Oscar Wilde, Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and his Gnostic Aide de Kampf, Carpocrates. The Gospel of Mark - both Canonical and `Secret.' Uranians with their lispy Hatred of everything female this side of Salomé. Jesus with a Yoot who is naked under his White Linen. Apokatastasis and the Harrowing of Hell. Holy Michael the Archangel. Who is like God? The Dreamy Bishop of Avranches with Michael's Thumbprint burned into his skull. Seth, the 3rd Son of Adam, in quest for the Oil of Mercy. And Who killed Anne Frank? Max Weber. Dead Fairies. Oriental Jones. Hans Mullikin crawling up the Natchez Trace. Nigel in Paris with Ibeca directing. Nicolas Poussin and the Dance to the Music of Time. The Angel of Mons & the Entzauberung der Welt. Kit Carson. Gaius Cassius. Hemingway & Pontius Pilate. Emile Durkheim with a hole in his heart called Anomie. The Spear of Destiny. Johan Huzinga and the Broken Spell. The passing of the Parisian Pissoir. Amy's Orgasm and that 3 Titted Bitch with great Qualia. Mr. Natural. The wilting of the Magic Garden. Alain de la Roche and Rosary Numbers. Sphragis. Apocalypse. Traumatic Insemination. Otto 1 & the 1st rule of Relics. Hans Marie Widerhaken Ritter von Vollendete. Marie Laveau and her Voodoo Kin. Eromenos & Erastes. Neaniskos and Fernand Braudel with his Structures de la longue durée. Bricolage. Joe Chouinard. Rene "Bobby" Cavelier de la Salle, his Griffin and its Skinning Pole. Sinomé - the sensuous shill. Walter Pater. Lazy, lewd Corinthian girls. The Venerable Bede and the #30. Medieval Numbers & Maps of Jerusalem. Judensau & constipated Luther and his Eternal Jew. Passion Plays. Mystery Plays. Der Stürmer/Streicher: die Juden sind unser Unglück. Marazion. The Sister of the Youth. Cornwall. Maeterlinck. Rent Boys 4 Hire.
The Dance of the 7 Veils. St. Michael's Mount. Descensus. Mar Saba. Mount Sutra, Mount Baldy, Mount Parry, Mount Elbert. Mont St Michel. The hidden grave of Ezra Pound. The Slut Granddaughters down to their last Veils. Where was I?
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All in all the Mar Saba letter purported to be from Clement of Alexandria concerning the Secret Gospel of Mark tells a 20th Century Tale, not an Ancient one. It misreads Christian Liturgy and badly bungles an attempt to present a picture of Hellenistic Homosexuality. It's a letter aimed at "altering our view of the early Christian landscape" by reimaging Christ as a Gay Priest of a Secret Mystery Cult with Magical Homosexuality as its Secret.
Morton Smith's bogey begins to unravel around this core: His vision of an Original Homo-Christianity exhibits "the 4 characteristics that have been identified as typifying the `gay' sexuality that is common in the Industrial world today." Which are: 1. The relationship is Egalitarian - the partners are not locked into the old Greek trope of Pursuer and Pursued with the Older wooing the Younger. Smith's Gospel uses this formula, negating its legitimacy as an ancient Greek practice. 2. All Heterosexual Sex is excluded - like when Jesus refuses to meet with the Yoot's Mother and Salome. Most Ancient Greek Homos were Married men with families. 3. There is an Us vs. Them Mentalité. Jesus, the Neaniskos, & the Carpocratians lined up against Clement, Salome, and Theodore to whom the Mar Saba letter was written. 4. Which leads to "Separate Institutions," and separate Secret Cultures: Carpocratians, Catholics, Uranians. As Jeffery says: "Clement's excoriation of Carpocratian practices, too, echoes the preaching of not a few modern pastors, whose idealistic vocabulary and feigned compassion belie their angry intolerance, even hate." All of this, Jeffrey claims, is just too Post Modern 20th Century and misses wildly the actual Mentalité of Alexandria in the 2nd Century AD. Morton Smith's Clement is Morton Smith's Foil. His Shill. His Inside-Man in the Bogey. Smith is simultaneously "savagely ridiculing" Clement while using him as a Marionette - which is the `mot juste' because it's a description of the Puppet which looked - to the medieval mind - like a shrouded Virgin Mary. How cool is that. We awarded Ibeca the Blue Celtic Sword Cross Sigil which were purchased by Skippy in Marazion and given to the 6 Principles in the St. Michael Spike. Skippy, Slag, Captain, IwoJima, Bill Allen, and Ibeca. For some reason, unexplained, Ibeca is wearing the Sigil Couchant rather than Rampant. A distress signal? But wait! Look at her shoes! She refuses to wear Laces. Like Morton Smith, Ibeca has rejected the easy signature of a Creed Outworn and Inverts it for her own Purposes. This goddamned Spike is filled with Hiding, Inversion, sudden Revelation.
