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THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
A Science of Gods Old and New

by Alfred de Grazia


Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey


Notes on the printed version of this book

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data de Grazia, Alfred, 1919 -

The Divine Succession:
A Science of God Old and New

Includes Index

1. Theology
2. History of Religion
3. Human Behavior

ISBN: 0-940-268-05-1

Copyright @1983 by Alfred de Grazia

Printed in the U.S.A. Limited First Edition

Address:
Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213
Princeton,
N.J. 08542,
U.S.A.

The cover is a composition based upon Kandinsky's  Circles  (1934) and two reconstructed
friezes of the Temple of Zeus of Olympia. The text was set on Compugraphic machines in 10
pt. Paladium type by  Get Set, Inc.  typesetters, Lambertville, N.J. and the cover was made
by Carol Stoddard. Printing and binding are by Multiprint Company, New York City.

to
Earl S. Johnson

melior magister myriadis




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THE DIVINE SUCCESSION: 



THE DIVINE SUCCESSION

A Science of Gods Old and New

by Alfred De Grazia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 TITLE-PAGE

 PART I. THEOMACHY

01. The Genesis of Religion
02. The Succession of Gods
03. Knowing the Gods
04. The Heavenly Host
05. Legends and Scripture
06. Ritual and Sacrifice
07. Man's Divine Mirror
08. Indispensable Gods

 PART II. THEOTROPY

09. Sacral Vs Secular Man
10. Ethics and the Supernatural
11. Religious Elements in Science
12. New Proofs of God
13. Catechism

 CONCLUSION: The Divine and Human

A Note on Sources






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THE DIVINE SUCCESSION: 




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
A Science of Gods Old and New

by Alfred de Grazia


FOREWORD

Plato could already say in ancient times "that when men first had thoughts about the gods,
with regard to the way they came into being, their characters, and the kind of activities
in which they engaged, what they said about these things was not an acceptable account of
them or what well regulated men would approve.." (Epinomis) We should have to agree and add
that the subsequent 2500 years have managed, also, to obscure the origins, characters and
deeds of the gods.

Many philosophers have quit concerning themselves with religion, believing that the road to
wisdom is paved with logical forms. I doubt, however, that they can evade St. Thomas
Aquinas' medieval injunction, to wit, "The name of being wise is reserved to him alone,
whose consideration is about the end of the universe, which end is also the beginning of
the universe." (Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 1)

In this book we take up the history of religion and consider the meaning of the universe.
From the first, humanity had to be religious. It is still so. Further, it will be religious
so long as it will exist. Religion is ultimately hope, and humans live on hope. So goes, in
other words, much of my story. But to my surprise, I have discovered that there is really
something to hope for. The two parts of my book, going from theomachy to theotropy, pursue
a way from despair to new hope.

At all times every aspect of the human mind and behavior has been religiously affected. No
bit of culture escapes religious relevance or effects. I mean this literally. Such is the
cultural dimension of religion, which will be explained.

That religion penetrates the fullness of history and culture licenses us to draw upon any
and all human settings for illustration and proof. Every person in every setting, no matter
how secular, merits attention as religious man.

No trick is intended, no cunning definition of religion. Religion for us here is simply a
belief in the existence of a metaphysical order, together with the practices relating to
it.

The means that I employ to select, analyze, and report religious material will be
recognized and approved by aficionados of scientific method. Not that the scientific method
is used throughout; but, when I move off the frame of positivistic, empirical science, I
execute the movement self consciously, so that an ordinary reader, a scientist, or a
philosopher of science will be alerted and recognize in the procedure a defined and denoted
mode of thought. Once again, no trick in intended; all of my cards are on the table.

What will follow, then is a narration in two parts and three themes. These themes are:
religion as delusion; religion as politics; and religion as truth. Although treated vaguely
in this order, they are also intermingled throughout.

Under the topic of religion as delusion are carried the most important components of human
nature and the most important historical transactions. We shall name and discuss these.
Psychology, anthropology, and history are the conventional disciplines most heavily brought
into play.

Under the topic of religion as politics, we survey the religious aspects of collective
behavior, showing religion again to be the most important part of social behavior, with the
disciplines of sociology, politics, and philosophy most sharply involved. Science can
explain every aspect of religion, but paradoxically, it is religion in the end that
determines the metes and bounds of science.

Under the topic of religion as truth, we move into metaphysics. All that historical man has
attempted to achieve with religion is adequately describable by the scientific method. Most
of it is also disposed of as anthropological material, not true religion. The residuum of
true religion, which is also describable by scientific method, is not only considerable but
also exists in its own right, functionally and eternally. This body of religion does not
logically or essentially engage in controversy with science, nor with politics.

Religion is an autonomous human activity, a fact of existence, like a rock or a sexual
discharge. It may be useful, but its utility is not its justification nor even ordinarily
expected of it. We call this activity "divine," meaning simply a person acting truly
religiously. Appreciating the immediate challenge that will arise at any claim to the word
"truth," we hasten to ask for a postponement of its trial until more can be said about
"truthful" activity . Few will object if, in the meanwhile, we define truth as an open
question of religion; one need not fear being forced to his knees.







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THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER ONE

THE GENESIS OF RELIGION

To the fresh, mad eye of primeval man, the world was full of gods. The human mind worked so
as immediately to create religion. It does so now and it did so at its beginning. This is a
function common to all humans everywhere, at all times, intrinsic, inherited, irresistible,
Religion is then naturally ecumenical; any two people anywhere can agree in general on what
it is that they are talking about.

The mechanism is simple. The thousands of books, the infinite discussion over millions of
fires, the pomp of parades, the grandeur of cathedrals, and the hysterical wars and
killings about religion - all of this intimidates inquiry. Yet all of this, as we shall
see, descends from the operation of the mechanism as if a holocaust would flare from a
flint striking stone.

The human mind, as soon as it starts working, builds a multiple identity, a self-awareness.
In the origins of the race, this trait is so pronounced as to set the creature apart from
other forms of life. Self-awareness is the psychological manifestation of a physiology of
the central nervous system, especially the cerebral cortex, which presents a person with
the feeling of being at least two persons. It is like the bother of two eyes that cannot
focus well upon a single object, but it is of course enormously more ramified and
important.

Since the body is one alone, it is "intended" for one mind, one spring of action, a single
commanding organ. Never mind that in some remotely related animals two brain centers occur,
or, for that matter, that in man himself, there are such "lower" brain centers that have
escaped the parturition which we speak about here as self-awareness. A person has the
instinctive appreciation of and a nearly total apparatus for realization of unitary
conduct. But this preparedness for the life of an ordinary mammal is rudely challenged by
the sense of an inner conflict of selves, which can 'change one's mind' and redirect one's
energies at any time, whit seemingly little possibility of control. It delays by
microseconds the instinctive response that the mammalian physiology and neurology crave.

The result of the perceived conflict, that "I am I, but who am I that says 'I am I'" is
fear. We can call this fear existential because it is the absolute quality of human
existence. The fear is indistinguishable physiologically from the anatomy and process of
mammalian fear that arises out of non-existential causes; such would be the fear of a blow
or of a lightning stroke. If it is to be distinguished at all from animal fear, existential
fear has to be discovered by statistical means, by logical reasoning, by experiment, by
psychiatric theory. We assume, hoping to be more empirical later on, that existential fear
is a "free-floating" fear overload that characterizes the human and is attributable to the
"fear of oneselves" associated with self-awareness.

This state of affairs called "self-awareness" is instinctively undesirable. Its advantages
are ambiguous. It interferes with peace of mind; it blocks the instinctive action of the
beast; it introduces unwanted self-consultation concerning decisions and evaluation of the
effects of action. It introduces continuous distrust of the self. It requires, as will be
amply discussed, an endless stream of devices and decisions, all basically intended to
adjust the elements of the self to each other, some of them taking place within the bodily
frame, others occurring in interpretations of and controls upon the outer world of other
people and nature.

Obvious schemes occur to the human person. One is to stamp out the other selves, to produce
a granite-like person unbothered by internal inquiries. Another is to kick out the other
selves like unwanted children or undesirable tenants. The first method is workable only up
to certain point; many subconscious activities occur and leak out onto external objects, no
matter how impressive the monolith.

The second method, expulsion of internal conflicts, creates the human's world, but is not
effective as intended, either. A lady who has a bad dream, and then doubles her
contribution to a church collection, may successfully lower her level of anxiety, but is
likely to receive more cordial solicitations from her church, which, if refused, may give
her more bad dreams. A boy who perceives a ghost under his bed will in time flesh out the
ghost with various traits, motives, and activities. Displacements of anxieties, that is,
are boomerangs which, no matter how far flung, unerringly return.

Since the struggle of the selves is essentially psychological, it can be called
supernatural. Then it is even more proper to call the projection and displacements of the
self supernatural. To become more focused upon religion, it should be said that there is
absolutely no resistance of the part of the human to displacing his internal world, in
effect, living his life - upon super-sensory or ultra-sensory phenomena. It ill behooves
the source to deny its essence in the world outside.

At the same time, the operation of tying a world of external supernatural phenomena to the
world of internal supernatural phenomena is invariably expressed in ritual practices, that
is, repeated related performances. The lady and the boy in the instances above establish
practices. The ramifications of practice are limited both by the environmental forces
governing practices and by the tendency to reiterate actions. From action to practice to
habit to obsession goes the continuum, a rating scale on which, given the object in the
world to which people relate, the same people can be graded, like churchgoers from once-in-
a-great-while to those who would rather die than miss a church service. Paul Radin has
properly pointed out "that all people are spontaneously religious at crises, that the
markedly religious people are spontaneously religious on numerous other occasions as well,
and that the intermittently and indifferently religious are secondarily religious on
occasions not connected with crises at all."

"Fear made the first gods of the world," wrote the Roman Statius (c. 45 to 96 A. D.). In
the long history of religion it is the only theory to come close to the truth. And man, in
return, is theophobic, full of dread of god. The first gods were also the first humans, a
scheme of delusions to map and control the immense, live universe. Everything seemed
capable of turning into a god; hence gods were in everything (as the early philosopher
Thales conjectured). They controlled everything, it appeared, but were unaccountable and
did both the expected and the unexpected.

The simple mechanism of religion is then self-awareness, fear of the self, fears or
anxieties displaced upon supernatural or tangible appearances of the world, and the
development of practices to control and maintain transactions with the supernatural
appearances. The drive to control oneself (oneselves, we should say) is paramount and moves
man to wherever his rears alight. Again, Radin's anthropological surmise is acceptable:
"man was in a state of fear, physically, economically, and psychically. Man thus postulated
the supernatural in order primarily to validate his workaday reality." His aim was "the
canalization of his fears and feelings and the validation of his compensation dreams."

The judgment of what is supernatural and what is tangible may bother intellectuals and
theologians but has never been much of a problem to the ordinary person or priest. The
logic of the multitude is foolproof: the supernatural is everywhere and is incorporated in
tangible things. We shall come to understand science better when we appreciate the
futility, yet inevitability, of its struggles to squeeze the supernatural out of the rocks
and out of the mind. It is trying to make an animal out of man, just as the pesky
theologians say, that is, trying to destroy all outward manifestations of the uniquely
human person, if not he mind itself. Mircea Eliade has reported will the state of mind of
the "religious man" through the ages.( He uses the term as, for instance, H. D. Lasswell
uses the term "political man," as the "pure" or obsessed type of actor in history.) Where
we employ the term "supernatural," Eliade uses the term "sacred."

"For religious man," he writes, "the world always presents a supernatural valence, that is,
it reveals a modality of the sacred." Every bit of the cosmos has its sacrality. "In a
distant past" (but why not include today?) "all of man's organs and physiological
experiences, as well as all his acts, had a religious meaning," "Homo religiosus always
believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but
manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real." "For religious
man, nature is never only 'natural'; it is always fraught with a religious value."

Finally, "the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The
sacred is saturated with being... Religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in
reality, to be saturated with power. This rounds out an accord with our ides of religious
genesis. Man naturally sees the world supernaturally. Reality is supernatural. His heart
and soul go into tying this reality to himself, to gain its powers. We should say that all
of this grandiose ambition is to stabilize his mind, to let him live unanxiously,
unfearfully, to be at peace with himself."

How good it is to be assured of this, too, as the Hebrew Elohim assures man, that he shall
"fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the
birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth," and furthermore
has given him "every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every
tree with seed in its fruit..." Elohim is thinking and working like any ideal reasonable
man would think and work. All is divinely created, by hard labor. All is sacred, therefore.

Yet, granted that humans are bent upon creating the supernatural and tying it into
themselves, why should they dispose of the credit to gods? Why should they not he frankly
proud of the world that they create and control, whether it be supernatural of tangible?
First there is the fearful fact that they do not control it. Second there is the fear that
disregards fact. They fear that they may not control anything; man is born with an
inferiority complex from not controlling himself. Third, there is the appearance of
purposeful control of the world by non-humans, an appearance, one may insist, that has both
invisible and perceptible substantiation.

Take up first the fearful fact that man does not control himself, or the world. Hence
religion arises to drug mankind, according to Karl Marx: "religion is the moan of the
oppressed creature, the heart of heartless world, the sense of senseless conditions. It is
the opium of the people."

Perhaps the most powerful suppressant of religion is the promise of science to give one
such controls. "Serious" scientists do not pretend to such abilities or make such promises.
On the other hand, they at least feel relieved when other "non-responsible" people, like
science fiction writers or humanists or philosophers, make such claims in their name. "We
are approaching the time when we will be able to control..." - and every human anxiety has
its assurance - "our anxieties," "climate," "earthquakes," "approaching comets," "plague,"
"birth defects," "war," "governments," and ultimately "the challenge of death itself." This
wealth of promises emerges from the instruments and procedures of scientific method, a
process finding its way only through provably material entities.

For those who doubt the fulfillment of these promises, the outlooks of cynicism, stoicism,
and pessimism - or, alternatively, religion - are available. A society dominated by the
scientific outlook will, however, endeavor to persuade many of these of its promises, and
for that will take over all of the trappings of propaganda and organized pressures
developed over the ages by religions, and, later, political systems. The secular society is
then in being. However, there is still the fear that disregards fact. There is a factual
element in anxiety, but additionally the aforementioned existential element. It is highly
probable that no change in the human condition can erase this anxiety except the
eradication of the human in man. Self-awareness can be detrained, stunned and doped, but
never with complete success and never over a whole population for very long. If it could be
done, it would long ago have been accomplished. We may suppose that most cultures, in one
way or another, have tried to do so, with no lasting effect. Man has achieved every
imaginably bad society except one of lasting soullessness.

But fear alone might bring forth the supernatural, and the ways of dealing with it, without
gods, unless some inherent part of religious mechanism demanded them, For this we require
both an internal and external cause. The divine being must be both in us and in nature.

The internal sequence may be suggested. If it is the plural self that disturbs our peace of
mind, then the infinitely varied displacements of this self that are employed to ease the
fears engendered by the civil strife of the ego are likely often to emanate as living
forms. That is, the world created by the human mind is animated. The world is alive.

It is an absurd but common notion, fostered unfortunately by scientists who are disciplined
observers trained precisely to observe objects as "stripped-down," that the human neatly
undresses his thoughts of their libido before placing them upon the world. To the contrary,
the human is naturally surprised, like the child bumping his head on a table, when whatever
he encounters turns out to be unalive according to the battery of tests that his mind
applies consequent to the encounter. "Everything is alive until proven dead" is the natural
psychic principle to go along with "Everything is sacred, unless demonstrated to be
secular."

To say then that a natural force has to be animated into a god by some separate
superstition which the observer must be trained to apply is incorrect. Depending upon its
impact, the force is a god or a manifestation thereof. It is historically, as well as
psychologically, incorrect to think that humans invented gods as a kind of convenience to
collect their thoughts and then gave them names. It is more likely that gods were observed
and in the very process of perception named by ejaculations (so beginning human speech),
and then, following natural observation, the world was ordered in consonance with the gods.
As Hock well says about the early gods of Greece "... these gods were not felt by the
Greeks to have been manufactured or invented as the 'Personification' implies; they were
discovered and recognized, precisely as the modern scientist discovers and recognizes the
effects of something that he calls 'electricity. '"

Furthermore, the apparitions of nature are anthropomorphized insofar as they seem
purposeful and humanlike. The human, responding to a vast range of stimuli in time and
space, entranced by the sky as well as the abyss, infiltrating his spirit into this vast
world, is both psychologically and materially affected by them. It is practically
impossible, for any length of time, to take the apparitions of the world impersonally.

There is "every reason" to regard the fall of a meteor as a purposeful intervention in
one's life. It moves through the air like a flaming lance, sword, chariot, or torch held
high. It is faster than a bird. It screams like a tiger. It strikes with the might of ten
thousand men. As scientists say, "Everything must have a cause." Well, here the cause is a
superhuman thunderbolter. From effects, one reasons to causes.

If especially there are periods of time when great effects are common and men are shaken by
them, the gods are implied, even visualized, as when a comet resembles different human
figures and organs. Men measure the effect carefully, as the ancient Etruscans every spot
struck by lightning, to see in the measure of a divine intervention the intent of the god.

In summation, the age becomes confirmed as religious. The more intense, pervasive, and
frequent the experiences, the more religious the age becomes. It is as certain as any other
proposition of science, that, were an asteroid or comet of modest size to strike the globe,
astronomy would promptly become astrology, meteorology divination, biology creationist,
politics catastrophic, and theology revivalist. Evidence for this statement is strewn among
all writings on the effects upon humans of close-in and crashing celestial bodies.

This divinity, perhaps the same, perhaps another, is known not only by celestial or other
natural apparitions; it is also manifested in ways that will be demonstrated in chapter 3.
The god is as prompt to appear as religion itself, inevitable in the primeval mind, as
culture, too, is prompt to appear and as fast as it is instrumented, married into, if not
born of, the sacred. We speak thus, of a hologenesis of homo sapiens, culture, religion,
and gods.

Logically, the evolutionary theory of a slow final development of homo is gone; so is the
theory of cultural evolution, of the evolution of religions, and of the progressive
evolution of a concept of god. All of these things are today very much perceived, afforded
and functioning as they did in the first centuries of humankind.

The science that those of us who write books so highly esteem represents a sharp break with
the history of mankind, but scarcely less a break with the human thought and behavior of
today. We can, and shall, make much of it, but should remember all the while that the
proportion of science to religion in human behavior is like the ratio of the depth of the
surface crust of the Earth to the radius of the whole globe, one to four hundred. And as
the thickness of the crust varies beneath oceans and continents, so does the depth of
penetration of the scientific method vary in different cultures and minds.








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THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER TWO

THE SUCCESSION OF GODS

The first god who was, remains in the latest god who is. The gods have been of the same
descent, always, everywhere. I mean this not in the sense of many theologians, that, "Yes,
God has been eternally Himself but we have gradually learned more about His nature," nor in
the sense of many sectarians that, "Yes, people have forever worshiped false gods but
gradually we are coming to see my God," but rather I mean it to say that the gods were
discovered once, in the earliest times, and that there had been a direct descent of the
same divinities down to the present. By "discovered" is meant that the first humans
perceived gods in the world; they perceived the supernatural, and they took immediate steps
to control it.

Such statements may provoke panic in various intellectual quarters, and we wonder whether
to arrest the panic or let the room be cleared. Much of out religious thinking depends upon
refusing or denying the statements. Even some hard-boiled anthropologists meekly purchase
meliorism in religious history, part of the famous idea of evolutionary progress, some such
belief as that by indistinguishable degrees, dull-witted savages become plant-worshipers,
and these grow into deists, who later become monotheists and finally begin to be
secularists - and anthropologists. Even those who do not believe in gods are quite sure
that they are competent to distinguish good gods from bad ones.

Yet the history of religion permits the statement. Leroi-Gourhan believes that the Upper
Paleolithic hunters were probably religious. I have supported this view in Chaos and
Creation with illustrations of a probable mating of Heaven as a bison and Earth in the form
of a woman. Much earlier practices respecting burials and the mounting of bear skull accord
to Neanderthal man also basic religious ideas. Leroi-Gourhan (in Religions de la
Prehistoire) produces a scenario of a large primordial religion from an "insignificant"
incised tablet. What is revealed by relics must be only a token of full-scale rites of
religion. A recent Soviet excavation finds religious incisions on animal skulls hundreds of
thousands of years ago; for that matter, Pietro Gaietto attributes sculptures to "hominids"
of 1.5 million years of age; but, as I have argued in other works, the measurement of time
is a sorry state of disrepair. In Homo Schizo I, incidental to establishing the hologenesis
of culture, a connection of symbols and the supernatural is made. In my general attempt
there and elsewhere to shorten drastically the time of homo sapiens and to identify to
erase the need to account for a long period of stupid human development prior to a
mutation, or natural selection, or social invention that would initiate religion, along
with man.

Further, I am in accord with the claim of anthropologists Washburn and Moore, that mankind
could have originated only once. It seems to me that humanity is so distinctive in its
self-awareness and symbolism, and that these traits are so suffusive over the scope of
human behavior, that, once human in these regards, thence human in all regards.

Paul Radin (Primitive Religion) agues against the belief, represented especially by Andrew
Lang, Pinard de la Boullaye, and others, that the primordial religion contained a belief in
a Supreme God or High God. Rather, "wherever a Supreme Deity or a High God... exists it is
the belief either of a few individuals or of a special group." He is persuaded that
ordinary people are bereft of sky religion, a thesis that is patently false and can only be
precipitated out of the materialistic brew of early Marxist anthropology.

Our interest is not to inter this debate but to veer towards a more important truth.
Earliest humans gave preeminence to sky gods, as soon as one or more might be discerned
through the thinning canopy of clouds. Ouranos and his counterparts in other cultures were,
as we have remarked, first Heaven, then God, corresponding to the canopy and the appearance
of a great sun-like object (among many others) in the new skies. However, since we believe
this tumultuous set of natural events took a part in creating the human race itself, we
would maintain that man was never human before he was religious.

Some tribes appear to follow spiritualism and animism and lack astral heavenly gods of
human quality. We find ancestral spirits and ghosts usually inhabiting territories and, if
they are disembodied, lower parts of the atmosphere; or the atmosphere is a medium through
which they may move more easily than by treading the earth. Indeed, was not the vault of
heaven itself low? And was not the Earth the goddess, sufficient itself to the first age of
religious awareness? The Clouds of Heaven were many and low, until descended in deluges.

The Vault of Heaven was lifted and humans saw the heavenly bodies removing themselves to
remoteness and, too, the gods and hosts of heaven behaving destructively and benevolently
with their own wills and human features.

We can agree with Mircea Eliade (The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion) Where,
discussing Wilhelm Schmidt (Ursprung der Gottesidee) he says,

     It is true that the belief in High Gods Seems to characterize the oldest cultures, but
     we also find there other religious elements. As far as we can reconstruct the remote past,
     it is safer to assume that religious life was from the very beginning rather complex, and
     that 'elevated' ideas coexisted with 'lower' forms of worship and belief.

Thus, a prominent, although not dominant school of thought in the history of religion,
exemplified in the work of A. Lang, M. Muller, R. Pettazoni, W. Schmitt, and M. Eliade
propounds the thesis that the first worshiper and hence the ancestors of all religions
believed in sky-gods. We find their arguments persuasive and add to them what we know about
actual prehistoric skies and catastrophic occurrences affecting the skies. The belief in
sky-gods is attested to both by the most ancient sources of religious practice and by the
studies of modern so-called primitive peoples (whom we prefer to call "tribal"). All of the
"great" religions begin their stories in the skies: The Judaic complex, the Greco-Roman
complex, the Egyptian, the old Chinese religion of Heaven, the Meso-American complex, the
Teutonic, the Persian, the Hindu. "The Chinese T'ien means at once the sky and the god of
the sly." Among the less familiar religions, the Mongol, the Sumerian, the Babylonian, the
Celtic, the Baltic, and the Slavic have nominated the sky and its god( s) for preeminence.
Not only this; so far as one can tell, all primitive religions have important celestial
referents, and we may quote cases from Eliade again:

     The supreme divinity of the Maori is named Iho; iho means elevated, high up. Uwoluwu, the
     supreme god of the Akposo Negroes, signifies what is on high, the upper regions. Among the
     Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego God is called Dweller in the Sky or He Who is in the Sky.
     Puluga, the supreme being of the Andaman Islanders, dwells in the sky... The Sky God of the
     Yoruba of the Slave Coast in named Olorun, literally Owner of the Sky.
     
     The Samoyad worship Num, a god who dwells in the highest sky and whose name means sky.
     Among the Koryak, the supreme divinity is called the One on High, the Master of the High,
     He Who Exists. The Ainu know him as the Divine Chief of the Sky, the Sky God, the Divine
     Creator of the Worlds, but also as Kamui, that is, Sky. The list could be easily extended.

Why is the sky the seat of the gods and even the gods themselves? From his unmatched
scholarship, Eliade fetches a proposition which we believe to be incorrect: "Simple
contemplation of the celestial vault already provokes a religious experience. The sky shows
itself to be infinite, transcendent... For the sky, by its own mode of being, reveals
transcendence, force, eternity. It exists absolutely because it is high, infinite,
powerful." This speculation which figures over several pages, stands without supporting
evidence. It seems to say, "since heaven is divine, and the gods are celestial, there must
be a reason; the reason is a) since the gods are there, the sky must have impressed man and
b) the sky is impressive (for the gods are there)." The logic is confusing and borrows,
though not with conscious purpose, the propaganda technique of showering agreeable
statements upon the reader.

     Indeed, if one shows ( as has been done in recent decades) that the religious lives of
     the most primitive peoples are in fact complex, that they cannot be reduced to 'animism, '
     'totemism, ' or even ancestor-worship, that they include visions of Supreme Beings with all
     the powers of an hypotheses which deny the primitive any approach to 'superior'
     hierophanies are nullified.

One must return to the beginning. Granting that the sky-gods and sky-religions are
primordial, how is man prompted to perceive the supernatural there, place preeminent divine
activities there, and make the sky the centerpiece of religion? If humans existed long
before religion was invented, then it should be embarrassing to argue that the skies might
exist for millions of years before the idea of religion popped into the minds of people
everywhere (and very much the same idea of religion, that is, sky-religion without aeons of
animism, pantheism, ghosts, totemism, and such other forms of religion).

Eliade does not explain how early religions would move from sky-gods to demonism, totemism
and animism, and sometimes back, for modern tribes of this ilk meet no insuperable problem
in adopting a sky religion such as Islam or Christianity. We offer two explanations. First,
these religious practices were originally, have been, and are always with us, and are not
at all embarrassed at co-existing with sky-gods.

The second explanation is consistent with the first. The sky-gods seem to have disappeared
from many minds of our "high" civilization in favor of the worship of technology, cinema
and political heroes, and a number of psychopathological quirks. "Primitive tribes," since
explorers and anthropologists began their profuse reports, seem to have lost their sky-
gods, too, or never to have had any, or to possess dei otiosi. May not these tribe people
be acting like these civilized people in focusing upon the sky-gods when the gods are
active, or when the memory of them, consciously or unconsciously, is acute, tending to
dismiss, forget, and deny them when they are not causing great trouble? The skies became
peaceful and the world stopped shaking; people turned to the supernatural manifestations of
their closer environment. In this case, we may surmise also that the sterner the
institutions of memory (records, graphics, priesthoods, bureaucratic churches, holidays)
the longer the sky-gods will persist in a culture.

Faced with embarrassment, the idea of long evolution of religion (but then perhaps, too, of
the long evolution of man) might be dropped. Then at least, we see man becoming human and
sky-religious concurrently.

But another embarrassment occurs. If this occurs at one place and one time, as we have
asserted, how do all people settle upon the sky and often the same creation stories of
first generation gods, as we shall see? "Diffusion," one might venture; from the first Adam
and his home locale, there went forth the common focus and story (" Just as the Hebrew
Genesis says!"?). If so, the first human must have achieved the diffusion; there would be
no humans to pick up the story elsewhere.

In his book of Timaeus, Plato accepts and rationalizes in its early pages the existence of
"everything visible, and which was not in a state of rest, but moving with confusion and
disorder" prior to the work of the Divinity of demiurge which in its plenitude of
intelligence and power "reduced it from this wild inordination into order."

Here is the first revolution; a Chaos, worked upon by a Demiurge (God) produces Order. This
is a common ancient myth but we recall that Timaeus is a highly sophisticated Pythagorean
and thinker. I conclude that the first of all great events remembered by man and
emplaceable in primevalogy is the separation of Heaven from Earth.

The Divinity, according to Plato-Timaeus, using earth, fire, water, and air from the
universe formed (generated) it into a figure, an animal containing all figures and animals
and gave it the 'most becoming'... "spherical shape, in which all the radii from the middle
are equally distant from the bounding extremities." So says Taylor in his great commentary
on Timaeus. This universe moves in a circular revolution.

Taylor concludes that the boundless, the universe before god was composed of thick cloud or
mist to early and late Greek philosophers. Fire made it visible and that is why it became
the first of the elements.

There is a major dilemma in Timaeus, faced by all philosophers and theologians who explain
creation. Was God always around but disinclined to do anything about the Chaos? Then
finally did he act and make order, i. e., the universe as man knows it?

My interpretation is as follows:

     The Cosmologist is Man. Man senses ancient experiences. He asks when did experience begin.
     In fact, he is asking "when did I begin?" i. e. my inquiring mind.
     
     He thinks everything always was, because this is a logical thought. He recollects, however,
     a time before the time he recalls, and remembers such time as chaos or disorder (or thick
     fog).

This time of the ordering of chaos must be either a memory of when man first got his head
straight, i. e. could reason and ask basic questions, or an actual revolution of his nature
or environment (a catastrophic set of events involving perhaps the lifting of a law canopy
from Earth) which he recalls because he was already homo sapiens in all or part; but he
cannot recall any specific catastrophic events before this time ; therefore it becomes his
creation moment, his gestalt of creation.

Then there are later stories about divine and celestial behavior that are found throughout
the world, as, for example, the later coming of an electric or thunderbolting god. For
instance, Eliade comments, as have I, on "the later transformations of sky gods into storm
gods." Is this diffusion, or a common experience of separated people? Evidently, religious
historians do not sense that a sequence of gods might exist, which are related to real
natural events as experienced by widely separated people, such events being originally
involved in the selection of the sky as the first god and the home site of the gods.

Religion begins and endures in the sky, and the gods with it, because the sky has been much
more than the sky that we experience today. The oldest religions and tribal legends agree
generally that the skies were a heavy and full covering of the Earth, that they become
turbulent, descending upon the Earth, that the broke and discharged liquids and solids upon
the world, that before man's eyes the god of the sky tool shape, and that here was the
first or Ouranian religion.

The primordial heaven and god do not endure forever. And at this point, Eliade recalls the
famous ancient concept of the deus otiosus, the distant, removed, hence disoccupied god.
Having created the world the first gods generally retire. "Celestially structured supreme
beings tend to disappear from the practice of religion, from cult; they depart from among
men, withdraw to the sky, and become remote, inactive gods( dei otiosi);" Eliade presents
relevant cases. "Everywhere in these primitive religions the celestial supreme being
appears to have lost religious currency. . . Yet he is remembered and entreated as the last
resort. . ." A quantavolutionary would surmise that the tribal (' primitive') response to a
long period of settled skies is exactly like the civilized society's response: to forget in
part the great gods of disastrous ages, to secularize, to reduce religion to superstition,
and also to make the Sun a catch-all for the gods.

But once again Eliade resorts to reductionist explanation and writes such lines as, "The
divine remoteness actually expresses man's increasing interest in his own religious,
cultural, and economic discoveries." He illustrates the "remoteness" by cases where in good
times, gods are ignored, only to be appealed to in desperate times. This is a very
different remoteness. In the celestial archetype, god is remote because he is not around
and operative; in the second case, god is present but neglected.

Eliade does not bring out the most striking fact about the retired god. His is often a
forced retirement, following a bloody, world-shaking revolution. The Greek Ouranos was
castrated by his son Kronos in a terrible revolt, and moved into exile, with no intimations
of a return to power. A new great age begins.

The birth of the great goddess Athena is reported in the Homeric "Hymn to Athene."

     Athene sprang quickly from the immortal head and stood before Zeus who holds the aegis,
     shaking a sharp spear: great Olympus began to reel horribly at the might of the bright-eyed
     goddess, and earth round about cried fearfully, and the sea was moved and tossed with dark
     waves, while foam burst forth suddenly: the bright son of Hyperion stopped his swift-footed
     horses a long while, until the maiden Pallas Athene had stripped the heavenly armor from
     her immortal shoulders.

Moreover, the new great gods are also celestial. They are not household familiars, woods
sprites, or volcano ghosts. The Greek pantheon is well-known, but there are others as well.
All of the great Greek gods are sky gods, though they may keep house on Earth as well,
Hephaistos on Lemnos, Hades in the nether regions, and so on. The great ones are identified
with the moon and planets: Aphrodite, Kronos, Zeus, Hermes, Athena, Ares, and possibly
Apollo, Uranus, and Poseidon. (We do not refer, of course, to contemporary nomenclature.)
When these gods are entered upon the historical record, dim though this time be, a period
of greatest power can be assigned to each; this project was undertaken in Chaos and
Creation. Then the sequence goes: Ouranos, Aphrodite as Moon, Kronos, Zeus (Hera), Apollo,
Hermes, Athene and Hephaistos as Venus, and Ares. And there is substantial reason (not
commonsensical) that these gods achieved power, fame, and worship because they were
identified with great sky bodies, such as the planets, upon the occasion of great natural
catastrophes be falling the Earth. Scanning Samuel Kramer's collection of Mythologies of
the Ancient World, we find persistent outcroppings of the procession of gods and ages
despite his complete disregard of events in the heavens that might differ from the behavior
of the sun, moon, planets, comets, and stars today. We find dual splitting creation gods,
of the type of Earth and Ouranos; we identify Saturn, Zeus, Venus, and Mars, and also
stories of cataclysms of the raising of the sky, and of world ages.

In the Epinomis, Plato is accomplishing a significant trick of theology. Complaining of the
mythology that places the gods on Mount Olympus, he replaces them upon the planets where,
he says, they belong, hoping to reform their bawdy characters thereby. He says we must get
rid of any notion of the strife of the gods. They move always in order. (Elsewhere, Plato
would have any disbelievers in orderly skies punishable.) The astral gods are the real
ones, he insists, and gives them their names. (He anthropomorphizes the vault of Heaven,
Kosmos.) Their names, he suggests, should be coordinated with Syrian and Egyptian
observations, which are much older and "tested by vast periods of time." To us it occurs
that bringing the gods down to Olympus was psychologically an effort on the part of Greek
myth-makers to control the gods; they became human and tied to human fortunes directly. Now
Plato, feeling no threat of planetary disorders, wants to send them back to their former
homes, which are once again safe. De otiosi, the removed gods, will be doubly safe, safe
for themselves and safe for mankind.

We note that the Greek and many other cultures regard their sky gods as blood-related. To
the Greeks - to us, for that matter - this could only mean that their history was
intertwined, overlapping, of the same order of celestial experiences.

We note further that the greatest Greek philosophers and scientists did not argue against
the succession of gods. They did not challenge the succession because somehow it was real
to them. Somehow they were experientially or psychologically inhibited from claiming that
the gods were born together. And so it was with other great ancient mythologies. Eliade
hardly pries into the secrets of the Hebrew gods; yet, guided by the hypothesis that gods
occur in succession, and lend their new traits to religion it is not difficult to see in
the Bible and the legends of the Jews a series of gods, not badly matched with the Greek
and Mesopotamian gods. These were objects of worship by hostile factions. At the least
monotheism becomes, if not polytheism, then serial polytheism. Thus, in the opening
passages of Genesis, the figures of Ouranos and Kronos are vaguely discernible, occurring
in turn, whereupon intimations of worship of the Moon, Jupiter, Hermes, and Baal-Venus
intrude. The Archangel Gabriel, through Jewish legend, can be linked to the planet Mars,
and the destruction of the Assyrian army of Sennacherib in 687 B. C. Yahweh, who is linked
to Elohim (Saturn-Kronos) by Mosaic fiat, seems to be a Zeus-Horus-Jupiter figure to most
scholars, and seems also to be a Thoth-Hermes-Mercury figure, blended with the Zeus figure,
to the present writer (see God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus). This latter
god( s) can be fitted into history at the beginning of the Old Bronze Age in Egypt and the
Near East. Thus, there has been a succession of gods and goddesses in human history. Yet
human nature is obsessive, that is, faithful; further, it was a great sacrilege to forget
god, and severe punishment and expiation not only followed forgetting but were performed as
prophylaxis. The compelling reason to change gods is to be found in reality. The reality is
that the gods have changed, and, despite all his efforts to be loyal, man has been forced
to worship new gods over the ages.

