Who was Nimrod?

If you are like me, you may have been baffled to see long stories posted on social media by members of fringe Christian groups (and some atheists) claiming that Nimrod was the founder of most ancient pagan worship, that he was the husband of Semiramis, the father of Tammuz, and the inspiration for many of the beliefs and practices of mainstream Christian churches.

Nimrod appears in the Bible in three places. First, in Genesis 10:8-12 “Cush became the father of Nimrod; he was the first on earth to become a mighty warrior. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; therefore it is said, ‘Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.’ The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar. From that land he went into Assyria, and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-ir, Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah, which is the great city.” Cush was the son of Ham, one of the sons of Noah.

This is from the RSV, probably the most literal of the reliable modern translations. But the Hebrew can just as well and probably better be read “From that land came Ashur, who built Nineveh, Rehoboth-ir..” etc. Ashur was one of the sons of Shem. The same word is used for both the person and the empire. Ashur is also the name of one of the gods of Assyria.

Nimrod is also mentioned In Micah 5:6 “They will shepherd the land of Assyria with the sword, the land of Nimrod at its entrances.” This does not mean two different places. It is the typical parallelism of Hebrew poetry. Here Assyria and the land of Nimrod are the same place.

And in 1 Chronicles 1:10 “Cush fathered Nimrod; he began to be a mighty one on the earth.”

In a social media discussion I was told that the word “mighty” (gibbor in Hebrew) in the verses from Genesis and Chronicles actually means despot, so Nimrod was a mighty despot and hunter of those who belonged to the Lord. While the word gibbor can mean despot or tyrant, it more usually simply means mighty, as when applied to God in Deuteronomy 10:17, Psalm 24:8, and Isaiah 9:6. Neither Genesis nor either of the two other Biblical references and surrounding context give any basis for claiming Nimrod was a hunter of those who belong to the Lord.

Another Facebook conversation claimed that “before the Lord” means “in rebellion against the Lord.” But this is not the plain meaning of the text. Exodus 29 repeatedly speaks of worship and offerings before the Lord. Deuteronomy 16:11 instructs the Jews to rejoice before the Lord. 1 Samuel 2:18 tells us Samuel ministered before the Lord. In 2 Samuel 6:14 David danced before the Lord. Psalm 37:7 tells us to be silent before the Lord.

For people whose basis of belief is sola scriptura, the most that can be said of Nimrod is that he was the son of Cush, the great-grandson of Noah, that he was a mighty hunter, and that he later became associated with the land of Assyria.

Like Enoch and Melchizedek, Nimrod seems to be important, but the Bible doesn’t give much information about him. As with the former two, this has led to speculation and the development of further legends, none of which can be substantiated by reference to other historical records.

The Jewish historian Josephus records some Jewish legends about Nimrod. In book 1, chapter 4 sections 2 and 3 of his Antiquities of the Jews he wrote:

“It was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it was through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach! and that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers!

… When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion.”

In this story, Nimrod built a great tower to the heavens because he was determined to avenge the destruction of humanity in the flood.

But there are other traditions. For example, the Targum Yerushalmi, also known as the Targum Pseudo-jonathan, a Judean interpretation and explanation of the Torah, reports the belief that Nimrod left Shinar and moved to Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, refusing to take part in building the tower of Babel, and that God rewarded him for his faithfulness by giving him four cities in Assyria. Ephrem the Syrian, a Christian theologian and hymn-writer who lived from 306AD to 373AD, likewise recorded that Nimrod was mighty for the Lord, and opposed the rash actions of those who built the tower.

None of these older sources, nor any other historical document before 1850, claim any association between Nimrod, Semiramis and Tammuz. Who then were Semiramis and Tammuz?

Semiramis is a legendary figure in Assyrian and Babylonian history. She was the daughter of fish goddess Derkato and a human male. Abandoned by her mother at birth, she was found by the royal shepherd and brought up in the palace. She married Onnes, a general under king Ninus, and came to the king’s attention as a military advisor. After she proved herself not only as a strategist but a fighter, leading a successful raid which led to the capture of the city of Bactra, Ninus fell in love with her and married her following the death of Onnes by suicide. Ninus and Semiramis had a son called Ninyas. When Ninus died, Semiramis ruled in Ninyas’s place for forty-two years, during which time she conquered much of the Middle East, extending the boundaries of the empire as far as India, and restoring the city of Babylon. There is no evidence for any of this in any historical records or in the comprehensive king lists of Assyria or Babylon.

It is possible the character of Semiramis is based on that of queen Shammuramat, wife of King Shamshi-Adad V, who ruled between 824BC and 811BC. The legendary accounts of Semiramis are placed much earlier than this, and as myths and legends usually are, not at any specific time. It is possible that when Shamshi-Adad V died, Shammuramat ruled as regent until their son Adad-nirari III came of age. Later writers and traditions ascribed many military campaigns and building projects to her, but the only reference to her that is close in time to this period is a stele (obelisk like monument) she had built in the city of Ashur, which reads: “Stele of Shammuramat, queen of Shamshi-Adad, King of the Universe, King of Assyria, Mother of Adad Nirari, King of the Universe, King of Assyria, Daughter-in-Law of Shalmaneser, King of the Four Regions of the World.” Regent or not, Shammuramat was a woman of considerable skill and power.

