#Canaanite Polytheism

[tsalmu]

Yarhibol, the Sun-God Dura-Europos, Syria c. 50 CE Source: The Pantheon of Palmyra by Javier Teixidor, 1979

[alephskoteinos]

I need to meditate to Satan more so that he can tell me about what the deal with El is.

What do I mean? A friend of mine pointed out a selection of passages from the Book of Zechariah which positions Satan as standing against YHWH, but, according to him, not El, as he is one of El's beloved sons. I could do with some gnosis on that, being as El is esssentially the ruling god of the Canaanite pantheon.

[alephskoteinos]

Huh, I remember reading about this being a statue of Astarte.

Babylonian Alabaster Statue of the goddess Ishtar, 350 B.C.

[ofroadsentwinned]

Ok so back a few years ago, maybe more like 5?

There was a levpag content creator who made collaged images of the gods and now I can’t find their work.  I was trying to specifically find the images for Ashera/Athirat and El/Ilu.

Are you still out there?  Do you still publish these images for community use?

[alchameth]

Canaanite Polytheism Resources – antlered

[elegantshapeshifter]

Steven Dillon's conversion to Christianity: what does it mean to Hellenism and Pagan Community?

Steven Dillon, the author of "The Case for Polytheism" and "Pagan Portals - Polytheism: A Platonic Approach", recently returned to Christianity.

This event made me think a lot. I think this event can teach us that the more you are concerned with "the One" and you think it can respond, the more likely you will go towards monotheism.

The point is that "the One" is us, and is "a thing", not "somebody".

The One is not a person. This is the reason why we worship the Gods, they are persons.

The One, the All, is so big that the idea that it can listen is nonsense.

Monotheism emerges when you think the entire universe can listen to you. Polytheism is the humbleness to understand that only certain parts of the Universe can listen to you.

And when you think you are talking to the One you are always actually talking to a part of it.

This is the reason why Christ, Yahweh, Allah, etc. are parts of the One and not the One.

Even attempts to interact with the entirety of the One are just interactions with parts of the One, ie one of the many Gods.

This is confirmed by Aleister Crowley's experience, we can read from the Liber Astarte Vel Berylli that he considered Allah, Christ and Yahweh as Parts or Aspects of the One, exactly as other Polytheistic Deities, and not as the All/the One in its entirety:

"Let the devotee consider well that […] Christ and Osiris be one […]".

"As for Deities with whose nature no Image is compatible, let them be worshipped in an empty shrine. Such are Brahma, and Allah. Also some postcaptivity conceptions of Jehovah".

"[…] the particular Deity be himself savage and relentless; as Jehovah or Kali."

-

Moreover, Dillon was (is?) Platonic, and the problem is even worse, because sadly the reaction to the problem of evil is very similar between Platonism and Christianity.

However, the Stoic (and maybe the Hindu and Buddhist) worldview completely destroys the problem of evil, because if the Divine is good and we simply don't perceive the goodness and that is what evil is, ie ignorance or misperception, then the problem of evil is solved.

If we, instead, perceive the evil as something real and the Gods as totally good not evil, the problem of evil remains.

-

Finally, a Pagan that comes back to Christianity usually doesn't know history very well, and is unaware of Natib Qadish, ie Modern Canaanite Religion or Neopaganism.

If you listen to Natib Qadish (ie Canaanite and Israelite Polytheistic Neopaganism) and Wathanism (Arabian pre-Islamic Polytheistic Neopaganism) practitioners' voices, you cannot come back to Christianity.

In fact, Christianity doesn't make any sense: Yahweh is a Storm God that comes from Edom to Israel through the Kenites or Shasu, which were nomads. His name meant "to blow", and so he was a variation of Baal Hadad.

In the origin, El was the father of Baal/Yahweh, and his sister was Anat and his mother Asherah. Later, El ie the Sky God and Yahweh ie the Storm God, merged and so Yahweh was seen as the husband of the Goddess Asherah.

In fact in Kuntillet Arjud it's possible to see blessings by "Yahweh and his Asherah". Moreover, even the Bible (read The Book of Judges) witness that people worshipped Asherah/Astarte and Baal together with YHWH.

In Elephantine in Egypt there was a Jewish temple for Yahu-Anat, ie both Anat and YHWH.

So how can Jesus be the son of the only God Yahweh if Yahweh was never a monotheistic God before the Josiah's reform that made Judaism monotheistic?

If Judaism is originally polytheistic then Christianity makes no sense.

By reading the "Cycle of Baal" we'll discover the origin of the Biblical Deity (or Deities?).

I end my dissertation with some interesting quotes from the Bible:

Jeremiah 7:

"17 Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? 18 The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes to offer to the Queen of Heaven."

Jeremiah 44:

"17 We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. 18 But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine.”

"19 The women added, “When we burned incense to the Queen of Heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, did not our husbands know that we were making cakes impressed with her image and pouring out drink offerings to her?”"

"25 This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: You and your wives have done what you said you would do when you promised, ‘We will certainly carry out the vows we made to burn incense and pour out drink offerings to the Queen of Heaven.’"

[zenosanalytic]

#and the worst part is…#sometimes you don’t have a choice(via@a-book-of-creatures) Yeah (:T

Hi, sorry if this has been asked before, but do you have any reliable sources that talk about Ashtar? I'm also looking for articles that talk about El/Ilu; and Shalim and Shahar as well. I appreciate any form of help.

