LIGHT OR BLACKOUT OVER BETHLEHEM?
I shall first review this week’s Australian ABC1 broadcast of Britain’s Channel 4 production Star of Bethlehem: Behind the Myth and mention a few common, but misleading, approaches to the whole Christmas star theme. I’ll then offer some perspectives in light of controversial experiences I've had in treating this sensitive subject over the years and now in more recent days faced with virtual censorship on communication of remarkable new facts and data concerning the birth and life of Christ.
Something of the scope and revolution of what I’m claiming, (necessarily one of the more remarkable finds of Christian history if true and with unprecedented insight into Jesus’ mind and intentions) can be gauged by copies of the ignored News Release and refused author’s Op Ed material pasted below in conclusion here. My Testament of the Magi was published two weeks ago, but as a doctor of religious studies I’m already compelled to ask who reckons to own and/or block access to the subject of the Star and related vital issues around Jesus. The problem (since the material is not intellectually opaque) is arguably a profoundly spiritual one for especially self-declared Christians who have been caught unawares (and perhaps found wanting!). This whole issue - like “no room at the inn” itself - amounts to one big but largely hidden scandal.
THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM DOCUMENTARY
The Atlantic Productions' documentary was commendably wide-ranging. It was also fair, though I question the title’s implications. There is no “myth” to get behind, rather there are certain religious and scientific prejudices to overcome that have too long obscured the picture and stopped anyone reaching the firmer conclusions needed and now possible. The feature never went beyond informed speculation. There was strong and sensible argument for the star being a planet, though towards the end also speculation I would deny, but reasonable, that a nova in 5BC could have summarized other earlier and mainly Jupiter related phenomena so as to be the Bethlehem star for brightness. (The star as comet got rightly dismissed - comets were traditionally deemed unfortunate, not good news).
Astronomer, David Hughes, whose line I endorse, was given more time than I expected to explain phenomena of 7 BC in Pisces and the association of such phenomena with Israel, something which by contrast Michael Molnar (whose popular views are now regularly repeated every Christmas) either denies or is unconcerned with. Molnar emphasizes the sign of Aries for Israel and again Jupiter, his interest triggered by a coin from Antioch showing a Ram and the moon and Zeus/Jupiter on the other side. (I didn’t gather why alleged Christians commemorating Christ’s nativity would stamp coins with Zeus on it!).
Though astrology was acknowledged as indissociable from ancient astronomy hence of some symbolic importance to consider, its wider significance was ignored or else denied in favour of “scientific” explanations for the star. It was hoped science and an ever better scanning of ancient skies may yet reveal what the original secret was - if by now "the mystery" is not better and more potent than the truth! Most participants, even scientists, nonetheless assumed the Star did represent a truth to discover, though one Canon theologian of London's St Paul’s Cathedral was content to accept it might only be a symbol for the greatness of the Christ event. Ironically, it was the Magi finished the most knowable, revealed datum of the inquiry. Almost certainly Persians, we can know how they dressed and that they probably rode on horses not camels. The feature’s bright kaleidoscope of facts could neither inspire nor offend in its inconclusive nature. Normally, theories both mentioned and ignored in the BBC feature are more strongly defended and contested. Here’s a brief criticism.
THE ERROR OF SINGLE FACT AND OVERLY ASTRONOMICAL BETHLEHEM STAR THEORIES
Some BS theories, most notably those promoting Jupiter/Moon occultations or Jupiter/ Regulus contacts (Michael Molnar and Rick Larson respectively), or Jupiter/Venus conjunctions in 3 and 2BC (David Reneke, Ernest Martin, the latter popular but ignored in the docu), no matter how scholarly in certain respects, are not well rounded. And they are not necessarily well informed either - Jupiter occultations in ancient astrology indicated a king's death or conditions of shortage, certainly no birth to celebrate! These theories satisfy little more than conservative Christians. The latter want their signs to be bright heavenly spectacles, not the full blown astrology and destiny patterns which Magi dealt in and which get conceded to, if at all, in only the mildest possible way i.e. just Jupiter or Regulus or zodiacal sign Leo are allowed to signal something royal and even then more or less independently of the rest of the celestial patterns within which they occur.