The Bible records that Nimrod was Noah’s great-grandson. Using Ussher’s chronology and reconstructing from genealogies, it is possible he could have been alive when Abraham was born in about 2,000BC. He could not have been alive in 811BC. There is no possible link between Nimrod and the historical Shammuramat.

Tammuz was a minor early Mesopotamian god of sheep and herding. His father Enki was one of the great gods of Sumeria. His mother Duttur was symbolic of ewes. Later Tammuz was absorbed into the Assyrian pantheon, and possibly from there to Babylon, though there are very few references to Tammuz in the Babylonian period. Over this time, his role changed from pastoral (herding) to agricultural (cropping). Historians believed that In Assyria he was a dying and rising god, but this view is no longer held. It seems more likely he was like Persephone in Greek mythology, not dying, but spending half the year in the underworld, and the other half on Earth or in the heavens.

The only record of Tammuz in the Bible is Ezekiel 8:14. In a vision, along with many other sins and abominations, Ezekiel was shown saw women sitting in the North entrance to the temple, weeping for Tammuz. This was sympathetic magic. The women were not weeping as in mourning, but on his behalf. It was believed his tears watered the crops, so their sharing in his weeping would make the grain more productive.

The temple no longer existed at this time. Ezekiel, who was born into a priestly family and was familiar with the temple, was taken to Babylon at the fall of Jerusalem in 597BC when he was about twenty-five, and died there in his early fifties. All of the book of Ezekiel was written in Babylon during the Exile. Ezekiel’s purpose is to explain that the temple was destroyed and Israel (actually the Southern tribes, the Northern tribes having been dispersed by the Assyrian Empire some one hundred and twenty years earlier) was taken into exile because of their failure to keep the law, and especially because of their defiling of the temple with idols and the worship of other gods.

It is worth remembering that Ezekiel does not say that he ever actually saw Tammuz being worshipped in the temple, nor is there any evidence that the worship of Tammuz was common in Israel. It is very likely, on the other hand, that some of the exiles adopted some of the religious practices of the society in which they now lived. This needed to stop before God would return them through the Northern entrance to Jerusalem and allow the temple to be rebuilt. There is no evidence that Tammuz or any other of the old Assyrian or Babylonian gods was ever worshipped, or even remembered in Israel after the return from exile.

None of this has anything to do with Nimrod or Semiramis. There is no connection in any ancient literature between Nimrod, Semiramis and Tammuz. Nimrod was not married to Semiramis, Tammuz was not Semiramis’s son. Where did this idea come from? The answer is a pamphlet called “The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife,” written by a Free Church of Scotland minister called Alexander Hislop. This pamphlet was published in 1853, and expanded into a book in 1858. It has been in print since, going through several new editions.

Before going on, let’s note that mainstream Christian worship and belief does have some things in common with some pagan cults.

We offer worship to a god we believe is personal, and who takes an interest in us. So did pagans. We sing songs of praise. So did pagans. We participate in a memorial meal which brings us into God’s closer presence. So did some pagans. We use images to remind us of the love and justice and generosity of God. So did pagans. We read from sacred texts inspired by God to lead us to Him. So did pagans. We use water for baptism. Some pagans also used water to symbolise the washing away of sin. These are simply universal aspects of all human worship. They are not in themselves pagan, and there is no reason Christians should stop reading from the Bible or gathering for worship or singing just because pagans did.

Hislop claims are much stronger than this. For example, he claims the reason Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25th is that this was the birthday of Tammuz. Leaders of the Catholic Church know this, he claims, and celebrate Christmas on this date because they know their religion is a continuation of the Babylonian cult of Nimrod, Semiramis and Tammuz (despite the fact there is no evidence any such cult ever existed). In the same way he claims Christians honouring Mary are actually worshipping Semiramis. Asking our friends in the great crowd of witnesses to pray for us, belief in the real presence of Jesus in Holy Communion, the baptism of children, and the celebration of Easter, are all also, he claims, evidence that the Catholic faith, and the faith of other churches including the Orthodox churches, and most mainstream protestant denominations, is actually worship of Nimrod, Semiramis and Tammuz.

Hislop claims that all major pre-Christian pagan religions were adoptions or transformations of his Babylonian/Nimrod religion. How did he get this idea? The simple fact is, he made it up. No archaeologist or historian believes Hislop’s pamphlet is any more than a collection of disconnected fantasies.

Nimrod does not appear in any of the comprehensive king lists of Assyria or Babylonia, but this is no hindrance to Hislop. He simply asserts that the mythical tale of Semiramis and Ninus is history, and that Ninus was Nimrod. Ninyas was, he claims, is another name for Tammuz. This makes as much sense and has as much basis as claiming Robbie Burns is the same person as Robin Hood, and Eddie van Halen is the same person as Einstein.

How does he get a birthdate of 25th December for Ninyas/Tammuz? Hislop claimed that Adonis, Apollo, Bacchus, Cupid, Dagon, Hercules, Lucifer, Mars, Merodach, Mithra, Moloch, Narcissus, Ninus, Odin, Orion, Osiris, Pluto, Saturn, Typhon, Vulcan, and Zoroaster, were all the same person, and that stories of all these other monsters, gods, and heroes were in reality stories about Nimrod. Since Semiramis was the wife of Ninus, and Ninus is Nimrod and all the other aforementioned deities, then Aphrodite, Artemis, Astarte, Aurora, Bellona, Ceres, Diana, Ishtar, Iris, Juno, Mylitta, Proserpine, Rhea, Venus, and Vesta, were all really Semiramis, all really the wife of Nimrod, and all the stories about them are stories about Nimrod’s wife.

