Subtitle: Another special role of the USA
The first lines are omitted: they form a bridge between the previous paragraph
– Slavery and the special role of the US (§93)- and this one.
Almost every educated American knows who the Salem witches were: the 19 women executed in Massachusetts following accusations of witchcraft 211). We are writing the year 1692.
‘Only 19‘ I could also write in this context: this number should be compared to the number of victims of the witch hunts in Europe.
Estimates of this number vary widely, but the lowest estimates are in the hundreds of thousands and the highest estimates are in the millions.
This organised massacre of women 212) was given a solid foundation in the form of a book with the popular title The Hammer of Witches.
A gruesome title for a book with even more gruesome content.
How many Europeans know of the existence of that writing compared to the number of Americans who are familiar with the Salem witch hunt?
I would still be positively surprised if it turned out that one out of every hundred educated Europeans knew at least the title of this manual for Catholic torturers.
While in Europe tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of times more gruesome executions took place, usually after prolonged horrific torture.
Translating the previous sentences cast a very special light on the difference between Europe on the one hand and the USA on the other. The Dutch word ‘beul‘ has two different meanings. The same goes for the French word ‘bourreau‘. These words can refer to two different professions (!):
1) a person that tortures and
2) a person who performs legal executions.
(American) English has no word for the first profession.
The first time I engaged somewhat with the subject of witch hunts, it was in the context of my studies in psychology.
When I began that study, the university in question still had “Catholic” in its name.
Superficially, there had long since been little evidence of a Catholic character. Although the university was located in the southern, more Catholic and somewhat more conservative part of the Netherlands, leftist students manifested themselves there even earlier and more successfully than in Amsterdam, which was known as progressive.
I am referring here to the infamous year 1968.
Almost 47 years later, looking back on that first phase of my studies in Tilburg, I think that Catholicism still had some influence on the content of the courses. For the course Psychological History (not to be confused with ‘history of psychology’) I wrote an essay on the witch hunt.
The most remarkable thing I remember about its contents 213) was a certain relativization of the role of the Spanish Inquisition. From a position of authority, Catholic scribes pronounced judgments on whether people (read: women) were witches or not.
And these verdicts protected people from bloodthirsty mobs.
And even more painful: what also stayed with me was that it concerned hundreds of thousands of women -not millions- over a period of hundreds of years.
The horror of The Hammer of Witches and especially the underlying unfathomable ecclesiastical contempt and hatred for women was not included 214).
Am I ashamed of these omissions?
I was already past twenty, so I can hardly hide behind my youthfulness. The year before, fellow students had given me the nickname ‘the professor‘: so I was probably not or hardly more naive than the average peer.
No, I am not ashamed of it.
I certainly do regret it.
However, I am not going to defend myself and my peers again here: I already did so in the second part of the paragraph Sympathy for Israel and the role of the Cold War (§77).
Here I only add that before the existence of a public Internet, research was so much more difficult, especially for a student from a working class background like me 215).
That I can now, in these paragraphs, put the spotlight on that Catholic hatred at length is due to the fact that I realised when I started writing this Postface that undoubtedly others (than myself) must also have seriously faced up to the fact that gods are created by men in the past decades.
ANd I realised that I even had an unread book on my bookshelf with the title Man Made God !
It was written by Barabara G. Walker and I purchased it several years before on the recommendation of Dorothy Milne Murdock.
I found Murdock through social media 216). She also wrote the foreword for Man Made God.
The foundation of both Murdock’s and Walker’s work is the juxtaposition of ‘holy books’ on the one hand -especially the Bible 217)– and the content of myths on the other.
Myths that are in part much older than those books.
No doubt due in part to the fact that both women primarily took Christianity to task, criticism of their work also came primarily from that side.
A not very extensive orientation to the content of that criticism became an embarrassing experience.
An important part of the underpinning is formed by something that appears to be referred to as the ‘criterion of embarrassment ‘.
