Adelphiasophism
Ring, Cross, Nature, Goddess: What should We Worship?
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999
Abstract
What should Adelphiasophists Worship?
What is there in the universe that deserves worship? Is there anything? What is there that men and women could kneel to, pray to and adore? If there is anything that deserves such worship from human beings, where is it?
The earth has towering mountains, vast and powerful oceans, delightful and delicate flowers, the beauty and suppleness of animals, the sweet and entrancing melody of a song bird, the athletic grace of human beings: but none of these merit our worshipping. Beyond earth is the sky, with the grandeur of thunder storms, the all encompassing blueness of the daytime sky and the wonder and awe of the starlit night sky, the brilliance of the sun and the serene silver of the moon.
Christians say that we should not worship the sun, the moon, the stars, or any earthly thing. The worship of natural objects is considered idolatry. Yet, Christians think we should worship an idol you cannot even see—an idol in our heads.
Primitive people worshipped objects, idols and heavenly bodies that they felt influenced their lives for good or ill. If these things really did influence their lives and were capable of responding, the worship might have been quite sensible. We now think they were deluded because they were unsophisticated.
Adelphiasophists have outgrown the worship of objects. Nothing on the earth or in the heavens can we worship. Only one thing encompasses it all, its mechanics and laws, its harmony and beauty, its spiritual role as the womb of our existence—it is not any imaginary God but Nature. If there is a God, he is part of Nature. Nature is not part of God
Christians have traditionally feared the word Nature and, for several centuries, it was associated with our base selves, depravity and everything evil. Nature was assassinated to preserve orthodox religion. Theology condemned Nature and the pulpit touched it only with gloved hands. To speak of Nature as anything good was regarded as banishing God from His rightful place.
Nature has been slandered and lied about but people are getting over their fright. Investigation of Nature through science has taught us far more than investigation of God through theology. It is Nature which is found to be true, not God. Nature is all there is.
Adelphiasophists might personify Nature as a Goddess but not like the Christian God as some omniscient overlord waiting to interfere with his own laws. Human worship cannot directly benefit Nature, nor result in her consciously turning in our favour. We can admit the mystery of Nature and of the universe but there is nothing to be gained from treating it as an arbitrary potentate that we have to flatter or amuse by worship or song.
If Nature is to be worshipped, it is fair to ask what purpose would be served by it. Random acts of Nature and our own deliberate acts affect our lives. How can worship affect either? What benefit then is there of a Goddess religion?
How selfish the very question sounds? Humanity is coming to mean selfishness. People always want to know what benefits there are for them. “What’s in it for me?” People do not seek improvement to help save the world, to aid progress and truth, but to satisfy selfish desires. “Improvement” has become merely self-gratification. The highest consideration of mankind is self. Self is preferred to all. Self-interest makes the object of life to overcome others—one must fall that another may rise. General welfare is sacrificed to individual ownership. Selfishness solely is sacred to self.
The answer is that worship of Nature is not being sycophantic to the mighty Goddess to please her but a psychological act of conditioning “ourselves.” The point of it is the denial of self, because self is not selfless, it is selfish. By consciously showing deference and respect for Nature, we aim to avoid our own selfish acts of vandalism and Nature’s homeostatic response.
By singing the praises of Nature and our admiration for it, Adelphiasophists remind “ourselves” that it is a precious and fragile thing which we have to take care to preserve unbroken. It is by taking care of Nature that we, or rather our children, will benefit. That is how Adelphiasophists help ourselves and our fellow human beings.
Futurologists used to write of the golden future time when man will master the elements of Nature. Today we are more likely to see men as unpleasant parasites on the face of the globe. Nature has a habit of redressing the balance when one species becomes a nuisance. Man believes he is a demigod. He must be firmly placed back on the earth! Today we must be humble and see that we have to harmonize with the Goddess as she intended not try to overpower her.
We must make sure a human form is never found beneath the Goddess’s robes lest we defeat our object and invest her with all the selfishness and arrogance of human Nature. The test of praxis is “Does it help Nature?” not “Does it help mankind?”
