Krivda, the Godtrix against the Matrix

PART ONE

TRACKING THE COMPONENTS OF A GOD’S RELIGION

The 31 year old King (James) had presided over her [Agnes Sampson] trial…It was his first witch burning…For the next six years, hundreds of witches were miraculously discovered and tried all over Scotland. The King…was moved to write his first book, Demonology… a best-seller… In 1604, King James would begin his second literary opus as managing editor of the Bible. James True

Gods and their religions have not always existed as we understand them today. We aren’t really clear as regards their purpose, on a wide spectrum extending from spiritual salvation to enslavement via opium of the people. We can’t really claim to know who ‘god’ is - let alone ‘gods’ plural. We don’t know if they are really immortal, whether we really need them and what for, whether they need us, and what for.

The bigoted rationalist would dismiss such musings as unworthy of an age of science. The ‘spiritual’ post-religious age prefers to expand the fuzzy god-field with warm reassurance that you can call ‘it’ whatever you want, God, Spirit, Source, Allah, Supreme Being, The One…’, and even with an invitation to humans to ‘become gods’, even ‘creator gods’. Hurray! But what a mess - a mess that the skeptic finds suspect.

Whatever the ‘nature’ of the unnameable at the core of, and pervading everything, its ‘isness’ simply cannot be represented, let alone named as are specific individual and historically known ‘gods’. Unlike these, it has no story and no history. The whole mess around god-names has to be about something else that we aren’t seeing. What is staring us in the face, is a real problem that starts with the ‘god’ word and the ‘god-thing’ that lead into the ‘god-religion’.

Modern culture being ostensibly secular, religion has become a more or less important private and social component of life, nothing like the monolithic religions of the past. Yet do we notice how frequently the ‘god’ word, and its corollaries the ‘religion’ word and the ‘priest’ word, pop up everywhere in non-religious discourse, in casually cynical association with non-religious terms such as war, money, science, medicine? The trend is ubiquitous, with phrases such as ‘the gods of modern medicine’, ‘the religion of settled science’, ‘the high priests of finance’, ‘the gods of high tech’… The old ‘god’ of monotheism has faded and the gods of Rome are gone, but the terminology they have left behind is thriving. ‘God’ words pop up spontaneously, and very consciously, to characterize any manmade specialty or institution so dominant as to exhibit abnormal power and magnitude. But what is thus unwittingly revealed is the deep subconscious internalization - even in the most religion-bashing among us - of the naturalized power of god-words, a power hidden in plain sight in the way we think and speak.

Preamble - an Indian encapsulation of ‘gods’ and poverty

The god-word came out of hiding for me, some twenty years ago, hitting like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky, in a minuscule non-event. The humor of the universe can deliver a tempest of insight in a tiny teacup, in this case a cup of chai in a West Bengal village, around the year 2000.

A typical Indian tea-stall scene under a large tree. Two villagers on a rickety bench are sipping hot chai in tiny unbaked clay pots, heads wobbling, faces serious. When these two meet they usually indulge in intense debate for hours, delighting a large audience and the chai maker’s business. One being a devout mainstream Muslim, the other a Sufi in the local grassroots wisdom tradition, their sparring follows an ancestral tradition of spiritual debate. The Sufi always comes out the winner. But today there is no debate, no delightful adversarial brilliance, no truer-than-thou certainty, no rapt audience. Both are silent, confused, for once in full mutual agreement over shared cognitive dissonance. The Sufi today says nothing at all.

His interlocutor speaks. ‘Like our parents and their parents and grandparents, we always thought that Allah was God - obviously the only God, the top God above all the gods of the others… But now… whaaat??? Money is the top god. Higher than Allah!!!!’ The Sufi wobbles his head. For him, Allah is less real than his cherished Human Path. But he sees all too clearly that the god of money is overpowering the Path all around him, in his own community. The mainstream Muslim has dared to say it out loud.

From that local micro-event, zoom out to the Indian subcontinent. First half of the 20th century. Gandhi galvanizes the masses with powerful ideas, the dignity of the poor, and the restoration of frugal self sufficiency, for India to become herself again, independent from colonial power.

Fast forward to the 1970s. Prime minister Indira Gandhi declares the ‘war on poverty’. This does not seem to have galvanized the minds of the masses. What exactly is this thing called poverty? It’s a very different thing depending on whether you view it from above or from below or from within. Among the unorthodox Sufi folk and countless other sectarian groups across India, as long as life conditions remained in place for frugal self-sufficiency, preferably with a small plot of land, being poor in money and stuff was not an issue. What counted was wealth in wisdom - and having the leisure time for it.

