...the remoteness of desire degenerates into dangerous enjoyment.
This partly explains Tournier’s condemnation of image and photography inLa Goutte d'Or (1985). He explicitly links their power to Medusa's petrifying fascination and contrasts them with the art of writing which is the art of education and the route to wisdom 'par excellence'. It would seem that the fear experienced at thesight of Medusa's head is the terror of discovering the secret behind the representation of the image.
I had to call my wife up, and apologise to her for raping her,
because I didn't know that when you're married to somebody,
that didn't allow you permission to just take The Pussy...
I didn't know that.
Nobody had taught me that. "
- Bro. Dick Gregory
" There are those who theorize that Hecate is as old as the early Egyptians. She possibly evolved from the Egyptian midwife goddess know as Hequit, Heket or Hekat, a goddess with Nubian roots. It is said that this goddess took her attributes from the "heq" ("heka") or tribal matriarch of pre-dynastic Egypt. This wise woman was believed to command the "hekau" or "(M)other's Words of Power", giving power to the sacred word.
".... - for the emanations of Hek Ka, the mighty
energies of a million hearts, are contained within her...."
The goddess Hekat birthed the sun each morning and was called the "most lovely one" - a title of the moon. Her totems was the frog, a symbol of the fetus
".... Oldest of the Old, amphibian being that swims in the
water, yet walks upon the dry land...."
This goddess, in turn, was connected to the goddess Nut. She was the sky and the heaven and was invoked with many names. The Great Deep, The Starry One, Cow Goddess, Mother of the Gods, Mother of the Sun, Protector of the Dead, Guardian of the Celestial Vault. These titles all relate to Hecate in her association with the moon, the night sky and the underworld.
The worship of Hecate may also have passed through the fertile crescent of the Israelites and Sumerians. Hecate may have been related to the Sumerian Goddess of Death and Magic.
She may have influenced or been influenced by the legends of Lilith, the first wife of Adam who was demonized as "the accursed huntress" and the dark phase of the moon - also attributes of Hecate.
Hecate had elements in common with other female manifestatitions/elements of this region. The feminine spirit of knowledge, Sophia, has been depicted with three heads as was Hecate who as the Crone is considered the Wise Woman. Hecate has even been linked to the Virgin Mary through Mary's indirect link to Lilith (as the second Eve) and through the association of both with the holy day of August 15. This is the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin when Mary is petitioned to avert storms so that the fields can ripen. A festival for Hecate was held on August 13. She too was invoked for help in preventing storms so that the harvest could be gathered.
In Greek Myth
Medusa, one of the three Gorgons, daughter of Phorcys and Ceto. She was the only one of the Gorgons who was subject to mortality. She is celebrated for her personal charms and the beauty of her locks. Neptune became enamoured of her, and obtained her favours in the temple of Minerva. This violation of the sanctity of the temple provoked Minerva, and she changed the beautiful locks of Medusa, which had inspired Neptune’s love to serpents. According to Apollodorus, Medusa and her sisters came into the world with snakes on their heads, instead of hair, with yellow wings and brazen hands. Their bodies were also covered with impenetrable scales, and their very looks had the power of killing or turning to stones. Perseus rendered his name immortal by his conquest of Medusa. He cut off her head, and the blood that dropped from the wound produced the innumerable serpents that infest Africa. The conqueror placed Medusa's head on the shield of Minerva, which he had used in his expedition. The head still retained the same petrifying power as before, as it was fatally known in the court of Cepheus. . . . Some suppose that the Gorgons were a nation of women, whom Perseus conquered.
From Lempriére’s Classical Dictionary of Proper names mentioned in Ancient Authors Writ Large. Ed. J. Lempriére and F.A. Wright. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Camille Dumoulié
Medusa's head, an apparently simple motif linked to the myth of Perseus, was freed through being severed and cut loose from its 'moorings' by the hero in the remote depths of the world. There is something paradoxical about the story since the monster was all the more indestructible because it had been killed. Indeed, the figure of Medusa is characterized by paradox, both in terms of the actual mythical stare, which turned men to stone, and in the interpretations that have been given to it. The fascination that she exerts arises from a combination of beauty and horror. Her head was used, in Ancient times, as an apotropaic mask -- a sort of talisman which both killed and redeemed.
As well as being the very symbol of ambiguity, Medusa's head is also one of the most archaic mythical figures, perhaps an echo of the demon Humbaba who was decapitated by Gilgamesh. Everything implies that it is a 'representation' of the most meaningful aspect of the sacred. Insofar as it is the role of literature to assume responsibility for the sacred, each era, when confronted with the mystery of the 'origins', has re-examined Medusa's head with its mesmerizing stare as something which conceals the secret of the sacred.
THE OTHER AND THE MONSTER
If ambiguity is the hallmark of the sacred, the role of myths, as René Gerard purports in his La Violence et le Sacré (1972) is to generate differences and contrasts, to distinguish between the two faces of the sacred. Therefore, from the viewpoint of the oldest texts which are true to the spirit of the myth, Medusa is a representation of the Other by virtue of her absolute and terrifying difference. At first sight, her monstrous ugliness and her petrifying stare certainly bear this out.
In La Mort dans les Yeux (1985), Vernant demonstrates that, for the Greeks, Medusa represented the face of the warrior possessed by battle frenzy. In The Shield of Heracles (232-3), Hesiod describes the wide-open mouth, the fearsome hair and the Gorgons' shrill cries which conjure up her terrifying aspect. Thus Medusa's mask frequently appears within the context of a battle. It is present in the Iliad on the shields of Athena (V, 738) and Agamemnon (XI, 36), and also during the Renaissance, e.g. on Bellona's helmet described by Ronsard in the 'Ode á Michel de l'Hospital' (Premier Livre des Odes, 1560). The Gorgon also represents what cannot be represented, i.e. death, which it is impossible to see or to look at, like Hades itself. In Hesiod's Theogony (275 et seq.) and in the Odyssey (XI, 633-5), Medusa is the guardian of terrifying places, either the nocturnal borders of the world or the Underworld. She reappears in this role in Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, IX, 55-7) and Milton's Paradise Lost (II, 611). Guarding the doorway to the world of the dead, she prevents the living from entering.
In Christian symbolism, Medusa represents the dreaded enemy and death, and thus becomes an embodiment of the Devil. She appears in this guise in a passage in the Book of Arthur which belongs to the cycle of the Holy Grail (Vulgate version of Arthurian romances, Vol. VII, Washington, 1913). In fact, this is a female monster, the 'Ugly Semblance', who lives at the bottom of a river. She does not exercise her powers by turning people to stone, but by causing the waters to swallow them up.
Similarly, a play by Calderón, which tells of the adventures of Andromeda and Perseus (Fortunas de Andromeda y Perseo), has the hero, a new incarnation of the Saviour, defeating Medusa who is the personification of Death and Sin.
At first glance, therefore, Medusa's head is very much a representation of the terrifying Other, of absolute negativity. She continues to fulfil this function in the twentieth-century trilogy by the Greek writer Pandelis Prevelakis, The Ways of Creation, which comprises The Sun of Death (Athens, 1959; Paris, 1965), The Head of the Medusa (Athens, 1963) and The Bread of the Angels (Athens, 1966). In the trilogy, the Gorgon represents both 'Nietzschian nihilism' and the foreign ideologies which threaten Hellenism. The hero sets out to free Greece once again from the monster, but he fails and realizes that there is no longer a single piece of untaited land in his country. Everything points to the fact that the malady specific to modern Greece, and the country's inability to accommodate, change, have provoked this monstrous 'representation' of the Other. Medusa's head does indeed seem to be a mask which serves to justify her absolute and evil strangeness.
The fact that Medusa is a mask and that this mask hides a more human face, is borne out by the way in which her portrayal is developed from the pre-Classical era to the Hellenistic period. There is a dual transformation i.e. the disappearance of both facial quality and ugliness (see Images de la Gorgone, Bibliothéque Nationale, 1985). Beneath the mask lies what could be called Medusa's 'tragic beauty'.
THE MIRROR AND THE MASK
Many elements of the myth suggest, through its basic ambiguity, the tragic nature of Medusa. One of the most revealing of these is the gift from Athena to Asclepius of two drops of the Gorgon's blood, one of which has the power to cure and even resurrect, while the other is a deadly poison. Medusa's blood is therefore the epitome of the 'pharmakon', while she herself -- as is shown by the apotropaic function of her mask -- is a 'pharmakos'. As has been demonstrated by René Girard, the 'pharmakos' is the scapegoat whose sacrifice establishes the dual nature of the sacred and reinforces the separation of the monster and the god. However, it is for literature and the arts to reveal the close relationship between opposites and the 'innocence' of the victim. In this respect, the myth of Medusa is revealing. In his study The Mirror of Medusa (1983), Tobin Siebers has identified the importance of two elements, i.e. the rivalry between Athena and the Gorgon, and the mirror motif.
According to Ovid (Metamorphoses, IV. 779ff), the reason for the dispute lay in Poseidon's rape of Medusa inside the temple of the virgin goddess. The goddess is supposed to have punished Medusa by transforming her face, which therefore made Medusa an innocent victim for the second time.
However, another tradition, used by Mallarmé in Les Dieux antiques (1880), stressed a more personal rivalry: Medusa had boasted that she was more beautiful than Athena. Everything points to the face that the goddess found it necessary to set herself apart from her negative double in order to assert her 'own' identity. Common features are numerous. For example, snakes are the attribute of Athena, as illustrated by the famous statue of Phidias and indicated by certain Orphic poems which refer to her as 'la Serpentine'. Moreover, the hypnotic stare is one of the features of the goddess 'with blue-green eyes', whose bird is the owl, depicted with an unblinking gaze. Finally, because she has affixed Medusa's head to her shield, in battle or in anger she assumes the terrifying appearance of the monster. Thus, in the Aeneid (11, 171), she expresses her wrath by making flames shoot forth from her eyes. These observations are intended to show that Athena and Medusa are the two indissociable aspects of the same sacred power.
A similar claim could be made in respect of Perseus, who retains traces of his association with his monstrous double, Medusa. Using her decapitated head to turn his enemies to stone, he spreads death around him. And when he flies over Africa with his trophy in a bag, through some sort of negligence, drops of blood fall to earth and are changed into poisonous snakes which reduce Medusa's lethal power (Ovid, op. cit., IV. 618). Two famous paintings illustrate this close connection between the hero and the monster. Cellini's Perseus resembles the head he is holding in his hand (as demonstrated by Siebers) and Paul Klee's L’esprit a combattu le mal (1904) portrays a complete reversal of roles -- Perseus is painted full face with a terrible countenance, while Medusa turns aside.
In this interplay of doubles, the theme of reflection is fundamental. It explains the process of victimization to which Medusa was subjected, and which falls within the province of the superstition of the 'evil eye'. The way to respond to the 'evil eye' is either to use a third eye -- the one that Perseus threw at the Graiae - or to deflect the evil spell by using a mirror. Ovid, in particular, stressed the significance of the shield in which Perseus was able to see the Gorgon without being turned to stone, and which was given to him by Athena.
Everything indicates that the mirror was the real weapon.
It was interpreted thus by Calderón and Prevelakis, and also by Roger Caillois in Méduse et Cie (1960).
Ovid was responsible for establishing the link with Narcissus, a myth that he made famous. It seems that the same process of victimization is at work here. The individual is considered to have been the victim of his own reflection, which absolves the victimizer (Perseus, the group) from all blame. This association of the two myths (and also the intention of apportioning blame) appears in a passage in Desportes' Amours d’Hyppolite (1573) where the poet tells his lady that she is in danger of seeing herself changed 'into some hard rock' by her 'Medusa's eye'. Even more revealing is Gautier's story Jettatura (1857) in which the hero, accused of having the 'evil eye', eventually believes it to be true and watches the monstrous transformation of his face in the mirror: 'Imagine Medusa looking at her horrible, hypnotic face in the lurid reflection of the bronze shield.'