Some say it is absurd that a deity should need human beings to protect it. They suppose that the Christian always calls on God and God never on His worshippers. If that is so, why is there a crime of blasphemy? Why do different sects of Christianity each defend their own God in Northern Ireland through bombing and murdering the others? Why did Christians throughout history, burn and torture to death witches and heretics? Why did Dietrich Bonhoffer in a Nazi prison in 1944 ( “ Letters and Papers from Prison ”) conceive of a post-War world in which people would have to stand by God rather than God standing by them?
Admittedly, it is foolish to defend an idol whether it is of wood, stone or empty space, but to defend the Goddess Nature, who succours us, is perfectly sensible for selfish as well as altruistic reasons. Christians should accept what Bonhoffer prophesied by substitute Goddess where he has God.
The Ring and the Cross
We choose, as our symbol, the ring or the spiral rather than the cross.
Any lover of Nature should adopt the spiral, circle or lunar disc as a more meaningful and sensitive form than the cross. Rings and spirals evoke cycles, the cycles of Nature, the daily cycle of the moon and sun, the seasonal cycles, the revolutions of the celestial orbs and the precession of the ecliptic as well as the less distinct cycles of history. The cross evokes a sword or dagger, symbols of strife and death. The ring is infinite in its concept—it can be traversed forever—and therefore universal, yet it encloses, being womb-like and therefore symbolic of motherhood and life.
The cross was important to the Old Europeans, who worshipped the Goddess, and seems to have been taken as a symbol by Christianity when the northern Europeans were converted in the fifth and sixth centuries. Before then, the Christian symbols had been the Chi-Rho, the lamb and the fish.
For the Old Europeans, the cross was like the ring, its four arms being the four seasons. The cross was an adjunct to the ring as seen in the sun-cross, the common form in northern Europe, meant to add seasonality to the ring’s continuity, but really detracting from it. However, the cross also meant fertility to the ancients, it being a stylised phallus, the horizontal denoting the glans penis, and so appears combined with the ring, denoting the vulva, in the ancient symbol of life, the Ankh.
As a symbol denoting a penis penetrating a vulva, the Ankh or the sun-cross could only have meant procreated life—life as we know it—not some baffling mystery of eternal life. Christian belief made it stand for life after death—truthfully just death.
Today, the cross represents an end to life, it arms leading nowhere but the circle is the everlasting cycle of being. The cross leads to a single point that might be taken by the Christian faithful to represent the absolute but it is static and falsely precise in highlighting a meaningless focus. The circle encloses a space but is imprecise about what is within or where it is to be found, thus suggesting uncertainty and change, the quintessential characteristics of life. The cross is precise but a lie, the circle imprecise but true.
The ring, not the cross, is the true mystical symbol of life. In getting people to think about the cycles of existence rather than the utterly false and selfish Christian objective of salvation as the eternal survival of the personality, meditation on the circle seems to be a good start. We see with little encouragement as our eyes follow the circle round that motion is all, change is all, nothing is static, nothing stops. The falseness of a never ending, unchanging personality, living forever is immediately apparent, whether it is your own desire or God himself.
Myths
Myths are stories often based on a hero with whom the reader or hearer is encouraged to identify. They show how society expects you to behave. The hero is what today is often called a role model. Myths help to bond people with a common set of principles of behaviour as expressed through their heroes.
Myths show us how certain circumstances in life should be handled. In particular, myths offer people a model of how to behave at critical times in their life and offer an explanation of the rights of passage that societies adopt to signify important transitions during life. Any sort of fiction can serve the same purpose for an individual but a myth is accepted widely within a society and becomes an expression of its culture.
Morality
Morality is the practice of certain modes of conduct in our principles and behaviour in life. When humanity became self-conscious, they soon recognized that certain patterns of behaviour were desirable if communal living was to be tolerable. Human beings invented the ideas of right and wrong. What was for the good of the community was right, and that what was not for the good of the community was wrong. Social life without some system of morality could not exist; for without it there could be no security and no confidence, and without these no happiness.
Morality has been patronized by Christianity to such an extent, adopted by it as its own offspring, and imposed upon the public as such, that people have come to think that morality cannot exist without Christianity, and are unable to understand any severance between them taking place, without the annihilation of the former.
