Mission (39 page)

Ucello's canvas shows
Binah
chained to the Dragon – synonymous with the Biblical serpent, and complete with spiralling tail; the ‘Braxian vortex which has sucked spiritual Man down into the physical world, and which also symbolises the female vagina. And in case you miss that, Ucello has thrown in the dragon's lair, to which the spiralling tail points, a dark, crinkled, semi-elliptical cavern which does not make undue demands on the imagination.

But don't worry. The good news is on the right. St George astride his white horse is the male principle,
Chokmah
– representing Wisdom; usually equated with divine wisdom or illumination, as opposed to the nuts-and-bolts type comprehension possessed by
Binah.
St George is armed with a lance, synonymous with the Sword of Truth and the male phallus. The lance that will vanquish the ‘Braxian dragon that has made a prisoner of our powers of understanding represents the Power of The Presence – or the power of God, or whatever you wish to call it.

The princess and the knight,
Binah
and
Chokmah,
represent the twin aspects of the Creator. The left and right hand of God. They are linked to each other, and to
Kether
(The Crown, or God-Head) to form the supreme Trinity of the
Sephiroth
which, according to Kabbalic lore, purports to map the twenty-two paths to God, Allah, The Presence, the Ultimate Principle. Once again I have to emphasise that the name doesn't really matter because, when you get there, you won't need to be introduced.

The last key element in the picture can be seen in the sky above the knight: a spiral cloud formation. The second spiral of forces. The one that leads Man upwards to the heavens, and to the Empire Beyond.

None of this, I hasten to add, is intended to bring the feminist movement, or things pertaining to their gender, into disrepute. Regardless of our sexual classification, we all contain both male and female elements. In the context of the greater struggle, masculine and feminine are merely generic terms for the complementary aspects of
the Power of The Presence. The
Shekinah.
The polarity that underpins the material universe and the language we use to describe it. Good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The dualism of Zoroaster which was denounced by the nascent Church of Rome as heretical was an essential part of the all-embracing Oneness of The Presence.

But let's go back to when the
shaman
was getting his act together. We are talking about a time when Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and the Christian church that was to crush both, lay far in the future. When Uncomprehending Man was busy organizing Dionysiac-type cults where everybody went on seasonal binges to celebrate the agricultural highlights of the year, solar and lunar cycles, and anything else they could think of.

It was at this point that S.H.E.E.F. – Supreme Headquarters Empire Expeditionary Force – completed their plans for the counter-attack, and launched the Invasion. And the twelve tribes of Israel woke up one morning to find that they had been selected as the bridgehead. The Jews were the grains of sand on the beaches of a cosmic Normandy. The first piece of Celestial real-estate to be liberated.

But, as the French discovered in World War Two, liberation can be an arduous and often painful process. It's not all flags, flowers, kisses and cigarettes. It's also blood, sweat and tears, shells through the roof and tank-tracks over the tomatoes. It's great in the end but if, like the trapped Celestials and their earth-hosts, you can barely remember what it was like to be free, it is only natural to wonder whether it is worth the pain and the inconvenience.

For while the rest of God-forsaken humanity was having a good time, the Israelites got landed with Judaism. Without even being consulted, we were chosen to be the guardians of Man's spiritual heritage and future salvation. The book-keepers of Man's moral bank account. Moses gets called to Sinai and is told to make sure that we keep taking the tablets. We start living our life by the Book and, before you know it, the Jewish nation has become an island of spiritual and moral rectitude in a sea of heaving buttocks.

With this re-awakened awareness of the world of the spirit and the trapped Celestial presence, the world of matter – in the eyes of the Jews, at least – came to be more clearly defined as the prison of the human soul. We might not be able to escape but we could earn remission for good conduct. Two concepts which were echoed in equally
ancient theosophies east of the Euphrates.

