Call Me Ishmael

Recently I've taken to using art as a tool for the manifestation of the collective unconscious in a Jungian sense, and so as Moby Dick has been prodding me for over a year now since Hong Kong, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom, I set up an RSS feed and curated a mood stream of every new piece of original art being shared with the world on the topic, and supplemented that with bits of data plumbing Jedi Knightery, to see if I can compile an emerging narrative. 

The learning so far is unsettling and an anomaly in expressionistic terms when looking back at history. It seems one of the key themes is not just the death of Captain Ahab and crew, but the death of Whales. Spooky whales levitating above the sea as if drawn in a state of mourning; lamenting the transit to a marine afterlife.

And then I awoke up from a nap just now, and for the umpteenth time was reminded of the book by The Guardian who week in and week out out are echoing the questionably tinnitus driven peals, ringing in my head and then out of nowhere, I realised the part of Moby Dick I had been so eager to share when reading this unusually off-topic novel for me that I find hard to follow. I overcame the age and relative formality of its language through the time tested clamour of Bangkok Go-Go bars. I find the neon, noise and nubility more soothing than when left a difficult text, alone in the distracting silence of home.

In any case, I meant to write how extraordinary it was learning of the whaling business in its heyday with respect to being the precursor for the entire edifice of imminent planetary industrialisation. That is to say, built upon the global scale of a wind powered floating business, in singular pursuit of yet another of natures exclusive and historically irreplaceable organic yields. If asked it is for this reason I argue leaving the oil in the ground instead of fuelling jet engines in the air for an economy levitating on the hologram of endless financial growth. What if say quantum entangled oil is the spice melange of a future interstellar life? To me, the what-ifs are a full nelson on the what-the-fucks line of reason.

I'll leave you with Melville's passage that left a slow burning mark upon me with a lesson on gateway drugs of the monkeys (homo consumericus) obsession with whale oil that was only displaced  when the black stuff leaking from the ground, looked like it had something going for it. 

Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?

Moby Dick - Chapter 24 -The Advocate

Moby Dick

Lurking around Youtube on the subject of Moby Dick last night/this morning I came across Cyrus Patel - Professor of English Literature at NYU. Each of these lectures on Moby Dick has around 5000 views (Jan 2011) which is rock star status for a lecturer on a subject that ostensibly doesn't pay immediate bills. 

He's amazing. 

I'm working my way through them but his lectures are a tour de force in video learning. Any more self-learning of this calibre and I'm flat out booked up on attention bandwidth for the rest of my life (or cloning is on the table). I've written a post about the process I'm going through with video learning that is still lurking in draft but this is brain crack stuff so I need to get it out there before I pop.

Was Jesus A Flavian Dynasty Propaganda Invention?

I've posted interviews with Joe Atwill before over here. He asks a great question. In an area where Qumran, Jericho and Jerusalem are a stone's throw from each other in 'shoebox sized' Judea how did the Christian story emerge with two conflicting narratives? One from the Dead Sea Scrolls talks about killing the gentiles and the other talks about turning the other cheek and rendering unto Caesar that which is his.

They also cover Aramaic scholar John Allegro's mushroom and the cross which I've posted about previously, and I recommend reading my Was Jesus An Arsehole Zadokite? and this Dead Sea Scrolls post.

There are so many conflicting accounts of Jesus that I just a pick a couple of lines here and there like, love thy neighbour, and hope they're the right ones to keep and are not elite manipulation of the kindness of humans. Religion has after all been their most powerful tool to get us killing each other. Their latest religious cult is called Government and a lot of people are hooked on it.

Here's the details from Jan Irving's post:

This episode is an interview with Joe Atwill, author of Caesar’s Messiah, part 2, titled “On Caesar’s Messiah, John Allegro, and mind control” and is being released on Monday, August 06, 2012. My interview with Joe was recorded on June 09, 2012.

This is our first video episode, so if you’re getting this in audio only, please go to the Gnostic Media website if you’d like to see the video version.

We had Joe on back on April 1, and today he’s back.

Joseph Atwill spent his youth in Japan where he attended the only English-speaking school in the country, St. Mary’s Military Academy. The school was run by Jesuits so removed from the events of the modern world that they did not even consider shutting it down during World War II, and taught a curriculum that had not changed since the eighteenth century. Atwill describes that, “The majority of every one of my school days was spent studying Greek, Latin and the Bible, which for some reason I found fascinating.”

After studying computer science in college, Atwill began working with one of the most renowned programmers in the world, David Ferguson. David had been granted the first two patents ever issued in computer software. Over the next twenty years, between 1975 and 1995, David Ferguson and Atwill started a series of companies including Ferguson Tool Company and ASNA. “After selling my interests in our companies to investors in 1995, I returned to my earlier interest; the origins of Christianity,” Atwill says of this time period.

Atwill continues, “Though I had drifted away from the Catholic faith, my study of Christianity never stopped. Over the course of my life I had read perhaps six or seven hundred books relating to the historical Jesus and early Christianity, but none of them left me feeling like I really knew anything about how the religion began or its founder.” Atwill contends that the more he studied Christian origins the more he saw the question of how the religion began as an open one. Atwill held this position in spite of the fact that in the popular mind, and in the minds of most scholars, Christianity began as a movement of lower class followers of a radical Jewish teacher in the 1st century CE.

Says Atwill, “I did not share in this certainty.” What contributed most to his skepticism was that at the exact time the followers of Jesus were purportedly organizing themselves into a religion that urged its members to “turn the other cheek” and to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, another Judean sect was waging a religious war against the Romans and seeking a Messiah who would lead them militarily. Atwill continues, “It seemed implausible to me that two diametrically opposite forms of messianic Judaism would have emerged from Judea at the same time. So the Dead Sea Scrolls became of such interest to me that I began what turned into a decade-long study of them.” Like others, Atwill was hoping to learn something of Christian origins in the 2,000 year old documents found at Qumran. To assist in his understanding of them, Atwill began studying the history of the era.

It was then that Joseph Atwill came across the key that led to his discoveries. “While reading Josephus’ War of the Jews, and his account of Titus’ destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE,” Atwill recounts, “I noticed some curious parallels. At first I could make no sense of the parallels between Titus’ campaign and Jesus’ ministry. So I tried to look at the Gospels with fresh eyes, as if I had never seen them before, giving up any preconceived notions about what they meant.” This perspective resulted in the discoveries Atwill presents in Caesar’s Messiah and his soon-to-be-published book, The Single Strand. A Roman imperial family, the Flavians, had created Christianity, and, even more incredibly, they had placed a literary satire within the Gospels and War of the Jews to inform posterity of this fact.

Understanding the symbolic framework for the Gospels opened up the hidden history of Western Civilization to Joseph Atwill. That framework enabled him to recognize the typology that underlies authors such as Marlowe and Shakespeare and see the incredible story their typology tells us, and is the basis for The Single Strand.

Joseph Atwill concludes, “I am an avid chess player and proud to state that I have more than 100 victories over Grandmasters and International Masters. I hold an ICC Masters rating of 2358.” It is this form of strategic thinking that enabled Atwill to uncover the strategy behind the Romans’ invention of the Gospels.

Books by Joseph Atwill include Caesar’s Messiah, Ulysses Press 2006, the best selling work of religious history in the US in 2007, and its German translation Das Messias Ratsel, Ulstein 2008, achieving #1 Best Seller status. Atwill’s upcoming book, The Single Strand is also slated to be published by Ulstein. The German Magazine Focus published a cover article of Atwill’s work: Issue #52 December 25, 2008.