Jesus in Hell
A long-standing Christian tradition holds that Jesus spent the three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection rescuing Old Testament prophets and holy men who had been accidentally damned to Hell, the idea being that since pre-Christians monotheists like Noah and Abraham had been deprived of Jesus’ saving grace in life, they required an extra trip in death.
Jesus’ redemptive journey into the dark world of the dead recalls the tales of psychopompic warriors found in most ancient Meditteranean mystery religions; long before Christianity even existed, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all told similar stories of heroic god-men who descended to the underworld on supernatural rescue missions.
This paradigm can also be found in the shamanic beliefs and practices of indigenous tribal cultures the world over, even today.
SAVED SINNERS
In a contrary revision of this same, basic story, the gnostic teacher Marcion presents a Jesus who releases the rebels and outcasts of the Old Testament from Hell while abandoning the righteous to eternal damnation:
“Cain and his kin, the sodomites, the Egyptians, and those like them, and in general all heathens who have walked in every aspect of evil, were saved by the Lord when He descended into Hades, and hastened to Him, and were taken into His kingdom.
But Abel, Enoch, Noah, and the rest of the righteous, along with all the prophets and those who pleased God, did not participate in salvation… for since they knew that their God was always testing and tempting them… they suspected that He was also testing them at that time, and did not hasten to Jesus nor believe His proclomation; and therefore their souls remained in Hades…” [1]
THE DEVIL, BY GOD
In the book Sacred Drift, his study of Islamic heresy, researcher Peter Lamborn Wilson uncovers a very similar story about Satan (or “Iblis,” as the arch-fiend is known in the Muslim world).
According to a legend recounted by Ibin Arabi, Iblis fell from the heavens when God commanded the angels to bow to Adam.
Iblis – convinced that his loyalty was being tested – refused.
In Arabi’s view, the Devil is thus revealed as a model for the perfect lover of God – a being so devoted that he would rather suffer the torments of Hell than acknowledge another.
FOOTNOTES
1. St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies: Marcion, from Willis Barnstone’s The Other Bible, 645, 1984
2. Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift, pp.94-98, City Lights, 1993
2 Comments
Leave a Comment
First, let us assume… that a series of cataclysms… did occur, that mankind was exposed to these terrible events and that some of them lived to deal with the consequences, particularly the emotional consequences. Second, let us assume that after a time memories of the experience, as well as the intense feelings stirred up by…
Read MoreThe Aquatic Ape Theory states that approximately 6-7 million years ago, our ape ancestors were trapped in a semi-aquatic environment. This forced them to search for food in the water and become very comfortable in the water; over time altering their bodies to be more effective in the water. The theory says that a founder…
Read MoreThe idea is that the universe evolved in a way which is very analogous to natural selection in a population, say, of bacteria. To do this the universe needs to reproduce itself, and I took over an older idea by John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt, who were pioneers of quantum gravity. Their idea was that…
Read MoreOur ego – in this context, the neurotic mind that grasps onto a solid sense of self-identity for support – is extremely powerful and will fight against any view that threatens its security. It is deeply disturbed by the suggestion that the I, like everything else, is something merely designated by conceptual thought. Therefore we…
Read MoreParanoia creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle in which suspicion breeds suspicion, threat breeds counterthreat… Paranoids begin with imagined enemies and end up with real ones… In paranoia-a-deux hostility becomes synergistic, enemies become hypnotized by each other and become locked in a prison of mirrors. Human consciousness, it seems, is able to create or…
Read MoreMuch like characters on a television show would not know that their seemingly 3-D world exists only on a 2-D screen, we could be clueless that our 3-D space is just an illusion. The information about everything in our universe could actually be encoded in tiny packets in two dimensions. ((Fermilab. Press Release, August 26,…
Read More…the Creation was in fact an ‘information collapse’ – a ‘colossal increase in entropy’ as Davies puts it; indeed, in Gnostic and subsequent Alchemical versions of the fall it is God Himself who falls, and is thereafter imprisoned unconscious in the chains of matter. Thus it was that the alchemists saw it as their task…
Read More…the whole idea really is that space-time, the four-dimensional system of Einstein, is really just a subspace of this much higher dimensional space. And so the three-dimensional space that is the space of our ordinary experience is very much an illusion. It reminds me very much of Plato’s idea of the shadow world inside the…
Read More“Plato likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind…
Read MoreWe are not… biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism. ((New Maps of Hyperspace: Terrence McKenna. http://www.jacobsm.com/deoxy/deoxy.org/t_ondeath.htm))
Read More
Here’s a few words we should look into the etymology of…
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance is a dictionary of the Bible – it is needed because the Bible is a coded book that was not meant to be taken literally.
The word God is an inferior word. It is word 430 and is: applied by way of deference to magistrates. It also means Judge.
The word Jehovah is word 3068 and means: the Jewish national name of God. It is made up of Yah (word 3050) + Hovah (hav’vah) (word 1942, 1943, 1961, 1962).
Yah means: I am.
Hova means: ruin, calamity, iniquity, mischief, mischievous (thing), naughtiness, naughty, noisome, perverse thing, substance, very wickedness, naughty penis, eagerly coveting, rushing, falling, desire.
The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary (de)notes the word deism as: [f. L deus god + -ISM].
Deus = God.
The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary (de)notes the word deuce as: [f. OF deus f. L duo two].
The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary has Entry Level Meaning of the word deuce as: the Devil; misfortune, mischief.
Deuce means damned and confounded. In the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary the word deuced has the entry: = DAMNED.
The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary (de)notes the word demon as: [ME f. med. L, f. L f. Gk daimon deity].
Demon = deity.
The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary has Entry Level Meaning of the word demon as: 1. Evil spirit or devil; malignant supernatural being; cruel, malignant, destructive, forceful or fierce, person.
The word Zeus is derived from Deus.
Deus is Zeus who is the Deity and means devil.
But…the letter “J” was invented in 1565AD by Francis Bacon and used to replace the letters ‘I’ and ‘h’ (as in Jew and Jesus – there was no person running around 2,000 years ago with a name pronounced Jesus). It is the most recent letter of the alphabet. Jesus came out of Lesus/lesus which came out of Zeus. In nearly all non-English speaking countries, it is pronounced “Hey-Zeus” or “Yah-Zeus”.
The word Jesus is a compound word Je (Yah) = I am + sus (Zeus) = The Devil.
Marc that’s a heavy dose of conflation. You get that right? This is a joke, yes?