This is a mistaken notion, fostered by the clergy for their own interests. Morality is not dependent for its existence upon theology in any of its forms, and existed for millennia before the idea of a patriarchal God arose. Christianity has foisted on to morality an evil motive for a good one, a selfish one for an unselfish one—the fear of displeasing an arbitrary, capricious, and despotic deity, with the accompanying loss of the promised reward—instead of the good of our world, our fellows and our society.
Virtue consists in pleasing the deity and satisfying his whims. Vice is opposition to the whims of the deity, and defying his anger. Encouragement and restraint to human conduct consist of rewards and punishment in an imagined transcendental world beyond death, instead of in this world.
Now, true morality is the product of unselfishness and the feeling of “goodwill towards others”, including other species and all the natural world. It is “doing as you would be done by”, with the reward being reciprocated love and the regard of others and other creatures and the world as a whole, because that which is not injured or destroyed remains to sustain and repair. It is doing right because it is constructive and avoiding evil because it is destructive.
Virtue is not limited to abstaining from sex but is general moral goodness. Yet, the clergy lay so much stress on virtue as abstinence from sexual activity, though it is the essence of all complex life, and repression of it to satisfy the arbitrary will of an imaginary deity, is both physically and mentally injurious, and productive of morbid states.
Virtue requires everyone to use their imagination to visualize the pain others experience by disregard, vandalism and exploitation. The laws of the state are insufficient to restrain and control human conduct and actions, and to act as a protection to people and places. Indeed the state is often the biggest criminal and the wealthy the biggest exploiters.
Poverty is itself a virtue in the sense that people voluntarily restrain themselves from unnecessary consumption which merely damages the world more.
The regard for goodness is increased and intensified by habit and knowledge, for it is by this and the exercise of regard and moral judgement that we know right from wrong. Having chosen the way of goodness in life, Adelphiasophists satisfy their consciences, that, when their time arrives, they will meet death with composure. They know that, having lived truly and loved the earth and all its children, they have contributed to the continuation of a fruitful earth. Although they no longer survive as a separately conscious entity, their substance lives on in everything and their influence on the world resonates forever through the ripples made in its cultural and energy fields.
At death the body, by a process of bacterial and fungal decomposition, disintegrates into molecules and atoms—which disperse as gases into the air or remain as solids in the earth whence they originated—ultimately to become constituents of other bodies. There is nothing in the end which was not also in the beginning. All life is the womb of another and all substance is indestructible and eternal. Death is simply a rebirth in another form.
Human beings play only a small part in the drama of life and on the immense stage of Nature. Of little note is a human life in the limitless cast of the universe. Most humans attract sparse applause while on stage in life, and touch only a few hearts when they exit in death. Yet we enjoy living, and our last act is to shed a silent tear as the curtain falls when our part is played and the lights dim.
No conduct on our part can preserve our individual conscious existence after the breath of life has left us. If rewards or punishments are due to us, we must receive them in this world. We should rejoice in the knowledge that like all organic Nature, just as the waters return to the ocean whence they came, so we return to the bosom of the universal Goddess Nature, safe in her eternal embrace, knowing that we have added to her blessings in our conscious lives and not tormented and tortured her through selfishness and neglect.
Procreation
Young people normally seek out the opposite sex in heterosexual relationships, yet if they chose the company of the same sex in homosexual relationships, they are not to be condemned. Everyone needs companionship and same-sex relationships for men and women avoid adding to the human biomass through additional children. It should be commended.
By the same token, prostitution should not be condemned but promoted because often men merely want to satisfy their lust and having done so are quite happy, whereas otherwise they might be dangers to society. This too helps to prevent overpopulation of the globe with human beings, and women who provide these sexual services benefit us all.
Those who wish to have children should note that marriage ceremonies are a superstitious relic of male ownership of women. Among the ancient Hebrews and others the husband, was generally the owner of so many slave concubines, and women were bought and sold like cattle. Moslems retain the old system, though a man is limited to four wives, the number of concubines being unlimited.
The sexes should always have equal rights and, though marriage is not obligatory, monogamy should be the custom because it is children who matter and they have a claim on both parents for care and protection. Marriage is in the interests of the children and is preferable to single parenthood. So, if couples wish to have their relationship blessed, they are free to do so.
