GERMAINE GREER, MRS SHAKESPEARE, ROBERT PATTINSON AND THINGS I KNOW

GERMAINE AND OTHER SPECULATIONS
Germaine Greer’s attempt to shed light upon dark corners of Shakespeare’s life and marriage in her Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) concludes with the observation “there can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her, and even humiliated her”.

I have a special interest in the fact that it is precisely Germaine Greer and no one else, even among feminists, who has written the study she has done on Anne Hathaway’s world and drawn the conclusions she has. It helps confirm a piece of research I made way back in 1991 and which people have continued to appreciate or cite - much to my surprise as it was issued as an article “Getting Shakespeare Right” in a little known Australian magazine that somehow or other some people have even read in America. (I don’t find the article on the Net). On the other hand, I believe I managed to make a very special and needed discovery that some have recognized as such.

I set out to discover if a horoscope for Shakespeare for the given day of his birth in Stratford could be found to work for traditionally accepted facts about him and thus prove the Bard was himself, not Marlowe or other contenders for his crown. I found that a pattern which describes and works for Shakespeare (i.e. for first publication, son’s birth, father’s death, etc) exists and will supply him a birth around 11.20 am with 19 degrees of theatrical Leo rising. The Bard was himself and no other.

To mention only a couple of relevant life and character points in relation to the finding, the proposed Leo rising places Shakespeare’s Saturn in Cancer conjunct his theatrical Jupiter in Leo behind the ascension point in his twelfth house. This agrees with his originally being a thespian who didn’t shine (12th house is hidden) but who performed character parts the best of which were of elderly men (“elderly” Saturn conjuncting the Jupiter). Then, shocking and surprising Uranus placed in his fourth house, (which is involved with one’s home and last resting place) and in religious Sagittarius is eloquent for the Bard’s odd ecclesiastical last resting place with its attached curse and even the fact he had died rather suddenly.

SHAKESPEARE AGAINST HIMSELF

So, as I say, things agree and time well. But back in ‘91 I wasn’t using the micro-astrology of asteroids so that today almost the weakest link in the whole pattern might seem to be asteroid, Shakespeare, itself. Instead of falling in the usual way of name asteroids in some meaningful and obvious place like conjunct an angle or in the career and reputation sector it’s hidden away in the poet’s sixth house (work issues) and in affliction aspect to his career house Neptune so important for his art.

I decided to read this as indicating how Shakespeare didn’t like being known for what would make him famous much as he wasn’t too enamoured of the scene of his triumphs, London, putting up with it for work purposes – asteroid London likewise falls in his working sixth. In line with his era Shakespeare felt that it was a bit beneath him (the sixth house is work and the working classes) to be on stage even though asteroid Actor was suitably conjunct his fifth house cusp (the main zone involved with theatre and performance). Also in relation to the afflicted Shakespeare, consider there’s some doubt about Shakespeare’s name – there have been up to ten different spellings of it - and even his identity has been disputed and aligned with Marlowe, Bacon, de Vere etc. a meaningful effect for an affliction square to the often deceptive, confusing Neptune. There’s no Marlowe asteroid we can refer to, but it’s at least suggestive for the long established Francis Bacon thesis that asteroid, Bacon, is closely opposite Shakespeare’s Venus, ruler of his career/reputation Midheaven and also square to his Pluto). Even back in ’91 I could see that in 1767, the year the Bacon thesis was launched, confusing Neptune had been directly conjuncting what I had become convinced was Shakespeare’s reputation Midheaven.

THE BARD’S ODD MARRIAGE

But assuming I have finally obtained the right chart, what might this say about the Bard’s marriage? Well, with Leo rising his partnerships and marriage cusp is necessarily the opposite sign, Aquarius, which can describe an unusual or surprising marriage, one that may even end in separation and divorce - all of it like Prince Charles’ marriage to Diana as Charles likewise has Aquarius denoting his marriage issues.

The rulers of Aquarius are Saturn and Uranus and for Shakespeare with Saturn in his twelfth conjunct his Jupiter his wife could indeed remain hidden away from the world, sacrificed to his Jupiter in Leo theatre interests plus with Uranus in the fourth of home, Anne Hathaway just stayed at home while these interests were pursued. And since independent/separative Uranus also loosely opposes the Bard’s Venus, general register of love and relation but for Shakespeare’s also ruler of his career Midheaven, love and career could clash or make for a degree of separation - as we know occurred. Moreover, as Uranus enjoys gay associations there are hints that while absent from home, in the style of the sonnets and theatre life of the times, same-sex attractions might feature.

Germaine Greer may overstate the case, but generally Shakespeare probably did, as she assumes, somewhat resent Anne as representing the shot gun union of standard biography. He was probably also glad to be periodically away from his wife and was a bit grumpy around her because he had the classic sharp or grumpy towards women Moon square Mars aspect and at that involving a Mars alien from itself in moody, feminine Cancer and squaring an artistic and mirror-like moon in Libra. The Libran input nonetheless likely helped keep him basically polite and restrained amid it all so that it’s doubtful he would outright humiliate his wife as Greer supposes. The same Mars/moon aspect would contribute within Shakespeare’s pattern not exactly to homosexuality but the disposition to a bisexuality which famously emerges in especially the sonnets. Libra seems to be the most bisexual of signs.

YOUNG SHAKESPEARE AND A ROBERT PATTINSON SYNDROME

Why did Shakespeare pursue and get an older woman into trouble and why would Anne let herself in for a tricky marital future with this person having originally such poor career prospects? With restrictive Saturn in Cancer, the mother sign, it’s possible Shakespeare’s mother was not too motherly and her son would seek to compensate this, feel victimized or challenged by older women. Greer is probably correct that Shakespeare would have been the wooer rather than merely being seduced by a designing woman, (the sort of seductive Cleopatra or insistent Venus his works present?) even if Shakespeare would like to perceive things that way.

It’s rather clearer why Anne would be vulnerable to the young poet who apparently wrote no verse about her…unless she was the inspiration for Venus and Adonis itself which is possible given Venusia (the things of Venus) trining his marriage cusp. And this could be the secret of the awkward marriage. Shakespeare was no libertine but he was all of a sexual romantic (he had Pluto in dreamy Pisces in the sex house but no corresponding planet in the marriage house so it was chiefly eros would periodically fire any relation, perhaps to Anne’s modest disquiet). Whatever, Shakespeare would be irresistible to a woman, especially in the case of Anne, a woman of an age to be getting nervous she wouldn’t make it up the aisle. In recent years there have been a couple of flattering man-about-town portraits that experts are claiming represent the young Shakespeare. Whether genuine or not, they surely tell us something like the truth. The modern comparison for what the young actor Shakespeare was like is…another actor and Everywoman’s dreamboy and heart throb, Robert Pattinson. They both in their different ways could be considered incarnations of Adonis. Adonis conjuncts Shakespeare’s arty Libran moon and it trines his Venus (“Venus and Adonis” is anticipated) and if the birth time is rightly known (see below) Adonis exactly trines Pattinson’s reputation Midheaven.

It’s true that modern Robert lacks that super-quick Mercury in Aries in the ninth house of classic writing; but like Shakespeare this Taurean does have planets in Taurus, in Cancer, in Pisces; he even has Shakespeare’s Venus in Gemini (at 20 degrees instead of the Bard’s 13 which is where Pattinson’s Chiron falls) but again a Venus opposite Uranus; and then, where Shakespeare’s Uranus falls, Pattinson’s Saturn conjuncts). To judge from reports about Pattinson staying at home and not much liking Hollywood and suspicious of friendships there and not himself wanting to destroy women’s lives and being terribly romantic, one begins to hear echoes of those reports about the Shakespeare who preferred to stay at home and wouldn’t “be debauched”.

And I really wonder what Shakespearian themes Robert Pattison might be cooking up in his mind though not writing into immortality. Kristin Stewart, allegedly the only reason he auditioned for his celebrated vampire part, is plainly the Juliet to whom he wishes to be the Romeo. (Juliette conjuncts his sun so Juliette plainly names RB’s Jungian anima and he’s looking for her - unfortunately for analysis there’s no Romeo asteroid to conjunct his sun or anywhere). Anyway, with Shakespeare trining Pattinson’s Venus I’m unlikely to be too far wrong about what sort of impression the young Shakespeare gave out.

ROBERT PATTINSON’S BIRTH DATA

In passing, I should mention that though astrologers say Pattinson’s birth time is unknown, I gather that the Twilight website claims it’s 8.32 am in London on 13.5. 1986. This could actually be correct. It doesn’t supply Shakespeare’s Leo rising but it does place asteroid, Kristina, exact on Pattinson's 5th house cusp of theatre, drama and romances and aspecting his seventh house unions cusp. That would chime with how he’s romantically obsessed with Kristin and apparently wants to marry her despite the gay rumours sparked less by gossip around his life than by his taking a strongly gay role as Dali in Little Ashes. (With Venus opposite Uranus and asteroid Gaily conjunct Pattinson’s ascendant and trine his reputation Midheaven the gay image will always pursue him and this situation may be the modern Pattinson version of the Shakespeare sonnet games). Plus for the 8.32 birth time there’s the suggestive astro-speak for any Vampire actor of asteroid, Vampilov, falling at 16 Cancer near to the image-giving ascendant at 14 Cancer. Also note that if the birth time is right there’s an interesting semi-sextile (the meeting and connections aspect) to asteroid Dali at 14 Leo, artist Salvador Dali being the gay role RP plays in the film, Little Ashes, opposite the poet Garcia Lorca.

LILITH ON THE ATTACK

But back to my point of departure which was Germaine Greer’s Mrs Shakespeare. Quite simply, as an Aquarian Germaine is more likely (fated?) than most to zero in on the Aquarian style marriage of Shakespeare. Perhaps she even imagines herself as Shakespeare’s wife. Certainly it’s Aquarian to be concerned with the real or imagined limitations upon the human rights of oneself and others. It was another Aquarian, Virginia Woolf, who wrote A Room of Her Own, which introduces the theme of women’s limitations in the arts and the possibility of a Shakespeare sister. So I wondered would my chart show Germaine’s sun conjuncting the Bard’s marital seventh cusp or inside his union house? Actually, at 8 degrees it doesn’t and anyway marriage never was Germaine’s thing. Germaine’s contact is rather of her Dark Moon Lilith with that asteroid Shakespeare - they are both at 4 degrees of Aquarius.

It’s a wonderful promise of how Australia’s most individualistic feminist would let loose some venom and blame upon the Bard. Dark Moon Lilith, (a sensitive point in the heavens rather than a planet), is widely used on the continent but little by English speaking astrologers. It/She seems to turn up significantly in the pattern of many misfortunes and marks a difficult place in any natal chart. In Jewish myth Lilith is queen of demons, Adam’s first wife, then Satan’s favourite wife. Rage and revenge are her business. Feminist spirituality has tried to appropriate or reassess mythic Lilith but to all practical purposes she’s somewhere beyond redemption. Shakespeare who, despite his grumpy, woman-suspicious Mars, shows a Lilith in perfectionist Virgo conjunct his victim of unmerited revenge, Desdemona. She makes opportunity aspect to his Saturn. So, taken as an archetypal force, the Bard would have exerted patience and will towards Lilith as perhaps demonstrated in The Taming of the Shrew; but Germaine’s Lilith in her own sign goes straight for the jugular of the Shakespeare name.

In fact, if this pair had met they would not have got along too well. The sparks would fly despite a modicum of attraction and/or sense of obligation between them. Shakespeare’s 12 degree Taurus sun is surrounded by Germaine’s 10 degree Taurus moon (which would link them in its way) and her closer, rebellious 13 degree Taurean Uranus. The poet is besieged by her and also opposed – born at 6 am with Aquarius rising, Germaine Greer reverses Shakespeare’s self-and-other Leo/Aquarius axis as far as relationship is concerned and so would tend to demand all of the attention and more that she imagines poor Anne never enjoyed.

A professional relation would have worked rather better than a personal one. In effect, academically, it somewhat does so, since Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama is Greer’s academic specialty and for studying and knowing his work she does have her Pluto (any research) in degree exact conjunction with the Bard’s theatrical Jupiter while her Saturn more loosely conjuncts what’s all-important for Shakespeare’s writing, namely his Mercury at 16 Aries. Sensitive degrees work across the centuries and are what allow us to study and connect with long dead persons. My own Shakespeare asteroid is in degree exact fortunate trine to my Uranus (anything to do with astrology) an indication I would be on the front line to prove anything astrological about the poet. I could certainly connect with his work. The feminine of my name (asteroids were originally registered in feminine form like Nelsonia for Nelson) conjuncts the Bard’s nodes, a connection point. And perhaps, dare I say it, the reason that I don’t find it too excessively difficult to write along Shakespearian lines could be involved with the ruler of my writing house trining a certain Aries Mercury and my Jupiter trining a certain Jupiter. A complete poetic drama of mine was performed by the ABC because it was said I had written in modern English the closest one could approach to the style of Elizabethan drama.

