Liberty, Freedom, and Fairness

I’ve been continuing my reading on culture, most specifically David Hackett Fischer and Colin Woodard among many others. One of the other authors is James Loewen whose work is mentioned by Fischer. I’ve also been thinking about Francis Fukuyama’s book on cultures of trust.

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What has caught my interest lately is the history of certain words/concepts: liberty, freedom, and fairness.

Colin Woodard mentions the basic distinction between freedom and liberty in American Nations, but David Hackett Fischer discusses all of this more fully in several of his books. In Albion’s Seed, four varieties of freedom/liberty are discussed in terms of the four cultural strains in the American colonies. He goes in more detail about all of this in Liberty and Freedom and Fairness and Freedom.

Etymology is one of the most insightful ways of analyzing cultural values.

The distinction between ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ as words is their origins in Northern and Southern Europe respectively. An important difference in early Europe is that most people were born free in Northern Europe whereas in the areas ruled by the Roman Empire most people were born enslaved and/or without self-rule, a difference that resonates with the separate traditions of common law in Northern Europe and civil law in Southern Europe. These origins play out in the meanings of the words.

Freedom (etymologically related to friendship) implies social connection in terms of community and kinship. A free person is a member of a free people. Freedom goes hand in hand with rights, another word that has origins in Northern Europe. Rights are what a person has who is born into a free society.

Liberty (along with similar words in the Hellenistic world) implies separation and independence. Liberty is about a hierarchy of privileges where there are no universal, inborn rights. Privileges are bestowed upon an individual by a government or other institutions of authority. Having the privilege of liberty is simply the negation of being a slave (i.e., the state of existence prior to being given privileges and following having privileges taken away).

In the earliest sense, a person is only free to the degree he is part of a free society. Freedom isn’t possessed by an individual; rather, it is participated in. Liberty, however, doesn’t require a free society. The Stoics went so far as to see liberty as a state of mind that even a slave could have. So, one can have liberty without freedom. Having based their society on the slave-holding republics of the ancient Mediterranean, privileged aristocrats in the American South correctly saw no conflict or hypocrisy in upholding the value of liberty while enslaving others.

Some mistakenly see the fundamental distinction as between positive and negative freedom. The negative means freedom from and the positive freedom toward. It does seem that negative freedom fits liberty, but positive freedom doesn’t fit the original meaning of freedom. To be a free person among a free people, isn’t so much freedom toward as it is freedom with. A lone person in the wilderness has perfect liberty, although not freedom for social values don’t mean much without a social context. This social factor is almost entirely ignored or else forgotten by mainstream American society, especially on the right (E.J. Dionne discusses this well in Our Divided Political Heart).

Fairness, especially from an American perspective, complicates matters. It originally just meant something being pleasing or good and also referred to how free people should treat one another in a free society. It didn’t mean equality or justice and it’s not so much about laws or rules. Fairness is more subjective or rather more intersubjective and more relative or rather more about interrelationships. To be fair necessitates characteristics such as honesty and authenticity along with requiring an attitude of respect and good intentions, understanding and sympathy. Not just about results, but also process.

The Scandinavians combine the values of freedom and fairness. That is a powerful combination as is attested by the examples of Scandinavian countries. I’d suspect that there is a particularly close relationship between cultures of fairness and cultures of trust. I’d also suspect a resonance with the correlation between economic equality and social health. Fairness seems to magnify the social factor of a free society.

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A couple of statements about etymology surprised me.

Apparently, only Western languages have a native origin for single words directly defined according to freedom/liberty and only certain Northern European languages have a native origin for single words directly defined according to fairness. Many languages have since adopted these or similar words, either by borrowing or invention.

The English language is unique in its history. It is one of the earliest languages to form around all of these concepts. Celtic language was related to the languages of Northern Europe and they shared the concept of freedom. Germans and Scandinavians, having settled in the British isles, helped to form the English language and further strengthened the native values of freedom (along with the common law tradition) and introduced the linguistic concept of fairness. The Normans thereafter conquered England and placed an overlay of Latin words on the English language (along with establishing civil law).

In the English-speaking world, these linguistic concepts have become intertwined and overlapping. This is particularly true between freedom and liberty that are often used as synonyms, but the sense of their separateness was still understood during the revolutionary era when the two words would sometimes be combined as if to cover all bases. Even fairness and freedom are regularly paired signifying their vernacular resonance.

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David Hackett Fischer looked at the use of these words in published writings.

The words liberty and freedom were increasingly used during the colonial era and their use reached a peak around the time of the founding of the United States. This left a permanent imprint on American culture that has lasted long after the use of those words decreased in Britain. Following the revolutionary era, the word fairness increased in Britain. This increase wasn’t seen as strongly in America, but New Zealand was strongly influenced as it experienced high rates of British immigration in the latter 19th century. This is how the founding effect had a different impact on two similar English-speaking free societies.

America is complicated beyond this revolutionary era founding effect. Each of the colonies that formed the regions also had their own founding cultures. The Norman-influenced Cavaliers spread the value of liberty throughout the South as there was a massive exodus from Virginia and into Appalachia and the Deep South. The Puritans, Quakers and Dutch brought a more German culture to the North. This was magnified by the several large waves of Germans that settled in the Quaker Midlands and there moved Westward. Also, Scandinavians combined their numbers with the Germans in the Upper Midwest where communitarianism, social democracy and socialism took hold.

New Zealand is a smaller country with a less diverse history of immigration. They didn’t have colonies founded by the likes of Cavaliers and Puritans, and so they didn’t have the schism that has plagued America. They also didn’t have many border English or Scots-Irish immigrants. I don’t know that they even had many Highland Scots or Irish. From what I understand, they had a more general mix of English immigrants who were of the middling sort. On top of that, they didn’t receive boatloads of criminals as did Australia and America nor did they receive boatloads of slaves along with the slave-holding aristocrats. The lack of ethnic and class diversity may have helped the value of fairness to take hold.

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t underestimate the influence of fairness on American culture and politics, even though it hasn’t been embraced across all populations. New Zealand doesn’t have the German and Scandinavian population like the US. Germans are the single largest ethnicity in the US and one of the most widely spread throughout the country. Scandinavians may be smaller in number and more regionally isolated, but their influence is greater because they settled in areas with culturally sympathetic Germans.

The early colonial and revolutionary strains of grassroots democracy had been taken up by these Northern European immigrants and their descendents. Where they were concentrated in the Midwest, radical politics of populist reform took hold and from there permanently altered national politics. They were very talented with organizing movements and forming institutions. The Midwest was a stronghold of Populism, was the beginning point for much of Progressivism, and was a model of municipal socialism that set the national standard for good governance (it probably wasn’t accidental that the popular t.v. show Happy Days was set in socialist-run Milwaukee).

It is interesting to note that the word fairness has become more often used across the entire English-speaking world, including America. The German and Scandinavian waves of immigration had been particularly large in America during the 19th and 20th centuries which helped to emphasize the component of their cultures within Anglo-American culture (at a time when other ethnic immigrants such as from southern Europe were prohibited).

The World Wars caused many Germans to seek refuge in America, especially scientists, intellectuals and artists. Scandinavians and Germans have also been major players in globalized capitalism as a disproportionate number of international corporations originate from Northern Europe. Along with Germany’s influence on America, the influence also flowed back the other direction when the US helped to rebuild the German economy and industry after WWII.

I suspect the spread of the English language is related to the spread of democratic beliefs, ideals and practices around the globe… even if the putting into practice part is often severely imperfect. Also spreading to other societies would be the failures and hypocrisy, the rhetoric and doublespeak that underlies or is consequent to such linguistic concepts.

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David Hackett Fischer discusses both the positives and the negatives.

One particular negative was most personally relevant. A problem of freedom involves the opposite of being a part of a free people. Free societies/communities have often defined themselves by who  is excluded. He references James Loewen’s work on sundown towns in this regard.

I was generally aware that sundown towns existed, although I’m not sure I’ve ever heard them called that. They are basically towns where blacks weren’t (and, in some cases, still aren’t) welcome after dark, so unwelcome that their lives could be in danger (such as being arrested, beaten, or lynched). I was even aware that towns unfriendly to non-whites have existed all over the United States. Racism is pervasive throughout American society. Still, I was surprised by how pervasive these sundown towns supposedly were, especially in the far North and far West.

There was an era following the Civil War where an anti-racist idealism prevailed. It took hold most strongly in the Republican majority areas outside the South. Blacks were very much welcomed into towns across the country and blacks took up the new opportunities available to them. What I never knew before was that blacks had settled in so many small towns and rural areas outside of the South. Like Loewen before he did the research, I just assumed most areas always were lacking in minorities.

For example, a nearby town is West Branch in Cedar County. My brother and his family live in West Branch, and he has noted the old boys network that keeps that town from changing, despite all the other small towns nearby experiencing lots of change. A longtime friend of mine grew up there for much of her early life and she recalls the racism that was common there.

Loewen briefly discusses Cedar County in his discussion of presidential hometowns (as Hoover lived in West Branch as a child). West Branch did and does have a large Quaker presence and the Quakers sought to help blacks after the Civil War. According to the census data, there were 37 black residents of Cedar County in 1890, but only 2 in 1930.

This appearance and disappearance of blacks happened all over around this time. During the 20th century, blacks increasingly became concentrated into big cities. Loewen was unable to find any legal documents, newspaper accounts or oral history about what caused the  blacks to leave Cedar County, but he did find plenty of evidence to explain what happened in other places. In some cases, white mobs forced entire black communities to vacate a town, a county or larger area (Oregon was a sundown state in that there were anti-black laws enforced to keep any new blacks from becoming residents). Whether through official decree or unofficial policy, many of these places remained all white for most or all of the 20th century, some still remaining all white to this day.

The Deep South didn’t have this problem as its culture was never based on the ideal of being a free society. Instead, the Deep South aristocracy idealized liberty which doesn’t require equal rights for all citizens. Sundown towns were rare in the Deep South because their entire economy and lifestyle was dependent on cheap black labor. So, there was a vested interest in keeping their black populations close at hand. It’s for this reason that one finds the South to be well integrated in the basic sense of living in close proximity, even if blacks and whites typically go to separate churches and schools.

This difference among the regions can even be seen in the settlement and residential patterns among whites.

I’ve always had this sense that there is more diversity even among whites in the North, but this diversity goes hand in hand with the same kind of segregation seen with blacks. In the North, a single ethnicity (Irish, Germans, Czechs, etc) would tend to all live together in a single neighborhood, town or county. A defining factor among Scots-Irish in the South is how early on they were more open to intermarrying with those of other ethnicities, as the Scots-Irish based their social organization more on kinship than on community (and if you married into a Scots-Irish family you were kin). This also has to do with the fact that much of the white immigration in the North (and on the West Coast) happened in the 20th century such as with the influx of Germans during the era of the world wars whereas the influx of Scots-Irish in the South happened much earlier.

With my German ancestry, I’ve given this much thought.

Germans were among the most idealist of immigrants, including a streak of anti-racism, which is why the Germans felt at home in the Quaker Midlands. For centuries, Germans came to America with very clear notions of the freedom they sought. This sense of freedom had it’s roots in the linguistic history involving the sense of being a free people. Being free was tied up with their sense of nationality. Germans congregated together and enforced their culture and language onto the communities they were a majority in, that is until the WASP oppressiveness of the Cold War Era.

There is a clear resonance to the pattern in northern Europe and northern United States. Both areas were distant from the populations of those of African and Hispanic ancestry. Both areas have been centers of industrialization and globalization which are, as Fukuyama points out, related to cultures of trust.