I've answered a similar Ashtar question a few months ago, refer to the bibliography here. I do not have much to offer when it comes to Shahar and Shalim because as far as I can tell most scholarship focuses on exegesis of the Bible, which is something I have next to no interest in. I've answered a question about them here; the main source to depend on is Pardee's Ritual and Cult in Ugarit. When it comes to El, the basic selection of sources dealing with Ugaritic religion should obviously be the start: Smith's Baal Cycle commentaries, Pardee's aforementioned book, Rahmouni's Divine Epithets in the Ugaritic Alphabetic Texts, Handbook of Ugaritic Studies, etc. For more specialized information I recommend: a) Il in Personal Names by Alfonso Archi (early history, and why names with the element il and its cognates do not necessarily refer to a specific deity in pre-Ugaritic sources) b) West Semitic god El in Anatolian Hieroglyphic Transmission by Ilya Yakubovich for the first millennium BCE c) The God Eltara and the Theogony by Anna Maria Polvani for El's Hurro-Hittite career (there's also the Elkunirsa myth but I do not think there's any recent treatment of it, so your best bet is to just read the translation in Hoffner's Hittite Myths from the 1990s) d) The Dwelling of ˀIlu in Baˁlu and ˀAqhatu by Madadh Richey for some lexical considerations regarding El's residence e) God (Ilu) and King in KTU 1.23 by Theodore J. Lewis for El's role as the king of the gods

Also, it's worth checking out Wiggins' monograph A reassessment of Asherah: with further considerations of the goddess since while hardly focused on El, it does discuss Athirat's relationship with him in the Ugarit section. Similarly, might be worth looking into this author's Shapash article.

[crankyscribe]

A suggestion from someone new to Canaanite Paganism

This sort of ties in to some local cultus kind of deal, but with Halloween coming up I was thinking about adding a Canaanite flavor.

Now this is sort of UPG but bear with me here. If you're a Canaanite pagan, you probably know about Mot.

He's the spooky God of death, always hungry for pretty much anything and everything (man or God alike), and he received absolutely ZERO offerings or worship. So around this time of year it could be that M/t is at his worst, looking for prey. Carve a scary face in a gourd or some other vegetable to scare him away.

Sort of like the ritual that pruned him like a grapevine.

[sag-dab-sar]

Deity Dagan

Originally a god of West Semitic speakers from the Levant, but worshipped widely throughout the Near East, including Mesopotamia.

Deity of grain, as well as its cultivation and storage. Indeed, the common word for "grain" in Ugaritic and Hebrew is dagan. According to one Sumerian tradition and to the much later Philo of Byblos, Dagan invented the plow. In the north, he was sometimes identified with Adad. Thus, he may have had some of the characteristics of a storm god. In one tradition his wife was Ishara, in another Salas, usually wife of Adad. Salas was originally a goddess of the Hurrians. Dagan also had netherworld connections. According to an Assyrian composition, he was a judge of the dead in the lower world, serving with Nergal and Misa-ru(m), the god of justice. A tradition going back at least to the fourth century BCE identified Dagan as a fish god, but it is almost certainly incorrect, presumably having been based upon a false etymology that interpreted the element "Dag" in Dagan as deriving from the Hebrew word dag "fish."

The earliest mentions of him come from texts that indicate that, in Early Dynastic times, Dagan was worshipped at Ebla. Dagan was taken into the Sumerian pantheon quite early as a minor god in the circle of Enlil at Nip-pur. Kings of the Old Akkadian peri-od, including Sargon and Narām-Sin, credited much of their success as conquerors to Dagan. Sargon recorded that he "prostrated (himself in prayer before Dagan in Tutul [sic]" (Oppen-heim, ANET: 268). At the same time, he gave to the god a large area of the country he had just conquered, including Mari, Ebla, and larmuti in western Syria. A number of letters from the Mari archives, dated mainly to the reign of Zimri-Lim, record that Dagãn was a source of divine revela-tion. The letters reported prophetic dreams, a number of which came from Dagan, conveyed by his prophets and ecstatics. In his law code, Hammu-rapi credits Dagan with helping him subdue settlements along the Euphrates.

The Assyrian king Samsi-Adad I commissioned a temple for him at Terqa, upstream from Mari, where funeral rites for the Mari Dynasty took place.

In the Old Babylonian period, kings of the Amorites erected temples for Dagan at Isin and Ur. In the Anzû(m) myth, Dagan was favorably coupled with Anu(m). At Ugarit Dagan was closely associated with, if not equated to, the supreme god El/I(u). Although he is mentioned in the mythic compositions of Ugarit as the father of the storm god Ba'lu/ Had(d)ad, Dagan plays only a very minor role. His popularity is indicated by his importance in offering and god lists, one of which places him third, after the two chief gods and before the active and powerful god Ba'lu/ Had(d)ad. Dagan is attested in Ugaritic theophoric names. In Ugaritic texts the god is often referred to as "Dagan of Tuttul." It might also be the case that one of the two major temples of the city of Ugarit was dedicated to him, and he might there have been identified with the chief god I(u) / El.

Festivals for Dagãn took place at Ter-ga and Tuttul, both of which were cult centers of the god. He was certainly worshipped at Ebla and also at Mari.

At Mari, in Old Babylonian times, he appears as fourth deity on a god list; that is, he was very important. He was venerated also at Emar. There a "Sacred Marriage" ritual between Dagan and the goddess Nin-kur was celebrated.

At the same city, a festival was held in honor of "Dagan-Lord-of-the-Cattle," at which the herds of cattle and prob. ably sheep were blessed.

According to the Hebrew Bible, Dagan was the national god of the Philistines. I Samuel:5-6 tells of the capture of the Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines. It was customary in the Ancient Near East for the conquerors to carry off the deity statues of the conquered to mark the surrender not only of the people, but also of their deities.

