From the Narrow Desert

This morning, I woke up with the phrase "Stink Gorilla More" in my head. For those who slept through Art History, that's the name of one of the most famous paintings ever produced by a gorilla, probably second only to "Pink Pink Stink Nice Drink." Michael and Koko, the gorilla artists behind these two pieces had, apparently, adapted the sign for "stink" to mean "flower."

This last old man,

Whom with a crack'd heart I have sent to Rome,

Loved me above the measure of a father;

Nay, godded me, indeed.

My January 30 post "Hearts of gold, new shoes, dirty paws, and walking on air" included a video montage of scenes from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty set to the song "Dirty Paws." At one point, the video shows someone holding a black-and-white photo of a thumb:

Akass declares his intention to kill Tintin by having him covered in liquid polyester and sold as a work of art by César Baldaccini.

As announced in my last post, I'm putting the sync fairies on hold for a few weeks while I try to make sense of what they've already given me. And like it or not, the linchpin of the recent cloud of syncs (do clouds have linchpins? Jeeves?) is this stupid and gratuitously offensive (not that there's anything wrong with that) meme I found on 4chan:

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Hercules in New York

The running man in the foreground of the meme is Arnold Strong as seen in his debut film, Hercules in New York (1970). After this breakthrough role, he would ditch this English-language stage name and replace it with his real surname, Schwarzenegger. In German, the word for a black man is Schwarzer, and their version of our "n-word" is Neger. Etymologically, Arnold's surname means "person from Schwarzenegg" ("Black Ridge") and is unrelated to the racial slur. Still, though, Mr. Strong's becoming Mr. Schwarzenegger obviously syncs with the idea of replacing English words with nigger.

By the way, there are two different places called Schwarzenegg: one in Austria, and one in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland.

For now anyway, Hercules in New York is available on YouTube in its entirety, and it's a pretty decent contribution to the "so bad it's good" genre:

In the scene from which the still in the meme is taken, the demigod Hercules, having just arrived in New York and been befriended by "Pretzie," a nebbishy pretzel vendor, happens upon a park where some college athletes are training. Here's a sample of the top-notch dialogue:

Pretzie: Where are you going?

Hercules: Over there.

Pretzie: What for?

Hercules: To show them how to throw the discus.

Pretzie: No, no. You've gotta stay here. You can't go buttin' in there.

Hercules: They would not like me to instruct them?

Pretzie: No, it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed.

Hercules: I am Hercules.

So Herc wants to participate in sports with a group of white New Yorkers but is forbidden because there are "no outsiders allowed."

Throughout Herc's adventures in New York, the scene periodically changes to Olympus, where we see Zeus and various lesser gods observing him through -- uh, a big white crystal ball. You remember Zeus's famous crystal ball, right?

Near the end of the movie, Hercules is in trouble, having lost his divine powers and disappointed the gangsters who were counting on him to win a televised weight-lifting competition against a black dude. To save this wayward son of Zeus from the irate gangsters, the Olympians send down Atlas and, you guessed it, Samson! You remember all those Greek myths about Samson, don't you? No explanation is offered of how this Hebrew worthy came to be living on Mount Olympus after being crushed to death in the temple of Dagon; he is just mentioned matter-of-factly, as if he belonged there just as much as Mercury and Apollo and the rest.

Two other bodybuilders briefly show up and join the brawl without having any noticeable effect on Herc's fortunes. It's not clear which of them is supposed to be Samson, as they both have short hair, but in the end it is Hercules himself who ends up playing the Samson role of bringing down the pillars -- only in this case the "pillars" are just stacks of large cylindrical objects, wrapped in brown paper, in the warehouse or wherever it is they're fighting. (The characters never call it anything other than "that building.") Still, the allusion to Samson is obvious and obviously deliberate:

These "pillars," unlike those of Samson, aren't actually load-bearing structures supporting the building, so nothing falls down other than the pillars themselves. Somehow this translates into a final victory for Herc -- I guess we are to assume that all the gangsters were crushed by the falling objects? -- because the scene immediately cuts to Herc and Pretzie, now apparently without a care in the world, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. 

Radio: Any time you wish me to be with you, all you need to do is think of me, and there I shall be, in your mind and in your heart, for as long as you want me to be, as long as you need me. Due to temporary atmospheric difficulties, we were interrupted in our broadcast. We resume . . .