Working on from this point, Hislop argues that Egyptian goddess Isis (whom he insists is Semiramis) and her husband Osiris (whom he tells us is Nimrod) had a son Horus (whom he tells us is Tammuz), and that Horus was born on December 25th.

These Egyptian gods are mentioned in the Pyramid texts from 2350BC on. Shammuramat, the likely basis of the legends of Semiramis, did not live until 1500 years later, making it impossible that she could be the inspiration for the legends of Isis. That would cause most people to have second thoughts. But Hislop ploughs on regardless.

Hislop relies for his belief that Horus (Tammuz) was born on December 25th on Egyptian legends that the son of Isis was born about the time of the Winter solstice. Since all the other gods and monsters he mentions are all Nimrod, and therefore they are all married to Semiramis, and therefore all the firstborn sons ascribed to them are actually Tammuz, all of them were also born on December 25th. Hislop comes to this conclusion despite the fact that not a single legend concerning any of them names that date as their birth date.

In addition and obviously, about the time of the Winter solstice (December 22nd) is not necessarily the 25th of December. Egyptians celebrated the birth of Horus in Spring, not Winter.

Hislop relied on a book called The Ancient Egyptians by Sir J Gardner Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a careful and accurate collector of facts and stories. His work is still held in high regard, and he is considered the founder of modern Egyptology. Wilkinson records that the son of Isis who was born about the time of the winter solstice was not Horus, her older son, but a younger son, Harpocrates. Wilkinson may not be correct here. In some versions of the story, Harpocrates is the childhood name of Horus. But Hislop did not even quote Wilkinson correctly, instead simply grabbing what he thought supported his views, leaving anything out that did not.

Easter, claims Hislop, is the celebration of Semiramis as a fertility goddess (which she was not) under the name of Ishtar (no one except he has ever claimed any connection between the two). He claims Ishtar was pronounced Easter (it wasn’t), and therefore the Christian celebration of Easter is really about her, which means it is really about Nimrod, Semiramis and Tammuz.

I have written about the date and name of Easter here: https://qohel.com/2017/04/17/easter-ishtar-and-eostarum/

And the date of Christmas here: https://qohel.com/…/04/03/christmas-yule-and-sol-invictus/

Names and dates are not the only instances where Hislop misquotes Wilkinson and other sources, or quotes selectively and deceptively.

For example, Hislop claimed one of the proofs that Catholicism was a continuation of the Babylonian mystery religion of Nimrod, Semiramis and Tammuz is that Catholic churches use round wafers in Communion. Relying on his Isis equals Semiramis theory, he quotes Wilkinson’s The Ancient Egyptians, noting that Egyptians used round cakes on their altars, and claims that since all these stories are really stories about Nimrod, they must have been used in Babylonian mystery religion. That is, the religion he made up, for which no evidence exists. He leaves out the surrounding sentences in Wilkinson’s book, which note the Egyptians also used square and folded cakes, and cakes in the shape of animals.

The real reason many churches use round wafers is twofold. First, it is a reference back to the manna provided by God in wilderness: “When the dew that lay had gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, like hoarfrost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, “What is this?” For they knew not what it was. And Moses said unto them, “This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.” Exodus 16:14-15. Holy Communion is the new manna, the new bread from heaven. Secondly, the bread used by Jesus at the Last Supper was the unleavened bread of Passover. This is a flat round bread like naan or pita. The Apostles continued to use round flat bread so that they were following Jesus’ instructions as closely as possible.

Paganism all began with Nimrod! No, it didn’t. There are a few ambiguous lines about Nimrod in the Bible, and some contradictory later Jewish traditions, none of which associate him with Assyrian or Babylonian deities. Nimrod appears nowhere in the lists of ancient kings. No ancient texts mention any link between Nimrod and Semiramis, and Semiramis and Tammuz. No text anywhere mentions this until Hislop’s’ pamphlet in 1853.

The Babylonian mystery religion of Nimrod, Semiramis and Tammuz never existed. It was entirely the invention of a bored Scottish Presbyterian with no knowledge of ancient Middle eastern history or languages.

Every year we seem to get the same bleating on Facebook about silly Christians celebrating Christmas. It usually goes something like this:

“Well, it was a pagan festival, something to do with the sun, and the Christians pinched it to try to make their religion more popular.”

This is one of those things people just ‘know’. But like many things everyone ‘just knew’ at one time (eg, the Sun goes round the earth, older women with moles are witches), we now know this to be false.

The belief that Christians appropriated a pagan festival and made it into Christmas started with Paul Jablonski, a German historian writing in the 17th century.

A radical protestant, Jablonski wanted to show that the Catholic faith was unreliable because it had almost immediately started absorbing pagan beliefs and customs. Jablonski believed, and wanted to prove, that ‘Sola Scriptura’ (Scripture alone) was the only safe foundation for faith.

