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thetygre · 6 years

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30 Day Monster Challenge 2 - Day #15: Favorite Great Old One/Monster God

1. Nurgle the Great Unclean One (Warhammer)

I think you can tell a lot about a person by knowing which of the Chaos Gods is there favorite. I’m not saying there’s a right answer, but I’ve always been a Nurgle man myself. Nurgle is more than just the daemon god of disease and entropy; he’s the god of the value of life. Nurgle loves all of his children equally, down to the smallest virus. It can be hard for people to accept that, to realize that they have as much cosmic significance as a single-cell organism, but that’s just because they don’t realize how much love the Urfather has for that little cell. In Nurgle’s phlegmatic embrace, all of us are equal, regardless of race, gender, or cell count.

Nurgle asks only that you spread the love he has so willingly given, so that all may be his children. Death and disease are natural parts of life; we struggle to fight them so, but they always come back to us. Through Nurgle, we may exalt in the power of pus and the greatness gangrene. We grow stronger with each infection, and every tumor is a sign of endurance. We do not die when the Plague Bearer calls us; we merely transform for the vermin and bacteria that consumes us, to be reborn in the eternal cycle. Truly, Grandfather Nurgle moves in wondrous ways.

2. Ithaqua the Wind Walker (August Derleth)

It should come as no surprise that the god of all wendigos is one of my favorite Great Old Ones. The Ithaqua Cycle is probably the best thing August Derleth wrote, for what ever that’s worth. Ithaqua is just such a chilling god; the image of some skull-faced giant thing turning around a mountain is the stuff of nightmares. Ithaqua is the primal urge inside life, the need to do anything to survive in an unrelenting environment. He walks in the cold places of the world, but also in that cold space between worlds, spreading his cannibalistic madness from world to world. Ithaqua himself seems hardly necessary, or the countless wendigos that follow him. It’s the chaos and horror he causes between people in a desperate situation, pitting one man against the other and breaking taboos until only the strongest is left. Ithaqua is the cold and brutality of the North personified.

3. Lolth the Queen of the Demonweb Pits (Dungeons and Dragons)

Lilith is so pastiche these days. You know where the real rebellious queen of evil action is at? Spiders, man, and Lolth is the Spider Queen. Lolth has been in Dungeons and Dragons since the beginning. Wherever the dark elves go, Lolth goes too, like any deity, and her absence from a setting is noticeable. She’s one of D&D’s greatest villains, and countless adventurers have lost their lives in the Demonweb Pits. Her entire realm is an arachnid hell crawling with spiders as small a mite to as big as her spider-golem palace. Lolth is an entity of contrasts; her priesthood is a strict matriarchy, but Lolth herself is absolutely insane. It’s hard to tell if there’s anything left of the elf goddess she used to be. Beneath the layers of scheming, beauty, racially motivated hatred, and plans to conquer the known multiverse lies a beating heart of blind hunger, an overwhelming instinct to survive by strength alone.

4. Saaitii the Hog (William Hope Hodgson)

Saaitii is actually what got this particular entry in the challenge. See, I wanted to do just ‘Top 10 Great Old Ones’, but then I was worried that not everybody would know what the Great Old Ones are and it’s kind of an arbitrary category that Lovecraft wanted people to change from story-to-story for fun, so then I just broadened the category to ‘monster gods’ and now here we are. Anyway, Saaitii is a monster that William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective Thomas Carnacki encountered in his monster-hunting stories. The locals tell Carnacki that Saaitii is the ghost of a boar wrongfully killed long ago, but Carnacki suspects that it’s an extradimensional something using the spirits of dead hogs to try and come through.

First off, I just want to know what William Hope Hodgson’s deal with pigs was. This is explicitly his second pig monster story, following the pig men from The House on the Borderlands. But the usage of that aesthetic is definitely refreshing a little unsettling. In an age of meme-tentacles, we need new and different cosmic horrors. Pigs can be disturbing; we think of them as cute at best and filthy at worst, but rarely evil or malevolent. Even the meanest boar has a kind of nobility to it. But the Hog brings up images of mindless, vicious cruelty, dark things in the forest and filth. The concept of a higher life form like some extradimensional whatsit coming into our world through ‘lower’ lifeforms strikes a little close to the karmic bullseye for some, turning the tables on humanity and reminding us that in the eyes of the cosmos, we’re just so much more food.

5. Ogdru Jahad the Seven Who Are One (Hellboy)

You’d think there’d be more dragons on the list, but so far it’s just the one. Seven. 369. Whatever. The Ogdru Jahad are the Hellboy/BPRD universes Great Old Ones, and the source of… a sizable amount of trouble there. Not all of it, but most of it. At the dawn of time, the Sons of God formed the mud of creation into seven great dragons that were filled with the shadow of the moon, for whatever reason. Things would have been fine and dandy there, but one little angel named Satan, for reasons that are still unclear, took the fire of God and filled the dragon with it, giving the Ogdru Jahad life. The Ogdru Jahad birthed their 369 offspring, and the angels had to fight them off before the whole Creation thing could get rolling. From that day on, every human culture has been warned about the Ogdru Jahad, and they have been ingrained in the human consciousness as the Dragon, from Tiamat to the Beast of Revelations.

It’s a nice fusion of Judeo-Christian Biblical lore and cosmic horror. I honestly don’t think it would work if it wasn’t for the fact that Satan is notably absent from the Hellboy series and, as of BPRD: Hell on Earth, the Ogdru Jahad are winning, where even their smallest children can cause natural disasters. I love conflating the image of dragons with cosmic monsters. Cthulhu as Leviathan, flying polyps as oriental dragons, hunting horrors as wyverns; it’s a direct play to the archetype that both types of creatures fill. The Ogdru Jahad illustrate that perfectly, simultaneously something the most modern of cosmic horror and the most ancient of monsters.

6. Flowey the Flower (Undertale)

Flowey’s final form gets in on design alone. There aren’t a lot of monster designs that actually freak me out, but Flowey is just horrible. Of course that’s also because it’s a genius bit of sprite animation, with the usage of textures contrasting so hard with the rest of Undertale. It looks like something that ate its way inside out from at least three Madoka witches. The claws, the eyes, the mouths; it all makes something perfectly awful and abhorrent. And, of course, the music. I actually think Flowey’s boss theme rates pretty low compared to other Undertale boss themes, but the title is just something else. How are you supposed to do better than “Your Best Nightmare”?

7. Rom the Vacuous Spider (Bloodborne)

It’s Rom. C’mon. Look, I know she’s not actually a Great One; she’s Kin, like Mergo’s Wet Nurse. But look at her. When I think, “What’s my favorite eldritch monstrosity boss from Bloodborne?” I keep coming back to Rom. Just look at her dumb, stupid face. One of her attacks is just falling over. That’s the most relatable a video game has been for me since I was an undergrad. Rom doesn’t want to hurt anybody; she’s just a giant, stupid bug/fungus thing. You could just walk away, man. You could just leave poor Rom alone. She’s doing her best trying to grant people eyes and you’re over here hassling her. In front of her kids, man. Just leave her alone.

8. Moder the Bastard of Loki (The Ritual)

Y’know, as a jotun, this guy could have been on the giant list, but I feel like its design and concept are too unique for that. This is a special monster, a kind of revelatory creature. Its design is just out of this world, blending human and stag and those creepy little eyes. But there’s so much more to it than just a great design. Its ability to create illusions essentially gives it access to shapeshifting, tying it to the actual mythology of Loki and Norse giants. The actual ritual to appease Moder, where it picks a person up and impales them on a tree, is reminiscent of the story in Norse mythology where Odin impales himself on the World Tree Yggdrasil to gain the knowledge of the runes. Before a person is killed, Moder shows them something precious to them, or a defining moment in their life; it is, in its own way, giving the person a revelation about what is vital in their own universe. Moder, like any good monster, delivers a message about the meaning of reality to the people it encounters.

9. Set the Slithering God (Conan the Barbarian/Marvel Comics)

I like this comic book version of a god. The actual Egyptian deity Set is fairly complex, and actually examining his character and divine portfolio gives insight into how Egypt’s culture changes over time. Comic book Set, on the other hand, is the god of snake villains. He is the snake villain to end all snake villains. Marvel cooked him up for their old Conan comics based off an offhand mention in one of Robert E. Howard’s stories because they needed Conan to have a nemesis. So Conan’s nemesis, the arch-wizard/priest Thoth Amon, worships the dark god Set, regardless of the fact that Thoth Amon appeared exactly once in the very first Conan story. Now, it’s fifty years later and Set is apparently one of Marvel’s Primordial Ultra-Deities.

It’s that mixture of traditional myth and the cosmic I like again, though this time it’s less H.P. Lovecraft ‘cosmic horror’ and more Jack Kirby ‘cosmic action’; new gods and a new mythology for a new medium, but still the same old story. Set is the Serpent, like the Ogdru Jahad, manifesting in human lore as everything from the serpent in Eden to Leviathan. He was the first murderer, able to absorb the power of any other god he ate, and even today he seeks reptile supremacy. Wherever there is Set there are snakes, enacting the cosmic cycle of death and rebirth while lounging in decadence.

10. Haos the Ultimate Bio-Weapon (Resident Evil 6)

… We’re going to do this now, and then we’re never going to do it again. Because we’re going to talk about something good that was in Resident Evil 6. One of the most infuriating things about RE6 is that it had some of the most incredible monster designs in the Resident Evil series. Great designs. The kind of monster designs that other games only wish they could achieve. And they were wasted on one of the worst games the series has produced. One of those designs was Haos, the apparent ultimate bio-weapon engineered by (ugh) Neo-Umbrella in a secret facility at the bottom of the ocean good lord I’m putting this on a list with William Hope Hodgson.

Haos deserves a better game; its design is unnecessarily fantastic. It looks like a ningen crossed with a jellyfish. It’s some far future stage of human evolution driven to its most extreme and bizarre form. There’s something forlorn and sad about it, but also beautiful and powerful. Its concept is purely apocalyptic; Haos will rise from the bottom of the ocean before it finally dies and dissolves into a gas that will spread across the world, turning humanity into zombies and monsters. Herald of a world of gods and monsters and all that. Even its name is kind of cool; ‘Haos’ is literally Siberian for ‘chaos’. And every day I have to wake up with the knowledge that this wonderful, horrible monster was stuck at the end of a Resident Evil 6 campaign. It’s depressing. So here’s to good old Haos; at least here you’ll get some respect.

#30 Day Monster Challenge 2 #30 Day Monster Challenge #Great Old Ones #Warhammer #Nurgle #Dungeons and Dragons #Lolth #Hellboy #Undertale #long post

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moonmythology · 6 years

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What it Feels Like to Be Human -- Chapter 4: A Wolf in the Distance

Synopsis: Athdhea Lavellan always wanted to find out what it means to be human. Becoming the Herald of Andraste taught her to be careful of what one wishes for. So far away from home, she finds herself drawn towards her Commander, despite their differences, and a mysterious elf, who has always been in her dreams. CullenxLavellanxSolas.

Chapter Overview: Solas grapples with his growing feelings for Athdhea--a girl he once saved, a woman who now bears his mark. While he hated this new world that he created, his burgeoning feelings for her is starting to make this world suddenly somewhat beautiful.

This has been posted on fanfiction.net and will be updated on AO3.

He woke to a world where the dreams he knew did not exist.

His people had lost their cities and their villages. Humans treat them like stray animals. Worst of all, they had lost their dreams and clung to the very chains that he sought to break.

Once, walking in a human city, he was chased away as soon as its inhabitants realized that he had magic. For many people in this world, magic was a sin.

Like walking in a world of Tranquil, this world had nothing but death. So he sought to change it again.

And then he met her.

The first time he saw her was in a long dream. In his long slumber, he led this child and her baby sister through the Veil towards a mirror, one that led them near safety towards a nearby Dalish clan.

On the second time, he sought her out. At first, he did not know it was her. He merely wanted to find the mage with the mark who was found in the Conclave.

She was Dalish, and she probably grew up despising him. The words that he would use to describe her was: young, beautiful and dying. Her battle with death was hopeless because none but he could bear the mark and live. Poor thing, he thought. It was his orb that caused it, along with the deaths of so many others. True, he had caused the deaths of so many. One does not get to survive wars, lead rebellions and fight for freedom without some sacrifice, so he never understood why he didn't want her blood on his hands.

For days, she slept. He often wondered what the color of her eyes was. So he followed her in her dreams.

It was there that he recognized that little girl he once walked with. They walked alongside the same mirrors that walked through years ago, while she peppered him with questions: Is it more useful to have intelligence, common sense or wisdom? Can people's natures actually change? Is it possible to live lives without prejudice? What is power? What does freedom mean anyway? Whenever she asked about him or who he was, he always found a way to distract her. One time, he even introduced her to Wisdom. Both had lengthy conversations that he knew that she most likely would not remember, but would linger in that space between dreaming and waking.

And then, she woke up.

He guided her hand to close one rift.

And then she did it again on her own. And again.

With a gesture of her hand, she continually silenced ghosts and ushered lost spirits to where they belong. If such a person could carry the mark, a burden that he thought that only he could carry, everything he knew, everything he thought possible could change.

Her spirit was indomitable.

The version he met of her in this world was much different from the one he's met in her dreams. While the one he met previously was a little more open and carefree, the person he met in the world outside the Fade is slightly more reserved, more guarded. But then, he concluded that maybe because she had to live in the world of humans. Still, in those times when she is relatively at ease, that carefree side of hers would show. Because he wanted to see more of that person in her dreams, he became her friend in the waking world too.

It is simply wonderful to be liked for who one is. Not as Fen'Harel, but Solas. For a while, he realized that he had forgotten what friendship and affection felt like.

To live in this world with such a person, he thought, maybe this world can be beautiful. That thought frightened him more than anything.

"Solas!" she called, marching out of the Haven's open-air dance floor towards him. "By the Dread Wolf! What are you doing sulking over there?"

He snickered at her choice of expletives. Normally he was unnerved whenever anyone else said them, but there was always some sweet irony whenever she said them.

Her eyebrows lifted. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing," he snickered. "But this is how I like to enjoy such fleeting celebrations such as these. Distance just makes things easier given certain inevitabilities."

"You mean the Elder One?"

He nodded. "You have now interfered with his plans twice. Once at the Temple of Sacred Ashes, and now again at Redcliffe. A being who aspires to godhood is unlikely to ignore such an affront. You should prepare yourself."

"And this is how I prepare myself." Her arms stretched out to the sky, the cold air became visible as she exhaled. "I breathe a bit."

"Time is not a luxury that everyone has."

"True. But not everyone has managed to time travel, and be given a chance to save the future."

"Are you certain you experienced time travel? Could it have been an illusion, a trick of the Fade?"

"I've been to the Fade," she said firmly. "I'd know it."

"Point taken," he agreed. "It is vital the Inquisition succeed to avoid the future you witnessed."

"I am surprised you are not more interested in your own future," she posited.

In truth, he had seen it in her dreams. The vision she saw of him was one who was weak and desperate, someone who could only rely on her to remedy his own failures. "I know enough. If that future happened then I—and Cassandra, Cullen and the rest—failed to stop this Elder One."

"This time we will not fail," she stated with much certainty that he almost believed her.

The music by the bonfire continued, but for a while they sat in silence, simply breathing. Her eyes turned to examine him, and he prepared for another onslaught of questions. She never did run out of questions.

But this time, it wasn't a question. "You know sometimes, Solas, when you look at me, it's as if you look beyond me—it is as if I seem like a ghost to you like I'm someone dying."

"Are you not the least bit afraid of dying?" he asked.

"Maybe," she admitted. "But we're all going there anyway. That makes living so much more precious. Hearing Cassandra's bellowing every single day, Sera's sniggering…Those times that drive me insane when I can't seem to wrap my head around what our Commander is thinking, or times like these when I just get to sit with you. To me, these are all precious."

He remembered similar words from Varric, in those conversations they had about the dwarven kingdoms and that story he told about the fisherman. Everything you build, it tears down, the Stone Child said. Everything you've got, it takes—and it's gone forever. The only choices you get are to lie down and die or keep going…That's as close to beating the world as anyone gets. All of them—these people who knew they were dying—seem to talk about struggling, about striving. Then he understood that it's all the effort that made life for them so precious. It's a concept that still seemed alien to him.

So he changed the subject. "Did you find the person you were looking for at Redcliffe?"

It was, of course, a loaded question. He knew that she was looking for him, and there's always that part of him that thought that maybe she knew that he's always been there for her. This time, he only looked like a person she knew.

"No," was the abrupt reply. "But I will find him. I don't care how long it takes. Because I know, everything he did for me, they all happened. Even if it was all in the Fade, even if everyone else tells me he's not real, he was real to me."

He opened his mouth to say something in reply, but the sound of battle horns interrupted him.

After that, everything went by so fast, but small moments slowed down in his eyes—the terror in her eyes as she first glimpsed the so-called Elder One and his army, the mages' battle cries, the whirring of the trebuchets, the race towards the Chantry as dragon fire consumed Haven's feeble structures of wood and hay, the Commander's stern pleading against what she had set out to do, the last look that she gave the Commander before the Chantry doors closed, the push to the last trebuchet, the way her voice cracked when she ordered them to leave, the snowy mountain falling down around them, and the Commander ordering everyone to move out while he begged the man to send out a search party.

She was alive. He was sure of it. He would have felt his own magic leave her if she did. His consciousness reached out to the Fade for recent memories. At first, all he could see was chaos. Spirits fled the confusion, and numerous deaths ruptured the Veil. And then he glimpsed her form standing as steadfastly as she could against the dragon and its master. Defiantly, she flung the last shot that shook the mountains, before falling to the depths below. The small spark that lit her hand was still there, fighting, enduring but slowly fading.

He couldn't lose her. That was the only thought on his mind as he slipped away from the weary caravan of survivors, and into the cold. With just a little bit of magic, his hands changed into paws. It was a form that he had not used for some time—a form that he did not want her to see. But time was of the essence. He needed to find her. So he pulled his nose down and sniffed.

Athdhea peered through the blizzard. There was no way one could tell which direction one should go.

A sharp pain continually shot through her arm and through her spine. She just narrowly escaped a darkspawn magister and an avalanche. The mark on her hand bore through every nerve in her body. As if it had a will of its own, it triggered an explosion decimating demons in the cave that she fled minutes ago. Theoretically, she knew that generating fire magic could keep her warm, but the explosion exhausted a lot of her physical and spiritual energy. Now it seems that the cold is harder to outrun.

Her steps slowed. Even as she tried to move forward, the snow was lulling her to sleep. Her body tumbled onto the snow.

It is said that in death, one's life flashes by in an instant. That was how her life appeared to her that led to that moment: the boots that Keeper Deshanna bestowed upon her as a parting gift before she left the Clan-Samahl's tears as she said goodbye-Cassandra bursting through the prison doors minutes after she woke with a mysterious glow on her left hand—the first time Solas guided her hand to close her first rift—the moment she placed her hand on Cassandra's tome as she swore her allegiance to the Inquisition—that time Cullen blushed when she touched his forehead—that release she felt that morning after the end of her long nightmare—that memory of that dream where she walked with an old friend—that promise that she spoke as Cullen stared earnestly at her—and that relief she felt as she saw Cullen's flare up in the sky.

He was safe. They were all safe, at least. She wouldn't have minded dying. Only, she regretted that last moment she saw Cullen because there was still more to say. He was an ignorant human ex-Templar. He hurt her pride once when he vehemently told her that he wasn't interested in her. Of course, she wasn't interested in him, but it hurt her pride nonetheless. She almost always had an opinion, something to say to people, but with him, sometimes she ran out of words. They often disagreed, and their worlds were completely different. Yet she found that she disliked his disapproval more than anything. A part of what he said was right. Mages have been oppressed for ages, but in some ways so are Templars because of the broken systems that allow all of these to happen. Because she did not act quickly enough, she could not save them both. So when the chance came, she was glad that she could fulfill her promise.

The wind was strong, and it tore through every layer of clothing she had down to her bones. Yet if this cruel wind could carry her to where Cullen was, she would have thought herself content. Or if she was nearing death, maybe in her dreams, her old friend would come for her, like he always did in the loneliest moments of her life. Because dying alone is such a sad thing.

Then, as if the Creators heard her plea, she felt a wet nose sniffing through her hair. Looking up, her eyes came face to face with a large black wolf with three pairs of grey eyes staring down at her.

But instead of devouring her, it gingerly nudged her arm with its nose. The creature carefully sank its teeth on her sleeve, in an attempt to drag her on her feet. Why?

Perhaps in answer to her question, the creature stood erect and slowly transformed into that person she wanted to find.

"A Friend," she smiled, tenderly reaching for his wolf mask. "I knew I would find you again." At least now, she wasn't dying alone. And she found him.

"Get up!" he said. "Your allies are nearby. If you move now, you could still catch up to them."

"Is this a dream?"

"No," he replied firmly. "The snow is real. The cold piercing through your bones is real. You will die if you stay here. Take my hand."

When she reached out, his hand felt so warm, so familiar, and so real. She was not dreaming, and they were both real. He was in her world.

"You are real," she joyfully whispered, getting up on her feet. "You're real! I knew it!"

"Now is not the time for this!" he argued. She felt his frustration as he let go of her hand. "Follow me, lethallan."

"It's too cold."

"If I answer three questions, would you follow me then?"

"Just three?"

"Just three."

"So stingy."

They trudged through the snow for a while. Even with his coldness, she noted his care. Her body was still a bit weak, and while he kept his distance, he made it a point to slow down his steps for her.

"So how does your magic work? I mean, I've met you a few times now, and as far as I can tell, you don't seem to age much. And you seem to easily walk between the Fade and then here."

"It is the same with all magic. It all comes from the Fade. But unlike you, my people have a special connection to the Fade."

"Who are your people exactly?"

He stopped. For a moment, he turned his face to her but she could not see under his mask. Then he continued on his way.

"You promised an answer."

"They lie asleep. Awaiting to wake from their dreams."

"That's not an answer."

"Please ask about something else."

She sighed. "Very well then. How do you always find me in situations such as these?"

"I just do."

"That's not an answer either."

"Quiet!" he cautioned. "Listen, they've come."