So the Philistines took the Ark, the symbol of the god of the Israelites, into the temple of Dagan at Ashdod. Since the Israelites had no statues of their deity, the much revered Ark was an obvious substitute. In this way, the Philistines marked the submission of the Israelite god to Dagan. However, on the next day, the people of Ashdod found the statue of Dagan lying face down in front of the Ark. The following day the same thing happened except that the head and hands of Dagan's statue lay broken on the temple threshold. This biblical account seems to be an etiology for a practice of the priests of the temple of Dagan at Ashdod, for it states that for this reason it is the custom of the priests of Dagan not to tread on the threshold as they enter the temple of Dagan. The best-known of the biblical stories that mention Dagan is in Judges 16, the tale of Samson and Delilah. After Delilah arranged for the Philistines of Gaza to capture Samson, they blinded him, shackled him, and made him a slave at a mill. During a festival to Dagan, the Philistines took Samson to be exhibited in Dagan's temple, where thou sands of Philistines had gathered for the celebrations. After praying to the Israelite god, the now long haired Samson got back his old strength. By pushing against two central pillars, he brought the temple crashing down on himself and on more Philistines than he had killed in his whole lifetime of killing Philistines.

— From a Handbook to Ancient Near Eastern Gods & Goddesses by Frayne & Stuckey page 67-69

[chamberofthespirit]

✧ Introduction to Yahwism ✧

Yahwism is a iron age religion from the Isrealite tribe from before the existence of Israel. According to the story, the Israelites were saved from slavery in Egypt when the god, Yahweh, came to set them free. Yahweh had become the god of the Israelites. As the Israelites met the Canaanite tribe, they adopted the worship of the gods El and Ba'al along with the goddess Asherah. Asherah had been seen as being the consort of Yahweh. As time went on, prophets of Yahweh and the rest of the Israelites, began becoming unhappy with worshipping other gods along side Yahweh so they destroyed idols of Asherah and banned the worship of the other gods, though this did not completely stop the worship of them. The Israelites saw Yahweh as the only deity worth worshipping in their tribe so they abandoned polytheism but still being aware of the existence of the other gods. As time went on and Israel came to be, Judaism and Christianity branched off from Yahwism but Yahwism is absolutely NOT Judaism or Christianity. Yahwists only follow the teachings of the Tanakh (hebrew old testament) as it was the first bible. Yahwists do believe in Jesus but only as a prophet and only use his original name, Yahshua. Yahshua only said he was the son of Yahweh but as a metaphor for being a believer and follower.

Differences:

Yahwism

~ Focus is Yahweh and His holy spirit

~ Follows the Tanakh

~ Yahshua (Jesus) is only a prophet

~ There is no hell, either eternal life for the worthy or eternal oblivion for the non-worthy

~ Using the labels "God" or "Lord" is seen as disrespect as they are not Yahweh's name

Christianity

~ Believes in the holy trinity, Jesus is a form of God

~ Uses the labels "God" and "Lord"

~ Contains the new testament, which is Roman in origin

~ Believes in hell

~ Celebrates easter, christmas, etc.

~ Uses holy water and holy oil

~ Believes in judgement day

Judaism

~ Uses the labels "God" and "Lord"

~ Believes using the name "Yahweh" is disrespectful and too divine to be said

~ Not much focus on the afterlife, focus is life on earth

~ Follows the Tanakh

~ Celebrates chanukah

[passionesolja]

Christianity to me is so unserious. Now, I don’t think that Christians serve Yahweh. I know that Jewish people serve the deity, but I don’t think most Christians research enough about the history of their god to know what the fuck is going on. Like some arrogant Christian will equate “El” with “Yahweh” and it’s like “you dumb mf, EL was the creator god in Ancient Canaanite religions”, mfs just believe whatever makes them feel good. A lot of Christians are terrified to even call Yahweh his/their name. I’m not. I know that Yahweh was a Canaanite storm god, and like a lot of early polytheism, he was worshipped by Canaanites and Jewish people of that era. His reach evolved as Christianity became a thing and it evolved. The average Christian doesn’t know this. No hate to them, but I take religions serious so I feel like I have to know this.

And with that in mind, I think the entire concept of an all powerful, all knowing god is so mf childish and stupid. Historically, gods had vices and flaws. Also, why would a god torture me for eternity just because I don’t fw him? Seems really man made, psychological torture to me. Like, plenty of Apes can comprehend the world at a 2nd/3rd grade level and that’s the age a lot of mfs get converted at. So is god gon send them to hell? Elephants have names and burial ceremonies, mfs aren’t converting them. Crows can make tools and have lil insular societies. Nobody give a fuck about them. Whales are super intelligent, like we’re just learning about how smart they are. Nobody is rushing to convert them over.

It’s almost like Christianity (as white people have used it) is an tool for mfs to gain power and subjugate others. “Oh those really intelligent animals aren’t important. We have dominion over them so even tho us and them share similar practices, we’re better so they can’t have a soul” dumbass mf you’re giving the game away. If your god gon send me to eternal hell for no reason (bc you can be a murderer rapist, tell god sorry, and face no eternal punishment, which is insane and not even how laws work) then I’m not gon fw him anyways. Even if he was real, which he’s not in the way that most Christian’s imagine him.

Christians really worship their own ego, and a mf like me has an ego but I don’t need every bitch on planet earth to lead the life I do. I’m too nonchalant to try to force my beliefs on a mf lmao

[tsalmu]

Baal Hadad, God of Storms and Fertility Stele from Tel Burna, Shephelah c. 1400 BCE Source: The Louvre

[aerial-jace]

Re: biblical analysis

I had a bit of a hard time when I was deconstructing coming to terms with how much I love a good Jesus metaphor

But yeah it's a book that a lot of people had be the basis of their literary development, and it's cool to see the themes pop up in other places

But you have to treat it like a book to be analyzed

I find the Bible fascinating from like a history of religion kind of perspective.

