[IMAGE 29]

We have seen the "little vase" [IMAGE 20] before, and may see it again.  Now, we need to discuss the "Precious Blood."

Hebrew law requires meat to be bled-out thoroughly because in olden times people believed that the essence of an animal was in its blood.  And who wants to become a sheep or a goat?  But the drinking of the blood of a powerful enemy, or even the blood of a powerful fellow-tribesman, goes back into human history to times immemorial. 

What comes as a unwelcome surprise to Caucasians is how recently our European ancestors still continued the practice.  A persistent joke about the Irish is that we still practice headhunting and anthropophagy (cannibalism) because we "behead" then "consume" our politicians!  Yet, we gave up those actual practices long before most other Europeans!

The Roman law under which early Christians were prosecuted was a law against blood-magic.  Early Christians pretended to drink the blood and eat the flesh of their God.  And some Christian groups, whose names are listed by the Church's first historian, Bishop Eusebius of Caesaraea, actually used human flesh and blood in the ceremony.  As a consequence, the Romans, who themselves only recently had ceased such religious practices, apparently thought that all Christians ate the flesh and drank the blood of their children.  Perry, 1991, supra, page 163.  As has been observed so many times, no one is as intolerant of smoking in public as ex-smokers who just have kicked the habit!  Perhaps, you never have thought of Roman prosecution of early Christian groups in this light?

The story of Abraham and Issac (or Ishmael, if you are Islamic) was the Hebrew cultural and religious justification for ending child-sacrifice, which continued to be practiced by their neighbors for long years afterwards.  The Bible tells us that the Israelites were so afraid of that sacrifice's being practiced against them by their enemies as an act of holy magic that they cut and ran, stopping their attack upon the city! And the Israelites were not known as cowards, even when our Celtic steel swords "did break" their bronze swords!  Which is some evidence that even the bravest of  men were afraid of the "magic" of infant sacrifice.

Once-upon-a-time, blood-and-flesh magic was wrapped up in the religious concept of the king who reigned but did not rule.  As is echoed by the Grail literature from the distant past of humankind, early people apparently believed that the health of the land and of the tribe were dependent upon the health of the king.  So, when the king became sick or infirm, he was put to death and another king was chosen.

However, power structures can be expected to find ways to avoid surrendering power.  So, the concept of kings who reigned but did not rule came into existence.  The false "king," who would be sacrificed some day for the health of the people, and for the health of the land, lived sumptuously during his "time," which usually was one solar year.  He then was put to death, and his flesh and blood were distributed to the members of the tribe in a sympathetic magic ceremony intended to protect the health of the people and the health of their land. In the European context, the flesh and blood of the false "king" actually were mixed into the soil of the agricultural fields, allegedly to fructify them.  The "gods" of those times must have been considered by the people to be rather stupid if the people thought they could fool the gods into believing that the false "king" was their real king; hence, that a "big" sacrifice was being made!

Any Christian Fundamentalist who has made his/her way this far into the dark recesses of this essay probably just got a sinking feeling in the tummy because it certainly would require bottomless, blind faith on their part to avoid understanding that Jesus was not the first alleged "year-king" to be sacrificed for the alleged "good" of His people!   We will learn later in this essay that Jesus' ministry was for a solar year, and that he allegedly died at age 30, the age of mythical solar heroes.

Moreover, we will learn, later in this essay, that during the first hundreds of years of Christianity, the concept of Christ's being a "Savior" who was sacrificed then consumed in theanthropophagy (consumption of the god) for the good of his people was wholly absent from Christianity.  Instead, Christ was described in Christian writing, and portrayed in Christian iconography, as being an image of pure light, awaiting, with open arms, our return to the Center of Heaven, from whence we allegedly came at birth, and to which we allegedly would return at death. 

What happened?  What caused the return during later Christianity of the sacrificial blood-and-guts sort of religion which was so graphically portrayed by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ ?  Which human-sacrifice-plus- theanthropophagy-religion the Hebrews much earlier had replaced with the sacrifice and consumption of the Pascal lamb?  And with the driving of the Goat into the wilderness onto which ribbons had been tied, thereby allegedly carrying away the sins of the people?  (I hope you do not think that practical-minded Hebrews would waste a perfectly-good goat by allowing it to parch and to starve in a desert.)

The answer to what happened is that the religion of the Roman State happened!  With the help of the Roman Army, the Roman State's religion became the dominant form of Christianity.  Except in those remote regions such as Scotland and Ireland where the Roman Army never marched!  A conquest by sword and spear!   The Roman State's state-owned and state-run religion was organized as a mixture of earlier Christianity and the western form of the warrior cult known as "Mithraism."

Lord Mithra allegedly was born on December 25th.  His birth allegedly was witnessed by shepherds and by Babylonian astrological priests, that is, magi.  After opposing the power structure, Mithra or Mithras, allegedly was captured and put to death by his enemies.  But not before having a last meal with his supporters.  And if you just will believe in him and obey his priests, you will have a happy life forever with him in the sky!  Where have I heard that story?

Mithraism was the principal religion of the Town of Tarsus.  Saul of Tarsus?  Saint Paul, the "architect" of Christianity?  Bet on it!  Saint Paul no more could have grown up Jewish in Tarsus without knowing about Mithraism than a little Jewish boy could grow up these days in Vatican City without knowing about Roman Catholicism!  Imagine Paul's coming home to Tarsus, telling a crowd in the town square about his newly-divined (from his visions)  religion named "Christianity."  Might someone in the crowd have shouted, "Hey, Saul, or Paul, or whatever you now call yourself.  Have you forgotten our childhood sky-stories about Lord Mithra"?

The Roman soldiers who occupied Britain (but not Scotland and Ireland) for so many years until they were summoned home to defend the Empire against the hoards of invaders arriving from Asia, were not small-of-stature "pre-Italian" Christians.  Instead, they were tall, muscular "pre-Iranian" warrior cultists of Lord Mithra.  The places of worship for Roman soldiers garrisoned along Hadrian's Wall are not Christian chapels.  They are Mithraria!

The Roman State did not need a wide-variety of open-minded and thinking "Christians."  It needed hundreds of thousands of "believe and obey" soldiers who were ready to sacrifice themselves for the Roman State.  Get it?  Must I spell it out for you?  The Roman Civil and Religious power-structures created a syncretic warrior self-sacrifice religion to advance the cause of the Roman State's policy of expansionism or colonialism.  And what better icon for such a religion of military conquest than the Son whose Father allegedly gave His Son to be sacrificed for the good of the Roman State?

There, I just wrote it!  Hate me if you must for being that blunt.  But then wake up to historical reality.  The Christianities of peaceful thinkers were declared to be "heresies."  The hierarchy, clergy, and adherents of peaceful Christianities were in effect traitors against the Roman State.  But the "other Christianities" were not destroyed.  Instead, they merely went underground throughout Europe.  And they now are being "born again" from the "grave" into which Pauline, Nicaean, Augustinian Christianity thought it had consigned them.

Call it what you may. Label its adherents variously. But alternative Christianity is a religion of light.  A religion of thinkers.  Not a religion of those who are content to "believe and obey."  A religion which conquers the mind with sensible propositions.  Not a religion which compels the body to obey under threats of penalties not only during this lifetime but in perpetuity.  About which "light religion" we shall read more in the main text of this essay before we again go about our separate ways.

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