The fact is – astrologically – the Jesus of the gospels simply could not be a Messiah or King of Israel born under conquering Jupiter in Aries aspects or Jupiter/Venus aspects that looked good or bore loose association with things regal. Such aspects would mean Jesus was born, or must become, the conquering hero some hoped for, or be another glorious Solomon, but not any tragic or spiritual Messiah. It’s notorious that Jupiter/Venus aspects incline to lifestyles of the rich and famous or even accompany natal patterns of lucky devil criminals!
I have already mentioned the Jupiter occultation error, but in any case the related sun sign of this thesis, Aries, bellicose sign of the outgoing era, is very much what Jesus was never about even if one concedes there’s some evidence that Aries enjoyed associations with the Jews among at least the pagans of the West if not stargazers further east. Texas lawyer, Rick Larson, who has issued a popular, much promoted DVD on the Star (it is directed by Steven McEveety who directed Gibson's The Passion of the Christ) wants those seeing and purchasing his film to contribute to his Star Project for ongoing scientific research into the Star! (He hasn’t replied to my comments). Meanwhile Michael Molnar proclaims in Net interview that his theory seems to be the best yet, and is as good as incontestable according to those who have reviewed him.
Most theories, even when apparently comprehensive, tend towards a one fact bias, the trump card approach. One or another phenomenon is deemed the birth star because it fits with the fact Israel was symbolized a certain way, or else kings were, or because Herod died a certain year, or a census was one year, not another, or Jesus wasn’t “about thirty” when he began his ministry if born in 7BC (there’s a special and important answer to that problem I supply). Given the limits of our information both biblical and historical it’s always possible to make one fact fit, or fault a theory by stressing how another fact doesn’t tally. So it is
a) The greatest all-round level of agreement must be taken into account
b) The stellar information likewise should offer all round, not giving single factor sense, i.e. one will take not just a planet for Israel, for kingship or religion but read an entire planetary picture. The pattern should also work for the last week of Jesus’ life and work to this day for Jesus issues too.
This is what I can dramatically demonstrate and in unprecedented detail but which is not being examined or in effect not permitted to be so. Those who know little about astrology or theology are telling those who do what the picture should be, and various prejudices of religion and science are allowed to prevail. And beyond that limiting situation one then perhaps has to convince communicators like TV production companies who these days need to be approached before the TV channels.
[An interesting footnote to this section which emerges via comments I see posted to the latest seasonal You Tube promotion of Larson's DVD is the following observation which I paste:
This guy (Larson)is a lawyer. Which may be why he was careful to tweak the info he lifted from Ernest L. Martin's book 'The Star that Astonished the World' (free to read at ASKELM-dotcom) just enough so he couldn't be accused of plagiarism.He basically switched September 11, 3 BCE from being Christ's birthday to the day of his conception, which undoes layers and layers of rich, meaningful symbolic and prophetic fulfillment as the late Dr. Martin showed in his scholarly book back in 1991.
Obviously I deny the Martin thesis too, but I'm interested in the promotional side of things. There are by now vested interests which make inquiry more difficult].
UK PRODUCTION COMPANIES AND THE BETHLEHEM STAR.
During much of ‘06 I found myself subject to a bewildering sequence of demands for reports and plans, with promises to me both made and broken regarding a docu with links to my claims re the astrology of Christ and related issues. The company’s contact didn’t want me applying elsewhere but in exhaustion I finally did so to more helpful, realistic responses. In two cases religion and history had just been dropped as company themes otherwise, I was told, I would have been taken on. One company advised me to skip the double problem of dealing from Australia by applying direct to Acquil Ahmed, who would supposedly be either interested or able to direct me to who would be. AA is the Pakistani born Muslim who formerly ran religion at Channel 4 and to some controversy has since been appointed head of religious broadcasting for the BBC. Over around 3 months, no amount of emailing or phoning to his UK office and done in light of the recommendation given me, produced one word or line of response. Later and while in Hong Kong in ‘07 I received calls and inquiries about contributing to a proposed British docu on Christ (rather than celestial signs as such) but this got refused at Channel 4.