Biblical archaeology is not exactly my area but I do know a bit about it and when it's not a "Heinrich Schliemann looking for Troy with a shovel on one hand and a copy of the Illiad in the other" type of situation the Bible is an incredibly helpful tool in analysis and contextualization not only of the archaeology of the Levant but of the Near East as a whole.

I'm particularly fascinated by what close historical readings tell us about the development of Levantine religion during the time of its redaction. From Canaanite polytheism into Israelite monolatry and monotheism right down to Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity. It's such a rich source for thousands of years of extremely foundational history.

I've also been learning a lot more about Judaism recently thanks to the exposure of my Jewish mutuals and general connection to the Jumblr community on here. Hearing their perspective on these texts I was familiar with as a Christian has been really illuminating and has really opened my eyes about the VAST gulfs there exist.

I really recommend this website, Better Parables, which contextualizes the Jesus parables in its first century Jewish context and provides very interesting exegesis of them from a Jewish perspective. It's one of my current favorite Bible scholarship resources and it's really made me want to dive deeper into Jewish responses to Christian texts. I especially rally am itching to read the Jewish Anotated New Testament but I'm refraining because I do NOT need to make an unwise financial decision and buy a book like that right now.

[a-witch-in-endor]

Three Jewish Commonwealths: Reflections on Religion

Today has been Yom Ha’atzma’ut, or Israel’s Independence Day. I’ve been thinking about what it means to live within a historical period while able to reflect on past time periods, and my “thinking out loud” (or: via tumblr post) on that has turned into this slightly unhinged text on the history of religious development in the three Jewish Commonwealths. I have no excuse. Just lots of thoughts. Feel free to join me on a meandering path through religious history...

Please note: my expertise is religious studies, not in modern politics. If you have a unique perspective or expertise in politics, I’m generally happy to chat (recently met a previous head of the Shin Bet; it was intense; I was interested and frightened), but at this point I have learned Too Much and it is all falling out of my ears, so I won’t be engaging much with political discussions. 

The First Jewish Commonwealth: ???? BCE - 586 BCE 

When and how did the First Jewish Commonwealth come about? The truth is: we don’t really know. 

The earliest potential reference to Israel is the Merneptah Stele (1213 BCE - 1203 BCE). It’s absolutely gorgeous! Behold!

https://www.worldhistory.org/image/9384/stele-of-merenptah/

Does it refer to Israel? Maybe. I’d err on the side of “probably”. The hieroglyphs do lend to being read as “Israel”, and the context would make sense. But there are alternative readings, and it’s an unusually early reference. For comparison, David (second king of United Israel, after what the Bible reports to be a long period of “Judges” [read: tribal chieftans]) looks to be around at 1000 BCE. 

And here is the recent discovery at Mount Ebal in Hebrew, which parallels almost absurdly well with a Torah story, which is dated to around 1200 BCE.

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/mt_ebal_inscription/

So let’s assume that we’re unsure about the stele but happy with the tablets. The tablets tell us a few things: worship of the God of Israel was already in place (note: it does not tell us the extent, just the existence); Hebrew literacy had begun; the Torah story of the curses of Mt Ebal have some kind of historical basis. 

The Jewish cultural narrative is that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, escaped with Divine aid, spent 40 years in the wilderness, and ended up in the Holy Land (where some of their ancestors had previously been but had left due to famine). It’s a great story. In terms of its historicity, it’s unclear. Until recently, archaeologists were tending toward being minimalists and stating that basically nothing was historically accurate up to, really, the reign of King David. It turns out, some hats do need to be eaten (due to things like the stele and tablets above), but they can keep some of their hats.

In terms of historical evidence outside archaeology, there are some fun linguistic and historical-social reasons to assume that at least some of the people who would come to call themselves Israelites had an experience of slavery in Egypt. For more on this, I recommend Richard Elliot Freidman’s “The Exodus” (biblical scholar; thesis: a small group went through slavery and came to Israel, introduced their monotheism/monolatry, and the story became part of the cultural narrative) and Jan Assman’s “Moses the Egyptian: the Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism” (egyptologist; thesis: the short-lived monotheistic/monolatric cult of Pharaoh Akhenaten influenced Jewish, and therefore monotheistic, history). 

(Also, by-the-by, they’re both wonderful guys as well as fascinating scholars.) 

What we do know is: there was a monotheistic cult (or perhaps a monolatric cult) who worshipped what we now recognise as “God” with a capital G. There was a certain amount of theological messiness with Canaanite polytheism (inasmuch as polytheism really exists, which is a rant for another day). The lines between the two are very blurry indeed, which indicates that much of what we now think of as “Israelite” religion was really a development within “Canaanite” religion. Genetically speaking, we know that “Israelites” and “Canaanites” were really the same people. So it’s a safe assumption, when one adds the archaeology and the genetics and the linguistics all together, to see the development of the Israelite religion as internal to the Land of Canaan/Israel, as well as pondering how/when/to whom an exodus from Egypt really occurred. 

That’s a short note on the origins of Israel. By the time we get to King David, we’re more comfortably in Israelite history, though how united his reign really was remains unclear. But we do know that, however united it might have been under his son King Solomon, it was not destined to remain that way. 

The Time of Two Kingdoms: The Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah

The good news is that we’re in more solid territory, archaeologically speaking. 