Before she could ask anything else, he transformed once again into a wolf and scrambled away. The moment he disappeared, the warmth left her body, and it suddenly grew cold again.

"Fenedhis!" she mumbled. "You are so unfair! Whoever you are."

The snow got less deep as she plodded forwards into a snowy gorge. Fatigue and the cold started taking over her body again, but she pushed onwards. Her friend gave her this chance, and she was not going to waste it.

She managed to glimpse some light from afar. Though her sight started to fade in and out, she tried to focus on the light. But her feet gave way, and her knees sunk into the snow.

"There!" a familiar voice sounded out. "It's her!"

"Thank the Maker!" uttered another familiar voice.

Moments later, she felt the rush of armor and moving bodies surrounding her. Someone's arms were around her. They were warm. They smelled like elderflower and oakmoss. Cullen, she thought. A smile formed on her lips. For a moment, she felt the brush of lips on her forehead before sleep finally took her.

Finding her was not a difficult task. He simply followed her scent, and his own power calling to him. When he found her, she was on the ground, slowly getting buried under the falling snow. Noticing the look of terror in her eyes as she woke up and glanced at the wolf, he changed into a form that was dear to her.

Predictably, the easiest way to get her to move was to make her ask questions. Even weakened by the cold, her questions were sharp, and he did his best to answer them without giving away too much information.

The moment he heard a search party coming, he took the opportunity to leave. Of course, they would come for her, even if at first they seemed hesitant. From a distance, he noted the way the Commander held her, it was as if he found something precious that he had lost. The way she smiled peacefully as she nestled on his neck—he had not seen that smile before.

As they laid her to rest, the medic indicated that she had a fever. For days, she moved in and out of consciousness. The people around her at times could hear her whisper in her sleep, "Please don't hurt the wolf. He means no harm…A Friend…you didn't really answer my questions. You are so…unfair." She searched for him in her dreams, but he dared not show himself. He chided himself for being such a coward, but then every time he appeared to her always had a risk of exposure. He loved and hated that in this dance with her.

When her fever broke, and she finally came to, she wasted no time in meeting her advisors, who all argued endlessly about the next course of action. Their angry voices echoed across the encampment. But as soon as she appeared out of her tent, all of Haven's survivors gathered around her, singing a song of hope that resounded far into the dark night. A smile played on his lips while he pressed his staff and watched. Only she could have inspired this.

After the scene ended, he approached her quietly and led her to the outskirts of the camp. There, as her friend Solas, he confided in her that the orb that Corypheus was elven. Unlike that other friendly version of himself that often appeared in her dreams, at least Solas can feign some ignorance, allowing him to evade further questions.

The next day, through her, he advised the survivors to move Northwards. Again, they plodded through across snowy mountains, but this time, as Solas and Athdhea. He took comfort in how slowly, their relationship in both the land of dreams and this world was starting to become more similar. On their long walk, she confided in him how she somehow managed to defend herself against demons with only the Anchor, and how that ability drained so much of her spiritual energy. He theorized, and she debated with questions. He realized he could listen endlessly to her voice and not tire of it.

They did not stop until Sera voiced out, "Hey, weirdies! We've been listening to your magical blah blah for hours. How much farther do we still have to walk?!"

It did not take long for a scout to spy Tarasyl'an Te'las. It was a place that he had not visited for some time, not since after creating the Veil or his long slumber. Much had changed—it contained traces of humans, dwarves and other elves and their dreams. The humans started calling it Skyhold. The name slowly caught on.

As soon as Haven's survivors settled into it, they began rebuilding parts of it that fell into disrepair. Only mere days later, Andrastian pilgrims started visiting, hoping to catch a glimpse of the one who survived the destruction of the Temple of Sacred Ashes, and faced the darkspawn magister and his archdemon. These devotees also helped tend the wounded and the dying.

The day came when both pilgrims and refugees assembled into the courtyard. She ascended up the Keep's long staircase and lifted a sword, vowing to everyone present how she, as an elf, would stand for all of Thedas. "The Inquisition," she proclaimed, "is for all!"

This was welcomed with cheers from the crowd below.

And just like that, she became the Inquisitor.

Already, she was shaping the remnants of his world into something better. As he admired from the windows of his old tower, he fancied that in this place, their worlds could possibly meet after all.

A/N: Finally all three are here. Writing using Solas’ POV was challenging, but it was compelling. I had to replay Trespasser over and over again for this.

Now that people have probably seen Athdhea with both Cullen and Solas, and we now know how those two think, I now wonder what you guys think about their interactions. I obviously have my biases, but which relationship do you think is better?

#cullenxlavellanxsolas #cullen x lavellan x solas #solavellan #solavellan hell #solas dragon age #solas x lavellan #cullen rutherford #cullen x inquisitor #commander cullen #dragon age inquisition #dragon age #dragon age fanfiction #dragon age fic

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a-bittersweet-life · 6 years

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Creative Inspiration: Sculpting Time, Essays on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

Sculpting Time, “a major retrospective of all seven films by the true master of cinema,” presents a collection of essays that examine the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and offer captivating and refreshing insights into the impact and significance of Tarkovsky’s filmmaking career: One of world’s most visionary, celebrated and influential filmmakers, Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven features before his tragically early death at the age of 54. Characterized by metaphysical and spiritual explorations of the human condition, each film is an artistic masterpiece of extraordinary visual beauty and stand as enduring classics of world cinema.

Ivan’s Childhood

by Lanre Bakare, Deputy Arts Editor of Guardian US

Andrei Tarkovsky's debut feature Ivan's Childhood (aka My Name Is Ivan) was described by the Guardian’s Philip French as “one of the great movies about the horrors of the second world war.” Based on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov and shot in the damp bleakness of Belarus' Pripet Marshes, it's an account of the travails of the titular 12-year-old boy, who is used as a scout by the Soviets after his parents are killed by the Nazis.

Tarkovsky described Ivan--played by the unnervingly accomplished Kolya Burlaiev--as “a character created and absorbed by war,” someone whose life was in constant conflict. And it is. Apart from the strangely arresting opening scenes of him playing on a beach, Ivan and the older officers caring for him--Captain Kholin, Lieutenant Galtsev, and Corporal Katasonych--his war is presented as a never ending cycle of daily nightmares and nightly terrors where he's haunted by what has befallen him. When he plays, it's to act out the fantasy of avenging his parents, while his school yard is the war soaked marsh that surrounds the action.

The soldiers aren't fit to be parents either (there's a vague idea he might live with Katasonych after the war), and continue to use him as a scout even after his predecessors young bodies are hung from trees by the Germans. Tarkovsky said he “wanted to see the grave changes which war makes in the life of a man, in this case a very young one.”

The film introduced Tarkovsky as a director who took imagery and cinematic vividness, which was called “utterly personal and surprisingly spiritual, even transcendent” by the New Yorker, to new levels. Flashbacks to Ivan's Childhood aren't simply a way to fill in the blanks and to explain his actions, they're opportunities to put the camera where it usually doesn't venture and create moments that weren't just calling cards but a blueprint for one of cinema's most iconoclastic careers.

The horrifying well scene, when Ivan falls into the watering hole, is cinema as fever dream, while Kholin kissing the army nurse Masha as he holds her over a trench in a forest of birch trees is as beautiful as the aforementioned well scene is harrowing. As a Soviet film, Ivan's Childhood took a divergent course by placing the individual front and center. The war, although always lurking in the background, is the setting for a young boy's tragedy, one which drags the soldiers in too and forces them to contemplate their decision to keep a young child near conflict.

While other Soviet second world war films, such as The Ballad of a Soldier, captured the world that revolves around conflict--romantic or otherwise--Ivan’s Childhood forces viewers to confront the horror without flinching and in a manner never before seen.

Andrei Rublev

by Sophie Monks Kaufman, Contributing Editor at Little White Lies

Religion is no longer the heart of social life, but in 1966 Andrei Tarkovsky used the semi-biographical, medieval setting of Russian icon-painter Andrei Rublev to express a worldly Christianity that encompasses everyone, even non-believers.

Rublev (played by the craggily handsome Anatoly Solonitsyn) is an artist, a monk and a wanderer. The film is a chronicle of what he sees over a period of 24 years marshalled into eight parts. There are long sequences in which a first-time viewer may struggle to understand a scene’s significance to the overall story. This doesn’t matter. The atmosphere transmits more than any sub-plot, character or exchange. What seems like a challenging runtime contains nothing extraneous, but this is only clear in retrospect, when you cast your eye back over the meticulously crafted landscape. All that happens in the film contributes to the spirit of the artist. All that he has witnessed and endured years to him, hours to the viewer, give rise to a payoff that is as pure an illustration of redemption as anything I have ever seen. But what exactly came before? What do you watch when you watch the film?

It’s hard to write calmly or clearly about a work of filmic art which has a perspective that binds the tiny and the tremendous in endless symbiosis. Tarkovsky depicts the difficult labor that serious industry requires (the last hour shows the building of a large bronze bell), but the whole is concerned with the shape of life--showing in long gracefully shot sequences, Andrei’s encounters with naked pagans, violent royals, dogs, horses, men, women, and children.

The most infamous fact about Andrei Rublev is that you see a horse (which Tarkovsky bought from an abattoir) killed on screen. During battle, the noble beast collapses down a flight of wooden stairs, then lands on a spear--its fall caused by a bullet fired out of sight. The scene lasts less than ten seconds. The sacrifice was for a flicker of celluloid. This anecdote is indicative of the whole, grave procession, which took six years to realize. Everything is rooted in preparation that spans way beyond the film world. Everything is in black and white until it meaningfully attains color. The breadth and depth of natural vistas are so spectacular that it’s sometimes hard to concentrate on foreground conversations, although each wagging tongue is an extension of each character’s soul.

Andrei Rublev’s main stress is over his own moral value and the fate of the Russian people. There are countless faces in this film, all lingered over lovingly, whether on screen for seconds or hours. Andrei Rublev (the film and the man within the film) is about love. Not earthly love, and certainly not sexual love, but a type of fraternal kinship that finds release from personal burdens by sinking into the mud to comfort another. Andrei Rublev (the film and the man within the film) is also about the point at which, after years of bearing witness in a state of speechless despair, hope, wisdom, and talent alchemize to create an enduring work of art.

Solaris

by Jemma Desai, Founder of I Am Dora, Film Program Manager at British Council and BFI London Film Festival Programmer

Andrei Tarkovsky famously described his filmmaking as “sculpting in time.” As cinephile video essayist Kogonada reminds us in the excellent Auteur in Space, in Solaris this sculpture leads us wondering where his meaning might lie: “He [Tarkovsky] will spend five minutes following a man in a ordinary car traveling along the highway and less than two minutes showing his main character traveling through space.”

So how do we understand the meaning of Tarkovsky’s Solaris after it has been sculpted through the perspective of another passage of time: all the way to 2016? Is it the ultimate science-fiction film, an inner space epic of magnificent proportions, or an anachronism that has become pastiche of cinematic futures?Is it not about the future, or space at all and rather, about universality, the past, and memory? Is it, as writer Philip Lopate has beautifully described, about “falling in love with ghosts...the inability of the male to protect the female, the multiple disguises or ‘resurrections’ of the loved one, the inevitability of repeating past mistakes.”

A series of macho face-offs mark its journey to audiences now. Tarkovsky’s film is based on polish author Stanisław Lem’s novel of the same name. Lem famously had had little love for Tarkovsky’s elliptical version of his novel, resenting his infidelity to the source material (a complaint he later repeated on release of Steven Soderbergh’s remake in 2002). Tarkovsky later regretted any fidelity to Lem at all saying: “The rockets and space stations--required by Lem’s novel--were interesting to construct; but it seems to me now that the idea of the film would have stood out more vividly and boldly had we managed to dispense with these things altogether.”

Deeply embedded in any contemporary cineaste’s reception of Tarkovsky’s inner space epic is another takedown by Tarkovsky. Namely his criticism of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) “for being too enamored by the spectacle of the genre, for being too exotic, too immaculate” and his explicit disdain for the concept of genre in general and the West’s take on science-fiction in particular.

Some decades later, in 2009 when director Lars von Trier made what film publication Variety called his “big fat art-film fart,” Antichrist, the review from its premiere press screening in Cannes reported catcalls and boos which were particularly loud when the credits revealed a dedication to Tarkovsky.

Reading back in time had the audience of international film critics equated a reverence to Tarkovsky as a sign of the ultimate pretension? Or had Von Trier committed the ultimate sacrilege to a great Soviet martyr who had famously struggled to make the “anti-spectacle,” the “anti-2001,” the “anti-Antichrist?”

With all this macho jeering, it might be easy to think there is nothing in Solaris, or indeed in Tarkovsky, for the female spectators. At a screening of Solaris I once attended, a discussion took place afterwards on the influence of Tarkovsky and him as a “filmmaker’s filmmaker.” A question from the audience asked the panel’s thoughts on why Tarkovsky’s was so often cited by male directors as an influence. From Von Trier to Carlos Reygadas, Terrence Malick to Alexander Sokurov. Was there something that made the films resonate more meaningfully with men rather than women? It seems fascinating to think about this question now and see if the rise of feminist film theory in the years since the film was produced might have added another dimension to the meanings the film might have today.

In addition to contextualizing assumptions and myths around Tarkovsky’s isolation and difficulties with Soviet authorities, Philip Lopate also unpicks our go-to cinematic references when we watch Solaris today. Lopate cites Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1956) as a better comparative text than Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. For him, the powerful driver in the film is protagonist Kris’ guilt and grief at his wife Hari’s past suicide. On Solaris, these emotions conjure up another Hari, an apparition, seen only through the gaze of Kris’ desperation “to do anything to hold onto [an image of] her, even knowing she isn’t real.”

Lopate’s comparison to Vertigo gains special relevance when we realize that the same year Solaris was produced (1972), feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey began work on her seminal text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (later published in 1975), where she explored the idea of the male gaze in cinema, famously unpicking this gaze through her reading of Vertigo.

The ideas in Mulvey’s text--now over 40 years old, and expanded on by many wonderful scholars of both sexes over the years--are my guide map when making my way to Solaris today. This map shows the landmarks of patriarchal critical acclaim as well trod pathways, and invites me on a less travelled path. The monument to meaning at the end of this pathway in here is Natasha Bondarchuk’s extraordinary performance as Hari: one that has gained some extraordinary resonance when in 2010 Bondarchuk revealed she had an affair with director Tarkovsky during the shoot, and attempted suicide when they split in 1972.

So when you go on the journey to Solaris, take this map with you. Make like Tarkovsky and sculpt in time to mold your perspective. Make your way through the multiple gazes on Hari, and Bondarchuck, to see them both for yourself.

Mirror

by Michael Pattison, Critic

In Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky’s legacy for unforgettable imagery finds its purest form. This intensely autobiographical work, which channels the filmmaker’s childhood memories as well as his father’s own memoirs, is structured as a dreamlike mood poem, progressing by means of associative leaps rather than a strict cause and effect logic. It helps to unshackle the images, affording them a freedom to work as standalone compositions.

For Tarkovsky, these images held deeply personal meanings, rooted to his family history as well as culturally specific notions of Russian identity. But in their startling simplicity, such images have repeatedly proven to be profoundly relatable and endlessly moving for a broad range of filmmakers and cinephiles. In Sight & Sound’s most recent “best ever films” poll, Mirror was voted 19th by critics and ninth by other directors.

The painterly compositions presented in Tarkovsky’s most challenging and rewarding film may defy explanation in narrative terms: a burning barn watched on from a family home, a woman levitating from her bed as she sleeps, a fingerprint shrinking from a tabletop. Though powerful and absorbing in themselves, such moments are only enriched by their juxtaposition. Tarkovsky weaves through this fabric in such a way that opposites don’t so much collide as merge: peacetime and war, the domestic and the social, the past and the far past.

Otherwise ordinary scenes, such as a wind gliding through trees, become strangely haunting, as if the elements are being controlled. Tarkovsky knew that the magic of memories was that they’re always half-fabricated, distorted, allowed to blur into one another like a thick soup. We are guided through this by a masterfully imaginative, rhythmically precise soundscape, in which voiceover utterances of “Papa” and “Mama” act like punctuation marks that glue the emotional meaning of the work together. Likewise, we must adjust to the inexplicable switches between sepia and color--as if this too is part of the magic.

Tarkovsky’s longstanding reputation for slow, single-take sequences is both deserved and reductive. While it’s certainly true that the Russian director has inspired whole waves of filmmakers with scenes of notable duration, he also understood as well as anyone how to mix things up. Mirror, which came at the midpoint of his career, might be approached today as the summation of two conflicting styles that run through the master’s work: complex, drawn-out long takes on the one hand, and exhilarating montage on the other.

Indeed, some of the images in Mirror are all the more beautiful for being so fleeting. And while many of them unfold in slow motion, the film itself never feels slow. Though he helped legitimize a form of filmmaking that was free from the pressure to constantly advance story, Tarkovsky grasped that brevity was the true soul of poetry. Maximizing their visceral impact, he cuts his slow-motion scenes short at the very moment they jerk to dramatic life. As when a bird crashes through a window, for instance, or when another takes flight from the hand of a dying man.

Stalker

by Chal Ravens, Writer for Fact Magazine and The Wire

Stalker contains just under 17 minutes of music--a tiny fraction of the film’s 160-minute runtime--yet its otherworldly atmosphere and subtle science-fiction twist rest on Andrei Tarkovsky and composer Eduard Artemyev’s extraordinary handling of sound. Long, disorienting sections of near-silence, echoes of classical music in the clatter of passing trains, a locomotive rhythm dissolving into eerie electronic drones--nothing is quite what it seems when you enter the Zone.

Even at the end of his career, Tarkovsky had conflicting ideas about the purpose of music in cinema. In his book Sculpting in Time, published just before his death in 1986, he emphasized how “important and precious” music had been to his films, but admitted: “In my heart of hearts I don’t believe films need music at all.” In Stalker, he attempted to resolve this contradiction, showing how the barest use of sound could be even more expressive than an emotive musical score. He directed Artemyev not to write music but to use sound to create “states and conditions” establishing the Zone’s atmosphere of unreality. Watching the film, our suspicions are raised through subtle changes--a distant river suddenly becomes audible, beckoning our three travelers, or we hear a breeze but notice the grass isn’t swaying. The laws of physics do not seem to apply in this strange territory.

Artemyev, one of Russia’s pioneers of electronic music, used the British-made Synthi 100 synthesizer to build on this alien mood. Stalker’s short musical score, first heard in the opening titles, places the long, airy drones of the Synthi 100 under a flute and an Iranian stringed instrument called a tar. This suggestion of Eastern music (particularly Indian classical music, where a tanpura provides a continuous harmonic drone underneath a sitar’s melody) adds to the sense of dislocation--we’re a long way from the sepia-toned Russian town where we first encounter the Stalker.

Artemyev’s electronic scores (including those for Solaris and Mirror) added to a wave of synthesizer-based soundtracks in the 1970s, particularly in sci-fi and horror, where their unfamiliar tones helped establish worlds where normal rules do not apply, as in A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Suspiria and the sound design of Alien, released the same year as Stalker. Tarkovsky believed electronic music had huge potential for cinema, as it could remain indistinct and indefinable, working subtly at the edge of our awareness: “The moment we hear what it is, and realize that it’s being constructed, electronic music dies.”

In Stalker he further loosens our grasp on reality by hiding fragments of famous classical pieces (”La Marseillaise,” Bach’s “Tannhäuser Overture,” Ravel’s “Bolero” and Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”) in the din of passing trains, like the everyday illusion of hearing a familiar song under the noise of a locomotive. Just as the experience of mishearing a melody shows that what we perceive as reality is always colored by our perception, so we might suspect that, in their quest for the Room, the Stalker, Writer, and Professor are really searching for themselves. On their long journey into the Zone, the rhythmic clanking of the motorized trolley dissolves into synthesized drones and metallic echoes. The camera ignores the moving wheels and much of the passing scenery, instead panning between the travelers’ faces; we seem to enter their very thoughts as they cross into the unknown. Their journey is not merely a physical effort, but a mental transformation. Tarkovsky and Artemyev’s achievement is to erase the distinction between the physical world and our inner lives.

Nostalgia

by Carmen Gray, Film Critic/Journalist

Andrei Tarkovsky made Nostalgia in Italy toward the end of a career cut short by his death from cancer. It was the first feature he made abroad, and its culturally alienated protagonist can be seen as a mirror of his own deep homesickness and longing for Russia. Tarkovsky had forged his career under the Soviet regime, but had bitterly struggled to avoid having his work suppressed by a bureaucratic studio system tasked with realizing the state’s view of cinema as a propaganda tool to indoctrinate the masses with heroic communist ideals. He alarmed the authorities with his highly intuitive, personal, and poetic approach to directing. His films, which all deal with spiritual crisis, tend towards a dream logic, incorporating visually stunning imagery with fragments of memory in a manner that defies simple, set interpretation. He did not overtly identify as a political dissident, but he found the pressure exerted by the state on his ability to create with unhampered authenticity so taxing that after going to Italy in 1982 to shoot his sixth feature, he announced he wouldn’t return. The Soviet authorities actively prevented Nostalgia from winning the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes. This obstruction only strengthened Tarkovsky’s resolve not to go back to his beloved homeland, even though his young son was there and not permitted to leave.

Tarkovsky had made autobiographical work before, his 1975 masterpiece Mirror being essentially a weave of childhood recollections set into the wider context of Russia’s tumultuous history. The fictional story of Nostalgia, which he dedicated to his mother, holds clear parallels to his own predicament of self-imposed exile. A Russian writer, also named Andrei and played by Oleg Yankovsky, has travelled to Italy to research compatriot 18th-century serf composer Pavel Sosnovsky. Andrei is suffering in the throes of a profound sense of displacement. The companionship and declared affection of his beautiful interpreter Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) only serves as an additional strain. The tension between creative freedom and ancestral belonging troubles his thoughts and is an irreconcilable problem echoed in the fate of Sosnovsky, who had felt compelled to return to Russia despite knowing he would be enslaved again. There, he had turned to drink before committing suicide.