After all this… I’m interested and to a degree happy that any broadcast from any perspective on the Christmas Star has got through the hoops; though again I say without compromise I have decidedly more information both conclusive and significant than is offered by existing theories that enjoy more promotion. TV however is not the sum of media, there’s also the press to convince.
THE NO MAGI ARCHBISHOP AND HIS NO MAGI CHURCH TIMES
Some Christians like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, have decided the Magi are probably myth. The prelate spoiled some people’s Christmas in ‘07 when his unnecessary scepticism hit the headlines with a privileged ease contrary report on the subject can’t obtain in times when scepticism is trendy. Oriental Magi were a standard if controversial feature of the Roman empire until the emperor Constantine banned them after the Church was established. It’s extremely unlikely the very Jewish Matthew would put such disapproved pagan people into his birth narrative without much reason to believe they were somehow associated with Jesus’ birth. But people believe what they want to believe. An editor of the Church Times, organ of the church Williams oversees, controversially dismissed me a few years ago (when I was less advanced with my researches but had been reviewed by CT for another book so felt it could feature something on the Magian theme) with the words: “We know all there is to know about Jesus, we don’t need to know about the Magi”. But, they do need to know because otherwise they may miss things they need to understand about Jesus today!
THE NO MAGI CLONES AT RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
Following in the Archbishop’s footsteps, to help spoil some Americans’ Christmas for ‘09, one of the writers of Religion News Service put out a feature in America Today highlighting the book, The First Christmas by Marcus Borg and John Crossan of the Jesus Seminar. The authors’ position is basically the birth narratives are just introductory poetic flourishes. I had given my PR notice to the Religion News Service who couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge. Since I am published in religion and a doctor of religious studies and have compelling information it would be hard not to feel censored especially as I then wrote to the editor to check material was received. Again no courtesy of reply.
NO ROOM AT THE INN AT UNHELPFUL, CHRISTIAN TODAY.COM.
I’m not Jonathan Swift, so not wishing to be merely vindictive I won’t list as I could all those outlets and persons to whom PR re my Testament of the Magi findings were sent and who didn’t respond. The silence of some is anyway almost more odd than rude like Time magazine seeing I was several years ago listed as an expert whom they might consult. However….I do rather identify with the Jesus of Revelation wanting to spit lukewarm, indifferent Laodicean Christians from his mouth when I recall Christian Today, described as the biggest British Net purveyor of religious news. I rang from Australia to discover the best way to approach them. Plainly the hard to understand receptionist wasn’t interested in any unique news nor willing even to let me speak to anyone about such. I must send email to an address given me. Receiving no acknowledgement to this and made aware of a temporary email and server problem I rang to certify if anything ever arrived. No, this couldn’t be dealt with. Email the press room - to which I was categorically refused permission to speak. The mails were now working but in view of the communication problems and the singular subject I specifically requested as a Christian courtesy to have acknowledgement even if it was only negative. I’ve never received reply. This isn’t good enough. Religious organizations should improve on the indifference of more secular organizations devoted to more material ends.
ANOTHER CHRISTMAS LET DOWN BY THE AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPER
Some years ago when working at the more traditional, technical version of the Star theory that became my published Signs for a Messiah, the late strange, (some said pedophile) priest, James Murray, then religion editor for The Australian newspaper, put me to considerable trouble and even expense towards a colour supplement feature of my work. It was cancelled for vague reasons at the last minute and I felt Murray wasn’t too honest with me about it. It has left me feeling The Australian might kindly owe me a little space on my theme. I did mention that point and also this week’s broadcast in offering an author's Op-Ed on the Star theme for to the Opinions editor who had nothing more to say than “Thank you I can’t use it”. With or without religion as theme Australia can be shockingly rude and indifferent to its authors and intellectuals. Now if I were a footballer…!
