E.g.,
"Take away the Holocaust and the Jews are seen for what they are, a sneaky and snakey little reptilian people, liars and land-thieves and sneak-killers...." "....I think it would probably cheer me up to think that at least some of those reptiles in human form who caused it all got theirs."
cf. Nizkor.org (An anti-Nazi site, keeping tabs on these fellows.)
It is odd to find the same pattern. They probably read it in Nazi writings.
A similar instance,
"If we do not succeed in destroying the biological substance of the Jews, the Jews will some day destroy the German people.' As Höss recalled, he had been “suddenly summoned” by Himmler in the summer of 1941 and told, “The Führer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order.” ."
(The Nazi Doctors; Medical Killing and the Psychology
of Genocide, By Robert Lifton :157)
How about this:"Jews are the eternal enemies of [me, Satan] and [so] must be exterminated."
"If [I] do not succeedin destroying the biological substance of the Jews, the Jews will some day destroy [...me! They are the snakes, not I!]."
The snake used to have a lot of followers and worshippers, in fact reptilian symbols and an association with a malevolent sort of wisdom are, or were, pretty much universal.
". . . .It is an interesting fact that in that remarkable sculpture—the oldest surviving representation of the fall—which was found in the temple of Osiris at Phila, Eve is seen offering the fruit to Adam, the tree is between them, and the serpent stands by in an upright posture (Pember).
. . . .Ophiolatreia has characterized the universal race of man over the whole globe, to an extent without a rival; unless perhaps, the worship of the sun, which was generally identified with it. Deified as the serpent has been all over the world, it has always been the emblem of the evil principle in nature, and its worship was inspired rather to avert evil than to express reverence or gratitude. A god it might become in the perverted judgment of fallen men, but the feeling of antipathy and aversion with which it was regarded has never abated. It might be feared, but loved it never was nor could be. Thus, we are told that while many Hindus pay religious homage to the serpent at the present day, they regard it, notwithstanding, “as a hideous reptile, whose approach inspires them with a secret awe, and insurmountable horror.” Worshipped universally, the serpent was still “cursed above all and above ever beast of the field.” In the symbolic language of antiquity the serpent occupies a conspicuous place.
. . . . It was an ancient belief of all peoples that the serpent was endued with a large share of sagacity. The eating of its flesh, it was supposed, imparted it. In Egypt, as late as the second century, there was a sect of Gnostics who connected it with their Christianity; and under the name of Ophites (i. e., serpent-worshippers), had a living serpent which was let out to glide over the sacramental elements to consecrate them, it being the source of wis dom; exactly as was done with Isis, the great object of serpent- worship; and exactly as was done in the serpent-temple at Abury and other places, as recorded in British bards, writings of that day.
. . . .In Brittany, where the remains of dragon-temples are abundant, it is curious to see the mounts (“barrows,” as they are called) where the sun was worshipped with the serpent, now all dedicated to St. Michael, whom the Revelation presents to us as the destroyer of Satan’s power.
. . . . Interwoven with the ophiolatry which once so generally prevailed are dim and distant notions of a redemption which resembles that revealed in the Bible, and which can be distinctly traced. Thus, in Greek mythology, Apollo (the sun) established his worship at Delphi by slaying Python, an immense serpent, who was also said to have been cast down from heaven by Jupiter. He then gave oracles in his place. Still the serpent was sacred to him, and was otherwise associated with the Delphic worship. Of the ophiolatry of Mexico Humboldt says, “Other paintings exhibit to us a feather-headed snake cut in pieces by the great spirit Tezcatlipoca, or by the sun personified, the god Tonatiuh. These allegories remind us of the ancient traditions of Asia. In the woman and serpent of the Aztecs we think we perceive the Eve of the Semitic nations; in the snake cut in pieces, the famous serpent Raliya, or Kalinaga, conquered by Vishnu, when he took the form of Krishna.” Hercules, and other such mystic personages, destroy serpents in all manner of fables.
The most striking illustration of Scripture redemption, as embodied in serpent-worship, is found in Norse mythology. . . . . Among its supernatural beings is one called Loke, a subtle demon, who is always characterized as mischievous, deceitful, treacherous, malicious, in short, the father of lies. His dreadful brood. . . . are the Fenris-wolf the huge Midgard-serpent and the woman monster Hel (English Hell)! . . . ."
(Universality of Serpent-Worship
By W. G. Moorehead
The Old Testament Student, Vol. 4,
No. 5. (Jan., 1885), pp. 205-210)
On the scripts of mythologies, there can be only one script that is Scripture. Whether you believe that to be the mythological narratives of naturalism or something else, you will have a script that you treat as a sort of Scripture.
"A curious parallel appears in America, where among certain Indians the medicine tree-that is, the tree of knowledge rather than of healing-is inhabited by a serpent."