The ambivalence of the gods caused mankind from the beginning to exert itself strenuously
to control them. A continuous redefinition occurred. Yet never has the nuclear complex of a
god been put aside without great external pressures, the most excruciating of which has
been the advent of an apparently more flexible and potent deity. In these cases, people
have, as often as they could, tried to merge the new and the old; any evidence of
continuity and any confusion of identities, whether physically or psychologically produced,
have been seized upon to establish that the worship of the new is faithful to the worship
of the old.

Therefore it happens, consciously or not, that all gods have an unbroken line of ancestors
going back to primordial chaos; there the gods are made from the abstract elements such as
air and water or the world begins out of nothing. We should bear in mind that when Egyptian
history opened, with the Pyramid texts, Osiris( Saturn) was already dead, deus otiosus, and
Horus (Zeus) reigned. Thus too, recorded history and ruins of civilized settlements portray
the Saturnian (Osirian) "Golden Age" and its horrendous destruction.

The god Nun of Egypt, first god of the first recorded cosmogony, bears in his hieroglyphic
name that he is of the primordial wastes of water in the sky, and Egyptian legends state
this to be the case. Mother Earth, Terra Mater, the Universal Genitrix, Gaia, is the most
durable of the gods, and found practically everywhere. In Hesiod's Theogony, she gives
birth to Ouranos who is "a being equal to herself, able to cover her completely." It is
clear, however, that Earth (who may even be conceived of as masculine sometimes) reacts to
the changing gods of change. This Nun or heaven is "father of the gods" and father of Atum
or Re. He or it is the demiurge of the boundless, featureless darkness, from which evolved
the first hills or eminences. There appeared in early Egypt four different cult centers
with special creation myths, all of which were essentially the same.

In Sumer in the 5th millennium before the present, as legend has it Nammu, whose ideogram
carries the meaning of "sea," was called the mother of heaven and earth who also bore the
gods. Fluids and gases are favored elements of chaos and materials of creation. There is
more than a semblance of logic alone in this accord of legends; the idea that gases go with
chaos is attractive but is more than ex post facto explaining of legendary fiction. Fluids
and gases must indeed have enveloped primordial man and attended the birth of the gods.
Ouranos emerged out of the watery and turbulent wastes of the sky cloaked in robes of
clouds. Philo Byblius anciently reported from earlier sources that the first Phoenician god
was Elium or Hypsistos (" the Highest") and was succeeded by Ouranos who was succeeded by
El or Kronos. But I would interpret this primordial god as the first stage of Ouranos, the
adamantine condition of the sky prior to its breaking open to reveal the great light of
Ouranos.

The Babylonians, successors to Sumer, in the early third millennium B. C. worshiped Marduk-
Bel (Baal) as patron god and world creator, exalted over the old Mesopotamian pantheon just
as Jupiter came to be exalted over Saturn in the Roman-Greek pantheon. Poseidon (brother of
Zeus and son of Chronos) remained in heaven after his father fell and only later, upon
agreement with Zeus, descended to rule the seas. He also flooded the land as he did so and
was known as the land-encroacher. Thus the descent of Poseidon (Neptune) is to be
identified with a great deluge, perhaps a name for, it not a later part of, the same great
deluge that is connected with the crippling and binding of Kronos (Saturn) and is the same
as the flood of Noah brought down by Elohim in Hebrew Genesis.

The qualities of new gods were thus to replace, overlap, and add to the qualities of the
old; theology assisted by political power and the manifest abilities of the new god
performed the task. Jupiter, for example, was called "fecundator," but the original
fertilizer of the Earth and founder of agriculture was his father, "Saturn fecundator." The
process by which the Sun usurped the identity and history of the old gods over the past two
thousand years is homologous; when the skies settled down, this great and apparent sky-body
grew in religious stature.

Buddhism climbed upon Hinduism; Confucianism and Taoism evolved from the worship of T'ien.
The Christians and Muslim supplied "new testaments" to the Hebrew "Old Testament." There
are no "Great Religions" in the world whose occurrence cannot be contemporaneously
connected with natural events of the caliber of world-wide catastrophe. The same applies to
small but persistent, durable religions such as modern Judaism, and Parsiism, descended
from Persian Mazdaism through Zoroaster. I do not speak of many other religions of the
world, some of which may well be "superior" or more deserving of the title "great" by such
criteria as may be advanced in discussion. Nor do I distinguish among sects within the
"Great Religions," while recognizing that in reality there may exist distinctions as
significant, say, among Christian groups as between the "average" Christian religion and
other religions. We hear of many instances in which Christians or Muslims are more
comfortable among "head-hunting" sects or gnostic or totemistic religion than among their
own kind.

An important line of attack may be leveled against our assertion that he succession of gods
reflects a series of natural catastrophes upon Earth. Religions have continued to acquire
new gods without actual catastrophes and have spread widely without catastrophes to help
them do so. Some of these religions have been militarily aggressive, others peaceful. Thus
Islam conquered large areas at first by the sword, as is will known, but in recent years
has converted peoples readily with little bloodshed and compulsion, as in central Africa.
Father back in time, as Wheatley (The Pivot of the Four Quarters) asserts, the Hindu
pantheon moved into Southeast Asia along with its social institutions. Along with the
religion went peaceful commerce. Many shrines were erected, around which there grew up
cities. So enthusiastic were people for the peacefully inculcated religion that sometimes
the near totality of a state's economy was given over to oblations to the pantheon.

The 2600 years since the probable last great natural catastrophes have not been
distinguished by peacefulness. War and slaughter have been conducted in the name of a
warlike religion (or interpretation thereof), or of a peaceful religion, or in the name of
no religion but the state or tribe. We are led, then, to conjecture that homo sapiens
himself, though relieved of direct models of destructive behavior in the skies, continues
to carry out deeply rooted impulses to destruction, whether through unconscious memory or
because he is constructed genetically to do so. That both are in fact the case is a main
thesis of my volumes on Homo Schizo. So long as the skies were disturbed, and the Earth
with it, the character of religion reflected clearly natural events and imposed models of
conduct upon man. But religion itself was born in the creation of man and, if he were other
than true to his nature or were of another nature, he would not have a peaceful religion
and behave peacefully in all probability. Religion is a dependent variable of human nature.
It is a dependent variable of natural events. We shall have to inquire, as we proceed,
whether, in some other sense, in another kind of reality, religion may be an independent
variable, owing its existence to conditions freed of human nature and ancient natural
disasters.

To speak of religion as a variable reminds us of how vague and intangible are the materials
of the history of religion and even of religious behavior today. We must toy with notions
of impractical super-surveys, in frustration over this situation.

To speak properly about the religion of a person, a standard intensive interview at the
least is required. "What precisely are your perceptions of the supernatural?" "What
practices, life-pattern, or habits do you possess that are related to these perceptions?"

Then, of course, inasmuch as one's behavior is never quite aligned with one's professed
beliefs and behavior, one should bring in some external objective testimony to supplement
the interview. We should have hundreds of pages per person, but only from these would we be
able to define operationally the person's religion.

Were all the people on Earth thus interviewed, and the results properly classified,
tabulated, and analyzed, we should be able better to generalize about the relation of
present religion and gods to the historical religions and gods - provided, we should add,
that we have assembled and ordered all that might be known about historical religions back
to their origins in the origins of man; this, however, we should probably be incapable of
doing unless we were to adopt as the guiding hypotheses those already suggested in these
first chapters: namely:

     The earliest human cultures were simultaneously religious.
     
     The earliest and most important supernatural objects everywhere were celestial.
     
     The Ouranian complex of Heaven and Gods was the first list of Dramatis Personae of religion
     everywhere.
     
     The Ouranian complex was overthrown by nature and simultaneously by man.
     
     All successive gods everywhere have descended from and relate to the Ouranian complex.
     
     Man believed himself forced to change gods from time to time by evidence in nature.
     
     Man, as he changed gods, accomplished the transition with as few variations as possible in
     previously assigned powers, traits, names, vestments, rites and religious conceptions.
     
     In these transitions, man became adept (to his way of thinking, which was and is delusory)
     at reconciling and controlling his gods through his religion, whence, by controlling the
     gods, at controlling the world, all with the ultimate and impossible goal of obtaining
     self-control and peace of mind.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 1: }
{Q THEOMACHY }
{C Chapter 3: }
{T KNOWING THE GODS}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER THREE

KNOWING THE GODS

The collected qualities of gods resemble a bazaar where all types of potentially useful
objects, frequently queer, are brought in by all sorts of people. The childish, outlandish
and genial effects of the human mind are displayed in seller and buyer alike.

What brings one to he market: curiosity? hope of a rare beautiful utensil that one can
afford? something to lighten our spirits? the euphoria of the busy scene? a thing - we know
not what - that may change one's life? So one shops for gods. Some say, they are in
everything. Some say, you cannot find what don't exist. Some say, they are most useful.
Others say, they are not to be found when you need them.

If it were not for the fact that two billion people claim to know one or another god,
perhaps we should scarcely bother to take up the question of what is known in this regard.
Further, since most believers claim that their god wishes to be adored, and is infinitely
capacitated, should not the god display himself clearly and prove at least his own
existence, if not his other qualities, beyond a shadow of a doubt? But he avoids the flea
market. He seems to want privacy, but then he should certainly resent the continuous
universal efforts to bribe him to appear.

A few hardy souls venture to say that gods have little interest in humans and therefore
have no motive to prove themselves. Some, like the deists, argue that the gods created
everything and set it into motion; then, retiring, the gods left the world to develop by
itself. Some merely say: "God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform." (There is,
incidentally, a religious adage for every circumstance.) Most who believe in gods - these
are in numbers largely of the Hebraic complex or Hinduism - prove their case by pointing to
divine signs (hierophanies), including the marvelously intricate reality of the world, by
asserting there must be a purpose to everything, and by commanding, "Don't ask questions;
have faith."

Gods appear directly to people, especially to heroes, on occasion; if not the gods
themselves, then surrogates or messengers reveal themselves, if not these, then
hierophanies or manifestations of gods occur. Dozens of gods, thousands of agents and
subordinate gods, and tens of thousands of hierophanies, performing in plural appearances,
would, if catalogued, constitute millions of appearances. Zeus knew many women; Athena
marched before many soldiers; Buddha came from a noble family; Jesus was known among the
people as a man; Paul met him on the Road to Damascus, resurrected; children of Fatima
conversed with Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Millions of such encounters have gone unreported because of the modesty of people; they
could not believe their good luck. In Some religious sects, it is expected that now, if not
earlier or later, every member must experience at the least a significant hierophany and a
changed life thereafter.

A divine appearance or hierophany must be social, not individual, in the sense that it must
the authenticated by the belief of others. This has not prevented millions of individuals,
at some risk of persecution, whether criminal or medical, from claiming encounters.

Who validates encounters? This is properly a subject for the political science of religion.
Who "should" validate them is the claim of as many theistic religions as exist. A large
bureaucratic church may devote much energy to acknowledge any encounters, sometimes saying
that god does not conduct himself so, so that he did once but now does not.

All sects lay down (that is, their gods lay down) rules for encounters. It is unthinkable
that a Christian could conceive of his god going about raping women as Zeus was inclined to
do. On the other hand, Yahweh, the god of Moses, delighted in the killing of enemies both
foreign and domestic; at least so says Moses in numerous cases, as when the heresy of the
Golden Calf is discovered, and the Lord's order is "slay every man his brother, and every
man his companion, and every man his neighbor." Three thousand Israelites were killed that
day.

In the Hebraic complex, Moses is the central figure. "Moses spoke with God." These
conversations have been subjected to analysis for thousands of years and it is unlikely
that late psychiatric explanations such as have been offered by Julian Jaynes and the
present author will be final. Be that as it may, the relationship of Moses and Yahweh can
be analyzed within the framework and propositions of the psychology of hallucinations and
delusions. That is, Moses was conducting interior psychological operations. Yahweh was, to
his mind, a real sacred Lord God.

By treating the world around him - the Egyptians, the Israelites, the desert, the
architecture of sacred enclosures, the bushes, rocks and waters, and his disciples as if
they too were under the direction of Yahweh, Moses created a marvelously integrated
religious complex recomposing this world and himself in the midst of great natural
turbulence. The more one studies the Books of Moses, the more sense one can make of them as
literal history written by a deluded and masterful genius. But this hardly advances the
cause of the Hebraic religions.

Increasingly, psychiatry and physics are pressing upon religions to surrender all cases of
alleged hierophanies. The majority are easy to prove false. But, as we shall see later on,
science is "getting too smart for its own good," and beginning itself to present important
arguments concerning the supernatural -  its own hierophanies perhaps.

Certain types of ancient hierophanies lend themselves to scientific reinterpretation.
Examples are the collectively witnessed catastrophes of great magnitude - such as the
Deluge of Noah -  and electrical discharges of types no longer experienced, such as were
central to, the operations of Moses' Ark and the Delphic Oracle. Whereas new evidence and
scientific interpretation go to prove the veracity of ancient reports, the super natural
character of the reports is thrown into doubt. Thus, a substantial proportion of the
appearances of Yahweh in the Book of Moses occur in connection with (literally "on") the
Ark of Moses; most probably these were electrical displays, ingeniously managed, and
believed to represent the fiery essence of the deity.

Deluge legends are worldwide. Survivors included not only Noah's family but, to believe
their legends, other people in different places on Earth. Evidence of large-scale flooding,
totally beyond present experience, is worldwide. The cause, focusing now only upon the
floods contemporary with Noah, were exoterrestrial and the water was in large part new
water from outer space most likely from a nova of a theretofore much larger Saturn. The
establishment of this theory, even if it is accepted as the second most likely alternative
to "no worldwide flood at all," reduces the religious and hierophanic aspects of the Hebrew
story (and of all other religious descriptions).

Those who before saw the direct intervention of an explaining, instructing, humanly
motivated god in the deluges gain a minor victory from the validation of sacred scriptures,
but suffer a defeat of the notion of a divinely chosen people working under the immediate
personal direction of their god. Dozens of peoples, perhaps all of them, inherit the belief
that the gods once saved only them from a worldwide ruin. Doubt is cast upon all
ethnocentric religious aspects of the Deluge, whence some persons will be led to a "higher
religious synthesis" of the relations between gods and the natural world, while others will
be led out of religion entirely.

Many people believe that they know gods by their effects, not by the grand effects of
nature but by targeted effects upon issues of personal concern. The word "god" in Aryan
etymology stems from the words "to sacrifice" and "to invoke." Invocation, prayer, and
rituals are seen to be followed by events unexplainable except by a direct divine
intervention. A sick child is for example, the object of medical therapy and religious
solicitations; a cure is accredited to the divine; a failure of cure may be deemed to be in
part a punishment, or the result of unconvincing solicitations. Seeking divine attention
and determining whether and how it was provided take altogether too many forms, most of
them well-known, to consider them at length here. The scientist will say "Explain all
effects by natural causes; those not precisely determinable must be natural as well; where
psychological effects are produced, these too are natural; for the human mind and its
morale can be significant producers of effects in the context of human activity."

Modern theologians and religious practitioners tend to transmo-grify all forms of knowing
about gods that seem vulnerable to the lances of science. Most theology has been apology
for vulgar religion. Realizing, for instance, that mental asylums are well populated by
hallucinators, they are most approving of more subtle religious encounters. Encounters are
favored that do not implicate divine personages or voices or external visions but which
display simple faith, spiritual resources, and the Lord secondhand. Thus, "I have faith in
a benign Intelligence. It enables me to draw upon deep spiritual resources. I feel like
Jeremiah, when the Lord told him 'Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. '" The problem
of hallucination ceases as soon as one uses indirect quotation, "I think that god would
help me to defeat the enemies of our country." This technique works all the better because
in a bureaucratized society it has become rather insane for any job-holder to say "I" do
this or that, rather than "We" or "our policy" or "the management" or "they."

It is not an accident that the most strongly individualistic and anti-bureaucratic
groupings of modern America overlap largely the religious sects with the greatest
expectancy of personal encounters with their god. (This, incidentally, may explain the
"mystery" to many people of how the suave Hollywood product Ronald Reagan came to be allied
with the simple direct primitive evangelical Christians; he was a "rugged individualist,"
anti-bureaucratic.) The belief in gods arising from "faith" is a step away from personal
encounters and authoritative testimonials. "Faith" is an affirmation. As such it is taboo
in logic, for logic is grounded upon reasons and proofs. Logic would not exist if faith had
its way. Faith cannot be proven, but it can never be driven from its deep psychological
recesses; it can only be surrendered. What is reported by a triumphant rationalism as the
"destruction" of faith must always remain the dubious word of a third party. If the
believer resists the terms of surrender, faith will never be conquered.

Faith cannot prove itself by logic, but it can be justified by its effects. "See how happy
is the person who believes. If you would be happy, believe!" If the faithful receive more
than the usual share of what are regarded as the goods of life, their faith acquires a
pragmatic proof, different from and inaccessible to empirical proof. Insofar as "the goods
of life" are psychic and exoterrestrial, one can construct an infallible circle from which
the non-faithful are excluded. One can come from heaven, live bathed in heavenly light, and
return to heaven, invulnerable to mundane contradiction.

Let one step for a moment out of the charmed circle into competition for mundane "goods of
life" and one finds oneself amidst a crowd of the variously successful where statistics
come into play, and one can no longer be sure that faith is associated with achievement.
"God must love the poor; he made so many of them," it is said. Moreover, if the "goods" are
doubted and "faith" as a good is committed to definition, debate and proof by conduct, then
evil is the lot and behavior of many of the "real" faithful. "Faith moves mountains," says
the Gospel of Mark (II: 22-4), but faith in whom, and to where are the mountains moved?

"Faith, hope, and charity," are supplicated by Paul the Apostle, but faith in its uttermost
recess may be another word for the strong and unquenchable hope of a divine existence.
Scientific psychologists will agree; faith is an attitude established by, preserved by, or
destroyed by all that makes, maintains, and breaks other attitudes and predispositions: as
for instance, drinking and smoking, quarreling, charitability, studiousness, political
party affiliations, etc. All this is what concerns a college course in developmental
psychology: the workings of indulgences and deprivations of infancy, family life, and
society systematically and authoritatively explained. Faith is educed as a pattern of
expectations, endorsed and rewarded, such that the faithful one, under normal conditions,
will never regret his course of life nor lose his expectations.

Besieged and buffeted in its last traditional trenches by modern science, faith
nevertheless survives, because nothing else survives better, because the desperate refugees
from science and reason crowd in with it, and because a variety of non-traditional licenses
are granted to privateers who venture to vest their faith in ancient astronauts, flying
saucers, and the like.

Philosophical arguments for the existence of the divine can scarcely capture the popular
imagination and suffuse popular religion with practical implications and a precise
operative morality. A mention of the traditional arguments for the existence of god may
illuminate the problem.

There is first the argument of the necessary reality of perfection: if we can conceive of
the idea of a perfect being, the being must exist, because existence is an aspect of
perfection. We join most philosophers in refusing this argument. A great deal of nonsense
exists in the human mind, product of its inner machinations; must it all be granted the
status of reality somewhere, sometime, someplace? All the monsters of fairy tales and
science fiction would come alive. Dante's Inferno would be awaiting its newest victims even
now.

Most conceivable things do not exist. Nor can we make them exist by an act of will, by the
mechanism that has been called "omnipotence of thought," although we can make them exist as
operative forces in people's minds, as illusions. Furthermore, we know that people lie in
part according to their illusions, in all areas of existence -  politics, love, economics,
beauty, etc. Illusions have consequences. Hence if the consequences of a belief in a being
of specific absolute perfection are good, or at least better than the consequences of any
substitutable illusion, we may seek earnestly to establish and maintain the illusion, or
myth (for that is what it is as well.)

A second traditional argument for the existence of god pleads that the world as we see it
cannot have come about without a previously existing cause. Since the universe is so grand
and so complex, containing by definition everything, its cause must be at least as great,
conforming to what may be called god, the demiurge, the first cause, the creator.
Everything does have a precedent form -  call it a sense. This we sense; and every
experiment can probably prove it.

But it may be of the nature of the world to extend itself indefinitely in an infinity of
forms occupying time and space or a presently unimaginable dimension. Hence the gods as
creators are unnecessary. One may slide into a counter-assertion to prove their existence:
that the gods are in the principle of change, there being no ultimate reason for change
other than the will of a demiurge, who may be Aristotle's "unmoved mover," or Heraclitus'
inherent changefulness of all things. So close are such abstractions to scientific
generalities, so far removed from practical religion, and so vulnerable to contradiction
(for all things can be viewed in their unchanging aspects a la Parmenides), that the gods
would soon shuffle off to Sheol with their help.

The most popular of arguments for the existence of gods is the (humanly perceived) design
of the world. So marvelous are the construction and interconnections of things and so
purposeful (that is, moving towards their proper goals) that an infinitely masterful
designer must have created the universe. However, even before modern science exposed some
of the guts of the material world, including the physiology of psychology, philosophers,
priest, and ordinary people were acutely aware of the evils of the world. They were aware
that the world had been nearly destroyed on occasion by natural (divine) forces, so that
the gods came to represent destructiveness as well as constructiveness. Under such
conditions, the problem of evil was tied into the grand design, so that interminable
arguments might occur concerning what parts of the world and its people were deliberately
designed by the gods to malfunction. The tedium of this discussion hardly assists in any
proof of divine design, while the issue keeps people in a prolonged and useless state of
fear and quarrelsomeness.

To be sure, a great many processes of the world seem to be moving toward a definable end.
Thus, the common astronomical theory is that the sun will ultimately burn itself out; so is
the idea already cited that the present fragmented universe of starry bodies was created by
a primordial explosion, but that a limit of expansion will be reached, whereupon the
universe will implode. Again it is often said that man will colonize space, etc. All such
processes appear to be non-random, hence to some thinkers, purposeful.

Take the biological "law" that evolution cannot reverse itself. If this is so, evolution
appears to have some goal, which encourages certain theorists to feel better about the
world and others to believe in gods. Materialists can take a different view: non-random
processes develop an evermore specific direction out of inertia; once an ear begins to
evolve in animals, it will develop into various ears unless it finally quantavolutes; the
developing ear preempts some proportion of the changeability of the organism. Therefore, an
"end" or "purpose" can be claimed. It is hardly an occasion for divine pride, or for pride
in the divine. And sense organs may degenerate in evolution, not only among blind moles,
but in man, whose senses are stunted by comparison with those of one or more species.

With an irresistible thrust, most theistic religions have promoted the idea that "nothing
is impossible to the gods," The gods are usually allowed perfection. They are eternal,
omnipotent omniscient, omnipresent, omnivirtuous, unchanging and unchangeable (for how can
perfection change?) So naive are such assignments of qualities, that they seem to be pure
projected delusions. Just as one can solve a mathematical problem by manipulating the
concept of infinity, one can arrange and interpret any divine action with the concept of
complete qualities.

It seems that design is found where the heart is: one who is healthy, reared to optimism,
indulged, and promoted in life, is likely to find better designs in what he senses and
experiences than others find who are less blessed. Indeed, a goodly part of much religion
consists precisely in designating the world as evil, in anticipation of our arriving
shortly after death in a better world, or escaping presently from the world about.

The stress of religions upon suffering is unavoidable. Suffering is not only blatant in
ordinary lives; it is also regurgitated as feelings out of history, not merely church and
social history, but the history of great disasters engineered by the gods. Finally,
suffering gestates in the very genetics of humanity, in its eternal fearfulness, in the
contradiction between wishing for everything and controlling nothing.

At times, religious factions diverge and sects spring up which preach a religion of secular
joy and the elimination of suffering and sorrowful memory. But secular joy as religion soon
liquidates the religion. The joy of religion generally must consist in the appreciation of
man's lot and a surcease from it upon death, or resurrection, or otiose earthliness.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant perceived in the moral laws always present among human beings
a proof of the existence of god. Unlike the beasts, men rule themselves by voluntary
ethics, it is said. This unique and universal search for the good suggests a divine
purpose. Only the magnificent order of the heavens, which moved Kant to "ever-increasing
wonder and awe," was comparable to "the moral law within me."

Modern quantavolution readily demonstrates the inconsistency of the order of heavens. As
contrasted with older generations of scientists, the younger generation sees more and more
the history of the heavens as of quantavolutions and catastrophes. Ethology and socio-
biology meanwhile are asserting vigorously the presence, now here and now there, in animals
and plants, of moral rules and moral behavior that man used to regard as products of his
superior and voluntary ethics.

As for the "moral law of man," sociologist Louis Wirth used to remark to his students that
"people differ in every way that they can." A thoroughly relativistic and pragmatic
philosopher would add that it is "the moral law within me" which causes most of the worst
human conflicts in this world. I agree with both men. The claim to know gods, so general in
history and today, has not reduced differences so much as it has promoted fights over them.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 1: }
{Q THEOMACHY }
{C Chapter 4: }
{T THE HEAVENLY HOST}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER FOUR

THE HEAVENLY HOST

The animation of nature is an instinctual interpretation, primordial with humankind. It
occurs with humans today, more obviously among the young. To exorcize it takes training.

The earliest gods took shape as the Sky and Earth. There developed next a more definitely
formed solar god of the Sky. A change in nature was responsible for the change in divine
forms. Logically, and in accord with most evidence of what was manifest, the primordial
welkin was densely packed, without brilliant separated lights, until the sky was broken up
and these appeared. The great god would have come first in his solar (or planetary) form if
the sky had been penetrable.

Until nearly 2700 years ago the skies were periodically invested with changing forms, and
much of this turbulence was impacting upon the Earth physically, as well as upon the minds
of humans. The scene was conducive to polytheism. Divine presences of all types might be
discerned. Yet there was usually a great god, a father of gods, an Ouranos, a Kronos or a
Zeus.

We infer from this fact that such beings were at some time most impressive features of the
sky and, when they were not, were scalding memories, which had so dominated the human
setting that no successor, no matter how prominently active could match what its "ancestor"
or "father" had achieved.

Some cultures, such as the Roman, Greek, and Hindu, did not conceal the succession of
fathers, and assigned family roles to junior actors, while the Hebrews over a period of
time accepted the Mosaic rationalization which fitted several great gods into a unity. This
did not come without ideological and political struggles of great intensity and long
duration, some of which are recounted, in expurgated form, in the Old Testament.

"Varro had the diligence to collect thirty thousand names of gods -  for the Greeks counted
that many. These were related to as many needs of the physical, moral, economic, or civil
life of the earliest times." He found 40 Hercules alone. So writes G. Vico. The sacred book
of the Mah…b…rata (1: 39) claims 33,333 Hindu deities, and later sources say that there
were a thousand times as many. The Nordic Grimnismal gives over 50 names to Odin. The
Babylonian Emunia Elis culminates in a recital of 50 names of Marduk. In the history of
symbolism and language, words may actually have begun as god-names. Words might have been
more sacred than pragmatic, until an advanced state of collective amnesia and sublimation
had been achieved. Even today, a great many people cannot adapt to the idea that words are
not real hard things.

If the Greeks had 30,000 god-names, and the Hindus even more, then all the world's cultures
must have had hundreds of thousands. The great numbers, however, reduces to a
comprehensible order when a proper theory is applied to them. The total of this heavenly
host includes, first, a few great gods, whose real existence in the sky lent structure to
the ages. Second occur the thousands of names of the great gods, most of which have yet to
be identified with their referents. Many of these names are concealed references; others
are what foreign cultures call a certain culture's gods; some names isolate a quality of
the gods; some names are used to marry the gods of one culture to those of another.

The principle of ambivalence (in the form of opposites) leads to the division of great gods
into gods and devils. Here the human mind seeks to control the gods by projection of
benevolence and beneficence upon a good god, and malevolence and maleficence upon a bad god
or devil, hoping that the one will outwit and outstruggle the other. Devils have invariably
extruded from an animated religious setting, there being no way of exorcizing them from
man's primordially established soul. In the Hebraic complex, god cannot commit evil; if a
bad effect is deemed evilly inspired, it is attributed to the devil.

Some religions have merged the contradiction of good and evil into the same god, who holds
different names for his given qualities and exercises benevolent or malevolent impulses for
inscrutable reasons, or for "obvious" reasons, or for reasons not to be inquired about. The
Greek gods were rather of this type. One significant result of the differences may be in
the potential intensity of the "guilt complex." The Greco-Roman pagans suffered less from
guilt-feelings than their Christian counterparts. Such gods may acquire many appellations,
some of them contradicting others. New appellations may also serve to avoid the designation
of new gods, an ever-present "problem" in a polytheistic system.

Appellations may thus be congruent and complementary, that is, logical and harmonious
qualities that a single personality may possess. Or they may appear nonconforming, leading
nonparticipating observers (enemies or scientists) to question the nature of the god.
However, as with great contradictions -  " God vs. Devil" -  so with lesser contradictions
-  "god of arts vs. god of war" -  the contradiction might be only apparent, the same
supernatural being having apparently produced a variety of effects during his primary
effective manifestations in nature. Thus Mercury-Hermes is both thief and healer. And
Santillana and von Dechend refer to "the baffling Mesopotamian texts dealing with gods
cutting off each other's necks and tearing out each other's eyes."

In the eternally agonizing search for a great god with whom one might co-exist peacefully,
those who followed the path of opposites have been plagued by the possibly triumphant
fearful powers of the devil, whereas those who pursued the path of the contradictions had
to admit the mutability of their god and the impossibility of more than incessant recurrent
reconciliations between god and people.

Another major source of divine names (besides the attributions) is the outcome of processes
of memory and forgetting. To forget the disasters that characterized the appearance of the
gods was urgently demanded by the bruised mind; but any lapse of memory would be
accompanied by fear that god will not permit himself to be forgotten and will punish
forgetfulness. The mind then works to define and characterize god so that his image will be
tolerable upon the conscious level. It further adds new words to its vocabulary of the
divine, discovering that a god called by another name is less threatening. Still further,
by the logic of delusion, a god whose name is mysterious or hidden will respect the awe and
fear bound up in the secrecy and at the same time will restrict himself to activities that
do not threaten the very core of terror that crouches in the human soul. A plethora of non-
names, secret and cult-names, and common partial names comes forth.

Effects of many kinds are produced, the least of which is the confusion of names that
confronts the outside observer; the selective remembering is tolerable; occult elites can
dominate societies; the language and concepts of a people are enriched as the naming of
gods flows through the symbolic world by association, analogy, and implication.

Although some thousands of names are those of great gods in one form or another, other
thousands are assigned to angels, minor devils, minor divinities, spirits, divinized
natural phenomena of the earth, air, water, fire, plants and animals, divine heroes, and
divine heroes, and divine kings. This myriad of names also possesses its logic. Prior to
human creation the names could not exist: there was not stimulus, impulse, or mechanisms.
Once the mind had exploded into self-awareness, however, a great many beings might move
into it.

Limits to the number of names were set by the "behavior" of such beings, there being more
sub-gods in disastrous than in peaceful times. The need for alleviation of anxiety
occasions a sort of subconscious shifting of cargo with an invention and appeal to a new
god following the failure of performance of an old one. The logical operation or reduction
of "beings" is useful, when, for purposes of control, fewer sub-gods are needed. Finally,
the ability of the inventor to achieve collective consensus may sometimes fail; no doubt
heroic charisma or priestly office allows one to designate a new god only to a degree.

But, while these factors restrain the process, in any given culture the number of
supernatural beings is apparently magnified by the telling of tales from foreign and
destroyed cultures; these beings of course enter the mind only as subordinates or evil
opposites of one's own gods. Moreover, as in classical Greek mythology, supernatural beings
pile their traits and presence upon the true beings of the culture until, to the
undiscerning mind, they become indistinguishable from the humans; the totality of
divinities and spirits becomes a seemingly nonsensical mass.

By analogy with the cultures of modern tribes, and by reference to surviving cave drawings
and artifacts, it would seem that people are naturally inclined to perceive gods in all
aspects of nature. This perception is true insofar as the gods of creation must be assumed
to be genetically behind every divine or spiritual (supernatural) communication, symbol,
and image. It is also natural even among apes (The neuter gender, the "it," is itself
probably a product of divinely inspired categorization; "it" is needed not for inanimate
objects, as school children are told, but for a godly presence that is neither female nor
male.)

The collective experience and interpersonal communication of an event that requires a
naming -  an event whose connection with the numerous high-energy expressions of nature is
obvious but whose direct efficient cause is not a great god -  is a final way by which many
a demigod is produced.

Thus the breezes are named, the meteors, the volcanoes, the erratic boulders, the deeps of
caves and seas, the ancient trees, the animals of curious form and expression, and so on to
many thousands. Then, too, the early kings, the kings of crises, their mothers, the
sorcerers, saints, inventors, prophets, and so on to many more thousands of the divine and
semi-divine. Then, further, the products of their work: "devil's hole," "angel rock,"
"Mount Zeus," "Meteora," and so on through a world whose geography -  that was once worked
upon by the gods -  belatedly and usually mistakenly accredits the heavenly host via a
largely invented name. All of these processes of naming are consistent with and dependent
upon the primordial appearances of the gods.

The saints of several Christian churches are a form of minor divinity, who are deemed to
have performed celestial miracles, given great social services, communed with the Lord, or
served gloriously in battle. Saint Joan of Arc comes readily to mind. Periods of natural
and social crisis are their favored setting. The Hindus, who do not draw scholastic
distinctions so fine, have created divinities of the same order. Thus the villages of West
Bengal worship Sitala, Goddess of smallpox, though smallpox no longer troubles the area. R.
W. Nicolas has found the origins of Sitala in the 18th century, upon an unprecedented
outburst of the plague. Bengali doctors soon became preeminent in their analysis and
treatment of smallpox, using variolation. Simultaneously, the disease was ascribed to
Sitala, who had been born late among the gods and found none who knew how to worship her.
So she chose to infect especially children with the pox, for "a late-coming goddess
required such terrible weapons." Hers became an annual and major rite, accompanied by
processions, animal sacrifices, and music. When the plague was absent, she was also served,
for "both the presence and absence of disease are manifestations of the grace of the
Mother." One notes the psychic need, that science cannot fill, to displace blame to a
divine party, to turn punishment by the God back upon the self, and to propitiate and thank
the divinity for not exerting its full powers if bestowing evil.

Divinity has often been assigned to kings and emperors. Egyptian, Assyrian, Roman, Chinese,
Japanese, and the rulers of other cultures were considered gods, and worshiped in life and
death. They have been pronounced by themselves and their associated elites as a relatives
of gods or even one of the gods. This practice, so repulsive to democrats, is a means by
which an elite and the people it rules can deal with and control the gods. At the same
time, rule by divine kings is easier because the source of the rule is a god. He claim to
divinity varies with the secularism of the elite and masses, so that it is by no means rare
that the god is usurped, overthrown, and killed.

In some forms of society, now extinct, kings were not only gods or semi-divine but were
used as sacrifices regularly or in emergencies (often but by no means always in the form of
temporarily appointed surrogates).

We see once again, as we no repeatedly and more clearly than in other life spheres, the
basic functioning of religion to secure humans from fear of celestial disasters, and all
fears of matters deemed to be connected with the heavens gone astray and chaotic. The
Japanese Emperor used to be regarded as a god and was compelled to severely restrain his
movements upon critical occasions, such as during some unusual celestial phenomenon. This
catatonic state was believed to restrain the gods and heavens; if the god emperor does not
change even his countenance, one believed, the countenance of heaven will not change
either.

The puzzle of the god-heroes, with their half-and-half ancestry, still occupies us. Why
must there be everywhere these hundreds of men and women who muddy the waters of great
gods?

