Apologies for not having written a HPANWO main site article
for so long, over a year now in fact. The reason for this is I didn't have time
while writing my new novel, see: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/roswell-rising-is-here.html.
The concept of the messiah is one of these universal ideas which appear in
different forms across the human world. It is so widespread it is virtually an
endemic archetype. The best known and most literal manifestation of the messiah
is found in Judaism. The word messiah
comes from the Hebrew and means "the anointed one". It refers to a
person of royal lineage, ie: descended from King David and King Solomon, who
has the holiness and power to unite the tribes of Israel and bring about a new
age of universal peace, love and prosperity. This age will only come about
after a period of extreme hardship and spiralling destruction known as the eschaton, which will end with the
crowning of the messiah as the king of the Jews. The future paradise is
described in captivating detail in the Book of Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears
into pruning hooks; no nation will raise arms against another nation and they
will no longer study warfare." (Isaiah 2:4) "The lion shall lie down with the lamb, the wolf shall lie down
with the goat, the calf and the fox and the yearling together; and a little
child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down
together, and the lion will eat straw like the cow. The infant will play near
the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy on my entire holy mountain, for the earth
will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters covering the sea."
(Isaiah 11:6-9). Some Jewish traditions date the arrival of the Messianic Age
as 6000 years after Creation; that's 2240 in the Gregorian calendar, still over
two hundred years to wait. However the Christian vision of the eschaton is more
nebulous; it is described in the disturbing abstract imagery of the Book of
Revelations, the final chapter of the New Testament. However, there's a catch;
we are not told when the Messianic
Age will begin. It could happen tomorrow, or in ten thousand years' time. "But about that day or hour no one
knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
(Mark 13:32 ) The Christian idea of
the messiah is developed from the Jewish one, but is different in several ways.
Jesus Christ is a messianic king of sorts; in fact Christ means "anointed" in Greek; however he is more than
a worldly king, he is the Son of God. Christians differ from Jews because they
believe that the prophesies of the Old Testament were fulfilled in the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jews are still waiting for their messiah to
this day when Christians believe he arrived two thousand years ago and the Jews
failed to accept him for who he was. The result of this is one of the most
dynamic concepts in theology, the Second Coming. This belief in universal among
Christians and is included at the end of the Nicene Creed: "He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and
his kingdom will have no end. ... We look for the resurrection of the dead, and
the life of the world to come." The return of Jesus will by
synchronous with a time known as the rapture,
which is similar to the Jewish eschaton. Despite what Jesus says in Mark's
Gospel, many people believe they have correctly predicted the rapture, very often
from studying the Bible in intricate detail, even to the point where the text
is broken down and scanned for secret codes. This practice has been going on
since the very dawn of Christianity and barely a decade has passed since then
which does not contain a date predicted by some new prophet or other as the day
of Armageddon. The most recent example was the American evangelist Harold
Camping who assured us that the rapture would begin on the 21st of May 2011 . I don't doubt some other
preacher will very soon foresee another day in the near future. The obsession
with the rapture is most common in the United
States of America , but can be found all over
the Christian world. The popular structure of the "end times" is
inspired by the Book of Revelations and has heavily influenced American
culture; I'll be saying more about that below. Islam also has a rich messianic
mythology that is even more complex than the Christian one. The Holy Quran
cites Jesus as the penultimate prophet before Mohammed, the final and greatest
Muslim prophet. They call Jesus Isa-ibn-Maryam
and he will also play a crucial role in the end times. Muslims believe in the
Second Coming but only after the arrival of the Mahdi, the final imam and redeemer of Islam. The Mahdi and Jesus, in his second
incarnation, will have to battle the antichrist, known as Masiah ad-Dajjal, literally the "false messiah". When the
Day of Judgement comes and the dead rise from their graves, according to the Abu Dawad Hadith: "Jesus will fight for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross,
kill the swine, and put an end to war. God will perish all religions except
Islam. Jesus will destroy the antichrist, who will live on the earth for forty
days and then he will die. The Muslims will pray behind him." What a
nasty shock that will be for Pastor Terry Jones.
