what temple? The planetary temple, and his fall made what the tree and the pyramid symbolize. Thomas, like Jesus, was a tekton, and like Jesus, a builder of this temple. Stephen was stoned to death, but according to apocryphal accounts, so was Jesus. As one version states it, he was “lapidated at the junction of two streams.” A deeper meaning than stoned would be turned to stone, at the junction of Involution and Evolution. This was Peter’s fate; not only was he hung head downward but from water he became petra, stone. This is the New Testament version of Demon est Deus inversus. And such is the painless record of apostolic martyrdom; such also is some of that attributed to the first Christians. They were thrown to the lions, but so was Daniel; they were imprisoned but so was Joseph. Actual martyrdom there was, and secular persecutions too, but they began not with the symbolic characters of this Creation myth, but with the actual characters who later, believing blindly in this myth, sought to impose it upon others. This they finally did, and because of it no one in two thousand years has had the intelligence to see the deception. What is needed here is “eyesalve.”
We need this also to understand the Church. Jesus was not speaking of that institution we call the Church, Catholic or otherwise; in fact, there was no such word or institution in his time. The original was the Greek ecclesie, and it meant only a gathering, an assembly—no pope, no priest, no hierarchy. Now to understand this gathering or assembly we must again remember the position of the Creator when these alleged words were spoken. It was immediately before the Transfiguration—the invisible elements made visible. The ecclesie was therefore the gathering, or assembling, from space of the planetary elements in the sun, Hades. The choosing of its personnel is therefore but the New Testament parallel of the Old Testament’s “chosen people.” So likewise is the rock on which it is founded. The precedent for this is the rock or stone that grew in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream until it filled the whole entity. This is the earth itself. Here we see why “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Why should they, since this hell or Hades created it? After its creation, the elements were again gathered and assembled in Evolution, and the ecclesiehere is the organic forms —and the Life force will be with them “even unto the end of the world.” Thus the Church founded on Peter, the rock, is but the earth and its biologic life. This is the only catholic or universal church there is. If the human institution was meant, why did it become divided, instead of assembled, into some seventy odd sects? If Christ chose Peter to head this institution, why did the apostles ignore his wish and elect “James the Just” instead? He, not Peter, was the first Pope. Later he was deposed and stoned to death. And Ananus who deposed him was also deposed. Does this sound like divine selection?
All this forgotten now, we’re taught that Christianity was a new revelation of truth and its founders enlightened men and saints. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Ignorance is the soil in which religions grow and Christianity is no exception. The New Testament itself calls the disciples “unlearned and ignorant men,” and the Jewish judges before whom their converts were brought pronounced them idioti, from which we get the word idiots. Still later they were called “fools in Christ.” The Samaritan doctors called them Thartacs, and their period, “the Reign of Thartac.” Thartac was the Egyptian god of “credulity and the vulgar faith.” He was portrayed as a man with a book, a cloak, and the head of an ass. He appears in the Old Testament as Tartak, one of the foreign gods that Solomon worshiped.
If then the leaders were ignorant and credulous, what of the masses that followed them? According to Lecky, they were “in all intellectual virtues, lower than any other period in the history of mankind.” “They were made up mostly of the poor and obscure, who were drawn to embrace the Gospels by an inner need, and whose low position in the social scale was a standing ground of reproach against the new religion from the side of its adversaries.” G. P. Fisher. “It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless—slaves and women folk and children— whom they wish to persuade to join their congregation or can persuade.” Celsus. And again, Celsus: “The rude and menial masses, who had hitherto been almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture flocked in.” And Hodges, on Celsus: “He disliked them for their poverty and ignorance. They seemed to be presumptuous and impertinent people who undertook to be teachers, having never learned.” “I will not sit in the seat of synods while geese and cranes confusedly wrangle.” St. Gregory Nazianzus. “The ‘many’ had begun to play with psychic and spiritual forces let loose from the Mysteries; and the ‘many’ went mad for a time and have not yet regained their sanity.” G. R. S. Mead. “They had their full share of tumult, anarchy, injustice and war.” Lecky. “The primitive Christians were men whose ardor was fierce in proportion to their ignorance.” Massey. And speaking of the fierceness of their ardor, one of their own number, Jerome, said this of some who came to join but fled in fear: “Lo, they desire to depart—nay they do depart, saying that it is better to live among wild beasts than with such Christians.” And Julian, who tried to enlighten them, left them with this: “. . . the deadliest wild beasts are hardly so savage against human beings as most Christians are against each other.” And again, “. . . There is no wild beast like an angry theologian.”
Julian tried to restore some sanity and sense to his day by replacing Christian absurdity with pagan philosophy, but as with Ikhnaton of Egypt, the fanatical priests were too much for him. To this day he is known as Julian the Apostate, yet which was right, the apostate or the apostle? “The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” compared to the Christian Greece and Rome answers that question.
All this the apologists smothered in lies and now our deluded preachers, teachers, playwrights and scenarists paint these early Christians as the inspired few, fighting and dying for the one true faith, and brand the really inspired as ignorant pagans. In Chapter 19 we dealt with the intelligentsia of the day; it might be of interest to know what these thought of the new religion. “It is a pernicious superstition.” Tacitus. “The new faith is a perverse and extravagant superstition.” Pliny. “A superstition vain and frantic.” Suetonius. Today a still-deluded race looks upon these statements as pagan opposition to “the light of the world” when they were but prelude to our spiritual dāmmerung. Little wonder the Jews did not accept this “superstition vain and frantic”; they knew too well what it really was—their old mythmakers at it again.
Thus whatever the early Christians suffered, it was not as the Church asserts, because of the new gospel they preached, but because of the old absurdity they resurrected—belief in literal mythology. Another “Son of God,” No. 16, had appeared, miraculously conceived and virginly born, a third part of the Trinity walking about in Galilee. This was that “blasphemy barbarously bold,” Porphyry had denounced, yet a band of fanatics called Christians was actually demanding its restoration, which meant in plain words, a return to the dark night of pre-historic Greece and Rome. Well, this just must not happen —but by heaven it did. The darkness fell, and for two thousand years it covered the Western world. All the wisdom-knowledge of the ages was burned in the market place; the “light of the world” had triumphed and the light of reason died. As Canon Farrar said: “The triumph of Latin theology was the death of rational exegesis.” This is hindsight; those with foresight might well have anticipated Earl Grey: “The lights are going out all over Europe.”
In the light of these facts, the “tyrants” Nero, Tiberius, Domitian, seem less monstrous; indeed they stand out as the defenders of truth. They tried to save the world from two thousand years of ignorance, but that ignorance was too much for them. They found themselves accused of the very things they tried to prevent, riot, arson, rebellion. The Christian priesthood, inheriting the libelous cunning of its Semitic prototype, caused the burning and the fighting and blamed them on its enemies. Whether it burned Rome or not, it burned the truth and that is worse.
The destruction of all evidence of Christianity’s gnostic and pagan source was “the first work.” It was the evangelists themselves who started it, in Antioch, as stated in Acts. Speaking of just such things the Emperor Julian said he would deal with them more at length, “when we begin to explore the monsterous deeds and fraudulent machinations of the evangelists.” And of their followers, Edward Carpenter wrote thus: “. . . they took special pains to destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own dishonesty.” By order of the Church all the books of the Gnostic Basilides were burned, likewise Porphyry’s thirty-six volumes. Pope Gregory VII burned the Apollo library filled with ancient lore. Emperor Theodosius had 27,000 schools of the Mysteries paprus rolls burned because they contained the doctrinal basis of the Gospels. By offering rich rewards Ptolemy Philadelphus gathered 270,000 ancient documents; these too were burned for the same reason. As someone has said, the early Christians heated their baths with the Ancient Wisdom. And what knowledge they may have contained!
