A. Theocracy on Earth has passed through four different stages of
development so far, and is now entering a fifth. We will describe
the first four stages here, leaving the fifth for a later chapter.
The first stage was tribal shamanism of the type that produced the
Alta Mira cave paintings thousands of years ago. First-stage
Theocratic religions have never entirely died out, and still exist
today among certain tribes of North American Indians, Africans, and
Australian Aborigines.
Most of them, though, have been evolving into
more advanced types or have been replaced with outside religions
since these peoples came into ever-increasing contact with
foreigners over the past few hundred years.
Q. In the course of my training as a magician, I’ve worked with
people who practice a number of these “primitive” systems and found
that many of them are as skilled at telepathy, psychic mind control,
psychic healing, etc., as highly trained Eastern and Western
occultists. I’ve also read extensively about dozens of other
shamanic spiritual systems, and they all seem to be designed to
teach advanced operational magic techniques as a routine part of
religious practice.
What’s primitive about that? When it comes to
magic, it is Christianity and the other modern mainstream religions
that are primitive, not the shamanic systems.
A. First-stage Theocratic religions are not primitive from a human
perspective, but they are from a Theocratic perspective. As you
point out, most of them teach extremely sophisticated and effective
psychic-development systems. This is what makes them primitive – in
the sense of “crude and inefficient” – from the viewpoint of the
Theocrats, who judge a religious system by how well it allows them
to control every phase of human thinking and behavior, especially
the conscious use of the psychic powers.
In any society with a first-stage Theocratic religion, the majority
of people who learned significant psychic skills in a previous
lifetime have an opportunity to develop them consciously during the
present lifetime, because the shamans who serve as clergy are
conscious psychics themselves.
Religious services in a first-stage
Theocratic religion are usually conducted with the entire
congregation in a psychic trance. This is in direct contrast to the
more advanced forms of Theocratic religion, which discourage
conscious, independent psychic activity, and employ the religious
trance rather than the psychic trance.
A religious elite composed of
shamans is much harder for the
Theocrats to control than one composed of clerical or secular rulers
who submit to religious mind control. A shaman is much more likely
to put his or her own psychic development above the telepathic
commands of the Theocrats.
Also, shamanic mythologies often contain
major elements of the truth about Theocracy, and so teach people an
instinctive aversion for mind control and enslavement by spirits.
Q. I know from my reading on the subject that most such religions
teach that some disembodied spirits eat others.
A. They do, but the information is usually encoded in such a way
that the believers, including the shamans who channel it, do not
realize that the “Eaters of Souls” are their own gods. Instead, the
Eaters of Souls are said to be the gods of enemy tribes, or
spirits
that are very different from human beings such as
the Windigos of
various Amerindian tribes, or the ghosts of human criminals and
outcasts. The shamanic religions usually teach that a tribe’s gods
protect their own people from the Eaters of Souls.
Also, the powers of the Eaters of Souls are exaggerated. Most of the
legends say they can steal the souls of living people, except those
of the most powerful shamans. And this idea hasn’t died out at all.
It’s present in the writings of
Lovecraft, in the modern
Fundamentalist propaganda about demonic possession, and in the
extant first-stage religions themselves.
For example, the
present-day
Navajos
still have powerful instinctive fears of witches
and shape-changers, and much of their traditional religious practice
is intended as a defense against these evil beings.
Q. When you come right down to it, I myself feel deep instinctive
fears that maybe the Theocrats can in fact forcibly take over the
minds of living people or somehow damage their souls.
A. Of course you have these fears. You
learned them from a psychic
and social environment still dominated to some extent by the
Theocrats and their propaganda. However, the very fact that you are
able to write about this is evidence that the Theocrats are liars.
Their control over people is indirect, exercised mostly by
programming the subconscious mind.
They can’t overwhelm the
conscious will of any normal person, only the wills of people with
seriously damaged physical or astral minds; and they can’t directly
harm or enslave the soul when it is incarnated.
However, at a certain point in the future, the Theocrats will
probably become more powerful; but this has nothing to do with the
history of Theocracy so far. We’ll deal with this subject in Part
Three. For the time being, we will just say that it is nothing to be
unduly alarmed about, because we’re prepared to deal with it.
Q. OK, let’s leave it alone for now and go back to the description
of first-stage Theocratic religion.
A. First-stage Theocratic religion is far less efficient than the
more advanced stages of Theocratic religion in providing nourishment
for the Theocrats, because it doesn’t provide much opportunity for
them to enslave and devour the souls of believers after death. The
souls of shamans often don’t allow the Theocrats to control them on
the astral plane: either they reincarnate, or they set themselves up
as independent Theocrats in competition with the existing ones
hanging around that particular tribe.
