From an outsider’s perspective, the sibling rivalry between Christianity and Islam is a fascinating slice of religious and cultural history. Though the propagandists of both faiths tend to deny this heatedly, they have many more points in common than differences, especially when compared to religions elsewhere in the world. Both developed in the eastern penumbra of the late Classical world, where Hellenic and Semitic cultural currents tangled and blended; both took the basic principles of Judaism as a starting point, while rejecting a great deal of Jewish teaching and practice; both are militant faiths whose followers like to think of them as religions of peace; both have an extremely checkered history that combines great cultural and humanitarian achievements with all too frequent outbursts of horrifying violence.
Both religions have also spent most of their history caught up in an intricate dance of interaction with each other, in which competition, murderous conflict, and peaceful coexistence have all had roles to play. The Mediterranean has always formed the main geographical divide between Christendom and the Dar al-Islam, though that boundary has always been contested: swinging north, for example, with the Arab invasions of Spain and Sicily or the Turkish invasion of the Balkans, and south with the Crusades or the European colonial conquest of North Africa in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire. Subtler modes of interaction have also seen plenty of play.
What makes this all the more interesting is that the two faiths, and the cultural and political spheres that they define, have risen and fallen in alternation over the centuries. Christianity had its first great period of political power in the centuries just before the birth of Islam, seizing control of the entire Roman world and using mob violence and legal penalties to suppress rival religions. Islam took the lead from it in the early 8th century, invading and conquering half the Roman world and extending its power to include Spain, Sicily, and nearly all of the Middle East. The 11th century saw the pendulum begin to swing the other way, with the Norman conquest of Sicily, the growth of Christian kingdoms in the north of Spain, and the audacious project of the Crusades.
The high Middle Ages thus saw Europe in the ascendant, but that changed as the Ottoman Turks emerged as major players in the Dar al-Islam in the 14th century. In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, and the Balkans were overrun over the decades that followed; in 1529 and 1683 Ottoman armies besieged Vienna. All through these years Christendom was racked by savage internecine wars and had little ability to exert its power outside its own boundaries. Then the tide turned again; in 1571 the Ottoman navy had already suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Lepanto, and thereafter Europe used its control of maritime trade to fund an economic and military colossus that by 1900 dominated the planet.
All this is necessary prologue to the point I plan to discuss in this essay. A few years ago, in a discussion on this blog, I mentioned that in 1500 or so the Ottoman Empire, not any of the quarrelsome statelets of Christian Europe, was the dominant political, economic, and cultural force in western Eurasia. The Ottoman Empire in those days extended from the borders of Iran most of the way to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Horn of Africa to the southern steppes of Russia. It reaped massive wealth from its control over the trade routes connecting western Eurasia with India, China, and Africa, and deployed huge armies and navies throughout its entire expanse. So great was its cultural charisma at the time, I suggested, that the Protestant Reformation in Europe could be seen as an adaptation of older Christian traditions to fit the model of Islam.
It was a passing comment, and I’m not at all sure how many of my readers understood what I was suggesting. Nonetheless it attracted some interest, and began to field votes as a topic for months with five Wednesdays—when, as readers of this essay will doubtless recall, my commentariat gets to nominate topics for the month’s last post. At the beginning of this month, it won the vote handily. This week’s post accordingly will try to explain what I meant.
It’s going to be necessary to stray some distance from the obvious theme to make sense of what I want to discuss. The first thing that has to be grasped is what cultural anthropologists call “stimulus diffusion.” This is different from ordinary diffusion, which is what happens when specific practices borrowed from one culture are taken up intact by another culture.
Consider the use of the Latin alphabet to write the Vietnamese language. Until the French conquest of Indochina, Vietnamese was written using Chinese characters, but these didn’t really fit the Vietnamese language well. When the French conquest introduced an alternative that worked better, literate Vietnamese took up the Latin alphabet with enthusiasm, adapting it as needed to fit the distinctive qualities of their language. In due time, they threw the French out, but they kept the alphabet and still use it to write Vietnamese. That’s ordinary diffusion.
Compare this to the creation of the Cherokee syllabary by Sequoyah. The advantages of having some way to write their own language were apparent to Sequoyah and other Cherokees, but they didn’t just borrow the Latin alphabet from their English-speaking neighbors. Sequoyah’s creation wasn’t even an alphabet—it was a syllabary, in which each character stands for a syllable rather than a single sound. What he borrowed was not a writing system, nor the principles of a writing system, but simply the basic idea of a writing system. That’s stimulus diffusion.
Does this happen in religious history? You bet it does. One example more colorful than most is the mass production of new religions in modern Japan. That occurred in two great waves, in parallel with the two great waves of Westernization in Japanese culture: the first following the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868, the second following the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945. (The second has the endearing nickname kamigami no rasshu-awa, “the rush hour of the gods.”) In both cases the flurry of new religions borrowed heavily from Japanese folk religion but they also adopted core elements of Christianity—a great many of them, for example, are monotheistic, and many predict an imminent apocalyptic transformation of the world.
Another example, even more relevant to the theme of this post, took place in the Middle East during the sixth century BC. If history was a newspaper, the top story from that century would have been the defeat of the last of the ancient empires of Mesopotamia at the hands of a new great power, the Persian Empire. The Persians were monotheists; they followed the Zoroastrian faith, the oldest of the Middle Eastern monotheisms, while most of the nations they overwhelmed practiced Pagan faiths with roots dating back millennia to the mud-brick towns of Sumer.
The Babylonian Empire, the last of those dominoes to fall, had the habit of dealing with rebellious vassals by forcing entire populations to leave their homelands and go live somewhere else under the watchful eyes of Babylonian officials and soldiers. Seventy-odd years before the Persian conquest, they inflicted that penalty on a petty kingdom on the Mediterranean coast you might have heard of. Yes, that was Judah, whose people were the ancestors of today’s Jews. When the Persians took over, they decided to release the various populations the Babylonians had interned and let them go back to their homelands. The people of Judah took them up on the offer, returned to their city of Jerusalem, and became loyal vassals of the Persians.
As Raphael Patai pointed out quite some time ago in his book The Hebrew Goddess, and as other scholars have confirmed since that time, the people of Judah weren’t monotheists before the Babylonian Captivity. They worshipped a god and two goddesses, and temples to all three of them atop what is now called Temple Mount north of the Old City of Jerusalem. (The temples of the two goddesses are called “the house of the Cedars of Lebanon” and “the house of Pharaoh’s Daughter” in later accounts.) Their religion was very similar to that of their neighbors, most of whom also worshipped a small group of national gods. The one oddity about the god of Jerusalem is that it was taboo to speak his name or to portray him by any image.
All that changed in the generation or two after the exiles settled in Jerusalem again under Persian patronage. The goddesses got dropped like hot rocks. An assortment of legends, chronicles, and folk traditions got written down, revised, and codified into a set of holy scriptures, replete with dietary and behavioral taboos. Zoriastrianism had its own scriptures and taboos, its one god surrounded by a court of amesha spentas (that’s spelled “angels” in English), and a bevy of other features that seem to have popped up in Judaism about the same time.
None of this, please note, required any bad faith on the part of the Jews. The charisma of a dominant culture exercises a potent gravity on the human imagination. Just as the founders of Japanese new religions had religious visions that happened to incorporate features of the charismatic Western nations that pressed in on Japan so forcefully, the former exiles who returned to Jerusalem and had the task of reconstructing their religious traditions from the ground up saw those traditions in a Zoroastrian light because that cultural influence pressed in on them with overwhelming power.
That force determined how they interpreted the fragmentary records they had of the history and theology of their past. Of course the references to goddesses in the old records had to relate to evil Canaanite cults that good Jews had rejected all along, and of course the god of Jerusalem just happened to have most of the same qualities as the Persian god Ahura Mazda! It would have required an independence of thought very rare among our species to think otherwise. Yet the Jews didn’t convert to Zoroastrianism; they took ideas from the faith of their Persian liberators and applied those ideas to their own religious traditions. That’s how stimulus diffusion works.
Fast forward to the first few centuries of Christianity and you can see the same process in action. Here the religious modality that pressed in on the vulnerable young faith was that of classical Paganism in its mature form. That form had already begun to pick up a bias toward monotheism, and an equally significant bias away from the earthy, visceral, traditional forms passed down from ancient times. Quite a few of the most influential intellectual and spiritual figures in late Pagan society were acutely uncomfortable with traditional practices such as animal sacrifice, and also with the enthusiastic embrace of sexuality that had Pagan religious processions in Greece carrying huge wooden penises down the streets as emblems of the abundant fertility of the gods.
People with these attitudes were increasingly drawn to Christianity as the new religion grew from a fringe cult of social outcasts to a rising power in the Roman world. Inevitably, they brought their existing habits of thought and practice with them. Despite what you can still read in many books, for example, the closest equivalents to early Christian churches in the pre-Christian Roman world were not the basilicas where civil officials held hearings; they were Pagan mystery temples such as the Pythagorean temple at the Porta Maggiore in Rome. In exactly the same way, the closest equivalents to the Mass in Roman Paganism were the ceremonial sharing of sacred foods that took place in mystery celebrations.