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I sense that cultures of trust are key for understanding much of this.

Some people have noted that societies with strong cultures of trust often are ethnically homogenous. At least in Western countries, this appears to be based on or influenced by the national sense of being a free people (according to Fischer, a nation isn’t the same thing as a country, but instead simply means a shared culture). A free people aren’t just free. They are united in a collective sense of belonging to a shared free society. This requires immense trust (along with social capital in general) and in turn creates the groundwork for the continuance of trust.

A culture of trust seems even more important for the Scandinavian countries that reinforce their sense of freedom with a demand for fairness. Scandinavian countries are probably even more ethnically and culturally homogenous than Germany for they are, along with being far away from the Mediterranean, further away from Eastern Europe. This might be why Scandinavian countries are so small. It might be part of what makes them successful as cultures of trust.

This presents a dilemma for the United States. The US is neither small nor ethnically homogenous. The US at an earlier time could have chosen to have remained smaller and more ethnicially homogenous, but the Westward expansion and concommitant acquisition of former territories of France, Spain and Mexico irredeemably ended the dream of a permanent WASP supremacy. Nonetheless, Americans have managed to create a reasonable level of social capital, enough so that a free society can function to a minimal degree.

Maybe the trick isn’t lack of diversity in and of itself. Sundown towns tend to lack ethnic diversity, but that also makes them insular and so less well assimilated to the larger American culture. Cultures of trust don’t seem to fit well into insular communities. Sundown towns are often so insular as to be antagonistic to anything new and different. It reminds one of how the Nazis took over Germany, and Loewen does point out that Germany experienced a similar thing with towns putting up signs forbidding Jews.

What makes the difference between a society becoming an insular society and a society becoming a culture of trust? Which direction is the US moving toward? It makes me wonder about what freedom means or could mean. Our concepts of freedom/liberty arose prior to democracy and the entire Enlightenment Age.

Cultures most often change slowly and not easily. I have doubts about the ability of cultures to be changed from within. When forced by external forces, though, cultures can sometimes change quickly and dramatically. So, what kind of external forces could put pressure on American culture to expand it’s ideals of freedom and liberty? Or even what could make more Americans see the failures and problems of their own ideals?

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http://www.npr.org/2012/07/04/156258435/founding-fathers-defined-freedom-differently

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/183822-1

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/opinion/07fischer.html?_r=0

http://cchadley.free.fr/3rdYr/3rdYrCiv/FischerFreedomLiberty.html

http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/difference-between-liberty-and-freedom/

http://www.lewrockwell.com/stromberg/stromberg14.html

http://kiwiscots.blogspot.com/2012/03/fairness-and-freedom-nz-and-us.html

http://artsfuse.org/56492/fuse-book-review-fairness-and-freedom/

http://paulwindsor.blogspot.com/2013/01/fairness-and-freedom.html

http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/256-justice/10868-the-worlds-wealthiest-failed-state-fairness-and-freedom-in-contemporary-america

Iowa State Parks: Past and Present

Here is the sad result of living in a farming state with the richest soil in the world. I can only assume that this is mostly a result of the transition from small family farms to big agribusiness. The following is from ”State Park Paths 2013″ by Mark S. Edwards, formerly for 30 years the Trails Coordinator for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources:

“Iowa started our state park system around the early 1900’s because there was so little left undisturbed. Even before we could designate these areas as parks they had been clear-cut, mined, plowed and heavily grazed. Iowa struggled through the 1930’s Great Depression, along with dust bowl days, unimaginable droughts and economic collapse to expand a state park system for all Iowans.

“By 1937 we lead the nation in the establishment of state parks. Today we compete with one other state for the very bottom in state parks and public lands. We are the most biologically changed place in North America. Roughly 98% of Iowa’s 36 million acres have been altered for agricultural use, cities, and roads.

“There are no old growth forests left to study or enjoy. We drained 98% of our wetlands, cut 80% of the trees, and plowed up 99.9% of our prairies. We have the most polluted surface water, the least species diversity and are at the bottom in environmental spending in the nation. This makes these parks very, very special not only for people but for the remaining critters.

“If we combined all our state parks together in one place we have 55,871 acres or a square just over nine miles on a side, a short day’s walk. The city of Des Moines covers 71,000 acres or a square about ten10 and half miles on a side.Urban sprawl in Iowa alone has increased 50,000 acres in the last ten years. Farmers converted around 50,000 acres of grassland, scrubland and wetlands from 2008 to 2011.”

Cultures and Determinism

Culture isn’t deterministic in an absolutely predictable way. We can measure certain factors within a culture that can probabilistically predict outcomes, but a culture as a whole is constantly shifting even as patterns of collective identity are maintained. Cultures aren’t just limits, but also potentialities. A cultural worldview is a reality tunnel that, while closing down particular possibilities, opens up other possibilities.

This became clear to me in reading Colin Woodards American Nations. He described the development of California. It seemed like a perfect example of how cultures interact to with unforeseen consequences.

California (and the Ecotopia Northwest) is a unique area, very different from the Eastern part of the country. Americans normally identify the Scots-Irish with the Appalachian South, but Scots-Irish are concentrated in many different areas. Scots-Irish immigrants mostly entered through Pennsylvania where there still are many and they have assimilated to the Quaker Midlands culture there. Extending from Pennsylvania, there are many Scots-Irish in the Lower Midwest border area, although interestingly there are fewer Scots-Irish in the Upper Midwest than in New England. The largest concentration of Scots-Irish is actually in the region around the Northwest, including Northern California and the Northern Far West.

It’s equally interesting to consider all the areas the Scots-Irish have intentionally or unintentionally avoided for the most part. As I pointed out, the Upper Midwest is almost entirely devoid of Scots-Irish. The population of the Upper Midwest is a combination of Germans and Scandinavians, and it is the area of the US known for having one of the strongest traditions of socialism and communitarianism, certainly the only area that had a city run by a socialist majority political leadership for about a half century. The only other areas with comparatively low percentage of Scots-Irish are Florida and the Lower Southwest, both Hispanic areas of the former Spanish Empire and once part of Mexico.

California, specifically Northern California, has a connection to New England Yankeedom. It seems strange to see how many Scots-Irish chose to move to both of these areas heavily influenced by Yankee culture and politics. I’m not sure if the Scots-Irish assimilated in New England, but in Northern California it wasn’t a perfect assimilation for anyone involved. Mexicans had settled in Southern California more and they maintained their culture there while New Englanders came after to Northern California where they had a majority in government while also operating the first churches, schools, and newspapers. Following the New Englanders settling the mostly coastal areas which became urbanized, the Scots-Irish spread out mostly in the rural areas. Yankee dominance was never complete for New Englanders were outnumbered by those of other ethnicities.

This created a weird amalgam in California not found anywhere else. The New Englanders brought the Puritan tradition of industriousness and utopian social reform. The Scots-Irish brought their love of independence and grassroots populism. The two cultures conflicted at first which lessened certain aspects of both cultures while magnifying other aspects. Strangely, the Scots-Irish undermined the Puritan religious impulses and helped secularize California which is completely the opposite of how the Scots-Irish embraced evangelical fundamentalism in Appalachia. Also, the Scots-Irish population in the Northwest shows less gun violence than in Appalachia.

Different social conditions lead to entirely different results.

Common Law & Civil Law: Response to a Review

Interesting review. A worthy analysis you present.

It seems we have different biases, but I appreciate the type of data you use to back up your argument. I largely agree that distinctions as you make are important such as between common law and civil law. The tricky party is teasing out what they mean in a diverse society like the US with a complex history and also what are their origins.

There is a complicating factor to your analysis. The English were divided by traditions of common law and civil law long before the colonial era. The Germanic tribes (Anglo-Saxons) brought their common law tradition which was syncretized with the prior Celtic traditions and they formed the early kingdoms. Later, the Romanized French (Normans) conquered England and brought the kingdoms under the civil law tradition. This created a conflict in English society from early on. It eventually led to the Glorious Revolution.

The conflict wasn’t created in America after the colonies gained independence, but was formed long before in England wherefrom Americans inherited it. In the early to mid 19th century, many Americans began to identify this conflict with the regionalism that had formed from settlement patterns of the earlier colonial immigrants. The Cavaliers of Virginia had an outsized influence on Southern culture, including the dialect. The word ‘cavaliers’ is of French Norman origin and the Cavaliers were of Norman nobility. The Puritans fought on the opposite side of the Glorious Revolution and, interestingly, they came from the regions of England originally settled by Anglo-Saxons. Northerners and Southerners prior to the Civil War had come to see themselves as defined by the respective cultures of Anglo-Saxons and Normans.

The British Isles had a close relationship with Europe for millennia. British societies were conquered and ruled by many different European groups, the most influential being those from Northern Europe: Germany, Scandanavia, Norway, Netherlands, etc. Also, the influence went the other way for at times British rulers held control or kingship over European territories. The English language is of German origins. The English in general are as German as they are Celtic. Even the later Normans who had a massive influence were originally Germans. albeit Germans with more of a Roman social and political structure. All of Europe, like all of the British Isles, were influenced by the competing interests of Germania and the Roman Empire, the two cultures forming various amalgamations.

The reason Germany had such outsized influence on the British Isles was because both areas were never fully conquered by the Romans. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the concomitant Mongol invasion, German tribes were forced South and West. Also, with the European wars, later Germans were forced to migrate in great numbers to the New World. From the beginning of the Pennsylvania colony, Germans were the majority there, not Scots-Irish. Germans are the largest ethnicity in the United States, beyond just the region of the former Quaker colony. The Union would have lost the Civil War without the massive German immigration, partly because many of these immigrants were seasoned revolutionaries who had stronger idealism of democracy than any other immigrant population. Along with radicalism, they also brought with them their Protestantism, work ethnic, highly skilled labor, and high levels of education.

The entire area influenced by the German migration included the Midwest and then down into Northern Texas. This is why the only socialist run city was in the Midwest and why socialism was even found in Texas in the 19th century. But many Americans don’t know what socialism is for these German immigrants were simultaneously mistrusting of big government because of the oppressive governments they escaped in Europe. So, the socialism they developed was more in the libertarian tradition of local democracy and self-rule. The reason Germans mostly settled in the Quaker colony was because it was one of the least oppressive colonies at the time.

By the way, socialism wasn’t a foreign concept to the British isles or no more foreign than the rest of Enlightenment thinking. The Welsh businessman Robert Owens built a socialist community in Southern Indiana during the early 19th century. Owens and his sons became some of the most influential politicians in their day. This isn’t surprising as radical leftism began to make it’s mark in London going back to before Thomas Paine which is what caused Paine to bring that English radical tradition to America, thus being a major force that inspired revolution and offered forth a vision alternative to colonial empire.

Germans were also known for their Enlightenment thinking which related to their revolutionary and radical idealism. One of the Germanic countries that influenced England greatly also influenced America greatly: Netherlands. Locke sought refuge in Netherlands when the English government sought to censor and imprison him. The Netherlands published more books than anywhere else in the world at that time. Spinoza, the founder of the radical Enlightenment, lived in Netherlands. The Dutch founded the New Netherlands colony which, even after being taken over by the British maintained its founding culture and politics which is what makes New York City unique to this day.

