4. HISTORY
Textbook history is not what it seems. It is a delusion; an 18-19th century, Eurocentric, Christian delusion.
History … orthodox textbook history … is a particular version of events compiled and blessed by establishment academics and believed by most people, at a certain point in time. The Authorised Version. But it changes with time. In the late 20th-century, it was said that the definition of a Soviet historian was a man who could predict the past. In Orwellian fashion history was determined by the Ministry of Truth … Oceania was always at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia; but actually, because his memory had not been fully adjusted, Orwell’s Winston recalled that only a few years before Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.
We smile uneasily at those metaphors … as if such manipulation of history could happen somewhere at some time, but not to us. Surely not to us!
Yet, by way of illustration, almost everything we think we know about the Iliad turns out to be not true. It was not written ‘in’ about 700 BC … but written down about then from prior centuries of oral lore recited by wandering minstrels around the community campfire. There are numerous ancient manuscript versions with scholars’ marginal notes debating the merits of different renditions.
There was no such person as Homer. The title was the ‘Iliad of Homeros’ … the ode of the isle of man. It was not ‘by’ Homeros but ‘of’ Homeros … composed and recited by countless bards around the campfire.
It was not a Greek story but just a Graecianised version of a universal story … the Greeks were the Hollywood storytellers of their age.
It was not set in or near Greece, nor even in the Mediterranean. There was no such place as the ‘city’ of Troy. Schliemann did not discover Troy; he just excavated an old destroyed city of which there were dozens around the Mediterranean.
The original setting was Ilium … the isle of man … an earthly ‘island’ home surrounded by the great ocean of space. The catastrophe which overwhelmed Ilium was at least hemispheric … when Aeneas fled the destruction of flood and flames he cried aloud, ‘what tract on [planet] Earth is not full of our agony …’
Later, when the demi-god Odysseus voyaged home [in the Odyssey] he travelled not around the Mediterranean but through the constellations of space … noticed long ago by Sir Isaac Newton. But no one believed Newton on that point … he was accused of heresy and homosexuality which were unpopular at the time, and forced out of Cambridge.
There were not even any real Greeks in the story … they were just names added for local colour. The Trojans [humans] were assailed and totally overwhelmed by ‘the gods’ … by celestial forces from the sky. Apollo’s flaming arrows (meteorites) fell for nine whole days until the ground ran red with blood … until finally, Ares (Mars) threw a giant rock, black and jagged and great. Asterius son of Cometas (an asteroid fragment of a comet) soared over the temple and plunged into the forest … Ilium (Earth) groaned and was overwhelmed by fire and flood, killing all. King Priam lamented over his lost family … [it was] ‘Ares (Mars) that killed them’.
The evidence says it was a worldwide catastrophe caused by flaming meteorites falling from the sky. But in the Christian era, we have rejected that; we cannot bear too much reality, we prefer romance.
Now we live in the early 21st-century in the fading days of what will become known as the Christian Delusion Era. The greatest hoax ever visited upon man. We think of Christianity as a religion, just about ‘God’. But it was profoundly more than that, shaping every aspect of the intellectual and cultural fabric of Western civilisation for nearly 2000 years. The reality of human history had been known and preserved in the folklore of the pagan pre-Christian world … but then it was actively destroyed at the hands of the Church.
Christianity was invented, ironically, amongst the Jewish refugees from the sacking of Jerusalem by Vespasian and Titus in about 70 AD. These nascent Judaeo-Christians were taken to Rome as slaves where they subversively fostered their new cult underground until it was legitimised in a magnanimous gesture by Emperor Constantine in 320 AD. But the decisive fatal blow was delivered by Theodosius in 390 AD with a politically expedient edict making Christianity compulsory on pain of forfeiture of property … throughout the Roman Empire, which at the time was most of the known world. In Gibbon’s words, that opened the floodgates for an army of religious fanatics to destroy the finest temples of antiquity.
It was not just the physical temples that were destroyed but also the intellectual fabric of the old pagan customs, rituals and folklore. It was not sufficient just to preach a new mythology … but also to zealously destroy the old. The early Church fathers were proud of their ambition to destroy old knowledge and even left a published record of their policy. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, preaching at the dedication of a new church in Tyre, urged the gullible Christian converts to …‘spit upon the faces of idols, trample upon the unhallowed rites of demons, ridicule the ancient delusions of their ancestors, and acknowledge only the One True God’. [1] The new faithful were urged to ‘ridicule ancient delusions’ … and we did.
In Orwellian fashion old records were expunged … by incineration.
As early as 270-275 AD the original library of Alexandria containing all the books in the world was attacked and burned under orders of Emperor Aurelian; then in 391 AD its successor the Serapeum was burned by edict of the Coptic Pope Theophilus.
In 420 AD a mad monk called Porphyrius was appointed Bishop of Gaza in Palestine and later canonized for his role in destroying human history. He torched pagan temples which burned for several days, then searched all private houses for books of ‘magic and superstition’ which were also consigned to the flames.