(The Serpent in the Old Testament
By Ross G. Murison
The American Journal of Semitic Languages
and Literatures, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Jan., 1905), pg 128)
(Snake Stones
By M. D. W. Jeffreys
Journal of the Royal African Society, Vol.
41, No. 165. (Oct., 1942), pp. 250-253)
(The Serpent Mound of Adams County, Ohio
By Charles C. Willough
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 21,
No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1919), pp. 153-163)
Etc....it seems to have been a universal symbol, perhaps more so B.C. than A.D. It would not surprise me, not much does anymore. I would not be surprised to learn of UFO cults that believe in aliens who are "reptilian" shape shifters, for instance. But never mind....a lot of this is just food for thought.
5 comments:
"you know who david icke is, right? hes one of the main people behind the reptilian alien shapeshifter theory as it stands today."
I don't know David Icke. Maybe I'll read him sometime. I have other reading to do though.
I looked him up in Google. He seems to be a conspiracy theorist.
A note on it,
Generally the orthodox scientist (the modern keeper of knowledge) is too orthodox and myopic while in contrast, the conspiracy theorist will take you from A to Z based on knowledge that probably only goes from A to B, if that. You can tell when they begin to ask questions in which you are supposed to fill in the blank, etc.
The pattern of it:
Isn't it funny that, this? Why, maybe this, that. So given that this is that, as is obvious now, such and such must have happened.
It's fairly easy to deconstruct. But then again, one cannot miss the things that are not subject to repeated testing or simply write them off. It's perfectly possible that someone had an experience that is a one time event. There is no way of putting that in a test tube. And there may be no way of making it fit into Naturalism in the way that the modern scholar has been taught to.
For instance, there is a weighty tome called (Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil by Ron Rosenbaum) that I was reading. Most of the scholars of the time and the like begin to invoke imagery and symbolism that only makes sense if Hitler was a demoniac. They do not offer that supernatural explanation, although some come close. Yet when you keep talking about a "demonic" sort of charisma, Hitler having "visions," etc., why exclude a supernatural explanation of some sort? Because it fits religous narratives?
The cold toads seem too orthodox, they will only dissect and dissect. Then they will arrange the parts to make it look as if it fits Naturalism. Yet they do not dissect themselves and live by their own sort of Naturalism.
This has gaps and speculation in it, but here is my sort of filter for trying to recognize malevolent intelligence, (mainly, pattern matching) while trying to also filter out the excesses of conspiracy theory, (pattern recognition gone too far into creative pattern invention) while also avoiding the myopia typical to orthodox Naturalism. (the rejection of pattern recognition....then a myopic bit of it creeps in anyway, depending on the prejudices of the cold toad who made their dissection in the first place.)
Some patterns of malevolent intelligence:
Wanting to kill Jews.
Pedophilia, pederasty, some type of sexual perversion or other inversions of basic natural categories. (Male/female, child/adult, life/death, etc.)
"Visions."
An otherwise ignorant and perhaps pretty stupid person invoking ancient symbolisms and the like, in my view there has to be a bit of a pattern to that too.
It's all culmulative, and most things could make sense in Naturalism. It would seem that malevolent forms of intelligence can hide in Nature more easily than the benevolent. It's much easier to see the work of an engineer who designs a building (an artifact of intelligent design, leaving manifested signs of the blueprint) than the work of one who works to make cracks in the foundation (an artifact of a malevolent anti-designer, blurring the signs, perhaps just altering them a bit). In forensics only the criminal who tries to murder can hide in Naturalism or the corruption of Nature, i.e. naturalistic accident, odd happenstance, poisoning, etc.
Personally, the first thing that comes to mind regarding Nazi propaganda against Jews is the image of rats; that seemed to be more pervasive in Goebbels' campaigns. I suppose my several re-readings of Spiegelman's Maus also firmly implanted that notion into my head.
Yes, that is correct. I should not have called it a "pattern" with respect to symbolism of the reptile. The real pattern is that at the end of civilization there will be attempts to merge the natural categories of human and animal. E.g. Rwanda, Serbia, Nazi Germany, etc.
Although there were some instances of the merging that I noted there, more often (and in the propaganda) it was the merging with rats.