Medusa's head is both a mirror and a mask. It is the mirror of collective violence which leaves the Devil's mark on the individual, as well as being the image of death for those who look at it. Both these themes -- violence rendered sacred and death by petrifaction -- are found in Das Corgonenhaupt (Berlin, 1972), a work by Walter Krüger about the nuclear threat.
However, when considered in terms of archetypal structures, Medusa's mask still retains its secret. What is the reason for the viperine hair, the wide-open mouth with the lolling tongue, and, in particular, why is Medusa female? What relationship is there between violence, holy terror and woman?
THE DISCONCERTING STRANGENESS OF THE FEMININE
Robert Graves (Greek Myths, 1958) believes that the myth of Perseus preserves the memory of the conflicts which occurred between men and women in the transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society. In fact the function of the Gorgon's mask was to keep men at a safe distance from the sacred ceremonies and mysteries reserved for women, i.e. those which celebrated the Triple Goddess, the Moon. Graves reminds us that the Orphic poems referred to the full moon as the 'Gorgon's head'.
The mask was also worn by young maidens to ward off male lust. The episode of Perseus' victory over Medusa represents the end of female ascendancy and the taking over of the temples by men, who had become the masters of the divine which Medusa's head had concealed from them.
Although it may have become less intense, the battle of the sexes was not resolved. The feminine continued to remain a source of fear for men, and the association of women with Medusa, evoked an aspect of the sex which was both fascinating and dangerous. Medusa often appeared in Renaissance poetry, e.g. Ronsard's Second Livre des Amours (S. 79, 1555), but the stare which turned men to stone was often only a conventional metaphor for the lover's 'coup de foudre'. The comparison took on a deeper meaning during the nineteenth century. Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and 'decadent' literature such as Lorrain's M. de Phocas (1901), provide illustrations of the dangerous fascination exerted by woman, with her deadly stare and mysterious hair. But it was Goethe's Faust PartI (1808) which supplied the real significance of this connection. During the 'Walpurgis night,’ Faust thinks he sees Margarita but Mephistopheles warns him that it is Medusa and explains that 'magic deludes every man into believing that he has found his beloved in her'.
This terrible woman, the paragon of all women, whom every man simultaneously fears and seeks and for whom Medusa is the mask, is in fact the mother, i.e. the great Goddess Mother whose rites were concealed by the Gorgon's face. Countless texts illustrate Medusa's affinity with the depths of the sea and the terrible power of nature, e.g. Hugo's Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1864), Lautrémont's Chants de Maldoror (1869) and Pierre Louÿs' Aphrodite (1896), but the most explicit example is probably the text written by Freud in 1922: Das Medusenhaupt -- 'Medusa's Head'. He presents her as the supreme talisman who provides the image of castration -- associated in the child's mind with the discovery of maternal sexuality -- and its denial. The snakes are multiple phalluses and petrifaction represents the comforting erection.
From this point onwards, the myth of Perseus takes on a new psychological meaning. It tells of the exploit of the hero who, because he has conquered ‘castrating' woman and armed himself with the talisman of Medusa's head (seen here in its comforting, phallic role), is able to conquer Andromeda, the terrifying virgin, and kill the sea monster which represents the evil aspect of woman. This motif is also found in the Christian legend of St George (Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée, (1264) as well as in the anthropological legends concerning the fear of the 'dentate vagina'. A 'sacred' man must perform the first sexual act with a woman.
Two texts illustrate this aspect of the myth. One is, the Book of Arthur (op. cit). in the passage devoted to the 'Ugly Semblance'. The monster occupies the lands of a maiden who not only asks the king for the assistance of a knight but also for a husband whom she describes as though he had always been intended for her. The task that he performs seems to have been the necessary requirement for his union with the Virgin. The story stresses the association of the monster with the element of water and, in particular, with the sea into which it has to be driven back. The second text is a short story by Döblin, Der Ritter Blaubart -- the 'Knight with the Blue Beard' (1911). Because the hero has had mysterious and intimate relations with a primitive monster -- a giant medusa -- he is forced to either kill all the women he loves or allow them to be killed. However, one of them, because of her purity, confronts the monster in the secret chamber where it lurks. In this last example, the character seems to have been unable to free himself from the maternal influence and fear of the feminine.
Finally, this association of Medusa with castrating woman is very evident in a passage in Chêne et Chien (1952) by Queneau: 'Severed head, evil woman/ Medusa with her lolling tongue/So it was you who would have castrated me?' However, the myth reveals -- and this seems to be obscured by the Freudian interpretation -- that woman's 'castration' is a result of the violence imposed on her by the original hero. Woman only appears in the story divided by separative decapitation, casting off the feminine in the remote depths of the world. Cast down, the feminine remains unrecognized within its innermost recess and it is this 'abject' void which maintains the theatre of the world and the logic of the talisman. In this theatre, woman occupies the two opposite extremes of evil (castration, sorcery) and their cure (the phallus, the Virgin), i.e. of the abyss and the Ideal. That is why, despite her terrifying power, she is fascinating. 'Fascinum' means 'charm' and 'evil spell', but also 'virile member'. Between the 'emptiness' and the Idol represented by the division of woman, yawns the gulf of male Desire. This persistent ambiguity can be found in the classification of the creature called the medusa. It owes its name to its resemblance to Medusa's head (Apollinaire, Bestiaire, 1920), but is included in the Acephelan category. Medusa keeps her secret behind the ambiguous mask. Although she is 'representable', she is never 'presentable' and even Perseus only sees her reflected in his shield.
She is the hidden presence, absent from the world, which enables the scene to be played out. In his 'heroic comedy' Le Naufrage de Méduse (1986), Ristat shows Perseus searching for the Gorgons and meeting Hermes, the 'Guardian of Resemblances', who proves to the terrified hero that 'Medusa herself is only a shadow'.
However, the hero remains trapped in the interplay of images and the logic of the talisman, just as he remains fascinated by the Gorgon mask. Thus Medusa's head becomes, for the man who takes possession of it after severing it from the terrifying woman, and in accordance with the principle of the 'pharmakon', the complete opposite, i.e. the 'skeptron' -- the sun.
‘O MEDUSA, O SUN'
In the same way that there is a hidden similarity between Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, and Medusa, a similarity also exists between the sun, symbol of the Ideal and the Gorgon's mask. Although they are both objects of desire, Athena and the sun are unapproachable and terrifying for those who come too close. This danger is illustrated by the Platonic myth of Phaedrus (247-8e) in which the downfall of souls is brought about by an overpowering desire to see the sun. Certain structural elements from the myth of Medusa also reappear in the myth of the Cave (The Republic, 514-7a), i.e. fascination, averted eyes, violence inflicted on the philosopher, etc.
In his poem (op. cit.), Queneau maintains that the sun, like the Gorgon, is fearsome and castrating: 'The sun: O monster, O Gorgon, O Medusa/O sun'. In this way, Medusa herself can become an incarnation of the Ideal, i.e. of Virtue (Du Bellay, Epithalame, 1559), of Beauty (Baudelaire, op. cit., 'La Beauté') and of Truth (Kosmas Politis, Eroica, Athens, 1938). Surely the sun itself is the severed head that, like the head of St John the Baptist, only soars in the zenith: 'In triumphant flights/from that scythe' (Mallarmé, Hérodiade, 'Cantique de saint Jean', 1913). Whoever seeks Athena, finds Medusa's head. Whoever approaches too close to the sun discovers its castrating and castrated monstrousness (Bataille, L’Anus Solaire, 1931).
Although Nietzsche had embarked upon the destruction of all idols, he too, in this way, recognized the desire for death inherent in the desire for truth at any cost. The philosopher who wants to examine all things 'in depth', discovers the petrifying abyss. The destiny of the man whom Nietzsche refers to as 'the Don Juan of knowledge' will be paralyzed as if by Medusa, and will himself be 'changed into a guest of stone' (Morgenröte i.e. the Dawn of Day, 327, 1881). This is also the destiny of the 'lover of truth' who, in the Dionysos Dithyramben (1888) appears to be 'changed into a statue/into a sacred column'. Nietzsche, who was aware of the necessity 'for the philosopher' to live within the 'closed circuit of representation' (Derrida), to seek the truth even if he no longer believes in it, without ever being able to attain it, devised his own version of the 'truth', his Medusa's head, the Eternal Return: 'Great thought is like Medusa's head: all the world's features harden, a deadly, ice-cold battle' (Posthumous Fragments, Winter 1884-5).
All thinkers who reflect upon the nature of representation, as well as on thought which pursues the 'eidos' are in danger of confronting Medusa's head. Thus, Aristotle, in The Politics (VIII)differentiates between instructive and cathartic music which is associated with Bacchic trances, whose instrument is the flute and which should be avoided. To prove his point, he refers to the myth of Athena. When she played the flute, her face became so distorted that she abandoned the instrument. It was in fact she who had invented the flute to imitate an unknown sound, virtually unrepresentable, i.e. the hissing of the snakes on Medusa's head as she was decapitated (Pindar, The Pythian Odes, XII, 2-3). As she played, she noticed in a spring that her features were becoming distorted and assuming the appearance of the Gorgon's mask. This once more introduces the Narcissistic theme and the blurring of the difference between Athena and her rival, which here arises from tragic art. Therefore, in terms of philosophy, art should remain in the service of the 'eidos' by continuing to represent the image that arouses desire for the Object.
But it is also condemned if it presents the object in such an obvious manner that the remoteness of desire degenerates into dangerous enjoyment. This partly explains Tournier’s condemnation of image and photography in La Goutte d'Or (1985). He explicitly links their power to Medusa's petrifying fascination and contrasts them with the art of writing which is the art of education and the route to wisdom 'par excellence'.
It would seem that the fear experienced at the sight of Medusa's head is the terror of discovering the secret behind the representation of the image.
Leonard, if Hartman comes in here and catches us, we'll both be in a World of Shit.
Private Pyle:
Iam! In a World - of Shit!
Left shoulder, hut!
Right shoulder, hut!
Lock and load!
Order, hut!
This is my rifle!
There are many like it but this one is mine!...
