In a previous blogpost I discussed the work of Ian Stevenson on children’s memories of past lives, which suggest the reality of reincarnation. In his book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect¹, he describes the phenomenon of otherwise inexplicable birthmarks which appear at places on the body where a wound was inflicted in a previous life. He says: “The birthmarks and birth defects provide an objective type of evidence well above that which depends on the fallible memories of informants. We have photographs (and occasionally sketches) which show the birthmarks and birth defects. And for many of the cases, we have a medical document, usually a postmortem report, that gives us a written confirmation of the correspondence between the birthmark (or birth defect) and the wound on the deceased person whose life the child, when it can speak, will usually claim to remember… The birthmarks and birth defects in these cases do not lend themselves easily to explanations other than reincarnation”.

    I have recently rediscovered some further evidence of this idea. Varvara Ivanova was a Russian psychic and healer active in the 1960s and 1970s. Her work is discussed in chapters 9 and 10 of The New Soviet Psychic Discoveries, by Henry Gris and William Dick². It was said (by others) that she “controls such a wealth of psychic abilities that she is unmatched by any person in the Western world”. She was “particularly known for her outstanding ability to diagnose and cure illnesses by telephone at virtually any distance — in one documented case, at the range of 8,000 miles”.

    With regard to reincarnation, she believed that “skills learned in previous lives can explain a great deal about why some people show unusual talents in their early life”, especially in regard to languages. She used past-life regressions in her healing work. Here’s what she has to say about birthmarks:

    “Birthmarks are particularly significant. A secretary ‘saw’ her death from a bullet, which a man had shot at close range into her chest in a previous life. She had a jagged birthmark in the same spot, yet she had never heard about reincarnation and birthmark coincidences.

    A young engineer, when regressed, ‘saw’ his death from an arrow in Asia. He had felt a sharp pain in his chest, where the arrow hit him, and was feeling it even after he had been ‘brought back’ to the present time. People at the experiment wanted to see if there was a birthmark, and asked him to show the spot where the arrow hit. He said there was no mark there. But on closer scrutiny, he found a pale round mark, a half inch in diameter, that he had never noticed before.

    ‘There are too many examples of this type of birthmark for it to be ignored’, Ivanova said with conviction… She was once asked to treat a young man for mental illness. She had never met the patient, but had a vision of him as a French soldier killed in battle, with a saber stuck into his side. The boy’s mother then revealed that her son had a birthmark exactly at the saber entry point!”

    If this theory is true, there are obviously huge implications for our understanding of reality. The obvious one is that death is not the end of our being, contrary to what many believe in modern times. If memories are retained, and manifest themselves again physically in a later life, even though the body and brain have died, then one has to ask where these memories are stored. Clearly not in the brain! They must be stored somewhere in an immaterial consciousness, which would be a significant blow to scientific materialism. Stevenson, talking of “the evidence they (birthmarks) provide that a deceased personality — having survived death — may influence the form of a later-born baby”, says “I am well aware of the seriousness — as well as the importance — of such a claim and can only say that I have been led to it by the evidence of the cases” (p2).

Footnotes:

1. Praeger, 1997

2. Sphere Books, 1980

    This is the first in a new series of articles. Understanding consciousness has been something of a nightmare for science and philosophy, because it seems that no one can explain how something material, the brain, is capable of producing something apparently immaterial, the phenomenon of consciousness, subjective experience. This led the Australian philosopher David Chalmers to coin the term ‘the hard problem’, as in my title. I shall be arguing that only a spiritual understanding of life can resolve the difficulty. Along the way, I’ll be using as a sounding-board a book by philosopher Philip Goff called Galileo’s Error¹, in which he wrestles with the relevant issues. The subtitle is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, which explains more clearly than the title what it’s all about.

    Here is a brief summary of Goff’s argument. He rejects dualism, the idea that consciousness is of a fundamentally different nature from matter. He thinks that physical science is incapable of explaining consciousness, and so rejects materialism. He concludes therefore that panpsychism is philosophically the most plausible solution. He defines this as “the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality” (p113).

    I agree with that statement when taken at face value but, as he goes into more detail, some problems begin to emerge. The first ones are of a philosophical and scientific nature.

    Although he rejects materialism, his panpsychism is not really an alternative to it, rather a watered-down version, in effect saying that we need to expand our understanding of matter to include consciousness. He states that very clearly here: “Panpsychism… does not postulate consciousness outside of the physical world… The panpsychist places human consciousness exactly where the materialist places it: in the brain” (p115).

    By adopting this position, it seems to me that he has merely moved the goalposts and created a new Hard Problem. How is consciousness a fundamental aspect of matter? Merely stating that this must surely be the case explains nothing. I understand that one of the qualities of good philosophy is that it should be explanatory powerful, and Goff believes that his version of panpsychism is that (he uses those words on p114). I assume he thinks that because panpsychism is an improvement on materialism and dualism. However, since he offers no explanation for how consciousness might be a fundamental aspect of matter, I would argue that, at least on that specific point, this version of panpsychism fails.

    Good philosophy should also be internally consistent. Goff distances himself from the view “that all kinds of inanimate objects have rich conscious lives”. This leads him to the, on the face of it, contradictory position that not literally everything is conscious, even though he has defined panpsychism as “the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality”. He thinks that “the fundamental constituents of the world are conscious”, but not that “every random arrangement of conscious particles results in something that is conscious in its own right” (p113). Thus socks are not conscious, even though the subatomic particles that comprise them are. That seems somewhat internally inconsistent to me. At the very least, it would require some further elucidation.

    There is another problem. According to the scientific method, a hypothesis must be either verifiable or falsifiable. Goff concedes (p115) that, in the case of panpsychism, this may be impossible. If that is so, then it could not be the foundation of the new science of consciousness that he is seeking. It would remain merely a philosophical speculation.

    The last point leads to a difficulty of a different kind. Goff turns to his version of panpsychism, not because it is necessarily true, rather because it is philosophically appealing, since he perceives it to be the only way to avoid dualism. It is therefore a kind of get-out clause, a diversion from a purely philosophical discussion to his preferred worldview. As he says, “the main attraction of panpsychism is not its ability to account for the data of observation, but its ability to account for the reality of consciousness” (p115). He is therefore conceding that its appeal is theoretical, not empirical. And why is it so appealing to him? Because, like so many scientists and philosophers in modern times, Goff wants to avoid at all costs any appeal to ‘magical’, i.e. spiritual/immaterial, explanations. He says, “we must somehow find a way of making consciousness… the business of science” (p23).

    Why must we? Perhaps the true nature of consciousness is beyond the reach of science, or at least beyond science as it is currently conceived. That is my assumption, and will be the theme of this series of articles. An important question will be: Goff’s panpsychism is an obvious improvement on strict materialism, but does it go far enough?

    Since he considers the concept of an immaterial mind to be a ‘magical’ (his word) explanation, and therefore rejects it on a priori grounds, it’s worth considering whether his arguments are reasonable. A discussion of dualism will therefore be the subject of the next article.

Footnote:

1. Rider, 2019

    There have been several articles on Medium in recent months discussing Simulation Theory, as formulated by Nick Bostrom, and brought to mainstream public attention by the film The Matrix, the idea that the ‘reality’ we experience might be some kind of computer simulation. The latest one that I have come across (click here), although not recent, is by scientist and philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci, who argues strongly against the theory, describing it as “nonsense from modern pseudo-physics”. His specific target is an article by Klee Irwin, Marcelo Amarai, and David Chester, who have developed the theory further than Bostrom.