It was against this background that women came to be seen as the seductive agents of ‘Braxian reality. Even though they had a fully integrated role in the daily rituals of Jewish life, any man who succumbed to the lure of female sexuality was thought to be playing Russian Roulette with his soul. Carnal knowledge became the forbidden fruit.

From the beginning of Biblical history, women have had to bear the burden of guilt for Eve's quasi-adulterous relationship with the Serpent that put Adam in
shtuk
with God and left them both out-on the street with only two fig-leaves and a half-eaten apple between them.

The incident resulted in the segregation of men and women in the teaching and practice of Judaism, and other discriminatory acts such as the decree in
Leviticus
which specified that if a woman gave birth to a female child she was held to be ‘unclean' for sixty-six days whereas if she gave birth to a son, the ceremony of purification could take place thirty-three days after delivery.

From the very beginning, the rabbinic office and worship in the synagogue was decreed an exclusively male function. It marked the beginning of a kind of spiritual apartheid which was carried over into Christianity. With the notable exception of the Gnostics, who allowed women to preach and maintained the total democracy that had flourished in the post-Pentecostal communes founded by the Apostles, the Church of Rome swiftly debarred women from office; a principle that the papacy has upheld to this day. And likewise, when the revolutionary purity of Islam became corrupted, the Muslims adopted similar discriminatory practices that reduced the social status of women even further.

This religious demarcation dispute can be traced back to
Genesis
and the Creation legend but it is based on a built-in error. Adam and Eve were
not
the archetypal man and woman. They represent the dual aspects of the Presence.
Chokmah
and
Binah;
Wisdom and Understanding. The Garden of Eden story is an allegory of events that pre-date the destruction of Atlantis. It goes back to the
First
War of Secession. And it relates to Celestial powers, not proto-humans. It is not about the fall from grace of Earth-Man and Woman. It describes the entrapment of our Celestial selves in the universe that ‘Brax had helped to create.

The apple – the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge that
‘Brax, the Serpent, persuaded Eve to offer Adam – represented the power given to the Celestials to create and control the physical universe. And Adam's acceptance of it, in defiance of God's injunction, represented the rebellion by ‘Brax's blue-collar angels against the authority of God: the Will of The Presence. The Garden of Eden was not an earthly paradise but the Celestial Empire from which the rebellious angels were banished. And their crime was in allowing themselves to be seduced by the wonder of the universe they had helped create into thinking that they were the equal of God.

It was ‘Brax, their leader who was the transgressor. It was
he,
not us, who fell from grace. Adam and Eve represented the twin aspects of his Celestial psyche. It was ‘Brax who was driven from the Eden that was the Empire. The
cherubims
were the Loyalist angels; the flaming sword the First War of Secession, which caused the Empire to seal itself off behind the Time Gate to protect the Tree of Knowledge, the Power of The Presence from which all things sprang.

It was only later that we poor ham-fisted humans came along and got caught in the cosmic meat-grinder. By which time, ‘Brax had done one of his great impersonations and had convinced us that it was all our fault and that God was extremely displeased with Mankind in general. A shrewd move designed to alienate us from the Presence. And to top things off, ‘Brax had hung
his
original sin around
our
necks like the Ancient Mariner's albatross.

But here's the good news: it's no crime to be born. Jesus may want you for a sunbeam, but the Empire needs you as people first. The trapped Celestials who got us into this mess need these bodies of ours in order to survive until the Empire regains control of the World Below.

People have had a lot of trouble trying to reconcile the eye-for-an-eye God of Vengeance of the Old Testament with the somewhat more benevolent God of the New. And many have asked themselves why an omnipotent creator should go to all the trouble of creating the world and then proceed to give us such a hard time. But once you know that ‘Brax has been impersonating the Old Man, it's possible to work back through the texts and discover the bits where he gave us a bum steer.

