The Gospel of Barnabas

From time to time readers will encounter tantalising stories in the media and these days its 'social' adjuncts of a long lost gospel that has been recently rediscovered that proves the Mahometan version of the life of Christ. Great claims are made for this gospel and it is usually said to be in the possession of museum authorities in Turkey. The media story keeps reappearing. The present author must have seen it four or five times now over a period of twenty years. It is an item of sensationalist drivel that bored journalists recycle on a regular basis. 

The document in question - although it is often not named in these stories - is the medieval Gospel of Barnabas. It is surely one of the strangest of texts from the occidental Middle Ages. It has long been an object of fascination because it does indeed present a Mahometan or at least Islaamified version of the life of Christ. It is clearly a work of the Middle Ages, although there remains the possibility that it contains material from earlier periods - even from the early Christian era.

Over the years it has been the centrepiece of the present author's academic work. Unfortunately, it has been - and continues to be - entangled in the febrile inter-religious disputes of Christian and Mahometan apologists. For their part, the Musulmans claim that it is the long lost Injeel of the Prophet Isa. The Christians, on the other hand, want to dismiss it as a worthless or even a "vile" forgery. The present writer is firmly of the view that it is best to consider it separate from this atmosphere of polemic.

You can find some work on this fascinating and mysterious text here:

http://medievalbarnabas.wix.com/fra-marinos-treasure

Here is a page from the said document. As readers can observe it contains Arabic margin notes. These have never been explained. In fact, we do not know who wrote this gospel text, when, where or why. After twenty or so years of research this writer believes he has a few clues but much of the mystery remains. Cross-posts of a few items on this mysterious Gospel of Barnabas will be placed here in the near future.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Flying Carpet - Vasnetsov

Without dwelling on contemporary political events in the Ukraine, it is very clear that the Euro-American/Russian divide has been renewed in what amounts to a neo-Cold War. The present writer is of the view that this is a situation largely contrived and orchestrated by NATO and concerns geopolitical squabbles over resources and military domination. It certainly has little to do with "freedom" and "liberty" and other noble principles. On the whole, and in view of these events, he grow more sympathetic to the Russians, and Russian civilisation, by the day, and this has led him to delve further into the extraordinary artistic legacy of the Russian people. (Actually, it is not only an artistic legacy, but a spiritual tradition. Russia is not merely a country. It is a civilisation - a Christian civilisation - of extraordinary beauty and depth.) 

Accordingly, his explorations of Russian art lead him to uncover more and more treasures. Most recently, he discovered the works of Viktor Vasnetsov, born 1848, died 1926. He is counted as a Russian "romantic" who specialised in depictions of Russian mythology and folklore, but he was also an icon painter who produced profound Christian works including great frescoes in Russian cathedrals. He should be counted among 'orientalists' (Russia is 'east', after all) because there is a distinctly oriental ambience and oriental motifs in many of his works. For example, there are his paintings that feature that most oriental of motifs, the magic carpet. Perhaps his most famous painting is a picture of the Russian folk hero Ivan Tsarevich on a quest for the Firebird of Slavic legend on a flying carpet. Here:

Ivan Tsarevich is no one in particular. (The flying carpet is often associated with the more concrete hero, Baba Yaga.) Ivan Tsarevich is just a ubiquitous and pervasive hero in Russian legend. The Firebird is a feature of Slavic mythic adventures where, typically, the hero must seek out the bird having first discovered one of its feathers. Vasnetsov's painting of the quest is a bold, sweeping image that brings these two features of Russian folklore together through the oriental vehicle of the flying rug. The painting is often entitled Samolet (ie. air craft). You will note the crescent moon in the clouds.

The flying carpet is a motif the artist used several times. Here is another instance, more gentle and less spectacular and fantastic:

The magic or flying carpet, of course, alludes to the prayer rug - a device for spiritual flight, the ascent of the spirit. In this sense it is related to the symbolism of the cloud. Here is another painting - this time on a familiar religious theme, Madonna and Child (Bogomater) - by Viktor Vasnetsov:

There is much more to be said about this parallel. The flying carpet and the hovering cloud are closely related symbols. They recur in oriental myth and folklore - the Arabian Nights, for instance - often. Hopefully, this can be explored in future posts along with other works by this neglected artist. Vasnetsov is a wonderful artist with a rich folio of paintings and drawings covering both mythological topics and Christian iconography (in the Orthodox tradition.) 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Aleister Crowley and the Occult Orient

Crowley of Arabia. 

In the recent annals of Western occultism one figure looms large: Mr. Aleister Crowley. There is no need to rehearse his credentials here; of all the figures who embraced the occult revival of the late 19th C. he, more than anyone else, took it by the horns and pursued it with a life-long dedication. He was endowed with both a small fortune to spend and a very considerable and creative intellect to apply to the task. Raised by Plymouth Brethren Puritans, he devoted his adult life to the tireless exploration of occultism and magic, both white and black, and at length created his own religious edifice - "Crowleyanity" as some have called it - the cultus of Thelema, advanced by several organisations of Mr. Crowley's creation such as the O.T.O. (Order of the Templars of the Orient) and the A.A. (The Silver Star). Today, Mr. Crowley retains a wide and growing following having long been a darling of the counter-culture who were impressed by his libertine bisexuality, his endless indulgence of drugs and his personal war on Christian morality.