Also, you have to consider the French and Spanish. Modern Britain would be entirely different without the French Normans. The French Empire later had much influence on Canada, parts of Northeastern US, and Louisiana. The early explorer Champlain helped establish one of the most democratic visions ever brought to North America. The Quakers inherited the good relations with Native Americans that Champlain had helped to develop in the Ohio Valley. The Spanish Empire took over Louisiana along with the rest of their territory throughout the South such as Florida over to Texas, the Southwest and California. After the Spanish Empire receded, Mexico controlled much of the former imperial territory. Spanish and French demographics and culture were well established in these areas long before and long after the US took possession. One significant factor is that states like Louisiana and Texas have the remnants of the civil law tradition written into their constitutions and legal system.

The Catholic Church had it’s influence, but the early radical influences in America preceded any large immigration of Catholics to the Eastern seaboard. There are many other possible influences that might have undermined the common law tradition, besides of course the Norman influence. The Deep South plantation owners were the sons of Barbados plantation owners. They came to America looking for land to start their own plantations. Barbados was known as the most violent slave colony in the entire Western world and this was imported to South Carolina and then throughout the rest of the Deep South.

I don’t have any ultimate conclusion. I’m just suggesting that it is complicated.

Northern Case For Southern Secession

I finished two books on the same day:

What’s the Matter with White People
by Joan Walsh

Better Off Without ‘Em
by Chuck Thompson

I’ve been in the process of reading a ton of books, but these are two I started some months ago and finally got back around to completing. I thought I might appreciate Walsh’s book more than I did, although it was still worth reading. Thompson’s book, on the other hand, was surprisingly insightful.

The authors are both Northern leftists and their books are, in a way, complementary. Both are about American culture and politics, both compare liberals and conservatives, and both focus on specific regions of the country. However, in another way, they are immensely incongruous. Walsh is a serious-minded do-gooder wanting to unite Americans in a common purpose. Thompson is a humorous travel writer advocating for secession so that the North and South can happily go their separate ways.

In reading Joan Walsh’s book about her Irish family, I was hoping for something akin to Joe Bageant’s writings on his Scots-Irish family. She is smart and she does offer me some perspective on an ethnic group with which I have little direct experience. Bageant, however, is a much more entertaining writer (Thompson being more similar to Bageant in writing style).  Walsh maybe takes herself too seriously. Besides, her mainstream liberalism irritated me on occasion, very different from Bageant’s left-wing outsider viewpoint.

Criticisms aside, I liked her positive intentions and I liked the way she expressed her position. She does a good job of explaining how our country became so divided and maybe why it doesn’t need to be that way. It was her personal anecdotes about her family that drew me in the most. Like a good liberal, she was sympathetic toward even those she disagreed with.

I don’t know what Chuck Thmpson identifies as, but he doesn’t act like a well-mannered housebroken liberal. He presents himself more as a cantankerous rabblerouser. I didn’t hold his opinionatedness against him for he remained amusing, even when or especially when ranting. I realized that few people would read a book like his without it having entertainment value.

The main reason I picked up his book was simply because it was provocative. Not many people these days advocate for the South to secede, and those who do tend to be right-wing Southerners rather than leftist Northerners. You’d think he would advocate for Northern secession, but he seems attached to the United States as the name of his country and so thinks the South should reinvent the Confederacy, although for some reason he feels reluctant to letting the South take Texas.

He played up the hyperbole and some would perceive his writing as mean-spirited. He used caricatures for humorous effect, but he also used a massive amount of data to make a serious argument. Although I’m well read about the North/South divide, even I learned a fair amount from his book. I discovered some new authors that I’ve added to my reading list.

The comparison and contrast is fascinating between these two books I finished. I typically come across more books like Walsh’s where the argument is for unity of the country, for compromise and cooperation, for everyone trying to get along. But Thompson points out we’ve been trying to do that for a long time and maybe it’s tme to give up on the myth of a single American identity that is supposed to be embraced by all, whether willingly or through coercion.

Here is what Thompson writes about this dilemma of diversity and division (Kindle location 4911):

“Nothing really new there. As Abe Lincoln said of slavery in the run-up to the Civil War, “Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the entire controversy.”

“It takes little imagination to apply that statement to many of the fundamental divisions still hamstringing the country: religion, abortion, federal governance, taxation, education, health care, assistance for less fortunate neighbors, distribution and ownership of public wealth and resources. These are philosophical and moral problems with no definitive answers, issues that simply come down to one side thinking them right, and the other side thinking them wrong.

“In his “House Divided” speech, Lincoln also said that he did not believe the American house would fall. “I do expect it will cease to be divided,” he said. “It will become all one thing, or all the other.”7

“But Lincoln was wrong about that one. Unity hasn’t ever really come. Slavery is gone, but the cultural milieu that produced it and a raft of other cultural toxins still exists.”

I’m in agreement with Thompson.

Having grown up between the two regions, I’ve experienced the cultures of both the North and South. I’ve spent recent years reading every book I could get my hands on about this topic. I’ve thought long and hard about it. I’ve written about it over and over. I honestly don’t feel confident that there is enough commonality to hold these regions together.

(Plus, I’d add an argument for secession based on minarchism and decentralization. Our country is too vast, our population is too large, and our government is too unwieldy. We definitely don’t have much of a functioning democracy at this point. For the sake of civil liberties, I suspect we’d be wiser to opt for a smaller direct democracy or rather democracies and, while we’re at it, smaller localized economies. Small is beautiful, as it has been said. Secession would be good for all involved.)

In the earliest history of this country, the South had become dominant in both the military leadership and in federal politics. After the Civil War, the North took the lead role for quite a while. Now, the South is coming back into power and reasserting its influence over the whole country. It’s an endless vying for control of the nation, but it never leads to any fundamental unification of culture and certainly no common vision of politics and economics.

As accurately portayed by Thompson, this divisiveness is experienced and expressed most strongly in the South. No other region of the country has such a strong sense of shared identity. The Civil War may not have brought the country together, but it sure did bring the South together.

I was never called a Yankee and I never thought of myself as a Northerner until I moved to South Carolina in middle school. It never previously occured to me that I was part of a region called the North, although I may have vaguely been aware of the Midwest as a region. To the degree I thought about identity at all, I would probably just have considered myself as American.

Living in South Carolina, I regularly saw the Confederate flag. It used to fly over the capitol when I was growing up there. Even though the South lost the battle for being a separate country, they did succeed in creatng a separate national identity that is only rivaled in distinctiveness by some Native American nations.

Thompson makes a strong argument for why this is problematic. The reasons he gives are many, but one in particular stood out. The core of the problem is that, in thinking of themselves as separate from the rest of the country, Southerners act as if they aren’t part of America’s shared societal enterprise. Instead, they act like competitors looking out for their own interests and no one else’s.

On the political front, there isn’t now nor has there ever been a Solid North in the way that a Solid South exists. The South essentially has a one-party system. This doesn’t lend itself to playing well with others in a democratic sociey. Thompson has doubts that a one-party system can be considered as democratic at all, and I suspect many Southerners would agree in a sense by asserting they live in a republic, not a democracy.

The economic role the South plays isn’t dissmilar from that of Mexico and China, countries that aren’t known for having well functining democratic political systems. They don’t protect workers’ rights or the environment. They leave their population poor and under-educated. And they disenfranchise their citizenry.

Southerners, or rather the Southern political elite, refuse to raise their own local and state taxes to pay for their social infrastructure and social services, preferring to suck on the government teat of federal funding which means the rest of the country pays to keep the South from turning into something like aa third world country. They take what little tax money they do take in and give massive subsidies to corporations so as to lure them away from other states. Overall, the South is an economic drain on the United States.

On top of that, their luring corporations to move to the South has caused people to move to the South looking for the jobs taken away from them. This increased population is giving the South increased representation in Washington and hence increased political power.

Meanwhile, we in the North (and West) are enabling the South to rob us blind. I take this personally, as I happen to live in one of those states that pays more in federal taxes than receives in federal funding. Why am I helping Southerners to live beyond their means? If the South has such a booming economy, isn’t it time for them to take responsibility by carrying their own weight and paying their own way?

None of this is to imply that I have an overall dislike of the South or that I think most Southerners are bad people. It’s just that the South has some serious dysfnction going on and Southerners keep voting the same people into power. Nothing is likely to change in the South, at least not in the near future. Like Thompson, what concerns me is that the South might end up changing the rest of the country instead and I doubt such changes would be positive.

For some concluding thoughts, I’ll let Chuck Thompson explain what liberals like Joan Walsh don’t understand (Kindle location 4923):

“In the same fashion that people across the South had denied culpability to me, had winked at all the issues that needed addressing in their own part of the country, every one of those who’d gathered at the Globe had in some form or other insisted that they themselves did not embody the predictable characteristics and behaviors (I’m not calling them stereotypes, I believe I’ve provided enough evidence to back up my contentions) that I was using to portray the less attractive side of Dixie.

“We aren’t crazy religious—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who you’re thinking of.

“We aren’t dedicated political obstructionists—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who you’re talking about.

“We aren’t racist—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who have a problem.

“We aren’t the ones keeping public school budgets at barely functional levels—that’s just a small percentage of southerners that don’t appreciate the inequities in the system.

“We aren’t against basic rights for workers—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who you have an issue with.

“We aren’t single-issue abortion voters or the ones who have a problem with gays—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who the media unfairly fixates on and uses to vilify the rest of us.

“All of these statements may be true. The majority of southerners are not loudmouthed, uneducated, redneck fuckwits flying Confederate flags from the backs of their Kia and Mercedes lynch wagons. To what extent they were ever true many of these notions are comically outdated. Operative word “comically,” which is why I’ve employed them from time to time in this book, since few things are as hilarious to the northerner as a well-placed Snuffy Smith zinger.

“What the majority of southerners are, and have always been, however, is willing to allow the most strident, mouth-breathing “patriotic” firebrands among them to remain in control of their society’s most powerful and influential positions.

[ . . . ]

“Maybe the fanatics do represent a minority, say one in three southerners—that’s a fair guess, in my estimation. That’s still an extremely potent one-in-three that the rest of the South enables—or succumbs to—or aligns with—or votes for—year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Theirs are the voices that perpetuate the agenda because theirs are the voices that ring with the most sincerity, that are most bereft of apology, that in their bellicosity resonate as the most authentically “southern.” If there’s one thing about the South that hasn’t ever changed it’s the hypnotic influence of the angry crusader.”

The Cultural Amnesia of German-Americans

My reading lately has been varied, by which I mean I’ve been jumping between many books without finishing any of them, but I’ll finish them all eventually. This jumble of reading has my mind in a jumble. I was also doing some genealogical research, actually for someone else’s family as a favor to a friend. Looking at this other person’s family reminded me of my own family with lots of German ancestry. The German aspect came up in my reading as well.

Thinking about this other guy’s family, I was reminded of how much German ancestry there is in the American population. It is the single largest ethnicity in the entire country. What is odd is how invisible is the German influence.

In a post a while back, I wrote about a few books related to American whites, two of which were about specific ethnic populations. One book focused on the Scots-Irish and the other on the Irish. These two cultures have received a lot of attention and they are in many ways very visible cultures. Even if not English, they are still British and so they more easily fit into the standard narrative of America. German immigrant culture fundamentally undermines this simplistic narrative in a way no other ethnicity is capable of doing. Yet I know of no book about German Americans that is equivalent to the many books on the Scots-Irish and Irish.

A little over a century ago, German culture was the complete opposite of invisible. The German language was widely spoken in the US, second only to English. In German majority cities, public schools were taught in German and the newspapers were printed in German. Now, the only viable surviving German culture and language is that of the Amish, and it has survived for the reason the Amish isolated themselves from the changing world around them.

