THE ILLUMINATI

 

 

Ask yourself ‘What is the most important thing that I could be working on in the world right now?’ AARON SWARTZ (1986–2013)

 

The entire legal system is called into question when laws are used to persecute the innocent.

CHAPTER 1

THE COUNTERCULTURE IMPERATIVE

‘Socialization is a process by which we learn to fit into our surroundings.’

This was the mantra of my social studies teacher which I learned to recite in secondary school at the tender age of 15. Even then I suspected it was the anathema of individuality and creativity, and on reflection I consider it an insidious piece of brainwashing to inflict upon young adults. Today, it is a lesson that I see taught everywhere, from the tide of mainstream media that vilifies and humiliates anyone who stands apart to religions that would imprison us with blatantly dishonest dogmas. Socialization is apparent in the words of our politicians that expect us to trust their disinformation and the actions of government agencies that imprison hackers for defacing the websites of morally corrupt corporations.

We should know better than to question the news channels that report wars as if they were the spectacle of a firework display while denying us the footage of bombed schools and hospitals filled with civilians. Nor should we call to account the economists who recommend deregulation that allows bankers to ravage the economy and walk away with huge bonuses. And there is absolutely no alternative to banks charging interest on the money they lend, which puts every country and individual in perpetual debt, making economic slaves of us all.

In all aspects of life we are told this is how it must be and we have no choice other than to conform to fit into society. But this is a lie.

Counterculture is the anathema of socialization. It is the ambiguity that undermines all forms of government and their methods of control. In counterculture there are no boundaries or social structures, just forms of evolution and revolution. The new groups that gather and disperse usually foreshadow future trends in some way, and might prove to be the catalyst for change. To embrace counterculture requires that we cease to adapt to society and begin to exert our own identity so that individuality becomes a form of expression, a way of life that escapes tradition.

We now live in an age of mass surveillance which records and reports our every electronic conversation, purchase, location and social interaction. Through this, governments can track and identify the members of any counterculture, or any party that would speak out against the ruling powers.

Since the dawn of civilization governments and dictators have fought to take power and hold on to it by either force or manipulation. Those that stand against them risk persecution, censorship and death. Treason and heresy have always incurred the wrath of those trying to keep dominion over the masses, just as challenging religion led to heretics and scientists alike being imprisoned or put to the flame by the Inquisition. To counter this there have always been secret societies working in the shadows of every civilization to uphold an alternative view, and sometimes the truth, in the hope that one day all humanity would be free. Their ideas and philosophies were seeded into the public domain through philosophy and art, ritual and heresy. In Europe they fought to undermine the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the Age of Reason through social engineering. During this period the controlling facade of the Church, toxic with corruption and hypocrisy, was losing control and no amount of burning corpses could hold back the revolution. By the 18th century a social upheaval was blowing through the West in the minds of philosophers, the words of poets and the civil unrest of the masses.

The secret societies of the 18th century established a philosophy that can be traced through counterculture to the online hacktivist groups of today. But we begin with the archetypal secret society and the one group that first stood in open revolt against all forms of oppression set upon humanity: the Illuminati. The term Illuminati belongs to three distinct groups in history.

The first is the original Bavarian Illuminati, the real secret society that appeared in 1776 among European Freemasons and academics with the intention of liberating humanity from physical, mental and spiritual bondage. During their brief incarnation they encapsulated the entire ethos of counterculture into a single system of organized dissent that is still relevant today.

Many secret societies were founded to protect and promote spiritual ideals in the face of the Inquisition, and the Illuminati drew upon these but chose to be far more politically active in shaping the world to suit their beliefs. They had emerged among the Bavarian universities and Masonic lodges with the intention of liberating Europe from the royal and religious control of education, politics and science, and eventually they would become a driving force in the dissent that culminated in the French Revolution.