PUBLISHING THE TRUTH ABOUT CHRISTMAS SHORTLY

Be that as it may, the real point I want to make here is that the asteroids, rocks in space between Mars and Jupiter though they are, do speak and reveal and very accurately so. Another point is that though it’s satisfying to be able to certify Shakespeare’s birth data it’s more important to be able to settle for once and all time the birth data of Christ. I said I would probably not be writing again on this Blog until I was published on that theme which I am not yet but soon will be (there has been a bit of delay around the cover). Some of the exhaustive information I will supply will include regarding the micro astrology of asteroids – 430 of them are used and 70 Arabic Parts.

All being well, my Testament of the Magi: Mysteries of the Birth and Life of Christ, should be on Amazon around mid November. There will be many surprises because this book seriously claims to be a picture exact as a fingerprint for Jesus. Unless you discount astrology, current scholarship and the Magi narrative entirely it will seem perverse against the statistical improbabilities presented to deny this could be Jesus’ data and that he never existed - or, if he existed, that he never died on the cross. Also the material will take us right into issues of our own times because it is still working today.

HERE COMES ISRAEL'S TEMPLE

THE ALTAR BRINGS A JERUSALEM TEMPLE NEARER

They started building the Altar of Sacrifice for the Jewish Temple last Thursday 30th July at 5.30pm. It was the 9th of Av, a major day of mourning in the period of mourning that commemorates the destruction of two Temples and many disasters in Jewish history which uncannily manage to cluster around this time of year.

Work on many features of the Temple from its ritual implements and items including the Menorah and Table of Showbread to the High Priest’s garments have already been completed, but building the altar can be deemed highly significant. Obviously it's central to the whole point and purpose of the traditional system that the Temple Institute aspires to restore.

The altar is made from undressed stones - by ritual Law no iron must touch them, apparently because iron represents death and the stones represent the creation and life against which the sacrifices representing death are offered. The huge stones mostly from around the Dead Sea have to be welded together with special sand, clay, tar and asphalt and the special melding and heating process has been learned at a glass making factory.

AND THE SKIES ARE REFLECTING IT

Since the time that the work was to begin in Jericho was given as 5.30 pm, I was interested to examine the pattern which doesn’t disappoint. Asteroid Tempel (Temple) is suitably on an angle (the Descendant - the same angle it occupied when the Temple area was taken back in 1967, while another angle (the destiny Midheaven angle) is in Libra, sign of the Laws, the Torah itself. Then we look at the ascension sign and the moon. These are commonly regarded as the two most immediately important, revealing factors in any Event chart.

Rising is the sign of Capricorn, sign of any stones, which this issue is about, and absolutely also of any goats. It is the goat which is sacrificed at the main ceremony of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Chosen by lot one goat is for the Lord, and one for sending to Azazel, a fallen angel/devil figure in the wilderness that the book of Enoch makes more sense of than the Bible as such. Suitably again, the planetary symbol of any stones which is also the “ruler” of the ascending Capricorn sign, namely Saturn, is conjuncting the cusp of the 9th house of religion as work on the altar began.

Astrologically the house of any rituals, sacrifices, purifications and healings is nevertheless always the sixth, so in parenthesis I should add we find placed there both Mars and Venus - Mars the killing, cutting planet and Venus the Shalom and Peace planet which is precisely what traditional sacrifice is about: making: peace through blood and sacrificial death. The moon of this event is in late Scorpio, the death and transformation sign, which again is what this whole ritual establishing event and its aspiration is about whether viewed as something affecting atonement or something about rebirth of Israel’s traditions.

However, this moon is effectively what’s called “void of course” making no regular aspect before leaving the sign it’s in, though it is making what’s called a quincunx (150 degree aspect) to Venus and, as normally interpreted, meaning “adjustments have to be made”. And we may imagine such will indeed have to be the case. There will be problems around this entire venture and in fact I see rather more in and about this chart, some of it suggestively prophetic, but which I prefer not to go into at this time.

TAKING A SABBATICAL?

One of the reasons I won’t enlarge on things that I see is I would prefer to have some work and ideas relevant to all this out and published and I do aim to have my Testament of the Magi, issued for Christmas which means out by October. It is in fact one of the things keeping me busy and preoccupied at present and I might, depending on swine flu and other problems, also be voyaging overseas. So, altogether I am not reckoning to post on this Blog for perhaps 3 months unless I find I finish up very leisured or just force of events positively constrains comment.

And that might happen. It’s not just would-be prophets but respected trends analysts who suspect that things in especially America could become really serious around late August or early September, more economic crisis, possibly even a bank holiday. Whatever, I myself had a few questions astrologically about that period as potentially difficult as I indicated earlier this year when I critiqued a line in forecasts from popular flamboyant preacher, David Wilkerson - he sees riots, New York in flames and heaven knows what else "soon" this year, but I feel he's slipped up too much with forecasts before to take him too seriously. I said I questioned he was right, but if there was anything to what he was saying, around late August might prove more potent than some other times to realize a few nightmares. I can’t and won’t so easily dismiss the trends analysts because I recall how early last year I posted some material from them to a very financial person in HKong while I was still living there and it contained some really correct warnings about last September. So maybe again this time they'll be right.We shall see.

MARCELLA ALTHAUS-REID: THEOLOGY’S BISEXUAL SHOCK JOCK AND QUEEN OF OBSCENE

MOURNING MARCELLA AND MISSING THE POINT

When the self-professed doyenne of “indecent”, no knickers theology, the Argentinean bisexual, Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952-2009) died in February, flags were lowered at Edinburgh university where she was its first female professor in theology. There was a major thanksgiving service for her life, obituaries, encomiums described her as a woman of “deep Christian convictions”, a “mystic”, “a star” of modern theology whose disruptive insights and vital influence could well impact for centuries. Certainly she had become something of a bestselling celebrity on the theological circuit of the West and these days there are studies expounding her theories along with those of the new school of “body” theologians like Lisa Isherwood and J. Carrette

Althaus-Reid’s early demise (from apparently cancer at the Marie Curie hospice) is obviously tragic and one dislikes to speak ill of the dead. In the interests of truth I nonetheless feel obliged to raise a dissenting voice in what is effectively less a Blog entry than a full essay of assessment that needs to be written but would be unlikely at this time to be easily accepted anywhere. Almost more a quirky philosopher than a theologian I will propose that Marcella’s very distinctive combination of feminist theory with a Queer theology, strongly coloured by what’s called postcolonial theory, is the purest modern instance of the emperor’s clothes principle played out upon academe and society whether gay or straight.

In reality, Marcella Althaus-Reid constitutes one of the strangest phenomena in the long and diverse history of Christian thought. To judge from her published works this lecturer in “Christian ethics” who dismissed the Ten Commandments as “a consensus” reflecting “elite perspectives” (2003:163) was less a spokesperson for the “indecent” or disruptive she is supposed to represent and that might have had it uses, than an unusual kind of atheist and blasphemer whose written wit and reportedly frequent laughter in person barely disguised the extent of the game she must have known she was playing. Within the increasingly effete, too often irrelevant world of theological and Queer studies she found opportunity. Her admirers, and in her last years she had them on an international scale, have been deceived or perhaps never really understood what she wrote - whole chunks of it admitted to be dense, difficult, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary based. Those who truly understood might have to be considered infidels towards the religion they profess.

MARCELLA ALTHAUS-REID WAS MORE THAN “INDECENT”

For those who know nothing about Marcella Althaus-Reid and to whom my claims could sound merely extreme and insensitive I will start with a few examples of Marcella-speak. Some of her titles for the divine include “God the Whore”, “God the Sodomite” “God the Drag Queen” and “God the Lobster” (the latter in imitation of theories of the atheist, Gilles Deleuze, for whom the lobster was like an event horizon where meanings coalesced – Deleuze was influenced by Spinoza’s conception of the wholly impersonal God of natural laws).

Marcella, who maintained theology in South America was “an overvalued penis” (2000: 173) wrote of the need for “the indecent exposure” of God, to speak of “God in the name of Vulgarity, Impurity and Horror” (2003:36) (basically because she was interested in a Queer “holiness” imagined in the style of the Marquis de Sade). She thinks of Trinitarian doctrines as “God the Orgy” (2003:143). Referring to any notion of God the Father as a form of “oppression” she proposes we should “undress the father of power and glory and leave God sitting in the cold while the Queer community occupies the Trinity” (2003: 62). God meanwhile could however usefully be given fishnet stockings and boots as Marcella wants God kinky and theology “incoherent” with the incoherency of sex rather than the imperialistic coherence of traditional Systematic Theology.

It’s however specifically the Holy Spirit within the Trinity whom Althaus-Reid suggests should be made Queer and ambivalent; she says we could think of him as akin to “the hidden third man in many heterosexual marriages where the husband practices rough trade or the lesbian lover of the wife” (2003:.58). This is supposedly fitting for God’s many forbidden desires and she thinks “our beloveds (lovers) are like holy ghosts” (2003:58). One could put the Antichrist inside the Trinity because he’s a true Trinitarian identity, namely a real sexual identity, in fact he’s like a tell-tale blouse stuck in the theology closet (2000:59).

All this barbed and bitter jesting around the God of traditional theology’s “imperial sex act” along with suggestions like the smell of bodies and sex could well accompany our prayers is made possible and quasi-acceptable in especially academic circles via a type of postmodern philosophical jargon laid on like too much lippy and face paint. Plus the fact, I believe, Marcella never really believed in God anyway. But I justify that idea presently. First, a little background, and a least a few positive words because, sadly, Marcella could have more usefully explored and developed ideas and life experiences that in her hands finish becoming merely part of a trendy intellectual box of tricks and a pyrotechnical display of sensations.

BUENOS AIRES BACKGROUND: THE FAILURES OF LIBERATION THEOLOGY

Whether by accident or Queer design (as per a stated aim to be “nomadic”, fluid, changing and a theologian “with many passports”) little is known of Marcella’s background - I gather there were problems even establishing her birth year. Her various religious/ideological affiliations remain to considerable extent a mystery. Marcella Althaus (the hyphen Reid got added, Spanish style, at marriage so that the paternal Althaus line probably represents German immigrant descent) was born in Argentina in Rosario, or, was it, Che Guevara? (Marcella perhaps wanted to re-christen the city because one of her heroes also saw the light of day there). Apparently raised Catholic in Rosario Marcella appears to have lived many years in Buenos Aires. Later, when training to be a teacher she was, or had become a Methodist - perhaps in the hope as a woman of arriving at something nearer the priestly career she’d wanted since childhood - and she obtained a theology BA at Argentina’s ISEDET Protestant university. Later she became, either in Argentina or Europe, a Quaker, and then or simultaneously, a member of the gay MCC (Metropolitan Community Church) though when living and working in Scotland she attended the Anglican church. She disliked to take communion anywhere though MCC sometimes persuaded her - she dismisses Mass similarly to eschatology as akin to masturbation (2003:137) and/or the “supplément” that masturbation represents according to the anti-philosopher, Derrida, whom later in life she was uncharacteristically embarrassed to meet.

Marcella trained in especially (Catholic) Liberation Theology working with the famous Basic Ecclesial Communities for the poor that some liberationists formed (and others disapproved) within South America. After leaving Argentina she pursued feminist and philosophical studies in Scandinavia, Germany and Scotland where she lived during her last and successful years. Her life was nonetheless indelibly marked by her supposedly slum poor origins in Argentina (where she claims to have been once hospitalized for malnutrition), by life under the often nightmarish oppressions of the Generals and by the postcolonial legacy of South America more generally as this still makes for exploitation and cultural confusion - Marcella has much to say, postmodern style, about breakdown of “Grand Narratives” in Latin America – and the various moral/spiritual accommodations unimaginable to most Europeans.

Sometimes one wonders how much the Buenos Aires of Marcella’s memory was real or imagined like the Santiago of Isabel Allende’s youth which the latter admits to have blurred sometimes in her autobiography, My Invented Country. Was it true young women needed to avoid men masturbating and ejaculating over them in Buenos Aires public transport (2000:75) or that Marcella suffered the reported confessional problems related to whether she knelt in the sight line of where a priest’s penis would be, an issue on which several paragraphs of The Queer God seem unnecessarily wasted? (2003:13,14)

Fortified by the controversial claim of Aquinas that God is indescribable, the Marxism of Latin American Liberation Theology is intensely materialistic, often assuming that God, like some Hegelian Geist, cannot be known outside of historical happenings or, as theologian, Luis Segundo had it, God is simply “society”. This was Marcella’s radical and religiously sceptical starting point, leaving her lifelong interested in mainly praxis, not metaphysics or mysticism. Christian doctrine was, or had become, a mere species of evil capital that rich, privileged nations and people could use to exploit lesser nations. So, among the liberationists Marcella realized churches must address the poor and be dissociated from capitalism and colonialism completely if possible - she will tend always to critique Christianity and any kind of mission on its part as nothing but colonialism. But she also realized liberationists need to engage, as she complained Liberation Theology signally failed to do, with the urban poor (rather than just rural communities) and with the sexually marginalized. The latter represented the new theology’s conservative blind spot. Even radical liberationists addressed nothing but idealized Catholic wives and mothers, not girls raped by fathers and brothers in the slums or forced into prostitution by poverty or gays and drag queens bashed in the streets. But to achieve greater charity and relevance Marcella believed theology must become “bisexual” in style and feeling, and like bisexuality itself, be hard to pin down.