The mysteries were very popular among groups dissatisfied with ordinary religious practice in the late Roman world, so it’s not surprising that stimulus diffusion inspired by them played a role in shaping Christian ritual. Notice here again that the emerging Christian churches didn’t borrow Pagan mystery traditions intact, any more than they borrowed Pagan architecture intact. Basic ideas rather than fine details were what made the jump from the old faith to the new.
Those same features didn’t make a comparable leap into Islam. One of the core differences between Christianity and Islam is precisely that Christianity rose within the Roman Empire while that was still a going concern, while Islam rose outside it at a time when it was in a state of collapse. Christianity, like the classical Pagan mysteries that influenced it so powerfully, had sacramental rituals and a priesthood set apart from the laity; Islam went out of its way to have neither. What it had instead was holy scriptures that took precedence over everything else, a clergy whose role was simply to interpret and teach from the scriptures, and religious services that consisted of group prayers rather than sacramental rites.
All those things, in turn, appeared in Christendom all at once with the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, just as the Muslim Ottoman Empire appeared to be sweeping all before it. I think it’s worth considering the possibility that it was another product of stimulus diffusion.
The impact of three centuries of European global dominance on our present sense of history is overwhelming enough that it can be difficult to remember that in 1500, nobody thought of Europe as the focal point of history or the most important part of the planet. In 1500 the history you learned in European schools all took place in the Middle East or the Mediterranean basin; the thought that France or England, say, had histories of their own worth studying didn’t occur to anyone until the seventeenth century. Education in Europe consisted of learning and commenting on what Greeks, Romans, and Arabs wrote about any subject that mattered; the great quarrel between “Ancients” and “Moderns” that reshaped the Western intellect was still in the future.
In 1500, for that matter, nearly all the centers of global economic power and influence were found in a band of ancient cultures extending from the Middle East through India to China; the great exception wasn’t in Europe but across the Atlantic in Mexico, where the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was the center of the world’s most populous (and one of its most prosperous) urban areas. Europe was peripheral. Its people were tough and resourceful, as the Turks found out the hard way when their armies left the safety of the Balkan mountains and found out what Polish hussars could do on Eastern Europe’s open plains. In Spain and England, shipbuilders were busy tinkering with technological innovations that would revolutionize the world system, but in 1500 nobody realized what would come of that; it wasn’t until half a century later that John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court wizard, started promoting the concept of something he called the British Empire, and he was as usual well ahead of his time.
It’s relevant here also to notice that it wasn’t the people who had to deal with the Ottoman Empire up close, at the distance of a cavalry saber or a boarding pike, who discarded all the features of Christianity that differentiated it most sharply from Islam. To the peoples of the Mediterranean shores of Europe or the countries within an easy march of the Balkans, Islam was the religion of their would-be conquerors, and they clung to everything that differentiated themselves from the Ottomans. It was those who lived further off, and didn’t have to worry about the imminent threat of Ottoman invasion, who could let themselves be dazzled by the cultural charisma of the great empire of the East, and be drawn into a reinterpretation of their own religion that shows the signs of stimulus diffusion from the Muslim world.
Were there other causes at work in that process? Of course there were. No event anywhere ever has a single cause, and great historical transformations in particular have many causes, large and small. Yet it’s worth noting here that all the other causes that have been proposed for the Protestant Reformation had been in place for centuries before that time. It’s been argued that the Reformers were motivated by those same Zoroastrian-influenced Jewish scriptures discussed above, or that people who spoke Germanic languages were somehow more susceptible to the arguments of the Reformers, but these weren’t exactly new influences in the 16th century.
It’s also been suggested that the rise of printing and the mass literacy it made possible was the cause of the Reformation, but that wasn’t new in the 16th century either, and there’s no geographical correlation between the concentration of printing presses and Protestant sympathies—Italy and southern Germany had an abundance of printing presses and stayed Catholic, for example, while the Scandinavian countries had far fewer and went Protestant. I think, therefore, that a case can be made that while plenty of other causes contributed to the process, stimulus diffusion from the Ottoman Empire may have played a triggering role.
I’m not going to draw any grand conclusions from all this. Again, my view of Christianity and Islam alike is that of an outsider; I don’t see religion, as most Christians and Muslims do, as something handed down once and for all by the one and only one god, but as something that human individuals and cultures create in response to their own inevitably limited and partial experiences of a transcendent Divine. What you make of it, dear reader, depends accordingly on your own view of things—and that, of course, is your business.
A little bit back, a blogger named Cremieux noted that the Protestant Reformation may never have happened without the Ottoman incursion into Europe as it diffused the resources that otherwise could have been used by the Catholic powers to suppress heresies. In the ensuing Catholic-Protestant fights, the Protestant nations eventually came out ahead not necessarily because their interpretation of scripture was less dogmatic (see for example Calvinist Geneva and the Salem witch trials) but because unlike the post-Counter-Revolution Catholic world, there was no monopoly on coercion in the Protestant world. As a result, they evolved to be more tolerant while the largely Catholic Mediterranean world underwent a brain drain.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-ottoman-origins-of-modernity
Even as late as the 15th and early 16th Centuries, Italians considered other Europeans to be barbarians.
https://x.com/LandsknechtPike/status/1838402512941965490
I would also add that the Islamic world fell behind to a large degree as they mainly used the Arabic script which although beautiful particularly in caligraphy, was not well-suited to the printing press. Meanwhile, more hardline clerics were rising in influence compared to the “Islamic Golden Age” who did not premit deviation from what was after all the script of God’s messenger.
Speaking of Zoroastrianism and Islam, it is worth noting that Islam would probably have been a relatively minor local religion in the Arabian peninsula had it not been for a largely forgotten but profoundly influential conflict between the Eastern Romans and Sassanian Persians between 602 and 628. This conflict is sometimes called the “Last War of Antiquity” as it permanently exhausted both of the traditional powers of region at the worst possible time, when an obscure prophet in the Arabian desert was bringing an unusual amount of cohesion to the usually fractious Arabs.
https://www.amazon.ca/Last-Great-War-Antiquity/dp/019883019X
Even so, had the Eastern Romans not had a leader as capable as Emperor Heraclius, the outcome of that conflict would have been a strong Persian superpower dominating the Near East as virtually everyone at the time expected (https://www.amazon.ca/Decline-Fall-Sasanian-Empire-Sasanian-Parthian/dp/1784537470). Here is an amusing meme that illustrates the shift of fortunes between the mighty Persian Empire under Zoroastrian leadership and an obscure cult in Mecca.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14wccpg/620_ad_the_persian_empire_is_the_largest_in_the/
Then still, the Eastern Romans might have re-conquered Egypt and the Levant under Constans II had he not been murdered in a bathtub:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203917304574412984059644024
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Ron M’s friend Paul, who passed away on April 13, make his transition through the afterlife process with grace and peace.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer. Healing work is also welcome. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe]
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May JRuss’s friend David Carruthers quickly find a job of any kind at all that allows him to avoid homelessness, first and foremost; preferably a full time job that makes at least 16 dollars an hour.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Pierre in Minnesota be filled with the health, vitality, and fertility he needs to father a healthy baby with his wife.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May 1 Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties, and may she quickly be able to resume a normal life.
May Jennifer’s newborn daughter Eleanor be blessed with optimal growth and development; may her tongue tie revision surgery on Wednesday March 12th have been smooth and successful, and be followed by a full recovery.
May Mike Greco, who had a court date on the 14th of March, enjoy a prompt, just, and equitable settlement of the case.
May Cliff’s friend Jessica be blessed and soothed; may she discover the path out of her postpartum depression, and be supported in any of her efforts to progress along it; may the love between her and her child grow ever more profound, and may each day take her closer to an outlook of glad participation in the world, that she may deeply enjoy parenthood.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who passed away on 2/24, make his transition to his soul’s next destination with comfort and grace; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah and their daughters Joanna and Eleanor be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
“In 1500, for that matter, nearly all the centers of global economic power and influence were found in a band of ancient cultures extending from the Middle East through India to China; the great exception wasn’t in Europe but across the Atlantic in Mexico, where the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was the center of the world’s most populous (and one of its most prosperous) urban areas. Europe was peripheral”
Nicholas Taleb has noted this.
https://x.com/nntaleb/status/1079537894086361088?lang=ar
For that matter, the very concept of “Europeans”, the notion that the peoples of the Western peninsula at the Western end of Eurasia form a distinct grouping of peoples at all (let alone a distinct “continent” of its own) only came about as a result of the conflict between the new forces of Islam and the holdouts of Christendom in what is now France!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_of_754
Over time, thanks to the conquests of Islam, the Classical notion of a world divided between (civilized) Mediterraneans and (less civilized ) non-Mediterraneans gave way to the idea of Europeans vs non-Europeans (or “white” and “non-white”).
https://x.com/ByzRomanLevant/status/1706703952475988059
Christianity, when it began to grow in Rome, was a religion of the poor, many of the converts were slaves or former slaves. Maybe as a result of this, eventually, after many centuries, slavery and serfdom were abolished in Europe (although not in its colonies, where it was economically very profitable). Conversely, Islam was, originally, a religion of free warriors, who enslaved the vanquished.
