Taoist Portal Deities

The old city area of George Town, and other older areas of Pe Nang, boast some of the most beautiful and illustrious Chinese Taoist temples outside of China proper. The Chinese settled Prince of Wales Island and the straits of Malacca at an early period for purposes of trade. At first they established temples to gods sacred to seafarers, but over time they also established clan temples devoted to ancestral worship. It is now the clan temples that are most prominent. They house the gods of the various clans, memorials to ancestors, as well as acting as social organisations and meeting halls for clan members. In the XIXth century there was often fierce or even violent competition between rival clans, sometimes leading to outbreaks of killing and riots. The sagacious British rulers of the isle had to sort it out. Today, the rivalry between clans can be seen in the efforts each has made to render their respective temples bigger and better and more beautiful than others. This has made these temples especially splendid, and in recent times there has been an effort to restore them to their original state. 

Some of the Chinese temples in George Town have Boodhist features, and some - including the central Temple of the Goddess of Mercy in Pitt Street - include Hindoo deities, but most are Toaist and house Taoist gods. One of the keys to understanding Chinese religiosity is that its dominant theme is the continuity of life and death. This often leads it to be characterised as "ancestor worship". Very often, illustrious and important ancestors become worshipped as gods. This is a Taoist extension of the institution of the boddhisatva in Mahayana Boodhism. A famous physician, for example, will be said to forgo eternal felicity (nirvana) after he dies in order to continue to assist the ailing among the living, and in this way he becomes a god of healing. His image is set up in temples and prayers are made to him for intercession. Famous ancestors of particular clans are elevated to the status of deity after the same manner. Prayers concern the prosperity of the clan, wealth, good fortune and social advancement. The dead do not move on. They continue to look over and assist the living. This is one of the main themes that the Chinese take from Mahayana Boodhism. It goes neatly with their "ancestor worship". 

One of the most outstanding features of the George Town clan temples are the portal doors. In many temples these large, heavy wooden doors are painted with images of protective deities who prevent evil spirits from entering the temples. The protective deities are two generals who lived in the Tang Dynasty. They once stood as guards for the emperor. Now, in the afterlife, they have sworn to continue in this role and so they are worshipped as guardian deities; their images adorn portals and doorways and other places where it is necessary to prevent the entry of malevolent influences. 

The photographs on this present page show examples of the protective portal guardians from several George Town clan temples, as well as some images of the interior spaces of the temples themselves. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Chinese Red - Temple Vermillion

The moment you take even a step into the Sino-Asiatic world - any part of east Asia with a significant Chinese population or under Chinese influence, or else into your nearest Chinatown - you enter a world coloured with red. It is very conspicuous. The Chinese adore the colour red. It features in all of their adornments, both domestic and public. But it is not just any colour red - it is a very particular type of red. Not fire engine red. Not Santa Claus red. Not Red Cross red. Not communist red, either. No. It is Chinese lantern red. Chinese temple red. It is a particular, unmistakeable shade of red usually identified as "vermillion" or else, in the past, as "cinnabar". See the colour square above for an example. 

There is no official definition of the exact shade but in the sample given above "vermillion" has the Hex value #E34234. Any shade of red near to it will pass as "Chinese red" as we will call it here. You will find it used in a thousand different ways. Red lanterns. Red ribbons. Red signs. Red seals. The present author has recently arrived in the Chinese section of George Town on the Prince of Wales Island and this "Chinese red" is on display everywhere. He recently ate at the "Red Garden Food Paradise" which is literally "Chinese red" from top to bottom - red tables, red chairs, red writing, red uniforms on the waiting staff. Everything in this distinctive "Chinese red". 

The standard explanation for the love of this colour among the Chinese is entirely unsatisfactory. We are told, unhelpfully, that the Chinese regard it as "auspicious" and that it brings "good luck." More detailed explanations are equally uninformative. We are told that it "symbolises fire" and this "represents spring" and the "direction south" and is therefore "lucky" or "auspicious" for this reason. Certainly, the Chinese are given to preoccupations of "luck", but surely something more lies behind the ubiqitous use of red, and this particular red. How do we explain that this red - this "vermillion" - is regarded as "auspicious", and also why it is so completely and comprehensively "auspicious" that the Chinese use it so extensively in all contexts great and small? What is it about this red, this particular red, that renders it so important to the Chinese? In the pictures below we see some examples of its many uses:

Tradition lacquerware

Temple entrance with lanterns 

Row of lanterns

Traditional seal (or "chop")

Chinese wedding 

Calligraphy

* * * 

The present author offers the following explanation for this characteristically Chinese phenomenon. It is not difficult to piece together the symbolism of this colour in the Chinese tradition:

Until the development of synthetic alternatives, this particular shade of red was traditionally prepared from 'cinnabar', which is to say from Mercury Sulphide (HgS). Cinnabar is a sulphide of mercury that, when ground into a powder, yields a strong, stable permanent red that can be used in paints and lacquers. Good, stable red colourings are relatively rare in nature, so this preparation - a by-product of mining and metallurgy - was especially valued. 

