Carrie Bailey Allen's Blog

It’s tempting to get very philosophical about being a writer and claiming your identity as a writer. During my first year, I participated in groups of novice ink slingers who...

It was – if you really thought about it – inevitable. John thought so. But, John was a man never completely convinced of his ordinariness despite years of evidence that...

I respect Veterans and their service to the country. This includes people who died in American wars. Soldiers are so often young people seeking opportunities to improve their lives and...

I don’t blame anyone for wanting to hope that the current problem in the US isn’t as big as it appears, but first go to the whitehouse.gov website and read the new...

I live in a small town. Some people I see regularly, but for the most part, most people avoid each other except to exchange the random awkward greeting and give general updates on the lives of anyone other than their own. Small town America.

I rank among those residents in this quaint little village, who were not born and raised here, but I’ve shown my face enough now around the local shops that some people have learned my name and even noticed that I don’t work a traditional schedule.

Yesterday, a tightly knit gaggle of elderly women struck up a friendly conversation and mentioned that the new manager of the convenience shop down the road needed a sandwich maker who could close up after the night shift. I asked which shop. They gave me the name. And the one amongst them with white pixie cut added omniously, “It’s something to think about. I believe she’s paying $10 an hour.”

Before my brain had enough time to instruct my teeth to bite my tongue, I said, “Oh no, I’m not asking for me. There is a fifteen year-old in my home who is very eager to start work.”

At that moment, it turned into one of THOSE conversations as the women all scowled in unison. The disapproval felt interminable, finally proving that the space time continuum itself was not a thing of uniform glory, but punctuated by experiences that pass too quickly and moments that don’t end, regardless of how much you’d like them, too. Eventually, one of the ladies helpfully made quick mention of the importance of working for at least 3 to 6 months just to get started. I nodded.

“Yes, it’s hard for a person her age to get her first job,” I said. “Her father and I have suggested volunteering to get that experience.”

Most of the scowls on the old ladies’ faces remained fixed within their crape-like wrinkles. Don’t get me wrong here. I like these women, but times have changed and they haven’t. And that could be a problem. In small towns, a person’s reputation tends to begin before the individual does anything worthy of notice and it tends to outlive them through generations of random banter. These are a very bored people.

Attempting a little damage control in the conversation, I sputtered out a little information about myself, “I actually started in libraries when I was fifteen back when we sill had to type records on card catalogs. In fact,” I continued brightly, “I have a Masters of Information Studies. Now, libraries are all managed by ALS. That’s the, uh, automated library system. I supposed that’s why I made my career in libraries until I was disabled. I like technology.”

I was sunk. I never learn. Against soft bigotry, I lose every time.

Sure, I could have told them that I write books and that I paint, but that was another pothole I hoped to circumvent in order to manage the impression I presented to these virtual strangers. I’m not famous and not rich enough for most people to accept that having a creative occupation is legitimate work.

The friendliest one moved position to face me in the middle of the crowd, “I changed careers halfway through my life. First, I worked in offices, but then I went back to school and became a nurse!”

Oh, yeah. I was getting a pep talk.

Before I could dig myself into a hole deep enough for a grave and much higher than I could pull myself out from, I thanked them sweetly and made a dash for the exit.

I used to hope that New Englanders of all ages and backgrounds would stop challenging me to prove my work ethic. I wished they would quit trying to wedge unwanted assistance into my life. I fantasized about someone teaching them to access the internet and self-educate, crush the dated stereotypes they learned via television broadcasts and multi-volume encyclopedias and accept that someone who doesn’t look like or act like them may truly be an honest, responsible citizen.

I don’t have to validate my medical conditions or my invisible disability to strangers. I don’t have to carry my diplomas, passport and CV around in my pocket to prove my experience and background. I don’t have to justify my choice to work online or show anyone my bank statements and credit reports to demonstrate that I am financially fit if not famous.

One constant of human nature is that people see and hear what they want to see and hear. They see what validates their world view. They hear what makes them feel good about themselves.

You might imagine that these old ladies helped elect Donald Trump, but I can assure you that A) I know they didn’t and B) the problem in America is much deeper than superficial politics.

The US runs on a culture of manufactured superiority. Many of us still think equality means allowing people we perceive as disadvantaged to participate even when we doubt their merit and ability. Not so. Equality requires us to reward merit and ability regardless of where it originates. And um, we’re not very good at that, but that will continue to change simply because the demographics of the country will not support the skewed vision that dominated the landscape of previous generations.

I feel bad for the old ladies that will never see it happen, not because they aren’t here watching the developments unfold, but because they don’t know how to divorce the evaluation of personal merit from archaic and painfully false stereotypes even those that apply to themselves. It can’t be easy getting old.

I wish I could help them. You see, all you have to do is walk to the nearest mirror or hold up your camera and face your reflection. If you can find your self worth in there, you will never need to look outside at others and filter out the truth that we are all much more than we appear.

Of course, it takes balls to accept the good and the bad, but it’s a lot better than being bigoted and bitter.

Redo: it takes a vagina to accept the good and the bad, but it’s a lot better than being bigoted and bitter.

Hmmm…

If you did not vote for Donald Trump and you’re facing the possibility of visiting family members for a holiday dinner, who you KNOW most likely did support the man of the year‘s candidacy, you need a game plan.

There is no logical argument and no clever or well-informed meme on social media that will make it all go away. Denial is not an option. The time to prepare is now.

#1 Show NO Weakness

As soon as that door opens and you can smell the familiar scents of your favorite foods wafting from the kitchen, strut into that room like Hillary or Sanders or whoever you supported actually won. They didn’t, but you need a game face.

We all have that one family member who likes to gloat. Maybe they like to debate by raising their voice rather than talking about facts or, I don’t know, making logical arguments to support their position. Perhaps they take an indirect route by just questioning what they think you believe before you ever have the chance to explain. When opposing politics cross the dinner table, it can feel like an iron curtain has descended between the brussel sprouts and the mash potatoes or it can erupt into World War III.

The problem is that our potential family disputes are small and insignificant compared to what we truly face these next four years. That annoying cousin may go to war and die. That aunt may be attacked and killed for her non-conformity. That sister may be raped and denied due process of law. That grandfather may lose necessary medical benefits.

Showing no weakness doesn’t mean that you’re ready for a fight. It means that you will not be provoked into action on someone else’s terms.

#2 Hold Your Fire

Control your emotions and don’t, I repeat, don’t be the first one to start a full frontal assault. There is nothing you can say that hasn’t already been posted on Facebook. It might feel good for a few moments. Anger has the power to make us feel strong, but it’s like a drug and after the dust settles, you’ll be one who dragged everyone into the conflict.

Since we’re talking about your family here, it’s important to remember that even the most obnoxious person at the table shares important bonds with someone you love. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be there.

Think of the family get together like a board meeting, not a battlefield.

#3 Forget the Facts

If Trump supporters cared about facts they would not be Trump supporters. And that’s a fact.

In fact, a great number of us lead with our emotions and then look for facts to support our position after the fact. You don’t need facts to survive dinner. You don’t need arguments. You don’t need to explain your position or defend your position or even hold your position.

If this were a winning game plan, it would have won the election. Time to face facts and accept facts and try a new direction.

#4 Collect Intelligence

This is the secret to making a real difference this holiday season as we prepare to defend our rights, our liberties and our crazy families over the next four years.

We should consider that when the conservatives said that Trump tapped into a silent portion of the US that they were dead wrong, but there was something to learn from this gross misrepresentation of the loud, angry and uninformed masses who fear all muslims, want a wall, want to return to the days of Regan, think racism is exaggerated unless you’re talking about POC not being gracious toward a white person.

Maybe that is your most dreaded family member. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe underneath the misinformation is a lot of fear and anger. Actually, we already know this is the problem.

One of the reasons I believe I can write this blog post is that I’ve had great success helping people overcome xenophobia and recognizing their superiority complexes.

I know what works. The Socratic method.

Socratic method, also known as maieutics, method of elenchus, elenctic method, or Socratic debate, is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presumptions.

Try it. Whatever that one family member says, keep asking questions. Whatever they answer, ask a deeper question. Don’t even think about turning the conversation around and sharing your perspective. The Socratic method works by focusing entirely on the thought and belief system of one individual and following the person’s reasoning until they say something that they recognize as dissonant to their view of themselves.

