Syncretism and Simulacrum in Ritual Abuse, Pt. 2
Ritual Abuse In Antiquity; Ritual Abuse In Modernity
The story of ritual abuse is ancient. It is not a new invention or concept; it is nearly as old as humanity itself. No belief system that emerged out of humanity ever escaped its contradictions; human beings reconcile those contradictions by mashing contrarian belief systems together into a bastardized hybrid. The Jews assimilated idol worship into their worship of Yahweh, with a temple just beneath Jerusalem where child sacrifice was practiced in order to obtain entry into the presence of an idol:
There was a place below Jerusalem, Tofet was its name. Rabbi Yehuda says: It is so named due to the inferno that was in it. Rabbi Yosei said: The Valley of ben Hinom. There was a hollow idol there that was placed behind seven partitions. There was a bronze tray in its hand and there was a stove placed upon it. For anyone who would sacrifice fine flour, they would open one [partition] for him; pigeons and turtledoves, they would open two for him; a sheep, they would open three for him; a ram, they would open four for him; a calf, they would open five for him; a bull, they would open six for him; and for anyone who would sacrifice his son, they would open seven for him. They would place him into the bronze tray and ignite the stove beneath him. They would laud before him and say to him: ‘May it be pleasant for you and sweet for you.’ Why to that extent? So they would not hear the moaning of their sons and change their minds.
-Midrash Yelamedenu
King Josiah’s reforms included abolishing idolatry from the temple itself, which included male temple prostitutes, females who wove coverings for the goddess Asherah whose statue was in the temple, and various vessels used to make offerings to Baal and Asherah.
4 And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest and the priests cof the second order and the keepers of the threshold to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels made for dBaal, for eAsherah, and for all the host of heaven. fHe burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron and carried their ashes to Bethel. 5 And he deposed the priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and the moon and the constellations gand all the host of the heavens. 6 And he brought out hthe Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, to the brook Kidron, iand burned it at the brook Kidron jand beat it to dust and cast the dust of it upon the graves kof the common people. 7 And he broke down the houses of lthe male cult prostitutes who were in the house of the Lord, mwhere the women wove hangings for hthe Asherah.
Idolatry was rampant in Judah, a fact made apparent by Josiah’s destruction of the molech at Tofet, and the tearing down of the temples dedicated to Ashtoreth and Chemosh to the east of Jerusalem. Josiah burned the pagan priests on their altars, and his wrath extended further: he “put away nthe mediums and the necromancers and othe household gods and pthe idols and all the abominations that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, that he might establish qthe words of the law that were written in the book rthat Hilkiah the priest found in the house of the Lord.”
Israel and Judah were removed because of idolatry. Their history was convoluted; a mixture of idol worship and Yahwehism, with numerous violations of the covenant they made with God.
Christian history was no different.
Christian Syncretism
The Pauline epistles make it brutally clear that gross immorality was present within the early church.
5 It is actually reported that there is wsexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, xfor a man has his father’s wife. 2 And yyou are arrogant! Ought you znot rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
As Paul noted in his second epistle to the church at Corinth, the situation had not improved:
21 I fear that when I come again my God may humble me before you, and I may have to mourn over many of those iwho sinned earlier and have not repented of the impurity, jsexual immorality, and sensuality that they have practiced. This is the third time I am coming to you. Every charge must be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 2 I warned those who sinned before and all the others, and I warn them now while absent, as I did when present on my second visit, that if I come again I will not spare them—
-2 Corinthians 12:21-13:2
Over three separate visits, Paul witnessed a church at Corinth that had rampant sexual immorality, and that immorality was deeply rooted in the Hellenistic sexual license of the surrounding culture. Paul explicitly linked the practice of sexual immorality to idol worship:
9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous2 will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: xneither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality,3 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And ysuch were some of you. But zyou were washed, ayou were sanctified, byou were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
In his epistle to the Romans, Paul makes it clear that sexual immorality is connected to a rejection of the true God and an embrace of false gods:
18 For kthe wrath of God lis revealed from heaven against all ungodliness andunrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 Forwhat can be mknown about God is plain to them, because God has shown it tothem. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature,nhave been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,7 in the thingsthat have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God,they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they obecame futile intheir thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 pClaiming to be wise,they became fools, 23 and qexchanged the glory of rthe immortal God for imagesresembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
24 Therefore sGod gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to tthedishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged thetruth about God for ua lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than theCreator, vwho is blessed forever! Amen.