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Morton Smith's Secret Gospel of Mark has been called a "political manifesto, uproarious send-up, a bizarre perversion, a `nice ironic gay joke,' and `the most outrageously successful `inside job' ever perpetrated in the modern field of early Christian studies.'" Morton Smith, à proposito, was an English Major at Harvard University, before he became a failed priest, and before he became a failed Academic who had been denied tenure in 1955 and needed to prove that he was smarter than everyone else - all those gloating Straights who were keeping the Uranians down. He was Motivated to make a big Splash.
"We historians," writes Peter Jeffery in his book: The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery," do not judge texts by whether we personally approve of their ethical character; we have to assign them to the historical context they fit best. This text exhibits many startling and confusing features, but the interpretation that accounts for all of them compels us to conclude that the Mar Saba oddity is not a writing of the early Christian period. Nor did its 2 unknown expansions of the gospel of Mark ever exist except in the mind of the modern author. Historians of the future, then, will see this latter-day pseudo-Clement as a fascinating artifact of a unique period of historical change: a last gasp of the academic subculture of Uranian Venus, yet somehow also a harbinger of the new, more aggressively self-affirming sexualities that would soon bring humanities departments everywhere back from the dead. Written `at the dawn of the Sexual Revolution,' it anticipates numerous other writings of the later 20th Century that depict heterosexual Christian moralists as liars and violent hypocrites but homosexuals as innocent, unjustly punished for the sole offence of loving honestly, as archetypally represented by the `Martyrdom' of Oscar Wilde.'" That's Sid, our Guidon Bearer for our Procession. She's sitting on a Stump which has been placed on an Altar Stone which has been Set on Slag's deck. She contemplates a Seed Stone which has been set inside an Athanor like a Jewel. Or maybe not. Maybe she's thinking about the Disenchantment of the World, the Death of Magic, and the Cold Icy Grasp of Quanta on the Mystery which can no longer slip away. Could be.
Still it was Brilliant - and that's what Barber Perfect had been pushing Skippy to discover. Smith's Clement was "more like Clement than Clement ever was." His Mark was "too Marcan to be Mark." He knew how to Salt. He planted his Letter from Clement in a Library which was known for its Clement Letters. He knew enough to do it all in an 18th Century Greek Script and to keep away from trying to forge it on ancient Papyrus. He was an expert on such Scripts.