As their influence began to impact society, the inevitable persecution followed and the Illuminati chose to take refuge within a myriad of other societies to continue their work from the shadows. In their absence their ideas would continue to find a voice in the many counterculture movements of Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries until they eventually resurfaced as a myth in the 1970s.

For the second Illuminati incarnation in 1976, authors Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea published The Illuminatus Trilogy, a vast work of fiction that claimed that the Illuminati were behind every major conspiracy and key event of history. The idea was perfectly timed to capture the imaginations of those who were living in the wake of the Kennedy assassinations and at a time when Nixon succumbed to corruption. A cultural idea was forming that the world was ruled by a New World Order, a hidden hand that conspiracy theorists were quick to assign to the Illuminati.

Since that time the term Illuminati has become a meme, giving a name to the shadowy architects that controlled the past, present and future of the world. They became synonymous with the idea of a New World Order devoted to control, enslavement and exploitation at the hands of banking cabals and corrupt politicians. While their name was being usurped by the conspiracy theorists, a new form of dissent was taking shape. In a climate of pranks and youthful exploration, the hacktivist collective Anonymous was born. Their ideals of freedom from censorship and the empowerment of societies against their rulers make them the idealistic successors of the Illuminati. Groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks shared a common loathing of injustice and corruption and would thrive by using similar tools of secrecy and social engineering. Just as the Illuminati supported the French Revolution, these groups played a key role in the Arab Spring uprisings by using the internet as a new channel for dissent.

Governments were quick to persecute and incarcerate those who took up the fight for free speech and transparency in politics, but counterculture is born out of necessity. From the first secret societies that protected spiritual truths to WikiLeaks hiding the identities of whistleblowers, the same battle has been fought on a continuous timeline, and the ideals of the Illuminati still ring true today. The political corruption and religious control that inspired the Illuminati to organize and take action are still present as a lesser evil, surpassed by the business and financial institutions that are trying to take control of the world for their own ends. A new Inquisition has shifted its focus from secret societies to wage a war on the connected communities of the internet age that form the current raft of countercultures.

These marginalized groups maintain rebellion against the establishment, with some subversively spreading progressive ideas, and others exposing government secrets. Together they drive a history of counterculture and subversion. The quote by Aaron Swartz that prefaces this book is a call to action that many now seek to fulfil but have no clear view of how to achieve. Given that the term ‘Illuminati’ means ‘enlightened’, it seems appropriate to invite the reader not just to learn about the Illuminati but to involve themselves in, and to influence others to take part in, what is the most important movement of this age. With emerging technology there is an opportunity for everyone to become an agent of change.

A war has raged for centuries between the rigid structures of society and the emerging counterculture.

This book is both the story of that war and a call to arms.

CHAPTER 2

THE DESCENT INTO DISSENT

Society is a sphere of conformity clustered around an idea of what is acceptable. There are always outsiders: those unique individuals who exist on the fringe of acceptance because some aspect of their being or beliefs excludes them from the mainstream. Many people live and die alone as maverick spirits, while others may find or form groups that share a common perspective. There are examples of these groups that have existed for centuries as heretical religions, philosophical schools and secret societies. Secrecy was often necessary for the survival of these groups as any perceived threat to what is acceptable is a threat to the ruling power, and this usually results in persecution and incarceration.

The ruling elite are rarely progressive: they fear new ideas and disruptive ideologies and will use any form of suppression to maintain their position. Historically, this caused the greatest thinkers, scientists, philosophers and theologists to lurk in the shadows and enrol in secret societies to find acceptance. For every oppressive regime that rules from a corrupt or regressive outlook there will always be a freedom fighter, a heretic or a revolutionary forging ahead in spite of them. The outsiders have to fight for a world that accepts them, and this often places them in a better position to see how power should be implemented. Where those in power try to stamp out progress with injustice and inequality, terrorism and revolution become distinct possibilities.