Tarkovsky often used rain and crackling fire in his work to create oneiric, mystically charged worlds teeming with the elemental grandeur of nature. Nostalgia plays out in ruins flooded with water with dripping walls in which indoors and outside merge; in the eerie haze of a steaming Tuscan spa; in a pool in which Andrei attempts to walk from one end to the other without letting a candle extinguish. This last act is called for by local Domenico (Erland Josephson), who may be martyr or madman and who makes an extreme stand against the catastrophic state of the modern world. A final iconic image shows Andrei lying with his dog in front of a Russian dacha, nestled inside an Italian cathedral. Tarkovsky once claimed, after all, that Russians are fatally attached to their roots.

The Sacrifice

by Tom Seymour, Editor of British Journal of Photography and Journalist

In May 1986, a month after the Chernobyl disaster, The Sacrifice won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Andrei Tarkovsky, at the age of 54, could not accept the award. He was in Paris, battling lung cancer.

The prize was collected by his son, Andrei Jr. The Soviets had waited until the recalcitrant genius was beyond cure before granting his children permission to stray beyond the Iron Curtain. Back in Russia, the award went unreported by the state media.

Tarkovsky died, in exile, later that year. And so The Sacrifice, this Dostoyevskian epic of apocalyptic grandeur, can be seen as his final farewell.

Ingmar Bergman once said: “Tarkovsky for me is the greatest director, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

The Sacrifice seems to be the Andrei's way of returning Bergman's compliment. It was shot in the summer of 1985, on the Swedish island of Gotland (the Swedish military denied Tarkovsky access to Bergman's island of Fårö). Employing, to large effect, the Swedish language, Tarkovsky also used two of Bergman's veterans--the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and the actor Erland Josephson. In the vein of Bergman, the film asks questions of Biblical proportions to frame a midlife crises. The Vatican includes The Sacrifice as one of 45 “great religious films,” yet it is essentially a story about a rather dysfunctional birthday party.

Josephson plays Alexander, a writer and academic of unflinching sincerity whom tells us, in an opening monologue, of humanity’s great moral failings in the authoritarian age of nuclear arms. “Humanity is on a dangerous road,” he says. “We are living like savages.”

Quite a way to kick off one’s birthday. We meet him in his remote, spartan home on the banks of the sea, joined by his wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), her teenage daughter Martha (Filippa Franzén), and their young son (Tommy Kjellqvist), referred to only as Little Man, and whom cannot speak. Two housemaids hover in the background, and he is visited by two friends whose provenance remains uncertain.

The roll of thunder is heard in the skies overhead, and then the thunderous shudder of military aircraft passing by. We hear mysterious cries, faraway in the night. Then a voice on the radio intones with words that shake the party; a nuclear holocaust is imminent, the world is about to end. Only a deal with God, an anti-Faustian-pact, holds the chance of salvation.

In One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, a documentary about Tarkovsky from another cult cineaste, the late French director Chris Marker, we are given access to quiet, revertant footage of the great man brought low with sickness, greeting his family after years apart. Marker's film contextualizes this with, seven months hence, backstage filming of The Sacrifice. Such sunlit, shimmery footage of Tarkovsky--already ill, exactingly and, in his own way, joyously planning the film's climatic end--is a lovely foil to this weighty, portentous film.

For it is possible to read The Sacrifice as a metaphor for Tarkovsky’s own state of being. Six years earlier, he seemed to foretell the Chernobyl disaster with Stalker, which takes place in an abandoned, desolate expanse called The Zone. Tarkovsky, his wife Larisa Tarkovskaya and Anatoli Solonitsyn, the lead actor in Stalker, all died from a comparable type of lung cancer (Vladimir Sharun, the film’s sound designer, claimed the director and cast were exposed to lethal carcinogens by the production’s proximity to a chemical plant). When he shot The Sacrifice, he must have known the end was in sight.

In the opening act of The Sacrifice, Alexander helps his son plant a tree by the sea. Without speaking, the small boy listens to his father’s instructions--if the tree is watered, every day, it will become something larger than ourselves. It will outlast us, and in that act, a small part of the world will change.

And so, in the final moments of The Sacrifice, we see Little Man, now a bit bigger, carefully watering the sapling, still fragile but steadily growing, winding its roots into the earth.

What a way to sign off. That maybe, in the act of dedicating oneself to small tasks, in the embrace of sacrifice, we might find our chance to build a legacy.

#Creative Inspiration #Andrei Tarkovsky

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les-legions-noires · 6 years

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Les Légions Noires (The Black Legions), was an important part of 1990s underground black metal, that originated in France in the early 1990s, shortly after Norway’s black metal explosion, when a small group of socially alienated teens fueled by hopeless anger among other frustrated emotions shocked the metal scene and their local communities with absurdly raw, maniacally misanthropic music and a rash of ideologically-manifested crimes. Les Légions Noires, for their part, represented a more deranged and bizarre perspective that further disoriented metal’s conventional aesthetic and philosophical standards. Theirs was a sound festering in demonic decadence directed towards a grave destiny by a self-destructive sense of existential oblivion. The aesthetic was a vision of life stripped to shreds, twisted and evil; rather than inspire with familiar musical aspirations, they sought to disturb with terrifying expressions of their unholy visions. Black metal descended further into the depths of inner torment and black despair. Les Légions Noires represented the ultimate response to Norway’s black metal revolution, exaggerating the destructive tendencies of Mayhem and DarkThrone with an unsettling sense of and ludicrous delight in morbid insanity.

Les Légions Noires was more about the will to existential disintegration than noble spiritual transcendence. The recordings, a large majority of which were strictly limited obscure demo tapes, were made at a time when black metal was nearing the end of its classic era, and the trend of slickly produced keyboard black metal albums was on the horizon. They came as if to announce and celebrate the death of black metal, with gloomy and haunting ambient recordings that sounded like black metal’s tortured ghost summoned in bizarre ceremonial rituals in dilapidated castles. In this fashion the bands of Les Légions Noires were like black demon-shadows ascending from the depths of Hell to take black metal back where it belongs, as music labels swooped in to commercialize the style.

"Black Metal doesn’t mean anything any longer. It has become the shame of Satan, undermined in it’s very essence by all those pathetic worms, false Satanists, traitors and bastards of all kinds, have gathered to insult our art, and the less one can say is that they really succeeded in making it pure shit, a simple and only matter of image, money, publicity."

Les Légions Noires belonged to black metal’s second wave, which formalized itself in the early 1990s. The French bands were never as technically accomplished as their Scandinavian influences, though they never made it a point to be so, preferring to emphasize atmospheric mood, imagination and aesthetic over musical sophistication. Undoubtedly skilled in atmospheric composition, much of the effect was due to the absurdity of the expression and the extremely raw nature of the sound.

This was a true underground phenomena that vehemently opposed the commercial tendencies that a few of black metal’s major proponents would find themselves indulging later in their careers, seemingly determined to fulfill its own pre-ordained destiny of total self-annihilation.

Musically, what distinguished Les Légions Noires from their Norwegian inspirations was the severity of their dissonant emphasis, which possessed the sound of a more violent and evil aspect, and the irregularity of their rhythms, typically embellished by the often clumsy drumming performed by musicians who either didn’t care about instrumental proficiency or outright rejected it as an aesthetic imperative. They were intent on invalidating black metal as a commercial prospect, largely eschewing the conventions of record labels and interviews as an ideology of the purity of obscurity, which shrouded the entire scene in mystery. They were able to intensify the raw sound and misanthropic spirit of black metal, and channel it through a unique creative identity rooted in the morbid decadence that permeates much of French philosophy and art. In this way, they invented an individual style and cryptic mythology (complete with the invention of an unpronounceable language), while expressing a nihilistic drama of the absurdity of meaningless suffering and torment within the context of an anguished will to emptiness. They were better dramatists and aestheticians than instrumentalists, possessed of an intuition of ghoulish mystiques with an artistic vision and expressive objective that was more oriented to fulfilling self-prophecies of oblivion than advancing musical technique.

On purely musical terms, most of the Les Légions Noires material is of dubious value, and because it is ultimately this that determines endurance and artistic significance in this medium, the cultural, aesthetic and philosophical adaptations of these bands appear trivial to many. However, the few examples of musical validation provide enough substance to treat the French scene with serious consideration as an artistic phenomenon. The confirmation is melody, best exemplified on Mütiilation’s Vampires of Black Imperial Blood and Remains of a Ruined, Dead, Cursed Soul, both of which exhibit Burzum-style wandering melodies with a romantic sense of exquisite melancholy, with Black Murder’s melodic diversity and Aäkon Këëtrëh’s brooding ambient melodic meditation offering further demonstrations. Vlad Tepes, who displayed the most impressive musical consistency of this collective, wrote distinctive songs developed out of perceptive melodies in a somber interpretation of the epics of Bathory and Celtic Frost, only more dissonant, violent, and atmospherically obscure.

"Currently any fucker that has nothing to do with our beliefs can get BLACK METAL releases, in record shops, because of those treacherous labels that have made the unfortunate and unpardonable mistake of not understanding what true BLACK METAL is . That is was born in darkness . Where it shouldn’t have come out of, and where it will return soon. BLACK metal has become the music of everyone, which is the total contrary of what it intended to become at the time of it’s genesis. All the structures, labels, zines, even worse, the bands themselves have exhibited as any other human musical style such as “Death Metal”. The bands betray themselves one after the other getting into ideologies that have nothing to do with Satanism ( Nazism, Viking Culture) missing up the original BLACK METAL style in all sorts of stinking and intolerable mixtures!!"

Their legacy is a phenomenon of an almost mythological quality, though it seems that most are acquainted with the scene through their occult-oriented obscurity and monochromatic cut-and-paste punk-style visual aesthetic rather than the actual music. The variety of offshoot noise projects and their goofy exaggerations have resulted in their more substantial efforts being discounted by less-informed metal fans.

Each band/project possessed a distinctive atmosphere manifested in what seems to be a shared compositional vision of perceptive harmony; pure and lucid dramatic sequences unfold as songs or soundscapes take form according to the experiential context of a particular mood, impressing upon the listener a deep feeling of wandering through dark and cryptic scenes. While this is a general concept of black metal songwriting, the French bands expressed within this fundamental idea an unparalleled caliber of inner-dark penetration and emotional catharsis, including reveling in an inherent degeneracy, the perversion of dark desires, and libertine justifications for self-destruction and spiritual deviance.

The bands of Les Légions Noires underwent through their music a ceremonial process of purification towards individualized definition, a descent into the abyss of inner darkness in demonic celebration of all the depravity and luxuria swirling within as a liberation from the constraints of the conditioned self, and out of which rises the nihilistically invented truth and freedom of an independent spirit, albeit shrouded in occult mysticism.

The central bands of the Les Légions Noires were Mütiilation, Vlad Tepes, Torgeist, and Belketre. The bizarrely-named members involved in these groups recorded other music in different incarnations, some of which were solo ambient/noise recordings.

#les legions noires #lln #black metal #france #mutiilation #vlad tepes #belketre

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abbyjcho · 4 years

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They Say, I Say - Written for UC Berkeley ENG 190 (Fall 2019)

KING CLAUDIUS

'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,

To give these mourning duties to your father:

But, you must know, your father lost a father;

That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound (90)

In filial obligation for some term

To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever

In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;

It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, (95)

A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,

An understanding simple and unschool'd:

For what we know must be and is as common

As any the most vulgar thing to sense,

Why should we in our peevish opposition (100)

Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,

A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,

To reason most absurd: whose common theme

Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,

From the first corse till he that died to-day, (105)

'This must be so.' We pray you, throw to earth

This unprevailing woe, and think of us

As of a father: for let the world take note,

You are the most immediate to our throne;

And with no less nobility of love (110)

Than that which dearest father bears his son,

Do I impart toward you. For your intent

In going back to school in Wittenberg,

It is most retrograde to our desire:

And we beseech you, bend you to remain (115)

Here, in the cheer and comfort of our eye,

Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.

(1.2.87-117)

Heaven appears 40 times in Hamlet. In the first instance of the word “heaven” in line 95, the more appropriate meaning from the OED is: “the abode of God and of the angels and persons who enjoy God's presence, traditionally regarded as being beyond the sky; the final abode of the redeemed after their life on earth; a state or condition of being or living with God after death; everlasting life. Opposed to hell.” The quote,“Teache the people to gett heuen with fastynge” from R. Tracy’s Supplycacion to Kynge Henry VIII written in 1544 most closely corresponds to the first instance of “heaven” in Claudius’ speech. In the second instance, the more appropriate meaning from the OED is: “Instrumental and locative”. The quote “Words of the Heau'n-prompted stile” from written in 1606 byJ. Sylvester and G. de S. Du Bartas.

The most relevant special dictionaries that would contain “heaven” are Shakespeare's Religious Language : A Dictionary which defines concepts like "soul," "pray," “absolve" and Shakespeare's Demonology which defines the ideas of ghosts, fairies, spirits, superstitions, and magic. Shakespeare’s Religious Language contained an entry for heaven which defined it as “Another name for God and God’s omnipotence, his providential agency, or his dispensing of eternal justice and mercy”. This is the most accurate description of heaven that lends its relevancy to its use in Hamlet. The idea that heaven is locative and instrumental, as described by the OED is implied through this definition in the described omnipotence of God as well as his providential agency. Although Shakespeare’s Religious Language gave a helpful definition for “heaven” and its uses in Shakespeare’s works, the Demonology did not include an entry for “heaven”. However, it did contain a definition for Hell. This is interesting because the existences of both Heaven and Hell are intertwined with one another; there is no Hell without a Heaven. It is described in Milton’s Paradise Lost as Satan falls from Heaven and descends into Hell. The Demonology describes Hell as:

“Where there are devils, demons or fiends in Shakespeare’s works, there is also often the notion of hell, along with hellish artifacts and related demonic creatures. The Christian hell was conceived to be an underworld, like the classical underworld which was also an afterlife, but in this case flamingly hot and a site of torture for damned souls after death. Ghosts might return from hell to plague the living – several of Shakespeare’s, such as the ghost of King Hamlet, refer to tortures endured after death in either hell or purgatory.”

This definition does not imply the existence of a heaven, but its appearance in the Demonology without the appearance of “Heaven” shows the heightened importance of Hell over Heaven.

“Heaven” is word that appears over 450 times in all of Shakespeare’s work. It is an interesting word because heaven as a term can be used as both a noun and a verb. The noun form refers either to a place either above the Earth or the location of God and the angels that signifies that opposite of Hell. The verb form refers to a transitive state: “To transport into heaven; to make supremely happy, enrapture; to beatify; (also) to make heavenly in character or appearance” (OED). These two definitions both refer to transcending one’s current state and becoming something higher than they already were. This transition into a higher calling is seemingly out of place in Claudius’ speech to Hamlet at the end of Act I, Scene II. Claudius is a hypocritical character who, in this speech, is instructing Hamlet to stop his excessive mourning. Hamlet’s trappings of woe are nowhere in comparison to that of his mother, who Hamlet accuses of over-playing her part. Claudius genders sorrow, by calling it “unmanly grief” (1.2.94), and then goes on to further shame Hamlet by telling him that his mourning is “show[ing] a will most incorrect to heaven” (1.2.95). Heaven, in this context, is not a location but rather is an extension of God and a higher power that will hold judgment.

The next instance of the word “heaven” occurs again in Claudius’s speech to Hamlet about ceasing his mourning over the death of his father. In this use however, the word “heaven” is used to imply that heaven is a concept akin to the natural cycle. “Why should we in our peevish opposition/Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,/A fault against the dead, a fault to nature” (1.2.100-102). Claudius equates heaven to both the dead and nature. Death and nature are concepts that are intertwined with one another; death is a natural occurrence and all natural things will die. Heaven is not natural because it is a created and imagined holy place. In this way, Claudius faults not only nature but also the created. Claudius implies that Hamlet’s sorrow is for something imagined and goes against the natural cycle of life and death. This speech leads off with an example of a cycle, where “…your father lost a father; /That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound/In filial obligation for some term/To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever/In obstinate condolement…” (1.2.89-93). This cycle is implied to be inescapable and natural, but it is the job of the sons to “persever” (1.2.92) and continue the cycle. By persisting in never-ending sorrow would disrupt the cycle of nature, thus going against heaven, which is the land of God, who set human nature.

The differences between heaven in line 95 and heaven in line 101 is subtle and nuanced, but becomes incredibly important. In the context of line 95, heaven is used to hold Hamlet to a higher power that will judge his actions as wrong. This use of heaven makes the word more commanding than its use in line 101. In line 101, heaven is implied to be a created aspect of the natural. It is cyclical in nature but is inevitable. Both uses of heaven imply that it is a highly powerful entity and is something that should be revered, but they touch on different aspects of heaven that are not explicitly apparent in the many different definitions of heaven that are brought up by both the OED as well as Shakespeare’s Religious Dictionary. Heaven can be both the location of God and the angels, but it can also be an extension of God and his judgement. The different uses of heaven can seem to change its meaning very slightly, but the differences between location and entity are extremely distinct, as one can be used to directed to whilst the other will do the directing. In Hamlet, Claudius uses both to dictate that Hamlet stop his mourning of his murdered father.

#Abby Cho

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swipestream · 5 years

Text

Liminal Review

I will let you all in on a secret. I may have a little bit of a weakness for urban fantasy. There is something that speaks to me about being in the modern world, but still finding the strange and magical just out of regular view. Tell me about ghosts and shadows and fey that still hang out just down the street and explain why I don’t always see them when I look their way, and you’ve got my attention.

There is no shortage of urban fantasy RPG products today. What is less common is one that details a specific setting that does not default to the United States. It’s very easy for me to view urban fantasy through a lens crafted from watching Buffy and Supernatural, and reading the Dresden Files. Liminal, the RPG that I’m looking at today, features the UK as it’s setting, and that important distinction is evident in several places.

Ghostly Forms

This review is based on the PDF of the product, which is a 286-page full-color document. It has single column formatting, and unlike many RPGs, where art is limited to full page chapter introductions and potentially half page or quarter page illustrations, there are many pages that utilize thematic imagery blended across half the page, under the text, or pages that have a running theme such as a city skyline across the bottom of the page.

While many products evoke a feeling with the included artwork, the way Liminal uses its imagery tends to weave in and out of the narrative to create an otherworldly feeling in several places in the book. While some artwork is used traditionally as half page pieces, there are several pages where the artwork also serves as the background image for the page.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 serves as a basic introduction to the premise of the game, introduced with a short piece of in-character fiction. The game revolves around liminal characters–characters that are part of both the mortal world and the supernatural world–forming crews and solving cases. There is also a quick reference to the base resolution mechanics, which utilizes two d6s + a modifier, versus a target number. If modern game design leads you to wonder if this is a Powered by the Apocalypse Game, it isn’t, but we’ll get into more of the mechanics later.

The basic framework of the setting involves the following “truths”:

There is magic, and magicians

There are vampires with their own power group

There are werewolves and werewolf gangs

There are fae with multiple courts

There are ghosts

The myths of the UK, as well as many cultures that the UK has interacted with, have a basis in fact

Some religious organizations know about the supernatural

The UK has a police division that deals with the supernatural

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 delves into character creation. This involves coming up with a character concept, picking a drive, choosing a focus, and then buying skills and traits.

The drive is what the character wants to accomplish by getting involved with supernatural cases and interacting with the hidden world. The character’s focus is the chassis on which the character is built, and includes the following options:

Determined (someone with strength of will and a strong mind)

Magician (someone trained or with a natural talent to use spells and magical abilities)

Tough (someone with a strong body or powerful endurance)

Some of the traits listed later in character creation are keyed specifically for each of these character foci. While most forms of magic use are restricted to the magician focus, shape changing is available outside of the magician focus to represent lycanthropes and other were-creatures, although only magicians can learn multiple animal forms.

Initial skills have a skill cap which can later be increased during character advancement, and some skills can double as stats used for casting spells. For example, most magic will use Lore, but Glamour magic uses Art to resolve effects.

Characters have Endurance and Will as attributes, which measures how much physical and mental wear and tear they can take, respectively. These have a base number, modified by the Athletics or Conviction skill.

Traits are similar to what other games would call feats or stunts. Picking up the ability to use a specific form of magic is a trait, but there are also traits like Graceful or Rich as well. Characters can also pick up to two limitations, which can get them additional points to use for character creation. These limitations are also the means to represent characters that fit a specific supernatural origin, so giving a shape-changing were creature a weakness to a specific material can help create the overall theme, as can giving someone with vampiric abilities an aversion to sunlight.

In addition to focus, skills, traits, and limitations, there are example archetypes in this chapter to cover what a formally trained wizard might take, versus a mortal investigator, versus a lycanthrope or a dhampir. There are also sample player characters, which are the same characters utilized in the text for various in-character quotes and introductory fiction.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 details the rules on creating crews and adjudicating factions. There is a specific list of things to detail about a crew before the game begins, and the information derived from this helps to shape what the campaign will look like. It is essentially a mechanized session zero for the group.

Crews have a goal, much like a group version of the individual drives that characters create for their characters. There is a list of crew resources, and each player picks one of those resources for which the crew has access. This can involve having greater starting capital, a headquarters, a safe house, or even a bonus when dealing with specific enemies.

The group determines what major factions are at play in the campaign, and each PC determines if they have a positive or negative relationship with that faction. Rankings for each faction at play go up one for each positive relationship, and down one for each negative relationship, to a maximum of +/- 3, with an extreme rating meaning that the crew is either known as an ally to, or devoted enemy of, that faction.

Additionally, each player will provide a hook, an open-ended supernaturally adjacent bit of news that is floating around the game world, that the GM can then weave into the greater campaign.

I really like this formalized way of setting up the crew, and even separated from the specific mechanics of the game, it serves as a good way to start a campaign and to poll the table as to what the campaign should look like and what the players want from the game. The biggest sticking point I think may be the hooks–it’s a great idea, but not every player is going to have a strong hook to contribute early in the campaign, and it may feel a bit like putting them on the spot.

Chapter 4

This section deals with how the game rules work at the table. Base resolution is 2d6 plus a relevant skill versus a target number, but there are a number of ancillary rules that make this resolution a little bit more robust.

Opposed tests involve a base number plus the opponent’s relevant skill, rather than having both sides roll against one another. Characters can spend points from their Will attribute to modify their rolls. When a character fails, the GM gets to determine which of four options apply to the failure, so failure doesn’t feel quite as binary as it might otherwise. Additionally, if a character succeeds by 5 or more on a test, there is a list of additional effects that can be added to the result.