    My intention here is not to argue with Pigliucci from a scientific or philosophical perspective; he does a good job of criticising the article from those standpoints. Instead I want to comment primarily on one striking sentence. He says that the simulation hypothesis “claims that there is a high probability that we are not physical beings (all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding), but rather simulated beings, ‘alive’ inside a gigantic simulation set up by unknown higher beings (which, according to Bostrom, are likely themselves to be simulated, and so forth, almost ad infinitum)”.

    What interests me here is that this is precisely what religions and spiritual traditions have been saying for centuries, albeit in different language. For ‘unknown higher beings’ read ‘gods and goddesses’. For ‘simulated almost ad infinitum’ read ‘emanate from the infinite Divine Consciousness’. Pigliucci thinks the theory sounds like “a thinly disguised pseudoscientific notion of God”. Indeed it is, which might be a good reason to take it more seriously. He wonders “whose thought was the trigger for the self-simulation of the universe?” He may have already answered the question; it was this Divine Consciousness, otherwise known as God, or Brahma in Hinduism, En Sof in Kabbalah, and other terms in various traditions.

    Even Genesis 1 agrees, since the Hebrew word Elohim found there, (mis?)translated as ‘God’, suggesting monotheism, is plural, and therefore possibly represents the ‘unknown higher beings’ referred to in the Simulation Theory. And doesn’t our best scientific understanding agree with the theory when it says that we are not physical beings? At least since Einstein mass, thus matter, has been perceived to be a form of energy. Pigliucci appears to insist that we are physical beings, but does not say what he actually means by this. Science seems to suggest otherwise.

    It is not only the ancient religions that understand the universe in this way. It is also the viewpoint of esoteric, secret societies down the ages and up to modern times, as described by Jonathan Black in his important book The Secret History of the World. Here is a sentence from Pigliucci’s article, which is intended as criticism of the Simulation Theory: “ ‘The all-encompassing thought that is our reality’ offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of ‘sub-thoughts’ that reach all the way down to the base mathematics and fundamental particles. Human beings themselves are ‘emergent sub-thoughts’ and we experience and find meaning in the world through other sub-thoughts”.

    Compare that with this passage from Black: that the physical universe is “a series of thoughts emanating from the cosmic mind. Pure mind to begin with, these thought-emanations later became a sort of proto-matter, energy that became increasingly dense, then became matter so ethereal that it was finer than gas, without particles of any kind. Eventually the emanations became gas, then liquid and finally solids… Emanations from the cosmic mind should be understood in the same way, as working downwards in a hierarchy from the higher and more powerful and pervasive principles to the narrower and more particular, each level creating and directing the one below it… At the lowest level of the hierarchy… these emanations… interweave so tightly that they create the appearance of solid matter”¹.

    Stanislav Grof, transpersonal psychologist working with LSD as a therapeutic tool, says that in altered states of consciousness his patients experience visions of deities, archetypal entities, but they never take these beings to be the ultimate principle, thus that they are unknown higher beings which have themselves been simulated. Or, as the ancient traditions said, they were emanations from the higher levels.

    I would suggest therefore that, even if Simulation Theory does not stand up to strict scientific and philosophical scrutiny (Pigliucci certainly finds the authors’ arguments unsatisfactory), it is at the very least an excellent metaphor for the process of creation, thus the nature of the universe. My only complaint might be that the theory is an attempt to express in too modern language what is said better in the words of the ancient traditions.

    The computer is a useful analogy for this creative process. The hardware is pointless without the software, and software cannot exist without a programmer. And obviously the hardware did not come into existence out of nowhere; it started as an idea in the mind of its creator. The combination of hardware and software allows images to appear on the screen.

    The equivalent of the software in the cosmic scheme is what Carl Jung called the archetypes, meaning literally the blueprints, thus the transcendent plans, for life at the ‘material’ level. These are often called divine ideas by commentators (although I’m currently engaged in a conversation on Medium with Mitchell Diamond, who is attempting to persuade me that this is not the case).

    Pigliucci quotes David Chester, one of the authors of the article he is criticising: “While many scientists presume materialism to be true, we believe that quantum mechanics may provide hints that our reality is a mental construct”. By saying ‘hints’, Chester is possibly being over-cautious, because what he says was certainly the firm view of the early quantum physicists:

• Werner Heisenberg: “The smallest units of matter are not physical objects… They are forms, structures, or — in Plato’s sense — Ideas”². Ideas in what mind we might reasonably ask.
• Sir James Jeans: “The universe is looking less like a great machine, and more like a great thought”³.
• Max Planck: “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter”⁴. This statement would not have seemed out of place in a Kabbalistic text.
• Sir Arthur Eddington: “The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions”⁵. If substance is an illusion, then it must be something other than matter, perhaps a thought.

    Chester may also be being cautious when he says that the theory “is compatible with ancient Hermetic and Indian philosophy.” That is, of course, the point that I’m trying to make in this article. One could argue, on the contrary, that it is actually in complete accord with these ancient worldviews.

    Pigliucci thinks that “none of this actually connects to science as we understand it”. That might just be a problem for science rather than Simulation Theory. It seems that we have to choose between the viewpoint of modern science and that of the ancient wisdom that has been around for thousands of years. I prefer the latter. Perhaps science needs to expand its understanding of how the universe works.

Footnotes:

1. Quercus, 2008, p39–40

2. quoted by Ken Wilbur, Quantum Questions, Shambala, 1984, p51

3. The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1947, p137

4. lecture given in Florence, quoted by John Davidson in The Secret of the Creative Vacuum

5. The Nature of the Physical World, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1935, p10

    This article is inspired by this recent one on Medium.com by Patrick Paul Garlinger. In it he identifies seven signs of spiritual awakening. Much of what he said resonated with my own experience, so I am writing this in support of what he is saying.

    His article contains several phrases that are completely alien to atheists and materialists, and which lead them to mock the beliefs of spiritually oriented people:

• “your soul is trying to pry open your mind”
• “the universe conspires to bring you experiences so that you start to see reality differently.”
• “a deeper undercurrent of wisdom in which the Divine is communicating with you”
• “you have an inherent connection to the Divine”
• “guidance from a higher power”
• “spirit guides and guardian angels”
• “the ways that the universe is in conversation with you”.

    To believe in such things is considered by many to be naive and foolish. Perhaps one term which sums them all up would be Supernatural Intelligences. My point would be that, once one has had experiences of this type, a bridge has been crossed, and it is no longer possible to regress into materialist, atheistic ideas, because one knows that they are false through direct experience.

    I’ll focus on four of Garlinger’s signs of awakening which have been especially meaningful for me. He calls the first the Dark Night of the Soul. In my life this manifested itself as a period of deep depression, the culmination of several years of alienation and unhappiness. During that period I had become attracted, at various times, by the philosophies of Sartrean existentialism, atheism, and Marxism. I hadn’t thought especially deeply about the issues; it was more a question of a psychological, emotional appeal. These worldviews seemed to explain and justify my gloom, and the lack of meaning in my life.

    Garlinger says: “These moments force you to look within and ask yourself why you’re here and what you’re doing with your life”. Indeed, the significant turning point in my life was when I decided to psychoanalyse myself, thus to look within my own life for the source of my problems, rather than blaming the outside world. This decision was the trigger for my spiritual awakening. From that moment on, just as he says, the universe conspired to bring me experiences which made me see reality differently.