Typical explanations are unsatisfactory. It is said that gods and god-heroes are the same -
a truth, but too limited a truth to answer the question. Others say that people want to be
descended from gods, as, later, we shall see that they cannibalize their gods. This also is
apparent. And some are content to say that gods are really only big heroes. Because of such
explanations and simply because of the inordinate confusion from the plethora of names and
deeds, the truth behind myth is difficult to find and, indeed, few are ready to believe
there is a truth.

A quantavolutionary explanation of who and what are god-heroes can be set forth for what
its worth. God-heroes are sublimatory. When, in periods following the direct and evident
appearance and behavior of natural gods, there occurs a lull and a stability, humans,
continuing their search of means to control the gods begin the process of denying their
existence by humanizing them. If people were left to pursue this process, the gods would be
ultimately erased from the human mind (and history). The first phase, that is, consists of
direct experience of gods in nature. The second phase permits god-heroes, the third phase
pure heroes, and the fourth phase calls for plain human beings with typical human
behaviors. To take an example: Mars is Ares; Ares becomes Hercules; Hercules is a god, but
also Hercules becomes human, first as a god-hero; Hercules becomes quite human; Hercules
becomes subject of a mass of folk tales; the unconscious artistic mind can push to all
limits of the imagination with him.

What halts the process of losing gods entirely? On occasion (and many live in such
expectations) the gods reappear, wreak havoc, and, so, self-sufficient, unassisted, full
and direct god ship is restored. At the same time, the most obsessive and schizoid
officials and prophets outlast the social sublimation that is occurring, and insist that
gods directly are the only authorities, and will not let the process of creating god-heroes
go too far.

Then, too, a minor phenomenon occurs, which is incorrectly elevated to the major
explanation by uniformitarianism and psychic monolithics: pride of ancestry; elite self-
elevation, etc.; "credenda et miranda" of ruling groups. Heroes are built into a group's
history: "A treason it is to deny them." "We can't eliminate god-heroes without denying the
gods." That is, the heroes of a ruling class are made divine. This, we stress, does happen
but is not the primary and independent cause of gods and god-heroes. The impregnated
themselves in the god-heroes.

There is little question that Campbell has succeeded in telling the universal plot of the
hero found throughout the world from the most ancient times.

     The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the
     formula represented in the rites of passage: separation -  initiation -  return.... A hero
     ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder:
     fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back
     from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons of his fellow men.

How does this universal and even obsessive plot of mankind relate to the theory of
quantavolution? Simply, we think. First we note cycle: the going forth ends in the return.
Second, the world of the hero begins ordinarily, though almost always with premonitions and
prophecy; indeed the ordinary may be actual nothingness. This may be interpreted as a
regular order of the universe. Next come the disastrous experiences: a succession of
personalized natural forces beat against the hero, testing his will to survive, and to
control himself and the human and natural environment. When the forces have subsided or
have been defeated, the hero returns to a stable social order upon which he bestows his
moral and material gains.

The career of the hero thus mirrors the career of the gods, who mirror the career of
nature. At first the tie to gods is direct; imitation is permissible, but not "heroic
myth," which would be considered intolerable insolence by the gods. Only after a period of
the suppression of experiences and after a working out of psychic methods of dealing with
them, can a human act out the plot of the gods and be called god-names. Once the process is
begun, however, it has no end of sublimated ramifications until the gods are treated
cavalierly and even desacralized -until the next catastrophic event.

Campbell joins himself to the psychoanalytic school that regards gods as non-existent
psychological means for the human to jump beyond the ordinary world into the imaginary
world; "gods are only convenient means to the ineffable." They, and myth, help the mind to
transcend phenomena and achieve the great void or openness of spirit. Although this theory
is functionally true, it is very limited, and without realization of the grave primordial
dependence of the human mind upon the real events of its history and of nature. Connections
between divinities or sacred thing and stars are usually the result, not of the activity of
the stars nor of the playful resort to placing fairy tales among the stars, but of the
fixing of the location from which a great event appeared to originate. The Deluge of Noah,
by its many designations, is connected in widely-separate countries with the planet Saturn,
but also with the star-cluster known as the Pleiades; some grave event affected the sky and
earth when the Pleiades could somehow represent effects of Saturn. Scorpio is the
background setting from which cometary Venus launched herself on a destructive swoop upon
Earth. Scorpio is identified, if not before the event, then after the event, in new
associations with the event. Early and later events occur in connection with Scorpio and by
extension are associated with the Venus episode. Myths of one time and character become
mixed up with others later on. The stars themselves, alone or in clusters, come to acquire
legendary histories, and, as such, acquire future functions as places of resort or
transubstantiation or limbo for worldly or otherworldly heroes, people, and divinities.

Plato insisted that the stars "are not small, as they appear to the eye, but each of them
is immense in bulk." Further every solid body of heaven had "a soul attached" to it. Thus
Proclus in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus declares that each celestial god has angels,
demons, and heroes who are phases and extensions of it. And usually these characters have
abodes or posting places in the sky. The rich Polynesian legends carry their heroes on many
travels that are often imagined as terrestrial and maritime but which originated as travels
of gods though the vast stellar and planetary regions. In one of its dimensions, the legend
of the Argonauts is of a sky voyage that carried the adventurers to Circe (Corsyra, the
Boreal Circle) where the island of Drepane (" sickle") lay, beneath which was buried the
sickle of Kronos.

Much of what might be told of angels is sung by Rainer Maria Rilke. Here we have the multi-
faceted visions, the mixed love and terror, the mirroring of the human mind, and the sense
of co-creatures of genesis long ago.

     Every angel is terrible. Still, woe to me, I sing to you, near fatal birds of the soul,
     full-knowing of you... Early-achieved and over-indulged of creation, you high ridges, dawn-
     reddened peaks of all genesis, - pollen of the flowering godhead, links of light, halls,
     steps, thrones, welkins, shields of joy, uproars beauty then suddenly, singly mirrors
     scooping up outpoured beauty back into your own faces.

To the quantavolutionist, the presence of naturally occurring "angels" is logical and
historical. More puzzling is whether they were comets, planets, or meteorites. Thus, the
astronomers Strube and Napier attempted a natural history of the encounters between Earth
and comets, and argue that in the early days of mankind disastrous comets were variously
named and, when they had retired to the farther reaches of the solar system or had crashed
or broken up, their natures and behaviors were assigned to the planets who were the
regularly eccentric movers of the solar system.

That is, they would deny the asseverations of those such as Santillana, von Dechend,
Velikovsky, Milton and myself who assigned the active roles in legends to the planets, and,
in the case of the last three, give large changes in motion and behavior to all of the
planets such as to fulfill the requirements of some angelic behaviors. This is not to say
that comets did not occur, but that their original creation and impetus arose out of
planetary explosions and disturbances. Too, it may be borne in mind that any body changing
its movement in space will behave as a comet, growing horns and tails and trails and
presenting a variety of apparitions.

It will take many years of study, and even then it may be impossible, to determine the
historicity of the celestial solid body identity of even the more important "angels" and
"sky-heroes" of world legend. Dwardu Cardona, in his studies of the Archangel Michael and
others, has set an example of what must be done on a large scale to eliminate the confusion
of planets and angels.

Humans have been polytheistic even when their ruling religion states that one god and only
one god exists. The people (and usually, too, their religious guides) establish a heavenly
host (including devils) to complement, supplement, and assist the supreme god. So it was in
the beginning and ever thereafter.

The propaganda for monotheism is massive, so that people claim to believe in one god while
worshiping many. The monotheistic illusion occurs in two forms. First, monotheistic
affirmations are made by people who upon psychological investigation obviously mean
different things by the word "god." Thus, a sample of the American people in 1982 indicates
that all except 2% believe in god.

If the same people were interviewed in greater depth, however, different 'gods' would
emerge: a punitive god, a loving god, a deus otiosus, a god who pries into every nook and
cranny of every mind, a helping god, a god who helps those who help themselves, a very
human 'old man', an abstract principle of good, a god of true believers, a god of all
people, and so on. Some people feel close to god, others not. God confides in some humans,
but such an idea seems preposterous to other believers.

Then, other divinities would appear: the Holy Trinity, Christ the Son, the Virgin Mary, the
Holy Ghost, each taking some godlike qualities upon themselves, supremely competent in some
regard. Saints, agents of god, would appear in abundance. Many person's religious mentation
and practices are given over to a saint, whose direct protection and assistance one feels
to be superior to those services obtained from god the Father or God the Son; these latter,
it seems, "are never there when you need them." The devil comes up with some or many divine
qualities, almost always evil but "doing god's work," and god is often deemed helpless,
even if by his own will, to rid the world of the devil. Historical and contemporary heroes,
such as George Washington and the incumbent President, find themselves contending with
saints for the possession of divine qualities and the performance of miracles. In sum, a
great variety of gods exists in fact under the name of The God. Such people may still be
called monotheistic, so long as we understand the limits of this term.

Then other peoples of the world confess to more than one god. Such are the Hindus and
Taoists, for instance. They need not agree, either, on the definition of he gods of their
pantheon, any more than the Teutons, Greeks, or Romans would have agreed upon theirs. A
peculiarity of the Hebrew religion of Moses was its very early achievement of an
abstraction of the Lord which permitted an easier succession of gods (so long as integrity
of a Hebrew nation was preserved). This is so despite many deviations and p polytheistic
cults, and much editing of the story to stress the unity of the Lord.

Not all early Hebrews were devout worshiper of Yahweh alone. Also, several rebellions
against Moses were directed at his special, all-inclusive, exclusive god, Yahweh.
Theologians have occasionally surmised, and correctly, I think, that Aaron, High Priest of
the Jews under Moses, would have been fully tolerant of the worship of Baal, and that by
Baal was indicated possibly more than one god besides Yahweh, possibly Saturn, Mercury, and
Venus (to employ planetary representatives who had many parochial names.)

When Korah and his followers rebelled against Moses, one of their principal complaints,
which has not been fully excised from the Bible and is also the subject of legend, was his
suppression of their freedom to commune directly with the Lord. One encounters the same
demand among the English Levellers of the Seventeenth Century, now raised against Oliver
Cromwell, their Mosaic leader of the protestant revolution against the Crown. One god, the
rebels are told, means a monotheism both of god and worshiper, by authoritative definition.
This other kind of anarchistic monotheism cannot be tolerated by a theocratic regime. Else
every person would have his own god.

Jewish legends, which should be generously interpreted in the face of the monotheistic
propaganda, accord a place for religious beliefs and practice connected with the Holy
Spirit, The Archangels Michael and Gabriel (both identified with planets), the Moon hosts
of angels, characters out of Sheol, and the Devil. Legends speak of these entities
cordially and understandingly, as well as accusingly. From these stories and the historical
record, it is clear that the victory of Yahweh was never complete among the Jews, and that
much of the time he was "the professional man's god," the god of priests, military
officers, and most kings and judges.

And so it went thereafter; the seekers and executors of "the Truth" sponsored monotheism.
Moses was a scientist as well as a monotheist, I have concluded from my study of his life.
Akhnaton, monotheist Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, proclaimed his slogan as
Truth ma'at, and was overthrown by polytheistic priests and populace. I suspect that he
derived his monotheism from the Levant where he spent his childhood, perhaps even from
Israel.

Polytheistic societies have had their monotheists, often connected with a free-thinking
intelligentsia, akin to scientists. Thus, around 500 B. C., we find the Greek Xenophanes
saying, "There is one god" (Fragment 23), and "He sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and
hears as a whole" (fragment 24). The philosophical discovery of a single god often, too,
verges upon pantheism; the idea that "all things are full of gods" is not far from the idea
that "god is in all things."

When the Romans put down the Jewish rebellions of the first century and ultimate dispersed
the population, they acted partly in order to defend the principle of extending religious
rights to all gods that would tolerate other gods. This the Yahwists would not accept.
Meanwhile, the Christians, having promoted the Son of Man to become the Son of God, and
then to become an identity united to a redesigned Yahweh, penetrated the larger population
of the Roman Empire. They were persecuted as often as not on grounds that they would not
tolerate other gods or worship the divine aspects of the secular power latent in
monotheism; nor could the regimes succeeding to the Empire integrate the Christian doctrine
firmly into their moral and legal order. The Byzantine Empire accomplished the first
unification,. Only after a tine Empire accomplished the first unification. Only after a
thousand years from its legitimization, could certain western regimes quite dominate
monotheism.

For this triumph, they required a weakened Roman Catholic Church, a theory of divine right
of monarchs, and ultimately popular nationalism that in democratic form placed god and
country in the hands of the "people." There came them in government and industry the theory
of centralization, carefully developed over centuries by the church and embodied in many
ideas, ranking from that of papal infallibility to proofs of the existence of god built
upon absolute and extreme values.

Finally, monotheism could obtain support from science because science derived support from
monotheism. Science has been a greater exponent and defender of monotheism than has
traditional Christianity. Almost all scientists who have confessed to a religious belief
have been deists, that is, believers in a god whose qualities and behavior bordered upon
the laws of Nature. Nature (" herself," we note in a singular transposition of sex) tends
to acquire among scientific religious believers and scientific non-believers much of the
omniscience, purposefulness, immanence, transcendence, power, absoluteness, lawfulness,
orderliness, and responsiveness to human goodness and sin otherwise characteristic of the
single deity. There is widely believed to be only one truth, one ma'at, in science.

In addition, then, to its other peculiar historical features, mosaic monotheism operates
still as a vital feature in the ideological, hence structural, processes of modern
religions of the Hebraic complex, in conventional bureaucratic and single headed
(especially charismatic) governments, in judicial fictions (such as "finding the law"), in
international politics, in science, in pedagogy, in communist (but hardly "Marxist")
regimes, in tradition; philosophy as in most humanistic disciplines, and, of course, in the
family.

The sociological treatise whose writing we are imagining would probably conclude that some
of the most powerful and pervasive influences of monotheism have been manifested in
"enlightened" secularized processes of the scientific revolution of the 17th to 19th
centuries and the largely secular political history of the 18th to 20th centuries. Nothing
of this should surprise us. Religion, we have already explained, seeps into all things.

A final comment on the effects of monotheism may be in order. Elsewhere, in Homo Schizo I
and II, I explained the grave and genetic human problem of combining the several egos
naturally emanating from the structure of the human mind into a single ego, "a person who
can live with himselves." A percipient authority once termed the ancient Greeks
schizophrenic, and central in the syndrome of their behavior was their polytheism. We can
surmise that monotheism was not available to them to help "get their heads together."

Further, we say that monotheism fashions a therapy for one kind of schizophrenia by
creating another kind. It allows an orderly mind by pushing every object and tension onto
one or the other pole -  oneself or a god. In line with what we have already said of the
effects and function of monotheism in society and science, we can expect from the
monotheistic homo schizo a more orderly and consistent accretion of symbols and a greater
psychological penchant for mental discipline and linear logical forms (as opposed to
artistic, analogical and intuitive modes of thought). Monotheism thus can serve as a tool
of inquiry in seeking to understand why certain groups and individuals historically and
today have more disciplined minds, are logically consistent, and are superior at scientific
investigation and human organization. We stress once more, however, that monotheism does
not clearly distinguish religions - all being polytheistic in one or more senses -  but
that a belief that one is monotheistic may create special qualities in oneself.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 1: }
{Q THEOMACHY }
{C Chapter 5: }
{T LEGENDS AND SCRIPTURE}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER FIVE

LEGENDS AND SCRIPTURE

The biggest difference between myth or legends and sacred scriptures is that the latter are
selected legends, called "divinely inspired or spoken" by their believers, which have been
carefully guarded and edited to pursue the continuous but also continually changing
religious goals of their custodians. Myth and legends, not so regarded, or whose line of
custodians died out, were left like abandoned children to wander through time as casual
history and unconstrained imagination, until caught up by scientific mythological studies.

Giambattista Vico was the first modern scholar to perceive this process when, two centuries
ago, he wrote:

     The fables in their origins were true and severe narrations, whence mythos, fable, was
     defined as vera narratio (a true account).. But because they were originally for the most
     part gross, they gradually lost their original meanings, were then altered, subsequently
     became improbable, after that obscure, then scandalous, and finally incredible. . . These
     are the seven sources of the difficulties of the fables...

One of many debts that we owe to Plato is his respect for myth and legend. He, too,
fulminated at those who dismissed or, worse, corrupted history by their misuse of legends.
In my skeptically minded exploration of the story of the destruction of Atlantis, the
attitude of Plato mitigated my doubts. Plato goes out of his way to insist that the story
be taken seriously, despite its prehistoric origins. Critias, his protagonist, is given to
claim repeatedly that he heard and learned the story from his grandfather as a true and
exact account. Significantly, to a modern mnemologist, Critias declared that although he
had forgotten much of what he had heard of the previous day's discussions, he had forgotten
none of what he had learned as a child about Atlantis.

The Atlantis story is generally disbelieved, yet if an educated unbeliever were to compare
it with the story of the Deluge of Noah in the Bible, it would appear to be just as (im)
plausible. It is no less specific. The "author" of one is Plato, of the other, Moses; who
is more reliable? True, Atlantis is no longer to be found, above or below the sea, and
therefore presumed not to have sunk; but the flood that climbed to great heights all over
the Near East has vanished, too. Objectively, one would have to be as skeptical (and no
more so) about the one account as about the other. The difference is that a great many
millions of people believe in the Noachian Deluge because they believe in its sacred
format, while the Atlanteans are long dead and the moral of their story -  that Zeus
destroyed them because he found their squabbling and vices intolerable -  no longer lives
in people's minds.

A legend is history which has been largely unconstrained by realism and objectivity since
the happenings that it describes. The boundary zone between legend and history is, of
course, thickly populated. Thus, we have the well-known legend of the founding of Rome by
close descendants of Aeneas, exiled prince of Troy, who settled in Latium. Many ancient
scholars believed the story. Most Romans accepted it as true. The actual beginnings of the
legend occur before Virgil, who related it in his epic poetry. If historical, the legend
should go back to the also legendary beginnings of Rome, in the Eighth Century B. C. Then
it was that Romulus and Remus, grandsons of Aeneas, built the town.

But while scholars have accepted the legend's time of the founding, the Eighth Century,
they have rejected the Aeneas story because the last war of Troy was placed in the Twelfth
Century or earlier. However, recent studies have emptied Greek chronology of four to five
centuries of time, which would permit placing Aeneas within a century of Romulus and Remus.
To confirm the connection is a task of future research, but in support of it is the
important fact that when faced with a collection of practically all the evidence of art,
archaeology, inscriptions, stories and ancient comment about the earlier times of Rome, one
finds a striking gap in the collection extending between the 13th and 8th centuries, as was
manifested in the great Bimillennial Exposition of Virgiliana held at Rome in 1982.

Another case of the interplay among history, legend, and scripture may be offered. It
concerns the Christian Gospels of the life and work of Jesus. These are four in number, all
written some years after the death of Jesus, under circumstances that have never been
clear. Furthermore, as the reader will acknowledge, attitudes towards the Gospels and Jesus
have ranged from the denial that he ever existed, passing through an acceptance of the
Gospels as generally or exactly true, to other extreme ideas such as that Jesus was a
Jewish radical rebelling against Roman rule, whose story was censored in the Gospels.

Dr. Livio C. Stecchini, both an ancient historian and a historian of science, for several
years before his death taught a college course on the trial of Jesus. There he developed a
theory that Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and Roman statesman, was the basic
source for the Gospels. His brother met Saint Paul of Tarsus when Paul was imprisoned in
Rome awaiting trial and execution, and Seneca himself could have interrogated Paul at will,
given his high state position. That the Stoic and Christian positions on many ethical
issues were similar -  more so than the Mosaic-Christian position -  has been often
remarked upon. That Jesus follows the birth history of many Greco-Roman heroes is manifest:
His father being divine, his mother human.

Seneca, said Stecchini, composed a great tragedy, later lost, and upon its manuscript and/
or performances the Gospels drew very heavily. Thus it happened, as Stecchini has
elaborated, that the plot of the trial and execution, the actions of the characters, and
the timing and scenes of the Gospels are framed in the traditional structure of Greco-Roman
drama.

As important as Stecchini's theory may be, we cannot treat it here as more than a
conjecture. The conjecture, however, allows us to make a point about legend and scripture.
To the studious non-believer, sacred scripture is forever the source of historiography and
the analysis of myth and legend. Scripture may be dissected from as many perspectives and
in as many ways as the creative and scientific mind can imagine and instrument. On the
other hand, to the studious believer, sacred scripture is first of all literally true, and
all that the creative mind can imagine must be consistent with the literal truth. Even if,
by every empirical test that is respected by historical and natural science, Jesus were
deemed to have never existed (an unlikely prospect), the believer can continue to believe
in the holiness of his mundane being and therefore in the literalness of the gospels, just
as the Roman Catholic believer asserts in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the
veritable body and blood of Christ in the Holy Communion.

What we should then, by scientific standards, possess would be an entirely fictional and
mythical complex contained in identical form in millions of cerebro-neural systems
governing a host of behaviors. The reality of these systems and behaviors cannot and would
not be disputed by science. Science would say, here we have a purely delusional system to
accompany the larger delusional system that is a mixture of history, legend, myth, and non-
reality known as the Old Testament or Mosaic system. And if all of the Old Testament were
empirically disproved (also very unlikely), the scientist would then retire to the same
position, namely treating the total New Testament -  Old Testament complex as a purely
delusional system with behavioral consequences.

Myth may be defined as a religious and aesthetic interpretation or story based upon legend
and history. Its goal is to serve essentially non-historic functions while reminding its
audience of a significant historical happening. Myth is closely related to rituals and
sacrifices, which have the same goal, but, like sacred scriptures, are under severe
theocratic constraints.

Myth is often indistinguishable from legend, but this occurs in part because the original
culture to which a myth and legend belonged no longer exists to explain to us the
difference between the two; myths and legends intermingle in a flow through time which we
experience much later and find indistinctly composed of both. The famous myth of Phaeton,
who drives the Sun's chariot, burns up the Earth, and is destroyed by a thunderbolt of
Zeus, is by common standards today an entertaining myth, but appears upon investigation
more and more as a legend supporting an historical intrusion of a cometary body upon the
Earth's atmosphere.

Sacred scripture consists of authoritative prescriptions of various compounds of legend and
myth, frequently describing rites and commands for their recital, together with moral
judgments. All legends and myths of the most ancient kind contain some sacred quality, but
scriptures enhance sacrality by ascribing their own origin to divine or divinely authorized
sources.

Debating sacred scriptures is deemed to be arguing with god, which is not only useless but
sacrilegious as well. One effect of this view is to allow only such discussions and
research whose intended effects are to prove the scriptures correct in morals, rites, and
history.

This situation is antithetic to scientific method, which permits only hypotheses, never
absolute and eternal truth. Nevertheless it often happens that believers in holy
scriptures, when justifying and proving them, cast many bones from their campfires into the
darkness where the jackals of science prowl. The very insistence of literal Biblicists has
driven scholars to test the authenticity of some reported events, thereupon to learn to
their surprise that these can in fact be confirmed.

One of these was the dropping of manna among the hungry Israelites in the desert. Fitting
precisely the details provided in the Bible and legendary sources to the conditions under
which manna-like confections could be manufactured -  electrical discharges, high
temperatures, strange atmospheric gases, molecular compounding, etc. -  a considerable
degree of confirmation can be accorded to the Biblical story, enough to swing the
scientific balance in its direction. Once more, however, I would stress that by proving the
capability of natural causes to have produced the Biblical "miracle," ordinary science
erodes sacred scripture. It removes Yahweh from the manufacturing process and the product,
and tends to make him a deistic god, that is, an ultimate cause or designer of
manufacturing machinery.

Here, to be sure, Yahweh is still very close to events, according to Moses. But we recall
that Moses is under suspicion of hallucinating; that is; another science, psychology, is
working to erode the sacredness of the scripture, even while providing another form of
natural explanation which authenticates in its own way the actions and speech conveyed in
the scripture.

Sacred scriptures will always contain a high proportion of vague, indecipherable,
incomprehensible, contradictory, and substantially untestable material. They will also have
lost much, as historiographic methodology increasingly shows, owing to the alteration and
accidents of their form of transmission, through cultural miscegenation, by reconciliation
of older history with later history, by imposition of patterns of integration and new
styles, by the collective amnesia that seeks both to forget actually and recall
symbolically the traumas provoked in terrible ancient catastrophes, and by other changes in
referents to accommodate ancient to present conditions, as a comet becoming a star, or as
invisible electrical discharges which are now referred to as purely symbolic
manifestations. Therefore there are limits to the scientificity that can be granted to the
Rig Vedas, Bible, Eddas, Book of the Dead, I Ching, Popul Vuh, and other scriptures.

Nor can it benefit the credibility and influence of believers in sacred scriptures to be
relegated by general consent, including their own, to the nonsensical remnants of the
works. For example, many Biblical scholars refuse to employ or give credence to Talmudic
commentaries and ancient legends of the Jews, when these documents will often testify to
the authenticity of Biblical statements and elaborate them in a way that enhances their
credibility. Ominous conclusions emerge from these several pages. There is much history in
myth, legend and scripture everywhere in the world. In a sense, all religions are
desperately honest in their fundamental statements. Yet it is appreciated that, in a memory
choice between a delusion and an historical fact, a religion will prefer the delusion. An
attempt to "clean up" an historical religion by eliminating historical and empirical errors
cannot succeed. Meanwhile we affirm that a religion cannot subsist on delusions alone: it
must make historical and empirical statements. Are we to believe then that historical
religion must be abandoned? We are not yet ready to answer this question.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 1: }
{Q THEOMACHY }
{C Chapter 6: }
{T RITUAL AND SACRIFICE}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER SIX

RITUAL AND SACRIFICE

The Spanish conquistadors were appalled when they came upon extensive human sacrifices and
cannibalism in Aztec Mexico some five centuries ago, and they killed an unnecessarily large
number of this "master race" in the name of Jesus Christ. The bones were thrown to the
dogs, which the Aztecs also liked to eat. An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand
people were being killed and eaten annually, about one percent of the population of the
whole region. It is argued by a student of the subject, Michael Harner, that this increment
of meat went far toward making up for a serious protein deficiency in the Aztec diet.

When asked the reason for the sacrifices, which were conducted always with religious
rituals, the Aztec spokesmen replied that the god managing the Sun depended on them. If the
sacrifices were suspended, the Sun would not rise and set, and this glorious Age of the Sun
would terminate in chaos. So quite aside from the matter to dietary protein, the stability
of the cosmos was at stake. There had to be here, as elsewhere, a religious justification
for cannibalism and human sacrifice.

The Spaniards were not impressed by this argument. They by now had many centuries of
experience in confining their sacred cannibalism to the body and blood of Christ, which
they absorbed whenever they partook of Holy Communion, which, if they were devout, ought to
have been daily. The authority for this was Jesus Christ himself, as confirmed by no less
than Saint Paul. This ritual sacrifice and cannibalism sufficed, and does to this day among
the majority of Christendom. Nor did the Spaniards sacrifice animals, or even slaughter
them ritually, which the ancient Jews, who almost always avoided any semblance of human
sacrifice, faithfully performed according to the precepts of the Old Testament, and the
Muslim followed suit.

No culture has been free of cannibalism in its history, nor are most religions that profess
gods fully exempted today. Apparently cannibalism touches upon some vital nerve center of
historical religion. Else there would be only the onetime universal practice, which would
have been stopped, and there would not have continued the substituted sacrifice and eating
of animals nor the complicated symbolic sublimations whereby at the same moment religious
believers both eat and do not eat human flesh. There has never been anything but sacred
cannibalism except in dire life emergencies, such as occur now and then.

Actually it is easier to understand why cannibalism originated and flourished than why it
has been severely constrained and, in some god-supporting religions, abandoned.
Cannibalism, like killing others of his kind, is spontaneously human. It is a product of
the set of mechanisms that generate when the self-aware, self-fearing human first appears.
Seeing his alter ego in himself, he sees himself in other. He is continuously seeking to
assimilate himself; he seeks to assimilate himself in others.

The identification with others is but a prelude to empowering himself by his ingestion of
others. One does the same with the gods, here abetted in one's actions by the perceived
behavior of the gods. The gods are frequently cannibalistic, he thinks. Gods fall to Earth
or are cast down to Earth or are cast down to Earth and are devoured. Gods encounter one
another electrically in meteoritic and cometary forms in the sky, are split up, are
attracted and repelled.

When Giorgio di Santillana comments on the "baffling" bloody battles of the gods in
Mesopotamian legends, he might as well have spoken of all legend and of the cannibalism of
the gods. It may always be moot whether men got their ideas of warfare, sacrifice, and
cannibalism from the gods. They say so in holy writings, but who can trust sacred scripture
and get a degree in astronomy without being as contradictory as the gods themselves?

A decline in celestial divine struggles and in the horrendous fears incited thereby in
humans may explain why cannibalism has declined. The less fearful the human, the less
inclined to sacrifice and the lesser the oblation. Man, it may be said to his credit,
drives a hard bargain with his gods. The Aztec-Nahua rites were the last large-scale frank
cannibalistic exercises, although small populations in Africa and Oceania pursued such
practices until this century, and, from time to time, cannibalism is reported in chaotic
and deprived human settings, as in Germany during the Thirty Years' war of the 16th century
and in Cambodia during the terrible Indochinese wars of the mid-twentieth century.

Yet the Aztecs were two thousand years removed from what we suggested were prime
catastrophic motivators of cannibalism. So far as we know, the latest universal
catastrophes brought on by exoterrestrial forces were in the eighth and seventh centuries
before Christ. Later, however, Mexico and Central America were subjected to extremely heavy
volcanism (related, we think, to the earlier exoterrestrial episodes) with clouds of ashes
that darkened the days and obscured the sun.

None can scientifically estimate the duration of memories. Many of today's customs go back
thousands of years, indeed probably to the very first men, so obdurate and obsessive is the
transmission of collective experience. With occasional heavy disasters and appropriate
mythology, a people can behave in the ways of their remote ancestors.

None can deny that some of the Israelis of today see themselves as reenacting the scenes of
the Israeli conquest of Palestine of 3400 years ago. Prime Minister Begin was himself a
"Moses buff" who enjoyed greatly long discussions about "those days" with other members of
the "Club." Yet he appeared to all the world as a substantially secular figure, operating
efficiently amidst high Twentieth Century technology. Although anti-religious in a
conventional sense, but professing a racial credo claimed to be consistent with ancient
Teutonic legend, the Nazis of Germany between 1942-5 consigned millions of European Jews of
all shades of religious belief to death by methodical gassing and burning. They murdered
many millions of other Europeans, too. The routine, almost automatic procedures used for
most of this holocaust, and the absence of traditional religious rituals in its execution,
seem to remove it from the scope of religious study. No conventional religion would
tolerate such conduct.

Still, the initial impulse, in Hitler and other Nazis, was that of "purification of the
race" and the creation of a new master race (" chosen people") to rule the world. Nor did
Hitler's status rank below that of the divine heroes of legend; his book, Mein Kampf, was
given to newly-wed couples in place of the Bible.

The rituals frequently staged by the Nazi rulers of Germany were as spectacular and soul-
stirring as any in history. The holocaust, however, was not a matter of public spectacle
and in this regard was a source of sacrificial strengthening in the minds of some thousands
who directly participated in the killings.

One might venture that these were special ceremonies reserved for the Nazi priesthood.
There is small chance that the Nazi genocides would have stopped with the Jews. Gypsies
were already suffering the same fate. The treatment meted out to civil populations in
Eastern Europe teetered on the brink of genocide. If the Nazis had won World war II, there
would have been ample opportunity to extend the holocaust in East Europe, Asia and Africa;
a successful cleansing genocide of six millions might readily extend to sixty million, or
until some historical accident would happen to stop the process.

Sacrifice and anthropophagy are still in the religions of a billion people and in the
everyday life of almost totally secularized billions. The typical American follows the
secular rules of eating, being very early in life told, "Don't just shove the food into
your mouth." We are advised that "it is bad to eat between meals," we are told to "wash
before coming to the table," to "set the table properly," to dress decently for dinner, eat
the proper foods in the proper order, to serve foods in the proper order (' no dessert
before the meat'), that father carves the meat, to leave a bit on the plate, to observe
decorum at the table, and, in lesser numbers, to pray before every meal."

There are a hundred or more such typical rules of etiquette, rationalized as prophylaxis,
"consideration for the feelings of others," and other particular explanations involving
breeding and health. But there also were and are rules, of course, for the genteel
cannibal, and well-educated sacrificer. The proverbial Englishman who used to dress for
solitary dinner in the jungle was doing his part to hold the universe (and his own mind)
intact. It was, of course, a joke when Cathedral Dean Jonathan Swift, viewing Ireland's
dismal economic state in 1792, sardonically recommended that the poor sell their babies to
the rich for eating.

Slater, a careful scholar of the Greek mind, thought the Greeks more mad than other
peoples. Especially did they dwell in their myth upon parents eating their children. This
he blamed upon the fathers for putting down the mothers, who thus, in fancy at least,
revenged themselves pedophagously.

The children of Alsace are treated around Christmas time (at the feast of Saint Nikolaus,
December 6th), to cookies in the shapes of children distributed by Saint Nikolaus (Santa
Claus) who is accompanied by Rubezahl, a gigantic man in a mask and cloak, a late
impersonation of Wotan, and who can best be identified with Saturn, as indeed can Santa
Claus. The one gives the imaged cookies to the good children; the other menaces the bad
children. It should be recalled that infant sacrifices and cannibal rites to Saturn
survived well into Christian times; in the present rites, unconscious of origins, the
ancient rites are sublimated more or less in playfulness.

Ritual is prominently displayed in matters having to do with alimentation. But it covers
all aspects of religion, therefore all aspects of life. There is a rule for everything.
Man, deprived of instinct, is a habit-former, an obsessional creature. Not only is his
language founded upon obsessive reiteration, not only are his dietary manners as well, but
likewise his sexual, affectional, social, agricultural, industrial, physical, and learning
behavior. In all of these regards, religion and ritual come in the beginning of human
existence and remain forever.

If religion persists despite the extensive and eroding process known as secularization, or
rationalization, or pragmatization, it will do so logically in the centers of life prone to
chaos and accident. That is, religious rites focus upon and persist in the fearful and
catastrophe-prone areas and, as from a lantern, diffuse their light perceptibly and
gradually into the secular.

For instance, baptism, ceremonializing the creation of new life in the world is a critical
juncture, hence persistently ritualized; the Christian Baptists, who are relatively non-
ritualistic and even anti-ritualistic, nevertheless are insistent that baptism into the
church should occur by total immersion of the freely consenting new member in water to
signify death of the old life and rebirth in the new. Baptism in a church is general among
the French, even though the population has abandoned almost all rituals of the Roman
Catholic Christian religion. Early Christian leaders believed that they had found in the
Deluge of Noah the ultimate precedent and model for baptism, which repeats for each "saved"
initiate the end of the wicked world and the entrance into a new epoch.

Rituals are centered upon the creation of the world and man, upon the first time everything
was done, upon catastrophic breakdowns of an age and the beginning of new ages, and upon
the rites de passage of human life -  - birth, maturation, marriage, and death. Filling in
as important subcategories of these are such features of human existence as warfare, where
the gods are the models and the gods "Bless our weapons," as the Kaiser of Germany (and
many others) once prayed.

Celebrations of cosmic breakdown are a feature of the focusing of rites upon controlling
the world against chaos, as in the case of the Aztecs. The New Year is ignored by no
culture, because it stands for the end of one age and the beginning of another; the usual
rationalizations are afforded, that harvests are now gathered, that the calendar now
repeats itself, etc. Nonetheless, beneath the considerable excitement, stirs the anxiety
that the year may not repeat itself, the sun may not turn backwards to reenact the seasons,
that once upon a time the world went out of control and could not provide assurances of the
repetition of its orderly cycles.

The bacchanalia were orgies named for Bacchus or Dionysus, a god, reputed to have traveled
the world with a wild troop of both sexes, carrying wands and serpents, acting out a mad
composition of dancing, drinking, battling, sacrificing, cannibalism, and feasting. Regular
and sporadic orgies, patterned upon the mythology, persisted for centuries before Christ
until the Roman Senate with some success banned them for their flagrant challenge to
morality and political order.

