-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder Craig Lockwood�1993 CompCare Publishers 3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100 Minneapolis, MN 55441 612.559.4800/800.328.3330 ISBN 0-89638-363-6 255+pps � out-of-print/one edition. ----- A very interesting and excellent book. Om K --[12]-- Chapter 12 Rome And The Early Christians "Alas! Constantine! "What evil you bore into the world! / Not by your conversion, but by that dowry / Which the first rich father took from you! " -Dante Alighieri Civic cults, Emperor-worship cults, Phrygian cults of Cybele, Mithras cults, Dionysian cults, Greek mystery cults, cults of Isis/Diana, Serapis/Jupiter, as well as many other long-forgotten sacrificial cults abounded in Rome at the time of Christ's death, and for the next three hundred years.[1] Many of these belief systems were Romanized imports from the earlier Mycean, Phoenician, and Etruscan cultures. Others were the legacy of slaves and mercenaries, brought in from the far reaches of the Empire. Most beliefs, given time and the generally tolerant Roman attitude toward non-native religions, were eventually accepted or assimilated.[2] Among Rome's slave, servant, and artisan classes, however, was a cult of apostate Palestinian Jews, who worshipped an obscure, deceased rabbi, and preached an apocalyptic doctrine that predicted the imminent end of the world. The Christiani, followers of Jesus, were considered obdurate, uneducated rustics, social rejects, and outcasts who had been expelled from Palestine and Judea. Early Christianity was as much a political-social movement of the lowest economic classes as it was a religious cult. The Rome of Augustus, into which the early Christians arrived, was history's first example of a large, complex, ethnically and culturally diverse society. But it was also a stratified society where wealth purchased privilege. Urban Rome had a population of about one million. A significant proportion of this populace were impoverished, deemed unemployable, and entertained by "bread and games"welfare and free public entertainment.[3] Considered people without hope, their lives were brief and brutal. Early Christianity, with its bias against the rich and guiding ideology of poverty, identified with and favored poor people notes Stephen Benko in Pagan Rome and the Early Christians. Christian doctrine offered the hope of redemption and an afterlife to balance the pain-filled existence of earthly life. Stressed were charity and compliance�which, until Christians began running afoul of demands for the official worship of Roman gods, served the Roman social order well. Benko reports that Roman officialdom considered Christianity a sect of Judaism. Since Jews had been tolerated, Christians were also tolerated�at first. Then, under Trajan's rule in 115 A.D., the Jews again rebelled. While Palestine for once was quiet, rebellion spread to Egypt and Cyprus in 116 A.D. Trajan's armies killed approximately one million Jews in their efforts to quash the rebellion. Since early Christian culture was identified with Jewish culture, Christians were expected to behave as the Jews did, and participate in official Roman religious observance. Christians balked, an action that immediately established them as fanatics. Against All Odds Replacing Trajan in 117 A.D., Hadrian stabilized the empire. An initiate into the Greek mystery cults, writes Benko, he was also exposed to Christianity. But Hadrian, a practical politician, wasn't inclined to change the rules. By Nero's earlier legal decree, Christians who did not acknowledge Roman religious authority by public worship were considered traitors and, if denounced, could be executed. Christians were not short on conviction, however, and they knew how to survive. Beneath Rome, in the catacombs reserved for the dead, amid gruesome human remains, Christians met and worshipped. These were fitting venues for people who believed the end was near. Fourth-century Rome was beleaguered, a Rome under attack by barbarian tribes, a Rome doomed to self-destruct from a moribund social system. Christians, in time, won converts among the aristocracy, including the Emperor Constantine's mother. When Constantine had a religious vision of the cross and won a battle in October 312, temporarily saving Rome, Christian stock went up. Constantine decided he would convert to Christianity�that afternoon. Miltiades, the dark-skinned African Christian Pope, was summoned before the Pagan Germanic warrior king, who stood with his victorious troops in a narrow alleyway outside the humble Christian's tiny living quarters.