In the Julian calendar, created in 45 B.C. the winter solstice fell on December 25th. It seemed obvious to Jablonski that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one.

He was wrong.

In fact the feast of Sol Invictus, or the invincible sun, was instituted by the emperor Aurelian in 274AD. By this time Christians had been celebrating the birth of Jesus on that date for many years.

Hippolytus, a priest in Rome, wrote thirty years before this that Jesus’ birth “took place eight days before the kalends of January,” that is, on December 25th. St John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, also confirms that Christians had celebrated the birth of Christ on this date from the early days of the Church.

How could the Church have known when Jesus was born?

There is nothing complicated about this at all. The simplest explanation is that the earliest disciples asked Jesus’ mother, Mary, and she told them. And they told those who came after, just as they related the other facts of Jesus’ life and teaching.

A little additional confirmation comes from John Chrysostom. He explains that the date is confirmed by Luke 1 which says Zechariah was performing priestly duty in the Temple when an angel told him his wife Elizabeth she would bear John the Baptist.

During the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Mary was also visited by an angel and Jesus was conceived. She then went immediately to visit Elizabeth, who was her cousin.

The 24 classes of Jewish priests served by roster in the Temple. Zechariah was in the eighth class. Jewish tradition tells us the class on duty when the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70.

Calculating back from that, Zechariah’s class would have been serving in October in the year before Jesus’ birth. That is when Elizabeth became pregnant.

Mary visited Elizabeth six months later, just after her visit from the angel Gabriel. That is, in March. Jesus was born nine months later – in December.

It was the pagans who attempted to bolster their falling numbers by appropriating a Christian festival, not the other way around.

So Happy Christmas!

A school principal in Florida has been fired after showing her grade six students a photo of Michelangelo’s David.

You can’t understand the history of Western art without knowing Michelangelo’s David. It is an astonishingly beautiful and detailed work.

But it might have been wise to let parents at a conservative school in a conservative district know you were planning to show their ten and eleven year old children a statue of a naked man.

Of course the truth is always more complicated than it first appears. The principal claims a letter was written to parents but school admin forgot to send it. There are also claims the school board had been concerned about her performance for months, and that this incident was the last straw.

It is easy to manufacture outrage. Don’t be outraged on demand. Step back and investigate first.

I have mentioned before that I have never met anyone who claimed to be an “empath” who did not turn out to be a self-absorbed narcissist. That is a tautology, I know, but the contrast between empaths’ avowed ability to imagine themselves in other people’s situations and feel other people’s feelings, and the often shocking unkindness with which they treat anyone whose views differ from their own is worth noting.

Recent incidents in Australia and New Zealand are a perfect example. Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, better known as Posie Parker, visited those countries to speak on the importance of maintaining women’s identity, and women’s spaces in sport and art and politics (not to mention restrooms). Her rallies and events had the general theme “Let women speak.” The idea that women should speak on matters which concern them is an outrage to the kind and inclusive.

Protestors responded with violent fury, doing everything possible to silence and intimidate, so that everyone’s voices could be heard, and no one be afraid. No, it doesn’t make any sense, until you realise that everyone’s voices means only the voices they want to hear, and that it is OK to intimidate and act with violence towards people who disagree, because those people are nazis and therefore not real people.

Posie Parker describes her experiences here.

“Wind and solar will not only fail, but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment and be entirely unnecessary”. So say the mathematicians and physicists. Needless to say, the costs and pain of unreliable energy plans will fall mostly on the poor.

Climate is a social justice issue. Just not in the way climate alarmists think.

There are many alarming things on social media. This is one of the most concerning I have seen recently.

There is a frightening depth of both ignorance and contempt for our history in the responses to this survey. It is not hard to understand where this comes from. School and university students are taught to value other cultures, and that is good. But at the same time they are taught to revile and reject the culture of the West.

I had a discussion with a history student a couple of weeks ago. She said that the West had no culture, nothing worth preserving. I was horrified, but not surprised.

We have given the world its greatest art, its greatest architecture, literature, dance and music. We have given the world science, democracy, rule of law, secure property rights, and the notion that all human beings have intrinsic value. We are the only culture in the history of the world that ahs voluntarily given up slavery.

Western culture and values are adopted around the world because people find them attractive. People from other cultures form an endless stream of immigrants to the West. By all means let us value what others have to offer. And at the same time, let us recognise the enormous gift the West and its accomplishments and values have been to the world.

Despite what you may have seen in shonky crockumentaries like Died Suddenly, COVID-19 vaccines have not caused a massive increase in fatal blood clots.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/died-suddenly-a-tsunami-of-antivax-misinformation-and-conspiracy-theories/

Despite memes being passed around social media, sudden cardiac death, even among young people, is not new (see this Australian journal article from 2004, for example: https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2004/180/3/causes-sudden-cardiac-death-young-australians ), and has not increased in frequency. It’s just that your average social media meme creator and passer-onner has very little knowledge of pathology, and imagines that if he or she has not heard of something before, it must not have happened before, and must be related to something new…

In reality multiple large studies have shown LOWER rates of cardiac death following COVID-19 vaccination. Hardly surprising, since cardiac arrest is common in severe COVID cases. See this summary from the world’s most highly regarded heart research foundation: https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/coronavirus-vaccine-your-questions-answered/myocarditis-and-covid-19-vaccines-should-you-be-worried

Also, despite what you may have seen being passed around social media, often consisting of statistics which the posters don’t understand, and which say the opposite of what they claim, the vaccines are effective in reducing transmission and even more effective in reducing severe illness and death.