The crimes attributed to Dionysus were infinite, yet he received a place on the Olympian
council of gods, replacing the gentle Hestia, according to one legend. Dionysus was a sky-
god, perhaps originally an errant and destructive comet; the orgiastic behavior
accompanying him resembles the kinds of social disorder that have been historically
reported upon the fear-inspiring apparition of cometary bodies.

The saturnalia of the Greco-Roman world are more precisely applicable to prehistoric
events, when the god Saturn was allegedly overturned in a revolt of his wife and children,
particularly Jupiter. The last days of the year are regarded as the period when chaos
begins, and the new year is seen as the coming of a new age.

     Even if, as the result of successive calendar reforms, the Saturnalia finally no longer
     coincided with the end and the beginning of the year, they nevertheless continued to mark
     the abolition of all norms and, in their violence, to illustrate an overturning of values
     (e. g. exchange of condition between masters and slaves, women treated as courtesans) and a
     general license, an orgiastic modality of society, in a word a reversion of all forms to
     indeterminate unity.

So says Mircea Eliade. Types of saturnalia are found throughout the ancient world -  - the
Middle East, the Mediterranean, China, Japan, and tribal societies of America. The Hebrew
religion is not excepted, according to Santillana and von Dechend. And they continue in
many places today.

Eliade merges the saturnalia with creation myths. This is contra-indicated by his own
evidence. The catastrophe of Saturn and the end of its Golden Age involves the destruction
of a preexisting, ante-deluvian, "old world," and therefore comes long after the original
creation.

The dramaturgy of the Babylonian Akitu Festival is illustrative of "the abolition of lost
time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act." The
god Marduk slays the dragon of chaos, Tiamat, and creates the cosmos from the fragments of
its body, including man from the blood of a demonic ally of Tiamat. In the chaos all social
forms are confounded, as in the Roman Saturnalia. It is probable that both creation and
recreation are handled together in the drama; that is, Marduk (Jupiter) is in a sense a
creation god but the Babylonians and Sumerians had older more authentic creation gods;
Marduk would be, let us way, a recreation god. Eliade implicitly grants this, when, in
discussing the Akitu drama, he adds, "The creation of the world... is thus retroactualized
each year," and, a little later, "the hierogamy is a concrete realization of the 'rebirth'
of the world and man."

Eliade tends to force all celebrations and rites into illo tempore, "those first great
days." He has made an important contribution to the theory of the history of religions by
assembling from all over the world evidence of the obsessive reiteration in human
activities of the earliest days of mankind. However, he scarcely considers whether real
events lay behind this compulsive return to origins of all peoples, a mechanism exactly
consonant with Sigmund Freud's mechanism of compulsive reenactment of traumas. Freud, when
he essays to explain the origins of the mechanism, postulates a primordial social crisis
among the hominids whereby the "father" is killed by the "brothers" of a horde to gain
access to the females whom the "father" monopolized; this theory is so weak, as I have
shown elsewhere, as not to deserve treatment here.

Eliade does not offer a theory to explain compulsive repetition of chaos and creation, the
most prominent of all ritual behavior. He quotes lines from Jensen's Mythes et Cultes chez
les peuples primitifs that call out to the original events: "The sacrilege of not having
remembered is logically expiated by remembering with special intensity. And because of its
special meaning, blood sacrifice is a particularly intense 'reminder' of this sort."

Perhaps relevant as well is an inscription of the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Seti I: "The
Light God Ra said: 'You are forgiven your sins. The slaughtered victims remit your
extinction. ' Such is the origin of the sacrifice of victims."

The shocking psychic fear associated with human creation and the terrors of the active sky
can be combined to explain why mankind has persisted, openly or beneath many kinds of
subliminatory activities, in reenacting the earliest scenes. But the general catastrophes
were several, accounting for the succession of gods, whereas the creation trauma was
singular and unique. The human has been responding not only to the successive natural
catastrophes which, of course were also treated as recreations. In racial memory the
traumas blend over time. It is noteworthy that they have not entirely merged, with all
distinction erased, but they have apparently merged enough so that on the one hand the
historian and theorist Eliade does not separate them chronologically, and so that on the
other hand most creationist scholars who hold to a literal interpretation of Biblical
history are preoccupied with the Deluge of Noah, seeing it as the unique catastrophe that
sculpted the face of the Earth.

Mankind, in bursting forth upon the Earth, experienced catastrophe, and thereafter was
confirmed in his catastrophized memory by a succession of natural catastrophes. His global
sense of the sacred, a sense that Otto and others have described as ambivalent feelings of
fearful danger and creative power, expanded with each quantavolution of nature and relaxed
between the age-breaks.

Rituals are attempts at close encounters with the gods. They are a primary instrument for
controlling oneself and the environment as the gods approach. We find the formula quite
clearly perceived by theologians who refer to the sacrifice as the use of an intermediary,
the oblation, to communicate between the mundane and the divine. "Sacrifice is ... offered
to a divinity in order to establish, maintain or restore a right relationship of man to the
sacred order," thus writes R. L. Flaherty in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on
sacrifice.

The means of ritually controlling the gods (for "communication" conveys the subservient
theological mood more than it does the aggressive political mood) can be analyzed. They are
scarcely exotic, though often esoteric. First, man behaves in imitation of the gods. This
is in every sense the same as the behavior of the child with respect to his adult guardian
and model. It is intended to gather in oneself the strength of the god, and at the same
time disarm the god from directing aggression to him. "Imitation is the sincerest form of
flattery," as the saying goes. So, if the god fights, the man fights. If the god rages, man
rages. If the god bestows generous gifts, so does the man. And so on.

Appeasement of the god's proven potential for aggression against his very worshiper, as
well as his enemies, takes many forms. Giving of one's most valued possessions is the most
appropriate sacrifice. All manner of bribery, solicitations (it must be discovered what the
god wants, even if by trial and error), prostitution (whether as vestal virgins or as
temple harlots) -  - these are common gifts.

Nor does worshipful man stop short of trickery. That god knows what one thinks does not
prevent the most ludicrous practicality and flamboyant excesses. "It can't hurt to perform
the rites." Do this and that, not because it is right in the eyes of god, but "lest you
die;" ritual is to be performed, not understood, nor does it matter to understand. The
important thing is to obey the command. Miserliness is common too: "We are not sacrificing
at all to Awwaw this year, since rain has fallen early," remarked an Iyala priest of
Nigeria, quoted by Paul Radin.

Much of ritual therefore is a kind of tactical game to exploit the gods. The human
encountering god is thrown into a panic, He often overcompensates and contradicts his own
view of god as all-wise . He will stop at nothing to be on the right side of his god -
never mind inconsistencies, preserving other life values, and saving a personal
relationship. It is the politics of absolute autocracy to some, to others the politics of a
monarchical court with its courtiers, to still others a two-person game, intensely
personal.

Without a theory of origins and earliest history it is perhaps impossible to say whether
man modeled kingship upon gods or gods upon kings, Whether rituals were practiced among men
and them upon gods, or vice versa. Our particular theory here would make kingship and
politics initially religious and soon afterwards transferred into a partially secular
sphere, there ultimately to be pragmatized and secularized.

Later one could have a secular republic such as the U. S. A. or France, highly ritualized
with specific rules excluding religion from the rituals. Finally one would arrive at the
Marxist republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and others, where the very
permission of religious ritual is viewed as an anomalous and temporary concession.
Consistent with its denial of religious ritual, religious faith and revelations are treated
as mental aberrations.

Religion without ritual is fear without defenses. Secularism without ritual must be the
same. The suppression of supernatural belief does not eradicate the existential fear of man
but only its referents -  gods, spirits, etc.

The French Revolution after 1789 burst upon both the political regime and the church.
Churches were seized, the clergy laicized. A great Feast of the Supreme Being was
inaugurated, conducted on the Champ de Mars in Paris. It is clear that the Supreme Being
was Reason and Nature. Some churches were rededicated as temples to the Goddess Reason, who
was sometimes represented by a pretty girl. New rituals were improvised to replace the old
ones.

Numerous writers have pointed out that the supernatural is actually irrepressible and finds
it way into astrology, "life in other worlds," " the unexplained" (an enlarging, logically
boundless area), and the like. Furthermore, the religious finds its way into the
divinization of political heroes -  - "St. Karl Marx," "Comrade Mao," the entombed and
preserved Lenin, the charismatic leader Mussolini, or de Gaulle, or Franklin Roosevelt, or
Gandhi, et al.

We offer no argument against this line of reasoning. A religion of the supernatural, of
faith and of revelation can be educed from such secular social phenomena. We would only
wish to supplement them. There may be a reciprocal growth in secular ritual to accompany
the loss of religion and its ritual.

Two phenomena accompanying modern secularization display conspicuous growth, and may be
surrogates for ritual. One is bureaucracy, the other centralization. The two are
interconnected: the logic of bureaucracy tends to centralization. The logic of
centralization demands bureaucracy. One sees the shadow of religion and ritual in the two.
The French Revolution, anti-religious, gave a great boost to centralized bureaucracy
throughout the world.

Centralization is a search for a central truth and law toward which all procedures may be
directed. Bureaucracy supplies the procedures. Large-scale armies, mass media, huge
building complexes, human and computerized industrial giants, mass transportation, global
planning -  - all of these supply, whatever else they provide (and religion once supplied a
distribution system for food out of sacrifices) reiterative, compulsive (compulsory, too),
routinized activities lending a feeling of awe and security to those whom they engage and
serve. The idea of "efficiency" is offered frequently as a purely secular notion, an
activity that can be carried on without a hint of the supernatural or the rite. In the
first place, "efficiency" like "god" is all things to all people, hence is not to be
accepted as meaningful at face value. Efficiency as a reduction of activity (energy)
between two points (from "here" to a goal) to a minimum is flagrantly contradicted by
bureaucracy. Efficiency seemingly contradicts sacrifice and ritual, superstition and magic,
but actually religious ritual can and has been over the ages consistently intended to be
efficient. The idea is not new; it is only aimed at different goals. One can be sure that
ancient priests worked continuously to increase the efficiency of fires on altars.

The orders, rules, and laws, practically all now in written form, which pour out of the
ruling organizations of the world take up many thousands of large volumes a year. Is this
not ritualized behavior? It secures those involved from the nagging fear of existence,
acting as a lifeline for the weak psyche to grasp. The summary effect of this overwhelming
flood of order is to tell people what they must do and how to go about doing it, in the
sacred written word of authority.

Gone for most modern people is the lifeline of religious ritual; in its place is secular
ritual. We think of the novels of Franz Kafka (The Castle, Amerika) and of George Orwell
(1984) to illustrate our point. It is untrue, although Dostoevski wrote so in The Brothers
Karamazov, and one hears it often said, that "if God doesn't exist, everything is allowed."
After all, is it not said of the great Soviet State that "Whatever is not forbidden is
compulsory"?

The problem is too large for discussion here. I mean merely to add for consideration that
the secularized world has a rich and abundant ritual, as well as secular divinities,
charismatic experiences, and supernatural "pastimes" that are more serious than religion to
their practitioners. The modern secular child knows more rules than the ancient religious
child. And so, too, the adult of this world today. At some stage hereafter we must contrast
the two modes of life and evaluate them.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 1: }
{Q THEOMACHY }
{C Chapter 7: }
{T MAN'S DIVINE MIRROR}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER SEVEN

MAN'S DIVINE MIRROR

No god is the same to any two people, nor to any two sects. This is a psychological fact,
akin to saying that no two people share the same experience. It would be a more definitive
statement if the gods existed in no other realm except the minds of people. It also relates
to the fact that no two delusions or hallucinations are alike, although especially when a
group happens to hallucinate the same image -  - an angel, say or unidentified flying
object -  - the description may be close, and when a mass of separate hallucinations is
analyzed statistically, one does obtain averages and types.

When two people discuss a similar religious experience -  a visual revelation of the Second
Coming of Jesus Christ, say -  one can statistically adumbrate shared social and psychic
features of the people that tend to qualify them for the experience, such as a deficient
formal education, erratic and disturbed personal backgrounds, and so on. Cases where a team
of scientific observers, warned and trained to be objective, are rushed to the scene to
corroborate the vision are rare.

Even were such to occur, the new (and probably negative) evidence would have to be
dismissed on grounds that the preparation for objective identification would necessarily
incapacitate the team to share the experience. If the two people had seen a monster in the
Sewanee River and called it a dragon and the team had hastened in with cameras and nets, an
alligator of a certain size might be captured and the vision placed upon a firm scientific
footing. It would not be surprising, then, if the original viewers claimed an improper
identification, insisting that the wrong creature had been snared. Whereupon psychologists
would once more be called upon. That gods are often snares and delusions must be admitted.
Yet the occurrence of the delusions, we have implied, takes on patterns evocative of actual
events and of common mechanisms of the analyzed human mind. Natural expressions of high
energy occur in cometary approaches to Earth, deluges of water and other material from the
skies, anomalous intensifications of heat and cold by conflagration or sudden icing on a
large scale, simultaneous large scale volcanism, and otherwise. Much evidence goes to show
more of such catastrophes in ancient and prehistoric times than over the past 2500 years.

We say that the more frequent these occurrences and the greater their intensity, the more
that gods appear and the more religious humanity becomes. If these be called gods insofar
as they are apparitions and because of their enormous effects, then there is a real
historical reason why mankind once was much more religious than now. Geology and
archaeology can demonstrate (with much more research than they are inclined to provide) the
actual basis for enhanced early religion. Psychology and the history of religion can show
how the religious mind has expectedly peaked in these actual stress periods and subsided
when the strains relaxed.

Practically all historians of religions of religion and renowned modern theologians have
accepted evolutionary theories of cultural development in describing religious history.
Even Henri Bergson who spoke of a "discontinuous evolution which proceeds by bounds" saw
this progressive achievement of higher forms of behavior against the backdrop of an
unchanging natural scenery. To all of such thinkers, religion must have progressed out of a
rational advancement of humanity (even though Bergson credits mysticism with innovation in
religion). That is, rationally evolving man creates ever more rational religion.

Without correcting the human mental infrastructure, they have placed an ever heavier
superstructure upon man, not knowing that when man has assumed the burden of what they term
rational behavior, it is because natural conditions have allowed him to do so, and that
this happened as much or more during the Golden Age of Saturn as during any period of
modern times. Horses have not become smarter; horses have not; how should man have done so
without a proven physiological alteration of his mind?

If one wishes to animate the ancient apparitions (metaphorically or delusionally) and
assign the fantastically great natural events to interventions of the gods, defining gods
as "whatsoever can produce such effects," and further goes on to distinguish and assign
gods to the different effects of, say, air, fire, water, and earth, there can be no logical
objection. So long as one does not proceed beyond the evidence to impute motives, make
misleading classification, and imagine an organization of the cosmos, none of which can be
even partly demonstrated, the gods of nature can be said to exist as truly as "democracy"
or an "infinite regression series."

Here is where mankind gets into trouble with the scientific authorities of anthropology and
psychology: it assigns a great many undemonstrable qualities to the gods and spirits. Then,
hardly pausing, it fashions such qualities into a mirror of man, which like the mirror in
the fairy tale of Snow White, so long as Snow White is sleeping, always tells the ugly
Queen that she is beautiful. The mirror lies.

We can make two principal statements and several dependent propositions about the Divine
Mirror of Man: first, all human qualities are found among the gods; second, divine
organization portrays a reorganization of the human mind.

To demonstrate that every human quality has been sometime, somewhere, and even frequently,
a divine quality requires hardly more than a list of references on the history of religion
and anthropology. Let the reader make the test himself; let him try to think of any human
action or trait, no matter how trivial or significant, which a god does not exhibit. The
humans build a great tower to reach the sky. Very well, the gods have already their sky-
topping mountains, their cosmic trees, their pillars of heaven, and many sacred paths by
which souls can ascend and angels descend. When the constructions threaten the gods, the
gods destroy them. So it happened with the giants who piled Ossia upon Pelion to reach
Zeus, who, however, overthrew everything, and as happened with the Tower of Babel, which
the Hebrew Lord sent crashing by lightning and quaking.

But this is a sublime challenge, someone may object; an ordinary act is not divine, for
example, excretion. But urine is a word from Uranus who copiously watered the earth in
earliest times; and gold is the excrement of the gods to some people, perhaps remembering
vaguely an exoterrestrial fall-out of the precious metal.

Is the god assembled anthropomorphically? The implication, even when not stated explicitly
in sacred scriptures and legend, is that all of the traits of the divine do amount to a
creature not unlike man. That Elohim created man in his or their image is, of course, a
direct statement of the Hebrew Genesis, and if one were to compose a physiological mosaic
from all references to Yahweh, the mosaic would evolve to look like Moses and act like him,
including how Moses would like to have acted.

The Divine Mirror, it seems, is more perfect than the gazer. For it contains all of his
qualities and all of his dreams and desires. Sometimes these are contradictory, but the
mirror finds a solution. It may show a god with devilish features, or a god who is both
female and male. Does it ever show a god who is both brave and fearful? Often; despite the
fact that fear creates gods who are afraid of other gods, afraid of themselves, or
mistrustful of their worshiper, this last being a kind of fear that drives gods (as it does
men) to excesses of all kinds. So, indeed did the Lord behave toward Job, when the Devil
drove him to be suspicious of his devoted and good worshipper.

In an early work, C. J. Jung wrote an Answer to Job where brilliantly but in a
fundamentally naive form, he hints that man is too clever for God. "It were better,"
however, "not to wax too conscious of this slight moral superiority over the more
unconscious God." One notes the marvelous schizoid behavior of the human, Job, when he is
trying to control God. The making of the ambivalent god and them the controlling of him
becomes the greatest work of man.

God suspects and is jealous of the game that man is playing, a contradiction-in-
contradiction, mirror in a mirror in a mirror, contra-contra-contradiction, which the
schizoid can continue indefinitely, always one step ahead of God. In the story of Job, one
finds the full range of schizophrenic conduct, including the creation of the Lord as the
preferred instrument for working out human delusions. I trace the schizotypical character
of the human race in other books.

Significantly, wherein lies at least his early naivete, Jung separately focuses his
research upon Job and then upon schizophrenia. In the story of Job and God we even locate a
tendency of humans to make of gods what they would make of themselves if they could, a kind
of unreflective healthy instinctive animal, rid of the curse of self-awareness -  - though
this same self-awareness is the only true mark of the human and the source of god as mirror
of man.

Usually, it is declared that the gods are not like man, because they possess an infinity of
virtues. But who is to say what is virtue, except man-bound-in-culture? And what are the
traits that appear infinite in the Divine Mirror but extensions of the valued traits of
mankind. Even philosophers, and certainly theologians, submit to the dictates of mirroring
when they accept the challenge of defining gods, and thereupon they say god is omni-this
and omni-that : omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnicreative, omnivalent, all-loving,
absolutely just, and so on, setting, to be sure, on precisely those qualities that man has
and wants much more of: power, respect, affection, wealth, skill, and knowledge.

To win a debate over whether all divinity that man can know is anthropomorphic hardly needs
empirical evidence. So logical is the proposition, that it is probably tautology. That is,
granted that man can only know by an extension of himself, the self becomes the model of
the real, and no trait can be imagined that is not already present in humanity. Therefore,
in the anthropo-centric sense, all divinity must be anthropomorphic.

In the days when gods were rampaging upon the Earth, theology was close to the disaster-
ridden life of the people, naming and describing the fulsome operations of the divine
forces, transmitting direct commands from above, concocting rites, and letting out the
chains of fear carefully into sublimatory and practical behavior.

When the gods remove themselves somewhat, the chains are slackened. Language, symbols, and
myth are allowed to bury memories deeper. Religion becomes less depictive and denotative,
more general and abstract. Finally, philosophy is freed to play about the sacred and
rationalize the cosmos. The gods of the philosophers are mirrored. "An otiose God, then,
surveying unmoved 'this dusty, fuliginous chaos, ' is the residuum of all this furious
apostrophising." So wrote once Frederic Harrison.

We find that the most ancient people -  and we are not told how -- knew that the planet
Jupiter had bands and the planet Saturn had rings. Probably they witnessed them directly
and more closely than at any time until the year 1659 A. D when scientists observed them by
telescope. By the time of Plato, several centuries before Christ, this knowledge was
perhaps only present in legend, and was part of the legend that has the god Zeus Jupiter
overthrowing his father, the god Kronos-Saturn, and binding him to prevent his return to
power (and thus bring further destruction upon the world). The knowledge comes to us via
the works of the platonic philosopher, Proclus, eight hundred years later( ca. 410-1485 A.
D.).

Proclus, in startling clear language, but philosophical language, tells us that Jupiter,
mighty and powerful, the supreme intellect of the universe, bringer of law and order to the
world, asserts his own reason upon the world by putting the also perfect intellect of
Saturn under bonds. Then, because Jupiter is logical and just, he binds himself, too, so
that he also will be subject to his own ordering principles. As I proceeded elsewhere to
trace the development, the statements of Proclus exemplify how a primordial real experience
becomes anaesthetized by its traumatic effects on humans; it is forgotten as direct
experience. Yet it is remembered obsessively in the form of a religious creation legend,
and then the suppressed memory and the legend are subliminated one more step into
philosophy where they are used to express concepts of divine rule and natural law. The new
ideas still give relief to the deep hidden anxieties over the horrible warfare of the gods,
and they promote respect for human government and laws, which, it is said, are and should
be modeled upon the behavior of the gods.

The nature of the gods is geared into the nature of religious organization. The jealous
Yahweh of Moses was not the syncretistic, confederational, religious organization closely
similar to the imperial, bureaucratic, secular-dominated, religious organization of
Solomon. Forms of religious organization have been many, no two quite alike as we are prone
to say. This, too, is a Mirror of Man. From the organization of spirits-shaman-tribal
culture to the organization of the Holy-Trinity-priesthood-Roman Catholic world religion,
variation is endless.

The descent of secular organizations from theocratic ones is well marked. For instance, the
13th century forms of political representation in England and elsewhere owed much to the
representative convocations of the Dominican Order of the centuries preceding. Where not
well-delineated, the lines of descent are concocted, In the 17th century, the Stuart line
of England was "demonstrated" to go back to Adam, the First Man, and the divine right of
monarchy was sustained. We might begin at the earliest age, and go on for many pages
listing the religious structural forms and their secular descendants.

Suffice to say here that the secular forms, so far removed from the primordial religious
ones, are nevertheless still "sky-struck." Stars and totems adorn their banners; the right
and the left factions stem from the Saturnian Throne in the sky; the official secular
calendars are largely religious in origin; the American dollar portrays ancient Egyptian
cosmology; parades, processions, decorations, robes and a multitude of rituals precede and
accompany officers even after they swear an oath, in which "So help me God" may be absent
but the pledge is as symbolically complete and solemn.

Celestially or mundanely, man is operating with the same mental mechanisms and their
external social extrusions. Symbolizing, displacements, identifications, memory, obsession,
cognitive disorders, aversion to others -  these psychic movements (were they not mostly
unconscious, they would be called maneuvers or tactics) are all directed at handling
fearfulness, and function in both religious and secular contexts. They are expressed in
habitual, orgiastic, catatonic, and sublimatory behavior, which again have religious and
secular counterparts.

The reader may have remarked that these mechanisms and expressions are schizoid and, if
practiced in full conflict with the customs of one's group, would amount to a full-blown
case of schizophrenia. The human is naturally schizotypus -  I call him homo sapiens
schizotypus elsewhere -  whether speaking of religious man or secular man; when an
individual diverges from the peculiar schizotypicality of his culture, he is identified as
schizophrenic.

We would stress how much our view contrasts with the conventional approach, which analyzes
the human as a rational individual with egoistic impulses who is struggling to reconcile
these with social or altruistic demands. The distinction between self and society is itself
a socially imposed distinction as it is presented, say, by Henri Bergson or the English
utilitarians (whom he assails). The distinction is ex post facto. The factum is the
schizotypical mechanisms mentioned above. These are what set into motion the operating
religious and secular person. The "social" is immediately part of the person; it arises
from the original gestalt of creation of the human species and in the birth and development
of every person thereafter. The experience of all peoples has been generally the same,
intense ecological stresses anciently operating upon a divided, fearful mind. To say
therefore that gods are "good" and men are "evil" makes anthropological history impossible,
theoretically or as fact. We have already said that gods, relatively or crossculturally
considered, display all "evils" and all "goods". It matters relatively, not absolutely,
that the burden of good and evil is shifted to certain different gods, devils or spirits
going from one culture to another. The basic facts are the common experiences of "gods" and
the ambivalence of the human mind in relation to itself. The ultimate expressions, such as
"selfish" against "altruistic," are just that -  expressions -  not the fountainhead of the
social problem or of the problem of man against god.

The obverse to "how the gods could be believed to do evil to people" is, "how the gods
could be believed to do good." The efforts of humans to justify the evils visited upon
themselves are extraordinary, considering the gravity of those evils. Some profound reason
must prevent them from declaring that gods and devils are one and the same -  a disaster.
Why do they not recognize the animated high-energy forces of the world as the open enemies
of the human race? Indeed, this did become finally the feeling of a great many people in
modern times, whose change of attitude coincided with a de-animation of the forces of
nature.

Primeval man and his successors found good in the gods because in the first place the ideal
of the good god itself performed useful functions. The gods created man, and man was
superior to the mammals whom he resembled and lived among. Therefore, gods should be loved
for their creative deeds.

Still, gratitude is a refined subliminatory trait that would hardly result from this
syllogism. There had to arise a satisfying powerful identity out of the gestalt of
creation: the creative god was built into the mind of the creature; it was his first
projective delusion. His first great relief from fear was placing the responsibility for
his creation, not upon himself (an idea that must promptly have occurred) but upon "some
himself not himself," ergo a god. Who denied god, denied himself; who denied himself would
not survive. The madness of great delusions was the condition for survival.

There remained only the elaboration of the madness into human norms. A quick transfer of
traits occurred -  man gave to god all of his abilities and took them back as blessed
gifts, down to the rudiments of stone age technology, the very fashioning of a club.
Because of the obvious powerfulness of the gods, the gifts acquired power in the human
mind, and man would step forward to control the world with an obsessive confidence, a false
confidence, very often, yet with enough successes to accredit the transfer. At the same
time, man could deny his personal responsibility for all that he was creating.

Further, by imitating the gods, invention was promoted. More and more objects and
procedures for controlling himself and others were imagined to descend from the gods and
more and more were created under divine inspiration. This despite the interference of the
gods thenceforth in inventions of all kinds, wherein nothing could be invented and applied
unless it had come from the gods or was blessed by the gods. The psychological mechanism
had its drawbacks; in the most peaceful and pragmatic periods, the wellsprings of invention
were overlooked, while the subservience of practical innovation and social reforms to
religious dogmas and rituals was damned.

The mechanism for projecting and retrojecting gifts of power and techniques was in itself
adequate to explain why a punitive god could be assigned benevolent and beneficent
qualities. Yet it was not the only source of the idea of the good god. The first mutant
humans came into being in the midst of chaos and destruction. That they had survived while
all around them lay a biosphere of death and destruction, including what had been their own
kind, was a miracle; their minds were now equipped to reflect upon it.

Mourning was a trait already possessed; mammals and primates mourn. Beyond mourning,
however, or if human mourning were t be distinguished, was a new consciousness of the self,
an individuation from the group, that could see what had happened to others, see what
oneself had escaped, and assign to the escape a selective feature, a blessedness, a sense
of being chosen for survival.

Thus arises the quality of personal satisfaction and joy amidst ruin, that interjects
itself into the most grandiose human tragedies, and causes people to dance, laugh, and sing
when the world shakes and burns around them. It was a primordial human acquisition,
directly connected with the animated forces of destruction. Sailors, returning aboard a
ship off of Krakatoa in 1883, who watched the desolation of their families on the shore
from volcanic explosion and tsunamis, laughed and jumped with joy that they were being
spared. Hysterical conduct, to be sure, in awful fear, but such is the nature of hysteria,
and laughter often is a fringe around hysteria.

The divine identification and imitation justified and provided morale for survivors to
revive and conquer. A newly-acquired super-mammalian aggression abetted the profits of
survival. Those who survived could move out, reinforced by grace of the gods, and in
imitation of the gods, readily loot, kill, or enslave whoever remained alive and strange.
The material gains of aggression were thenceforth regarded in the category of gifts of the
gods, and regularly some portion of them was returned to the gods by means of sacrifices.
From old Mexico Brundage gives us a song composed by the Emperor Axayacatl: "The flower
death (for sacrifice and cannibalism) came down to Earth. It came here. It had been created
in Tlapallan (Heaven)."

Nor were these the only material benefits that came from the divine delusion. On some
occasions, carbohydrates descended from the sky, notably during times associated with
terrifying celestial phenomena between 3000 and 3500 years ago when manna, soma, and
ambrosia were provided to starving survivors. This I explain in The Lately Tortured Earth,
where too, many legends are reported insisting that copper, gold, silver, petroleum and
iron were exploded or dropped onto Earth and used by their finders. Meteoric iron was
commonly used long before the controversial "Iron Age" and may have fallen in amounts
sufficient to institute this age. Myths of dragons burying gold are met with. And so on.
The stone (and wood) age might have gone on forever if the surface of the Earth had not
been blasted into metals and by metals from the skies. If this is a fact, then mankind
would be historically as well as psychologically blessed by the gods.

Fountains and springs of water erupted, too, in many places, even where the pre-existing
waters had been diverted or buried, so that the gods could be said to have first removed
good things and then relented and given them back. The gods, sang Homer, were the givers of
all good things. Jupiter took away fire to punish mankind; the god-hero Prometheus stole it
and gave it back to man; Zeus enchained and tortured Prometheus eternally for his gift. But
the fire remained.

We have spoken largely of displacement, identification, projection, and aggression
heretofore. Alongside these mechanisms moves habit, the human's answer to the blunting of
instinctive behavior during the creation of self-awareness.

Outstanding in human behavior is the voluntary and unconsciously motivated repetition of
actions in every sphere of life. In individuals, instinct serves for habit, the distinction
generally being that instinct is untrained. Habit and custom are inculcated by training or
imitation. Not only is habit pervasive of normal activities of individuals and groups. It
is also characteristic of many psychopathologies, where it is called obsession.

The origin of habit and custom lay in the primeval fears of the self-aware human, and the
discipline that such fears subconsciously and later consciously impressed upon him. First
came schizophrenic obsession. The more intense a blow or trauma to the body (mind), the
more intensely and frequently it is autoinflicted neurologically afterwards. An obsession
is an auto-inflicted reiteration of some or all of the initial reaction to a trauma. An
obsession discharges quantas of the stored force of the trauma, which originally could be
tolerated short of death only by it redistribution (i. e., memorizing) in successively less
related circuitries contacting the affected area. Some effect of a trauma also are
discharged through interfering circuitries, some of which were developed in primeval man
analogously obsessive and some in non-analogous behavior, especially symbolic
manifestations and erratic uncontrolled seizures.

These forms of dissipating the impactive force of the trauma are founded upon analogous
primate behavior. They establish themselves as quasi-voluntary and voluntary activities of
the split self, which more or less observes its own reactions and discharges. They are seen
by men as voluntary because the self views the action as a decision of two or more
compromising internal selves.

Four major patterns of expression emerged finally from the primeval trauma: catatonic,
obsessive, sublimatory, and orgiastic behavior. Authentically human behavior was ever after
derived and composed from one or more of these patterns. Hence all human behavior reflects,
no matter at how great a distance in time and pragmatic relevance, the traumas of cosmic
destruction and creation that made and successively battered primeval humans.

The catatonic consists of activity whose primeval function was to keep the world unchanged.
The Atlas who held the world on his back was a catatonic symbol of arrested movement; when
Atlas shrugs, the Earth shakes, The Hindu Manu who held the world up for ages while
standing on one leg and meditating is another catatonic god. Since the Hebrew god rested on
the seventh day of creation and ordered his example to be followed forever, many millions
of people have dreaded to violate the Sabbath, fearing that the world would be upset in
various ways by the angry God.

Physiologically, catatonism is a freezing effect, to prevent the conscious from opening up
blockages of suppressed fear. It acts promiscuously, but also in more sophisticated ways,
that is, partially and selectively, reluctantly forced to do so by other more determined
modes of coping with the needs of the organism.

Primevally, the person froze with fear. Symbolically, humanly, the meaning of freezing with
fear became the preservation, at all costs, of existing circumstances, the arresting of the
world, of sense intakes, of outputs, of activity, and especially of free or creative
activity, all both individually and socially. By projection, if the person and group stop,
the disorderly processes of nature will stop; the disorderly processes are deemed to
proceed because people are moving and acting.

Obsessive activity has the function-effect of sustaining a line of behavior, of repeating
it endlessly with as little deviation as possible. The first symbols and sighs of the self-
aware persons were naming and ejaculating. Almost instantly this became liturgy, a
continuous repetition -  - expressive, denotative, and expiatory -  - - of anguish,
labeling of the cause of anguish, and formula for control of the cause, all in one
utterance, repeated continuously. Thenceforth, over thousands of years, the obsessive in
symbol and behavior become infinitely varied and yet basically recognizable as originating
in fearfulness and its reciprocal of ritual controls. Habit, "the great flywheel of
progress" (William James), and custom came to dominate human affairs.

Sublimatory activity functions and has the effects of discharging impulses that are
traumatically aroused, together with associated agglomerated impulses, by deviant behavior
that simultaneously and subconsciously is analogous enough to the impulses to be
organically tolerated and yet sends the organism in new directions that not only complement
and supplement but also contradict other behaviors. Even when contradictory, the
sublimation is subconsciously recognized by others to be providing such discharges and is
accepted and even encouraged by them.

Symbolic communication is heavily developed by and originates in sublimatory behavior
because it is like an endless treasury of ambiguities, flexible for the most remotely
analogous tie-ins of original impulses and ultimate conduct.

Orgiastic behavior functions and has the effects of discharges through explosions of the
original traumatic force. It has the characteristics of erratic displays of energy, of
spastic behavior, and acknowledged as such: it is actually approved not despite, but
because of, its senselessness. It demands death, sacrifices, cannibalism, self-mutilation
and the wounding of other human, animal, plants, property. It is both suppressed by and
revenges itself upon the other patterns of behavior-erasing obsessions in a burst of
destructiveness; alternating with catatonic behavior sometimes side by side; destroying and
giving new forms to sublimatory behavior.

The cumulative effect of the four behavior patterns of man was to set him apart as a
voluntary self-mover. The continuous gap between the two aware selves allowed a kind of
fission-fusion reaction on an energy scale immensely larger and more efficient than that of
which animals and hominids were capable. Projects of many different kinds could be
generated and carried on. Combinations of the four patterns provided a large variety of
model or test cases, the effects of which might be pragmatically adjudged good or bad,
before deciding to adopt them as ordinary behavior.

The divine, thereupon, becomes a mirror image of the human, just as schizotypical as, or
more so, than man, exhibiting human traits, mechanisms, and expressions. No two minds can
see the same image in the mirror. This mirror is emphatically not divorced from human
experience. It reflects indeed man's most destructive and exhilarating experiences. All
gods are connected with disaster, the greater the god the more central his role in ancient
disasters whose scope is unimaginable to most people today. The primordial human mind
governs the modern mind, being the same mind, being retentive of the same experiences. We
presented the view earlier that all religion goes back, overtly or covertly, to the first
gods . We presented arguments that mankind was a creation of the very experiences that
presented the gods to view. In discussing scripture and legend, we mentioned that the
figure of Christ was heavily Greco-Romanized, perhaps even formed for the Gospels by a
philosopher-dramatist, Seneca.