Now fast forward again to the very end of the century. The tentacles of globalization have reached into the villages along with electric power that works two hours a day, plus the magic of TV, commercials, serials, agro-chemicals, and cheap consumer goods. Back in Bengal, the unorthodox Sufi folk and the other peasant communities have been coopted into ‘progress’ and the larger economic system, without any kind of ‘informed consent’. They feel the dignity of self sufficiency, leisure time and wisdom wealth all crumbling. Their wisdom legacy is being bulldozed under by their newly acquired awareness of a new kind of poverty and of an incomprehensible ‘war’ against it. The dignity of poverty, yesterday’s Gandhian virtue, has become a sin. One has to work much more, for never-enough money, and leisure time is gone. The Human Path loses its substance even as its lovers cling to its now hollow discourse and songs.

The poor have become poor for good. They know it, don’t understand it, and they have acquired shame for it.

Finally, fast forward into the early 21st century. In 2009, Aadhar, a new digital ID card is boldly introduced, to capture all Indians. It will connect biometric data with every other transactional aspect of the individual’s life. A new drive is launched to get all the ‘un-banked’ masses to have an account and a plastic card. Not all Indians are yet covered by this scheme when big drama erupts on 8 November 2016. Overnight 500 and 1000 rupee notes are demonetized, and the country descends into chaos. Untold hardship hits the poor who live in the informal cash economy, their savings stashed under the mattress in - of course - 500 and 1000 notes, now worthless for the banks don’t have enough smaller-denomination notes to exchange.

That chronology, packed in a very short time-frame, is a snapshot of three gods in rapid succession. The centuries-old religious god Allah - the money god’s brutal take-over - the even more brutal invasion by the god of digital intelligence. The snapshot from ‘Amazing India’ is a time-condensed version of the much broader god-story of the west, now extended to the whole world, that we shall explore sequentially.

Each of the ‘gods’ comes with a different poverty package for the people. Under the religious ‘god’ (Part I), poverty is a fact of life without shame for the poor whose resilience dwells in community and traditional knowledge. Under the money ‘god’ (Part II), poverty becomes a big war-sized problem, and the masses of poor people suddenly embody the enemy called poverty. Under the digital tech ‘god’ (Part III), the final frontier of poverty is to take away from the poor the ownership of their last treasure - life and body.

Mother India might be the only Earth culture capable of holding conflicting timelines as the whole charge of the sequence of three ‘gods’ was delivered to her within a span of merely seventy years. Today I look back at my humanist-anthropologist self, on a path to my lost soul precisely among the bewildered grassroots initiates of Bengal. I witnessed them experiencing the poverty revolution in an even tighter timeframe. The inevitable futility of my problem-solving efforts among them, whose wisdom could not process a concept of poverty no longer owned by them, weighed on my heart for another two decades. I was again in India in November of 2016, appalled by the demonetization shock that came down on the people. As the ‘god’ of digital intelligence suddenly burst out onto the world scene in 2020, cloaked in ‘biosecurity’, I saw the pieces of an old puzzle falling into place.

The ‘gods’ are closing in on human poverty - on humanity as a whole.

CHAPTER 1

Probing deeper into the words

If something has no name, then it cannot be conceptualized or summoned into the commercial world of illusion, Dylan Saccoccio

The implicit unquestioned notion of what God, or a god, is involves a higher being around which a religion exists. Historically and anthropologically, the development of such a religion around such an entity is what makes a ‘god’ become a fact of collective and individual human experience.

The non-glossary in the Introduction flagged the words ‘god’ and ‘religion’, along with related terms, as problematic. They come with a heavy multi-millennial baggage. People’s need for solace, inspiration, soul-connection, together with their ancestral cosmogonies, have been appropriated and distorted by deliberate manipulation and agendas of control wrapped in mysteries of ‘spirituality’. It is noteworthy that those problem-words don’t have an equivalent, or carry very different meanings, in cultures that have remained more ‘primitive’ and rooted in Nature.

The charge of meanings invested in the word ‘god’ has the strange distinction of being both extremely specific and extremely vague. It is used ubiquitously as a generic term. It can be interpreted, taught, imposed, embraced… in all sorts of ways depending on the culture, and on how its religious institutions operate. One extreme is the Indian culture of world-renunciation where a human can (with great exertion, assuredly) ‘become greater than the gods’. The other extreme is monotheistic western religion with its eternally unbridgeable distance between the high almighty and the lowly powerless human. Both these extremes, and everything in between, are somehow encapsulated in the paradigm of ‘god’.

Considering also the vast extent of cultural and political dominance, direct or indirect, of Christianity across time and space over the past two thousand years, its own god-word has spread around the world, through colonialism, conversion, translation, acculturation, and the recent globalization of English. It is the reductionist champion that crowds out all other local and indigenous words. As a single all-encompassing generic word it is applied to other understandings of the unseen realms in cultures not governed by ‘god’ concepts, including those where a ‘god-thing’ may not exist at all. Thus the words and understandings of ‘god’ and ‘religion’ that are used to translate the spiritual realities and understandings of subjugated or indigenous cultures, historically and in the present, imply a similarity of content that is injurious to the latter’s deepest sense of being human.