This had consequences. In the Muslim world, slavery was abolished only recently, under Western influence. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 (!). The last Saudi slaves were liberated the year when you were born, Mr Greer…
The first printing office of France was created in Paris in 1470, by three German printers (Gutenberg, who died in 1468, was German), at the request of two Parisian scholars. In Morocco, the first printing office was created in 1866, almost four centuries later. In my opinion, it doesn’t mean that the Moroccans were less capable than the Europeans, but, for centuries, Morocco had developed slavery as an industry, raiding European coastal villages and cities to capture slaves, and Christian printers traveling in Morocco would have been at a great risk of being enslaved.
In our quaint local dialect, it’s “Kill ’em all, God’ll sort ’em out.” Say that, and you’ll get booted from the jury pool on a death penalty case.
Huh, while i was kinda skeptical of the influence of the ottoman on reformation, now it seems sensible. Poland had lively reformation, there were even thought of the national church, but it just so happen that XVI century was free of wars between Commonwealth and Ottomans(just ocasional raiding by tatars and cossacks between the two). XVII century of constant wars with the muslims(turks and tatars), protestants(swedes) and orthodox(russians) and counterreformation killed polish protestantism as a movement. The most popular movement among nobility was calvinism, but we also had some lutherans in cities and polish brothers who were unitarians(though they were hated by all and were banished after deluge for collaboration with swedes)
The first time I ever entered a Catholic church (for a wedding) I was blown away by the pageantry; the smells and bells, statues and symbols, candles and gold leaf everywhere, it was CLEARLY a pagan temple to my (Baptist raised) young eyes. And what I was left with was a sense of impoverishment; the blank walls, hard pews and plain wooden cross of the Baptist churches that Grandma dragged us off to had a monomaniacal severity that was deeply unwelcoming. At six years old I decided that it was the lair of a death cult and I wanted nothing to do with it. Even the cookies and kool-aid after sunday school were flavorless and lame…
To this day, I see the Roman Catholic Church as a fascinating window into the possible practices and imagery of ancient mystery traditions from the Roman, Hellenic, Mesopotamian and Egyptian eras. The mainstream Protestant churches with their single effeminate god feel like small beer to me in comparison… They kept the Baby and threw out the Mother with the bath water!
Any thoughts on stimulus diffusion up through the current crop of religious movements? The pastor-centric evangelical protestant churches that have popped up like toadstools after a rain over the last century or so seem to be much more aligned with the sturm and drang of the old testament Yaweh than with the preacher of Galilee’s teachings.
I think you’re right on the money on this one, John. For Catholics and Orthodox, the Church is the authority. The protestant project was designed to sever the control that the Church had over society, so it makes sense that it transfers authority from the Church to the scripture (which actually just ends up in endless debates over interpretation and infighting). When I hear fundagelicals talk about the inerrancy of the Bible, how the Bible is the most unique book, and how it should be the guide for every kind of issue I am reminded distinctly of how Muslims talk about the Quran.
Extremely interesting, thank you.
Would history say that Islam is/will be in ascendancy now that Europe/Christendom seems to be in decline?
I also wonder if China increases its role as a world superpower how/if it will affect religions in other places?
A while back I heard a talk by an Orthodox priest who was discussing sola scriptura and why it isn’t part of his tradition. He was one of the new generation of Anglo-American converts to that faith, and I’m afraid I’m not a very big fan of that crowd. Nevertheless, he captured the point in a few words better than anyone else I’ve ever heard: “Our Bible is not a Koran; our Word is a man.” He then said, “If I had time, I could prove to you that the doctrine of sola scriptura comes directly from the encounter with Islam” (or something to that effect). He didn’t have time, and I’ve lost the lecture somewhere on the internet, but the words stayed at the back of my mind until I saw your comment on the subject a few months ago.
It is a hard thing to demonstrate– though apparently possible for at least one English Orthodox priest– and it’s true that the Reformers were consciously trying to Judaize their religion. Nevertheless, it makes sense of a number of features of Protestantism, including sola scriptura, the attack on sacred images, the lack of a priesthood or sacraments, the subjugation of women, and the prohibition of alcohol and dancing in some denominations.
It also makes sense of the strange Magian undercurrent to the culture of the United States, in particular our Bibliolatry. Worshiping documents and getting saved by books is as American as apple pie, even when the Good Book is Atlas Shrugged or On the Road. Or, for that matter, the Constitution. The current of transmission would go from the Ottomans through John Calvin to Massachussets (etc), where it became nativized and is now endemic. And also how we managed to produce our own homegrown imitation of Islam in upstate New York, and why it quickly migrated to the deserts of the Southwest.
And here I thought stimulus diffusion had something to do with those checks we were getting from the U.S. Govt.
This makes me wonder if there is anything from Islamic mysticism that the protestant groups could borrow to get some of their mojo back. Or from some other culturally diffused source. That book on the Hebrew Goddess has been on my get-to list for awhile. The time might be a bit sooner. One of the Christian esotericist’s I knew always stressed the word Elohim was reffering to a plurality of gods/godesses and that it was also a gender neutral term.
What is the relationship between stimulus diffusion and pseudomorphosis? (Besides being a topic for meditation?) I find the concept to be fascinating.
David, that blogger was wildly inaccurate to say that there was no intellectual monopoly or coercion in the Protestant world; he should talk to some Catholics about the persecution of members of their faith in Protestant England under Elizabeth I, just to start with. Nor were the sciences persecuted in Catholic Europe after the Counter-Reformation got going — check out the number of Jesuits who have lunar craters named after them because of their contributions to astronomy, just for starters! We have a lot of Protestant propaganda in our educational system, even now. Your comments about the Roman and Persian situation, though, are spot on; the cascade of oddities that made it possible for Islam to carry out its first great age of conquests are remarkable enough that I don’t blame them for thinking that something supernatural was involved.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Horzabky, are you suggesting this as a primary difference between Christianity and Islam, or what?
Nemo, I’ll keep that in mind!
Katylina, interesting! Thank you for this; I don’t know as much about Polish history as I probably should.
Ken, to my mind a Baptist church is just a mosque without the pretty calligraphic decorations, but that’s me. As for the current crop of evangelical pastorolatries, there’s certainly some influence from Judaism, but I suspect the main influences are the modern cults of celebrity and political leadership. The pastors are substitutes for movie idols, rock stars, and charismatic political leaders, and what goes on at those churches is a lightly veiled anthropolatry.
Enjoyer, I ain’t arguing.
Edward, yes, it does look as though Islam is in the ascendant as European Christendom declines. As for China, it depends greatly on what happens to it culturally and spiritually. Marxism is simply the far end of Protestant social-gospel theology, and until China discards it and either returns to its historic spiritual roots or comes up with something uniquely Chinese, it’s not going to regain its place as a major cultural force.
Steve, that is indeed a neat phrasing. The thought of the Latter-Day Saints as our Muslims, though, works only if you see them as the American Shi’a in contrast to the Protestant Sunnah.
Warrior, no such luck!
Justin, if Protestantism borrows any more from Islam they might as well just start saying prayers five times a day. My take is that if they want their mojo back they need to get it from Jacob Boehme, Emmanuel Swedenborg, and the old Lutheran Rosicrucians. Elohim — yeah, it’s a plural noun, and as I was taught, it’s a masculine plural of the feminine noun Eloh, “goddess.” (I’ll gladly accept correction on this from Hebrew scholars — this is what I learned from goyische Cabalists.) As for stimulus diffusion and pseudomorphosis, the latter is what happens when the former becomes the keynote for an entire culture.
This is a fascinating walk through the history of one particular family of religions!
One lesson that I think is embedded in this is that if you’re going to start a new religion – even if you’re pretending it’s an old one – you really should be mining other faiths for good ideas instead of trying to cast it all off in the name of authenticity. I suspect this is a bigger aspect of neopaganism’s failure to launch than many suspect. Ironically, the refusal to do this is something that was borrowed from Islam through Protestantism.
“ The thought of the Latter-Day Saints as our Muslims, though, works only if you see them as the American Shi’a in contrast to the Protestant Sunnah.”
For what it’s worth, I think this is dead on. The really striking thing about Mormonism is that the official narrative of how the LDS church was founded is strikingly similar to Islam’s official narrative, down to some of the unsavory details about the founders.
“ the cascade of oddities that made it possible for Islam to carry out its first great age of conquests are remarkable enough that I don’t blame them for thinking that something supernatural was involved.”