I’ve heard many people voice fears and hatred that later made them recoil. There is no instant change, but when given the chance to air our unspoken thoughts and feelings, we often find that they just sound bad. Hidden in the recesses of our mind, they fester. In the open air, they wilt and wither.

It takes practice to engage someone with the Socratic method without becoming emotionally involved in their responses, but it is a skill we all benefit from developing.

#5 Defend, Defend, Defend

It’s perfectly likely that you won’t defuse all the landmines that Trump’s divisive rhetoric has gifted our homes this year. You may not even finish dessert unscathed, but you can do one thing that makes a real difference.

Say no to hate.

Conservatives and liberals alike can take a stand and draw the line between what is a matter of opinion and politics and what blatantly immoral. Aggression toward any group of people for any reason, simply because they are a member of a group, is hateful.

There is defense and there is aggression. Be a defender.

In some families, the Trump supporters are outnumbered and may be targeted by the angry and disillusioned. In others, it may be the LBGT person who was not invited. It may be the religious nutcase or the rabid atheist. It may be the millennial feminist or aging male boomer. It may be the unemployed, the addict, the bitter divorcee, the socially oblivious gamer, the radical, the promiscuous, the arrogant academic, the weirdo, the dullard.

Anyone can be a target of exclusion.

Whatever the politics enter your holiday, remember that we cannot be a whole country, or be a whole family, without the peace that leads to open, honest dialogue between all members.

And that’s the one thing that will most undermine the objectives of the new administration. The persistence and strength of our commitment to peace. And that can start at home.

I model a lot of my writing on bronze age and stone age mythology. People living today may have evolved considerably on a physical level, but I believe the biggest difference between us and our ancestors lies in our ability to store information outside of our own minds.

Writing. Records. Books. Decent filing systems. Databases.

Otherwise, we very much resemble the people who lived at the beginnings of our known history although it seems most of us want to believe that our intelligence or our humanity, our civilization, outshines cultures that practiced human sacrifice or cannibalism. We’re much better than that, right? Not biologically. No. We may not be superior, but our ability to communicate is more advanced. We can share photos of our cats anywhere. Instantly. Ancient Egyptians would be SO jealous.

I think a lot about what the ancient world must have been like without information. Even before the internet, we had encyclopedias and libraries and telephones and broadcast television and newspapers keeping us from lacking knowledge of history as well as current events.

During my research for the second book in my Immortal Coffee Series, which is a post apocalyptic narrative, I was ravenously devouring documentaries about Mesopotamia, where civilization began in the Western world, when I ran into the same problem.

No one is objective about the origins of human civilization

On one end of the spectrum, you find archeologists making assertions that what cannot be proven doesn’t exist and lay persons on the other, sometimes accrediting their preconceived theories with degrees, trying to show that the evidence supports events in their religious text. Everyone has a personal agenda. Objectivity is rare regarding this region of the world, because the early myths and cultures gave rise to Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

In general, I notice the academics interviewed in documentaries tend to maintain complete skepticism and avoid acknowledging the possible historical value of the writings combined to form religious texts. They’re quick to cry, “Confirmation bias!!” at anyone drawing a connection between an event in the Bible or Quran and archeological evidence in modern Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the surrounding regions.

Unfortunately, both parties are equally guilty of treating the writings used by current religious communities as something other than documents from an early era of human history. Avoiding those records is as bad as relying on them entirely to tell us what the world of was like around the time writing was invented in 3200 BCE. That happened in Mesopotamia. People began writing in China in 1200 BCE and in Mesoamerica in 600 BCE. People generally accept the idea that ancient Mexico invented writing independent of the ancient people of the Middle East, but people just as quickly believe that ancient China was taught. It had two thousand years to filter over there, but that distance between Asia and Alaska? Impassable!

As a writer, I like to challenge myself to imagine how people without our access to information reasoned about the world around them and to the best of my ability, I try not to bother with historical fact. Although, I have one main guideline, I assume that people living then were as intelligent as people living today. You can take that however you want.

The World Before Literacy and Public Libraries

I was watching the series Secrets of the Bible on Netflix this week. This series, produced in Britain, some ways lacked the American passion for fundamental interpretation and extreme refutation of Biblical scholars. They focused less on the people’s conclusions as on the journey each layman and archeologists with religious motives took to confirm evidence of the Bible. Most episodes proposed solutions to Biblical events that were contradictory. It seems everyone wants the story of Exodus to be true, unless you’re an academic, then the ancient people of Israel borrowed the story from another culture and there is no connection between the development of monotheism and an enslaved population of semites in ancient Egypt.

I remember being amazed by the poor quality of the special effects in Cecil B. DeMile’s Ten Commandments (1956) as a child where a pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere and somehow managed to prevent Egyptian chariots from steering their horses around it. A man with the staff and robe of a wizard performed some magic. I could hardly distinguish Moses from Merlin or Gandalf.

The actual text of Exodus referred to a god leading some recently freed Hebrews with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Cecil B. DeMile envisioned a pillar of fire in the day. No smoke. No leading. While, in fact, a better interpretation of the text may have been that the people in the story followed a massive volcanic eruption. Why not? If you’d never seen or heard of a volcano, wouldn’t you mistake it for something incredibly awesome worth investigating?

 

If you’d never seen or heard of a volcano, wouldn’t you mistake it for something incredibly awesome, possibly worth investigating?

 

Natural wonders are sublime, because they force us into a higher awareness of our own insignificance. We marvel at the awesome forces required to create the natural world. They’re beautiful. Even the destructive forces of flooding or tornados or earthquakes demand some respect. It stops us from thinking about the petty interpersonal disputes of our lives and places our lifetime in a broader context.

I believe we all interpret all rely on faith to interpret what we cannot explain. Many people living today firmly believe that the scientific method can and will explain everything eventually. Maybe this sounds like simple good reasoning, but it’s actually just inductive reasoning. Science has provided many explanations in the past so we can induce that it will continue to do so in the future. Unfortunately, we have to use induction to prove that inductive reasoning is valid reasoning, which is known in philosophical circles as the problem of induction. At best, it’s been claimed that science doesn’t rely on induction, but those arguments rely heavily on semantics. And no matter. Induction works. It’s just not perfect. Most people accept that the current collection of scientific theories do not represent perfect knowledge of the world. That is easy to accept. But, the belief that science will eventually provide all answers as merely a strong conviction derived from inductive reasoning similar in almost every meaningful way to religious faith? Much less easy to accept.

I’m not trying to undermine the philosophy of science in favor of current religious belief systems. I’m trying to demonstrate that all belief systems depend on rational thinking, creative insight and faith in uncertain theories operating within the context of the information available to them.

This is the premise for my speculation about the Knights Templar

Who Were the Knights Templar?

Episode 11 of the Secrets of the Bible was the most ridiculous of the series, because it lacked a concrete conclusion. They followed a man who followed the activities of the medieval knights established to protect pilgrims from Europe to Jerusalem in 1108, but then got tangled up in stories about a Holy Grail and during their steep ascent to power and ruthless disbandment and may have a century later, merged with the Freemasons.

They purportedly excavated the Temple of Solomon, which was and still is assumed by many to be the Temple Mount where the Dome of the Rock was built. This holds significance, because Orthodox Judaism believes they can have only one Temple, which is why the places where they gather their congregations are referred to as shuls, Yiddish for school. In Christianity, Jesus would have knocked over a table and got the attention of the authorities who killed him at this very important temple. The Ark of the Covenant would have been kept in it. It was filled with a lot of gold and statues of angels.

Devoid of human feeling, these cherubim were much more interesting angels than the currently popular harp wielding versions. I wrote them into my first novel as a product of genetic engineering.

 

Anyway, the episode draws a quick connection from the discovery of something in the Temple that led to the sharp increase in power of the Knights Templar. Presumably, it was the grail, but scholars know it wasn’t necessarily a cup. After visiting a few cathedrals displaying the Black Madonna and talking about Freemasonry, the person interviewed for the episode concludes that the Knights Templar did indeed find something at the Temple Mount.

They found brotherhood.

What an obvious conclusion! So easy to miss! The quest for the Holy Grail was always really just a quest for spiritual enlightenment. There never was a cup of immortality that caught the blood of Jesus and held wine at the last supper. Nope. They dug and dug and dug and found brotherhood.