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Better. Deeper. He knew how to create the Right kind of Text. One which would Rope in the Etics & the Scholars from a wide variety of Academic Disciplines. All those Hungry Bastards with a Horse in the Race - with a book to write, maybe. Or a Paper. Here was a Major Church Father with a Lost Original Gospel. One which could explode the Christian Mythos. It had Gnostic Sects, Gnostic Sex, & Gnostic Doctrines on Secret Gnosis among the Cognoscenti of the Kiki Hierarchy. It had Jesus - Naked with a Yoot - in some kind of Awful and Wonderful 7th Night Initiation into the Mysteries of the Kingdom of God! Oliver Stone could get a Blockbuster out of all that. Histories would have to be rewritten. Gods would have to be reimagined. Jesus Christ, the fucking thing was Bold! Balls Out Bold! Then he wrote his first book on the Mar Saba Letter and had it published by Harvard University Press. Instant Cred. Instant Auctoritas. Sphragis. There were 10 miles of Erudite Footnotes and "mountains of minutiae" - the stuff which makes Old Scholars Stiff one more time. Academic Viagra. In the book he quoted all kinds of Etics - his Brothers in Scholarship - to whom he had written, soliciting their expertise on this or that connected with the Mar Saba document. He got men to write about things which they should have been doubting and investigating and thereby engendering a "weighty atmosphere of seriousness tantamount to credibility." Then he wrote another book on the Secret Gospel aimed at the Popular Audience - so he had both of them where he wanted them: Scholars and the Public - talking seriously about his Bogey. The two books and the slew of Articles which the books occasioned kept the Topic Page One ... ka-chink! And finally: "the author had the literary imagination to build on some adventurous interpretations, turning one Salome into another, knowing that her performance at the climax of the original play would, like a 7th Veil, hide within it another climactic performance." Hiding & Covering. Uncovering & Revealing. Keep the dance going, there's only one more Veil and then we get to see it. It. Fucking IT.
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Chesterton called Oscar Wilde's Sin "nameless and secret." It's code in the 19th Century for the "Crime of Sodomy," which - when it was referred to at all - was described in Euphemistic Latin as: "peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum." The Horrible Sin which among Christians is Not to be Named. The Gnosis that Homosexuality was the "impurity" that must not be named goes back to a Medieval exegesis which identified the Eponymous "Wrath of God," with the destruction of Sodom. But there was no such Gnosis during the time of Clement of Alexandria - that Mentalité is both Medieval, and Modern. Yet Smith tries to present his Clement from within this gnosis.
Smith puts that modern, medieval bromide "things not to be uttered" - word for word - in the mouth of his Clement who is explaining why they must Lie about what the Secret Gospel says: "the things not to be uttered, . . . the hierophantic teaching of the Lord." Things, PseudoClement says, which Mark did not write down because of their Supreme Secrecy in the accursed Carpocratian Christianity - but things "which provide the interpretation for everything else in the Secret Gospel and the strange letter that contains it." Then Jeffery pops the kind of Evidence which Skippy loves: "The greek word that Smith rendered as `things not to be uttered' [aporrheta - aporrheta], a term from ancient mystery religion that the historical Clement did use, can also refer to words that should not be spoken because they constitute `obscene, silly, and vulgar talk.' Smith could have translated that Mark `did not divulge the ineffable secrets,' or 'forbidden things.' By Englishing it as `things not to be uttered,' Smith was accessing a long-standing trope in English Literature, marking the unspeakable as interpretive key to the unheard of. Indeed he was referencing a particular constellation of texts that spell out the core story in the hagiography of Oscar Wilde." Lord Douglas, himself - the Eramenos to Wilde's Erastes - the translator of Wilde's Salomé - the cause of his destruction - Lord Douglas had written in his best known poem: Two Loves - that 2 Loves are represented by 2 Young Men who argue about what to call each other, until one of the Yoots "resigns himself to being `the love that dare not speak its name.'" It looks very much like we have found Morton Smith's `donné'
In Quality Lit. terms, the donné is what you have as a `given.' It's the Germ the author or artist uses to begin a Work. It could be an Idea - or it could be an Image. Take the Dragon, for instance - what does that bring to Mind? Think Qualia, not Quanta. Trust your `Intuitions.' That's a fancy bunch of Latin which means "to look at what's in front of you." Or words to that effect. Intuition is what you already Know. Old Timey thinkers called it Gnosis and it's supposed to be some kind of residual knowledge from the Past. Some kind of `donné' - given by god. Or the Old Dragon.
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