March, 2003: The chief executive of News International admitting to a Select Committee of the UK Parliament to paying police for information:
“We have paid the police for information in the past.”
Archaeology cannot be divorced from the cultural layers it studies – and within which it exists.
Our study of the archaeology of Greek magic and associated cultic and religious practices using chrest/good to conjure divine men into existence during the first centuries of the modern era, defines this term as ’the great and the good‘ and this became a foundation stone of Western Civilisation.
This same expression was used recently by a commentator describing the elite British circles of power in the on-going clash with the Fourth Estate, in which for many years the police, ministers of the crown and parliamentarians generally regarded criminal activity and complicity between the media, police and politicians as both normal and acceptable.
If this complicity is not to be regarded as conspiracy, then it is a societal norm in which the great and good regard themselves as above all others (which in a class-ridden society, they generally are) and as a final, logical consequence, above the law.
The present furore follows others in a crescendo:
- Pension-selling scandals which made some very wealthy at the expense of pensioners.
- The Cash for Honours scandal in which police interviewed the Prime Minister.
- Banking crises of 2008-9 in which public funds were used to protect private money.
- The 2009 banking bonus scandal in which “Investment banks profit as the public suffers”.
In each of these and similar, recent “scandals”, the beneficiaries are within the elite, the victims are the general public – and the political class either openly favours the elite, or blithely ignores the plight of the victims.
Further, British police, security and intelligence forces have been seen to be involved in extra-judicial killings, allowing terrorists to move in and out of the country, and complicit in extraordinary rendition and torture.
A still from video footage obtained by The Guardian showing the aftermath of what appears to be a police assault of Ian Tomlinson on April 1, 2009. Homeless paper-seller Tomlinson was pushed from behind outside the Bank of England as he walked back from work. He died within minutes. Last year, Keir Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales, announced that no charges would be brought due to conflicting medical evidence. That decision was placed under review after an inquest jury ruled last month that Tomlinson had been unlawfully killed.
The commonality between the admittance to an official body of bribing police (the video, top) and the unlawful killing of the newspaper seller is that although both were witnessed by many in authority, they all chose to fail in their public duty, while the public is unsurprised by this reaction to the point of general acceptance.
Late Roman marble copy of the Kriophoros of Kalamis (Museo Barracco, Rome).
The Good Shepherd. Ceiling - S. Callisto catacomb.
The character of the problem is thus defined as both shepherd and sheep complicit in their situation and role.
Sheep, of course, are to be shorn regularly and at the appropriate time, slaughtered and eaten; ensuring this is the role of the shepherd.
The office of episkopos (now: bishop) over his flock has not changed in its basic function since Philip II of Macedon – father of the Alexander who became in the modern era a god – emulated the Persian “King’s Eye”.
I do not know yet when Jesus Christ and the Christian Church first appear, though I have been searching assiduously across the archaeology from the first century and onwards, to report here my findings. As we reach the 4th century, there is nothing but Manicheism with its Jesus Chrest from Parthia and when we look at copies of the New Testament made for Constantine I, there is no Christ there, either. No doubt we will find him eventually, though he becomes increasing ‘late’.
The Roman Church will appear out of the shadows of the Religio Romana with its Pontifex Maximus and other offices such as the Archigallus, colleges and rituals.
Drawing of a relief picturing an Archigallus. A Gallus was a eunuch priest of the Phrygian goddess Cybele. In Rome the head of the galli was known as the archigallus, at least from the period of Claudius on. A number of archaeological finds depict the archigallus wearing luxurious and extravagant costumes.
The Roman Church was built, quite literally, atop the Panhellenistic.