In some ways, it’s a better theory than Dan Brown related in The Da Vinci code. In his extremely popular novel, the great secret of European Christianity was that the grail was a woman. Mary Magdalene. She carried the DNA of Jesus forward to our time. Real actual descendants of Jesus are alive today. That’s um, great.

How You Could Mistake a Woman for a Chalice in Medieval Europe

Jerusalem was captured by European crusaders in 1099 and the Knights Templar formed in 1118. The first mention of a graal occurred in an unfinished romantic story about a guy named Perceval, written sometime between 1135 and 1190, maybe 1180.

It should be understood that literacy wasn’t the priority in the past in the same way it is today and a lot of time and distance separated the first mention of something like a grail.  The work written by Chretien, who may have been a member of the Order of the Knights Templar, was clearly a fantasy story. A romantic fantasy story that happened in the time of King Arthur, which would have been the 5th or 6th century CE. Five hundred years before the crusades during the Saxon invasion.

From the original source, we can’t tell what the graal is supposed to be.

In the story, a squire brings a white lance, which is bleeding, to a meal where the Fisher King is present. He is accompanied by a beautiful young girl who is carrying an elaborately decorated golden graal past Perceval and another servant carries a silver serving platter. The room is illuminated by the contents and they pass by him again on their way out.

The next day, a woman admonishes Perceval for not asking why the lance bled or who was served by the graal. It wasn’t said to be a holy graal and it wasn’t more significant than the bleeding white lance, but whatever it was, it wounded the king in the thigh region. It is implied that Perceval could have prevented the injury if he asked about it. The women then tells him that she is his first cousin and that his mother is dead.

In the next known graal story, written in 1210, Parzival, not Perceval, has to go on a quest, because he did not ask the healing question. The graal is assumed in this story to have the power to heal, because if Perceval had asked about it, then the Fisher King would not have been wounded in the thigh region. In the Parzival story, the Fisher King gets a name and it is explained that the wound is a punishment for taking a wife, because the person who keeps the grail was supposed to remain chaste.

The Christian part of the story isn’t added until later on by the guy who wrote Merlin, Robert de Boron. He establishes that the grail was a vessel given to Joseph of Aramethia.

In its original unfinished Perceval form, the popular romance with lots of sex and many female characters had a single mention of a bleeding lance and a golden serving dish or vessel, which is best understood as something carried by a processional salver. The beautiful woman would have been carrying some item of food tasted for poison in a vessel and perhaps the room lights up, simply because the platter is gold.

These stories were popular at the same time that the Knights Templar rose to prominence, a very secret and very powerful group of people, but if they found something in the Temple Mount in 1099 or so, it was not in the possession of the Fisher King in the 5th or 6th century CE.

What we know from other sources that two centuries after the conquest of Jerusalem, people claimed that the Knights Templar were denying Jesus Christ, spiting on crucifixes during their initiation rites and worshiping idols. Specifically, they called them Baphomet, a word that may be derived from the Greek words baphe and metis meaning absorption of knowledge. Since the 19th century, Baphomet has often been associated with an Egyptian goat or fertility god. This Goat of Mendes is associated with the snake in the Garden of Eden story via the Babloyian version. One way or another, the Knights Templar were accused of dismissing Christ and worshiping some form of knowledge, like the pursuit of knowledge was a sin of some sort, maybe an original one. And fertility.

The Knights Templar were supposed to be chaste, they couldn’t have physical contact with any women, including members of their own family. They gave all their possessions and wealth to the Order when then joined, which explains their increasing influence in Europe in a short period of time. Publicly, the Knights Templar erected many churches to the Black Madonna or Black Virgin and were said to carry many of these figures back with them from Jerusalem.

 

Many theories abound about the hundreds of statues of Mary erected across Europe following the crusades.

 

The Queen of Heaven

Uh-huh, brotherhood.

Well, I bet they found figures of Asherah. I know many people would prefer to interpret the black madonnas as a statement about race, but semites from the region known as Canaan depicted in Egyptian art have light skin and light hair. Other people would say that the crusaders learned about a black goddess of wisdom from the mystic sufis, a dimension of Islam. Of course, the Hagia Sophia translates as Holy Wisdom, which is an ancient Greek personification of Wisdom, but also an important Byzantine church visited by the crusaders. They could have learned about a goddess from the gnostics. They could have learned about goddesses from their contemporaries in Europe. Regardless of what sources they sought to increase their knowledge of a female deity, I believe they would have required a significant catalyst to adopt the concept with enough enthusiasm to erect hundreds of statues, as they did.

It seems likely to me that they arrived in their Holy Land and found at least one of the extremely common, but ancient figure of a woman in the location where they expected to find sacred artifacts like the Temple Mount.

The Queen of heaven. God’s wife. Asherah, the Canaanite goddess, was everywhere in Mesopotamia, because no one had gone there and sat the people written about in the Bible down and explained they were supposed to have always been exclusively monotheistic since around 1300 to 1500 BCE when Moses supposedly lived. In the early texts of the Bible, the Torah, and the stories written by prophets of ancient Israel, people are constantly trying to wipe out and destroy images of Asherah and Baal. El is often assumed to be the same as Yaweh. Lots of Canaanite gods are mentioned in the Bible. Yep, the god of Abraham was a jealous god that wanted no other gods before him, because there were a lot of other gods at the time.

I don’t think the crusaders would have thought of the discovery of a female figure as heresy, but rather an expansion of their truth.

People have always ascribed to more than one system of thought or faith and generally been more flexible than they claim. Today, people who believe in primarily in science often find themselves praying as their car crash or face other life threatening situations. Religious people find evidence supporting another religion and convert. Agnostics discover neo-pagan movements that allow them to experience spiritual community without supporting the larger organized religions. Many churchgoers attend services weekly, but often do so out of habit or familial obligation, while firmly convicted of the theories of science and rationalizing it with a humanistic perspective.

We are, if anything, we are very complicated and so was humanity at the beginning of history and so was the time of the crusaders.

At some point in Biblical history, apparently Jeremiah 44:15-18, First Kings 14:23; Second Kings 17:10, First Kings 14:15, Second Kings 16:3-4 and Second Kings 17:1, the female deity that accompanied the main male deity of the Canaanite tribes was regularly translated as the grove and there was a big thing about her being associated with trees. While the Bible talks about the people destroying images of other deities, like the Canaanite Baal, in surges of monotheistic outrage, it seemed that a lot of people may not have been completely on board with the idea.

Figures of Asherah are still found buried all over what is today Israel and Palestine, which makes it likely the crusaders dug around and found some.

The Israelites wouldn’t have been likely to destroy them anyway. Imagine you’re a clergyman at a temple a few thousand years ago. You’re surrounded by cherished images of your deities. Some radicals come tearing in demanding you destroy the ones they feel are destroying society.

Okay. Imagine it’s today. You’re a museum director who just finished giving investors a tour of the Renaissance collection when a bunch of radicals, powerful radicals, march in and demand that you remove and destroy all evidence of Issac Newton, because they consider his legend scientific dogma. They claim that scientific inquiry was not discovered or invented, but one of many processes of determining knowledge used as early as Aristotle and developed by multiple theorists in a variety of cultures. These people believe that the narrative of Newton’s apple hinders human progress by creating a mythology around science and an ethnocentric distraction from the corporate bias that has increasingly driven the pursuit of knowledge, muddying science, and generally bastardizing it.

Maybe you don’t totally disagree with them, but what about Ibn al-Haytham? Why should the museum maintain the mythology of great dead European male geniuses as if they acted in isolation and ascribe them godlike status. You know Leonard Da Vinci was a great artist attributed with inventing many great developments in engineering during the Victorian era that we know now were recorded in earlier publications by other people of his time. He just drew them well. You sort of agree.

Right or wrong. You probably also, as this museum director, remember force equals mass times acceleration and the story of the apple from your childhood. You don’t want to destroy the Newton collection. Instead, you hide it in the basement where most of the items deteriorate, except that magnificent bronze bust.

Many of us maintain lingering respect for what was considered to be true even in the face of reasonable skepticism and valid argument. We still love the stories of Newton and DaVinci. They still inspire us. It is normal to mythologize history just as it would have been normal for people to hide the statues of Asherah.