As ‘god’ gets used in all sorts of very diverse cultural and spiritual contexts it comes with its own baggage. When a tribal elder has to use the word ‘god’ to convey her own cultural meanings to a non-tribal listener because of the dominance of English (or of other colonial languages), she may be unwittingly feeding the listener’s own cultural ‘god’-conditioning and distorting the original meanings. Since the advent of ethnology - a tool and by-product of colonial enterprise - very different flavors of the unseen realms across the cultures of the world have been misrepresented simply because of translation using inadequate words. And mistranslation is inevitable since English does not have the words to do justice to those other realities. The only honest solution then is to use the terms of the original language and culture, along with abundant explanations that are usually too meticulously scholarly for anyone beyond academia to understand.

Add to our conditioning the discreet but powerful effect of the modern Latin script used in western languages, where we have capital letters. Many other written languages do not have them – including ancient and ‘sacred’ languages. How great then is the subconscious, totally naturalized, visual impact of the word with a capital G, the prerogative of the monotheistic ‘god’? Is there not an automatic ‘spiritual downgrading’ of any other ‘gods’ of other cultures, even when approached with inter-cultural respect? When writing about ‘gods’ of other cultures, even the non-religious among us have awkward choices to make about lower or upper case.

Westerners’ spiritual hunger in modernity has propelled many into encounters with non-Christian cultures. But the internalized subconscious sense of what ‘god’ is supposed to be makes it tremendously difficult to overcome a barrier that is more than cognitive - it is for many a barrier at heart-soul level. For others, it can be liberating to realize that other peoples may have no ‘religion’ or ‘god’ as such, yet are nevertheless very well anchored to something ‘spirit-full’, with totally different words, or even without words.

The ‘god-word’ is also a problem, quite unacknowledged, for the sane reactivation of the Feminine needed to rebalance our cultures. When the best word available, and enthusiastically embraced by proponents of the Feminine, is the word ‘goddess’, the result is a double dose of error. ‘Goddess’ as the female version and derivative of ‘god’ does not convey the deeper charge of the Feminine as Principle, and it carries the same burden of error as the masculine word ‘god’.

It is a problem that the implicit and automatic understanding of the ‘god’ realm as being transcendent, immaterial, eternal and immortal, not only defines its complementary partner, the human realm, as the opposite - material, mortal and finite - but also omits intrinsically human attributes of soul and spirit that exist independent of the ‘god’ realm. It can be noted in passing that the ‘mortal finite human’ concept feeds the stubbornly materialistic perception of life-as-a-problem-to-be-solved, by ‘god’ and now by science. For any true life-loving human, this is incorrect.

If reductive concepts of humanity are incorrect, then the opposite lofty concept of ‘god’ can also be less than correct. Serious studies, as we shall soon see, document how religious dogma about the transcendence, immortality, eternity and immateriality of ‘god’ are flawed. The Bible - the most abundantly sold book in the world, and the least read - portrays the allegedly benevolent ‘god’ as an explicitly jealous and violent figure. The Elohim category to whom Yahweh belongs are long-lived but not immortal. But the implicit lofty god-concept remains intact in the collective subconscious since scholarly and theological works that openly question the dogma are not read by the general public.

We must credit our two lowly Bengali chai-sippers, well aware of the ‘spiritual’ incongruity of money become more ‘divine’ than Allah, for their sense of reality - they knew how to recognize a ‘god’ when they saw one, unlike us educated, rational, secular modern people. We are also unaware that the money ‘god’ simply slipped into the earlier religious formatting that is operational in all of us, including the non-religious. ‘Religion’, an incredibly efficient device of collective mind-control, has morphed into fields ostensibly far removed from the ‘religious’ but its essence remains the same. And its core motif of Krivda has acquired ever greater skills and power in the art of ‘crooked-truth’. Instilled in the collective subconscious over millennia, it needs to be clearly seen for its un-natural power to distort what humans knew to be Reality, into something for which normal language has no words.

It follows from these preliminary considerations that our exploration should start with some word-digging. It is good to remind ourselves that the root of ‘etymology’ is Greek etymos, meaning ‘true sense, sense of a truth’, in other words a tool for sniffing out words that have gone ‘crooked’.

What’s in a (god-)name?

It does not take an expert etymologist to discover that the origin of the word ‘god’ itself is shrouded in mystery, to the point that such a weighty word hardly has an etymology at all.

Another element of mystery is that, etymology aside, the Hebrew Old Testament does not talk about ‘god’ - this will be examined more in detail a little later.