Pretzie: Herc? Herc? "Any time you need me, any time you want me, just think of me, and I'll be there for as long as you want me to." Yeah. I think I'll eat an apple.

Kneeling in prayer with this group he was impressed to locate the temple at Bern, Switzerland’s capital. The next morning before the travelers left for Holland, they inspected several sites and chose one in the southeastern part of the city and assigned Swiss-Austrian Mission president Samuel E. Bringhurst to acquire the property. President Bringhurst, however, discovered that this parcel had just been acquired for the city of Bern as a college site. Conferring with David O. McKay by phone, President Bringhurst was directed to identify other potential sites to be inspected by President McKay when he returned for his regularly scheduled visit to Switzerland in early July. 

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).

The October 24 post "William Wright is back -- and he's bringing syncs" introduced the 1992 They Might Be Giants song "The Statue Got Me High" into the sync-stream. I connected it with this photo I took last year:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

From Raphael's Council of the Gods

A correspondent recently emailed me about the upcoming Pluto Return -- the return of Pluto, for the first time, to the precise zodiacal position it occupied on July 4, 1776 -- and I mentioned in reply that I had previously associated Biden with Pluto because his name resembles bident, the two-pronged spear traditionally associated with Pluto.

On December 18, I received two emails in reply. The first asked me to send links to the blog posts where I had mentioned the Biden-Bident-Pluto connection, and the second pointed out an additional Biden-Bident link that I had not previously been aware of.

I've been researching about Pluto and the Bident and found this interesting connection from Wiki: "In Roman agriculture, the bidens (genitive bidentis) was a double-bladed drag hoe." . . . I don't know if you've read this or not on social media / urban slang, but Biden and Harris are often referred to as JOE AND THE HOE. Harris being the Hoe because of allegations that Harris 'slept' her way up to her positions in politics, especially with her alleged relationship with Willie Brown.

Thinking about the Bident again today, I realized that there is another prominent person whose name is associated with a two-pronged fork: David Hume.

And doesn't the name Hume strongly suggest Pluto? To exhume a body is to remove it from the grave, so by implication hume is the common grave of mankind, Sheol or Hades. Hume's name was originally spelled Home, but that is appropriate as well. "Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets" (Ecclesiastes 12:5). Or, as They Might Be Giants put is, "We long to swim for home, but our only home is bone."

Exhume actually derives from humus, "earth," whence also humanus, "earthling." Thus the etymology of human parallels that of Adam, from adamah, "earth."

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In my "Green Manalishi" post of exactly a year ago, I associate the two-prong crown of the Manalishi with the two-prong bident of Pluto. (The song was supposedly inspired by a drug-induced dream of being barked at by a long-dead green dog that represented money. Pluto represents both money and death, and he has a dog.)

The two-prong crown made me think of the "two-horned man" of the Quran, recently mentioned both by myself and by Chris Knowles, as described in my post "Ye Cannot Serve God and Ammon?" The title of that post alludes to Knowles's theory that Mammon (money) derives from Ammon -- but money is more an attribute of Pluto than of Jupiter.

The two-horned man is Alexander the Great, portrayed with horns because he was supposed to be the son of Zeus Ammon -- a combination of Zeus with the Egyptian god Amun, who was sometimes given a ram's head or four rams' heads. This four-headed "Ram of Mendes," later considered to be a form of Amun, was called Banebdjedet. The Wikipedia article on this god begins thus:

Banebdjedet (Banebdjed) was an ancient Egyptian ram god with a cult centre at Mendes. Khnum was the equivalent god in Upper Egypt.

And who is Khnum? Well, it turns out he is none other than the Green Manalishi with the two-prong crown.

That's right, Khnum (the god of the Nile, later assimilated to Zeus Ammon as Jupiter Nilus) is specifically a green god with two horns.

The second of the demonic beasts of the Apocalypse -- the one that comes from the earth rather than the sea and would thus be associated with Pluto rather than Neptune -- also wears the two-prong crown.

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men (Rev. 13:11-13).

The horns of this beast are specifically those of a sheep, but the beast's true nature is that of a dragon. Compare this two Khnum, who has the horns of a ram but is green -- a reptilian, not a mammalian, color.

The association of the apocalyptic Manalishi with supernaturally produced fire is also interesting, given the inexplicable but persistent way in which the sync fairies keep connecting Joe Biden with the idea of spontaneous human combustion.