The bad news is that the kingdom split asunder. The Southern Kingdom had, in Jerusalem, the Holy Temple (known herein as the First Temple, which is spoiler-y, I suppose). The First Temple was the central place of worship for the monotheistic cult, but it was in constant battle with bamot, or “high places”, where Israelites would worship God (with a capital G) in ways that were, um, a little idolatrous according to the Temple cult. 

In the Northern Kingdom, more bamot were built. According to the biblical narrative (which, at this point in biblical literature, is mostly dry history with a good helping of Polemic Against the North), King Jeroboam I (first king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel) built two particular sanctuaries at Beth El and Dan, in which he placed two golden calves for worship. Cows were certainly an important religious symbol, and golden calves have an, um, historical... thread... in Israelite religion, so it’s entirely possible it played out this way. I’ve been to the ruins of Dan and the sanctuary there, which fit pretty well with what the biblical narrative describes. Beth El is a lot trickier to identify, and if it has been found (which is arguable), it doesn’t really seem to align as well. 

The Southern Kingdom fluctuates in terms of religious practice, but seems to stick more clearly to what we would recognise from biblical literature. However, to be clear, this is because the Southern Kingdom of Judah is where most of the biblical literature gets written, and even when it doesn’t get written there, it usually gets edited there. So take its aspersion on the North with a grain of kosher salt. 

The North Falls: 722 BCE

The Northern Kingdom eventually falls to the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The entire land was divided into tribal settlements even when it was “United”. The North consists of Ten Tribes. The South is mostly just Judah, which is where it got its name. Therefore, when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was dispersed, we mostly lost ten whole tribes. It’s a huge upset to Israelite history, and certainly to the history of religious development in the area. The Southern relationship with the Temple tightens. Whatever was going on in the North, religiously, is understood by the Southern Kingdom to have been their downfall. 

(Note: some groups claim to be part of the Ten Northern Tribes. Most famously, Ethiopian Jews have an oral history of descent from the Tribe of Dan. While we don’t know the historicity of that claim, the Ethiopian Jewish community is old af, with whispers of their existence reaching the mainstream Jewish community as early as the 9th Century CE, so it’s certainly plausible. Most Ethiopian Jews now live in the Modern State of Israel, having arrived under the Law of Return after fleeing persecution. Their experience is a mixed bag; better than Ethiopia, and with much love of the Holy Land, but Israel retains a racism problem that is having a significant impact on their ability to thrive.)

The First Exile: 586ish BCE - 538ish BCE

We’re in safer hands now, historically speaking. Israel is enough of an entity that not only are they popping up everywhere archaeologically, but the story of the exile itself is recorded (above is a pretty cuneiform tablet referencing the exile, from 580ish BCE, in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin). 

The Babylonian Exile began and ended in stages, which means that while we do know when things occurred, it’s harder to define when the exile actually began and ended. For the Israelites, this meant life without access to a) the Holy Land, which the entire religion was built on, and b) the Holy Temple, where worship occurred. In this time, we see the first seedlings of religious practice being community-based in a way that wasn’t, um, arguably idolatrous according to the Temple cult. We might call this the beginning of the era of synagogues. 

The seeds of messianic redemption are born in a pre-exile world, and probably sustain the Jews through the First Exile. The idea is messy and contradictory, but it boils down to: God will bring us home. Jeremiah tells the exiles to pray for the country in which they reside (which is the basis of the Prayer for the Country that Jews still do in synagogues today). 

Why did this exile happen (historically) and why did the exiles think it happened? Largely, the First Exile was due to a game of politics. The kingdoms were small and needed to make allies, and variously become vassals of other states, and sometimes made decisions that were obviously poor in the grand scheme of history but weren’t so obviously poor at the time. The story retained in the South would be mixed explanations about turning against God: idolatry, lack of trust, trying to play games with empires instead of just trusting that God would protect, etc.

But what really bothers me about it is: if the North and South had managed to be consistent allies with one another, or perhaps not split in the first place, they probably would have been in a much stronger position. But it seems they were constantly squabbling with one another, including (but not limited to) royal assassinations. And in a sea filled with bigger, more dangerous fish, it probably doomed them more than a little. 

Return From Exile (Thanks to Cyrus the Messiah): 538ish BCE

Big picture history: the Neo-Assyrian Empire went caput, giving a brief period of terrifying political vacuum (at which point the Southern Kingdom of Judah kept changing its mind on allies and betting on the wrong horses), leading to the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The Assyrians had scattered the Northern Kingdom of Israel (722 BCE). The Babylonians then exiled the Southern Kingdom of Judah (destruction of the First Temple was 586 BCE). Then the Babylonians fell to the Persians, and we came to the reign of the only non-Jewish king referred to as a moshiach (messiah) in biblical literature: Cyrus the Great. 

We love him. Why? Because Cyrus had some weirdly forward-thinking views about religion, and he sent the Jews home and supported the rebuilding of the Holy Temple.

The Cyrus Cylinder details how Cyrus was in the practice of sending peoples home and restored shrines. We stan one (1) Achaemenidian Emperor. 

The Second Jewish Commonwealth: 586ish BCE - 70 CE

Second Temple Judaism was a slightly different creature. The Israelites had now survived being uprooted from the sacred land and had to deal with what it meant to, well, replant themselves on it. This is the period in which the prophets of old drew their last breaths and a more textual Judaism came to be. 

Some scholars argue that this is when the religion developed from monolatry (the worship of one god, but the belief that many exist) to monotheism (the belief that there is only one God). Honestly, I am decreasingly convinced that any of these labels reflect religious reality anyway, so take what you want from that. However, the idea that the experience of being away from the land belonging to the local god could develop into the concept that there truly is only One God is, in itself, fascinating as a development. 