The reader may then have wondered: since early Christians had a New Testament, a new model
of God and were antisemitic (Seneca was so too), why did they not cut their ties with Old
Testament Judaism? The reason, I think, is clear: the Christians needed the catastrophic
history afforded by Old Testament religion; they required the Creation chaos, the Flood,
the harassment of Job, the Tower of Babel, the Destruction of the Cities of the Plain, and
the Exodus. Otherwise, they would have condemned themselves to early obsolescence and
extinction.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 1: }
{Q THEOMACHY }
{C Chapter 8: }
{T INDISPENSABLE GODS}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART I. THEOMACHY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER EIGHT

INDISPENSABLE GODS

We have progressed so far from the early chapters of this book that a review of them is
probably needed, a final commentary on the divine succession and historical religions.
Historical religions conserve the memory of a certain time when the world was created and
humans came into being. None says that mankind always existed, or that he evolved
mechanically by random association of particles. A purposeful act took place at a certain
time. Most religions say that mankind was subsequently destroyed and recreated. Almost
always the extermination of humanity stops short at a surviving couple or the equivalent.
The subsequent homologue of the first chaos is a subsequent set of catastrophes by flood,
fire, wind, and earth movements.

To preserve the memory of the first time of creation is a function of rituals, liturgy,
anniversaries, and sacrifices. Many religions have strenuously sought to reproduce, short
of deliberately re-annihilating themselves, the exact circumstances of chaos and creation.
They have obsessively kept forms, practices, and words that go back to the beginnings of
all religion and the first experience with the gods.

All historical religions are therefore highly conservative and weaken their foundations as
soon as they admit deviations. The function of inescapable and exactly repetitive practices
and symbols is to relieve the massive anxiety stored from the earliest times by confessing
what happened in those times and reliving them successfully.

What appears to be radical in religious history is reactionary. Practitioners of the
religion, wrought up beyond sufferance, find even the rigid rites of their church
insufficient to recapture the moments of chaos and creation. Prophets, apostates,
evangelizes, and orgiasts arise. So do whirling dervishes and berserkers. They are chiliast
or millennialists. They proclaim the end of the world while demanding that everyone
acknowledge the full and immediate meaning of the creation of the world. They prepare to
die and be saved in the recapitulation of the original catastrophic times.

All historical religions are based upon punitive gods, are self-punitive and are punitive
towards others. Gods are adjudged good to the degree to which they refrain from destroying
their creatures. Humans exist by divine tolerance. A common word for a good person in most
religions in "god-fearing". Personal merit through skills, altruism, and dogmatic belief
and practice is sometimes, but more often not, a guarantee to a greater of lesser extent of
the gods' benevolence; never is merit a perfect or universal guarantee. This belief in the
denial to merit of its due is not, therefore, as some think, a connivance of religion with
the envious mob.

Sacrifices are forms of punishment of the self and others to forestall, and therefore to
control, a punishment from Heaven. The concept of representation effectively lets a partial
sacrifice stand for a full sacrifice and a sacrifice of others stand for a sacrifice of
oneself. Sacrifices are said to be gifts freely given; yet it is acknowledged that
withholding sacrifices will be followed by divine retribution. The more valuable the
sacrifice, and the more strict the rules under which sacrifice and all other kinds of
punishment occur, the more pleasing to the gods.

Guilt is self-punishment. It is the refusal of pleasure to some negative degree. We often
knows it in its late and rather pragmatic sense: guilt is what makes a fickle creature
responsible; without guilt, personal and social discipline would be impossible. To get
relief from guilt, one follows religious directives or some secularized substitute such as
warring for one's country or pursuing "the work ethic."

But primeval guilt originated from the terror of "the other self," the terror produced out
of the minute systemic delay of instinctive impulses. At the same time, the heavens were
turbulent and terrifying. To control one's unbalanced self, one signaled the gods to
arbitrate; and the gods responded, saying, "Your soul is a struggle of good and evil. We,
with your cooperation, will take care that the good dominates you. You are not sick. Be
hopeful. Help is on its way." This formula, although it can be called delusion, was a great
invention. Granted the essential incurability of human schizotypicality, it alone could
lead to a manageable psychic world.

Important anniversaries or holy days are celebrations of divine destruction and near escape
from destruction. Every truly religious anniversary celebration is therefore ambivalently
tragic and joyful. Anniversary excesses and orgies, at both extremes of somberness and
exuberance, are nevertheless occasions for the relief of tragic memory, more or less deeply
suppressed. Anniversaries cluster around the great cycles of the ages, which give evidence
of having been common to most of the world's cultures. Calendar diversions, not
psychological changes, have driven apart the anniversaries of different cultures; they are
farther apart in days than they are in mind. The end of the year inspires saturnalia in
many cultures. Also thus, Roman Catholic and Greek churches mark a different Easter holiday
for unessential reasons. Anniversaries sometimes are pulled together in a given culture by
their original proximity during a cycle such as a solar year and by their psychological
resemblance. Thus, Venus (perhaps at -3437 B. P., where Before Present =1984 A. D.) and
Mars catastrophes (perhaps in -2671) occurred around March 23, close to the Spring equinox;
the holidays were merged ultimately, and are submerged at Easter time in Christendom and
comparable holidays in other cultures.

Sublimation, like ritual, is universal in religion; it pacifies, dissembles, represents,
and rationalizes the strict conditions of the fatal times. Sublimation becomes more secular
and pragmatic with the evaporation of stored anxiety over long periods of prosperity and
peace. Disaster, deprivation, and frustration raise anxiety levels; they cause reactions
against secular sublimation occurring in the artistic, social, political and religious
spheres; these activities are attacked as irrelevant and blasphemous.

Furthermore, all religions incorporate directives for every aspect of life -- work, sex,
property, power, relations, health, and knowledge. Humanity was created and made deistic at
the same time; the human mind is not logical, but it is wholly occupied by a way of looking
at the world as a supernatural creation. The question of separating special values and
calling these "the province of religion" has no meaning to a mind that was originally
formed with every value at stake.

Religious practices are basically similar everywhere and have been from the start.
Permutations of practices are innumerable. The new humans executed religious observances
among their first acts. In this sense, all the world's religions came from one religion,
that of the first and only band of humans. Then different experiences befell the different
peoples. Some were non-catastrophic experiences and these brought many minor changes. Other
experiences were catastrophic -- global and intense -- and these reinforced the basic
resemblances of religions while at the same time prompting many minor variations. Thus
ultimately, history came to witness a similar succession of great gods ruling amidst a
congeries of ethnic religions.

One god has been replaced by another on various occasions. Almost always, the replacements
successful because of unconscious techniques of cross-identification and rationalization.
Sometimes men sought to replace gods by deliberate choice, with or without the help of
events such as cultural amalgamation; invariably then compulsion and heavy propaganda were
employed. Such occurred when Hinduism moved over Southeast Asia, when Christianity came to
dominate the Roman World, and when Islam moved across Asia and Africa.

The replacement of all gods by materialistic and atheistic ideology is a special case,
discoverable, in non-catastrophic times, among philosophical schools such as the ancient
cynics, among scientists and humanists of the post-enlightenment, and among communists.

Invariably secular replacers have argued the lack of empirical proof of the existence of
gods; they have also stressed the contradictions of ruthlessness and mercy in the concepts
of god; and they have attacked the behavior of religious establishments. As alternative
behavior they have recommended principles of brotherly love, cooperation, and mental
health, among humans, or principles of an ideally organized state that provides enough
goods to satisfy people's needs without recourse to supernatural agents.

The major proof that such ideologies might succeed is based upon the waning of the gods
when societies possess a pragmatically optimistic morale and are materially prosperous or
believed to be potentially so, as recently. Then the gods have seemed remote and unneeded;
considerations of logic and efficiency would appear to dictate their abandonment, removal,
and forgetting.

Even under optimal conditions of prosperity, secular morale, compulsion and propaganda, the
replacement has proceeded slowly and painfully. At the peak of their success, the ungodly
ideologies have been undermined by new gods (e. g., Christianity in the Roman Empire),
resisted successfully by the masses (e. g., communist Poland, 1945-1983 A. D.), transformed
into secular religions of temporary duration (e. g., Roman Emperor worship, der Fuhrer
Hitler, Comrade Lenin), or transformed into pseudo-scientific therapeutic or philosophical
sects employing substitute semi-divine agents (e. g., gurus, anthroposophists).

The fundamental obstacle to ungodliness has been the construction of the human mind.
Inasmuch as the events of creation that split the hominid character introduced the
splitters as gods, humans become god-seekers as part of becoming human. The particular
manner in which the universe was seen for the first time implied perforce the
instrumentality of divinity. Self-awareness, formed a nature which was unceasingly prone to
discover gods.

Far from being an afterthought, the gods were a first thought. To excise this thought,
after thousands of years of experience with it. was not only most difficult pragmatically;
it was structurally impossible, at least as long as the origins, function, and mental
structure of religion were not understood.

To forget the gods is impossible; the memory deck can only be reshuffled. To retain self-
awareness without schizotypicality is a contradiction in terms. Human creation involved a
basic reconstruction of mammalian mind; to extinguish this essential schizotypicality would
restore man as an instinctive mammal, but is in any event now physiologically and
psychologically impossible. Symbolism as the effect of the split self, flows naturally and
cannot be obliterated. By the same logic and dynamics, treating symbolically with both the
"other self" and the "outsider-others" must inevitably result in projectional thought, that
is, treating the "outside other" with the same mechanism and feeling that the self utilizes
in dealing with its "own other."

All of this process is transactional and the transaction is of the essence of human being.
Therefore a group mode of projection, a group communication, is inherent in the individual-
social complex. Thence, naturally, whatever is unanswered and questionable becomes a matter
for resort to authority -- that is, a prevailing, preponderant group opinion. Since the
group is forever under historical and existential stress, it is forever seeking authority
and incapable of receiving satisfactory answers to its questions without a symbolic,
abstract and animate referent that provides solution. Thus it happens that, if humans
exist, god exists. God is the closing of the circle -- both question and answer. But so
inextricable are the question and answer that only logical artifice can distinguish and
designate the two.

Man's need to control the terrible and the terror causes him to invent gods. Nowadays, if
one were asked how to control or stop an advancing comet, he would dismiss the possibility,
and say that we must await it. He is not prepared to undertake all the actions that ancient
man had ready just for such approaching catastrophes -- propitiation, sacrifice, ritual,
saturnalia, "going on the warpath." Nevertheless, as catastrophe approaches, at first
slowly and then rapidly, and then hysterically, the modern human will act like his
ancestors, including the excesses of guilt for not having foreseen the deserved end of all
folly. He will draw upon the dwindling and remaining reserves of the "old time religion."

If the fossil voices telling us of the nature of the gods and of the rules for man's
behavior respecting the gods are distorted and incorrect, and though they are not valid and
reliable guides, yet these voices have told us things of positive value. They have given us
foundations of history. They have recounted the basic facts of existence repeatedly. They
have conjured existences differing from ours. They have in effect performed innumerable
experiments with the allegedly divine from which we can learn what not to do religiously,
and to a lesser extent what to do.

Perhaps the greatest lesson they have taught us (by negative inference) is that the
religion of today and tomorrow should not be sought in the religion of the past: that
humans, until they reach some certain level of perfection cannot be trusted to have known
and arrived at the nature of the gods. Whenever historical man has said "Let us change our
religion," (even if he does so in the name of preserving the old religion) he is saying "We
were wrong about god and religion and it is up to us now to find a new way to god and a new
religion."

The gods have retired into new forms, but they still operate through the busy humans whom
the poet Rilke called "the bees of the invisible." The gods are still everywhere and are
not as remote as our scientific texts would have us believe. They are in astrology, in
magic, in fortune-telling; they fly to the scenes of disaster; they augment the forces of
authority; they heal and console; they scare; they make anxious; they set the rituals for a
multitude as they have done since the times of Ouranos. They assume their own negation: for
they argue with themselves in Natural Law, Bureaucracy, in Dogmatic Materialism, in Reified
Words, in Mummified Heroes, in Times and Worlds without End. They let themselves be molded
into One and the One obliges his necessities by becoming Many. Beyond all else, they stand
at ease waiting for Armageddon and the Day of Judgment. Then they will don their armor and
gather their hosts.

Although they have retired it still takes rare courage to contemplate all of their
continuing manifestations and to resist the invention of new negations. There is yet
nowhere else to go and few who would follow.

By skimming along on the thin ice of the cerebral cortex or by mathematical astrophysics or
metaphysics or another such exercise, the gods can be sublimated. Dumb bestiality may be
equally functional. We think that of all ways of facing them, the best is to look at them
everywhere, contemplate their every manifestation, anticipate their reappearance, but do no
more. If there is any question of human madness, it is erased when one pretends to be
divine. Our human destiny is an open question. We deny our humanity if we try to close it.
We belittle ourselves if we plead with the gods to answer the question at any cost.

Whenever gods and religious practices have been abandoned, put aside, forgotten, changed
consciously or unconsciously, those who made such changes are saying to us their
descendants, "Do not think that our ancestors, or us, or even you, will have the answer.
There will be New Testaments without end." We the present generation are told that we are
not the first, nor the last, but a truth-seeking figure in the series of forevers until the
day when somehow, somewhere, we shall be perfect. At which time, we might, if we dared,
claim omniscience, omnipotence, and the fullness of virtue.

In hastening to accuse traditional religion of claiming falsely absolute truth and
morality, we often fail to see in the seeming absoluteness its inherent self-confessed
contradiction. Just as psychiatry has proven that excesses of anger, self-destructiveness
and aggression have ordinarily come out of self-doubt and self-hatred, so we can see in the
madness and excesses of historical religious behavior the same psychological sources of
self-doubt and self-hatred transformed into dogma, authority, bigotry, punition and guilt
in the name of absolute achievement and arrival at the nirvana of perfection. Yet even
while civilizations and peoples are being destroyed in the name of absolute truth, newly
arrived at, a class of readers or priests of the absolute are contradicting the behavior in
gushes of explanations and interpretations of the ways of the gods. As the Hindu Brahmin
calculates, the warrior slays. As Anselm seeks proof, King Arthur crusades.

The most important question of religion is not how to eradicate gods, but to establish gods
at one with humanity and the human soul. For there can be no logical or moral objection to
the concept of and belief in gods in themselves; again the human being, insofar as he knows
any happiness, has known it in activities of a sublime sort that are inextricable from the
divine. A formula and model is required, which is physically possible, and which will
forego conflicts of the self, among humans, and between devils and gods. Specifications
are: a) sufficient relief from fearful stress to permit the search for a new formula; b) a
search for physico-chemical change agents (whether mutational or continuously operative)
that would eliminate terroristic memories, with all that subtends from such in the way of
self-destructiveness and other-destructiveness without damaging, and optimally while
promoting, the affectional and inventive facilities of humans; c) and, while the search
goes on, and anticipating that the search may be unsuccessful, the invention of social
strategies( therapies and institutions) that will hold the conflicts in abeyance
indefinitely.

Secularism is a negative counterattack against religion, justifiable as a restraint against
malpractices known to everyone. Generally, however, humankind is not in a state to abandon
religion and the gods. At best it is capable of achieving a concerted view of an overall
divinity and the sacredness of existence. It can borrow from and encroach upon science.
Great good would ensue, provided that the concerted belief could work its way into the aims
and practices of myriad rituals of human lives.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 2: }
{Q THEOTROPY:}
{C Chapter 9: }
{T SACRAL VS. SECULAR MAN}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION

PART II. 
THEOTROPY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER NINE

SACRAL VS. SECULAR MAN

Any old religion is likely to have a complete life-program, guaranteed to give
satisfaction. It will include answers to all problems that arise, with a counseling service
from birth to death. This is no mean achievement, but rather a work of unceasing genius
characterizing all ages and all cultures, and therefore thousands of designs and operative
systems. Our admiration of the astronomical universe pales in the light of universal
religiousness. Indeed, if one is hungry for proofs of the existence of ultimate design and
intelligent gods, here is fertile ground to plow.

But why, out of all this experience has there not occurred one religion of all times and
places for all people such that a model human being would lead a happy life? Why should not
one formula have been discovered? Why all the changes, conflicts, misery? In replacing the
instinctive existence of other creatures, why could not man rapidly invent just that proper
set of behaviors that would satisfy the respective and combined needs of his human
mechanisms and culminate in expressions of satisfactory existence? Is there some practical
impossibility, the fault of the external world? Or is there some inherent contradiction of
the mechanisms of human nature?

Let us set up a model of religious citizen (not a leader) and inquire whether he should be
happy, and, if not, why not. We call him "sacral man." not because he is sacred, but
because he believes a great many phenomena and actions are sacred. He sacralizes.

A thorough moral defense of religion from the standpoint of its expression through sacral
man has not appealed to modern writers. Such old and religiously circumscribed works as
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress will hardly do for these days, when the field instruments of
sociology, biology, psychology, economics and political science need to be orchestrated for
the purpose. Available are negative critiques of ritual and assaults upon the supernatural.
But where are the moral scientific (as opposed to merely sociological) studies of the
Baptist and the Secularist living on the same street, multiplied a thousandfold to cover
the world scene?

The ideal sacral person is born of religious parents, is baptized at an early age, and
attends schools whose curriculum and teachers are of same belief. He or she hears of the
gods, and experiences religious rituals, at an early age, so that by the time of receiving
catechism he is already identified with supernatural beings and is pleased to learn that
they have played the most important role in all major and many minor events of the history
of his culture. Well before receiving formal religious instruction, he has been rewarded
and punished in the name of the gods, and (he is convinced) by them directly. He knows this
latter to be true, because he has had indirect and accidental rewards and punishments at
the hands of what "must have been god." He has a fairly concrete impression of at least one
god, the Great God, anthropomorphic but dressed in ritual clothing. He knows of many
instances in which God has intervened in the current lives of persons dear or near to him,
and to many others that have been the objects of his affection or the attention of his
closely identified mentors.

Following upon years of catechism, he can explain events by himself to the satisfaction of
members of his religion, and possesses a general history of his group and of mankind from
their earliest creation by his gods. He can sacralize readily, that is, impute sacred
meaning to any event, natural or human, consistent with his religion. His religious mentors
have long since informed him of the political climate of his larger culture respecting his
religion, so that he can know what to expect from strangers in and outside of his culture.
He knows how to invoke the gods by prayers and rites, even only by mentation and, perhaps
with a poor sense of statistics, believes his score of successes far outnumbers his score
of failures. He enjoys a logic that employs heavily the formula, "This follows That because
God willed it;" "God must have willed This" (where 'This' is an event with significance and
within the expected scope of God's actions -- love -- death, etc., or so unusual as to be
the work of God); "This other cannot be, because God would not will it."

He questions authority, since he is early forewarned of its religious untrustworthiness. He
pursues a line of secular work regularly and responsibly, as an offshoot of religious
ritual behavior. He understands readily the news of the larger world, for there is a
general correlation between his political and religious friends and enemies. By virtue of
his early training in displacement and projection, he can readily conceive of the larger
society, even the whole world's people, within the sphere of and dependent upon his gods.
His sources of mundane authority, if not religious, partake of the respect, authenticity,
and reliability granted religious authority. Births, marriages, accidents, careers,
illnesses, and deaths of all with whom he identifies -- who are part of him -- are handled
by old, well-known procedures. He is probably better able to confront a personal disaster
by appropriate sacred explanations, instead of trying to cope with it independently as for
instance, does the character Charlotte, in Joan Didion's novel, A Book of Common Prayer,
who, highly secularized but also fearful of self-examination, slips into catatonic denial
and mourning when it develops that her daughter was pursuing another life, an alter ego, of
political criminality. For sacral man, ways and limits of mourning are well-set. Reactions
and decisions are pre-fabricated. He can feel secure that all happens as part of a sacred
history, elevated to celestial levels of meaning, and contemplates and suffers his own
death in the same frame of mind. Since he identifies with gods, his time scales for
personal achievement and for the expected future history of the world, including even
rewards and punishments for actors on the present scene, are celestial as well as according
to the secular calendar. He is confident of indirect and unknown measures being taken on
his behalf by supernatural agencies.

From early childhood, he has been god-fearing. By satisfying the gods, he is exempted from
much fear of men and accidents: "If I please God, God will take care of me;" "When God
calls, I am ready to go." He realizes very early in life that he has problems of self-
control; he projects the unruly selves onto the deities, and thus can "bargain with them at
arm's length. Self-hate becomes devil-hate. When his psychic system becomes well
established, he acquires self-confidence.

He has several persisting problems. Some are due to his inherent structure as a human
being. Others are owing to his uniqueness when confronted by what must, after all, be a
general formula of his religion for handling all humans. There occur also conflictful
features of his larger culture, and accidents and natural disasters. Thus his religion, so
holy to him, may be disliked by other groups with whom he must deal. He ( and his group)
may have such consistently bad luck with nature that active punitive measures are
continually taken -prayers, sacrifices, guilt, fasting and abstentions. Aggressive behavior
against outsiders is sometimes called for by prophecy and divination: "God needs help in
punishing his enemies."

Furthermore, he may be genetically a "difficult character" for his religious institutions,
a "nervous type" uncontrollably impatient with ritual, a person whose parents were a little
deviant and unwittingly made him more deviant from the religious norms of belief and
behavior. Guilt-feelings, self-destructiveness, suspiciousness, extravagant behavior
(aggressiveness, asceticism, etc.) may result.

Finally his modes of logic may interfere with what he wants to do with himself and the
world. If the gods manage so much, he is left to cope with little, and may see little need
for pragmatic learning. He may, by continuous resort to his religious logic, become stupid
and retarded in contributing to and gaining from the larger culture, where different logics
are called for, such as "This cannot occur without That" or "To obtain, That, do This and
no more." He may suffer from a great many floating opinions, unanchored to mundane cause
and effect, good for ritual, useless for practical life, whether dealing with people or
tools.

Regarding these issues as a whole, one large risk seems to confront model religious
citizens. The near impossibility of a general religious system being all things to all
people all the time causes universal individual problems within the religion. It also
causes divisions into priesthood and parishioners, mystics and ritualists, managers and
managed, and so on, which aggravate the insecurities of all affected by the divisions, that
is, of all believers. Ritual resembles instinctive behavior and may cover most aspects of
life except revelation. No religion exists without a place for mystic revelation. Yet
revelation is the opposite of ritual. Somehow every church must give birth to and nurture
this hero (or assassin).

In addition, every religion exists within at least a partially secularized society; even in
the most simple tribal society, where all seems to be definitively sacralized, there is an
everyday need to confront and exploit nature, to use tools variously, to deal with
outsiders. Conditions change; religion is conditioned; religions change. Every ritual
change is a slap in the face of the religion, and face-saving tactics are numerous.

I am not taking present Western European society as typical of religious settings, for this
would be too easy. Change and secularization are rampant. I am trying here, as elsewhere in
this study, to employ the most conservative type of analysis, and to avoid taking advantage
of the many loop-holes of speculation and illustrations that religious history and
philosophy ordinarily profit from.

I am asking consideration of relatively changeless culture, while asserting that there is
never a state of changelessness. And so, within and outside the model citizen, change is
happening and causes him lifetime anxieties which the religion cannot possibly control by
scripture or rites. A calculus of felicity is not difficult to imagine. The greater the
stresses within the church and in the relations (direct and indirectly effective) between
the church and the environment, the greater become the anxieties and uncontrollable
outbursts of our model citizen; the greater then the changes within his groups as well.

In none of this discussion have we spoken of the moral values of the activity, except we
have presumed a kind of dolce vita religiosa for the citizen. We have not asked how many
orphans has he sheltered, how many cannibal feasts has he enjoyed, or how productive has he
been, nor have we made any quantitative gauges of his feelings of nearness to god.

It seems that we must always come up to the point where we are saying "What his religion
happens to say is good, is in fact good." whereas we know "in our hearts and minds" that
this cannot be. There has to be more than this to justify a religion on moral grounds. Is
there some metaphysical morality that can weed out bad from good religions, bad from good
citizens?

Or, perhaps, a model of secular man can reveal, by way of contrast, a morality
overshadowing religious morality. Let us see. As with sacral man, we shall be taking an
optimistic view of his development; the model is optimistically biased. Here now the person
we have in mind begins life as the child of parents and in a group who disbelieve in the
supernatural and practice no rites in the name of gods or spirits. They point out to the
infant actions and persons whose effects are good or bad. The child is taught that nothing
exists unless it can be experienced by himself and proven to his authorities, for he has
these, too, in his parents and attendants. He is trained to reason pragmatically rather
than to practice religious rituals or seek revelations.

He is ritualized, but in the name of necessary training to achieve good or logically
necessary effects. By reward and punishment he is taught to seek or avoid objects, persons
and activities that he is likely to encounter. He is discharged from training when his own
sense of right and wrong appears to rule him adequately.

He learns that his society is benign in its intentions toward him, behaves justly toward
him and others, and protects him from himself, potential assailants, and foreign enemies.
If he participates voluntarily in his own training, he will acquire skills that the
economic system and the governments will welcome and pay him to use.

Ritualized or routine training is justified in terms of its consequences. As the British
Statesman Gladstone put it (1876) in the years when the concept was becoming current, "The
Secularist.... does not of necessity assert anything but the positive and exclusive claims
of the purposes, the enjoyments, and the needs, presented to us in the world of sight and
experience."

There is only body, not soul (except metaphorically), and no afterlife to look forward to
or worry about. He may enjoy fictional stories about the supernatural; he may pretend "for
fun" that any phenomenon is unreal. He observes a number of secular holidays arising out of
political, social, and heroic events.

His respect for scientific method (empiricism, facts, logic, experiment, control of the
environment) is high; he claims to believe only in its application and findings, whether in
the human or the natural realm. He expects a continuous upgrading of his life, partly
because of a general upsurge in health and living standards. His feelings are not rigid nor
profound, He expects every person to do his duty, and does not accept authority without
explanation in material, empirical, and logical terms. He seeks generally to belong to
groups whose leaders are elective.

What will be our felicity calculus for such a model citizen? He may be on the whole as
"happy" as the religious citizen. The word "happy" would mean a usual mild euphoria, which,
we must admit, may come genetically, or as a result of brute affection generously granted
the infant being. Still, this affection may be tendered by his identification with "Infant
Jesus" in certain cultures, which would therefore allow an intrusion of religion even into
the recesses of infancy.

What he loses of the security in the perceived protection of the gods, he makes up for by
an increase of security owing to the perceived way in which changing explanations go along
with changing events. His defenses stop at the grave, but his hopes of increased beneficial
effects of science for himself and his human identifiees are greater.

He has fewer judges of his actions, and perceives fewer entities to please. He will,
however, be more frequently and poignantly disappointed with humans, because their conduct
is not mediated through his gods, and strikes him directly and rudely. His only hope is
other humans. This increases his load of fear and anxiety, and probably this will be
heavier than the fearload of religious man.

His temperament may also be more mercurial. On one hand, his life offers less inspiration
and may be insipid, while on the other hand he may strain for sensory stimuli and orgiastic
behavior. He is not likely to be less aggressive or less vicious than religious man.

His morality is no more explainable than that of religious man. He simply holds it on
natural grounds: "That is the way people behave when they are not driven by superstition or
authority."

The secularization of modern times may well have had its likenesses at certain times and
among certain groups of the Golden Age of Saturn, the Confucian period of China, the Middle
Bronze Age in the Near East, the Classical age of Greece, the pagan Roman Empire, the
Renaissance, and other eras. The clash between the religious and the secular is prominently
displayed. We have an idea that a large section of the elite, at least, in these eras was a
disbeliever, a shopper for ideas, luxuriating in freedoms of choice among supernatural
views and between cultism and materialism. Here may be the difference -- freedom of choice
against a bound-up cosmos, not secularism versus supernaturalism or religion or sacralism.
We cannot be certain at all that the secular man has ever been really secular, rather than
merely a disintegrated sacred man.

The modern secular man was emerging in the Renaissance. Machiavelli was living at the same
time as Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuit order. Loyola, unlike
the author of the Prince, who moved fully and confidently into the modern disintegrated
secular society, was seized by the need to keep the total image of Jesus under control and
in mind, and to capture and reintegrate any escaping impressions and thoughts. Roland
Barthes has grasped the essence of Loyola's mission and procedures, as spelled out in
Loyola's book of Spiritual Exercises.

     The obsessional character of the Exercises blazes forth in the accounting passion
     transmitted to the exercitant: as soon as an object, intellectual or imaginary, appears, it
     is broken up, divided, numbered. The accountancy is obsessional not only because it is
     infinite, but above all because it engenders its own errors... [Every failure induces,
     requires, more accounting.] Everything is immediately divided, sub-divided, classified,
     numbered off in annotations, meditations, weeks, points, exercises, mysteries, etc. [That
     is,] The Exercises can be conceived as a desperate struggle against the dispersal of images
     which psychologically, they say, marks mental experience and over which -- every religion
     agrees -- only an extremely rigorous method can triumph.

The whole aim and process is a totalitarian domination of the mind for the purpose of
putting oneself into a position to ask God questions and to receive passively the answers.
All vagaries were returned to the Source. There is no denying the social impact of the
Jesuit method and practice. Allowing that traditional Catholicism continued inertially,
Jesuitry become a great active sword that held much of secularism at bay while causing it
to involute. Evidence abounds that secular man is actually a form of sacral man with
Jesuitical control. What is sacred possesses for its experiencer an aura of the holy, of
awe, of fear, of divine arbitrariness, of supernatural animation. Sacral man in his extreme
expression sees the cosmos and all its details as sacred; there are few of such men, of
course. The extremely secular man sees everything as void of the supernatural and fully
accessible to the senses; there are very few of such men, too.

Let us provide some categories of behavior that might be regarded as sacred or at least
non-sensible, to which most so-called secular men adhere. For one thing, they believe in
many myths, myths of their descent and families, of their country, of the history of their
locale, of wars and voyages. More, and now we make a few specific allusions applying to
some, by way of illustration, they hold myths about GM, GE, IBM, their President and
political leaders, Albert Einstein, Hollywood, the Mafia, the flag (" Old Glory"), Harvard
University, the "Spirit of Saint Louis," the Philadelphia Eagles Football Team, Bellevue
Hospital, the "Monopolies," "Justice," "free will," "reason," "truth," "nature," snakes,
elephants, diets, and so on and on.

What do we mean by associating such people first with myth, then with the supernatural,
hence with the sacred? The myth has in common with the sacred a non-empirical aura of
"emotion" or feeling attaching itself to a non-existent or otherwise psychologically
incomplete perception such that, whatever it is, it would not recognizably exist unless it
were mythified. International Business Machines (IBM) does not exist as entity, but only as
hundreds of millions of mental and physical operations of people, partly related to
machines. But "it" is "mighty," "global," "venerable," "rich," "progressive," "losing money
this year," "in need of revitalization," and so on. One is "loyal" to it, "depends" upon
it, "accepts its policies," "questions it sincerity," "sues it," tries to "break it up,"
"ignores its complaints" and so on. Lawyers hop around on "its giant body like fleas on an
elephant," "defending it," "justifying it," and of course "living off of it." A great many
people derive a feeling of the supernatural and sacred form when functioning in the
corporate ambiance. The Chief Executive of the great Schlumberger multinational enterprise
said recently that a corporation nowadays must learn from the Japanese that "we have the
responsibility that religion used to have."

Are these behaviors and beliefs any less religious, say, than the behavior of believers in
a volcano religion? The typical secularist worships a dozen such volcanoes; he is
polytheistic; he believes in the supernatural and practices rites in regard to it. I do not
argue here the consequences: this mythicized aggregate produces millions of hard objects
for people; what does the religious aggregate produce but "useless objects" such as church
buildings and a superabundant "software?"

We cannot maintain that secular man is less superstitious than sacral man. Does he more
often believe "13 is an unlucky number" or carry a rabbit's foot for luck? Encyclopedias of
false beliefs and superstitions are available, but they do not speak to this issue.
Superstition is sacralization gone wild, uncontrolled by formal religious authority or
science. There is very little difference, too, between superstition and the "false cause"
of an anxiety; worrying over the number 13 is not much different in cause and effect than
worrying that the airplane in which one is sitting will plunge to earth. Secular man has a
plethora of both types of illnesses.

Inseparable from myth in practice are symbols and fictions. Language is but the greatest
set of all fictions. That it is magical is provable in the behavior of humans in regard to
it from their beginnings up to the present. Words lead a life of their own, in the world of
words, distinct in part from the objects to which they ordinarily refer. Modern secularists
use words freely; a candy is "divine;" every accident is a "catastrophe." No matter; that
the world turns with an energy of 10 37 ergs of energy does not deny to a leaf wafting down
from a tree its own erg. What we have in secularism is a disintegration of the sacred
cosmos into infinite particularistic ergs of the supernatural, but at the same time a
denial of the cosmic supernatural. Words merge into symbols, which may be words, pictures,
displays, but also contain the impact of sets of words, without integration with the
grammar of the language. A symbol contains a stimulus to arrive at an attitude or
predisposition of mind or behavior. The symbol of the cross has been found throughout the
world from the time of the earliest gods up to the present, denoting the chief god or a
reference and extension of the god. Wherever a cross occurs, the supernatural does as well;
in the ancient world, stones of Hermes were put up at crossroads. Many symbols are likewise
ancient. Some of them, like the cross, find their way into the secular crests of noble
families, secular institutions, the trademarks of modern corporations, and the escutcheons
of government agencies.

Such modern references are very weak, it is said; this is true, and art designers and
public relations experts will invent trademarks and other symbols for a price, using
scientific techniques for determining how readily the public will recognize and accept the
symbol. Still, unauthorized use of the trademark can incite a law-suit for millions of
dollars; something sacred must be conveyed. It contains more than a single erg of the
supernatural.

So it is with fictions, which are of several kinds, including the words, myths and symbols
referred to already. We need only to mention that others remain, and also contain qualities
of the supernatural, and they are continuously and necessarily employed by the secular mind
The "average" is one of the most useful concepts of science, but it does not exist. Very
often sought, like the Golden Fleece, once found, it leads to marvelous gains. That
"everyone knows the law" is a fiction treated as fact in a court of law; "ignorance of the
law is no excuse for an offense."

Science, law, literature, drama, and music constitute a veritable fictional world that no
amount of secularism can eradicate. Secular man can only claim that these are all piecemeal
tools, that he "uses" them, that they do not make him a believer in the supernatural, and
that he can understand me when I tell him that these are unreal. But this must be a very
special secular man, not an ordinary one, for the ordinary one does not see the dizzying
use of hundreds of tools; he is used by them, attaches all kinds of fleeting supernatural
associations to them, and does not understand well at all when I speak of them as unreal.

So the ideal, extreme, purely secular man will try to squeeze out of life all that is
fictional, we suppose, if it ever ended in anything but the most mad hermeticism, with
various rituals for exorcising fictions, in a direct confrontation of the real. Pure
secularism would be a life of instinctive stimulus-response: wordless, thoughtless, myopic,
and solitary. Wrung out of existence would be the arts, politics, law, the market-place,
love, human relations, and science itself, including both the conception of all these and
all of their ritual accompaniments.

Since he must himself employ the supernatural and its rituals, secular man, we see, does
not so much want to destroy religion as he does to particularize it, to make it pantheistic
and kaleidoscopic. He wants to keep all his options. He wants full freedom to pick up and
lay down any iota of the supernatural or any practice connected with it. He is like the
sophisticated Roman of 2000 years ago who also wanted to pick up and lay down any god or
rite as he pleased. He does not wish to be part of an all-embracing and integrated cosmic
religious system, not even to be reminded that everything in the world and in culture is
tied to everything else, even secularly, if not sacrally.

Religion as such threatens his options. He wants to freely disperse his affects and
attentions. He wants to be free to change them. He admires the composer who builds
idiosyncratic tonal works or the sculptor whose "Composition in plastic, number 18"
pretends to communicate with nothing or nobody. Just so, he wants individually to compose
and recompose the vignettes of his life.

There is accordingly a strong trend toward the disintegration of morality. Morality, too,
is piecemeal in secularism. Each item is judged right or wrong by itself. We note this in
pragmatism where the consequences of an act determine its morality. We note it in American
law where social consequences tend to be the measure of a crime and its punition. We note
it in the press, where instantaneity and shocks push aside moral priorities. We note it in
democratic politics, where the politicians must, and willingly do, fix the plight of
whoever is complaining most, generally ignoring the "good of the whole," scales of values,
or long-term considerations: "The wheel that squeaks gets the grease."