    His second sign is called Disidentification with Your Thoughts. He says: “you may start to realize how much your thoughts… shape your perception of the world… The world you perceive is the world you — or more accurately, your mind — has created for you”. This is a profound statement. I now understand that my attraction to Existentialism, atheism, and Marxism came as a consequence of my personal psychology, not because they had any validity. They were illusions created by my mind, which my consciousness accepted uncritically. The period of spiritual awakening shattered these illusions.

    I now believe that it is a major problem in the modern world, that so many people accept uncritically illusory ideas and worldviews which emerge from within. We need to separate our consciousness from our minds. Buddhism seems to have a profound understanding of the problem, since one of the first tasks in Buddhist practice is to require the practitioner to observe rather than accept the thoughts which emerge and float past. Once thoughts have been observed, without having been accepted, then one can analyse them, and try to understand how they might have arisen, their origin in the unconscious. Also, the Transpersonal Psychology Psychosynthesis uses the following mantra: “I have a body but I am not my body. I have feelings, but I am not my feelings. I have a mind, but I am not my mind”.

    Garlinger’s third sign is Deeper Awareness of Your Purpose and Values: “You’ve made choices that seemed rational and grounded but perhaps did not align with who you truly are. You may have wanted to be an artist, a dancer, or a writer, but chose a more ‘practical’ job instead”. This was precisely true for me. I had probably always wanted to be a musician, but didn’t have the confidence or courage to follow that path. I therefore made bad choices, effectively sell-outs, and this failure to be myself was the true source of my depression and gloom, which led my mind to be attracted to these illusionary philosophies. 

    His fourth sign of awakening is Signs, Messages, and Synchronicity, a term coined by Carl Jung to describe highly meaningful coincidences with no causal explanation. Garlinger calls it “a connection with a deeper undercurrent of wisdom in which the Divine is communicating with you in ways you had previously ignored”. My own period of spiritual awakening was full of such occurrences, proving to me that the universe is governed by much more than the four forces known to physics.

    To conclude, Garlinger says: “Once you embrace that truth, and allow your soul to guide you, a whole new world, beyond the limited version that your mind has perceived, becomes available to you”. This is obviously relevant to the highly limited atheistic and existentialist philosophies. It is also regrettably true of much of modern science, which has a very, very, very limited view of the true nature of reality.

    This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a long time and it’s been on my list of subjects to write about, but so far I haven’t managed to get round to it. I’ve been spurred into action, however, by an excellent article on Medium.com by Benjamin Cain, which explores the history of the Mythicist debate, that is to say, the question whether or not there was a historical person Jesus at the beginning of Christianity. Several authors have argued this. One of the better–known books is The Jesus Mysteries by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy¹, the subtitle of which is Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God?

    Here is a brief summary of Cain’s position. He believes that the Mythicist argument is probably correct, but thinks that the issue is ultimately unimportant, because it is the theological, supernatural Christ that is crucial to Christian faith. Since he thinks that this can be disposed of by scientific, historical considerations, the question of whether a historical Jesus really lived or not becomes merely an academic puzzle to solve.

    If such a person did exist he would therefore have been, according to Cain, at best some mostly-unknown itinerant, rebellious Jewish preacher and healer, “who issued countercultural, Hellenistic-Jewish diatribes about reversals of fortune at the imminent end of the world and who was crucified for his troubles”. His true opinion, however, is expressed more clearly here: “There is no unique residual figure of Jesus in the New Testament that bears the unmistakable mark of history”; “(he) could have been assembled over some decades by syncretism between Judaism, the Mystery cults, and Hellenistic philosophy”.

    In order to solve this academic puzzle of the historicity of Jesus, Cain says that we are left “with the need to find merely the best explanation of the available evidence”. 

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    Here are some preliminary remarks, before addressing the main question of the Historical Jesus.

    Cain complains that most of the scholars who dismiss the Mythicist hypothesis are themselves Christian, therefore “if most of the scholarly community rejects Jesus mythicism, this could be due not to any theoretical fault of the latter, but to these scholars’ prior religious commitment to Christianity”. He says that some conservatives “are dogmatic apologists and are therefore inauthentic historians”.

    I’m happy to agree, and can easily think of some candidates who fit his description. The same accusation, however, must surely apply to the Mythicist community. How many of them are atheists, secularists, and adopt a ‘scientific’ worldview? If you start from such a position, the very least that can be said is that your preconceptions might occasionally cloud your judgment. (I’m trying to be as polite as possible here.)

    Cain is undoubtedly hostile to Christianity. He describes it as “the least tenable of the major religions”, and says that there are so many problems that it is hard “to decide which are the most fundamental, damaging, or embarrassing to a religion like Christianity”. (This is a quote from an earlier article of his.)

    I’m sure he would argue, of course, that his hostility is reasonable and well founded. My main grievance is that he dismisses the theological, supernatural Christ on principle, and he is quite insistent about it. This is the strongest of several similar statements: “We must content ourselves with searching for what’s plausible, whereby we swiftly eliminate the theological Christ, that is, the New Testament’s full-throated picture of Jesus”. We might reasonably respond, who has the right to decide what is plausible? Should we hand over this responsibility to Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, for example, or even to Cain himself? We know in advance what answer we would get.

    In any investigation or inquiry, nothing should be discounted on principle. Cain would seem to be starting from a biassed position, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Christian scholars of whom he disapproves. He thinks that the historical Jesus can only be the limited figure as described above, because he doesn’t believe in the possibility of a supernatural Christ, however we understand such a figure.

    I can readily agree with him that the problems with Christianity are legion, especially that its followers take literally what are almost certainly mythological features, and that a complete picture of its origins is something of an impenetrable mystery. However, his purpose seems to be to deconstruct Christianity in order to discredit it and, I assume, to be rid of it. While starting from similar beliefs as him about Christianity as we know it, my purpose is to deconstruct Christianity in order to revive it, rejuvenate it. If we can gradually peel away the layers of propaganda, disinformation, dodgy theology, editing of texts, and political interference, we might find a hidden treasure, a pearl of great price.

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    Now I’ll turn to the main issue at hand, the question of the Historical Jesus. When addressing such a difficult question, it is essential to gather as much relevant information as possible. Mythicists tend to make a good case when read in isolation on their own terms, but often miss out some important information which would contradict their case. For example, they focus upon, and are obsessed with the question, did a human being Jesus exist? It is possible to make a reasonably convincing case that he didn’t, as many have done. Has all the relevant information been taken into account, however? If Jesus didn’t exist, should we therefore assume that the gospel accounts are a complete fiction? Would that mean that Mary Magdalene never existed, that Jesus’s brother James and his other relatives mentioned never existed? And if it could be shown that they did exist, would that mean that a Jesus-figure existed also?

    Cain says that we “need to find merely the best explanation of the available evidence”, but he does not even take into account all the information in the gospels, which are our primary source. (I assume he must have done, but I sometimes wondered, while reading his article, whether he has ever read them.) He thinks that Jesus was, at best, an unknown itinerant Jewish preacher, but that actually there was no single individual figure. The gospels frequently say, however, that Jesus was seen as the Jewish Messiah, descended from King David, therefore heir to the throne of Israel (if they could only get rid of those pesky Romans). Cain may not believe that such a person ever existed, but the very least that could be said is that, if he did, then he would be historical, neither theological nor supernatural. Cain should therefore address this issue, not ignore it.

