Monotheism stands or falls with Supergod

Rank a-the-ists put a for the
and spell me with a little g,
for their conceit is to refer
to Great I Am as if I were
but an almighty, nothing more
than Pan, Poseidon, Thoth, or Thor.
Jehovah's one with Jove or Zeus--
so they'd imply with this their use
of a and an, but they blaspheme -- a
curse upon their an/a thema!

-- Yes and No

As everyone knows, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are monotheists, while pagans are polytheists. So when, in Book V of the Odyssey, Zeus sends Hermes to convey a message to Calypso, all three of these characters are gods. When Calypso asks Hermes why he has come, he replies (in A. T. Murray's translation)

Thou, a goddess, dost question me, a god, upon my coming, and I will speak my word truly, since thou biddest me. It was Zeus who bade me come hither against my will. Who of his own will would speed over so great space of salt sea-water, great past telling? . . . But it is in no wise possible for any other god to evade or make void the will of Zeus, who bears the aegis.

In Luke 1, when the God of the Hebrews wishes to convey messages to Zacharias and to Mary, he also sends an immortal heavenly messenger to carry out his will.

I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.

Gabriel, though, is not a god; nor, despite the cult that would later grow up around her, is Mary a goddess. Monotheism is widely considered to be extremely important, and entirely different from polytheism -- so what is this essential and fundamental difference between, say, Hermes and Gabriel that makes the one a god and the other a mere saint and angel?

Is it that Gabriel is entirely subordinate to God? But Hermes, as he explains to Calypso, is entirely subordinate to Zeus and is, no less than Gabriel, playing the role of an angelos -- that is, a messenger or envoy. And anyway, even beings that are not subordinate to God are still considered to be "angels"; Set and Loki are gods, but Satan is not.

Is Hermes considered a god because, unlike Gabriel, he was worshiped? Well, first of all, this is a difference in the religious behavior of human beings, not an intrinsic difference between Hermes and Gabriel themselves. (It may reflect some such difference, of course, but cannot be the difference.) Secondly, the supposed distinction between the "worship" of Hermes and the mere "veneration" of Gabriel is by no means an obvious one. If there were Temples of Hermes, hymns to Hermes, and so on, it is also true that there are prayers to St. Gabriel the Archangel and several houses of worship called St. Gabriel's Church. Catholicism considers the dulia due to Gabriel (and the hyperdulia paid to the Virgin) to be entirely different from the latria proper to God alone -- but for all the talk of how that difference is "infinite and immeasurable," "one of kind and not merely of degree," no one seems to be able to say clearly in what this supposedly infinite difference consists. What specific behaviors are proper when directed toward God but not when directed toward the Virgin, Gabriel, or any of the other saints? Every explanation I've read simply states that the objects of the different forms of servitus are infinitely different and seems to take it for granted that the two forms of servitus must therefore themselves be (in some unspecified way) infinitely different.

Suppose we leave Hermes out of the picture and simply ask why God is a god but Gabriel is not. If we accept the Supergod premise (that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent and created everything out of nothing; see The Supergod delusion for details), obviously there can only be one Supergod, and he is qualitatively different from everything and everyone else. If being a god means being Supergod, then of course Gabriel is not a god. But then neither is Calypso, or Hermes, or even Zeus before he was reconceptualized by the philosophers -- or, for that matter, Yahweh before he was reconceptualized by the philosophers. If nothing short of Supergod can be called a "god," then polytheism has never existed. Some post-Platonic pagans -- those who adopted the "Superzeus" conception -- were monotheists in precisely the same way that Supergod-believing Christians are, but most forms of paganism were, by this definition, atheistic; they believed in "angels" but not in God.

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If Supergod is rejected, monotheism loses its meaning. There is a continuum of increasingly godlike beings, from ordinary men and women all the way up to God the Father, and deciding where along that continuum to draw the line between gods and mere saints is as arbitrary as the paleontological convention that separates the mammal-like reptiles from the reptile-like mammals.

Lots of new blue goo now

Fra. P. said jokingly that everything contained the Truth, if you knew how to find it; and being challenged, proceeded to make good. It is here inserted, not for any value it may have, but to test the reader. If it is thought to be a joke, the reader is one useless kind of fool; if it is thought that Fra. P. believes that the makers of the rimes had any occult intention, he is another useless kind of fool.