Suggested etymologies for English ‘god’ are scarce, and very hypothetical by their authors’ own admission. As an English word it originates late, coming from the old German gott of various tribes converted to Christianity. There seems to be no relation of ‘god’ to god-names of pre-Christian pagan cultures. ‘God’ stands apart from the equivalent words stemming from the Latin deus for which etymology does provide solid information. What elusive etymology there is for the Germanic ‘gott->god’ does not align with ‘god’ equivalents either in most other languages of Christendom, or in other major Indo-European languages.

We find another anomalous case of missing etymology for the Russian bog.

Just these preliminary observations are enough to sow a seed of suspicion if there is more about ‘god’ than meets the linguistic-etymological eye. Now, with only a superficial perusal of etymology and comparative religious linguistics, it is soon found that ‘god’-words form a very strange maze. Guidance will have to be taken from an expert in esoteric symbology and etymology to light up some corners of the maze.

Starting with other languages’ words for ‘god’, we do find etymological coherence within the Indo-European (IE) family, with dio - deus - theos, (‘god’ in Italian, Latin and Greek), cognate with Sanskritic languages’ dev.

The Greek theos is possibly also derived from IE dhhisos, ‘what has been put or built in a sacred place’. The word ‘sacred’ in its strict sense of sacrum-facere, means to ‘make separate’, to set aside from the ordinary human realm something thus con-secrated, for making sacri-fice. In other words, theos involves separateness from ordinary human affairs. A further possibility for theos would be ethein, ‘to burn’ - suggesting the ‘burning’ of sacrificial offerings, something to which most ‘gods’ do seem to be rather addicted. The two derivations put together, dhhisos-ethein, are rather congruent in the sense that the ‘god’ theos requires ‘sacred things/beings put in a sacred place for sacrificial burning’.

Theos is perhaps etymologically related to Zeus, chief deity of the Greek pantheon, in charge of sky and weather, lightning, thunder, rain and wind (Roman god Jupiter).

Zeus is clearly related to Dyaus - the sky god of the ancient Hindu Rigveda. In the genitive this latter name becomes Dios, and Dieus was the name of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) god of the daytime sky, also called Dyaus Pita or Sky Father. As the sounds ‘dy’ and ‘z’ and ‘j/y’ are phonetically cognate or equivalent, we see the proximity of Zeus and Dyaus, and Ju-piter deriving from Dyaus Pita.

The PIE root in those connections is dyeu, ‘to shine’. This signals a crucial theme of ‘light’, running through the continuity of Zeus -> deus in Latin -> dieu in French, dio in Italian, deo in Portuguese, and so on in the other Roman⁹ languages. ‘Light’ informs a broad semantic category evident in the general IE root diw. The latter is clearly continuous in Indian languages where the generic ‘god’ word is dev, and diwali is the ‘festival of lights’.

At this point, we might feel confident that we have grasped the essence of the ‘god’ word in most languages of Christendom, continuous with pagan Greek and Latin and with India - it is all about ‘light’. After all, Christian exegesis is replete with notions of ‘god’ as ‘light warding off darkness’, and esoterically the Bible codes the yearly celestial trajectory of the sun. But what about the previously noted thread involving ‘sacred setting aside’ and ‘burning’, both of which conceptually converge in the ‘burning of sacrificial offerings’? Here too, Christian doctrine heavily emphasizes what is sacred, and the importance of sacri-fice…

This is where esoteric etymology may contribute something more. Pierre Sabak’s voluminous coverage deciphers god-name etymologies at the deeper, hidden, level of ‘esoteric puns’ that prove to be ubiquitous in ancient ‘god’-languages. We can see with just a small sample of what he uncovers, that godly pun-names mean things that are far from trivial. The first shocking lesson of phonic/phonetic proximity in esoteric punning is a clear association of certain ‘god’-names of antiquity with fright.

-The Greek theos (god-name) is close to deos meaning ‘fright’

-The name Yahweh is close to Hebrew yare, ‘fright’

-The Old Semitic Baal is close to behal, ‘to terrify’¹⁰ .

-Zeus is also close to deos because of the interchangeability of ‘z’, ‘d’, ‘dz’.

Ancient texts say unambiguously that Zeus, Baal and Yahweh were indeed very frightening ‘gods’. The notion that fright is associated through pun-symbology with the sound of very different ‘god’-names, from Mesopotamia to the Old Testament and ancient Greece, is a significant indicator in its own right. The pun-symbolism would have been familiar for the populations living in fear under those ‘gods’ - who were not mysterious and ‘spiritual’ like the later Christian ‘god’. The existence of pun-symbolism in ‘god’-names tells us today that a covert level of meaning, such as ‘fright’, can be wrapped within the overt meaning of an etymology denoting ‘light’. In other words, there is good reason to not take for granted the names of ‘divine’ beings, for they are esoterically encoded, and here their ‘light’ is already giving off a whiff of ‘frightening’ Krivda.