Nor did the destruction end with the Founders; the fanatics they made carried on the work: the Crusaders burned all the books they could find, including original Hebrew scrolls. In 1233 the works of Maimonides were burned along with twelve thousand volumes of the Talmud. In 1244 eighteen thousand books of various kind were destroyed. According to Draper, Cardinal Ximenes “delivered to the flames in the square of Granada eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts.” On finding similar lore in the New World, the Spanish Christians destroyed it and the temples that contained it.
All evidence of source destroyed, the Christian Fathers could now substitute their own absurdities. And to substantiate them they altered words and inserted verses that did not exist in the original texts. Celsus, a witness to this falsification, said of the revisionists, “Some of them, as it were in a drunken state producing self-induced visions, remodel their Gospel from its first written form, and reform it so that they may be able to refute the objections brought against it.” On this same subject Massey wrote thus: “They made dumb all pagan testimony against the unparalleled imposture then being perfected in Rome. They had almost reduced the first four centuries to silence on all matters of the most vital importance for any proper understanding of the true origins of the Christian superstition. The mythos having been at last published as a human history, everything else was suppressed or forced to support the fraud.” It is well known the Christian Fathers were notorious forgers: even the Catholics admit that. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “In all these departments forgery and interpolation as well as ignorance had wrought mischief on a grand scale.” Indeed Pope Stephen II went so far as to write a letter and sign St. Peter’s name to it. When we know that Peter never existed these deceptions take on new meaning; they give the key to the Church’s entire history, motive and purpose—domination, wealth, and power. To this end all else was done, including the fakeries, forgeries, and the burning of books.
In spite of all this we are told the founders of our faith were good men, filled with the Holy Spirit and therefore above the crime and cruelty of common clay. Such is the teaching, yet their own words belie these lies. Consider this from Jerome, for instance: “If thy father lies down across thy threshold, if thy mother uncovers to thine eyes the busom which suckeled thee, trample on thy father’s lifeless body, trample on thy mother’s busom and with eyes unmoistened and dry, fly to the Lord who calleth thee.” This is Christian zeal and the very opposite of religion. And Tertullian, gloating on the prospects of seeing the philosophers in hell, exclaimed: “How shall I laugh! How shall I rejoice! How shall I triumph when I see so many illustrious kings who were said to have mounted into heaven groaning with Jupiter their God in the lowest depths of hell.” And St. Augustine on his religion: “The enemies thereof, I hate vehemently; O that thou wouldst slay them with thy two-edged sword.”
And who were these “enemies”? Atheists, infidels, destroyers of the truth? No indeed, the keepers of the truth, those abhorrent Gnostics. Here we should recall the words of Frances Swiney: “It may truly be said that the blackest and bloodiest records that history can show us are the attacks of the Orthodox Church upon the Gnostic mystics.” Oh yes, it takes more than ignorance to found a religion; it takes dishonesty, cruelty and war as well.
That Christianity had such a beginning may seem to the faithful quite incredible, but if so, it is only because the little that they know about it came from priestly apologists lying for the same reason as their predecessors. The unbelieving should read contemporary historians, Eusebius, for instance, in 250 A.D., that’s, A(fter) the D(elusion). He left a record of the Church at that time and it reads like this: “But since from our great freedom we have fallen into neglect and sloth when each had begun to envy and slander the other, when we waged intestine war against each other, wounding each other with words as with swords and spears, when leaders assailed leaders, and people assailed people, hurling epithets at each other, when fraud and hypocrisy had reached the highest heights of malice . . . when devoid of all sense, we gave no thought to the worship of God, but believing like certain impious men, that human affairs are controlled by no providence, we heaped crime upon crime. When our pastors despising the rule of religion, fought with each other intent on nothing but abuse, threats, jealousy, hatred and mutual enmity, each claiming for himself, a principality as a sort of tyranny.” And we are asked to believe these men were saints guided by the Holy Ghost.
We see then that the early Christians were by no means a united band against a pagan world; they were, on the contrary, a number of fanatical cults all contending for place and power.1 As the Church acquired both, internecine war broke out for the spoils—and now the noble martyrs began to martyr one another. Hundreds fell at the hands of their greedy rivals; thousands died in battles fought for churches, papal elections, and the right to conduct services. With such a beginning, the Crusades, St. Bartholomew, and the Inquisition become more understandable.
Another fallacy perpetuated by the Church concerns its creeds and dogmas, rites and rituals. The gullible laity is led to believe these all drive from God, or Christ, the apostles and the scriptures. They should read their own Bishop Hilary. He told them where they came from. “It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous that there are as many doctrines as inclinations, and as many sources of blasphemy as there are faults among us, because we make creeds arbitrarily and explain them as arbitrarily. Every year, nay every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries; we repent of what we have done; we defend those who repent; we anathematize those whom we defend; we condemn either the doctrines of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; and reciprocally tearing each other to pieces, we have been the cause of each other’s ruin.” Here we have the source of our sacred doctrines. Where they are not the work of ignorance trying to explain what it does not understand, they are the result of priestly endeavor to control the human mind.
According to their teaching “the blood of Christ washed away the sins of the world,” still with us. What it actually washed away was the sanity of the world. In due time its doctrines so bedeviled the Western mind that Agobard of Lyons wrote thus: “The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe.” Should the skeptical reader wish a sample, we offer another tale of Christian martyrdom, this time about the precursor of the curse, John of the Gospels. According to the saints, John, when very old, incurred the anger of the Emperor Domitian. To punish him, the latter had this holy man thrown into a caldron of oil and resin. A fire was lit, and when the liquid began to boil the jeering crowd heard a voice singing in the flames—the Christian Shad-rach, etc. When the caldron boiled dry, there was John still alive and quite unharmed. Jerome, Eusebius, Tertullian all relate this miracle and practically all hagiographies contain it. And now, if these eminent Christians could believe this absurdity, they could believe anything, even the Gospels. And do you realize that what they believed was that “faith once delivered to the saints”? It was, and for fifteen hundred years their word was law, and men were burned at the stake for doubting it. It would seem that these saints were the most ignorant men who ever left their mark on human thought. Of Causation and Creation they knew nothing; of Evolution and its qualities they knew no more, yet their substitute “superstition” still dominates the religious mind.
Anyone dominated by religious thought is under the influence of a reason-perverting power. Such were Christianity’s Confounding Fathers. Today we honor these misbegotten for their courage without realizing the crime they committed—the complete destruction of ancient science and philosophy. This resulted in fifteen hundred years of darkness, in which the Christian people did not even know the earth is round. And yet as early as the sixth century Before the Confusion, Pythagoras taught that the earth was not only round but going ‘round the sun. In the third century B.C. Aristarchus outlined the true heliocentric theory developed as a great discovery nineteen centuries later by Copernicus. In the third century B.C. Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth, and in the second Hipparchus invented longitude and latitude, determined the obliquity of the ecliptic and discovered the precession of the equinoxes. In the fifth century, Democritus and Leucippus taught the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of life. These men were doing what man is supposed to do—turn Reality into Truth—but “the game was called on account of darkness,” the night of Christianity. In the Dark Ages the “blackout” was complete—a curious effect for “the light of the world.”