[4] Stained with sweat, blood, and dust from battle, Constantine, in his clipped court-Latin, decreed an end to Christian persecution. Next he demanded the three nails that had pinned Jesus to the cross be given to him. Last, he confessed his sins. Silvester, Miltiades' head priest, translated the little Pope's almost indecipherable gutter Latin for the Roman Emperor. Constantine told him he would erect basilicas on the spots where the Apostles Peter and Paul had been killed. Palaces and land would be given as places of worship. Little Miltiades, sixty-two-years old, hunted and persecuted as a Christian all his life, was ignorant of nearly everything but Christian theology. He struggled to comprehend what was happening. At dawn the next day he delivered the nails to Constantine. Constantine accepted them, mounted his horse, and shouted down at Silvester: "The Godhead wills us two to do great things in the name of Christ. Be here when we return." History, from that moment, was changed forever. Christian by Fiat Christianity's spread was fostered perhaps less by its inherent superiority as an organized religion than by the fact that in 322 A.D. Constantine decreed Christianity the official religion of Rome. When Miltiades died fifteen months later, Silvester replaced him. Silvester, swept up in Constantine's energy and vision, accepted the union of church and empire. Reconceived, the church would now don the "trappings of political and economic power." Christianity was officially put on the map. That map included most of the Western world. Earlier, as Rome struggled to expand and maintain the military and economic integrity of its far-flung and constantly threatened empire, social institutions evolved that fostered allegiance to Rome, while simultaneously perpetuating Rome's vast tax-collecting bureaucracy. Official Roman religion had evolved from earlier Mediterranean influences, among them the Greek pantheon of deities and a number of highly secretive esoteric cults. It was a complex religious system, difficult for primitive colonial subjects to understand, let alone worship under. Christianity's advent, however, gave a new life to the Empire's quest for hearts and souls in service to Rome. Christian dogma's primary doctrinal assertion�the only way to God lay through the worship of Jesus�amounted to religious suzerainty. This proved handy for the ever-practical Romans. Becoming a Roman citizen now meant becoming a Christian. By controlling "God's truth" from Rome, provincial civil and territorial military administrators could enforce social control in the "here," as well as in the "hereafter." Britain and Gaul, during the earlier period of Roman conquest and colonization under Julius Caesar, were still essentially Neolithic cultures. Celtic chieftains and their Druidic priests were a powerful oppositional force to the Romans. Emperor Claudius, in the first half of the first century, executed an important Roman knight for wearing a Druidic symbol on his breastplate. "Druidism" became the central rallying point for forces in Gaul that resisted Romanization of the province. Sympathy for Druids was subject to being interpreted as "anti-Romanism," a "crime against the state." Druids were also known to "perform human sacrifices." So "negative were the connotations" attached to the name Druid that without investigation "the Romans presumed criminal behavior."[5] Native Celtic/Druidic cults used both animal and human sacrifice, and some of these rites�while different in detail�may have seemed familiar to many of the Roman legionnaires and Frankish mercenaries who manned the garrisons. They had come from cultures with similar and equally ancient traditions, not the least of which were sacrifices incorporating sex and blood. Occupation troops soon mingled with local women and fathered children. This was encouraged by the Romans in some cases because it hastened the process of assimilation, smoothing the path of Roman colonization. Mixed-marriage offspring, raised with a social/linguistic foot in both cultures, were of great use to Roman administrators. Over time a spiritual mingling also took place. Aspects of Roman/Mediterranean occult traditions were grafted onto Celtic/Druidic traditions. This created a tradition different from the rites practiced by northern and eastern Europeans. Today's English witches claim theirs is a tradition that has persisted down through the ages and still exists today in the British Isles.