When the Knights Templar discovered female figurines, they would not have been expert scholars of their time who somehow might connect the figures to the forbidden Asheroth. The excavation of the Temple Mount would have been just as much of a religious experience for the crusaders as traveling to Israel is today for many Jews, Christians and Muslims. However, they would have believed their god was actively guiding their life and naturally would associate the figures with their current system of belief and the most prominent woman in the Christian narrative, the mother of Jesus, Mary.

Is this what the Knights Templar found?

 

And they might even assume that the people of their Bible venerated Mary. So, they may have done likewise, because the people living in the time of Jesus must have known something, a purer version of the ultimate truth of our existence. In fact, this is the same line of thinking that created the myth of the Holy Grail. The Knights Templar must have found something or learned something truly exceptional to be accepted as an Order by the Pope of their time and rise to power and influence so quickly.

But, then after a lot of veneration of Mary and a lot of accumulation of money and power, it might just have easily been misunderstood that they had been worshiping the ancient European goddess associated with Spring and fertility from which the word Easter is derived or some other European female goddess that had not been completely eradicated by the presence of Christianity.

By Victorian times, their goddess worship may have been interpreted as fertility god worship or worship of an ancient Egyptian god, because Victorians had more access to knowledge of ancient Egypt.

In the end, none of that really matters.

Wait, Why Does This Matter?

People love to recycle old themes when they write. In the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan sacrifices himself to save everyone just like Jesus. In Harry Potter, Harry sacrifices himself to save everyone just like Jesus. We have to face facts. People continuously retell the same themes making adjustments to suit the cultural atmosphere of the time they live in, borrowing from new sources, reworking old ones. That is what writers do. We don’t work in isolation. We use stories and actual events and theory like a palate of paint to create something original.

We also use myth and legend to shield ourselves from the uncertainty of our own systems of thought, our methods and the real horror that is a human existence. Birth. Conflict. Aging. Death. Stories help us cope with uncertainty and give us numerous convulsions of facts and ideas so that we don’t have to question the tenets of our systems of belief and they keep us from overthinking the questions we can’t answer so we can get on about the business of life. We believe the impossible of our heroes and events we never witness personally, because it is practical to do so.

Many people, lots of feminists, believe Asherah was systematically removed from the Bible as an act of chauvinism rather than monotheism. Many academics do not draw a connection between the Knights Templar and Asherah, but they do bypass her and make a connection between the ancient Egyptian god Isis or ancient Greek Virgo and the Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary.

I think a direct line between Asherah and the Knights Templar makes the most sense, but I can also see why it would make a lot of people uncomfortable.

Asherah, along with other local gods, were vilified and outlawed in Israel. But, after the life of Jesus, during the decline of the Roman Empire, Christianity sought to incorporate Jesus in their new religion, not as a teacher or prophet, but as god. Since there could only be one god, the monotheistic god was decided to be consubstantially three distinct persons. A father. A son. A spirit, which is holy. Without diving into a theological debate, it’s interesting to note that the worship of Asherah in Israel likely ended around the 2nd century BCE and the issue of the relationship between the father and the son in the Christian movement existed for sometime before the concrete establishment of trinitarian doctrine in modern Turkey, which occurred around the 3rd century CE at the First Council of Nicaea.

Basically, within a few hundred years, the wife was kicked out and a new son brought in and the new followers of Jesus, were not looking very monotheistic at that point, having at least two apparent deities. It took centuries for Europeans to spread and maintain the illusion of monotheism by driving out pre-Christian European gods.

However, for Christianity, the era of crusades must have felt like a time of incredible certainty much like we experience today with science.

Today, old religions are typically viewed as quaint traditions or irritating backward thought. Faith in a god is debatable. Faith in the scientific method or the body of knowledge derived from the community of scientists, who are venerated by academics much like the saints of medieval Europe, is much more likely to cause a controversy. People who believe in science confidently attempt to incorporate the practice of older religions as being beneficial to mental health under the umbrella of psychology, but there is an intense unwillingness to consider that science, as a system and set of beliefs, could be replaced as the most unquestioned, most blindly accepted philosophy. Replaced by something new. Not something old.

Let’s face it. Science does make better technologies and it explains things better than religion. It’s a bit weak on morality, but it’s better than monotheism for life-saving technology. Besides, if you really need some spirituality, most scientists don’t feel threatened by archaic religions.

That is exactly what believing in Christianity must have felt like one thousand years ago. No cannibalism. No human sacrifice. The weak and the poor have an honored position. Christianity brought in a code of laws and behaviors that required a stable social order. Christianity wasn’t typically threatened by what it considered pagan beliefs and practices. It incorporated them into the religion to make people more comfortable.

Based on this similarity, we should not compare the faith of the Knights Templar to Christians today. We should compare it to the faith of the dominate philosophy today, which is science. So, if they found something in Jerusalem that challenged the tenets of their faith, I do not believe they would not reject it. Like anyone today, who believes in science, they would try to incorporate it and make sense of it within Christianity. The Christians today that reject scientific developments have typically practiced ignoring ideas that conflict with the Bible. It’s hard work ignoring fact and evidence, but the Knights Templar lived before the Renaissance. Christianity was progress, the framework of their civilization and they would most likely assume that anything and everything could be explained within the doctrine of Christianity. So, if the statues of Asherah were unearthed in the ground at the Temple Mount, the real quest would have been to make sense of what would clearly have been a sign from god.

If Asherah was the Holy Grail of the Crusades, how would that change our perception of history?

Maybe the manliest of European men at the height of chivalry in the era of the chivalrous weren’t obsessed with immortality or the legacy of Jesus. Maybe they were simply awestruck by simple figures of women they found digging in Jerusalem and they even found immense inspiration through the process of incorporating the mystery into their understanding of the world. Maybe the consulted sufis and gnostics and pagans. Maybe the borrowed enough ideas to make them figures make sense to them.

What we do know is that they erected churches to Mary and carried “fertility” figures with them. They were chaste and refused to even touch women. Within a few decades, perhaps it was their discovery that ushered in a movement toward chivalry, exemplified by the romantic stories of Camelot, complete with a code of conduct for the treatment of women.

Maybe the Holy Grail was a woman. These soldiers may have believed their god led them to find the figure of a woman, because in the religious thought, the discovery of figures of women at the Temple Mount could not have been an accident. God didn’t make accidents. So, perhaps for a few centuries, the discovery of a female deity changed the Western world, because the manliest of men had been faced with the very real possibility that their own god was not simply made in the image of a man with a son that once lived as a man. They believed their god showed them a woman and there is no reason to believe they had a quick answer for it, but they embraced the mysterious woman completely.

To me, that makes a much better story.

I model a lot of my writing on bronze age and stone age mythology. People living today may have evolved considerably on a physical level, but I believe the biggest difference between us and our ancestors lies in our ability to store information outside of our own minds.

Writing. Records. Books. Decent filing systems. Databases.

Otherwise, we very much resemble the people who lived at the beginnings of our known history although it seems most of us want to believe that our intelligence or our humanity, our civilization, outshines cultures that practiced human sacrifice or cannibalism. We’re much better than that, right? Not biologically. No. We may not be superior, but our ability to communicate is more advanced. We can share photos of our cats anywhere. Instantly. Ancient Egyptians would be SO jealous.

I think a lot about what the ancient world must have been like without information. Even before the internet, we had encyclopedias and libraries and telephones and broadcast television and newspapers keeping us from lacking knowledge of history as well as current events.

During my research for the second book in my Immortal Coffee Series, which is a post apocalyptic narrative, I was ravenously devouring documentaries about Mesopotamia, where civilization began in the Western world, when I ran into the same problem.

No one is objective about the origins of human civilization

On one end of the spectrum, you find archeologists making assertions that what cannot be proven doesn’t exist and lay persons on the other, sometimes accrediting their preconceived theories with degrees, trying to show that the evidence supports events in their religious text. Everyone has a personal agenda. Objectivity is rare regarding this region of the world, because the early myths and cultures gave rise to Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

In general, I notice the academics interviewed in documentaries tend to maintain complete skepticism and avoid acknowledging the possible historical value of the writings combined to form religious texts. They’re quick to cry, “Confirmation bias!!” at anyone drawing a connection between an event in the Bible or Quran and archeological evidence in modern Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the surrounding regions.