"Property is theft," Hagbard said, passing the peace pipe. "If the BIA helps those real estate developers take our land," Uncle John Feather said, "that will be theft. But if we keep the land, that is certainly not theft." Night was falling in the Mohawk reservation, but Hagbard saw Sam Three Arrows nod vigorously in the gloom of the small cabin. He felt, again, that American Indians were the hardest people in the world to understand. His tutors had given him a cosmopolitan education, in every sense of the word, and he usually found no blocks in relating to people of any culture, but the Indians did puzzle him at times. After five years of specializing in handling the legal battles of various tribes against the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the land pirates it served, he was still conscious that these people's heads were someplace he couldn't yet reach. Either they were the simplest, or the most sophisticated, society on the planet; maybe, he thought, they were both, and the ultimate simplicity and the ultimate sophistication are identical. "Property is liberty," Hagbard said. "I am quoting the same man who said property is theft. He also said property is impossible. I speak from the heart. I wish you to understand why I take this case. I wish you to understand in fullness." Sam Three Arrows drew on the pipe, then raised his dark eyes to Hagbard's. "You mean that justice is not known like a dog who barks in the night? That it is more like the unexpected sound in the woods that must be identified cautiously after hard thinking?" There it was again: Hagbard had heard the same concreteness of imagery in the speech of the Shoshone at the opposite end of the continent. He wondered, idly, if Ezra Pound's poetry might have been influenced by habits of speech his father acquired from the Indians—Homer Pound had been the first white man born in Idaho. It certainly went beyond the Chinese. And it came, not from books on rhetoric, but from listening to the heart— the Indian metaphor he had himself used a minute ago. He took his time about answering: he was beginning to acquire the Indian habit of thinking a long while before speaking. "Property and justice are water," he said finally. "No man can hold them long. I have spent many years in courtrooms, and I have seen property and justice change when a man speaks, change as the caterpillar changes to the butterfly. Do you understand me? I thought I had victory in my hands, and then the judge spoke and it went away. Like water running through the fingers." Uncle John Feather nodded. "I understand. You mean we will lose again. We are accustomed to losing. Since George Washington promised us these lands 'as long as the mountain stands and the grass is green,' and then broke his promise and stole part of them back in ten years— in ten years, my friend!— we have lost, always lost. We have one acre left of each hundred promised to us then." "We may not lose," Hagbard said. "I promise you, the BIA will at least know they have been in a fight this time. I learn more tricks, and get nastier, each time I go into a courtroom. I am very tricky and very nasty by now. But I am less sure of myself than I was when I took my first case. I no longer understand what I am fighting. I have a word for it— the Snafu Principle, I call it— but I do not understand what it is." There was another pause. Hagbard heard the lid on the garbage can in back of the cabin rattling: that was the raccoon that Uncle John Feather called Old Grandfather come to steal his evening dinner. Property was theft, certainly, in Old Grandfather's world, Hagbard thought "I am also puzzled," Sam Three Arrows said finally. "I worked, long ago, in New York City, in construction, like many young men of the Mohawk Nation. I found that whites were often like us, and I could not hate them one at a time. But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak from the heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on the movie screen. They play roles. And their leaders are not like our leaders.They are not chosen for virtue, but for their skill at playing roles. Whites have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their leaders, and yet they follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished. Then, also, the leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too often. But the worst thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders have lost it and they have lost mercy. They speak from somewhere else. They act from somewhere else. But from where? Like you, I do not know. It is, I think, a kind of insanity." He looked at Hagbard and added politely. "Some are different." It was a long speech for him, and it stirred something in Uncle John Feather."I was in the army," he said. "We went to fight a bad white man, or so the whites told us. We had meetings that were called orientation and education. There were films. It was to show us how this bad white man was doing terrible things in his country. Everybody was angry after the films, and eager to fight. Except me. I was only there because the army paid more than an Indian can earn anywhere else. So I was not angry, but puzzled. There was nothing that this white leader did that the white leaders in this country do not also do. They told us about a place named Lidice. It was much like Wounded Knee. They told us of families moved thousands of miles to be destroyed. It was much like the Trail of Tears. They told us of how this man ruled his nation, so that none dared disobey him. It was much like the way white men work in corporations in New York City, as Sam has described it to me. I asked another soldier about this, a black white man. He was easier to talk to than the regular white man. I asked him what he thought of the orientation and education. He said it was shit, and he spoke from the heart!
I thought about it a long time, and I knew he was right. The orientation and education was shit. When the men from the BIA come here to talk, it is the same. Shit. But let me tell you this: the Mohawk Nation is losing its soul. Soul is not like breath or blood or bone and it can be taken in ways no man understands. My grandfather had more soul than I have, and the young men have less than me. But I have enough soul to talk to Old Grandfather, who is a raccoon now. He thinks as a raccoon and he is worried about the raccoon nation, more than I am worried about the Mohawk Nation. He thinks the raccoon nation will die soon, and all the nations of the free and wild animals. That is a terrible thing and it frightens me. When the nations of the animals die, the earth will also die. That is an old teaching and I cannot doubt it. I see it happening, already. If they steal more of our land to build that dam, more of our soul will die, and more of the souls of the animals will die! The earth will die, and the stars will no longer shine!
The Great Mother herself may die!"
The old man was crying unashamedly.
"And it will be because men do not speak words but speak shit!" Hagbard had turned pale beneath his olive skin. "You're coming into court," he said slowly, "and you're going to tell the judge that, in exactly those words." Federal Court for the 17th District of New York State. Plaintiffs: John Feather, Samuel Arrows, et al. Defendants: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, and President of the United States. For plaintiffs: Hagbard Celine. For the defendants: George Kharis, John Alucard, Thomas Moriarity, James Moran. Presiding: Justice Quasimodo Immhotep. MR. FEATHER (concluding): And it will be because men do not speak words butspeak shit! MR. KHARIS: Your honor, I move that the last speech be stricken from the record as irrelevant and immaterial. We are dealing here with a practical question, the need of the people of New York for this dam, and Mr. Feather's superstitions are totally beside the point. MR. CELINE: Your honor, the people of New York have survived a long time without a dam in that particular place. They can survive longer without it. Can anything survive, anything worth having, if our words become, as Mr. Feather says, excrement? Can anything we can reasonably call American Justice survive, if the words of our first President, if the sacred honor of George Washington is destroyed, if his promise that the Mohawk could keep these lands "as long as the mountain stands and the grass is green," if all that becomes nothing but excrement? MR. KHARIS: Counsel is not arguing. Counsel is making speeches. MR. CELINE:I am speaking from the heart. Are you— or are you speaking excrement that you are ordered to speak by your superiors? MR. ALUCARD: More speeches. MR. CELINE: More excrement JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Control yourself, Mr. Celine. MR. CELINE: I am controlling myself. Otherwise, I would speak as frankly as my client and say that most of the speeches here are plain old shit. Why do I say "excrement" at all, if it isn't, like you people, to disguise a little what we are all doing? It's shit. Plain shit. JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Mr. Celine, you are coming very close to contempt of court. I warn you. MR. CELINE: Your honor, we speak the tongue of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Melville. Must we go on murdering it? Must we tear it away from its last umbilical connection with reality? What is going on in this room, actually? Defendants, the U.S. government and its agents, want to steal some land from my clients. How long do we have to argue that they have no justice, no right, no honor, in their cause? Why can't we say highway robbery is highway robbery, instead of calling it eminent domain? Why can't we say shit is shit, instead of calling it excrement? Why do we never use language to convey meaning? Why must we always use it conceal meaning? Why do we never speak from the heart? Why do we always speak words programmed into us, like robots? JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Mr. Celine, I warn you again. MR. FEATHER: And I warn you. The world will die. The stars will go out. If men and women cannot trust the words spoken, the earth will crack, like a rotten pumpkin. MR. KHARIS: I call for a recess. Plaintiff and their counsel are both in no emotional state to continue at this time. MR. CELINE: You even have guns. You have men with guns and clubs, who are called marshals, and they will beat me if I don't shut up. How do you differ from any other gang of bandits, then, except in using language that conceals what you are doing? The only difference is that the bandits are more honest. That's the only difference. The only difference. JUSTICE IMMHOTEP : Mr. Marshal, restrain the counsel.
MR. CELINE: You're stealing what isn't yours. Why can't you talk turkey for just one moment? Why—
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Just hold him, Marshal. Don't use unnecessary force. Mr. Celine, I am tempted to forgive you, considering that you are obviously much involved with your clients,
emotionally. However, such mercy on my part would encourage other lawyers to believe they could follow your example. I have no choice. I find you guilty of contempt of court. Sentencing will take
place when court reconvenes after a fifteen-minute recess. You may speak at that time, but only on any mitigating grounds that should lighten the degree of your sentence. I will not hear the United States government called bandits again. That is all.
MR. CELINE: You steal land, and you will not hear yourselves called bandits. You order men with guns and clubs to hold us down, and you will not hear yourselves called thugs. You don't act from
the heart; where the hell do you act from? What in God's name does motivate you?
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Restrain him, Marshal.
MR. CELINE: (Indistinguishable.)
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Fifteen-minute recess.
BAILIFF: All rise.
"The seventeenth-century Rosicrucian cult of Fludd, Ashmole, et al. was a resurfacing of a notorious, usury-practicing, medieval sect known variously as the Cathars, Bogomils, or, more commonly,
"The Buggers."
The sexual perversions of the Cathars are a direct, doctrinaire correlative of this materialist dogma of theirs. Briefly,
one of the cult's Elect was forbidden to place his semen in the vagina of a woman, lest he cause the procreation of newborn human flesh!
The spirit inhabiting the Elect must be kept apart from the utter depravity of the fleshly process of human procreation."
The Contamination of Spirit by Matter
(which is shit)
The cult of Buggery vs. Cusa and Kepler
Let' s situate the problem in terms of science as such .
What we call modern science-that is, the idea of an integrated, comprehensive mathematical physics, or physical science, began during the second quarter of the 15th century-we might say, in effect, at about the time of the 1439 Council of Florence. From inside science itself, the policy and perspective, the Christian Platonic approach to science typified by the work of Cusa, who is the virtual founder of modern science, by Leonardo da Vinci, and by followers such as Kepler, was essentially uncontested, that is, within science itself, up until about the beginning of the 17th century; and after that period, the foundations of science laid by, principally, Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, and Kepler, were continued by people such as Desargues, Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz, the Bernoullis. and so forth. into Monge and Poncelet, Riemann, Gauss, and Cantor, in the l9th century.
The problem on which we should focus, both in science-that is, the problem of lack of understanding of what the cold fusion experiments signify, the crisis in science, the epistemological crisis in science prompted by the cold fusion experiments- results, and the witch-hunt itself-both go back to something which happened essentially during the 17th century in England and France. On the British side, the problem was the establishment of what became known as British empiricism by a group of Rosicrucian cultists associated with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Elias Ashmole (the founder of British Freemasonry), John Locke and, of course, including Isaac Newton. These people introduced an anti-Renaissance, what was considered at that period an anti-science, Aristotelian method, which was infused in a very peculiar with one element. This element was the introduction into science of what became known as empiricism, but was originally the central feature of the most notorious, sexually perverted religious cult in the history of medieval Europe - that is, the Cathar, Bogomil, or Bugger cult from the district of southern France associated with Albi and Toulouse. The same thing happened in France itself. Buggery, in the form of the influence of this cult upon science, manifested itself in the work of Rene Descartes, particularly in Descartes's notion of deus ex machina. This established Cartesianism as a form of Buggery which has been traditional in French science and poisoning it or buggering it to the present day. This is quite literally the case: a Rosicrucian cult (which featured alchemy as one of its claims to fame), which was Aristotelian, cabbalistic, and Bugger (that is, it featured this split between spirit and flesh, as the new materialistic doctrine), which is characteristic of the Buggery cult of south France, of the Rhone district and Albi-Toulouse centuries earlier. This cult merits a little bit of attention just so we know what we're talking about. Most people don't know this. Before Christianity, there were established some very vicious cults in the area near Babylon: Oriental cults. These cults led to the various manifestations of a particular form of cult called Manicheanism. Now, one of these Manichean cults was situated in the eastern part of Turkey in the mountainous areas. For a while, this cult was used - it was a very vicious, bloody-handed cult - by the Caliphate against the Byzantine Empire. Later, according to Gibbon and others, a Byzantine Emperor called Constantine Copronymous took the cult, transplanted it or a good part of it from eastern Anatolia and stuck it in what was then Thrace, which is today modern Bulgaria. This cult was given the position of guarding the northern borders of the Byzantine Empire against these Slavs who were coming down into the area at the time. As a result, as the cult became embedded there, sponsored by the Byzantine Empire, no less, the cult took a Slavic name, and became known as not only the Cathars, but also the Bogomils.
The cult was spread by Venetian bankers working on behalf of the Byzantine Empire, into the south of France, where it was known variously thus, as the Bogomil cult, which is what the Bulgarian branch of the cult called itself, the Cathars, which all called themselves, that is, the Cathars, the "pure," or the purified, and it was also known in France as the Bulgarian cult. So we had the French les bougres, which was translated into English for the convenience of the English speaker, as "the Buggers."