All of this is well documented. What is less well understood and has received less commentary is the extent to which Mr. Crowley falls into the category of 'Orientalist' and, indeed, the extent to which the so-called 'occultism' to which he was dedicated was and is an essentially orientalist enterprise. That is to say, it consists of appropriations from the real or imagined 'East'. Especially the imagined. In the case of Crowley his orientalism is easy to demonstrate. While ostensibly an exponent of the 'Western' path and a Master of occidental magic, the whole content of his doctrine is oriental in origin. For a start, the central structure of his teaching is an adaptation of the Hebrew Cabala based, largely, upon the alphanumerics of the Hebrew alphabet. To this he has added elements of yoga (via his teacher, a Mr. Allan Bennet) and a liberal dose of Taoism (very largely via the I Ching). This is all then incorporated into the distinctly quasi-Mahometan Masonic structures of the O.T.O. (Knights of the Orient) with, above all, a supposed sacred text called the Book of the Law which was written by this Mr. Crowley in Cairo in 1904. The 'Book of the Law' is nothing less than a pastiche of the Koran dressed up in Egypto-magickal clothing. Endlessly restless, Crowley travelled to India, journeyed across China and toured North Africa and the French Levant in search of his own variety of enlightenment. His journeys to Russia and his work as a British spy are less well documented.

Crowley dressed as a Chinaman. 

Crowley trekking in the Himalayas. 

It is very noticeable that there is little or no truly occidental content in this mixture. Like other Victorians, Crowley looked eastwards. In particular, when he needed a model for his system he looked to Mahometan models and to Soofism. Very few sources give full credit to this fact. The clues are all there, though, in books such as Mr. Israel Regardie's The Eye in the Triangle. Mr. Regardie notes that Crowley had immersed himself in the study of Mahometanism and had learnt to recite portions of the Koran just prior to the "revelations" of 1904. According to Crowley's own account (he is notoriously unreliable in accounts regarding himself, it should be observed) he and his poor wife Rose were living in Cairo when he, Crowley, was contacted by a "praeta-human intelligence" named "Aiwass" who appointed him Holy Prophet of the New Aeon and dictated the Book of the Law to him. That this is a carbon-copy of the story of the Prophet Mahomet having the new law of the Koran dictated to him by the Angel Jibreel is all too obvious. It is remarkable that more people have not commented upon it. In setting himself up as "Prophet" Mr. Crowley has modelled himself upon the Prophet of Islaam. It is a very obvious appropriation. There are stylistic and other parallels too. Those the new prophet deputised in his new religion he named "Caliph", among other strongly Mahometan gestures. While he was a vicious and embittered enemy of Christianity, Aleister Crowley wrote approvingly of many aspects of Islaam and adopted the prophetic structures of Islaam in his self-made quest for illumination.

The debt of Crowley to Masonic-Soofism and to Mahotemism more generally deserves to be the subject of a major study, or at least it deserves to be among the issues considered in a broader study of the "occult" as an orientalist phenomenon. We might start, for example, by noting that the magickal cypher ABRAHADABRA - one of the keys to Mr. Crowley's cryptic Cabala - is, like most "barbarous names" and "magical formulae" - just a European corruption of Arabic words. This is true of European occultism in general. It is a fringe phenomenon - a dabbling with the Other. (The Occult-as-Other and, conversely, the Other-as-Occult.) Aleister (his real name was Alexander) Crowley is a particularly transparent case. He was indeed a very English and very Victorian adventurer who became fascinated by the Orient, but in his case by the Orient as source of the mysterious, the occult (which is to say 'hidden') and, by extension, as source of the Sinister. It is a very persistent and very deep theme in European culture - Islaam as the Hidden, the Dark. Crowley devoted his life - brutish and coarse and grossly self-indulgent as it was - to exploring exactly that. It makes him one of the most interesting and colourful characters in this genre and a worthy focus for any study of the general topic, Mahometanism as the source of the occult.

Amongst other things the case of Crowley underlines what we might call the arena of shadows on the borderlands between European and Mahometan (Occidental and Oriental) civilisation. Think of the Occident and the Orient as being like tectonic plates. Where they meet there are fissures, eruptions, tremors, earthquakes. What is called the "occult" in the West is, very often, if not usually, a manifestation of those borderlands. The present writer proposes this as a general thesis. No consideration of Islaamic/West relations can be complete without some address to this borderland of shadows. There are deep and dark forces in that borderland. It is impossible - and very unwise - to consider Islaam/West relations without taking such forces into account. Arguably, as the two civilisations intermingle in the contemporary blending of 'globalism' and the supposedly 'post-colonial era' many of such forces are now loosed upon the world.


Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black