    This suggestion immediately creates huge problems for Christianity. The gospels present Jesus as a promoter of love, peace, and forgiving one’s enemies. If he had a claim to the throne, and wanted to free the Jews from Roman rule, perhaps he was more militant, more warrior-like. Various authors have argued this.

    There are some tantalising clues in the gospels that this might indeed be the case. Firstly, crucifixion was a Roman punishment for political rebels, whereas Jesus was accused of blasphemy, so should have been stoned to death, according to Jewish law. It’s worth noting therefore that, according to Matthew (27.29), following Mark, the soldiers mocked Jesus, saying “Hail, King of the Jews!”, so they presumably did not think he was being executed for blasphemy. This is made even clearer when they put a sign above his head with “the charge against him”, not blasphemy, rather “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews” (27.37). They were saying implicitly, look what happens to those who rebel against Roman rule.

    This puts the entry into Jerusalem a week earlier into a completely different light. Was he arriving in order to announce triumphantly his claim to the throne? That is what the crowd seems to think, since they shout “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (21.9).

 The first thing that Jesus does after arriving is to make a great nuisance of himself by overturning the tables of the money-changers in the Temple, an obvious act of defiance against the status quo. This would surely have attracted the attention of the authorities, and was presumably intended to identify Jesus as a trouble-maker.

    Secondly, there is a bizarre sentence in Mark’s gospel (15.7): “Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection”. What insurrection? There has been no mention of an insurrection so far, yet Mark seems to expect, if not us, his readers at the time to know what he is talking about.

    There are other significant details. If you were to read the name Simon Zelotes in the Bible, you would probably think it was a first name and surname, much like your own. It means, however, Simon the Zealot, and the Zealots were a group of militant, revolutionary freedom fighters. They are not mentioned in the gospels, at least not directly.

    It would seem, however, that Jesus chose some of them as his apostles. The more well-known one is Judas Iscariot. This apparently derives from Judas the Sicarii, which is another term for Zealot, possibly an élite group of assassins within their ranks. The less well-known one is Simon. The King James Bible has ‘Simon called Zelotes’, which we might assume is an appellation. Luke (6.15) does not bother with this, and says straightforwardly ‘Simon who was called the Zealot’, thus revealing where his sympathies lay. (One wonders why he was called the Zealot when there were so many of them.) In Matthew and Mark he is called Simon the Cananaean. Again we moderns have no idea what this means. It derives from the Greek version of Mark where Simon is called Kananaios, which is a Greek transliteration of the Aramaic word for Zealot. Perhaps in order to play down his significance, we are told almost nothing about him, and he has no significant role in the gospel accounts.

    It’s also worth noting that the two men crucified with Jesus are explicitly described as lestoi, which is the Roman word for Zealots².

    When the authorities come to arrest Jesus, in the synoptics one of his followers is said to be carrying a sword, and without hesitation uses it to cut off the ear of the slave of the High Priest. In John this person is identified as Simon Peter. We might wonder whether he had ever listened to his master’s teachings, except that, according to Luke, Jesus had instructed his followers to buy swords (not of course to use them, heaven forbid, but in order to fulfil scripture!).

    All this seems reasonably convincing, but raises more questions. Is there any Roman record of a Jewish rebellion around the relevant time? I have never read any biblical scholar or historian referring to one. Perhaps it was a relatively easy one to quash, so they did not think it important enough to record. As several scholars have pointed out, life in Palestine at this time was nothing like what we find in the gospels; it was a hotbed of anger and rebelliousness against the Romans. Perhaps, therefore, dealing with an insurrection in Jesus’s name would have been nothing special, a normal day at the office for them, not even worth the trouble of recording.

    This leads to the next problem with this understanding of Jesus; how on earth did he think he would be able to overcome the might of the Romans? Did he have a significant army? Was he expecting divine intervention? The Jews believed that they were God’s chosen people, and did tend to think, often mistakenly, that Yahweh would be on their side, and help them to defeat their enemies.

    Highly relevant, therefore, is chapter 10 in Matthew, where Jesus sends out his apostles to preach. The most relevant verses are 7, “As you go, proclaim the good news. ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near’ ”, and 23, “you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes”. This suggests that Jesus was expecting his prophecies, and therefore his mission, to be fulfilled not merely within his lifetime, but imminently. He also was expecting divine intervention (the Son of Man) to help him achieve this. As things turned out, it would seem that he was badly mistaken. It can be argued, however, that he was not completely certain that he would succeed, because he seemed to have a back-up plan, in order to avoid death on the cross, if things went wrong. (It is possible to argue, reading between the lines, especially in John’s Gospel, that Jesus, with the help of his closest allies, planned to survive, and did indeed survive the crucifixion. I’ve written an article about this.) Why would the author go to so much trouble to leave such clues, if the account were not historical? It is one of the Mythicists’ favourite arguments that there were many pagan saviour gods who were crucified and then resurrected. (See for example, Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviours³.) Jesus would surely have been the first and only one who actually defied death by surviving the crucifixion, which suggests that the story might be true.

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    I’ll now investigate whether the people I mentioned above really existed, starting with the one with the least historical evidence, Mary Magdalene. She may well have been Jesus’s wife, even though the gospel accounts do not say this explicitly. I’ve written three earlier Medium articles about this, arguing, I believe convincingly, that the gospel accounts are concealing this information but that, reading between the lines, one can deduce that she was married to Jesus. (If interested in the details of this question, click here, here, and here.) It would be extraordinary if the gospel writers went to such trouble to conceal the marriage, while leaving clues, if Jesus and Mary were not real people in the first place.

    There are legends that she fled to Southern France, possibly with their child, and landed at or near Marseilles. This may of course be a fictional or ‘mythical’ story. However, I believe that it is a historical fact that a cult of Mary Magdalene appeared in Southern France. Why would that be, if she never existed and never arrived there? Furthermore, there must have been something very special about her, because people would not normally elevate to cult status a foreign refugee arriving in a boat. A possible explanation would be that there were Jewish communities already established there, who might have known who she was.

    I’ll turn now to a figure with convincing evidence for his existence, thus much harder, if not impossible to explain away, Jesus’s brother James.

    It is a cliché of Mythicist literature to say, as Cain does, that Paul is “strangely silent”, or “says barely a single word”, about the Historical Jesus. This is taken to be evidence that no such person as Jesus existed. However, as everyone knows, Paul never met Jesus prior to the crucifixion, and says that he only met the leading disciples three years after his conversion, since which time he had been completely preoccupied with what Cain would call the supernatural Christ. So why would we expect him to say anything significant about the life of Jesus? What could he know of any importance?

    He may say “barely a single word”. What he does say, however, is extraordinary in the context of the Mythicist debate, and Christianity in general. Firstly, he says that God’s Son was “descended from David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3). (Cain fails to mention this.) He is therefore acknowledging the reality of the bloodline as stated in the gospels — Jesus is not merely Cain’s insignificant itinerant preacher. Paul also appears to be denying the Virgin Birth story, since he stresses “according to the flesh”. (He might not even be aware of it, since he was writing in advance of Matthew and Luke who, scholars assume, have added this episode in order to promote the supernatural Christ idea. The fact that he stresses it may be an indication that such stories were beginning to circulate.)

    Secondly, and even more importantly, Paul says that James is Jesus’s brother.

    Since, as Cain says, these texts have “passed through the hands of Christian copyists who could have sanitized them with ecumenical interpolations and redactions”, and nevertheless survived intact, it is reasonable to conclude that these are Paul’s authentic words.