Still, the supernatural of everyday life in modern society is not enough religion for a
great many secularists and they solicit new religions, inventing them, so they think,
actually "reinventing the wheel" time and time again. These are by no means to be
dismissed; they are heroic endeavors to join science and traditional religion, to worship
the Divine and the Good without reference to the succession of gods, to build peaceful
humanistic communities, to make contact with presumably intelligent beings in outer space,
to achieve sacred communities with new rituals that dignify rather than abase their
members, and to build a satisfying non-materialistic life around ideals. To ridicule them
is by implication to ridicule ourselves. (To ridicule ourselves, on the other hand, is not
far from our minds, as we mistake one turn of the road after another; we feel always on the
brink of absurdity, that the whole enterprise of penetrating and ordering religion is
surreal.)

We hear of physical therapy communities, where diet, exercise, and love build new souls,
and of group therapy communities where, in one case, one learns to love oneself and, in
another case, to give up selfish love of oneself to love others. We learn of astrological
networks of believers who adjust their lives to the elaborated meaning of planetary motions
and conjunctions.

There are communities and networks of haute couture, work, skills, fraternity, "rock and
roll," sexual practices, diet, outer space communications, sports, and many other special
areas that go far beyond occasional meetings and informational exchanges into the dense
supernatural and ritual affairs of religious cults. They are voluntary. Participation may
be brief and intense; it is for that period sacred, supernatural and ritualistic.

We begin to see an overall pattern of the people of a secular society; they live amidst
many intense but sporadic religious episodes, where their minds are fully occupied in
recapitulating birth, baptism, initiation, marriage, priesthood and death in brief compass,
and in between these episodes, they float and paddle in a swirling world of secular
symbols, legends, myths, and fictions. Are they happy? Have they found Truth and Morality?
Once again, I would warn against a hasty denial. What is "happy"? Who is happy in this
world? "Happy" may be a little thing, quite evasive, quite accidental and lucky, though
subjectively grand in its effects.

As for "moral", that, too, may be the accident of a soul that is bumped and tossed about
like flotsam, until finally jettisoned onto the shores of goodness.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 2: }
{Q THEOTROPY:}
{C Chapter 10: }
{T ETHICS AND THE SUPERNATURAL}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART II. THEOTROPY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER TEN

ETHICS AND THE SUPERNATURAL

After a brief military campaign in the Falklands (Malvinas) Islands in 1982, memorial
services for the dead of Great Britain and Argentina were held at the Cathedral of
Canterbury, England. To some of the British, the idea of memorializing the Argentine dead
was already irksome. Then going beyond ceremony, the Archbishop in his sermon deplored
warfare, asserting that it proved the failure of a foreign policy. Whereupon he was
verbally chastised by Prime Minister Thatcher and like-minded representatives of English
jingoism for not having made it clear to the assembly that the British were righteous and
victorious in the eyes of The God of the Established Church of England. Reasonably the one
party might complain, of what use is the State Church if it does not support the State's
wars? Just as reasonably, the Archbishop might say: Of what use is a religion if it cannot
teach peace to politicians?

The peacemakers often go unblessed by the religions, too. Mirza Ahmad Sohrab, in his grand
tome, The Bible of Mankind, compares the great world religions to the strings of a single
harp each of which gives forth its own dominant note, while the harmonious blending of all
produces a symphony of music. The dominant note of Hinduism is the divine presence
pervading nature; of Buddhism, remuneration; of Zoroastrianism, purity; of Confucianism,
filial piety; of Taoism, the path to reason; of Judaism, righteousness; of Christianity,
love; of Islam, submission, and of the Bahai Cause, universality, "In their efforts to
admit and confess all humanistic doctrines of religions, the Bahai have been frequently
persecuted by god-fearing believers, and, even while the British were wrestling with
Christian "love," the Bahai were being dispossessed and killed, allegedly for religious
and statal treason , by Iranian Muslim practicing "submission" to Allah.

Secularists frequently pronounce religious slogans for lack of a substantial ethics of
their own. Moral issues often intimidate secularists, too. There is a sacredness about
them, a confusion, a threat, a secret, a god buried somewhere among them, a priest ready
to pull one in like a fish if one takes the smallest bait.

There used to be a major area of study called "the moral sciences." It is defunct. In
turn, every field of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities has tried to
extricate itself from moral responsibility and qualify for the name of science. Even
practical schools of business, medicine, dentistry, law, agriculture, engineering,
architecture, nursing, social welfare, etc., claim to provide an objective education; they
have achieved the logically impossible feat of inculcating in their students an abundance
of the best ways of doing things, while pretending not to consider good from bad, right
from wrong.

We know this to be nonsense. All applied science most exhibit preferences for lines of
conduct. Scientific method is itself a moral system. And just think of the vast proportion
of alumni of schools who confess, with a quaver in their voices, to all that they know and
owe to their alma mater. Somebody is teaching somebody something in the way of morals!
What is happening?

Is this hypocrisy? Are the schools and students, the society and its people, claiming one
thing and practicing another? Yes. They are using a technique that places upon an
unreachable, untouchable level certain problems such as god, religion, and the
supernatural, along with the associated problem of the ultimate sources of morality and
their justification; they take up all other problems as only of instrumental importance,
as problems of means, not ends, as problems whose solutions can be taught to burghers,
brigands, and beggars alike.

Whereupon a society becomes secular, segmentalized and instrumental (hence exploitative)
in its behavior as well as its morals. From many a segment are cast many grappling hooks
for the larger morality, some of which catch hold and from here and there spring the many
varieties of religious practices characteristic of the secularized society.

Where there is not a grappling for religion there is often a contradictory pair of
behaviors: the one a specialized nose-to-the-ground empiricism, the other a hopelessly
dispersed attention. The former was discussed in the last chapter as an aspect of
secularism and occurs again for treatment in the next; the latter requires a few more
words here. Religion generally focuses attention onto a few, high-priority objects of
value; secularism dissipates attention.

Attention is itself a value imposed on whatever is attended to. It is a preference for its
object, selected out of all potential substitutes as objects of attention. Attention is
instinctively determined in non-human creatures and modified by parental and group
training in many species; the ambiant force impinging on the creature also helps to
determine the objects of its attention. As with other creatures, man's attention in part
is a valuing of the object, elementary, without training, without justification.

Very few persons will even admit that their valuational life is already half described
when their attention spectrum is drawn up. But so it is, pathetic as it may be.

They would like to believe that attention is a real, natural, automatic experience, about
which they promptly cogitate. This is Cartesian rationalism, for does he not offer as a
first principle of his Discourse on Method, cogito ergo sum, "I sense that I perceive,
therefore I am," and, further, "I perceive because I want, and therefore am."

So, straightaway with birth, we fix the infant, if he had a mind to wander, upon the
right, proper, goods things -- the nipple, the nurse, the movements of the nurse, her
voice, his bowels moving, his eyes lightening, his muscles flexing, all following after
the not so good things -- his wonderment at himself, a loss of his boundaries, a panicky
feeling of loss of his warm pool, stunned dissolution exposed into infinite space.

Suppose his family to be church-goers. He is habituated to church as soon as he can be
counted upon to be quiet most of the time there. Time passes, and one day, when he hears,
"We are getting ready for church," he displays a mind of his own. "Why?" "Because..."
"Because of what?" "Because it's Sunday." "Why do we go to church on Sunday?" "To worship
God." And so on. It is almost entirely a morality of means, that carries him from one step
to the next, not "really explaining."

Sometimes this begins, or he is catechized, even if he asks no questions. "Why should I
worship God?" "God gives us our blessings in life." "Like ice-cream?" "Yes." And like your
mother, and father, and bed to sleep in, and food to eat, to train him properly, the
trainer is usually clever enough to number only things which the trainee likes. But there
is small pay-off for the trainer unless he slips into the list of blessings things that
he, the trainer likes. So they go to church to assure the blessings that each wants. They
already have different religions, in a sense.

Still later on, the child has a habit of church-going, as a result of which, his
authorities are happy to observe, he feels better with himself, when he attends, and
guilty if he misses church. He knows people there, and may even enjoy an occasional
service. Unfortunately for his educators, he now changes, we presume. He is bored and
fidgety in church; people scowl at him. He does not get the blessings he especially wants.
He is drawn to television, and wants to play baseball with the kids who do not go to
church. Here are better rewards in his mind; though he has no doubt of God, God's command
to "Worship Me in My House," does not get to him forcefully enough. He begins an argument
with his educators that will go on for years.

What can be said of morality in this simple story? There is a great deal of moral training
and moral response. The church and its religion are part of, and will always be part of
the child's life. Unless he undergoes heavy secularization he will posses hundreds of
ethical views that are connected directly and indirectly with his religion. Almost none of
them has come about through autonomous action, reasonable analysis, a survey of cases. The
morals collect upon him like fuzz upon a rubbed glass rod.

I am saying merely what dozens of writers have said before me. With regard to practically
all those who have practiced religion throughout history and today, the whole of religion
may be regarded as a generally effective machine to structure a collection of behaviors
and bring about their enforcement. The key to the ramshackle edifice is the reduction of
cosmic, existential self-fear.

For all that religion has dominated the human world from its beginnings, its ethical
results have been paltry. The one thing that is supposed to justify religion is precisely
the thing that religion does worst, making the human a satisfactory ethical creature.

But it must be said that religion has forever assumed the most difficult of all tasks:
supplying human existence with an objective morality. The problem is multiplex: how to
deal with oneself, one's inner relations; how to deal with others; how to treat with the
animate and inanimate world of nature. In the end, one is supposed to be able to say
"ought" confidently, to live according to the same "ought," and to be happy. In all of
this, one's morality ought to be consonant with the real world and its operating
principles, science, that is. Hence, morality is the governance of behavior by rules for
preferring and achieving certain human and natural relations and states of being.

Unfortunately the simplest, most general rules crack under the stress of psychology and
anthropology. "Don't drive while drunk" is a reasonable rule. It should readily illustrate
what Emmanuel Kant meant when he propounded his famous dictum: "Act only on that maxim
through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Yet
Kant's rule, though it might work to his personal satisfaction, might bring about
continual disasters if it were allowed to justify others, such as many suicidal and dying
persons who would be pleased to have the whole world die with them. Even the drunk may a)
deny that he cannot drive safely, b) suggest that everyone should enjoy a drunken drive
from time to time, or c) suggest that drunken driving is a good way to play the necessary
game of half-wishing self-destruction. If he does not express such ideas, it may be
because he realizes that the police make no distinction between common drunks and drunk
philosophers. But now we speak of authority, not Kantian rationalism.

If we ask what functions are performed by an ethical judgment, we get a more lively sense
of this feeling. Feeling ethical, one praises or reprimands, one rewards and punishes
another. This sometimes changes the behavior of the targets of such feelings in the
direction desired by the moralist. More broadly, then, one exhibits a preference in order
to arouse enthusiasm or indignation, to rally support. One raises an ethical feeling in
order to determine a policy, and to get on with affairs in an orderly organized way. None
of this would be done without our or someone's expression of value.

Subjectively, too, the very power to make an ethical judgment is a satisfaction in itself,
which often is sufficient unto itself, regardless of consequences. To express one's
feelings is in fact synonymous with giving vent to ethical judgments.

Alongside all of these functions is the one which religions stress but which very few
people feel regularly, that is, to carry out the will of the gods or of the supernatural
or fate or nature, because an ordinary resort to this function floods the sluiceways of
personal and collective action; it is usually blocked very early in its manifestation.
However, it can be the most powerful of all functions of ethical judgments, as we see in
the Crusades, the Islamic conquests, or nowadays the rule over Iran by Khomeini. We can
agree. These are the functions of words. Man is irretrievably consigned to a life crowded
with them. Morals are now a heap of functions as well as forces.

Thousands of unsuccessful moral philosophers attest to the frustrations abounding in the
pursuit of morals. Voyaging to the Moon is less difficult than the problems of morally
justifying the effort involved in the accomplishment. Nonetheless, all humans behave
morally and always have. By moral behavior we mean acting one way rather than another
because, among other reasons, one feels that it is right and good, and that not acting
that way would be wrong and bad. This "feeling" is a "real" thing, physiologically
compelling, with physical disturbance and mental states called frustration, indignation,
anger, humiliation, and anxiety if the moral act is not performed and euphoria,
satisfaction, and physical and mental relaxation if it is performed.

The easiest way to "solve" the moral question is to deny it, that is, to assert that
people feel moral or immoral, right or wrong, in consequence of a heap of experience,
commands, forces, and natural traits. There would be found in this heap no specific
independent moral quality. Morality then is no more than what is in the definition above,
"among other reasons."

The only fault that I can find with this idea is that I do not like the way people behave,
and I feel that I am not alone in this regard, so I wish to change people. But how do I
extricate a moral principle from the heap? Why should anyone else care what I like or what
I do not like, unless I had power to force compliance with my morals and they would do
well to obey my rules, or else -- "lest you die ..." as Yahweh might say.

So I must search for "justification" of my morality (call it M). What is meant by
justification?

     1)
     
     What so appeals to those I wish to change (adopt my preference) that they change their
     
     a) attitude
     b) behavior
     c) both.
     
     That is, I manipulate them. Nothing here can be considered the satisfying "justification"
     which I seek. I have, after all, used completely knowable means to warp their wills and
     minds (" applied social science"). The forms of manipulation include:
     
     a) force;
     b) bribes;
     c) persuasion by symbols and propaganda, by example, by citing god, priests, scriptures;
     d) proof of advantages they derive for and by themselves (" 'x' or 'y' is good for you").
     They will feel better, look better, etc.;
     e) 'logical' proof (" If you want 'x' do 'm'").
     
     
     But in all of this (M) remains unjustified (except the word of God, but which they
     dispute, hence, is unjustified); that is, I have no right to inflict (M), that is, to
     change others.
     
     2)
     
     So I examine myself. How does it happen that I
     
     a) do not like their behavior (M),
     b) want to change it (M) and I find many causes (reasons) for
     a) and many causes for
     b) which boil down to material benefits, property, convenience, and control. All of these
     are without validity so I must go on. I also feel embarrassment, guilt at their behavior.
     
     3)
     
     Why am I guilty when they behave so.
     
     a. Identification: I feel that I am part of them and hence suffer their effects.
     b. Projection: I feel that their motives are my own.
     c. Self-punition: I feel guilt for them. For all of this, I change them.
     
     But why do I feel guilt?
     
     a) Because I am trained to feel guilt.
     b) Because I want to behave like them or did once and was punished or harmed.
     c) Because of experience (e. g. "I let my younger brother behave so, and look at him
     now!")
     
     So none of these justify either!
     
     4)
     
     I listen to My god, and don't let them interpret god their way, and get support to
     suppress them. But now my insight (still active) tells me I may be wrong re god.
     
     Is there any other means of justification?
     
     5)
     
     Can I now say, "What I want is what I want, and it is, at least, 'good' in that if I get
     it, I satisfy whatever it is that makes me want it."
     
     Now what is it that I am satisfying?
     
     a) A psycho-physiological process of which there are several, viz.: damping of fear,
     extension of control (over self, over others), displacement of affect, identification,
     obsession (repetition), ambivalence;
     
     b) possessing one or more of, more wealth (things); affection; power; well-being (safety,
     health, strength); respect; skill (knowledge).
     
     Thus everything said of 1) to 4) beforehand may in fact be the superstructure of 5) here.
     
     6)
     
     The only way I can budge from this position of 5) which has established my Basic Morality
     is by changing myself so that another different or an altered want takes the place of (M).
     But, if M2 is substituted for M1 (no matter how little time or how long it takes) then I
     am changed and have a different morality.
     
     7)
     
     What can cause this different morality (M2)?
     
     a) Failure by resistance;
     b) accident;
     c) internal change (metabolism goes down, illness, different glandular flow, etc.)
     
     8)
     
     Then I repeat M2 with respect to the group of people whose actions I did not like before
     and go through 1) to 7) again.
     
     9)
     
     Now is M2 better than M1 and will M3 be better than M2... Mn? How would one know?
     
     10)
     
     Suppose Mx has these subsequences or consequences? It is significantly easier to run
     through the process. Further, no change occurs when it is achieved in me, i. e. Mx = Mn,
     the final value of morality.
     
     11)
     
     Therefore, I settle upon Mx and practice Mx and all closely analogous Mxa.. n . This
     becomes in effect my moral system in regards to the class of behaviors we are discussing.
     
     12)
     
     We note:
     a) Mx is mine, but also other's moral system because we are effectively transacting within
     its rules!
     b) The system is both egoistic and species-racial (social). It works. It can be
     mythicized, religified, philosophized.

In the sequence of events, 1) to 12) it will be noticed that all processes are explained
in natural terms, as instances of well known and common psychological and social dynamics.
The supernatural is involved on the level of such fictions, concepts, perceptions, and
illusions as are usually encountered in human psychic and social transactions.

Moral demands, moral behavior, and moral struggle are occurring. Ethical resolutions and
principles are evolving. But it is all happening without resort to a moral source existing
and coming from beyond the act and process themselves.

Let us consider the choices of a typical person, Abel. We assume that he makes an average
of 140 choices a day, and therefore roughly 50,000 in a year. They range in significance,
for example, from deciding whether to brush one's teeth quickly or thoroughly, to whether
or not to begin setting aside $3000 a year towards the college education of a child. If it
is argued that brushing teeth is hardly a moral or ethical issue, one can either argue in
rebuttal or simply raise the threshold of a moral question by some criteria of
significance that excludes brushing the teeth. Where this latter point would commence is
not easy to define. Perhaps it should be an issue which, whatever its subject, involves
conscience, that is, a slight or larger factor of anxiety and guilt pursuant to an
uncertain decision (if it were to be uncertain). Since we are being so speculative, we can
presume to estimate also that 10% of the decisions will have such a guilt factor, giving a
total number of about 4000 moral decisions per year, or about 13 per day.

Thus, one would count as containing the guilt factor: a choice of watching a television
entertainment or doing school homework; drinking a second glass of whiskey or not;
deciding how much money to put in the church collection box; whether or not to eat a
gourmet garlic sauce before going on a blind date; slapping a child; etc. We shall not
attempt a fine mathematical analysis of our typical citizen, Able, but merely assign him
categories and percentages, basing the categories on the kinds of mentation occurring as
the decision is made. (The classification is obviously slap-dash.)

TYPES OF MORAL MENTATION BY HYPOTHETICAL TYPICAL CITIZEN (On Annual Basis)
A.	 Practically automatic	                           40%	 2000
B.	 Conscious, sloganized	                           20%	 1000
C.	 Rationalized gibberish	                          15%	  800
D.	 Carefully calculated	                             1%	   50
E.	 Passionate, intuitive	                            5%	  250
F.	 Troubled by aware internal conflicts	             5%	  250
G.	 Troubled by aware social conflict	                6%	  300
H.	 Flights of fancy, fantasy, solipsism	             7%	  350
-	 -	                                               100%	 5000

Thus, imagining one certain day in his life, Abel might make the following ethical
choices:
Moral Action Type of Mentation Involved
Withholding a child's allowance F
Giving a seat to an elderly lady on the bus A
Overcharging a tiresome client E
Working a little overtime on his job A
Fantasying adultery with an attractive woman H
Buying a lottery ticket A
Absorbing news of a friend's death C
Angered by a newspaper article on crime A
Explaining his preference for a politician B
Commenting on an office quarrel F
Wondering whether to bring home a cake B
Deciding to be  sick  and not work one day D
Signing a negative report on an employee G

Moral Action Type of Mentation Involved

Withholding a child's allowance F Giving a seat to an elderly lady on the bus A
Overcharging a tiresome client E Working a little overtime on his job A Fantasying
adultery with an attractive woman H Buying a lottery ticket A Absorbing news of a friend's
death C Angered by a newspaper article on crime A Explaining his preference for a
politician B Commenting on an office quarrel F Wondering whether to bring home a cake B
Deciding to be "sick" and not work one day next week D Signing a negative report on an
employee G

It happens, we say, that each of these decisions gave Abel a moral twinge; the other 117
moral choices did not. Other people will have different numbers, types, and intensities of
moral action in a day's time. If one reads James Joyce's Ulysses, a fictional masterpiece
on a day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, Ireland, taking up some hundreds of pages
of print, we realize that we are probably greatly underestimating the profusion of ethical
choices in a 24 hour period.

Yet I have no idea of the range, average, or typical kinds of moral actions in a day's
time. People are called by those who know them "conscientious," "unconcerned," "busy-
body," etc., words that must refer to the extent and types of their moral behavior, but
the appropriate sample survey with what happens in moral discourse of the self with itself
and others has very little resemblance to the kinds of problems analyzed by philosophers
and imagined by most preachers and teachers. Bloom, the character, had, I guess, an
unusually active mind and more conflicts to resolve by the nature of his background,
romantic wife, advertising work, avidity for many things in life, and continuous movement
about the city.

Still, we have enough of exemplary material and a frame of reference to allow suggesting
several points about moral mentation and action. The average life presents a great
abundance of moral choices. The form of mentation employed before, after, and in the
course of acting morally is largely absurd. What happens in moral discourse of the self
with itself and others has very little resemblance to the kinds of problems analyzed by
philosophers and imagined by most preachers and teachers. Only a small portion of it is
related to science or theory except indirectly. Only a tiny percentage of a modernized
population spends much moral energy on the divine, or on methodical calculation (unless it
is one's paid job to do so).

In Civilization and Its Discontents Sigmund Freud points out the commonly known problem of
ethics:

     that ill-luck -- that is, external frustration -- so greatly enhances the power of the
     conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a man, his conscience is
     lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he
     searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience,
     imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself with penances. Whole peoples have
     behaved in this way, and still do.

He calls this an "original infantile state of conscience."

     fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is unfortunate, it
     means that he is no longer loved by this highest power; and, threatened by such a loss of
     love, he once more bows to the parental representative in his super-ego ---- a
     representation whom, in his days of good fortune, he was ready to neglect.

Fate is looked upon as an expression of Divine Will. Fatalism is very strong in early
religions and ethics. Why? The authorities and experts say: because primitive man was at
the mercy of savage natural forces. Still, if man were to be of the same ideological cast
today, he would also be fatalistic because obviously, when one think of it, very little
real control has been exercised over the immense and infinite area of difficulties
besetting us. Rather, the change of attitude has come about as a result of changed
ideology, weltanschauung, and this has changed because of a fairly long calm condition of
the Earth and the skies, and the development of a progressive, free-will, uniformitarian
(self-contradictory) philosophy. Perhaps the distinction between traditional sacral and
modern secular man is that the former has not forgotten his primeval scenarios, whereas
the latter has suppressed them very deeply and become overtly pragmatic.

John C. Caldwell wrote a memorandum, not formally published, on the Sahelian Drought of
the 1970's. We take leave to quote him lengthily:

     Fatalism 
     Fatalism is an unsuitable term because it can be used in two ways: to mean the
     rational acceptance by those living in a traditional society that they have little control
     over the forces affecting their lives; and to mean such a reluctance to attempt any
     control that they are more battered by such forces than need be the case.
     
     The acceptance of the blows of fate is often so great in traditional society that it is
     difficult to measure the personal impact of disaster or even to discuss it properly. Often
     technical aiders give up the attempt and go to talk to other technical aiders who seem to
     speak the same language, and thereby sustain the conventional wisdom and often lose all
     chance of adding to worthwhile knowledge about the situation. Sometimes they wonder if
     they have been entirely misled about the reality of the position. In one of the few honest
     reports ever written on this question, a transport expert working intimately with the
     truck drivers bringing food relief in the recent Sahelian drought and having substantial
     contact with the rural population reported that at first none of the local population
     seemed ever to have heard of the drought; later he concluded that they felt it deeply and
     were taking rational steps to minimize the hurt in ways they had known all their lives...
     In Yelwa, northwest Nigeria, it was reported that, "The Emir of Yauri and the Divisional
     Officer, head of the Local Administration, held that drought did not occur in Yelwa and
     that no problem with shortage of rains was extant". Even the farmers talked of locusts,
     weeds and lack of good lands as much as drought.
     
     There are many reasons for this kind of reaction. One is that the matter is irrelevant to
     the outsiders, whose lives are demonstrably not affected by the climatic conditions.
     Another is a belief, held also by the outsiders, that nothing can be done to alter the
     weather. Actually this view is usually more rational still -- a feeling that the bad years
     are as much part of the totality of what must be experienced as the good years and that
     the lot of man is to bend with each wind. Such attitudes are embedded deep in the culture;
     they find religious expression and are reinforced by religion. In much of the savannah and
     desert of Africa, people take drought to be a necessary divine warning that religious and
     moral standards are slipping and that a revival is due. Drought provides assurance that
     Providence is paying attention and is still concerned. It indicates a need for religious
     leaders to intercede with God. If the drought is long and severe, resort will also be made
     to age-old methods, long predating Islam, for encouraging rain... From the Western Shael
     to Somalia drought and religious observations are deeply linked.. In profane literature
     and oral tradition references, the need for water [is] equally pervasive. In these
     circumstances it is not surprising that the common man is somewhat apprehensive about
     recalling the last drought or predicting the next one. The Yelwa survey reported that,
     although there was clear agreement about the nature and seriousness of drought, there was
     complete disagreement in the farmers' responses as to when the last one occurred and
     three-quarters did not wish to encourage bad luck (or to trespass into the domain of
     Allah) by suggesting that one would ever again occur...
     
     Not only is the origin of drought either divine or in any case not to be influenced by
     Man, but so is death -- a proposition that is still true over most of the Shael most of
     the time. Western doctors working in the drought refugee camps were disturbed when the
     mothers of dying children seemed to be more concerned about obtaining cloth to serve as
     shrouds for their dead or dying babies than they appeared to be about the fact of death
     itself. Their reaction were partly explained by the fact that the babies had symptoms
     which have always presaged death in the savannah. Part, too, was the religious conviction
     that the babies were being called away and had been destined at this time to leave the
     world (the Fulani express it as the child wanting to go.) These are not societies in which
     determined efforts are likely to be made to counter the condition of an apparently dying
     child or indeed to prevent the births of children. Urbanization and other types of
     economic modernization ultimately lower child mortality both by providing greater health
     services and by convincing people that one can and should intercede with the forces that
     determine children's sickness and death.

We see how sacral man confronts secular problems and converts them into forms amenable to
sacred solutions.

The thousands of cultures existing in historical time and space have given us a fair
sample of the ideal and practical ethical capabilities of religion. The experience on the
whole has been unimpressive to one looking for a happy human way of life. The more one
trusts to religion, it seems, the less good one can obtain from science and politics. On
the other hand, science in itself (that is, science which is entirely positive and
empirical) is quite helpless to address the moral perplexities of man.

Politics, moreover, has, if anything, a poorer record than religion, speaking now of
politics as a secular approach to human issues; for politics tends by itself to depend
upon sheer physical force to order a population, and systematic violence is hardly an
improvement upon whatever chicanery and delusions historical religions employ to rule a
people. Would one have preferred to be governed by the barons or by the monks of the
European Middle Ages, by the warlords or by the Shinto and Buddhist priests of Old China,
by the shaman or by the priest, by Aaron or by Joshua? And, today in America, if the
lawyers, lobbyists, and military contractors were replaced in the ruling circles and
representative assemblies of the country by ministers, priests, and the religiously
devout, would the country be better governed, its people more peaceable, mentally healthy,
and prosperous? Would one prefer to be governed by the Shah of Iran or the Ayatollah
Khomeini?

The questions are difficult, enormously complicated, and perhaps biased. Still they are
worth considering if only as a means of suggesting that ethical progress in a society is
not to be identified with its secularization. The key to good governance is an ethical
system beyond facile contrivance. Neither religion nor secularism, as such, promises
success.

Even though it may be true that our morals come in a tangled concatenation, the human
could scarcely accept the fact. One whose overriding aim is self-control and control over
the world will refuse to recognize in a garbage pile his towering morality. This in itself
would seem to prove him a moral failure -- shifty, gutless, inconsistent, contradictory
(all that he really is, someone might comment). He feels that there must be an absolute,
pure source of right conduct somewhere, and is all to ready to find and proclaim one, even
an impostor.

Yet occasionally the human becomes ashamed of living a lie and hates himself and hates his
religion and gods for having created his dependency upon delusions. He admires the
"honesty" of the bear, the trout, the dog; they are not of two minds and forked tongue.
Why cannot his morality be so straightforward?

Blame part of it upon his obsession with history, his compulsion to repeat his worst
experiences. He demands that his morality today be that of five thousand years ago. He
demands that it be of the highest order: We know what that means; it must come from
Heaven. Further he demands that all people share in an ecumenical morality. The logical
and sociological impossibility of both demands will not deter him. He is implacable. He
will not pluck his morals from a garbage heap.

What can the scientist counsel? Try as they might, the anatomist and physiologist cannot
separate a pig and a man far enough for comfort. The biologist, try as he may, cannot
worship an arrangement derangeable by an unseen particle, and a lucky hit out of hundreds
of millions of spermatozoa. Try if he would, the anthropologist could not work up an
agitation over adulterous intercourse and let the commandment be written down by the hand
of a god. Nor can the geologist see in an awful blasted out crater more than a crashing
meteoroid. Nor the astronomer see more than a vast number of worlds in just that, a vast
number of worlds: it seems that the gods, too, have a compulsion to repeat. No, the
scientists cannot appease their consciences and man's sacrality with any consistency.

Besides providing people with morality, it is said, religion puts them directly in touch
with the supernatural realm. For the mass of people this is untrue, just as it is that
their religion gives them some special ethical competence. A few practitioners must enjoy
the facilities for communion with the spiritual universe which churches and temples
provide. The mass media (motion pictures especially) and drugs, as T. Leary has eloquently
argued along with others, and, too, many gurus, seances, and non-church rites provide this
type of communion.

The supernatural is hard to distinguish from political illusions and fictions. To the
practitioners of scientific method, a devotee of astrology and a political fascist share
several features. Both analyze the present state of world and personal affairs, and gain
confidence and make predictions on the basis of their beliefs. Knowing that a person is an
astrologist or, on the other hand, a fascist, enables the social psychologist to assert
and predict with high probability that each will possess certain attitudes. The fascist
believes in his leader as the possessor of semi-divine qualities, a superman. He has a
warped conception of history and the future (according to our scientists). The astrologist
believes his astrologer has access to supernatural knowledge; he, too, has a warped
conception of the path of history and the future. Both types are paranoiac in believing
that a great deal of what is really happening in the world is concealed by the
establishment or conspiratorial powers.

The far departure from reality in both cases may have little to do with their success in
life. General knowledge and matter-of-factness are only loosely connected with achievement
in society. The belief of both the astrologist and the fascist in the supernatural lends
each a confidence denied to less convinced persons; self-confidence is in many life
situations more of an asset than knowledge of the situation. Whereas the ordinary human is
only schizotypical, these two tend more towards the schizophrenic.

We seem to be at an impasse, owing to my downgrading of the creative moral and spiritual
functions of historical religion. Supernaturalism appears to be all manner of anti-
scientific folly. Morality exists concerning countless particulars in human activities,
even while neither religion nor secularism can justify its source, hence their
application.

We see no easy solution, perhaps none at all. Later on, we may offer some grounds to
justify a relatively absolute" morality, meaning by this verbal barbarism some unchanging
moral propositions that are themselves changing. If one might conceive of a religion that
is an integrated whole, accommodates change easily, and that does not fundamentally and
continuously violate the controls and benefits supplied by science, then this religion may
not only be superior but also popular.

Does this mean that morality is human and mundane, part of an endless process going on in
millions of transactions every day everywhere? Yes. Does it mean that the supernatural,
the divine, the gods are not the source of morality, that ethics exists without religion?
Yes. Does it mean that mankind is morally sui generis and autonomous? Yes.

Does it mean that humans are "immoral" and "wicked," with no means of setting ethical
standards? No. Does it mean that the supernatural, all that is divine and sacred, has no
effect upon ethical behavior? No.

The supernatural, as non-knowledge, is knowledge of a sort. Those who transact or seek to
transact with the supernatural in order to think upon the divine, engage in an ideational
relation with the divine, and are affected by the knowledge which we possess of the
divine. They will behave differently than those who deny the supernatural and avoid it.

Religion, to put it in commonplace language, can make people better. It should be the
"right" kind of religion, and, of course, this would be the form we are here advocating:
self-aware, open, relativistic, non-historical, connected with the sciences of natural and
socio-psychological processes, non-anthropomorphic morphologically, anthropomorphic
structurally. Let us see what science is doing that is religiously relevant and can be
adapted to religion.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 2: }
{Q THEOTROPY:}
{C Chapter 11: }
{T RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS IN SCIENCE}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART II. THEOTROPY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER ELEVEN

RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS IN SCIENCE

Out of religion came politics and then science, each reacting upon the others while going
its own way. Science is a set of interests that is religiously, socio-politically, and
autonomously determined. Science struggles to conform to a scientific method in whatever it
does. The struggle lends it its distinction, providing it with its social character.
Without the method, it is useless to speak of science. The method is applied to whatsoever
extension of the senses is of interest and controls such extension; both operations
sometimes fail but also often succeed in our day.

A scientific procedure typically puts forth a hypothesis about what is measurably expected
to occur under certain conditions, and, by finding or producing the conditions, finds or
produces the event. Wherever conditions permit, these are produced under controls; wherever
they occur naturally, they are overseen as strictly as possible. No place is allowed in
theory for supernatural conditions or supernatural effects, that is, for the intervention
so factors that are undefinable in material terms, or of an external ungovernable will.

As Alexander Hamilton quipped, when Benjamin Franklin suggested prayer at an impasse while
composing the American Constitution in 1787, we should not call upon the help of a foreign
power. Hamilton, intending for politics what Franklin had already practiced in electrical
experiments, had in mind a republic whose behavior might be predictable when certain
regular operating conditions were established by its structure.

The incident reminds us that science includes social as well as natural science. Humans are
a material factor in the one, if not in the other; they are a contaminating factor in both.
The human factor has so continually disturbed the scientific method in its application to
natural phenomena that, in a sense, all science becomes social science, especially as the
material conditions of study become more difficult and less amenable to continuous ordinary
sense observation. We cannot go here into the progressive discoveries of the intervention
of anthropo-sociology and especially psychology in the workings of natural science, citing
the works of P. W. Bridgman and others, but we can, without fear of rebuttal, warn of the
inevitable effects upon experimenters and researchers of their psychological as well as
physical presence amidst the supposedly materially and logically observer -- proof
conditions of scientific work.

Already, then we have to be on the alert, in all that passes as science-applying-
scientific-method, so as to detect the interest that inspires the work and to discern the
sometimes exceedingly subtle intervention of the mind in the process of discovery, proof,
and disproof. The "interest" in a scientific task may range from the most banal, obvious,
and limited (e. g. to polish better a lens so as to see stars more clearly; to adjust the
angle of a spade to bite the ground with less energy input) to the general and ideological,
that is, unconscious (e. g. to validate evolution by setting up hypotheses implying or
excluding neo-darwinian evolution; to calculate pre-historical sky charts by
retrocalculating or presumptively modifying present motions of the Earth and Solar system).

The aggregation of "outside" interests creates a continual uneasiness in scientific work;
like barnacles on a fine yacht, it keeps science from being "clean;" but the barnacles are
part of life at sea: no barnacles, no sailing. We may sympathize with scientists who call
up their psychic mechanisms of unconscious denial by indignation at the idea that they may
be skirting the supernatural, or, worse, serving the supernatural, or by backing up into
ever narrow slips of material phenomena where it is hoped that none can say that anything
but sense data are implicated in their work. The search for a body of pure science,
however, like the search for the Golden Fleece, eventuates in taking aboard a witch with
the long-sought prize, and Jason and his Argonauts must move on evermore in unresting
adventure.

The main theories of astronomy are as remote from experience as to be spooky. Astronomers
walk on a tightrope between science and religion, depending upon a few principles that are
empirically formulated to keep the field aloft as a science. The most that astronomers can
say empirically is that much of the universe, including fortunately most of the solar
system, exhibits some large uniformities of behavior. As soon as they retroject or project
by thousands of years they become vulnerable, that is, unbelievable.