The messiah meme has spread way beyond the three Abrahamic
religions. In their own way, most other faiths have the concept of a saviour
who will act as a revolutionary force that will demolish an old epoch and usher
in a new one. Krishna is said to be the son of Vishnu in
the Hindu tradition who appears as a worldwide avatar at the end of the Kali yuga,
the present era, and battles the dark forces until the great upheaval has
brought about the dawning of a new and happier world. People of the entire
world, whatever their faith, will look to Krishna as
their lord and saviour. The Buddha is destined to return after he first
achieved enlightenment in the 5th century BC. His new incarnation is known as Maitreya. However Buddhists, along with
Hindus, don't believe in a single eternity, only the endless turning over of
cycles of ages. Therefore in every kalpa,
the largest cycle which includes all the medium sized and smaller ages, there
are said to be a thousand Buddhas. That sounds like an abundance, however a kalpa is at least 4.32 billion years
long. So if the last Buddha came along as Prince Gautama in 500 BC and if their
occurrence is regular, we have over four million years to wait for Maitreya. It
could be worse; there are extended kalpa
period times at over 1.28 trillion years... you do the maths. There are some
faiths that believe the messiah is alive today, or was recently. The
Rastafarians believe Emperor Haile Selassie I is the messiah and call him Jah Rastefarai, "God's Haile";
however this is a label the emperor himself denied before he died in 1975.
What's more the Rastaferai religion is most popular in the Caribbean
rather than in Selassie's native Ethiopia .
Another common theme that lies alongside the messiah is its antithesis, a force
that appears at the same time as the messiah and works in opposition to it,
hoping to derail the dawn of the Messianic Age and instead build an incarnate
hell. This antithesis is best known as the antichrist,
"the beast." "Let the one
with understanding reckon the meaning of the number of the beast, for it is the
number of a man. His number is 666." (Revelations 13:15–18) As with
the calculations for the date of the Apocalypse, many people have striven hard
to identify the individual who is the son of Satan based on that little three
digit number.
Is there any evidence that the messiah or antichrist is
really walking amongst us? There is according to a Scotsman with a strange
name, Benjamin Creme. He travels the world giving lectures about how he
believes that the messiah has already been born and lives today. Although he
calls the anointed one "Maitreya" Creme asserts that he speaks for
the whole world and all religions, not just Buddhism. Creme is a Theosophist
and this is the terminology they use. From 1945 Creme says he began to receive
telepathic messages from God announcing the arrival on earth of Maitreya. He
describes a secret meeting in 1959 in which he was given more details. He met
with some mysterious people in a parked car in London ,
summoned by a phone call to a lane near Tower
Bridge London
soon from where he was born in the Himalayas . In 1982
Creme held a press conference in which he said Maitreya had flown to London
from Nepal in
1977 and was living in the city with the Asian community on and around Brick
Lane in Tower Hamlets. He was living there
incognito, which must have been difficult because he was said to be seven feet
tall. I remember seeing Creme's appearance on TV as a small child and being
worried. Was I worthy? Creme stated that Maitreya would be going public within
the next few months and making his own TV appearances. The programme featured a
woman who claimed to have seen Maitreya at a lecture. Nothing happened, but
that did not deter Benjamin Creme. He carried on promoting the message that
Maitreya was coming, sometimes taking out full-page adverts in major newspapers.
This he continues to do today at the age of ninety-three. Amazingly, he has
never made any money from his activities and sells his book royalty-free, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvjkH7e-Lu8.
Apparently Maitreya is making the occasional public speech at various places
around the world. The best known of these is the most interesting because it
includes possible photographic evidence. Mary Sinaida Akatsa is a woman from Kenya
who runs an outdoor spiritual retreat at the town of Kawangware ,
a suburb of the capital, Nairobi . Her
congregations can number over a thousand people. During one of her ceremonies
on the 11th of June 1988
she suddenly announced that God had given her a message and that there was
going to be a miracle. An unusually bright star materialized overhead, one that
could be seen even in the daylight. Then the tall figure of a man appeared from
nowhere. He was dressed in a white robe and was barefooted. He smiled
benevolently and his bearded face radiated love, joy and peace. Many of the
onlookers who were sick found themselves instantly healed. He turned to the
crowd and said in perfect Swahili: "We are nearing the time for the reign
of heaven. But before that I shall come back and bring a bucketful of blessings
for all of you." He then turned to Mary Akatsa and told her: "You are
doing an important job for God. Keep preaching and don't let anybody stop
you." Then the mysterious man left the meeting and asked for a lift to the
bus station. One of the people there agreed and showed him to his car, no doubt
feeling skeptical at this request. Why would the son of God need a ride in a car?