Althaus-Reid was herself bisexual with a yen like that of theologian, Paul Tillich - but a yen rather more indulged - for S/M (sadomasochism). She even seemed to fantasize leading God by a dog collar (2003:46). Evidently she had a history of odd affairs with clergy and, in what may be the tragic clue to her entire psychology and theology, (namely that God got early confused in her mind with an absent father and abuse by men on the prowl) she admits: “..I am not keen on elderly divine figures looking for sex (such as God the Father) due to some bad experiences I had with men in my life including such as bishops” (2000:48).

It had been part of Marcella’s rebellion against life under the generals that she chose “indecency” in Argentinean terms refusing marriage to instead set up home with a gay man. Theologically, however, “bisexual” for Marcella means a thinker who leaves behind the “dyadic” thinking of heterosexuality and Christianity which last has even arrived at a Trinity of two (Father and Son), for a more fluid, dialectical or both/and Trinitarian thought mode. Undoubtedly something of the kind has long been needed and the challenge of a statement like “the problem is that universal contractarian ethics cannot deal with sexual differences” (2003:21) should be accepted. Yet one surely wouldn’t need “to lead God astray” to remedy the lack, nor in order to improve things do theologians need to be “voyaging vaginas seeking to kiss God’s lips and bite her nipples” (2003: 49) – the kind of definition to which one imagines theologian, Karl Barth (and his allegedly long term live-in mistress) would doubtless have shouted a resounding Nein. But Marcella was decidedly radical and considered doing the real, fluid, Queer style type of theology as “baring behinds” (2003: 149) .

LA CONSCIENCE DANS LE MAL OR JUST ETHICAL ANARCHY ?

Though it’s hard to imagine how the exploited, marginalized souls Alhaus-Reid highlighted and defended could be helped by her often remarkably convoluted, dense writings, (a sort of Queer “speaking in tongues” that owes a lot to the also recently deceased Eve Sedgwick and her impossible 1990 classic, Epistemology of the Closet) undoubtedly many of Marcella’s themes were deeply meaningful. Before the “Christian” and theoretically monogamous conquistadores arrived, raped and enslaved the local women and threw homosexuals to wild dogs, South America was mainly polygamous. It is a fact, not just in South America but in Africa, that the ruthless imposition of monogamy by missionaries upon non or newly Christian societies would often make not for virtue and justice but corruption and injustice – in Africa it’s notorious the determination to dismiss polygamous wives wrecked families and swelled the numbers of prostitutes as women were left abandoned and homeless. And this occurred at the behest of the religion, whose OT at least, has stories of heroes like Gideon who had seventy wives or Solomon his thousand.

A likewise disastrous scandal for Christianity that Marcella, whose frame of reference is obsessively Latin American, didn’t consider is how Christian missions in Japan were wrecked by “saints” like Francis Xavier who called Japanese nobles lower than animals, inhabitants of Sodom because of existing warrior attachments that David and Jonathan might have understood. This and more does make a case for the evil of what Marcella calls “T-theology” (Totalitarian theology and ethics) and a need for the more flexible and eros-friendly treatment long called for. It’s also true as Marcella affirms, that sexually marginal people can be strongly spiritual and have their own stories to tell that shouldn’t be excluded, a principle akin (though she doesn’t mention it) to Baudelaire’s “la conscience dans le mal” and more recognized in Catholic countries where casuistry is not automatically a bad word. Though she never proposes as much (in line with the fact the Bible figures minimally in her considerations) no doubt this hidden spirituality of the marginal would be relevant even as regards some of the prostitutes with whom we are told Jesus associated. Even if classically repentant it’s unlikely in the context of their times most would have been able to re-enter society and abandon the lifestyle many would have entered through poverty in the first place. So, as they plied their trade, would we say if we met them that their faith and experiences meant nothing? Then, what about the divorced and remarried? Is one to propose they cannot pray, or can pray but never be really heard or experience God, something the church may not say but perhaps implies? (Divorced remarried Catholics are refused communion lifelong).

The list of the marginal could be extended and can include gays. But however long the list it’s still a big step to pass beyond suggesting life and religion have grey areas that require more grace and possess more meaning than normally accorded to proposing a) that “God” exists, or can be actively sought, within the experiences themselves that compose the grey areas so that we could even have “a theology of mistresses” (2003:133) and deem adultery “biblical and godly” really (2000: 140) or b) that popular cults and religions arisen often from sheer ignorance of Christianity, lack of pastoral care from or instruction in the faith by the religion’s leaders, should enjoy equal validity. As regards a) we even find Marcella taking the side of the pornographic philosopher, Georges Bataille, endorsing the notion that, like a character in one of his stories, we could indeed find “God” in a hag prostitute’s revelation of her pubis in a brothel – Marcella then offers a section headed “Pubis Liberation Theology” (2003:97,98)! As regards, b) we find Marcella endorsing a variety of quasi Christian cults like the Santa Librada (a crucified virgin type favoured by transvestites and various marginal peoples in South America). It’s the kind of endorsement which begs the question would Marcella approve the perverse death cult of Santa Muerta in Mexico? This oddly demonic saint takes the side of thieves and drug pushers that the church understandably doesn’t and can’t acknowledge. But perhaps she would. Certainly she feels adultery has spiritual insights to offer and we know that drug pushers of the Camorra clans (see Roberto Saviano’s Gemorrah p. 226) believe they can perform rites to honour Mary and appease Christ as they make and store their drugs.

MARCELLA ALTHAUS-REID’S NEW SEX(Y) GOD

If it isn’t to be described as a savvy career decision, it’s almost a mystery that Marcella believed in “God” at all - or did she really ever? No trace of a notion of Creator crosses her work and she sneers at belief in any unique personal deity asking would such an entity (imaged as She) want to lick her fingers? And she protests “what love and friendship can be had with masters?” (2003:143). I suggest the reason Marcella doesn’t dismiss God entirely is because she could reduce deity to the idea “God is always potential” (2000: 109), a human potential, and because (unlike various feminist influences like, Mary Daly and Daphne Hampson with which last she had falling out in Scotland), the emotional force of what she calls “disaffiliation”, got directed and exhausted elsewhere. It was with Latin America’s Virgin Mary rather than Mary Daly’s God the Father or Daphne Hampson’s Christ that Marcella broke most violently “blaspheming” her with talk about wanting to put hands up Mary’s skirts to see what wasn’t there and much more like it…..in page after page. If it all sounds obscene that’s intended since obscenity will keep us from the evils of “unnecessary transcendence” and is grace invoking (2000:110) and Marcella, dismissing the Virgin, goes in quest of the Obscene Bi/Christ.

I have so far quoted almost solely from The Queer God rather than the earlier Indecent Theology (see below) which is largely a tirade against the historically oppressive role the Virgin has allegedly had for Latin American politics generally and women in particular whom Mary “disembodies”. And, since Marcella’s position is Marxist/materialist and she wants to change less distribution than production, her aim is to remake deity itself. Since however she considers the Bible “fiction” and theology a form of (perhaps necessary) lies anyway (2003:130) the labour of correction and re-creation should be made rather through recourse to literary and philosophical than scriptural sources. (If Althaus-Reid was made professor of “contextual” theology this was almost necessary given the lack of scripture and theology employed in her arguments!).

For philosophy and literature beyond Bible and Marx Marcella’s materialism has recourse to the Transcendental Materialism of the suicidal Deleuze and the Queer theory of the atheist, Foucault, beloved of academic cliques within the gay world. In literature she favours especially the mystical atheists, Klossowski and Bataille (a theorist of the erotic and the significance of orgasm) and the Marquis de Sade. Armed with insights from these sources Marcella’s Edinburgh style “contextual theology” can take flight and does so with weird, anti-credal suggestions like: “The Son gives birth to the Father and both of them originally come from the Spirit” (2003:75). More theologically, Marcella appropriates the biblical doctrine of kenosis (the self emptying of God in incarnation) to assist God to come “out of the closet” to realize himself and let we ourselves find him cruising around “in dark alleys”. We, it seems, can and will find salvation with “the Voyeur God” (2003:39).

Whatever, Marcella is explicit as regards deity that: “This is a God who depends on our experiences of pleasure and despair in intimacy to manifest Godself” (2003:108). This Godself, it seems, is the only true God, one “displaced, theologically speaking, by a God of grand heterosexual illusions….”. Any belief in the incarnation of God is not or should not be about the historical Jesus but rather a belief that God is present in our historical struggles. It’s a liberationist idea, one akin to a line among radical feminist theologians who believe Christ is what continually incarnates in the religious community. However, ever different and dissenting, Marcella speaks less of incarnating the Christ than incarnating and queering the Holy Spirit (2003:127).

That this humanly dependent, community incarnated “God” is more or less just sex is certified by the untranslated dedication of The Queer God to the author’s friends and lovers who, she says, like herself are buscando a Dios en medio de amores (seeking God amid love affairs) an idea further suggested by the book’s affirmation, “bodies speak and God speaks through them (2003:34). When God isn’t sex it’s a case simply of God as concept only, the reason Marcella explicitly states she should be able to say whatever she likes about God uncensored, a claim she stakes when talking about preventing “Premature Ejaculations – God in Transit”(2003:67). It may be only “metaphor” and “concept” but it demands of Christians levels of tolerance way beyond anything Islam and most faiths could begin to imagine and which certainly denies all accepted notions of the sacred.

DOING THEOLOGY IN THE BEDROOM WITH DE SADE

Amazingly, since Marcella considers teaching the Bible in Sunday School is more guilty of promoting sex crimes in the world than all the modern writings on sex (2003:35) she proposes, since truth and justice necessarily go beyond any laws, we should establish our epistemologies like de Sade . We should do our theology in the bedroom and reflect upon the ways of libertinism along with the “no limits” Marquis. Christ and de Sade were beyond limits type people - Jesus died as a “dissolute Messiah” (whatever that means). Love and justice only begin beyond any laws, a god of law cannot even hope to deal justice (2003: 34). The jealous God the Father is an anachronism who doesn’t fit with the actually or potentially “polyamorous” loves of the Trinity (2003:.37) and all he could ever do was sexually harass Mary and torture his son (2000: 109) – Marcella assumes with Mary Daly of Beyond God the Father an identity of Yahweh with God the Father. It’s a point that in my Cosmic Father, along with some other theologians, I seriously contest.

There truly is something outrageous in Marcella’s association of theological schemas with those of de Sade with its talk of Sadean “holiness” and Queer saintliness and you wouldn’t need to be Christian to think so. Quite simply there have been clear links of the Sadean heritage to serious crime (such as Britain’s celebrated Moors murders of tortured children for which de Sade was an inspiration) and a few years ago I recall reading in one of Colin Wilson’s many tomes how this expert on the esoteric came to realize you can’t play around with the Marquis. He set out to read him as an intellectual exercise and found he was struck by horrifying nightmares. The devils came out to play. Clearly S/M practitioner Marcella (she liked to turn up at the all-inclusive MCC in leather) had a strong stomach and expected her readers to have the same.

I have never read The Hundred Days of Sodom, only a few excerpts from a condensed version with commentary. I fell over it one evening while ransacking in his absence the bookshelves of my Sorbonne roommate today one of the West’s leading authorities on Islamic affairs ), shelves which at the time seemed more dedicated to just the sort of lit crit and post structuralist writings that would influence Althaus-Reid than Islamic affairs. I seem to recall somewhere near the conclusion the inmates of Castle Silling get to have some demon linked orgy and are horrifically slaughtering one another. I didn’t later suffer the nightmares Wilson and others record but I did recoil, nauseated, and almost as though I'd received a sudden blast of something like heat on my face. While details of the text escape me I’ve never quite forgotten that odd impression. Whatever, I felt I’d brushed against something intrinsically evil not for contemplation and meddling. But (perhaps in imitation of precisely de Sade’s classic) the brazen Marcella supplies a suitably extreme finale to The Queer God. She wants to appropriate the hell spaces (2003:167) and the demon role, reject “salvation” as capitulation to capitalism and colonialism and generally make queer saintliness into “the ultimate trespass”, a protesting form which disrupts all existing belief and practice. Moreover, “Queer trespass” also has a body somewhere because there are no bodies in heaven but there are some in hell (2003:168) - truly a new doctrine if she doesn’t mean to hint, as her intellectual vanity actually might that there are only nobodies in heaven but there are real somebodies in hell?!

REFUSING SALVATION QUEER STYLE AND WHY GAY SPIRITUALITY MATTERS

In opposing “salvation” Marcella rejects the related repentance including for the interesting and significant idea it would rob us of our past knowledge and sexual attachments - “the solidarity of ex-lovers” (2003:164). To grasp truth between the intellectual games here (I don’t think they’re much else) it’s important to be aware Queer theory and theology are ever “in process” always marginal, changing, disruptive, transgressive, materialistic and so, explicitly or implicitly, follows the atheist, quasi- Buddhist line of Michel Foucault’s ideas influencing contemporary Queer theory that self and soul are as good as illusory. Accordingly, for Marcella at least, it seems one’s only solid grounding would be the memory of what one has thought and done, been and loved (which, however, a Buddhist would say should not be clung to). If follows that to regret or repent past errors, finishes a loss of whoever one imagines oneself to be. Clearly Marcella would make a poor Buddhist, though interestingly her most vocal admirer, ex Jesuit, and MCC pastor, Robert Goss, author of The Queer Christ, happens to be an expert in precisely Buddhist studies. (His understanding of Christianity I’ll pass over!).