Oppression has powered dissent through much of history, and today we see it in all areas of culture, politics and business. Inevitably a new idea or technology will upset the status quo and threaten to shift the balance of power away from those who cling to thrones and titles. How a society reacts to such upheavals is a measure of how civilized it is. Historically, the prevailing form of oppression has been religious in nature. That is because, as a society tries to evolve, the religious dogma that permeates it becomes increasingly incongruent. Religions become fixed in time and unable to develop, which prevents their subjects from discovering new ways to understand the world. Where they have control, religions also stifle education and science as they struggle to prevent the shadows of superstition from dispersing. Where authority is absolute, the balance is sought by heroic figures that exist to challenge the limits of society.

In response to unjust laws and oppression, we can see the earliest forms of counterculture explored in myth, religion and history. Prometheus disobeys Zeus and Adam seizes the apple symbolizing humanity’s quest for knowledge. Abraham was inspired by God to leave his home and go in search of spiritual experience. Akhenaten, in Egypt, rejected polytheism and was struck from contemporary records. Moses suffered the same fate in his flight from Egypt. This urge to shun normality and strike out on one’s own is a recurring theme in counterculture, as is the common experience of rejecting the past to seek a personal truth beyond existing social tropes.

Countercultures are often led by those who can rise above a stagnant society with a clear view of how humanity could be free from tyrants and religious bigots. Their dissent can range from the single cry of an angry individual to the full-blown political machinations of a coup or revolution. The empowerment of true revolutionaries comes from being free of all mindsets and structures of cultural influence. This begins with attaining some sense of truth from their environment and cultural history.

MYTHIC HISTORY

‘History is a matter of which myth you choose.’ VOLTAIRE

The first freedom to be attained is from the past. To be born is like waking in the middle of the night without knowing what came before. The dream that evaporates and the sound that awoke you cannot clearly be remembered, and the further you look into it, the more it becomes a matter of speculation. At that moment there is no influence to distort your view of reality. Briefly, the child is connected to everything; but from the umbilical cord onwards it is all a matter of separation.

Early childhood is mythic, and this helps to allow the young mind to integrate their experiences and understanding of the world around them. Ask a child what happens at night and they will elaborately explain how the sun goes to bed beyond the clouds. They remain in this dream-like state until logic and reason take hold. But society does not always want logic and reason to rule, because society is influenced by religious and political thinking. It maintains its own myths, and these become tolerated as they justify separation, upholding a view of reality that can allow politicians to go unchallenged when advocating mass murder through war and supporting the followers of one false god against another.

Religions are so dependent on maintaining their superstitions that they are threatened by basic science. As the distant past is slowly coming back into focus from the research of impartial historians and the evidence of archaeologists, any claims of historical accuracy in Christianity are called into question. The oral histories and parables of the Bible were merged from earlier myths to teach a simpler mind, and it would still shock many today to discover that the story of Jesus is as much a parable as his teachings. But hidden among the biblical fictions are clues to an underlying truth that once meant something of great importance, and to deny this is to deny the source of many of the major religions.

A RETURN TO THE SOURCE

It is clear that Christianity drew heavily upon earlier religions, and if the Bible were read in the context of mythological literature, the provenance of the stories therein would be revealed. Many key events that appear in the Old and New Testaments, including the Virgin Birth and the Crucifixion, are taken from religions that predate Christ and even Judaism. For the ancients the cycle of death and rebirth, which lay at the root of nature, gave rise to the image of the wheel of life and also the journey of the soul. In the Greek Eleusinian mysteries, Persephone is described as being trapped in the Underworld in winter only to escape again in spring. Her journey into the Underworld is the story of the soul descending into the material world where it incarnates; and then, on death, it ascends again. This myth explains life as a cycle of nature, like the turning of the seasons.

