Acharya S - The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

by Acharya S

Few books present so smooth a blend of clarity and erudition as The Christ Conspiracy. This is a well-crafted, thought-provoking work that belongs in the library of every thinking individual. It should be read by every person concerned about the moral, ethical, and spiritual aspects of our culture; it should be read particularly by those who profess belief in any of the numerous varieties of Christianity. It is a book of true enlightenment.

-Barbara G. Walker, author of The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, The Crone, Amazon, The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Women's Rituals, Feminist Fairytales, The Skeptical Feminist, etc.

For two millennia, a spurious tale has enslaved the human mind and spirit. It still does. Acharya S's The Christ Conspiracy may well be the most dangerous and important book of our time, for it reveals beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ is not a historical figure but simply a mythological toehold by which powermongers provide the dope of hope to the needy, malleable and violent masses.

-Adam Parfrey, author of Cult Rapture, editor of Apocalypse Culture

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The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe-that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

H.L. Mencken

The search for the conspiratorial origins of the name of this book's author takes a circuitous route. "Acharya" means "teacher," but the title conjures an image of a little old man in India. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, bestowed the title onto his spiritual heir, Acharya Vinoba Bhave, who began the Bhoodan land movement in India in the early 1950s. More strictly, the word means "preceptor," the head-master or principal of a school. A student could further fine-tune that definition by discovering, only in some dictionaries, that "preceptory" includes reference to the Knights Templar, an order ostensibly founded in 1119 CE to protect Holy Land pilgrims during the Second Crusade until it was banned and went underground two centuries later. Today, Freemasonry continues to claim descent from this medieval brotherhood.

None of this rumination suggests that Acharya S claims title as a preceptor or direct kinship to the Freemasons, although she has helped re-popularize an essay by Thomas Paine regarding Masonic sun-worship. Acharya's preceptory resides in cyberspace, on the web at www.truthbeknown.com, on her discussion list, through her posts in such e-places as konformist.com and Steamshovel Press, of which I am the publisher, and through her non-profit Institute for Historical Accuracy. Acharya S is also not a kindly little old guru. Her writing reflects a wicked wit and the intelligence of a person who does not suffer fools gladly. Under the flashing head of Bob Dobbs on her website and the words "God is BORG" are essays/rants on Earth and the cosmos, the existence or nonexistence of "God," the spiritual paucity of organized religion, as well as conspiracy and UFO/alien realities. "The believers/ theists feel my views are intolerant," she writes, "while the nonbelievers/ atheists object to the mysticism and perceive me as creating new beliefs ... While I do not wish to live in a world where everyone is deluded by blind belief, I also do not want to totally dismiss all imagination or color."

A certain contemporary, straight-talking style distinguishes the work of Acharya S, which is surprising in that her scholarship sets out to recover ancient understanding from the relatively modern corruption of Judeo-Christian culture. Her style and perception are reminiscent of the late novelist and satirist William S. Burroughs, and she no doubt agrees with this assessment of his: "Perhaps the most basic concept in my writing is a belief in the magical universe, a universe of many gods often in conflict. The paradox of an all-powerful, all-seeing God who nonetheless allows suffering, evil and death, does not arise." Indeed, Acharya S likes to say, "There is no single giant male god in charge. There are six billion little gods all jockeying for position."

What is most interesting, perhaps, about Acharya S's work is that, while a rabblerousing rebel, she has an impressive set of academic credentials. She belongs to one of the world's most exclusive institutes for the study of ancient Greek civilization, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece. She has taught on Crete and worked on archaeological excavations in Corinth, site where legend holds Paul addressed the Corinthians, and in New England. She has also traveled extensively around Europe and has a "working knowledge" of Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese and other languages. She has read Euripides, Plato and Homer in ancient Greek and Cicero in Latin, as well as Chaucer in Middle English, and has clearly sat down with the Bible - in English, as well as in the original Hebrew and Greek - long enough to understand it more than most clergy.

So, as entertaining and edifying as is the dharma combat carried on by Acharya S via her expository cyberprose, this book, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, reflects the scholarship from which her fiery perspective comes. Some readers may find different aspects of it familiar. For instance, her survey of the lack of evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus contains information that has become increasingly accepted even by Christian revisionist groups such as the Jesus Seminary. As inflammatory as that material remains in many circles, it serves only as the beginning for Acharya S. She takes hammer and tong to many other non-historical figures, fraudulent church scams and misrepresented history in a matter of fact way, with chapters containing mythological character cross-references and details of legends. She recovers astronomical and cosmological elements in biblical texts that are far older than the corrupted versions revered in churches. The thesis of her work, that Christianity was created artificially out of older religions to consolidate Roman state control over those religions, as well as various mystery schools and secret societies, is a wellspring of awareness for students of conspiracy. Acharya S also makes a clear case yet for the existence of an ancient global civilization.

While some may wonder about her motives for creating such a monumental work that will no doubt shake up many people's perceptions of reality, Acharya S told me in no uncertain terms that "one of the reasons for doing this work is that I spent the first decade of my life literally becoming ill at war, violence, death and man's inhumanity to man and other creatures. Such vile behavior has all too often occurred because of religion and unfounded beliefs. The deception of the religion business is appalling, and it's high time it is exposed." Amen.