Messiah

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 where the people inside told him Maitreya would be travelling to 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 by the Hobbits, the "Fourth Age" dawns on Middle Earth and the King is crowned etc. Another piece of fiction I want to discuss in detail is one of the less well-known films by M Night Shyamalan, the director of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. The Lady in the Water was a box office flop and received trashing comments from the critics, but it is highly underrated in my opinion. In the story an aetheric naiad, a water nymph, emerges from a swimming pool in order to contact a writer who lives in a home nearby, played by the director in a supporting role, to inform him that the political textbook he is working on will powerfully influence a young man. This young man will grow up to become President of the 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, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/energy-politics-and-ufos-2015.html. Some people in the conspiratorial movement are keen on astrology and talk about the "dawning of the Age of Aquarius" and of course we all remember the 2012 phenomenon, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/2012-mayan-calendar-day-is-here.html. The main difference is that I don't think anybody in the Truth movement personally represents the messiah... although there are a few people I could name who regard themselves as such. The same goes for the antichrist (No, it's not Prof. Brian Cox). I don't dismiss the possibility that the imagery of the end times could be an actual allegory of real activities by the Illuminati. This worrying thought is addressed in Christopher Everard's very disturbing documentary Illuminati II- the Antichrist Conspiracy. The film claims that the rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons conceived a golem child with the actress Margery Cameron in 1945 and the baby was placed in a lead canister beside the Trinity test, the first ever nuclear explosion. The child lived and was female... Personally I think it was Hillary Clinton, see: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ILLUMINATI-Vol-2-Antichrist-Conspiracy-Oppenheimer/dp/B004XRRBC6. Whatever the answer, what I find most interesting about the concept of the messiah, in all its forms, is that it is a symptom of a universal part of human existence. People the world over seem to experience a regret, an uneasiness, a dissatisfaction with their life and the world they live in. This might be a distant race memory, or an upwelling of the Jungian collective unconscious, but it is there; as Morpheus said, "like a splinter in your mind". If this disquiet is justified, which surely it is; then what does it mean? I think it means we all have the intuitive sense that the world is not meant to be the way it is. The destruction and injustice we see all around us and are pummelled with every day is neither natural nor inevitable. Some of us can learn to live with it. We even force ourselves to shrug and say: "Well, that's just the way the world is, mate"; but even if we do, we never lose that niggling feeling that this is still the wrong path. The messiah is a personification of that sorrow. I don't believe in literal sons of God; except in the fact that, in a way, we are all sons and daughters of God. Along with the messiah, many cultures also have legends about the "fall of man"; that we humans once lived in a higher state of civilization than we do today and something went wrong; there was a disaster and we descended into barbarism. Eventually we developed a deformed and defective version of what we had previously created. Whether it's the snake in the garden, or Noah and the flood, the destruction of Atlantis or Pandora opening her box, all these tales have the same basic theme. The ancient mysteries researcher Maria Wheatley believes she may have even found archaeological evidence for this, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/programme-203-podcast-maria-wheatley.html. Perhaps I have identified the cause of this universal human sadness, the one that makes us fantasize about figures of love and justice who come along, sweep away our antagonists and change things for the better. Like in the powerful poem by CS Lewis which he includes in his classic children or young adult's novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: "Wrongs will be right, when Aslan comes in sight. At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more. When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death. And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again." It's also expressed beautifully in the classic Christmas song by Johnny Mathis When a Child is Born, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ6hJNGZ8vg. If this is true, that we humans have fallen from grace, or whatever terminology you want to put on it, then can we rise again back to grace? I hope so. I sometimes believe so, especially when I hear David Icke and many others talking about a "great awakening", see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGbdN_Z43UY. Until we do awaken and return to our previous high state of being, we will never be happy. We will continue to create fables about messiahs of all kinds, to console us, because these fables are embodiments of our own eternal aspirations. One thing is for sure, as long as those aspirations exist, the hope of a new Eden will always be there; and they definitely will always exist because they are an essential part of what makes humans what we are.

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