-- footnote to Aleister Crowley's exegesis of nursery rhymes

Having predicted Slow Joe Crow, Fox in Socks continues to be applicable to the world of 2020.

Slow Joe Crow, as his name indicates, represents both Joe Biden and the birdemic. Rose is the past tense of rise, so "Crow's rose" represents the reported "rise" of those two things. What fuels this "rise"? A nose hose -- that is, a hose suspended from the long nose of Slow Joe Crow himself. And, since Pinocchio, a long nose only means one thing.

Knox is Trump. Fox is the news media. Do I really have to spell this out?

This is what Fox says after shaming Knox for objecting to the whole nose-hose-rose-grows thing. Nothing like a little distraction. Here is lots of new blue goo now -- or, as we like to call it, "news."

And now I have a new nickname for Google!

Mr. Knox, sir, what a shame, sir!

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No, I don't think Dr. Seuss was a prophet; and no, I don't think this is a coincidence. Writers who deliberately write nonsense, like those who use drugs, partially enter the world of dreaming and open themselves up to all kinds of influences, including subconscious precognition and "Jungian slips." It's the Edgar Cayce effect, named for the famous "sleeping prophet."

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Update: Immediate confirmation from the synchronicity fairies! Literally the very next thing I did after clicking "post" was to open up my phonics book to see what I was teaching today.

A nose, a fox, and a rose in a pot. The "cone on a fox" echoes my earlier association of Slow Joe Crow's nose with a plague doctor's mask. As for "There's a hole in the cone and the robe and the bone," I mentioned that I've been reading Scott Alexander's Unsong, and at the moment I'm in the middle of the kabbalistic analysis of "There's A Hole In My Bucket"; the chapter uses as an epigram Leonard Cohen's line "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."

Vice and vice versa

One of the best ideas to come out of the Junior Ganymede blog is that of the "virtue set" -- an improvement on Aristotle's famous "golden mean" model of virtue. Aristotle, you will recall, maintained (in the Nicomachean Ethics) that any given virtue lay on a continuum between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. Insufficient courage, for example, is the vice of cowardice, while excessive courage is the vice of rashness. True courage -- the virtue of courage -- lay between the two, and consisted in being precisely brave enough without being too brave. Using a conceptual tool that was not available to Aristotle himself, we might plot each Aristotelian "virtue set" (of a virtue and two vices) as a curve.

The horizontal axis indicates how courageous one is, and the vertical axis how virtuous, with the horizontal origin line marking the division between virtue and vice. The curve is asymmetrical because Aristotle recognized that the point of maximum virtue is closer to one end of the scale than to the other -- that, in this case, courage is more akin to rashness than to cowardice, and that cowardice is more properly its opposite.

For Aristotle, then, virtues are not to be maximized but optimized. You want to be just brave enough but not too brave, just honest enough but not too honest, just and benevolent but not excessively so.

But is this really the correct way to think about virtue? If someone suffered from the vice of cowardice, you might well encourage him to have more courage -- but if his besetting vice were rashness or foolhardiness, would you say he should try to have less courage? The rash man's fault is not that he is too courageous, but that his courage is distorted by the lack of another virtue -- in this case, another of the cardinal virtues of the Greeks: prudence.

G's breakthrough was to add this second virtue to the model. An Aristotelian virtue set consists of two vices, with a virtue conceptualized as the optimal balance between them. In contrast, a Ganymedean virtue set (for lack of a better term; the unadorned letter G isn't very good for naming things after), consists of two complementary virtues and two vices. Each vice distorts one of the two virtues via a lack of the other. In the example we have been using, the two virtues are courage and prudence. When courage is distorted by a lack of prudence, it becomes the vice of rashness. When prudence is distorted by a lack of courage, it becomes cowardice.

This relationship can be expressed in a Ganymede diagram, thus:

One big advantage this has over the Aristotelian model is that it reflects the qualitative nature of the difference between virtue and vice. The point is not to zero in on a precisely optimal degree of courage and of prudence, but to strive for perfect courage and perfect prudence -- for the two virtues are not themselves in opposition, but are complementary.

And, pace Aristotle, neither are the two vices in opposition -- and here we come to what inspired this post in the first place. Under the Aristotelian model, a single person or action could no more be simultaneously cowardly and rash than a single integer could be both positive and negative. But we know better now, don't we?