Obliquity, precession, longitude and latitude are complex subjects requiring much scientific knowledge about the earth, its shape, its size and motions. Now let us compare Greek scientists with Christian saints. Against some scientist still surviving one had this to say: “This fool wishes to reverse the entire system of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth”—and some thirteen hundred years later a pope issued a bull to the same effect. Another famous argument was that “in the day of Judgment men on the other side of a globe could not see the Lord descending through the air.” Concerning the earth’s motion, St. Augustine had this to say: “It is impossible there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the earth, since no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam.” And Father Inchofer: “The opinion of the earth’s motion is of all heresies the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous; the immobility of the earth is thrice sacred.” And Lactantius concluded, “It is impossible that men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and trees on the other side of the earth hang downward and that men have their feet higher than their heads. . . . Now I am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one absurd opinion with another.” How peculiarly applicable are these words to those who uttered them. We know now these men were wrong scientifically, but we still do not know they were wrong theologically.
Among those most active in this perversion of truth was the great Augustine—not an ignorant man scholastically but certainly ignorant metaphysically. The proof of this lies in his own words, his Confessions. Though he did not know the earth is round, he presumed in these, to explain its creation, as of Genesis. This is how it reads:
This then is what I conceive O my God when I hear thy Scriptures saying, In the beginning God made heaven and earth: and the earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep, and not mentioning what day thou createst them; this is what I conceive, that because of the heavens—that intellectual heaven, whose intelligences know all at once, not in part, not darkly, not through a glass, but as a whole, in manifestation face to face; not this thing now, that thing anon; but (as I said) know all at once, without any succession of times; and because of the earth invisible and without form, without any succession of time, which succession presents ‘this thing now, that thing anon; because where there is no form, there is no distinction of things; it is then, on account of these two, a primitive formed and a primitive formless; this one, heaven, but the heaven of heavens; the other earth but the earth movable and without form; because of these two do I conceive did the Scriptures say without mention of days, In the beginning God created heaven and earth. For, forthwith it subjoined what earth it spoke of; and also in that the firmament is recorded to be created the second day, and called heaven, it conveys to us of which heaven he before spoke, without mention of days.
And this goes on for pages, ending in rhapsodical raving. And for this the Christian world renounced Greek science and philosophy; for this all ancient learning was burned in the marketplace. If ever Disraeli’s words were applicable it is here: “It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.” A crime may affect only a few, and for a brief period, whereas a mistake of this proportion affects the destiny of the race; it can even subvert Evolution —and did. Thus are the sins of the Christian Fathers visited upon their sons, and not just to the fourth generation, but to the present time. But for this crime the light of Greece might have burned on, from Aristarchus to Copernicus, from Aristotle to Bacon, and from Democritus to Darwin. Hero’s steam engine might have been perfected, America discovered in 492. Why, we might now be civilized. But no, that guiding light went out and darkness was again upon the deep.
Until this triumph of fanaticism, the ancient world was on its way to true enlightenment. Besides those already mentioned, it had produced such men as Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and many others. Collectively, they laid the philosophic and even scientific bases for true civilization; the Christian Church destroyed them. “The Emperor Justinian closed the doors of the Academy at Athens, and the seven philosophers, who alone represented the Neoplatonic faith, took their books and sought the hospitality of the East.” Hodges. And not until their philosophy reappeared did the darkness disappear. The Church’s separation of religion from philosophy and cosmology was its greatest crime and error. By so doing it robbed the racial mind of cosmic perspective without which it could not distinguish truth from error, the personal from the universal.
No one ignorant of the Mystery schools and the kind of consciousness they developed can realize the blight that Christiantity became. With its tortured Christ and sense of sin, it robbed us of the joy of life the earlier people knew. With its fake salvation and false God-concept, it denied us knowledge of Evolution and our place and purpose in it. This alone explains our plight yet the pagan philosophers taught it. Thereafter, our philosophers fell asleep at the switch, and while they slept a train load of devils passed right through and founded the kingdom of error on earth—Christianity, the greatest mistake man ever made.
A good example of their work is the Athanasian Creed. This consists of thirty-seven items, much too long to quote in full, yet here is the wisdom of the Christian Fathers, here is Western man proclaiming his metaphysical competency; we think they should be heard.
1. Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.
2. Which Faith, except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
3. And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.
4. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
5. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.
6. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the glory equal, the majesty coeternal. (They aren’t even coexistent in one body.)
7. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.
8. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost un-create.
9. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.
And under such a creed everything else becomes incomprehensible.
As everyone knows today, the word person as used in this creed comes from the Latin persona. This did not mean a person, an individual as we use it; it meant a mask. In the Roman theater the actors wore personae to hide their real identity. The Greek equivalent was the word from which we get hypocrite. Thus instead of identifying, the word implies something false and deceptive. Esoterically it might be thought of as matter, the mask behind which the ever unknowable Creativity conceals itself. Today, however, it is but a mask behind which a cunning priesthood hides from us the true nature of our source. Tear off that mask and the mystery disappears, likewise the incomprehensible. And this we will do.
The Trinity has nothing whatever to do with things religious or with religion’s God. That we may see this let us consider the Hindu Trinity: Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—Creator, Preserver and Destroyer. But of what? Why, of the world, of course, hence cosmology, not religion. Brahma creates the substance of the world, Vishnu preserves it for billions of years, but finally Siva destroys it through radiation. If you would see all three at once you have only to look at the sun, the earth and the moon, the three stages in the cosmic process. Now compare this with the Christian Trinity.
In his metaphysical incompetency Western man turns to his semi-Oriental Bible for his spiritual knowledge, but if this be the source of it, there should be no doctrine of the Trinity or belief in it, for this does not come from the Bible; indeed the word Trinity does not appear in the Bible, at least in the original. The nearest approach to it is the reference in John’s gospel to “three witnesses in heaven,” and all authorities today pronounce this an interpolation as late as the ninth century. How then did it get into the creeds?
The doctrine of the Trinity is a wholly pagan concept, taken over by triumphant Christianity without its authors’ understanding of it. One of the chief contenders with early Christianity was Mithraism, the religion of the Persians. This had a Trinity, and in their efforts to win the Mithraists over to Christianity the Founding Fathers incorporated this pagan Trinity in their faith. Thus the Athanasian Creed is but an ecclesiastical attempt to harmonize Jewish monotheism with pagan polytheism. Originally the Trinity was part of ancient cosmology; it was only in the Zodiacal Night that it became religionized. The Christian Fathers took the pagans’ concept literally and on it founded the most spiritually illiterate Faith in all the annals of religious fanaticism. All others have some relic of the wisdom-knowledge in them; Christianity not only lacks it, it destroyed it.
By the time this creed was written, all knowledge of Causation and Creation was lost, and so these creed makers knew no more about cosmogenesis than little children know about biogenesis. Over the one little word filioque, son, the Pope of Rome, Leo IX, and the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Ceru-larius, excommunicated each other. And neither knew what he was talking about. This mutual excommunication occurred in 1054 and it took the Church 911 years to revoke it, in 1965. That is its pace and tardy reform.
