Belief in the Unknown and Unknowable

Once more, before I move on
and set my sights ahead,
in loneliness I lift my hands up to you,
you to whom I flee,
to whom I, in the deepmost depth of my heart,
solemnly consecrated altars
so that ever
your voice may summon me again.

Deeply graved into those altars
glows the phrase: To The Unknown God.
I am his, although I have, until now,
also lingered amid the unholy mob;
I am his—and I feel the snares
that pull me down in the struggle and,
if I would flee,
compel me yet into his service.

I want to know you, Unknown One,
Who reaches deep into my soul,
Who roams through my life like a storm—
You Unfathomable One, akin to me!
I want to know you, even serve you.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1864. Translated by Michael Moynihan

Nietzsche here frankly expresses a strikingly honest form of spirituality which I believe typified the highest sentiments of the Indo-European spiritual worldview. It combines faith, which most religions require, with an honest appraisal of what is truly known of the divine by mortals. In this case the existence of the god is unquestioned, but the exact nature or even the name of the god are not known.

In this post I will provide some examples of this heroic spiritual view of the divine and of death. Consider the Nāsadīya Sūkta also known as the Hymn of Creation, the 129th hymn of the 10th mandala of the Rigveda (10:129). In it, the speaker or singer asks philosophical questions about Creation, and answers himself - we do not know and maybe even the creator himself does not know.

1. Then even non-existence was not there, nor existence,

There was no air then, nor the space beyond it.

What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?

Was there then cosmic fluid, in depths unfathomed?

2. Then there was neither death nor immortality

nor was there then the torch of night and day.

The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.

There was that One then, and there was no other.

3. At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.

All this was only unillumined cosmic water.

That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,

arose at last, born of the power of knowledge.

4. In the beginning desire descended on it -

that was the primal seed, born of the mind.

The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom

know that which is, is kin to that which is not.

5. And they have stretched their cord across the void,

and know what was above, and what below.

Seminal powers made fertile mighty forces.

Below was strength, and over it was impulse.

6. But, after all, who knows, and who can say

Whence it all came, and how creation happened?

the gods themselves are later than creation,

so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

7. Whence all creation had its origin,

the creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,

the creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven,

he knows — or maybe even he does not know.

This reflects the religious attitude of the Bronze Age Aryan, in which no insincere claims are made about what can actually be known with any certainty by mere mortals. Obviously this is less consoling than a religion which claims to have all the answers, but in this spiritual worldview, truth comes first.

This same attitude is evident in Greece where there was a shrine to the unknown God at the Areopagus. St Paul exploits this in his sermon, twisting the pagan honesty about that which is unknown of the divine, and calling this a failing of the pagan faith.

"As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship — and this is what I am going to proclaim to you."

Either in ignorance, or as a technique of deception, Paul missed the pious and honest religious meaning of celebrating that which is unknown and unknowable of the divine by mortals. Christianity can not accommodate this kind of expression of faith, if it did we should see Christian prayers where they ask frank questions about what it is possible for them to know with certainty:

"Did the angel really appear to Mary or was it a daemon? We cannot say.
Was Jesus really a god or was he possessed by a daemon? It cannot be known.
Is YHWH the only god or is he lying? Maybe even He himself doesn’t know for sure.”

Instead, even uttering such things is called heresy. The Bible and the Abrahamic faiths in general provide only a tautological argument that their claims are true because of the scripture and that the scripture is true because it says it is true.

We have seen how Christianity exploited the frank admission by Greek pagans of what can be known of the divine by manipulating the less secure and less knowledgeable pagans who longed for consoling answers to the great unanswerable questions. I believe the same thing occurred 700 years later in England.

In Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Bede describes how the pagan King Edwin of the Northumbrians calls a council of his wisest retainers to debate whether they should convert to Christianity and it is at this point that one of the "king's chief men" gave the following speech:

“The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.”