One of the recurring themes of the Old Testament is the oft-repeated warning to the Israelites to beware of false gods and false prophets. God, The Presence, or Whoever was
not
omnipotent in the World Below; the claim that He/She was had been disseminated by
‘Brax to take the heat off himself. The Second War of Secession has been a constant battle of wits between the Empire and ‘Brax; between the Loyalists and Secessionists. One is forced to hark back to the analogy of the Allied-backed Resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Empire keeps flying in agents to boost the activities of the Loyalist underground with the full knowledge that the network has also been penetrated by V-men (
Vertrauens-manner
); the double-agents recruited by ‘Brax.

The Man had come to boost our awareness of our real selves; our spiritual origin and destiny, and the nature of external reality. But he did not condemn the physical world. He wanted us to see it as it really was, not as ‘
through a glass, darkly'.
He wanted us to understand our part in the great cosmic struggle and how, through the Power of The Presence, we could contribute to the final victory by harmonising the spiritual and material elements of existence. Restoring the lost equilibrium between
Binah
and
Chokmah
and their link with the God-Head.

‘Brax hates equilibrium. As the Lord of Chaos, he specialises in discord. The Man had brought us news of the Celestial Empire; the Judeo-Christian Kingdom of Heaven. And the Resurrection had demonstrated the supremacy of the spiritual world. ‘Brax's response was swift and diabolically clever. Working through well-meaning ascetics, he began to expound the virtues of the spirit and an abhorrence of the flesh, and all things pertaining to the world. Which led to the self-mutilation I mentioned earlier, St Augustine having to persuade Christians not to throw themselves off cliffs, vows of celibacy by Roman priests, exclusion of women from ecclesiastical office while simultaneously propagating an extreme veneration of the Virgin Mary, and sado-masochistic mortification of the flesh by mad monks and middle-class medieval pietists. Such as the gentleman who had lengths of knotted cord wound tightly round his body so that it cut into his flesh, wore an unwashed hair-shirt crawling with lice, and walked around with sharp pebbles in his shoes.

One has to admit it's a hard act to follow.

Any sane person could be forgiven for thinking that a God who made the world, the heavens and all therein and then expected everyone to behave like this, was out of his all-embracing mind. No one could reconcile the notion of a benign cosmic intelligence with such aberrant behaviour. The licentious celibates, the venality and self-enrichment, the intemperate luxury and abuse of power all helped
bring into disrepute the church that God did not want and The Man had not asked for. He had made it quite clear when he had put down the squabbling disciples. ‘
The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
' And he had underlined the antihierarchical nature of the Empire by washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper; a practice that had found few takers amongst the temporal princes of the church that professed to follow his teaching. But these same people did not hesitate to use the Bible as a club to beat the middle and lower classes back into line. And when they became strapped for cash, all they did was point the finger at some rich fall-guy and brand him as an heretic, or go out and beat up a few more Jews.

The wilful misinterpretation of The Man's message by the founding fathers of the church has robbed the world of The Truth for nearly two thousand years. For centuries, clerics conspired with kings to rule their subjects; teaching their docile congregations that it was God's will that each should have his fixed station and that it was their lot to suffer the misery of poverty, starvation and oppression until Jesus Christ returned to build the new Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, princes and prelates dressed in cloth of gold and lesser men in rags. Man was constantly reminded that he was born in sin and in mortal danger of committing further transgressions. All was not lost, however. The church had acquired the monopoly on salvation and it was available to all. For-a price, of course. The classic squeeze play. And one more example of how The Man's message was perverted.

It was little wonder that people tended to go along with ‘Brax. He's brilliant. The charismatic kind of villain we all love to hate – and secretly admire. Let's face it. If you look at things on a short-term basis, he makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that, for most of us, there is a small still voice that occasionally makes itself heard above the din of daily existence and which asks us if there isn't more to life than meets the eye.

It's a tough question; the toughest, in fact, because neither I, nor you who are reading this, will be around at the end of the game to cheer the winner. We'll be there in the spirit, of course, but the earth-bound bundle of bones that bears the name of Leo Resnick and you, Dear Corporeal Reader, will be long gone.