Unfortunately, both parties are equally guilty of treating the writings used by current religious communities as something other than documents from an early era of human history. Avoiding those records is as bad as relying on them entirely to tell us what the world of was like around the time writing was invented in 3200 BCE. That happened in Mesopotamia. People began writing in China in 1200 BCE and in Mesoamerica in 600 BCE. People generally accept the idea that ancient Mexico invented writing independent of the ancient people of the Middle East, but people just as quickly believe that ancient China was taught. It had two thousand years to filter over there, but that distance between Asia and Alaska? Impassable!

As a writer, I like to challenge myself to imagine how people without our access to information reasoned about the world around them and to the best of my ability, I try not to bother with historical fact. Although, I have one main guideline, I assume that people living then were as intelligent as people living today. You can take that however you want.

The World Before Literacy and Public Libraries

I was watching the series Secrets of the Bible on Netflix this week. This series, produced in Britain, some ways lacked the American passion for fundamental interpretation and extreme refutation of Biblical scholars. They focused less on the people’s conclusions as on the journey each layman and archeologists with religious motives took to confirm evidence of the Bible. Most episodes proposed solutions to Biblical events that were contradictory. It seems everyone wants the story of Exodus to be true, unless you’re an academic, then the ancient people of Israel borrowed the story from another culture and there is no connection between the development of monotheism and an enslaved population of semites in ancient Egypt.

I remember being amazed by the poor quality of the special effects in Cecil B. DeMile’s Ten Commandments (1956) as a child where a pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere and somehow managed to prevent Egyptian chariots from steering their horses around it. A man with the staff and robe of a wizard performed some magic. I could hardly distinguish Moses from Merlin or Gandalf.

The actual text of Exodus referred to a god leading some recently freed Hebrews with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Cecil B. DeMile envisioned a pillar of fire in the day. No smoke. No leading. While, in fact, a better interpretation of the text may have been that the people in the story followed a massive volcanic eruption. Why not? If you’d never seen or heard of a volcano, wouldn’t you mistake it for something incredibly awesome worth investigating?

 

If you’d never seen or heard of a volcano, wouldn’t you mistake it for something incredibly awesome, possibly worth investigating?

 

Natural wonders are sublime, because they force us into a higher awareness of our own insignificance. We marvel at the awesome forces required to create the natural world. They’re beautiful. Even the destructive forces of flooding or tornados or earthquakes demand some respect. It stops us from thinking about the petty interpersonal disputes of our lives and places our lifetime in a broader context.

I believe we all interpret all rely on faith to interpret what we cannot explain. Many people living today firmly believe that the scientific method can and will explain everything eventually. Maybe this sounds like simple good reasoning, but it’s actually just inductive reasoning. Science has provided many explanations in the past so we can induce that it will continue to do so in the future. Unfortunately, we have to use induction to prove that inductive reasoning is valid reasoning, which is known in philosophical circles as the problem of induction. At best, it’s been claimed that science doesn’t rely on induction, but those arguments rely heavily on semantics. And no matter. Induction works. It’s just not perfect. Most people accept that the current collection of scientific theories do not represent perfect knowledge of the world. That is easy to accept. But, the belief that science will eventually provide all answers as merely a strong conviction derived from inductive reasoning similar in almost every meaningful way to religious faith? Much less easy to accept.

I’m not trying to undermine the philosophy of science in favor of current religious belief systems. I’m trying to demonstrate that all belief systems depend on rational thinking, creative insight and faith in uncertain theories operating within the context of the information available to them.

This is the premise for my speculation about the Knights Templar

Who Were the Knights Templar?

Episode 11 of the Secrets of the Bible was the most ridiculous of the series, because it lacked a concrete conclusion. They followed a man who followed the activities of the medieval knights established to protect pilgrims from Europe to Jerusalem in 1108, but then got tangled up in stories about a Holy Grail and during their steep ascent to power and ruthless disbandment and may have a century later, merged with the Freemasons.

They purportedly excavated the Temple of Solomon, which was and still is assumed by many to be the Temple Mount where the Dome of the Rock was built. This holds significance, because Orthodox Judaism believes they can have only one Temple, which is why the places where they gather their congregations are referred to as shuls, Yiddish for school. In Christianity, Jesus would have knocked over a table and got the attention of the authorities who killed him at this very important temple. The Ark of the Covenant would have been kept in it. It was filled with a lot of gold and statues of angels.

Devoid of human feeling, these cherubim were much more interesting angels than the currently popular harp wielding versions. I wrote them into my first novel as a product of genetic engineering.

 

Anyway, the episode draws a quick connection from the discovery of something in the Temple that led to the sharp increase in power of the Knights Templar. Presumably, it was the grail, but scholars know it wasn’t necessarily a cup. After visiting a few cathedrals displaying the Black Madonna and talking about Freemasonry, the person interviewed for the episode concludes that the Knights Templar did indeed find something at the Temple Mount.

They found brotherhood.

What an obvious conclusion! So easy to miss! The quest for the Holy Grail was always really just a quest for spiritual enlightenment. There never was a cup of immortality that caught the blood of Jesus and held wine at the last supper. Nope. They dug and dug and dug and found brotherhood.

In some ways, it’s a better theory than Dan Brown related in The Da Vinci code. In his extremely popular novel, the great secret of European Christianity was that the grail was a woman. Mary Magdalene. She carried the DNA of Jesus forward to our time. Real actual descendants of Jesus are alive today. That’s um, great.

How You Could Mistake a Woman for a Chalice in Medieval Europe

Jerusalem was captured by European crusaders in 1099 and the Knights Templar formed in 1118. The first mention of a graal occurred in an unfinished romantic story about a guy named Perceval, written sometime between 1135 and 1190, maybe 1180.

It should be understood that literacy wasn’t the priority in the past in the same way it is today and a lot of time and distance separated the first mention of something like a grail.  The work written by Chretien, who may have been a member of the Order of the Knights Templar, was clearly a fantasy story. A romantic fantasy story that happened in the time of King Arthur, which would have been the 5th or 6th century CE. Five hundred years before the crusades during the Saxon invasion.

From the original source, we can’t tell what the graal is supposed to be.

In the story, a squire brings a white lance, which is bleeding, to a meal where the Fisher King is present. He is accompanied by a beautiful young girl who is carrying an elaborately decorated golden graal past Perceval and another servant carries a silver serving platter. The room is illuminated by the contents and they pass by him again on their way out.

The next day, a woman admonishes Perceval for not asking why the lance bled or who was served by the graal. It wasn’t said to be a holy graal and it wasn’t more significant than the bleeding white lance, but whatever it was, it wounded the king in the thigh region. It is implied that Perceval could have prevented the injury if he asked about it. The women then tells him that she is his first cousin and that his mother is dead.

In the next known graal story, written in 1210, Parzival, not Perceval, has to go on a quest, because he did not ask the healing question. The graal is assumed in this story to have the power to heal, because if Perceval had asked about it, then the Fisher King would not have been wounded in the thigh region. In the Parzival story, the Fisher King gets a name and it is explained that the wound is a punishment for taking a wife, because the person who keeps the grail was supposed to remain chaste.

The Christian part of the story isn’t added until later on by the guy who wrote Merlin, Robert de Boron. He establishes that the grail was a vessel given to Joseph of Aramethia.

In its original unfinished Perceval form, the popular romance with lots of sex and many female characters had a single mention of a bleeding lance and a golden serving dish or vessel, which is best understood as something carried by a processional salver. The beautiful woman would have been carrying some item of food tasted for poison in a vessel and perhaps the room lights up, simply because the platter is gold.

These stories were popular at the same time that the Knights Templar rose to prominence, a very secret and very powerful group of people, but if they found something in the Temple Mount in 1099 or so, it was not in the possession of the Fisher King in the 5th or 6th century CE.

What we know from other sources that two centuries after the conquest of Jerusalem, people claimed that the Knights Templar were denying Jesus Christ, spiting on crucifixes during their initiation rites and worshiping idols. Specifically, they called them Baphomet, a word that may be derived from the Greek words baphe and metis meaning absorption of knowledge. Since the 19th century, Baphomet has often been associated with an Egyptian goat or fertility god. This Goat of Mendes is associated with the snake in the Garden of Eden story via the Babloyian version. One way or another, the Knights Templar were accused of dismissing Christ and worshiping some form of knowledge, like the pursuit of knowledge was a sin of some sort, maybe an original one. And fertility.