From a great number of inscriptions, in both Greek and Latin, we know that there was a sanctuary of Cybele and Attis on the other side of the Tiber, close to the Circus of Gaius (Caliglua) and Nero. In an old description of Rome it is referred to as the Phrygianum. Since in 1609 most of the altars were found below the facade of St Peter’s, on the Piazza San Pietro or in its immediate surroundings it must be assumed that the building was situated there. But up till now it has not been excavated. From the extent of the area throughout which these scattered finds were made it may be concluded that this temple, just like the one at Ostia, probably had sacred grounds, where the monuments stood in the open air. Practically all these altars had been erected to commemorate a taurobolium or a criobolium, and they are sometimes decorated with extremely beautiful reliefs. Consequently it is clear that these ceremonies were exclusively performed here on the Vatican Hill, and not on the Palatine. Most of the altars date from the fourth century AD, but with a gap of twenty-eight years. Practically all archaeologists associate this period in which no altars were erected with the first construction of St. Peter’s by Constantine. The enormous building activity in this area made it inconvenient for the followers of the “Phrygian” cult to carry out their rites in peace. It is now known when the Phrygianum was built, but it is highly probable that this took place under Antoninus Pius, if not earlier, in the first century under the emperor Claudius. (M.J. Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis)
Ceiling Mosaic - Chrestus Helios, the mosaic of Sol in Mausoleum M. Detail of vault mosaic in the Mausoleum of the Julii. From the necropolis under St. Peter's Mid-3rd century, Grotte Vaticane, Rome.
The “Tomb of the Julii” (Mausoleum “M”) survives in the Vatican Necropolis beneath St. Peter’s Basilica. The discovery (left) near the crypt has a vaulted ceiling bearing a mosaic depicting Helios (Roman Sol Invictus) with an aureole riding in his chariot, within a framing of vine leaves.
This Dionysiac scene dated to the late 3rd century to early 4th century has been related to the True Vine imagery of Gospel of John 15.1. Other mosaics in this tomb depicting Jonah and the whale, the Good Shepherd carrying a lamb (the kriophoros motif), and fishermen.
Both the Christian Church and its divine man are constructs of Late Antiquity, at the earliest, and its history is fiction, expropriated from other faiths, cultic practises, nations and people.
The counter-argument that the Christian Church left no footprint because it was both secret and persecuted is self-defeating, for it cannot be both at the same time.
The Tradition it began to fabricate for itself in the 4th century – through the archaeological fakery of the Empress Helena, the first New Testament with its Jesus the Good, and the fictive Ecclesiastical History by an assembly of imperial clerics labelled ‘Eusebius of Caesaria’ – has never had substance, nor withstood scrutiny and invited rejection by all but the chronically-credulous.
Instead, the institutions of Western Civilisation, including and especially universities and governments, have spun a culture of dishonesty to dress an ugly, corrupt, self-interested, greedy and ultimately dangerously-violent elite in piety and self-righteousness.
From Sunday School and divinity lessons for children, to bible scholarship and Divinity Schools within universities, to the perversion of historiography and the provision of false contexts to archaeology, scholarship at all levels has failed utterly to abide by its own standards.
Instead of looking to primary sources, using empirical evidences and reasoning, the peer-review process has been systematically perverted to produce a structure with no more substance than a house of cards.
Publications of archaeology use ‘Before Christ’ and ‘Anno Domini’ as a warning sign of their intellectual corruption.
That the world is changing and generally – if slowly – for the better, in due less to some magical betterment of humankind and more to technology, specifically Web 2.0, which has produced the social media generation, blogging and the twitterati.
A sniper takes aim at the cameraman and apparently shoots him dead: Syrian forces 'targeting mobile-phone videos'. The Independent, 5 July 2011
The cultural revolution sweeping North Africa, the Near East and Arabia began with Wikileaks and a tweet, and continues through Facebook and Youtube.
The news media has been liberated by the hashtag and news anchors are now the young men and women with mobile phones facing snipers, machine guns and tanks.
The revolution is coming your way and may be seen in your street any day soon.
The great and the good are neither great, nor good, any more than Christ is Chrest is actually divine.
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