Sunday, January 25, 2004
PHILIP OCHIENG / Fifth Columnist Their false witness to Freemasons
As Chronicles would say, Mzee Kimani Maruge will soon "lie with his fathers". But he is completely illiterate and cannot read Chronicles. So, at 84, he has decided to learn the Three Rs. I cannot sneer at that motivation. I know, from my own reading, that the pursuit after god can be a major spur to worldly knowledge. You wouldn't know it from the bloodthirst with which the Vatican has pursued scientists. But even Christianity began as a "knowledge cult". Techno-scientific knowledge – though steeped in magico-sexual ritual and abracadabra – was the only path to god. Thus the original Christians are called Gnostics (from gnosis, Greek for "knowledge").
We see it in Carl Sagan's remark in the introduction to A Brief History of Time that, by subjecting the physical universe to minute inspection, Stephen Hawking is eavesdropping on "god's mind".
In the days of Giordano Bruno, Hawking would have roasted at the stake. Today even John Paul II apologises for what the "Holy Office" did to Galileo Galilei. The Pope asserts that the Big Bang of quantum mechanics was the same event that Genesis calls "the beginning".
Many powerful Jewish minds – Spinoza, Freud, Marx, Trotsky, Einstein – would have no quarrel with that. When they call themselves atheists, what they are rejecting is only the god of Deuteronomy.
Einstein once told some rabbinical opponents of his General Relativity that what he objected to was only the whimsical, stormy and salacious god of Joshua, with a people "chosen" by a moral criterion which is most impugnable.
In its search for a Grand Unified Theory – a single formula to explain everything in the universe – what modern physics is seeking is a divinity who manifests herself through the governability of her creation.
Before the rise of the rigidly androcentric monotheon, this was the case throughout the world. Self-created and then fertilised by the Serpent – her own begotten son-husband – Mother Earth was the only Creator that humanity knew.
It was only in the second millennium BC, when Semito-Aryan patriarchy invaded Hamitic motherland, that she (as Tiamat) fell to Marduk, as Hera to Zeus, as Minerva to Jupiter, as Isis to Osiris, as Rahab (or Tehom or Leviathan) to Yahweh.
Elsewhere she was known as Athene, Cybele, Diana, Oestre, Anath, Hawwa, Eve, Hebe, Kali, Ngame. But, along the Nile, she was focused on Maat, the Goddess who personified cosmic and social order, symmetry, harmony, unity, justice, beauty, love and peace.
Even after the Nile itself had been "patronised", pursuit of knowledge remained its idea of worship.
It was Thoth, Cush's god of science and magic – adopted by Greece as Hermes and by Rome as Mercury – who introduced Hermeticism in Europe, whose preoccupation with astrology, alchemy and the elixir that so appalled the Vatican.
Yet, in the hands of the Knights-Templar, the Priory of Zion, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons and other anti-Church movements, this "black magic" was what created the modern West.
They went underground first because they were part of the ancient Egyptian tradition in which knowledge was always arcane and could be accessed only by the initiated and, secondly, to escape the murderous hands of the Inquisitors.
But, despite the persecution, it was they who created the modern university, the Gothic cathedrals, the Renaissance, the voyages of discovery, the Enlightenment, the American War of Independence, the Industrial Revolution, the Information Age.
Both the Anglican Church and the Church of Scotland are vitally linked to Freemasonry. The royal families have always been Freemasons and yet the monarch has always been the head of the national church.
That was why I was surprised when a newspaper reported that Kenya's chapter of the Anglican Church would not help plant my high school class-mate Joab Omino because he was a Freemason. The Church has done well to deny it.
For, though I myself am not a Freemason, I know that it is a knowledge movement dedicated to an African goddess of justice and order and that this is why the Vatican continues to bear false witness to it.
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mitayo Potosi
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