    I believe it is an undisputed historical fact that James was the Head of the Jerusalem Church in the period following Jesus’s death (if he did indeed die). There is a lot of non-biblical source material about him, so much that the scholar Robert Eisenman has managed to write a book almost 1,000 pages long about him and his life⁴.

    Eisenman agrees with Cain and myself that the facts about Jesus “are shrouded in mystery and overwhelmed by a veneer of retrospective theology and polemics that frustrates any attempt to get at the real events underlying them” (Pxxiv). However, “extra-biblical sources contain more reliable information about James than about Jesus” (Pxxi). The gospels barely mention him, although he does eventually turn up in Acts. James was “systematically downplayed or written out of the tradition” (Pxix). “This was necessary because of the developing doctrine of the supernatural Christ and the stories about his miraculous birth” (Pxx).

    That is, of course, how the Mythicist argument began. However, as Eisenman says: “In the original accounts — the Gospels as they have come down to us, Paul’s letters, and Josephus — no embarrassment whatsoever is evinced about this relationship with Jesus, and James is designated straightforwardly and without qualification as Jesus’ brother”. There is no attempt “to depreciate or diminish this relationship” (Pxxix).

    Intriguing, therefore, is one reference in the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas: “The disciples said to Jesus, ‘We know that you will depart from us. Who is to be our leader?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Wherever you are, you are to go to James the righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being’ ”⁵. This suggests that Jesus was, at the very least, prominent in the Jerusalem Church, and even more likely its leader. Eisenman says that it is “clear that James was the true heir and successor of his more famous brother Jesus” (Pxxii).

    There were two traditions relating to Messiahship in Judaism, one a priest/king partnership, in which case James would seem to be the priest and Jesus the king, and a second of a one person priest-king, in which case this would seem to be Jesus with James as his immediate successor.

    As with the militancy issue above, this becomes a very disturbing problem for the Christian Church, because “the Movement led by James… will be shown to have been something quite different from the Christianity we are now familiar with” (Pxxi). “The person of James is almost diametrically opposed to the Jesus of Scripture… (who is) anti-nationalist, cosmopolitan, antinomian — that is, against the direct application of Jewish Law — and accepting of foreigners and other persons of perceived impurities, (whereas) the Historical James will turn out to be zealous for the Law, xenophobic, rejecting of foreigners and polluted persons generally, and apocalyptic” (Pxxxiii).

    So, if James was as described by Eisenman, and succeeded Jesus as Head of the Church, was the Historical Jesus also zealous for the Law, xenophobic, rejecting of foreigners and polluted persons generally? He was certainly apocalyptic, if the synoptic gospels are anything to go by. That is one of the few things that scholar Bart Ehrman thinks we can say with certainty about the Historical Jesus: “Jesus appears to have been a Jewish apocalypticist anticipating the end of this present evil age within his own generation., This may not be the Jesus we have learned about in Sunday school or seen in the stained-glass window… But it does appear to be the Jesus of history”⁶.

    There is one interesting passage in Matthew which has amazingly been allowed to remain by later editors, given that it seems to contradict the conventional Christian understanding of the message of Jesus. This is The Mission of the Twelve (10.5–40), referred to above, when Jesus sends out his apostles to preach, expecting the almost immediate fulfilment of his mission. He says: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. Does this sound like the version of Jesus with whom Christians are familiar, or is it closer to Eisenman’s description of James? (The text of Matthew, as we have it, describing this Mission is an incomprehensible mess, as I have discussed in this earlier article.)

    The question therefore arises, where does the portrayal of Jesus as it appears in the gospels come from? It seems to be based upon Paul’s theology of the supernatural Christ. As Eisenman says: “The Christianity we are heirs to is largely the legacy of Paul and like-minded persons” (Pxxxi). This suggests that all the gospels were written by followers of Paul. This is not in itself surprising, since all scholars agree that Paul’s letters are the earliest known Christian literature, and anything which follows might well be influenced by them. It is unusual to find this spelled out directly, however, scholars preferring to say that the writers were consulting various ‘sources’. It’s also worth noting that Freedom from the Law was one of Paul’s key slogans. (There is an alternative understanding, which will be explored later in the series.)

    This is therefore an appropriate place to mention the Islamic position that Jesus was not divine, merely a human prophet, that he was faithful to, perhaps zealous for, the Jewish Law, and that Paul was the ‘enemy’ who distorted Jesus’s message, which needed a further revelation to Muhammad to correct the mistake. Isn’t that interesting in the light of the above?

    There is further material in the Dead Sea Scrolls which could be interpreted as supporting this viewpoint. (Modern people might ask themselves whether they would prefer to live in a society inspired by Jesus’s brother, a xenophobic Jewish nationalist, or by Paul’s ‘supernatural’ Jesus Christ.)

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    James would be one of the desposyni, the name reserved for the blood relatives of Jesus. They may provide the most convincing evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus.

    They claimed to be descended from King David and/or the high priest Aaron. The Roman occupation, however, aided and abetted by the Judean establishment, made it impossible for any of the desposyni to rise to or seize political and religious power.

    They have, up to a point, been airbrushed out of history by the Catholic Church, who must have been ambivalent about their existence. On the one hand, they provided evidence that Jesus had really existed (although probably at that time the Mythicist debate had not yet started in earnest.) On the other hand, they were an inconvenience because their existence contradicted the false story of the supernatural Jesus that had been concocted.

    The Roman Catholic Church had tied itself up in knots. It believed the story of the Virgin Birth as found in Matthew and Luke, when it only had to read its own ‘infallible’ scripture, i.e. the epistle of Paul quoted above, to know that this was not true. (The Virgin Birth is obviously a piece of mythology, which can be found in many other pagan saviour stories.) Then it decided that Mary was a perpetual virgin, even though the alleged divine incarnation was supposedly a one-off event, and its own gospels, which can still be read today despite various edits, said that Jesus had four brothers — James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas —  and at least three sisters. (Matthew [13.56] says “all his sisters”.) The Church was therefore forced to conclude that they could not have been his real siblings, that Joseph was only his stepfather or foster father, therefore that the other brothers and unnamed sisters were only half-brothers and sisters. So we end up with a situation where Saint Jerome called the brothers cousins, and Saint Augustine said that Jesus had no father, only a mother. If only they had read their Bible, instead of the Church’s theology!

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    What is the historical (non-biblical) evidence for the existence of the desposyni?

    In The History of the Church⁷, Eusebius quotes a letter written by Africanus, the purpose of which is to explain the discrepancies between the genealogies found in Matthew and Luke. This mentions “the Saviour’s human relations” who have kept records traced back to David (I. 7, p21 ): “Herod, who had no drop of Israelitish blood in his veins and was stung by the consciousness of his base origin, burnt the registers of their families, thinking that he would appear nobly born if no one else was able by reference to public documents to trace his line back to the patriarchs or proselytes, or to the ‘sojourners’ of mixed blood”. (Even though the Massacre of the Innocents is almost certainly an exaggeration and fictional, this sounds consistent with Matthew’s account.) The quote continues: “A few careful people had private records of their own, having either remembered the names or recovered them from copies, and took pride in preserving the memory of their aristocratic origin. These included the people mentioned above, known as Desposyni because of their relationship to the Saviour’s family”. Africanus goes on to say “This may or may not be the truth of the matter… (but) we are not in a position to suggest a better or truer one” (p22).