However, vaccines are not effective for everyone; people with impaired immune systems, for example, who cannot mount an effective response to the illness despite the prompting given by the vaccine. In addition, COVID-19 is very good at evading immunity. Existing vaccines may be less effective against newer strains like the Omicron BF7 strain causing the current massive outbreak in China.
https://theconversation.com/covid-what-we-know-about-new-omicron-variant-bf-7-196323

A vast amount of research is being done around the world, in thousands of hospitals and research facilities, to develop vaccines which are even more effective at reducing transmission, and which will be effective against new strains.

A similar volume of research is seeking new treatment and prophylactic protocols. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have tested hundreds of existing drugs to check for possible utility in the fight against COVID-19. They have just published the partial results of this research. Read the link below. Ursodeoxycholic acid is an off-patent medication which is cheap and quick to produce.
https://scitechdaily.com/off-patent-liver-disease-drug-could-stop-covid-19-and-protect-against-future-variants/

Vaccination is the cheapest and most efficient way to slow transmission and stop severe illness – better not to get it, than to get it and have to treat it. Even apparently mild cases can have unpleasant long-term effects. But for people with impaired immune systems, and perhaps as a prophylactic for medical staff or in areas of very high community infection, this medication offers another tool to save lives.

Lots on the news over the last few days about protests in France, the fiery but mostly peaceful kind, about changes to the age at which citizens can access the old age pension. Currently in France it is 62. It is being raised to 64. In Australia it is 67.

The protests are being framed as complaints about changes to retirement age. They are no such thing. Anyone can retire at any time they like. They just can’t expect someone else to pay for it. That is the objection – that they have to wait two more years before someone else will pay for their retirement.

In a way I understand the frustration. I am 64 now, nearly 65. I have worked and paid taxes all my life. Twenty years ago I could have retired on a pension just a few months from my current age.

But the reality is that the old age pension was never intended to be a 25 year tax payer funded holiday, and it simply cannot be.

Pornhub has been purchased by a Canadian investment company called Ethical Capital Partners.

You have to wonder what “ethical” can possibly mean if it includes investing in a company that promotes using other people as objects, essentially as masturbation aids, and which has a history of profiting from child exploitation videos

Painting stripes on a cow doesn’t make it a zebra.

My nephew Jaden’s band Two Time Shy have just released an EP – “It Looks Better Than It Sounds” consisting of their previous three singles, and this new one – “I’m Ready This Time.”

They are great – tight sound, intelligent lyrics, real tunes (!) and good stage presence.

Website: Two Times Shy

Spotify: Two Times Shy

Apple Music: Two Times Shy

Compared with wages, Australian electricity prices went down consistently from about 1955 to 2001.

Over the last twenty years, electricity has increased in price to a point higher than at any time in our history.

The speed of increase is accelerating. Residents of Victoria have been warned to expect a 30% rise this year. Homes and businesses in NSW and Queensland get off lightly, with only a 24% predicted increase.

What has changed?

Chris Bowen, Federal Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction blames the Russians. Maybe Russia’s adventures in Ukraine have had some minor effect on Australian electricity prices over the last two years. What else has happened?

Over the same period, Australia has spent more than any other nation, on a per capita basis, on free energy from wind and sun.

The problem is that when you take high capital costs, short component service life, unreliability, transmission and storage costs into account, free energy is far from free. Everywhere large scale renewable energy has been forced into the market by government, prices have increased.

Australia used to be a world leader in primary industry and manufacturing. We are no longer. Australia cannot compete when our energy prices are disproportionately high compared with our neighbours and major trading partners.

We cannot run an economy in the modern world market on unreliable, expensive energy. Businesses will move somewhere else or close.

Australia must stop basing energy policy on wishful thinking, must stop spending tax-payer money on pipe dreams, and as far as possible, stop interfering in energy production and transmission and let the market do its job. Everywhere this has been tried, it has worked.

Every time a major Christian festival comes around there is a flurry of posts on social media about how this festival was originally a pagan feast which was stolen by the Church. Not all great feast days, only those secular society has figured out how to make money out of. The Martyrdom of Peter and Paul, Ascension Day, Pentecost, and Epiphany, for example, are harder to make a buck out of, and have so far escaped commercial and wider public notice. Following the “this is a pagan festival” posts, there are often posts from Christians who have accepted the claim of the wiccans or pagans or modern druids, and agree that, since it is a pagan festival, Christians should not join in celebrating it.

Both of these claims are false. I have written previously about Christmas and its supposed roots in the Roman festival of the invincible Sun, or the Northern European celebration of Yule, and about Easter and its claimed background in Ishtar, Tammuz or other dying and rising fertility gods.