This makes me wonder if Islam isn’t Christianity’s nemesis in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Perhaps once Europe is finally effectively all converted to Islam, it will begin its own decline simply because its work will be done.
(Sorry for the multiple posts; I’ll slow down now!)
I was thinking of the Rosicrucians as well, and even had the shoemaker mystic in my mind as I typed, but kept mum about that possibility. I was also thinking of texts like The Cloud of Unknowing, the Interior Castle of Teresa Avila, and the mythos of William Blake… for starters. I certainly hope so. I know that @Roy Smith was talking about hermetic Christianity in the open post. It seems like a good, and hopefully more tolerant, more curious and less judgmental, direction. A hermetic Christianity would also allow for a bit more eclectic influences to come in, as is the case with hermetic traditions. Here the work we just did studying Eliphas Levi and a symbolically based interpretation of scripture would also be helpful, in departing from the strictly literal interpretation.
Thanks for this insightful article, JMG!
I love the Cherokee Syllabary! I needed a magic language for my webcomic Etherwood, something connected to North America (Alleghenia specifically) rather than anything Old World, like Latin. I also needed it to be not easily google-translatable, and I didn’t want to use a conlang. While it takes more effort on my part to us it, I think it lends the right mixture of alien and deeply familiar. I hope others get the same feeling.
The difference between the pre- and post- exile jews is very clear even in just the text of the Old Testament. I find it especially clear in Maccabees, where you see Jews killed for not eating pork and losing battles by not fighting on the Sabbath for the first time. The Israelites/Hebrews fought wars before, but somehow the issue of being repeatedly attacked on the Sabbath never came up until then – clearly the earlier Israelites didn’t have the same attitudes.
The connection between protestant Christianity and Islam seems obvious to me, too, even as an insider. I grew up as a relatively hardcore fundamentalist evangelical Christian (becoming Catholic in high school), and when I later read Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine (for work research), I found that they were intuitively easy to understand, much more so than, say, an American leftist-communist magazine does. The AQ and ISIS types take exactly the same attitude to the Quran as I was raised with in the Protestant Bible. Other people might say they are not ‘real Islam’ but I sure couldn’t argue with their interpretations of their scriptures.
The sympathy goes beyond theological arguments. Depictions of what I’ll call ‘not Islam’ always had my sympathy back in the day. Halo’s covenant might be weird bad aliens bent on the extermination of the human race as they wrongly seek a rapture-like ascension, but their actions and attitudes always made more intuitive sense to me than those of the ‘not USA’ humans.
After over 15 years of being Catholic (and nearly a decade with this community), I’m still struggling to unlearn those habits of thought from my fundamentalist days.
@ Edward #10
What I’ve heard from within the Islamic world suggests that it’s going to go through massive changes as a result of its exposure to Western thought; the stimulus diffusion could be happening in the opposite way. Muslims have flooded into Europe and bragged about taking over, but beneath that facade I’ve heard there’s a widespread but secretive dropoff in religiousity among the youth. Salafism and other extreme forms of Islam that have been in vogue lately don’t do a good job of answering teenagers’ questions about the world and it’s hard to enforce such beliefs in the middle of a Western liberal society. Ex-Muslim groups have been springing up all over social media.
I’ve also heard reports out of Turkey that the Islamism that was so strong 10 years ago is now in tatters as Erdogan’s only political strategy has been to appeal to religion to distract from his failures. Political Islam in Turkey is now synonymous with corruption and economic crisis and this seems to mirror trends in other countries, where the more religious the government is the more the country declines. There have been reports of secretive atheist book clubs springing up in Iraq in the wake of ISIS. And speaking of such radical groups, a big part of their recruiting strategy was to claim that Judgment Day was imminent and that their members were destined to fight in the last battle. Now those groups are gone and Judgment Day hasn’t come, further discrediting their ideas.
As for China’s influence on global religion, it seems to come mainly in the form of their promotion of Marxism, the latter-day secular eschatology. The CCP barely heeds Marx’s actual principles but promoting them seems to be its most reliable avenue to build soft power.
Many of my Neighbors are Hindu’s from India. I recently. made the acquaintance of a young fellow from India up the street a block or so and we have been exchanging labor on each others yards. Two days ago he was somewhat distraught as he had discovered a mouse in his garage rummaging among the boxes and supples he had stored there.
I offered to help him make a live trap for the little beast as I assumed he was Hindu due to his accent, clothes and wifes clothing. As we discussed the live vs spring type traps i found out he was muslim as the spring trap was no problem. I had no idea that the number of Muslims in India ( not Pakistan) was almost as large as the number of Hindus.
As per the discussion here it seems that his familie’s version of Islam has been very heavily influenced by Indian and Hindu culture and in many outward ways different than what I was expecting.
As a Hindu living in India with 200 Million Muslims living in India and Christianity still strong in India with most of our educational institutions the entire thing seems so fragile that the ceasefire between the religions will one day will destroy so much in India that because of that our Constitution has made us the Hindus which are the majority in our own country a threat on it’s own right. And all this propaganda about all religions being one. How can we get out of this stupid notion before *** hits the fan?? I am not able to convince anyone from my family that religions are different and really cannot co-exists with one other without the threat of violence hanging over our heads. Due you believe that the fall of Industrial Society over the next 100-150 years will help in destroying this ridiculous propaganda??
“David, that blogger was wildly inaccurate to say that there was no intellectual monopoly or coercion in the Protestant world; he should talk to some Catholics about the persecution of members of their faith in Protestant England under Elizabeth I, just to start with. Nor were the sciences persecuted in Catholic Europe after the Counter-Reformation got going — check out the number of Jesuits who have lunar craters named after them because of their contributions to astronomy, just for starters! We have a lot of Protestant propaganda in our educational system, even now…”
Fair points. Still, there is a one theory that a state of polycentric fragmentation is far more favourable to greater innovation and freedom than large land empires are. This is perhaps most persuasively articulated in Walter Scheidel’s “Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity “:
https://reason.com/2020/02/24/good-riddance-to-the-roman-empire/
Scheidel’s main interest has been in what some scholars call the “Sui-Justinian Divergence “, why the Mediterranean world really fragmented after Justinian failed to re-conquer the lost Western Roman Empire (thanks in large part to a climactic event and a plague) by the Sui Emperor succeeded in China. In essence, it was because there was no successful attempt to restore a large state on par with Rome in Europe and the Mediterranean (except maybe briefly under Napoleon and Hitler), that Europe was able to advance ahead of the rest of Eurasia (this is often called the “Great Divergence”).
It was not the case that the other polities lack the ability to build trans-oceanic empires like Western Europeans. They just had little incentive to due to already large amounts of territory and resources being available to them coupled with strong central authority figures often influenced by landed elites who were wary about the prospect of a more innovative mercantile elite potentially gaining more power.
For example, in the 1420s (three generations before Columbus), Ming China sent out a massive fleet under the command of a Muslim admiral named Zhang He to go as far afield as possible. They went as far as Africa, even bringing back giraffes, and possibly beyond that. Each of these ships was so large, all three of Columbus’ ships could fit snuggly on one of its docks.
However, a series of misfortunes back home lead to the rise of figures who were suspicious of contact with all foreigners leading the Middle Kingdom to begin one of its recurring periods of isolationism. The fleet and most documents were burned and destroyed.
In Europe, back contrast, there was no central authority to call in all ships even if they wanted to but instead a series of rival kingdoms constantly trying to get a lead over each other. “Western Civilization” zoomed ahead in large part precisely because there was no equivalent of the Chinese Emperor, Ottoman Caliph, and after the Reformation and Wars of Religion, there wasn’t even a Pope!
A melding of sufi style Islam and Orthodox Christianity seems to occur in Gurdjieff. He, himself, was Orthodox, yet his writings are full of Islamic influence, mostly sufi. Some of his students were involved in translating the Philokalia. During my rather brief time with the Gurdjieff Foundation, I thought the “mood” was mostly Christian. I attended a couple of Orthodox services some time later. I mentioned the Philokalia to the priest and he replied, “Oh! So you want to go right to the good stuff.” It was a snarky reply, but not unfair. I sort of hate to admit it today, but I read Gurdjieff’s “All and Everything” nine times back in the day, including once out loud to myself.
I am not Polish even by by descent but a recent twitter interchange with a Polish woman has me fascinated with Polish history. So much action that is left out of the history that I had read. I did see Poland mentioned somewhere as the one country that turned Protestant, then went back to Catholicism.
The history I learned in school has Poland as eternal victim, always either being partitioned or overrun by its huge neighbors. Kind of the guy in the red shirt in Star Trek. But the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was the strongest European state in its day. (Also interesting that for much of its history, Lithuania was a conquest state ruling mostly non-Lithuanians (and a target of crusades), not a tiny Baltic state.) And Poland is one nation that did manage to march on Moscow and win. I think you will find the run up to the partition fascinating. Has to be a leading candidate for most dysfunctional government of all time.