[6] Arriving in Britain and Gaul with traders, servants, slaves, and artisans were the occasional Christian missionaries who began proselytizing. Eventual factional disputes over doctrine isolated some of these groups. Branded as heretics, they were, if not excommunicated, at least held in suspicion by the Roman Christians. Rome's Christianization brought more Christians to the already well-established British colonies. Christian churches soon supplanted the old official Roman temples. Christian doctrine, however, met with more difficulty. Across the channel, throughout fourth-century Europe, the church encountered resistance from indigenous Pagan belief systems. Churches eventually replaced sites of Pagan worship. Converts, in what would become France and Germany, were baptized at spear or sword point, or killed�a system guaranteed to enhance mass conversion if not mass approval. Where the old religion was openly and defiantly practiced, adherents were proscribed. Merging of the newly imposed religion with earlier indigenous beliefs inevitably occurred. Generally, as with the Celtic Britons, these primary rites were ancient, some perhaps dating from Neolithic times. Often they included some tradition of sexual ritual and/or blood sacrifice. Many incorporated worship of a homed deity. [7] Benign elements of these beliefs were expediently incorporated into Christian practice, including animal sacrifice. Thus in German we find: "geschmuckt wie ein Pfingstochse," decked out like an ox at Pentecost. In formerly Soviet Armenia a regular Sunday service feature is the slaughter of a sheep in front of the local church.[8] Well into the twentieth century, isolated Greek Christian communities in Cappadocia celebrated an ancient sacrificial ritual. Opposite the altar in the local chapel of the saint was a sacrificial altar complete with burning candles and incense and decked with wreaths. A goat or a sheep was brought in, led around the altar three times while children threw grass and flowers. While the priest stood by at his altar the animal was slaughtered to accompanying prayers. Afterward the animal was cooked and the head, feet, thigh and skin given to the priest. Christian feast days and celebrations throughout history and across many societies were expediently matched with their Pagan counterparts. End of Empire By 452 A.D., Attila and his Huns and Scythians, who had sacked Rome in 410, were again on the banks of the River Po. Pope Leo turned them back, as he would turn back the Vandals three years later-not by force of arms, but with the words of Christ.[9] Christianity had, in ninety years, become a force to reckon with, and Christ's vicars' words were considered potent. Subjugated under Roman civil and Christian religious law, Paganism went underground throughout Europe, but somehow a few elements of belief and ritual managed to survive. During the evacuation of Britain in 405 and the overrunning of Europe by Anglos, Saxons, Huns, Goths, Visigoths, Franks, and Vandals, Europe's Pagan traditions enjoyed a brief renewal. Pax Romana, the Roman centuries of peace, passed into memory. Enter the Dark Ages. Medieval Europe bore little resemblance or relationship to the Europe of today. It was a place of vast forests and a time when non-Christian barbarian tribes constantly threatened communities, cities, and villages. Lacking the unification of Roman administration as well as the protection of Roman garrisons, road systems and water systems fell into disrepair. Efficient communication ceased. Isolated and segregated by the barriers of ancient tribal languages and customs, people fell back on the old ways. Throughout the Dark Ages, Christianity and entrenched Pagan beliefs existed side-by-side. Monastic scholars and sorcerers both served the aristocracy as tools of social control. Various heretical Christian sects, including the Manicheans (third to sixth centuries), Bogomils, (tenth century), Paulicians (seventh to ninth), and Cathars and Albigenses (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), flourished intermittently for generations before the church. Fearing the sects' increasing power, the church sent troops in to exterminate them. Rome's spiritual dominion was never as rock-solid as many historians in the past believed it to be. There were always schisms, adversaries, heresies, dissention, disingenuities, and dissimulations. Christianity, it seems, was less an historical rock, than a chunk of Swiss cheese. pps. 129-136 --[notes]-- Chapter 12 1. S. Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984). 2. J. Gager, "Religion and Social Class in the Early Roman Empire," The Catacombs and the Colosseum: The Roman Empire as the Setting of Primitive Christianity eds. S. Benko and J. O'Rourke (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 197 1). 3. Juneval, Satires trans. W. J. Rudd (Oxford UP, 1991). 4. M. Martin, Decline and Fall of the Roman Church (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981), 19-27. 5. S. Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984). 6. F. King Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (London: Carol Publishing Group, 197 1). 7. S. Piggott, The Druids (Norwich: Thames and Hudson, 1975). 8. W. Burkett, Nomo Necans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 8. 9. M. Martin, Decline and Fall of the Roman Church (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981), 49-53. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