Only when the more enlightened laity makes of it an anachronism does it hasten to reform, hence the recent Ecumenical Council. Another “gathering” of the “ecclesia,” but how different from the first—some twenty-five hundred lords and princes of the Church in which “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” And what was the purpose thereof? To discuss the great fundamentals, Causation, Creation, Truth, Reality? No, for of these they know nothing. And in what were “the sweeping changes” wrought? Poverty, ignorance, commercialism, communism, birth control? No, only in liturgical minutia: a bit of the mass can now be said in the native tongue instead of in Latin; the celebrant can now turn his face instead of his behind to the congregation; the communicant can now fast one day instead of three before communion; save Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, he can even eat meat during Lent; a nun can now appear in something other than a symbol of the Black Death.
If the former decrees are wrong now, why have they been right for two thousand years? If they can be changed by man, they were made by man. And that a man in far off Rome can tell millions the world over what they can eat and when they can rise is sheer mental tyranny. That this tyranny endure, no change was made in creed and dogma; heaven and hell remain and love and mercy preside over them. No change should be expected here. These “innocents abroad” haven’t even discovered the demoniac nature of Causation yet. The theological significance of the dictum Demon est Deus inversus is quite beyond the ken of ecclesiastics. What then of the “infallibility of the Pope”? It is indeed pitiable. Of the more than two hundred and sixty, not one of them had the slightest knowledge of the true meaning of the scriptures.
For these recent changes credit is now given to John XXIII but in the long perspective of time it may be seen he but set in motion the beginning of the end.
For nearly two thousand years Christianity has been trying to save us instead of civilizing us and it has ended in a century of savagery, an era in which two hundred and fifty million Christians died in Christian wars. See p. 463. It has failed because it has not enlightened us; it has not developed our consciousness, the evolving factor. Our present problems are the product of our present consciousness but consciousness that creates problems cannot solve them. Only a higher degree of consciousness can do that, and until it is attained we will remain victims of that “will” that manifests in Nature.
Such is Christianity, a religion based on a fraud, founded by “fools” and confirmed by an assassin—Constantine the Great. If we can believe history, he killed with his own hands two of his brothers-in-law, had his wife, his son Crispus and two nephews murdered, bled to death his political rivals, threw the unbelieving into a well, and caused uncounted thousands to die on the field of battle. Constantine was another “man of God,” and so was favored with a vision, the cross, and under its banner “In hoc signo vinces,” he conquered all Europe for Christianity. And we’re told it was the teachings of the gentle Christ did that. Gibbon, the historian, knew better. “The Church of Rome defended by violence the empire which she had acquired by fraud.”2
And now that Christianity is firmly established, what do we find? “The kingdom of heaven upon earth”? On the contrary, a moral and intellectual degradation unparalleled in human history. According to Lecky, “The two centuries after Constantine are uniformly represented by the Fathers as periods of general and scandalous vice.” And the following two were no better. Bishop Gregory of Tours wrote an account of them and it is one of the darkest pictures in all history. On reading it, Gibbon remarked: “It would be difficult to find anywhere more vice or less virtue.” As for the fifth century, Salvianus, a priestly historian, had this to say: “Besides a very few who avoid evil, what is almost the whole body of Christians but a sink of iniquity? How many in the church will you find that are not drunkards, or adulterers, or fornicators, or gamblers, or robbers, or murderers—or all together?” And we are told Christianity uplifted the race, rid the world of pagan sin and paved the way for true civilization. This too is Catholic scholarship.
According to this, the saved and sanctified Christians were not responsible for these wretched conditions; they were the result of the invasion of the barbarians and their destruction of the Roman Empire. Only after this, they say, did morality and learning sink to abysmal depths. They do not tell us these “awful barbarians” were also Christians. A hundred years before the invasion Bishop Ulfilas had given them a Gothic Bible, and they had embraced the faith.3 It was not then a case of barbarous pagans against civilized Christians, but barbarous Christians against semicivilized Christians. And of the two, the former were the more morally decent. Immorality is a civilized vice, and the higher the civilization, the more depraved its vicious-ness. Tacitus, in his book The Morals of the Germans, shamed the Romans by holding up to them the superior morals of their invaders. Hodglein, in his history, Italy and Her Invaders, called these Vandals “an army of Puritans”; and so did Salvianus. The latter also said that the invaders were scandalized by the moral indecencies of Christian Carthage. And here for once Catholic scholarship concurs, “Crimes of all kinds made Africa one of the most wretched provinces in the world.” Catholic Encyclopedia. Dean Milman, a Protestant historian, admits that “Christianity has given to barbarism hardly more than its superstition, and its hatred of heretics and unbelievers. Throughout assassinations, parricides and fratricides intermingle with adultery and rape.” After examining the morals of Italy under the Ostrogoths, he implies that those of pagan Rome were better than those of Christian Rome. To quote him directly: “Under the Ostrogothic kingdom the manners in Italy might seem to revert to the dignified austerity of the old Roman Republic.” The Vandals were ignorant and hence destructive but the Church has put upon them far too much blame for the havoc she herself had wrought. As Draper said: “It was not the Goths, nor the Vandals, nor the Normans, nor the Saracen, but the popes and their nephews who produced the dilapidation of Rome.” This was Christian Rome. As for Christian Greece:
Eternal summer gilds thee yet,
But all, except thy sun, has set.
Byron, Don Juan, Canto HI
Nor was it pagan sin that destroyed the Roman Empire; since it was thoroughly Christianized by the fifth century, the claim that its fall was due to the enervating influence of Christianity would be more logical; in fact, it was the natural result of Augustine’s City of God—take no thought for this world, prepare for the next. Such was the Christian teaching. When Celsus reproved the Christians for not helping the pagans defend the Empire, Origen replied, “We defend it with our prayers.” And so it fell, and with it, a thousand years of darkness.
The nadir of this Christian night was around the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, practically a blank page in European history. Nothing was done of any consequence, yet this period was most prolific in the production of saints. From this we can see where the saints come from—out of the night of ignorance, fear and superstition, the three grey hags with the single eye, the eye of faith. With this all Christendom saw Reality inverted: truth was error, right was wrong, and science of the devil.
During this “Reign of Thartac,” education was frowned upon. As Compayre said, “Once the pagan schools were closed Christianity did not open others, and after the fourth century a profound night enveloped humanity. The labor of the Greeks and Romans was as though it had never been.” The only effort to restore education was made by those barbarians the Church claims to have civilized. Theodoric the Goth brought to his court all the artists and scholars of his day, and his daughter Amalasuntha carried on the work after his death. Charlemagne tried to reestablish general education because, as he said, “the study of letters is well-nigh extinguished through the neglect of our ancestors.” But “the monks and bishops resisted the pressure of Charlemagne and closed nearly the whole of the schools as soon as he was dead.” Bishop Brown in The Bankruptcy of Christian Super-naturalism, p. 102. It is the proud boast of the Catholic Church that its “monks and bishops” kept alive the light of learning throughout this night. It did, but it also kept it to itself and for the very good reason that this light was also a means to power. For the same reason it kept it from the masses; these could neither read nor write. This was indeed Christen-dumb!