Evidently the anecdote is provided by Bede as an example of a pagan feeling hopeless with the uncertainty of pagan beliefs, and thus wanting something more solid in the form of Christian doctrine. However, this story is intended to impress pagans and encourage them to convert and is part of a conversion narrative, therefore we should expect to see in it tropes that would be recognised by pagans. For that reason I believe that Bede has used a well known pagan poetic metaphor about the uncertainty of life, not only after death, but before birth! I have covered in my videos how Germanic and Celtic pagans believed in a form of reincarnation so the fate of the “soul” prior to birth was also a concerning question for them.

The idea that this passage was just an expression of Christian belief is unsatisfactory because Christians do claim to know the fate of the soul after death and they certainly do not consider that souls have a similar existence prior to birth as they do after death. The possibility that this passage is a modified pagan metaphor, misrepresented by Bede in a similar way to how Paul had misrepresented the unknown god, seems very likely and it is therefore mysterious to me that no other historian has suggested it (as far as I am aware). The passage was, after all, put in the mouth of a pagan Anglo-Saxon, so why should we not presume it is intended to reflect a pagan world view to some extent?

I am also convinced it has pagan provenance because it matches the heroic and frank attitude toward death and the divine which is seen elsewhere in Indo-European religions and which I have outlined above.

The same heroic, Indo-European fatalistic resolve in the face of death survives in Buddhism and is beautifully portrayed in the film Kagemusha by Kurosawa. In the scene below, Oda Nobunaga the demon king, quotes the following lines:

"Human life lasts only 50 years, compare it with the life of Geten (a form of Buddhist paradise, where one day lasts years of our world), it is truly a dream and an illusion. Life, once given, cannot last forever”

The text recited by Oda Nobunaga is from a Japanese Noh play called "Atsumori" which was named after Taira no Atsumori, a Taira soldier who died during the Gempei war 1180-1185 (Taira vs Minamoto clan). The Oda clan claimed descent from the Taira and this dance and song is famous for having been recited by Oda Nobunaga which is why Kurosawa included it in Kagemusha. Watching this performance, I can imagine the story of the sparrow in the hall was sung in a similar way, in a meadhall by a scop to all the Thegns and the Lord. I imagine them moodily pondering the unknowable destiny of the soul as the scop strummed his lyre and recited the holy verses.

Your Body is not Your own!

And so it came to pass that all men would unite and become one in the eternal struggle against their own limitations!

The following is a satirical article written in 2008 regarding the threat posed to bodily integrity.

Put aside the arrogance of the sociopathic belief that you may allow your body to bend and twist in the ceaselessly flowing waters of time! No longer shall it be acceptable for a man’s skin to wrinkle and temples grey, just as an oak’s trunk twists and knots, and its leaves wither and die with each autumn. Repent those among ye who believe your bodies to be your own! Like a rented vehicle on a lost weekend, you dare to call damage to your body irrelevant as long as the present is a time which brings meaning and joy to your life. You are sick for thinking this and shall not be forgiven; not by your god, not by your employer, not by society and not by your government!

You have been lent a tool for the benefit of others. Whether or not you wanted this gift is irrelevant. It is yours and you must carry it to a death that is no more yours than life. To prolong the usefulness of this implement is the means by which you may earn praise from your masters. The maintenance of these tools is an extremely costly and tiresome affair. The NHS saves the weak and the selfish with the credit earned by the sweat and blood of all those that have preceded you and those with whom you coexist. Give thanks to your superiors for they are merciful to spare you the uncertainty of death in favour of a guarantee of unnecessarily prolonged suffering, and increased productivity. For the harder you work, the more the suffering of your existence will become apparent and the more grateful you will be that you exist. You prolong the lives of countless others who would sooner be dead, had they the means to comprehend the futility of their efforts. If they were selfish enough not to see the glory of the communal will, they would merely exist as individuals with the concerns, hopes, fears and convictions that an isolated mind must suffer instead of choosing to shut out those negative thought processes and acknowledge one's existence as a part of a whole, a whole whose movements and intentions are beyond the simplistic understanding of individual thought.