The theories include largely a set of Newtonian laws that are fading fast and may soon be
abrogated, and which serve to fire projectiles from the Earth in the direction of objects
in space, such that, by deft ad hoc maneuvering, arrive on target. Otherwise, they boast La
Place's mathematical explanations, which La Place himself declared to be dependent upon
uniformitarian premises. Then there occur various ways of measuring brilliance, heat,
distance, chemistry, speed, and chronology of heavenly bodies, which are hopeful
speculations, thanklessly spared from all but an iota of factual proof, leaning upon one
another for support but also begging each other's question.

So great, however is faith in the one "law of falling bodies" that all else passes as
science simply because, as I said, the proof of science is the scientific method, and all
of astronomy, by this time, has become couched in scientific form. That some of the more
famous astronomers and related scientists of these decades - Urey, Hoyle, Wickramasinghe,
Crick, T. Gold, and Sagan, the name only several, have toyed with bizarre theories
impermissible to laymen, acknowledges the essential fragility and defensive posture of the
field.

Nowadays an astronomer, provided that he has an appropriate university degree, can profess
the Doppler Effect, Bode's Law, intelligence in other worlds, the "Big Bang", the La Place
theorems, empty space, straight lines, exact solar time and motions, and a dozen other
mostly conventional concepts. Whatever the mix, it is apparently unsystematic, unreliable,
ad hoc, and temporary. If scientists lay claim to authority on grounds that such a mix is
true and fully representative of reality, they can deny a "union card" to whoever disturbs
the mix. If, however, they place claims of authority in the procedures of scientific
method, then they must give a respectful hearing to any educated person who seeks to
establish an identity for Plato's "divine animal" in the universe or to prove empirically
any number of such hypotheses.

The same kind of reasoning can be directed at biology and geology. Basic conventional
theories in both of these areas of study are weak and straining at the point of collapse
into disintegration, if not supernaturalism. No more than physics can define energy other
than by fiction, operations and hypothesis, can biology define life. Fringe life forms are
several, with subatomic behavior, crystals, and viruses providing initial confusion, and
sending practitioners to more comfortable empirical fields to work. Ethology is rampant in
the fields distinguishing among animals. Evolutionary theory is a shambles; "natural
selection" is invoked as often as God in the Bible, but it is an embarrassment to do so.

The Earth Sciences, like the other fields, are making many advances to which the name
"revolutionary" is increasingly applied with some pride. Yet two of their greatest
operational concepts -- that of time and that of uniformitarian change -- are in peril.
They invest much hope in radiochronometry to preserve long time spans and therefore smooth
out curves of change, but, as I have explained elsewhere, radiochronometry is based upon
radioactivity which is affected by the kind of history that it claims to prove; that is,
catastrophe destroys time even while time pretends to disprove catastrophe.

Psychology and anthropology include so many variations of methodology that discerning the
supernatural in them is not difficult; only the naive can persistently believe that variant
methods are independent of moral perspectives, simply grasping the struggling corpus by a
toe instead of its nose. Every psychological or anthropological "school" is a supernatural
sect, whether it seeks to confront the supernatural or turn its back to it.

But, although moral and supernatural, science in itself is not capable of justifying human
action; it cannot even justify its own. The myth that it can, which was exposed as soon as
science was mature enough to bear the truth, lives on like any other supernatural belief,
lending motivation, inflaming passions, claiming moral credits, inspiring lives, and
narrowing thought and options. Probably, too, many scientific secularists labor in the hope
that something marvelous and morally convincing will grow out of their work, as penicillin
emerged serendipitously from a mold.

Willy-nilly all sciences, in their healthy vigor, are wrestling with the supernatural and
contributing to its expansion thereby. In this sense, all sciences are addressing the
foundations of religion and theology. The more scientific work that is performed, the more
areas of uncontrollability and contradiction come upon the stage. Science itself is the
biggest factory of the supernatural. It tears holes in the fabrics extending reality. It
works all the while surrounded by amateurs of the supernatural and theologians, pelted by
derision. Perhaps one might forecast the most esteemed and influential religion of the
future by locating the contemporary cult that is closest to the anomalies and radical new
interests of science.

Theology can be a science, whether it be formulated as pure or as applied science. As the
latter, it can be called religious science, or, simply, religion, just as certain
departments of political science in American universities call themselves departments of
politics (New York University) or departments of government ( Harvard University), both of
these terms meaning applied political science. A proposition (hypothesis) in theology might
then read: "All cultures denominate historical gods."

We suppose that this proposition, empirically tested, may eventuate with exceptions, such
as the Buddhists or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and possibly several other
totalitarian socialist regimes. Then, if we wish, we may restate the proposition, as some
have, to include "pseudo-gods," saying that "a god includes a figure with 3,4. .n
attributes of which at least 'x' have to be present to permit the designation 'god' to be
used." Hence certain cultures have figures such as Lenin or Mao Tse Tung who possess at
least 'x' attributes, while others have celestial figures that border upon gods such as
Region 'A' in China where "Heaven" (Ti'en) is accorded at least 'x' traits of a god, and
still others elevate masters and gurus to the stature of Mohamet.

We perceive that the pure proposition is heading in a certain direction and that by the
manipulation of the definition of the term "god," certain areas of empirical research are
opened up, and, furthermore, that some hidden intent may even be present, such as to
demonstrate the ineradicability of the worship of gods.

A related proposition in applied theology or religion can continue to illustrate the nature
of theology and at the same time show how applied propositions formulate matters often more
transparently, from the viewpoint of ideological research. Thus, one says: "To disestablish
gods of traits 'a.... n' including 'g' and 'h' it is necessary to establish a totalitarian
regime with semidivine figures of traits 'a... n' less 'g' and 'h'."

So elementary an introduction will hardly persuade anyone of the profoundity and
possibilities of theology as a science. The reader may be justifiably impatient to hear
what theology can do with propositions of the supernatural. He may be wanting to know
whether the supernatural exists, for example, and how the science of theology proves this.

One ought not be evasive; nevertheless, it must be pointed out, in anticipation of the
answer to this question, that no science pretends to answer impossible questions, even
though these may be scientifically formulated and studied. Medicine has few researchers
(perhaps one-ten thousandth of its energies?) given over to the long-term prolongation of
human life, although this may be a strong interest of the public. Nor are many
astrophysicists preoccupied with voyages of a duration greater than a few seconds of a
light-year. Nor are many political scientists or psychologists devoted to the attainment of
utopias. That is, one can conceive of a flourishing science of theology that concerns
itself hardly at all with proving hypotheses on the existence of the supernatural (and,
indeed, may flourish for that very reason, just as chemistry flourished only after it
stopped seeking for an Elixir of Life and to transmute lead into gold).

So warned, we can put forward a proposition that deals with the central interest that many
people have in religion. One may hypothesize thus: "The spiritual, defined as any event
contradicting existing laws of science relating to materiality, and probably
nonreproducible by known scientific procedures does (or does not) exist." I see no
objection to arguing that this statement is scientific. For instance, let us suppose that a
person claims to achieve a certain vision, that no one else can see. (" No one" here means
nobody in a large random sample of a population to which the visionary belongs.)

Suppose an adept in drug-use demonstrates that 'X' percent of the population, to whom a
certain drug is administered, claim the same vision as 'A. ' The vision is therefore proven
to be possible, although not proven to deal with real objects. A scientific explanation of
'A' is not forthcoming, even though the state of 'A' is reproducible. Theology takes in
consequence the position that the vision itself is actual, that 'A' and possibly some other
rare persons are capable of it, and that many others can attain it upon taking the certain
drug. Obviously we are not faced with a powerful proof of the existence of the
supernatural.

But suppose that 'A' reports that this vision is of a vaguely defined human form who tells
him "You shall see my power at Bunting Green Airport in 48 hours." Two days later a plane
crashes at said airport. This has happened while a quarter of the large sample has been
taking the drug and many of these had images predicting dire events at the same airport or
some airport at roughly the same time. It would not require many cases of this sort to
prove the validity of this type of supernaturalism (the type is very commonly asserted in
legends, mythology, and religious documents, as, e. g., when Yahweh tells Moses to fetch
the Elders on the Holy Mountain to be near The Lord and they come and do see the Lord.
(Exodus 24)

However, if one were a foundation grants officer he might give money to the "control group
drug study" as described, but not in any expectation of a resulting byproduct such as the
air crash prediction. For he would be warned by practically every alert and informed person
that cases such as this occur only insofar as visionary figures make predictions and that
the predicted events practically never occur. If you cannot expect definite and defensible
results from it, you should not grant funds to a project. Never mind the appeal that to
prove god at work once in a million projects is enough.

Suppose yet another type of proposal comes before the foundation. This asserts that,
"Totemism in religion functions to repress human creativity, while anthropomorphism in
religion increases it." The applicant conjectures simply that if people imitate an animal,
even in imaginary behaviors, they will not become very clever, whereas if they imitate an
equally fictional superman, they will become more clever. "Imitation" is, of course,
defined and measured operationally as part of religious totemism and anthropomorphism, as
are the concepts "totemism," "anthropomorphism," and "creativity."

Whatever the results of such an inquiry, which is highly relevant both to anthropology,
where pre-existing theories of the origins of totemism amount to over forty, and to
theology, where, whether or not one believes in the well-nigh universal anthropomorphism,
it is useful to know how it functions in the social structure, they are relevant to main
lines of investigation in these fields and a priori must be useful.

Our imagined foundation is not likely to look so kindly, however, upon another proposal
which crosses its threshold proposing to show that A) Moses' monotheism is anti-democratic
and B) leads to politically harmful ideas of the supernatural among persons steeped in its
learning. If government-financed and American, the foundation might decide that support for
the program might be liable to court action on grounds that it violated the constitutional
guarantee against abridgment of the freedom of religion, even though the argument might be
advanced that the Constitution has the right to discover and protect itself against
potential enemies.

A private scientific foundation would probably decide that the study would bring in no
valid or useful results. The probable pro-Moses trustees would also determine that such a
study is not scientific, even if the word "harmful" were replaced by several categories of
consequences, empirically verifiable and undeniably relevant, such as "proneness to belief
in charismatic authority," "totalitarian," "highly ethnocentric," and "highly aggressive
and non-conciliatory."

Perhaps the term "anti-democratic" might escape similar close scrutiny, although quite
vague and usually meaningless as employed; here again, the proponents of the research would
no doubt advance empirical indicators, such as scoring high in attitude test of tolerance,
respect for discussion, consultation with others, compromise in decision-making, belief
that opposing views may be right, and relative immunity from paranoia and hallucinations.

In sum, expertly espoused, the project could rebut all attacks against its scientificity,
and certainly would transport scientific method into the core materials of theology. But it
would be unlikely to win support. Generally speaking, scientific investigations have
scarcely been employed in the field of theology proper. To the degree that theology in a
given setting could be studied scientifically, it is deprived of the means, the intervening
variable being indifference. This can be promptly and cheaply demonstrated by examining the
articles in standard encyclopedias having to do with the field and those who have worked in
it. What is to be observed, creeping into the area from its fringes, are studies in
anthropology, ethnology, sociology, political sociology, and psychology, few of which ever
gain entry except through works such as Mircea Eliade's in the history of religion or works
carrying a favorable attitude (from the standpoint of the market in ideas) such as Henri
Bergson's and Teilhard de Chardin's or Hans Kung's.

A group of scholars working in the area with an approach termed "creation science" have
developed their own audience and market. Their efforts to correlate natural history with
sacred scripture qualify for the field of theology, too, and there is nothing un-scientific
about quoting words attributed to Elohim or anyone else as a hypothesis for testing human
or natural history. One would not refuse as the hypothesis for the study of, say, American
politics (1965-80), or of history generally, a quotation attributed to an historian, Harold
Acton, "All power tends to corrupt; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." One would
however have to assure himself of the usual criteria: that "power," "absolute" and
"corrupt" are operationally defined, and empirical indicators or measures provided for
them.

When certain scholars determine to test the veracity of the Bible by quoting therefrom "God
said to Noah... I will bring down a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in
which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die,"
and plan to adduce evidence from natural history of such a deluge, they are certainly
proposing an ambitious project. And to qualify as scientists, they must clarify precisely,
hypothetically, the extent of the destruction that is mentioned and its main instrument, a
watery deluge, then validate by geological and ethnological evidence the occurrence of this
particular flood (as distinct from a series of floods, etc.) And they would have to eschew
any direct test of whether in fact the conversation took place between Elohim and Noah,
because it is unverifiable. Most scientists would be logically compelled to accept a
properly drafted study proposal of this type as belonging to the realm of scientific work.

Some scholars, gripped in the avoidance mechanism previously alluded to, would deny the
relevance of any study whatsoever that would tend to confirm a scriptural statement. When
one examines an encyclopedia such as the Britannica which assigns millions of words to
theological matters and many more millions to geology and ancient history, with only a
dozen paragraphs treating the deluge issue, whether as an issue or as a disputable event,
and when one considers that the deluge problem has agitated all generations of man
everywhere since the beginning of history and before, one is inclined to ask, at least in
this instance: "Who is the more biased against science: the creation scientists accepting
scientific terms, or the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica avoiding the subject
unconsciously?"

Waiving the question, whose intent is obviously polemical, one may note once again how
important is the matter of "interests" and the motives for such interests in science. The
choice of subjects for hypothesis and study is obviously crucial in human culture and
welfare, and yet has little to do with scientific method but much to do with the
meaningfulness of science. And what is "meaning"? And who shall determine it?

"Meaning" is certainly among the most profound questions of philosophy and theology. "Why
do we exist?" "What is our destiny?" If scientists choose to interest themselves, or are
forced to occupy themselves with research on the advertising of commodities and with the
perfection of weapons of destruction, to the extent say of ten thousand times the efforts
put into the most meaningful questions of human existence, then they can hardly complain
that the profound questions are overvalued.

One is led, therefore, to suggest that the supernatural is a proper and major concern for
scientists, even if successes in the field come hard and require that they conduct humbling
investigations of themselves. Perhaps a tithe of ten per cent of one's scientific energies
and resources to theology is in order, and a similar tithe to the basic needs of humanity
in regard to a basic minimum material subsistence, a basic possibility of gaining life
experience through free movement and education, and a basically equal access to
disinterested justice in all situations of conflicts of desire or interest. For, in this
latter regard, scientific effort is also hugely biased against giving itself over to just
those problems that render mankind incapable of an adequate material substratum of
meaningfulness. It is from the basic desire for new experience that the interest in the
supernatural emerges. To stunt it, by allowing it a meaningless diet according to the
scientific method, is a form of deliberate, if unconscious, deprivation, just as much as to
stunt it by forcing it into obsessive narrow ritual which has nothing to do with scientific
method.

Under such circumstances, it becomes ironical indeed to speak of "meaningless"
propositions, as many modern logical positivist philosophers call considerations of the
supernatural, for it is precisely against their "meaningless" reductionism that religious
man is rebelling. "Words" are important in thought, but to carve them down into nothingness
except as they have rigid and narrow denotations is but an unconscious method of assuring
that the thought that occurs is to be equally rigid and narrow.

The kind of person who is then to be fashioned out of the raw material of homo sapiens
schizotypus comes to depend upon only very limited mechanisms of fear-control, to wit,
obsessed and catatonic behavior according to scientific rules, with a limited capacity for
displacement of the selves of a person, a limited ability to identify the selves with the
larger human and natural world, a severely suppressed ambivalence turning back upon the
self, and a general lack of animation of the psyche. Surely this is not the intent of
science, which only hopes to use words instrumentally and to solve otherwise impossible
problems by a sure-fire method; but it does tend to be the effect of science when science
exceeds its logical limits, demands to be "pure," and goes so far as to restrict its own
method to areas guaranteed not to possess deep human meaning.

We can take up two attitudes in the face of the threat posed by many scientists to human
development. One is that scientists are bound to fail in this method of coping with man's
essential madness. "Just be patient; the movement will collapse from its inherent
weaknesses," and indeed scientists do feel an overpowering weakness, and ensuing
exasperation, when human cultures fail to embrace their interests and techniques or, worse,
fashion crazy worlds of science fiction to dwell in while waiting for science to solve all
problems without the aid of politics or religion.

A second attitude, much to be preferred, is to encourage science in every way possible to
examine itself and proceed to the examination of human nature, upon whose basic mechanisms
science, politics, and religion must ultimately depend. What must this human being be fed
to keep him creative and within bounds? The answer may be scientific theology. Bring
together all that science is producing, half-consciously, in the way of theological
findings and blend them into an integrated metaphysics, the whole of which addresses, not
"mythical" or "rational" man, but the operative homo sapiens schizotypus.

I have examined human mental structure and operations in other works, so am permitted to
relate here only the central relation of religion and science, and of this most clues are
already familiar to the reader. Science emerges from the limited but most significant
ability of the human mind to capture pragmatically, that is, to control, the connections
between the person and an immense world of identifications and displacements. From his very
beginnings, mankind has identified and sought to control the heavens and the gods, the
mountains and oceans, the plants and animals. No other being on Earth is so ambitious; all
others are confined to such rational activity as instinct requires for the purpose of
survival and propagation.

The human mind, disordered by genesis and at birth, has the immense problem of extending
pseudo-instinctive (that is, voluntary) controls over connections with existence that have
very little to do with survival and propagation. The human, for instance, will sacrifice
(both in the functional and symbolic senses) everything -- food, family, sex, lesser
powers, safety --in his efforts to command the skies.

Furthermore, besides the skies, there is many another realm of being that he is compelled
by his mind to deal with, an infinite set of realms it seems, even though his mind, we must
remember, is assisted by only moderately competent sensory organs, so that he is encumbered
in his ingesting, questing, and adjusting.

So the need to order one's head requires that the cosmos be set in order, and it is natural
for one to apply the pragmatic( scientific) techniques that substitute for instinct in the
obtaining of both very close necessities and the most faraway necessities, and hence the
elaboration of science out of immediate pragmatism occurs on both the intimate material
level and the cosmic level.

Science is a human activity and therefore can be characterized as such, no less than
religion is a human activity. It has a history, a sociology, a sub-culture, a psychology.
It exhibits struggle, cooperation, ambition, failure, success, inducements --payoffs and
penalties, a total range of material subjects to study, just as religion is subject of
study, by the scientific method. It has religious and political aspects. It deals in
authority, fictions, myths, claims, anomalies, rituals, and hypotheses, all of which are
perilously reminiscent of religion and the supernatural. And, of course, to distinguish it
especially from all other social activities, it is obsessed with the secular ritual of
scientific method, and tends to extend the practice to all spheres of life.

The basic rite of scientific method is similar everywhere. But there come into being
elaborations, embellishments, and variations of the basic rite. Some scientists like to
think of the changes in naming, conceptualization, procedures, research interests, and so
on as "progress" or at least "different ways of looking at the same thing." Other
scientists know that they are in the grip of fashion and fads, whether in astronomy or
geology, psychology or sociology. Magic, cultism, and other overtones, usually sounded and
noticed in religious practice, can be heard in any science.

Every science must have a supernatural auxiliary. I would call it a suprascience, if such a
term would not offend. I mean that the science itself consists of a stripped-down method
and its findings, and that there must form around it not only a halo or encrustation of
fictions, hypotheses, and non-empirically derived speculations, but also an attitudinal
complex, rather like a system of illusions and delusions, or like a ruling formula (a term
which Gaetano Mosca applied to the field of political science).

This auxiliary suprascience functions as a propaganda machine to make the science appear to
its practitioners and public as continuously worthwhile, to tie it non-empirically into
various problem areas of life, to act as a lightning rod (I will not argue whether
lightning rods really are effective against lightning) to dissipate attacks gathering
against the field, to give the field a history (much of it pseudo-history) and a future
(much of the genre of science fiction).

As political science is impossible to consider without its ruling formulas (elites,
democracy, kingship, laissez-faire, militarism, etc.), so astronomy cannot exist
unaccompanied by schools of astrology, or geology without forms of uniformitarianism, or
economics without models of "economic man," or literary analysis without fads and fashions,
or medicine without magic and homeopathy, or chemistry without suprasciences, one or more
for each of its numerous subdivisions such as diets alongside food chemistry, drug cultures
alongside drugs, aesthetics alongside plastics, and so on.

There is no fakery here; there is strict necessity; man lives in the skies as well as in
his hovel; culture marches along all paths and all paths are psychically connected, even
when, especially in a scientific and pragmatic age, they may be, by an effort of will,
separated for specialized solutions.

Under these circumstances, man lives throughout the cosmos, effectively. He lives
pragmatically in the cosmos that he can experience and command through sensory
manipulation. He lives mentally (and, by ritual, pragmatically) in the cosmos that is
beyond experiencing but which he can imagine and bring into order. We may fancy that Jesus
of Nazareth would speak this parable:

     A woman of the mountains saved her money to buy a rain cloak, for she was often wetted by
     the rains there, and when she had sufficient she ventured to Jerusalem to buy a cloak. But
     the cloak was so beautiful, that she would not wear it, so as to preserve it, and all her
     clothing became wet and damaged. Now I say unto you, wear your beautiful cloak of religion
     and all of your other clothing will be saved, and your Father in Heaven will replace your
     rain cloak with the raiment of angels.

Reason, many theologians and secularists pray, will serve religion, and show a person what
is good and bad in religion. So, if there is bad religion, it is because men do not use
their reason to find the good, or they exercise their free will to choose to do bad with
religion.

Rationalism is thus used in two ways to damage religion. First, it becomes secular and
refutes most or all religious pretension, as with Voltaire and Marx. Second, and more
important here because it is a lesser known argument, rationalism erodes religion because
it claims that mankind, possessed of the gift of telling what is "true" religion from what
is "false" religion, only needs to be educated to distinguish "truth" in order to pursue
true religion.

Thus the problems of religion can be said to be solved by the independent pursuit of the
principles of reason with regard to supernatural beings and rituals. In this second
situation, the rationalist theologians, counting here Saint Thomas Aquinas insofar as he is
Aristotelian and rationalistic, lend themselves to the continuation of evil in the name of
religion; for evil becomes the result of ignorance and neglect of reason.

Reason, as conceived in traditional and conventional philosophy and theology, presumes
"free will." Free will is considered as the endowment of human nature with the capacity to
choose one out of two or more alternative options as the basis for action upon an issue.
Thus, employing reason, a choice of good over evil is imposed by free will, and an opposite
decision becomes a free choice of evil. It is this "free will" which has been used in many
cultures to explain the harsh effects of religion. Man is wicked and is therefore punished
by his gods; by no means can the wickedness be blamed on the gods.

This argument would appear to constitute an imposing defense of traditional religion and
may even explain why all other life activities are dealt with by the principles of
rationalism and free will (rather than the other way around). If so, it is one more
important indication of the extent to which the religious sphere permeates and dominates
the structure and operations of the other seemingly separated spheres of life.

Actually, the belief in free will can be viewed as a primary obstacle to the improvement of
religion. Not only does it make of man in his own eyes a wicked sinner, much more fearful
of the gods, the authorities, and the people around him than he would otherwise be, hence
aggravating his natural paranoia, ambivalence, and hostility to others. But it also makes
it impossible for man to govern himself; for he believes that he has within him, quite
divorced form the really essential set of mechanisms according to which he behaves, the
ability at any time to change himself from good to bad and from bad from bad to good.

Furthermore, the "bad" and "good" are themselves applied in the religious sphere often
quite apart from any connections which they might have with the other spheres of life.
"Free will," and rationalism as well, are fantastically individualistic fictions. They
permit the dissociation of an individual decision from all that in fact determines, and
should determine, the decision. Neither a balky donkey nor the gods themselves can prevent
man's exercising his will upon them to turn along his way.

By contrast, the theory of homo schizo holds that man derives his religion from the same
set of mechanisms whence he derives all his religion, from the same set of mechanisms
whence he derives all his other interests and activities. One cannot allow the concepts of
free will and rationalism to enter. All of human behavior considered as a mind transacting
within himself and throughout the medium of his culture is of one piece, holistic.

Free will is no longer, if it ever was, a useful idea. The known and experienced deviations
or range of choice available to us is large enough, whether determined or free, to allow
for extremely diverse decisions.

Now see what this theory of homo schizo does to the status of the supernatural and of
religion. It elevates their status, rather than depressing it. But, more than that, it
makes sacred and religious man impregnable to separatistic assaults upon his religion. For
he can say and he can prove, or others can do this for him, that even if his religious
aspects are suppressed, he will be different only in those particulars where a transference
occurs, from the prohibited areas of religion, to the permitted secular areas.

Religious man can further declare that the elimination of religion does not eliminate evil,
but merely introduces more evil to other quarters of human behavior. And he can heap up
evidence showing that secularized societies and secularized man have shown no noticeable
improvement in conduct denominated as good.

Until we decide who we are and what we want to be, we are at fault in what we are and want
to do. Unless we shut the doors against all unwanted conduct from all spheres of life,
shutting the door against religion in the hope of stopping all unwanted conduct is futile;
it will enter by the other doors. As well as saying that religion cannot be suppressed, and
as well as stating that much of religion behavior is true both in itself and in
reconciliation with science, we are now prepared to say that the suppression of religion
will not consign evil beyond man's ken. For that great task, a reconstruction of human
nature is required.

Such a reconstruction may well be impossible. We do not know enough yet to define the terms
of reform. What we can do at this stage of our study is to argue for the incorporation into
religion of our findings, both to prepare the ground for the possible coming reconstruction
and to maintain the best possible, the least damaging, of religious as well as of all other
systems.

The problem of absolute morality -- of the standards of good conduct and the means to
practice it -- must go unsolved here. Absolute morality may be forever beyond human
abilities to demonstrate. Short of this, we resort to what many philosophers before us have
advocated, a natural law of human behavior: How people have always behaved and seem
compelled to behave is restructured so that the consequences which people seem always to
have wanted -- even when acting in contradiction -- will ensue.

Since we do not appeal to gods, reason, or secular authorities, nor to charism, faith, and
revelation, it would appear best to label our natural law as hypothetical, tentative, and
only so good as its consequences are acceptable to most people, whether educated or not, in
all cultures. This might be called a natural moral consensus.

To summarize from suggestions offered in various passages of our work, we perceive four
essential and general human demands: for freedom from fear, for material subsistence, for
new experiences, and for a disinterested arbitration of human conflicts. Fearlessness;
subsistence; experiencing; and justice: these words may be used also.

All of these require controls over the self (selves), others, and nature. Control requires
skills (considering even brute force as a kind of skill at leverage, if nothing else), and
mankind is obsessively driven to elaborate his internal and external control system to a
stage where he has obtained what he can regard as minimal and sufficient guarantees of his
several needs.

The overall problem of a culture is, unconsciously or consciously, to provide a network of
practices that will supply its people with excellent chances of obtaining these guarantees.
And so we proceed to human relations, technology, politics, religion -- family government,
world government, cosmic government -- and science, which acts to supply better ways for
cultures to fulfill these needs.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 2: }
{Q THEOTROPY:}
{C Chapter 12: }
{T NEW PROOFS OF GOD}
{S - }



THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART II. THEOTROPY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER TWELVE

NEW PROOFS OF GOD

Ideas of quantavolution -- of sudden great changes -- attract the attention of historians
of religion in especially two regards: religion was, and must remain in whatsoever guise,
the companion of the newly born, traumatized, self-aware human mind; and the earliest
religious voices, still speaking through the sacred documents of ancient times, were
telling many truths, even literal truths about natural events, human nature, and human
institutions -- truths that bespeak quantavolutions.

Yet quantavolution also presents a distressing problem to those who believe that, if once
they could approach closer to the earliest days, when "the gods walked on earth" they would
be inspired, ennobled, and reinforced in their faith. This is not the case and they may
become downhearted and skeptical.

They should realize that even before quantavolution was assembled as a body of theories,
those theologians, mystics and millennialists who ventured into the great first days of
creation had to feel the terror and suffering that comes with "looking upon the face of
god." Hence, indeed, most religions have calibrated the approaches to the sacred, so that
only the well-prepared and thoroughly-warned would attempt the journey. That is, long
before quantavolutionism, it was fully known that only the hardiest of souls could cope
with the revelations of the first ages, could endure the historicity of the apocalypse.

It is possible to absorb the theories of quantavolution solely in the form of science,
eschewing all contact with the religious experience as truth, while pursuing every avenue
to religious experience as sociological and psychological fact. That is, quantavolution
would only ask of its students that they exercise its hypotheses and evidence according to
the current general methodology of science. This would be the more comfortable and easier
choice.

Alternatively, however, one may confront the issue of the religious truth contained in this
body of revolutionary theories, probing, inquiring whether perchance there is inherent in
them something that those seeking a truth that is religious will recognize as valuable. The
road is hard, and lined with the philosophical tombstones of many catastrophists and
uniformitarians who have gone before, trying each in turn to transport a body of science
into the realms of religious truth. Nevertheless I shall aim at the same goal.

I shall try to reach my goal in several steps. A metaphor of a box is used throughout. The
human mind is inextricably contained within a physiologically limited box of perceptive
possibilities and cyclical redundant logic.

The truths of religion are not within this box. Yet the existence of the box is proof of
the supernatural, this being what is outside the box, which, we must admit, has an outside.

It is well that religious truths are not within this box, for the box limits and shapes its
contents, and therefore disciplines the fields of knowledge that it holds.

The box nevertheless is indefinitely expansible. Its resources and limits have not been
fully tested or strained. (This differs from the expansion mentioned above, which was only
communicative expansion.)

In whatever direction the box expands, it is not likely to be limited. Hence the
supernatural is not bounded by the accomplished full testing of any of its facets.

The simplicity and complexity of things are subjectively perceived or operationally
invented. Things is themselves cannot be defined as absolutely simple or complex. The same
is true of the concepts of space (size), time, past, and future. The same is true of "life"
or "animism." It is subjective percept or operational invention, not defined other than by
the human mind.

Now, if god is whatever is beyond the box (i. e. limitless), god must be also what is in
the box, inasmuch as what is in the box is speculating upon what is outside of it, as we
here.

Therefore, all that we sense and think in ourselves and our perceptible and thinkable world
is part of the supernatural. If the supernatural and god are joined, we are pantheists.

Putting god into an animistic metaphor, god is our judge; god has already judged us. We
already are composed and function according to god's cosmic spirit, by intelligence, and
necessity.

The very nature of our ignorance, then, cribbed and confined in our cosmic box, constitutes
a proof of the existence of gods. The agreement of extended ignorance from the crypto-blind
bio-box probably stands up better under modern scrutiny than the traditional arguments for
the proof of god that we mentioned in an earlier chapter. Furthermore, a second modern
proof may tend to confirm the existence of gods, and support the proof from the cosmic box.

The universe is presently thought to be some billions of years old, probably finite,
although the boundaries are not clear, and populated by many billions of stars. Many stars,
if not most of them, are believed to have spawned planets. Planets will have had ample
occasion to acquire atmospheres and "the building blocks of life," as we like to say from
inside our cosmic box. We are also forced to admit that life as we know it is defined from
inside our box, and "intelligence," as we might conceive it without actually knowing it,
may be a product of other means of manufacture and assembly.

Even if we have to conjecture the birth of gods from the elements of the atomic table, the
combinations and permutations of this, plus the practically unlimited conditions of time,
space, temperature, and pressure can provide the substance and form of a god whom even
scientific materialists, even Karl Marx, must recognize as authentic and in being.

In the creation of all things, we must contend with the principle of entropy, a term
invented by Clausius in 1865 to refer to the state in which thermal energy is no longer
available for mechanical work. Later, and especially with Norbert Wiener, the term was
broadened to describe "the running down of the universe." Clausius himself had written "the
entropy of the universe tends to a maximum." (Thus the idea merely subsisted until a
century of history changed the optimistic mid-nineteenth to the pessimistic mid-twentieth
century intellectual climate.)

Given even a time of short duration, or of a conventional dozen billion solar years, the
number of occasions for "phenomena" or "phenomenal intelligence" to appear in the universe
is extremely large. Cases of "negative entropy," that is, of existence moving toward
creation rather than desuetude, must be very numerous.

There is no reason to use life on earth as the archetype of the universe. As the
Encyclopedia Britannica reports, "all the organisms of the earth are extremely closely
related, despite superficial differences. The fundamental ground pattern, both in form and
flesh, of all life on earth is essentially identical." Nor ought we take mankind as the
measure of the product of potential habitats of intelligence. In some proportion of them,
something much more than homo sapiens schizotypus must have emerged. There should exist
planets or complexes where beings of much greater intelligence and competence than
ourselves exist. There must be a range of such superior intelligences from superman to
gods.

Whether individuals, conglomerates, complexes, spirits, physiological aggregations unknown
to us, or even creatures suggesting ourselves, these will all have many times our
abilities. Perhaps some will have supernatural capacities (for we cannot understand them) a
billion times our own. Perhaps one of the beings may have generated power to move the
universe itself; for, as the second law of thermodynamics maintains that the universe and
all matter within it is running down, but an exception is made in the case of life which is
negatively entropic, so there is an excellent chance that somewhere in the universe in an
intelligent being, of which we can conceive but which we cannot become, whose powers are
such that it is in control of the universe moving in the direction of intelligence and
progress as we conceive of it: this being certainly must be called god. It would then be
for all practical purposes omniscient and omnipotent. That it would be all-caring, omni-
benevolent, may also be presumed, for to take care of itself it would have to take care of
the universe in some part, as a case of "enlightened selfishness," in our limited human
terminology.

Thus the traditional concept of god is exercised with a new proof involving the probability
of supreme negative entropy. God is created by the universe, working in opposition to the
principle of entropy with the equally universal principle of creation. The creative
principle, arising like the phoenix from its ashes of entropy, must naturally turn to
controlling the universe.

If this god is not already a fact, still, in the aeons of time to come, it must become a
certainty. As the local gods of the solar system were born and died in succession, there
may have been many temporary or quasi-omnipotent gods in times and spaces beyond all solar
system experience. The universe offers billions of chances for a supreme god to arise in
the future. Sooner or later, the universe will create its supreme master, just as the
earth, this indescribably minute place, has created its locally supreme master, the human.
Whereupon truly the universe would be intelligently ordered, as contrasted with the present
chaos, and the far-flung parts, including our own, would be irresistibly induced to
cooperate.

Let us proceed to discuss this theory of divine actual or potential existence at greater
length.

To establish a new religion on solid grounds requires that the history of religion as the
history of the true god be rejected. If one relies upon the scientific history of religion,
one would be led to the conclusion that gods do not exist. Luckily for those who yearn for
gods, one can go beyond the history of religion, to psychology and philosophy. There they
will learn that the human mind is basically limited. Its perceptions and condition are
structurally bounded. To exceed this structure they must rely only upon corollaries of the
cosmic proof: 1) extension of some hitherto neglected remote recesses of the structure of
mind and body and 2) a type of reasoning that proceeds on an "if.... then" basis which
says: This is desirable; the question is open; the desirable is therefore not foreclosed.
If god exists or gods, and is as we think god ought to be, then we are happier and can seek
progress. Since the "if" cannot be foreclosed by any known means, the "then" is always
possible.

What is greater than the self can only be known anthropomorphically, that is, by extensions
of the self as it is known to one. Hence, if the universe has dimensions that are quite
divorced from human traits (or their extensions), we can never know them. But the premise
that more exists, which we cannot possibly know, is itself a proof of the existence of
gods, even though we cannot know them in any other way than in this paltry manner.
Moreover, it is possible that dimensions of the universe hitherto unknowable to us will
make themselves known, whether because they change so as to be comprehensible (" God makes
himself known,") or we change ourselves structurally by genetic accident or manipulation.

If the universe has only those qualities which we now possess or may in the future possess,
or if the universe changes its qualities, then we can come to a knowledge of the gods that
we, in our limited way, know must be there.

Are these possibilities of knowledge additive? can we say that our full knowing potential
plus the potential of the unknown gives us virtual certainty that gods exist? Like the lost
sailor, we know that land lies in every direction. Also we know that land may be far away
if we go in some directions. Can we determine in what direction the divine land lies? A wee
mouse, five centimeters long, is in many ways superior to the human. In proportion to size,
he can run 20 times as fast, jump fifty times as high, scale walls, swim naturally well,
has senses superior to those of men, and trains readily for reactive tasks. His brain and
his organs are marvels of miniaturization, relative to ourselves. The outstanding
difference is that homo is schizotypical, that is, self-aware and all that flows from this
fact.