I did not know the term by that name, although I described its application earlier in this book in the sections Muhammad later made up? (§60) and A Christian Mirror Image (§68), both in Part III.
Quite extensively in the latter, the historian Josephus is also discussed.
One encounters texts that are reminiscent of the ‘97%-of-the-scientists’-narrative we know from the non-debate on CO2 and climate.
In connection with Jesus Christ as a figment of myths, that narrative is even more absurd.
In the so-called climate debate, one also encounters scientists who honestly state that they started doing somewhat ‘climate’ related studies after or even because their concerns were raised.
In this other field, a large majority of ‘scientists’ or scientists who are engaged in this field are devoted admirers of Jesus Christ as a historical personage.
I don’t want to use the percentage 97 directly, but would venture to say that it is a large majority.
Speaking of embarrassment, how difficult must it be for someone with such a background to really open themselves up to arguments on the part of women like Walker and Murdock?
Do they realize at all that arguments in this context outweigh indisputable facts? AFTER ALL, THERE ARE VIRTUALLY NONE!
The writings of this same Josephus that I wrote about earlier in the part A Christian Mirror Image, also is counted among the ‘most reliable sources’ regarding the existence of Jesus of Nazareth or Bethlehem as a physical person!
Let me give you an example of such an ’embarrassment narrative’ that deals with things I already wrote about in the paragraph Apocryphal texts (§58) in Chapter 10 of Part II:
… found in the stories of the Infancy Gospels. In one account from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a very young Jesus is said to have used his supernatural powers first to strike dead, and then revive, a playmate who had accidentally bumped into him. If this tradition had been accepted as worthy of inclusion at some key juncture in the formation of the Christian Bible (and hence integrated in one way or another among the canonical Gospels), arguably many modern Christians would find it quite embarrassing-especially strict believers in biblical inerrancy. But as is suggested by the existence of this early non-canonical pericope, it must not have been embarrassing to some early Christians.
Not a completely nonsensical line of thought, but what is painfully left out of consideration is the phenomenon of decision-making as such on all kinds of matters of faith at different times.
Hence my emphasis on that ‘at some key juncture’.
That decision-making took place in particular at so-called Councils. All kinds of doctrines/issues/Bible books were voted on, some even several times with different results. That applied to the Gospel of Luke -the only gospel in which the birth of Jesus is discussed- and that terrible Revelation ‘of John’.
Sometimes even adopted with a one-vote majority.
On the question of whether women are actually human beings, for example …
Something that until the last century was still a theoretical and de facto question for the Catholic Church, and into this century for Muslim demigods.
One of the most famous of those Councils was that of Nicea.
The most illustrious of its visitors was the infamous Constantine. I will return to him explicitly later (in §96 Constantine the Evil and Thomas the Repulsive).
The girl sacrifice and Lillith’s ‘rant’ (§95)
I insert this paragraph here to prepare you to be able to deal meaningfully with the kind of critique of fundamentalist Abrahamic thought by women like Walker in the following.
It consists of two rather different pieces.
The first is actually about the liberating act of laughing at the most repugnant aspects of Abrahamic thought.
The second is about a form of emancipation truly worthy of the name.
During the preparation of my own first book, a book that contained hardly any criticism of the Jewish and Christian faiths, I had already come across that peculiar difference between the stories of Abraham’s exemplary obedience of Muslims on the one hand and of Jews and Christians on the other.
On two remarkable differences actually, but I only mention here the difference that Walker in Man Made God also deals with: which son was Abraham going to sacrifice like a piece of cattle?
You could go into hair-splitting or war over that question.
You could mull over the question of why mohammedans chose to have Abraham almost kill that other son or consider whether it is even theoretically conceivable to find reliable evidence on this question today in ancient inscriptions, on coins, in caves, at the bottom of a sea or in the stomach of a mummified aardvark in South America (Yes, these are South African animals).
Walker does something completely different. In doing so, she is simultaneously even more empathetic and even more ruthless than I am.