IN PARENTHESIS: ASTROLOGICAL CURIOS OF THIS SUBJECT AT THIS TIME
Astrologers believe in what are called “sensitive degrees” observed to repeat and connect across time. The following might not mean too much to non-astrologers (who can skip it if they wish), but the other day I noticed, as I should have done earlier, that the late Ferrari D’Occhieppo (1907-2007), ultimate source of my and David Hughes'line of inquiry which radically develops from the thesis Jupiter was the Star of Bethlehem, natally has his crucial
Jupiter at 13.30 Leo
(his career/destiny linked Saturn is also conjunct the Bethlehem star)_
Hughes who popularized D’Occhieppo’s views for the English speaking public adding some some views of his own, has his own name asteroid,
DavidHughes at 14.44 Leo (i.e. within Jesus natus - Hughes doesn’t supply his own date of birth).
Rollan McCleary who has cracked the code the scientists missed and worked the despised astrology of the relevant theses natally has,
Pluto at 14.53 Leo
Mars at 15.48 Leo (i.e. on a world point)
All three of us are therefore opposed to,(i.e. can be challenged by), the degree of Chaldea (a name traditionally associated with Magi and Eastern mysteries at
Chaldaea) which is at 14.03 Aquarius in the natus of Jesus
THERE’S NO PROOF OF THE BETHLEHEM STAR WITHOUT A RELEVANT HOROSCOPE
I shall now wrap up my comments before concluding with copies of the ignored and rejected media directed messages. The Magi were astrologers seeking and following signs. Though they may not have cast a horoscope for Jesus, such were cast in the era for prominent people. Astrological signs work across-the-board for events, for groups of people (like nations) and individuals. Therefore any signs betokening the birth of a Messianic king must do so in meaningful, personal terms on a personal horoscope. It would however require a near revolution in consciousness for many Christians to accept this point since they have decided that astrology is a biblically verboten form of divination although the rabbis of the Talmud and the Essenes never saw things that way.
THE DUTY AND CHALLENGE TO EXAMINE THIS EVIDENCE
As I’ve been insisting, the findings I possess are objectively some of the most remarkable in Christian history if true. If untrue – attempt to beat the odds to disprove them! – then they are at least a remarkable statistical anomaly, an interesting curio which in the normal way of things it might be expected would be taken up at this season. To ignore the possibility I could be correct, to dismiss and disregard all evidence is a censorship and unworthy of at so-called Christians and arguably finishes less an insult to myself than towards who and what is represented. This needs to be considered.
COPY OF PRESS RELEASE MESSAGE ON CHRIST DATA (unacknowledged by all press and media religious and secular approached).
MODERN REVELATION OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS: New Christ data exact as a fingerprint.
That Jesus never existed will become harder to sustain. Questions around Jesus like who he descended from, when he died, if he married the Magdalene, what he believed, are resolved in an unprecedented revealing study from a doctor of religious studies issued at the end of this month.
Enlarging upon a respected line in historical and astronomical scholarship, Dr Rollan McCleary knew years ago he had cracked the Magian code and discovered Christ’s true birth data and the dating of the Easter week. But proving it to sceptical laypersons and non-astrologers seemed impossible. Now, especially with ability to apply to remote dates the same kind of detailed, but little used kind of micro-astrology of names, places and concepts that if applied to, say, Prince William’s natus reveals asteroid Kate in his relationship house, a wider, more obvious range of information emerges.
Jesus’ house of origins actually names notable ancestors in his messianic line. The heavens produce a super-conjunction of his names. His disciples are meaningfully placed like Peter conjuncting his brother, Andrew. The patterns are so repeatedly, consistently exact they can only belong to Jesus at whose death one even finds Lucifer opposing Peter in tension to Hahn, i.e. the cock associated with the denial. The data work across time. An eclipse opposite Jesus’ Magdalena preceded the modern burst of publishing on all aspects of the Magdalene story. The patterns are doubly remarkable because the asteroids were named in modern times so apply retroactively and trans-lingually implying time and language are ultimately one. The study employs 430 asteroids and many so-called Arabic Parts like Part of the Father in their unique positions and inter-relations.