About persecution by dogmatic English Protestants, one could argue that this happened precisely because the Anglican Church was as Catholic as a church could be and still claim to be Protestant. My Irish ancestors would not be interested in any excuses for Protestant perfidy in Ireland though.
About the Mormons, they did wander around the Midwest from one pogrom/mini-war to another until their founder was lynched (allegedly at the connivance of the federal government). My guess is that Great Salt Lake City area was selected not because they were drawn to the desert, but partly because it was outside the US when the Mormons arrived and partly because it was easily defended. Utah was included a few months later in the territory annexed by the US from Mexico at the end of the Mexican War. Mormon sources say that getting out of the (for them lethal) US was not a motivation, but they would pretty much have to say that, so it is hard to say. Utah did after all fight a successful war against the US government in the 1850s. The first of our great science fiction religions.
“Your comments about the Roman and Persian situation, though, are spot on; the cascade of oddities that made it possible for Islam to carry out its first great age of conquests are remarkable enough that I don’t blame them for thinking that something supernatural was involved.”
Yes. I have recently read a book titled “The Great Arab Conquests” by Hugh Kennedy.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Great_Arab_Conquests.html?id=DWRKDgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
Apparently both the victors AND the losers saw the extraordinarily rapid pace by which the Muslim Arabs made what was then the biggest empire yet seen in history as a source of divine intervention (divine punishment for those Christians or Zoroastrians in the new Caliphate).
If I were a Muslim, historic or contemporary, and wanted to point to the strongest evidence for what could be seen as the divinely ordained truth of my faith, I would point to the fact that God sent his Holy Prophet to exactly the right place (the desert sands of Arabia) at exactly the right time (when the two traditional powers of the region, Rome and Persia, were bleeding themselves to exhaustion in a particularly nasty war).
I’m wondering if the gods arrange such religious stimulus diffusions in order to retire and get replaced by other deities, or to get experience in guiding humans using a different framework than the ones they’re accustomed to.
The religious stimulus diffusions themselves seem to me to be broadcasts from extroverted, vigorous Culture-souls and can probably be initiated by deliberate magical workings.
See? JMG always does his homework.
Christianity and paganism are inseparable. Take that, Luther. And on the flipside, how often do we hear about what neopagans have borrowed from Christianity, or from eastern religions?
Slithy, Neopaganism is just another radical Protestant offshoot. It has all the usual hallmarks — the priesthood of all believers; the fixation on leftward politics as a substitute for spirituality; the linear sacred history with exact equivalents of Eden, the Fall, and the Second Coming, and so on down the list. Its unique features are that it puts Jehovah in drag (“the Goddess”), it goes further in the direction of enthusiastic sexual expression than most (though there are equivalents), and the usual fixation on sacred scriptures got tangled up with the priesthood of all believers to create the Book of Shadows phenomenon, in which every participant wrote their own personal scripture. That last point seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years, about the time Neopaganism peaked and began its current decline.
Justin, well, The Cloud of Unknowing and The Interior Castle are both from the Catholic tradition. William Blake, on the other hand, is a fine example of Protestant mysticism, strongly influenced by Swedenborg. Take a moment, or more than a moment, to think about what it would be like to see a future Protestantism that worships Jesus the Imagination, as Blake did!
Sirustalcelion, hmm! It’s certainly a fine elegant script, and it’s got deep roots in the southern Appalachians. As for Protestant Islam, I’m glad not to have been raised in that tradition…
Clay, that’s India for you. A million years after they’ve died out everywhere else, Christianity and Islam will still be practiced by small communities in India, and you’ll have to work very hard to tell the difference between them and their Hindu neighbors. Habits concerning mousetraps are about the distinctions I’d expect.
Arnav, I’m not sure the alternative view offers any better prospect; the Muslim armies that Mahmud of Ghazni led into India in 1001 certainly didn’t believe all religious were one, but that didn’t provide much benefit to the Hindu community then. The great problem is that the alternative to coexistence is mutual mass slaughter — you can see how that worked out if you have a look at West Asia and the European subcontinent.
David, polycentric fragmentation didn’t cause Japan or the kingdoms of Southeast Asia to outstrip China in the maritime field, even though both had access to the whole suite of Chinese maritime technology — Japanese pirates were the scourge of the East China Sea all through the period when Chinese fleets sailed to East Africa. The quest for simple explanations for historical change is to my mind mistaken; Spengler’s decision to focus on the morphological description of what happens, rather than trying to come up with theories about why it happens, strikes me as very sensible.
Phutatorius, it’s struck me more than once that Gurdjieff may have been a kind of foreshock of the religion of the future Russian great civilization: the Volga basin, which I suspect will be the heartland of that civilization, is exactly such a zone of cultural fusion between Sufi-influenced Islam and Orthodox Christianity.
Jessica, Eastern European history generally deserves more attention than it gets. As for Mormonism as a science fiction religion, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it called that before, but you’re right, of course!
David, granted; it’s just that since then, the Divine doesn’t seem to have favored Islam to anything like the same degree.
Patrick, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
JoustAGuy, not often enough. As a rule, the more loudly a religious movement insists that it’s utterly different from the established religion of its culture, the more details of that established religion it’s copied wholesale or simply stolen and filed off the serial numbers.
“Ken, to my mind a Baptist church is just a mosque without the pretty calligraphic decorations, but that’s me. As for the current crop of evangelical pastorolatries, there’s certainly some influence from Judaism, but I suspect the main influences are the modern cults of celebrity and political leadership. The pastors are substitutes for movie idols, rock stars, and charismatic political leaders, and what goes on at those churches is a lightly veiled anthropolatry.”
Yes, whatever one wants to say about Protestantism, when it comes to aesthetics, they are definitely towards the rock bottom among pretty any religious sect that I can think of. This is certainly true within Christianity.
https://www.churchpop.com/catholic-vs-orthodox-vs-protestant-how-to-tell-the-difference-in-10-hilarious-memes/amp/
Apart from Salafist Islam and maybe some Orthodox branches of Judaism, I can’t think of any other creed whose aesthetics are more flat, dry, or arid.
I have watched an online documentary showing places in Mexico and I am astounded how even medium-sized cities have churches that often rival St.Peter’s in terms of elegance and beauty. The Hapsburgs themselves were pretty ugly but it seems like almost everything they built was beautiful whether in Latin America, the Danube region of Central Europe or elsewhere!
“David, polycentric fragmentation didn’t cause Japan or the kingdoms of Southeast Asia to outstrip China in the maritime field, even though both had access to the whole suite of Chinese maritime technology — Japanese pirates were the scourge of the East China Sea all through the period when Chinese fleets sailed to East Africa. The quest for simple explanations for historical change is to my mind mistaken; Spengler’s decision to focus on the morphological description of what happens, rather than trying to come up with theories about why it happens, strikes me as very sensible”
Fair point.
I would say that Japan had the potential to have lead a trans-oceanic empire but after a failed invasion from the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in China due to a storm, the Japanese developed an intensely nationalist, isolationist conception of themselves. Scheidel does actually cite Southeast Asia as the one region of Eurasia most similar to Europe in terms of geography and political formation. According to Scheidel, Southeast Asia suffered from the opposite extreme. It was too fractious to enable the formation of stable states or societies out of which one could safely innovate. Also, no overarching “ecumeme” like Latin in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire or overarching religion like Christianity. Hence, the communication enabling any equivalent of the “Republic of Letters” in Europe would have been grossly inadequate.
Thanks, this was very insightful and inspiring post! Also, I wonder if there could arise some synthesis of Christianity and Islam, especially in future western Europe, patronized by its (then again) autocratic monarchy, especially as it might save those lands from a long centuries of communal violence? Of course neither of those religions would like their bastard child, but … new prophets and new religions like Sikhism and Baha’i-ism still happen now and then.
And then to quite off-topic idea (I missed the Open post, but here I throw it anyway):
I started to wonder about all this deindustrial fiction genre (having read none, unless “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is counted as such), and it occurred to me that in the far future, we will almost certainly not return to medieval / antique worldview with just four elements. Instead, whatever alchemy will rise then, it will be based on folk-memories of our current chemical and physical knowledge.
E.g., (some) people will know that water is a combination of something called hydrogen and oxygen (marked with “H” and “O” in ancient letters), and that “oxygen” is also the magical part of air that is needed for keeping us alive, thus a part of general ambient life force. The other part of air is “nitrogen”, which is also known to exist, mysteriously, in beans and urine.
Et cetera: that the table salt could be decomposed by the ancients to something called sodium and chloride, that helium was mysterious gas, lighter than air, which the ancients used to make their ships fly, but it is not known where it could be found now. And the secret why the best ancient steel didn’t rust is that they mixed some other metal called “chromium” into it.
Probably they would have some version of the periodic table at their disposal, and would be able to place most of the common metals and elements like carbon, sulfur and arsenic to their correct positions there. Also, that a metal called “uranium” had great power in it, with which the ancients were able to destroy whole cities, but nobody knows anymore how to release that power, even if they were able to find uranium in the nature.
