J. Douglas Kenyon - Forbidden Religion: Suppressed Heresies of the West

Acknowledgments

To all of those to whom I directed special credit in Forbidden Historyour previous volumeonce again I claim an extra measure of gratitude for making Forbidden Religion possible. Included, of course, are my wife, my parents, my original financial supporters, and many others who made Atlantis Rising magazineas well as this latest projectpossible.

This time, though, I would like to make an important addition to the list of those to whom I am deeply indebted.

I speak of the founders of the United States and of the protections they bequeathed to us all through the Constitution. These days, when so many of us feel free to challenge entrenched authority wherever we find it, it is worth remembering that such challenges have not always been easy, a fact that remains true in much of the world today. Indeed, as we chronicle in these pages, many of our forebears paid with their lives for attempting to express sentiments much like those written here.

However, the fact that our freedom of religionno small matter in a book called Forbidden Religionand the freedom of the press, so dear to all of us in the publishing business, are now taken for granted may be both a wonderful thing and something to worry about. If we forget how fortunate we are, can we expect to continue so? In a time when so many feel threatened by the freedoms of othersespecially freedom of conscienceand they seek the means to deny such rights to those with whom they differ, we must not forget the importance of vigilance.

That these liberties, at least as spelled out in the Constitution, may now be commonplace does not mean they are insignificant. Without them, we suspect that some would try very hard to prevent publications such as ours from seeing the light of day. We are forever grateful to be free of their oppression, and to be able to discuss our issues openly, without fear of the consequences.

Introduction

J. Douglas Kenyon

T he history of the world, some allege, is the history of a war between secret societies. And religion, they argue, is but the public tip of a secret iceberg by which human activity can be directed for good or ill. Just as leaders may have kept their real agendas secret, so have the true purposes of many religions been hidden from public view.

But, as with the wind, invisibility does not mean an absence of force, direction, or intensity that, to a careful observer, can reveal the ultimate goal. Just as approved religions may advance the hidden purposes of powers that be, virtually forbidden religions exist that do not, and their followers must gather in secrecy.

If religion is defined as a set of beliefs and practices maintained by the faithful that assert the nature of divinity and his (or her, or its) relationship to humanity, then, in fact, many people are religious who do not think they are. Indeed, even those who deny the existence of a deity are themselves religious, in that they espouse a belief in the nature of deity (i.e., that it does not exist) that they cannot prove and that they maintain by something very much like faith.

In the meantime, many have come to believe that behind the veil, strings are pulled and preachers of every persuasionincluding the secular, the scientific, and the politicalproclaim visions that have been revealed to them, while an ancient and invisible chess match among hidden elites has shaped our entire history and continues doing so to this very day. This great struggle is focused on the true dimensions of mans inner being, and at stake may be the survival of the human soul itself.

On the one hand are those who see the human race as little more than consumers of artificially manufactured stuffreligious and academic doctrines included. According to this line of thinking, we are all products of the Darwinian struggle and nothing more. Whatever claim we have to worth and dignity is due solely to our collective advancement since leaving the caves a mere few millennia ago, from which, we are told, we set forth on a heroic ascent to our present lofty height. Notions of immortality and transcendent individual possibilities are said to be illusions born of social conditioningnothing more.

Those who support another view, however, see unlimited capacities in each of usnot excluding personal immortality. Never mind that the human psyche of today clearly suffers from ancient wounds. The evolutionary scheme is seen by these optimists as far grander, more subtle, and, indeed, more sublime than mere survival of the fittest.

And yet, in this age, so many people are enslaved by a shriveled concept of their own identity. Programmed to accept the authority of the dominant scientific/secular/humanist establishment, we have given up on the more exalted possibilities that lie within us. The rulingacademically rootededifice has convinced most of us that its formulations are settled matters, well beyond challenge. We are left to play our assigned partsnothing more.

The writers of this book argue that the underlying logic or rationale on which the ruling establishmentwhether Church, state, or academiabases its authority is fallacious, if not corrupt, and has been so for a long, long time.

At the heart of the matter remains the old dispute over how one can know the truth of anythingand which is better, science or religion? Lets not forget that the distinction between science and religion, so fundamental to our twenty-first-century point of view, is an entirely modern one born out of the alienation of Western civilization. Only a society that sees a great gulf between what is within and what is without is capable of drawing such a sharp distinction between the two. Even quantum physics has demonstrated the lack of separation between the observer and that which is observed, yet we stubbornly cling to our cherishedalbeit artificialdistinctions.

The ancients did not divide the world in this way. For them, science and religion were one. What mattered was ultimate truth, not category. If their enlightened understanding of the soul was actual knowledge and not entirely based on faithas we have learned to believe todaywho can say what kind of science and technology may or may not have developed?

Could the study of subjects like electricity, magnetism, gravity, and energy have grown out of experience with the soul in search of immortality? For us, the natural world as currently conceptualized is subject to scientific study; but if we cant conceptualize it, we call it supernatural and consider itif not hallucinationsimply beyond human understanding.

Perhaps the ancients were not so constrained. If, as we encounter their legacy, our arrogant attempt to pigeonhole their handiwork falls short, the fault is more likely ours than theirs.

Knowledge, it has been said, is power. We have also heard that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (emphasis on little). We think the important question is: What is knowledge anyway? Orto take a cue from neurotic contemporary thoughtdoes knowledge even exist?

In many great and ancient spiritual traditions, gnosis or knowledge of some sortself-knowing, truth-knowing, love-knowingis a goal, if not the goal, of life. And yet we see Western culture questioning the very possibility of knowing anything with certainty, least of all the answers to ultimate questions of truth: Who are we? Where did we come from? What is our purpose?

The issue, of course, is not whether there is such a thing as truth, but how capable are we of apprehending whatever it may be. From Slaughterhouse Five to A Clockwork Orange, from Catcher in the Rye