Testament of the Magi: Mysteries of the Birth and Life of Christ is a virtual fifth gospel taking readers as never before into the self-understanding of Jesus. The book is being released from November 28th and direct onto Amazon for a reason. Increasingly houses and agents are refusing to consider religion projects so the writer risks waiting through the 36 houses needed for even Roy Williams’ now successful God, Actually to be accepted. A Transworld editor did deem Testament “fascinating and groundbreaking”, but recommended it for another major house which refused it without explanation probably as inconvenient to their promotion of a title at variance with Testament’s evidence. With “no room at the inn” threatening the project it seemed best to release material without further delay. This Christmas it can be known when the real Christmas was, what it meant and much else about Jesus.
Rollan McCleary holds dual Irish and Australian nationalities. He is a doctor of religious studies from Queensland University, Brisbane, and a qualified astrologer. Published in mainly religion his first main publication, The Expansion of God in 1982 on the relations of Christianity and Asian cultures was a critical success. His A Special Illumination: Authority, Inspiration and Heresy in Gay Spirituality (2005) caused some controversy internationally.
COPY OF OP-ED refused by The Australian newspaper Opinions section with just “Thank you I can’t use it”
THE BETHLEHEM STAR IS NOT A MYSTERY:
At the end of the Introduction to my Testament of the Magi I remark that much of the book was written in a state of surprise and perhaps can only be read that way. The same advice might apply for this article. I will try to convey here the confronting claim we can finally know beyond all reasonable doubt when Jesus was born, when he died and much more about him. Those who care to argue must now beat some major statistical odds to do so since nothing more convincing than I show is likely to be produced – ever.
In 1977 astronomer, Ferrari D’Occhieppo’s Der Stern der Weisen opened a scholarly path towards discovery of Jesus’ birth and in 1980 astro-physicist David Hughes' The Star of Bethlehem was published. Mid September 7BC was their general target area. But where was the horoscope? Could and should there be one? Such proof (on which the scientists weren’t keen) wasn’t forthcoming. Ever since 1987I have known that, enlarging on the path opened up, I had cracked a code the scientists missed and found the only possible working data for Jesus, (a pattern which responds to Jesus issues to this day). But popularizing the case from technical data would be hard especially given the hostility of religionists and scientists to anything astrological, a hostility requiring you need to be overwhelmingly obvious and precise even to be heard. Now with recourse to a micro-astrology especially of name, place and concept asteroids made available for remote dates the irrefutable case can be made.
First a few words about asteroids. They work. And perhaps because all time and language are one they even work retroactively and trans-lingually from their modern naming. Australia's Schapelle Corby imprisoned in Bali shows asteroid Bali conjunct Saturn, traditional symbol of sorrow and confinement. Prince William shows asteroid Kate in his relationships house while asteroids Camilla and Diana battle it out in conjunction between two painful planets. Now apply asteroids and Arabic Parts to a correct birth time for Jesus remembering that to establish house divisions and use Arabic Parts like Part of the Father you need time accuracy. The late Gwen Stoney, Australia’s expert in modern techniques measuring fate/death patterns most astrologers avoid, early encouraged my researches once convinced the birth time was extremely correct for the assumed date of Christ’s crucifixion.
I can hardly convey the wealth and intricacy of detail derived from 430 asteroids and 70 Arabic Parts applied to the itself suggestive root planetary pattern; but some things can’t be missed. Jesus’ “house” of family and origins produces names of leading messianic ancestors along with some creed-like flourishes like asteroid Paradise. The chart’s Midheaven (reputation and destiny) produces exact conjunction with Licht (light) and Shabas (Sabbath) in the sign of originality and the masses, Aquarius. It’s suitable for someone uniquely called “Light of the World” and self-called “Lord of the Sabbath” especially as both asteroids form degree exact aspect to Logos (Word) in astrology’s traditional religion and doctrine sign (Sagittarius). The death pattern is as remarkable as for birth, with many, often very theological details but also an unforgettable opposition of Lucifer to Peter in affliction aspect to Hahn, the cock of the famous denial.