Parents cannot justify having larger families than they can support. Indeed they should have constant regard to what demands are being placed on the resources of the earth with the burgeoning biomass of human beings. The world is already overpopulated with human beings partly because the ancient texts of the Hebrew bible urge procreation, with no regard for the consequences. It is irresponsible, unsocial and contrary to Nature to bring into the world children then neglect them. Human beings have no natural predator, have largely conquered infectious disease and already use up too many of the earth’s resources. It is everyone’s duty not to add to the existing imbalance, or else Nature will rectify the balance in her own way.
When people do have children they will want to name them. Baptism or christening is a superstition and not necessary for the naming of children. Parents can name their child without the use of any religious rite. They should name their children while they are babes so that they have a clear identity. Not to do so is cruel and to confuse a child’s identity by giving them different names is cruel, especially if the parents place emotional burdens on the children.
Freedom of Thought
The people are the source of all authority. Liberty of opinion is the right of every human being. Everyone has a right to pursue their own good in their own way, so long as they do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Everyone has an absolute right to independence, and is sovereign over themselves and their own body and mind. No one is accountable to others for their opinions—religious or otherwise. Our opinions may be right or they may be wrong; but so may those of others be.
Adelphiasophists ought, as individuals, always to be ready to hear with patience the opinions of others. Neither the government nor society has the right to suppress the expression of opinion—as long as the controversy does not involve harm to others on this earth. Neither have we the right to deny the voicing of the opinion of others because we in our own judgement have condemned them, subject to the same restraint.
If only one person in humanity held an opinion contrary to the rest, the majority of humanity would be no more justified in suppressing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in suppressing the majority. Suppressing opinion is robbing the human race. If the opinion is right, we are deprived of the truth. If wrong, we lose almost as great a benefit—the clearer appreciation of truth produced by the refutation of error.
Liberty of thought and opinion, however, is not necessarily liberty of public speech, for there is no absolute freedom of speech in civilized society. Individuals must be limited in their speech as in their conduct. All have a right to talk freely concerning public matters, so long as they do not violate the moral law by menacing the rights or welfare of others, by instigating people by inflammatory language or placards to acts of violence against minorities.
Holy Days
In Pagan tradition a holiday includes as part of the festival the evening before. This stems from the time when the Northern European Pagans, like the Jews, counted days from sunset to sunset, but it remains satisfying to begin a celebration one evening then continue it the following day.
Sunday, the first day of the week, commemorates the weekly festival of the sun, the planet whose glorious rays give us life, health, delight and happiness. In Northern European Pagan tradition, the sun is the goddess, Phoebe or Saule.
Monday is the special day of the Goddess and is particularly special at the full moon, when on clear evenings magical ceremonies and festivities can be held under the silver moonlight in open countryside or in someone’s large garden.
All traditional cultures had seasonal festivals and rituals. There are four major festivals: winter and summer solstices, when the sun reverses its travels, and spring and autumn equinoxes, when night and day are equal. Between each of these major holidays are the “cross quarter days.”
- The spring equinox comes around March 21 or 22 but spring is only barely beginning at that time in Europe. True spring—warm reliable spring doesn’t come until later. This is the cross quarter day—May 1—which Europe celebrated with maypoles, gathering flowers, and fertility rites. May became the month of Mary after the Christian church took over and May crownings and processions were devoted to Mary instead of the old earth goddesses.
- The summer solstice comes on June 21. The next cross quarter day is Lammas Day in early August. This is the only festival that our country does not celebrate in any way. The Church put the Feast of the Assumption on this day to honor Mary.
- The autumn equinox comes on Sept. 21—the cross quarter day is Hallowe’en, the ancient Samhain of the Celts.
- Then comes the winter solstice—the sun’s turn around point from darkness to light. The cross quarter day between the solstice and spring equinox is Imbolc in early February—now celebrated in the church as Candlemas.
Candlemas or Imbolc is a quarter day (1 or 2 February) dedicated to the Goddess, Bride, Bridget or Birgit, who represents the first stirrings of life afer winter. It is the beginning of Spring. (The present custom of calling the equinox the first day of spring is confusing to most people because it is wrong!) The Goddess throws off her guise as crone to be renewed as the virgin. The symbol of Bridget is the asymmetric cross which is the equivalent of the sun cross and the Ankh, a symbol of procreation, it being a cross topped with the mound of venus, thus representing a penis entering a vulva.
