image: Wikimedia commons (link).
If you think that your everyday problems are not related to the Bible, think again.
You may ask yourself: How can anyone make such a sweeping claim in this modern day and age? Most people today don’t even “believe” the Bible (in terms of accepting the characters and stories described in Bible stories as being literal and historical and “true”), and don’t think that the dogmas derived from its ancient texts have any relevance in the public sphere or in their daily lives and struggles.
“Perhaps in previous centuries,” I hear these people saying, “the Bible and its dogmas might have had some impact on the lives of the average man and woman, but today those teachings are hardly a factor. We have much more pressing problems to worry about!”
But such arguments are akin to an ant or a wasp saying that it doesn’t believe in the power of the spores of the cordyceps fungus to infect ants and wasps, and that by ignoring the existence of such spores, it can safely ignore the horrific danger of those spores entering into ants and wasps and then growing aggressive mycelium tendrils inside the body of their host, turning the unfortunate victims into zombies while devouring their internal tissues and causing them to act in self-destructive and ultimately suicidal ways.1
Whether an ant knows about the existence of the parasitic cordyceps fungus, or knows that the spores come from a club-shaped fungal fruiting body that sprouts out of the head of its latest victim, or even acknowledges that those spores have any relevance in modern-day ant life — the cordyceps fungus does not care.
The fungus continues to reproduce and propagate its spores, whether or not its danger is recognized, and continues taking over its unfortunate victims and hollowing out their flesh while controlling them like puppets, making the hosts serve the invading fungus instead of pursuing their own organic needs.
The cordyceps is pitiless. In fact, it has no detectable mind or consciousness at all. It has but one purpose: its own survival and reproduction, and it uncaringly devours and discards the empty shells of its victims, without a thought and without mercy.
This description can be applied with chilling accuracy to the dogma contained in the “fruiting body” of texts gathered into the canonical books of the Bible. The historical record shows beyond doubt that the Bible can generate an absolutely destructive social construct that causes men and women to unconsciously act together in a way that gives this social construct a kind of life, and to act almost like an independent entity of parasitic and anti-human destructiveness — without even requiring any malicious intent on the part of the individual men and women who are giving this social construct its “life.”
That assertion may sound bizarre, but in most of our own personal experience, we have probably witnessed examples in which individual men and women have, simply by “buying into” a larger organization, given that larger “entity” a kind of life of its own, to the point that it seems to act with direction and a sort of “spirit” of its own, independent of the will of the individuals whose very assent and participation somehow imbue it with life.
I think, for example, of my own participation in the institution of the US Military Academy at West Point, where I served both as a cadet for four years before being commissioned as a lieutenant in the US Army Infantry in 1991, and later as an instructor in the Department of English and Philosophy from 2001 to 2003. West Point as an institution certainly has leaders of various rank directing it at the upper echelons, but even so the institution itself seems to have its own mysterious “spirit” and “will” which propels it, and which is somehow larger than the individuals from which it arises or even the buildings and physical terrain on which West Point is located.
If we were to analyze this idea more closely, we might conclude that the “spirit” of the place (or of the “institution” or even of the “entity” which is called “West Point”) arises from its founding documents, and its mission, and its ideals, and further from a kind of narrative (or even, to be more accurate, an entire “tangle” of narratives, interweaving, sometimes containing “narratives within narratives” of their own).
These all give rise to an almost supernatural spirit, in some cases — and I would point out that in the case of West Point, the narrative is built upon ideals of duty, honor and country but also that it involves the goddess Athena, whose helmet is on the West Point crest and on every West Point uniform, and on many of the buildings, and even on the top of every single dinner plate in the mess hall, where cadets eat their daily meals. The goddess Athena is the goddess of wisdom, and of war — but differing from Ares, who is also a war-god of ancient Greece in that Athena is the goddess of war for right and just causes, as opposed to war for the sake of killing, chaos and destruction.
Perhaps you have felt something like a “spirit” or a “personality” at a place of work or business, whether positive or negative, that certainly must arise in some way from the individuals within that organization, but which at the same time feels as though it has a life of its own and which grow out of its own “founding concept” and ideals and narratives — again, these can be either positive and uplifting, or the opposite.
When I say that the Bible generates a parasitic, nation-devouring “entity,” this concept is what I have in mind. I believe that the reason it generates a parasitic spirit is because the texts of the Bible have themselves been tampered with or altered, as if a parasite has jumped onto them in the same way that a cordyceps takes over its ant or wasp victim. There is evidence to support this conclusion, as we will see. And that tampering has resulted in the Bible being animated by the spirit of a god — who gives his name as YHWH or Yahweh — unlike any other god found in the myths and sacred traditions of humanity, and one giving rise to a destructive and parasitic spirit found nowhere else.
When I examine the contours of the corpus of texts which we refer to as “the Bible,” I see something very much akin to the outlines of the body of an unfortunate ant or wasp that was invaded and taken over by a cordyceps fungus long ago, its tissues devoured and replaced by the parasite, which after turning the insect into a hollowed-out zombie has pushed up a club-shaped fruiting body that ever since has been producing toxic spores and sending them out into the world.
These spores create what we might label a “cordyceps-of-Biblical-origin,” zombie-like and with only one purpose: to devour societies, continue to reproduce by spreading its spores, and ensure its ongoing survival. To best understand the very real danger that I am trying to describe using this cordyceps metaphor, it is useful to think of the cordyceps-of-Biblical-origin as the mystical entity generated from the participation of the individual men and women, and the narratives that they have “bought into,” rather than one residing within the individual participants themselves. In other words, the institutions that their participation creates — just as West Point as an entity or “spirit” is larger than the involvement of the cadets and officers and graduates who are associated with it.
