Jesusatand The Peacock Angel
It all started when I had a little too much time on my hands and started leafing through one of the many books I have piled up around me (home and work, though in this case it was the latter). The book that caught my eye was Inside Secret Societies: What They Don’t Want You to Know by Michael Benson (an "encyclopedic listing of secret societies around the world and across history," good for browsing and not much else) and the entry that caught my eye was Peacock Angel, The Order of the. It described the order as a "devil-worshiping society" with ancient roots which still exists in the Middle East, where they’ve come to be known as the Yezidis. I’m a sucker for secret societies (where do I join up anyway?) and any ancient religion that has refused to knuckle under to the worldwide hegemony of that Jewish/Christian/Moslem hairy thunderer who seems so driven to have the playing field to himself.
Not surprisingly, the Inside Secret Societies entry was a little more sensational than the one I found on Wikipedia, which revealed a very contemporary angle. The Yazidi (everybody has a different spelling) are Kurds who live in present day Iraq, and maintain their ancient traditions by being extremely clannish and secretive. Although they are often accused of being Satan worshipers, their deity is Melek Ta’us, an archangel and intermediary between the creator and humanity. Interestingly enough, the Yazidi are among the biggest boosters of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, believing it provides a safe buffer between them and those countrymen who consider them infidels, although this belief, as we shall see, proved to be as misguided as any other positive opinion of that utter debacle.
All this suggested, as so much else does, the need for further reading. A keyword search on my book distributor’s web page turned up two likely suspects, a scholarly anthropological study, and a book from Adventures Unlimited Press categorized as "Controversial Knowledge." The attentive RADIOFREEUBU reader will have little doubt as to which of these two I selected. I was already familiar with Mark Amaru Pinkham, the author of The Truth Behind the Christ Myth: The Redemption of the Peacock Angel from his previous work The Return of the Serpents of Wisdom, a volume which both informed and is quoted in my own indispensable yet unpublished novel Snakes in Caves.
Pinkham takes a much more, um, cosmic, view, seeing the Peacock Angel as an archetypical figure in world mythology, the offspring of the primal god and goddess, arriving to renew the world as the youth of a thousand summers, known by a thousand names. Unlike Benson, who presents his "Yezidis" as upholders of a 4,000 year old tradition which is possibly the original religion of the world, Pinkham sees the "Yezidhi" as syncretists, mixing the Mithraic, Gnostic and Sufi ideas around them to produce their own unique religion. Interestingly, Pinkham recounts the vision of the Yezidhi prophet Musafir, who while riding beheld an enormous tower which fell, threatening to destroy the world, only to be consoled by a shining youth who identified himself as Melek Taus and told him that after the tower falls there will be chaos, but the Yezidhi "will be unharmed and rule over the ruins."
Rather than the Christian devil, Pinkham describes the Yezidhi as worshiping a deity more like the Gnostic demiurge, the king of the world who, like the world itself, is neither inherently good nor evil but transcends those false dichotomies. As he says "…the Yezidhi worship Melek Taus, not Satan, and strive to cultivate only the good qualities of Melek Taus, while also seeing them in each other." There’s a persuasive Gnostic idea that the divine undergoes some kind of diminution by becoming immanent in time and matter, and the Yezidhi seem to believe the archangel Melek Taus started as pure, but began to absorb some of the seedier elements of the terrestrial world like pride, envy and greed as he became more and more a part of it.
And let’s face it, the whole idea makes sense – if the Christian god is all powerful and all benevolent, how can the world be so messed up? If he created man in his own image how can we be so full of crap?
As I read the Pinkham book a strange conviction came over me – maybe things have gotten reversed, and the figure so many people today invoke as Jesus is actually closer to Satan. Maybe when the son of god came to earth he didn’t redeem us as much as sully himself, in time embodying the egotism and materialism which is such a part of human nature. The religion that bears his name has certainly become corrupted – Christianity’s former ideals of love, otherworldliness and compassion have been replaced by materialism, hatred and pride, its practice devolved from peaceful words and charitable deeds to the demand of complete surrender of individuality and the subjugation of all who will not conform. Listening to any T.V. preacher will show that today’s believer does not expect their reward in heaven but right here on earth, preferably in the form of dollars.
We are constantly told what good and faithful Christians the members of the Bush regime are, and yet, far from exhibiting the attributes Jesus preached and embodied like meekness, charity, forgiveness, etc., their misrule can best be characterized as hateful, polarizing, corrupt, selfish and smug. Surely, as the current documentary No End in Sight vividly demonstrates, the actions of the Bush regime in unilaterally initiating and pursuing the disastrous Iraq invasion can only come under the category of hubris, insane and demonic. Individuals like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are absolutely unable to admit that they could have made a single error and seem to believe that they are superior beings whose actions cannot be questioned by mere mortals, embodying what is the essential characteristic of Satan, his infernal pride. And couldn’t Bush, the embodiment of the religious right, who has so often misled the American public, easily be known by the Satanic epithet King of Lies?
Instead of Bush’s constant, semi-articulated view of today’s society as an endless war between absolute good (himself and his followers) and absolute evil (everyone else), maybe there’s another kind of dichotomy going on. Adam Gopnik articulated it beautifully in his New Yorker article on Philip K. Dick, "The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real – this thought today does not seem exactly crazy."
And as if to cap it all off, as I was in the middle of reading and thinking about these things an awful thing happened. On August 14th, four suicide bombers attacked a Kurdish Yazidi community in northwest Iraq, killing hundreds in one of the deadliest assaults of the American occupation. Evidently hating the Yazidi is the one thing Shi’ite and Sunni can agree on, putting Bush in the ironic position of being the only protector of people who he would no doubt consign to hell.