At times I’m left with questions. Why are Adam and Eve beside a viper in a pattern of symbolism I won’t describe but which bespeaks the Edenic prophecy? One could explain the primal pair away as figures in Jesus’ mind (which I claim is revealed as never before); yet can I likewise deny Kate Middleton exists when she’s in William’s unions house? Sometimes there are borderline cases I call “astrospeak” where the skies seemingly give muffled echoes of something from the limited available lexicon like (also in Jesus’ origins house), Patria conjunct Betlem – homeplace Bethlehem? Also in an improbable super-conjunction of Jesus’ names Christ is Christa because early asteroid namings were in the feminine – Nelsonia, etc.
Compelling though all this is “No room at the inn” haunts this subject with archetypal force. No PR notice on the theme this season has been taken up - even by the religious press. I imagine reaction was akin to a church newspaper contacted while writing the book: “We know all there is to know about Jesus, we don’t need to know about the Magi”. But missing the Magi you may miss things about Jesus and the future too. The data remains sensitive. An eclipse opposite Jesus’ Magdalene asteroid preceded publication of Susan Haskins' study of the Magdalene which unleashed the torrent of speculation on this individual.
It’s ‘No room at the inn” in publishing too. Despite its sensational nature and my being published in religion my book has been released direct onto Amazon because, with a singular exception at Transworld, I have not been able to interest publishers or agents to look at the project. “It wouldn’t fit our programme” “We don’t take religion or spirituality”. Couldn’t they make an exception? No! Too busy like the wedding invitees in Jesus’ parable? It’s a fact everyday arrangements can finish more important than life and truth themselves!
So, there’s something here of the Christmas story in its raw form. But that same story is also a foundational one for the West which is increasingly dismissing it. However the Bethlehem star and the skies against which it appeared still hold messages to guide us and which it would be unwise to ignore.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
A NEW REVELATION OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS
JUST WHEN FINDING NEW FACTS ABOUT JESUS SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE…
My Testament of the Magi:Mysteries of the Birth and Life of Christ available shortly on Amazon (the end of this month I’m told) is definitely different. It’s different from anything I’ve yet written or that you will have yet read. Not a mere exercise in speculation but in development of already respected research, Testament offers genuine and uniquely new data on Christ and takes the reader closer to Jesus’ psychology and self-understanding than is usual.
I call my data exact as a fingerprint for Jesus, so exact it couldn’t possibly be for anyone else. And simply to draw attention to the surprising nature of the book and the element of fifth gospel attaching to it, on my website and when preparing promotional material I have emphasized my use of a micro-astrology of names, places and concepts and how the names of leading ancestors appear in Jesus’ house of origins while his birth produces a super-conjunction of his names. However….. though such facts are remarkable and statistics-defying, much of the wonder of what I demonstrate (through extensive commentary and 22 diagrams) arguably exists elsewhere. It is something more psychological and theological as one begins to see what Jesus believed and expected and how he would have experienced such as the crucifixion for which the most dramatic and unmistakable patterns emerge….
Data for this event include even Lucifer in opposition to Peter and both asteroids in tension to the cock of the famous denial. But again, this decidedly eerie fact does not belong with the more psychological and theological picture amid which it stands and which would seem as much and more important. I devote a whole chapter to just the data for the crucifixion whose details, diagrammatized, should be more accessible to the average reader than if I had dealt with it only via the details and methods of traditional astrology and the Event Chart.
The first part of the book is (readably, accessibly and differently) astrological in emphasis while the second part, much less astrological, is about three disciples, the Magdalene, John and Judas. They are the figures who seem most to provoke interest and controversy today and whose precise relation to Jesus is under the spotlight and subject to much renewed speculation. Readers of Testament of the Magi may never read the gospels in quite the same light again and they should certainly never again be in doubt about the dating of the beginning and end of Jesus’ life. They may also realize too how the data for Jesus is still working for Christ issues to this day.
TESTAMENT OF THE MAGI, THE PUBLIC, AND PUBLISHING.