She writes simply that Yahweh got Abraham twice this way: Isaac and Ishmael were both nearly sacrificed, and on both occasions Abraham did not stop because he came to his senses, but because Yahweh appreciated his submission so much that he came up with a lamb at the last minute.
Brilliant. Utterly brilliant!
With one almost careless, but deadly disruptive gesture, she simultaneously shines the spotlight on two crucial issues: the fact that these are not historical events but similar myths of three religions, and on the utter repugnance of the myths.
It is really just about impossible not to make yourself look utterly ridiculous when you try to contradict Walker about the number of sons Abraham almost sacrificed.
And yes, a repugnant myth.
The sacrifice of children, unfortunately, is itself historical and not just a mythical event.
The idea of slaughtering a child and sacrificing it to some deity does at most fill one in a million people today not with absolute revulsion.
The idea of slaughtering one’s own child will now, at most, still occur to one in 10 million people.
Not six or seven, but almost eight billion other people wholeheartedly agree: there is something very wrong with these people and they should at least be distrusted in absolutely everything.
This last fact is a wonderful illustration of the fact that mankind –yes, with terrible fits and starts, certainly, but still– is making moral progress.
Sputtering about which son was almost slaughtered in honour of Abraham’s god becomes even more painful when opposite the fate of the boys Isaac and Ishmael is placed that of the girl Iphigenia.
The story about her comes from the book of Judges.
This is the second book after the series on Moses.
The first book after that is named after a new right hand of Yahweh: Joshua. The book of Judges is about a whole series of ‘judges’ who led the Jews in the four centuries after Joshua. The best known of these is Samson: many movies are dedicated to him.
Some time before this long-haired powerhouse, one Jephthah filled that role of ‘judge’.
The chance that you know who that was, I estimate, is very much smaller.
Like other judges, this Jephthah finds himself at the head of a great military campaign. To increase his chances on the battlefield, he promises a human sacrifice to Yahweh.
A surprise sacrifice, so to speak: he will slaughter the first person he sees upon returning from his campaign –if (!) it was successful.
But what bad luck –or was it a purposeful cruel lesson from his own god or from a god of his enemies?– let that be his only child, his young daughter Iphigenia.
Jephthah informs the girl of his promise to his god and the child does not hesitate for a moment: you must keep every promise to your god, daddy.
Jewish tradition has it that it is extra sad that the girl was still a virgin.
She even gets permission to moan about that with her girlfriends for two more months, but after that she really has to face it: on the fire.
The ‘holy books’ do not provide any details about this slaughter feast: centuries after the near slaughter of those little boys.
Was the mother of the girl invited? Were other people watching? Or angels? Was there a curtain that spontaneously torn?
Yes, I am cynical here 218).
We do get a different kind of context by looking for the possible mythic inspiration for this story.
As for just about every passage in the Bible, there is a mythical story similar to it.
It is not entirely clear when that sacrificial girl was given a name: in the King James version of the bible, the sacrificial daughter did not yet have a name.
Searching on her name in the 21th century does bring you in seconds to a daughter of deity (or devil?) Agamemnon who was also supposedly murdered by her own father.
A female goddess, Artemis, is blamed for this.
For once, it wouldn’t be so…
In one version of this myth Iphigenia is also murdered, in another Artemis saves the girl at the last moment.
Something about a young sacrificial animal …219).
And that brings me to the part about emancipation, emancipate.
According to a Dutch etymological dictionary, that stands for “to free from a dominant authority or judgement“.
Merriam Webster mentions the (third) meaning: “to free from any controlling influence (such as traditional mores or beliefs)”.
So not literally freeing oneself from legally sealed oppression, but from an oppressive body of thought; going against all and all kinds of self-proclaimed elites.
The best response to mythical stories presented as historical events by all three types of Abrahamic fundamentalists is to introduce a new myth.