It could all be dismissed as just an old trace of frightening ‘gods’ belonging in the dust of bygone cultures. But Sabak’s association of Greek theos ‘god’ with Greek deos ‘fright’ is phonetically even more obvious between Latin deus ‘god’ and Greek deos ‘fright’. Hence all the Roman-language names derived from deus in Christianity (dio, dieu, dios…), and used to this day by a large proportion of the world population, can be considered to carry a subconscious charge of ‘fright’. In other words, the allegedly benevolent dio, dieu, dios… of the New Testament has covertly preserved the ancient ‘fright’, nested in its ‘light that dispels darkness’, without discontinuity from the terrifying ‘gods’ of earlier millennia. The scriptural notion of a moralistic ‘fear of god’ might just be the veneer to cover that ‘fright’ which lives on inter-generationally, hidden deep inside humans’ subconscious memory. Modernity lives under the delusion that there are no gods to fear, unlike ancient peoples who knew the terror to be all too real.

Sabak has more in store in the ‘fear’ department. Another ancient Greek word for ‘fear’ is deimos. Here the phonic-esoteric punning brings in daimon, a broad-spectrum word for ‘divinity, spirit, demon, djinn’. Daimon carries the good-and-bad ambivalence of the unseen beings familiar to all ancient cultures, as well as their frequent lack of clearly separate identities. We have no difficulty associating the ‘bad’ daimon with deimos ‘fright’. But deimos associated with daimon blurs the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ daimon. This should give us pause. Deimos is the middle term that both differentiates and un-differentiates theos/deus ‘god’ and daimon ‘demon’. Schematically put, there is fright associated with both ‘god’ and ‘demon’: god -> fright <- demon’. The ancient people dealing with ambivalent denizens of the unseen realms had a problem that is clearly conveyed by their own old words - the ‘positive divine’ and the ‘negative divine’ were known to be relatives sharing a power unfriendly to humans. Through their power to frighten humans, ‘gods’ can be demonic and ‘demons’ can be godly. At the very least, this challenges the simplistic dualism of a god of pure goodness in absolute opposition to a demon of pure evil.

The clues found in ‘fright’ can be checked for a possible punning connection with the themes of ‘light’ observed in etymologies of deus-names. It is not fortuitous that the Christian ‘god’ extolled as ‘dispeller of darkness’ asserts the very weighty duality of light-versus-dark. Sabak offers a relevant clue with the connection of two Greek words, theos ‘god’ and phos, ‘light’. This new pair adds on to theos-deos, ‘god-fright’. ‘God’ is thus associated with both ‘light’ and ‘fright’. It can thus be suspected that ‘light’ belonging with ‘god’ is substantially more complicated than the ‘good’ power to dispel ‘bad’ darkness.

Yahweh’s metamorphosis by the New Testament into Greek theos and Latin deus shifted his old terrifying identity into benevolent godly ‘light’. But Yahweh in the Old Testament already did have (as we shall see below) a certain type of ‘light’, so frightening as to be his main tool of terror.

Leaving esoteric puns aside for a moment, we can check how a couple of other cultures handle ‘gods’ of ‘light’. India has some ‘outlier deities’ whose names are not aligned with the IE diw/dev yet are unquestionably in the semantic realm of ‘light’. The old sun-god Surya, and Indra the lightning god as well as former king of the gods, are marginal in the Indian pantheon today. On the other hand, the dev root that we saw above has become a generic addition to the individual name of any Indian deity (feminine devi). It is used as a suffix - not as a god-name, unlike the monotheistic name deus-dio-dieu - such as in Lakshmi-devi. There are two exceptions, namely Maha-dev and Maha-devi, or ‘great male/female deity’, applying to Shiva and Shakti and denoting the Masculine Principle and Feminine Principle rather than the western meaning of ‘god’ and ‘goddess’. The dev root-word is used on its own as a deity-name only for the Supreme Feminine Devi, ‘the Goddess’ being in essence a modern reductive translation since Devi belongs ‘above the gods’.

Moving north from India, the Sun is found to have been an essential High Being for the ancient Slavs, and persistently so in Slavic peasant traditions. But its names have no connection with the diw/dev root, surprisingly considering the proximity of Slavic languages to Sanskrit. Russian folklore had a dynamic pagan ‘sun-pantheon’, with a sun-being Dazbog whose sun-daughters ushered in the dawn light, like the Greek daughters of the sun.

There will be further discussion of the all-important ‘light’ theme in the next sections. But now it is time to turn to the strangest outlier-names of the Christian Indo-European domain, the English god derived from Germanic gott, and the Russian orthodox bog. Both lack any discernible etymological relation to the otherwise dominant theme of ‘light, shining’, and do not denote ‘sun’. The strangest detail is that they are as poor in any kind of etymology as they are powerful as masters of their respective churches.

