Wilhelm Reich - The Murder of Christ: The Emotional Plague of Mankind

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Contents

Where is the exit?; The great tragedy; The great danger; The body and the flesh; The riddle of the original sin; The forbidden tree; Freedom peddlers.

Christ as healer; The dream of paradise; Christs way of life; The ten maidens.

Lifes way of loving; Merger of two living beings; Making love.

The Son of God; Christ as teacher; Verbot against knowing God.

The reality of God; Peoples helplessness; Stalins technique; The sucker; Danger of knowing God; Universality of genital misery.

Sitting on the spot; The mobility of Living Life; The immobility of armored life; They do not understand; The way to social disaster; Moscow Modju; The big hatred; Christ doomed.

The martyr ideology; Forgive thine enemy; Hosanna in the Highest; The ocean of human life; The ripple; Knowing God.

Christs love for women; Moralistic restrictions necessary; Primary and secondary drives.

Efforts wasted; The murderer revealed.

The true killer; Mocenigos Way; Accusation of the victim.

Christ Out of place; The tragedy of truth; Rational nonsense; Victim of peoples craving; Christs conflict.

Be on guard; Let people save themselves.

True justice; The meaning of Christ.

Life can hate; Truth lonesome.

Eloquent silence; Let us pray.

All friends are gone; Mystification of Lifes glow; The universal Life force.

Women present; Dont ever touch it!; The well of Life; They invent the miracle; The rational meaning of resurrection.

The bio-energetic meaning of truth; Truth and countertruth; The Little Man parallel; Who is the enemy?; Hideous distortions of orgonomic truth; The rational root of the Resurrection; The meaning of countertruth; The new leader.

Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.

TO THE CHILDREN OF THE FUTURE

INTRODUCTION

The social crisis we are living through is basically due to the inability of people in general to govern their own lives. From this inability cruel dictatorships have grown over the past thirty years, with no rational social ends at all.

Serious men and women everywhere are deeply concerned with the misfortune which is threatening to extinguish our lives, our happiness, and cause disaster to our children. These men and women want blunt truth. They want blunt truth about peoples true ways of being, acting and emotional reacting. To tell the people everywhere the full truth about themselves, means paying respect to their social responsibilities. The problems presented in T HE M URDER OF C HRIST are acute problems of present-day society. However, the solutions to these problems, given in T HE M URDER OF C HRIST are immature, emotionally blurred, insufficient or lacking completeness. Therefore, T HE M URDER OF C HRIST is being published only as historical source material from the Archives of the Orgone Institute.

The Oranur Experiment, beginning 1947, has unexpectedly provided some basic solutions to emotional and social problems of man, solutions which have been entirely inaccessible heretofore. An extensive publication of the emotional implications of the Oranur Experiment is in preparation. T HE M URDER OF C HRIST may well serve as an introduction of biographical background material to Oranur.

God is Nature, and Christ is the realization of Natural Law. God (Nature) has created the genital organs in all living beings. He has done so for them to function according to natural, godly law. Therefore, to ascribe a natural, godly love life to the messenger of God on earth is no sacrilege, no blasphemy. It is, on the contrary, the rooting of God in mans cleanest depth. This depth is there from the very beginning of life. Propagation is only added to genitality in puberty. Godly genital love is there long before the function of propagation; therefore, the genital embrace was not created by Nature and God only for the purpose of propagation.

Orgonon, November 3rd, 1952

And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they did not know what to answer him. And he came the third time, and said to them, Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough; the hour has come; the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.

( Mark 14: 37-42)

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the praetorium, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe upon him, and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on his head, and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him they mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! And they spat upon him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe, and put his own clothes on him, and led him away to crucify him.

( Matthew 27: 27-31)

Wilhelm Reich (1952)

C HAPTER I

THE TRAP

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know.

Jean Jacques Rousseau asked this question in the very beginning of his Social Contract some two hundred years ago. Unless the answer is found to this basic question, there is little use in setting up new social contracts. There has for many ages been something at work within human society that rendered impotent any and every single attempt to get at the solution of the great riddle, well known to all great leaders of humanity during the past several thousands of years: Man is born free, yet he goes through life as slave.

No answer has been found till now. There must be something at work in human society that obstructs the asking of the correct question to reach the right answer. All human philosophy is riddled with the nightmare of searching in vain.

Something, well hidden, is at work, that does not permit posing the right question. There is, accordingly, something in operation that continuously and successfully diverts attention from the carefully camouflaged access to where attention should be focused. The tool used by the well-camouflaged something to divert attention from the cardinal riddle itself, is human EVASIVENESS with regard to living Life. The hidden something is THE EMOTIONAL PLAGUE OF MAN.

On the correct formulation of the riddle will depend the proper focusing of attention, and on this in turn will depend the eventual finding of the correct answer as to how it is possible that man is born free everywhere and yet finds himself in slavery everywhere.

Certainly, social contracts, if honestly designed to maintain life in human society, are crucial tasks. But no kind of social contract will ever solve the problem of human agony. The social contract, at best, is no more than a makeshift to maintain life. It has heretofore not been able to remove the agony of life.