Nature reflects this cycle in the simple event of the rising and setting of the sun every day. Sun worship was central to early cultures partly on account of their fear of the dark but also because they recognized the sun as the bringer of light and heat that would grow crops and fruit and provide the people with food. Early civilizations would track the passing of time in the procession of the stars to know when to plant crops. Stories captured these events to transmit a people’s knowledge of nature to future generations. These were the basis of all myths and formed a natural religion that is the source of all religions today.

Persephone’s journey is archetypal to this natural religion, as it describes the soul’s descent on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice – 22 December. There follows a three-day period of transition when the sun is lowest until 25 December when the soul incarnates in the world. Because the soul is both spiritual and manifest, it is often depicted as being born of a virgin, to reflect the belief that the child is in part divine.

This story derives from a time prior to even the ancient Egyptians, when the constellations were used to illustrate the epic cycle of death and rebirth as the sun sets, or dies, on the Southern ‘Cross’ (visible from southern Egypt) at the winter solstice, and nine months later in September is reborn through the constellation of Virgo. This trajectory is also psychological, as it maps onto the process of exploring the underworld of the unconscious to redeem the lost fragments of the self in order that they may be returned to the light of the personality.

This incarnation through Virgo appears in the birth of mythological characters, gods and demi-gods. Horus, Attis, Zoroaster, Dionysus and Krishna were all born to a virgin. Mithras was born to a virgin on 25 December. Virgin birth, or parthenogenesis, is a common myth among gods of the ancients, of which the story of Jesus is just a current retelling.

Persephone, as the soul on its journey, is set to leave the Underworld and return to the gods at Easter, when the day becomes longer than the night. Again, three days mark the transition from death to resurrection. In a pre-Christian myth Attis, who died at Easter, was taken by his mother Cybele to a tomb from which he was resurrected after three days ‘for the salvation of mankind’. Dionysus was crucified and pierced by a spear in his side, died and was resurrected; Osiris was resurrected having been reconstituted by the great mother, Isis.

A ritual enactment of the cycle of death and resurrection was a key teaching of the ancients. An account of this ritual is briefly described in the New Testament when Jesus, the Son of God, raises Lazarus from the dead in the town of Bethany. This is taken from a much older myth described in ancient Egyptian texts as Horus, the Son of God, raising Osiris from the dead in the town of Beth-Anu. These narratives are identical and there is no reason to believe they are anything other than the same story repeated to preserve the ritual for future generations.

The ancient Egyptians incorporated the afterlife into every aspect of their belief as they considered their journey through death to be more important than the journey through life. They believed that we pass from the visible to the invisible and back again over many lifetimes. Like the seasons of nature, we die and revive as surely as night transitions into day. Even now we uphold the ritual of dressing the dead in their finest clothes as we endeavour to maintain the dignity of the deceased in the afterlife.

For the ancients the final secret of the mysteries was that the journey through death is a return to the source and oneness. They understood life to be a spark that separates from the divine source to manifest within matter as the soul. Through life the soul has the opportunity to become self-aware and bridge the gap between spirit and matter before eventually returning to the source. Our time of death is reflected in Easter, a day dictated by the cycle of the feminine moon, and our birth is measured by the masculine sun roughly nine months later, the gestation time of a human foetus.

By pretending that these archetypal events in the story of Jesus are factual, the Christian churches have denied their followers the underlying wisdom of the ancients. The journey through the Underworld is an incarnation into life and not death, since it is through death that the soul returns home to the divine source. Dante understood this when he wrote his masterpiece The Divine Comedy, which depicts a journey not through heaven and hell but through a karmic life that invokes its own judgement on those consumed by their weaknesses.

The descent into the physical world inspired the Gnostics and the Cathars to believe that the physical world was created by the demiurge, a half-god that believed itself to be the creator of all. This demiurge is the ego which denies the divine source of life and turns its back on the cycles of nature by pretending there is only the material world. The Underworld of Orpheus and Persephone, and the Inferno of Dante, depict the trials of life and the soul immersed in matter. This is the ‘suffering’ that Buddhists seek to escape, believing that we are imprisoned souls waiting to be awakened from the dark slumber of the needs and desires of the material world.