One of my favorite rules bits in this section involves persuading or coercing other characters. Successfully doing this doesn’t mean that the character has to do what you want them to do, just that they either have a penalty to actions that don’t line up with what you want them to do, or they must suffer a hit to their Will to shake off the effects of the failed contest.

In conflicts, initiative is handled in a manner similar to Cypher system, in that the players roll against the highest opponent’s skill to determine if they go before or after the opposition.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 is all about magic. Way back during character creation, you could buy the base level of various forms of magic, but this chapter has a number of upgrades that you can purchase to allow more thematic effects based on the type of magic being enhanced. The magic traditions included in this chapter include:

Blessings and Curses

Divination

Geomancy

Glamour

Necromancy

Shapechanging

Ward Magic

Weathermonger

Most of these are straightforward effects that utilize the game rules. For example, base necromancy lets you talk to spirits, and one of the upgraded effects lets you drain life energy from opponents. Shape changing gets a little tricky and confusing, at least for me. Bigger than human forms get a bonus to Endurance, smaller than human forms get a penalty, and animal forms grant a bonus to skills that animal form is good at performing–all this works for me and adjudicating what an animal form is good at on the fly isn’t too hard in this kind of game.

Where I got a little turned around is that the description of the ability in this chapter starts mentioning traits that may go with the animal form, and that some of those may carry over to the mortal form, and I don’t know if that’s just flavor for how a character should build their character, or if you are meant to give them bonus traits based on animal form, and to decide if they should be split across animal and mortal forms. I don’t think this is the case, but for some reason, I got turned around it this particular form of magic and its description.

Chapter 6 and Chapter 7

I’m grouping these chapters together, as they are both descriptive of what the assumed setting of Liminal should look like. Major and minor factions are detailed, as are various cities and sites in the UK. One of the elements that sets Liminal apart from other urban fantasy games is that the factions and locations often have ties to specific elements of UK history. Some historical figures were turned as vampires, and their deaths covered up. The Council of Merlin may have looked the other way during some historical events while protecting the isles during others. There are a lot of details that feel like they add one extra layer to history, without burying the setting in lore, and without changing some important, sensitive events by shifting the blame from human shortcomings to supernatural involvement.

There are major factions for wealthy, formally educated wizards, less formally trained and potentially less lawful wizards, government agencies, Anglican, Catholic, and Muslim religious organizations that deal with the supernatural, a powerful werewolf family attempting to unite the various gangs, fey courts native to various geographical areas of the UK, and the primary vampire organization in operation.

There are some subtle and not so subtle commentaries going on with some of the factions. Vampires are dangerous, but their organizational goals tend to be a little out of date. The Council of Merlin is very much a rich male organization that thinks it is being very progressive by allowing women to join and having a reasonable application fee that only the wealthy could possibly front. The police unit that investigates supernatural crime doesn’t actually formally record any supernatural details of events, to shield information from the public record, but there is also an ancient group of wizards that still nominally works for the crown as well.

One interesting aspect of the setting that becomes apparent as organizations and locations are detailed is that creatures like demons and angels aren’t really a feature of the setting. Gods are mentioned as potentially being powerful fae creatures, and djinn and rakshasas seem to be fae as well, so it may be that all of the ephemeral creatures from “other realms” fall into this category.

There are a few places in the text where this struck me previously, but in these chapters, especially, I am very aware that there are no specific sidebars or separate discussions on safety or content. Not only are we dealing with some fairly ghastly werewolf rituals, predatory vampires, and gruesome means for ghosts to come about, but we’ve also got the misogyny of the Council of Merlin, potential religious friction, at least some discussion of political tensions between various regions of the UK, and fae king who kidnaps women to be his bride (they are mentioned as needing to willingly accept the position, but they are also mentioned as being kidnapped, coerced, misled, and put in suspended animation when he is ready for a new bride).

It is a rich history that has been woven into a real-world location, and it has been done better than some urban fantasy setting material, but in this era of games, there really needs to be more awareness of content that could be problematic, and how to deal with that in a game that touches on those topics.

Chapter 8, 9, and 10

The final three chapters in the book are the chapter on gamemastering, the chapter for “faces” (which includes stats for various supernatural beings PCs might encounter, and the chapter for sample cases.

The gamemastering chapter has sections on how to structure cases, advice on setting difficulty, and places outside of the UK where Liminal stories may take place. I like the very solid, practical advice on how to structure a case, and its advice that could work for structuring other urban fantasy games as well, making it even more broadly useful. It’s also interesting to see the setting assumptions applied to locations in the US and Germany as well as the baseline assumed setting.

The faces section includes new traits, some of which can be available for PCs, but may push them further into the fully supernatural, rather than the border between. These traits mainly exist to help with the stats found in this chapter, which include fae, ghosts, clued-in mortals, ordinary mortals, vampires, and werewolves.

The final chapter sample cases do a really nice job of explaining the setups, the facts of the case, the point at which complications may occur, and ways that the case may be resolved, but not much about detailed specifics between certain “notes” in the case. The outlines are more interested in pointing out that you need to find out about X, not that you need to do a specific thing to find X, but that once you find X, some kind of complication should happen. I like the solid outline with flexible sections between approach.

That said, between gamemastering and sample adventures, no dedicated discussion on safety or content warnings for a game that can have some potentially uncomfortable content.

Index, Concepts, Sketches, Process, Afterword, and Acknowledgements

The final sections in the book include an index, a section that showcases the art that serves as the backdrop of most of the book, without the words and formatting that obscures it, an afterward, and an acknowledgments section that details the various backers and playtesters.

Geomantic Node

The setting resonates as a strong urban fantasy realm that is both familiar and unique, because of the rich ties to historical locations and events.

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The rules do a nice job of riding the line between simple and granular and pick up some of the best modern game design notes by building in ways to fail forward and to add detail to skill tests. The setting resonates as a strong urban fantasy realm that is both familiar and unique, because of the rich ties to historical locations and events. The crew creation rules provide a solid structure and direction for the campaign and ensure a degree of intentionality that would benefit a lot of games.

Shadowed Path

The rules are just granular enough that they may have benefited from a few more summaries or examples, especially where magic is involved. While not entirely a negative, players need to have some creative investment to get most of the structure of the rules. In a modern game, there really needs to be more discussion on safety and content warnings at the table, especially when modern problems and elements of horror stories are assumed aspects of the game.

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

This is a rich urban fantasy setting with a solid set of rules for adjudicating the game, but you may need to do your own work to reinforce safety at the table without any support from the game, and you may want to be sure your players are up to coming up with their own elements that help to shape the setting.

Have you also been bitten by the urban fantasy gaming bug? What are your favorite urban fantasy games, and what subgenres within urban fantasy are your favorites? What games do you think have most effectively utilized the tropes of your favorite subgenres? Let us know in the comments below–we’re excited to hear from you!

Liminal Review published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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musemash · 5 years

Photo

Images from The Return Of The King, courtesy of New Line Cinema

ARWEN’S CHOICE, GRIMA’S TEAR – part 3

Temptation & Forgiveness

The many Christian elements clearly present in Jackson’s Rings have been noted by some critics, including the power of sin, service to others, sharing, conversion, overcoming evil, pilgrimage, good will, salvation, vocation, love, compassion and redemption. One theme would be obvious even to a biblically illiterate viewer: susceptibility to temptation, as embodied by the One Ring’s effect on Bilbo, Smeagol, Deagol, Saruman, Boromir, Denethor and Faramir. This motif is presented at its most complex in the various stages of temptation Frodo goes through.

Forgiveness is especially apparent in several places: Frodo’s treatment of Gollum; Gimli’s change of heart regarding elves; Aragorn’s acceptance of Legolas’ apology; and Theoden’s kindness to the repentant Grima. The self-sacrifice, loyalty, servant nature and unconditional friendship of Samwise are a beacon throughout the film. Christ’s devotion to his mother Mary is echoed when Aragorn honors his own deceased mother’s statue (which is itself an obvious reference to Catholic veneration of the Virgin).

Providence

Divine providence rears its majestic head in several places. Gandalf tells Frodo: “Bilbo was meant to find the Ring; and you also were meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.” As Aragorn lies grievously wounded, Arwen’s spirit hovers over his body. Deep in Mordor, Sam looks up and sees a star through a break in Sauron’s poisonous cloud, and says: “There is light and beauty up there, Mr. Frodo, that no shadow can touch.” The White Tree finally blossoms, a none-too-subtle reference to the Tree of Life. Frodo and Sam are rescued by Gandalf and the eagles, as if by angels.

The filmmakers also add a surprisingly biblical twist to Theoden’s release from mental and spiritual subjugation: the king is literally exorcised, freeing him from being directly possessed by Saruman. Whether this was done because Jackson knew it was a very Catholic concept, or simply because it was a way cool cinematic device, is a matter of speculation.

Christ Figures

Just as Sauron, Saruman and the Witch King are clearly symbolic of Satan, and the Black Riders represent demons, the film also presents several obvious Christ figures: Gandalf, Aragorn and Frodo. Gandalf is explicitly called The White Rider – invoking the horseman of Revelation 19:11. As Gandalf the Grey, he falls at Khazad-dum, his arms spreading out to form a cross; he wrestles the Balrog of Morgoth (Satan) into the abyss (hell); he is later reborn as Gandalf the White, a more powerful Istari than he has ever been. In his new form, he is able to drive the fearsome Nazgul away with the white light issuing from his staff.

In the book, after the battle of Pelennor Fields, Aragorn demonstrates his gentler skills in the Houses of Healing. Tolkien writes: “The hands of the king are the hands of a healer – and so shall the rightful king be known.” While Jackson doesn’t overly emphasize this, he shows Eowyn being nursed by Aragorn – accompanied by a peaceful and lyrical song by Liv Tyler. Early in the film, Aragorn also uses his healing skills to help Frodo. There is also a very touching moment near the end, when Aragorn tells the hobbits: “You bow to no one.” He bows his knee to them, echoing an aspect of Christ: “He humbled himself.” His humility is also demonstrated by his earlier willingness to serve another king, Theoden, even though he is a monarch waiting to ascend to his own throne.

Mercy & Sacrifice

Frodo repeatedly shows mercy to Gollum, hoping to somehow help reverse the effect of the One Ring and start the pathetic creature on the road to regeneration. Frodo also embodies the punishment Christ endured when He was “wounded for our transgressions.” By the time the hobbit gets to Mount Doom, he is a devastated shadow of his Shire self.

The crucial moment, where he is stricken by the poison of evil, comes in act one – when he is wounded by the Witch King on Weathertop. Jackson reminds us of this moment several times, through flashbacks and other references. Toward the end, Frodo tells Sam: “It’s never really healed.” The price he pays in gaining the victory over Sauron’s evil, through his sacrifice, echoes the price paid by Jesus on the Cross.

Rebirth & Eternity

Resurrection is also very much evident throughout the film. Gandalf is literally raised from the dead. The injured Aragorn is restored by a mystical kiss from Arwen’s spirit; and the future king symbolically conquers death by walking the Paths of the Dead. At the Grey Havens, the last elves in Middle-Earth board a ship to the Undying Lands (also referred to by Tolkien as the Blessed Realm, the home of the Valar).

Frodo tastes death symbolically several times: getting stabbed by the morgul blade, whose poison could turn him into a wraith; succumbing to the Ring’s power on several occasions; falling into a swamp filled with demonic ghosts; and being struck down by Shelob’s sting. But all of these are overthrown by the Grey Havens scene, which represents his resurrection. “We set out to save the Shire,” he says, “and it has been saved – but not for me.” The only way out for him is to pass from Middle-Earth to the elves’ paradise across the sea. Thereby, “death is swallowed up in victory.”

The film only briefly alludes to the Undying Lands, with no detailed explanation of the term; but the concept of eternal life is touchingly enunciated by Gandalf, in a wonderful passage taken almost verbatim from the climax of the book (describing Frodo approaching the Undying Lands). As they sit barricaded in Minas Tirith, with enemy forces closing in, the wizard says to Pippin: “No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass. And then you see it … white shores – and beyond them a far green country, under a swift sunrise.”

Arwen’s Importance

Many critics and purists have complained about the increased role given to Arwen. Initially, the perception was that the filmmakers were simply tacking on a gratuitous romance to appeal to ‘the female demographic.’ But such talk died down when it became known that most of the Arwen scenes were taken directly from material in Appendix A of the book. Curiously, most Christian commentators don’t seem to have picked up on the Christian elements that virtually saturate the Aragorn/Arwen subplot.

In my view, this subplot was the most significant script decision taken by Jackson and company; indeed, it was a stroke of genius. By expanding Arwen’s role, based faithfully on the back story outlined in the Appendices, the scripters greatly increased the Christian content; they added a strong metaphorical element which was only implied in Tolkien’s actual narrative. It makes me wish Tolkien had woven the details into the narrative instead of relegating them to the appendix.

Arwen’s Grace

A summary of the Arwen/Aragorn story arc will help clarify my thesis. The first hint of the subplot occurs in act one, before Arwen appears in the film. Beside a campfire, Aragorn softly sings a song about the legendary elfmaiden Luthien, who gave her love to the human Beren, thus relinquishing her immortality. Frodo asks whom the song is referring to; Aragorn’s response subtly indicates he is thinking of his own immortal lover. Arwen is introduced soon after, and rescues Frodo from the Black Riders; as his wound overcomes him, she prays: “What grace is given me, let it pass to him; let him be spared.” In Rivendell, Arwen gives Aragorn encouragement, renews her vow to ‘bind herself’ to him, and bestows her Evenstar jewel upon him. He goes off on the quest, after a somber parting.

In act two, there is a flashback to Rivendell. The lovers share a tender moment; then Elrond exhorts Aragorn to give Arwen up, thereby allowing her to leave Middle-Earth and keep her immortality in the Undying Lands. Reluctantly, Aragorn breaks off the relationship; but she insists that he keep the Evenstar. Later, he is severely wounded in the warg attack. As he lies stricken, she materializes above him, conferring a blessing and a phantom kiss upon him. We hear her voice: “May the grace of the Valar protect you”; the Valar are the Ainur, the Holy Ones, the first creations of Tolkien’s Creator, Iluvatar – in other words, angels.

Arwen’s Destiny

The scene switches to Rivendell. Arwen refuses to leave Imladris with the other elves, determined to be reunited with her lover. Elrond then tells her what will become of her after Aragorn meets his inevitable mortal end; in a vision of her future, Arwen sees herself mourning the passing of her beloved, as her father paints a devastating picture of the black-clad widow wandering desolate, alone in a barren forest. Arwen capitulates, and leaves Rivendell with the other elves.

In act three, Arwen is heading through the forest with her elvish escort. She sees a vision of an older Aragorn embracing his young son, who is wearing her Evenstar jewel. She returns to Rivendell, and confronts Elrond about this alternate future; she chooses to stay in Middle-Earth, to bring her son into the world – and exhorts her father to reforge Narsil, the shattered blade that cut the Ring from Sauron’s hand 3,000 years before. Elrond sadly accepts her choice, comforts her and laments: “The life of the Eldar is leaving you.” Meanwhile, in his tent, Aragorn has a dream of the Evenstar being shattered.

Elrond gives Aragorn a gift: Anduril, the reforged Sword of the King. He also gives him the sad tidings that Arwen is dying – her destiny now mysteriously tied to the fate of the One Ring. Aragorn later uses a palantir to confront Sauron – who shows him a vision of his dying lover; the Evenstar shatters, this time for real. Aragorn takes up Anduril, and goes to confront Sauron’s army at the Black Gate; the Ring, and Sauron, are destroyed. At Aragorn’s coronation, he is reunited with his lover. The reunion, while joyous, is rendered even more poignant by the bittersweet implications of Arwen’s new mortal status.

Love & Hope

In total, Arwen is onscreen a fairly small amount of time; but it feels much more substantial. Her appearances are paced just right, and her importance to Aragorn resonates throughout the film. Their story is heavily imbued with Christian meaning, as web critic Abercius has eloquently pointed out at CatholicQandA.com. Aragorn is willing to sacrifice Arwen’s companionship to save her from a life of war and despair – loving her “as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself up for her.” Yet, he never totally gives up on his love for her, continuing to wear the Evenstar.

Indeed, he is the very embodiment of Christian hope, in Tolkien’s view; the author names him Elessar, which means ‘the Renewer’, and Estel, meaning ‘hope’. While the film doesn’t clarify these ideas, Aragorn still embodies them. At Helm’s Deep, facing overwhelming odds, he tells a boy soldier: “There is always hope”; when all seems lost, he motivates Theoden to ride out and meet the enemy regardless; and his short rallying speech to the troops at the Black Gate is truly inspiring.

Ultimate Sacrifice

In her own way, Arwen is also a true Christ figure. She, too, humbles herself; and she also makes the ultimate sacrifice. She is free to go to the Undying Lands, but chooses not to – partly motivated by the vision of the child she could only have if she stays with Aragorn. She sacrifices her immortality to bring the child into existence. While her motivation is a combination of romantic love, and love for the child, the fact is that she lays her life down to save another’s life. What could be more quintessentially Christ-like?

In some respects, Arwen is the purest element in the entire film, an embodiment of nobility, grace, loyalty and love. Her story adds extraordinary emotional and spiritual power to the film. By increasing her role, Jackson and his co-scripters actually improved on Tolkien in a profound way – and that is no mean feat.

For Fanatics Only?

Finally, here’s where we separate the elves from the dwarves. At the risk of being dismissed as a hopeless fanatic, I have to say that The Lord Of The Rings is best appreciated when it is watched in an all-day marathon; the story has greater immediacy, momentum and accumulative emotional impact. Some key elements resonate more intensely throughout the saga. Indeed, watching the complete film in one sitting (with breaks for second breakfast and afternoon tea, of course!) greatly enhances one’s appreciation of some of the most important elements of this sprawling narrative.

These include: the evolution of the relationship between Frodo and Sam; Smeagol’s struggle against his alter-ego, Gollum, and his ultimate capitulation to evil; the growth of Merry and Pippin, from juvenile clowns to seasoned warriors; the dire significance of Frodo’s wound; the relationships between Denethor and his sons; Aragorn’s progress from uncertain exile to confident monarch; the weight of Arwen’s acceptance of mortality; Theoden’s evolution from slave of Saruman to courageous champion; Gandalf’s progression from lovable Grey bungler to imperious White commander; Frodo’s view of Smeagol, going from hatred to pity to mercy; the importance of the Shire as the hobbits’ idyllic refuge from the world; Eowyn’s progression from sheltered royal to shieldmaiden; and Frodo’s evolution from carefree and complacent hobbit to haunted, battle-scarred outsider.

The shorter version is probably best for a day-long marathon, of course, simply because of the daunting length of the extended edition; but the latter is well worth devoting a day to, for the maximum experience. For the less venturesome, the film can also be split very nicely into two parts and viewed on consecutive days. In my opinion, it’s best to end part one after Saruman sends his army of Uruk-hai off to Helm’s Deep; and to begin part two with Merry and Pippin seeing Saruman’s army in the distance. A Galadriel monologue soon after that scene effectively encapsulates the key points of the story’s first half.

Missed Opportunity

After all is said and done, there’s only one thing Jackson could do to improve upon his work: release the full extended film worldwide as a big-screen special event – preferably in Imax theatres. The extended editions of Fellowship and Towers were given a brief theatrical run in 2003; but as far as I know, aside from a few limited presentations, the extended finale has never been widely shown to the public on the big screen internationally. Surely, this is a missed opportunity.

Now that he has gotten his King Kong remake, The Lovely Bones and The Adventures of Tintin out of his system, and especially since The Hobbit has finally become a reality, I hope Jackson may consider doing a big-screen edition of the complete Rings saga (maybe even a 3D version, if it is done properly). New Line Cinema would be wise to do it now that the complete Hobbit trilogy has run its course; indeed, I would love to see a special presentation of both trilogies in the theatres.

Supreme Masterpiece

Speaking of The Hobbit, much has been written about the supposed failure of Jackson to remain faithful to the book. I have to disagree with that assessment, and have done so at great length in my review (see link below). Personally, I think the Hobbit series is surpassed only by the Rings Trilogy, as a supreme work of fantasy. I can't think of any production unit that could have done a better job than Peter Jackson and his colleagues, and I am greatly looking forward to further flights of fancy from those quarters. It's fun to ponder how the Kiwi Wizard could possibly top himself.

We might dare hope that he and his team could someday tackle The Silmarillion. It is a rather unwieldy book, but a great film could be made by focusing on the creation myth of Iluvatar and the Ainur; the theft of the Silmarils; the villainy of Sauron’s mentor, Morgoth; the tragedy of Beren and Luthien; the cataclysmic destruction of Numenor; and Sauron’s defeat in the War of the Last Alliance. Tolkien’s Children Of Hurin would also make a fine film – albeit a rather gloomy one, but powerful nonetheless. However, considering the intransigence of the Tolkien Estate, it is highly unlikely Jackson would ever get the movie rights.

In conclusion: It is indeed no exaggeration to call The Lord Of The Rings a supreme masterpiece. While it has a few miniscule flaws, it is nevertheless one of the very greatest accomplishments in the history of film. It is highly doubtful that it could ever be surpassed as a spectacle. In my mind, the only thing that could conceivably trump it would be a faithful adaptation of the Book Of Revelation – done with the same state-of-the-art technology, craftsmanship and imagination, by someone with money willing to invest it. Is George Lucas listening? Just kidding! How about Spielberg?

For an archive of outstanding Rings-related videos, click here for the APPENDICES:

http://musemash.tumblr.com/post/181194210475/the-rings-trilogy-multi-facet-appendices-in

VINDICATING A SPLENDID HOBBIT'S TALE

https://www.facebook.com/fugue999/photos/a.337095876312460/1040775709277803/

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MAN IS A HUMAN DEVIL

HUMAN NATURE HAS MADE MEN HUMAN DEVILS “But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man.” John 2:24-25 “I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts” Ecclesiastes 3:18.

