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
…[I]f the theory of consciousness presented in this paper is correct, then all the contents of consciousness — including our visual sensations — lie in a space, or brane, of their own outside the physical universe. Normal perception, in this theory, is mediated by the causal chain object–photon–retina–brain–(cross to a new brane)–visual field. Hallucinations involve…
Read More…[M]atter is never entirely passive… rather… material things actively “solicit our attention” or “call our focus,” coaxing the perceiving body into an ongoing participation with those things. In the absence of intervening technologies, sensory experience is inherently animistic, disclosing a material field that is animate and self-organizing from the get-go. Drawing upon contemporary cognitive and natural…
Read MoreMemory is a relationship… across time between past experiences and present ones. The brain is… like a television receiver [which] doesn’t store all the images and programs you watch on it; it tunes in to them invisibly… The whole of the past is potentially present everywhere, and we access it on the basis of similarity……
Read MoreTo be more specific, we are now coming to understand the innate tendency of energy systems to evolve into structures that capture energy and use it to organize even more complex, flexible, and tenacious structures… It turns out that systems which exist far from equilibrium are the natural product of the self-organizing tendencies of energy…
Read MoreWhen you’re dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way… that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and…
Read MoreOne problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor. He thought he was a fact. And when he said, I am God, a voice was heard to say, You are mistaken, Samael. Samael means blind god: blind to the infinite Light…
Read MoreSelf-organization is more likely to be achieved in undirected states, such as meditation, fantasy, or reverie, that border on waking. Dreaming serves to loosen associations lest they become obsessively tight. Francis Crick theorized that we dream in order to forget. Dreaming may be our most creative conscious state, one in which the chaotic, spontaneous recombination…
Read MoreLife’s order is characterized by… the spontaneous development of self-organized order among ensembles that can neither be predicted nor explained by examining component parts in isolation. Spontaneity and self-organization mean that no external agent is sculpting the organism: it sculpts itself. ((http://jap.physiology.org/content/104/6/1844))
Read MoreThe atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically…
Read MoreRecent science has also challenged the belief that physical matter is completely inanimate, unresponsive, and substantive. In their explorations of wave functions, scientists have found physical reality to be both ” idea-like” and “matter-like.” The division between mind and matter, which corroborated the Christian division between heaven and earth, is not true scientifically. The physical…
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?