And especially, that almost all the magic of the ancients was based on that elusive thing called “electricity” that flowed in those copper filaments. And together with “silicon”, which the ancients separated from ordinary quartz, they could even make their machines to “think” and play games.
“Horzabky, are you suggesting this as a primary difference between Christianity and Islam, or what?”
Not a primary difference, because both religions tolerated slavery in the past, but rather a different history. All Muslim countries have made slavery illegal in the 20th century (except, in the last decade, for Daesh in Irak and Syria — I guess that everyone remember the horrific fate of Yezidi women — and, also briefly, some Islamist groups in Libya after the fall of Gadhafi), but the fact is that Mahomet, who owned slaves, regulated slavery, thus preventing its worst abuses, but also making it legal.
Jesus seemingly ignored slavery. The Old Testament regulates slavery, it doesn’t outlaw it. The Buddha forbid trading in human beings as an obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, which implies that people who don’t care about spiritual enlightenment and being excluded from the Buddhist community can do as they see fit.
Everything I know suggests that the great spiritual leaders of the past were like the Greek and Roman philosophers: slavery existed in the societies they lived in, had always existed, and they didn’t expect that it woudn’t exist in the future.
Here in France I had a discussion recently with a neighbor of mine, a socialist woman. She spoke to me about the horrors of French colonialism in Algeria, and I told her that the French colonization of Algeria hadn’t been all bad, because it led to the suppression of slavery there. She told me that what I said couldn’t be heard (“c’est inentendable” she said, which was doubly baffling to me, because the correct French adjective is “inaudible”, as in English). I think that she meant that such an inconvenient fact cannot be stated in polite society.
Michael Servetus is a good example of this process, as the proto-Unitarianism that he promulgated is actually indistinguishable from Islam. His native Spain, and Hungary/Romania, where early Unitarianism flourished, were both on the shifting borders of the Islamic world. So I’m in full agreement with your excellent thesis.
I would add that the Babylonians deported the Jews for a specific reason. The one feature that distinguished them from other Near Eastern tribes was their religious militancy, which brought them into frequent conflict with the authorities. So they were actually deported to the Mesopotamian heartland in order to acquire civilisation, by a comparatively kindly Babylonian governor. In exile they were compelled to learn a variety of economically beneficial trades, such as goldsmithing. So when they finally returned to the Levant they had become quite culturally distinct from their Semitic relatives, who are now called Arabs.
My only quibble is with the description of Zoroastrianism as ‘monotheism’. In fact it’s a kind of weird dualism. Ahura Mazda is the supreme deity in this religion, in opposition to Satan like Ahriman, but neither of them are considered creator deities nor are they seen as eternal. Standing above both of them, in true command of the universe, is the abstract principle of Zurvan (time). This is much the same as the overarching Goddess Necessity in the Pagan Greek religion. In Zoroastrianism there has always been a heretical tendency to recast Zurvan as a monotheistic deity, which has been repeatedly suppressed by mainstream Zoroastrianism. So it is quite possible that this obscure Iranian heresy was the real inspiration for early Judaism. In the present day many Zoroastrians will assert that they are actually monotheists, but this is really a survival mechanism, because they have largely escaped persecution within the Islamic world by being (monotheistic) ‘peoples of the book’. In the same way Zoroaster is portrayed as a Judaic style prophet, when in reality he was a (rebel) magi and reformer.
Lastly, I must confess that as a Buddhist, I can’t personally make any sense of the Abrahamic religions, and it’s been decades since I studied Iranian religion, so I could be completely wrong. 🙂
@23 Arnav Jindal
I see the notion that all religions are the same as ridiculous. In America, many Christians believe that non-Christians & heretical Christians will be eternally punished. But they know that people will not freely convert to their religion, and they do not have the power to impose their beliefs on everyone, and that imposing the correct faith on all would be messy. So we tacitly agree to disagree to keep the peace– and our rights.
Also, in practice, most Americans currently believe more strongly in secular political ideas, whether conservative or liberal, than they do in religious ideas and are more passionate about converting others to them.
Since I was raised protestant (if you can call World Wide Church of God that) and had six years of Catholic school, whilst becoming a teenage Thelemite, those lines between Catholic & Protestant tended to blur. Another way of saying it would be, half my family was Catholic and half hillbilly, and I opted for Crowleyean rebellion and heresy, at least for a little while.
Blake & Swedenborg… I like that vision. Throw in some Diggers, and I’ll at least come hang out.
(“I Was A Teenage Thelemite” strikes me, though, as a potentially lurid pulp novel in the old beatnik paperback vein.)
Jessica, the Polish diaspora in the USA has been playing that Poland as eternal victim movie for it must be a century now. It is becoming tiresome, especially as that particular diaspora is among those who never cease promoting Russia hatred which they expect the rest of us to share.
JMG, as you know, there were many heretical social movements during the European Middle Ages. I once asked myself, why did this particular one, post-Luther Protestantism, take hold when so many others did not. The answer I came up with was that this time, in the 16thC, rulers supported the dissenters instead of the established church. In Islam, as I understand it, there is no separation of church and state, the Caliph was Commander of the Faithful. So, I am wondering if the Protestant princes saw that the Ottoman sultan had no religious authority over him and could, for example, set aside and take news wives just as he chose? Also, that among the Ottomans, there were no consecrated religious, and therefore all good land could be taxed and given to a ruler’s faithful friends.
JMG, great essay and food for thought. One insight of mine that matches yours – I will have to meditate on it – is that the Leviathan, that is, the state as seen by Thomas Hobbes, is an adaptation of Islamic statehood.
“the fixation on leftward politics as a substitute for spirituality;”
Hmm. The embrace of (neo)conservatism by Evangelics from the late 1970’s to early 2010’s really was an aberration, wasn’t it? I’m reminded of the fact that in the 60’s and earlier, American Evangelicals tended to be theologically conservative but socially liberal on most of the relevant cultural issues — including civil rights and abortion.
The switchover happened in the 1970’s primarily due to prominent Evangelical theologian Frank Schaeffer’s embrace of the pro-life cause at his son Francis’s urging (something Francis later came to regret when he switched politically to the left and then IIRC lost his faith), and the Southern Baptists splitting from the American Baptists over segregation. Before that, being anti-abortion had been “a Catholic thing” that few Protestants wanted to touch, and most Evangelicals were egalitarians when it came to race.
Since the mid 2010’s we’ve seen a reversion to the historical norms: mainline Protestant churches have embraced the lion’s share of the Left’s various causes.
“the usual fixation on sacred scriptures got tangled up with the priesthood of all believers to create the Book of Shadows phenomenon, in which every participant wrote their own personal scripture.”
I honestly never thought about this — this is a really interesting point I’ll have to give some thought to. Hmm.
Thoughts of Yeats’ A Vision swirling in my head these past few weeks now mingle with the drama of Medieval Christianity and Islam’s widening and narrowing gyres, cultural and religious streams intermingling, alternating, waxing and waning, stimulus diffusion acting its part in the play of forces. Tracing the subtle patterns of necessity and will, time and tide, “I have been part of it always…”
Thank you.
To be overly cynical for a moment, it’s almost like when one music band makes a new sound that takes off and gains popularity and then all the other musicians go “Well, I can sound like that too”, and then shortly thereafter you get all the music sounding the same as they all start copying each other, I mean all the songs just start to merge into each other as they get played on the radio. And then it all crashes and some new band takes a risk and then things sound different for a while. Or at least that’s how it went before the Great Stagnation started after 2008.
Except it’s religions that are doing this instead.
I suspect if the doo-dads and decorations in Catholicism started to take off, you’d see all sorts of other churches going “Well, we can decorate too”.
A pedantic quibble:
The Vietnamese alphabet came from Portugese missionaries, not the French.
Some of the marks designate tone (the ones that look like accent marks, foward and backward, plus the dots and the wee questionmark looking one and the tilde– five marked tones, plus the neutral tone which is not marked), and others tell you how to pronounce the vowels (hats, and whiskers off the side of O and U).
That said, I totally realize that these facts do not affect the gist of your argument.
David, no argument there. A few Protestant offshoots figured out how to make simplicity beautiful — I’m thinking here especially of the Shakers, whose crafts rival Zen Buddhism in their elegance — but most Protestant sects act as though they saw something pretty once and hated it on sight. (Unlike the Habsburgs, who were astoundingly ugly and decided to make up for it with arts, crafts, and architecture.) As for Japan and southeast Asia, it’s precisely the idiosyncrasies in these cases — and Europe’s — that make history what it is, and confound any attempt to set up general laws.
A, Karhukainen, oh, it’s quite possible that five centuries from now the Islam practiced in the European subcontinent will be heavily larded with Christian influences, to the point that more orthodox Muslims will regard their European brethren with the same suspicion that many Arabs today direct toward Iranians. As for the rise of science-flavored mythology, no doubt — and yes, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic work of deindustrial SF. You might like Edgar Pangborn’s Davy, in which the reigning church of deindustrial eastern North America has forbidden the faithful to have anything to do with anything that might contain atoms, since everyone knows that those blow up.