It was not exclusive to the Chinese, though. Cinnabar (the name comes from Greek but is probably Persian in origin) was known and used in other cultures as well.  We see it used as a red ink in medieval European manuscripts, for example, and as a paint used in the murals of Roman Pompei: 

But the Chinese adopted it as their own. The reason for this is that the Chinese tradition - and especially Taoism - is essentially alchemical and cinnabar, as a metallic essence, is a key ingredient in Taoist alchemy. In the Occident alchemy is, and has always been, a peripheral or 'fringe' tradition. In the Chinese spiritual order it is far more central and mainstream. The colour symbolism of 'Chinese red' and its associations with 'good luck' have a basis in and are to be explained by the significance of cinnabar in Chinese alchemy. 

The primary alchemical significance of cinnabar is this: during the mining of gold the miners might encounter 'veins' of red cinnabar (Mercury sulphide)in the bedrock. Gold and cinnabar are often found together. This is because both gold and mercury are heavy metals and such metals tend to be found in the same geological strata. (For the same reason, arsenic and other heavy metals are often found with gold.) 

Thus cinnabar is associated with gold and in the alchemical mythology of gold mining is often called 'Dragon's blood'. Dragons are believed to store and protect gold in their 'lairs' in the womb of the earth. When miners encounter 'veins' of blood-red pigments running through rocks near and around gold deposits they imagine them to be veins of Dragon's blood. This idea is suggested by the word 'vermillion' too, since it comes from the same root as the word 'worm', and a dragon is a 'worm' in many languages. 'Vermillion' means 'the colour of the dragon/worm'. 

The basic idea here is simple and straightforward. Vermillion - dragon's blood - is "lucky" because it signifies the proximity of gold. When a miner encounters cinnabar (dragon's blood) he is in luck, because he knows there is likely to be gold nearby. When he strikes dragon's blood he has struck gold. 

By extension, this colour is associated with gold and with the auric properties of gold in a general sense. Gold here carries its alchemical significance. It is not merely a precious metal valued in terms of wealth; it also signifies spiritual perfection. Accordingly, the Chinese surround themselves with things the colour of 'dragon's blood' because it points to the perfections of gold. Indeed, as we see in the case of the calligraphy illustrated above, we often find the colour gold with 'Chinese red'. Cinnabar/vermillion/dragon's blood goes with gold in Chinese colour symbolism. You can walk into any Chinese temple and see instances of this. 

By understanding these alchemical associations, and by appreciating the inherently alchemical character of the Chinese tradition, we are in a position to appreciate why this particular colour red is so highly regarded by the Chinese. To a large extent, of course, the traditional connections may be forgotten, and so people will merely regard 'Chinese red' as "lucky" in a superstitious way, but the reasons behind the superstition can still be discerned and understood. In effect, the colour signifies gold, as well as all the things that gold itself signifies, especially the spiritual perfection of the 'Golden Race' and such other parallels. It is remarkable that this metallurgic symbolism has persisted and become so pervasive in the Chinese order. Understanding the symbolism of 'Chinese red' is one of the keys to the entire Chinese tradition. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Sam Gerrans, Quranites & Petra

Those many people who, not unreasonably, suspect that something is profoundly amiss in contemporary Mahometanism often mistakenly turn to the Koran and try to identify odious passages that supposedly give license to suicide bombers, clitorectomies, beheadings and such other Islam-related atrocities that today populate our news feeds with appalling regularity. They will hold up the Koran, point to nefarious texts, and declare that “the problem starts here!” But in fact, as anyone with more than an outside and partisan view of the religion knows from bitter experience, the problem is not the Koran but rather the secondary sources of Islamic piety, the Hadith. These are the so-called ‘Traditions’ of the Prophet, and the thing that characterizes modern Islam – certainly since the rise of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia – is an uncritical adherence to a selected collation of such Traditions to the extent that the Koran is read through that lens. This fact is on full display in the approved Saudi translation of the Koran known as the Hillel edition. Every passage and verse of the Holy Book is explained by reference to one or other of the voluminous Hadith. The Wahhabis are, first and foremost, Hadithists. They elevate the supposed Traditions of Mahomet to the status of pseudo-Scripture and impose them upon the text and meaning of the Holy Writ. The justifications for suicide bombings, female genital mutilation, and so on, are not to be found in the Koran but rather in the Hadith, or else in the Koran as interpreted via the Hadith. The manifestly unhealthy state of contemporary Mahometanism has its roots there, and nowhere else. Accordingly, efforts to correct this state of affairs, and somehow to rouse the Saracens to sensible reform – some practical accommodation with the facts of modernity – must begin there and nowhere else as well.

This, in a fashion, is the agenda of Sam Gerrans. He has rightly gauged that the religion known as ‘Islam’ is primarily a construction of Traditions (Hadith) and is not a simple reflection of the Koran at all. He thus regards it as a “man-made” construction that has been imposed upon – and violates – the actual teachings of the Holy Koran. He is an enthusiast of the actual teachings of the Holy Koran, but not at all fond of the religion known as ‘Islam’. He devotes himself to separating these two things and to promoting a non-Islamic, non-Mahometan, reading of the Arabic Scripture. It is a unique point of view. He calls himself a ‘Quranite’. He has no doubt that the Koran is a divine revelation, but he insists that it has nothing to do with the man-made religion of those he calls Traditionalists, which is to say Hadithists. He dismisses the Hadith literature of the Muslims as hearsay and affords it no authority at all. He offers a reading of the Koran with the lens of the Hadith, and the whole edifice of the Mahometan faith, removed. To this end he has learnt Arabic, acquired a vast understanding of Koranic grammar, and has produced a copiously annotated Islam-free Koran available for free at his website Quranite.com. 