The whole religious system encourages people to practice conscious
psychic development techniques and to become shamans themselves if
they have the necessary talent. Since the shamans enjoy political
power and social prestige, there is strong motivation for psychic
development, even though the training methods such primitive
societies employ are usually extremely laborious, painful, and
dangerous.
Q. I can see proof of Theocratic mind control and group minds by
observing what happens when Amerindians move from isolated
reservations to “red ghettos” in the big cities. They suffer more
from culture shock than do rural black people when moving to the
city, because they are entering a totally alien environment on the
psychic level as well as on the physical level.
The blacks are
already familiar with Christian group minds, but Amerindians who
have been raised as believers in a first-stage religion are not.
That is why many “City Indians” are skid-row alcoholics, or spend
much of their lives in prisons or mental hospitals. It also explains
why a large number of City Indians who do adjust to the urban
environment become Christian Fundamentalists: they don’t have the
experience to resist Theocratic propaganda and religious mind
control.
This leads me ask: do the Theocrats who pose as the gods of
a tribe with a first-stage religion find it easy to enslave tribal
members who haven’t have highly developed shamanic powers?
A. Not often, because such people’s fears of the Eaters of Souls
keep them from approaching their gods after death. They expect to
become fearful wanderers after death, and that’s exactly what
happens. Sometimes the Theocrats manage to catch them and persuade
them to put themselves under direct telepathic hypnosis, but that’s
the exception rather than the rule.
The Theocrats of a primitive
shamanic religion are usually quite short-lived. Often, deceased
shamans try being Theocrats for a while; then they have to
reincarnate to keep from literally starving to death.
Q. OK. What, then, the
Second Stage of Theocratic religion, and what
cultures have practiced it?
A. The Second Stage of Theocratic religion involves
mass human
sacrifice and usually cannibalism on a large scale as well. The
Aztecs practiced it until about five hundred years ago, and some of
the ancient Middle Eastern people did also, starting about five
thousand years ago.
Q. I’m familiar with the practice of large-scale human sacrifice by
the Aztecs, the Assyrians, some of the Babylonian and Punic tribes,
and others; but don’t human sacrifice and cannibalism go back much
earlier as common religious and social practices?
A. They do. Such practices were part of many primitive shamanic
religions. The difference is in the scale of the sacrifices and
cannibalism. The second-stage Theocratic religions became possible
only when human societies started to become densely populated and
highly organized. Such societies built cities and had reasonably
sophisticated farming techniques.
They also had large, powerful
governments and highly organized armies that fought major wars.
Q. For some reason, less is known about these societies and their
religions than about either primitive shamanism or more advanced
societies that existed simultaneously. I take it that the ancient
Egyptians and Hebrews were not societies with second-stage
Theocratic religions?
A. No, both were in the
Third Stage when they first appeared in
written historical records, and archaeological evidence shows that
they probably went directly from the first stage to the third, as
did the Greeks and the rest of the Western Aryan peoples. The Second
Stage of Theocratic religion was a failed experiment from the
Theocratic point of view. And from the human point of view, such
societies were so repugnant that few people want to learn much about
them. This is why historians have written so little about them.
For example, the historians of ancient Rome reported that their
leaders said, “Carthage must be utterly destroyed,” and that the
city was eventually torn down stone by stone, the population
slaughtered, and the surrounding agricultural area sown with salt.
But they didn’t explain in much detail what it was the Carthaginians
did that justified this genocide, except that they practiced human
sacrifice.
Now, the Romans also practiced human sacrifice through
most of their history: gladiatorial fights to the death and throwing
people to the lions are definitely in that category, but the Roman
religion was still third-stage, not second-stage.
Human sacrifices
were only a small, atavistic detail in Roman paganism, not the main
focal point of the whole religious system that they were to the
Carthaginians.
Q. As I understand a second-stage Theocratic religion, it’s usually
a literal theocracy, with the despotic rulers of the earthly society
claiming to be god-like beings superior to the rest of the
population. Is this significant?
A. No. Third-stage Theocratic religions may also be ruled by
“God-Kings.” The ancient Egyptians are the best-known example. And
the rulers of many societies with fourth-stage religions have also
claimed divine descent: the feudal emperors of both China and Japan
are examples. Nor do the rulers of a second-stage Theocratic society
always pose as divine beings.
They may claim only to be a mortal
priesthood acting out the will of disembodied gods; or such a
society may have separate clergy and secular rulers. This is not a
factor in determining whether or not a society has a second-stage
Theocratic religion.