Human Nature Revealed This treaty is not penned to condemn any race of peoples for all races of men stand condemned and guilty before God. It is our own human nature that condemns us as it is written “For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved” John 3:17. The Creator knows what is in man and that man needs to be protected from himself. It is the very purpose for which He gave us His Word by sending His Son into the world. It is human nature that has turned men into human devils. And this treaty is written to bear out the facts that through human history men have proven themselves to be but human devils. It was human nature that crucified Jesus Christ. We all are guilty, whether we are Jew, Gentile or of the Church of Jesus Christ, our sin our human nature killed the Son of God and put God on the Cross. Human nature being what it is apart from grace would do it again if it were possible. Humankind apart from the saving grace of God is nothing more than a human devil. The same forces which crucified Jesus Christ over nineteen hundred years ago are today trying to crucify His body, His Church and every single living member of His body is the object of their persecution with a death contract. And to accomplish their goal in America it means the incitement of revolution and the overthrow of the United States Constitution, the only truly free country left in the world. WE MUST KNOW OUR ENEMY! Many Christian leaders have not yet realized it, but Christianity is in the grip of a life and death struggle at the present time. International Jewish Communism, which has already undermined all nations, firmly expects to exterminate all Christians. What the Cause of Christ has endured in Russia the last 100 years surpasses its suffering at the hands of bloody Nero. One of the purposes of this present writing is to show that this struggle is not of recent origin. THE JEWISH ASSAULT ON CHRISTIANITY In the first twelve chapters of the book of Acts, five specific persecutions, sponsored by Jews against the infant Christian Church, are recorded. Failing to blot the new religious conception from the face of the earth by putting its Leader to death, they invented every conceivable scheme for torturing and murdering those who pledged allegiance to His plan for redeeming the world from the curse of sin. The Jews regarded Christianity as being an illegitimate child of Judaism. Therefore, in their hatred, they believed it to be their solemn duty to stamp it out. After the divine visitation at Pentecost, so many thousands of Jews were converted that the leaders became alarmed. One thing stood in their way, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Had His body remained in the tomb, they would have found it easy to combat the new Faith which had suddenly sprung into existence. But with the resurrection being discussed on every side, they found themselves confronted with an insurmountable difficulty. When first faced with the fact of the empty tomb they did not hesitate to resort to deliberate falsehoods. "And when they were assembled with the elders and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying say His disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept. And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and secure you. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day." The first few months of the Church's history witnessed five distinct persecutions. What the Cause of Christ has endured at the hands of Jews, through the centuries, far surpasses anything the Jewish people have suffered from Christians. The attitude of the Jews toward the early Church reminds us that there would be no Christianity in the world today had Paul and others not taken the Gospel message to the Gentiles. First persecution: Acts 4:1-22. A pitiful beggar, a man born a cripple, was placed near the gates of the Jerusalem temple every day to beg for alms. On a certain occasion, as Peter and John were about to enter, the poor, helpless creature stretched forth a dirty, bony arm and pleaded for a coin. "Silver and gold have I none," said Peter, "but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk." Instantly the resurrection life of Christ smote the recipient of divine mercy and he jumped to his feet "walking, and leaping, and praising God." The man was more than forty years of age and had therefore been a familiar object on the streets of Jerusalem for years. This miracle caused a great stir throughout the city. Large crowds of curious people gathered around the apostles and the healed beggar. Peter was quick to take advantage of the opportunity and turned the occasion into a sermon. "Why marvel ye at this?" he asked, and then explained that a far more wonderful miracle had occurred a short time before in Jerusalem, namely the resurrection of Christ from the grave. When the report of this healing reached the treacherous Jews, their minds got busier than ever. They began devising new plans for putting an end to everything that was being done in the name of Christ. Their first thought was to deny that the miracle had been performed. Then they realized that this was useless because the man was so well known. At that moment he was rejoicing, praising God, testifying to his deliverance and telling everybody what had happened. "And we cannot deny it," mourned the Jews who would have lied to discredit the story if it would have advanced their selfish purposes. The members of the Sanhedrin came together and the little band of Christians was forced to appear before them. A torrent of abuse was turned loose upon the trembling group until finally Peter, "filled with the Holy Ghost," became bold. As spokesman for the group, he made it clear that the Christians proposed to obey God rather than man. Had it not been that the mobs were at that time favorable toward the apostles because of the miracle which had been performed, the Jewish leaders would have no doubt put the entire body of believers to death. Second persecution: Acts 5:17-42. "Many signs and wonders" were wrought among the people by the apostles. All manner of diseases were healed. But the Jews could see no good in any of this relief of human suffering because it did not come through the narrow, selfish channels of their bigoted nationalism. The leaders agreed to the use of physical weapons in their attempt to destroy spiritual power, the same as Communists are doing today in trying to exterminate Christianity by killing Christians. Repeated acts of supernatural intervention preserved the early Church. Without divine assistance, it would have perished. These early miracles confirmed the words of the Founder that the gates of hell would not be able to prevail against the Church. The Jews "laid hands on the apostles and put them in the common prison. But the angel of the Lord by night opened the prison doors, and brought them forth." Next morning when the Jewish senate convened and messengers were sent to bring the apostles for trial, it was discovered that unknown to the jailors, they had escaped and were at that very hour preaching in the area of the temple. Jerusalem was in turmoil by this time. Had the officials dared, they would have killed the Christians without a legal trial. When the saints appeared before the tribunal they were told that they had been previously warned not to teach in the name of Jesus. "Ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man's blood upon us," said the high priest. From this, it is evident that the apostles had been denouncing the Jews and charging them with the responsibility for Christ's death. Here we find the leaders complaining about His blood being upon them, forgetting apparently their previous utterance: "His blood be on us, and on our children." It is to the credit of our spiritual ancestors that they were able to fill a whole city with the doctrines of Christianity in the face of such defiant opposition. Peter finally dared to shout: "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree." Next, he called upon his persecutors to repent of their sins. We read that this "cut them to the heart." Who was this upstart that he should have the audacity to rebuke them! When they were almost ready to demand the lives of the apostles, Gamaliel, a tolerant member of the Sanhedrin, lifted a warning voice. If the new cult was not of God, he declared that it would come to naught and fall by its own weight. "But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God." At length, this line of common sense reasoning prevailed, and the passions of the leaders cooled a bit. The result was, instead of killing the apostles they were given another warning and a severe flogging. This form of punishment was cruel, brutal, cowardly and unjust. But even though bitter and painful to the flesh, it caused rejoicing to the spirits of the faithful few. As the wounds healed they "rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name." The only way the Jews had of striking at the Christ Whom they hated was to injure His followers; they availed themselves of this opportunity. Boldly and properly disregarding their illegal judges, the Christians kept on preaching Christ and reminding the Jews of their crimes against the government of God. Third persecution: Acts 7:54-60. The blood of martyrs began flowing in the same year that the Lord ascended into heaven. The Jews' first victim after Christ was a man named Stephen, whose primary crime was belief in the deity of the Son of God. This was regarded as blasphemy. The story of the murder of Stephen is one of the saddest in all the history of the Church. It is significant that a Hellenist, rather than an apostle, should have become the first Christian martyr. Stephen was accused of three things: blaspheming God, setting aside the Old Testament, and belittling the Temple. Each of these charges was untrue. Even while lying witnesses were being introduced against him, the members of the Jewish counsel saw his countenance light up with a spiritual glow like "the face of an angel." After listening to the charges, the priests asked their helpless victim: "Are these things so?" But instead of devoting himself to an answer of questions which everyone knew to be based upon falsehoods, Stephen entered into a discussion of Israelites’ history and closed by rebuking his judges for their hypocrisy. He declared that their devotion to God, the Law, and the Temple, was hypocritical. Here are his words: "Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your father’s persecuted? And they have slain them which showed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers." Thus Stephen laid bare the full measure of their guilt. The blood of the Son of God was upon their heads; they had ignored the miracles which testified of His deity; they had rejected the Pentecostal program of the new Church; they had also spurned the wooing of the Holy Spirit. Before God, they stood condemned, and judgment was sure to overtake them! Taking no thought of his own safety, Stephen shot his words of truth, like barbed arrows, into the hard hearts of his merciless tormentors. As he spoke, the Jewish leaders yelled and screamed to drown his words. They stopped their ears with their fingers to avoid hearing the truth about themselves. Like serpents, they hissed their poison at the courageous Christian. They rushed upon him with one accord. In their madness they dragged him outside the city, removing their outer garments as they ran. With stones, they pelted the body of the first Christian martyr until his life ebbed away. This execution was illegal because the matter was not submitted to the Roman Governor. Emulating the blessed Saviour, Stephen cried with a loud voice: "Lord lay not this sin at their charge." "And when he had said this, he fell asleep." Fourth persecution: Acts 8:1-3. The first three persecutions were spontaneous and did not result from deliberate planning. There had been no coordination of effort. Events had transpired so rapidly that there had been no time to sit down and quietly work out a concerted plan of attack. But the spilling of Stephen's blood seemed to whet the Jewish appetite for more Christian suffering. From that hour, nothing but a terrible pogrom could possibly satisfy them. The sight of blood, the appearance of the first deadly wound in the flesh of a believer, seemed to stir all their criminal instincts. They came to the conclusion that an organized effort was imperative if the new Faith was to be put down. Up until that time, their attempts to suppress the truth had proved ineffective. In searching for a persecutor who would be both cunning and brutal they selected a brilliant young rabbi by the name of Saul from the city of Tarsus. It will be recalled that this was the young man who had guarded the coats of those who stoned Stephen. Saul stood grinning at the contortions of the martyr squirming and writhing in death agonies, under the barrage of rocks which were heaped upon him. Jesus told his followers to go everywhere proclaiming the glad tidings. This was done following the Pentecostal harvest feast which brought Jews to Jerusalem from all parts of the civilized world. Those who accepted the Gospel message, on that great occasion, returned to their various communities to kindle spiritual fires. Unwittingly, in the fourth persecution, the Jews contributed to the success of this very plan of evangelizing because when Saul began scattering believers, driving them from their homes, forcing them into exile, "persecuting them from city to city," every such Christian became an evangelist. Until this time, the activities of the Christians had been confined for the most part, to the city of Jerusalem and its immediate environs, although a skeleton of Church organization was set up reaching into other areas, resulting from the embers which blew in all directions after the experience Pentecost. "As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women, committed them to prison. Therefore they that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word." The very name Saul became a terror to the early Christians because of the heartless methods which he used. He and his helpers were happiest when they could rush into a house and catch a little group of believers in the act of worshipping, they would kill and wound some, banish others, and torture still others in ways too numerous and terrible for words. The irony of this organized attempt on the part of the Jews to blot the cause of Christ out of existence was the fact that their own ringleader got gloriously converted on the road to Damascus and became the greatest missionary and evangelist the world has ever known. But, in later years, Paul never forgave himself, nor was he ever able to erase the memories of his early attacks upon the little Church, which he came to love so dearly and for which he finally sacrificed his life. Fifth persecution: Acts 12:1-19. The next spasm of Jewish terror, mentioned in the early part of the book of Acts, was directed against Peter. This persecution is of particular importance because it introduces a new element in the Jewish plan of destroying Christianity. It reveals the scheme, which was continued for hundreds of years, influencing Gentile rulers to do their dirty work for them. During the first few centuries of Church history, when the pagans slaughtered Christians by the tens of thousands, a careful study will show that time and again the pogroms were precipitated by powerful Jews who were able to maneuver things from behind the scenes. They simply used pagans to carry out their crimes against Christians in the same manner that the player moves chessmen on the board. St. Justin said in the middle of the second century: "The Jews were behind all the persecutions of the Christians. They wandered through the country, everywhere hating and undermining the Christian faith." Tertullian said about the same time: "The Jews formed the breeding ground of all anti-Christian action." A plain example of Jews causing unbelieving Gentiles to destroy Christians is to be seen in this, the fifth persecution. We read that Herod the king has James put to death by the sword because of Jewish influences being brought to bear upon his throne. This ruler was the grandson of Herod the Great who murdered the babes of Bethlehem after the birth of Christ. James was one of the three, with Peter and John, who enjoyed the sweetest possible fellowship with the Lord. No details are given in the Scriptures about the killing of James. And yet underneath the simple statement, a deep anguish and sympathy may be felt. Then the next verse shows that the wicked king had planned to make away with Peter in the same way. "And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. And when he apprehended him, he put him in prison ... Peter, therefore, was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him." The Jews desired a public execution of Peter. They wanted his death to be viewed by all because he was one of the principal leaders of the despised Christians. This would give them a chance to gloat over their ability to wrap Gentile monarchs around their fingers. It was quite an achievement, in their estimation, to get a Roman king such as Herod, to do their bidding. But a strange thing happened during the night proceeding the day when Peter was to be put to death. Another miracle occurred. Although execution awaited him, the faithful apostle who spent the night chained between two soldiers, slept as sound as a babe. Suddenly a shaft of light shot into the darkened cell like a bolt of lightning and an angel smote Peter on the side. He dressed quickly and followed the heavenly visitor to the outer court, through the gate, and down the street. Not until then did he realize that his deliverance was real and not merely a dream. Making his way to the home of Mary, the mother of John Mark, Peter found that an all-night prayer meeting was being held in his behalf. He came into the presence of the saints rejoicing "that the Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod, and from all the expectation of the Jews." The angel smote Peter and the result was life and liberty. A short time later the same angel smote Herod and the result was disease, death, and worms devouring his flesh. And this king was not the last to be cursed for allowing himself to come under the domination of Jews. So Herod having consented to an ignominious death for Peter, himself suffered one much more ignominious. Following thru history, we find it was ten, 10 Roman Emperors that sat out to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, ten periods of Roman persecution where millions of Christians were martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ. Would you dare take a look at this period in Roman history where these ten Emperors sought to wipe Christianity from the Roman Empire? THE BLOODIEST ROMAN EMPERORS IN HISTORY: Ruthless and violent, Roman emperors are famous for their tyrannical reigns of terror. But who were the worst Roman emperors? We all know about the Roman Emperors, don’t we? Mad, bad and decidedly dangerous to know. Who can forget Peter Ustinov’s Nero in the 1951 epic Quo Vadis? Or John Hurt’s tortured and murderous Caligula in the BBC’s I, Claudius? In fact, as historians point out (to anyone who will listen), many of the emperors on the list below were competent, even gifted administrators, and the sources for some of the more lurid stories about them are not always above suspicion of exaggeration or invention. And some of the crimes that most shocked their contemporaries like a penchant for performing in public would not necessarily offend us so much today. Some emperors, like Nero or Domitian, have passed into history as models of erratic, paranoid tyrants; others, like Diocletian, were able administrators, providing good government (unless you happened to be a Christian, in which case you were in great peril). Even under the worst emperors, Rome continued to function, but involvement in public life could become a decidedly dangerous business. Tiberius (ruled AD 14–37) Tiberius was the successor to Augustus, though Augustus did not particularly want Tiberius to succeed him, and it was only the untimely death of the emperor’s grandsons Gaius and Lucius, and Augustus’s decision to exile their younger brother, Agrippa Postumus, that put Tiberius in line for the imperial throne. Tiberius was a gifted military commander and respected the authority of the Senate. However, he had a gloomy and increasingly suspicious outlook that won him few friends and led him into a bitter dispute with Agrippina, the widow of his war hero nephew Germanicus. Fatally, Tiberius relied heavily on the ambitious and ruthless Aelius Sejanus, who instituted a reign of terror until Tiberius, learning that Sejanus planned to seize power himself, had him arrested and executed. Tiberius sank into morbid suspicion of everyone around him: he retreated to the island of Capri and revived the ancient accusation of maiestas (treason) and used it to sentence to death anyone he suspected. Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus give us a picture of Tiberius living on Capri as a depraved sexual predator, which may owe more to the colorful imagination than to fact, though he certainly made use of a sheer drop into the sea to dispose of anyone he took issue with. Tiberius was not a monster in the mold of some of his successors, but he certainly set the tone for what was to come. Gaius (Caligula) (ruled AD 37–41) Gaius (‘Caligula, or ‘little bootee’ a childhood nickname given him by his father’s troops) is best known for a series of eccentric actions, such as declaring war on the sea and proclaiming himself a god. His reign actually began quite promisingly, but after a serious bout of illness, he developed a paranoia that led him into alarmingly erratic behavior, possibly including incest with his sister, Julia Drusilla, whom he named as his heir. Gaius took particular delight in humiliating the Senate, claiming that he could make anyone consul, even his horse (though contrary to the popular story, he didn’t actually go through with this). As the son of Germanicus [a prominent general], Gaius was keen to establish his military credentials, though his campaign in Germany achieved little and his abortive invasion of Britain had to be turned into a battle with the sea god Neptune: he is said to have told his troops to attack the waves with their swords and gather seashells as booty. Gaius declared himself a god and used his divine status to establish what was, in effect, an absolutist monarchy in Rome, he followed Tiberius’s example of using treason trials to eliminate enemies, real or imagined. In the end, it was his rather childish taunting of Cassius Chaerea, a member of the Praetorian Guard which brought Gaius down. Chaerea arranged for his assassination at the Palatine Games. He is supposed to have protested that he couldn’t be killed because he was an immortal god, but he turned out to be rather less immortal than he thought. Nero (ruled AD 54–68) Nero is the Roman Emperor we all love to hate, and not without reason. He was actually a competent administrator, and he was aided by some very able men, including his tutor, the writer Seneca. However, he was also unquestionably a murderer, starting with his step-brother Britannicus, with whom he had been supposed to share power, and progressing through his wife Octavia, whom he deserted for his lover, Poppeaea, and then had executed on a trumped-up charge of adultery. Probably on Poppaea’s prompting he had his own mother murdered, though the initial attempt, using a collapsible boat, went wrong, and she had to be beaten to death instead. He then kicked Poppaea to death in a fit of anger while she was pregnant with his child. Contrary to the myth, Nero did not start the great fire of Rome, nor did he ‘fiddle’ (nor even play the lyre), while the city burned, in fact, he organized relief work for its victims and planned the rebuilding. But Nero’s fondness for his own music and poetry, which made him force senators to sit through his own interminable and talentless recitals, meant people could easily believe it of him. Nero was much hated for building his huge, tasteless ‘golden house’ complex [aka the Domus Aurea, a large landscaped portico villa] in the ruins of what had been the public area of central Rome. He undoubtedly persecuted Christians in large numbers, and his childish insistence on winning the laurels at the Olympic Games in Greece, whether or not he actually won, or indeed finished the race brought the whole empire into disrepute. Nero was toppled by an army revolt that sunk into a destructive three-way civil war. Domitian (ruled AD 81–96) Domitian was the younger son of Vespasian, the general who had emerged from the chaos after Nero’s fall and restored a certain element of stability and normality to Roman public life. Domitian inherited none of his father’s charm and, like others on this list he suffered from a deep suspicion of those around him, amounting to paranoia, possibly a result of his narrow escape from being killed during the civil war. He was particularly suspicious of the Senate and had a number of leading citizens executed for conspiracy against him, including 12 ex-consuls and two of his own cousins. Domitian’s rule became steadily more autocratic, and he demanded to be treated like a god. He turned against philosophers, sending many of them into exile, and he arranged the judicial murder of the chief vestal virgin, having her buried alive in a specially constructed tomb. Domitian was eventually brought down by a conspiracy arranged by his wife, Domitia, and was somewhat inexpertly stabbed by a palace servant. Some historians think Domitian’s tyranny has been overstated; others have compared him to Saddam Hussein at his most vengeful. Commodus (ruled AD 180–192) Commodus was the emperor immortalized by Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000). Commodus was indeed a passionate follower of gladiatorial combat, and he fought in the arena, sometimes dressed as Hercules, for which he awarded himself divine honors, declaring that he was a Roman Hercules. Commodus was the son of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius and, although the film’s scene in which Commodus kills his own father is invention, it is true that Commodus was the very opposite of all that his father had stood for. Vain and pleasure-seeking, Commodus virtually bankrupted the Roman treasury and he sought to fill it up again by having wealthy citizens executed for treason so he could confiscate their property. Soon, people began plotting against him for real, including his own sister. The plots were foiled, however, and Commodus set about executing still more people, either because they were conspiring against him or because he thought they might do so in the future. Eventually, the Praetorian prefect and the emperor’s own court chamberlain hired a professional athlete to strangle Commodus in the bath. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus I (Caracalla) (ruled AD 211–217) Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the son of the highly able and effective emperor, Septimius Severus. ‘Caracalla’ was a nickname, derived from a hooded coat from Gaul that he introduced into Rome. Severus named his younger son, Geta, as co-heir with Caracalla, but the two quickly fell out and civil war seemed imminent until Caracalla averted this scenario by having Geta murdered. Caracalla dealt brutally with opponents: he set about exterminating Geta’s supporters and similarly wiped out those caught up in one of the cities of Alexandria’s regular local risings against Roman rule. Caracalla is remembered for the magnificent bath complex named after him in Rome, and for extending Roman citizenship to all free men within the empire, though he was probably simply trying to raise the money he needed for his own lavish spending. He certainly turned the surplus he inherited from his father into a heavy deficit. Caracalla was a successful, if ruthless, military commander but he was assassinated by a group of ambitious army officers, including the Praetorian prefect Opellius Macrinus, who promptly proclaimed himself emperor. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus II (Elagabalus) (ruled AD 218–222) Elagabalus was a relative of Septimius Severus’s wife, put forward to challenge Macrinus for the throne after the murder of Caracalla. Elagabalus overthrew Macrinus and promptly embarked on an increasingly eccentric reign. His nickname came from his role as priest of the cult of the Syrian god Elah-Gabal, which he tried to introduce into Rome to universal consternation, even having himself circumcised to show his devotion to the cult. Elagabalus deliberately offended Roman moral and religious principles, setting up a conical black stone fetish, a symbol of the sun god Sol Invictus Elagabalus, on the Palatine Hill and marrying the chief Vestal, for which, under normal circumstances, she should have been put to death. Romans were particularly offended by Elagabalus’s sexual behavior as well as a string of marriages he also openly took male lovers, and he seems to have been what would nowadays be recognized as transgender. Few historians have much good to say about Elagabalus, and eventually, the Romans’ patience gave out: Elagabalus was murdered in a conspiracy organized by his own grandmother. Diocletian (AD 284–305) It may seem unfair to include Diocletian in this group, since he is best known for the risky but sensible decision to divide the government of the Roman empire in two, taking Marcus Aurelius Maximianus as his co-emperor, each with a subordinate known as a Caesar, in a four-way division of power called the tetrarchy. Diocletian was a good administrator and managed to hold his divided command structure together at a time when the Roman Empire was coming under increasing pressure from its enemies outside its boundaries. What gets Diocletian included here, however, is his utterly ruthless persecution of Christians. Christians had long been regarded by most Romans with a mixture of distaste and a rather amused tolerance, but Diocletian set about the total eradication of the religion. Churches were to be destroyed, scriptures publicly burnt, and Christian priests imprisoned and forced to conduct sacrifices to the emperor on pain of death. Christians who refused to give up their faith were tortured and executed. It was an unusually vicious persecution, given that the Romans were usually accepting of other religions, and it reflects Diocletian’s fear that, at a time when unity of purpose was essential for the empire’s survival, Christianity represented a rejection of Roman religious values that he could not afford to allow. These were all human devils demonstrating the wickedness of human nature turning men into wicked beasts. TEN HORRIFYING TORTURES OF EARLY CHRISTIANS: Early Christians sometimes faced persecution and even death for their beliefs. Many were tortured first; some were not. Of Jesus’ 11 disciples (not counting Judas) Peter, Simon the Zealot, Phillip, Jude the brother of James, and Andrew were all crucified in various parts of the world. Peter requested to be crucified upside down, a request the Romans were only too happy to grant. Andrew’s Cross was in the shape of an X, which is now called St. Andrew’s cross and appears on the Scottish flag. This list contains ten, 10 of the most bizarre and painful methods of torture inflicted upon the Christians of antiquity through the Early Middle Ages. Much of this information has been gleaned from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and corroborated elsewhere. Many Were Cooked To Death; Saint Lawrence of Rome is better known for the manner of his death than his ministry in life. When a Roman prefect demanded that the tithes of the Catholic Church be handed over to the Roman state, Lawrence brought forth his impoverished congregation, who he stated were the tithes, as the money had been given them for food. The infuriated prefect ordered metal plates to be set over a bed of coals and heated until they were red-hot. Lawrence was then bound and laid naked on them, face up. His flesh sizzled, smoked, and was burned black, yet Lawrence made no outcry, nor did he beg forgiveness from the prefect. He finally called in a clear voice, “I’m done on that side. Turn me over and eat.” He is now the patron saint of cooks. Peter, a eunuch of Diocletian’s household, was discovered to be a Christian and cooked in the same manner as Lawrence. Dragged to Death; It was Evangelist Mark, who wrote the Gospel of Mark, founded the Christian Church in Alexandria and preached to the masses that they should give up their Egyptian gods and goddesses. It’s not clear how long he was able to keep this up, but he did convert many before A.D. 68 when an angry mob tied a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets behind a chariot for two days without interruption. The dragging continued even after his death until his bones were showing. According to some sources, Hippolytus of Rome, an elder under Pope Pontian, was dragged to death behind a wild horse on the island of Sardinia. He is now the patron saint of horses. In 257, Saturninus of Toulouse was dragged behind a bull around the city until the bull was chased down a flight of stone steps and Saturninus’s brain was dashed from his skull. Julian the Apostate succeeded Constantius II (who succeeded his father, Constantine the Great) in 361. Julian restored the pagan religions to the empire and horribly persecuted Christians. Within two years, he was ordering them sought out and dragged to death in every city and along the caravan routes throughout Palestine. Skinned Bartholomew: Removal of the skin is so excruciating that victims invariably passed out multiple times during the torture. To prevent this, they were usually hung upside down so the excess blood flow to their brains forced them to remain conscious. The skin is not easy to remove, and torturers rarely made an effort to remove it in one piece unless they wanted a trophy. Typically, the skin was sliced into strips, and then each strip peeled from the body with the aid of a knife. Often, the skin was thrown into a fire or to animals, or dangled before the victim’s eyes. This is how Bartholomew, one of the 12 apostles, was killed by locals in Armenia, into whose language he translated Matthew’s Gospel. The Armenians refused to abandon their idols and executed Bartholomew by crucifying him upside down and skinning him. Sewn into Skins and Eaten by Dogs; Siemiradski Facke, in this torture was devised by Nero himself, not merely to cause Christians pain but to entertain him and his guests. Nero was infamously rumored to have crucified Christians on trees in his gardens, coated them with wax, and set them on fire to light his nightly walks (he evidently didn’t mind the stench). Others he ordered sewn into hides, any large animal was skinned, and the prepared skin sewn around the victim except for the head, hands, and feet. Then ravenous dogs were set loose. The victim could only scuttle around on all fours like a crab. Nero was said to have laughed heartily as the dogs gnawed at the skin as they would a bone. Julian of Antioch was tortured every day for an entire year and displayed to the crowds in every town in Cilicia, (a southern coastal region of what is now Turkey). He was then sewn into a skin filled with asps and scorpions and flung into the Aegean Sea. He was said to have floated all the way across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, Egypt. Starved to Death, Martyrdom of St-Stephen, Emperor Decius ruled from 249 to 251, when he was killed at the Battle of Abrittus in Bulgaria. During his short reign, he had a temple built in Ephesus and required that all Christians sacrifice for the good of the emperor (not “to” the emperor, since this would impute divinity to Decius, who was still alive). This was against Roman law, but the Christians largely considered any similar sacrifice counter to their faith and refused, even when warned that they would be tortured to death. Pope Fabian himself was beheaded over the issue. The next year, seven of Decius’s best soldiers, Constantinus, Dionysius, Malchus, Martianus, Maximianus, Joannes, and Seraion, were discovered to be Christian converts. Decius attempted to bribe them back to the Roman faith by giving them a long furlough while he was away. They fled the area and hid in a cave. Upon Decius’s return, he was told of their whereabouts and had the cave sealed. All seven died from starvation or dehydration. There is a legend, similar to Rip van Winkle, that these seven men fell asleep and woke up 360 years later, exited the cave and amazed the people in the town. Boiled To Death; boiling-cauldron boiling water causes almost instant first-degree burns and will cause third-degree burns after 10 minutes. Eventually, the flesh will slough away deep into the muscle, and death is usually marked by the water turning red as it finally breaches the blood vessels. Tradition holds that John the Apostle, who wrote the Gospel of John, survived without harm after being boiled in a cauldron of oil, after which he was exiled to Patmos Island in the Aegean. In 222, a woman named Cecilia, possibly Saint Cecilia, was boiled in a bathtub over a bed of coals for a day and a half, after she converted her husband and brother. They were beheaded, as was the captain who led them to their deaths because he converted in view of the victims’ fearlessness. After Cecilia was drawn alive from the tub, she is said to have sung a song of praise to God, which is why she is the patron saint of music. She was then beheaded. This inspired the Second Nun’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Inquisition’s by the 13th century, everybody expected the Spanish Inquisition. The church formed inquisitions in every country in Western Europe, but the Spanish were the most brutal and feared. Anyone found guilty even of reading the Bible in his or her own language was tried, usually convicted, and often executed. The ceremony of execution and torture was called an “Auto da Fe,” or “Act of Faith.” The Inquisition was required not to spill any blood in performing tortures, but this requirement was usually ignored. The most common method called for the victim to be stripped to his underwear and laid face-up on an elevated platform. Thin cords were passed through holes and wrapped around the limbs, then drawn so tightly that they cut through the victim’s flesh to the bones. If no confession was made, the process was repeated up to four times. If this elicited no confession, the next stage involved folding the arms back behind the victim with the palms outward, then, both arms were tied to a winch that ratcheted them closer and closer until the backs of the hands touched. This ripped both shoulders out of the sockets with such pressure that blood spewed from the mouth. A surgeon would then set the joints and the victim was given two months in prison to recover. Two months later, the last torture involved a heavy chain lashed around the body with both ends attached to a winch. The arms were pinned straight at the sides and the chain was passed around the wrists. Then it was tightened like a tourniquet until the shoulders and wrists dislocated. The joints were then reset, and the torture immediately inflicted a second time. If the victim still did not confess, he was sent to be burned at the stake. If he did, he was placed in prison for another month or two, then, released a cripple. Ground to death in a Mill; under the rule of Maximian, Saint Victor Maurus may have suffered the most excruciating death of all. He secretly ministered to his parishioners in Milan until about 303, when he was discovered and immediately dragged through the streets behind a horse while the crowds stripped him naked and beat him, then, demanded he recant. He refused and was stretched on the rack for a day, during which time he prayed to God for patience. He was then imprisoned and immediately converted three of his guards. When Maximian heard of this, he ordered the guards beheaded, and Victor racked again, while the torturers beat him savagely with clubs. He was ordered to recant and refused a third time. Maximian had a Roman altar built and ordered Victor to sacrifice incense on it to Jupiter. This enraged Victor, who kicked over the altar. Maximian furiously ordered the offending foot cut off, after which Victor was flung into a stone mill used to grind wheat into flour, and the torturers ground him to death. Broken on the Wheel; the breaking wheel is a horribly painful method of torture in which the victim was tied to the side of a wheel laid flat on the ground. Then one of two methods was employed: Either the torturer used a sledgehammer to smash every limb to a pulp, or the wheel was made to turn in transaction with another, like gears, so that the victim’s body was crushed between them. No bone or section of bone was spared, except the torso and head to keep the victim alive. Sometimes the genitals were smashed. Then the victim was left in this condition to die from exposure, blood loss, or to be eaten by birds and ants. This was the fate of a man called Peter, in Lampsacus, Mysia (now Lapseki in Turkey), in about 250. He was martyred along with three others: Paul, Andrew, and Dionisia. Dionisia was condemned to be raped to death, but tradition holds that an angel spared her and the three nominated rapists ran away in fear. She then escaped prison, but desired to be martyred like her friends and allowed the authorities to recapture her. She was beheaded, and Paul and Andrew were stoned. Peter was broken on the wheel, then, beheaded. Having Their Guts Eaten by Pigs; In 363, under Julian the Apostate, Saint Marcus was Bishop of Arethusa, a town near modern Apameia, Syria. Julian ordered Marcus to repair a dilapidated pagan temple, but Marcus destroyed it instead, then, fled the city. He soon realized that his Christian followers would pay for what he had done if he did not return and so he did. The enraged townspeople dragged him through the streets, stripped him naked, stabbed him all over his body with their pencils and quills, then smeared him with honey and suspended him in a basket in a town square, where the wasps and bees would swarm into the basket and devour him. Several of his followers were discovered and dragged down by the mob, which ripped their bellies open with their bare hands. Corn was packed into their abdomens and pigs were set on them. The pigs devoured the corn and their intestines. CHRISTIANITY TODAY Christianity is passing through a crisis the like of which it has never faced before. Whether or not it possesses sufficient moral and spiritual resistance to survive remains to be seen. Paul said the Christian's instruments of battle were not physical: "For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds." The same thought is emphasized in the supernaturally inspired words to Zerubbabel: "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts." The strength of the Church is in its ability to influence the hearts and lives of men by the demonstration and proclamation of divine truth. Questions like the following constantly haunt the writer: "Will the Church be able to demonstrate sufficient power to triumph over its foes in the present crisis? Or has it become so weakened by apostasy and pernicious teachings that it will have to be drenched in its own blood before it can be brought to its senses?" Persecution has always had a purifying effect upon the Church. Like the individual saints of which it is composed, its "strength is made perfect in weakness." Unless the Christian forces of the western nations come under a new baptism of old-time spiritual power, the Church will go down and Soviet Atheism will come up. The Russian Empire was destroyed by the Red hordes, many years ago, because it did not possess sufficient spiritual vitality to resist the onslaught. The Greek Orthodox Church, which governed the religious life and thought of Russia, was a cold, dead, pagan institution. It lacked life, emotion, and creative energy. Consequently, it yielded to the first attack of organized Atheism. Its gorgeous temples have been turned into museums, brothels, and centers of entertainment and vice. Its wealth has been confiscated. Its priests and other leaders have been put to death. Its members have been slaughtered by the millions. Church life is a memory of the past. This very day the Russian “gulags” concentration camps are overflowing with Christians. Now let us turn our attention toward Germany. Next, to the British, the German people are the most religious people in Europe. Protestantism was cradled there. Out of a sixty-seven million population, sixty million Germans are today identified with some kind of a Christian Church. For several years, the Moscow conspirators focused their attacks upon Germany. It looked for a time as if the Country was doomed. But by degrees, the Church began to assert its moral and spiritual strength. Finally, the deep, underlying principles of Christian truth manifested on the surface with the result, that by a single stroke, Communism was destroyed. Dynamic Holy Spirit evangelism is the only dependable antidote for Soviet Atheism. Everyone is acquainted with the phrase, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?" Rev 6: 1-8. The horses are of different colors, each color representing some event of far-reaching proportions which is to come upon the earth. They are White, Red, Black and Pale. It is predicted that these horses will gallop over the earth in the end-time of the present age. Each horse possesses characteristics which make possible its identification. The objective of the Red Horse is to "Take Peace from the Earth." Is it a mere coincidence that the one great system of government in the world today which exists for the open and avowed purpose of destroying peace, should be called Red? Since the butchering of the Czar and his royal family, Russia has become the parade ground of Communist practice. Moscow is the center from which world-wide revolutionary activities are being directed. The Red leaders concentrate first upon one part of the world, then another. The plan has been to keep revolutions breaking out systematically in different parts of the earth. In the year 1922, when the great strikes were being directed from Moscow, the United States government was very near collapse. Few people outside of government circles knew how serious conditions really were. And our country is once more being made the target for Red propaganda and agitation. For very good reasons Moscow believes that the time is ripe to start the Red Horse galloping over our land again, with the ultimate objective of destroying our churches, bombing our government, confiscating our property and introducing a reign of terror, out of which a heartless dictatorship is expected to be set up. During the first communist regime under Lenin, an investigating Committee in 1919 reported this incident: "The entire floor of a large garage was used as an execution site in the provincial city of Kiev. It was swimming with blood. It did not flow, but formed a layer several inches thick and was a grisly mixture of brain and skull fragments, as well as strands of hair and other human remains. "The entire walls were holed with thousands of bullets and were splattered with blood and fragments of brains as well as the skin that adhered to them. A ditch ran from the middle of the garage to a subterranean outlet pipe. This drainage ditch was 25cm wide and 25cm deep lt was filled to the top with blood. "Immediately after the executions, the corpses were removed by Lorries or horse-drawn carts and were buried in a mass grave. In one corner of the garden, we found an older grave which contained some 80 corpses, in which we discovered the most varied and unimaginative cruelties and mutilations. There were corpses with their entrails removed; others had their eyes poked out and there were deep wounds in their hands, face, and neck. Further on we found a corpse with an ax buried in its breast, while others had no tongues. In one corner of this mass grave, we discovered many arms, legs and severed trunks." You may be inclined at this point to say: "What a gross description. Who would believe it?" Well you better, if you want to stop it from coming here. I have been told of worse in Korea. Have you ever seen a man impaled alive on a sharp bamboo pole, while his pregnant wife is stripped before him and then raped over and over, before being chopped into pieces before his dying eyes? Have you ever seen a young woman stripped of her clothing, while she is nailed to a tree with spikes driven through her breasts and a bundle of rice straw, soaked in oil is bound between her bare thighs and set on fire? Have you ever seen an elderly nun crucified against the walls of her church, with bayonets driven through her hands and rib cage and listened for agonizing hours as she screamed, and cried, and begged for mercy from men who knew no mercy? Have you ever seen a tiny baby snatched from his mother’s arms and then tossed back and forth between two drunken soldiers, as they caught the little body on the points of their bayonets? Of course, you haven't and many of you are going to say or think: "How can you be so gross?" You don't even understand the meaning of the word "gross." I do because I saw these things in Vietnam and had a friend who was tortured having wooden spikes driven thru his skull in the shape of a crown as his captors were mocking his Lord. I promised God if He ever got me out of that mess, and safely back to the country I love and the people I love, I would do everything in my power to see that these things never happened in America. I can tell you without equivocation, that I get angry when I see plans underway in America, to bring that same kind of terror here. But look at the record. This terror is not unusual for Talmudic-Communism they have done it too well over 100-million people in the past seventy years. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK AMERICA IS IMMUNE? Human devils are the results of men’s fallen human nature! Under Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky over 60 million Russians, their own people were murdered during the Bolshevik revolution, most of them Christians killed by Talmudic Jews. During the II World War under the reign of the Nazis, Hitler was responsible for murdering six 6 million Jews. When China was taken over by the Communist, twenty 20 million more Christians were slaughtered by the Reds. One of my best friends was a missionary in China and got out just as they closed the doors to all American missionaries. He had to leave his wife, who was Chinese and his two sons behind who were not allowed to leave. He came home a broken man. They have recently admitted that over 336 million babies have been aborted many forcibly. That’s not speaking of the murder of millions of unborn babies in America as America’s government seeks to rid our country of all recognition of Christianity and its founder Jesus Christ. You say it can’t happen here, you are blind to your own nature. Let me not forget to mention the millions that the Muslims have been killing. This is not taking into effect all the other crimes of rape and murder going on in the United States every day. Just yesterday, a man returned home in our area and shot his wife in the head and then turned the gun on his three children killing all four, then committed suicide, five dead. We must be insane not seeing the tragedy of human nature. We must stop lying to ourselves human nature is “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked…” Jer. 17:9. Human nature in its fallen state hates God and is out to eradicate all reference to Him. If free America is to remain the land of the free and the home of the brave, it’s imperative that her leaders and her churches turn back to God NOW! You may kill this preacher and like, many other believers but you will never stop the prophetic fulfillment of Holy Scripture and the return of Jesus Christ to rule and reign. “Every knee will bow” “Every tongue confess” and “Every man will give an account to God”. FALLEN HUMAN NATURE INDEED HAS MADE MEN HUMAN DEVILS!