In my November 23 Magician's Table post "Four rams' heads," I discussed Amun in his character as Zeus Ammon and particularly as the four-headed Ram of Mendes (Banebdjedet), and I mentioned ancient coins that depicted a horned Alexander.

Alexander the Great, a prototype of the "emperor" figure, was supposed to be the son of Zeus Ammon, and ancient coins depict him with ram's horns. (The personage called the "two-horned man" in the Quran is generally believed to be Alexander.)

On November 26, Chris Knowles at The Secret Sun (who I'm pretty sure does not read my blogs) posted "He Walks Ammon Us: Egypt's Restoration Ritual at Luxor," writing that

the big daddy of the gods is Amun, AKA Jupiter Ammon, AKA Banebdjedet, AKA Baphomet, AKA you name it. All the same thing, really: the Horned and Hidden God of kings and conquerors.

If you're wondering about the Baphomet connection, the modern goat-headed Baphomet figure (as opposed with the severed head supposedly worshiped by the Templars) was invented by Éliphas Lévi and associated by him with the "Goat of Mendes" -- i.e., Herodotus's distorted account of Banebdjedet, who was properly the Ram of Mendes. Knowles goes on to mention Alexander as the "two-horned man" of the Quran, and then he offers this interpretation of "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

This is another one of those hiding-in-plain-sight kind of deals that eluded scholars looking for something more contrived. But it's very simple: Jupiter Ammon was on all the coinage that Jesus and the Apostles would have been familiar with. It was rendered "Mammon" as was typical of the transliteration of the time.

Well, no, I don't think adding a random M to the beginning was "typical of the transliteration of the time." Nor is it true that "Jupiter Ammon was on all the coinage" in Jesus' time. When Jesus held up a Roman denarius and asked, "Whose is this image and superscription?" they answered, "Caesar's." I have looked at many pictures of denarii from the reign of Tiberius, but none of them feature the horns of Ammon. But even if some of them did have horns, it's pretty clear that Jesus and his contemporaries thought of the bloke on the coins as "Caesar," not "(M)ammon."

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In my post "John, the Bear Witness," I connected John the Baptist with the Great Bear constellation and mentioned that pun I used as a title: It is said in the Fourth Gospel that John came "to bear witness." The Greek word for "bear witness" is marturese (whence martyr), and it occurred to me that if you dropped the initial letter, it looked a lot like Arthur or Arcturus ("bear" names both) -- but the connection is a stretch even by my standards, so I didn't mention it in the post. Later I find Knowles doing exactly the same thing, even the same letter.

Actually, come to think of it, Arabic at least does form words by prefixing m- to a root (Muslim from Islam, maktab from kataba, etc.). Is there anything similar in Hebrew or Aramaic? (A pseudo-example from English would be meat, originally meaning "food," from eat.)

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After writing part of this post, I had to go to work. While on the road, I was thinking about the idea of a horned god and how it contrasted with the Elizabethan use of horns as a symbol of cuckoldry and a mark of shame. I remembered how back in 2020 Francis Berger had posted a photo of himself sitting in front of a deer-antler trophy so that he appeared to have antlers coming out of his head, and how I had commented about the Elizabethan meaning of such. This led me to thinking about the white stag and how Frank had adopted it as a sort of personal symbol.

Just then I turned a corner and saw that a new billboard had been put up -- showing an enormous white stag with a crow or raven perched on either antler. So, that was weird.

Looking up Frank's old post now, I find (which I had not remembered!) that in the comments we even talk about rams' horns, Jupiter Ammon, and Alexander the Great.

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Note added Dec. 2: I asked one of my staff to put something Christmassy on the small blackboard in front of our school. I didn't say anything more specific than that, but by chance she decided to make a drawing centered on a large white pair of antlers.

Rank a-the-ists put a for the
and spell me with a little g,
for their conceit is to refer
to Great I Am as if I were
but an almighty, nothing more
than Pan, Poseidon, Thoth, or Thor.
Jehovah's one with Jove or Zeus--
so they'd imply with this their use
of a and an, but they blaspheme -- a
curse upon their an/a thema!

-- Yes and No

As everyone knows, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are monotheists, while pagans are polytheists. So when, in Book V of the Odyssey, Zeus sends Hermes to convey a message to Calypso, all three of these characters are gods. When Calypso asks Hermes why he has come, he replies (in A. T. Murray's translation)

Thou, a goddess, dost question me, a god, upon my coming, and I will speak my word truly, since thou biddest me. It was Zeus who bade me come hither against my will. Who of his own will would speed over so great space of salt sea-water, great past telling? . . . But it is in no wise possible for any other god to evade or make void the will of Zeus, who bears the aegis.