Germans were among the earliest settlers, the British government offloading German refugees onto ships heading for various colonies and plantations. In the American colonies, Germans even formed their own separate communities early on. The influence of Germans only increased over time with several massive waves of German immigrants in the 19th century. The sewer socialism and progressivism emerging out of the early Midwest was mostly the result of German ideas. Germans loved promoting projects for the public good such as public education, even as they mistrusted the federal government and the often nativist populations surrounding them.

The nativism is where I’ve gained a foothold of understanding. The Republican Party arose partly out of the support of the Know-Nothings who were anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, the former being especially directed at the sizable German population. Non-English immigrants were initially wary of the Republican Party for good reason and non-English immigrants to this day are wary of the Republican Party for good reason.

Nonetheless, the Republican president Lincoln wouldn’t have been able to win the Civil War without the large ethnic immigrant influx that gave the North a population advantage, not to mention the quality of immigrant was very high with Germans on average being more well-trained and well-educated than the average non-German American, specifically more well-trained in fighting modern warfare as many were political dissidents fleeing revolutionary wars against empire. Many of Lincoln’s administration and military leadership were German immigrants and even more were soldiers in his army.

Much of the political foment following the Civil War involved the German population or was in reaction to the German population. Germans fought for workers’ rights and farmers’ rights, the two coming together within the Populist movement. Germans fought against corporatocracy in the way they fought against empire back in Europe. More importantly, they won many of the political battles they fought and we today benefit from their struggle such as with the 8 hour work day and 5 day work week (try working every waking moment continuously 7 days a week and then tell me you aren’t grateful for their struggle and sacrifice). On the other side, Prohibition and Sunday laws were partly enacted in order to control the influence of ethnic immigrants such as Germans and Irish who were fond of their drink.

The ugliness of nativism became a central issue on the national stage when World War I began. The media of the day portrayed Germans as being vile and dangerous which led to mobs forming and many Germans dying. Also, the Germanic culture was nearly eliminated. German newspapers were censored, German names of buildings and streets were changed, German traditions were attacked, and German-Americans experienced political and economic oppression. They were arrested, imprisoned, and deported. They had hard time finding work. Their formerly influential culture suddenly became a liability. Along with the impact of World War II, nearly all traces of German heritage had been eliminated. Many German-Americans experienced a cultural forgetting that scoured the German culture from the collective memory of American history.

There was only one saving grace that helped some minor German identity to survive. The German refugees escaping the Nazis included many of the greatest intellectuals of their day. These German intellectuals gained employment in the arts and education. Slowly, German-American culture has been rehabilitated in correspondence with the German nation itself being rebuilt after WWII. It is no longer shameful to be of German descent, but the living culture in America was nonetheless destroyed beyond repair. The only thing left are a few German newspapers and the popular German festivals involving beer drinking.

This saddens me as so much of my ancestry is German, on both sides of my family. My German ancestry goes back for centuries in American history. But my family has complete amnesia about its Germanic past. America as we know it wouldn’t exist without the German influence. It’s hard to imagine what America would be like if Germans hadn’t been around to help win the Civil War or to help America live up to its democratic promise.

Wineinger/Wininger: A Close Family

I was trying to clean up my mom’s family tree. We’re using ancestry.com because it is useful for organizing all the relationships and data, but it’s not perfect. I’m still trying to figure out how everything works.

The reason a clean-up is necessary is because somehow extra profile pages were created. A profile page gives the detailed info about one person and shows their immediate family relations. For certain people, multiple profile pages were created. It may have happened in the process of adding data from the family trees of other ancestry.com members.

In getting rid of the clutter, I have to be very careful that I don’t delete something that is important. The same names are often repeatedly used in families, generation after generation after generation. People are named after parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. So, I look at everything very carefully.

I had gone through most of the names when I came to the Wininger/Wineinger family on my maternal grandmother’s side, and initially I was more perplexed than anything else I’d so far come across. I opened up about twenty profile pages in order to see the connections and possible duplicates. I saw the same names with the same birth and death dates, some were centuries in the past while others were in more recent history, but those in the middle were different.

It slowly dawned on me what I was looking at. When I showed it to my mom, she was able to clarify it even further. Several lines of Wineingers descended from the same patriarch, Nicholaus/Nicholas Wineinger. Four and Five generations later, three lines of descent merged again, all of them finally meeting together in the person of my maternal grandmother’s father, Rollie Franklin Wininger.

It sounds kind of incestuous, but the people involved actually weren’t that close of relatives. They were distant cousins, although not extremely distant. In the two marriages of convergence, both involve one spouse’s parent being first cousins of the other spouse’s grandparent. So, that makes the spouses several times removed.

It does look odd when the connections are mapped out on a piece of paper. Only fourteen people of the Wineinger/Wininger Clan are directly complicit in these three lines, including the originating patriarch and the final person of convergence.

Quite fascinating.

In case any genealogists are curious, the following is precisely how it played out:

Nicholaus/Nicholas Wineinger fathered Andrew and John Alexander (Sr.). Andrew fathered Phillip, Phillip fathered George, and George fathered James Klepper. John Alexander (Sr.) fathered John Alexander (Jr.) and William. John Alexander (Jr.) fathered Elizabeth Ellen. James Klepper married Eliabeth Ellen, and from them was born George Alexander. William fathered John, John fathered Sarah, Sarah mothered Eliza Elizabeth. George Alexander married Eliza Elizabeth, and from them was born Rollie Franklin.

Clear as mud, eh?

Liberalism, Enlightenment & Axial Age

There are two historical periods that have interested me for a long time: the Enlightenment Age and the Axial Age.

We speak of these modern times as if there is something fundamentally different about society today, but I feel unconvinced as I look about the world. I often get this sense of how primitive humans still are with only a veneer of civilization.

This brings me to my fascination with history. The past isn’t really in the past. History is the act of storytelling in the present. All the basic problems of humanity still exist and have always existed. The reason tumultuous events of bygone times fascinate us is because they symbolize the very issues with which we still struggle.

At the same time, there are societal shifts that are fundamental. I would add that there is no way of going back. But the shift I perceive is much larger than any given historical period. The Enlightenment Age and the Axial Age are the outward manifestations of this foundational reallignment. It comes down to civilization itself, specifically in terms of the the first cities and city-states as they developed urban infrastructures and cultures which in turn laid the groundwork for the first empires.

We are more or less the same as humans during other times in the development of civilization, but we are utterly transformed from humans prior to that. The Axial Age most clearly demonstrates this period of transition. It’s when all the problems of civilization and urbanization came to the forefront. It’s also when patterns were being set down that would lead to all later developments: Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment Age, Revolutionary Era, etc.

The Axial Age was more pivotal than even the Enlightenment Age. I’d argue that the Enlightenment thinkers were largely just responding to the ideas and practices first introduced during the Axial Age, although it is worthy of note that the Enlightenment Age allowed those ideas and practices to be taken to their next level. What the Axial Age prophets and philosophers offered to ensuing generations are such things as individualism, republicanism, democracy, anti-authoritarianism, universal truth, transcendent idealism, non-ethnic/non-tribal communitarianism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, scientific inquiry, rational thought, international trade, syncretism, etc; but also such things as monotheism and patriarchy.

We moderns, left and right alike, are the descendants of the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment thinkers, radical and moderate, were descendants of the Axial Age.

So, this makes us all descendants of that first shift that began as civilization more fully took hold across all societies.

This shift has been continuing ever since and has yet to play itself out. I don’t sense that we’ve yet come to another era that comes even close to the vast significance of the shift that became so apparent during the Axial Age. What was started so long ago either needs to come to some kind of conclusion or else utter failure; then and only then will society be ready for something entirely new.

My most personal interest at the moment, though, is on a much smaller scale.  As can be seen from many recent posts, my mind has been overly focused on conservatives and liberals, even moreso than usual which is saying a lot. My focus has often been on what divides people in terms of ideologies, movements and predispositions. But thinking about the Axial Age reminded me of what unites all modern people.

I’ve thought about this most specifically in terms of America which is most representative of what it means to be modern, considering most Americans have so little sense of the larger past beyond the American Revolution. One implication of American history can be interpreted as a lack of having a tradition of conservatism. Those Americans claiming to be ’conservatives’ tend to identify with classical liberalism or at least be heavily influenced by it.

The problem with this is that classical liberalism isn’t simply or directly opposed to modern 20th century liberalism. For one thing, later liberalism emerges out of classical liberalism (in the sense of classical liberalism being defined as all liberalism prior to the 20th century, including radical liberals such as Spinoza and Paine). For another, classical liberalism originated specifically in opposition to classical conservatism. Conservatives can’t simultaneously claim classical liberalism and classical conservatism, two mutually exclusive categories. American conservatives aren’t traditional conservatives or, to put it another way, their tradition of conservatism isn’t very old and is actually a reformulation of one variant of early liberalism.

In some ways, this is just an argument about terminology. But it is important because it is about the history of that terminology. I don’t care, in a practical sense, how others choose to label themselves. What I care about is the deeper meaning and values that underlie those labels. Liberalism by any other name is still just as liberal.

An obvious thing to note is that conservatives today are more socially liberal than liberals were in past centuries. So, we presently all are social liberals. It’s just that people who identify as liberals are slightly more socially liberal than people who identify as conservatives. Most of the things that conservatives opposed in the past have now become the social norms for modern Westerners and for much of the world as well. Conservatives no longer defend monarchy, theocracy, slavery, racism, genocide of the indigenous, etc; at least few do so fully and overtly. Traces of classical conservatism remains, but they are just traces at this point. Even fundamentalism is just another manifestation of modernity.

All of this can’t be denied, and yet most conservatives can’t accept the truth of it. They are caught up in the word ‘liberalism’, not looking beyond their own fearful projections to the actual meaning behind the word. That is the challenge. There doesn’t seem to be any neutral language to use. Instead of social liberalism, I could speak of social democracy. But that is problematic as well since social democracy has a history with socialism. Of course, we technically live in a social democracy already, whether or not conservatives realize this simple fact. America is a liberal society, in the basic sense of the word.

The Axial Age can be seen as the first time social liberalism manifested on a larger scale, even if it only looks like mere glimmerings by today’s standards. It took the Enlightenment and many revolutions to bring this emerging social liberalism to greater fruition. Even now, social liberalism can feel like it is barely limping along. The important part is that we’ve collectively come to see that social liberalism is of central value, no matter what terms we use to describe it.

I don’t know why the language aspect is such a stumbling block. I think that is why I was recently thinking about this in terms of the Axial Age. That earlier era came before such labels were invented, although I’m sure similar distinctions were beginning to arise back then.

Maybe if we liberals speak about social liberalism in the terms of the Axial Age,  then it will be more acceptable to conservatives. The Axial Age as the origin point of Christianity is less threatening, if anything the source of what many conservatives see of value. To find a shared language, we might have to step back in time before we can step forward.

Notes on Jesus Christ, Scarab, Dung Beetle, etc

I was just remembering these notes I took a long while back. I meant to put  it together as a followup to my previous posts on the topic (see here), but I never got around to it… and I don’t know if or when I might ever get around to it. So, I’ll just present the notes as they might be of interest to some people.

—

“Homage to thee, Ra ! Supreme power, the god with the numerous shapes in the sacred dwelling, his form is that of the beetle.”