Despite being several times regularly published in religion, including with critical success, the book is being offered directly on Amazon. Not uniquely among writers in religion today (but a little more controversially given the exceptional subject matter), I have had to contend with a marked indifference, occasionally hostility, of regular publishing to even looking at the project. One editor at Transworld who exceptionally did see something of it declared it “groundbreaking, fascinating and publishable” but for certain reasons recommended it for another large publisher which promptly lost the ms then found it and refused it without explanation. Overall, publishers and agents are increasingly liable to inform a writer they “don’t take religion or spirituality” (which often means won’t look at anything Christian) or if they do, their list is already filled, or that the theme wouldn’t suit some apparently inviolate “programme” for the year you’re applying. Obviously this can finish a sort of modern “no room at the inn” situation where no effort, dispatch or respect will prevail for the genuinely exceptional or sacred.
Some authors like the now successful Roy Williams suffer through the publishing long haul such as took his God Actually through thirty six houses and many agents before achieving acceptance. In the case of the ideas in Testament, not only have I anyway waited very long, too long to want to wait further – I knew the core the data and the general thesis twenty years ago even if the new information and the micro-astrology of the book is precisely new – but this time round in conscience it has not felt completely right to take begging bowls to the heedless when offering the virtual grail of astrology itself, the final solution to a millennia old mystery. So, some independent action seemed appropriate.
KNOWING THE KAIROS (THE RIGHT/APPOINTED TIME)
Truth is often hidden. Sometimes it even needs to be so as the gospels assure us and it must be conceded there are a few limits to how much should or even can be revealed of the subject matter I’ve been – periodically - engaging with over the years. But it’s in no one’s interest that there should there be a ban or pre-censorship on it and one feels that some people (I include people in the churches and astrology) who might have known better, have contributed to keep things in this area hidden too long from a wider audience on the lamest of pretexts. Not wanting to burn the page I won’t speak of certain astrology writers in America and Britain, but the words of a feature editor for a leading religious newspaper who I suggested might feature what I was doing are rather classic: “We know all there is to know about Jesus, we don’t need to know about the Magi”. One wonders if knowing “everything” means knowing about the kairos – supposedly the gift of true Christian perception!
Whether revelations of Testament will finish known by many or few isn’t my moral and spiritual responsibility though I do believe the time, the kairos, is right to know some of the facts I deal with due to issues that exist and may be expected to emerge around understanding of Jesus.
It’s been very difficult to get to this stage! Living where I presently do in the country and not being an expert in computer and graphics, getting the cover and diagrams done, and going through the whole publishing process without the usual benefits of editing advice and technical assistance, (though I have troubled helpful local friends for some of the latter) has been a terrible marathon. Even if I yet make a few corrections and additions (even now I’ve seen a few more relevant stellar factors along with some dropped commas since I stopped!) it’s still time to go ahead so that the larger picture can be known and even just the fact of having the knowledge is known. Having made the discoveries and regardless of their reception I feel relief finally to have done what’s necessary and released the information even if it’s not with the fanfare of big business promotion but somewhat more of the quiet, scarcely announced arrival of the Magi themselves.
See excerpts on my website of Testament of the Magi: Mysteries of the Birth and Life of Christ, and more extensively shortly at fReado
My Testament of the Magi:Mysteries of the Birth and Life of Christ available shortly on Amazon (the end of this month I’m told) is definitely different. It’s different from anything I’ve yet written or that you will have yet read. Not a mere exercise in speculation but in development of already respected research, Testament offers genuine and uniquely new data on Christ and takes the reader closer to Jesus’ psychology and self-understanding than is usual.
I call my data exact as a fingerprint for Jesus, so exact it couldn’t possibly be for anyone else. And simply to draw attention to the surprising nature of the book and the element of fifth gospel attaching to it, on my website and when preparing promotional material I have emphasized my use of a micro-astrology of names, places and concepts and how the names of leading ancestors appear in Jesus’ house of origins while his birth produces a super-conjunction of his names. However….. though such facts are remarkable and statistics-defying, much of the wonder of what I demonstrate (through extensive commentary and 22 diagrams) arguably exists elsewhere. It is something more psychological and theological as one begins to see what Jesus believed and expected and how he would have experienced such as the crucifixion for which the most dramatic and unmistakable patterns emerge….