In Luke 1, when the God of the Hebrews wishes to convey messages to Zacharias and to Mary, he also sends an immortal heavenly messenger to carry out his will.

I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.

Gabriel, though, is not a god; nor, despite the cult that would later grow up around her, is Mary a goddess. Monotheism is widely considered to be extremely important, and entirely different from polytheism -- so what is this essential and fundamental difference between, say, Hermes and Gabriel that makes the one a god and the other a mere saint and angel?

Is it that Gabriel is entirely subordinate to God? But Hermes, as he explains to Calypso, is entirely subordinate to Zeus and is, no less than Gabriel, playing the role of an angelos -- that is, a messenger or envoy. And anyway, even beings that are not subordinate to God are still considered to be "angels"; Set and Loki are gods, but Satan is not.

Is Hermes considered a god because, unlike Gabriel, he was worshiped? Well, first of all, this is a difference in the religious behavior of human beings, not an intrinsic difference between Hermes and Gabriel themselves. (It may reflect some such difference, of course, but cannot be the difference.) Secondly, the supposed distinction between the "worship" of Hermes and the mere "veneration" of Gabriel is by no means an obvious one. If there were Temples of Hermes, hymns to Hermes, and so on, it is also true that there are prayers to St. Gabriel the Archangel and several houses of worship called St. Gabriel's Church. Catholicism considers the dulia due to Gabriel (and the hyperdulia paid to the Virgin) to be entirely different from the latria proper to God alone -- but for all the talk of how that difference is "infinite and immeasurable," "one of kind and not merely of degree," no one seems to be able to say clearly in what this supposedly infinite difference consists. What specific behaviors are proper when directed toward God but not when directed toward the Virgin, Gabriel, or any of the other saints? Every explanation I've read simply states that the objects of the different forms of servitus are infinitely different and seems to take it for granted that the two forms of servitus must therefore themselves be (in some unspecified way) infinitely different.

Suppose we leave Hermes out of the picture and simply ask why God is a god but Gabriel is not. If we accept the Supergod premise (that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent and created everything out of nothing; see The Supergod delusion for details), obviously there can only be one Supergod, and he is qualitatively different from everything and everyone else. If being a god means being Supergod, then of course Gabriel is not a god. But then neither is Calypso, or Hermes, or even Zeus before he was reconceptualized by the philosophers -- or, for that matter, Yahweh before he was reconceptualized by the philosophers. If nothing short of Supergod can be called a "god," then polytheism has never existed. Some post-Platonic pagans -- those who adopted the "Superzeus" conception -- were monotheists in precisely the same way that Supergod-believing Christians are, but most forms of paganism were, by this definition, atheistic; they believed in "angels" but not in God.


If Supergod is rejected, monotheism loses its meaning. There is a continuum of increasingly godlike beings, from ordinary men and women all the way up to God the Father, and deciding where along that continuum to draw the line between gods and mere saints is as arbitrary as the paleontological convention that separates the mammal-like reptiles from the reptile-like mammals.

Jean-Pierre Payen, 1713

One of the distinctive characteristics of so-called Tarot de Marseille "Type I" decks ("Type II" being the standard Tarot) is that the fourth trump, the Emperor, has, in addition to the Roman numerals at the top of the card, an Arabic numeral 4 floating in front of his face. Only the Emperor has this; every other trump has only the standard Roman-numeral label at the top. The question is, why?

It is customary for Tarot commentators to see in the Emperor's crossed legs and the rough triangle formed by his head and arms, an allusion to the alchemical symbol for Sulfur, which is a cross surmounted by a triangle. However, one could just as easily see the Emperor's legs as forming an Arabic numeral 4 -- and this numeral is also very close to the astrological symbol for Jupiter.

The resemblance of the Emperor to the god Jupiter -- who also sits on a throne, holding a scepter, with an eagle at his side -- should be obvious.

1st-century Roman statue of Jupiter

Other representations of the number 4 can also be connected to Jupiter. Although the Tarot de Marseille consistently uses strictly additive Roman numerals (IIII, VIIII, XIIII, XVIIII), the standard Roman numeral for 4 is IV -- the first two letters of the name Jupiter (IVPPITER). It was to avoid taking the name of Jupiter in vain that many Roman sundials, although they used the subtractive IX for 9, opted for IIII instead of IV. (The Tarot de Marseille uses "IV" only in the names of the trumps Justice and Judgment, with which it would not be disrespectful to associate Jupiter.)