There are some genuine Christian feast days which have drifted so far from their real meaning as almost to be completely opposed to what those days stand for and encourage. St Valentine’s Day is an example. In the Church’s year it celebrates the humble service and self-sacrifice of Valentinus, Bishop of Umbria, who as well as secretly marrying Christian couples contrary to the orders of the emperor, was known for his care for the poor and for prisoners. He was murdered by Roman authorities in 269AD, on 14^th February, which has been kept as his feast day ever since. The lessons of his life are generosity, love for others, discipline, obedience and self-sacrifice. A very long way from advice in Valentine’s Day editions of teen girls’ magazines about how to give their boyfriends oral sex to celebrate their love. Or what they imagine is love.

Halloween falls into this category. It began as a Christian festival, and All Saints’ Day (All Hallows) is still one of the major feast days of the Church year. But contemporary secular celebration of Halloween has little to do with rejoicing in and giving thanks for the saving work of Christ in the lives of ordinary men and women.

One of the common claims is that Halloween is really Samhain, a Druidic festival in which the boundaries between this world and the next are blurred, and the dead or other spirits may walk the earth, needing to be placated.

However, the reality is that no one has much clue who the druids were or what they believed. They were one of two upper-class groups in Celtic society, and in France and the British Isles (and possibly other locations) had priestly and legal functions. The other upper-class group were hereditary nobles. Much of what we do know of Druids and Celtic society comes from Julius Caesar’s History of the Gallic Wars, written in about 45BC.

He wrote: “The whole nation of the Gauls is greatly devoted to ritual observances, and for that reason those who are smitten with the more grievous maladies and who are engaged in the perils of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow so to do, employing the druids as ministers for such sacrifices. They believe, in effect, that, unless for a man’s life a man’s life be paid, the majesty of the immortal gods may not be appeased; and in public, as in private life they observe an ordinance of sacrifices of the same kind. Others use figures of immense size whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame. They believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods; but when the supply of such fails, they resort to the execution even of the innocent.”

It is important to note that apart from this (and a few other) very limited accounts, most of our conceptions of who the druids were are a result of mistaken or fanciful conclusions dating from about two hundred years ago. For example, we have no idea what the Druids wore, what the core beliefs were that drove their legal decisions and cultic practices including human sacrifice, or what their festivals were. We do know they had nothing to do with Stonehenge, which was built long before Iron Age Celtic Druidism.

Of course, reality, whether in relation to science or history, has little impact on popular belief, or on social media!

Samhain is first mentioned in Irish literature dating from the 9^th century. By this time, Ireland had been Christian for five centuries, and there were no known practising Druids. These accounts, which mention Samhain only incidentally, and make it clear it was a minor festival, about as important as Arbor Day is to us, appear to be based on no earlier written material and are Medieval fantasies about events, largely imagined, which supposedly took place over six hundred years earlier. Other supposed details, such as the burning of bonfires, disguises and blackening faces, do not appear in any stories until the 15^th century.

Interest in Celtic art and myth, and in Druidism, began to rise in the wake of the Romantic movement in Europe, and especially its belief that primitive societies were closer to nature, happier, gentler and wiser. This, of course, was and is nonsense.

Tribal societies are notori0usly violent, generally view people not of their tribe or group as less than human, and often as commodities. Early shamanistic religions were frequently hideously violent, and demanded torturous human sacrifice. The best known example is the mass human sacrifices of the Aztecs, but others included Middle Eastern mother religions, the worship of Odin, and Druidism. Hobbes was more accurate with “”No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” than Rousseau and his delightful but baseless fantasy of the noble savage, basking in sunshine, eating what he chose, going where he wished, and enjoying sexual freedom.

The suggestion that All Hallows was based on Samhain was first made by James Frazer in his highly influential book The Golden Bough, which was published in varying numbers of volumes between 1890 and 1915. I first read The Golden Bough when I was nineteen, and thoroughly enjoyed it, in the same way I had enjoyed reading the works of psychoanalyst and fantasist Immanuel Velikovsky. Both are fascinating, detailed and well-written. But because they try at every point to turn every detail to fit the Procrustean Bed of their over-arching theories, they are often completely wrong.

Someone (I cannot now find who) said of Velikovsky, “He is wrong, but he is magnificently wrong.” The same could be said of Frazer. His work is incredibly detailed, but fails to be convincing at any point. Edmund Leach, president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1971 to 1975, wrote of him: “Frazer used his ethnographic evidence, which he culled from here, there and everywhere, to illustrate propositions which he had arrived at in advance by a priori reasoning, but, to a degree which is often quite startling, whenever the evidence did not fit he simply altered the evidence.”

In the case of the pagan origins of All Hallows, Frazer offered no evidence at all, for the simple reason that there is no evidence. To demonstrate what he suggested was true, he, and those who then and now share his view, would need to show:

• Contemporary records that Samhain was a major Druidic festival
• That Church leaders as far away as Baghdad, Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome were aware of it and concerned about it
• They decided to institute a festival with similar themes to counter or overwhelm it

No evidence exists for any of these things.

By contrast with the fantasies of Frazer, the Romantics and neo-pagans, there is no doubt about the evidence for a day of thanksgiving for the holy people of God set aside by the early Church.

A day of commemoration of unnamed saints and martyrs had been held in the Eastern Church since at least 373 (mentioned as an existing festival in a sermon by St Ephrem in that year, and in the 74^th homily of St John Chrysostom in 407). In the Chaldean calendar (411AD) this feast was held on the Friday after Easter. In the West, on 13^th May, probably in 609, Pope Boniface IV dedicated what had been the Roman Pantheon, long in desuetude, to the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs. From that time thanksgiving for all the saints was held on anniversary of that dedication.

