Dearest friends,
I was reading a blog by a very smart person, and it occurred to me that if I aped his style, others would also find me to be cool, smart, and attractive.
Prodigy Prodigal: Isn’t it peculiar that priests wear those black robes? And those churches, they have bells.
Mentor The Old Jew: What are you blathering about now?
Prodigy Prodigal: Bells are like… bell curves. They’re got the same shape. That’s math.
Unfortunately, I must confess, Reader, that I am an idiot, and to my chagrin, the clothes of a wise man are ill-fitting on a fool. Like all confessions, this one is best heard by a priest. And that does set me to thinking about them. The Priestly caste is a distinct feature of Indo-European societies.
Here are some quotes from Razib Khan:
“The Western Christian priesthood and the Dharmic religious class exhibit a degree of detachment from normal society due to their celibacy.” “I think the difference seems entirely reflected in the character of their philosophies. Christianity and the Dharmic religions have had large numbers of religious-intellectual professionals detached from worries of family life as monks across their history. In contrast, Jewish rabbis, Muslim ulema, and Confucian scholars have all had to concern themselves with family life.” “But, a minority are devoted to causes. To society.”
Now, it is popular among a certain set to proclaim their determination to be childfree. On one level, it’s a statement that the world is overpopulated. But that is part of the new civic religion in which Gaia must be appeased – anti-natalism is secular celibacy. The Bobos are the priests of a modern secular religion. And the Priestly Caste was not just morality police. They were the thinkers! They were the scientists and the intellectuals! While the Kshatriya were kings in early modern India, the Brahmin were its haughty mandarins.
They are priests, but also priest-lords, priest-scientists, priest-intellectuals. The distinctiveness of this idea and its consequences can be seen by contrasting Christians with Jews. I am not a believer in Sapir-Whorf. It gets the causal chain precisely backwards. Words do not shape our thinking. Rather, when we think about and attempt to grasp a concept, we find ourselves inventing words to capture the idea. And the more prominent the idea in our way of being, the more prominent it becomes in our language. Jews did not invent a metaphysics. YHVH is the verb to be. Ehiyeh asher ehiyeh, I am that I am. There are only two tenses, the mortal tense, and the Godly tense – the future perfect. God exists in a state of timelessness, while mortals do not focus at all on their existence. Jews go to their house. But Aryans *are* going to their house. They, in the verbiage, are constantly in a conscious state of existing and existence. The language necessitates a concept of self and in turn enables an obsession with self. Because the name of God is forbidden, Jews cannot easily discuss being, which precludes this deep exploration of the self.
When we arrive at Christianity, this develops further, because the universe is then supposed to be mechanistic, ordered by God-as-Logos. The self is an orderly thing which is then conceptualized within a universe of orderly things. The self-question thus extends into the general question of the Logos question. What is the order of the universe, its Logos, which serves as the divine principle, the Arche of being? Removing God from the equation does not kill the question, it merely secularizes it. Metaphysics is thus the secular version of two interrelated questions. Who am I? And what is existence, especially in relation to me? Do I exist and does existence exist? Can I truly know that which is Other to me?
The priest, therefore, becomes a figure that knows the secrets of the world of Logos and the true order of the universe, which of course is the truth of reality. He is a liminal figure which can step between the perceived earthly world and the world which is true. But, of course, he is also a moral creature. Because God is not just Logos, he is Goodness, he is Love. He provides not only the structure of the universe, but its morality. When we engage in the rites of the Church, the priest symbolically stands in the place of God. He acts on God’s behalf. In turn, when man demands it, the priest, being one who can walk in the other realm, can intercede on behalf of man. He is man’s intercessionary. Pagans do not need intercessionaries in this sense because the spiritual world is not made distinct from the physical world. There is no truth of the Logos lying behind reality. Gods are tangible things – bigger people, Sky Daddies, the Sun.
When you remove the religion, these norms still persist. Society only has so many narratives, and people naturally fit their roles to their narratives. The workplace is the court reborn, and its politics merely the continuation of Patrimonial Bureaucracy. So too are the Bobos merely the priests of yesteryear. Why is this significant? Because it means it’s futile to discuss the truths of ideologies (secular religions) with those who are not of the Priestly Caste. Outsiders may muster up all the facts they want, but that doesn’t matter. Facts are of the physical, untrue world, and not of the spiritual world. And the spiritual world, the other world, is the true world.
Okay, so it’s just a roundabout way of saying cultists don’t consider anything outside the walls. So what? We already knew that. Sure. But it ties into my next point…
The debate of the priests is the cycle of civilizations.
But perhaps I’m just trying to get the old Jew off my back.
Makes overlong excuses for being bad at math,
Monsieur le Baron