But when the driver dropped the strange man off, he didn't get on a bus; he simply
vanished into thin air. As luck, or providence, would have it, one of the
witnesses was a reporter for the Kenya
Times newspaper, and he had a camera and began taking snapshots of the
scene. These are the only known photographs of any alleged messiah, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4vHv3zys6E.
Here's Benjamin Creme's website: http://www.share-international.org/.
The concept of the messiah, the antichrist and the eschaton has
been the inspiration for many films and literary works. The Omen is a trilogy of horror movies running from 1976 until 1981
that charts the life of the antichrist, born as a boy called Damien with the
number 666 as a birthmark on his scalp. The story ends as an adaptation of the
final tribulation in the Book of Revelations with the ultimate conflict between
the Second Coming of Jesus and the son of Satan. The adult Damien is close to
how I would imagine the antichrist to be; smooth, cold, suave and very high in
conventional status. The kind of person we're all supposed to admire and envy.
There are a number of other similar dramas. Predictably these include the very
American Left Behind series of books
and films that are thin and weak and loaded with very Bible Belt superficiality
on an epic scale. There are others. Probably the best is The Second Coming written by the Doctor Who producer Russell T Davies. This two part TV movie is an
extremely vivid and credible vision of what might well happen if the real
Second Coming did occur. The messiah in this case is not a simple carpenter
from Galilee, but a similarly simple video rental store worker from Manchester,
Stephen Baxter, played by the Ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston. Davies and
his team came very close to creating a brilliant fantasy drama here, but it is
spoilt because the reveal is so theologically and philosophically shallow. It's
as if Davies, at the very moment of his literary triumph, just put down his pen
and let the management committee of the British Humanist Association write the
denouement. Davies is an outspoken atheo-skeptic and humanist, and he totally
failed to murder his darlings. The end of the film is an unforgivably preachy
and simplistic anticlimax. Judith's final speech is the author talking, not the
character. Nevertheless it is still worth watching for its gems; just skip the
last twenty minutes, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEO_iZJyEZw.
There are other more subtle references to messianic themes in some other films.
The Lord of the Rings, based on the
book by JRR Tolkien, is all about the destruction of the world's evil which is compacted
into a tiny Pandora-like package, the One Ring of Sauron. When it is destroyed
in Mount Doom United
States and bring a change for the better to
the world. The naiad says: "A boy
in the Midwest of this land will grow up in a home where
your book will be on the shelf and spoken of often. He will grow up with these
ideas in his head. He will grow into a great orator. He will speak and his
words will be heard throughout this land and throughout the world. This boy
will become leader of this country and begin a movement of great change. He
will speak of you and your words. Your book will be the seeds of many of his
great thoughts. It will be the seeds of change." There's not much
difference in meaning between that and Revelations' description of the New
Jerusalem. The only difference is that the saviours are not God, but a writer,
a nymph and a boy. The end titles of the movie are scored by a cover of Bob
Dylan's Times They are a-Changing.
This is a fascinating film because its concept involves the traditional
spiritual messianic message, but it also includes a bridge to the secular
aspect of the messiah which I will examine next.
You don't have to believe in God, or water nymphs, or even
technologically advanced extraterrestrials like the Aetherius Society and
Raelians do, to have messianic thoughts. The archetype can affect the most
hardened atheo-skeptiko-materialist. The textbook example is Marxism. The
economic and political philosophy of Karl Marx states that the driving force of
human society is class struggle and since the working class carry out the means
of production, they can seize possession of it and run it themselves via a
"dictatorship of the proletariat". Therefore Marx urges the workers
of the world to "unite". This slogan is even carved on his
gravestone, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/my-trip-to-highgate-cemetery.html.