There are other Koran-only Muslims who have rejected the intruding authority of the Hadith literature, but Mr. Gerrans goes further. He does not count himself a “Muslim” at all. He is only a follower and devotee of the Koran - hence "Quranite". He insists that this has no relation to the historic Islamic religion. Unlike Koran-only Muslims, he has no interest in reforming or correcting Islam or in redefining or sanitizing the designation “Muslim”. He has severed the links entirely. He has cut the Gordian knot. He is a “Quranite” pure and simple. He is immersed in and marvels at the revelatory wonders of the Koran but comprehensively rejects anything and everything to do with the “man-made” religion called ‘Islam’.

It is a radical stance. And challenging, and also, as he does it, refreshing. If nothing else, Mr. Gerrens is a determinedly independent thinker. He has, at some point in his life, encountered the Holy Koran – or it has encountered him – and he has relentlessly pursued his own intuitions regarding that sacred text, and – most impressively – he has done so while holding the pervasive mind-set of the Mahometans at bay at every turn. How many others have been able to grapple with the Koran and keep it rigorously separate from the vast structures of institutional Islam? It is surely a feat of great intellectual discipline. One would imagine that if someone is so moved by the Koran that they become convinced it is a divine revelation this would naturally lead them towards some embrace of the Mahometan creed. Many converts to Islam attest that they came to the faith via the Holy Book. But not Mr. Gerrans. Instead, he was struck by how at odds the Mahometan religion is to the plain teachings of the Book. He was moved by the manifest inconsistencies between the practices of the Muslims and the teachings of the Book they purport to cherish. He was able to keep himself intellectually aloof from Islam and its traditions and to just become a devoted student of the Book. It is a noble independence. His work has the integrity of someone who has been able to think outside all the habits of Islamic civilization, and he does so while maintaining cogency and lucidity. Reading Mr. Gerrens’ work offers a new, fresh view of the Koran, throwing new light on a text that even the most occidental orientalist has habitually viewed through Mahometan eyes.

As an example, let us ask: what does the Koran say concerning non-believers and the propagation of the Koranic message? The institutions of jihad, Mr. Gerrens insists, are Hadith-based and not in the least Koranic. Rather, all the Koran proposes is this: that believers share the ‘Warning of the Last Days’ of the Koran with non-believers, urge them to embrace the One God, but then to leave judgment, reward and retribution to God, while authorizing self-defense if believers are subsequently attacked. This is all that a plain reading of the text allows, and nothing more. Other Mahometan institutions, Mr. Gerrens argues, have no Koranic warrant whatsoever. Are dogs unclean? This is entirely a concoction of the Hadith, he says, and has no basis in the Koran. The laws of Halal slaughter? Traditions, but not Koranic. An obsessive prohibition on alcohol? Not Koranic. Gerrens seeks to liberate the Holy Text from the distortions of the Hadith systematically and comprehensively. In an appendix to his translation of the Holy Writ he compares ‘Islam’ with the actual teachings of the Koran. The religion called ‘Islam’, he concludes, is not Koranic – it is essentially Hadithism. If one views the Koran without the distorting lens of the Hadith we arrive at something very different to any traditional form of the Mahometan faith.

This work of Mr. Gerrens deserves a much wider audience, both among Mahometans and others. It has impressive breadth for the work of a self-taught scholar. He engages with the Arabic text at depth and elucidates the finer meanings of the text with painstaking detail. It is the labour of decades, full of insight and intelligence. If nothing else, he offers a great resource to students of the Koran – the Koran seen through rigorously non-Islamic eyes. If one is looking for a fresh view of the Koranic Scripture, this is an excellent place to start. Let us suppose the Koran was not delivered into the cradle of nascent Islam as the traditional narratives would have it. What would it be like then? The‘Quranite’ exercise of Mr. Gerrens is like a view into parallel universe where the Koran exists and yet Islam does not. Given the state of contemporary Islam one can hardly be blamed for finding this position tempting. What if we throw out Islam but keep the Koran? It is a liberating thought.

It is to Mr. Gerran’s credit that his review of the Koran is not motivated by some shallow modernist agenda. There has been a welter of tawdry Korans of late – the feminist Koran, the ecologist Koran, the gay-gender-diversity-transexual Koran, and so on – that try to enlist VIth century Allah to XXIst century social causes. These are uniformly useless where they are not also ludicrous and cringeworthy. The Quranite endeavour is not in that category, thankfully. Mr. Gerran is not out to show how God is a leftist liberal. He seems intent on following his own methodology and on accepting the results whether they agree with modern sensitivities or not. His translation and commentary has the consistency and integrity that so many others lack.