Our expectations, when an indigenous religion is uprooted from the land, might be that the development is a) defensive (a scramble to keep the culture and practices alive, sometimes to the point of adapting in opposition to the surrounding culture), b) inwardly assimilative (not always deliberately, the beliefs/culture/practices of the surroundings become part of the indigenous religion), and c) outwardly assimilative (not always deliberately, the beliefs/culture/practices of the indigenous group become part of the surroundings). If we agree with the scholars who claim that monotheism was a development of exile, we have quite a bizarre example of religious development which fits under none of those categories. 

(Super interested in examples of other indigenous cultures developing in exile in a way that doesn’t fit a, b, or c. Do reach out if you know of any.)

But the newly-returned exiles aren’t safe. Yehud/Judea is still a teeny thing without much political power. It goes through phases of vassalhood, independence, and occupation (famously by the Greeks, who then got booted out in a rebellion, which you might know as the Story of Chanukah). 

The Second Temple Mark I was a bit plain compared to the First Temple, but became absolutely glorious when restructured under the reign of Herod. However, it never quite gains complete centrality. The reason now is less to do with alternative worship (such as the bamot of old), but rather to do with groups like the Pharisees (a group devoted to the working classes, interested in literacy and learning, and... you know, law and stuff, we stan) and the Essenes (who say “fuck it, everything’s corrupt, let’s go to the wilderness and not have babies for some reason”). 

Messianism/redemption theology continues to develop, now utilising the previous exile-and-return as a model for what will happen in the future, too. Various messianic figures pop up, famously including Bar Kokhba (a military leader who led a rebellion aimed at Jewish independence from Roman occupation). He turns out to be one of the most influential messianic figures, because the failure of his great revolt led to...

The Second Exile: 70 CE - 1948 CE?

The Romans eventually got tired of the people they were occupying fighting back and decided to squash all future rebellion through... well, murder, destruction, and exile. The Second Temple was destroyed. Due to the seeds planted by the Pharisees (regarding Jewish practice of individuals and communities being able to exist outside of the Temple-based system), Rabbinic Judaism is able to grow from the ashes of the Temple. It was not a guarantee that Judaism could survive at all, but thanks to the rabbinic movement and the fact that the Jews had survived one exile, Judaism struggled forward. 

Why did this exile happen and how was it understood? Historically, we can point to the constant occupations and empires. But the rabbis have woven different narratives alongside the politics: it happened because of sinat chinam, they said; “baseless hatred” between Jews. Or it happened because leaders were so interested in harsh justice and forgot that mercy has always been a part of the law. Either way, the surviving story is less interested in the evil of the Roman Empire and more interested in how our values and actions on an individual level spin out of control and affect the whole world. It’s a slightly less theological explanation. While the First Exile was due to “God is punishing us”, the Second Exile is understood more along the lines of “we caused this with our actions and values”. 

The Second Exile stretches long and far. Empires fall, as they are wont to, and other empires colonise and capture and conflict with one another. Jews spread out farther than ever before, but whenever they set down roots anywhere, expulsion is a constant threat. 

Christianity develops out of a mixture of Judaism and Hellenism, based on the cult following of a messianic figure, and crawls to a position of power and then starts running in the way it spreads. Islam is birthed by a single central leader with inspiration from both Christianity and Judaism and is immediately on the move and spreading. Christian and Islamic political entities conflict with one another. Things are generally worse for Jews in Christendom and pogroms are a semi-constant threat. Ashkenazi Jews, as a result, become more religiously defensive (see point a above) and develop a firmer view of the law. Rule under Islamic empires is usually better, but maintains a level of hostility, such as special taxes being levied and not being allowed to be physically “above Muslims”. 

The messianic dream continues to develop; the idea that “God will take us home” remains a deep and important thread in Jewish religion and liturgy. Jewish languages develop out of Hebrew and relationship with the outside world, such as Judeo-Arabic and Yiddish. Jews suspicious of the outside world tend to be more entrenched in messianic ideals. 

The Enlightenment seems like a positive thing for Jewish life in exile; many Jews get increasingly comfortable with life in exile. Some are more suspicious, due to events such as the Dreyfus Affair, and start to deliberately move the messianic dream into a potential political reality, now referred to as Zionism. The messianic dream becomes a political goal to end exile. 

Big picture history: The land is captured and colonised and recaptured time and time again. For a very brief version, it goes (deep breath): Roman Empire into Byzantine Empire, conquered by the Arab Caliphate (7th Century), conquered by the Fatimid Caliphate (10th Century), some skirmishes with the Byzantines wanting things back, into the Crusades where it went back and forth for centuries (no fun at all, do not recommend, zero stars), then the Mongols turned up and were ultimately defeated by the Egyptian Mamluks (13th Century), who were then conquered by the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire (16th Century), who were then defeated by the British (20th Century). Phew.

In this time, the holy site of the Temple (”Temple Mount”, or Mount Moriah) has been the site of the First Temple (destroyed by the Babylonians), the site of the Second Temple (destroyed by the Romans), the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque / the Dome of the Rock (still there), and, briefly, an Augustinian Church (I admittedly do not know how they did this, but I imagine they just turned up and said “this is a church now”). 

Back to the exile itself: one third of all Jews were murdered in the 20th Century in the Sho’ah. (We’ve just about recovered those raw numbers at this point, but the world population has gone from 2 billion to 8 billion in that time - so in reality, we’re a quarter of what we should be.) The British were occupying a land with some significant violence occurring and no living empire to give it back to, and they overpromised to get allies. A mess was made. The UN made a half-hearted suggestion about trying to fulfill two promises at once, and we get to...