The Knights Templar were supposed to be chaste, they couldn’t have physical contact with any women, including members of their own family. They gave all their possessions and wealth to the Order when then joined, which explains their increasing influence in Europe in a short period of time. Publicly, the Knights Templar erected many churches to the Black Madonna or Black Virgin and were said to carry many of these figures back with them from Jerusalem.

 

Many theories abound about the hundreds of statues of Mary erected across Europe following the crusades.

 

The Queen of Heaven

Uh-huh, brotherhood.

Well, I bet they found figures of Asherah. I know many people would prefer to interpret the black madonnas as a statement about race, but semites from the region known as Canaan depicted in Egyptian art have light skin and light hair. Other people would say that the crusaders learned about a black goddess of wisdom from the mystic sufis, a dimension of Islam. Of course, the Hagia Sophia translates as Holy Wisdom, which is an ancient Greek personification of Wisdom, but also an important Byzantine church visited by the crusaders. They could have learned about a goddess from the gnostics. They could have learned about goddesses from their contemporaries in Europe. Regardless of what sources they sought to increase their knowledge of a female deity, I believe they would have required a significant catalyst to adopt the concept with enough enthusiasm to erect hundreds of statues, as they did.

It seems likely to me that they arrived in their Holy Land and found at least one of the extremely common, but ancient figure of a woman in the location where they expected to find sacred artifacts like the Temple Mount.

The Queen of heaven. God’s wife. Asherah, the Canaanite goddess, was everywhere in Mesopotamia, because no one had gone there and sat the people written about in the Bible down and explained they were supposed to have always been exclusively monotheistic since around 1300 to 1500 BCE when Moses supposedly lived. In the early texts of the Bible, the Torah, and the stories written by prophets of ancient Israel, people are constantly trying to wipe out and destroy images of Asherah and Baal. El is often assumed to be the same as Yaweh. Lots of Canaanite gods are mentioned in the Bible. Yep, the god of Abraham was a jealous god that wanted no other gods before him, because there were a lot of other gods at the time.

I don’t think the crusaders would have thought of the discovery of a female figure as heresy, but rather an expansion of their truth.

People have always ascribed to more than one system of thought or faith and generally been more flexible than they claim. Today, people who believe in primarily in science often find themselves praying as their car crash or face other life threatening situations. Religious people find evidence supporting another religion and convert. Agnostics discover neo-pagan movements that allow them to experience spiritual community without supporting the larger organized religions. Many churchgoers attend services weekly, but often do so out of habit or familial obligation, while firmly convicted of the theories of science and rationalizing it with a humanistic perspective.

We are, if anything, we are very complicated and so was humanity at the beginning of history and so was the time of the crusaders.

At some point in Biblical history, apparently Jeremiah 44:15-18, First Kings 14:23; Second Kings 17:10, First Kings 14:15, Second Kings 16:3-4 and Second Kings 17:1, the female deity that accompanied the main male deity of the Canaanite tribes was regularly translated as the grove and there was a big thing about her being associated with trees. While the Bible talks about the people destroying images of other deities, like the Canaanite Baal, in surges of monotheistic outrage, it seemed that a lot of people may not have been completely on board with the idea.

Figures of Asherah are still found buried all over what is today Israel and Palestine, which makes it likely the crusaders dug around and found some.

The Israelites wouldn’t have been likely to destroy them anyway. Imagine you’re a clergyman at a temple a few thousand years ago. You’re surrounded by cherished images of your deities. Some radicals come tearing in demanding you destroy the ones they feel are destroying society.

Okay. Imagine it’s today. You’re a museum director who just finished giving investors a tour of the Renaissance collection when a bunch of radicals, powerful radicals, march in and demand that you remove and destroy all evidence of Issac Newton, because they consider his legend scientific dogma. They claim that scientific inquiry was not discovered or invented, but one of many processes of determining knowledge used as early as Aristotle and developed by multiple theorists in a variety of cultures. These people believe that the narrative of Newton’s apple hinders human progress by creating a mythology around science and an ethnocentric distraction from the corporate bias that has increasingly driven the pursuit of knowledge, muddying science, and generally bastardizing it.

Maybe you don’t totally disagree with them, but what about Ibn al-Haytham? Why should the museum maintain the mythology of great dead European male geniuses as if they acted in isolation and ascribe them godlike status. You know Leonard Da Vinci was a great artist attributed with inventing many great developments in engineering during the Victorian era that we know now were recorded in earlier publications by other people of his time. He just drew them well. You sort of agree.

Right or wrong. You probably also, as this museum director, remember force equals mass times acceleration and the story of the apple from your childhood. You don’t want to destroy the Newton collection. Instead, you hide it in the basement where most of the items deteriorate, except that magnificent bronze bust.

Many of us maintain lingering respect for what was considered to be true even in the face of reasonable skepticism and valid argument. We still love the stories of Newton and DaVinci. They still inspire us. It is normal to mythologize history just as it would have been normal for people to hide the statues of Asherah.

When the Knights Templar discovered female figurines, they would not have been expert scholars of their time who somehow might connect the figures to the forbidden Asheroth. The excavation of the Temple Mount would have been just as much of a religious experience for the crusaders as traveling to Israel is today for many Jews, Christians and Muslims. However, they would have believed their god was actively guiding their life and naturally would associate the figures with their current system of belief and the most prominent woman in the Christian narrative, the mother of Jesus, Mary.

Is this what the Knights Templar found?

 

And they might even assume that the people of their Bible venerated Mary. So, they may have done likewise, because the people living in the time of Jesus must have known something, a purer version of the ultimate truth of our existence. In fact, this is the same line of thinking that created the myth of the Holy Grail. The Knights Templar must have found something or learned something truly exceptional to be accepted as an Order by the Pope of their time and rise to power and influence so quickly.

But, then after a lot of veneration of Mary and a lot of accumulation of money and power, it might just have easily been misunderstood that they had been worshiping the ancient European goddess associated with Spring and fertility from which the word Easter is derived or some other European female goddess that had not been completely eradicated by the presence of Christianity.

By Victorian times, their goddess worship may have been interpreted as fertility god worship or worship of an ancient Egyptian god, because Victorians had more access to knowledge of ancient Egypt.

In the end, none of that really matters.

Wait, Why Does This Matter?

People love to recycle old themes when they write. In the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan sacrifices himself to save everyone just like Jesus. In Harry Potter, Harry sacrifices himself to save everyone just like Jesus. We have to face facts. People continuously retell the same themes making adjustments to suit the cultural atmosphere of the time they live in, borrowing from new sources, reworking old ones. That is what writers do. We don’t work in isolation. We use stories and actual events and theory like a palate of paint to create something original.

We also use myth and legend to shield ourselves from the uncertainty of our own systems of thought, our methods and the real horror that is a human existence. Birth. Conflict. Aging. Death. Stories help us cope with uncertainty and give us numerous convulsions of facts and ideas so that we don’t have to question the tenets of our systems of belief and they keep us from overthinking the questions we can’t answer so we can get on about the business of life. We believe the impossible of our heroes and events we never witness personally, because it is practical to do so.

Many people, lots of feminists, believe Asherah was systematically removed from the Bible as an act of chauvinism rather than monotheism. Many academics do not draw a connection between the Knights Templar and Asherah, but they do bypass her and make a connection between the ancient Egyptian god Isis or ancient Greek Virgo and the Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary.

I think a direct line between Asherah and the Knights Templar makes the most sense, but I can also see why it would make a lot of people uncomfortable.

Asherah, along with other local gods, were vilified and outlawed in Israel. But, after the life of Jesus, during the decline of the Roman Empire, Christianity sought to incorporate Jesus in their new religion, not as a teacher or prophet, but as god. Since there could only be one god, the monotheistic god was decided to be consubstantially three distinct persons. A father. A son. A spirit, which is holy. Without diving into a theological debate, it’s interesting to note that the worship of Asherah in Israel likely ended around the 2nd century BCE and the issue of the relationship between the father and the son in the Christian movement existed for sometime before the concrete establishment of trinitarian doctrine in modern Turkey, which occurred around the 3rd century CE at the First Council of Nicaea.

