Heresies of the Day Part 2!
So many of you wrote that you enjoyed yesterday's heresies that I have some more thoughts which continue along those lines.
Upon reading the comment, attributed to Christ in the Gospel of the Egyptians, "When ye have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one and the male with the female is neither male nor female" a friend commented that in the occult there is the view that the human spirit consists of two forces that are always in conflict.
Indeed, just this morning I read something quite similar to that very idea in one of the texts known from the so-called Qumran or Dead Sea Scrolls, the Community Rule. For some idiotic reason the full text of this is not yet available on the web, so I get to key it all in.
Anonymous, Hebrew
The Community Rule (50 B.C.E. - 50 C.E.; 1QS)
(from column III, 18-19)
And He (i.e. God) allotted unto man two Spirits
that he should walk in them until the time of His Visitation;
they are the Spirits of truth and perversity.
The origin of Truth is in a fountain of light,
and the origin of Perversity is from a fountain of darkness.
(and later, from column IV, 16-18)
For God has allotted these two Spirits in equal parts until thr final end
and has set between their divisions eternal hatred.
An abomination to Truth are the deeds of Perversity,
And an abomination to Perversity are all the ways of Truth.
And a fighting ardor pits one against the other on the subject of all their ordinances,
for they walk not together.
But in His Mysteries of understanding and in His glorious Wisdom
God has set an end for the existence of Perversity;
and at the time of the Visitation He will destroy it forever.
For the longest time this text was said to have been written by the Essenes, a minor sectarian group within Judaism described seperately by Philo and Josephus in historical texts dating to the first century C.E. Nowadays historians are scrapping over who really write the scrolls found in the Qumran caves - certainly with some 800 different texts now on the Dead Sea Scroll index no single order could be responsible for all of them. Despite this, I suspect that at least this scroll, found in Cave 1, really does belong to the Essenes - so many of the details square with the historical accounts of how they lived.
The novel idea that God will rise up at the end of time and destroy all evil is reputedly Zoarastrian. I would like to have turned up the "smoking gun" - chapter and verse on how Ahura Mazda rises up against Ahriman and puts him away for all time, curing the 99,999 diseases Ahriman has placed upon the world. Tell you what - I am most certainly NOT going to read through all that crap in the Avesta to find it; at least not tonight. Of all the incomprehensible babbling! Here - you figure it out:
http://www.avesta.org/avesta.html
It'll make your brain hurt like an ice cream headache.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com