Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Idolatry

Dio reports that on Trajan's return to Rome in 107, ten thousand Dacian prisoners took part in games lasting 123 days, and eleven thousand animals were slaughtered, along with about half the Dacian gladiators. The most famous of Trajan's arena victims wasn't a prisoner of war, but a dangerous atheos, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (fl.115 CE), 'the father of orthodoxy,' who rejected Trajan's gory pietas to his face.

Ignatius directly analogized the symbolic eucharisto with the ancient shamanic pharmakon: "At these meetings you should heed the bishop and presbytery attentively, and break one loaf, which is the medicine of immortality (pharmakon athanasias) and the antidote which wards off death but yields continuous life in union with Jesus Christ....Thus no devil's weed will be found among you; but thoroughly pure and self-controlled, you will remain body and soul united to Jesus Christ."

Ignatius could easily have avoided the Coliseum by prostrating himself before the image of the Emperor-Saviour or Juppiter, saying a ritual prayer and burning some incense, but such a course was unthinkable to this mystic politician, whose implacable courage magnified the influence of his Church throughout the Empire. Jesus was a real mystery god, a living one, whose eucharisto had enormous power in the face of the pseudo-tribal alternatives, precisely because he was post-tribal, neither Jew nor Greek (Roman), a 'third race,' katholikos, 'universal.'

Some Gnostic Christians, or aristocratic initiates of the mysteries like Ovid and Apuleius, might call the symbolic pharmakon 'vicarius,' a 'substitute,' but for many of the bulk of the population, for whom the mysteries weren't an option, the body and blood of Christ were far more genuine than the idols of the Emperor, whose shamanic posing was simply an insult. For Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, control of the powerful symbolism was everything: "It is not lawful apart from the bishop either to baptize or to hold a love feast; but whatsoever he shall approve, this is well pleasing also to God....He that honoureth the bishop is honoured of God; he that doth aught without the knowledge of the bishop [the vicar] rendereth service to the devil." The canonical word for sin is hamartia, an archer's term, 'missing the mark,' failing to toe the line.

Consistent with its authoritarianism, the Church evolved a sacramental ritual in which the priest imbibed the wine on behalf of the congregation, everyone partaking of the symbolic blood vicariously. That is political theology, authoritarian organizational genius which the Romans themselves refined and quite rightly perceived as a political threat. As Frend put it: "orthodoxy produced no leaders of the intellectual range and status of its opponents. The orthodox were often of an administrative cast of mind, ones to whom rules of behavior necessary to win salvation seemed more important than the fulness of Christ's grace."

Most of the Church fathers were so unoriginal and repetitive that reading them is painfully boring. They understood, however, the unique power of the Empire-wide organization they were building, and their mysticism is psychologically indistinguishable from their politics. That, of course, was precisely the Gnostic complaint. From the early to the later Apologists ('Defenders'), no Orthodox ('straight-thinking') Christian ever raised the standard of revolt in the Empire, ultimately penetrating its social fabric completely.

Septimius Severus ('The Severe'-193-211), legate of the Western armies based at Carnuntum, near Vienna, took the Principate by force after the death of Commodus. His consilium principis, run like a general staff and peopled by such legendary jurisconsults as Papinian, Plautianus, Paulus and Ulpian, asserted that the decisions of the emperor had the force of law (legis vigorem). Justification was found in the traditional legislative power inherent in the emperor's imperium, as promulgated by the Senate for Augustus and codified in the lex de imperio Vespasiani. Augustus had simplified the legal system by appointing a single magistrate who handled the case from start to finish. The magistrate could institute an inquisitio without the accuser that had previously been necessary. This was a cognitio extra ordinem, which, despite its name, became the ordinary form of criminal trial, such as the one Jesus was subjected to before Pilate. The likes of Domitian could then promulgate a prohibitio and instruct his magistrates to institute inquisitions on their own initiative, operating under the Emperor's legis vigorem.

It was these seminal legal thinkers who institutionalized the concept of sacrilegium ('stealing of sacred things') as maiestas, treason, in Western law, via Justinian's Code, the violation of a prohibitio being a sacrilege. This is quite literally the originary legal precedent upon which contemporary American Prohibition is based. Justinian's Code, adopted as canonical 'ancient law' by the medieval Church-State in the twelfth century, became the basis of the legal system of all Western nations. It is sickening to see contemporary Justices of the American Supreme Court cite this Roman inquisitorial law, which overthrew the aristocratic Greek libertarianism, as originary legal precedent, just as the Church courts of the Inquisition did.

