David Hillman - Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church

Original Sin

Copyright 2012: D.C.A. Hillman

ISBN: 978-1-57951-165-4

Published by

Ronin Publishing, Inc.

PO Box 22900

Oakland, CA 94609

www.roninpub.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author or the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Credits:

Illustrations are from Clipart.com

Cover: Michael Pacher, The Devil Showing St.

Augustine the Book of Vices, circa 1480

Production:

Cover & Book Design: Beverly A. Potter.

Editor: Mark J. Estren, Ph.D.

Library of Congress Card Number: 2012948278

Distributed to the book trade by PGW/Perseus

Dedication

FOR LIVIA: Never take your eye off the Muse.

Also by Dr. DCA Hillman

The Chemical Muse

Table of Contents

Dr. Hillman seated in front of an ecstatic follower of Dionysus. This drunken satyr promotes a conception of the gods that provokes a viscerally negative response from Christian culture. This satyr in ecstasypossibly Dionysus himselfis unlike most ancient sculpture because of the focus on the pubic region as a statement of the power of the mysteries.

T he sodomizing of young children by the Christian clergy is a practice as old as the Catholic Church itself. Most people today believe that the gruesome activities of priest pedophiles are an unfortunate reality of a religious hierarchy that promotes celibacy and deters its priests from experiencing any form of sexual pleasure. However, child abuse in the Church is profoundly institutional. From the earliest centuries of Christianity, priests, elders, monks and bishops established, promoted and defended the ritual rape of young boys. Child abuse is not an accident of Church history; it is an integral, foundational component of Christianity.

Ritual child rape performed by Christian priests was very much the result of a cultural war declared by religious zealots during the first few centuries of the Church. The earliest generations that followed the birth and death of Jesus witnessed incredible social upheaval on an unparalleled scale. Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia were all inextricably knotted up in the affairs of the political behemoth called the Roman Empire. The unity that so characterized the Roman world facilitated a head-to-head social conflict of Christians and non-Christians.

The polytheistic core of classical religion effortlessly adapted itself to encounters with new divinities from the East, but the arrival of proselytizing Christian monotheists in the Common Era was the beginning of the end for the Roman way of life. The Roman pantheon of gods, despite its inclusive tendencies, quickly succumbed to the demands of the Christian priestly hierarchy that flourished on the basis of its pronounced exclusivity.

Christian priests did not blend into the classical world. They were known for their uniqueness. Common members of the early Church were secretive and isolated. Monks were lone, intolerant zealots, beyond the reach of custom and law. Priests refused to swear allegiance to the emperor. Common Christians dropped out of society and became highly secretive. Mystery initiations involving the rape of children served to reinforce the Churchs efforts to set its members apart from the rest of the general population while rigorously promoting the not-to-be-questioned authority of its clergy.

The non-Christians who lived during the rise of the Christian Church claimed they were witnessing the end of civilization. The Greeks and Romans might have invented democracy, science and medicine, but their shared culture eventually resigned itself to defeat; in the face of the rapidly expanding power of an exclusively male priesthood, known for its novel views of sex, Roman educators, bureaucrats and politicians slowly ceded their cultural traditions to Church dogma.

The foundation of classical religion was its enthusiastic veneration of beauty. Unlike the rest of the classical world, the Christians employed general moral definitions of good and evil that made their followers unique. The Greeks and Romans believed individual inquiry determined morality. But for Christians living anywhere in the empire, under the auspices of any ethnic group, there was one cultural constant: Jesus was the standard of morality, not Nature. Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch and student of the Apostle John, was among the earliest of Christians to establish the concept of orthodox language, in his Letter to the Ephesians. In doing so he helped to limit any form of criticism of Church officialsa concession that non-Christian priests were never granted.

The Term Pagan

As orthodox speech and doctrine came to the fore of the ancient stage, Christians began calling non-Christians pagans. It was a pejorative term, like our modern hillbilly or redneck, and the word was meant to describe anyone who refused to follow the Christian messiah as the source of universal truth. Of course it was arrogantly condescending, but it was primarily a means of isolating non-Christians as morally distinct from the growing numbers of Christians.

In the early centuries of the Common Era, monks and priests increasingly painted pagans in a negative moral light based on their age-old use of drugs in religious rituals; the Christians portrayed them as spiritual criminals. Drugs had long been a staple of the back-woodsy, Roman religious cults.

Prominent Church fathers worked diligently to root out the use of drugs in their own meetings and celebrations in order to distinguish themselves from pagan religions steeped in the use of psychotropics. The earliest Christian Eucharist was referred to as the drug of immortality, but Christian priests worked diligently to distinguish their own drug use from that of non-Christians. In his Letter to the Ephesians, Ignatius, who assumed a title commonly reserved for important pagan priests, taught that the use of non-Christian drugs was tantamount to the rejection of orthodoxy: Therefore I am urging younot I, but the love of Jesus Christmake use only of Christian food and abstain from a foreign plant, which is heresy.

By the fourth century, thanks to the power of the bishops, Roman laws were written to ban the use of drugs in any sort of cultic practicesunder penalty of execution. This gave the bishops legal authority to arrest drug-using pagans and to seize their property.

Assets from drug seizures were directly absorbedby the Church. The pagans viewed this assimilation of public wealth by the Church as an injustice and evidence of the corrupt motives of Christian priests. Pagans had long suspected that Christianity was a convenient way to get rich. The pagan philosopher Porphyry, in Against the Christians, expressed the common sentiment this way: The words of Christ, I came not to bring peace but a sword. I came to separate a son from his father, belie the true intentions of the Christians. They seek riches and glory. Far from being friends of the empire, they are renegades waiting for their chance to seize control.