The Litany of Ra from Egyptian Literature, by Ephanius Wilson

http://books.google.com/books?id=NfV8_c40dCgC&pg=PA369&dq=epiphanius+beetle&lr=&ei=NMbfSfCFIpKKNZD4gbcO

“‘These creatures, like many others in the insect world, deposit their eggs in the ground, where they are hatched, and the appearance of their progeny rising from the earth is by some writers supposed to have suggested to the Egyptian priesthood the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Certain it is that beetles were very common in Egypt, and one of them, thence styled by naturalists Scarabeus sacer, was an object of worship: and this fact gives strength to the conjecture that this creature is meant in Exod. viii, as the sacred character of the object would naturally render its employment as a plague doubly terrible. Besides its being worshipped as a divinity, stones cut in the form of the beetle served as talismans among the Egyptians. The under surface was filled with figurines cut in intaglio of solar, lunar, and astral symbols and characters. They were held, according to Pliny, to inspire the soldier with courage, and to protect his person in the day of battle, and also to defend children from the malign influences of the evil eye. There is little reason to doubt that the Hebrews learned the use of these things Egypt, but they were prohibited by the Mosaic law. The Gnostics, among other Egyptian superstitions, adopted this notion regarding the beetle, and gems of gnostic origin are extant in this form, especially symbolical of Isis (q.v.).”

http://books.google.com/books?id=Iy8rAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA726&dq=literature+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+jesus+OR+christ&ei=ytfgSYe2GJWQMqDFgbAN#PPA726,M1

p. 467: “The biblical terms slsl in Deut. 28.42 and slsl knpjm in Isa. 18.1 were never satisfactorily defined. A thorough analysis of Ancient Egyptian texts, classical literature, Aramaic and rabbinic sources, post-biblical texts and archaeological material suggests that slsl in the Pentateuch means beetle and Isaiah’s phrase can be translated ‘land of the winged beetle’, that is, Egypt. Moreover, the Egyptian beetle metaphorically could represent a (sacred) boat and in Christian commentary, cruicified Jesus.”

International Review of Biblical Studies, by Bernhard Lang

http://books.google.com/books?id=4JmZPkmdYNEC&pg=PA467&dq=%22The+biblical+terms+slsl+in%22&ei=rHziSeX3EY2INYCt6Z8N#PPA468,M1

The author writes that, according to Massey, “The beetle-headed Kheper-Ptah is Cancer, the Beetle and, later, the Crab.”
The Suns of God, by Acharya S

http://books.google.com/books?id=rey19p_ycHUC&pg=PA107&dq=origen+beetle&ei=3czfScuVKYakNZ7KnbgO#PPA107,M1

The author writes about Kheper-Ptah, the sign of Cancer, the Beetle and the Crab.

Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, by Gerald Massey

http://books.google.com/books?id=t00XAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA732&dq=%22my+good+beetle%22+OR+%22my+own+good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22Bonus+ille+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22bonus+scarabaeus%22&lr=&ei=cFrkSY__DYmmNtOc_akN#PPA732,M1

The author goes into detail about Khepr, the scarab, and Isis and Nephthys rolling a ball; and also mentions Ambrose.

Book of the Beginnings Part 2, by Gerald Massey

http://books.google.com/books?id=Vz4oZRZ0deYC&pg=PA317&dq=%22my+good+beetle%22+OR+%22my+own+good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22Bonus+ille+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22bonus+scarabaeus%22&lr=&ei=cFrkSY__DYmmNtOc_akN#PPA317,M1

The author has some interesting thoughts about the allegorical meaning of the dung beetle in terms of Christian theology.

Who Is This King of Glory?, by Alvin Boyd Kuhn

http://books.google.com/books?id=lWwwru1RBbUC&pg=PA447&dq=%22my+good+beetle%22+OR+%22my+own+good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22Bonus+ille+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22bonus+scarabaeus%22&lr=&ei=9V3kSaGRKI7CMYSTkZIN#PPA447,M1

The author mentions that Khepr is born his own son.

Lost Light, by Alvin Boyd Kuhn

http://books.google.com/books?id=tOkWBBbNC_4C&pg=PA616&vq=beetle&dq=%22my+good+beetle%22+OR+%22my+own+good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22Bonus+ille+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22bonus+scarabaeus%22&lr=&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

And he mentions the motif of 6 months above and 6 months below in terms of the beetle.

http://books.google.com/books?id=tOkWBBbNC_4C&pg=PA617&vq=beetle&dq=%22my+good+beetle%22+OR+%22my+own+good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22Bonus+ille+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22bonus+scarabaeus%22&lr=&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

The author describes the beetle in European mythology and folk rituals.

Encyclopedia of Religions, by John G. R. Forlong

http://books.google.com/books?id=O_OviUJRzJAC&pg=PA273&dq=%22my+good+beetle%22+OR+%22my+own+good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+beetle%22+OR+%22good+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22Bonus+ille+scarabaeus%22+OR+%22bonus+scarabaeus%22&lr=&ei=ZWnkScCjAoqgMpmaiZ0N#PPA272,M1

An early Christian story: while fleeing to Egypt, Mary is looking for Jesus and soldiers are close behind.  When the soldiers pass where Mary had been the day before, they ask some farmers when the other had passed.  The farmers give a misleading answer, but a black beetle tells the truth and so helps the soldiers.

The Flight Into Egypt, by Henry Van Dyke (Harper’s Magazine)

http://books.google.com/books?id=zGICAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA45&dq=literature+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+jesus+OR+christ&ei=ytfgSYe2GJWQMqDFgbAN#PPA45,M1

‘ Saw ye passing to-day or yestreen,

The Son of my love— the Son of God ? ‘ ‘

We saw, we saw,’ said the black beetle, ‘

   The Son of freedom pass yesterday.’

‘ Wrong! wrong! wrong art thou,’

Said the sacred beetle earthy:

‘ A big year it was yestreen

  Since the Son of God passed.’

Carmina Gadelica

http://books.google.com/books?id=EYcM5W92JbQC&pg=PA189&vq=poem+of+the+beetles&dq=literature+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+jesus+OR+christ&lr=&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

This is strange as it seems to show the knowledge of the Egyptian dung beetle survived into much later apologetics:

The apology for the Church of England: and A treatise of the Holy Scriptures, by John Jewel, William Rollinson Whittingham

http://books.google.com/books?id=uNEQAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA133&dq=augustine+beetle+OR+%22my+own+good+beetle%22+jesus+OR+christ&lr=&ei=zEXeSc3zCpq0MeHblfAO#PPA133,M1

—

The author quotes Ambrose: “He was crushed although He was the Word made man; and He became poor, although He was rich, that we might be enriched by His want. He was powerful, and offered himself to be despised, as when Herod rejected and mocked Him; He was moving the earth, and He hung on a cross; He covered the sky with shadows and crucified the world, and He was crucified. He bent his head and the Word went out, he was emptied out and refilled everything; God came down, Man went up. The Word was made flesh that flesh might claim for itself the throne of the Word on the right hand of God; He was wounded and the perfume flowed. The beetle was heard and God was recognised.”

The Song of Songs and Christology in the early church, 381-451, by Mark W. Elliott

http://books.google.com/books?id=ClWJcAH_hucC&pg=PA57&dq=literature+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+jesus+OR+christ&lr=&ei=0v7gSf7tBIfSNP3GjaoN

In his Against Cainites, Epiphanius concludes: “After exposing the opinion—like exposing poisonous dung-beetles!—of such people, who desire what is bad, and after crushing it by God’s power because of its harmfulness, let us call on God for aid, sons of Christ, since we intend to inquire into the others.”

The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Sects 1-46, by Epiphanius, Frank Williams

http://books.google.com/books?id=K22xQJbzdUIC&pg=PA255&vq=dung&dq=epiphanius+panarion&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

In his Against Archontics, Epiphanius writes: “For I find even in the so-called naturalists—or rather, I observe this for myself—that dung-beetles, which some call bylari, have the habit of rolling in foulness and dung, and this is food and a task for them.  But this same filthy food of theirs <is obviously> ofensive and bad-smelling to other insects.  For bees too, this dung and foul odor is death, while to dung-beetles it is work, nourishment, and an occupation.  For bees, in contrast, fragrance, blossoms and perfumes serve as refreshment, property and food, work and occupation.  But such things are the reverse for the dung-beetles, or bylari.

Anyone wishing to test them, as the naturalists say, can cause the death of dung-beetles by taking a bit of perfume, I mean balsam or nard, and applying it to them.  They die instantly because they cannot stand the sweet odor.”

The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Sects 1-46, by Epiphanius, Frank Williams

http://books.google.com/books?id=K22xQJbzdUIC&pg=PA264&vq=dung&dq=epiphanius+panarion&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

In speaking about women worshippers of the Virgin Mary, Epiphanius says, “…since we crushed with the word of truth this beetle, so to speak, golden colored, winged, and buzzing about, at the same time very venomous and full of poison…” Cantharides beetle, some varieties of which are poisonous, are compared to Mary-worshipping (Isis?).  Certain beetles lick the chemical off of Cantharides in order to attract mates, and it is from Cantharides that is derived the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly but there are also other medicinal uses (diuretic, skin irritant).  Dung beetles are a type of blister beetle.  Blister beetles are also ground up in drinks.

The Virgin Goddess, by Stephen Benko

http://books.google.com/books?id=el_iYlS2qCQC&pg=PA173&dq=epiphanius+beetle&lr=&ei=F7DfSemKLJHaMeHxvcUO#PPA171,M1

Palladius says, “So Theophilus arrived at Constantinople, like a beetle loaded with the dung of the best that Egypt, emitting sweet scent to cover his stinking jealousy…”

The Dialogue of Palladius Concerning the Life of Chryisostom, by Palladius

http://books.google.com/books?id=QSNWAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA63&dq=epiphanius+beetle&lr=&ei=F7DfSemKLJHaMeHxvcUO

The author writes, “What is striking, for my interests, is the fact that John Scotus elaborates, as did Origen, naturalistic imagery for the resurrection, making full use of Clementine cyclical metaphors and of the Pauline seed.  The resurrection of the phoenix from ashes or the beetle from dung, the gradual unfolding of seeds in things, the turn of the seasons from winter to spring, all become analogies for a return to God that is transformation.”

The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, by Caroline Walker Bynum

http://books.google.com/books?id=l9M-gB1vMa8C&pg=RA1-PA143&dq=epiphanius+beetle&lr=&ei=Fr_fSe7PFYLANofdoM8O#PRA1-PA143,M1

“The “Hieroglyphica” of Horapollo is cited as an important source of information concerning the unicorn symbolism of Mercurius. According to this work there exists a genus of scarab which is unicorned and thus sacred to Mercurius. In addition to being one horned this scarab is described as being “born of itself.’ In Paracelsus, the prima materia is also depicted as “uncreated” and is directly linked with Mercurius. A further parallel found in the Hieroglyphica is the dismemberment of the scarab. Such a dismemberment was undergone by the dragon, a common symbol of Mercurius, in what is referred to in Egyptian alchemic literature as the “separation of elements.”

Abstracts of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, by Carrie Lee Rothgeb

http://books.google.com/books?id=_NrBKMGUfRAC&pg=PT102&lpg=PT102&dq=literature+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+jesus+OR+christ&source=bl&ots=tndKs_gfLD&sig=947GoHvr–j6LC2Me8Op3-KAB48&hl=en&ei=mNXgSeWTGNXfnQfF04imCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPT102,M1

scarab images

http://books.google.com/books?id=3z8GAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA32&vq=scarabaeus&dq=%22athanasius+kircher%22+OR+kircher+scarab+OR+scarabaeus&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

several pages on scarabs from above book.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3z8GAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA312&vq=scarabaeus&dq=%22athanasius+kircher%22+OR+kircher+scarab+OR+scarabaeus&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

More about Kircher on the scarab including an Osiris-headed scarab.

http://books.google.com/books?id=EVQLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA530&dq=%22athanasius+kircher%22+OR+kircher+scarab+OR+scarabaeus&ei=mDHqSYP8CYL0NPSutakB

In reference to the 17th century Athanasius Kircher, the author mentions the scarab in context of alchemy and cabala.  The author also points out the scarab being representative of the Son of God and defends this by quoting Augustine.