Basically, within a few hundred years, the wife was kicked out and a new son brought in and the new followers of Jesus, were not looking very monotheistic at that point, having at least two apparent deities. It took centuries for Europeans to spread and maintain the illusion of monotheism by driving out pre-Christian European gods.

However, for Christianity, the era of crusades must have felt like a time of incredible certainty much like we experience today with science.

Today, old religions are typically viewed as quaint traditions or irritating backward thought. Faith in a god is debatable. Faith in the scientific method or the body of knowledge derived from the community of scientists, who are venerated by academics much like the saints of medieval Europe, is much more likely to cause a controversy. People who believe in science confidently attempt to incorporate the practice of older religions as being beneficial to mental health under the umbrella of psychology, but there is an intense unwillingness to consider that science, as a system and set of beliefs, could be replaced as the most unquestioned, most blindly accepted philosophy. Replaced by something new. Not something old.

Let’s face it. Science does make better technologies and it explains things better than religion. It’s a bit weak on morality, but it’s better than monotheism for life-saving technology. Besides, if you really need some spirituality, most scientists don’t feel threatened by archaic religions.

That is exactly what believing in Christianity must have felt like one thousand years ago. No cannibalism. No human sacrifice. The weak and the poor have an honored position. Christianity brought in a code of laws and behaviors that required a stable social order. Christianity wasn’t typically threatened by what it considered pagan beliefs and practices. It incorporated them into the religion to make people more comfortable.

Based on this similarity, we should not compare the faith of the Knights Templar to Christians today. We should compare it to the faith of the dominate philosophy today, which is science. So, if they found something in Jerusalem that challenged the tenets of their faith, I do not believe they would not reject it. Like anyone today, who believes in science, they would try to incorporate it and make sense of it within Christianity. The Christians today that reject scientific developments have typically practiced ignoring ideas that conflict with the Bible. It’s hard work ignoring fact and evidence, but the Knights Templar lived before the Renaissance. Christianity was progress, the framework of their civilization and they would most likely assume that anything and everything could be explained within the doctrine of Christianity. So, if the statues of Asherah were unearthed in the ground at the Temple Mount, the real quest would have been to make sense of what would clearly have been a sign from god.

If Asherah was the Holy Grail of the Crusades, how would that change our perception of history?

Maybe the manliest of European men at the height of chivalry in the era of the chivalrous weren’t obsessed with immortality or the legacy of Jesus. Maybe they were simply awestruck by simple figures of women they found digging in Jerusalem and they even found immense inspiration through the process of incorporating the mystery into their understanding of the world. Maybe the consulted sufis and gnostics and pagans. Maybe the borrowed enough ideas to make them figures make sense to them.

What we do know is that they erected churches to Mary and carried “fertility” figures with them. They were chaste and refused to even touch women. Within a few decades, perhaps it was their discovery that ushered in a movement toward chivalry, exemplified by the romantic stories of Camelot, complete with a code of conduct for the treatment of women.

Maybe the Holy Grail was a woman. These soldiers may have believed their god led them to find the figure of a woman, because in the religious thought, the discovery of figures of women at the Temple Mount could not have been an accident. God didn’t make accidents. So, perhaps for a few centuries, the discovery of a female deity changed the Western world, because the manliest of men had been faced with the very real possibility that their own god was not simply made in the image of a man with a son that once lived as a man. They believed their god showed them a woman and there is no reason to believe they had a quick answer for it, but they embraced the mysterious woman completely.

To me, that makes a much better story.

Say you know someone in your family or network of friends who is a talented artist.

Maybe you admire their work or enjoy their style and so you’re thinking about asking them to create something for you that you’ve always wanted. You can picture how beautiful it will be. Of course, you’re willing to pay them, but one of the advantages of knowing an artist personally is getting something amazing with a personal touch that normally you might not be able to afford, right?

Okay, let’s stop right there.

While it is possible to commission – that’s an important word – a work of art from someone you know, the chances of you being a dick and damaging your relationship with that person are directly proportional to how much you know about being an artist. In fact, it’s an inverse relationship.

As the amount you learn about making and selling art increases, the chance of general dickheadery decreases thusly:

 

As no one really wants to upset an artist, but they do want their art, it’s important be informed before you get too excited and ask for something that’s just plain ridiculous or inappropriate. And this happens. Trust me.

My son’s grandmother, from the other side of the family, once in an attempt to become closer to me, decided to show an interest in my hobby. She asked if i would paint the faces of all her grandchildren on the side of the shed in her backyard. It sounded reasonable. She liked my work and she loved her grandchildren and I had been blessed with talent as a painter.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ART SKILLS

Some children are just good at art. So, they must be born with the ability.

No, the skills required to transform a medium do not emerge effortlessly from the artist’s brain. Artists spend a great deal of time observing the subjects of their work and considering how best to represent them. Artists have to master the fine and gross motor skills required to control their medium over years of experience.

Most good artists seek out instruction and practice. A lot. Basically, being an artist has more in common with being a plumber or an IT technician than it does having blue eyes or brown eyes. No one will deny that people are often born with an aptitude for creativity, but most don’t work hard to develop the skills required to realize their ideas.

Hard work is the difference between people who become good artists and just being creative.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TIME (AND LABOR)

Artistic talent is often so exciting to witness that we forget it requires labor that can be measured in units of time. Some people can make beautiful things very quickly, because they’ve practiced and practiced and practiced.

Unfortunately, they may be able to paint a tree in five minutes, but still require days to make the details of a face recognizable. If they are skilled in one area, it is because they have invested a lot of time. If they have not invested a lot of time in an area, it will take them a lot longer to learn it.

This means that the better the art, the more time is spent overall reaching that level of skill.

Even if a person is incredibly skilled and quick, all art takes labor. Whether it is a few hours, days or weeks, asking a person for art means asking them to work for you. If you decide to commission a work from someone, it will invariably require extra time unless it is essentially something they’ve already practiced.

We instinctively know that people like to get paid for their time, but with artwork, it often happens that people only consider the end product in terms of the value of their request. The same person, who would never feel it appropriate to ask someone to work 20 hours for them for free, will often request art that will take 20 hours and consider it a compliment.

Even the artist doesn’t know how long a work will take, but they are the only ones who can estimate based on their own skills.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MATERIALS

Good art supplies cost a premium, but the quality shows.

Cheap art supplies, like those used for grade school kids or many recreational forms of crafting, don’t cost very much, but again, the quality shows.

Even if an artist is equally excited about doing a project for you, that artist, unless they are very lucky, will have spent money on supplies and it might be a lot more than you realize.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE MUSES

If you’ve considered the skill, time and materials involved and have a good idea what you are asking from an artist, it should be easy to negotiate. Unfortunately, many people who commission a work of art from an artist AND manage to settle on a fair price based on their skill, the time involved, the materials and other less definite factors of the relationship between the two people, never receive it.

Maybe the person started, but they didn’t finish.

Perhaps they seemed to like the idea when you were talking about it in front of other people you both knew, but they always say they’re working on it whenever you see them and an awkward silence begins to grow.

I hate to admit it, but most people die before they get the artwork they ask for from me. At times, I might have had the inspiration, but I lost it later. I may have been asked for work from twenty different people and just to be fair, I didn’t do any of it.

Other times, I thought the person was dick.

I might not have said no, because I didn’t want to offend their volatile temperament, but I had better things to do with my time.

I remember the day my son’s grandmother asked me to paint a mural in her backyard and how I smiled in stunned horror as she described the work she wanted on her shed. She wasn’t wrong about my ability. I could paint murals. I could paint faces.

But, I thought the concept was tacky. And as I could barely handle an hour long visit at her house and what she wanted would have taken me weeks, I decided I had to be blunt.

“I’ll do it if you really want, but just the materials and time, even at minimum wage, would be worth more than my car. Do you think you could just accept my car instead?”

While I do love knowing that a friend or family member has my work in their home, I try to encourage people to buy things I’ve already finished. I give great discounts to people I know, because what artist doesn’t want their work to go to a good home?

It still happens at times that I get asked to paint something I don’t want my name on or someone implies I should be wiling to do them a favor and I lack the inspiration to follow through with their humble request. At the jobs I’ve worked, I tell people, as soon as they discover my talent, that if it’s not in my job description – I will only work on commission based on an estimate I provide with payment in advance.