    Eusebius (3.20) also quotes some fragments from a now lost second century text by Hegesippus:

• following the martyrdom of James, the apostles and disciples of the Lord still living assembled with “those who, humanly speaking, were kinsmen of the Lord — for most of them were still living”. They voted unanimously that James’s successor “to occupy the throne of the Jerusalem see” should be Symeon, son of the Clopas mentioned in the gospel narrative… He was, so it is said, a cousin of the Saviour, for Hegesippus tells us that Clopas was Joseph’s brother” (III. 11, p79).
• This same Symeon later suffered martyrdom, having been charged by ‘heretics’ “with being a descendant of David and a Christian”. Also, “other descendants of one of the ‘brothers’ of the Saviour named Jude lived on into the same reign” (III. 32, p95).
• “After the capture of Jerusalem Vespasian issued an order that, to ensure that no member of the royal house should be left among the Jews, all descendants of David should be ferreted out: and that this resulted in a further widespread persecution of the Jews” (III. 12, p79).
• “There still survived of the Lord’s family the grandsons of Jude, who was said to be His brother, humanly speaking. These were informed against, as being of David’s line, and brought by the evocatus before Domitian Caesar, who was as afraid of the advent of Christ as Herod had been. Domitian asked them whether they were descended from David, and they admitted it”. (Domitian reigned from 81–96 CE). Domitian let them go free because he despised “them as beneath his notice”, and “issued orders terminating the persecution of the Church. On their release they became leaders of the churches, both because they had borne testimony and because they were of the Lord’s family; and thanks to the establishment of peace they lived on into Trajan’s time” (III. 20, p81–82).

    In the light of what was said about James above, it is interesting to note that, according to the Irish priest Malachi Martin⁸, in 318 a meeting took place between Pope Silvester I and the desposyni, led probably by Joses.

    As we might expect, given that the Church had adopted a supernatural Jesus position, “neither Sylvester nor any of the thirty-two popes before him, nor those succeeding him, ever emphasized that there were at least three well-known and authentic lines of legitimate blood descent from Jesus’ own family”.

    The demands of the desposyni at this meeting were:

• the reintroduction of the Law
• that desposyni bishops should replace the Greek Christian bishops at Jerusalem, in Antioch, in Ephesus, and in Alexandria.

    In other words, they were demanding a return to the Church of James. The Pope, however, “dismissed their claims and said that, from now on, the mother church was in Rome and he insisted they accept the Greek bishops to lead them”. This was the last known meeting with “the disciples who were descended from blood relatives of Jesus the Messiah”.

    The question we have to ask, and Cain must answer, is why would a Roman emperor and a Pope take these people so seriously if they were not authentic? Would they have been so easily fooled by a group of con-men?

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CONCLUSION

    Benjamin Cain seeks the best explanation of the available evidence. Does the above qualify as conclusive proof that a historical Jesus existed? Does it bear an “unmistakable mark of history”? Possibly not; in the quest for the Historical Jesus and Christian origins, nothing ever does. So, what I have said here may be not the complete truth about Jesus, not even the best explanation, or not true at all. However, it is based upon, and consistent with, the available scriptural and historical evidence. Cain’s hypothesis is not, however, since it takes into account none of the above.

    My arguments may not be conclusive, but they’re good enough for me, at least for the time being, until I see what response he makes.

    So, contrary to what Cain suggests, there could well have been a single historical figure called Jesus at the time in question, and he would have been far more than an obscure itinerant preacher. If Cain disagrees with any of the above historically, he should argue the case, rather than ignore all this material. It does not follow that, just because a historical figure has been changed beyond all recognition in a fictional story, this person never existed in the first place. If there was a unique individual who effectively founded Christianity, however, on the basis of the available evidence it would seem that this figure was Paul.

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Footnotes:

1. Thorsons, 2000

2. My main source for the above is The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, Arrow Books, 1996, p392

3. The Truth Seeker Company, 6th edition, 1960

4. James the Brother of Jesus, Faber & Faber 1997, my copy Watkins Publishing 2002

5. Logion 12. The Nag Hammadi Library in English, James M. Robinson (General Editor), HarperSanFrancisco, 1990, p127

6. Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code, OUP, 2006, p138

7. Penguin Books, 1965, my copy 1989

8. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church, which I haven’t read

    This is the last in a series of four articles on the theme of demonic possession, which is itself part of a series called The Supernatural Origin of the Natural. What follows are just some random thoughts that I’ve not mentioned so far, because they were not central to my argument. They will only make sense to those who have been following at least the last three articles. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Religion and Spirituality at the top of this page.)

    Wilson Van Dusen is in the tradition of Carl Jung, who worked in the Burghölzli Mental Hospital, and the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, famous for his books The Divided Self, and Sanity, Madness and the Family. Instead of dismissing their patients as mad, and suffering from hallucinations, all three carefully listened to, and took seriously, what their ‘mad’, psychotic, schizophrenic patients were saying. They were rewarded by making significant psychological discoveries. Van Dusen’s work on spirit possession was described in an earlier article, and Jung went on to formulate his hypothesis of the collective unconscious.

    Laing caused a stir by claiming that some of his patients had become schizophrenic as a result of how they were being treated by their families. (We are not talking about overt, obvious abuse, rather subtle and unpleasant, albeit probably unconscious, psychological manipulation.) Psychiatrists were not especially impressed, although he became a cult figure among the general public. Scott Peck, however, agrees with his basic claim: “Whenever a child is brought for psychiatric treatment, it is customary to refer to her or him as the ‘identified patient’. By this term we psychotherapists mean that the parents — or other identifiers — have labeled the child as a patient — namely, someone who has something wrong and is in need of treatment. The reason we use the term is that we have learned to become skeptical of the validity of this identification process. More often than not, as we proceed with the evaluation of the problem, we discover that the source of the problem lies not in the child but rather in his or her parents, family, school, or society. Put most simply, we usually find that the child is not as sick as its parents. Although the parents have identified the child as the one requiring correction, it is usually they, the identifiers, who are themselves in need of correction. They are the ones who should be the patients”¹.

    By this he means that the parents (or perhaps other identifiers) are lacking in self-awareness, and therefore can act in an unconsciously evil way.

    I once had the great privilege of attending a couple of Laing’s supervision sessions. At one of these a patient of his was present, a teenage girl, together with her mother. This was an extraordinary experience for me. The girl had been diagnosed as psychotic or schizophrenic and, from what I knew at the time from my reading of Laing, appeared to be a typical case. There were two striking things.

    Firstly, even though the girl’s eyes were open, and there was no reason to believe that she could not hear what those present were saying, she nevertheless appeared to be completely unaware of what was going on in the room; she was, as they say, in a world of her own. She barely spoke but, when she did, it bore no relation to her physical situation. This does not sound like a typical Van Dusen case, where the patient’s conscious self remains in our world and is able to communicate, but is tormented by the inner voices of what he or she takes to be lower-order spirits. On the basis of one session, given that the girl was quasi-catatonic, it was impossible for me to tell whether she was hearing inner voices or not. If she was, it was not apparent.

    The second striking thing was the mother. Even though she looked normal, and said apparently caring things, there was something deeply sinister and unpleasant about her. I felt that I was truly in the presence of evil.

    My amateur hypothesis at the time was that the girl had withdrawn inside herself as a defense mechanism, forming a shield to protect herself against the evil mother. If I had known then what I know now, especially the work of Van Dusen, I would have had no doubt, and been able to understand much better what was going on, suspecting that the mother had indeed been possessed.