Easter is the spring festival of the Goddess, Eostre (Istarte, Venus), and commemorates the vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the equator, and the days become longer than the nights, and daily increase in length providing the bursting forth of the seed. It is Mid-Spring Day. The symbol is again a symbolic vulva, a ring, penetrated by a penis looking rather like two horns. The meaning remains the same because the whole of Spring is the time of conception.
Mayday is the Old Pagan Beltane, the first day of Summer and commemorates Nature’s profusion of flowers and blossom, which has from early times found expression in dance and song, and which instinctively excites feelings of gladness and delight. In Rome the Goddess Flora was specially venerated at this season, which custom has its modern representation in "the May Queen." Late on the eve of Beltane a fire is lit to symbolise the Summer sun and festivities continue while the fires burn. Young couples conclude the evening by jumping over the smoking embers. On May Day, maidens dance round the May Pole representing the tree of life, but really a symbolic phallus. The sign of Beltane is a phallus penetrating three vulvas, representing the three stages of the Goddess, and signifying uninhibited sexual activity prior to the swelling of the womb with the onset of pregnancy.
Whit Monday—The Monday after Pentecost, which is seven weeks after Easter, So-called from the white garments worn by the newly-baptized Catechumens in the Christian church, which rite took place on the vigil of Pentecost. Pentecost was a Jewish feast, held on the fiftieth day after the Passover, in celebration of their “Ingathering”, and in thanksgiving for their harvest. The Christian church adopted it from their precursors, the Essenes, who had their feast of the renewal of the covenant on that day. Christians celebrate the supposed descent of the Holy Ghost, one of the gods of the Trinity, on to the apostles on that day, presumably during the last renewal festival before the new sect of Jesus was started. In Northern Pagan tradition it is called High May.
Midsummer day (24 June) commemorates the sun attaining its highest point in the heavens, and our northern hemisphere being under the influence of the greatest effulgence of its rays. It is sacred to the Great Mother as the time when her belly begins to swell with life. The symbol is a swelling womb. Late on Midsummer eve, people light torches and walk around their homes and buildings with them in a sunwise direction to purify them. Fairs and festivals are traditionally held on midsummer day to celebrate the growth of life.
Lammas Monday or Harvest Festival, is the first Monday after “Lammas Day” (1 August), and is kept as a holiday or “festival of the ingathering.” Its name of Lammas refers to the offering in early times of the first fruits of the harvest to the god Lugh. It is the earliest harvest festival and is associated with baking bread. The symbol is a semicircle crossed by a line which probably symbolises a swollen womb and the taboo of sexual activity from now on.
Mabon (23 September) is the Autumn equinox and the ingathering of the fruit, the second harvest. Its sign is said to be a stylised dying plant.
Samhain is 1 November, a quarter day, representing the onset of winter and the end of the Celtic year and beginning of a new one. It has been Christianised to All Saints Day and its eve is All Hallows Eve. It was such an important festival to the ancient Pagan Celts of Northern Europe as the day when dead relatives and friends were remembered that the Christians had to make up especially lurid and frightening stories about it to scare off the “faithful”. Oddly enough, it has nevertheless revived, especially in the USA as Halloween. It is the third or animal harvest when beasts were slaughtered and salted for winter. In Britain the connexion with the dead persists in Remembrance day on 11 November, a result of the Gregorian calendrical adjustment. The symbol is a nine squared maze, rather like a nine men’s morris and evidently representing the nine aspects of the Goddess at the year end.
Christmas Day commemorates the birthday of the new sun—when the sun, after descending to its lowest point in the heavens (21 December), and after our northern hemisphere has been travelling away from the sun and getting less of his rays daily, after three days commences his return journey (25 December), and daily rises higher in the heavens. It is the birthday of all the Pagan sun gods and the birthday of the messiahs of various revealed religions. It is a long festival with much merrymaking, essential to cheer people up in the depths of winter. So it should remain whatever the Christian Pharisees might say.