Now, because of this cult's peculiar sexual perversion - that is, the belief that a man putting semen into a woman to impregnate her, was propagating the flesh, and that was evil - it resorted to various other kinds of sexual recreation and thus the name "Bugger" in English became associated with what it has become associated with in English to this day.
So quite literally, Francis Bacon and his tribe buggered science and the result of this was empiricism. And a similar thing happened in France, in the form of the cult of Descartes, of Cartesianism.
This cult, this pseudo-alchemic cult called "Rosicrucian" during that period, and later called Freemasonic (based on the Freemasonic orders which were spun out of Rosicrucianism by people such as Elias Ashmole, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and so forth), has been the dominant influence in what is called (or was called partly during the 17th century and more so during the 18th century), "the Enlightenment."
The characteristic of the Enlightenment is that it was anti-Renaissance, and that it promoted materialism. Now, let's look exactly at what that means, and how that affects the kind of problem in science we're dealing with in cold fusion today, how the two things intersect. First, as I said, we'll look, from the scientific side, at the epistemological crisis, and secondly, let's look at it from the standpoint of the cult aspect of the crisis.
The Essential Subjectivity of Science
Lurking among the numerous accomplishments of modern science, there is the absurd, but popular delusion, that "physical science" is both "materialist" and "objective." The worst, and most widespread forms of this delusion assume, first, that scientific method is essentially statistical, and that "mathematical science" is associated with measurement of forces acting along a straight-line pathway between two points. This popular delusion was key to the widespread "systems analysis" hoaxes, such as Professor Norbert Wiener's "information theory."
The proof, that such definitions of "objective science" are absurd, is elementary; that proof is given as a central feature of this author's introductory course in Leibniz's science of Physical Economy.45 We summarize the background considerations, point by point
1. If man were a mere animal, that is, like a baboon, a creature innately disposed to what is called "primitive hunting and gathering" modes of social reproduction, at no time could the living human population of this planet have exceeded about ten millions individuals 2. The increase in the human population, and the associated improvements in life-expectancy and standard of existence, are the cumulative benefit of what we may identify most simply and fairly as "scientific and technological progress." The measure of this function of progress is an increase in the potential population-density of the human species; this represents a higher per-capita standard of living and longevity, combined with a decrease in the total number of hectares required to sustain an average individual human life 3. These improvements are expressed functionally through a succession of successful, radical changes in human productive behavior, a succession akin to the series of discontinuities associated with A, B, C, D, E, ... referenced above. These changes in the behavior of successive levels of upward development of society are analogous in form or function, and effect, to successful, upward biological evolution of species among the lower forms of life.46 4. Thus, the problem of both discovering and choosing a Type of sequential ordering of thought-objects, corresponding to a negentropically ordered succession of revolutionary scientific modifications in known scientific principles, is a subjective matter. It is a matter of discovering which subjective Type of creative-mental generation of thought-objects corresponds to a negentropic sequence of increase in man's cultural potential for increasing potential population-density.
Thus, from this point of view, the subject of science is that higher-order of thought-object—a transfinite—which correlates formal scientific progress with rate of increase of this science-driven rate of growth of a culture's potential population-density. In other words, man willfully increasing mankind's power to perpetuate ever-more successfully his own species' dominating existence within the universe.
This view is in contrast to the popularized materialist mythos of so-called "objective science," of man as the contemplative mathematician-observer.
"I see myself creating, as I define creation, as a common principle of that array of named thought-objects of fundamental discovery associated with such as Plato, Archimedes, Cusa, Leonardo, Kepler, and Leibniz. I locate my own creating-activity in respect to an effort to attribute a higher thought-object, a Cantorian Type, to the manifold composed of such historic names of original discoverers. This attribution of a specific choice of order for such an 'aleph-manifold,' and of attributing a Type to that choice of ordering, is the immediate subject of my inquiry.
"This Type defines a relatively fundamental scientific principle, as an hypothetical choice of such a principle; in Plato, this is referenced as 'hypothesizing the higher hypothesis.' I now correlate that hypothetical choice of Type with a manifest ordering of science-driven growth of relative potential population-density, of relatively superior and inferior modes of physical-economic culture."
This correlation is the characteristic activity of physical science; seeking to subsume all such hypothesizing of the higher hypothesis as a manifold of a yet higher Type, is physical science.47
As described in other locations,48the details of this phenomenon are of the following form. The hypothetical inference of a new Type of ordering of crucial thought-objects of fundamental scientific discovery as a manifold (or, sub-manifold), in respect to a single Type of crucial (or, "unique") paradox, subsumes an experimental design for some crucial expression of this new hypothesis. That subsumes, in turn, the design of either an experimental apparatus, or an observational method akin to such an apparatus.
Thus, from fundamental discovery of (transfinite) ordering-principle, through the design of an experiment, through that experimental design expressed as a new principle of machine-tool (or, analogous) design, is the generation of a discovery of scientific principle transmitted and assimilated into a general increase of social productivity. In every step of that process, the essential thing is the generation of a new conceptual thought-object by, within, and in accord with the sovereign, individual creative mental processes of the mind of a sovereignly individual person.
We should emphasize by aid of such means as reiteration, that the process just outlined is Plato's "hypothesizing the higher hypothesis." The higher hypothesis is the Type of cardinality to which corresponds a manifold (or, sub-manifold) of thought-objects arranged in a certain choice of ordering. The choosing of such a particular such higher hypothesis, the hypothesizing of the selection of one or more such higher hypotheses for such an array of individual thought-objects, is itself the consideration of a manifold of such alternative Types. The latter manifold's Type is what we should signify by physical science.
In other words, physical science is essentially the process of discovering those rules of creative behavior of our individual mental processes which lead us to discoveries of a Type through which general culture may be changed to optimize the rate of increase of our species' potential population-density. In this fashion, physical science is essentially subjective.
Admittedly, that does not complete the argument. If a certain type of "hypothesizing the higher hypothesis" is physical science, then increases in potential population-density, so successively achieved, show us that the intelligible form of lawful ordering of nature is coherent with the process of perfection of our hypothesizing the higher hypothesis. Thus, it is our successful hypothesizing of the higher hypothesis, in this fashion, rather than our sensory impressions, the which is the proper basis for determining the lawful composition, and ontological characteristics, of that real physical universe which lies beyond the full reach of our mere senses.
Our creative-mental processes do not address directly sensory objects as sensory objects per se.Human thought knows only change; we know only a thinkable correspondence between a change in our behavior and a correlated change in the manifest behavior of nature. It is a correspondence of the two Types of change which constitute the entirety of real physical science. That correspondence is what is intelligible for us; we must discover everything else respecting nature from this approach to the elementary primacy of change, to the universal elementarity in space-time of nothing but change.
This point is clearer, if we look now at the historical source of the leading opposition to the picture we have presented.
The leading opponent of our Leibnizian view of science, and the modern opponent of Plato, Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, and Leibniz, for example, is the so-called "materialist," or "mechanistic" standpoint of Francis Bacon, Robert Fludd, Elias Ashmole, René Descartes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. This "materialist" dogma was introduced to seventeenth-century France and England by the then newly-established cult of the Rosicrucians. The essence of this gnostic Rosicrucian dogma is typified by René Descartes' deus ex machina49 and Isaac Newton's maxim hypotheses non fingo.50This is also the axiomatically "hereditary" origin of such modern forms of radical positivism as von Neumann's "systems analysis," Professor Noam Chomsky's Korschite "linguistics," and Wiener's "information theory" hoax.
Consider as much of this Rosicrucian cult's dogma as is essential to locate the origins of that popular delusion we recognize most readily as the mythos of "objective science." The derivation of the Rosicrucian cult is the best vantage-point for this undertaking.
The seventeenth-century Rosicrucian cult of Fludd, Ashmole, et al. was a resurfacing of a notorious, usury-practicing, medieval sect known variously as the Cathars, Bogomils, or, more commonly, "The Buggers."51 This sect, which infested the market centers of northern Italy and southern France ("Languedoc"), was one of many varieties of kindred gnostic cults sprung up over the centuries from such very ancient pagan origins as the Phrygian cult of Cybele-Dionysus, the Delphic cult of Apollo-Dionysus, the Hellenic cult of Osiris, and the sundry Babylonian and Canaanite mystery religions.
The relevant feature of these gnostic forerunners of Ashmolean Rosicrucianism is the doctrine of utter depravity of the "flesh" which is the direct source of the materialist dogmas of Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Newton, et al. The sexual perversions of the Cathars are a direct, doctrinaire correlative of this materialist dogma of theirs. Briefly, one of the cult's Elect was forbidden to place his semen in the vagina of a woman, lest he cause the procreation of newborn human flesh! The spirit inhabiting the Elect must be kept apart from the utter depravity of the fleshly process of human procreation.52
That said, consider the case of science-driven increase of society's potential population-density. The origin of a new, valid, fundamental discovery, is a mental act of creation, a spiritual act, the generation of such a thought-object. The derivation of a design of experimental apparatus, and then a machine-tool principle, from the new thought-object, is the source of a powerful material effect. This is the connection which the Rosicrucian Descartes insisted must be broken: deus ex machina,and which Newton forbade: hypotheses non fingo.
What kind of society do these Manichean, or Bugger Elect represent? The Elect are forbidden to interfere with nature; they cannot till the soil, nor perform other productive labor. They are permitted to subsist by begging for alms, or to loan their accumulation of monetary savings from alms-gathering in usury.The Elect form, thus, a parasitical class subsisting by tribute and usury.
The strength of such a usury-practicing gnostic conspiracy, is that the Elect of the "Bugger" sect could sell a note for twelve or more ducats in Lyons, which could be redeemed by the bearer at discount for ten ducats, or less, in Padua. Thus, spider-web networks of Elect "Buggers" spread across northern Italy and southern France of the Garonne-Tarn and Rhône regions, in symbiosis with the other principal usury-practicing "Elects" among Lombard bankers and Jewish money-lenders.
The following summary is fair. As the oligarchical, usury-practicing INuovifaction of the Venetian merchant-bankers spread their parasitical, oligarchical power, by such vehicles as the Levant Company, into England, the Netherlands, and the old Hanse regions of Northern Europe generally, the Netherlands and England became the target for the launching of such Levant Company spin-offs as the Bank of England, the City of London financial center, and the Dutch and British "India" companies. London became thus the "new Venice," a union of the usurious Levant Company "Lombards" with the Rosicrucian cult of Bacon, Ashmole, et al. These seventeenth-century developments were the roots of the combined work of the Liberal Party and (later) Fabians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in seeking to establish London as the capital of a "Third Roman Empire," a worldwide form of pax universalis, a British Empire which would be a revival of the pagan Roman Empire of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and Diocletian.
Originally, science was solely a creation of the Platonists of the Golden Renaissance, chiefly the work of those fifteenth-century moral and intellectual giants who are best typified by Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa and Leonardo da Vinci. This tradition was continued by the work of such as Kepler, Gilbert, Fermat, Desargues, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, and the Bernoullis. That seventeenth-century Leibnizian tradition was carried into the nineteenth century by such figures as France's Gaspard Monge, and Germany's Gauss and Riemann. This tradition is sometimes called "continental science," to distinguish it from the Cartesian, empiricist, and positivist outgrowths of the Rosicrucian influence.
The cases of Bacon, Fludd, Descartes, and Newton established the counter-science variously expressed as Cartesianism,empiricism, and positivism. The hegemony of this cult's "Enlightenment" materialism in most science classrooms today, is the result of British participation in victories in most of the wars of the past three hundred years. The supremacy of the Rosicrucian's materialist dogma in today's scientific establishment is not a scientific, but a purely political phenomenon.