Queer theory highlights awareness of a borderline, marginal consciousness that gays may find meaningful as one aspect of being gay. Gay consciousness and identity theory, less academically trendy than Queer, is more essentialist. Essentialism is becoming a verboten concept among some feminists and academics but, practically, it makes for more solidly grounded ideas and is closer to what the gay community actually thinks. Most gays considered themselves “born that way” and hence that orientation and identity, though they may be historically and socially influenced to a degree, are not the choices Queer theory makes them (a belief vulnerable besides to fundamentalist type charges gays are totally morally responsible for being gay). Since among its choices Queer classically won’t admit moral purpose unless in terms of economic policy or activities of the group (Foucault had problems even condemning child sex) and denies spiritual in addition to bodily being, plainly it's easier to incorporate gay theology into Christian thought than Queer theory. This is so including because the individual needn’t get traumatized losing bearings or identity if admitting, as might be necessary, that they had got involved in reckless relationships or inappropriate sexual experiments. One remains gay no matter what one has done and one is freer to come to come to terms with the purely scriptural and even somewhat with the “transgressive” impulse Queer emphasizes, as being something itself spiritual in the way I demonstrate in Cosmic Father when writing on “perversion and the prophets”. It’s the sort of theme Queer would tend to appropriate materialistically to oppose rather than illuminate faith.

Queer can be hopeless to the point of blind relative to spirituality and scripture as parts of the innovative Queer Bible Commentary (2007) to which Marcella contributed make clear. I need mention only its commentaries on Matthew and Mark, the latter commented by Althaus-Reid who believes all Queer commentary must be transgressive so offers no biblical exegesis at all. Basics of gay concern are ignored by her and some other contributors for intellectual “queering” exercises. She merely observes that Mark is the most “economic” gospel and that Jesus’ cry of desolation from the cross (traditionally understood to repeat words of a prophetic psalm) was about “God” in Christ suffering identity crisis and becoming redundant (2007: 523) something which Jesus, forgetting himself, calls for along with oblivion (2007:525)! Mark is thus reduced to the merest pretext to wander on about “faggots” killed in life and literature along with “clever” remarks about ‘cruci-fictions”. There is no exploration of even the Markan mystery of the naked youth in the garden of Gethsemane, which has made for gay controversies since the philosopher, Bentham, problematized it. Thomas Bohache’s commentary on Matthew ignores all the arguably gay positive references as on those born eunuchs, the Roman centurion’s boy, the Sermon on the Mount’s implicit cancellation of the same sex law of Leviticus at the Racah section on anger. It ignores speculations of American theologian, Tom Hanks (resident in Marcella’s Argentina), that Matthew might have been gay. Instead it wanders off on Queer paths about kingdom as a “kindom” and how we might perceive ourselves. In short, the Queer hermeneutics Marcella promoted is a mostly blind alley failing to confront scriptures on their own terms or mainstream Christian issues that need confronting. It concedes to academic trends at the expense of pastoral need or grassroots feeling. Having discussed or read parts of Marcella’s work with persons gay and straight I know it tends to evoke incredulity or even horror.

INTELLECTUAL QUEERDOM: J’ACCUSE

Queer theory’s net extends beyond gays to all marginal people but it’s hard see where it has meaningful impact, spiritual or any other, beyond shocking but impractical discourse and essay in academe. There is thus no record of which I’m aware of Marcella and followers in Scotland, whether with knickers, pants or kilts on or off, taking up the cause of Steve Gough, imprisoned so near them in Edinburgh. No matter how eccentric (queer/marginal?) one considers it and him, the heterosexual Gough has pressed a human right to circulate everywhere nude. If one cares to be theological he’s at least nearer to Isaiah, Micah, and prophets of Israel in the times of Samuel, than queers doing theology in Sadean bedrooms where they ignore the symbolism of nudity and its implications for transparency in social relations. Gough walked all England uncharged but ran into trouble in “Scotland the Brave” where a postman, “frightened” to see him, informed police. In a travesty of justice Gough has subsequently languished 3 years or more in Scotland for the individualism local queers haven’t protested against remnants of oppressive Calvinism.

I can speak against academic queerdom with some justifiable anger as an author on gay spiritualities in A Special Illumination. There were reasons, given its originality and controversies around it, that my doctorate was ever published, but the silence from queerdom with its body theologies and queer “spaces” a la Marcella was deafening. I was never approached, nor was I answered if I wrote, by what is fast becoming a tyranny of exclusive, queer leaning academics and clergy whose sources of inspiration are mainly atheistic even if they themselves pass as Christian. Due to lack of support my spiritualities theme is not one from which I have been able to progress to useful and needed research, post-doc or any other, on such vital and, relevant subjects as gay ethics. Nor will I be writing on this to be ignored by ivory tower queer scholars who set up such as Marcella as experts on “Christian” ethics, or rejected by publishers publishing Marcella’s style of theo-porn and profanities for profit. I know from sufficient experience how secular academe and publishing are organized to waste my energies.

I have so far cited almost exclusively from The Queer God. Before concluding I had better say something about the book that in 2000 truly launched Althaus-Reid and gives the name to her theology, that is Indecent Theology: Theological perversions in sex, gender and politics. The concept of “Indecent” theology is based on a natural enough revolt against absurd, often trivial distinctions, which could be based on even just hair styles, that the dictatorship of the Generals made between “decent” and “indecent” women. But beyond this Marcella’s Marxist materialist “indecenting” seeks to restore a unity to body and mind, or rather reject any body/spirit split. What is called her “hermeneutics of suspicion” suspects (exaggeratedly but sometimes correctly) that traditional theological/philosophical Idealism prevents sex from being properly studied or seen while even our notions of deity may be sex and sexuality coloured mental constructions.

In solidarity with some of the Buenos Aires poor, like the lemon sellers and South America’s tribal women who don’t wear knickers, Marcella’s symbol of indecent revolt, and body/mind resolution will be theology written and experienced sans knickers. She will also go in pursuit of the so called “obscene” which could be just the bodily, repressed and ignored. Much of Indecent Theology is taken up with very technical considerations about the construction of symbol and narrative. Even so, for sheer sensation the overall result is like some theological equivalent unique within Christian writing - albeit the post Christian Mary Daly with her talk about Mary’s “rape” by God probably influences it - of Pasolini’s film, Salo, based on the writings of de Sade.

In its intention to be indecent the book wonderfully succeeds though it would more directly offend Catholics than Protestants. It launches full scale attacks upon “Mary Queer of Heaven, Mother of Faggots”, whom Marcella regards as the horror mother of all political oppression (which, though the oppressive Pinochet was a Marian visionary, isn’t how, especially as Virgin of Guadalupe, Mary is seen in Latin America). Marcella does this at the same time as she maintains Mary probably never existed and it wouldn’t matter theologically if she didn’t (2000:72). A few quotes from the “indecenting” rant dismissing all virginal icons and imagery will give sufficient impression of the whole. As it’s distasteful I choose from what at least doesn’t like some passages refer to God amid four letter words. “Therefore let us consider that Mary is not the woman who conceived by inhaling the smell of Fatherly Semen. Let us think that she is the woman who has had “seven times seven” clitoral pleasure. Let us say she may have conceived by pleasure in her clitoris; by self-given pleasure perhaps…….Was Mary’s sexual encounter with God committed love or a one night stand with the unknown….Did she give God a blow job?” (2000:73) (Copying these words I recall the devotees who describe the plainly presumptuous Marcella as “a woman of deep Christian convictions”).

Though Mary takes the main force of Marcella’s “critique” Christ doesn’t miss out. She isn’t sure whether he was gay, transvestite or just butch lesbian and again it doesn’t matter what he was or if he existed so long as he was revolutionary. However, he wasn’t much of that either, but failed really to attack Jewish Law and was if anything “lacking in historical consciousness” failing in action against Israel’s oppressors (2000:87) (One wonders how, if Jesus wasn’t a historical figure, he should even be criticized for lack of historical consciousness!) For Marcella what’s certain is that if Jesus existed he had something of the sinner and prostitute in him or else what was he doing with such people? Moreover, “we all learn in community, even god/men. It is a historical law” (2000:113). And people like those in Argentina (herself?) “could have taught him a thing or two” (2000:113). Including about resurrection, apparently. Marcella decides, helped by someone in a bible study circle down in sexy Buenos Aires, that “the episode of Lazarus is nothing else but a scene of a physical resurrection in lust”(2000:122). Apparently Jesus “resurrected Lazarus because with Lazarus’ death Jesus himself died of abandoned love and terminal anguish”. This is an example of “resurrection from below”, the resurrection of lust. Marcella admits that among the liberationists resurrection wasn’t a subject. They were more interested in los desaparecidos (those disappeared under the generals) and “not illusory tales of leaving graves”. With these kind of beliefs or unbelief affecting her view of Jesus, whom she decides she will think of as bisexual, “the bi-Christ”, it’s hardly surprising that in wandering and wondering round the dynamics of symbolism Marcella asks could we talk about “Jesus the Moon”? (2000:107). Given a mind and imagination like Marcella’s I imagine one could.

QUEER AND PERSONAL

I’ll conclude my assessments on the personal note that the Queer theory I mostly reject favours and Marcella insisted theology should always include. When I first read the news of this theologian’s death, like everyone I was shocked. I didn’t know she’d been ill – I’d been intending, but put off emailing her a query – and though I could never have warmed to someone of her opinions I was saddened in a general way. Early deaths are always sad and Marcella had had tough beginnings and a hard end and she was perhaps a victim of sexual abuse. Which would explain and excuse much, though not everything. (Others similarly hurt have resolved their problems and helped others victims more). But even if Marcella hadn’t returned right answers she had raised pertinent questions based on experiences not to be ignored. One hoped she might provide better answers over time. The time she would now never have.

But there was something disturbing I couldn’t quite put my finger on, an impression that increased as, when re-reading her - I’d half forgotten and never quite absorbed her ideas - and, trying to obtain biographical facts, I came across the exaggerated, off-target praise surrounding her. I wanted to express a contrary viewpoint but began fretting whether I should so near to her decease, or at all. It was troubling to realize any criticism made would at least implicitly embrace all those who had praised, promoted, published and, employed Marcella. So this was alienating but re-reading Marcella I was confirmed in the view I could never approve her opus. And now, though there was no sensation similar to the one at reading de Sade long ago, I felt I was touching something hugely negative. And if even atheist philosopher, Iris Murdoch, can refer to Nietzsche and theologian, Don Cupitt, as “demonic” writers I won’t deny myself the usage. (I haven’t consulted charismatics about unusual impressions here but suspect they would propose that, assisted by a history of the odder sexual experiences which allegedly attract spirits, Marcella-speak could well have finished channeling everything up to and including St Paul’s “doctrines of demons”).

APPLYING “CONTEXTUAL THEOLOGY” TO ALTHAUS-REID

Subjective impressions apart, there are a few purely scriptural references that could be relevant to my or anyone’s negative assessments of Althaus-Reid.

God is not mocked….. (Gal 6:7)

There’s constant unabashed mockery of God in Marcella’s writings. The apostle’s often cited statement accompanies a warning about people sowing to corruption “in the field of their unspiritual nature” (REB translation).

Every thoughtless word you speak you will have to account for on the day of judgement. For out of your own mouth you will be acquitted; out of your mouth you will be condemned. (Matt. 12:30)

The foregoing has relevance for Marcella’s bold claim Queer theology is a first person theology that takes complete responsibility for its/her words (2003:8).

Whoever slanders the Holy Spirit (REB translation) can never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin (Mk 3:28)

Talk that compares the Spirit to the husband who wants rough trade (male prostitutes) on the side strikes one as….well… just slanderous. It may not constitute some unforgiveable sin - something apparently involved with calling good evil and evil good – but it takes disrespect towards the divine to unprecedented levels. And it is unacceptable from those who pass for Christians as opposed to just post-Christian radical feminist God blasphemers like Mary Daly whose recommendation is “Sin Big” and who variously demeans the Holy Spirit.

I will throw her on a bed of pain (Rev 2:21) (REB translation)

I won’t cite the whole passage which is Revelation’s warning to the prophetess, Jezebel, and those at Thyatira supporting her. The text is not one I read, nor need anyone, as fundamentalists on sex might (God like an Irish priest beating lovers out of the bushes). The essential point is Jezebel encourages believers to “fornication” (general sexual immorality) under the umbrella of things divine. Althaus-Reid teaching believers they can discover God, an orgiastic one, amid all and any sexual encounters they might have seems uncomfortably like duplicating the situation referred to or symbolized through the Jezebel name. The more so as Jezebel encourages partaking of food offered to idols and Marcella was willing to defend any spirit cult if it served her sexual messages always opposing any kind of Christian mission/conversion ideals. So was it morbid to note Marcella died “unexpectedly” following a long illness? In the context of her special professions, it’s uncannily like being refused the chance to be shriven after having had sufficient opportunity to attend to those matters of soul Marcella so breezily dismissed along with all beliefs like resurrection.