26 For this reason wGod gave them up to xdishonorable passions. For theirwomen exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 andthe men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed withpassion for one another, ymen committing shameless acts with men andreceiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, zGod gave them up to aadebased mind to do bwhat ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with allmanner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy,murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters ofGod, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know cGod’s righteousdecree that those who practice such things ddeserve to die, they not only dothem but egive approval to those who practice them.
In Romans 1, Paul was writing of the cult of Magna Mater, otherwise known as Cybele, in Roman culture. This cult was based on the myth of Attis, a beautiful young boy who was conceived when Agdistis, a hermaphrodite, castrated itself. From the castrated organs, an almond tree grew, and Nana took an almond and conceived Attis. Nana abandoned Attis, who was raised by a goat, and when he grew older and more beautiful, Agdistis fell in love with him, and when Attis was sent by his foster parents to marry a king’s daughter, Agdistis appeared in the form of Cybele and Attis was driven mad at her sight and castrated himself.
The cult of Cybele, also known as Magna Mater, spread to Rome, and her male priests would castrate themselves on the Day of Blood, as Lucian writes: During these days they are made Galli. As the Galli sing and celebrate their orgies, frenzy falls on many of them and many who had come as mere spectators afterwards are found to have committed the great act. I will narrate what they do. Any young man who has resolved on this action, strips off his clothes, and with a loud shout bursts into the midst of the crowd, and picks up a sword from a number of swords which I suppose have been kept ready for many years for this purpose. He takes it and castrates himself and then runs wild through the city, bearing in his hands what he has cut off. He casts it into any house at will, and from this house he receives women's raiment and ornaments. Thus they act during their ceremonies of castration.
-Lucian, De Syria De, §51.
The cult involved human sacrifice, according to Lucian: “§ 58 There is also another method of sacrifice, as follows: They adorn live victims with ribbons and throw them headlong down from the propylaia, and these naturally die after their fall. Some actually throw their own children down, not as they do the cattle, but they sew them into a sack and toss them down, visiting them with curses and declaring that they are not their children, but are cows.”
Cybele had adherents within early Christianity; the Naassenes attended her mysteries, engaged in ritualized homosexual acts, contended that God was human and Christ was the manifestation of Attis, and according to Hippolytus, the Naassenes were all initiates into the Magna Mater cult. For the Naassenes, homosexuality was a means of transcending gender roles and becoming closer to God, which was exactly the motivation of Cybele’s Galli, or priests, who castrated themselves in dedication to their goddess.
The early Christian communities that Paul wrote to existed alongside pagan mystery cults, and this is evident throughout the New Testament. In Acts 19, the silversmith Demetrius opposed Paul’s evangelism due to the financial costs to the craftsmen who made statues of Artemis. In Ephesus, the temple of Artemis was central to the city’s culture and its economy, and the site of a stone which fell from the sky and was venerated by the worshippers of Artemis.
Throughout Acts, the references to pagan gods are ubiquitous. At Lystra, Paul and Barnabas are conflated with Zeus and Hermes in Acts 14. The intervention of the Jews from Antioch and Iconium compelled the cross to stone Paul, leaving him for dead outside of the city.
The story of Christianity, then, was not a neat and tidy narrative. Christian belief and practice was interwoven with pagan and Jewish belief and practice in syncretized sects that emerged from the early church. Within those sects, which often were indistinguishable from orthodoxy, the emerging faith of Christ’s followers-who referred to their belief as The Way-was constantly under threat from those who would hybridize Christianity with pagan beliefs.
In Revelation 2, John writes of the Nicolaitans in his letter to the Ephesian church, and to the Church at Pergamum, he wrote of the teaching of Balaam and the Nicolaitans. For the church of Thyatira, the explicit reference to Jezebel the false prophetess, and her teachings of sexual immorality and idol worship make it clear that apostasy was present within the early churches. For those who had not been seduced by Jezebel, the revelation is clear as to what her doctrine was rooted in:
24 But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call ythe deep things of Satan, to you I say, I zdo not lay on you any other burden.
-Revelation 2:24
In every instance where sexual immorality is referenced throughout the Old and New Testaments, it is connected with the worship of false gods. It is ritualized action, and it culminates in human sacrifice.
The great myth of the modern era is that ritualized human sacrifice and sexual abuse are bygone practices. They are the stuff of conspiracy theory and blood libel, deeply rooted in bigotry and prejudice. The reality is that ritual abuse was interwoven with mainstream Christianity, existing as a religion within a religion, and manifesting in clergy abuse and organized sexual and physical abuse among the elites within religious denominations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5RJKSbjags
I have pondered this song.