Roman and European Mythologies, by Yves Bonnefoy

pp. 219-20: “Athanasius Kircher (1602-82), the hero of the quest of Isis, even while attacking alchemy magnified its purely spiritual doctrine, finding it in concord with the true Cabala, which he did not condemn along with the Cabala of the rabbis.  Dazzled by John Dee’s discovery, copied by Cesare della Riviera, of the hieroglyph of Mercury, Kircher perceived the hieroglyph of the scarab as the key to the chemical art, in perfect concordance with the famous exegesis of bereshit, the first word of the Hebrew Genesis, at the end of the Heptaplus.

The scarab signifies the raw material of the metallic art: rolling up the bodies of the whole world, it produces an egg, visible above its tail.  The seeds of all the metals that hide there eventually rise up to the seven spheres of the planets: besides the five spheres of the minor planets, the head of Horus designates the sun, and the segment of a circle above it designates the moon, and inside it is the cross, natural symbol of the elements.  Between its forelegs the scarab holds a tablet bearing (in Greek script) the word phulo which signifies love.  If like doctors we dissect this hierogrammatism into its parts, we obtain this phrase: The soul of the world or the life of things is hidden in the machine of this lower world, where rests the egg fertile in seminal reasons, which, exercising its power over the spheres of the metallic planets, animates them with its heat and makes them act, so that Horus, that is, the sun and the moon, emerges through the dissolution of the elements and the separation of pure from impure things.  When this is done, each thing is linked to every other thing by a natural and sympathetic love, and this is the completion of the work.

Kircher before explaining a discourse too obscure for novices, referred to his Prodomus Coptus, in which, after analyzing the hieroglyph of the scarab, he connected it with Pico della Mirandola’s analysis of the first word of Genesis: “The father to the Son or by the Son, beginning and end or rest, created the head, the fire, and the foundation of the great man by good accord or alliance.”  “What can the winged globe in the hieroglyph signify other than the famous circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, to speak with Trismegistus, which is the supermundane abstract Intellet, first Intelligence, celestial Father.  What could the body of the scarab signify other than the Son whom his Father has constituted principle, rest, and end of all things, by whom all was made and without whom nothing is made.  Lest someone be angered at seeing God himself, who surpasses all admiration, being compared to the most vile, the most horrible, the most stinking of all beings, let us hear what Saint Augustine, the great light of the Church, has said of the admirable humanity of Christ in his Soliloquies: ‘He is my good scarab, not so much because he is the only son of God, author of himself who took on our mortal form, but because he rolled in our filth, when he sought to be born a man.’  By this son, then, eternal Wisdom and true Osiris, the world was created, this great man, whose head is the angelic world, source of knowledge, whose heart is the sun, source of movement, life, and warmth, and whose foundation is the sublunary world.  What could the character signifying love designate but this Spirit, who, ‘meharephet peney ha-maym, floating on the waters,’ gives life to all things by the fire of his most fertile love, and ties all together in a good alliance.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=GkCe6oEmN4sC&pg=PA219&dq=literature+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+jesus+OR+christ&lr=&ei=9_XgSbSNKIHANuSNhbIN#PPA219,M1

p. 22: “The beetles in the zodiac Dendera have, according to Dr. Young, much more of a mythological than of an astronomical nature.  The beetle near the beginning of the zodiac is well-known symbol of generation, and he is in the act of depositing his globe: on the opposite side, at the end of the zodiac, is the head of Isis, with her name as newly born; both the long female figures are appropriate representations of the mother; and the zodiac between them express “revolving year” which elapsed between the two periods.”

A History of Egyptian Mummies, by Thomas Joseph Pettigrew

http://books.google.com/books?id=g0oZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA222&lpg=PA222&dq=%22woman’s+head%22+OR+%22head+of+isis%22+beetle&source=bl&ots=HBv0y8Mt5M&sig=4VErL9Xoj5LT7hz7RDxoKi_Fc18&hl=en&ei=DXjiSYzGDs_unQfSzaixCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=24#PPA222,M1

pp. 178-9: “Remarkably, a stylistic representation of the Rostau meteorite appears in the fifth chapter of the Book of the Hidden Chamber.  In figure 73, we see the beginning of the creation, as if it were frozen in time.  In the lower register is the body (or flesh) of Sokar, contained within an ellipse of sand, representing his ‘hidden land’.  He is about to put on his wings of transformation.  Above him, in the middle register, a pyramid-shaped hill represents the body (or flesh) of Isis, whose head is seen at the apex of the mound.  Above the head of Isis, in the upper register, there appears a dark, bell-shaped chamber, flanked by two falcons and surmounted by the hieroglyphic sign for ‘night’.  From the bottom of this chamber, a scarab beetle — symbolic of rebirth — descends towards the head of Isis in order to converse with Sokar below, but is menanced by a two-headed serpent who ‘sets himself in opposition to the scarab’.  Between the beetle and the head of Isis, there runs the rope by which the barque of Re is towed through the underworld by seven gods and seven goddesses.”

Pyramid of Secrets, by Alan F. Alford

http://books.google.com/books?id=EusI5PDYIK8C&pg=PA178&vq=%22book+of+the+hidden+chamber%22&dq=%22woman’s+head%22+OR+%22head+of+isis%22+beetle&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

“On the central vertical band, beneath Nut with her outspread wings, are (from top to bottom) a shrine with two crouching figures of Osiris flanking a scarab, Isis and Nephthys adoring the symbol of Osiris, a scepter flanked by winged wedjat eyes, and a winged scarab above the boat of the sun.”

Coffin set of Henettawy

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tipd/ho_25.3.182-184.htm

pp. 10-11: “In one rendition of John’s Gospel, instead of the “only-begotten Son of God,” a variant reading gives the “only-begotten God,” which has been declared an impossible rendering.  But the “only-begotten God” was an especial type in Egyptian Mythology, and the phrase re-identifies the divinity whose emblem is the beetle.  Hor-Apollo says, “To denote the only-begotten or a father, the Egyptians delineate a scarabeus!  B this they symbolize an only-begotten, because the creature is self-produced, being unconceived by a female.”  Now the youthful manifestor of the Beetle-God was this Iu-em-hept, the Egyptian Jesus.  The very phraseology of John is common to the Inscriptions, which tell of him who was the Beginner of Becoming from the first, and who made all things, but who himself was not made.  I quote verbatim.  And not only was the Beetle-God continued in the “only-begotten God”; the beetle-type was also brought on as a symbol of the Christ.  Ambrose and Augustine, amongst the Christian Fathers, identified Jesus with, and as, the “good Scarabeus,” which further identifies the Jesus of John’s Gospel with the Jesus of Egpt, who was the Ever-Coming One, and the Bringer of Peace, whom I have elsewhere shown to be the Jesus to whom the Book of Ecclesiasticus is inscribed, and ascribed in the Apocrypha.

In accordance with this continuation of the Kamite symbols, it was also maintained by some sectaries that Jesus was a potter, and not a carpenter; and the fact is that this only-begotten Beetle-God, who is portrayed sitting at the potter’s wheel forming the Egg, or shaping the vase-symbol of creation, was the Potter personified, as well as the only-begotten God in Egypt.”

Gerald Massey’s Lectures

http://books.google.com/books?id=-jRswRWRN5EC&pg=PA11&dq=augustine+beetle+OR+%22my+own+good+beetle%22+jesus+OR+christ&ei=IjreSYT5LIO-Nqms2LsO

This article shows that beetles (and in particular dung beetles) are a religious symbol older than Egypt.  As a main source of food, beetles have always fascinated humans and taken on divine meaning.  Beetles are able to fly and descend into the earth, and they emerge out of the earth when they’re growing.  The beetle as a creator and a potter is found in tribal cultures, in Egyptian mythology and even Jesus is portrayed as a potter.  In Egypt, the scarab was identified as a solar deity.  This is because the dung beetle forms balls of dung which it rolls around (and out of which it is born), and also because they’re shiny beetles who can fly (and it was believed they could fly carrying a dung ball).

Egyptians came to believe in the scarab as a resurrection deity and that it was self-originating.  So, it was considered virginal as they believed no sex occurred.  The author doesn’t note this but it is reminiscent of how Mithras was born out of a rock.  The scarab became identified in two forms that were identified with Osiris who dies and his son Horus who is born from his death, but the two forms were also identified as singular.  This dual aspect god was a central prototype of Jesus Christ.  In its role as resurrection deity and ruler over the dead, the scarab was associated with the heart (the scarab being placed over the heart of the mummified deceased).  From the Wikipedia article on the Dung Beetle:

“

It may not have gone unnoticed that the pupa, whose wings and legs are encased at this stage of development, is very mummy-like. It has even been pointed out that the egg-bearing ball of dung is created in an underground chamber which is reached by a vertical shaft and horizontal passage curiously reminiscent of Old Kingdom mastaba tombs.”[8]

”

Another interesting connection (not from this article) is the understanding of gender in Gnosticism and in the Egyptian portrayal of the dung beetle.  Despite an earlier association with a goddess, Egyptians came to believe that all dung beetles were male.  Another excerpt from the Wikipedia article:

The scarab was linked to Khepri (“he who has come into being”), the god of the rising sun. The ancients believed that the dung beetle was only male in gender, and reproduced by depositing semen into a dung ball. The supposed self-creation of the beetle resembles that of Khepri, who creates himself out of nothing. Moreover, the dung ball rolled by a dung beetle resembles the sun. Plutarch wrote:

“

The race of beetles has no female, but all the males eject their sperm into a round pellet of material which they roll up by pushing it from the opposite side, just as the sun seems to turn the heavens in the direction opposite to its own course, which is from west to east.”[7]

”

The ancient Egyptians believed that Khepri renewed the sun every day before rolling it above the horizon, then carried it through the other world after sunset, only to renew it, again, the next day.

Strong arguments have been made that Gnosticism (and through it Christianity) came from Egypt, and certain Gnostic texts speak of the female becoming the male.  Also, during the Axial Age, there was a mixing of gender traits as gender identities shifted.  Many gods (such as Yahweh) had taken over aspects of prior goddesses.  D.M. Murdock, in her book Christ In Egypt, argues that in Christianity’s competition with Isis worship, Jesus became identified with that which had been formerly identified with Isis for centuries throughout the Graeco-Roman world.  Furthermore, Isis’ son Horus (in his form as Harmakhet the rising sun) was associated with Khepri (combined forming an image of a scarab with wings).  Murdock points out archaeological evidence of Egyptian Gnostic merging of Horus and Jesus; and, in the Alexandrian Gnostic system, Isis is Sophia and Horus is the Logos/Word.  Early Coptic Christians mummified their dead, had scarabs with Christian emblems etched on them (The Sacred Scarabs, The New York Times), used the ankh as a cross, and even invoked Jesus and Horus together.  Also, followers of Serapis (a mix of Greek and Egyptian gods) are another example as they were supposedly described as the first Christians by Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata.  In many locations in Egypt, such as at the Serapeum (temple to Serapis) in Alexandria, large sculptures of scarabs have been found.  (Besides Murdock’s Christ In Egypt, much of this info and more can be found in Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge’s Amulets and Superstitions, the Egyptologist Erik Hornung’s The Secret Lore of Egypt, and Theologian Karl W. Luckert’s Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire; also, check out the books of Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Gerald Massey, and G. R. S. Mead.)