To put it more bluntly, what I am saying is that the Bible texts (and the narratives they contain, and the deity they describe and hold up as holy) generate an entity called Judaism and Christianity — the differences between them being less important than their similarities, as I will argue below, which is why I will treat them as one general Bible-originated entity (the phrase “reality distortion field” could also be used for the effect that I am trying to describe). This entity-of-Biblical-origin acts like malevolent, parasitical, devouring cordyceps — even if the individual men and women whose participation in literalist Judaism or literalist Christianity do not themselves behave in a malevolent or parasitical way at all, in their individual lives. Their participation gives life to something larger than themselves, something which takes on a spirit and a will of its own — and that will and spirit are not positive or beneficial to human society, even if the individuals themselves are lovely, well-adjusted, kind-hearted, caring, and well-intentioned.
When I say a cordyceps-of-Biblical-origin, I mean that the larger entity acts like a cordyceps, rather than saying that the individual men and women who buy into this narrative necessarily act that way.
What we have come to call “the Bible” is best understood as a mutant, twisted, “genetically-engineered” set of myths, in which the original ancient stories have been hijacked in exactly the same way as the body of an insect that has been infected with the parasitic cordyceps fungus has been. We can still see the contours of the original host, just as we can still see the outline of the original victim even after the devouring fungus has done its work.
The body parts that once served the organic needs of the wasp or the ant are still perceptible or detectible or traceable in the victim, but those body parts have been rendered useless as the invading fibers of mycelium took over control and over-grew the host.
image: Wikimedia commons (link).
For the past sixteen years, I have been examining the world’s ancient myths and finding overwhelming evidence showing that they all bear a common, world-wide pattern. The evidence for some kind of commonality between the world’s myths has been perceived before, argued by various authors and scholars in fields of psychology and anthropology and comparative mythology — but what distinguishes the approach that I have been led to pursue (following the work of other thinkers in the past who have followed this same line of investigation) is the evidence that the world’s ancient myths are connected by a shared foundation of celestial metaphor, in which specific figures and characters in the stories — and the events described in those stories — can be connected to specific constellations in the night sky, including not only the important zodiac constellations but also constellations ranged along the great ring of the Milky Way itself, which crosses the zodiac almost perpendicularly: constellations such as Ophiuchus and Hercules and Pegasus, Perseus and Andromeda (among others).
This connection to the stars adds a very strong element of objective verifiability to the connection between the world’s ancient myths and the assertion that they are all built upon the same common foundation.
A few examples of these connections across cultures and across continents will be given below, showing beyond reasonable doubt that the world’s ancient myths share a common celestial foundation. These are only the tip of the iceberg of the evidence that can be provided to establish the common pattern: I have so far written books which taken together total over 5,000 pages (including several hundred illustrations and star charts), as well as publishing hundreds of videos and numerous online courses showing these undeniable connections between our world myths and the constellations.
These findings should be revolutionary to our understanding of the ancient myths — and to our understanding of humanity’s ancient history — but they should also be absolutely devastating to the functioning of the mental cordyceps fungus coming out of the books of the Bible and their narratives, as well as to the claims of exclusivity put forth by the god described in those texts.
The stories collected into what we call the Bible, whether from the so-called “Old Testament” or “New Testament,” stretching from the book of Genesis all the way to the Revelation (or Apocalypse) of John, can be positively shown to be based on the exact same foundation of celestial metaphor which forms the basis for ancient myths from other cultures around the world.
This demonstrable fact of a shared celestial foundation for all the ancient stories should unite humanity, and prevent the superhuman entities arising out of the Biblical scriptures from claiming the superiority and uniqueness of their myths. It should similarly prevent those arising “entities” emanating from the Bible (literalist Judaism and Christianity) from attacking and denigrating the gods and traditional teachings of other cultures.
None of the other ancient traditions of mankind seem to have generated cultural institutions or “entities” (entities like literalist Christianity or literalist Judaism) which proclaim the gods of other nations to be false (or even worse, evil demons and not gods at all).
To the contrary, we have several surviving texts from ancient authors which testify to the fact that the ancients from one culture generally recognized the gods and goddesses of other peoples to be the same gods and goddesses that they themselves worshipped, with similar attributes and aspects, just with different names. Our own names for the days of the week demonstrate the same principle, with days named Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday in English being named for the gods Tiu (or Tyr), Wotan (or Odin), and Thor — while in Spanish and French those same days receive the names of their corresponding ancient Roman gods: Mars, Mercury, and Jove (indicating an understanding that the thunder-gods Thor and Jove are different names for the same deity, and the same with Tyr and Mars, or Odin and Mercury).
But the Bible is different, and when it gets into a culture and when its mycelium tendrils start to take over a host, it causes the host to behave in a most erratic manner, akin to the erratic behavior of an ant or wasp infected with the spores of a cordyceps.
That’s because the Bible texts themselves show evidence of being hijacked and their message changed and altered, into a complete inversion of what the rest of the world’s myths promote.
Let’s see the evidence to support these assertions, showing first that the myths of the nations are based on a shared system of celestial metaphor, and second that the stories of the Bible are based on that same system. Then we will see how this understanding helps us respond to the grave situation we are facing, as individuals and as nations, at this present moment.
For the full article, please check out my new substack page, where I have posted the entire thing: it's a long one, but I feel it is very important. Also, the substack article has full footnotes with links to sources cited.