The foundational document of Marxism, The
Communist Manifesto that Marx wrote with Friedrich Engels in 1848, is one
of the most influential books ever published and it states things like: "Society will take all forces of
production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange, and manage them in
accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of
the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences
which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished.
There will be no more crises. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will
reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction
of the needs of all. In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy
the needs of all its members. The division of society into different, mutually
hostile classes will then become unnecessary and intolerable. Just as the
peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way
of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big
industry; in the same way, communal control over production by society as a
whole, and the resulting new development, will both require an entirely
different kind of human material. People will no longer be, as they are today,
subordinated to a single branch of production. Industry controlled by society
as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human
beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system
of production in its entirety. The form of the division of labour which makes
one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a
stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will
completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize
themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of
production to another in response to the needs of society or their own
inclinations." How different is that really to the words of the
prophet Isaiah, the Abu Dawad Hadith
or Benjamin Creme? It is simply a secular embodiment of the same worldview, and
those who read it will develop the same longings as the pilgrim in the temple.
I myself was sympathetic to Marxism in my late teens when I started out in
hospital portering. It is the ultimate expression of the drive towards a
worldly messianic age. There's even an incarnate antichrist in the form of
"reactionaries", people who want to stop the revolution and maintain
capitalism. The right wing of politics has its own equivalents. Extreme fascist
movements have objectives that are as revolutionary and quixotic as those of
Marx. More moderate conservative tendencies can also become deeply idealistic
and visionary. Both left and right wing politics can regard history as
purposive, and leading up to an appointed end. On the other side of that end
lies an eternal universal utopia. There is even a book entitled The End of History. That name could
easily suit a communist textbook, but it is in fact written by a Japanese-American
neoconservative called Francis Fukuyama. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama
decided that the spreading of liberal capitalism and democratic states
represented the final act of human social evolution. The Western lifestyle
would eventually inherit the entire world and then a stable global equilibrium
would be achieved that could last indefinitely. In this sense Fukuyama
sounds astonishingly similar to Karl Marx. His ideas, as well as others like
Irving Kristol and Leo Strauss, have been very influential, especially in the United
States , and they were the philosophical
motive (at least for the uninitiated) for the War on Terror. This could explain
why many neoconservatives are former leftists. Christopher Hitchens is a prime
example. He began as a Marxist but ended up a fellow traveller of the
neocon-ridden Bush administration. His conversion process was a long one; but it
was surprisingly smooth, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpIY5_o1O5E.
The main difference with non-religious ideas is the absence of a God, but sometimes
secular messiahs take a far less abstract form. You only have to look at the
old films of a crowd listening to speeches by Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin to
see how similar a role these mortal individuals play to the divine saviour of the
religions. During the Soviet era, Russians sung adoring songs about Lenin that
were very similar to hymns. As I said, the messiah instinct is present in us
all; and if we deny the existence of the literal divine, it will manifest in
other ways.
This inevitably leads to the need for introspection; in what
form does my own messianic feeling take shape? I am a conspiracy theorist, a UFOlogist
and a paranormal enthusiast. I have no religion, but I accept spiritual
reality. I am not a member of any definitive political movement, but I take a
keen interest in politics from the conspiracy/UFO/paranormal perspective.
Reading my own words, I can see myself talk about the need to stop the New
World Order; and once we've done that a new era can begin without the burden of
the Illuminati and their agenda to build an Orwellian global state. I also
yearn for UFO Disclosure, the declassification of free energy and the
destruction of state secrecy and oppression. This HPANWO TV video in particular
illustrates my own vision for the equivalent of the Apocalypse and
establishment of the Kingdom of God Eden will always be
there; and they definitely will always exist because they are an essential part
of what makes humans what we are.
See here for the
latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/ben-emlyn-jones-on-christopher-everard.html.
See here for the
latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/jack-of-antarctic-rip.html.
See here for the
latest HPANWO Radio shows: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/programme-205-podcast-sandra-fecht.html.