As regards bog the few available etymological interpretations relate it to Sanskrit bhaga, ‘gifting, sharing’, or bhoga, ‘enjoying’. These roots do not seem congruent with the character of Russian orthodoxy, yet they are well relatable to Russian words denoting ‘wealth’, such as bog-aty, ‘rich’. These meanings seem disconnected from the ethos of the old pagan Russian peasantry who had their own different sense of ‘wealth’ and had no need for a ‘gifting/enjoying god’ to provide Christian ‘salvation’. In fact, recent alternative history seems to indicate that they did not embrace with any kind of enthusiasm the new Christian faith that came to them a millennium ago.

A very speculative possibility for the origin of bog is the more phonetically congruent Mongolian word boga/buga/boge that means shaman! Orthodoxy today would certainly never want to acknowledge such parentage, but this possibility is less outrageous than it seems at first glance. Indeed the ideological identification with Europe of the upper educated classes of Russia for the past three centuries, including in the Soviet period, has insistently been challenged by a few deep authors since at least a century ago. The latter consistently find in ethnographic material a kinship of proto-Russian and Russian village society with the Turkic and shamanic cultures to the east, across the vast Eurasian landmass.

It must be recalled that pre-Christian, Nature-based, pagan cultures had no ‘god’ and no ‘religion’ in the conventionally accepted sense, and that Christian missionaries proselytizing in ‘barbarian’ lands might adopt the name of a powerful pagan ‘spiritual’ entity to naturalize the Christian ‘god’. Nuance tends to get ‘lost in translation’. The Greek missionaries to old Russia may have picked up a boge-shaman word that the locals may have found applicable to… the missionaries themselves.

Something of that ‘god’ naturalization is plausible in the case of gott-god. Etymological investigation of gott-god has been scant, and has yielded inconclusive results. J.G.R. Forlong, in Encyclopedia of Religions, says, It is remarkable that philologists are unable to decide the origin of this familiar Teutonic word.¹¹ Leaving aside a few far-fetched hypotheses, there exists a notion popular with some Christians whereby ‘god’ is obviously related to ‘good’. Well… ‘the Scandinavian languages, like the old Anglo-Saxon, called god gud and called gud (good) god. Calling good god and god gud is bad enough to confuse us. Even worse is that the Old Netherlands languages regarded god as an idol and gud as the correct deity!’¹²

Considering the challenge of missionaries having to name ‘god’ palatably for ‘barbarian’ tribes, a possible derivation might be the pagan Germanic top-god Woden/ Woten/Odan, also called Godan. Like other male deities he had a feminine counterpart, frau Gode. In Westphalian dialect, Wednesday is Godenstag.¹³ The female name seems closest to our ‘god’ word. We could fantasize that the missionaries chose a nice lady’s name to coax the tough Teutons into the religion of the patriarchal deus. Or were these Teutons sufficiently impressed with the power of the strangers’ deus that he would be worthy of taking over their male top-god’s name?¹⁴

In proto-Germanic the term ansuz was applicable to the highest pagan deities, and is the name of the rune equivalent to the letter/sound A. Runes were a crucial cultural-magical tool of knowledge, wisdom and power. While high deities combined with magic power are semantically congruent with the ‘supernatural’ Christian ‘god’, ansuz did not become the name of ‘god’. Perhaps the pagans were not prepared to hand over to this new ‘god’ a name denoting their deepest wisdom heritage.

Lastly, the occult notion of ‘god’ as inversion of ‘dog’ to signify the Dog Star Sirius certainly makes sense in respect of the ‘light’ aspect discussed above. And it relates to the sense of ‘counterfeit sun’ that is considered in the next section - the Dog Star as an ‘alien sun’ whose worship usurps the natural relation of humans to the natural Sun.

As regards the one who became ‘god’ in the Bible (see next chapter), his name does not belong in this discussion of ‘god’ etymologies and meanings. For Yahweh is the personal name of a specific physical individual whom the Old Testament does not call ‘god’ in the sense familiar to us. Yahweh belongs within the generic biblical term Elohim that would become routinely translated as ‘god’ much later.

But the Elohim, who are directly related to Yahweh, do offer a further relevant detail according to Pierre Sabak’s esoteric etymology and pun-symbology. In old Hebrew texts not included in the Bible, the term Elohim is semantically related to the Irin and Seraphim. These celestial beings, whose name means ‘shining ones, watchers’¹⁵ - a ‘light’ theme again - all relate to a ‘serpent’ motif that causes… fright, again! Sabak’s detailed examination of these terms and equivalences is far too complex to summarize here, but the relevant point is the continuity of ‘shining/light’ and ‘fright’ associated with ancient Hebrew ‘proto-god’ words, continuous with other cultures of antiquity.