The Third Jewish Commonwealth (1948 CE - present)

I’m going to make an assumption here that you know some of this story already, and we’re treading into “modern politics” land, which is neither my forte nor my interest. In short: Everything was a mess when the British left. Israel declared independence. The Nakba. The war, then another war, then another war. There have been small glimmers of hope and then everything has crashed back to being terrible again. 

Religiously, the establishment of the Third Jewish Commonwealth has had a really interesting impact on self-definition. Did exile end with 1948? Some say yes; we’re now in diaspora rather than exile. Some say no; there might be a Law of Return, but with the state of the State, it’s hardly true that all Jews feel safe returning, and there’s no reason to think of diaspora as meaningfully different to exile. This brings up questions of Jewish identity worldwide. Are we a people exiled or a people redeemed? Is it possible to be neither of those things? Do we understand the establishment of the State in the kind of theological terms we understood the return from Babylonian Exile, or does the fact that we ultimately drew our understanding of the Second Exile from naturalistic/value-based/human causes mean that we see the “end of the exile” in the same ways?

There are no good answers to the above questions. Communities and individuals are split. On the one hand, it’s miraculous. On the other hand, it’s really, really not. 

In general, something that I think is religiously fascinating about Take Three is that the Jewish population is split between the very religious and the very secular. The middle path, what I might call Mainstream Judaism (from mainstream Orthodoxy through to Reform Judaism) barely exists at all. But what divides the Chareidim (ultra-religious) from the Chilonim (secular) is not a matter of Jewish identity or relationship with the land; it’s just a difference in whether or not religion matters. The answers appear to be “absolutely yes” and “absolutely no”, without much room for anything between. There is a kind of symbiotic relationship between the two sides, but they are very much two sides.

That there is such secularism is of course partly due to living in the modern world. But it also tells of a whole new relationship to the land. Chilonim still identify with the ancestral homeland, still see it as sacred in a sense, but don’t tie this sanctity to God. 

Why is the middle missing? Why has mainstream Judaism failed to get a foothold in the Third Jewish Commonwealth? It’s not for lack of trying. I’m at a bit of a loss as to why this would be the case. Looking back to Take One and Take Two, I can see how the development in the area led to the religious/political groups, but I’m at a loss for this one. Perhaps it’s about the impact of politics requiring people to take more extreme stances. Perhaps the trend is toward secularism, but the Chareidim just have so many babies that it bucks the trend. Perhaps middle-of-the-road Judaism is only appealing in exile/diaspora. 

And that brings me to the end of my musings. This has been on my mind because Israel’s democracy is currently under internal threat, which I find interesting in comparison to the First and Second Jewish Commonwealths. As Kohelet would say: there’s nothing new under the sun. 

[alephskoteinos]

I knew I was going to be interested in Esoterica's latest video about the Demiurge, and I knew I was going to look forward to part two coming up, but I find there's an analysis here that points to a god who has a central place in the "Gnostic" "demonisation" of Yahweh, and whose place as such may yet illuminate a pagan lens of what emerges as satanic outsideness.

The god in question is none other than Set, or Seth, the Egyptian god who ruled over the desert (the Red Land) outside the kingdom of Egypt. For this connection, Justin Sledge leans heavily into M David Litwa's book The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea, which I've since decided I now need a copy of.

It all seems to begin with the myth of Exodus, the Biblical story most people recognise as the one where God brings ten plagues on the land of Egypt to in order to force the pharaoh to release the Israelites from slavery and gets Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. An observation Justin makes is that, for Egyptian audiences, the Exodus story basically positioned the ancient Egyptian gods and the divine pharaoh as being powerless before the might of a single foreign deity, and the pharaoh as dying by drowning, which was apparently considered the worst die in Egypt. To Egyptian eyes, there could not be a more offensive, obscene, or humiliating portrayal of the Egyptian religion, and otherwise, to non-Jews in antiquity, the whole story seemed entirely unbelievable. For all that handwringing about how a foreign god could possibly threaten the good order of the gods of Egypt, there must have been some doubts about that order that entered the mind, if it had to seriously consider the possibility of a god like Yahweh standing toe to toe against Egypt.

But for some people responding to just how far Yahweh went against Egypt at least there was one answer: Yahweh must have been a malevolent donkey-headed god, if not just an angry demon. Or rather, to be more accurate, Yahweh was just Set/Seth, the Egyptian god who was already associated with foreigners who lived outside the kingdom of Egypt.

Set was also at a certain point already identified with Baal, or rather Baal Hadad, the Canaanite god of storms and rain, who Justin says was actually worshipped by nomadic traders in the highlands. That makes for an interesting link as far as local storm gods go. Yet, was Baal really just the main storm of nomadic highlander bandits? The connection to the barbaric outside is an interesting one to say the least, but surely Canaanite religion must have had a certain prominence in antiquity? Unless its presence was also elevated by its interaction with other religious traditions, such as early Judaism, Hellenic polytheism, and Egyptian polytheism? Still, Set being the "demonic" patron of foreigners linked to Baal being the god worshipped by "barbarian nomads" would be just the tip on its own. In a larger sense, one begins to see a massive gulf between that kind of divinity and the Biblical God presented by Christianity. In fact, especially with the link to Baal in mind, the image of Yahweh as Seth and Seth as Iao might seem to have almost nothing to do with the God of Judaism, apart from the calamities attributed to God in the Bible. Whereas Set was an ontologically ambiguous and wild god associated with storms and threats to cosmic and political order, Yahweh or God was associated with the absolute power of cosmic order as the guarantour of political order and sovereignty relevant to the nation of Israel, and only moreso with time, and as time past certain associations with storms, metallurgy, and war gave way to the kind of divinity more associated with El, as well as dominion over celestial objects (which God aggressively emphasizes to Job when he questions the goodness of God). It certainly is a grand and ancient story of recuperation if I ever heard it.