Horzabky, I rather like inentendable, as it suggests “can’t be understood” as well as “can’t be heard.”
Tengu, oh, granted, Zoroastrianism is philosophically dualist, but there’s only one god you’re supposed to worship, and everything else (including competing religions) belongs to Ahriman.
Justin, or a fine tacky movie —
— and the thought of Michael Landon playing the lead role is tempting.
Mary, that may well have been on Henry VIII’s mind, certainly! I could see it as a general rule, though it would require more study of the biographies of Protestant princes than I’ve done.
Bruno, that makes a great deal of sense. Hobbes’s concept of the social contract is basically a Westernized equivalent of the Sunnah, the body of teaching and practice accepted by the consensus of Muslims as binding.
Slithy, the interesting thing with Protestantism is that you often get situations like this, in which what counted as radicalism in an earlier generation has become reactionary, but still has a robust constituency. Think of the rejection of evolutionary theory — in the late 19th and very early 20th century, that was a radical Protestant thing, which is why the far-left radical politician William Jennings Bryan spoke for the prosecution at the famous “Scopes monkey trial.” Evangelical conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s was simply repeating most of the ideas of radical left-wing Evangelical Christianity circa 1910.
Goldenhawk, a Yeatsian analysis of Christianity and Islam as interpenetrating gyres has a lot to commend it.
Other Owen, that’s exactly what it’s like — and it wouldn’t surprise me for a moment if, now that old-fashioned sacramental Christianity is rising in popularity, some of the dying mainstream Protestant sects were to start copying them in an attempt to win back market share. (If any Protestant clergy are reading this, a word to the wise: it won’t matter a bit unless you go back to actually believing in the real existence of God, unfashionable as that may be.)
Methylethyl, hmm! I was misinformed. Thank you.
(This was to Justin, not me, but:) “Take a moment, or more than a moment, to think about what it would be like to see a future Protestantism that worships Jesus the Imagination, as Blake did!”
If I may, this sounds like you’re suggesting Protestantism become a kind of esoteric New Thought. If so, I like it.
Related: New Thought writer/lecturer Neville Goddard quotes Blake quite a bit in his books and lectures, especially after his mystical experience in 1959. Whether Blake meant his idea of Jesus the Imagination literally, Neville certainly did: his philosophy is based on the ideas (a) that each person individually is God, (b) the world is nothing but an objectified form of consciousness, and (C) Christ is our imagination through which we “crucify” old states of being (including those we conventionally think of as external) and “resurrect” new states into being. We are here to experience various states of consciousness and to individuate so that we can one day be gods — individualized aspects of God. (Compare Vishishadvaita Vedanta, though I don’t think Neville ever directly encountered that school since it’s never made many inroads into the West.)
He’s got a lot of eccentric and radical ideas — in some ways he epitomizes the radical end of New Thought that promises you can have everything for free — but I appreciate how often he distills down some of the standard ideas in New Thought, draws the obvious conclusions, and then states those directly rather than hemming and hawing about them to make them more respectable. (Also, his eccentric interpretations of Bible stories and symbolism as actually being about manifestation are kind of fun.)
Funny coincidence that today I would be reading IMPERIAL CHINA 900-1800 and come to a discussion of the mix of both ordinary diffusion and stimulus diffusion in how the Khitan of the Liao Dynasty adapted to ruling part of China during the 5 Dynasties period (between Tang and Northern Song) and during the Northern Song dynasty. For example, they copied writing with characters as the Chinese do but did not use the Chinese characters themselves, rather making up their own (unlike the Koreans and Japanese).
I think there is something beautiful about the white clapboard churches you see in the hills of the south. Coming around a bend, and seeing one on a hill or next to a creek, I like them. The nicer stone Presbyterian buildings often look nice, mistly thanks to the stone (thats the Druid in me). One thing I’ve noticed though is that the Catholic churches, and especially better funded cathedrals (two in my area) can just be walked into and explored. Thats because of the daily sacramental aspect, and they know people might be coming in to light some candles at a Marian shrine, or at a saints. Plus they have a bit more robust liturgical calendar… anyway, the big Presbyterian churches, that Id like to see inside of are always locked. But I used to go into the cathedral fairly often when I still worked in walking distance to it. The open door policy has a lot to commend it for a faith that wants to attract people. (Fish frys help too.)
This topic was not the least bit interesting to me when I saw it for vote the past few 5 week months, but even though I shouldn’t be surprised, I am.
The post is timely for me. Thanks for making me realize there is nothing wrong with having an interest in multiple religions and seeing the values they have. Further, it’s a bit freeing to think one can combine them and create their own, personal worship.
I suppose that point has been one common, underlying theme in many of your posts, that each of us experiences the world in different ways, and therefore we often express that experience in personal ways.
Perhaps because of my Christisn upbringing, it only made sense to me to think a religious practice had to be uniform with one, and only one that currently exists.
Thanks once again JMG! I appreciate your thought provoking essays.
@JMG,
I’m glad that this topic finally won out. And those other examples in stimulus diffusion – Vietnamese vs. Cherokee alphabets, the early Christian church as mystery cult, etc. – are also fascinating.
I have a few points of quibbling, though. First, I think you’re oversimplifying the situation with Judaism and Zoroastrianism when you say that the Jews weren’t monotheistic until after their contact with Persia. There is actually a lot of textual and archeological evidence for religious conflict all throughout the seventh century BC between a monotheist faction, championed by King Hezekiah and later by Josiah, and a more “traditional” party (the biblical narrative deems them heretics but modern archeologists and scholars consider they’re version of the religion to be older). Over and over a “reformist” king would arise, destroy the worships sites outside of Jerusalem, and purge the temple of the “idols” like the Asherah and the Brazen Serpent (since people had been burning incense to it.) Then there would be a king who “did evil in the sight of the LORD,” as the biblical narrative puts it, and he would restore the idols. The Babylonian captivity and eventual return made the monotheists the winners of the conflict (and also gave their religion new Zoroastrian elements like the tempter figure and individual judgment in the afterlife) but the struggle over how many gods the Jews should worship had been going on for quite a while before all of that. (Here is a link to a good online article about the archeological evidence for Hezekiah’s altar-smashing: https://biblearchaeologyreport.com/2019/10/04/king-hezekiah-an-archaeological-biography/)
Second point: I think your essay is incomplete without mentioning the fact that, from the point-of-view of Luther and the other Protestant reformers, the Catholics were the real Islam-enviers. Luther looked at the elaborate Catholic ceremonies, calendar of fast days, worship hours, rote prayers, and other such disciplines, and basically saw a watered-down version of Islam with its Ramadan fast and Salah prayers five times a day. He wrote extensively about how Catholicism and Islam were both religions of works that fooled people into thinking they could earn their salvation, and he argued that Catholicism’s failure to resist Islam was due to its having too much in common with Islam. (Here is a link to an article summarizing what Luther had to say about “the Turks.” https://www.zwemercenter.com/martin-luther-on-islam-and-the-turks/)
This take seems first cousin to Henri Pirenne’s “Mohammed and Charlemagne.” See also: Byzantine iconoclasm (definitely influenced by Islam, and subsequently deemed heretical).
The Reformers were diverse. Luther’s theses were fairly narrow in scope, and aimed at indulgences and papal power–he was not an iconoclast, and did not have strong views about church structure. As events got out of control, though, everybody with an agenda tried to further it. Calvin ran a police state, Menno Simons became a kind of cult leader. In England you had back-to-the land types (“diggers”) and nudists (“Adamites”), among other colorful radicals. How much of this was influenced by Islam, or the idea of Islam?
The Cree syllabary has been adopted by all kinds of First Nations groups, even for languages very far removed like Inuktitut. I think the driving force was that it looks cool, and very different from the Roman alphabet.
JMG: “Though the propagandists of both faiths tend to deny this heatedly, they have many more points in common than differences.”
In Islam, there is the whole “People of the Book” thing. Jesus is considered a prophet, whose teachings got distorted somewhat by Christianity (whence the Trinity etc.), but would have taught the same things as Muhammad and is equally holy.
JMG: ” the closest equivalents to the Mass in Roman Paganism were the ceremonial sharing of sacred foods that took place in mystery celebrations”
Now I have to ask which century you’re talking about. First-century Christians would have met for formal meals in private homes. Such meals came with established social conventions (similar, perhaps, to the dinners held nowadays by fraternal orders). Bread and wine were ordinary, basic foods. The meal was a full meal, not purely symbolic, and would have been accompanied by other items like fish or olives. The change may have come as a result of congregations growing too large to feed and house this way. Yes, the mysteries did have a big influence, but so did civil culture (ecclesia means a civil assembly).
Thanks for this, which contains a lot of material for reflection.