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clubofinfo · 7 years

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Expert: A number of recent, press articles, including an over 8000 word feature piece in the New York Times have asked, to quote the The NYT’s headline, “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?” Although the question was proffered, the reporters and editors responsible for the articles remain resolutely obtuse to the obvious: The bughouse crazy environment of late stage capitalist culture evokes classic flight or flight responses attendant to episodes of severe anxiety and panic attacks. The word panic has its derivation in reference to the Greek god of wilderness and wildness, of pastural repose, of the animal body encoded within human beings and its attendant animalistic imperatives, Pan. To wit, deracinate an animal from its natural habitat and it will evince, on an instinctual basis, a flight or flight response. If caged, the unfortunate creature will pace the confines of its imprisonment, chew and tear at its fur and flesh, become irritable, enervated, languish and even die from the deprivation of the environment it was born to inhabit. A caged animal, even if the unfortunate creature endures captivity, is not the entity nature conceived; the living being has been reduced to A Thing That Waits For Lunch. Human beings, animals that we are, respond in a similar fashion. Experiencing anxiety is among the ways our innate animal spirits react to the capitalist cage. Inundate a teenager with the soul-defying criteria of the corporate/consumer state, with its overbearing, pre-careerist pressures, its paucity of communal eros, its demands, overt and implicit, to conform to a shallow, manic, nebulously defined yet oppressive societal order, and insist that those who cannot adapt, much less excel, are losers who are fated to become “basement dwellers” in their parent’s homes or, for those who lack the privilege, be cast into homelessness then the minds of the young or old alike are apt to be inundated with feelings of angst and dread. Worse, if teenagers are culturally conditioned to believe said feelings and responses are exclusively experienced by weaklings, parasites, and losers then their suffering might fester to the point of emotional paralysis and suicidal inclinations. What does the capitalist state offer as remedy? Obscenely profitable, corporately manufactured and widely prescribed psychoactive medications. Treatment, which, at best, merely masks symptoms and bestows the illusion of recovery. As R. D. Laing observed: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.” In short, it is insanity to be expected to adapt to socially acceptable insanity. Yet we are pressured to adapt to, thus internalise odious, groupthink concepts and tenets. To cite one example, homelessness is natural to the human condition and is a communally acceptable situation. Closer to fact: The problem of homelessness is the result of a societal-wide perception problem — the phenomenon is the very emblem of the scrambling, twisting, dissociating, and displacing of perception that capitalist propagandists specialize in. Homelessness would be considered a relic of a barbaric past if this very simple principle was applied: Having access to permanent shelter is a human right and not a privilege. What kind of a vile, vicious people would deny the simple proposition? Those conditioned by a lingering Puritan/Calvinist mindset to believe: Punishment for resisting the usurpation of the fleeting hours of one’s finite life must be severe. If the overclass can no longer get away with, as was once common practice in the Puritan/Calvinist tradition, public floggings to whip the labor force into line, then those who will not or cannot comply will be cast onto the cold, unforgiving concrete of a soulless cityscape. It comes down to this: societies that are ridden with vast wealth inequity, due to the machinations of a rapacious overclass, create the obscenity known as homelessness. Moreover, the situation is only one of the numerous obscenities inherent to state capitalism. Obscenities that include, events that are dominating the present news cycle; e.g., the predations of a lecherous movie mogul, to the sub-cretinous doings and pronouncements of a Chief of State who is a bloated, bloviating, two legged toxic waste dump. How is it then, liberals fail to grasp the fact the Trump presidency is not an aberration; rather, his ascension to power should be regarded as being among the high probability variables of late stage capitalism and empire building? The psychopathic, tangerine-tinged clown Trump is the embodiment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a development that is concomitant to over-expanded empires. Thus he will continue to flounce deeper into the quagmire of crash-engendering, economic legerdemain and perpetual war. Empires are death cults, and death cults, on a subliminal bases, long for their own demise. Paradoxically, the collective mindset of imperium, even as it thrusts across the expanse of the world, renders itself insular, cut off from culturally enhancing novelty, as all the while, the homeland descends into a psychical swamp of churning madness. A draining of the swamp of the collective mind cannot come to pass, for the swamp and citizenry are one. Withal, the likes of leaders such as Trump rise from and are made manifest by the morass of the culture itself. In a swamp, the gospel of rebirth and redemption is heard in the song of humus. New life rises from its compost. In the presence of Trump’s debased mind and tumefied carcass, one is privy to arias of rot. While Hillary Clinton’s monotonous tempo was the dirge of a taxidermist — cold, desiccated of heart, and devoid of life’s numinous spark — Trump’s voice carries the depraved cacophony of a Célinean fool’s parade…its trajectory trudging towards the end of empire. As liberals new BFFL George W. Bush might ask, “Is our liberals learning?” In a word, no. For example, the collective psyche of US culture as been enflamed by the revelations that actresses were coerced into sexual encounters with a movie mogul whose power in the industry was only matched, even enhanced, by his sadistic nature. The staff of his company assisted, were complicit in, or remained silent about his lechery, as did the whole of the movie industry and the entertainment press. All as NFL athletes are being threatened with expulsion from the League if they kneel during the national anthem. Yet the great unspoken remains: The enabling of and submission to the degradation, exploitation and tyranny, and the lack of resistance thereof share a common and singular factor: The careerism of all concerned. The cultural milieu concomitant to capitalism is at the rotten root and noxious blossoming of the situation. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967, cinematic barnburner 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her should be required viewing for those unaware or in denial of the acuity of the film’s theme; i.e., becoming enmeshed within the psychical landscape of dominance, degradation, and submission inherent to and inseparable from capitalist/consumer culture will cause one to become party to societal sanctioned prostitution. When life is negotiated within a collective value system that devalues and deadens the individual’s inner life thus warps every human transaction, anomie descends, the worst among a people ascend to positions of power. Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. — William S. Burroughs, from Ghost of Chance When friends visited me in New York, where I lived for decades, I would take them on walking tours through the city. We would cross the Westside Highway and stroll the pedestrian walk along the Hudson River, or cross the East River by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. The effect of these excursions on people was often profound…the combined elements of the elemental beauty of the rivers and vastness of the city’s architecture and scope, clamour, and the dense interweaving of traditional ethnic customs and ad hoc social codes of New Yorkers often would heighten the visitors’ senses and open them to larger, more intricate awareness of themselves and extant reality…the freeways of the contemporary mind (conditioned to be constantly engaged in manic motion, with one’s mind either frenzied by an obsession with performing (ultimately futile) manoeuvres directed to saving time — or stalled at a frustration inducing standstill) were replaced by the exigencies of life at street level; i.e., novel situations that had to be apprehended and negotiated. The possibilities of life seemed greater. The crimped eros of insular suburban thought became loosened before the city’s intricacies and expansiveness. Although: Not all, or even a scant few, New Yorkers can maintain the state of being. Few of us can live by Rilke’s resolve to “make every moment holy.” Life, in the city, becomes grotesquely distorted…High rents, inflicted by hyper-gentrification, in combination with the deification of success and its cult of careerism overwhelm one’s psyche…There is so far to fall. Angst (the word originally can be traced to the ancient Greek deity Ananke, the immovable by prayer and offering bitch Goddess of Necessity and the root word of anxiety) clamps down one’s sense of awareness. Ananke dominates the lives of the non-privileged citizenry while Narcissus, Trump’s, the Clinton’s et al and their financial and cultural elitists’ patron God rules the day. The pantheon of possibility has been decimated, a cultural cleansing has been perpetrated, by the egoist caprice of the beneficiaries of the late capitalist dictatorship of money. Hence, we arrive at the primal wisdom tacitly conveyed by anxiety-borne states of fight or flight. Due to the reality that capitalism, on both an individual and collective basis, drives individuals into madness, all as the system destroys forest and field, ocean and sea and the soulscape of all who live under its rapacious dominion, our plight comes down to this: We either struggle and strive, by and any and all means, to end the system — or it will end us. http://clubof.info/