A millennium later when Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes defeated Montezuma in Mexico in 1521 his Soldiers of Christ set out to kill the Aztec ‘Sons of the Sun’ and destroy their culture. While the soldiers looted the heathen temples for gold and jewels, Bishop Diego de Landa collected a large number of books made of tree-bark and he burned them all – explaining, ‘they contained nothing but superstition and lies of the devil, [so] we burned them all, which they [the Maya people] regretted to an amazing degree and it caused them much affliction.’ [2]
Until finally, in the mid-1800s, missionaries of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary of Valparaiso, Chile were dispatched to Easter Island where they converted the entire [surviving] population and contrived to burn the historic rongo-rongo writing tablets as firewood.
The reach and zealotry of the Church knew no bounds, extending across nearly two millennia and including the vital centres of ancient records in the Middle East, Mexico and Rapanui (originally called Te Pito Te henua, the navel of the Earth). It is no wonder the Mexican Maya showed such bitter regret … for the wilful fanatical destruction of human history.
Megalithic earth and stone monuments were also destroyed … because they formed diagrammatic records of the old pagan knowledge. The early Church fulminated against stones. Councils from Carthage in 398 to Cambrai in 1565 issued edicts, like latter-day fatwas, threatening stone-worshippers with excommunication. Pope Gregory in 601 AD instructed his missionaries to convert old monuments … from the worship of devils to the service of the true God.
In the 1700s at the giant stone ring of Avebury (near the more famous Stonehenge), a cottage industry was established to break up the heathen stones so the fragments could be used to build a church, a pub and a cowshed … probably in that order. The pub was called, eponymously, the ‘Catherine Wheel’, after the rotating flashing meteorite depicted by the circle and its two trailing arms (now absent). That legendary vision of a coiling, twisting, writhing ball of fire was known to the Egyptians as the celestial devil Typhon; to the Greeks as the ‘rotating islands’ of the Strophades; and to the Celts as the rotating ‘silver wheel’ of Caer Sidi or Arianrod.
All that was a long time ago but the malicious policy of the Church continued into at least the early 20th century at the famous site of the ‘Alignments of Carnac’ in Brittany. An early 1900s photograph showed local men proudly destroying a dolmen, with the commentary … ‘In a common practice of the time, Catholics fiercely demolished the ancient heritage claiming they were offensive temples of false gods of a blood-thirsty cult. [3]
Our pagan heritage was destroyed in the name of the new Christian mythology … but not quite. Sufficient traces remain to patch together a coherent story of the old reality.
The ancient Egyptians knew everything. The Pharaohs claimed to be sons of the lords from the ‘First Time’ (prior time). They called themselves ‘Followers’ [descendants] and celebrated a ‘We Remain’ festival commemorating the ‘First Time’ [prior time] when the solar year was exactly 360 days … until they added the five epagomenae – the ‘extra days’ – added to the three hundred and sixty of which the year formerly consisted – named for the celestial ‘gods’ who caused the change. [4]
All that and much more of the old knowledge remained in what we now scorn as folklore, legend and myth … before it was all swept away under the tide of Christian doctrine. Aeneas and his kin fled the flood and flames … they were what the later Greeks called superstes (survivors) and their folklore became known as ‘superstitions’. Deliberately misconstrued in the derogatory sense in the Christian era.
The reality of human history was deceptively simple. About 10,000 BC planet Earth suffered a massive cataclysmic event causing hemispheric fire and flood, as recounted in the Iliad … ‘what tract of [planet] Earth does not know our agony’. But Prince Aeneas and his few kin were forewarned and fled to safety and survival.
Impact debris and volcanism clouded the sky. In Biblical imagery ‘darkness was upon the deep’ and in Homer’s phrase ‘night drew her veil across the mortal sphere’.
The surviving lords sent their sons … ‘remnants of Ilium’s noble race’ … far across the world to lighten the darkness and bring salvation to mankind. Along the way they saw that the daughters of local men were fair and they took them for their wives … and the mixed results of those unions multiplied until the descendants were as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. Now about 7 billion and counting.
It is a story of men. The ‘lords’ were descendants of a ‘noble race’ … of men. There were no ‘gods’ or aliens or extraterrestrials or supernatural beings, or astral spirits, mystics, magicians, angels, devils, evil demons or any such imaginations. Just men!
This is their story, our story.
[1] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History
[2] Landa de, D. Landa’s Relacionde las Cosas de Yucatan, Peabody Mus, 1941
[3] Extraite de du Bulletin N°34 de la Société d’Archéologie et d’Histoire du Pays de Lorient. Les Démolisseurs à l’ouvrage. Photo prise par Zacharie Le Rouzic entre 1900 et 1910 on voit les 2 carriers démolissant un dolmen: pratique banal pour l’époque!. Que ce soit les catholiques s’acharnant sur “les temples des faux dieux issus d’un culte sanguinaire”.
[4] Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride
A Different Story 