For the moment, I’ll mention a few points, some of which may seem to be ide issues; if I have time, I’ll continue on.
First, the surge of new religions in post-Tokugawa Japan. A substantial part of the initial surge should be attributed to the end of energetic suppression of new (or unorthodox) religions that had been in place throughout the Tokugawa shogunate, during which state-sponsored Buddhism was used to control or eliminate other forms of religion (leading to the anti-Buddhist developments in the Meiji restoration).
In addition to such currents as “hidden Christianity”, Shinto, and so on, there was also the very old tradition of mediumistic revelation (shared with China, Korea, Vietnam, etc). (Some of the elements of Christianity may have come from the hidden Christian tradition, or from rumors of what it was supposed to have been.) A close analogy is the Cao Dai religion of Vietnam, which clearly has Christian (and simply French) elements. But the tradition, and technique, of these mediumistic revelations goes back very far: the Shangqing Daoist tradition goes back to Wei Huacun, who not only received scriptures mediumistically, but also transmitted more scriptures — a century or so after her death. Similarly, the stimulus diffusion that led to the formation of the Taiping Rebellion was received by and adapted to the existing context of scriptural revelation and messianic revolution that had been a cultural constant from at least the Yellow Turban movement to the foundation of the Ming Dynasty.
So the key question is not whether there are similarities, or plausible candidates for diffused stimuli, but why and how certain aspects of the stimulating source are appropriated by people in the receiving culture, and why they prove viable.
The scripture-teacher-congregation model, after all, could have been familiar from Jewish congregations, where they existed. (Or, for that matter, schools and universities. If one follows Christopher Beckwith, European colleges could have been based on Buddhist models.)
There was a certain “Judaizing” tendency, at least among intellectuals, as a kind of theological model – but perhaps the overt, public adoption of Jewish ecclesiastical forms would have been a bit infra dignitatem. But perhaps for rulers who really wanted to be free of meddlesome priests, the idea that the clergy were subordinate to the ruler may have been pretty attractive.
Of course, all of these influences may have been at work! As you point out, monocausal explanations don’t work very well in history.
Hi John Michael,
And western Europe is sinking into a quagmire – they just lost their prize, to the US.
I still can’t quite comprehend how our leaders are backing Europe.
Cheers
Chris
Slithy, I suspect New Thought has blazed some of the trail that Protestantism will follow if it survives, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Jessica, hmm! I wasn’t aware of the origin of Khitan writing. Japanese is a (typically) weird example, because they use Chinese characters but they also have two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which were created (like the Korean Hanggul syllabary) by stimulus diffusion from Sanskrit!
Justin, one of the reasons I’d like to see Jesus the Imagination get a foothold is that those white clapboard churches could evolve an austere beauty of their own. Since they’re locked most of the time, though, there are hard limits.
Prizm, you’re most welcome. That point — that religion is a much broader and more flexible phenomenon than recent ideological faiths have tried to make it — is an important one for me.
Sandwiches, I’m far from sure I buy the claim that Hezekiah and Josiah were what the scriptural writings claimed they were. There was certainly conflict between centralizing and decentralizing forces in Israelite religion, but was that a matter of monotheism vs. polytheism, or simply whether the central government kept control of worship? As for the Reformers, that doesn’t surprise me — look for a preacher these days who rants about the evils of homosexuality and you know he has a boyfriend on the down low. We reject most heatedly what we are…
Ambrose, thanks for this. The centuries I’m talking about are the third and fourth, as Christianity stopped being a fringe cult of social outcasts and turned into a major force in the ancient world. That’s when, for example, incense stopped being something that only Pagans burnt and found its way into Christian ritual, and the communion ceremony stopped being a community meal and took on the characteristics of a mystery rite.
LeGrand, oh, granted. I don’t know a lot about the mediumistic traditions in the Sinic sphere, not having access to any of the relevant languages, so I’ll ask you: in your knowledge, was a monotheist view with a single creator god common in those traditions, and if so, when did it find its way in? (I know the apocalypse meme goes way back — cough, cough, Yellow Turbans, cough, cough.) It’s the way that so many Japanese new religions postulate a single creator deity in place of the crowded pantheons of Buddhism and Shinto that leads me to suspect stimulus diffusion.
Chris, our managerial classes here in the US are still on Europe’s side. I’ll discuss that in a future post.
Hi Other Owen,
Kuato the Martian mutant might suggest to you: “Open your mind!
People have been making that observation to me about music since the 90’s. As a suggestion, it may not be the music of today, it could well be your perspective. But then, we’re a long way from anywhere down here and may have a livelier music scene as a result.
Listen to Kuato. Hear Kuato! 😉 Good luck.
The federal government down here has a platform for new youth music and anyone can put up pretty much any genre, and the best gets played on the air – all commercial free. What you’re seeing may be a dilution of culture by invested interests seeking safety and a return? Dunno.
Cheers
Chris
Apparently Protestant Christianity got mojo in China . 1,000,000 in 1950 now around 40,000,000 https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/15/protestant-christianity-is-booming-in-china, may be quite a bit more according to other sources I have run across. All achieved with out pretty churches, Hermeticism, vestments, ritualistic liturgy. Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox left quite in the dust. Miraculous phenomena were apparently a part of the mojo.
This sentence saves your hypothesis, in my opinion: ” To the peoples… within an easy march…, Islam was the religion of their would-be conquerors, and they clung to everything that differentiated themselves from the Ottomans. It was those who lived further off, and didn’t have to worry about the imminent threat of Ottoman invasion, who could let themselves be dazzled”. It is in fact striking that Protestantism took hold in countries that were relatively far off from the Ottoman empire.
Not that the correlation is perfect – France, for example, was just as far away from the Ottomans as Saxony or Franconia were, and Catholicism won in France. Actually, maybe it is more fruitful to investigate why Catholicism ended up winning and reconquering certain areas than why Protestant sympathies sprang up initially in others. Hungary, Austria, Bohemia and Poland once had quite substantial Protestant minorities. As you say, there are many causes in play.
One argument of yours I didn’t understand was your affirmation that “rise of printing and the mass literacy it made possible was the cause of the Reformation, but that wasn’t new in the 16th century”. I do think printing was rather new in 1517, though I don’t know if literacy was any higher in the early 16th century than in earlier ones.
In any case, a very interesting and equilibrated essay!
The relationship between islam and christianity is even more complicated than that. Don’t tell the muslims, but islam is basically a christian heresy that was not adequately suppressed. Many of the early mosques were repurposed churches, and some other islamic practices may be relics of early christian practices. It’s possible that some of that came full circle and found its way back into christendom.
I’ve been reading up on Rosicrucianism, and like the theory that it was a sort of imaginary Protestant answer to the Jesuits. Yates thinks Dee was involved, but that’s speculative.
Slithy Toves: ” if you’re going to start a new religion – even if you’re pretending it’s an old one – you really should be mining other faiths for good ideas instead of trying to cast it all off in the name of authenticity.”
One common method is to start from within another religious group, then (perhaps as a result of losing a factional fight) hive off into a separate group.
Phutatorius, I notice that the Wikipedia entry for “Enneagram of Personality” connects that emblem to Evagrius of Pontus (who listed eight deadly sins, not just seven) as well as 1 / 7 =.1428571. and the enneagram is drawn by connecting points 1-4-2-8-5-7-1 (plus the triangle).
Very interesting JMG, whoever isn’t reading your blogs is definitely missing out!
May I just ask, Northwind Grandma, I haven’t seen any comments of late, if you’re reading this, can you just reply, so we know you’re still reading, if not commenting?
Regards, Helen in Oz
BeardTree, Christianity generally flourishes best under persecution, so that may be part of the mojo, too.
Aldarion, France is right across the Mediterranean from the westernmost provinces of Ottoman North Africa, so it’s considerably less sheltered than Saxony. Muslim pirates raided French commerce in the Mediterranean all the time, and the Ottomans besieged Malta in 1565; the pressure from the Ottomans was fierce enough that the French monarchy began cutting deals with the Ottomans in 1525. As for printing, it depends on what you mean by “new” — woodblock prints of single sheets date back in Europe into the 1300s, whole books were already being printed via woodblock in Germany by 1400, and movable type (invented in China in 1041) was in use in Europe by 1439 at the latest. By 1517, everyone in urban southern and central Europe but the very oldest had grown up with printed documents as an ordinary part of life. That drove a dramatic increase in literacy, since access to written materials was the main bottleneck in the manuscript period — once printing came in, hornbooks (the basic European tool for learning the alphabet) could be and were mass-produced, along with cheap broadsheets and other low-cost popular literature.
Weilong, funny. Muslims like to say that Christianity is a distorted version of their religion, you know.
Ambrose, Dee’s involvement is speculative, granted, but one of the original Rosicrucian manifestoes prominently displays his magical emblem, the Monas Hieroglypica, so it’s not baseless speculation by any means. One way or another, it didn’t stay imaginary for long!