As it happens, however, the present writer feels that the Gerrens strategy goes a little too far. The Hadith literature is, after all, a vast treasure-house in itself – an extensive folklore, deep and profound, a storehouse of traditional wisdom assembled over many centuries and bringing together diverse strands of oral culture. But it should never be allowed to overshadow the Koran. Would it not be possible to put the test of Koranic compatibility to the Hadith literature and to put the Koran first and the Hadith second-most where it belongs? Need we throw out the baby with the bathwater? The real problem, indeed, is not even the Hadith as Mr. Gerrens and other Koran-only advocates propose, but rather the way in which the Hadith literature is used to construct the Shariah and other Mahometan institutions. It need not be used in that way. The problem lies in elevating the Hadith to the status of pseudo-Scripture instead of recognizing it as an oral tradition of beautiful textures, colours and moods but of strictly limited authority. This writer, at least, celebrates the Hadith literature - acknowledging its many blemishes and obvious forgeries - but he understands that one ought never read the Koran through its lens. The relation between that literature and the Holy Book needs clarification. That is a task of outstanding urgency today. 

One aspect of Mr. Gerrens brave adventure into Koranic independence stands out for special comment. He is so keen to divorce the Koran from Mahometanism that he has embraced, somewhat recklessly, the daring archaeological thesis of Mr. Dan Gibson as advanced in the book Quranic Geography. Mr. Gibson has proposed the extraordinary notion that Mahomet and the early Muslims did not live in Mecca but rather in the Nabatean city of Petra. It is proposed that during civil wars in the first century of the Era of the Hijra the Arabs of the Hijaz region transplanted the geography of Mahometan piety from there to Mecca and thereafter Mecca became the place of Islamic pilgrimage and the holy city of the Musselmans. This is, needless to say, a very radical thesis indeed, and accordingly requires a wealth of compelling evidence to support it if it is to be entertained. Incautiously, Mr. Gerrens has embraced this Petra thesis as a whole and one finds reference to it throughout the footnotes and commentary of his Quranite Koran. Incautiously, because on the face of it the thesis of Mr. Gibson is a long stretch and by no account can it be considered even part way demonstrated. This is not to say it is necessarily wrong, but it is far from being proven. 

Gibson offers some enticing arguments for supposing that the Koran was first composed in Petra, not Mecca, but they are not altogether convincing. There is a tendency in secular scholarship nowadays to suggest – or at least to suspect – that perhaps the origins of the Koran did indeed lie westwards of Mecca in Syria and Nabatea. There is a body of (minority) scholarly thought that supposes that the roots of Koranic Arabic are Syrio/Aramaic. The Arabic of the Koran is strange and at odds with that typical of Mecca. And moreover, as many readers of the Koran have long noted, the geographical notices in the Koran do not seem to match Mecca and surrounds. Secular scholars are happy to consider the possibility that the Koran – or the core of the text – was originally composed somewhere other than around Mecca, most likely in the cradle of ancient Judeo-Christian Syria. Petra was once a sacred city of those Arabs. Mr. Gibson joins the dots and, citing various elements of the archaeology of Petra, argues that Petra is a better locus for the origins of the Koran than is Mecca. Mr. Gerrens, eager to distance the Koran from institutional and historic Islam has attached his non-Islamic reading of the Koran to Mr. Gibson’s proposal.

But to do so is surely premature and it adds an unecessary dimension of conjecture and archaelogical speculation to an otherwise rigorous translation of the Koran. It would have been enough for Mr. Gerrens to note that the geography of the Koran is ill-fitting with the known geography of Mecca and to leave it as an open question. Instead, he has settled on the Petra thesis and argues the case for Mr. Gibson from the signals in the Koranic text. This has the effect of removing the text from its familiar Mecca/Medina setting, and Mr. Gerrens obviously enjoys the way in which this loosens and liberates meanings and messages from the accepted and traditional contexts, but it also has the effect of making his translation seem crankish and eccentric in places. He has hitched a very fine labour of translation to a very dubious, or at least questionable, archaeology.  His work is far more solid than that of Mr. Gibson. 

It remains to be seen if the Quranite translation and Mr. Gerren's work attracts a following or whether it just floats around in cyberspace as yet another one-man adventure in speculative Islam. There are many aspects of his work that are unsatisfying. He rejects the classical distinction between early and late surahs (chapters) in the text, for instance, and some of his renderings of familiar vocabulary seems idiosyncratic. It is, after all, Sam Gerren's lifelong encounter with the Holy Koran that is offered to readers, his personal encounter, and so it carries his fingerprints and is blemished with his personal peculiarities. It is not objective and selfless. But it is courageous and bold, and courage and boldness are certainly qualities that the Koranic world - Islamic and otherwise - need in abundance in these very sorry times. Conventional Islam is in a terrible mess. Some bold thinking outside the strictures of traditional or rather Wahhabist Islam is long overdue. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

The Rehabilitation of Buddhism

Boodhism presents a challenge to many systemizations of religion. In many crucial respects it does not conform – or does not seem to conform - to the norms of most other religions. It stands apart. Most obviously, it does not posit a supreme deity as most traditions do and it appears to be indifferent to the metaphysical questions that so occupy other religious systems. Among religions, it is somewhat problematic. This has led certain parties who should know better to make extravagant and often silly statements about it. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for example, is on record as saying that Boodhism is not a religion at all – which is demonstrable and irksome nonsense but which exploits the fact that Boodhism is different in type to religions in general. Even such an authority as Rene Guenon, the French metaphysician – who, frankly, had a deeper knowledge of these matters than the present Dalai Lama - dismissed it as a “Hindoo heresy” and was reluctant to accord it any serious status as an integral tradition. More generally, for the Perennialist school of thought, guided throughout as it is by the work of Monsieur Guenon, Boodhism remains an uncomfortable fit in its model of orthodoxy which is based upon Platonic/Advaita Vedanta standards.