VALE MARCELLA ALTHAUS-REID

These texts were only potentially relevant. I’m not suggesting God drew my attention to them. At this point however I approach areas like those sometimes broached in my Cosmic Father which includes reflections on what constitutes the forth-telling of “prophecy”. I choose to believe God did put another verse into my mind, one I now consider the answer to the question I wouldn’t have asked, nor expected to have answered if I’d asked it. Driving through open country meditating should I even write this article, almost like a hammer to the head I registered with great force a very different text whose words I hadn’t recently heard or read. I wasn’t so familiar with them that I immediately knew their source. I thought perhaps Deuteronomy but found they conclude Psalm 95. They ran: “to whom I swore in my wrath they would not enter into my rest”. I looked at the immediately preceding words. ”They are a people whose hearts are astray, who do not discern my ways”. This seemed relevant enough to Marcella and those engaging her path of “Sadean holiness”.

Finally I knew why I’d been disturbed about the death of Althaus-Reid. It wasn’t your average death if there’s such a thing, more like the death of a Sartre which makes to ponder. What do such people really represent? I don’t believe in any conventional sense that God has “wrath”, a point considered in some detail in Cosmic Father. Yet in a moment I knew, as certainly one can ever know anything, that this person who took full responsibility for her words, will be taken at her word. She will not have the salvation she declared against…..And with that there’s nothing else to say unless that, just as there is a warning that the supporters of Thyatira’s Jezebel should dissociate from her, those who have aided, abetted and laughed along with Marcella should awaken to the illusion – the emperor’s clothes effect represented. Nor should they disregard such warning because the Jezebel reference is “only” from Revelation. In effect the condemnation “only” agrees with the gospels which declare, what might almost be an epitaph for errant theologians:

Alas for you when all speak well of you
That is how their fathers treated the false prophets
words preceded by “Alas for you who laugh now…”

There’s no accounting for tastes or beliefs, but we should recognize doctrines of theo-porn guru, Marcella Althaus-Reid, were very wrong. Marcella suggested we might need to be forgiven for loving God (2003:1). I suggest people need to be forgiven for loving Marcella in her role of blasphemer.


Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, London and New York: Routledge, 2000

Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, London and New York, Routledge, 2003

Thomas Bohache (ed) The Queer Bible Commentary, London: SCM Press, 2007

Rollan McCleary, A Special Illumination: Authority, Inspiration and Heresy in Gay Spirituality, London: Equinox Press, 2005

Rollan McCleary, Cosmic Father: Spirituality as Relationship, Amazon, 2009

rollanrm@yahoo.com

THE LOST ARK: MY SPECULATIONS JUSTIFIED

[On June 26th, against media expectations the Ethiopian Patriarch would only confirm the authenticity of the Ethiopian Ark of the Covenant, denying it would be unveiled to the public. Personally I must admit I have never believed the Ark is in Axum but my article retains validity as regards what it says about factors at work at any time the Ark and facts about it, true or false, would be a public issue]

THE ARK OF THE COVENANT SOON ON VIEW

This Friday at 2pm in Rome the Patriarch of Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church will announce that after centuries, even millennia, the hidden Ark of the Covenant will finally be soon open to public display – in a museum and for the time being anyway. Ethiopians believe it must ultimately be returned to Israel as an offering to the Messiah who will rule in Zion. The new policy could thus imply Ethiopian belief the church age is drawing to a close and Christ is expected to return to rule the millennial kingdom. What is all this about? There’s more than one answer.

MESSIANIC SIGNS

In a small corner of an exhaustive study of the astrology of Christ that I should have published for this Christmas I make a very special claim. I propose that something in the data likely points to the mystery of the Ark (recall that Jesus called himself the Temple) but we could only know this for sure at such time as facts (whether true or false) about the Ark come before the public in a major way. Only then would the relevant part of the pattern be exactly affected…. or it wouldn’t. Now that the Ark is suddenly news just what I suspected would be triggered is so - to the day. So, apart from what this may be saying about the Ark itself, events are again proof of having the true pattern for Christ’s birth which is an ongoing predictive tool for Jesus issues across history.

I’ll paste last here the relevant section of my ms, but first some facts about the Ark and whether Ethiopia’s Ark can be considered even genuine.

THE ARK OF THE COVENANT IN ETHIOPIA OR WHERE?

There are many claims and theories regarding the Ark’s whereabouts – underneath the Temple Mount, beneath Golgotha, inside Mt Nebo, put there by Jeremiah and supporters (the apocrypha states as much), hidden around Qumran etc. Ethiopia doesn’t seem too likely especially if one is to put faith in a non biblical story that an alleged child of Solomon and Sheba who became Menelik 1st in Ethiopia secreted the Ark away to avoid Solomon’s paganism. Biblically the Ark appears to have been in Jerusalem well after Solomon and disappeared only before the Babylonian invasion centuries later around the time of King Josiah and the prophet Jeremiah. Josiah assumed the Ark was still in Israel and told the Levites to return it to the Temple (2 Chron. 34:28) from which it had probably been withdrawn during the Temple defilements of King Manasseh; Jeremiah forecast a time would come when the Ark would be forgotten and no longer important (Jer 3:16). Certainly the Ark didn’t get placed in the Second Temple when exiles returned from Babylon and so wasn’t rescued from Mt Nebo if Jeremiah and his supporters ever hid it there. So why the Ark in Ethiopia and is it even possible? It’s just possible in two ways.

It could be that:

a) Jews who fled to Egypt prior to the Babylonian invasion and who made an imitation temple there at Elephantine Island also made an imitation Ark that ultimately went further south,

b) the true Jerusalem Temple Ark fell to the possession of the Ethiopian Egyptian Pharaoh, Necho, with whom King Josiah inexplicably and secretly went to war - perhaps to regain the Ark the Levites never returned to the Temple? – and from Egypt the Ark then went south for protection to the homeland of this Pharoah’s ancestors. There is at least one prophecy in Zephaniah some believe indicates that the latter days will see something precious brought (literally carried as the Ark was carried) to Jerusalem: “From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia my suppliants, my scattered ones, shall bring my offering” (Zeph 3:10).

WHAT COULD BE THE “REAL” ARK OF THE COVENANT?

It’s also possible Ethiopia hasn’t exactly got the Ark - which should be an oblong box originally containing the tables of the Law, a pot of manna and Aaron’s rod that budded -but something associated with the original Ark.

No one knows what the Ethiopian Ark is meant to look like and even the imitations found in Ethiopian churches for ceremonial purposes are well covered over like the original. However, a strong advocate of the Ethiopian Ark, Graham Hancock in The Sign and the Seal, says what he has seen of an imitation is a tabot, not a box. This makes him think a table of the Law could be involved. I prefer a theory it could be what covered the Ark, namely the crucial Mercy Seat on which rested the cherubim who carried the glory of the divine Presence. Being all gold this would be less perishable than the Ark on which it rested. The Mercy Seat would be an important enough relic even if the Ark is still under Mt. Nebo or has long since been destroyed.

CHRIST AS TEMPLE AND THE CURRENT RELEVANCE OF THE CHRIST DATA

If Jesus understood himself in some sense to be bodily the Temple and its high priest then the mystery of Temple and Ark should register in his true birth data and it apparently does so. The asteroid, Tempel (German for Temple) is found in his first house of the body and in the same sign and degree it will occupy at the time of Friday’s announcement – an indication if nothing else that, even if false, the announcement challenges Judaeo-Christian belief.

Because the high priest enters to commune with God in the Temple’s Holy of Holies and Aaron was first high priest I long ago suspected that asteroid, Aharon, (also near Tempel in Jesus’ house of the body), held some significance. Exactly opposite asteroid Aharon on the same axis and in religion sign, Sagittarius, I found asteroid, Acacia – the Ark was made of Acacia wood though lined inside and out with gold. I suspected therefore that the axis of 16 Gemini-16 Sagittarius represented an astrospeak phenomenon pointing to the Ark and involving what astrologers call “sensitive degrees” that events can trigger across centuries if need be. Just this happens on 26th June. On Friday as the announcement is made Mercury (any news, and media issues) is exactly conjuncting Jesus’ 16 Gemini Aharon triggering off the sensitive axis.

THE ISRAEL/TEMPLE DATA

Earlier this year astrologers were speculating on what the very spiritual conjunction of religious Jupiter with mystical Neptune and wounded healer Chiron would bring us. It now looks like it includes issues around Temple and Ark. In Israel’s 1948 foundation chart, asteroid Tempel falls in Israel’s sector of the land and what’s inherited and it does so in the sign of shocks, surprises and controversies, Aquarius. The mentioned “spiritual” conjunction presently falls across Israel’s Tempel which is at 25 Aquarius though it’s specifically “wounded “ Chiron that most nearly conjuncts Tempel. An ancient wound and loss of Israel’s coming to light!? But this pair is also conjuncting asteroid Jeremias. Might this be indicating Jeremiah is somewhere too ignored within current claims?

The time of announcement is wonderfully descriptive in more ways than I can describe here but Libra, sign of Laws, rises for the 2pm announcement and at that on what’s called a critical degree, 13 Libra, and one that happens to be very important in Christ’s natus. For medieval astrologers this degree in Christ’s natus would have included The Part of Rumours True and False - which seems relevant enough here.

I am troubled about true and false in this case. The mentioned Jupiter, Neptune, Chiron conjunction because it includes ambiguous Neptune opens the possibility of some illusion. Asteroid Israel from a hidden place in the announcement pattern is in a difficulty aspect to the important Tempel/Chiron/Jeremiah contact. I am therefore forced at this stage to conclude:

Either the Ethiopian claim will be found to be false

or

It is valid, even if perhaps for an aspect of the Ark only, but something to do with especially Jeremiah traditions about the Ark might yet need to be discovered.

But, whatever the case, it’s likely that:

The stress factor to Israel in the announcement pattern suggests the postponed, prevented or ignored quests for the Ark (a hot political issue because of the contested Dome of the Rock area and some Muslim denials the Jewish Temple ever existed beside the Dome or anywhere) will be resumed with renewed zeal. And I think the proposed Third Temple for which all this could be a crucial issue can be considered very much on the way. Remember the current Temple relevance for Israel of the conjunction I mentioned. The day after the first news of the Ark was heard in Rome on 17th June, clerics in Jerusalem launched a debate and plans regarding the re-building the Temple.

MY ORIGINAL JUSTIFIED SPECULATION

The following is what I wrote about two years ago. It’s from a long chapter which considers the position of 350 asteroids in Christ’s birth data, some of the data so remarkable that when I wrote it the following seemed at the time almost trivial by comparison. It’s nevertheless a comment on our times that publishers and agents have been disinterested even to look at any of this controversial research material or will tell you they just don’t nowadays “deal in religion or spirituality”. As a published author and doctor of religious studies I should be given more benefit of the doubt.

(excerpt)
Asteroids Aharon (Aaron) and Aaronson , Acacia and the Ark of the Covenant.
Jesus was not descended from Aaron, Moses’ high priestly brother and upholder of the Law, so we shouldn’t expect vivid connections here and we don’t find them. Aharon is not conjuncting Musa (Moses) while another asteroid, Aaronson is not notable unless in an aspect to Pluto - possibly implying how, prior to Jesus, Israel’s main link to God (Pluto) was understood to be through Aaron and the line of priest sons he represents. Still, the chart is not about Israel but about Jesus for whom Aharon falls in his first house of the body and image at 16 Gemini. Again nothing notable here unless perhaps Aharon’s loose conjunction to the Temple asteroid at 19 whose first house position reflects how Jesus will bodily become the Temple (and is, in his way, high priest identified too). However, materially, Herod’s Temple still stood during Jesus’ lifetime and within the Holy of Holies was a space where formerly stood the now lost or hidden First Temple’s Ark of the Covenant. Made of acacia wood this Ark had contained the two written tablets of the Law (Gemini sign of the Two and of writing), a pot of manna and Aaron’s rod which budded. So the close challenging opposition to Aharon of a suggestively ark linked asteroid, Acacia, and in faith/religion sign, Sagittarius (the challenge of things difficult to believe round Aaron?) is the sort of coincidence to make astrologers suspect astrospeak here and that 16 Gemini/16 Sagittarius could be a degree axis permanently sensitive to issues round the ark. If the ark is discovered, or if the Temple is rebuilt in our times, we might hope to certify if such is the case.

MARIANNE FAITHFULL, JOHN LENNON AND THE DEVIL…. PERHAPS

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: WALKER ON WAYS LESS TRAVELLED

The life story and various narcotic, psychic and near death experiences of rock chic, Marianne Faithfull, are so unusual they justify clichés like “fact more remarkable than fiction”. Faithfull (1994) and Memories, Dreams and Reflections (2007)are autobiographical sources but they raise many questions so I’ve always wanted to know the singer’s true horoscope to have other perspectives. Which I feel I finally now have.