Like Buddhists the mystery religions believed that once karma has been resolved and the individual has found illumination, they have nothing left to redeem and the need to reincarnate will cease. The enlightened soul can choose to reincarnate in service or return to the source. This belief comes down through the ages from the mystery schools that promoted a path to awakening. It teaches those who undertake this path not to conquer death but to learn how to conquer life.

Until that happens humanity exists in a state of exile.

THE MYSTERY SCHOOLS

The earliest mystery schools of ancient Mesopotamia are now buried in the rubble of southern Iraq. They were followed by schools that formed in Egypt, Greece, China, South America and then Western Europe. The scribes of these schools assimilated a vast body of knowledge into systems of teaching that have come down to us in the West as the hermetic and alchemical traditions. In their wisdom they mapped the psychology of death and rebirth as rituals to support the aspirant on their inner journey towards enlightenment.

Their teachings answered the spiritual calling that is present in every civilization as the personal quest for meaning. This quest must be undertaken by each person to discover for what purpose they are incarnate, as this is something that cannot be learned from others. With such knowledge comes the philosophical calling to be in the service of others, as it opens the mind to the higher functions of compassion and unconditional love that transcend the mere biology of life. In evolutionary terms this is the pinnacle of consciousness.

The current body of hermetic and occult works has become a rich and diverse stream of knowledge but the source of these documents can be traced back to some key ideas. The primary text for the hermetic arts is the Emerald Tablet attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth, which became the core text of every hermetic library. The Emerald Tablet was inscribed with the hermetic axiom, ‘As above, so below’, which recognizes the cycle of life and death as written in the stars. It also taught that the path back to the divine source is through transformation, which in nature and consciousness could be accelerated through the hermetic art of alchemy.

Alchemy was used as a tool to traverse levels of consciousness through ritual and the contemplation of symbols. It is described as the ‘royal art’ because it is art in its highest form and confers upon the student sovereignty over oneself. It is both ‘illuminated’ in its view of the world and capable of manipulating that world, as a true form of magic. In a way that reminds us of Persephone, alchemy symbolically describes the archetypal stages of the journey, beginning by redeeming past traumas in the unconscious. Centuries before Jung was born, the alchemists understood that personal change happens at an emotional level and is the key to transformation.

The hermetic teachings were also communicated by creative people through the ages, since artists understood that creativity is born of something greater than the individual who experiences it. Beyond the ego, true creativity would spring from an act of co-creation with the divine. The modern world of art, in particular, falls short of this ideal because it has lost sight of its divine and pagan roots. Science too has lost sight of the symmetry and beauty of nature. Of the later mystery schools, the Pythagoreans understood maths, music and geometry to be the template of nature. Pythagoras taught his followers to seek the divine harmony in all things and to recognize the sacred geometry of nature. Harmony was central to personal development through balancing the inner and outer life. This philosophy contradicted the social conditioning to be selfish, to silence the voice of the inner wisdom and to shut out nature.

As leaders attempt to maintain order, they instil a fear of the unknown in their subjects, who become suspicious of secret groups. One of the last mystery schools was the Pythagoreans in ancient Greece, who were persecuted, Pythagoras himself being eventually hounded to death by an angry mob. The time of tolerance was coming to an end, forcing the mystery schools to hide their existence through symbolic language. Some philosophies were captured and circulated as tools such as the I Ching and the Tarot, which are still used to discover the unconscious relationships of all things. Knowledge of sacred geometry, which became central to Freemasonry, had come to Europe via ancient Greece and had informed the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages.

The growing power of the Roman Catholic Church forced the followers of the old religions to practise in secret, just as Christianity had in the 1st century. The early mystery schools became the prototypes of modern secret societies, and some historians will claim that Masonic and Rosicrucian heritage stems directly from ancient Egypt. In the absence of proof of direct lineage, all that can be said for sure is that the secret societies of today have within them symbols and philosophies that are rooted in antiquity.