The practical issue of this political division in the science establishment, is the overarching conflict between the two principal, conflicting social systems which have, almost entirely, dominated European history since Solon's defeat of the oligarchical usurers of ancient Athens, more than two-and-a-half thousand years ago. This is the point made by Friedrich Schiller's contrasting the humanist, republican constitution of Solon to the American-Confederacy-like law of Lycurgus' Spartan slave society.53
To sustain scientific and technological progress requires appropriate education of virtually all participants in the society's productive processes. A population so educated will not tolerate indefinitely that division of society's population into oligarchs and helots which was characteristic of Lycurgus' Sparta, the pagan Roman Empire, and the American Southern Scottish Rite Jurisdiction's Confederate States of America. The brutish ignorance to which the slaveholders' oligarchical system degraded not only the Confederates' "poor whites," but also most of the so-called "planter aristocracy,"54 illustrates the point at issue. The so-called "socialist" zero-technological growth decrees of the Roman Emperor Diocletian are a notable, consistent precedent for the brutish degeneracy pervading the old Confederacy.55
On the other side of the same issue of policy, an ignorant people is not capable of self-government. To govern oneself requires the capacity for efficient comprehension of qualities of processes which are, by their nature, intrinsically beyond the developmental capacity of the scientifically illiterate strata. As several founders of the U.S. federal republic warned, the survival of such a democratic republic as theirs under natural law required a certain minimal quality of compulsory education.56 Friedrich Schiller presented the conceptual basis for the most successful model of Christian classical humanist education, the reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt.57
Under the influence of such a quality of universal compulsory secondary education, that educated citizenry will conspire to free itself from any oligarchical rule. Yet, without such an intrinsically anti-oligarchical form of education, a society could not generate, transmit, or assimilate efficiently scientific and technological progress in a general way. The self-interest of the oligarchy, as a social formation, is to destroy nations practicing generalized scientific and technological progress, and then seek to outlaw, throughout the world, both classical education and the practice of scientific progress. That is the entropic Type of cultural policy represented by the "(guild) socialism" of Diocletian, wherever the like appears, down through the ages of history since not later than the Phrygian Cybeline cult of Dionysus.
Like Kant's pro-irrationalist Critiques later, Descartes' gnostic deus ex machina dogma sought to paint a picture of the material world independent of that indispensable subjective agency, the creative mental processes upon which the discovery of all scientific knowledge depends absolutely. Kant did not deny the efficient existence of creative powers of scientific discovery, but pronounced deliberative creative acts to be impossible.58
That is the kernel of what passes for sophisticated philosophical materialism. To the credulous simpleton, the materialist demagogue exhibits himself as a solid, down-to-earth good fellow, one, perhaps, with all four feet firmly planted on the ground. "We materialists believe in nothing we cannot experience first-hand, with our own good five senses." To thoughtful, literate audiences, such cheap rhetoric is not persuasive; the argument of the Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself and Descartes' deus ex machina is offered, instead.
For us, the relevant experience on which physical science must be premised, is not fixedness, but change: the correlation of a change in our scientific thinking for practice, with the resulting change in the responsive behavior of nature. Unlike that theology as such which references theAbsolute of Plato's the Good,59mere physical science does not know the Absolute, but only Cantor's Transfinite. The domain of the transfinite is, at its highest level, Plato's hypothesizing the higher hypothesis, the domain of physical space-time, the domain of change, of perfecting that which remains unperfected. Thus, for physical science, the science of physical space-time, experience is change, and change is the elementary substantial feature of all scientific experience.
As the illustrative case of the experiment shows, change begins as an ostensibly non-material, subjective act of valid creative discovery of new, un-utterable Geistesmassen—thought-objects.This first step in the causal sequence of human action is spiritual, not "material." Under the "foremanship" of the relevant thought-object, a crucial experimental design is fashioned, a material medium for the spiritual cause, which latter is the thought-object. So, we had next, the derivation of the new machine-tool principle, and the medium through which man's per-capita power over the universe, per square-kilometer, is increased. The latter is the relevant material effect.
It is this sequence, this spiritual change causing the material change, which every successful experiment demonstrates. The materialist insists that the results of the experiment must be described only in such ways as leave the generation of the relevant new thought-object out of account. Since the universe responds to the experiment as it is actually developed, as prompted by an initially spiritual cause, materialism, with its materialist's fanatic adherence to formal deductive consistency, falsifies the universe by such reductionist fallacy of composition.
Footnotes
45. LaRouche, "In Defense of Common Sense," chaps. II-IV; and "The Science of Christian Economy," chaps. II-IV, VI; in Christian Economy,op. cit. 46. Cf. Nicolaus of Cusa. Cusa's view in an early work, On Learned Ignorance, is that "God has implanted in all things a natural desire to exist with the fullest measure of existence that is compatible with their particular nature .... There is in them a discernment that is natural and in keeping with the purpose of their knowledge, which ensures their natural inclination serving its purpose and being able to reach its fulfillment." Later, in "The Vision of God," (1464), Cusa develops the conception that each species, with its natural faculties as they develop, "yearns" for the existence of a higher species, as man does for the knowledge of the Absolute, of God. Here, Cusa's idea of negentropic species-evolution as the characteristic of Creation, is expressed by the poetic conception terminus specie. The universe consists of negentropic growth of higher orderings, whose microcosm is human reason. The species recognizes this divine order of creation, in its own way, and becomes a singularity in the transition from one ordering to the next. Thus the species has a terminus specie, the actualization of infinity in one point, which enables further development. "This power, which I have from Thee, and in which I possess a living image of the power of Thy almightiness, is the free will through which I am capable of either increasing or reducing the capacity to recive Thy beneficence." 47 See LaRouche, U.S. Science Policy, chap. III, section "The Geometry of Creative Reason," op. cit. 48 See LaRouche, "In Defense of Common Sense," chaps. IV, XII; "Project A," chaps. XVII, XVIII; and "The Science of Christian Economy," chaps. IV, VII; in Christian Economy,op. cit. 49 On Descartes' deus ex machina, see LaRouche, U.S. Science Policy, chap. IV 50 Sir Isaac Newton, in his The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (New York: The New York Philosophical Society, 1964), states "hypothesis non fingo" (I don't make hypotheses), and explains his reasons for this on grounds of induction versus hypothesis 51 See LaRouche, U.S. Science Policy, chap. IV, op. cit. We first hear of the Bogomils in the tenth century a.d.i n Bulgaria. (In Bulgarian, Bogomil means "beloved of God.") Among their beliefs is the characteristically gnostic one, that the Father of Jesus Christ was not the Creator of the world. For the Bogomils and later the Cathars, the power of the devil worked through the nature and constraints of the material world; matter and spirit were never meant to co-abit. This division and its corresponding principles of good and evil, light and darkness, is broadly called dualism. For the origins of the Bogomil or Cathar cults in Manicheanism, and the Albigensian Crusade against them, see LaRouche, Christian Economy, pp. 485-486, op. cit. 52 Cathar cult was known in France as the Bulgarian cult, or "Les Bougres," which translated into English as "the Buggers." Because of the cult's peculiar sexual perversion, which flowed from their gnostic doctrine of separationThe of matter and spirit, it resorted to various other kinds of sexual activity, and thus the name "Bugger" became associated in English with homosexuality. Overt gnostic cultism continues to this day, including the sexual perversions. In Colombia, for example, the head of the Universal Christian Gnostic Church, Samael Aun Weor, is the author of a book entitled Perfect Marriage,which asserts: "The age of sex is coming, the New Age of Aquarius .... Sexual magic will be officially admitted in the universities of the new Aquarian Age." The book continues: "To create a child, you do not need to spill semen. The spermatozoid which escapes without spilling semen is a choice spermatozoid of a superior nature, totally mature. The result of such impregnation is a new creation of exremely high order. That is how we can form a race of Supermen. In the mysteries of Eleusis, the sacred dances, the naked dances, the burning kiss and sexual connection, they make men unto Gods ... the Sufi dances and the whirling dervishes are tremendiously marvelous." Aun Weor is also the author of The Social Transformation of Society, which sketches the Gnostics' political program for Latin America. The Gnostic Church has been the political controller of the M-19 narcoterrorists who today share power with the government of Colombia 53 See Friedrich Schiller, "The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon," in Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom, Vol. II, ed. by William F. Wertz, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1988) 54 See Fred Henderson, "Free Trade, The Confederacy, and Slavery," The New Federalist, Vol. V, No. 36, Nov. 11, 1991, pp. 5-6; "The Lee myth is debunked but not the more dangerous mythmakers," Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 18, No. 38, Oct. 4, 1991, p. 62ff 55 The decrees of the Roman Emperor Diocletian (284-305 a.d. attempted to freeze the economic crumbling of the Roman Empire by fixing prices and wages by law. This led in the fourth century to the reforms of the Emperor Theodosius, which established legal enforcement of the occupation which each Roman citizen was forced to follow for his entire life. These Malthusian reforms were the earliest attempt to impose socialist decrees by totalitarian government. See Global Showdown, §2.3 (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1985), on the edicts of Diocletian and his successors 56 See, for example: Benjamin Franklin, "Proposals Relating to the Education of the Youth in Pennsylvania," Philadelphia (1749). Thomas Jefferson, "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" (1779), in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. by Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984): "[T]he most effectual means of preventing [tyranny] would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large .... [Therefore] it becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worth to receive, and able to guard, the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental condition or circumstance." John Adams, "Thoughts on Government" (1776), in American Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805, Vol. I, ed. by Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz (Indianaplis: Liberty Press, 1983). Benjamin Rush, "A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania; To Which Are Added, Thoughts upon the Mode of Education, Proper in a Republic" (1786), in American Political Writing,op. cit. 57 See Friedrich Schiller, "Aesthetical Lectures (1792-1793)" and Wilhelm von Humboldt, "On Schiller and the Course of His Spiritual Development," both in Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom,op. cit. Humboldt, who predicated his work on the influence of and education provided him by Schiller, was for a time responsible for all educational policy in Prussia 58 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965); Critique of Practical Reason, trans. by Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1956); also, in particular, Critique of Judgment, trans. by J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), §30-54, p. 152ff.: "[Genius] cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products .... [A] Homer ... cannot show how his ideas ... come together in his head, simply because he does not know, and therefore cannot teach others." 