Among the determining factors are a large, densely populated,
totalitarian society and the practice of human sacrifice on a large
scale. The most important factor is deism as we defined it
previously: belief in gods that are omnipotent or at least
significantly superhuman.
This separates the three higher levels of
Theocratic religion from primitive shamanism, which considers the
gods rather similar to earthly shamans, except that they are
disembodied spirits.
Often they are simply called “The Spirits of
Our Ancestors” or “The Shamans in the Spirit World.”
Q. OK then, under a second-stage religion, people believe in
superhuman gods who must be placated with mass human sacrifices that
also often involve cannibalism. Is the cannibalism a significant
factor?
A. No. It was practiced only by those second-stage Theocratic
societies that were short of red meat in their diet: the Aztecs and
the ancient Polynesians, for example, who didn’t have many
domesticated food animals. The reason that second-stage Theocratic
religion practiced mass human sacrifice was to supply the Theocrats
with a constant food supply.
When the victims were killed as part of
a large public religious ceremony, the telepathic chain-reaction
generated by a congregation in the religious trance was sufficient
to put the victims’ astral souls into a hypnotic trance before
death. When they were suddenly and violently killed, the Theocrats
were usually able to get control of the souls before they had a
chance to flee.
This is one of the few examples in the history of
Theocracy where the Theocrats were able to seize souls by force, and
they could do it only with the help of large numbers of living
people.
Q. This makes sense. Does it also mean that human sacrifices
performed by some of the more odious cults today don’t have the
support of the Theocrats?
A. Well, the Theocrats, all of them, like to see cultists do
terrible things like this because it gives occultists and everyone
else outside Theocratic religion a bad name, but they don’t usually
get control of the soul of the sacrificial victim. There simply
aren’t enough people at such ceremonies to generate sufficient
psychic power.
The main reason that second-stage Theocratic religion has been quite
rare in history is simply that it’s so cruel and violent. Societies
like that had to fight endless wars against their neighbors, or else
enslave and sacrifice a significant portion of their own population.
Either way, they tended to become unstable because of the mass
violence, or to be conquered by their enemies.
However, the real
reason such religions were short-lived is that they couldn’t compete
with third- or fourth-stage Theocratic religions when they came in
contact with them.
Q. OK. It’s time to go on to discussing the
Third Stage.
A. The Third Stage of Theocratic religion involves mass animal
sacrifices. Although they prefer human souls, Theocratic spirits can
nourish themselves off the astral souls of lower animals to some
extent. And these souls are easier to paralyze and control with
religious rituals than human souls are. However, the astral tissues
of animal souls aren’t very compatible with the astral souls of the
Theocrats, so they are not a good food source.
The main reason the
Third Stage is considered higher than the second is simply that
societies with such a religion can remain stable for long periods of
time.
Q. If the nutrition from animal souls isn’t really adequate, do
third-stage Theocrats tend to be short-lived?
A. Yes, except that they also receive some nourishment from the
psychic energy generated by their worshippers, which is better for
them than the animal souls alone. Even more important, most of the
major third-stage religions have had some fourth-stage components as
well. This was especially true of the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews,
Hindus, and Western Aryan Pagans.
Judaism and Vedanta eventually
evolved into fully developed fourth-stage religions. The others
survived for a long time with a mixture between the two.
One of the chief characteristics of all third-stage Theocratic
religions is their lack of concern for life after death. Greek and
Roman mythology, for example, gives an extremely accurate
description of what the afterlife was actually like for believers in
those religions.
Most people simply wandered aimlessly in Hades –
the
astral plane – for a few years and then sank into
“forgetfulness.” The concept of reincarnation was known, but only a
few elite groups comparable to modern occultists put much stress on
it: the Greek mystery cults, and a number of similar Roman sects,
for example.
Religious practice in third-stage religions was concerned almost
entirely with gaining the favor of the gods during earthly life, not
with life after death. The Theocrats running such religions didn’t
know how to enslave souls on the astral plane, so they ignored them.
Instead, they programmed living people to send them the souls of
sacrificed animals, and to broadcast psychic energy during orgiastic
rituals.
Q. What about the Fourth stage of Theocratic religion?
A. The Fourth Stage of Theocratic religion is the one represented by
all the major modern religions.
Its most important characteristic is
that the Theocrats use religious mind control to delude souls into
deliberately putting themselves under Theocratic control after
death, thinking they are entering “eternal bliss in Heaven” or
“union with the Godhead.”
The nature of fourth-stage Theocratic religions has already been
adequately discussed in previous chapters, so we will now leave the
history of Theocracy and discuss the other side for a while: the
Invisible College.