REWRITING THE MYTH

At the time when Christianity was taking shape, natural religion was widespread among the pagans who would choose to enact their faith according to the set of gods with whom they could identify culturally. Temples of Isis and Mithras had followed the spread of the Roman Empire across Europe, while a few Christian sects took root in Rome where they began the succession of the popes. It would take three centuries for the Bible to be compiled in its current form when in 325, at the behest of Emperor Constantine, the Christian groups converged at the Council of Nicaea where they decided that the myth of Jesus was to be presented as truth. The challenges of other Christian perspectives, such as the dualism of Arius, conceded and sank into the shadows of history. It is likely that Constantine recognized the potential for Christianity to unite the many religious factions of the known world under his leadership. He promoted Christianity as the state religion for the Roman Empire but remained a pagan himself until his deathbed.

Once the older myths had been subsumed and the pagan deities and festivals absorbed, Christian religion cast its sacred book in stone and decreed that the contents were no longer a myth but the absolute truth. In that moment, Christianity ceased to be progressive and began the long fall towards corruption, stagnation and perversion. As society tried to evolve at a natural pace, Christianity would resort to more violence and destruction in its attempts to stifle progress. The ancient mystery religions were all but purged from history, and for those who continued to practise the old religions, conflict was inevitable.

The campaign to win over the pagans was stealthily applied at first by incorporating their symbols into the Christian story to supplant the underlying archetypes. Iconography would appropriate earlier images, like the seated figure of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus which is found throughout ancient Egypt as the figure of Isis. The four gospel authors of the New Testament were symbolized by the lion, bull, eagle and man, which in Babylonian astrology are the fixed signs of the zodiac.

As the Christian religion grew in popularity and power, its followers began systematically to desecrate the pagan sites of Europe and repurpose them as Christian shrines. These ancient temples had been built to mirror the stars and mark the seasons, acting as both calendars and the keys to the mysteries. Across France the Gothic cathedrals were erected upon pagan sites of goddess worship; and in Paris, the abbey church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés is situated on the ruins of a temple of Isis. Also in Paris, Notre-Dame is aligned to the winter solstice and to appease the pagans originally hosted both Christian and pagan altars. Even in Jerusalem, where Temple Mount is subject to an unholy tug of war between modern religions, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is sited on the remains of a temple dedicated to Venus.

The destruction of the sacred temples also revealed a disturbing aspect of the new religion. It sought to eradicate the feminine as an archetype of power. For organized religions to rule, they must keep their followers from being empowered to find their own spiritual path. The psychological path of Persephone to the Underworld is through the emotions and the feminine, intuitive experience of thinking with the heart. For men this is work, but for women it comes naturally; and for this reason religions fear women and prevent them from rising to positions of authority.

The Catholic Church also saw fit to distort the emancipated female archetype of Mary Magdalene and depict her as corrupt or fallen. She was an independent woman of means, a figure of empowerment and a symbol of the sacred feminine that can be found in all goddess cultures. She remains the missing archetype from the Christian paradigm of Virgin, Mother and Crone which had tried to undermine the power of feminine energy by associating it with a whore. Her restoration would help to redress the balance of masculine and feminine in Western civilization. But to maintain power, the new Church had no choice but to deny the gnostic and pagan reality and claim to be the only path to God and salvation.

When a religion becomes dominant by being widely accepted or state-sanctioned, the first tenet of spirituality to be dispensed with is usually tolerance. The religious leaders will then attempt to fix a canon of belief, history and origins. At this point onwards, the religion ceases to develop and looks back towards a vanished Arcadia which it can never recapture. With the Bible consolidated as a canon, the Church sought to remove the alternative scriptures from circulation and eradicate the true pagan sources of Christianity. This has continued almost to the present day. In 1966 the Index of Prohibited Books ceased to be updated. Those who continued to openly practice paganism or other alternative faiths were judged as heretics and threatened with extermination.

