The Cloth of the Judeo-Christian Heart-Myth: More Ramblings on Religion

Ancient Hebrew dress of women from: Wight, Fred H., Manners and Customs in Bible Lands (Chicago: Moody Press), p. 98.

And so the writing god game from between heaven and earth. And he chose to write about the earth and the sky. The decision was fortunate for man, for Joseph, who had carried his technicolor dreamcoat over earth and sign, the Jews became the men and women of the cloth.

Thoth was the redeeming god because in his image the Scribe Ani chose to write about the experience of the afterworld and record it for memory that would remain: Thoth was the gift of writing to human beings to translate between the reals of the living mortals and the tenuous but vital reality of the immortals. Thoth's reed became the pouring forth of black ink that was the very line between life and death pouring from the scribe's hands.

But beyond the hands of the scribe was the woven cloth, of a far earlier memory and dream.

The Cloth was originally woven by the priestess (the Camel rests in the white rays of her moonlight). Its technology was set to break into the Pharo's selfishness. The Ibis heralds the movement away from Amon Ra the king toward first the five generations of gods, and then toward all finite mortals, mortal human beings. The pharo's corpse was wrapped in cloth, the cloth of the sutras, each was written on with a sacred prayer by the priests to guard against death and corruption.


Modern popular myth, populist myth dictates that the pharos are demonized, looked upon as decrepit mummies. However this bugaboo has lost its strength despite the film industry production of images round The Mummy (Sommers 1999 version; and its sequel "...Returns" in 2001).

The rich burn their wealth (The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky, 1973), a typical metaphor (though in point of fact each avatar of the earthly divinities is wealthy to their own excess.) The point here is to move away from the pharonic accumulation of wealth. "Burn your Pharo's wealth!" The more one goulishly accumulates, the more macabre and grottesque one's final decomposition seems to be

The mummy is a monster. Mummy: mummia

Origin: 1350–1400; ME mummie
The Persian root as "mum" (meaning "wax") points to the relation between the connective gluten or glue, colle, which is found throughout the Cremaster Cycle. What sticks together and adheres.

Egyptian religion was cold. No matter how much good work they could do the amimal faces remain immutable to any but the most primitive emotions. Animal faces lack compassion and tenderness that we humans foist as our best asset.

(The truth is we are in dire need of consultation with our animal faces-- the human face seems to have brought this planet to the verge of extinction, no matter how compassionate I might assert it to be in the ideal. The ecological face will be one that cannot simply be "many headed" Perhaps it will be the earth herself, return to the image of Gaia in infinite void of space but only as human's can render her)

("View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon")

The Theiromorphic Egyptian gods did not have the compassion or mutibility of a Christ born of the Jewish cloth. The face of Job was the first challenge to God to manifest the possibility of suffering before the divine hand. This face became the face of Christ, the face of a human being with a consummately bad day to deal with: crucifixion. And yet this was the threshold to the unseen and infinite God: it was the face of a human on a very bad day, a day of misery, this was the face of God. God was the punished. God was the one brought down.

And the cloth became soaked in the blood of man.

Before Christ there had been human sacrifice, pathetic and potent: sacred and abject. But always in that pattern of sacrifice the identification was with the greater personality or self who rose up from the charnal flames. Christ's figure announced that in this particular epithet all there was was the annihilation and death at the end of the road, complete torment and death one could worship as the implosion and crucifixion of Man. Grunewald's Christ...

(Matthias Grünewald, c. 1515 from his Isenheim Altarpiece)

The christ figure melted human with divine. No longer was each man or woman beholden to the whims of a tyrranical pharo upon this earth, nor would the tyrranical whims of the demi-ourgos hold complete sway over the life of human beings.


The point is for each human to become a king, and yet for Christ there was still deferral to the Father who was king. Individual sovereignty is frowned upon as egotism, and was likened again to the pride of tyrants. The pious man was humble, his pleas for help were and are incessant. The admission of powerlessness to affect situations becomes a cornerstone of prayer. But this is not merely the powerlessness reduced to infantile fantasy, this is a sacrifice of an adult, who enters a mature condition of awareness and humility before the predicaments one faces: the turmoil is endless, the possibility of falling before one's fellow men (who are also entirely sovereign) is profound. The only recourse is to prayer to request help. It is said that prayers that are requests for any kind of boon or bennison are doomed to short-sightedness in one's own way. How could someone's miniscule concern for her or himself matter in the face of the infinite universe. But the infinite divine force seems to work to deeper intimacy by tending to each infinitely small mending (Tikkun).


Christ did not step into the immanent politics of individual sovereignty. This maintained the human position as one who accedes to powerlessness and asks the universe, the Father, or the sacred for help. The father's place was that of infinite metaphor, distance from the immediacy of desire. And yet the Father had burned with desire when He spoke: fiat Lux.


It is the cloth of the Jews that held some metonymic texture of their first "homecomming" and founding of the state of Israel.