In his battle with that son of Roma, Maxentius, for control of Italy, Constantine actively sought the support of Italy's numerous Christians, the Sun evolving into a political symbol of Christ, the solar lion now accompanied by a Greek Cross, a plus sign in which all the arms are of equal length. The Greek Cross is an archetypal symbol recurring throughout the Paleo-Neolithic remains. It was used to represent the stars of heaven at Catal Huyuk and on the body of Hathor, also in Native American pictographs. A beautiful solid marble Greek Cross, below, almost 9 inches high, representing the celestial body of the Goddess, was the central feature of the Shrine of the Snake Goddess found at Knossos. It is also, of course, a basic element of most originary alphabets. The power of this archetypal imagery is awesome. It is unconsciously rooted in the feminine.

By recognizing the reality of the culture, and the army, which had become Christian, Constantine was enabled to leave Imperial ritual and law, including the laws relating to Emperor-worship ('vice-gerant of God'), slavery, penal servitude, confiscatory taxation and torture, completely untouched. In this he won the wholehearted support of the bishops of the Church, whom he released from all taxation and encouraged to go into business. Constantine's bishops achieved civil powers equal to governors on the Imperial investiture of the Church.

The unity of the Church, said Constantine repeatedly, was the guarantee of the prosperity of the Empire he ruled with power that came directly ek Theou, 'from God,' part of the pregnant phrase used to describe the Divine Augustus in Egypt, Theou ek Theou. Constantine claimed, like Diocletian, and Jesus Invictus, to be Parens Aurei Saeculi, Father of the Golden Age. His figure, bedecked in gold-embroidered purpura, sometimes wearing a jeweled flower garland, a diadem, image of the ennobling entheogen, holding the eagle-topped sceptre, was approachable in the nimbus of his sacrum palatium only in the position of proskynesis, not only kneeling in adoratio, but kissing the corner of his robe. This regal figure appeared on the coinage. These unrepublican images and ceremonies, instituted by Diocletian, were inherited from the vanquished Persian autocrats.

Like his predecessor Diocletian, Constantine was a book burner. The Gnostic and alchemical treatises were a special target of both. Much is made of the difference between the 'pagan' Diocletian and the 'Christian' Constantine, but they burned the same books and enslaved the same people.

Church organization, which effectively spanned the entire Empire, had been a positive inspiration to the Imperial bureaucracy, so Constantine coopted the vast Church machinery by conferring judicial powers on it, putting Church courts on a par with civil courts. The result was that ecclesiastical ordinance had the force of civil law, which wasn't really that much of an innovation. Cicero had said that there were no private unrecognized worships, sanction being given only to civic rites in temples or recognized groves or to family rites. Legal worship was thus sanctity, sanctitas, and sanction, sanctio, at the same time, just as sacramentum was either legal escrow or a compact with the gods. Unsanctioned worship, sacrilegium, 'sorcery and heresy,' were, as they had always been, equated with high treason, maiestas, the punishment for which was death and confiscation of all property, much of which flowed into the Church's hands.

50-60% of Constantine's subjects were slaves or indentured serfs. Most of the rest were debt-ridden smallholders. Control of rural land was about equally divided between the aristocrats, the Empire and the Church, and all ran their great estates with equal ruthlessness, despite the occassional pious exhortation. Magnificent churches were built with public funds in key cities throughout the Empire, with the bishops left in control of enormous annual subsidies and bequests. Constantine gleefully encouraged the destruction of priceless ancient temples such as that of Asclepius in Agis in Cilicia and Venus Ourania near Mount Lebanon, turning the plundered wealth over to the Church. Clerics were allowed to use the Imperial carriage system just as if they were government officials.

One of those officials was 'Saint' Augustine, whose first major appointment, in 382, was as the professor of rhetoric for the city of Milan, then the seat of the Imperial Court. His duty was to deliver the official panegyrics on the Emperor and the consuls of the year. That is, he was Minister of Propaganda. Like the senators he socialized with, Augustine thought slavery was just dandy, as 'divinely ordained' as marriage: "The prime cause of slavery, then, is sin, so that man was put under man in a state of bondage; and this can be only by a judgement of God, in whom there is no unrighteousness, and who knows how to assign divers punishments according to the deserts of the sinners....Yet slavery as a punishment is also ordained by that law which bids us to preserve the natural order and forbids us to disturb it; for if nothing had been done contrary to that law, there would have been nothing requiring the check of punishment by slavery."