Groups like the Cathars that flourished in France during the Middle Ages sought a simpler form of Christianity that resurrected the dualism of Arius. They accepted female priests and did not collect taxes, which added to their appeal. Their growing popularity in southern France rivalled Catholicism and prompted the Albigensian Crusade sent to ‘liberate’ them from their heretical leanings. At the siege of Montségur in 1244 the last of the Cathars were invited to convert back to Catholicism or face death. Every man, woman and child chose to burn rather than concede to the materialist dogma of Catholicism.

The Catholic Church could not compete with authentic spiritual experience which exposed layers of obfuscation and contrived dogma as barriers to spiritual development. It would seem that the Cathars and many heretics had transcended Christianity as they followed a path of gnosis towards illumination. For this reason, the Cathars chose martyrdom, thereby joining every nature worshipper who was burned or drowned as a witch by the Inquisition. Soon Europe was littered with the smouldering corpses of heretics who had still believed it was possible to know the divine through direct experience without the need for priests and popes.

As the lie of Christianity took hold, those in power became so entrenched in dogma that they began to deny the truth. The Catholic Church, in particular, has a long history of the suppression and incarceration of those who dare to question the infallibility of its teachings. Religions that predated Christianity were driven to ground and had little choice but to work in secret. Symbols were employed to protect their knowledge, and rituals were devised to instil their teachings into others. Many of the rituals and teachings were lost but some continued in secret or were rediscovered by later groups.

RELIGION’S END

Catholicism was not the only religion to take the wisdom of the mystery schools and corrupt it into a system of oppression. Having denied the cycle of death and rebirth, many religions would seek to exploit the void this created by offering to allay the fear of the unknown that follows death. This changed the focus of religion, as to maintain a fear of death they must greatly exaggerate the challenges of the afterlife. Religions depict a hell seething with the tortured bodies of the damned, while pretending to offer salvation … but only to their obedient followers. There was no such finality in the pagan view of the afterlife, in which judgement never went beyond the karma of ordinary life.

The idea of judgement in the afterlife gives religions undue power to psychologically blackmail their congregations with a fear of ‘hell’. It is the ultimate human sacrifice to suspend the right to think, to question, to be true to oneself and to dismiss those who cling to the belief that Noah’s ark was real and not a myth stolen from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Where once the temples played host to the great discourses of the wise, now ‘flock’ is an appropriate title for members of a modern congregation that is willing to be subjugated by the will of others.

The rigid structures of religion lay claim to the idea of the soul but have no intention of giving it a voice in the world. They cannot give the keys to the kingdom, because those keys are already within each and every person. As the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas makes clear, heaven is within us: through exploring the inner life we can find our own unique path to an experience of the divine. This is the secret that religions try to keep from humanity as all who discover for themselves the spirit within and have no need for popes, priests, rabbis or imams.

Regardless of any claims of universality or ‘chosen’ status, all major religions began as a cult. As they grew in membership, they began to accumulate wealth and power, which will eventually pervert any cause. Some spiritual teachings can only become mainstream if they are diluted until palatable for those who prefer not to think for themselves. But eventually the teachings become fixed in this simplified form, and the greater the following, the less elasticity those beliefs have until they become immutable in the minds of the masses. In time, the religious ideologies move from a position of being discovered and explored to one of being defended. With the will of the people subjugated, the religious leaders inadvertently cede into corruption to maintain power.

Within Christianity the myth of Jesus began as a morality tale on the importance of love, compassion, humility, poverty and progressive thinking. These ideals have been deserted by the current clutch of churches that claim to act in his name. Like the fall from spirit into matter, religions have sunk into the mire of greed, abuse, corruption and intolerance, preferring to wallow in the wealth of ignorance than evolve.