On 1^st November in about 735 Gregory III dedicated a chapel in St Peter’s to all the saints, and the feast of All Saints or All Hallows (saint, sanctify, hallows and holy all have the same root meaning) was held on that date from then on. Finally, in about 835, Pope Gregory IV, after consultation with other bishops in both East and West, promulgated that date, November 1^st, as the date on which the celebration of All Saints was to be held throughout the entire Catholic Church. Vigil celebrations, that is, Mass and prayers of thanksgiving on the evening before, All Hallows’ Eve, took place from the same time.

This hymn, written by English clergyman William Walsham How, captures the sense and purpose of this feast day. These are the first three verses of eight:

1 For all the saints who from their labours rest,

who thee by faith before the world confessed,

thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.

Alleluia! Alleluia!

2 Thou wast their rock, their fortress, and their might;

thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight;

thou, in the darkness dread, their one true light.

Alleluia! Alleluia!

3 Oh, may thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold

fight as the saints who nobly fought of old

and win with them the victor’s crown of gold.

Alleluia! Alleluia!

This hymn, and the feast day for which it was written, celebrate the saving work of Christ, the victory won in the lives of all faithful Christian men and women, especially those unremembered, who served humbly in their own families and communities, and encourage us to honour our Saviour by living with the same courage and commitment.

This is the second verse of Bernard of Cluny’s great hymn, Jerusalem the Golden, also often sung on All Saint’s Day:

O sweet and blessed country, the home of God’s elect!

O sweet and blessed country that eager hearts expect,

where they who with their leader have conquered in the fight

forever and forever are clad in robes of white:

in mercy, Jesus, bring us to that dear land of rest

where sings the host of heaven your glorious name to bless.

This verse from Hebrews 12 is relevant:

Therefore, since we also have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us rid ourselves of every obstacle and the sin which so easily entangles us, and run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking only at Jesus, the originator and perfecter of the faith…

Catholic and Orthodox Christians believe that this great cloud of witnesses (those who have gone before us in the faith) continue to watch over us, care for us and pray for us, and that we in turn can ask their prayers, just as we ask fellow Christians on Earth to pray for us. The prayer of a righteous man availeth much, James tells us James 5:16), and the prayers of those in God’s nearer presence, unencumbered by sin and distraction, and with unimaginably clearer insight into the will and purposes of God, availeth much indeed.

Christians should participate in worship, celebration, and thanksgiving on All Saints’ Day. But what about participation in the myriad secular traditions which have grown up around that day?

We need to be very careful indeed about any words or actions which may encourage interaction with the occult. There are spiritual realities and spiritual forces, and not all of them are good or wish us well. Some are full of hatred and spite, and will use any means; from intimidation and deception to offering us exactly what we want, to drain us of life and happiness, and drag us into darkness.

Christians should not under any circumstances participate in seances or use Ouija boards. Role-playing games which invoke demons or ask players to play as demonic forces should also be avoided. Books which encourage an interest in witchcraft, including the Harry Potter series, should be read with caution, especially with younger readers.

However, it is difficult to see any major harm in children dressing up as their favourite character, even if scary, and going from house to house in their neighbourhood in the company of friends or parents. It encourages a sense of community, and helps neighbours to get to know one another. If you want, get your children to dress as their favourite saint or Bible character: Judith, Esther, Samson John the Baptist, Mary MacKillop, Fr Damien of Molokai… the possibilities are endless, and fun.

Just remember to tell them what it’s really about, and to take them to worship the following morning.

Rings of Power review. Can it really be this bad?

First, let’s get past the accusations from some media organisations that customer disappointment with the series is based on racism. It is not. As anyone will realise who has actually read the reviews, complaints about the inclusion of “persons of colour” form a small part of the overall disgruntlement. They form a small part of mine.

Tolkien’s mythology was specifically based on Northern European myth and legend. Its peoples are white. That’s it. There is nothing racist about this, any more than there is anything racist in the people of Wakanda being black, or the characters in The Tale of Genji being Japanese. Including a few random European shopkeepers in a film version of The Tale of Genji for the sake of inclusiveness would not be brave or creative, it would just be silly. So is including a few random black dwarves, elves and harfoots in a screen version of stories set in Tolkien’s world. It is not a deal-breaker, but it is shallow and annoying to people who love Tolkien, and who care about the integrity of the stories.

While on the subject of silly prejudices, the producers’ prejudices are so much in evidence that they are bulging at the sides and bursting out the bottom. The dwarves are suspicious, stupid, belligerent, grasping, and drink too much. So naturally they are Scottish, or at least, speak with embarrassing attempts at Scottish accents. The Harfoots (more on them later) are naïve, stupid, have no apparent way of living, and wander around aimlessly in dirty clothes with sticks in their hair. So naturally, they are Irish, or at least speak with embarrassing attempts at Irish accents. The elves, however, all sound like they went to Oxford or Cambridge, so naturally they are gorgeous, brainy, produce beautiful art and are probably secret ninja warriors. Because as everyone knows, people who went to university and live in the city are superior in every way to yokels who live in the country and grow carrots and rabbits, and to those grubby, sweaty people who work in mines and factories or other yucky places.