The added element of ‘fright’ from ‘serpents’ associated with ‘shining ones’ is of course not far removed from the biblical account of a wicked serpent of temptation, and of the fallen angels of Luci-fer, the ‘light-bearer’. The points noted earlier about the elements of ‘light/shining’, as well as ‘fear’ in deos-daimon or ‘fear-demon/ divinity’, now relate also to ‘serpent’.

Overall, we end up with a disturbing meaning for what we call ‘god’ - an entity who emerges from a complex of ‘fearsome-light-gods-demons-serpents’.

This brief overview has provided some key ‘god-themes’ and esoterically coded conceptual clusters, the layered meanings of which would have been familiar to ancient peoples. To our modern minds they seem confusing - as they must, since those ancient meanings are perpetuated very subliminally in the masses, but very consciously by the initiates of ‘religions’, to this day. Now, thanks in large measure to the work of P. Sabak, we at least have a sense of how such clusters of charged words can operate as a spell under which our beliefs operate subconsciously.

The counterfeit sun

Explicit and esoteric etymology has provided three clusters of ‘god’-names.

1- An ancient pre-Christian sun-entity in cultures that call it by names not related to the dominant Indo-European diw/dev root. As is explicit in Russian folklore, the sun-entity occupied a high position among pagan ‘spiritual’ beings, as a natural entity to whom humans related with joyful reverence, not in a ‘religion’. For this Light of the natural Sun of grassroots cultures, the word ‘god’ in the conventional ‘religious’ sense should be avoided.

2- A large etymological and semantic cluster of ‘god’-words related to ‘light’, derived from an Indo-European diw-dev root. This cluster straddles the Indian realm, Greek/Roman gods, and Greek-Latin-Roman Christianity.

3- An esoteric cluster, largely coinciding with the exoteric second cluster, running from pre-Hebrew roots to Greek Zeus through to Christian deus, with esoteric puns encoding ‘light’ in association with ‘fright’ and ‘demons/deities’ and ‘serpents’. Of this cluster Sabak offers a most succinct encapsulation, to be borne in mind as our exploration unfolds: he says literally that ‘god=dread’.¹⁶

In addition to this crucial point, another highly significant aspect of ‘divine light’ is that ‘light’ associated with ‘gods’ is nowhere that of the natural Sun. Indeed the ‘shining gods’ have the ‘light’ of ‘serpent-fright-daimon’. In other words, the third semantic cluster esoterically codes fearsome supernatural beings of unnatural light, in which, to make matters worse, resides a profound good-and-evil ambivalence. This ambivalence of the spirit world was well known in Nature-based cultures that had their ways of dealing with it, notably through shamanic expertise. It may well have informed the old Russian discernment of Pravda/Krivda. Under Krivda, joyful trust in the Pravda of the natural Sun is occulted by a frightening ‘crooked light’.

Dualities, real and false

The distinction between the two kinds of ‘divine light’, the natural Sun that is not a ‘god’, and the supernatural frightening ‘light’ beings, leads into a further very important duality.

Light-and-Dark is a key polarity principle of our Earth reality. In ancient pagan/ shamanic cultures, the status of our natural Sun in its fundamental relation to our Earth, and at the core of multiple indispensable life processes including in humans, was something different from that of a ‘god of religion’. That status would be occulted by the un-natural ‘light’ of frightening entities that became ‘gods’. Many of the latter have names derived from the diw-dev root for ‘light’ - but their names do not signify the real Sun.

In our current reality the Sun’s natural life-supporting status has been downgraded and reversed in many ways. Techno-scientism ‘protects’ the planet by ‘dimming the sun’. A majority of the world’s population fears the Sun, on account of skin cancer in the west or of getting a peasant’s dark skin in the east. These fears are artificially seeded by scientistic authorities or by color-coded ideologies of social status. People avoiding the natural light of the Sun miss its countless real natural benefits. Its unnatural avoidance causes those living indoors with artificial light to experience vitamin D deficiency and any number of concomitant disorders. It is less well known that the Sun modulates the light spectrum from dawn to dusk, governing the circadian rhythm of all life, and that its morning saturation in the infrared zone is crucial for immune health. The Sun is in constant two-way energetic interaction with the Earth, positive charge to negative charge. The un-natural light ‘gods’ do none of this.

Thus emerges the uncomfortable realization that ‘light’ is not just the opposite of ‘dark’ but is made to comprise its own embedded natural-unnatural duality, and that we dwell in cognitive confusion about the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ terms of the duality. This serves the purposes of the unnatural ‘light-gods’, and it runs much deeper than vitamin D deficiency. But it is only part of the deceit.