59 Plato's arguments connecting the idea of the Good (or the Absolute Infinite as expressed by later Christian Platonists), both to the evolution of the physical universe, and to the process of Becoming proper to human reason, are developed with more and more arduous rigor in a number of dialogues: Theaetetus, Parmenides, Sophist, Republic, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias. 60 See footnote 58 61 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment,op. cit. 62 See A Manual on the Rudiments of Tuning and Registration, Vol. I (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1992), chap. 11 63 See footnote 1 64 Georg Cantor, Theory of Transfinite Numbers,op. cit. 65 See Nicolaus of Cusa, "On Conjectures," in Philosophisch-Theologische Schriften, Vol. II (Vienna: Herder & Co., 1982), p. 158. "Man is indeed god, but not absolutely, since he is man; he is therefore a human god. Man is also the world, but not in a contracted way everything, since he is man; man is therefore a microscosm or a human world. The region of humanity therefore embraces God and the whole world in its human potentiality." 66 See Nicolaus of Cusa, "On the Filiation of God," in Philosophisch-Theologische Schriften,op. cit.,, p. 640. "Indeed, just as God is the actual essence of all things, so is the intellect, separated and united in itself vitally and reflexively, a living similitude of God. Therefore, as God Himself is the essence of all things, so the intellect, the similitude of God, is the similitude of all things. Cognition, however, is effected through similitude. However, since the intellect is an intellectual living similitude of God, it knows, when it knows itself, everything in itself as the one." See also Philo of Alexandria, op. cit., §XXIII: "Moses tells us that man was created after the image of God and after His likeness (Gen. 1:26).... Let no one represent the likeness as one to a bodily form; for neither is God in human form, nor is the human body God-like. No, it is in respect of the Mind, the sovereign element of the soul, that the word "image" is used; for after the pattern of a single Mind, even the Mind of the universe as an archetype, the mind in each of those who successively came into being was moulded.... [The human mind] opens by arts and sciences roads branching in many directions, all of them great highways.... (W)hen on soaring wings it has contemplated the atmosphere and all its phases, it is borne yet higher to the ether and the circuit of heaven, and is whirled round with the dances of planets and fixed stars, in accordance with the laws of perfect music, following that love of wisdom which guides its steps. And so, carrying its gaze beyond the confines of all substance discrenible by sense, it comes to a point at which it reaches out after the intelligible world." 67 See LaRouche, "In Defense of Common Sense," chap. XI; "Project A," chap. II; and "The Science of Christian Economy," chap. V; in Christian Economy,op. cit. 68 Cf. A Manual on Tuning,op. cit. References are the Preface: "The Classical Idea," passim; chap. 2: "The Six Species of Singing Voice"; chap. 9: "The Principles of Bel Canto"; chap. 10: "The Synthetic Geometry of Composition"; and chap. 11: "Artistic Beauty: Schiller vs. Goethe." See also LaRouche, "Solution to Plato's Paradox of the 'One and the Many,' " and Jonathan Tennenbaum, "The Foundations of Scientific Musical Tuning," Fidelio, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1992 69 A Manual on Tuning,op. cit., chap. 10 70 Cf. A Manual on Tuning,op.cit., chap. 11 71 The attribution of musical notions to Cantor's work is ironically most appropriate. Cantor was an able amateur musician, of a musical tradition traced to his maternal grandfather Kapellmeister Ludwig Böhm, whose violinist brother, Joseph, was the teacher of the great virtuoso Joachim. (Adolf Frankel, Das Leben Georg Cantors, cited in Georg Cantors Gesammelte Abhandlung,op. cit., p. 452.) It was this Ludwig Böhm who delivered the definitive performance of Beethoven's late string quartets on Beethoven's behalf 72 See footnote 46 for Cusa's concept of species-evolution 73 See, G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, trans. by George Montgomery (LaSalle: Open Court Publishing Co., 1989) 74 See footnote 3 75 The, unfortunately, popularized myth of an "Hegelian" division of musical history, into successive "baroque," "classical," and "romantic" periods, should be simply ignored as nonsense. The work of Classical composerssuch as J. S. Bach, his famous sons, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, et al., is separated by a moral principle of composition from the contrasting, irrationalist principle of ascending chromatic eroticism adopted by such nineteenth-century Romantics as Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, et al. 76 Johann Sebastian Bach, "Musical Offering," BWV 1079 (New York: G. Schirmer, 1944) 77 Joseph Haydn, Opus 33, "Russian" string quartets (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1985), ed. by Wilhelm Altman 78 Cf. Bernhard Paumgartner, Mozart (München: 1991), chap. 31, pp. 299-311; p. 548 79 See A Manual on Tuning,op. cit., chap. 12 passim, on the principled approach of Beethoven and Brahms to composing a set of variations on a theme 80 Cited in Herbert Meschkowski and Winfried Nilson, eds., Georg Cantors Briefe, (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1991), pp. 9-10, 478; from J. Bendiek, "Ein Brief Georg Cantors an Pater Ignazius Jeiler O.F.M.," Franzisch Kannischer Studien 47, 1965, pp. 65-73. "Die modernen Mathematiker in ihrer Mehrheit durch den glänzenden Erfolg ihres stets sich vollkommenden Formalwesens, das immer mehr Anwendungen auf die mechanische Seite der Natur zulässt, in einen Siegesrausch hineingeraten sind, der sie zur materialistischen Einseitigkeit verkommen lässt and sie für jegliche objektiv-metaphysische Erkenntnis and daher auch für die Grundlagen ihrer Wissenschaft blind macht." 81 See footnote 28.
[ The Qabblist Conjorour ] said:
What is your punishment?
They replied:
With boiling hot excrement, since a Master has said:
Whoever mocks at the words of the Sages is punished with boiling hot excrement. Observe the difference between the sinners of Israel and the prophets of the other nations who worship idols. It has been taught: Note from this incident how serious a thing it is to put a man to shame, for God espoused the cause of Bar Kamza and destroyed His House and burnt His Temple.
Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Gittin
Folio 56a
He said, I won't. Then let me give you half the cost of the party. No, said the other. Then let me pay for the whole party. He still said, No, and he took him by the hand and put him out. Said the other, Since the Rabbis were sitting there and did not stop him, this shows that they agreed with him. I will go and inform against then, to the Government. He went and said to the Emperor, The Jews are rebelling against you. He said, How can I tell? He said to him: Send them an offering and see whether they will offer it [on the altar]. So he sent with him a fine calf.1 While on the way he made a blemish on its upper lip, or as some say on the white of its eye, in a place where we [Jews] count it a blemish but they do not. The Rabbis were inclined to offer it in order not to offend the Government. Said R. Zechariah b. Abkulas to them: People will say that blemished animals are offered on the altar. They then proposed to kill Bar Kamza so that he should not go and inform against them, but R. Zechariah b. Abkulas said to them, Is one who makes a blemish on consecrated animals to be put to death? R. Johanan thereupon remarked: Through the scrupulousness2 of R. Zechariah b. Abkulas our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt and we ourselves exiled from our land.3
He [the Emperor] sent against them Nero the Caesar.4 As he was coming he shot an arrow towards the east, and it fell in Jerusalem. He then shot one towards the west, and it again fell in Jerusalem. He shot towards all four points of the compass, and each time it fell in Jerusalem. He said to a certain boy: Repeat to me [the last] verse of Scripture you have learnt. He said: And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel.5 He said: The Holy One, blessed be He, desires to lay waste his House and to lay the blame on me.6 So he ran away and became a proselyte, and R. Meir was descended from him.7
He then sent against them Vespasian the Caesar8 who came and besieged Jerusalem for three years. There were in it three men of great wealth, Nakdimon b. Gorion, Ben Kalba Shabua' and Ben Zizith Hakeseth. Nakdimon b. Gorion was so called because the sun continued shining for his sake.9 Ben Kalba Shabua 'was so called because one would go into his house hungry as a dog [keleb] and come out full [sabea']. Ben Zizith Hakeseth was so called because his fringes [zizith] used to trail on cushions [keseth]. Others say he derived the name from the fact that his seat [kise] was among those of the nobility of Rome. One of these said to the people of Jerusalem, I will keep them in wheat and barley. A second said, I will keep them in wine, oil and salt. The third said, I will keep them in wood. The Rabbis considered the offer of wood the most generous,10 since R. Hisda used to hand all his keys to his servant save that of the wood, for R. Hisda used to say, A storehouse of wheat requires sixty stores of wood [for fuel]. These men were in a position to keep the city for twenty-one years.
The biryoni11 were then in the city. The Rabbis said to them: Let us go out and make peace with them [the Romans]. They would not let them, but on the contrary said, Let us go out and fight them. The Rabbis said: You will not succeed. They then rose up and burnt the stores of wheat and barley so that a famine ensued. Martha the daughter of Boethius was one of the richest women in Jerusalem. She sent her man-servant out saying, Go and bring me some fine flour. By the time he went it was sold out. He came and told her, There is no fine flour, but there is white [flour]. She then said to him, Go and bring me some. By the time he went he found the white flour sold out. He came and told her, There is no white flour but there is dark flour. She said to him, Go and bring me some. By the time he went it was sold out. He returned and said to her, There is no dark flour, but there is barley flour. She said, Go and bring me some. By the time he went this was also sold out. She had taken off her shoes, but she said, I will go out and see if I can find anything to eat. Some dung stuck to her foot and she died.12 Rabban Johanan b. Zakkai applied to her the verse, The tender and delicate woman among you which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground.13 Some report that she ate a fig left by R. Zadok, and became sick and died. For R. Zadok observed fasts for forty years in order that Jerusalem might not be destroyed, [and he became so thin that] when he ate anything the food could be seen [as it passed through his throat.] When he wanted to restore himself, they used to bring him a fig, and he used to suck the juice and throw the rest away. When Martha was about to die, she brought out all her gold and silver and threw it in the street, saying, What is the good of this to me, thus giving effect to the verse, They shall cast their silver in the streets.14
Abba Sikra15 the head of the biryoni in Jerusalem was the son of the sister of Rabban Johanan b. Zakkai. [The latter] sent to him saying, Come to visit me privately. When he came he said to him, How long are you going to carry on in this way and kill all the people with starvation? He replied: What can I do? If I say a word to them, they will kill me. He said: Devise some plan for me to escape. Perhaps I shall be able to save a little. He said to him: Pretend to be ill, and let everyone come to inquire about you. Bring something evil smelling and put it by you so that they will say you are dead. Let then your disciples get under your bed, but no others, so that they shall not notice that you are still light, since they know that a living being is lighter than a corpse. He did so, and R. Eliezer went under the bier from one side and R. Joshua from the other. When they reached the door, some men wanted to put a lance through the bier. He said to them: Shall [the Romans] say. They have pierced their Master? They wanted to give it a push. He said to them: Shall they say that they pushed their Master? They opened a town gate for him and he got out.
When he reached the Romans16 he said, Peace to you, O king, peace to you, O king. He [Vespasian] said: Your life is forfeit on two counts, one because I am not a king and you call me king, and again, if I am a king, why did you not come to me before now? He replied: As for your saying that you are not a king,
To Part b
Original footnotes renumbered.
Lit., 'a third calf'. (a) Reached a third of its growth, (b) the third-born, (c) in its third year.
Lit., 'the humility'.
[V. Josephus, Wars, II, 17, 2, who ascribes the beginning of the war to the refusal to accept the offering of the Emperor in 66 C.E.]
Nero himself never came to Palestine,
Ezek., XXV, 14.
Lit., 'to wipe his hand'.
[This story may be an echo of the legend that Nero who had committed suicide was still alive and that he would return to reign (v. JE. IX, 225).]
[Who ultimately was known as the Caesar; v. Halevy, Doroth. I.e. p. 2.]
It is related in Ta'anith, 19b, that this Nakdimon once prayed that the sun might continue shining (nakad) to enable him to discharge a certain debt he had incurred on behalf of the people, and his prayer was granted.
Lit., 'they praised'.
Perhaps = palace guards (from biryah). The reference is obviously to the Zealot bands who defended Jerusalem.
From the shock.
Deut. XXVIII, 57.
Ezek. VII, 19.
[Lit., Father of the Sicarii.' His real name was Ben Batiah, Ekah Rab, I. The term sicarii here is not to he confused with the sicaricon mentioned in the Mishnah, V. Rosenthal, MGWJ, 1893, p. 58].
Lit. 'there'.