Yet there were knowledge and learning everywhere except in Catholic Europe. At a time when even kings could not read or write, a Moorish king had a private library of six hundred thousand books. At a time when 99 per cent of the Christian people were wholly illiterate, the Moorish city of Cordova had eight hundred public schools, and “there was not a village within the limits of the empire where the blessings of education could not be enjoyed by the children of the most indigent peasant,” and “it was difficult to encounter even a Moorish peasant who could not read and write.” S. P. Scott in The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe. In Christian Europe scholars were burned at the stake; in Moorish Europe they were the highest paid men in the realm. One Moorish king gave his leading scholar forty thousand pieces of gold each year, while in Chris-tendom, Roger Bacon, credited with inventing the camera, clock, telescope and lens, gunpowder and steam power, was imprisoned fourteen years as a sorcerer and heretic. Pope Sylvester II was an educated man, but he had to go to these Moorish universities to get his education. On his return and elevation, he manifested some interest in medicine, and so fell under the suspicion of sorcery. He escaped the witch-burners only because of his high office.
The Church’s opposition to science, and particularly medicine, is too well known to recount here. We might, however, offer a keynote by way of illustration. This too comes from the saints.
For a thousand years benighted Christians took their cue from St. Augustine, who informed them that “All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment first-baptized Christians, yea, even the guileless newborn infant.” The remedy was also of the saints, their bones, the most efficacious of which were those of St. Rosalie of Palermo, which Professor Buckland found later to be those of a goat. The real “goat,” however, was the Christian people—some fifty million of them died of the plague in the Middle Ages. The saints were responsible for this also, for they had taught that filthiness was akin to holiness, and cleanliness unbecoming pride in that body reviled by Saint Paul. So ignorant were they of the cause of disease a law was passed that every peasant bringing food to the city must carry back in the same cart a load of the city’s waste, thrown out on the street during the night. Little wonder plague followed plague and the life-span was twenty-one years. Under such conditions Europe did not double its population in a thousand years. What these people needed was knowledge, scientific knowledge and the power over nature that it gives. Yet this was precisely what the Catholic Church opposed, for it well knew that “Ignorance is the mother of devotion”—and the supporter of the Church.
Most writers on this subject attribute the decline of science and learning wholly to ecclesiastical opposition. We think the cause lies deeper than this, deeper even than the Church. The ultimate cause is religion itself. The Christian religion diverted the human mind from the natural to the supernatural, from the inductive method of science to the deductive way of religion. This resulted in a loss of interest in the natural and the scientific; this molded the Christian mind for a thousand years. It was this that created the opposition; it was this that made what brilliant minds there were, ineffectual. Unlike our scientists, they had no accumulated knowledge to work from. Thus we lay the blame for both the decline of science and the opposition to it on religion, not just men. During the Renaissance conditions improved considerably, but what was the Renaissance but the return of pre-Christian enlightenment? It was this that raised the standards of Christendom, not Christianity. “Far from being a Christian concept, the value and dignity of the individual is a Renaissance notion which infiltrated Christianity in opposition to the Christian doctrine of providence and sin.” Reinhold Niebuhr.
Yet in spite of this the claim is made that Christianity put an end to pagan slavery and thereby dignified the common man. It did not; it only changed the name to serfdom. And what was a medieval serf, if not a slave? The Greek and Roman slave had definite rights,4 the medieval serf had none—not even the right to his bride the first night: this was “le droit de seigneur.” The Church not only condoned medieval slavery but also practiced it. During the feudal period some of the Catholic hierarchy had as many as forty thousand serfs, and their condition was unspeakable. They were unlettered, lived in filth and died of preventable disease. As a reason for being, the Church has always done charitable work for the poor, but never in all its history has it done anything to rid the world of poverty. At that time it was too busy burning heretics to bother with that. Its sins were not all of omission either; it opposed the efforts of others to improve the serfs’ condition. Montesquieu, a humanitarian and agnostic, was assailed because he opposed slavery and the use of torture. His book The Spirit of Laws was condemned and put on the Index. And what about the trade in African slaves? It was not only unopposed by the Church but carried on in the name of all that was high and holy. The Spanish Government signed its slave charters “in the name of the Most Holy Trinity.” The notorious slave trader, Captain Hawkins, named his slave ship Jesus, and from it threw the sick slaves to the sharks. In those days slavery, like smallpox, was “the will of God,” and the Bible sanctioned it. Did not Noah say, “Cursed be Ham and all his eggs (seed); a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren”? “So we see that God not only instituted slavery but he also made it to forever be a part of the moral probation of the human race, and to be a great lesson to the end of time of his abhorrence of sin.” (From Slavery, Its Institution and Origin, written by a minister, 1860.) His Reverence split not only the infinitive but the Infinite as well; he put the blame for slavery right where it belongs. We said religion was a reason-perverting influence; this well illustrates it. Slavery is not a sin; it’s God’s punishment for sin. This God cannot see sin in his unjust punishment but only in the punished. All right for the benighted past, you say, but we don’t take the Bible so literally today. “I would accept every statement in the Bible literally, no matter how it contravened my reason.” 5 W. J. Bryan. And this man aspired to be President, and others like him succeeded, hence Palestine for the Jews, the Bible says God promised it. So where again we see the mind-perverting influence of this unholy book; whatever it says or sanctions is “the will of God,” including slavery, cruelty, war and conquest.
It took Christianity nearly seventeen hundred years to perceive the evil in slavery, and it wasn’t the priestly mind that did perceive it, as per our quotation. There is a clue in this indifference we should follow. In Christ’s day slavery was everywhere, yet he made no effort to abolish it; his only words concerning it were parables about unworthy servants, a euphemism for slaves. Does this not imply this priestly indifferent mind created him? Perhaps this is why he did not concern himself with slavery.
No evil or injustice is seen as such in its own blind cycle; it is only as its cycle passes that it is seen as such. Who, for instance, saw the evil of colonialism in the eighteenth century? Who saw the injustice of segregation in the nineteenth? Why, even inquisition and crucifixion were accepted in their day. It is only as our consciousness and sentiency develop that we see these things for what they are. So is it with our own ways and institutions: nationalism, patriotism, capitalism, commercialism, and even theism. These are all barbarism, and seeds of war. Not one of them will exist in a civilized world. And strange it is that only “the kids” can see them for what they are. All unknowingly they are responding to the impulse of the coming Aquarian Age; their Piscean parents cannot, and so are shocked. Now just as with the above institutions, so with Christianity and Churchianity. They are of, for and by the benighted Piscean Age and will disappear with it. What is needed now is a super-Christian philosophy for post-Christian man.
Here we come to another false claim for Christianity—it softened the pagan heart, made us less brutal, cruel and warlike, yet where do you find more cruelty and brutality than that of the Christian Crusaders in the Near East and the Christian conquistadors in the far West? For their God and gold they plundered cities and destroyed nations. To such heights of bigotry did religion inspire ignorance that wholesale massacres were resorted to—St. Bartholomew’s Day, for instance, which “for per-fidity and atrocity . . . has no equal in the annals of the world,” wrote Draper. Here ten thousand Protestants were slaughtered, after which Gregory XIII had a medal struck to commemorate some more “Christian martyrs.” Nor was this all; in a letter to Charles IX of France, 1572, he expressed his Christian kindness thus: “We rejoice with you that with the help of God you have relieved the world of these wretched heretics.” Such also was the fate of the Albigenses and the Knights Templars. Add to these the ten million the Inquisition destroyed, of which “nearly thirty-two thousand had been burnt.” Again Draper. In the city of Verona alone sixty men were burned alive in thirty days, and let’s not forget the five hundred witches in two years. In those days murder was so common carts were sent out each morning to gather up the corpses. So frightful became conditions that Pagliarici exclaimed, “It is hardly possible for a man to be a Christian and die in his bed.” Christ’s “kingdom of heaven” was now Dante’s Inferno on earth. Oh yes, there’s a way out of the Catholic position but not its condition.