Data for this event include even Lucifer in opposition to Peter and both asteroids in tension to the cock of the famous denial. But again, this decidedly eerie fact does not belong with the more psychological and theological picture amid which it stands and which would seem as much and more important. I devote a whole chapter to just the data for the crucifixion whose details, diagrammatized, should be more accessible to the average reader than if I had dealt with it only via the details and methods of traditional astrology and the Event Chart.
The first part of the book is (readably, accessibly and differently) astrological in emphasis while the second part, much less astrological, is about three disciples, the Magdalene, John and Judas. They are the figures who seem most to provoke interest and controversy today and whose precise relation to Jesus is under the spotlight and subject to much renewed speculation. Readers of Testament of the Magi may never read the gospels in quite the same light again and they should certainly never again be in doubt about the dating of the beginning and end of Jesus’ life. They may also realize too how the data for Jesus is still working for Christ issues to this day.
TESTAMENT OF THE MAGI, THE PUBLIC, AND PUBLISHING.
Despite being several times regularly published in religion, including with critical success, the book is being offered directly on Amazon. Not uniquely among writers in religion today (but a little more controversially given the exceptional subject matter), I have had to contend with a marked indifference, occasionally hostility, of regular publishing to even looking at the project. One editor at Transworld who exceptionally did see something of it declared it “groundbreaking, fascinating and publishable” but for certain reasons recommended it for another large publisher which promptly lost the ms then found it and refused it without explanation. Overall, publishers and agents are increasingly liable to inform a writer they “don’t take religion or spirituality” (which often means won’t look at anything Christian) or if they do, their list is already filled, or that the theme wouldn’t suit some apparently inviolate “programme” for the year you’re applying. Obviously this can finish a sort of modern “no room at the inn” situation where no effort, dispatch or respect will prevail for the genuinely exceptional or sacred.
Some authors like the now successful Roy Williams suffer through the publishing long haul such as took his God Actually through thirty six houses and many agents before achieving acceptance. In the case of the ideas in Testament, not only have I anyway waited very long, too long to want to wait further – I knew the core the data and the general thesis twenty years ago even if the new information and the micro-astrology of the book is precisely new – but this time round in conscience it has not felt completely right to take begging bowls to the heedless when offering the virtual grail of astrology itself, the final solution to a millennia old mystery. So, some independent action seemed appropriate.
KNOWING THE KAIROS (THE RIGHT/APPOINTED TIME)
Truth is often hidden. Sometimes it even needs to be so as the gospels assure us and it must be conceded there are a few limits to how much should or even can be revealed of the subject matter I’ve been – periodically - engaging with over the years. But it’s in no one’s interest that there should there be a ban or pre-censorship on it and one feels that some people (I include people in the churches and astrology) who might have known better, have contributed to keep things in this area hidden too long from a wider audience on the lamest of pretexts. Not wanting to burn the page I won’t speak of certain astrology writers in America and Britain, but the words of a feature editor for a leading religious newspaper who I suggested might feature what I was doing are rather classic: “We know all there is to know about Jesus, we don’t need to know about the Magi”. One wonders if knowing “everything” means knowing about the kairos – supposedly the gift of true Christian perception!
Whether revelations of Testament will finish known by many or few isn’t my moral and spiritual responsibility though I do believe the time, the kairos, is right to know some of the facts I deal with due to issues that exist and may be expected to emerge around understanding of Jesus.
It’s been very difficult to get to this stage! Living where I presently do in the country and not being an expert in computer and graphics, getting the cover and diagrams done, and going through the whole publishing process without the usual benefits of editing advice and technical assistance, (though I have troubled helpful local friends for some of the latter) has been a terrible marathon. Even if I yet make a few corrections and additions (even now I’ve seen a few more relevant stellar factors along with some dropped commas since I stopped!) it’s still time to go ahead so that the larger picture can be known and even just the fact of having the knowledge is known. Having made the discoveries and regardless of their reception I feel relief finally to have done what’s necessary and released the information even if it’s not with the fanfare of big business promotion but somewhat more of the quiet, scarcely announced arrival of the Magi themselves.
See excerpts on my website of Testament of the Magi: Mysteries of the Birth and Life of Christ, and more extensively shortly at fReado
Monday, October 26, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
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
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
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