Tractate List
Gittin 56b
in truth you are a king, since if you were not a king Jerusalem would not be delivered into your hand, as it is written, And Lebanon shall fall by a mighty one.1 'Mighty one' [is an epithet] applied only to a king, as it is written, And their mighty one shall be of themselves2 etc.; and Lebanon refers to the Sanctuary, as it says, This goodly mountain and Lebanon.3 As for your question, why if you are a king, I did not come to you till now, the answer is that the biryoni among us did not let me. He said to him; If there is a jar of honey round which a serpent is wound, would they not break the jar to get rid of the serpent?4 He could give no answer. R. Joseph, or as some say R. Akiba, applied to him the verse, [God] turneth wise men backward and maketh their knowledge foolish.5 He ought to have said to him: We take a pair of tongs and grip the snake and kill it, and leave the jar intact.6
At this point a messenger came to him from Rome saying, Up, for the Emperor is dead, and the notables of Rome have decided to make you head [of the State]. He had just finished putting on one boot. When he tried to put on the other he could not. He tried to take off the first but it would not come off. He said: What is the meaning of this? R. Johanan said to him: Do not worry: the good news has done it, as it says, Good tidings make the bone fat.7 What is the remedy? Let someone whom you dislike come and pass before you, as it is written, A broken spirit drieth up the bones.8 He did so, and the boot went on. He said to him: Seeing that you are so wise, why did you not come to me till now? He said: Have I not told you? — He retorted: I too have told you.
He said; I am now going, and will send someone to take my place. You can, however, make a request of me and I will grant it. He said to him: Give me Jabneh and its Wise Men,9 and the family chain of Rabban Gamaliel,10 and physicians to heal R. Zadok. R. Joseph, or some say R. Akiba, applied to him the verse, '[God] turneth wise men backward and maketh their knowledge foolish'. He ought to have said to him; Let them [the Jews] off this time. He, however, thought that so much he would not grant, and so even a little would not be saved.
How did the physicians heal R. Zadok? The first day they let him drink water in which bran had been soaked; on the next day water in which there had been coarse meal;11 on the next day water in which there had been flour, so that his stomach expanded little by little.
Vespasian sent Titus who said, Where is their God, the rock in whom they trusted?12 This was the wicked Titus who blasphemed and insulted Heaven. What did he do? He took a harlot by the hand and entered the Holy of Holies and spread out a scroll of the Law and committed a sin on it. He then took a sword and slashed the curtain. Miraculously blood spurted out, and he thought that he had slain himself,13 as it says, Thine adversaries have roared in the midst of thine assembly, they have set up their ensigns for signs.14 Abba Hanan said: Who is a mighty one like unto thee, O Jah?15 Who is like Thee, mighty in self-restraint,16 that Thou didst hear the blaspheming and insults of that wicked man and keep silent? In the school of R. Ishmael it was taught; Who is like thee among the gods [elim]?17 Who is like thee among the dumb ones [illemim]. Titus further took the curtain and shaped it like a basket and brought all the vessels of the Sanctuary and put them in it, and then put them on board ship to go and triumph with them in his city, as it says, And withal I saw the wicked buried, and they that come to the grave and they that had
done right went away from the holy place and were forgotten in the city.18 Read not keburim [buried] but kebuzim[collected]; read not veyishtakehu [and were forgotten] but veyishtabehu [and triumphed]. Some say that keburim [can be retained], because even things that were buried were disclosed to them. A gale sprang up at sea which threatened to wreck him. He said: Apparently the power of the God of these people is only over water. When Pharaoh came He drowned him in water, when Sisera came He drowned him in water. He is also trying to drown me in water. If he is really mighty, let him come up on the dry land and fight with me. A voice went forth from heaven saying; Sinner, son of sinner, descendant of Esau the sinner, I have a tiny creature in my world called a gnat. (Why is it called a tiny creature? Because it has an orifice for taking in but not for excreting.) Go up on the dry land and make war with it. When he landed the gnat came and entered his nose, and it knocked against his brain for seven years. One day as he was passing a blacksmith's it heard the noise of the hammer and stopped. He said; I see there is a remedy. So every day they brought a blacksmith who hammered before him. If he was a non-Jew they gave him four zuz, if he was a Jew they said, It is enough that you see the suffering of your enemy. This went on for thirty days, but then the creature got used to it.19 It has been taught: R. Phineas b. 'Aruba said; I was in company with the notables of Rome, and when he died they split open his skull and found there something like a sparrow two sela's in weight. A Tanna taught; Like a young dove two pounds in weight. Abaye said; We have it on record that its beak was of brass and its claws of iron. When he died he said: Burn me and scatter my ashes over the seven seas so that the God of the Jews should not find me and bring me to trial.
Onkelos son of Kolonikos20 was the son of Titus's sister. He had a mind to convert himself to Judaism. He went and raised Titus from the dead by magical arts, and asked him; 'Who is most in repute in the [other] world? He replied: Israel. What then, he said,
about joining them? He said: Their observances are burdensome and you will not be able to carry them out. Go and attack them in that world and you will be at the top as it is written, Her adversaries are become the head21 etc.; whoever harasses Israel becomes head. He asked him:
Original footnotes renumbered.
Isa. X, 34.
Jer. XXX, 21.
Deut. III, 25.
So you should have broken down the walls to get rid of the biryoni.
lsa. XLIV, 25.
So they were waiting for some opportunity to get rid of the biryoni.
Prov. XV, 30.
Ibid. XVII, 22.
I.e., leave to found a seminary at Jabneh (Jamnia).
That the R. Gamaliel dynasty be spared. R. Johanan was particularly solicitous for R. Gamaliel and his family, as they were supposed to be of the house of David.
Coarse bran mixed with flour (Rashi).
Deut. XXXII, 37.
Euphemism for God.
Ps. LXXIV, 4.
Ibid. LXXXIX, 9.
Lit., 'and hard'.
Ex. XV, 11.
Eccl. VIII, 10.
Lit., 'since it trod, it trod.'
V. A.Z. (Sonc. ed.) p. 55, n. 1.
Lam. I, 5.
Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Gittin
Folio 57a
What is your punishment [in the other world]? He replied: What I decreed for myself. Every day my ashes are collected and sentence is passed on me and I am burnt and my ashes are scattered over the seven seas. He then went and raised Balaam by incantations. He asked him: Who is in repute in the other world? He replied: Israel. What then, he said, about joining them? He replied: Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever.1 He then asked: What is your punishment? He replied: With boiling hot semen.2 He then went and raised by incantations the sinners of Israel.3 He asked them: Who is in repute in the other world? They replied: Israel. What about joining them? They replied: Seek their welfare, seek not their harm. Whoever touches them touches the apple of his eye. He said: What is your punishment? They replied: With boiling hot excrement, since a Master has said: Whoever mocks at the words of the Sages is punished with boiling hot excrement. Observe the difference between the sinners of Israel and the prophets of the other nations who worship idols. It has been taught: Note from this incident how serious a thing it is to put a man to shame, for God espoused the cause of Bar Kamza and destroyed His House and burnt His Temple.
'Through a cock and a hen Tur Malka was destroyed'. How? — It was the custom that when a bride and bridegroom were being escorted a cock and a hen were carried before them, as if to say, Be fruitful and multiply like fowls. One day a band of Roman soldiers passed by and took the animals from them, so the Jews fell on them and beat them. So they went and reported to the Emperor that the Jews were rebelling, and he marched against them. There came against them one Bar Daroma4 who was able to jump a mile, and slaughtered them. The Emperor took his crown and placed it on the ground, saying, Sovereign of all the world, may it please thee not to deliver me and my kingdom into the hands of one man. Bar Daroma was tripped up by his own utterance, as he said, Hast not thou, O God, cast us off and thou goest not forth, O God, with our hosts.5 But David also said thus? — David wondered if it could be so. He went into a privy and a snake came, and he dropped his gut [from fright] and died. The Emperor said: Since a miracle has been wrought for me, I will let them off this time. So he left them alone and went away. They began to dance about and eat and drink and they lit so many lamps that the impress of a seal could be discerned by their light a mile away from the place. Said the Emperor; Are the Jews making merry over me? And he again invaded them. R. Assi said; Three hundred thousand men with drawn swords went in to Tur Malka, and slaughtered for three days and three nights, while on the other side dancing and feasting was going on, and one did not know about the other.
The Lord hath swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob and hath not pitied.6 When Rabin came he said in the name of R. Johanan; These are the sixty thousand myriads of cities which King Jannai had in the King's Mountain.7 For R. Judah said in the name of R. Assi: King Jannai had sixty myriads of cities in the King's Mountain, and in each of them was a population as large as that of the Exodus, save in three of them which had double as many. These were Kefar Bish,8 Kefar Shihlayim,9 and Kefar Dikraya.10 [The first was called] Kefar Bish [evil village] because they never gave hospitality to visitors. The second was called Kefar Shihlayim because they made their living from shihlayim [watercress]. Kefar Dikraya [village of males] according to R. Johanan, was so called because women used to bear males first and finally a girl and then no more. 'Ulla said: I have seen that place, and it would not hold even sixty myriads of reeds. A certain Min said to R. Hanina: You tell a lot of
lies.11 He replied: Palestine is called 'land of the deer'.12 Just as the skin of the hind cannot hold its flesh,13 so the Land of Israel when it is inhabited can find room but when it is not inhabited it contracts.
Once when R. Manyumi b. Helkiah and R. Helkiah b. Tobiah and R. Huna b. Hiyya were sitting together they said: If anyone knows anything about Kefar Sekania of Egypt,14 let him say. One of them thereupon said; Once a betrothed couple [from there] were carried off by heathens who married them to one another. The woman said: I beg of you not to touch me, as I have no Kethubah15 from you. So he did not touch her till his dying day. When he died, she said: Mourn for this man who has kept his passions in check more than Joseph, because Joseph was exposed to temptation only a short time, but this man every day. Joseph was not in one bed with the woman but this man was; in Joseph's case she was not his wife, but here she was. The next then began and said: On one occasion forty bushels [of coin] were selling for a denar, and the number went down one, and they investigated and found that a man and his son had had intercourse with a betrothed maiden on the Day of Atonement, so they brought them to the Beth din and they stoned them and the original price was restored. The third then began and said: There was a man who wanted to divorce his wife, but hesitated because she had a big marriage settlement. He accordingly invited his friends16 and gave them a good feast and made them drunk and put them all in one bed. He then brought the white of an egg and scattered it among them and brought witnesses17 and appealed to the Beth din. There was a certain elder there of the disciples of Shammai the Elder, named Baba b. Buta, who said: This is what I have been taught by Shammai the Elder, that the white of an egg contracts when brought near the fire, but semen becomes faint from the fire. They tested it and found that it was so, and they brought the man to the Beth din and flogged him and made him pay herKethubah. Said Abaye to R. Joseph: Since they were so virtuous, why were they punished? — He replied: Because they did not mourn for Jerusalem, as it is written; Rejoice ye with Jerusalem and be glad for her, all ye that love her, rejoice for joy with her all ye that mourn over her.18
'Through the shaft of a litter Bethar19 was destroyed.' It was the custom when a boy was born to plant a cedar tree and when a girl was born to plant a pine tree, and when they married, the tree was cut down and a canopy made of the branches.One day the daughter of the Emperor was passing when the shaft of her litter broke, so they lopped some branches off a cedar tree and brought it to her. The Jews thereupon fell upon them and beat them. They reported to the Emperor that the Jews were rebelling, and he marched against them.
He hath cut off in fierce anger all the horn of Israel.20 R. Zera said in the name of R. Abbahu who quoted R. Johanan: These are the eighty [thousand]21 battle trumpets which assembled in the city of Bethar when it was taken and men, women and children were slain in it until their blood ran into the great sea. Do you think this was near? It was a whole mil22 away. It has been taught: R. Eleazar the Great said: There are two streams in the valley of Yadaim,23 one running in one direction and one in another, and the Sages estimated that [at that time] they ran with two parts water to one of blood. In a Baraitha it has been taught: For seven years the Gentiles fertilised24 their vineyards with the blood of Israel without using manure.
To Part b
Original footnotes renumbered.
Deut. XXIII, 7.
Because he enticed Israel to go astray after the daughters of Moab. V. Sanh. 106a.
[MS.M. Jesus].
Lit., 'Son of the South'.