While we are insufficiently discerning about the natural/unnatural duality of ‘light’, we do unmistakably (unless we play computer games round the clock) know about the duality of light versus dark. The real natural duality governing time, and all life, in our natural world is the regular succession of day and night, modulating balance in every living being. So the question arises - if light comes with an embedded duality, what about dark? We are culturally and subconsciously diffident about dark. Subconscious polarization tends to agree with ‘spirituality’ in opposing ‘bad’ dark to ‘good’ light. For sure, demons like to torment living beings at night, but blaming night for their misdeeds is as foolish as blaming the pot for the boiling water that inflicts a burn. To the wise ones, day and night simply reveal different aspects of truth.

Darkness of night is where bodies and minds self-repair and dreams convey wisdom or warnings. Pagan cultures had important oracular or revelatory ‘deities’ of the night, predominantly emanating from the Feminine Principle (see Part IV). Dark caves were places of wisdom-seeking. Dark soils are the fertile sites of abundant harvests from the nurturing Feminine Earth. Under Feminine-debasing ‘god’-systems, dark becomes the ‘bad’ side of the light-dark duality¹⁷ . As is the case for ‘light’, we find that ‘dark’ too is split into its own duality - the natural Dark of fertile night and wisdom-bestowing caves, and the artificial dark that feeds human fears.

Natural and unnatural dark are very difficult to distinguish from one another because all of ‘dark’ has become such a predominantly negative opposite of desirable ‘light’. Who wants to be ‘en-darkened’ when everyone is after ‘enlightenment’, other than the few wise enough to go through a ‘dark night of the soul’? But the true dwellers of the unnatural dark are precisely those ‘divine’ daimon, djinn, demons that are ‘gods of fright’, who can also pass themselves off for ‘gods of light’ (because it is unnatural light). Furthermore, the unnatural dark is also the abode of all the ‘shadow’ aspects of our human psyche that fear the real truth-light of natural day and the real truth-night of wisdom-fertility.

Duality-within-the-duality, deduced here from P. Sabak’s esoteric excavations, is confirmed in the work of George Kavassilas, Our Universal Journey. He asserts that natural Light and Dark are the natural duality governing reality across this universe, while artificial light and dark are the handiwork of ‘the gods’. The double of the natural duality is inherently artificial because the ‘gods’ dominate this reality not as its creators, but as its expertly ‘crooked’ simulators. While they operate within the framework of a universe governed by real Light and Dark, their domination can only be deployed through their own version, the ‘crooked’ reality of simulated light and dark. Kavassilas asserts that the unnatural ‘god’ is the source of both the unnatural light and the unnatural dark, and is incapable of creating ‘real’ light and dark.

These pairs of real and false dualities are a fundamental key to understanding how ‘gods’ of ‘religions’ operate, how they manipulate humans to serve them, out of both conditioned fear and conditioned belief in the ‘goodness’ of their religions. Furthermore, the intimate continuity of daimon as ‘divinity-demon’ with ‘light’, and ‘fright’ produces the power of the ‘gods’ to be, or appear as, their own opposite - demons, devils, epitomized by the figure called Satan, who possesses the attribute of false light and its power to deceive unwary humans into trusting him. The doctrines of an absolute opposition between ‘god’ and ‘devil’ purposely ignore what initiates know - the ‘good-bad’ ambivalence of the daimon.

In our times of great confusion, disinformation, cognitive dissonance, and ‘spiritual’ fragility under the rule of Krivda, there may be no greater tool for us to acquire than discernment of true and false light and dark. This is no easy endeavor since we have lost the innate and culturally honed abilities of Nature-based wisdom cultures. But we do have the capacity to restore that discernment through vigilance to Krivda, the powerful notion of crookedness. To know Krivda, it is essential to understand the fundamental handicap of ‘the gods’ - their lack of intrinsic creativity. It is not difficult to see their claim to be creators as the lie that it is, when it is appraised through Nature’s inherent creativity as primary. Nature never lies, and has no Krivda. The ‘gods’ are experts of crooked truth, of the crookedness of simulated reality interwoven into right reality.

As for ‘sun-gods’ of the false duality, it is probably with Jordan Maxwell¹⁸ - and his sixty years of research - that we most clearly see how ubiquitously, ever since ancient Egypt, despotism has worked hand-in-glove with religions worshipping a sun-god or its variations in all major civilizations on Earth. The ancient false-solar pattern was carried through into the solar symbolism of the Christ, and into secularized versions such as western ‘Enlightenment’ and communist ‘New Dawn’. The iconography of all of them clearly and ubiquitously includes the ‘sun’ - its orb, or its dawn rays, or a halo of light around a ‘god’ or ‘saint’. This iconography, in its repetitiveness, denotes simulator ‘gods’, who cannot be nor create the natural Sun, who fool humans into believing that it is they who create and sustain all life on Earth. It follows that what their religions are founded upon is a psycho-cultural theft of the real Sun that is not a ‘god’ in natural cultures, and the distortion of our connection to our life-sustaining star through fearsome usurper