As regards Marianne’s experiences and stellar signatures for especially anything “Chez Satanic” (title of a chapter in Faithfull) there’s a real connection with issues I intended to write about this month re John Lennon but will now lead up to instead via Marianne. I feel almost obliged to examine the new and occult Lennon controversy given my Blogs of April and May ‘07, a version of which got published as "Imagine There’s No Heaven" in Investigate Magazine for April ‘08 in New Zealand. (The article was refused for a couple of suitable UK outlets as likely to cause public outcry while a trendy religious periodical said I was being “too esoteric” dealing with the afterlife!). But first to the intriguing Marianne.

Someone who unearthed an old magazine article of mine recently wrote complimenting me on my rectification skills (finding and testing true birth times) especially in finding the most convincing working chart for Shakespeare. But the elusive Marianne has always eluded me and I’d given up trying only to discover recently an accepted time is supposed to be 12.30 pm in London (Dec 29,1946) giving 3 degrees Taurus rising and placing the singer’s Capricorn sun in the 9th house. This pattern seems right and if it isn’t, I’ll eat my hat because factors now emerge like a telling accuracy with asteroids which I could never obtain before but felt I might need in order to describe and explain elements of Marianne’s story sufficiently. But what accuracy! The sheer fatedness is striking.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS: RELATIONSHIP AND SUICIDAL POTENTIAL

To encourage reader confidence in details like asteroids I’ll first mention two telling features for Marianne’s pattern independent of any birth time accuracy.

Uranus, planet of the shocking, unusual, brilliant, eccentric and often gay, is same degree conjunct Fama (fame) in communicating Gemini. So Marianne will always deliver shocks and surprises; she’ll not just sing but speak out, be heard and celebrated for notoriety, not least in relation to ultra radical gay men (Uranus) like Alan Ginsburg for whom she taught at the Naropa Institute, film director, Kenneth Anger for whom she acted, and writer William Burroughs whose example gave her the bizarre ambition to become a street junkie. (If the birth time is correct this shock effect is primarily and suitably conveyed through Marianne’s personal values sector).

But we know Marianne will also be famous for being involved with the very hetero Rolling Stones. Amazingly, Mars in Marianne Faithful’s chart, (the men in her life, the kind of man or men she wants) is degree exact conjunct asteroid, Rolling Stones!

If the birth time is correct, that Marianne will always be before the public and known as just herself is aided by the fact that asteroid, Marianna, loosely conjuncts her destiny/career/reputation Midheaven (MC) point from within her career house too. (MC 13 Cap.32,Marianna, 17Cap41 - note asteroids, traditionally deemed feminine, used to be named even for men with a feminine “a” on the end)

Reverting to the Rolling Stones, assuming again that 12.30 pm is correct, Mars rules Marianne’s Scorpio dominated partnerships/marriage sector. Marianne and Rolling Stone, Mick Jagger, (Marianne was also wildly attracted to band member, Keith Richard) could have married or at least had a child together but Marianne lost the child after several months. The event plunged her into the depression which triggered the drug addiction which helped separate her from Jagger. The pain and passion in relations(s) is reflected in the wounded Chiron in Scorpio conjuncting the unions angle while the often misleading romanticism directed by Marianne on relationships is signaled by asteroid, Fantasia also conjunct here. Even so, the basic wealth, generosity and luck attending Marianne’s partnerships (Jagger even bought Marianne’s mother a house) despite any pain involved is nonetheless described by the conventionally super fortunate Jupiter/Venus conjunction falling in the partnerships sector.

Marianne Faithfull is more than usually the proverbial “cat with nine lives “ and Jupiter/Venus is arguably one of its secrets to the extent this conjunction is notoriously fortunate wherever found. But in Marianne’s unions sector it suggests others will likely come to her aid, including to rescue her from death (Scorpio) - as has happened on several occasions! Jagger saved her just in time from her Sydney suicide attempt with an overdose of Tuinals.

Of course, the Venus/Jupiter in sexy if death ridden Scorpio is also a key to Marianne’s Faithfull’s one time sexy pin-up status and legendary self indulgence (which arguably includes a virtual love affair with death itself!) Another clue to the singer’s psychology, especially the celebrated addictive and bisexual tendencies, is the afflicted Neptune (it afflicts both Sun and Mars), a signature almost invariably found in bisexuality so far as I can tell, and reinforced by a no boundaries and “lost”, if mystical and musical, Piscean moon in the lost, unconscious twelfth sector.

However……all this collection of relevance which I merely make in the course of bolstering my point about asteroid accuracy is almost trivial against what asking certain ethical and spiritual questions led me to discover.

MARIANNE FAITHFUL: FROM ARTIST’S LICENCE TO DANCES WITH THE DEVIL

Marianne Faithfull likes artists and has always aspired to be one herself but has taken to utmost extreme the licence European culture and its aristocracies, have traditionally accorded artists to avoid the norms and conventional morals. In Marianne’s case this tendency is perhaps helped by the fact her Austrian great grand uncle was Baron Sacher-Mosach (from whence the supposed joys of masochism). No matter how personally simpatico and/or vaguely pathetic one finds Marianne one may still grow tired of hearing, for example, that some drug pusher, addict and recreational thief like Henrietta Moraes who in her last years, Marianne says, kept manifesting a demon, or Alan Ginsburg who wanted Marianne to have sex with her pupils at Naropa (she didn’t) and apparently wanted and believed in sex with kids, or some mother who apparently left her “carelessly neglected” kids disturbed (one dying a junkie) like wealthy aristocratic writer descended from a line of witches, Caroline Blackwood, were just the most marvelous endearing persons you could ever hope to meet. “I loved the glee with which she viewed folly, wickedness and perversity” writes Marianne of Caroline to whom she felt she owed “fealty” though “she was clearly an instrument of the sacred god of chaos”.

In the same spirit we now and again hear in press interviews things like the devil is the most fun person at any party (Marianne has on occasions acted the part of the devil for stage). Though I’m stressing asteroids it’s not irrelevant that as regards planetary symbolism Marianne as a Capricorn. It's a sign “ruled” by the Saturn traditionally associated with, work, guilt, limits, exact requital, and by medieval astrologers the devil. Under this sign there tends to be more disposition to be casual about, even feel affinity for Satan - Marilyn Manson is the rock world’s extreme example. (The other relevant sign is Libra, the sign in which Saturn/Satan is said to be “exalted”. This was the sign both of arch Satanist, Aleister Crowley and his admirer, John Lennon of whom presently).

So….it’s time to ask the question, if, despite protestations in Memories,, she’s not the witch or Satanist many imagine but merely a humanist with an individual spiritual track, is Marianne nonetheless a bit more responsible for influencing modern belief than she realizes and more of the devil’s party than she understands?

The placement of Marianne Faithfull’s Capricorn sun in her ninth sector, apart from covering for her foreign connections, links her to all and any issues of belief. So did Marianne help, however unintentionally, to birth modern Satanism when she encouraged Jagger towards reading The Master and the Margarita which prompted him to compose Sympathy for the Devil, or again when she took the part of devil’s bride Lilith, in Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising ? She admits the latter decision was folly and regrets it, but chiefly because Anger terrified her by subsequently cursing her. As an old proverb goes “it takes a long spoon to sup with the devil”. Marianne, who thinks the devil is a fun person, seems often to have been closer to dancing with him than just supping with a long spoon at table.

MARIANNE FAITHFUL’S ASTROLOGY OF THE DARK SIDE

Or so one may be inclined to think if we pursue Marianne’s astrology which is rather devastating in the area of beliefs with the dark side seemingly inscribed in her life pattern quite notably.

There are two devil asteroids, Lucifer, which can be considered the devil as light (Lucifer, light bearer), and Malin (French for devil) that is more like the devil as darkness. Malin conjuncts Marianne’s Midheaven, destiny/career point from within the career house within two degrees. The way in which the devil in Marianne’s career was originally involved with a reading of Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and the Margarita appears signaled by within the same career/reputation house a striking and unexpected same degree conjunction of Malin with asteroid, Margarita! Then, although not similarly aspected, the fact that asteroid, Lilith, (in Jewish mythology, Satan’s wife) also falls in Marianne’s career/reputation sector is suggestive of more “chez Satanic” tales, like her Lilith role in a Satanist’s film.

There is however another more vivid astrological Lilith, a point in the heavens called Black Moon Lilith. It’s much used by continental astrologers and never felt to represent anything good. Interestingly, this point is found in Marianne’s chart (at whatever the time of birth) at 26 Sagittarius which means it conjuncts the Galactic Centre which has a vital association with events in religion. If the birth time is exact, then this point additionally falls exactly conjunct Marianne Faithfull’s ninth house cusp of religion and philosophy which is to say she risks representing or channelling a Black Moon Lilith philosophy which could include the quasi challenge of suicidal urges – BML is opposite her Part of Suicide.

Of course Marianne won’t realize who and what is pulling the destiny strings, if such is the case, because for her the devil should be light and amusing, perhaps even bringing some good despite himself – like the Satan-Wolland figure in Bulgakov’s novel albeit the Master and the Margarita who have dealings with him won’t have salvation. One notes that Lucifer, placed - suitably for Marianne’s positive Satan images - in her chart in goody Virgo closely trines from there of all things asteroid, Rolling Stones. This betrays how there will be ample opportunity to influence Jagger with her interests. This aspected Rolling Stones falls besides in the philosophy/religion sector of Marianne’s chart signifying perhaps that Jagger could be almost Marianne’s philosophy or deity just in himself (one has the impression that that’s how things once were!) while she can in turn be his muse helping him to invent a bit of Satanic philosophy for public consumption even if (as is the case) he believes none of it personally.

Marianne’s mother, Eva, with whom Marianne had a love/hate relation and who respected Mick - with some reason as he gifted her a home! - tending to blame Marianne for any relationship problems with him, seems shown by the Eva asteroid. Eva’s relation with Jagger is indicated by the easy, potentially fortunate trine aspect to Rolling Stones. However, we learn that later in life the Catholic, half Jewish, Eva (Baroness Erisso) became “very religious” and when Marianne made her first suicide attempt which occurred in Sydney Eva arranged for nuns to be with her. So, on the basis conjunctions are very pro or con something, that asteroids Lucifer and Eva are conjunct and in turn conjunct the Christ asteroid, seems suggestive of the mother’s struggle for her daughter’s soul.

As if to certify that point, the struggle is in effect reinforced and duplicated by the way the Jesus asteroid suspiciously makes exact-to-the-degree conflict square to Malin/Devil. Not that if there’s any battle here it’s one that Lucifer is automatically fated to win – astrology is more about tendencies than pure fate and the Part of Success (given correct birth time) conjuncts Christ more than Lucifer.

One can’t know, especially from astrology alone, exactly where Marianne might stand with the Creator God she says nowadays she doesn’t believe in unless it’s a case of believing (as she puts it) that we’re all chips off some great Cosmic Rock. But it’s interesting that Marianne’s Sun is challengingly opposite asteroid, Bhagwat, Hinduism’s name for Lord (God) or personal deity, an asteroid which I believe works to symbolize especially God as Creator. Note this Bhagwat falls in the sign of the mothers, Cancer, so I imagine, especially as Marianne read Robert Graves’ The White Goddess at her mother’s death, any god desired or believed in by Marianne would tend to be the Goddess, who might then morph into just Lilith! It looks like Marianne has long courted and been considerably influenced by forces that make her second autobiography’s claim to be only a humanist not very convincing. But now for the big dark side question...

DID JOHN LENNON PACT WITH THE DEVIL?

The kind of apparently relevant occult data seen in Marianne Faithfull’s natus leads naturally to the question to what extent individuals can and do enter into relations with the dark side. It seems more likely that un-summoned the devil and spirits of whatever kind appear - I can’t recall the relevant line from Jung or Holderlin about this - rather than because anyone actually invokes or pacts with them. Attitudes and behaviour alone, and some might add family inheritance (Marianne admits to at least a family inheritance in terms of feelings for decadence) can amount to an invitation to spirit presence and the influence can be unconscious. This might explain a few dark corners of Marianne’s story. Obviously, though, some people historically have invoked and today still do invoke entities.

By contrast to the story of Marianne’s haphazard occult involvements there’s a new book out called The Lennon Prophecy which at time of writing I’ve ordered but haven’t yet read but whose central, already much contested claim, can likewise be subjected to a measure of astrological analysis and even without my reading all the details first.

Joseph Niezagoda proposes John Lennon made a twenty year pact with the devil for fame and fortune – he supposedly told a friend, Tony Sheridan, he had sold his soul. The book has been called gripping but, say critics, only as commercial fiction or bestselling conspiracy theory. I can’t help feeling that if the book’s advocates are to be called superstitious sensationalists (as is happening) their critics might need to be called the Lennon Angel party, people for whom their idol couldn’t be wrong and so be other than now in heaven’s front row (as I’ve seen suggested) merely because he said, very Libran style, “Give Peace a Chance” and “All you need is love”. One wonders did they never hear of Lucifer as light or being a deceiver? Obviously they aren’t aware of the conflicted quality of Lennon’s pattern which reveals, for example his Part of Honour conjunct his Part of Corruption, albeit I’m never so confident of evidence from Arabic Parts on a horoscope as compared to asteroids. However Lennon’s very close conjunction of truthful Jupiter with (at best) pragmatic Saturn, tells the same story. People with this conjunction under any sign – many of us believe Jesus was born under such – seem more than usually involved with moral choices and could be notably good or evil.