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    Many traditions accept the existence of demons or some similar word: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Jewish folklore if not mainstream Judaism², and Islam³.

    Any Bible-based Christian must surely believe in demons. The Apostle Paul clearly recognised that we are engaged in a battle against supernatural demonic powers: “For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). I paraphrase, the battle is not against evil humans, rather against the evil beings from the supernatural realms which possess them. Here Paul was speaking the same language as Swedenborg and Van Dusen.

    Scholar Elaine Pagels adds further material on this theme. Commenting on Romans 5: 6–9, she says: “Paul explains here how the saviour came to destroy the power that hostile archons held over mankind… Subjected to the cosmic powers, helpless to resist the evil powers ‘who attack the soul through the body’, mankind is ‘weak’, easily prey to their influence and tyranny”⁴. Commenting on Romans 7: 14b-25, she says that the Gnostic teacher Valentinus “describes how evil spirits dwell in the heart, effecting evil actions: ‘each of these (demons) effects its own acts, insulting the heart many times with inappropriate desires’. The tormented heart, having become the ‘dwelling-place of many demons’ cannot cleanse itself; the Good Father must intervene to cleanse and to illuminate it”⁵. This sounds like an exorcism being described, and could have been the cases mentioned by Crabtree, Peck, Grof, or even Van Dusen’s patients speaking! Former lecturer in New Testament studies at the University of Oxford, John Ashton, says of the same passage: “This is the language of possession; it is not just an example of… weakness of will. The ego here is totally dominated, possessed, and occupied by an alien power”⁶.

    So that is what Paul believes. Also, in the Synoptic Gospels, especially Mark, Jesus is portrayed as a master exorcist. I am a fan of, and have recently been writing about, Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of Why Christianity Must Change or Die. He has been a lifelong crusader for the modernisation of Christianity. Much of what he says about medicine and health would seem to be true, but on one point I think he has got it wrong. He says: “Epilepsy and mental illness also are no longer understood to result from demon possession, even though Jesus was portrayed in the Bible as believing that they did. Once again, honesty requires that we confront the Bible’s limited grasp on truth”⁷. I think that here, unsurprisingly, Jesus knows better than Spong, who has perhaps been led astray by modern science. I wish that he had read Van Dusen and Adam Crabtree to see what he would make of their case histories. What we read in the gospels sounds like the work of Crabtree, ordering, or trying to persuade, the invading entities to leave the victim. So it is certainly not true to say that all modern mental healthcare professionals have rejected the idea of possession as a causal factor in mental illness. (There are also the Peck and Grof cases mentioned in an earlier article.)

    So, there was a firm belief in demonic possession in early Christianity. And this is not just true of the ancient religion. The Roman Catholic Church still has exorcists, and every diocese has to have a team. During the papacy of Pope John Paul II, the Vatican issued guidelines for driving out devils.

    In 2016 Father Gabriele Amorth, who at the time was the world’s best-known, and chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome died at the age of 91. For 10 years he had been president of the International Association of Exorcists, which he founded in 1990. He said that he had performed thousands of exorcisms, although it’s not quite clear what is meant by the term in this context. He has been quoted as saying that “most of these people who required exorcism actually needed psychological help more than anything else”. So some of what he calls exorcism may be closer to some form of psychological cleansing. He did believe, however, that the Devil exists, and that he had met him 7 or 8 times. He also said that the film The Exorcist was “substantially exact”⁸.

    None of this constitutes proof of the supernatural and demons, of course, merely that materialist science has gone out on a limb in rejecting them, and takes great pride in doing so. As Steven Pinker has said: “The findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures…are factually mistaken…”⁹. Some of us are not convinced, however, by the hubristic fantasies of Enlightenment scientists, and believe that ancient wisdom and knowledge are closer to the truth. As I was arguing at the end of the previous article, it is people like Pinker who, while they mean well and think they are serving humanity, are unconsciously contributing to the continuing problem of evil in our world.

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    To conclude, on a slightly less serious note, in modern times the general public is still fascinated by this topic, witness the great popularity of the TV series Twin Peaks (total 29 episodes), and the follow-up film Fire Walk With Me. (I hope it’s not a plot-spoiler to say that the murderer was demonically possessed, and that the demon went on to possess one of the other characters.) David Lynch obviously believes in this phenomenon, since in another of his films Lost Highway, the nightmarish events of the main character’s life are organised by a sinister, supernatural figure from behind the scenes.

    In several of my recent articles I have been quoting Jonathan Black’s book The Secret History of the World¹⁰, which describes the worldview of the ancient Mystery traditions, as preserved by various secret societies. He calls Lynch an “American outlaw”, and says that his work is “steeped in the ancient and secret philosophy” (p28). Interesting! (That is presumably why people find his film Mulholland Drive so hard to understand¹¹.)

    We too will have to steep ourselves in the ancient philosophy, the mindset of the Apostle Paul and the ancient Gnostics, as well as the work of modern therapists like Crabtree, Peck, Grof, and Van Dusen, if we are ever to deal successfully with the problem of evil in our world.

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Recommended reading on the psychology of evil:

People of the Lie, by Scott Peck, see footnote 1

Dispelling Wetiko, by Paul Levy, North Atlantic Books, 2013

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Footnotes:

1. People of the Lie, Touchstone, 1985, p59

2. This is called a dybbuk, which is a demonic spirit, a lost soul of the dead, capable of possessing and tormenting a living person. Many of Crabtree’s patients are afflicted by such spirits.

3. Islam believes in Jinn, considered to be supernatural creatures. They live alongside us, and can see us from a place where we cannot see them. They are believed to be more bad than good, and the bad ones will trouble humans. They can physically possess a human being, which can cause illnesses, and mental health can be disturbed. This sounds remarkably like Van Dusen’s understanding of the lower order of spirits.

4. The Gnostic Paul, Trinity Press International, 1992, p26. At the end of that quote she has a footnote reference to Excerpta ex Theodoto, from Stromata, Clement of Alexander: ed., trans., and intro. F. Sagnard, Les Extraits de Théodote, Sources Chrétiennes 23 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1948, 73. 1–3.

5. ibid. p32

6. The Religion of Paul the Apostle, Yale University Press, 2000, p46

7. HarperSanFrancisco, 1998, p7

8. My sources for this information are BBC Radio5live, Afternoon Edition, November 2nd 2016, and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3794238/Gabriele-Amorth-prominent-exorcist-priest-dies-Rome.html

9. “Science is Not Your Enemy”, The New Republic, August 19th 2013, p33

10. Quercus Books, 2010

11. I have offered my interpretation of it here, or here on Medium.com

    This is the latest in a series, and really only makes sense if you’ve read the preceding three articles, and preferably the earlier ones, especially the introduction. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Religion and Spirituality at the top of the Blog Index page .)

    It’s possible that some readers might have been wondering whether all this material about demons and possession is of any relevance to their lives, or whether it might all be just a fringe issue which concerns only those working in the field of mental health. That’s assuming that you have been persuaded by the evidence I’ve presented that the phenomenon is real in the first place. Here I’m going to suggest that the question of demonic possession has significant implications for society in at least two, and possibly three or four, areas.

    The most obvious is mental health itself. Vast amounts of money are spent in trying to deal with all levels of this problem. There are many psychiatric hospitals, mental institutions which need to be funded and staffed. Wouldn’t it be enormously beneficial if we could find some way to heal the patients there? In order to heal anyone, we need to understand correctly the underlying problem.

