Configurations 2: The Cosmology of a Religious Queer

Let us start with a first problem. In our world today, people often ask rather superficially, "Religious or spiritual?" We would normally define religious as, "adhering to a religious tradition," and spiritual as, "someone who admires wisdom and mercy." Depending on the querent, you might be conservative-trash, or you might be liberal-trash, depending on how you answer the question. My own best answer at the present date, would be, "both."

Next in line. I recall reading somewhere - although I am not sure - that the early Aryan nomadic tribes had an interesting in next to nothing - whether food, clothes, music, dancing, writing, history, war, dates or astronomical calculations - the only thing they seemed to be interested in was their mythologies! We have very few records of the Aryan nomads, but I do recall seeing this very poignant fragment of material somewhere in an academic book. The fact is that this kind of singular-obsession with anything is not typical of early tribal-nomadic cultures.

"Aryan," is a massively loaded word in the world today, and between the current Aryan nation movements and the history of fascism, it is a word that is often best avoided in discussion at all. We generally associate Aryanism today with, "hair of blonde and eyes of blue," - I am in fact naturally both! The truth is - and this is why all points on these blogs are closed - that the early Aryan nomads probably looked a great deal like the people of Asian India do today.

Further, nearly all of the mythology in the world today seems to have derived from these Aryan-myth-obsessives, and the most true to color versions remain in the oldest records kept in the Indus-River Valley from about 7 or 8000 years ago. A few of these points are arguable, but many of these points are not arguable.

So, part one, I am a man who lives in a world of mythologies, and this makes me more Aryan than, "hair of blonde and eyes of blue." Second, I do not adhere to a mainstream religious tradition of any kind, but when I answer, "both," I feel myself to be within a certain Western religious tradition. As I discussed, there have always been people who felt that the regular sales-catalog just didn't do, whether it was Gnostic Christianity or the alchemists of the Dark Ages.

So as I see it, I am within the Western tradition of those who dissent from ordinary religion. That would be the more long-winded answer. We do need to be fair to the mainstream about Gnosticism and alchemy, and we will get to what is fair in just a moment. However, I next want to tackle the word, "wisdom." A simple definition of wisdom might be, "good-living, good morals, stability, mercy and nurturing, teaching, and broad-mindedness."

The word, "wisdom," in English is so out of common use today that you would believe that the word has been struck from every book in the world. We love our learning, but wisdom has disappeared off of our maps. I would suggest that one cannot be a human without some wisdom. Also - it is apparent from our records of old civilzations that wisdom was not considered a very common trait in a person. Still - our learning has amassed far beyond the learning of those times - yet we have not amassed too many more examples of wisdom.

Let us return to our Gnostics and alchemists. The Gnostics were cults, and their cult-mentality was about the same as any cult today - it was sadistic and pathetic. The heresiologists of the Catholic Church had an axe to grind - which was to annihilate Gnosticism - but they did not have to invent much colorful material to make the Gnostics look vile. There are some tall-tales in the heresiologies - but it is only fair to point out that they didn't make up very much in their recounting of the behavior of these cults.

Manichaenism is not true Gnosticism, as it came too late in history to be truly Gnostic. However, the Manichaen cults re-worked many Gnostic themes. Further, Manichaenism remains a historical singularity as one of the other worst cults of murder ever recorded in history, and it's fantastic morbidity is much better recorded than the cult of Marduk in Sumer.

As for the alchemists, on one hand they wished to conserve some ancient materials that were censured by the overwhelming power of the Holy Roman Empire, and also to explore both mysterious and evident science. That is the upside to the alchemists, and the downside for them was that they were hunted down and killed for disobeying the censure of the Holy Roman Empire.

There is however, a downside - and this is that the alchemists practiced some very bizarre things on guinea pigs - some of them human - who did not have the cultural power to escape their attempts to understand. That is only being fair. I consider myself in a counter-culture religious tradition, yet what is so often the reality is that the counter-culture is merely a culture of deviance. That is only being fair, and I have tried to show some of the warts on my own wart-hog. If we're going to be objective, it is only fair to mention these problems within my own religious tradition to which I adhere.

I chose the shocking title because as a religious person, I am counter-culture, and this makes me a marginal thinker, and to some - a deviant. So, we've got a beginning, and I'll sum up with an ordered list, and then we'll move to the second part of the article, which will explain some of this wart-hog's views of the cosmos, and a most queer cosmos it is. You'll see. So, the ordered list.

1. The Aryan-mentality of a "world-as-myth."
2. The Western tradition of religious dissent as my own tradition.
3. The marginalized viewpoint that my own cosmology and that portion of my work represents.

That third point is quite complex and could use more discussion, and we'll see how we get around to that at a later date - if I choose to tie up that knot in an article somewhere. So - I need another break, and then I will most likely do the second part of this article. In a bit.