To return to Cambefort’s article, the author mentions that Ptah the divine craftsman was connected with the scarab as the potter.  Ptah was also was at times confused with Osiris.  The wife of Ptah was Neith who was originally considered a beetle goddess before the scarab became identified as solely male and so she instead became identified with the vulture (which was considered solely female).  The vulture and scarab became a paired symbol and a word play.  In the 4th century, Horapollo wrote about hieroglyphics of this pair of deities. “He also described the scarab as “only begotten,” and the Greek word is the same used by John (3:16) referring to Christ (below).”

In Minoan Creta, horned “scarabs” crudely modeled in clay were used by peasants, probably in fecundity rites (right). Apart from these models, the scarab’s role is not obvious in archaic and classic Greek civilization. During late Egyptian periods, dwarves were devoted to Ptah (under the name “pataeci”) and many of them wore a scarab on their head. Probably for this reason, the scarab gained the reputation among the Greeks to be the king of Pygmies, although the Pygmies themselves represented the dead. In addition, we can find evidence that scarabs in a broad sense (sacred scarab and stag beetle were more or less confused) were important in the initiation rites of warriors (possibly due to the fact that warriors bring death). As a result, the scarab was consecrated to Zeus, to the same extent as the eagle. In fact, both animals seem interchangeable as favorites of the King of gods. Æsopus fable, “The Eagle and the Scarab,” is a testimony to the secular dispute between the scarab and the Eagle, or rather between their supporters. In this fable, the scarab wins, but historically, the eagle gained victory over the scarab, and remained the emblem of Zeus, carrying his thunder. The fable might also be a reminiscence of the late Egyptian periods, when the scarab and vulture (there are no eagles in Egypt) were united to write the Great Gods’ name T-N and N-T(above).

Meanwhile, the scarab became an object of derision and jokes, the most famous of them being Aristophanes comedy “Peace,” where a peasant flies up to Olympus riding a colossal scarab, whose coprophagous habits are insisted upon. Despite these trivial manners, the scarab retains his divine nature, which enables him to reach Zeus’ throne. Another clue of his importance could be the name “scarab” (greek: kantharos) of Dionysos’ cup, where pure wine is served in order to provide sacred drunkenness. Dionysos seems to be related to Osiris, who was said to have introduced wine in Egypt. As a sacred trance, drunkenness is related to shamanic powers of uniting the sky, the earth, and the underworld. Dionysos also had close relationships with Hephaistos, who was god of the fire. Since wine “burns” or at least heats as fire does, Hephaistos is often represented as being drunk. Hephaistos was confused by the Greeks with the late Egyptian scarab god, Ptah. In Germany, the property of thunder belonged to the god Thor (or Donar), who was second only to Odhin. The stag-beetle was devoted to Thor, and reputed to bear not only lightning and thunder, but also fire, in the form of embers. Thor was reputed to set fire to thatched houses, hence many names relating to fire and thunder are still frequently used in Germany.

…Coming back to Israel, the word “scarab” does not occur in the Hebrew Bible. The Jewish authors probably did not want to recall the detested enemy through this Egyptian emblematic character. However, in the Greek translation of the Bible (called Septuagint,) the word “beetle” occurs once (Habakkuk 2:11):

“For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beetle out of the timber shall answer it.”

Habakkuk’s passage would not have been quoted here except for the use that Saint Ambrose of Milan made of it. On five occasions, this Father of the Church alluded to the text and compared Jesus Christ to Habakkuk’s scarab. Other Christian authors (St. Augustine, St. Cyril of Alexandria, etc.) made equivalent or similar comparisons. These are the most obvious testimonies of a possible influence of Egyptian religion on Christianism. They also might have been influenced by (or had influenced on) some late Egyptian beliefs, e.g. reported by Horapollo (above), who described the scarab as “only begotten,” with the same Greek words (monogenes) as used by John 3:16 referring to Christ, and repeated by other Christian authors.

 

In Germany, where scarab worship, in the form of the stag beetle, has persisted longest, the equation scarab = Christ was widely accepted. The quintessential German artist, Albrecht Dürer, associated the stag beetle with Christ in various paintings, and produced a famous watercolor of the insect. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) did not hesitate to recall the identification scarab = Christ, referring both to St. Ambrose and Psalm 22:6:”But I am a worm, and no man,” verse which has been referred to Christ, and where (as Kircher says), “some read scarab instead of worm.” He went further to combine Christian faith with Alchemy: for him, the scarab was the prima materia of the Great Work. This idea was shared by some alchemists, e.g. Michael Maier (1566-1622), who explained in his writings that the so-called “philosophal stone,” product of the Great Work, was nothing other than Christ, resuscitated from the dead; a promise of resurrection for all human beings.

Beetles as Religious Symbols, Cultural Entomology Digest 2, by Yves Cambefort

http://bugbios.com/ced2/beetles_rel_sym.html

The author connects the  dung beetle with the vulture in opposition to the eagle.  He uses as an example Aristophanes play Peace where the dung beetle is used by Trygaeus to fly up to speak to Zeus.  This connection of dung beetle and vulture is similar to Bruno Schultz’ story “Cockroach”.

The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, by Marcel Detienne

http://books.google.com/books?id=CA9OAXb1d5QC&pg=PA26&dq=aristophanes+%22dung-beetle%22+OR+%22dung+beetle%22&lr=&ei=V-TfSdzxBJrAM9fW7ZQN

Peace, by Aristophanes

http://books.google.com/books?id=tdyMtAB4aC0C&pg=PA1&dq=aristophanes+%22dung-beetle%22+OR+%22dung+beetle%22&lr=&ei=lxrgScCAA5u8M_q2pLcN#PPP1,M1

Aesop’s Fables, “The Dung Beetle and the Eagle”

http://books.google.com/books?id=I_iCeceJWE4C&pg=PA79&dq=aesop+eagle+%22dung-beetle%22+OR+%22dung+beetle%22&lr=&ei=IxzgSbejMYL0NMHY3awN

The author discusses the gospel genre comparing the Christian, Judaean, and Greco-Roman traditions.  Specifically, he compares the text titled Life of Aesop.  I observed two aspects of this text.  Firstly, Aesop starts off as an ugly, mute slave.  He helps a priestess of Isis who prays for him and so Isis (and her muses) blesses him with speech.  Aesop starts telling fables which are equivalent to Jesus’ parables, and he uses his storytelling as a way of teaching and challenging authority.  This, of course, leads to trouble (similarly to Jesus, an accusation of blasphemy) and is condemned to death.  It is while being brought to his place of execution that he tells his fable “The Dung Beetle and the Eagle”.  This is rather fitting as the dung beetle is a lowly creature as Aesop was portrayed.  It’s also relevant in terms of the gospel genre of the doomed hero because the dung beetle is a symbol of resurrection.  The fable could be interpreted as saying that, unlike the judgement of the Delphians, Almighty God will pardon Aesop (like Jupiter/Zeus pardoned the dung beetle)

The quest of the historical gospel, by Lawrence Mitchell Wills

http://books.google.com/books?id=AxlbIjXP-jsC

“‘The Dung Beetle”: a medieval version of Aesop’s fable where Jesus speaks with the dung beetle.

The Peasants Bible, by Dario Fo

http://books.google.com/books?id=tULko3-xqJgC&pg=PA41&dq=aesop+eagle+%22dung-beetle%22+OR+%22dung+beetle%22&lr=&ei=LSXgSYT4Hoq-MpP-kJ8N

Later European fables involving themes of male pregnancy and birth and a beetle.  The way in which the beetle enters the priest or thief demonstrates a cultural memory of the birth of the dung beetle from fecal matter.

The Pregnant Man, by  Roberto Zapperi

http://books.google.com/books?id=CEDGQBhMjNcC&pg=PA48&dq=%22the+pregnant+man%22+%22the+beetle%22+%22chapter+3%22&lr=&ei=jTDgSb6INprAM9fW7ZQN

A Mithraic magical ritual involving a scarab during early Christianity.  This ritual is the type of thing that Christians would’ve been aware of as the two religions shared similar motifs and Mithraism was very popular.

The Historical Jesus in Context, by Amy-Jill Levine, Dale C. Allison, John Dominic Crossan

http://books.google.com/books?id=wj72hJe4YHgC&pg=PA190&dq=scarab+%22the+historical+jesus+in+context%22&lr=&ei=JSHgSYO0LKLuMvmvya0N#PPA185,M1

—

Richard Marsh’s The Beetle has a woman that transforms into a scarab.  The author speaks about the Gothic being relevant during times of uncertainty and change such as during the urbanization of the industrial age.  He also mentions Darwinism that created a sense of the closeness between man and animal, and theories arose of the possibility of degeneration to earlier forms.

The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, by Jerrold E. Hogle

http://books.google.com/books?id=ibKMe5iW70kC&pg=PA194&vq=beetle&dq=origen+beetle&lr=&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0#PPA195,M1

“Holland notes that beetles, unlike cockroaches, undergo total metamorphosis. Further, dung beetles are scarabs. The Egyptians venerated the scarab as an image of the sacred dung beetle linked to the sun god. Samson (Samsa) means in Hebrew “the sun’s man.” The German word for the title of the story, Die Verwandlung, means not only insect metamorphosis and transformation in general, but also transubstantiation… “The dung-beetle, then,” Holland concludes, “was the one animal that gave Kafka everything he needed: total metamorphosis from a wingless grub to a hard-working, traveling salesman-like adult plus the combination of loathsomeness and divinity”

The metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, commentary by Stanley Corngold

http://books.google.com/books?id=lZ6HXUPbnFUC&pg=PA91&vq=scarab&dq=literature+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+jesus+OR+christ&lr=&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0

“The brilliant writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote of the interpretative impact Kafka’s earliest translators had made by turning the character from The Metamorphosis, Gregory Samsa, into a lowly cockroach, when in actuality Kafka had Gregory metamorphosed into a magnificently domed scarab beetle. The implications here are profound when we contemplate Kafka’s intense intimacy with the figure of Christ, and his knowledge of ancient cultures and art. Kafka was obviously aware that Albrecht Duer associated the symbolic aspect of the stag beetle with Christ. ‘Some biblical linguists have written of the aramaic word “scarab” being mistranslated as “worm,” in Psalm 22:6, “But I am a worm, not a man.” Certain imminent alchemists considered the scarab to be a symbol for the Great Work of transformation. In ancient Egyptian alchemy the scarab beetle’s activity of making its nest out of dung for eggs to hatch from, symbolized the process of creating disciplines and procedures to bring forth spirit from flesh. The scarab is also associated in both Egyptian and Greek text with the solar aspects of the divine.”

Pushing Ultimates, by Lew Paz

http://books.google.com/books?id=dxT6HDvrEUMC&pg=PA264&lpg=PA264&dq=kafka+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+alchemy+OR+gnostic+OR+kabbalah+OR+kabbala+OR+qabala&source=bl&ots=akVfrvN1ij&sig=qAScJZvNupqGQ7LF1Decz15BwAQ&hl=en&ei=oUrgSei_C6rinQfjjvyiCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA264,M1

Gregor Samsa “is “a phonetic contraction of the Czech words sam (‘alone’) and jsem (‘I am’).” Also there is the suggestion of “samson” (literally “the sun’s man”), combining the image of the lowly dung beetle with the sacred scarab linked to sun god worship, an ironic “combination of lothesomeness [sic] and divinity.” The name “Gregory” (literally “watchful” or “awakened”) strengthens the symbolism of the story by implying that Gregor’s transformation corresponds with his sudden awareness of his own alienation.”