Whatever the truth, critics should at least know that the Yellow Submarine album cover of 1967 presented arch Satanist, Aleister Crowley, as one of the “people we like”. And early in the Beatles’ career it’s biographically established Lennon had associations with bohemians in Germany dabbling in the dark side. Nizagoda, a devoted Beatles fan, isn’t trying to make notably religious points. He is puzzled and conflicted about the evidence he claims regretfully to have unearthed over years but evidence which he feels alone makes sense of certain events, lyrics and statements.

JOHN LENNON’S SINISTER LIFE AND DEATH SKIES

Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment. Whatever the facts this much makes a pact theory plausible - astrologically. The Pact was supposedly made in second half December 1960 shortly before the Beatles’ meteoric rise to fame began. Although by transit Jupiter was coming to contact Lennon’s career Midheaven which would be helpful for propelling an ambitious person into the spotlight there is the paradox from any conventional astrological standpoint that the previous lunar eclipse fell within Lennon’s undermining twelfth house (hidden enemies) while the previous solar eclipse had conjuncted his co-ruler of the same sector, the dreamy, otherworldly Neptune. So, in late ‘60 Lennon might not have been seeing things too clearly (perhaps in a drugs haze?) and courting the fantastic and harmful. It was nevertheless still a dynamic time for him in which transiting Uranus was making tension/conflict square to his natal Uranus all month. So he might well do something a bit off-beat Uranian crazy then. But what? It happens that the transiting Uranus was near enough conjunct (under two degrees) his natal Malin (devil as darkness).

That Lennon might easily contact, even savour and favour the dark side and hell in its way - he said he loved the dreams that took him to worlds like those of the painter, Hieronymus Bosch - is indicated by a natal pattern that shows Lennon’s career relevant, close Jupiter/Saturn conjunction in earthy Taurus, making easy, opportunity giving, degree exact trine to hell asteroid, Hella (remember the “a” principle for asteroids I mentioned).

There’s no asteroid for Pact but it’s my considered opinion that asteroid, Constantia, stands for anything firm, lasting and Covenant-like. It could, then, be relevant that Constantia conjuncts Lennon’s sun at birth suggesting a covenant might define his life in some fashion; especially so as in Dec ‘60 Constantia was in (underworld associated) Scorpio, sign of Lennon’s Mercury, the planet/symbol involved in any agreements or contracts. And then, at Lennon’s death we do find Constantia conjunct death planet Pluto.

If that is suggestive of covenanted death dues then in line with that idea it may be relevant, and it’s suggestive, that at the time of Lennon’s shooting on 8th Dec 1980 Hella was at 25 degrees Leo. This means it was in direct so to speak completing aspect to that same Uranus square to natal Uranus pattern at 25 Taurus prevailing throughout December 1960 when Niezagoda theorizes the pact was made and then square the opposition of Uranus to Lennon’s natal Uranus at the time of death. There’s something else sinister around Uranus mentioned presently.

In the actual Event Chart for the shooting at 10.50 pm Dec 8th 1980 in New York, asteroid Hella was in the unconscious, underworld, place of loss as was suitably enough also asteroid Yoko. Asteroid Lennon was all of
a) conjunct the event defining moon of the moment (which last was also conjunct Chapman’s natal moon)
b) also directly aspecting the ascendant, signifying the event itself and its place in the world which would certainly hear about Lennon
c) conjuncting Lennon’s natal Midheaven, his destiny.

It is most interesting if plain sinister that asteroid, Chapman, was rising in the New York event chart in degree exact fortunate trine to aggressive Mars reflecting how easy the murder would be – almost given to Chapman who apparently believed he was about Satan’s business in the matter. After all, Lennon should have waited for his car to be taken round to the Dakota building’s security entrance at the back, not have exited on the street before the front entrance! Purists might demand that Malin(Devil) should be rising or even conjunct the event’s ascendant. I note however that it was within conjunction of the South Nodes at the time – generally regarded as involving matters from one’s past that need to be dealt with.

Re Chapman….Incredibly, asteroids Lennon and Hella are closely conjunct in his natus (18 Cap 18 and 18 Cap 35 respectively) and they link to his natal sun at 19 Taurus by favourable trine which bespeaks the love/hate relation to Lennon that biography records and that would be helpful to contacting Lennon and which surely made the murder all said and done a choice. Yet the hand of fate was still there somehow…..Lucifer at 26 Taurus in Chapman’s birth was conjunct Lennon’s 25 Taurus Uranus, and we have seen that transiting Uranus to Uranus is very much the trigger in this whole story. I have never mentioned the position of Lucifer as opposed to Malin in Lennon’s birth. It was 0 Cancer, which astrologers deem a world point. If it weren’t there arguably it would be less likely there would be widespread speculation upon just what the relation of Lennon to the forces of evil may have been.

FINALLY….DOES THE LENNON PACT MAKE SENSE OF A HELL VISION?

Even all these signs can still be dismissed as coincidence. But if there had been some mad Faustian bargain shadowing Lennon’s life it helps makes more sense of that most difficult of hell visions my Blog and magazine article (see above) tried to make sense of.

I wouldn’t wish to treat as holy writ the alleged vision of the seven Colombians who visited heaven and hell with Jesus in April ‘95 and supposedly encountered Lennon in hell. I always stated my doubts about probably culture contaminated elements in report of that vision. Memory can distort. Yet nothing can quite get round the pattern in the heavens at the time the vision was claimed. How could factors like the celestial signs at the time that the group either wouldn’t know or else not approve under American Protestant influence, such as asteroids Lennon and Christ in conjunction, reflect the events described? Anyway, it was claimed Lennon called out to Jesus as the screaming, terrified Colombians passed through hell and then cursed him because Jesus would not respond as he did to others in perdition. If this vision has any validity why would Christ not respond? Because Lennon was in some wise a special offender – which if he had been pacted with the devil and vowed to various blasphemies he would undeniably be?

Let’s suppose all the astrology here is misleading and the Colombians got things wrong too. When I had read the criticisms of Nizagoda’s book I read this from the Blog he established for his book. Again, like the vision of the Colombians, I can’t quite get round it.

Apparently the last song Lennon was recording was one asking the Lord to help him. In the background he utters strange words apparently accepting how things had to be. There does seem to be something genuinely sinister here, a bit like a Marlowe’s Faustus trying to call on God (with regret but not in any real repentance, simply wanting a way out) but getting the idea it’s probably too late. I cite Niezgoda:

"...Like many of those who enter into a pact with the Devil they are aware of their allotted time, and as the time of the pact draws to a close, they begin to feel remorse, and start looking for a way out of their fatal pact. In this final song we hear John pleading with the Lord, “I’m asking this question in the hope that you’ll be kind, please help me Lord, help me to help myself.” In the song John uses the old adage ‘the Lord helps those who help themselves’. Was he hoping for a way out of his pact?

Eerily, if you listen closely, in the final moments of the song John can be heard talking to himself in a faint voice, saying, “I see, that’s how you’re going to do it, Huh, ok.” What could John possibly be talking about, “That’s how you’re going to do it,” DO WHAT?

If anyone has another interpretation, we’d be interested to hear what you have to say!“

I hope there could be other interpretations but I may instead be forced to take the author’s point…..You can call all this superstitious – I know the pact theory is being dismissed as crazy. I’m not prepared to say that it automatically is so. Like Marianne, but for different reasons in different ways, I know the dark side exists - I have had my own encounters with it. I discuss this in my new book, Cosmic Father; Spirituality as Relationship (Some details in my last Blog). Especially in the book's third chapter called, Suffering, A Secret Hidden Doctrine and Hell Itself, as in the 07 Blog articles on Lennon I try to make sense of the whole idea of hell and the demonic. They are subjects which sound unreal until you really look into the matter with an open mind.

COSMIC FATHER: SPIRITUALITY AS RELATIONSHIP

A BOOK OF UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES AND ANSWERS

My new book, Cosmic Father: Spirituality as Relationship is now out and available on Amazon.com. Though many authors like to call their book exceptional, this one unquestionably is so starting with the fact it combines claims to direct experience of the divine with the kind of intellectual inquiry into God and Bible that almost never accompanies such. It broaches questions like:

• How and why did Christianity, the religion that prays “Our Father”, become a Son religion to the extent it scarcely addresses or knows this Father?

• What is God, and God as an interacting Trinity, like? Answers go beyond conventional ones like God is love and the Trinity just a sacred mystery.

• Why suffering? While there can be no complete answer to that question there is one that Christian philosophers almost consistently ignore but which explains most and is the most logical answer rather than the total mystery and “God’s Problem” that skeptics like Bart Ehrman make it..

• What about God and eros?

• What is the meaning and function of prophecy?

• Who and what precisely is Yahweh and is there a Godhead beyond God?

• How and why have popular religious writers on God like Jack Miles, Karen Armstrong and Deepak Chopra got it wrong about God?

TO ORDER
Cosmic Father can be ordered on Amazon.com by entering either the book's title or the author's name.

BACKGROUND
On professional advice Cosmic Father has gone onto Amazon direct because it could be assumed the difficulties and delay of issuing such an unusual book through conventional channels whether secular or religious would be too great – necessarily so I now think. I have been told by a currently bestselling author of a book on God that he went through 36 publishers and many agents before having his book accepted. The simple and controversial fact many would doubtless deny (but which is only what I more or less heard at the Society of Authors lecture a good few years ago), is that mainstream publishing industry isn’t interested to publish relative to God or Christianity unless negatively, gnostically, skeptically. I hope this is wrong but I have seen and experienced enough to believe otherwise.

I am pasting below the book’s back cover blurb and a list of chapters titles. (I expect to put a few excerpts from the book onto the Net at least on my Rollan McCleary website, if not a separate site devoted to it, but all such may have to await the assistance of my usual helper in web matters who is presently dealing with acute problems keeping them from all work).

BLURB

What does it mean to talk about, talk to, or be addressed by, God as Father? Is it even any longer helpful or meaningful in an era of inclusive gender language, high personal autonomy and a new pop atheism? Is there any awareness to be had beyond the new age guides to God consciousness, prolific “conversations with God” or the literary deconstructions of divine character from such as Jack Miles and Harold Bloom?

If Milton’s justifying the ways of God to man was always problematic, to argue for the existence and concept of God as specifically Father is still more difficult today. There is everything to consider from the apparent case against God in light of events like the Holocaust to feminist objections to a patriarchal God. There are therefore some high barriers to pass before anyone can hope to perceive the biblical God as Creator and Father. And this may require re-examining how and why we read the Bible as we do, listen to some philosophers we do and discovering if there a line in divine “thought” behind the Bible’s more difficult stories and reported acts of God.

This very original book offers a wide ranging, challenging mixture of reflections along with an open ended inquiry into God’s “character” and the nature of visionary/prophetic experience that has traditionally most claimed to reveal this. But the quest is also one prompted and illuminated by sudden, unexpected contact with “The Father” that the author is left forced to process along with a thoroughgoing examination of what is signified by the Trinity. Whether or not the reader would accept the testimony to personal experience that influences some of the conclusions drawn, it is still an impulse towards gaining some original insights and the quest engaged can deliver some real, perhaps life changing, surprises.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 Divine Contact

CHAPTER 2 “Our Father in Heaven” but What Sort?

CHAPTER 3 Human Suffering, A Hidden Secret Doctrine and Hell Itself

CHAPTER 4 Divine Character by Names

CHAPTER 5 Biography and History of God

CHAPTER 6 How God “Thinks”

CHAPTER 7 Reading God between the Lines

CHAPTER 8 Things the Magi Didn’t Tell You

CHAPTER 9 Losing the Father

CHAPTER 10 Finding the Father and What It All Means

ARCHBISHOPS BEHAVING BADLY

CAN EVEN GOD SAVE ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS?

No, the question is valid; I mean it. Rowan Williams doesn’t even believe God can save the planet, so why himself? To announce, as the Archbishop of Canterbury did last month, that the environmental fate of the world is entirely in our own hands and we may destroy ourselves without God intervening marks a flat denial, not the Archbishop’s first, of the Bible and tradition he’s supposed to represent. A prophetic statement like Revelation’s: “O Lord God, sovereign over all, you are and you were…..now is the time to destroy those who would destroy the earth” (Rev 11: 17, 18. REB) involves the idea there will be a time when the planet is threatened and the same God who gave the earth in stewardship to humanity will not permit its destruction to occur.

But no, the Archbishop either hasn’t heard it, doesn’t believe it or isn’t interested. When did you last hear him preaching anything remotely apocalyptic and in any case Rowan William’s skeptical, democratic generosity to most or all positions except the orthodox is such he believes even atheism should be taught as part of religion in schools with the help of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels. He has also proposed that some Sharia Law could be introduced to England to help the Muslims, none of whom, like the Archbishop himself, ever seems to have the will to object how Christians don’t even have the basic right to worship in Islam’s centre, Saudi, while under Sharia Law in Pakistan countless women are in jail because they dare to protest their rape under a system which allows such protest only if (improbably!) four men can stand witness to their claims! (Whether the Archbishop’s sympathy for Sharia bears connection to known sympathies with Islam of Prince Charles, rumoured to be privately a convert to Sufism, I have no idea).