Ask them for what you want, but get the real cost before you suggest that brother-in-law discount. If you like their work, there are probably a lot of other people who do, too, so don’t try to pay in compliments and flattery. Don’t expect a time frame for completion unless you pay in advance. The muses have wills of their own. Don’t be surprised if they can’t set a price on a type of work that requires skills they’ve not yet developed.

Do offer to buy them materials or make any arrangement that trades equal value for equal value. Do ask what they’ve already finished and how much they’d want to part with it. Don’t take it personally if they reject your vision. But, don’t be surprised if they’d rather gift you something than accept payment, but don’t expect it.

Most artists aren’t savvy businessmen and pricing art is an art form all on it’s own, but before you ask for a mural in your backyard or a portrait of your dog or baby as favor from your very talented friend or family remember, just remember, it doesn’t take an MBA to know when someone is being a dick.

I got a card from my dad’s girlfriend today, a simple blue hue with a line of sailing ships.

A few weeks ago, I had sent my father a handful of Chinese paintbrushes. I’d bought fifty-seven and decided I needed to share the wealth. It took me a month to choose the ones I would send him as I worried his eyesight might have began to fail and they would not be used. My father’s style has always been strong on composition and weak on proportions with distorted hands, awkwardly set noses and squat lines. The colors vary, but the palette always seemed dark and murky, over-mixed, over dramatic as if it were attempting to capture an audience by direct visual assault.

After reading the card, I closed it and realized the simple blue drawing was the docks in Portland where my father has been keeping his two sail boats. I didn’t recognize it as his work. So cheerful. So serene. Even the sea lacked the turbulance I had come to associate with his inner world. Many people had described his life in Dakota running around the reservations in the sixties and seventies, angry and drunk, looking for solutions to the unfairness of life through the American Indian Movement, a marriage that didn’t last, in work he couldn’t maintain. He was a cursed man back then, but now, here he was joyfully painting the docks in Oregon.

Mary, his girlfriend, had enclosed photos of his other paintings. The interior of his boat. Sails. Blue skies. Happiness.

The man I got to know as a young adult was not the man my mother said she knew years before. When her second husband dragged me down the wooden stairs by my arm and slapped my face over and over, I was eleven years old. He demanded to know if I thought I was abused. I had not made up my mind until that moment. I said yes. And he hit me. I said no and he hit me again. It kept going like that for awhile. He was huge. He screamed in my face as I walked across the living room to the front door. He told me my father was an asshole. I wasn’t angry. I was sad that I couldn’t defend a man I didn’t know. My stepfather had never met him either, but he knew my father did not pay the $75.00 per month for the support of my sister and I. Something he wanted to take from our skin.

Whatever the man was like, I figured he could not be much worse than my stepfather. I had seen his paintings of old ships tilted in dark waters that raised up alongside toward the slightly titled mast. Raised by the ocean, I knew the waters never looked so blue and brown at the same time. The ocean was gray or green or blue, but one should never take a pigment like raw umber straight from the tube and set it against a navy toned mixture.

As soon as I could drive, I came to his house demanding to know who he was and ready to show him that I’d exceeded his skill at art, his educational achievements – which were nil, and planned a decent life for myself – no thanks to him. The old man listened, smoked his pipe and started debating philosophy. It worked. I came back. Again and again. All doubts that I was his daughter wafted away with the scent of tobacco. He told me stories of life on the plains that others had told him. I had heard some of them from my grandmother, they were stories of our ancestors, but I had never been old enough to recognize that the animals were metaphors like Aesop’s fables. Teachers read these stories to children. Animism. But the animals that talked in their stories with vibrant drawings were never animals that taught the lessons a specific individual needed at that moment, tailored and reworked from memory for the present. It was as if I only seen snake skins and never snakes.

I found him easy to forgive.

Mary always hovered around him with lunch or ready to interrupt if he was overwhelmed by the conversations with his estranged daughter. She focused him. Her mother had come to the states from Northern India and met her father on a reservation in California. She appeared to be the only person in the world with whom he was entirely vulnerable, although his version of how their relationship worked sounded archaic, mysognistic and left the woman’s eyes rolling where he could not see. They separated for a while when I was in my twenties, but she often came around during that time and they reunited within a year or two, resuming their very simple life together. He asked me once while she was away if he should take her back. I believe he would have found a reason, but he needed to know I would not respect him less. I think I respected him more.

I have often wondered how a person so vilified by my mother and so destructive in his youth could find so much peace in the second half of his life. It’s in his paintings, his voice, his letters and on his face. The calm seas. The cheerful primary colors. I doubt he even used a tube of brown paint on the card I held.

I suppose what I learned from my father about happiness is that it has nothing to do with the material world. It cannot be found in advancing up the ladders of social hierarchies. It’s not in a bottle. It doesn’t come with success or prosperity or any kind, although happiness can precede success and financial stability. Fairness and equality does not create an environment of happiness. No matter how much faith we put in the political process, it cannot change our state of mind. Happiness begins inside and radiates outward. Friends cannot make us happy. It isn’t given or received by others. Although happiness often accompanies love, love is also attracted to happiness, making it impossible to tell which actually comes first to a person’s life. Sometimes, we can’t be happy until we reject people we love and turn away the needs of others we cannot meet.

I think my father found happiness more easily than other people, because he always was a bit contrary and naturally rejected popular wisdom and the status quo.

Popular wisdom will tell you that meaningful relationships are the foundation of mental health, but they never tell you that it’s okay to just walk away from people who are bringing you down or generally reject the parts of society that aren’t working for you. The definition of mental health isn’t being happy, but more like not being so unhappy that you burden other people with it. Those are some exceptionally low standards.

Today, thirteen percent of Americans are on anti-depressants. And I personally suspect the medical community knows as little about helping people find happiness as they do about turning the tide on the obesity epidemic. Science, which I love but do not reduce to dogma, can give us facts gleaned from studies of multiple variables in people’s lives that coexist with happiness, but they do not easily account for the complexity of our consciousness or the murky social world where the filters of our perception and the corrosion of stored and retrieved memories confuse the process of understanding our own emotional experiences.

We know the brain is matter and that thoughts and feelings have chemical and electrical processes, but you cannot find happiness during an autopsy and the complex consciousness that accompanies it is similarly missing in the physical body when its alive. Western thought has not been able to explain this phenomena for many centuries, although the new insight in physics that the world itself is like a hologram, echoes many non-Western views about reality that help our consciousness make more sense.

Earlier this year, I gave up trying to reconcile with my more difficult family members and protect what happiness I could create in my life. I had sought therapy for the process like a good citizen, but I found myself directed to accept mistreatment from other people. I’ve heard so many people subtly imply that their ability to get along with an exe for the sake of their kids or reconcile with a difficult family member or manage their jealousy with an unfaithful partner or cope with an abusive boss is proof that they are mature and well adjusted people. The message is always the same. The problem is not how people treat you, but how you well you handle it. Having worked in schools, I was familiar with the process, because I’d seen the children who reacted most strongly to bullying disciplined. The instigators were only noticed if they failed to cover up their behavior with proper repentance or general subterfuge.

I told my therapist I was satisfied. I’d started therapy to help with a personal crisis over a year before, but he threw a tantrum and yelled at me for firing him. In retrospect, I should have expected it. People encourage quiet suffering and praise us for denying pain, because it keeps the boat from rocking. It feels safe even if you’re slowly sinking. Deny it. Your up to your ankles in sea water. Grab a bucket and start bailing. Don’t swim. You don’t know if you can swim. Don’t even look at the water. Don’t rock the boat.

If there is one thing I learned from my father about how he went from turbulence to inner peace, it’s that you have to live bravely and not fear rocking a sinking boat. It seems so obvious, but do we trust ourselves to know when it’s time to jump?

I have been ridiculously pleased with my life for the last three months. I let go of everything that didn’t work for me including the idea that I could construct happiness by following rules and making other people happy. I headed directly into conflict through uncertain waters. Yes, I have not finished with the sea metaphors. I navigated poorly. I capsized. I weathered a few storms. I believed in my destination. I arrived.

No permission. No approval. Nothing changed, but everything is better.

If happiness is your destination, does it matter as much what else you find there?