Hence the quote on my assignment page:
Since gods are made of human words, then human words alone have the power to unmake them.
In the last six pages of Man Made God, Walker thus introduces a new myth.
I reproduce its first sentences below. To avoid any misunderstanding of the mythic nature of the text: having previously become the mother of Yahweh, Lillith subsequently had thousands of other children.
And yes, whether you consider an accompanying owl crucial to your image of Lillith: it’s entirely up to you.
Lillith speaks:
Barbara Walker. in the last six pages of ‘Man Made God ‘
Hey there, Yahweh, Jehovah, God, Allah, whatever pseudonym you’re using these days. It’s me, Lillith, the one you dethroned and tried to marry off to that jerk Adam -that clod who never learned to make love to a woman properly. Fat lot of good he must have been to Wife Number Two, poor old Eve. I’m back, Buster, and I’ve been watching you for a couple of millennia now. You’ve got a lot to answer for. You’ve been screwing up right, left and diagonally.
God speaks:
Why, Lillith, what are you doing here? My followers turned you into a demon long ago. You have no right to come back.
Lillith speaks:
I have more right than a johnny-come-lately like you, Sport. You know perfectly well that I was Queen of Heaven back there in Sumer and Akkad, thousands of years before anybody heard of you. As for the demon thing, all that Night-Hag nonsense and pretending that I took away men’s souls in wet dreams, why, you also know perfectly well that it was just a plot to make guys fear their own physiology -and of women even more. Do you know how much human agony your miserable anti-sex campaigns have caused?
God:
Well, agony is good (…)
Superb!
That equally appropriate and necessary lack of any shred of misplaced respect towards gods and their ground staff, whether or not their members identify themselves as demigods, superheroes, experts or wisecracks.
Notes
211 Remarkable: when I consulted some American sources on the Salem witches, I also came across the story of ‘ergot‘: an attack by a fungus on various types of wheat, especially rye. Consumption of this tainted grain leads to symptoms such as delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms; symptoms that were also seen in people ‘possessed’ by witches or devils. The remarkable thing about it was the suggestion that it was a fairly new insight, while this form of ‘drug use’ had in fact been known for many thousands of years. As an explanation for these phenomena, this poisoning was not preferred in all sorts of circles and over many centuries, indeed millennia.
212 I considered using the term ‘femicide’ or ‘feminicide’, but refrained.
213 Note: this is about the time before the personal computer. Later that year, I bought a real electric typewriter. Photocopiers already existed, but I had not made a copy of my paper. There was no such thing as digital copying.
214 Thanks to Walker, I learned -only now, I admit- of a major expansion and intensification of the witch-hunt for the financial gain of the persecutors.
215 And now it is getting harder again at a time when tech giants with no affinity whatsoever for the practice of science are assuming the role of censors even in the scientific field.
216 She also wrote under the pseudonym Acharya S. I had some direct contact with her. She unfortunately died of cancer in 2015.
217 Both of them paid almost no attention to the Torah or the Koran. Not to those other holy books themselves nor to the relationship between them.
218 In my childhood, I read the story of Samson several times, but I do not remember the text about Iphigenia. If I read it at the time, I did not realise that a girl was being slaughtered. Obviously, it did not speak of ‘slaughtering’, but of ‘sacrificing’. Now that I read again in that ‘Children’s Bible’, I also see that her name was not even mentioned and that it says that Jephthah did something that was not allowed but “he did not know that he should not have made such a promise“. This fine anecdote concluded for the reading children as follows: “And though it was wrong to sacrifice his daughter, yet he is an example to all the world of a man who kept his word“.
Extra sad note: this children’s Bible was written by a woman, H. Wolffenbuttel-Van Rooyen. The book begins by presenting Moses as the central figure: Genesis is put into his mouth … !
219 Now that we are at it: please take a moment to let it sink in, what it means for the Torah/Old Testament that the slaughter of the girl would have taken place centuries after the abhorrent misconduct of this Abraham!