We know nothing about any species that has the equivalent of schizotypicality and what this
affords us. We can conjecture how many species in all the universe might be schizotypical
or have other systems capable of performing operations that we designate as being along the
parameter of the human-as-divine up to the exceedingly divine, that is, the full god.

Moses and his followers claimed that Yahweh could see and punish malefactors and
delinquents. The Christian religion says that God can know the minds of all persons.
Paranoids will sometimes say that they can tell what all minds in a crowd are thinking and
single out individual minds, too. A body containing 10 20 cells can pass a signal to most
or perhaps all cells in a brief time so that they are all reacting consonantly. The number
of Jews is 10 7 +, of Christians 10 9 , of humans 4 x 10 9 . The coordination of "nature"
exceeds that of gods, so to say, in some respects, and goes far beyond the most paranoid
human mind. (Indeed, many humans are content to control one other person, such as a spouse
or child.) Coordination means two things: communication and control.

Thus far, the shocking modern revelation of the numberless stars and vast extent of the
universe has been converted into constructive thought regarding the possibility of there
being other intelligent beings in the universe, with whom we might possibly communicate.
Inevitably the thought has been elaborated into contentions that at some time in the past,
astronauts have settled upon our planet, assimilating biologically with lesser breeds, or
constituting the human race itself. The thought has also moved, theoretically, to the
contention that more intelligent or hostile or flagrantly incompatible beings might be
confronted, to our embarrassment, should we be successful in communicating with
exoterrestrials.

These discussions employ formulas not essentially different from what we employ here. We
take up estimates of 10 11 galaxies of 10 11 stars each, without counting dark stars or
clouds, reaching thus 10 22 stars. We count 10 22 dark stars and dark clouds as having
theogonic possibilities (" darkness" is our problem). Gods take time to develop, but we may
assume that the average body has had enough of such time, billions of years. Whether, for
instance, the Earth has subsisted for 4 x 10 9 or 10 6 years, it has had at least a 1/ 10
44 possibility of generating a god. Of the total source bodies, some 10 11 (plus dark stars
and clouds) would exist in our galaxy alone. We are not counting the separate planets or
comets, that would multiply these several stellar figures by 2, 5, 500, 1000 or some other
multiple not known, but depending on the average number of planets per star.

Suppose that science on Earth expands its capabilities ten times, a figure not in excess of
many predictions from various fields. Suppose the human achieves an IQ of 160, lives to be
200, and can travel to the neighboring star cluster of Arcturus. Suppose the human is even
morally set upon acting as god. The human will probably not be a god, but he will show that
gods are possible somewhere. That is, it does not take too much more than man can be in
order to define a god or demigod.

If there also are and have been 5 x 10 11 centers for realizing divine beings in the galaxy
and this over a period of time -- in fact, why not infinity? -- then the chance that one or
more gods have developed is certain. Probabilistically, at least one is certain; let us say
five are highly probable; 5000 are likely; 5 million are at least 50% probable; and some 50
million gods are possible, this in our galaxy alone. In the universe as a whole, these
figures would be multiplied by 10 22 . At 5000 per galaxy, the gods would number 5 x 10 25
, too many by far to crowd into Valhalla. If gods should die (speaking of the
g”tterdammerung), that is, lose some or all of their capabilities, one would halve the
number of gods in the confines of the stipulated universe.

Among all of the probable godships, should not many have evolved to a multi-galactic god ,
and at least one to supreme god of the universe? An interesting feature of the results here
is that there appear to have been more gods than the conventional formulas claim there to
be planets with intelligent life forms. This paradox occurs because one does not constrain
estimates by looking for something close to man, to technical civilization, or intelligent
life as we know it. Further the requirements of an environment similar to man's can be
waived; the gods need not be limited by humanly severe temperatures, or the presence of a
long string of prior primitive life forms called for by nonquantavolutionary evolution.

Thus, as soon as less conservative considerations than are customary are set for
intelligent forms in the universe, the number quickly exceeds the number of gods estimated
here. Ordinary calculations of life spans are irrelevant, too; the occurrence of gods
presumptively reduces time constraints; the possibility of divine viability stretching over
much, most or all of the age of the universe adds to the probability that gods are active
now.

In sum, of the terms of the formula used in many discussions of communication with
extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) only the gross number of celestial bodies is usable in
estimating the likelihood of the existence of gods. To find the number of extant technical
civilizations in the galaxy, by the "Green Bank formula" of F. D. Drake, N, one multiplies
R* (the average rate of star formation over the lifetime of the galaxy), by fp (the
fraction of stars with planetary systems), by no ( the mean number of planets per star that
are ecologically suitable for the origin of life as we know it), by fe (the fraction of
such planets on which life in fact has arisen), by fi (the fraction of such planets on
which intelligent life has evolved), by fc (the fraction of such planets on which a
technical civilization such as our own has developed) and by L (the average life of a
technical civilization). That is, N = R* (fp)( no)( fe)( fi)( fc)( L). [Product of these
factors.]

Results, depending upon the estimates fed into the formula, have ranged from one to
millions of technical civilizations in the galaxy. Our own technical civilization capable
of interstellar radio communication is only a single generation old. The 1000-foot-diameter
telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, existing transmitters and receivers, and a
presumption of the same type of equipment on another planet would provide a communication
medium of 1000 light-year diameter, providing 10 6 stars. Space travel and laser
transmission are technically near availability to extend somewhat the range. There is
therefore some chance of a communication exchange now.

But how have we defined a god that gods should be so numerous? By god is meant a
coordinated divine activity such that 1) it can endure or reproduce or replicate itself
indefinitely under highly varying ambient conditions, that 2) it can act so as to expand
communication pathways and thus its influence at an exponentially increasing rate, that 3)
its proven scope and domain of intervention is extensive within a galaxy or is
multigalactic, and contains no inherent limits, that 4) it provably (in human terms) acts
so as to increase the aptitude and appropriate behaviors of the most promising existences
(including humans) with the end in mind of reducing entropy and establishing theotropy as
the dominating principle of the universe.

How do these qualities, if applied to the human condition, reduce fear, war, and famine,
while increasing love and knowledge? I have mentioned but a few of such moral connections
in these pages. Their deduction from the principles of godship do not appear to present
problems in excess of those traditionally and successfully solved by theologians such as
Saint Thomas Aquinas when deducing human moral behavior from the qualities of gods.

Theotropy can be considered from the standpoint of gods and of humans. Regarding gods, the
achievement of influence is by means and in terms that we understand or cannot understand.
So far as we can understand, gods must extend themselves either immediately or by a
succession of moves.

Insofar as our world is governed by no intelligent divine influence -- at least no
sufficiently powerful and satisfactory influence   then no "great" god has even in our
short -- time view extended itself over us, whereupon we can probably more correctly
imagine that any god occupying itself with humans is proceeding by a succession of moves,
that is, by growth. Both may be occurring, a onetime immediate assumption of our world and
a succession of moves to change us.

A reader who has pursued our works on quantavolution knows how we believe man to have
acquired his nature and how the world as we know it has come about. Thereupon he may ask:
"Why does man need a god, considering all the troubles gods have appeared to cause?" Worse,
"What legitimate reason has man for seeking god?" Worse of all, "What can any god do for
man that is good for man?"

First of all, none of these questions can destroy the gods if they do indeed exist. No more
than one can dispose of tax collectors who are troublesome, unwanted, and useless. From a
homocentric point of view, however, we can be more cooperative in responding.

We need all the help we can get, plainly and simply. We are inadequate to our dearest
wishes for the universe: that it be controlled and beneficent to ourselves and the
posterity with which we identify.

We need help of a quality that is beyond the ability of everything whose qualities we know
directly. Our faithful dog, Shep, is not up to the task. Nor are even our most trusted
friends and allies. If there is a god, we need him.

The third question gives us pause. If the price exacted by seeking, finding and cooperating
with god is our most priceless gifts, we may prefer our troubles, death, entropy, and
oblivion. This leads abruptly to the question which we seem to confront at every turn of
the way. What does, what ought, the human wish to be? If he wishes to be like the gods, and
the gods are likely to be so indulgent, then all is well and good, and we should search
eternally, if necessary, for the gods.

One's purpose on Earth will then be answered from the divine point of view: the human is
created for the divine task of helping to save the universe. He, and all developing and
positive matter, are assigned this overall function. The universe has bred the human as a
way to its own survival, as a challenge to its death, as an antibody against the death and
dissolution foretold by the second law of thermodynamics.

Elsewhere we have written of man's basic needs, to fearlessly subsist, experience and live
justly. If the gods are theotropic, we have nothing to fear from them except the loss of
that element in us which is self-destructive and entropic.

What might this element be? Let us call it the diabolic, because it will turn out to be
that often highly attractive mixture of uncertainty, fear, hatred, spite, lies, greed and
egotism that goes into some of the most wonderful human creations. Will not the gods take
from man the taste of evil for which he slavers? Or will the gods, like certain historical
gods, allow man the gift of diabolism with all that it does for his music, dance, art,
inventions, and politics?

This is one question; another question, equally important, is related: will the gods take
away self-government, self-rule, decentralization of decisions, whether large or small?
There is indeed an argument, posed as, "Let every man go to hell in the own way." The felt
uniqueness, the exultation, the happiness of determining one's way are not to be given
over, even to the gods, one senses -- and we can hear the most stupid as well as the most
brilliant of humans saying so.

Perhaps the gods will be indifferent to such trivialities, perhaps they work sloppily,
letting as much as we know of life pursue itself along their general guidelines. Or perhaps
it will happen that in their intense pursuit of godliness, humans will get their fill of
risks, conflicts, imagination, and autonomy. In any event, this crisis is far down the line
of theotropy, whereas man's decline and destruction are always close at hand. We prefer to
think therefore that, in the pursuit of the divine, humanity will have all that it will
want of symbolism, diversity, and excitement.

From the human standpoint, gods are to be awaited and solicited. If they are awaited, the
presumption is that the gods are interested in expansion for its own sake. Any part to the
universe will do. This is probably an unsafe assumption because it implies a certain kind
of god. But god is more than a mere "land-grabber," we reason. He is interested in his own
development; he is maximizing his opportunities of theotropy and not interested in entropic
refuse. Therefore, gods are to be invited. For some lucky mystics, gods may indeed already
have been entertained. I cannot understand the means, hence cannot confirm the encounters.

But what are the occasions for conflict among potential and actual gods in the galaxy and
universe prior to the universal achievement of a single supreme god? Will there not occur
what even mankind has experienced on its low level of achievement, a set of squabbling
barons, a battle of the gods? Then the gods themselves will do what it is now widely
believed that man will do - destroy themselves and contribute to the entropy of the
universe?

As they move out to order and exalt the universe what will determine their jurisdictions
and, as implied in their aims, will merge them into one? Let us look once again at the
traits of the divine bodies. They excel in expansiveness, in sensitivity to domains of
potential theotropic existence, and in promoting theotropism (countering entropy). It is
this last that determines outcomes. The theotropism or divinity that competes most
effectively to eliminate entropy will merge with other divinities to the degree that they
operate in the same way. It is to their interest to behave in this way. In the end it will
be the constructive principle of the universe that will influence and absorb all potential
theotropy in the universe. Creation will triumph over destruction. This is the aim of the
universe, the greatest of natural laws, and is the ultimate good.

A second objection occurs. If, as has been asserted in this work, man is not a rational
animal in any usual sense of the term "reason," and if sublimation is employed to move him
from his great fear of himself and the world into large intellectual, imaginative and real
worlds far beyond himself, then why is this proof of the existence of divinity not another
sublimatory consideration? Is this all "mere" sublimation?

The answer is that sublimation is not unreal, even though it may refuse to treat directly
with its origins in human nature. Its rationalizations are testable by rules of reality,
logic, consensus, pragmatism, and evidence; this, too, we have said earlier and will
discuss later as well. Granted this, the theotropic proof must contend with all other
assertions about divinity on the basis of which ones best fit the state of the world as we
barely know it and of whatever provides the best consequences for the human condition. Homo
sapiens schizotypus is released from his fearful bind and contradictions by this view of
the supernatural and is directed to employ his energies constructively --theotropically
rather than entropically.

If the principle of entropy exists -- and we think that this is so out of our material
perceptions -- then its opposite principle may exist because, first, the world is not fully
entropic, next, there is an anti-entropism observed, and, third, entropism must originate
from something that decays. In this last case, the something that decays must have been
non-entropic, possibly anti-entropic, that is, theotropic.

The entropy and theotropy can co-exist: they do so under our eyes. It may appear that the
theotropic is declining, but this may be false. Our narrow perspective may be giving false
measures, and we are better conditioned to detect entropy than theotropy. Especially with
our present confidence in materialism, that is, our indifference to theotropy and our
desire to emulate the ideal instinctive animal, we may be today underestimating theotropy.

But is not the theotropic also material? It can properly be conceived as such, but only if
we realize that most of what we call material is the refuse of theotropic materialism. As
to what composes theotropic processes, we submit that theotropy is composed of what is
tangibly material, of some extremes of the knowably material (particles, waves, light,
etc.) of material potentially known to us but not yet known, and of material unknowable to
us. I only call it material for fear of erecting barriers between the "material" and
"immaterial."

Under the regime of theotropy, it appears that mankind is to be more of an observer,
thinker and admirer of the abstract than the active being who is acted upon. How can he
behave religiously otherwise, and how can his morals connect with this religion?

First, one who possesses this religion will be occupied with the future, as historical man
has first sought a heavenly salvation and lately has sought salvation in the future also
but in a more scientific and technological way.

Second he will be more objectively self-searching and theological than historically he has
been. He is looking for a different kind of divinity; this affects the quality of the
search.

Thirdly, he has to consider the question: Do I wish to attract gods? Do I wish to be
adopted by gods, lightning-struck so to speak; do I wish to become chosen by the gods? Do I
wish to be embraced by a larger theotropy than I have means of becoming in myself??

Surprisingly the answer to all of these questions will be a strong affirmative. (I say
surprisingly for I feel personally that we have no right to expect such definite answers to
questions that we have formulated with such difficulty and hesitation.) Behind the banners
of entropism stands a sad, scientoid diabolism. We do want to live in theotropy, in the
future, in the realms of the gods.

Then the question becomes : How do we attract the gods? Do we do so with signals, search
parties on vehicles, sending care packages of our little technical tricks into outer space?

Or do we go seeking the gods with a message that we think will have meaning for them? What
could such a message be ?

Our best message, our invitation to the gods, is our ability to take care of our own world
and its surroundings. It stands to reason that the gods, if they have already reached us
actually or potentially, or if they were to come upon us in their expanding operations in
the universe, would either embrace us or dismiss us by indifference or destruction.

What would achieve their embrace? Obviously, they would embrace theotropy, for that is
their essence. What are the signs of theotropy, which in our older language we might call
blessedness? They would have to be signs of which we are capable. These signs are not
negligible; they are signs of godliness.

Theotropy is the trend of existence to achieve divine influence. Inasmuch as humans may be
capable of it, it calls for an expansion of the influence of life over death and of mind
over matter. Thus, it appears that the very principles that we have ascribed to the
theotropy of the gods are principles that reverberate down the corridors of human time and
thought.

If these principles go unattended or are unsuccessfully pursued by mankind, the gods will
not punish us; the gods have more important matters on their more universal "minds." They
will ignore us, and let us continue in the predictable shortness of our forever to suffer
both from our own behavior and being god-forsaken, which must mean the loss of our hopes,
of our development, and of our future. There are a great many people who believe that god
may exist but always has reason to punish people, so much so that it is useless to attempt
even a decent peaceful and material subsistence for mankind. Famine, plague, flood or war
are seen to be inevitable divine visitations. Such apathy and fatalism go along with the
succession of gods who could hardly allow mankind to recover from one catastrophe before
bringing down another upon it.

At the other extreme of materialism stands the vanguard of the technical achievers. So
flushed are they with the successes of empirical science, that they predict a never-ending
invigoration of life and conquest of vast reaches of outer space. Among these are the ones
who would fill capsules with gimcracks to fire into far space.

The fatal flaw in their vision and plans is a misperception of human limits. The human race
stands at a crisis of will and belief, of world disintegration and warfare, even as
vehicles hurtle into outer space. Humans have not solved their basic issues of life over
death, and mind over matter. They may be incapable of doing so without the help of a great
achievement, is to invite the gods for help on matters of life and mind. This the
technocrats and military operators of the political economy and outer space are of no mind
to do, whether they by acting in the name of mosaism or atheism. In their arrogance, they
see no need to invite the gods to their feast. Or they try to beckon to them by exercises
paralleling the long history of sacrificed beings and the destruction of nations.

We conclude that gods -- or god, if you will -- exist. They do not exist in fear; fear is
human alone. They exist in our mind as the mind tests the limits of reality and invents,
while integrating these limits, a special kind of reality in the supernatural -- the area
of the divine. Gods exist outside the mind with as much probability as the universe that we
contemplate is real. In these two senses, god is reality.

Granted reality, the divine must be our most important reality. This may seem to be skating
on the thin ice of scholasticism. "Tell it to a starving man." But it is a statistical
reality and in the final analysis it is statistics that compose reality of all kinds. The
divine is the most important because it is the only distinction that is uniquely human; it
comes straight out of the awful realization of one's divided soul, two or more material
contradictions, ineradicable and appositionally creative.

Climactically a reconciliation takes place in philosophy and science. To know oneself is to
know more than oneself; it is to know the divine. Here is the reason for the failure of
historical religions, which damaged the soul is order to force it to hold delusions about
"hard reality" and external gods at the same time.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 2: }
{Q THEOTROPY:}
{C Chapter 13: }
{T CATECHISM}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION
PART II. THEOTROPY:

by Alfred de Grazia


CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CATECHISM

A catechism can summarize the fundamental facts and doctrines of religion from our
perspective. The word "catechism", which now broadly means an elementary instruction manual
in a given field, has for seventeen hundred years meant, more precisely, exercises for
instructing Christian neophytes. Before the word achieved popularity in its Latinized Greek
form, it may have come from the combined words "tying down", connoting a binding divine
covenant. Less religiously, it recalls a metaphorical American usage of the same words, as
when we "tie down" a matter so as to put it is form for easy handling. Our catechism here
intends to tie down in a well-known format the basic facts and doctrines of religion
deriving from our study.

Setting forth a catechism exposes to a pitiless light our beliefs concerning religion. The
onus of proselytism comes with it, for a catechism must tell people what they should
believe. There are health and strength in such an exercise.

1. How was the universe created?
The world has always existed in some of its infinitely possible manifestations, and is
being created in some others today, and so it will go on.

2. How long will this Earth endure?
The Earth will endure for an inestimable time, depending upon mostly unpredictable natural,
and divine human events.

3. How much can a person know about the world?
One can know more than one can learn and much less than what exists. 4. Can one know
oneself?
One can know oneself within the limits of one's abilities to know oneself.

5. Are the limits of these abilities known and achievable?
The limits of the abilities to know oneself are unknown but more extensive than the
abilities anyone has shown.

6. What should a person know of oneself?
One should appreciate one's operative complex of self-controls.

7. Does a person have free will?
One acts in accord with one's nature and circumstances; free will as action in ignorance of
one's nature and circumstances can exist, but is not characteristic of an autonomous
rational person.

8. What is known absolutely?
Nothing that matters. The absolute should be ignored because its main function is to
promote absolute fear.

9. What is absolutely clear?
Nothing, and tolerance of ambiguity should be a religious principle, both to combat fear
and to express the supernatural.

10. What is science?
Science may be usefully defined as the method of choosing the largest chance of certainty
in solving problems whose conditions and objectives are known.

11. How should science relate to religion?
Science should solve an increasingly large number of the indefinitely large number of
problems of religion, while religion expresses some of the directives and limits of
science.

12. How should we express our relation to cosmos?
We should relate to the cosmos by understanding it and celebrating it.


MORALS

13. What needs has one?
One's needs are fearlessly to subsist, to experience, and to be treated justly.

14. What duties has one?
One's duties are to help others fearlessly to subsist, to experience, and to be justly
treated.

15. Who is divine among people?
Whoever studies and expresses the divine is divine.

16. What differences exist between means and ends?
A means is a process of action that contributes to a more general process of action; it is
rational according to how it works; it is deemed good or bad in its own effects and
therefore contributes more or less good or bad to the end process.

17. Is good rewarded?
Insofar as the religious and secular realms are consonant, good action is rewarded in both;
the rewards of religion should be in its practice and in the health of character that it
fosters.

18. Should evil be punished?
Evil should be compensated for, personally and socially, not punished; it should be treated
as a problem of coping with natural forces.

19. Do right and wrong belong in the realm of the gods?
Yes, they belong where the human and divine realms interact.

20. Can a person distinguish right and wrong?
Yes, by exercising himself in the fringes of the supernatural realm where the mundane realm
fashions its judgments.

21. What is right or wrong?
Right is a determination of consistency in the consequences of an action with the divine
aspect of a person.

22. By what rules should a person act?
A person should act by the rules of one's nature adjusted to the related ordinances of a
consensus of like-minded others.

23. How should a person behave toward oneself?
One should accommodate consistently one's divine and mundane character.

24. How should a person behave towards others?
One should act towards others as to a differently shaped development of oneself, hence part
of oneself, hence considerately, hence helpfully.

25. How should a person behave toward plants and animals?
One should behave toward plants and animals as toward others, while recognizing in them an
acute differentiation from oneself in the tragic divine need to derive instinctive
gratification from their exploitation.

26. How should a person behave toward natural objects?
As toward animals and plants, in descending series of their divinity.

27. How should a person behave toward the supernatural?
One should practice an understanding of its potential.

28. What morality is devoid of religious significance?
All morality should be religiously and politically promoted.

29. What morality should be religiously and politically promoted?
Morality should be promoted which comes from a constitution that is based upon consensus
and offering procedures that among other effects tend to establish the dominion of divinity
in humans.

30. Is a person without religion bound to be wrong and evil?
His views are narrow and he may not understand his own religiousness, but his actions may
neither err nor have bad consequences.

31. What function does a person serve in the world?
The person represents and takes part in universal manifestations.


THE SUPERNATURAL AND DIVINE

32. Is there a supernatural part of the world?
What one cannot perceive and what one cannot understand, even if he learns something about
it is the supernatural.

33. Is the supernatural divine?
The supernatural is divine insofar as it is meaningfully integrated into human mentation,
but divinity implies no superiority over the pragmatically knowable.

34. What is the divine on Earth?
The divine on Earth is a uniquely human way of looking upon oneself and the world.

35. How does one worship the divine?
The rituals for worshiping the divine are whatever exercises are useful to achieve it.

36. What is sacred?
Everything viewed in its supernatural and divine manifestations is sacred.

37. What is faith?
Faith is positive morale, a conviction of meaningfulness about what one is thinking and
doing, which when related to the divine is religious faith.

38. What is revelation?
Revelation is the recognition by an internal or external stimulus of an important pattern
to existence, not previously experienced, to which if a divine element is present, the term
"religious" can be attached.

39. What is discovery?
Discovery is a revelation purposefully brought about, whose applications are readily
apparent and available to others.

40. What should authority be?
Authority should be the legitimate power of one person over another, which may be
religious; it should receive its legitimacy by the consensus of those ruled and should lose
its legitimacy to the extent to which it is physically and mentally coercive.

41. How should we behave toward the sacred?
As toward the mundane, although, as with mundane varieties, we should act toward the sacred
appropriately in accord with its distinctions.

42. How much of our energies should be given to the divine?
As much as necessary in order to receive divine energies in return, from ourselves, others,
the world and gods.

43. What is divine energy?
Divine energy is the morale that comes from developing relations with the supernatural.

44. Is there a sacred community?
Yes, the community of those whose understanding of the divine is similar in forms, scope
and intensity.

45. Will the cosmos ever be divine?
The theotropic universe will ultimately dominate the entropic universe.

46. Is the divine also god?
Yes, insofar as its mental integration functions as a presentation of the human mind, the
divine is godly.

47. To what futures should a person relate? A person chooses and lives partially in
whatever futures one wants and is capable of participating in, except that upon death one's
future is resolved into the cosmos and reconstructed beyond personal minding and control.


GODS

48. Is it proper to expect gods?
It is proper to expect gods, as it is to expect enlightenment.

49. What is a god?
A god is a generalized and immanent being, manifesting itself in material ways and through
a demonstrable external cosmic spirit, operating in the human mind as the repository of the
supernatural.

50. Is god material existence?
All material is effective: insofar as the divine is effective existence, and existence is
all material, the divine is material, and so is god.

51. Where is god?
The god is wherever it can be and acts so as to be.

52. Is there one god or many?
There are both one and many gods, depending upon how the mind assembles the divine facets
in its behavior.

53. Do gods behave like humans?
Yes, but only as the human in its universal and supernatural aspects.

54. How many gods exits?
We have not discovered how many, if any, gods exist on Earth, while in the universe myriad
gods exist.

55. What proofs do we have that there exists a supernatural, a divine, and a god?
That divine beings exist is known by the logical extension of our ignorance and limitations
into areas where divinity must being and exist.

56. Do all gods have the same traits and behavior?
Traits and behavior are limited ideas and actions to which the gods cannot be bound.

57. Where is god in relation to the human?
The god is where the human mind is affected by the supernatural and the divine, or may
ultimately be in conscious contact with it.

58. How is a person related to god?
Personally, as to an aspect of oneself, socially as to a joint aspect of oneself and
others.

59. Does a person elect god?
A person chooses god but his election is jointly with others to the extent that the gods of
others permit a joint representation.

60. Can I will against gods?
One can will against gods entropically for self or universally, including reductionism to
greater instinctive animality.

61. Can all historical gods be attributed to catastrophes and other natural causes?
All historical gods are in at least some of their manifestations catastrophic.

62. Are gods historical?
Historical gods have been the outcome of persons interacting with events, and, though
probably non-existent, persist in some of their earlier manifestations, so that all are
partly gone and partly present.

63. Should a person obey historical gods in their original ascribed apparitions?
The gods of the past are to be treated as hypothetical models to avoid and imitate as they
reflect upon the present and future and satisfy today's conditions of existence.

64. Are the gods rational and welcome?
Insofar as they are theotropic rather than entropic, the gods are rational and welcome, and
are to be preferred.


RELIGION

65. Can society hold together without religion?
Society cannot be conceived without religion and therefore cannot hold together without it.

66. Should two persons have the same religion?
No two persons can have or should have the same religion; all religion is therefore
personal.

67. How are persons united by religion?
Persons sharing significant religious perspectives identify with each other and constitute
a church if they recognize their mutual identity.

68. How should we regard existing religions.?
We should regard existing religions as in large part historically invalidated in terms of
the ongoing and future historical process of religion, and encourage their voluntary
assimilation and development into current standards of validation.

69. Should there be priests?
Priesthood as religious leadership must exist, and should be practiced ideally by all when
they can, and by the fewest possible full time forever.

70. What gifts should religion bring?
Religion should bring joy of thought, wonderful awe, a divine community, and freedom from
fear.

71. What gifts should be made to religion?
One should give to others by devotion, rituals, and cooperation the intelligence afforded
by religion.

72. What does religion offer to human suffering of body and mind?
Religion offers to the suffering body and mind the knowledge of self, morale, scientific
pragmatic support, and a cosmic sense of proportion.

73. What symbols should be sacred?
Symbols that retain the least historical implications and represent the major points of
this catechism should be created and promoted and become subjects of admiration and
stimulation; present sacred symbols should be reduced in significance and intensity.

74. What are sacred scriptures?
All graphic and written material that was ever sacred is still sacred and worthy of wonder
and study, but at a reduced level of psychic investment, while new contributions intended
as sacred scriptures should be no more sacred than any other sacrally intended or
scientific or literary work for which merit is claimed.

75. Should our rites be simple or elaborate?
Rituals should be as elaborate as necessary to learn the purpose of the ritual, as stressed
as necessary to enjoy its reassurances, as simple as the available energies would afford,
and should be productive of other goods aesthetically and otherwise.

76. What is the educative task of religion?
Religion should educate people theotropically, which is the constructive life force.

77. What is the task of politics?
The task of politics is the same as religion morally, but politics contends largely with
the pragmatic problems issuing from theotropism.

78. To what extend should we be bound by our religion?
We should be bound to our religion to the extent and so long as it helps us fulfill our
obligations to ourselves and the world.

79. How long will it be before humanity becomes religious?
Mankind will become religious when it discovers the existence of gods on experiential
principles without delusion.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 2: }
{Q CONCLUSION}
{C - }
{T THE DIVINE AND HUMAN}
{S - }



THE DIVINE SUCCESSION


by Alfred de Grazia


CONCLUSION

THE DIVINE AND HUMAN

Having begun with a pessimistic understanding of the divine succession, I have concluded
with an optimistic belief that the search for the supernatural is a virtuous, healthy, and
constructive activity. The divine exists and can be achieved to a significant degree by all
who properly seek it. It is probable that the divine extends to the existence of gods,
regarding whom the question of one or many is probably nonsense and should certainly not be
sloganized.

Religion is the system of relations sought for and maintained among the humans and the
divine, the divine being more extensive than the human. Religion or religiousness is
morally effective and can often change secular behavior with beneficial effects upon human
life and the satisfaction of human needs. Rituals are exercises of the human character and
are beneficial in the context of a proper religion.

The search for religion is the most civilizing and lofty human experience; the claim to
have found religion has been usually a disaster. Religion came with the first kit of
mankind, mentally and physically. Religion covered all existence and does so even today and
will do so. Neither the purely secular nor the purely sacral type of person is suited
either to study or to maintain the divine search.

Secularism has never been fully accomplished because it contradicts itself when it reaches
its psychic and moral origins. As the method of secularism, science can help greatly sacral
man achieve the divine, provided that it accepts the help of theology.

Historical religions, based upon the terrible power of natural forces, limited strictly the
extent to which humanity could pursue divinity. The gods were born as disastrous natural
occurrences playing upon the existential fear of the self-aware human.

The theory of quantavolution explains, thus, substantially the history of religion and
culture. It strengthens the scientific basis of religion by cutting off the claims of
traditional religion to authorize personal miracles and to arrange divine intervention.
Quantavolution furthermore discerns and pursues the consistent delusional schizoid syndrome
of human nature from its beginnings. It explains the unbreakable connection between the
sacred and secular.

Still, varieties of historical religions, such as Platonism, Stoicism, Christianity,
Buddhism, and Bahai, have often approached the divine by the same routes as we have
ourselves. They enlarged the human perspective and performed experiments; they organized
social and intellectual infrastructures for launches into the future.

The goal of religious practice is the revelation of the divine through the human, and the
integration of the human with the universally divine. This aim, which may be infinite and
unachievable, promotes operations extending beyond the blinded box in which the human mind
must work and seeks to establish relations with divine probabilities wherever they may
exist and be sensed.

The world of entropy is the dying universe of the second law of thermodynamics, and of the
dying mind. Entropy is confronted and contradicted by theotropy, no less valid, nor less
empirical, which is diffused through the universe as creation and life. Many glimpses of
the universal titanic effort of the forces of light against the darkness have been afforded
by historical religions operating at their best, and many unconventional and scattered
secular and religious voices presently sound a call for a new religiousness that can use
all that the scientific and secular might afford. Under such circumstances, religion need
not depend upon its past. It can become a new kind of divine procession into the future.








{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DIVINE SUCCESSION}
{P PART 2: }
{Q THEOTROPY:}
{C Chapter 9: }
{T A NOTE ON SOURCES}
{S - }




THE DIVINE SUCCESSION


by Alfred de Grazia


A NOTE ON SOURCES

If we were to scan all of the written, graphic, and artistic works of mankind prior to the
second World War, we should discover that religion was their chief topic, with political-
military subjects a poor second, and commercial records ranking a close third. This fact,
significant in itself, daunts whosoever wishes to delve into the literature of religion, or
to advise others about doing so.

My direct references are imbedded in the text. To assemble my general sources is an
exercise in self-searching that may not profit others. As is the case generally with the
humanities and sciences, the ideal reader and critic may have read few of my sources but
instead "something else," as good or better, or may have shared few of my experiences that
made my sources meaningful, but may have been a keen critic of the language and practices
of religion as observed from childhood to old age in his or her own social settings and
have read little but thought much, so that he would review his religious materials like
Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce reworked their lost pasts in their
autobiographical novels, making of the past a rich and elegant library.

There are, of course, encyclopedias about religion and philosophy, and a general
encyclopedia, excepting the Soviet, will offer perhaps a fourth of its articles as entries
related to religion. James G. Frazer's Golden Bough (13 vols.) is itself an encyclopedia of
the anthropology of religion. Also creations of Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell pertain
here.

Almost encyclopedic, yet entering boldly upon the analytic and systematic, are the studies
of Mircea Eliade. His Patterns in Comparative Religions, The Myth of the Eternal Return,
Myth and Reality, Images et Symboles, and other books are as indispensable as any
particular writings can be in an age when hundreds of books and articles descend upon every
subject. It may not be too early to alert the reader to the multi-volume encyclopedia that
is being prepared under the editorship of Dr. Eliade through the auspices of Macmillan
Publishing Company. [This work is now available]

Every country has had its religious wars, every religion its heretics and apostates, and
political history is loaded with religious conflicts. Bibliographies about them can be
initially retrieved through encyclopedias and card catalogues. Too, every sect has its
sacred scriptures and polemical masters, readily accessed through its leader's name --
Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Wesley, et al, as for instance, one proceeds along a particular
Protestant Christian line of thought.

Should not one begin with philosophy, to avoid trivia and a waste of time? Would that such
were the case. A careless saunter into the woods of theology and philosophy may end up in
the oven of a seminarian. Plato is recommended but not without Aristotle, nor Aquinas
without Eckhart, nor Loyola without Kirkegaard, nor Hegel without Marx, and so on.

The sociology of religion seems to me to be continually useful and I am sure that some of
the trails of my mind pass through Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Hans
Vaihinger, Benjamin Nelson, and the pragmatists with philosophical links, such as William
James and John Dewey. From here it is but a step to the commentators upon science, such as
Percy Bridgman and Alfred North Whitehead. In 1873 John W. Draper published a History of
the Conflict of Religion and Science, but today one seeks out also various works on the
conflict of science itself within science. Among the best of these might be Owen Barfield's
Saving the Appearances, David Bohm's Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, D. G. Garan's
The Key to the Sciences of Man, and Roger S. Jones' Physics as Metaphor. Norbert Wiener's
famous works on communication science are supplemented by God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment of
Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Roger Shinn and Paul Albrecht have
edited a two volume collection on Faith and Science in an Unjust World. Among several dozen
journals, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, occurs in this connection. E. A. Shneour
and E. A. Olteson have compiled writings and bibliography on Extraterrestrial Life.

Psychoanalysis provides a systematic awareness of the subconscious interaction of religious
material with the sexual, familial and symbolic. Sigmund Freud's relevant writings are
indexed and readily available. One might read Carl Jung more selectively. As in other
fields, an occasional perusal of major journals is called for. Most names in this note are
of famous men, and fame breeds fame, so that, as here, lesser luminaries are discriminated
against erroneously.

Much is made of catastrophe and quantavolution in this work. The reader will have noticed
that a background thereto is contained in other books of the author's "Quantavolution
Series;" thus, for the physical evidence of quantavolution and disaster, Chaos and
Creation, The Lately Tortured Earth, and Solaria Binaria; for the anthropological and
mythological ambiance of religion, Homo Schizo I, God's Fire, and The Disastrous Love
Affair of Moon and Mars; for the psychological, Homo Schizo II, as well as the foregoing.

My exposition adopts the format of ordinary language, the structure of whose utterances
must be systematic and conventional. Hence the form of communication renders obscure the
meanings of mystics, already beset by the problem in their own turn when they write. Such
is the case with Meister Eckhart, St. Theresa of Avila, or of Vedanta, Gnosticism,
Quakerism, Zen Buddhism, or Sufism; or of the pure symbolists and the occult. Still, laid
in the depth psychology of the present work and concealed by its positivistic style are
paths that a mystic might perhaps follow in exploring the divine within oneself.

End of The Divine Succession