The present author (whose sympathies are somewhat consonant with the Perennialist school and are certainly Platonic) readily admits that he has had great trouble coming to terms with Boodhism, try as he may. To some measure this is because he has had far too many encounters with the half-baked sentimentalized post-modern pseudo-psychology that is passed off as Boodhism (with much encouragement from the Dalai Lama) in the spiritual wastelands of the West. But even during his many travels in India and Asia, with visits to temples and gompas and conversations with Lamas and Ahats, priests and laymen both, it has never really gelled. The only exception has been the Shin Boodist (Pureland) tradition of Japan, which does make sense to him, but only because it itself deviates from most of the norms of the wider Boodhist fold. He has read books, studied texts, seen movies – but the zest of Boodhism escapes him. Even on his current extended tour of India and Asia, made for the very purpose of becoming more familiar with the Indo-Asian traditions, he takes to Shaivism, Samkya, and other forms of Hindooism without trouble, but his encounters with Boodhism leave him unmoved. 

During his visit to the great Boodhist shrine, the Mahabodhi, at Boodha Gaya in the state of Bihar, however, he was able to witness certain rites that restored Boodhism to the forms of what he calls the alchimie primordiale. As related in previous posts, Boodha Gaya is a small town built around the restored temple that marks the site of the Boodha’s enlightenment. The ancient temple is huge and beautifully reconstructed in modern times, much to the credit of the lenient objectivity of the British Raj. In the rear of the temple court, in the west, stands the Bodhi Tree, the tree under which the Boodha, they say, sat and came to his spiritual realization. Around the temple complex are various sites marking the seven weeks that the Boodha then spent there following his enlightenment, those sites being points of devotion for the thousands of pilgrims who venture there every year. The tree, and under it, the diamond throne, are the very centre of the Boodhist world. It is believed that all Boodhas at all times were enlightened on that exact spot, and that, moreover, that spot was the first point of creation and will be the last point remaining at the end of time. 

The sacred place at which Boodhists press their forehead. Behind it the Bodhi Tree. 

This, in itself, rehabilitates Boodhism to some extent. Many authorities – and conspicuously the Dalai Lama – would have us believe that Boodhism is a system without a cosmology and without a fixed centre. For those of us accustomed to the Platonic/Advaita Vedanta model this supposed formlessness is both irritating and incomprehensible. A religion with no centre? No god? No creation? No start or finish? The Boodhist is urged to not fix upon a centre but to drift like a rudderless dinghy in an endless sea of vague nothing. How is that, one wants to know, a spirituality? 

But one discovers at Boodha Gaya that that is not really the case. Boodhism does have a centre. And a cosmology. And a point of start and finish. This was not explicit and concrete in the many centuries during which the Boodha Gaya temple complex was lost and forgotten in the forests of Bihar, but it is made clear again today. This author spent many hours over many days sitting in the shade of the Bodhi Tree watching the pilgrims come and go. Contrary to the psycho-babbling shapeless mush, the spiritual custard, served up by wide-eyed Boodhist Modernists in the West, and the evasive double-talk one often hears from Boodhists in the East, the very concrete religious mechanisms of Boodhism are perfectly apparent at Boodha Gaya, and they are pretty much identical to those of any other religion.

Some years ago the present author, in his academic guise, published an article on the symbolism of Islamic prayer. The prayer, he related, is a centering exercise that brings the devotee back to the spiritual centre that is, at once, the earth and the deepest reality of his or her inner state. This state, he argued, is Adamic, and he sketched the ways in which the prayer expresses the alchemical theme of autochthony. The full text of the article can be found here. In practice, the devotee – taking the place of Adam, formed of clay - stands in the Edenic sacred space marked by the prayer mat, the prayer mat traditionally decorated with a stylization of the Tree of Life, and proceeds to press his forehead to the point of sajda – annihilation – on the earth, the point where full submission transmutes the clay of his creation to the gold of spiritual fulfillment (the extreme malleability of gold being the operative metaphor for submission to the Divine Will.) Moreover, in a related article, the present author has added to this some observations concerning other peculiarities of the Islamic prayer ritual, specifically the way in which devotees arrange their feet in order to place pressure upon the liver, that organ having an important (but long forgotten) place in spiritual alchemy.

The Boodhist rites at Boodha Gaya conform to these practices exactly. The symbolism is the same. The author sat there watching these rites and suddenly recognized the ways in which the Boodhist spiritual economy is precisely consonant with that of Islam as he had sketched it on those articles. 

Pressing the forebead to the frame behind which is the Bodhi Tree. The frame and the surrounding walls are coated in a gold film. 

Boodhism, that is, is no different. There is, of course, a different arrangement of symbols, but the symbols themselves are the same, operate in the same way, and towards the same end. The state of fana – annihilation, submission – that is the objective of the Muslim prayer is exactly the same as this “Void” or “Nothingness” with which Boodhist double-speak so often confounds us. And what is the Bodhi Tree but the Tree of Life? And what is Boodha Gaya – the first and last – but Eden? What is it but the qibla of the Muslim, with the profound emptiness of the Kaaba in Mecca a symbol of that same Boodhist Void and Nothingess? 