The Greek numeral for 4 is the letter Δ (cf. the triangle formed by the Emperor's upper body). This is also the initial of Διεύς, the ancient form of the name Zeus and cognate with the Latin deus (which, besides its primary meaning of "god," was used as an imperial title).

Finally, I note -- although it is almost certainly a meaningless coincidence -- that Nicolas Conver's 1760 deck, often considered to be the canonical Tarot de Marseille, gives this trump the anomalous name L'empereup. If IV suggests Jupiter, surely UP does as well. If UP represents Jupiter, then the full title of the Conver trump is nothing less than le M. Père Jupiter.

All in all, I find the links to Jupiter to be much stronger than the more traditional ones to alchemical Sulfur.

There were in the time of Elijah two rival cults in Israel. The first worshiped a God who may originally have had a name (contemporary scholarship suggests Hadad or Ishkur) but was generally known simply as "the Lord"; the second gave their God a proper name -- but, after centuries of superstitious refusal to pronounce that name or even to write it with its proper vowel points, its precise form is no longer known. Thus it has come about that, in our English Bibles, it is the second of these Gods that is called "the Lord"; while for the first -- the one that the Israelites called "the Lord" -- that Hebrew word is simply transliterated and used as if it were a proper name.

For my part, I shall use the title "Lord" as the Israelites did and deal with the uncertain name of the other God by means of the same expedient resorted to by Victor Hugo, Freud, and others when they had reason to avoid spelling out a particular proper name. Even choosing an initial presents some difficulties, since the Hebrew letter in question can be transliterated as I, J, or Y. Out of deference to Dante (see Paradiso XXVI, 133-138) and to English translations of Moses (Exodus 3:14), I have chosen the first option.

Regarding the detailed differences between the two cults, all we can say for sure is that the followers of the Lord used religious statuary in their worship, while those of I---- tended towards iconoclasm. Any other differences in religious belief or practice are a matter of conjecture.

Everyone will be familiar with the story of the showdown between these two cults on Mount Carmel, instigated by Elijah (whose name means "My God is I----"). The story is related in 1 Kings 18; except for punctuation, paragraphing, and the rectification of names explained above, I follow the King James Version.

And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, "How long halt ye between two opinions? if I---- be God, follow him: but if the Lord, then follow him."

And the people answered him not a word.

Then said Elijah unto the people, "I, even I only, remain a prophet of I----; but the Lord’s prophets are 450 men. Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under. And call ye on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of I----: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God."

And all the people answered and said, "It is well spoken."

When the prophets of the Lord were unsuccessful in obtaining an "answer by fire," Elijah ridiculed them and their God.

And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of the Lord from morning even until noon, saying, "O Lord, hear us." 

But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.

And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, "Cry aloud: for he is a God; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked."

Elijah was, of course, more successful in eliciting from his God an apparently supernatural conflagration. (We are told that the fire consumed even the stones of the altar!)

And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, "I----, he is the God; I----, he is the God." 

And Elijah said unto them, "Take the prophets of the Lord; let not one of them escape."

And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.

Of course that wasn't the end of the conflict. Magic tricks never really converted anyone, nor has making martyrs ever been an effective way of stamping out an unwanted religion. Attempts were naturally made to avenge the 450 murdered prophets, and the feud between the two religions continued for some centuries. In the end, though, so complete was the victory of I---- that in modern languages it is he who is known simply as "the Lord," while his onetime rival, his cult now long extinct, is remembered only as a cartoonish devil once worshiped by idiots in the distant past.


One or two centuries after Elijah, the prophet known as Epimenides appeared in Crete. No one really knows where he came from; the story that has come down to us is that he just emerged from a cave one day, having slept there for 57 years. Although his line "Cretans, always liars" later became the basis of a logical paradox ("If a Cretan says Cretans always lie, is he telling the truth?"), it seems highly unlikely that this tattoo-covered shaman was in fact an ethnic Cretan. We can only speculate as to his true origins, but to me such sparse information as we have suggests that he may have been of Scythian extraction. At any rate, he actually put the line "Cretans, always liars" in the mouth of Minos -- a genuine Cretan -- in one of his poems, so the paradox is saved. In the poem, Minos berates his countrymen for having dared to maintain a "tomb of Zeus."