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delwray-blog · 6 years

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THE CONSPIRACY TO DESTROY AMERICA’S FORM OF GOVERNMENT

The same forces which crucified Jesus Christ nineteen hundred years ago are today trying to crucify His Church.

And to do that they know they must destroy America’s form of Government. In 1893 the United States Supreme Court declared, "This is a Christian nation." Can you believe that in the day we now live. When Daniel Webster pleaded another famous case before the Supreme Court it made this record, "Christianity is the common law of the land." When a president takes the oath of office he does it on the Bible. When a witness takes the stand he swears by the Bible. Our whole system of jurisprudence is based upon the Ten Commandments. We observe one day in seven as the Sabbath, a day of rest. A day of Thanksgiving to God each year is a national festival. Our coins are stamped "In God We Trust." We got our idea of constitutional government from Moses. Both the constitution of ancient Israel and our own resulted from oppression. The government under Moses had thirteen tribes; ours had thirteen colonies. The Law of Moses provided for a Supreme Court of seventy men; an appeal on the part of any citizen could be taken to that body and our system is exactly the same. It has been pointed out that the constitution of ancient Israel and our own were the only two ever submitted to the people for ratification. Both constitutions provided for the naturalization of foreigners. Neither permitted one who was foreign born to become a ruler.

The founders of the American Republic were men who possessed a great faith in God and the Bible. When the representatives of the thirteen colonies met in Philadelphia to frame the constitution they engaged in three weeks of wrangling. When it looked like the meeting might break up in confusion, it was Benjamin Franklin who arose and said, "Mr. President, I perceive that we are not in a position to pursue this business any further. Our blood is too hot. I, therefore, move you, sir, that we separate for three days, during which time, with a conciliatory spirit, we talk with both parties. If we ever make a Constitution it must be the work of a compromise. And while I am on my feet I move you, sir, and I am astonished that it has not been done before, for when we signed the Declaration of Independence we had a chaplain to read the Bible and to pray daily; and I now move that when we meet again we have a chaplain to meet with us and invoke the blessing of heaven. For, sir, it has been wisely written, 'Except the Lord builds the city, they labor in vain who build it,' and if it be true that a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, surely a nation cannot rise without His aid."

We are told that George Washington's face beamed with joy as he arose to second the motion. With their minds energized by prayer, those men, after three days, prepared what Gladstone called, "The greatest document ever struck from the brain of man." And now, at a time like this, when the foundations of so many governments are crumbling, let us remember that "Righteousness exalteth a nation but sin is a reproach to any people." If the American people come to a full understanding of what is taking place before it is too late and learn concerning the conspiracy of what we call The Hidden Hand, it is probable that the Country can yet be spared a great deal of suffering which is certain to smite other nations.

The Jews and the Church

In the dialect of the street, the Jew is sometimes called a "Christ hater." The spirit of Judaism is one of direct antagonism to the principles of Christianity.

It is not difficult to understand why an apostate people, who have rejected their Messiah, should continue in spiritual darkness and despise everything that bears His name. No sooner had the tomb of Christ been sealed than the tormenters set out to destroy His followers. This assault has continued straight through the centuries until now it has come into fruition in the form of international Jewish Communism.

In the first twelve chapters of the book of Acts, five specific persecutions, sponsored by Jews against the infant Christian Church, are recorded. Failing to blot the new religious conception from the face of the earth by putting its Leader to death, they invented every conceivable scheme for torturing and murdering those who pledged allegiance to His plan for redeeming the world from the curse of sin.

The Jews regarded Christianity as being an illegitimate child of Judaism. Therefore, in their hatred, they believed it to be their solemn duty to stamp it out. After the divine visitation at Pentecost, so many thousands of Jews were converted that the leaders became alarmed.

One thing stood in their way, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Had His body remained in the tomb, they would have found it easy to combat the new Faith which had suddenly sprung into existence. But with the resurrection being discussed on every side, they found themselves confronted with an insurmountable difficulty. When first faced with the fact of the empty tomb they did not hesitate to resort to deliberate falsehoods.

"And when they were assembled with the elders and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying say His disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept. And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and secure you. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day."

The first few months of the Church's history witnessed five distinct persecutions. What the Cause of Christ has endured at the hands of Jews, through the centuries, far surpasses anything the Jewish people have suffered from Christians.

The attitude of the Jews toward the early Church reminds us that there would be no Christianity in the world today had Paul and others not taken the Gospel message to the Gentiles.

First persecution: Acts 4:1-22. A pitiful beggar, a man born a cripple, was placed near the gates of the Jerusalem temple every day to beg for alms. On a certain occasion, as Peter and John were about to enter, the poor, helpless creature stretched forth a dirty, bony arm and pleaded for a coin.

"Silver and gold have I none," said Peter, "but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk."

Instantly the resurrection life of Christ smote the recipient of divine mercy and he jumped to his feet "walking, and leaping, and praising God." The man was more than forty years of age and had therefore been a familiar object on the streets of Jerusalem for years.

This miracle caused a great stir throughout the city. Large crowds of curious people gathered around the apostles and the healed beggar.

Peter was quick to take advantage of the opportunity and turned the occasion into a sermon. "Why marvel ye at this?" he asked, and then explained that a far more wonderful miracle had occurred a short time before in Jerusalem, namely the resurrection of Christ from the grave.

When the report of this healing reached the treacherous Jews, their minds got busier than ever. They began devising new plans for putting an end to everything that was being done in the name of Christ.

Their first thought was to deny that the miracle had been performed. Then they realized that this was useless because the man was so well known. At that moment he was rejoicing, praising God, testifying to his deliverance and telling everybody what had happened. "And we cannot deny it," mourned the Jews who would have lied to discredit the story if it would have advanced their selfish purposes.

The members of the Sanhedrin came together and the little band of Christians was forced to appear before them. A torrent of abuse was turned loose upon the trembling group until finally Peter, "filled with the Holy Ghost," became bold. As spokesman for the group, he made it clear that the Christians proposed to obey God rather than man.

Had it not been that the mobs were at that time favorable toward the apostles because of the miracle which had been performed, the Jewish leaders would have no doubt put the entire body of believers to death.

Second persecution: Acts 5:17-42. "Many signs and wonders" were wrought among the people by the apostles. All manner of diseases were healed. But the Jews could see no good in any of this relief of human suffering because it did not come through the narrow, selfish channels of their bigoted nationalism.

The leaders agreed to the use of physical weapons in their attempt to destroy spiritual power, the same as Communists are doing today in trying to exterminate Christianity by killing Christians.

Repeated acts of supernatural intervention preserved the early Church. Without divine assistance, it would have perished. These early miracles confirmed the words of the Founder that the gates of hell would not be able to prevail against the Church.

The Jews "laid hands on the apostles and put them in the common prison. But the angel of the Lord by night opened the prison doors, and brought them forth." Next morning when the Jewish senate convened and messengers were sent to bring the apostles for trial, it was discovered that unknown to the jailors, they had escaped and were at that very hour preaching in the area of the temple.

Jerusalem was in turmoil by this time. Had the officials dared, they would have killed the Christians without a legal trial. When the saints appeared before the tribunal they were told that they had been previously warned not to teach in the name of Jesus. "Ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man's blood upon us," said the high priest.

From this, it is evident that the apostles had been denouncing the Jews and charging them with the responsibility for Christ's death. Here we find the leaders complaining about His blood being upon them, forgetting apparently their previous utterance: "His blood be on us, and on our children."

It is to the credit of our spiritual ancestors that they were able to fill a whole city with the doctrines of Christianity in the face of such defiant opposition.

Peter finally dared to shout: "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree." Next, he called upon his persecutors to repent of their sins. We read that this "cut them to the heart." Who was this upstart that he should have the audacity to rebuke them!

When they were almost ready to demand the lives of the apostles, Gamaliel, a tolerant member of the Sanhedrin, lifted a warning voice. If the new cult was not of God, he declared that it would come to naught and fall by its own weight. "But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God." At length, this line of common sense reasoning prevailed, and the passions of the leaders cooled a bit.

The result was, instead of killing the apostles they were given another warning and a severe flogging. This form of punishment was cruel, brutal, cowardly and unjust. But even though bitter and painful to the flesh, it caused rejoicing to the spirits of the faithful few. As the wounds healed they "rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name."

The only way the Jews had of striking at the Christ Whom they hated was to injure His followers; they availed themselves of this opportunity.

Boldly and properly disregarding their illegal judges, the Christians kept on preaching Christ and reminding the Jews of their crimes against the government of God.

Third persecution: Acts 7:54-60. The blood of martyrs began flowing in the same year that the Lord ascended into heaven. The Jews' first victim after Christ was a man named Stephen, whose primary crime was belief in the deity of the Son of God. This was regarded as blasphemy.

The story of the murder of Stephen is one of the saddest in all the history of the Church. It is significant that a Hellenist, rather than an apostle, should have become the first Christian martyr.

Stephen was accused of three things: blaspheming God, setting aside the Old Testament, and belittling the Temple. Each of these charges was untrue. Even while lying witnesses were being introduced against him, the members of the Jewish counsel saw his countenance light up with a spiritual glow like "the face of an angel."

After listening to the charges, the priests asked their helpless victim: "Are these things so?" But instead of devoting himself to an answer of questions which everyone knew to be based upon falsehoods, Stephen entered into a discussion of Israelites’ history and closed by rebuking his judges for their hypocrisy.

He declared that their devotion to God, the Law, and the Temple, was hypocritical. Here are his words: "Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your father’s persecuted? And they have slain them which showed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers."

Thus Stephen laid bare the full measure of their guilt. The blood of the Son of God was upon their heads; they had ignored the miracles which testified of His deity; they had rejected the Pentecostal program of the new Church; they had also spurned the wooing of the Holy Spirit. Before God, they stood condemned, and judgment was sure to overtake them! Taking no thought of his own safety, Stephen shot his words of truth, like barbed arrows, into the hard hearts of his merciless tormentors.

As he spoke, the Jewish leaders yelled and screamed to drown his words. They stopped their ears with their fingers to avoid hearing the truth about themselves. Like serpents, they hissed their poison at the courageous Christian. They rushed upon him with one accord.

In their madness they dragged him outside the city, removing their outer garments as they ran. With stones, they pelted the body of the first Christian martyr until his life ebbed away. This execution was illegal because the matter was not submitted to the Roman Governor.

Emulating the blessed Saviour, Stephen cried with a loud voice: "Lord lay not this sin at their charge." "And when he had said this, he fell asleep."

Fourth persecution: Acts 8:1-3. The first three persecutions were spontaneous and did not result from deliberate planning. There had been no coordination of effort. Events had transpired so rapidly that there had been no time to sit down and quietly work out a concerted plan of attack.

But the spilling of Stephen's blood seemed to whet the Jewish appetite for more Christian suffering. From that hour, nothing but a terrible pogrom could possibly satisfy them. The sight of blood, the appearance of the first deadly wound in the flesh of a believer, seemed to stir all their criminal instincts.

They came to the conclusion that an organized effort was imperative if the new Faith was to be put down. Up until that time, their attempts to suppress the truth had proved ineffective. In searching for a persecutor who would be both cunning and brutal they selected a brilliant young rabbi by the name of Saul from the city of Tarsus.

It will be recalled that this was the young man who had guarded the coats of those who stoned Stephen. Saul stood grinning at the contortions of the martyr squirming and writhing in death agonies, under the barrage of rocks which were heaped upon him.

Jesus told his followers to go everywhere proclaiming the glad tidings. This was done following the Pentecostal harvest feast which brought Jews to Jerusalem from all parts of the civilized world. Those who accepted the Gospel message, on that great occasion, returned to their various communities to kindle spiritual fires.

Unwittingly, in the fourth persecution, the Jews contributed to the success of this very plan of evangelizing because when Saul began scattering believers, driving them from their homes, forcing them into exile, "persecuting them from city to city," every such Christian became an evangelist.

Until this time, the activities of the Christians had been confined for the most part, to the city of Jerusalem and its immediate environs, although a skeleton of Church organization was set up reaching into other areas, resulting from the embers which blew in all directions after the experience Pentecost.

"As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women, committed them to prison. Therefore they that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word."

The very name Saul became a terror to the early Christians because of the heartless methods which he used. He and his helpers were happiest when they could rush into a house and catch a little group of believers in the act of worshipping, they would kill and wound some, banish others, and torture still others in ways too numerous and terrible for words.

The irony of this organized attempt on the part of the Jews to blot the cause of Christ out of existence was the fact that their own ringleader got gloriously converted on the road to Damascus and became the greatest missionary and evangelist the world has ever known.

But, in later years, Paul never forgave himself, nor was he ever able to erase the memories of his early attacks upon the little Church, which he came to love so dearly and for which he finally sacrificed his life.

Fifth persecution: Acts 12:1-19. The next spasm of Jewish terror, mentioned in the early part of the book of Acts, was directed against Peter. This persecution is of particular importance because it introduces a new element in the Jewish plan of destroying Christianity. It reveals the scheme, which was continued for hundreds of years, influencing Gentile rulers to do their dirty work for them.

During the first few centuries of Church history, when the pagans slaughtered Christians by the tens of thousands, a careful study will show that time and again the pogroms were precipitated by powerful Jews who were able to maneuver things from behind the scenes. They simply used pagans to carry out their crimes against Christians in the same manner that the player moves chessmen on the board.

St. Justin said in the middle of the second century: "The Jews were behind all the persecutions of the Christians. They wandered through the country, everywhere hating and undermining the Christian faith."

Tertullian said about the same time: "The Jews formed the breeding ground of all anti-Christian action."

A plain example of Jews causing unbelieving Gentiles to destroy Christians is to be seen in this, the fifth persecution. We read that Herod the king has James put to death by the sword because of Jewish influences being brought to bear upon his throne. This ruler was the grandson of Herod the Great who murdered the babes of Bethlehem after the birth of Christ. James was one of the three, with Peter and John, who enjoyed the sweetest possible fellowship with the Lord.

No details are given in the Scriptures about the killing of James. And yet underneath the simple statement, a deep anguish and sympathy may be felt. Then the next verse shows that the wicked king had planned to make away with Peter in the same way. "And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. And when he apprehended him, he put him in prison ... Peter, therefore, was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him."

The Jews desired a public execution of Peter. They wanted his death to be viewed by all because he was one of the principal leaders of the despised Christians. This would give them a chance to gloat over their ability to wrap Gentile monarchs around their fingers. It was quite an achievement, in their estimation, to get a Roman king such as Herod, to do their bidding.

But a strange thing happened during the night proceeding the day when Peter was to be put to death. Another miracle occurred.

Although execution awaited him, the faithful apostle who spent the night chained between two soldiers, slept as sound as a babe. Suddenly a shaft of light shot into the darkened cell like a bolt of lightning and an angel smote Peter on the side. He dressed quickly and followed the heavenly visitor to the outer court, through the gate, and down the street. Not until then did he realize that his deliverance was real and not merely a dream.

Making his way to the home of Mary, the mother of John Mark, Peter found that an all-night prayer meeting was being held in his behalf. He came into the presence of the saints rejoicing "that the Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod, and from all the expectation of the Jews."

The angel smote Peter and the result was life and liberty. A short time later the same angel smote Herod and the result was disease, death, and worms devouring his flesh. And this king was not the last to be cursed for allowing himself to come under the domination of Jews.

So Herod having consented to an ignominious death for Peter, himself suffered one much more ignominious.

Judgment!

It is not a safe thing for non-Christians to persecute Christ's saints. God will not permanently excuse or condone such crimes. History is replete with judgments being visited fast and furiously upon individuals and nations who have made this mistake.

Torturing Christians is a dangerous pastime. "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him." "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" "And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bears long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily." "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord."

The Jewish Bolshevik’s who are today digging a pit for Christianity in Russia are creating a future hell of judgment for themselves, exactly like the Jews of the first century sealed their destruction by torturing the saints at the dawn of this age.

The same Romans, whom the vicious, designing and tricky Jews used as tools to destroy the Christian Church, later turned against them and added sorrow upon sorrow until the nation was at last drenched in its own blood.

Jesus said to the Jews: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate."

This pathetic prophecy was literally fulfilled in the middle of the first century when Titus, the Roman Emperor, brought his iron legions against the city of Jerusalem for one of the most terrible slaughters the world has ever known.

Famine, disease, pestilence, and starvation on the inside of the city walls, and the Romans pushing fiercely against them from the outside brought upon the Jews such a wave of judgment and suffering as the human race has never before or since witnessed.

A few pertinent snatches from the history of the Jews, written by Josephus, will be sufficient to illustrate this fact:

"But the famine was too hard for all other passions, and it is destructive to nothing so much as to modesty; for what was otherwise worthy of reverence was in this case despised; insomuch that children pulled the very morsels that their fathers were eating out of their very mouths, and what was still more to be pitied, so did the mothers do as to their infants; and when those that were most dear were perishing under their hands, they were not ashamed to take from them the very last drops that might preserve their lives: and while they are after this manner, yet were they not concealed in so doing; but the seditious everywhere came upon them immediately, and snatched away from them what they had gotten from others; for when they saw any house shut up, this was to them a signal that the people within had gotten some food; whereupon they broke open the doors, and ran in, and took pieces of what they were eating almost up out of their throats, and this by force: the old men, who held their food fast, were beaten; and if the women hid what they had within their hands, their hair was torn for so doing; nor was there any commiseration shown either to the aged or to the infants, but they lifted up children from the ground as they hung upon the morsels they had gotten, and shook them down upon the floor.

"This miserable procedure made Titus greatly to pity them, while they caught every day five hundred Jews; nay, some days they caught more: yet it did not appear to be safe for him to let those that were taken by force go their way, and to set a guard over so many he saw would be to make such as guarded them useless to him. The main reason why he did not forbid that cruelty was this that he hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they might themselves afterward be liable to the same cruel treatment. So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest, when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.

"Titus then went round about the enemy with some chosen troops, and fell upon their flanks himself; so the Jews, who had been before assaulted in their faces, wheeled about to Titus, and continued the fight. The armies also were now mixed one among another, and the dust that was raised so far hindered them from seeing one another, and the noise that was made so far hindered them from hearing one another, that neither side could discern an enemy from a friend. However, the Jews did not flinch, though not so much from their real strength, as from their despair of deliverance. The Romans also would not yield, by reason of the regard they had to glory, and to their reputation in war, and because Caesar himself went into the danger before them; insomuch that I cannot but think the Romans would in the seclusion have now taken even the whole multitude of the Jews, so very angry were they at them, had these not prevented the upshot of the battle and retired into the city.