It is difficult for modern man to realize the cruelty of medieval man; it seems he did not have our capacity to feel. One of the emperors, becoming interested in the mystery of metabolism, had two live men dissected in his presence; the great artist da Vinci could and did watch the contortions of tortured heretics that he might put agony on canvas. Add to this natural cruelty the fervor of religious fanaticism and you have those saintly sadists of the “Holy Inquisition.” Yet these were the days of courtly manners and fine speech. Culture it seems is of two kinds, soul and social, the latter often but feline niceties to hide porcine natures. The history of the Middle Ages bears this out— fine manners and foul murders, chivalry and slavery, powdered wigs and plundered nations.
Such were the Bible-inspired Crusades, those “holy wars” for a wholly mythical tomb. Under the cross and the cry “God wills it,” millions of those “fools in Christ” went forth to die, including sixty thousand children. And in the name of a kindly Christ they committed crimes unspeakable. “If you would know how we treated our enemies at Jerusalem know that in the portico of Solomon and in the Temple our men rode through the unclean blood of the Saracens which came up to the knees of our horses.” 6 “See thou then to what damned deeds religion urges men.”7 If religion no longer urges us to kill, it is not because of religion but because of what religion opposed—science and enlightenment.
After five bloody attempts, these “fools in Christ” wrested the Unholy Land from its rightful owners—and to what end? Eight hundred years of Arab-Christian enmity. Here we’ll let the Encyclopaedia Britannica complete the tale. “So was founded the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem whose history is one of the most painful ever penned. It is a record of almost unredeemed envy, hatred and malice, and of vice with its consequent disease, all rendered the more repulsive in that its transactions were carried on in the name of religion. For eighty-eight turbulent years this feudal kingdom was imposed on the country, and then it disappeared as suddenly as it came, leaving no trace but the ruins of castles and churches, a few place names, and an undying hereditary hatred of Christianity among the native population.” A hatred so undying that seven hundred years later we are confronted with it—the Middle East problem. And here again Christian ignorance sets the stage—Palestine for the Jews; and here again the Bible is the inspiration. What have we learned in those seven hundred years? “Three million lost their lives in a futile attempt to rescue a tomb from the Mussulmans. Ten million were slain during the Inquisition. Fourteen million were slain in Christian wars of the Nineteenth Century. Thirty million lost their lives in wars between Christian nations during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. Wars, tyranny and oppression of Christian nations since the days of Constan-tine have caused the death of more than 200,000,000 people.” 8 And now we must add to this “Some 23,000,000 men in uniform from 53 nations, countries and dominions were killed or died; at least 28,000,000 civilians died from bombs or guns, hunger or disease or in the concentration camps.” Hanson Baldwin on World War Two. Such is the legacy left us by “the Prince of Peace.” “Put not your faith in princes,” particularly of the Church.
No account of this period would be complete without a word about them, also their claim to divine authorization, selection, and protection. What we offer here is admittedly and intentionally a one-sided picture, the dark and shameful side. Our reason for so presenting it is that millions of misguided souls are painting the other side and holding it up to a credulous world as the only side. We think both sides should be known, not only in the interest of truth but also of those who are living in spiritual bondage to a fraudulent authority. For these, a thousand years of crime and corruption are glossed over with the statement, “There were a few bad popes.” Were their informers honest they would admit there were a few good ones.
We have spoken of the dishonesty of Catholic scholarship. Nowhere is it more evident than in its whitewash of wicked popes. Their crimes were all done by others and “unavoidable,” their burning of heretics, a “necessity of the times,” their debaucheries, but “love of good cheer.” All save three it cannot whitewash were good, great and courageous men. Contemporary records completely refute these claims, and these records were not written by the Church’s enemies, but mainly by its own historians, popes and cardinals: Victor II, Pius II, Cardinal Baronius, Bishop Liutprand, Father Salvianus, and historians, Milman, Gerbert, Buchard, Guicciardini, Vacandard, Draper, and others. These are the authority for the dark and shameful side. What we offer here is but a hop, skip and jump over some 1500 years, but sufficient, we think, to disprove any claim to divine selection and guidance.
To begin with, the first fifty popes were all saints, save one, and some, as we said, couldn’t write their own names. This brings us to about 500 A.D. After that, the popes were such that not even Catholic scholarship can apply such a term to them. The Papacy had then become a means to power, and only the power-seekers achieved it—and not by right but by might. It was war to the finish. As the New Standard Encyclopedia states it, “In the furious strife of local parties, the papacy came to be hardly more than the spoils of party victory. Candidates of every variety of incapacity and unsuitableness were set up by rivals.” And among these were twenty-nine antipopes, all told. The authority for this is Hergenrōther, Cardinal Prefect of the Vatican Archives.
During the Dark Ages these divinely guided popes murdered one another at such a rate there were ten in twelve years (891-903) and forty in little more than one hundred. Sergius HI was a wholesaler; according to Cardinal Baronius and also Vul-garius, he murdered his two predecessors. In 708 Toto, a noble at the head of a rabble following, had his brother appointed pope. This was Constantine II whose eyes were put out by Christopher, his chief official. Then Christopher and his son plotted against Pope Gregory for which they too had their eyes put out. The two nephews of Leo III, Pascal and Campulus, themselves clerics, conspired to replace Leo and set a band of paid assassins upon him as he rode through the streets. When the hirelings failed, the two nephews dragged the pope into a monastery and completed the work. Pure fiction, downright slander, you say. But no, it is from the record of the papal biographer.
This was the order of the day. Pope Leo the V was deposed by another Christopher, who was in turn deposed and succeeded by the aforesaid criminal Sergius III, who murdered his predecessors. At this time it was not the Holy Ghost that selected the popes but what Cardinal Baronius called scortas, whores. This was the “rule of the courtesans,” sometimes called the Pornocracy, or reign of the whores. Among them was one Baronius called the “shameless whore,” Theodora, and her equally shameless daughter Marozia. Both had sons by Sergius III, and both put their illegitimates on the papal throne—John XI and John XII. The first was imprisoned, the second “turned the Lateran Palace into a brothel.” There was no crime he didn’t commit—murder, perjury, adultery, incest with his two sisters, bleeding and castrating his enemies, etc. He died, we are told, at the hands of an outraged husband.
According to the record, Cardinal Francone had Benedict VI strangled, after which he became Boniface VII, “a horrid monster surpassing all other mortals in wickedness,” according to Gerbert. He was no worse however than Boniface VIII—”a strong and courageous Pope.” Yes indeed! To gain his tiara he had the halfwit Celestine V disposed of. He did not long enjoy his victory for soon he was driven out by the Romans. Under a successor, Clement V, he was tried posthumously and found guilty of every crime including pederasty and murder. And when Clement died, his successor, John XXII, revealed that Clement had been so very clement he had given his nephew the equivalent of five million dollars of papal money. It was at this time the papal court was moved to Avignon, and now St. Peter had two successors, one at Avignon and one at Rome. But even this was not enough; there were at one time three—Gregory XII, Alexander V, and John XXIII.9
So corrupt was the latter, Sigmund of Hungary called a council to investigate him. The result was fifty-four articles describing him as “wicked, irreverent, unchaste, a liar, disobedient and infected with many vices.” As a cardinal he had been “inhuman, unjust and cruel.” As Pope he was “an oppressor of the poor, persecutor of justice, pillar of the wicked, statue of the simoniacs, addicted to magic, the dregs of vice . . . wholly given to sleep and carnal desires, a mirror of infamy, a profound inventor of wickedness.” He secured the Papacy by “violence and fraud and sold indulgences, benefices, sacraments and bulls.” He practiced “sacrilege, adultery, murder, rape and theft.” And now we can understand Petrarch’s remark—”a sink of iniquity.” Some of these popes so outraged decency they were exiled. At least two of them had their eyes and tongues cut out, then were dragged through the streets tied to the tail of an ass. Still others were so despised their corpses were exhumed and thrown into the Tiber. After fourteen hundred years of Christianity morals had sunk so low that Pius II tells us “scarcely a prince in Italy had been born in wedlock.” A statement as applicable to the princes of the church as of the state.