They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one,
Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But you are not dead: you live and abide forever,
For in you we live and move and have our being.

Zeus is supposed to have been born in Crete, and apparently he once had a tomb there as well! Could "Zeus" have been a real man who lived and died in Crete in the distant past, one of such blessed memory that he was gradually deified in the minds of those who survived him, coming to be thought of as a god, and eventually as God? It's interesting to speculate, but at any rate, by the time Epimenides came along, Zeus was God and God was Zeus, and a "tomb of Zeus" was blasphemous
nonsense.

Later, around the 3rd century BC, Aratus of Soli began his Phaenomena, a didactic poem on the rather unpromising subjects of astronomy and meteorology, with a prayer to Zeus:

From Zeus let us begin; him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the market-places of men; full is the sea and the havens thereof; always we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring; [. . .] Wherefore him do men ever worship first and last. Hail, O Father, mighty marvel, mighty blessing unto men. Hail to thee and to the Elder Race! Hail, ye Muses, right kindly, every one! But for me, too, in answer to my prayer direct all my lay, even as is meet, to tell the stars.

As readers versed in the New Testament will already have divined, the only reason such obscure figures as Epimenides and Aratus are on my radar is that they are quoted there, in Paul's sermon at the Areopagus in Athens as reported in Acts 17.

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him "we live, and move, and have our being;" as certain also of your own poets have said, "For we are also his offspring." 

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

Although Paul begins with his famous reference to the Unknown God -- implying that the true God is someone over and above the named and "known" gods of the Greek pantheon -- he goes on to quote with approval two different poems about Zeus as if they are about the true God -- which, in my judgment, they are. Where an Elijah would have held Zeus up to ridicule and insisted that his own, better God be worshiped instead, Paul took a different tack. Never did he say that Zeus was a false god, a devil, or a figment of his worshipers imagination. He did not stoop so low as to quibble over names. (As recently as the 18th century, certain French pamphleteers were maintaining that their Dieu -- etymologically, Zeus! -- was the true deity, while the English God was nothing but another name for Lucifer; before you laugh, think if you have ever been guilty of the same thing.) Paul took it for granted that the Athenians already worshiped God and attempted only to correct and expand their ideas regarding him. So Dante says of the Greek pagans not that they worshiped false gods but that "they did not worship God in fitting ways."

Paul, like Elijah, triumphed in the end. It took a century or two, but his God eventually supplanted Zeus entirely.


Well, whose approach was right? Was Zeus God? Was Baal? Is Allah? . . . Is Yahweh?

Logically, either answer to each of those questions can be made consistent with the same facts, since there is no logical difference between believing in something that does not exist and believing false things about something that does exist. When, as often happens, I receive a letter addressed to Mr. Tychanievich or Mr. Pychonievich, is that the name of a person who does not exist, or is it my own name, spelt wrong? Is it more correct for a Yuletide spoilsport to say "there's no such thing as Santa Claus" or "You have some inaccurate beliefs about Saint Nicholas of Myra"? Should I call myself an atheist (which I am, when theism is narrowly defined) or simply say that my beliefs about God are somewhat unorthodox?

The question of which approach to take, then -- of whether to be an Elijah or a Paul -- is a practical rather than a factual one, a question of rhetorical or pedagogical technique, and different situations may call for different approaches. Looking back, and setting aside our squeamishness about mass murder, we can perhaps say that both Elijah and Paul made the choices that were strategically "right."

Note: Synchronicity alert: Just after writing the Epimenides part of this post, which mentions in passing the Liar Paradox associated with his name, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and read his then-new post "Does the I Ching have a personality?" He quoted an interview of Philip K. Dick by someone called Mike, including this exchange:

Phil: No, I don’t use the I Ching anymore. I’ll tell ya, the I Ching told me more lies than anybody else I’ve ever known. [. . .] One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it said yes. And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I am a complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. 

In other words I set it up. I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak with forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn’t mean to say that. But it had already –

Mike: Then you get a paradox. [. . .] That’s the paradox. It’s lying when it says it’s lying.

Note added: I should make it clear that the form of my question is deliberate: not "Was Jesus really the Messiah?" but "Was the Messiah really Jesus?" I wanted it to have the same form as "Is Zeus really God?" -- where the status of Zeus is being questioned by asking if he is God, the status of God being taken for granted. In the same way, I am taking the divinity of Jesus for granted and questioning the idea of the Messiah, not vice versa.