The modern allegories of William Golding, by L. L. Dickson

http://books.google.com/books?id=boRaLhcgzE4C&pg=PA5&dq=%22james+joyce%22+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+OR+roach+OR+cockroach&lr=&ei=J17gSc_qDp3CMoGTzLEN#PPA6,M1

“In “carry, as earwigs do their dead, their soil to the earthball,” Joyce confuses (probably intentionally) the earwig with the dung beetle, the prototype of the Egyptian scarab.”  In a notebook, Joyce mentioned the scarab along with other symbols of regeneration.

Narrative design in Finnegans Wake, by Harry Burrell

http://books.google.com/books?id=6MmJgvi9jwcC&pg=PA105&dq=%22james+joyce%22+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+OR+roach+OR+cockroach&lr=&ei=FWbgScDSE4bUM4OvnKIN

Author describes Joyce’s reference to scarab (in terms of creation and generation) in a notebook that was later developed in Finnegan’s Wake.

Greek and Hellenic culture in Joyce, by R. J. Schork

http://books.google.com/books?id=v-PR2oOTjJoC&pg=PA187&dq=%22james+joyce%22+scarab&lr=&ei=0hvhSbzDEJe6M8eOhbIN

Dick writes in his Exegesis:

“Ugly like this, despised and teased and tormented and finally put to death, he returned shining and transfigured; our Savior Jesus Christ (before him Ikhanaton, Zoroaster, et; Hefestus). When He returned we saw Him as he really is — that is, not by surface appearance. His radiance, his essence, like light.  The God of Light wears a humble and plain shell here. (Like a metamorphosis of some humble toiling beetle).”

Mckee comments on this:

“For Dick, Christ will not return riding a white horse, but rather in the form of a beetle, a beggar, or an empty beer can kicked to the side of the road. God, though remaining all-powerful, allows himself to be made weak and to appear defeated in this world. But his moment of apparent defeat is truly his moment of final victory: Christ’s death on the cross is the moment that assures the salvation of humankind.

‘In this concept of the deus absconditus Dick’s theology overlaps with thtat of Martin Luther. Luther’s “theology of the cross” depends on just such a view of God’s hiddenness in wretched and helpless forms in our world.”

PKD’s God in the garbage is Augustine’s Christ as beetle who “has rolled himself in our filth and chooses to be born from this filth itself”.

Pink Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter, by Gabriel Mckee

http://books.google.com/books?id=-ggCutVx5N4C&pg=PA58&dq=literature+beetle+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+scarab+jesus+OR+christ&lr=&ei=9_XgSbSNKIHANuSNhbIN#PPA58,M1

The author quotes PKD describing an event from third-grade where he was tormenting a beetle that was trying to hide itself:

“And he came out, and all of a sudden I realized — it was total satori, just infinite, that this beetle was like I was.  There was an understanding.  He wanted to live just like I was, and I was hurting him.  For a moment — it was like Siddhartha does, was like that dead jackal in the ditch — I was that beetle. Immediately I was different.  I was never the same again.”

Divine Invasions, by Lawrence Sutin

http://books.google.com/books?id=mI_n52AJcBEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=beetle+OR+scarab+OR+%22dung+beetle%22+OR+%22dung-beetle%22+%22philip+k.+dick%22+OR+pkd

Jung: “A young woman I was treating had at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab.  While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window.  Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping.  I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside.  I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in.  It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. (The Structure and the Dynamics of the Psyche, p. 438)

The scarab here can be interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, of new life, an external manifestation of an inner awakening.  The dung beetle lives in filth, the material world which the rational mind can comprehend.  And yet the dung beetle represents that which is greater than rational and above the physical, the solar disk.  The Sun of God is Logos, but this isn’t rationality.  Logos signifies an ordering principle beyond causality, which Jung termed synchronicity.

A large section that describes the context of the scarab in Jung’s life.

Who Owns Jung?, by Ann Casement

 
http://books.google.com/books?id=0g8chpSOI3AC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=%22isaac+myer%22+scarabs&source=bl&ots=PaK7Wuw9WY&sig=774qsGal49-O56GBF4zBuBsngqE&hl=en&ei=CMjmSe2TG9XonQeq2OGUBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=34#PPA24,M1

What is an Empire?

I noticed a book about empires, their history and what defines them:

The Rule of Empires:
Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall
By Timothy Parsons

It looks interesting. I did some websearching and here is what I found:

http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2011-3-147

“His range is ambitious and impressive, from Roman Britain and eighth-century Spain to Europe in the 1940s, but his message is consistent: that empire as a phenomenon is always and everywhere about subjugation and exploitation. It would be a tough proposition to come away from The Rule of Empire thinking that imperialism was ever a good or beneficial practice. That might not be news to professional historians (though there are certainly practitioners who readily come to the defense of this or that empire), but in the public political context the case against empire has been rather more muted. Parsons offers a refreshing, engaging and cogently argued counterweight to the more usual neo-conservative reckoning of empire’s alleged benefits. As Parsons notes if one looks at empire from the perspective of those subjected to it, their profit-and-loss balance sheet approach to the topic falls away. Seen from the vantage point of the colonised, Parsons sees empire as, quite simply, “intolerable” (p. 18).”

http://reason.com/archives/2011/07/15/temptations-of-empire

“Parsons studies seven empires, searching for the features they have in common. His selections seem designed to illustrate the point that the conquerors become the conquered and vice versa. Britain was once a remote outpost of the Roman Empire, but many centuries later Britain’s might would far eclipse that of its former masters, covering a quarter of the world’s people and lands as far-flung as India and Kenya. The Umayyad Muslims controlled parts of Spain for more than 700 years, but once Spain was united as a Christian kingdom its rulers wasted little time in seizing a South American empire from the Incas. Napoleon led the French to dominate continental Europe, including the former Roman heartland of Italy, which the French treated as a backwater inhabited by savages. They were repaid in kind when the Nazi empire stormed across France in 1940, shocking and embarrassing an ostensibly formidable imperial power.

“Parsons argues that empires, contrary to popular opinion, are extremely vulnerable to conquest. Invaders can turn established rulers’ subjects against them and, once in power, expropriate the centralized administrative systems already in use. When a small number of Spanish conquistadors under Francisco Pizarro attacked the Incan Empire ruled by Atawallpa, they took advantage of the civil strife that had begun after the death of Atawallpa’s father. Pizarro and his men were assisted by numerous Incans who sought a better life after Atawallpa’s tyrannical rule, including several of his brothers, who hoped to claim the throne. “In effect,” Parsons writes, “the conquistadors enlisted New World peoples in their own subjugation.” Firmly ensconced in power, the Spanish used Incan roads and detailed censuses to exploit populations long accustomed to imperial rule.

“Parsons contrasts this gaping hole in the seemingly impenetrable armor of empire with the resilience of stateless societies. For example, the Nandi, an East African people who live in what is now Kenya, spent a decade successfully fighting off far more heavily armed British imperialists at a time when England was at the height of its power. Parsons does not mention them, but the Mapuche Indians illustrate the point even more dramatically: They resisted both the Incan Empire and the conquistadors, maintaining a large degree of independence well into the 19th century without any centralized political authority.”

http://www.crescenticit.com/2011/08/deep-seated-bias-mars-otherwise-useful-study-on-the-failure-of-empires-2986-articles.html

“However, Parsons also exposes certain biases to his subject material when he descends in the murky territory of which cases constitute “pure empire” and which do not. He characterizes the Soviet Union as an “old-style empire in denial,” noting that the USSR practiced brutal and direct authoritarian rule over its domestic population and the Eastern European blocs. However, the United States is “a hegemonic global power that its friends and enemies frequently mistook for an empire” (p.429). That is, the United States is a power that uses “imperial methods” that need reforming but is in its essence a progressive, democratic state.

 ”Many historians of the Americas would debate that claim. The US may not have openly acknowledged its empire, but the fact that it has over 800 military bases over the globe impels one to call a spade a spade. Parsons also ignores the import of the Monroe Doctrine, in which President James Monroe declared Latin America a US stomping ground and warned European powers to back off. This indicates a preference for the official narrative of US power even as he sympathizes with the “unfortunate” sufferings of the Latin Americans, African Americans, and other ethnic groups (including the Iraqis).

 ”He makes similar leaps of faith for the British empire: one of the starkest historical examples of greed is characterized as an empire by accident that came about after the British Crown nobly set out to deal with its unruly adventurers like Robert Clive. In the chapter on British rule over India, he writes about British “liberalism, utilitarianism, the advances of the early industrial revolution, free trade, and English justice… protected Indians from the kind of abuses” that Mesoamericans suffered under Spain. In other words, the British empire was somehow “better” and “more humane” than Spanish empire, ignoring the mass famines and desperation on the subcontinent caused by British policies. His sympathy for Anglo-American power fits with his marked tendency to apologize for contemporary US excesses.“

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66456/charles-s-maier/empire-without-end

“Many leaders of the American Revolution welcomed the idea that their new nation would grow up to be an empire. To them, the concept was compatible with a republic; it meant size and benign influence. David Ramsay, South Carolina’s delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote as early as 1778 that the grandeur of the American continent provided the basis for a realm that would make “the Macedonian, the Roman, and the British sink into insignificance.” George Washington thought of the new country as a “rising” or an “infant” empire. Thomas Jefferson, who secured the vast Mississippi and Missouri valley corridors, famously envisaged an “empire of liberty.” But whose liberty? The idea of empire as conquest or subjugation was curiously absent from this postindependence reverie. Cheered by the euphemism of “manifest destiny” deep into the nineteenth century, Americans of European origin continued to enjoy the incredible lightness of empire.

“Subsequent observers would contend that the process of building and managing an empire is often violent, unfettered by concerns about law and equality. Empire, as Joseph Conrad wrote and American anti-imperialists came to acknowledge, had a heart of darkness. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, the authors of the massive comparative study Empires in World History, argue, “Terror was the hidden face of empire.” And it has not always been so hidden, either.

“The word “imperium” originally signified the authority delegated by the Senate of the Roman Republic to exercise command over the republic’s own citizens and subdue others. It came to be applied to Rome’s new territories throughout Italy and then beyond, even before Augustus founded the Principate, the first formal phase of the Roman Empire proper. More recently, in the United States, the growth of presidential power has periodically awakened concerns about what the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., termed “the imperial presidency,” that is, the growth of executive authority at the expense of legislative supervision and public dissent…”

http://erb.kingdomnow.org/featured-the-rule-of-empires-by-timothy-parsons-vol-3-26/

“It is impossible to read this book without seeing the parallels to the American role in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the book has a long conclusion in which Parsons contrasts the perspective of the American architects of the war in Iraq with that of the Iraqis. One is quoted thus: “They came to liberate us. Liberate us from what? … We have our own traditions, morals and customs.” Parsons argues that one cannot dismiss the role of contemporary plunder in the form of Iraqi oil revenue, assumed to eventually pay for the costs of the invasion, occupation, and rebuilding of Iraq. “As with the new imperialism, Bush officials masked the inherent self-interest of Operation Iraqi Freedom with humanitarian rhetoric … arguing that the United States had a moral obligation to spread free markets, human rights, and democracy. The inevitability of civilian casualties was largely absent from this legitimizing rhetoric.””