Bad as all this was, the worst was yet to come—the Borgias, particularly Rodrigo. Of all the wicked popes perhaps he deserves the crown. By bribing fifteen cardinals with the equivalent of three million dollars he secured the election of one of the worst men in history—himself, Alexander VI. Guicciardini, the historian, describes him thus: “. . . private habits of the utmost obscenity, no shame or sense of truth, no fidelity to his engagements, no religious sentiments, insatiable avarice, unbridled ambition, cruelty beyond the cruelty of barbarous races, burning desire to elevate his sons by any means: of whom there were many, and among them one—not any less detestable than his father.” This was the notorious Cesare Borgia who to gain a cardinalate murdered his brother John, his sister’s husband, and two cardinals, only to renounce it for more profitable enterprises. As Guicciardini tells us, his father had a “burning desire to elevate his sons by any means,” and so Cesare became the Duke of Valentinos, his brother became Duke of Gandia, and his sister, the Duchess of Ferrara, and a princess after her marriage to a son of the King of Naples. Religion had become what it was designed to be, a means to power, honor and wealth. This Prince of the Church was, by the way, the inspiration for Ma-chiavelli’s book The Prince, an honest account of dishonest Christians.
While still a cardinal this rake and murderer turned his quarters in the Vatican into a brothel. According to Burchard, the papal historian at the time, he indulged in nightly revels in his rooms above the Pope’s, and courtesans “danced naked before the servants of the Lord and the Vicar of Christ.” And his sister, Lucrezia, distributed prizes to those who “had had carnal intercourse with courtesans the largest number of times.” This is that gaiety explained as “love of good cheer.”
Such were the Princes of the Church in those days. During the Middle Ages the College of Cardinals was as corrupt a body as could be found in all history. Securing a cardinalate was but a matter of money and influence. Neither character, learning nor aptitude played any part in it. Indeed boys of fourteen and fifteen were sometimes invested with the office. Paul III appointed two of his teen-age grandchildren to this high office, and when criticized for such absurdity declared he would follow the custom until “examples might be cited of infants in the cradle becoming cardinals.” Von Ranke. Paul IV made his nephew a cardinal, though, as he said, “his arm is dyed in blood to the elbow.”
Yet these were the men who, with the help of the Holy Ghost, selected the popes. On this matter King Ferdinand had his doubts. At the Council of Trent he wondered out loud: “How is it possible that the cardinals should choose a good pope, seeing that they are not good themselves?” Some of the elections were so violent that the Holy Ghost had no more chance than it has in an American nomination of a President. So with some of the investitures, that of Alexander III, for instance. As the cope was placed upon him, Cardinal Octavian tore it from him and putting it on himself, backwards we are told, proclaimed himself pope. The cope was then torn from him by one of Alexander’s supporters, but here by prearrangement, a group of soldiers burst in and declared Octavian the winner. And that is how Victor IV was chosen. But not for long; Alexander fled to France where he raised an army and returned. In the battle that followed several churches were wrecked and the floor of St. Peter’s was, as the historians tell us, “strewn with corpses.” The outraged Romans drove the invader out but on a second attempt he won and for three years thereafter wreaked vengeance on his rivals.
Now why isn’t this disgraceful record known as well as that of the good popes? Why aren’t Catholics told it was such men as these that caused the Reformation and not “that devil Luther”? Protestantism sprang not from Luther exclusively but from centuries of protestation against the crime and corruption of the Catholic Church. Satan Peter had outraged all Europe; as Draper tells us, “Erasmus and Luther heard with amazement the blasphemies and witnessed with a shudder the atheism of the city. Things steadily went on from bad to worse, until at the epoch of the Reformation no pious stranger could visit it without being shocked.” In time the shock produced reformers but instead of heeding them, the divinely guided burned them at the stake: Huss, de Molay, Savonarola, Arnold of Brescia, and others. And let us not forget the lesser known millions the “Holy Inquisition” destroyed. A thing of the past, you say. Yes, but not the authority; it still exists and was reaffirmed in our own century, under Leo XIII. “The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain its end when rebels act against it and disturbers of the ecclesiastical unity, especially obstinate heretics and heresiarchs, cannot be restrained by any other penalty from continuing to derange the ecclesiastical order and impelling others to all sorts of crime. . . When the perversity of one or several is calculated to bring about the ruin of many of its children it is bound effectively to remove it, in such wise that if there be no other remedy for saving its people it can and must put these wicked men to death.” Institutiones Juris Ecclesiastici Publici, by Father Marianus de Luca, Papal University, Rome. “Wicked men” like the aforesaid reformers, and we have just seen the nature of the “ecclesiastical unity” that must be maintained.
Under this unity every effort to improve the conditions of the poor was met with fire and sword. Innocent III even urged the King of France to invade England because something had happened there that threatened the “divine right” of popes and kings. This was the signing of the Magna Charta which he declared was “devil inspired,” whereas the Inquisition was divinely inspired. Well, which was inspired, the Magna Charta or the Magna Charlatans?
Neither mental, moral nor social welfare played any part in the Catholic Church of the Dark and Middle Ages. As it was written, “The Hebrews seek after a sign and the Greeks seek wisdom,” but the Catholics seek only wealth and power. As this was our contention from the beginning, we should not fail to offer some proof of it now.
Ever and always a Catholic empire was the objective of the Catholic Church, an empire with all Europe and northern Africa for its domain. It began under Constantine, but the church then lacked the ecclesiastical power to dominate the political power. It therefore began to build by piecemeal accretion. By the time of Gregory the Great in the sixth century, it was doing fine. Though eminently qualified for the acquisitive “Great,” this man was not mentally great enough to allay the prevailing fear of his time—”the end of the world”; nor was he morally great enough to refrain from using this Bible-inspired fear for the benefit of the Church. On the contrary, he used it to great advantage, hence “the Great.” By convincing the wealthy landowners that their heirs would never live to enjoy their property, he secured it for the Church. That he believed the Church would survive to enjoy it, suggests that his belief was based more on financial policy than scriptural eschatology.