"Then did the famine widen its progress, and devoured the people by whole houses and families; the upper rooms were full of women and children that were dying by famine, and the houses of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aged; the children also and the young men wandered about the market-places like shadows, all swelled with the famine, and fell down dead, wheresoever’s their misery seized them. As for burying them, those that were sick themselves were not able to do it; and those that were hearty and well were deterred from doing it by the great multitude of those dead bodies, and by the uncertainty there was how soon they should die themselves; for many died as they were burying others, and many went to their coffins before that fatal hour was come. Nor was there any lamentations made under these calamities, nor were heard any mournful complaints, but the famine confounded all natural passions; for those who were just going to die looked upon those that were gone to rest before them with dry eyes and open mouths. A deep silence also, and a kind of deadly night, had seized upon the city; while yet the robbers were still more terrible than these miseries were themselves; for they break open those houses which were no other than graves of dead bodies, and plundered them of what they had; and carrying off the coverings of their bodies, went out laughing, and tried the points of their swords in their dead bodies; and, in order to prove what metal they were made of, they thrust some of those through that still lay alive upon the ground; but for those that entreated them to lend them their right hand and their sword to dispatch them, they were too proud to grant their requests, and left them to be consumed by the famine.

"There was a certain woman that dwelt beyond Jordan, her name was Mary. She was eminent for her family and her wealth, and had fled away to Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude, and was with them besieged therein at this time. It now became impossible for her anyway to find any more food, while the famine pierced through her very bowels and marrow. She then attempted a most unnatural thing; and snatching up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said, 'O thou miserable infant! For whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine, and this sedition? As to the war with the Romans, if they preserve our lives, we must be slaves. This famine also will destroy us, even before that slavery comes upon us. Yet are these Jewish rogues more terrible than both the other. Come on; be thou my food, and be thou a fury to these seditious varlets, and a byword to the world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews.' As soon as she had said this, she slew her son, and then roasted him, and ate the one half of him, and kept the other half by her concealed. Upon this the Jewish soldiers came in presently and smelling the horrid scent of this food, they threatened her that they would cut her throat immediately if she did not show them what food she had gotten ready. She replied that she had saved a very fine portion of it for them, and withal uncovered what was left of her son. Hereupon they were seized with a horror and amazement of mind, and stood astonished at the sight when she said to them, 'this is mine own son, and what hath been done was mine own doing! Come eat of this food; for I have eaten of it myself! Do not you pretend to be either more tender than a woman, or more compassionate than a mother; but if you be so scrupulous, and do abominate this my sacrifice, as I have eaten the one half, let the rest be reserved for me also'? After which those men went out trembling, being never so much affrighted at anything as they were at this, and with some difficulty, they left the rest of that meat to the mother.

"This sad instance was quickly told to the Romans, some of whom could not believe it, and others pitied the distress which the Jews were under; but there were many of them who were thereby induced to a more bitter hatred than ordinary against our nation. But for Caesar, he excused himself before God as to this matter, and said that he had proposed peace and liberty to the Jews, as well as an oblivion of all their former insolent practices; but that they, instead of Concord, had chosen sedition; instead of peace, war; and before satiety and abundance, a famine."

Josephus tells how this state of affairs continued for months until finally the Roman soldiers set fire to the gates and literally burned their way into the city. The siege of Titus continued until the sacred Temple was burned and razed to the ground. He continues:

"While the holy house was on fire, everything was plundered that came to hand, and ten thousand of those that were caught were slain; nor was there a commiseration of any age or any reverence of gravity, but children, and old men, and profane persons, and priests were all slain in the same manner; so that this war went round all sorts of men and brought them to destruction, and as well those that made supplication for their lives, as those that defended themselves by fighting. The flame was also carried a long way, and made an echo, together with the groans of those that were slain; and because this hill was high, and the works at the temple were very great, one would have thought the whole city had been on fire."

Again we are reminded of the Lord's reference to this terrible judgment which was predicted to come upon the Jews, "Your house is left unto you desolate."

The Jews and the Church (Continued)

The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70 was a direct fulfillment of the prophecy made by Jesus in Matthew 24:2, "See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down."

Naturally, when Titus plowed down this gorgeous structure, Christians hailed the event as a confirmation of the Lord's ability to read the future. This aroused ever-increasing interest in prophetic subjects among the believers. The destruction of the Temple and the siege at Jerusalem resulted in the dispersion of the Jews. And wherever they went, they carried burning hatred in their hearts for the saints because they were constantly reminded that Christ had predicted their downfall.

Now, coming to the middle of the fourth century we find another example of Jewish influence over Gentile rulers, which is equally as remarkable as their control of King Herod.

For three hundred years, powerful Jews dispersed to all parts of the Roman Empire, kindled ill-will against the Christians. Then, came Emperor Constantine who reversed everything and made Christianity the official State religion of the nation. This was a rebuff to both the Jews and pagans who had used every conceivable scheme to destroy the Faith.

After the departure of Constantine from this life, his three sons ruled the Empire. Meanwhile, the Jews bided their time, waiting for the right opportunity to place a Gentile in power that they could control. Their chance came, following the death of Constantine's last son, when Julian ascended to the throne.

Contempt for Christianity filtered through Julian's mind and he resolved, as soon as an occasion might arise, to deal it a final, crushing blow. He swore that when the time was ripe he would throw off the religious cloak of Constantine.

It remained for the Jews to produce a situation in which they could assist Julian in venting his spleen against the believers who were then growing strong both in numbers and spiritual strength, due to more than a half-century of religious freedom. Happily, for the Church, this Emperor reigned only two years, but those two years embodied a period of unspeakable agony.

Julian gave the Christians the name "Galileans" which, in his day, was a word that carried a slur with it. As if actuated by the spirit of anti-Christ he adopted the curious means of attempting to nullify the Bible prophecies. His contact with the Jews was no doubt responsible for this novel idea. Early training had taught him how to gain favor with Jewish leaders by insulting and tormenting the followers of Christ.

Neither, Jews or Christians had forgotten that the destruction of the Temple was a fulfillment of predictions made by the Lord. It was therefore decided that, as a slap at the Christians, Julian should rebuild the edifice in Jerusalem and turn it over to the Jews.

From all quarters of the Empire, Jews came to assist in erecting the building and to offer their wealth. Julian personally made the preliminary arrangements and sent one of his chief officers to superintend the work. The Jews who were directing affairs from within the shadows, shaping the official policies of the Empire, saw in this a deadly rebuff which promised to ultimately threaten the very existence of the Christian religion in the world.

Stirring scenes were enacted. Women brought their ornaments and jewels by the cartloads. So much precious metal was received that tools were even cast and forged of it. It looked to Jews and pagans as if the prophecies of the Bible relating to Palestine were going to be set aside.

But God intervened at the last minute and when the Temple was partway built a violent earthquake and severe electrical storm took place which demolished the whole undertaking. Fear came upon the Jews and the workers so that all activities were suspended. Not only Christian writers but pagans as well, record this strange happening.

Julian was mortally wounded on the field of battle with the Persians a few months later. He became known in history as "the Apostate." It has been related that just prior to his death, he cried: "Thou hast conquered, after all, O Galilean."

Church leaders, through the age, have been alert to Satan's use of the Jewish people in thwarting the program of Christ in the world. Some Christians have been more outspoken than others, on the subject, but every generation has produced its watchmen who have known the truth and have dared to proclaim it. Among the more bold spokesmen on this question was Martin Luther who prepared a treatise entitled, The Jews and Their Lies. In it we read the following statements which are characteristic of the entire discussion:

"How the Jews love the Book of Esther, which is so suitable to their bloodthirsty, revengeful, murderous appetite and hopes! The sun has never shone on such a bloodthirsty and revengeful people, who fancy themselves to be the chosen people so that they can murder and strangle the heathen.

"No folk under the sun is more greedy than they are than they have been and always will be, as one can see from their accursed usury. They console themselves that when their Messiah comes, he will collect all the gold and silver in the world and divide it amongst them.

"The Princes and authorities sit and snore with open mouths and let the Jews take, steal and rob what they want out of their open purses and chests; i.e. they let themselves and their subjects be skinned and sucked dry by the Jews' usury, and make themselves, with their own money, beggars in their own State. The Jews have got our money and property, and are therefore our masters in our own land.

"It all agrees with the judgment of Christ that they are poisonous, bitter, vindictive, and malicious serpents, assassins, and children of the devils who kill and inflict injuries by stealth because they cannot do so openly.

"But if we fear that they may do us harm in body, wife, child, servant, beast, etc., etc. let us reckon up with them what they have taken from us by usury, and so share it amicably, but drive them forever into the fields.

"Anyone might think I am saying too much. I am not saying too much, but rather far too little. If we do not want to partake in the Jews' blasphemies we must be separated and they must be driven out of the land. That is the best advice that secures both sides in such a case."

The Jews and Communism

No informed person who is truthful denies the Jewish character of Communism! The writer recently published in one of his magazines, the names and nationalities of every leader in the Moscow dictatorship as it was set up many years ago. It was discovered that out of the 545 members of the bureaucracy, 454 were Jews and there were only 23 Russians in the group.

In other words, the Russian people are governed by a gang of anti-Christian foreigners, many of whom are said to be unable to speak the language of the people they govern. Some of the principal officials of the Red government are reported to have come from the East Side of New York.

It has been said on the floor of the United States Congress, and the charge has not been denied, that a certain Jewish banking concern in Wall Street sponsored Trotsky's mass meetings of rebellion in New York some years ago, sent him across the ocean secretly, and deposited millions of dollars in a Swedish bank to the credit of the destroyers, with which the Russian revolution was financed.

In her remarkable book Waters Flowing Eastward, Mrs. L. Fry states that back in 1893 a Jewish secret order here in America appointed Jacob Schiff, a Wall Street Jew, chairman of its committee on Russian revolutionary activities. If this is true, it simply means that Mr. Schiff sat at his desk in New York and directed the destruction of the Czar's government thousands of miles away.

It is impossible to separate Jewish Communism from Jewish Capitalism. Laboring men who think they can free themselves from the Money Power by embracing Communism are being betrayed by soap-box oratory.

The Moscow leaders are the world's wealthiest Capitalists. They own one-sixth of the earth's surface. They control one hundred and sixty million Gentile slaves. The Russian people are not allowed to vote, own property, exercise free speech, enjoy the freedom of the press, or worship God. The masses are kept in their weakened, helpless condition by the most powerful system of secret police ever invented in the history of the world.

The attitude of Communism toward Christianity was explained by Lunatcharski, one of the leading Jewish members of the Moscow dictatorship:

"Why should we believe in God? We hate Christianity and Christians. Even the best of them must be regarded as our worst enemies. They preach love of one's neighbor, and pity, which is contrary to our principles. Christian love is a hindrance to the revolution. Down with love of one's neighbor; what we want is hatred. We must know how to hate, for only at this price can we conquer the universe. We have done with the kings of the earth; let us now deal with the kings of the skies. The anti-religious campaign must not be restricted to Soviet Russia: it should be carried on throughout the entire world. The fight should also be developed in the Moslem and Catholic countries, with the same ends in view and by the same means."

There is no way of knowing how many millions of Russian Christians have been slain during the last eighteen years because of their faith in Jesus Christ.

The magazine, New Outlook, recently carried an article entitled, "Men of Russia." It was the author's purpose to make a critical examination of the ringleaders of international Communism. He says: "Some of the businessmen are Russians, but most of them are of other bloods, and practically all of them have prison records. In considering the men of Russia, it should be remembered that it isn't often that ex-prisoners get a crack at the society which punished them, but they did in Russia."

The writer in New Outlook then proceeds to discuss some of Moscow's principal Jewish fiends:

"Joseph Stalin is a minor official of the Soviet Government. He is but one of the three hundred or so members of the Central Executive Committee, and yet, nevertheless, he is the first man of Russia today. Although serving as secretary of the All-Russian Communist Party, Stalin is not a Russian. His every feature is commensurate with 'Stalin', the Russian word for steel." Parenthetically it should be remarked that Stalin is merely the customary "Gentile Front" for the Moscow Jewish leaders. His Gentile wife died a "mysterious" death recently and he immediately married a Jewess.

The article continues:

"Lazarus M. Kaganovitch is a member of the Politbureau or arbitrary 'Brain Trust', and chief organizer of the Second Five Year Plan. This Polish Jew is Stalin's Number One Boy, and his logical successor as dictator.

"Maxim Maximovich Litvinov is Commissar of Foreign Affairs. He is the super-traveling salesman of Bolshevism. This shrewd Polish Jew has fought diplomatic battles in every political arena where the gate receipts warranted his appearance. He returns from these victories from time to time to his spacious Moscow office to check up one more Red diplomatic triumph by sticking a new red glass tack in the huge map which covers the wall behind his desk.

"Klementy Voroshilov (another Jew) is Commissar of War and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. He is the dashing yet modest cavalry officer who is charged with preparing the Russian forces for an anticipated war.

"Mikhail Kalinin, (an Armenian Jew) is President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Like all big leaders, he served his term in prison, taking an important part in the revolution of 1905 as a member of the Council of Workers' Deputies.

"Karl Radek, (another Jew) is Contributing Editor of Izvestia, official government newspaper. Radek has frequently been suppressed by radical organizations for being too radical.

"Michael Borodin, Editor of the English-language Moscow Daily News. This Czechoslovakian Jew was educated at Valparaiso University in Indiana; and spent many years agitating for the International Communist Party, in Spain, in Mexico, in America, the British Isles, and China.

"'Just' Podolsky, master of the Foreign Office Press-Censorship Bureau, he may have a first name, but it is doubtful that anyone in Russia, including his wife, knows it. He is a soft-spoken Jew in eight languages, not counting American slang, of which he has a thorough knowledge. Padolsky is a hundred percent Communist.

"Jerry Lifschitz, Ex-Vice-Yankee Consul, ex-Second-in-Command of Moscow Amtorg. This Polish Jew had an American jail and prison record for I.W.W. activities; and an added palm for being twice tarred and feathered by irate Midwest American farmers.

"Comrade Smirdovitch, (another Jew) is the 'Red Pope'. Smirdovitch, an atheist, is the official restrainer and regulator of religion in the U.S.S.R. He is a member of the important Central Executive Committee. As the official Anti-Christ of the Soviet Republics, he decides how far remaining priests of the church may go toward preaching the Word of God. Kindly, cultured, educated, tolerant in manner, Smirdovitch says religion will die out when divorced from superstitious ritual, pomp, and fear. His job is to help kill it."

Toward the close of the article, this writer in the New Outlook says: "But the men who control Russia are not Russians. Members of the Jewish race from all over the world predominate. Every member of the foreign office press censor bureau is a Jew. Little men of Russia who help in responsible positions, heads of offices, trusts, are mostly Jews."

Let Christians remember that the international Jewish Communists and Capitalists expect to eventually destroy all Gentile governments, rule the world, and establish throughout the earth the kind of conditions they have introduced in Soviet Russia. They expect to murder all Christian believers and blot Christianity out of existence. The struggle is between the philosophy of the Jew Karl Marx and the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The manner in which the Moscow Jews have proceeded with their program of destruction is recorded in a quotation taken from the London Times dated November 14, 1919. The quotation is a letter written by a British army officer, who was stationed at the time in southern Russia, to his wife in England. It reads:

"The Bolshevists are devils. There are at least 64 official copies, photos taken by British officers at Odessa when the town was taken by the Bolshevists. I suggest they should be made widely known. Their horror may make people realize. The victim gets crucified with nails through his elbows. The hands are treated with a solution which shrivels the skin. The skin is cut out with a razor, round the wrist, and peeled off, till it hangs by the fingernails. a human glove. The victim gets terrified and insane. Other photos are of women. Women with their breasts cut off to the bone. Passes issued to Bolshevists by commissaries authorize holders to arrest any girl they fancy for use of the soldiery. Sixty-two girls of all classes were arrested like this and thrown to the Bolshevist troops. Those who struggled were killed. The rest when used were mutilated and thrown dead or dying into the river. Slaughter-houses were choked with corpses. Hundreds of suspects, men, women, and children, were herded in these, doors and windows manned and the struggling mass fired into until most of them were dead or dying. The doors were then locked and they were left with veritable plague spots causing widespread epidemics. The Bible, to them, is a 'counter-revolutionary' book to be stamped out. Churches are used for anything from movie shows to 'slaughterhouses.'"

Let no Christian be duped into believing that we are supposed to sit supinely by and permit the Reds to create a reign of terror in America simply because this menace happens to be a "Jewocracy." True, there is a stratum of Jewry that is indeed "Chosen" and has been a blessing to humanity through the centuries, but there is another stratum that is a "curse in all places" as Jeremiah said they would be. Speaking through the lips of the prophet in Ezekiel 38:3, God said: "I am against thee, O Gog" and this is a clear reference to Communism with its seat of government in "Meshech" (Moscow).

It is possible that this invisible empire has existed as a self-propagating body ever since the Jewish leaders contacted the Chaldeans while in Babylonia. Persons holding to this view agree that the organization has almost completed its course, that the time for the consummation of the plot is near at hand, that the last great attack is now being launched for the purpose of setting up an international system of Jewish government. The existence of this secret sinister organization in New Testament times is implied in 1 John 4:3, "And this is that spirit of anti-Christ whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world."

The entire cabal is so large and far-reaching, its motives so hellish, its plan of attack so contrary to Christian thinking, that it simply staggers the mind when it is first exposed to view. But the results of its devastating influence may be seen both in history and among the nations today. It breathes the spirit of the last great Beast-Emperor described in the thirteenth chapter of Revelation. It discloses the perverted Messianic theories of an apostate people.

This anti-Christ force has apparently manifested itself from its underground sources in different ways at different periods of history, but never with the boldness and permanency that it has since it came to the surface eighteen years ago.

There have always been two kinds of Jews. One racial division represents all that is highest and best in Jewry, and regards the Jews primarily as being a system of religion. The other has little inclination toward religion, but regards Jewry as a political State, the purpose of which is to conduct world conquest until the nations are brought under one head with themselves in control and all the Gentiles changed into serfs.

When the Romans turned against the designing and wicked political leaders of Israel, the Pharisees and Sadducees were driven under cover. With the dispersion that followed, their taint was taken to the ends of the earth and has grown up in every nation. No doubt Jesus had this in mind when he warned to: "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees." In all parts of the world, it appears that this poison "leaven" is "leavening" the whole lump of the nations. What used to be the Russian Empire is now completely "leavened."

These are the subversive forces that have moved through the centuries, changing their form from time to time as governments have been made to heave, totter, cave in, and fall, but always with the same object in view, a final culmination when all nations will be leveled and a super-Jewish State set up, presided over by one man, their apostate Messiah. This is the genius behind Socialism and Communism.

In the last analysis there are only two remedies for Jewish Communism,

The Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Full stomachs The Red Menace thrives only where there is spiritual apathy, and physical hunger.

It is impossible to anticipate the immediate future or to draw any kind of a satisfactory idea as to what may soon take place among the nations without understanding the position that the Jews occupy in the drama of current events and fulfilled prophecy. It is absolutely true that the Jews are a Chosen People and that, as a nation, they will eventually embrace the Messiah Whom they rejected; they are the central hub around which the prophecies revolve, but it is also true that in the present period of history, the Bible calls them "a curse," "a reproach," "a taunt," and "a byword." Jesus said their "heart is waxed gross" and Isaiah said they would be ensnared by "a delusion." But it is also true, notwithstanding, the nation as a whole is fitting in, unconsciously, to the working out of a great prophetic plan. And a part of this plan is the prophesied fact that prior to the second coming of Christ their leaders would gain control of the wealth of the world.

Some Bible teachers have allowed their emotions to over balance their knowledge of prophecy and have engaged in meaningless gush about the supposed helplessness of the Jewish people. True, the Jews have been persecuted, but it is also true that they are now and will continue to be in the future, mighty in the strength of gold. It is generally known that for many years, certain powerful leaders of their race have juggled international finance according to their likes and dislikes. There is little danger of the Jews of the western nations needing Gentile sympathy as far as material and national strength is concerned, in the immediate future. But with the eastern nations, beyond the territory formerly controlled by the Roman Empire, including Germany and Russia, it is certain to be otherwise. For the very good reason that the Antichrist dictatorship which is gradually evolving in Europe will embrace only those nations which are in the old Roman territory. In that territory, the Jews will continue to be the all-powerful leaders because of their control of gold. Hitler's attitude toward the Jew is exactly what one might expect because his nation was outside the boundary line of the Roman Empire; his realm will not come under the rule of the coming Jewish-financed dictatorship; the future strength of Germany will result from her contacts with Russia and the nations of the east.

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delwray-blog · 6 years

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EVERY MAN IN HEART IS A HUMAN DEVIL AND ONLY JESUS CHRIST CAN TAME THE HEART.

HUMAN NATURE HAS MADE MEN HUMAN DEVILS

“But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man.” John 2:24-25

“I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts” Ecclesiastes 3:18.

Human Nature Revealed

This treaty is not penned to condemn any race of peoples for all races of men stand condemned and guilty before God. It is our own human nature that condemns us as it is written “For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved” John 3:17. The Creator knows what is in man and that man needs to be protected from himself. It is the very purpose for which He gave us His Word by sending His Son into the world. It is human nature that has turned men into human devils. And this treaty is written to bear out the facts that through human history men have proven themselves to be but human devils.

It was human nature that crucified Jesus Christ.

We all are guilty, whether we are Jew, Gentile or of the Church of Jesus Christ, our sin our human nature killed the Son of God and put God on the Cross. Human nature being what it is apart from grace would do it again if it were possible. Humankind apart from the saving grace of God is nothing more than a human devil.

The same forces which crucified Jesus Christ over nineteen hundred years ago are today trying to crucify His body, His Church and every single living member of His body is the object of their persecution with a death contract. And to accomplish their goal in America it means the incitement of revolution and the overthrow of the United States Constitution, the only truly free country left in the world.

WE MUST KNOW OUR ENEMY!

Many Christian leaders have not yet realized it, but Christianity is in the grip of a life and death struggle at the present time.

International Jewish Communism, which has already undermined all nations, firmly expects to exterminate all Christians. What the Cause of Christ has endured in Russia the last 100 years surpasses its suffering at the hands of bloody Nero.

One of the purposes of this present writing is to show that this struggle is not of recent origin.

THE JEWISH ASSAULT ON CHRISTIANITY