Justin also points out that Set was, after some time, gradually reimagined as a donkey-headed god, whereas in older traditional iconography, Set has the head of a strange creature referred to simply as the "Seth animal" (or "Typhonic beast"), whose actual species (if it was even a real animal species) we still don't know and have no idea what it could be. The donkey association is pervasive in Greco-Egyptian magic, and it seems to have been prevalent enough in Greece at least that Plutarch references the claim that Typhon fled Egypt while riding on an ass for seven days, which Justin says was probably a mockery of the seven days of creation in the Book of Genesis, and that Typhon then sired two sons named Jerusalem and Judea. This, Plutrarch says, is simply an attempt by some people (apparently including Tacitus himself) to drag Jewish traditions into the legends of Typhon. Whatever the intent it does serve to establish that Yahweh was seen as associated with Typhon, perhaps by people who didn't like Judaism to say the least. There seems to be a similar theme with the Roman link between Yahweh and Sabazios, a god who the Romans detested. Of course, never mind the fact that there was an all the more prolific tendency in antiquity to associated Yahweh with Zeus, the chief god of Olmypus and the adversary of Typhon in Greek mythology.

In antiquity, the donkey was considered the "dumbest" of all animals. We probably still think that to some extent today. But in antiquity that was also meant to denote Typhon's irrationality and the foolishness of his conflict with the gods. The donkey image apparently seems to recur throughout antiquity not only in hostile references to Judaism but also in similar references to Christianity. There are unfortunately certain canards in the ancient Greco-Roman world in which Jews were accused of worshipping a golden donkey or donkey head while practicing bloody sacrifices out of hatred for every nation in the world. These were probably not all that commonly believed, but they existed, and they do seem to have been prevalent enough that Jewish authors such as the historian Josephus felt it necessary to refute them. But then later, when Christianity started to emerge as a new religion in town, both Roman polytheists and some Jews occasionally referred to Christians as worshipping a donkey god, using the word "onocoetes" ("he who lies in an ass's manger"), which was meant to imply. And then of course there's the infamous graffito of Alexamenos worshipping his "god": an image of Jesus Christ on the cross with the head of a donkey.

The fact that Christians were accused of worshipping a donkey-headed deity cannot be seen in isolation from Seth already being depicted as a donkey god and him already being associated with Yahweh previously. Perhaps, then, Christians, and Jews prior, were really being accused of worshipping Set. Of course, the accusation was ridiculous and often xenophobic in context. But what it conveys is the idea of worshipping a god seen as "beastly", unlike much of the gods worshipped by Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians (even though those same gods were sometimes worshipped in animal form!).

At the same time, as Jake Stratton Kent elaborated in Geosophia, Seth Typhon was, for a long time, regarded as the patron deity of magicians, as in the very magicians who wrote the spells of the PGM. Kent also elaborated links between Seth-Typhon and not only Dionysus but also Iao, and suggested that they were sometimes identified. Justin also comments on spells in the Greek Magical Papyri, particularly the "erotic" spells, noting that they invoke Seth/Typhon and also show his image (that of the ass/donkey) along the name Iao or variations thereof. I might examine these spells again for the purpose of my PGM notes. Justin at least implies identification between these gods is in play, and in my opinion that is not at all unlikely to be the case. In fact the presence of magical amulets featuring donkey-headed gods and the name Iao probably support that suggestion. And it has to be stressed that, even though the name Iao is invoked, this is an identity that has very little to do with traditional Judaism. Throughout the PGM Iao or Sabaoth or forms thereof are syncretised with polytheistic gods with Helios or outright identified with them, or even subordinate to Helios, all of which is in stark contrast to how God traditionally establishes himself as distinct from all of the other gods and as the sole recipient of worship ("You shall have no other gods before me"). But, speaking of Helios, Kent also also stressed that Seth-Typhon was a solar-pantheistic god, of the kind of solar-pantheistic divinity also represented by gods such as Helios and Abrasax.

The heavy-handed link that Justin (and perhaps M David Litwa as well) presents between Set and Yahweh in the minds of the ancient Egyptians and Hellenes actually makes it much easier to look at a "non-Abrahamic" "satanic outsideness" centered around Set and the Greek Magical Papyri. Well, I say easier, at the least it could provide a much clearer set of clues. I'm already somewhat more interested in the centrality of Seth-Typhon in the notion of divinity in play and its arcane religious outsideness than in any of the standard reasons for which people like Gnosticism. This is where we get not to the standard narrative of the "Judeo-Christian God is the Demiurge keeping people imprisoned from the Pleroma [which is still very much the Christian God!]", but Seth as the insidious "evil" god of magic and chaos, specifically the disorder of matter, but also, perhaps, the heroic strivings of the transgressive magician. There is the possibility of much to be found in common with Satan after all, or at least the Satan of Stanislaw Przybyszewski. There may also in fact be a sense here in which Bataille's Base Materialism and Gnosticism can have a very good effect, not as an analysis of Gnosticism but as illuminating a much greater, lost religious world.

And unfortunately I suppose Soul Hackers 2's Seth also makes a little sense in this light.

Fuck my entire life.

[dizzyghoast]

it is funny watching some jews on this website go on and on about about christianity stole xyz from judaism as if judaism didnt steal a hunch of shit from canaanite polytheism and zoroastrianism