A merging often found in Nazi cartoons,
"Not that the cinema-obsessed Third Reich was oblivious to the propagandistic power of the cartoon medium. Just as the Nazis took to the screen to celebrate themselves in a high-definition, cinematic format, the Jews were consigned to a lower-definition medium better suited to their status in the aesthetic hierarchy. Comic art. . . .is the visual medium most congenial to caricature and low blows. The pivotal inspiration for Spiegelman’s cat and mouse gamble was the visual stereotypes of Third Reich symbology, the hackwork from the mephistoes at Goebbels’s Reichsministry and Julius Streicher’s venomous weekly Der Sturmer—the anti-Semitic broadsheets and editorial cartoons depicting Jews as hook-nosed, beady-eyed Untermenschen, creatures whose ferret faces and rodent snouts marked them as human vermin (figs. 1 and 2). Hence, Spiegelman’s ironic boast that Maus “was made in collaboration with Hitler. . . . My anthropomorphized mice carry trace elements of [ cartoonist] Fips’s anti-Semitic Jew-as-rat cartoons for Der Sturmer, but by being particularized they are invested with personhood; they stand upright and affirm their humanity. Car toons personalize; they give specific form to stereotypes.” But again it is film that generated the iconic image of anti-Semitism under the Third Reich: the notorious sequence from Fritz Hippler’s Der ewige Jude (1940) that cross-cuts between rabbinical ghetto dwellers and swarming sewer rats. From subhumans to nonhumans, the Jews are linked with vermin, to be eradicated, like plague bearers, from the Fatherland."
(Art Spiegelman's Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust
By Thomas Doherty
American Literature, Vol. 68, No. 1, Write Now: American Literature in the 1980s and 1990s. (Mar., 1996), pp. 69-84)
I suppose a way to make the point is the vast difference between the way that Jesus uses animal metaphors and the way that Naturalists/evolutionists use them.
Jesus is using animals to make reference to spirtual, metaphysical, transphysical realities and issues. When he says, "Do not throw your pearls to swine." everyone knows that he in no sense except a truly metaphoric sense means that people are as swine. The metaphorical is the spiritual, it gets to the spirit of our nature. It is similar to the parable and Jesus makes use of both. I could go on, but the distinction should be obvious.
What, in contrast, does a Nazi do? Suffice it to say, they don't sit down and tell you a parable to try to give you spiritual insight on life through the metaphoric. It is the precise opposite. Their metaphors are the literalized metaphor, physicalized and crass. When they say that someone is like a rat they are really trying to say that the person somehow is just a rat. They mean this in some sense physically, clinically, medically.
On the literalized metaphor,
(Proverbs in Nazi Germany
The Promulgation of Anti-Semitism and Stereotypes through Folklore
By Wolfgang Mieder
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 95, No. 378.
(Oct. - Dec., 1982), pp. 435-464)
I will probably make a post drawing some things together on this sometime.
I ran across some people who seemed to bear in mind a Nazi pattern of thought. One wrote, "...now I see you as poison or rodent that must be eradicated."
Same thing,
"...Hitler concluded, he had to “ruthlessly exterminate the vermin.” "
("Annihilation through Labor": The Killing of State Prisoners in the Third Reich
By Nikolaus Wachsmann
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 71, No. 3. (Sep., 1999), pp. 624-659)
It's always a bit of a downer to see it written, even if one already knows it is there. So I wrote this parable and had a look at the pattern of principles involved. Some principalities do not seem so principled....
Once upon a time there was a man named Cain. He tilled the soil. He was a vegetarian. He thought to himself, "See how pure I am!" He looked at his brother one day and saw that he killed animals. He thought to himself, "His hands are bloody!" But look at mine, they are clean. He began to think, "Why does he kill the animals. It's just not nice." Then he began to feel, "It's just not nice! But I, well, I am nice....obviously." Then he began to see his brother a little differently. He began not to have the eyes that saw his brother as a human, instead he saw him as some sort of animal. Then, he thought, "Why...he is just a vermin! But I am nice. I am the nice one here. Why doesn't the One like me! See how they victimize me!" So he took a rock and crept up behind his brother...
Yet, later...Cain's vain imaginations left him and as he looked at his hands, there was blood on his hands.
Perhaps the sons of Cain yet believe in the Soil and then the Blood.
Who will determine, just who is the vermin? Sometimes the mice, they fight back! These are the mice that are truly nice!
"And so it went for the first few days, the poorly armed defenders giving ground before the attacks of tanks, flame throwers and artillery but keeping up their resistance. General Stroop could not understand why “this trash and subhumanity,” as he referred to the besieged Jews, did not give up....
'Within a few days [ reported] it became apparent that the Jews no longer had any intention to resettle voluntarily, but were determined to resist evacuation . . . Whereas it had been possible during the first days to catch considerable numbers of Jews, who are cowards by nature, it became more and more difficult during the second half of the operation to capture the bandits and Jews. Over and over again new battle groups consisting of 20 to 30 Jewish men, accompanied by a corresponding number of women, kindled new resistance.'"
(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany By William L. Shirer (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :976-977)
I like the cartoonist who subverts false symbols. He would have been killed before though. Many were, it seems a true test of courage and conviction.
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