It is these selfish thinkers who are draining our society of its momentum. They disrupt the productivity of the hive by refusing to acknowledge it as a greater form of good. Any work done against the will of the whole is counter productive and a naïve waste of precious life resources. Any communication made to gods outside designated centres of worship, is not worship but insanity. It is the mind of the individual turned in on itself and against the rest of us. It is time these types were rooted out and made to pay for their arrogance!

You see, whenever a man chooses to stay home with his family, he abandons his responsibility to the whole. Whenever a man takes a drink, he vandalises the vehicle which is a part of the whole and in his ungracious arrogance insults those who have nurtured his life to this stage! It is time that all men in our land are made to eat, drink and lead lifestyles which ensure their body projects an image that is pleasing to the eye of those that perceive it, particularly the all seeing eye of your master. Ageing has been accepted as an unstoppable force by those weak willed fools who would bow before death as inevitability. Those who bow to death turn their heads on our great society! Decay is to be hidden, so as not to offend those, who, upon beholding the grim spectre of age are reminded of their own mortality and thus may be fooled into believing their contribution to the whole is futile!

When your teeth fall out you must wear dentures,

When your hair greys you must dye it to feign youth and deny death!

When your interests become outdated, speak not of them to the young, lest you remind them of how easily ideals and cultures are trodden under foot as the stampede of modernity presses on ever harder, crushing those who can’t keep up, just as those who push in the opposite direction shall be crushed also.

When your face becomes wrinkled you will buy the appropriate creams, balms and lotions to defy time itself. So too must you follow the command of your superiors made clear for you in bold print on glossy paper, you will buy exactly what you are told to;

what berry from foreign land,

what teas,

what chemical supplements and new-age dietary requirements are dictated to you.

You are responsible for maintaining your body, because it is not yours, it is ours and if you fail to look after it sufficiently, you will have to answer not to a God, but to us, and the We. The whole is what really matters!

If you should fail to heed the relentless warnings from your masters, from magazines and TV screens, then you should feel the shame that the whole will bestow upon you for your arrogance. It is sociopathic in this day and age to expect your comrades to endure the sight of unconventional aesthetics. Your face, your body, or even your character shall be surgically restored so as to be comparable to a model of youth, subservience and functionality.

Technology must be used to make up for the mistakes of nature!

Not only shall time be our enemy, so too shall space!

Your thoughts must be made public as mine are now; your visage must be broadcasted to all who wish to see it. Your movements must be recorded and monitored, for your safety and for the safety of society; to remain in a small community is to accept inferiority, to be an object of ridicule for all. How dare you think you have the right to restrict the potential contribution your body could make to society by serving those only in the immediate area of your origin. You will not be able to stay anywhere for long now, as movement is to be a necessity, and all movement shall be monitored by your masters, as every movement is a drip of water added to the information ocean that is assembled for our protection. Do not avoid the watchful gaze of your electronic guardians, perched atop schools, banks, post offices and churches, these cybernetic gargoyles are our new angels, informing our lords of all our activities, punishing those who oppose the will of the masses.

Do not participate in public protest, know only what you need to. You need not identify your enemy, nor ask yourself moral questions, for the limitations of acceptable ethical boundaries will be made clear to you by the media. Your enemies may be your neighbours or they may be of a strange alien culture, in any case, you need not know of their beliefs, nor their motives, only their intent to disrupt the stability of the whole. You will ostracise and victimise those who attempt to distribute information that makes people feel uncomfortable. For the discomfort of the listener is surely evidence that the words falling from the speakers' lips are poison, and that they are intended to cloud your judgement and undermine the integrity of a united society. The discomfort felt when you hear people speak of difference is evidence of your loyalty and obedience. Be proud of this and hate those who would challenge our belief system. They are demons and disorder is their only desire. Suspect them everywhere, seek them everywhere, and when you find them, show them no mercy. You need not pity those who turn their backs on the stability of united society; they have polluted their minds with hatred and their bodies with toxins.

For your own sake, be pure of mind, think of yourself only in the pluralistic sense, be pure of body, accept only the toxins authorised for consumption by your superiors. For your body and your mind are not your own and are needed for the pursuit of higher things than you could possibly comprehend. Above all remain useful.

Rowsell 18/02/2008