But whereas the Muslim observes the prayer in the canonical manner at the appointed times each day, the Boodhist observes exactly the same in his pilgrimage to the Bodhi Tree, for there one can witness Boodhists in Islam-like prostration, turning to the Diamond Throne, falling to their knees and pressing their forehead to the earth in the gesture of sajda. Indeed, many of them adopt the same peculiar feet arrangement that is common in Islam and about which this author has written previously. 

Prostration towards the Bodhi Tree, along with the distinctive Muslim-like arrangement of the feet. 

It is a remarkable coincidence of practices and symbolisms. More than that, as the long procession of Boodhist devotees files past the place of the Throne under the Tree (the Tree in the Midst – to stress it again, precisely the same symbolism as the Tree in Eden) they turn and press their foreheads to a particular point on the fence that surrounds the sacred place. This point is framed by a rectangle that is much the same size as an Islamic prayer rug and which itself frames the sacred Tree behind it – so here we have an exact visual duplicate of the prayer rug with the Edenic Tree and that point, that centre, where the inner and outer worlds meet. 

Even more startling, the alchemical symbolism of that configuration of symbols is perfectly explicit because the surrounding fence, including the point where the Boodhist presses his forehead, has been painted with a film of pure gold paint. When he presses his forehead to the designated point the gold paint – peeling from the wear of years and the constant touching of the devoted – flakes off leaving a spot of pure gold on his forehead over his ‘third eye’. Devotees walk away from their devotions with a mark of gold on them – the Adamic gold of the autochthon on their forehead. In other words, these Boodhist rites exactly conform to those alchemical aspects of the Islamic rites – and so are united therein – that the present author explicated in his writings years ago. 

Needless to say, for someone looking for a solid foothold in the formless and featureless path of Boodhism, this came as a very welcome revelation. Boodhism is not so different after all. The view that it is different can largely be attributed to the intensely annoying habit of Boodhists to obfuscate and insist on exceptionalism. There are numerous commentators of a 'Perennialist' flavor, and other students of that disreputable shibboleth called 'comparative religion', who have attempted to explain how Boodhism 'approximates' other traditions. These efforts, usually highly theoretical, are not very helpful either. Instead, one needs to witness the living practices - read fewer books and see with eyes that can see what is plain to see. Boodhism isn't a centreless swamp of vapid nothingness after all. In its central rites, restored in Boodha Gaya just over a century ago, Boodhism is very obviously just another expression, a different configuration, of the alchimie primordiale, whatever Boodhist themselves might say.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

On Thomas McElwain

Dr. Thomas McElwain rarely contributes to religious debate these days, since he feels – with much justification – that we live in contentious times and public engagement merely invites rancor and hatred. It is a great pity, though, because he offers a unique voice and a fresh, unusual perspective. The present writer is drawn to Dr. McElwain’s work on several counts, but largely because he is a living embodiment of the overlap between certain strains of Protestant Christianity and the Mahometan faith. In previous posts (see here) this author has outlined his conviction that the Protestant Reformation was a type of Christian response, or realignment, to the pressing fact of Islam, most specifically – in historic terms – to the pressure of Turkish Islam upon central Europe in the 1500s. But the links between Protestantism and Mahometanism go deeper than historic mechanisms. They extend into early Christianity and, in principle, to the roots of the entire Abrahamic religious complex. This is the view, and even more the experience, of Dr. McElwain, who has devoted most of his adult life to the exploration and explication of exactly such roots.

On the surface he is an odd mix. He was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist in the southern states of the USA, with strong, unavoidable exposure to the Baptist tradition. Through both his grandparents, maternal and paternal, however, he was familiar with a stream of Unitarian Quakerism which, remarkably, was linked to the Alevi Soofi tradition of Asia Minor. His grandfathers wore turbans and revered the Twelve Imams of the Shia. Add to this a deep backwoods acquaintance with certain tribes of American Indians, their languages and their traditions, and the fact that he has lived for years in a remote snow-bound cottage in Finland converting Biblical and Koranic texts into rhymed verse and we can surely, in all fairness, state that Dr. Elwain has trod an unconventional road. He describes himself thus: “I’m sort of a Quaker hard-shell Baptist Sufi who has practiced Islam.” By his own account he is a follower of a certain Mr. Edward Elwall, who he counts as his intellectual mentor, a turban-clad English Unitarian Quaker who lived in the early 1700s and who belonged to a Turkish order of dervishes. Dr. McElwain is, in short, a southern American scholar in far north Scandanavia, a Biblical Christian with Shia Islamic Turko-Soofi affiliations.

This all makes him a fascinating character. Many would say eccentric – but that designation would allow his work and viewpoint to be too easily dismissed since it implies outlandish. In fact, Dr. McElwain is a thorough and very learned scholar whose teachings are founded in a deep study of languages, and at their centre is a simple but profound notion. He regards the Decalogue – the Mosaic Ten Commandments – to be the core of the Abrahamic tradition, and he reads all three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, through that singular lens. Not, however, by the usual legalistic and moral reading, but rather by an esoteric reading that emphasizes the fact that the Decalogue is the single-most direct revelation given by the Almighty in any of the vast literature of these three great traditions. Direct, that is, meaning unmediated by angels or other representatives. The Koran, for instance, is mediated by the Angel Jibreel. The Gospels come to us through the authority of the Apostles. But the Decalogue, the revelation of Sinai, is a direct and forthright encounter with the Divine where God speaks and reveals His law without mediation (except the Burning Bush.)

