Source: Giza Death StarDr. Joseph P. Farrell
We face a choice…we’re at a fork in the road with three branches:
Renaissance, Reformation, or Revolution. We stand, in other words, at
the same crossroads we stood at about half a millennium ago, and for
similar reasons.
Consider only the parallels. Then an elite prevailed that had been in
power for well over a millennium. It was an elite that controlled the
mechanisms of bureaucracy, of money, and most importantly, of
information and general culture. It could and did depose kings, and
arrange the fates of nations. It launched – on its pretended divine
authority – massive invasions of the Middle East and a “clash of
civilizations.”It launched one of the bloodiest internal purges in
history against the Cathars. It enforced its own version of political
correctness and hate speech legislation, burning people alive who dared
disagree with it, and hypocritically washing its hands of the deed by
making “the secular authority” perform the executions. Its institutional
claims, in spite of its modern face of gentility, have not changed. Nor
has it repented and disavowed many of those deeds.
Opposing that elite was another: a hidden underground stream that had
preserved a rudimentary knowledge of, and connection to, the “ancient
wisdom”, to the prisca theologia of Egypt. And they openly
talked and published their ideas, utilizing a new technology that made
it difficult for the other elite to control the flow of information: the
moveable type printing press. And the movement was called the
Renaissance. What came of that movement, with its open avowal of
Hermetic principles, were the scientific revolutions of Copernicus (who
cites the Hermetica in the preface of his revolutionary
scientific treatise), of Newton (an alchemist), even -if one stretches
the timeline – of Lebniz and his search for a universal symbolic
language, and a formula of religious tolerance. And that was the key:
in the face of recovered ancient wisdom and the scientific advances it
made possible, cultural tolerance of differing ideas – especially in
religion – became an implicit implication.
There was, however, another result: the Reformation, which, for our
purposes, we may also view as a Revolution, a violent revolt against the
old elite. We know the result: wars of religion followed… what we may
call the “First First World War,” a European wide orgy of bloodletting
that lasted Thirty years, that saw nearly every power in Europe
involved. And that ended, after all that expenditure of blood and
treasure, with more or less the same situation, with the significant
point that the Renaissance gains were only partial, and still submerged
beneath the veneer of religion and national churches.
We stand at a similar cultural crossroads. We too have seen the
advent of a new technology that has allowed the quick and global
dissemination of information. We have seen the rise of badly polarized
societies from Tea Party to Occupy, and insane fundamentalisms of all
sorts vowing to fight for their particular truth.We too are dealing with
a millennium’s old elite, clinging to power and outmoded ideas and
fanning the fuels of fundamentalisms and conducting purges and toppling
kings and nations. We don’t need a Reformation, nor a Revolution. We
need a Renaissance of culture, of learning, and most importantly, of
tolerance and civility.