    We should not rush to assume that every mental health problem is the result of the activity of Van Dusen’s lower-order spirits but, at the very least, it’s worth holding that as a working hypothesis, especially if all other avenues have been exhausted. This may be appropriate in mental health problems much less extreme than schizophrenia. An obvious example would be self-harming, which is an increasingly common phenomenon; that is exactly the type of thing you would expect a lower-order demon to command. Depression, eating disorders, low self-esteem etc. are other problems which may possibly be attributable to the influence of lower-order spirits, even if only in a small way. Remember that Swedenborg said that the interactions or relationship with spirits is normally not conscious for humans. In ‘primitive’ tribal societies, people would probably have recognised the signs immediately, and sought help from their shaman. We are not likely to be aware of this possibility in modern times, if we deny the existence of demons in the first place.

    There are also implications for the legal system. Is it just possible that serial killers, those responsible for mass-shootings, men who hide in bushes and rape and murder passing women, are demonically possessed? They are undoubtedly severely disturbed, and the vast majority of people would not hesitate to call them evil. Why not take the extra step and say that they are actually possessed by evil? In the light of what Van Dusen says about the lower order, “they attempt to destroy, they can cause anxiety or pain… they seek to destroy conscience, and seem to be against every higher value”, this would seem very reasonable to me.

    If this is true, it would still be hard to know how to deal with the problem, what action to take. It would not be difficult to have a coherent strategy in the case of mental health, because the patients are confined in institutions or, at the very least, seeking help in therapy. It is much harder to know what to do about potential criminals who are at loose in society, given that these individuals tend to plot alone and in secret. When their crimes have been committed, it is too late.

    Once they are imprisoned, then some kind of treatment programme would be possible. Before that, all we can do is to accept the reality of demonic possession, try to understand what can lead to an invasion. Trained professionals, and hopefully others, might be able to spot the danger signs, identify possible victims, then take the necessary action by informing the authorities.

    Those two categories seem reasonably clear cut to me. The third is perhaps more tenuous, but what about politicians? Do not some world leaders, and other figures in their governments, seem highly dangerous, to say the least? An obvious historical example would be Hitler. When you see him giving speeches in TV documentaries, he gives every appearance of being possessed; he does not look like a normal human being, as he rants and raves in a sinister way. I leave it to the reader to speculate whether this might be true of anyone currently in high office; it does not have to be so blatant as Hitler.

    Then we come to science. I’m going to go out on a limb in this last section, and make a controversial suggestion. Scott Peck’s book is a brave attempt to come up with a psychological understanding of evil. For those who haven’t read it, the early chapters, which describe some of the cases he has dealt with, are a real eye-opener. This is not just about violence, power-mad people, psychopaths etc. It is also not about full blown demonic possession (apart from the one chapter discussed earlier), which is, thank goodness, rare. A lot of evil is much more subtle, although no less sinister and destructive. There are many examples on a smaller scale of possible lower-order ‘demonic’ involvement in human affairs. The title of the book People of the Lie is therefore significant; Peck associates lying with evil: “Lying is simultaneously one of the symptoms and one of the causes of evil, one of the blossoms and one of the roots” (p218).

    There are many types of lying, not just the obvious one of deceiving someone else for whatever reason. There is self-deception, sometimes on a grand scale. There is also the problem of acting with a complete lack of self-awareness, total obliviousness to the destructive consequences of one’s actions, therefore unconscious evil. Peck gives some frightening examples of such people.

    He concludes: “Mental health is “an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs” (p207); one might call this a struggle for more self-awareness, increased consciousness, a battle against self-deception. ‘Reality’ here is an obvious synonym for ‘truth’. He also says: “(Science) assumes a profound human tendency to self-deception, employs the scientific method to counteract it, and holds truth higher than any personal desire” (p209). In his terms, therefore, we can say that the search for mental health and scientific truth are both a struggle against lies, therefore against evil in some form.

    A large section of humanity is, or believes it is, engaged in a search for truth: philosophers, scientists in many disciplines, theologians, religious people, and those members of the general public who follow the debates. (There are many such people writing on Medium.) Truth is a much sought after commodity. I’m fond of the adage,“there is no religion higher than truth”.

    What I’m about to say does not apply to all scientists. There is obviously much great work done in the name of science. However, science claims to be dedicated to the study of reality, the search for truth and, as Scott Peck said, it “assumes a profound human tendency to self-deception”. Some scientists, however, seem to assume that they have risen above this problem, that they are not prone to this tendency themselves, in effect that they are superhuman simply because they are scientists. There is much evidence to the contrary.

    If truth is the goal, it seems obvious to me that everyone should be completely open-minded to all possibilities. It is extraordinary, therefore, that so many ‘thinkers’ rule out certain possibilities on principle. One example is the unwillingness of many scientists to contemplate the supernatural, the paranormal, and their obsession with ‘natural’ explanations, even when these seem completely inadequate. Some of them are contemptuous of any mention of ‘religious’ ideas in relation to science. They spend much time and energy writing (on the whole unimpressive) tracts against religion, wedded, as they are, to the philosophy of atheistic materialism.

    For example, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, coined the term meme, which means an idea that spreads from person to person within a culture. He has said that religion or religious beliefs are such memes which, like a virus, jump from brain to brain and infect them. He doesn’t appear to have ever once stopped to consider that his atheism and hatred of religion may be viruses that have affected his brain. That would, in my opinion, be much closer to the truth. Does this remind anyone of Van Dusen’s lower order and their hatred of religion?

    Examples of the ‘lies’ in which some scientists indulge are:

• the ignoring of evidence and valid research, treating it as though it did not exist
• the allegation of fraud or the accusation, without good reason, that experiments were conducted improperly
• the indulgence in ad hominem attacks on the individuals involved, instead of evaluating their work objectively
• deliberately falsifying their own findings if they do not fit in with their desired outcome
• not taking into account the latest developments in science which contradict their own beliefs
• refusing to investigate a certain field because they do not want to find evidence of something which would challenge their worldview, their preconceptions.

    We might call such scientists ‘people of the lie’; they certainly don’t hold truth higher than any personal desire, to use Peck’s phrase. However, I do not imagine for one moment that they are acting in this way consciously. I’m sure that they consider themselves sincere seekers after truth, and are serving humanity. As I said above, much lying, therefore in Peck’s terms evil, is unconscious. One could argue that unconsciousness of this type is the major problem confronting humanity in general, not just scientists. The human condition has sometimes been described as the mists of illusion. The French novelist André Gide once said: “The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity”. Put more simply: “The true hypocrite is the one who believes the lies he tells himself”. The extent to which the lower order might be responsible for that is an interesting question, to which I don’t know the answer.

    In relation to the last point in my list above, Scott Peck says that “the phenomena of possession and exorcism need to be studied scientifically… There is a resistance to such scientific study — a part of the more general resistance of science toward the spiritual and ‘supernatural’. It is interesting that while possession and exorcism have never been scientifically studied, to my knowledge, in America or Europe, Western anthropologists have written extensively about exorcismlike healing rituals in distant foreign or ‘primitive’ cultures. It is as if it is somehow ‘OK’ to study such things ‘over there’ at a considerable distance from us as long as we don’t look at what’s going on closer to home among ourselves” (p200).

    Such unwillingness to even contemplate the study of the phenomenon of demonic possession means that these scientists are unconsciously happy to allow evil to continue doing its work in our world, all for the sake of maintaining their precious worldview that there is no such thing as the supernatural. I would call these scientists People of the Lie.