Religio meant the canonical Christian religion and its canonical sacraments; all others were superstitio, and "every superstition must be entirely uprooted." Justinian's Code prescribes confiscation of property and death by torture for soothsaying, sorcery, magic, divining, heresy, poisoning, unnatural lusts, adultery, Christian conversion to Judaism and many other kinds of nonconformity, on grounds of maiestas, treason. The legal definitions of these heinous crimes were left to the churchmen. Trial by jury disappeared. Marriage between Christian and Jew was defined as adultery. Using the ancient herbal sacraments was, of course, deemed to be 'poisoning' or 'sorcery,' the punishment for which was the same as for adultery - forfeiture of all property, torture and death. Today it's just forfeiture of all property and an agonizing prison term.

Both Justinian's Corpus of laws and Digest of opinions go on at length 'Concerning Torture' and 'On Punishments.' They became the model of the Malleus Maleficarum, the official handbook of torture of the medieval Inquisition. The most common evidentiary bust of the medieval Inquisition was the possession of prohibited substances - the traditional medico-sacramental herbs of the midwives. The forced drinking of boiling oil or molten lead, or death by burning alive, replaced the traditional Roman crucifixion and branding on the face - far more Christian, obviously.

As honestiores themselves, the churchmen, even if they broke the law, weren't subject to torture, but the testimony of the vast bulk of the population, humiliores, wasn't valid in capital cases, or against honestiores, without torture. This 'legal principle' degenerated into indiscriminate torture for many minor offenses. The methods employed included the rack, which tore the joints apart, the lignum, which pulled the legs apart, the ungulae, which ripped the flesh, the mala mansio, a metal body-suit, the bodily insertion of red hot metal, slow strangulation, and, as the Digest put it, "castigation with rods, scourging, and blows with chains." The only thing Christian martyrdom taught Imperial Christianity was methodology. "We call heretic everyone who is not devoted to the Catholic Church and to our Orthodox and holy Faith." The Inquisition had begun.

By Justinian's time (527-565), episcopal sees coincided with civil territories, the bishop of a rich see earning as much as the procurator. The personal wealth of the Church patriarchs, who controlled whole industries, was rivalled only by the richest senators. The patriarchs were those bishops that controlled the great see of an imperial territory: Alexandria controlled Egypt and Cyrenaica; Jerusalem controlled Palestine; Antioch controlled Syria; Constantinople controlled Asia Minor, Thrace and Greece; and Rome controlled Western Europe. Some of Justinian's favorite bishops and troops are pictured with him below in the famous mosaic on the wall of the church of San Vitale that he built in Ravenna, Italy, c.547. Above is Justinian's wife, Empress Theodora, offering a gilded communion.

The Roman and Alexandrian sees tried to break the power of Constantinople by attacking the orthodoxy of its bishops. To actually follow the 'theological' arguments in detail is both nauseating and stultifying, since behind them the most grotesque hypocrisy was at work: "begotten, unbegotten, preexistent, sole from sole, perfect from perfect, like in all respects, in all things, of the same substance, individualities, hypostases, manifestations," blah, blah, blah.

In a savage battle for control of vast wealth and influence, council after high council condemned one or another clerical politician for incorrectly using one pin-headed term after another. Whole sees actually depended on the difference between homoousios and homoiousios, 'of the same substance' and 'like in substance.' The dueling clerics actually divided into the homoousian party and the homoiousian party and fought it out for decades.

Apollinaris of Laodicea, in 375, was concerned to stress that Christ, God, could not possibly have had a human mind, "a prey to filthy thoughts, but existing as a divine mind, immutable and heavenly." Someone noticed that this radical homoousian position made Mary redundant, so Apollinaris was condemned. Mary, of course, despite all those children, was 'perpetually Virgin.' By Justinian's time the Church had made enormous theological progress: "The Word in the last times, having himself clothed with flesh his hypostasis [reality] and his nature, which existed before his human nature, and which, before all the worlds, were without human nature, hypostasized human nature into his own hypostasis."