It was in the interest of this temporal power that the famous forgeries were committed. Desiring more and still more land, Stephen II (752-757) forged the letter bearing St. Peter’s name. This was done to force the superstitious Pippin, father of Char-lemagne, to drive the Lombards out of Italy and turn over their holdings to the Church. As this was not sufficient, the forged “Acts of St. Silvester” were produced through which additional claims on Italy were made. Another of the “great” popes, Hadrian I, was also guilty of forgery, or the use of it. Under him appeared the infamous document known as “The Donation of Constantine” in which the first Christian emperor was alleged to have given most of Italy to the Papacy. Even Avignon was secured by dishonesty, moral and spiritual as well as economic. The Church acquired it by absolving the Italian Queen Joanna of the murder of her husband. Such were the means employed to gain material wealth and power, and so successful were they that at one time one-third of all arable land in Europe belonged to the Church, while its power lay over all. Indeed, it could give away whole kingdoms. Having taken France from Philippe le Bel, Boniface VIII wrote this to Albert of Austria: “We donate to you, in the plentitude of our power, the kingdom of France, which belongs of right to the Emperors of the West.” So was it with Aragon, Sicily, Hungary, Denmark, Portugal, and Ireland. Here the Church achieved its original objective—wealth, power and authority.
And now a word to the Irish Catholics: For centuries they have reviled England for her domination of them. We wonder how many of them know that one of their revered popes gave England this right? To Henry II of England, Adrian IV wrote this: “It is not doubted, and you know it, that Ireland and all those islands which have received the faith, belong to the Church of Rome; if you wish to enter that Island, to drive vice out of it, to cause law to be obeyed and St. Peter’s Pence to be paid by every house, it will please us to assign it to you.” And so for the sake of Peter’s Pence the Irish lost their freedom.
Money, then as now, being the all-essential, the best financial minds were employed to devise ways and means of raising it— the sale of offices, pardons, indulgences, relics, etc. Among these was John XXII, who out of the people’s money built the magnificent court of Avignon and palaces for his cardinals. Being a lawyer also, he had ways and means of making money, among which was robbing the rich Knights Templar. With the aid of his cat’s-paw King Philip, he despoiled and dispersed them. Another means was the confiscation of the revenues of ecclesiastical offices. In the jubilee year of 1300 pardons and indulgences were sold, not given, to pilgrims to Rome. So many came bringing their wealth to Saint Peter’s that the officials used rakes and shovels to gather up the money. Here we should recall the remark of one of the popes: “What profits have we not derived from this fable of Christ.” Many, however, were too poor to make the long and expensive trip, which was a grief to the holy financers, so they decided the fee when paid at home carried the same blessing and absolution.
As today, this robbing of the people was called “giving unto the Lord,” and so needy was he, not even prostitution was overlooked. During “the brilliant thirteenth century,” the clergy operated brothels, and so numerous and prosperous were they the financiers decided to tax them too.
The treasury was also enhanced by the sale of spurious relics. These were manufactured by the thousands, and included everything the mythical Christ, his family, and his followers were imagined to have had. There was Christ’s milk teeth, navel, and even foreskin, two or three of them in fact; there was Mary’s hair, and vials of her milk. Enough nails and wood from the cross were discovered to build a score of them, though Constan-tine’s mother in her day could not find the original. Washington Irving went further: concerning the wood of the cross, he said “There is enough extant to build a ship of the line.” Every church in Europe had these “holy relics”; indeed three of them had the one spear with which Longinus pierced Jesus’ side. This, by the way, caused a serious internal strife. A Sultan presented the supposedly real one to the city of Rome. The French cardinals were horrified; the original was in Paris, they said. The German cardinals ridiculed both for, as they said, everyone knows the original is in Nuremberg. Such antics seemed bad enough while we believed in the historicity of the Christ story, but when we know its purely mythical nature they take on a double meaning—dishonesty as well as credulity.
And speaking of credulity, another “money-making scheme” was, and still is, the “holy places” of Palestine. Concerning these and the gullibility of pilgrims thereto, the Encyclopaedia Britan-nica has this to say: “It is a pathetic record. No site, no legend is too impossible for the unquestioning faith of these simple-minded men and women. And by comparing one record with another, we can follow the multiplication of ‘holy places’ and sometimes can even see them being shifted from one spot to another as the centuries pass. Not one of these devout souls has any shadow of suspicion that, except natural features (such as the Mount of Olives, the Jordan, Ebal, and Gerazim) and possibly a very few individual sites (such as Jacob’s well at Shechem) there was not a single spot in the whole elaborate system that could show even the flimsiest evidence of authenticity.” Thus does modern scholarship bear out our contention. Not one of these places or relics is genuine, not even Jacob’s well. They are all mythic material, now commercial material of a money-hungry Church. This is the meaning of our statement—the Church turned Golgotha into Golconda.
It was for plunder this Golconda was turned into a battleground—that of the Crusades. Ostensibly the purpose was to wrest the tomb of Christ from the “unclean” hands of the infidels, but the real motivation was hungry Europe’s envy of the comparative wealth and splendor of Araby. This has long been overlaid with Christian sanctity but the contemporary Pope, Urban II, made no bones about it; in fact, it was his inducement to volunteers. In an address at Clermont he said: “The wealth of our enemies will be yours, and you will despoil them of their treasures.” This was also the motive for the plunder and exile of the wealthy Jews and Mohammedans in Spain. Several hundred thousand were killed or banished and their property confiscated by the Church. And “the Pope granted indulgences to all who carried on this pious work,” wrote Vacandard, a Catholic historian. “Pious work!” This is some more of their intellectual dishonesty. It’s quite amazing the pious persona they can put on priestly deviltry.
In this same framework lies another “pious work” of the Middle Ages—the great cathedrals and the “religious art” that adorned them. These noble edifices were not built for the glory of God but for the glory of the Church, and no matter how beautiful they may be, they are but monuments to human ignorance. So with their art, pure literalism proving, as we said, Western man’s inability to think in the abstract. As art, it is a worthy expression of man’s esthetic sense, but like its saints and lilies, it sprang from a soil as foul and putrid as any in human history; it sprang, in fact, from the moral nadir—the period of Alexander VI and his two successors, Julius II and Leo X. Its purpose then was not moral uplift but papal upkeep. Great art makes error attractive; it brought millions of pilgrims and hence millions of lira. The artists themselves painted not from religious inspiration but from papal command, and on pain of severe punishment.
It took great courage to defy the all-powerful “Mother Church” in those days. Many tried but they paid for it with their lives. The reformers of those days did not have the knowledge to effectively defy it. After fifteen centuries of Christianity, the racial mind was naive and credulous. Thus the Reformation was but adolescent rebellion against maternal prostitution. It was left for futurity (us) to turn this semirebellion into triumphant revolution. And this is not so far distant as some of us suppose; the list of future popes is not a long one. As the present cycle closes, another historian will write another book and he will call it THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN CHURCH.
1 To cite only the principal ones, there were Arians, Nestorians, Martionites, Marionites, Jacobites, Basilidians, Carpocratians, Collyridians, Eutychians, Sabellians, Valentinians, Gnostics, Ebionites, etc. Each of these had its own interpretation of the scriptures and the form that came down to us was but the one that triumphed over the others.
2 In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
3 They were “in the main, converts to Christianity before they crossed the boundaries of the empire.” Myers Ancient History, p. 576.
4 Can Christian slavery show anything comparable to this: Antonius Felix (spoken of in Acts) was a slave, yet became Procurator of Judea under Claudius, married the daughter of Marc Antony, and also Drusilla, daughter of Herod Agrippa 1.
5 “I’d believe the Bible even if it said that Jonah swallowed the whale.” A Jehovah’s Witness at a convention in 1973.
6 Letter from the leader of the Crusade to Pope Urban II, on receipt of which all Christendom held a jubilee.
7 Lucretius.
8 Colonel Emery Scott West.
9Later repudiated, the title was annulled and recently assumed by the successor of Pius XII.