What sort of appeasing, retreating, gutless un or anti-evangelical Christianity is this? Indeed what creedal elements of the religious denomination he leads does the basically rationalist Archbishop (inbetween an incongruous cult of icons and the Mary he wants to pray along with) really believe? Certainly he doesn’t believe in the Magi – he spoiled a good few people’s Christmas and possibly faith in ‘07 insisting the Magi probably never existed and the gospel Christmas narratives can be taken as myth accordingly. This itself was nonsense even if one entertained doubts about details of the narrative. Travelling oriental/Persian Magi (astrologers) were such a long-standing, half feared feature of the ancient world the Emperor Constantine banned them in 321 in what was a questionable move the churches have never quite recovered from against the astrology that features in Christ’s birth and we ought to be aware of.

As it happens a Welsh priest of my acquaintance in Australia who had on and off communicated with Williams in the past, recommended and sent through a book of mine dealing with discoveries regarding the astrology of Christ’s birth. Whether from Williams himself or his office, the courtesy of a reply was never received and the world was given the gift of Williams’ skepticism instead. He might at least have acknowledged other lines of thought exist on the magi but prelates don’t seem to think like that. One could say they mostly favour a “fair” skepticism….but rather dogmatically and dismissively!

CAN RICHARD HOLLOWAY BELIEVE ANYTHING AT ALL?

A good example of this corrosive "fairness" is Richard Holloway, former Archbishop or Bishop Primus (it amounts to the same thing) of Edinburgh of the Scottish branch of Anglicanism. His religion is in effect a spirituality of honesty in not believing or claiming anything specifically Christian at all. According to a suitably uninspiring Easter weekend feature in The Australian which influences my comments, Holloway admits to being “completely allergic to people who say that they know the ultimate, absolute truth”. He believes in “the virtue of uncertainty” and “If you know the mind of the mystery you call God, it makes you do terrible things”.

“Terrible things”? This is libel! Are we to suppose that, say, Christian doctors and nurses who are helping people and happen orthodoxly to believe that Christ is “the way, the truth and the life” and hence some kind of ultimate mystery, are actual or potential world destroyers like biblically illiterate, or just plain illiterate, medieval Crusaders on rampage overseas? But for this Archbishop such believers wouldn’t need to be pushing any of their beliefs in Christ anyway, even nicely, because “Evangelism is an abuse of power”. It’s even nothing but a fear based threat and the Church just a power structure. And it seems there would be nothing and nobody to evangelize anyway because the first of the Archbishop’s 26 published books was Beyond Belief: Godless Morality, (1981) which made the point there is effectively no Christian morality because atheists can be good – which doubtless they can be just as they can be evil. But is this the point and is it worth cutting down trees to make paper to publish it? Indeed, what publishers are complicit with promoting this religion of skepticism 26 times over when so much in religion can’t get published? What Holloway represents is an “abuse” of influence by an Archbishop who admits to have changed his mind so many times he is not sure what he believes but is ready to call himself "The Church in Exile". The Church in Auto-Destruct mode might be more appropriate!

As one priest remarked to me, people like this may be brilliant scholars (Williams is a linguist fluent in perhaps ten languages) but they would be better in academic posts where they would be free to change ideas and perspectives by the week rather than leading whole churches. I would agree their role is now so negative it belongs with Miltonics like “the hungry flock look up and are not fed”, or, more darkly and cynically if one were to cite Baudelaire, “It’s the Devil who holds the strings that make us dance”. In 2002 Richard Holloway did actually resign his post as was appropriate. Today he oddly describes the real beginning of his disillusion as being the 1998 Lambeth Conference with its fireworks over the subject of homosexuality. Gays and their cause seems to be the one of the few things the Archbishop can feel able to barrack for with any conviction. Admittedly Lambeth ‘98 seems to have been a conference to end all conferences…...

I attended a party a few years ago and not realizing I was talking to a bishop told him, when he asked me, about my doctoral studies which were in gay spirituality. This prompted him to inform me just how horrific the Lambeth Conference had been. So bad he said he never wished to attend anything like it again in his life. The atmosphere had apparently been electric with venom and potential and actual aggressive behaviour unworthy of Christians. But if such was the case the party chiefly guilty for stirring the pot was another unworthy Archbishop, Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria, of whom there were tales about trying to throw a gay delegate on the floor – possibly in attempts to exorcize him since he apparently believes gays are mostly demon possessed. From the under-belief of prelates western style we pass to over-belief African style.

CAN THE FANATIC ARCHBISHOP AKINOLA JUST SHUT UP?

I shall pass over whatever Akinola may have said and done since ‘98 (which includes hysterically calling all homosexuals "lower than the beasts",trying to split the entire Anglican Communion over homosexuality and make himself alternative head of some split off group) to quote him only in the very recent past. In recent attempts by the Nigerian government to move legally against gays (who get assaulted and generally persecuted in Nigeria as in other African countries like Uganda and aided and abetted by the churches) Akinola has made representations to a parliamentary committee. He has proposed gay marriages should be entirely illegal with anyone involved in such being jailed for 5 years and even anyone attending such marriages jailed for a year. He regards homosexuality as “capable of engendering moral and social holocaust” (i.e. the condition is catching if gay unions were permitted the population rate would either decline or be wiped out by AIDS!).

According to Akinola (as cited in Blaze Gay Magazine for South Australia, March 25th) “Same sex marriage apart from being ungodly is unscriptural, unnatural, unprofitable, unhealthy, un-cultural, un-African and un-Nigerian. Homosexuality is capable of existinctating (sic) mankind and as such should never be allowed to take root in Nigeria…”

Well, of course same sex marriage is unscriptural because the chiefly relevant biblical society (Israel’s) like most ancient societies didn’t envisage it - though it virtually does in the peculiar covenant union of David and Jonathan. One wonders what the Archbishop would think if we reminded him that Archbishops themselves are unscriptural, no such individuals are ever mentioned in the Bible. And heaven knows few Archbishops have done the churches much good. However, this angry and meddlesome Archbishop who doesn't wish to be in the same room as a homosexual and certainly won't take communion with them, is either grossly ignorant or else a gross liar if he contends that homosexuality is “un-African”. Lock this troublemaker up for 5 years and force him to read anthropological studies like Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (eds) Stephen O Murray and Will Roscoe, a couple of anthropologists….! A biology text wouldn't hurt either as this prelate remains under the pre-scientific illusion that homosexuality is not found in nature as amusingly in the case of Ninio the elephant in the Warsaw zoo and the penguins in Berlin's.

AND COULD ARCHBISHOP AKINOLA READ THE BIBLE?

…..But if he won't confront anthropology and biology at least make Akinola study the Bible. There are a few things Archbishop Akinola needs to know including about the Bible. One of them concerns what and who according to the Sermon on the Mount risks the hell fires. The very symbol used for the anger which is the root of violence and murder is the attitude which exclaims “Racah, you fool” (Matt 5:22). In the Aramaic it means something like abusing someone as an “effeminate pervert” or cursing someone as a faggot. Accordingly something like an ancient form of homophobia is used here as symbolic of the root mentality behind discriminating hatreds against outsider minorities of all kinds, social and racial, that can prompt bashings or even murder. Under the old Law, to the extent what probably referred there to sacred prostitution can even be applied to “homosexuality” as we now understand it, capital punishment was involved. But by rejecting hatred of marginal people as a potentially murderous attitude unacceptable to God, Jesus is tacitly rejecting whatever laws of his time might penalize same sex relations because under the old Law, angry attitudes like Akinola’s that justified discrimination and even execution would be acceptable.

Even if you don’t agree with this particular reading of the text, there are other hints in the gospels that Jesus did not regard what today we call “homosexuality” as the evil and unmentionable subject clerics like Akinola have made it over the centuries and we may affirm that point no matter what St Paul may or may not have thought and taught in this area. The Pauline position is something which for modern scholarship is anyway a contentious issue, far less clear than Christian conservatives care to acknowledge…..

Once again, as it happens, I somewhat addressed this issue in the mentioned book, reception of which the Archbishop of Canterbury didn’t acknowledge. I had more to say in my A Special Illumination, based on a world first doctorate from a religious studies dept and assessing the varieties of gay theology and spiritualities. It also happens that an acquaintance of the Archbishop (Rev.Canon Martyn Percy of Cambridge) described what I’d written as probably the best treatment of gay theologies ever done. Yet although the Archbishop has complained the church lacks guidance and knowledge in dealing theologically and otherwise with the gay theme, again, no recommendation of my work has had any effect. What might have helped clerics and committees debating gay issues to have more facts and a broader critical overview has not been cited or used. But since on most subjects those Anglican attitudes which count are still too often just snobbishly or cliquishly determined by the old boy network “no good thing comes out of Australia” may well have played its part. (I don’t just speak for my own work. For example it’s hard to see how a useful, magisterial study on the interpretation of the Sodom story across history from another Australian scholar - Michael Carden’s Sodom - could have been quite so ignored).

HOMOSEXUALITY BECOMING THE MAIN SUBJECT FOR BAD ARCHBISHOPS

There is something that unifies my bad Archbishops story and could extend it (since I haven’t explored Archbishop Jensen of Sydney, an ally and advocate of the infernal Akinola) and it’s the subject of homosexuality which is coming to outdo all other theoretically more important issues for Christianity from creedal orthodoxy to actual cure and care of souls.

Again the wavering Rowan Williams seems much to blame. He has giddied back and forth on the subject of homosexuality in a theological incertitude which like so much in Anglicanism has owed something to mere politics. (Anglicanism itself is a state church whose archbishops are selected by the Prime Minister who may care nothing for religion so that a lot of what spirituality and theology should be regulating can become a matter for social compromises and the supposed needs of national consensus rather than the church itself). When the economically powerful evangelical block was threatening withdrawal of funds over issues of gay ordinations and unions Williams became more conservative though enraging conservatives by unannounced attending a Eucharist with gay Christians as though to appease and apologize to them.

I believe that the blessing of same sex unions is and was a more vital pastoral issue than whether or not in the interests of simple equality there should be gay bishops in our generation. But had Williams taken a firm line in harmony with his original stated beliefs and purposes and ordained as first gay bishop, Canon Jeffrey John who was no longer in gay relationship he could well have forestalled other more serious controversies and schisms. These broke out over the unilateral decision of American Episcopalians, determined to have some gay bishop since Williams wouldn’t act as expected, to instead make a divorced bishop in a relationship (and as it turned out had alcoholic problems too) flag bearer for the new protest line. This poor piece of PR was then the trigger to the debates and politicking which brought out Akinola and his poison in full force.

Yet Akinola is really more political than almost anyone engaged in Anglicanism’s wrecking ball gay debate. Anglicanism’s own Robert Mugabe, Akinola is excused enormities and not described as a thoroughly despicable person largely, I think, because he is black and we don’t wish to be charged with racism. His macho pursuit of gays is exacerbating problems for gays and gay Christians throughout Africa where it has sent some to into depression and suicide and made them vulnerable even to death threats. (See reports from such as “Other Sheep” a gay religious organization which reports on what is going on in African churches). The macho patriotism of Akinola’s protests disguises the extent to which in fact he is weakly appeasing Muslim forces in Nigeria which would attack the church if it showed certain kinds of human rights concerns. Akinola also appears to have had certain ambitions to dominate a separate, schismatic church, so that in no way can his attitudes to homosexuality be considered the disinterested, biblically conservative position that allies like Archbishop Jensen of Sydney will make it out to be.

THREATS TO RELIGIOUS FREE SPEECH AND SPITTING OUT TRUTH'

Akinola-speak encourages nothing but a hate Christ attitude among secular gays internationally. It is the sort of phenomenon which moreover fuels the new hardline approach of the secular society in its opposition to Christianity and religion generally and which (opportunistically one suspects) raising the spectre of homophobia, drastically changes laws to confine abuse but in ways that threaten free speech itself.

Only this past week a worker for England’s St James Community that assists the homeless was dismissed from his post for the crime under new laws of having expressed his view to a co-worker that as a Christian he didn’t believe in same sex relations and gay marriage. Who could and should care that he doesn’t believe in such things as long as he’s not insulting gays or denying them assistance in line with his job? To everyone their beliefs. And who was the Judas of a co-worker friend who went off to report him as politically incorrect? But such is the unfortunate legacy to society that results from the fanatical homophobia historically and still today of clerics of Akinola’s kind and which not even modern western prelates like Jensen have hastened to condemn as they should. So the world will now legally defend people against it, and, because clerics have not troubled to express themselves within bounds of the generous or sensible it will now decide how people in religion will express themselves.

In almost nothing have the Archbishops of our time truly helped us. They are not defenders or proclaimers of the faith nor of human rights in suitable ways. They seem little short of a disaster. One could well wonder how might God see them. I don’t think simply because they probably mean well it would be correct to repeat, mantra-like, clichéd phrases like “God loves them very much”. Frankly, one suspects the inveterate confusion represented might be more liable to obtain something like the unsettling judgment on the indifferent Laodicean church - “I will spit you out of my mouth” (Rev 3:17).