This scriptural fact, Dr. Elwain has argued throughout his career, has been lost in the messy overgrowth of religious tradition. He has devoted his studies to reasserting the centrality of the Decalogue both within the Abrahamic traditions and, importantly, between them. The Mahometan tradition, for instance, has, he argues, lost sight of the fact that it is Moses – the Prophet Moosa – who is the central character in the Koran, and that at every turn the Koran reiterates the Decalogue as the essence of Allah’s will. The present author – let it be admitted – has had the experience, years ago now, of scoffing at this assertion, only to be shaken out of his complacency when he checked and rechecked Koranic texts according to the McElwain reading and discovering that the good Doctor is absolutely correct. Thomas McElwain is a very astute and careful reader of both Bible and Koran – and pseudepigrapha as well – and his reading and cross-reading of those texts is always perspicacious and penetrating.

For reasons best known to himself, he has chosen to present much of his work in the form of rhyming verse; it is an idiosyncrasy, certainly, and yet, perhaps, it preserves his thought from the straight-jacket of academic stultifications. This can only be applauded.

Unfortunately, he occupies that terrible no-man’s-land between the warring ideologies of the Christians and the Saracens. As he himself relates, his work on the Koran alienates his Christian friends and his work on the Bible alienates his Muslim friends. We live, as he says, in an age of renewed polarization. Indeed, this new atmosphere of mutual conflict has, over just the last few years, infected the once ‘moderate’ and Europe-looking world of Turkish Islam and the plight of the Alevi Mahometans in Turkish society has worsened considerably in recent times as Shia/Sooni sectarianism once again rips open the Muslim Ummah. Dr. McElwain’s work of eucemenical cross-fertilization, that is, – always in the left-field - is even less welcome in the public sphere than in the past.

Readers will find his name prominent in a vicious on-line attack upon the Dawoodiyya Soofi Order, – that Order being a beautiful inspiration, structured around the McElwain vision, celebrating the Psalms of David in the (Turkish) Soofi mode. Certain figures have seen fit to throw as much mud at the Doctor as they can. It is not surprising that he has withdrawn from this environment of hostility. There is only a certain amount of misunderstanding, abuse and derision a soft-spoken, sincere and warm-hearted scholar can take.

Another point in favor of Dr. McElwain, from this present author’s point of view, is his insistence that the medieval Gospel of Barnabas – one of the strangest works of Christian apochrypha – is, when removed from the context of Christian/Mahometan polemic, a work of spiritual power. This author has been a student of the said ‘Muslim Gospel’ for several decades. Much of his academic work has concerned a careful investigation into its origins and provenance, as well as inter-textual studies of its relation to New Testament and other gospels. Beyond that, however, it is – though it is rarely acknowledged as such – a work of great spiritual merit. Its merit lies in its extraordinary synthesis of all three Abrahamic perspectives. In practice, it manages to offend Jews, Christians and Mahometans, but there is a higher viewpoint that goes beyond such narrow confessional particularisms and in which this fact becomes a shining virtue.

In contemporary academic circles, it seems only Dr McElwain (along with the present author) recognize this. Regardless of how the Gospel of Barnabas came into being – and the present author is firmly of the view that its roots and some sections of the extant text are of considerable antiquity – it offers a Judeo-Christian-Islamo synthesis that is both unique and profound. Whoever composed the Gospel of Barnabas, they transcended the limitations of age-old religious divisions and attained a higher synthetic viewpoint. Dr. McElwain has devoted his career to doing much the same. The author counts him, for this reason and others, as something of a kindred spirit.

Dr. McElwain's rhymed verse renderings and commentary on Biblical and Koranic texts can be found under the title 'Beloved and I'. His most academic work can be found in the volume entitled 'Islam in the Bible'.

The present author’s work on the Gospel of Barnabas can be found here.


Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Reclaiming the Swastika

The polar significance of the swastika is implied in this depiction since it stands as a separate symbol to sun and moon. It is clearly not a solar symbol here. 

An immediately confronting, or at least baffling, aspect of India, Hindoostan and many other parts of Asia - Japan, for instance - for those not accustomed to such lands is the ubiquitous display of the swastika in nearly all walks of life. The symbol is so completely stigmatized to Western eyes following its misappropriation by the National Socialists in Germany from the 1920s onwards, and has such odious associations, that to step into an environment where it is displayed as an auspicious omen on everything from sacred temples to taxi windscreens requires at least some mental adjustment. 

We live, of course, in an age of unwarranted misappropriations at every turn. Consider the recent history of the word “gay”, for instance; once one of the loveliest and most potent rhymes in English verse – “their eyes, their eyes, their ancient glistening eyes are gay” - the word has, regrettably, been hijacked by those who would turn sodomy into a fashionable lifestyle. In such a short time the word has been almost completely ruined. It takes a brave soul these days to attempt to reclaim it. The author notes that Bob Dylan – who has much to answer for on other counts – gave it a good try when he declared himself to be “strumming on my gay guitar…” on his Time Out of Mind long player, and this without the slightest accommodation to the word’s newly approved connotations, but otherwise “gay" is gone. Half of the best poetry in English prior to 1970 now requires mental adjustment. 