Ps. LX, 12.
Lam. II, 2.
V. supra, p. 251, n. 4.
[Identified with Kafarabis in Upper Idumea mentioned in Josephus Wars, IV, 9, 9. V. Buchler op. cit. p. 191].
[Identified with Sachlin near Ascalon. Klein, D. ZDPV. 1910, 35.]
[Dikrin, N. of Beth Gubrin (Eleutheropolis); v. EJ. 9, 1132].
Referring to the exaggerated statements about the King's Mountain.
E.V. 'glorious', Jer. III, 19; a play on the word [H], which means either 'glorious' or 'deer'.
Because after the hind is killed the skin shrinks.
[Klein, S. Beitrage, p. 20, n. 1. suggests the reading [H] (Nazarenes) instead of [H] (Egypt). It is thus the Kefar Sekania (Suchnin) in Galilee (v. A.Z., Sonc. ed. p. 85. n. 1) a place with Nazarene associations. It was probably to contrast the erstwhile loyalty of the place to the then prevailing defection that the incidents that follow were related].
According to Rabbinic law it is forbidden or a man to live with his wife unless he made out for her a kethubah.
'Shoshbin' 'best men', 'Groomsmen'; v. B.B. (Sonc. ed.) p. 618, n. 10.
To prove that they had abused his wife.
Isa. LXVI, 10.
In Southern Palestine, the centre of the revolt of Bar Cochba.
Lam. II, 3.
This word is bracketed in the text.
[J., reads 'four mils'. The site of Bethar is still uncertain, v. JE. s.v.].
[Rappaport, 'Erech Millin refers this to the Roman devastation of the Jewish quarter in Alexandria in the days of Alexander Tiberius. The Valley of Yadayim ('Hands') is thus the Delta of the Nile. Graetz, Geschichte IV, p. 425 places this in the Bar Cochba war and identifies the Valley with Beth Rimmon Valley.]
Lit., 'gathered the vintage from.'
Gittin 57b
R. Hiya b. Abin said in the name of R. Joshua b. Korhah: An old man from the inhabitants of Jerusalem told me that in this valley Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard killed two hundred and eleven myriads,1 and in Jerusalem he killed ninety-four myriads on one stone, until their blood went and joined that of Zechariah,2 to fulfil the words, Blood toucheth blood.3 He noticed the blood of Zechariah bubbling up warm, and asked what it was. They said: It is the blood of the sacrifices which has been poured there. He had some blood brought, but it was different from the other. He then said to them: If you tell me [the truth], well and good, but if not, I will tear your flesh with combs of iron. They said: What can we say to you? There was a prophet among us who used to reprove us for our irreligion, and we rose up against him and killed him, and for many years his blood has not rested. He said to them: I will appease him. He brought the great Sanhedrin4 and the small Sanhedrin5 and killed them over him, but the blood did not cease. He then slaughtered young men and women, but the blood did not cease. He brought school-children and slaughtered them over it, but the blood did not cease. So he said; Zechariah, Zechariah. I have slain the best of them; do you want me to destroy them all? When he said this to him, it stopped. Straightway Nebuzaradan felt remorse. He said to himself: If such is the penalty for slaying one soul, what will happen to me who have slain such multitudes? So he fled away, and sent a deed to his house disposing of his effects and became a convert. A Tanna taught: Naaman was a resident alien;6 Nebuzaradan was a righteous proselyte;7 descendants of Haman learnt the Torah in Benai Berak; descendants of Sisera taught children in Jerusalem; descendants of Sennacherib gave public expositions of the Torah. Who were these? Shemaya and Abtalion.8 [Nebuzaradan fulfilled] what is written, I have set her blood upon the bare rock that it should not be covered.9
The voice is the voice of Jacob and the hands are the hands of Esau:10 'the voice' here refers to [the cry caused by] the Emperor Hadrian11 who killed in Alexandria of Egypt sixty myriads on sixty myriads, twice as many as went forth from Egypt. 'The voice of Jacob': this is the cry caused by the Emperor Vespasian12 who killed in the city of Bethar four hundred thousand myriads, or as some say, four thousand myriads. 'The hands are the hands of Esau:' this is the Government of Rome which has destroyed our House and burnt our Temple and driven us out of our land. Another explanation is [as follows]: 'The voice is the voice of Jacob:' no prayer is effective unless the seed of Jacob has a part in it. 'The hands are the hands of Esau:' no war is successful unless the seed of Esau has a share in it. This is what R. Eleazar said:13 Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue;14 this means, thou shalt be protected from the heated contests15 of the tongue.
Rab Judah said in the name of Rab: What is meant by the verse, By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion?16 This indicates that the Holy One, blessed be He, showed David the destruction both of the first Temple and of the second Temple. Of the first Temple, as it is written, 'By the rivers of Babylon there we sat, yea we wept'; of the second Temple, as it is written, Remember, O Lord, against the children of Edom17 the day of Jerusalem, who said, rase it, rase it, even unto the foundation thereof.18
Rab Judah said in the name of Samuel, or it may be R. Ammi, or as some say it was taught in a Baraitha; On one occasion four hundred boys and girls were carried off for immoral purposes. They divined what they were wanted for and said to themselves, If we drown in the sea we shall attain the life of the future world. The eldest among them expounded the verse, The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring again from the depths of the sea.19 'I will bring again from Bashan,' from between the lions' teeth.20 'I will bring again from the depths of the sea,' those who drown in the sea. When the girls heard this they all leaped into the sea. The boys then drew the moral for themselves, saying, If these for whom this is natural act so, shall not we, for whom it is unnatural? They also leaped into the sea. Of them the text says, Yea, for thy sake we are killed all the day long, we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.21 Rab Judah, however, said that this refers to the woman and her seven sons.22 They brought the first before the Emperor and said to him, Serve the idol. He said to them: It is written in the Law, I am the Lord thy God.23 So they led him away and killed him. They then brought the second before the Emperor and said to him, Serve the idol. He replied: It is written in the Torah, Thou shalt have no other gods before me.24 So they led him away and killed him. They then brought the next and said to him, Serve the idol. He replied: It is written in the Torah, He that sacrifices unto the gods, save unto the Lord only, shall be utterly destroyed.25 So they led him away and killed him. They then brought the next before the Emperor saying, Serve the idol. He replied: It is written in the Torah, Thou shalt not bow down to any other god.26 So they led him away and killed him. They then brought another and said to him, Serve the idol. He replied: It is written in the Torah, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.27 So they led him away and killed him. They then brought the next and said to him, Serve the idol. He replied; It is written in the Torah, Know therefore this day and lay it to thine heart that the Lord He is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is none else.28 So they led him away and killed him. They brought the next and said to him, Serve the idol. He replied: It is written in the Torah, Thou hast avouched the Lord this day … and the Lord hath avouched thee this day;29 we have long ago sworn to the Holy One, blessed be He, that we will not exchange Him for any other god, and He also has sworn to us that He will not change us for any other people. The Emperor said: I will throw down my seal before you and you can stoop down and pick it up,30 so that they will say of you that you have conformed to the desire31 of the king. He replied; Fie on thee, Caesar, fie on thee, Caesar; if thine own honour is so important, how much more the honour of the Holy One, blessed be He! They were leading him away to kill him when his mother said: Give him to me that I may kiss him a little. She said to him: My son, go and say to your father Abraham, Thou didst bind one [son to the] altar, but I have bound seven altars. Then she also went up on to a roof and threw herself down and was killed. A voice thereupon came forth from heaven saying, A joyful mother of children.32
R. Joshua b. Levi said: [The verse, 'Yea, for thy sake we are killed all the day long'] can be applied to circumcision, which has been appointed for the eighth [day]. R. Simeon b. Lakish said: It can be applied to the students of the Torah who demonstrate the rules of shechitah on themselves; for Raba said: A man can practise anything on himself except shechitah,33 and something else. R. Nahman b. Isaac said that it can be applied to the students who kill themselves for the words of the Torah, in accordance with the saying of R. Simeon b. Lakish; for R. Simeon b. Lakish said: The words of the Torah abide only with one who kills himself for them, as it says, This is the Torah, when a man shall die in the tent etc.34
Rabbah b. Bar Hanah said in the name of R. Johanan: Forty se'ahs
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Original footnotes renumbered.
V. II Kings XXV, 8ff.
The son of Jehoiada the high priest. V. II Chron. XXIV, 22.
Hos. IV, 2.
The high court of 71 members.
The lesser court of 23 members.
One who merely abstains from idolatry but does not keep the commandments.
Who accepts all the laws of Judaism with no ulterior motive.
The predecessors of Hillel and Shammai. V. Aboth, I.
Ezek. XXIV, 8.
Gen. XXVII, 22.
[Graetz, Geschichte, IV, p. 426, on the basis of parallel passages emends; 'Trajan', the reference being to the massacre of Alexandrian Jews by Trajan as a result of an insurrection. V. Suk. 51b.]
This seems a mistake here for Hadrian. [V. J. Ta'an. IV.]
The remark made above that through malicious speech the Temple was destroyed etc. (Rashi). [Maharsha refers it to the efficacy of the 'voice of Jacob.']
Job V, 21.
Apparently this means 'slander'. [According to Maharsba render: 'Thou shalt be protected (find refuge) in the heated contests of the tongue', i.e., prayer'.]
Ps. CXXXVII, 1.
Stands for Rome.
lbid. 7.
Ps. LXVIII, 23.
[H] of which [H] is taken as a contraction.
Ibid, XLIV, 23.
The same story is related of Antiochus Epiphanes in the second book of the Maccabees.
Ex. XX, 2.
Ibid, 3.
Ibid, XXII, 19.
Ibid, XX, 5.
Deut. VI, 4.
Ibid, IV, 39.
Deut. XXVI, 17, 18.
The seal had engraved on it the image of the king and by stooping down to pick it up he will make it appear as if he is worshipping the image (Rashi).
Lit., 'accept the authority'.
Ps. CXIII, 9.
For fear that he might accidentally cut his throat.
Num. XIX, 14. The meaning in the context is of course quite different.
Medusa, one of the three Gorgons, daughter of Phorcys and Ceto. She was the only one of the Gorgons who was subject to mortality. She is celebrated for her personal charms and the beauty of her locks. Neptune became enamoured of her, and obtained her favours in the temple of Minerva. This violation of the sanctity of the temple provoked Minerva, and she changed the beautiful locks of Medusa, which had inspired Neptune’s love to serpents. According to Apollodorus, Medusa and her sisters came into the world with snakes on their heads, instead of hair, with yellow wings and brazen hands. Their bodies were also covered with impenetrable scales, and their very looks had the power of killing or turning to stones. Perseus rendered his name immortal by his conquest of Medusa. He cut off her head, and the blood that dropped from the wound produced the innumerable serpents that infest Africa. The conqueror placed Medusa's head on the shield of Minerva, which he had used in his expedition. The head still retained the same petrifying power as before, as it was fatally known in the court of Cepheus. . . . Some suppose that the Gorgons were a nation of women, whom Perseus conquered. 
battle. It is present in the Iliad on the shields of Athena (V, 738) and Agamemnon (XI, 36), and also during the Renaissance, e.g. on Bellona's helmet described by Ronsard in the 'Ode á Michel de l'Hospital' (Premier Livre des Odes, 1560). The Gorgon also represents what cannot be represented, i.e. death, which it is impossible to see or to look at, like Hades itself. In Hesiod's Theogony (275 et seq.) and in the Odyssey (XI, 633-5), Medusa is the guardian of terrifying places, either the nocturnal borders of the world or the Underworld. She reappears in this role in Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, IX, 55-7) and Milton's Paradise Lost (II, 611). Guarding the doorway to the world of the dead, she prevents the living from entering.