Another minor annoyance, well more like a grinding, groan-inducing face-palming piece of stupidity, is characters holding lanterns right in front of their faces when they are trying to see ahead of them. Has anyone involved in this production ever been camping? Ever used a lantern, or even a candle (apart from the scented kind you put around your bath)? Holding a lantern in front of your face means you can’t see a damn thing except the lantern. If you want to see what is around or ahead of you, you hold the lantern or candle over your head, or beside you, so it is out of your field of vision.

There are other, intermittent bits of silliness. Hunters, to whom speed and stealth are vitally important, roam around the countryside with massive moose antlers on their backs. Massive as in bigger than they are. Why? Sauron, in his guise as Annatar (at least, I think it is he, since it cannot be a wizard – they did not arrive in Middle Earth until the beginning of the Third Age) streaks across the sky in a great flaming fireball which then crashes into a paddock. This is Sauron, master of subtlety and deception, who is about to insinuate himself into Elvish society and is desperate not to draw attention to himself. So why?

These are niggles. There are two bigger problems.

The first is that this is not Tolkien.

It is as if the producers have taken the name, picked a period in Tolkien’s timeline, and then ignored all of Tolkien’s history and philosophy.

Again, just a few examples. There is no record of hobbits of any kind, including Harfoots, in Middle Earth until a thousand years into the Third Age, that is, some 3,000 years after the events in the first episodes of Rings of Power. They are included presumably because the producers thought viewers would find them appealing. Men, on the other hand, were present in Middle Earth from the beginning of the First Age, and were known to Elves from about the year FA 310, that is, about 900 years before the period in which the series is set. Yet no men appear in the series. Perhaps in later episodes. But why mess about with the timeline in this way?

Elrond is told he cannot attend a meeting because it is for Elf-Lords only. But Elrond is an Elf-Lord, and has been since the moment he decided to be counted as elf-kind. This was his right by birth. He is a descendant of Thingol and Melian, grandson of Beren and Luthien, and son of Earendil and Elwing. So why?

The character called Galadriel in Rings of Power bears no resemblance to Tolkien’s Galadriel. To distinguish the two I will call the RoP character Sadriel. Galadriel is an elf of enormous power and strength of character. She led her people into Middle Earth across the grinding ice, a crossing that had previously only been made by the Valar and Ungoliant. Sadriel is more like a cross between Princess Leia and Neo from The Matrix, with the worst qualities of both. She seems to have no regard for the wellbeing of the people she leads. She certainly doesn’t listen to them. In one absurd scene, she jumps from a ship, apparently planning to swim 1,000 miles back from the shores of the Undying Lands, through treacherous and clouded waters.

By about the year 1,000 in the Second Age Galadriel had been married to Celeborn for 1,500 years. But Celeborn is nowhere to be seen, and is not consulted by Sadriel in any of her decision-making or obsessive campaigning.

Then there’s the fact that no one in this series can act. Perhaps that is unfair. There may be some quite competent actors in this schmozzle, but it is impossible to tell, because the script is so wooden, and the lines in places so pretentious, that it would be bordering on impossible for even the best of players to deliver them with conviction. Outstanding amongst these are the snippets of ageless wisdom delivered by the elves. For example: “The wine of victory is sweetest for those in whose bitter trials it was fermented.” Um, what? This is not wisdom. It is the kind of banal motto fourteen year old girls obsessed with unicorns write in their secret diaries.

The root of all this is that the writers and producers seem not to care about Tolkien or his writings at all. It isn’t even clear whether they have read LOTR or The Silmarillion, or any of the other works. If they have, they have not understood them. Tolkien’s work is pregnant with providence and sacramentality. Peter Jackson largely missed this as well, especially in the omission of Tom Bombadil, who represents what we are saved to, which as least as important as what we are saved from, but at least Jackson was mostly faithful to the story.

Most people whose understanding of Lord of the Rings is based on Jackson will never have heard of Glorfindel, will believe that Arwen found the fellowship and led Frodo to Rivendell, that it was she, not Elrond, who called down the river on the Nazgul, and that Saruman was killed at Isengard. Jackson’s agenda is in evidence where the text is changed, but in his film version of LoTR the actors can act, the characters, though sometimes distorted (Frodo was fifty-one years old when he set out with the Ring), are sympathetic, and the story largely holds together.

Rings of Power’s worst fault is simply that it is boring. It is impossible to care for characters who are shallow caricatures, or who are self-obsessed and arrogant. The first and vital step for the writers and producers of any drama is that the audience must feel a connection with the characters. If they don’t, they will not care what happens to them, and they will be bored. An audience will forgive almost anything – bad dialogue, cheesy special effects, even changes to beloved characters – but they will not forgive being bored.

Rings of Power will meet the same fate as Disney’s dire attempts at the Narnia stories. People who love Narnia went to see the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because of their love for the books. The movie missed most of what was important to Lewis, but as a movie it wasn’t terrible. Prince Caspian spent its first fifteen minutes deliberately alienating the audience from the main characters, and went down from there. Half as many people went to see it. Even fewer to Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Widespread love for Tolkien meant Rings of Power achieved high viewer numbers for its first two episodes. But it is not Tolkien. It is not even interesting. It will not last.

Yes, it really is that bad.