Outside of its Hindoo and Boodhist contexts, the swastika is almost beyond repair as well. Hitler (the worst military strategist in history and on the evidence of the newly republished Mein Kampf one of the worst writers too) and his cohort of thugs took one of the most noble of all symbols and dragged it into the pits of ignominy. One fears that it will never be rehabilitated in the Occidental world. This is a dreadful pity because it is one of the most ancient and also one of the most universal of symbols, and is not - or was not - by any means distinctly and exclusively Oriental. It once featured as much in ancient Western insignia as anywhere else, being known to the Celts, the Greeks, the Norse and many others besides. Hitler, with no more justification than a whim, decided it stood for some supposed "Aryan Race" and turned it to his evil ends.  It has now disappeared from Western symbology altogether, even to the point that the paternalistic do-gooders who run the European Union, in predictable fashion, have attempted to make its public display illegal throughout the entire European domain. 

In Japan, we read in recent accounts, authorities have decided to remove it from maps where it has long signified a Boodhist temple. It seems that European visitors are confused. When they see a swastika they think of goosestepping and zeig heils and imagine such locations on the map to be concentration camps. For the Japanese, quite rightly, it represents sanctity and piety. The symbol has been carried across Asia by the Boodhists; it is found throughout Japan in that context. 

Here in India, where the author resides at present, the symbol's Nazi associations are worlds away and the ancient symbology prevails. It is not subject to any post-Nazi sensitivities whatsoever. On a popular level it signifies all things auspicious and is often used for decorative purposes, but it has more precise meanings in such religious contexts as temples and shrines. It transcends the denominational divides of the sub-continent. Hindoos, Boodhists and Jains of all stamps, Vishnuites and Shaivites, all employ it such that it is a more or less general symbol for the holy and the sacred wherever one goes. No single group can claim it, although it is especially replete in Jain iconography. It appears in religious texts, in religious art and in religious ritual. It appears on walls as graffiti and it is inscribed on the foreheads of devotees. To be in India is to be immersed in a sea of swastikas. Although one can see some variations here and there, it is generally the same everywhere with remarkable consistency, namely the equal-armed 'fylfot' cross, or, more technically, the "tetraskelion", defined as a four-armed cross with perpendicular extensions, at 90° angles, radiating in the same direction, usually (but not always) clockwise.

The origins of the symbol are lost in time. Its use goes back to the neolithic era and beyond. It is pointless to speculate about when it was first devised and where. But there is some point in discussing why, and in discussing its meaning and significance. To say that it signifies "good luck" is, of course, completely unhelpful and is the sort of idiotic thing an anthropologist or sociologist or more likely a journalist might come out with. Clearly, it has deeper and more profound and exact meanings than that. But just what they are is subject to some debate and a wide range of views. Readers will discover a whole array of theories, some obviously more plausible than others. There are some outlandish and inventive proposals, along with some that seem more sensible and likely. We can be sure that the symbol had no attachment to "Aryan purity" and the like at its inception, and it certainly carried a more exact meaning than just "good luck", but what? 

On the whole the meaning of the symbol has two possible significances which are themselves not unrelated. The only question is which is earlier and more integral.The possibilities are that (a) it is a solar symbol, and refers to the cycle of the sun and therefore to the turn of the four seasons, or (b) it is a polar symbol and refers to the turn of the constellations (and especially the Great Bear, or the Big Dipper) around the north pole. For many reasons (upon which there is insufficent space to elaborate in detail here) the present author strongly favours the polar signification. Polar symbolism precedes solar symbolism. Rather than representing the sun, the equinoxes and the solstices - the fourfold nature and relevance of which is not in dispute - it represents, in its primal signification, the pole and the turn of the constellations around it. It is, that is to say, Hyperborean; in fact, the Hyperborean symbol par excellence. It becomes a solar symbol by extension and in a later phase of religious symbolism. 

The shift from polar alignments to solar alignments is one of the great movements in early human spiritual consciousness but is not widely understood. Many solar symbols were originally of polar significance. For instance, the common astrological glyph for the Sun originally (and obviously when you look at it) signified the pole and the artic circle, thus:

At a certain point, however, the polar association was lost and the newer solar meaning came to prevail. This has led to a great deal of confusion in religious symbolism and iconography, confusion that is exactly characteristic of what the Hindoos describe as the decline of the Ages or Yugas.

A recent post by the present author on the Hyperborean nature of the cult of Shiva in Benares deals with related matters and makes some relevant points about the symbolism of the swastika in relation to that of the lingam. Please find a link to it here. 

* * * 

The present author is an unashamed enthusiast for the swastika and actively campaigns to have it reclaimed from its Nazi associations. (He feels the same about recaiming the word 'gay' from cultural Marxism.) One fears, however, that such a reclamation might be beyond the guilt-ridden and unimaginative Europeans of our time. 

Readers can find below a collection of photographs of this noble symbol the author has taken at various locations around India during his recent travels:

The swastika is often found combined with the primordial syllable, AUM, pointing to its great antiquity and its primordiality. Such associations point to its polar significance and count against a solar meaning in the first instance.  

In this interesting example from a cafe in Benares we see the corresponding symbolism of the swastika with the magic square (Kamea).

The Jain ghat in Benares which features a huge red swastika facing out into the Ganges River. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black