In the venerable Stagirite's defense, he never experienced, and could never have imagined, the world of 2020. "Our house might have germs in it! Let's burn it to the ground!" -- where do you put that sentiment on your continuum, Aristotle?

I repudiate my past false neutrality.

I stand with President Trump.

I repent my pretentious attitude of dismissing Trump and Biden as two interchangeable lying buffoons whose squabbles were beneath my notice. This position was never, in the deepest sense, honest. It represented a forced override of intuition by discursive reason, and was motivated by pride and pusillanimity.

This is shaping up to be a total war, and neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. Mr. Trump is very, very far from being a moral exemplar, but it is becoming increasingly clear -- ever more so as every demon in hell is mobilized against him -- that God is with him and against his enemies. And so am I.

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My uncle and I used to play the "reincarnation game" -- how literally it was to be taken was left ambiguous -- of trying to figure out who various public figures had been in past lives. We were in agreement that Bush fils was George III and that Obama was FDR but could reach no consensus on Trump. My uncle said Caligula; I said Beowulf. We don't play that game anymore, but if we did, I would be very confident in asserting that Trump is Samson.

Samson: kinda goofy, lots of warts, certainly not anybody's role model -- but, as they say, "he also delivered Israel."

Let's hope his story has a happier ending this time around.

It's an emergency!

I find that -- despite the government's best efforts to keep the panic alive, including a new nationwide tin foil hat mandate, to be enforced by strict fines -- people still do not fully realize the gravity of the birdemic situation in Taiwan.

So, being the public-spirited type, I put together this graphic to make the numbers easy to visualize. The square represents the population of Taiwan (before it was culled by the birdemic). The red portion represents those who have died of the birdemic. Blue represents "cases" (in the inclusive birdemic sense of that word) who have not died -- including both active cases and those who have recovered. The gray portion represents everyone else.

You might want to zoom in.

Note added: The red portion actually ought to be slightly smaller than a single pixel, but I rounded up. Better to overestimate the danger than underestimate it!

Red crows of the sun

Over at The Magician's Table, I discuss how the red feather on the Sun card belongs, despite appearances, to a corvid. Also a brief note on the orangeness of Trump.

Synchronicity: Adam, who is He?

Back on November 19 -- that is, about a week and a half ago -- I checked the Junior Ganymede and found a one-sentence post by that blog's proprietor, who goes by the letter G. It read: "Wherever He is, there is beauty."

"He," being capitalized and all, obviously meant God. But something possessed me to pretend to think he was talking about the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and to post this comment:

This is why God added He to the names of his chosen, changing Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah. Definitely the most beautiful letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

I'm not sure why I left that comment, which I knew even at the time wasn't really funny or clever or anything, but I did. The thing about He being added to names in the Bible isn't even my own observation; I read it a few years ago in In the Beginning, Joel Hoffman's history of the Hebrew language.

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Today I happened to pick up Unsong, Scott Alexander's kabbalistic fantasy novel, which I have been reading on and off (more off than on) recently, and read a bit that talks about names of God that are even shorter than the well-known Tetragrammaton.

There is even a Monogrammaton. The sages took the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and decided that exactly one of them was a Name of God. That letter is "he". It's the fifth letter . . . . later I was looking through my trusty King James Version and started noticing things. Psalm 95:7, "He is our God". Psalm 100:3, "It is He that hath made us." Job 37:23, "He is excellent in power and judgment." All of these have an overt English meaning. But they are, in their own way, invoking the Monogrammaton.

So, shortly after reading the pronoun He, referring to God, and deliberately misreading it as the Hebrew letter He, I read something that says the letter He is actually a name of God and also connects it with the English pronoun. (I never knew that He was considered a divine name; I learned something from Scott Alexander today. I reciprocate by informing him that fish don't actually have four-chambered hearts.)

(A further coincidence is that "G," to whom my original comment was directed, chooses to go by a "monogrammaton" -- and by one which has also been used, by the Freemasons, as a name of God.)

One of the first things that came to my mind after reading the Unsong passage I have quoted, is that Hu is also a divine name, in Sufism, making the question "Who is he?" a statement equating one name of God with another. (Looking it up now, I see that Hu literally means "he" -- the pronoun -- in Arabic!) And that made me think of an essay I had read ages ago by the Mormon fundamentalist Ogden Kraut, titled "Adam; Who Is He? Adam; He Is God!" Who is He? He is God! Hu = He = God.

As for the "Adam" bit, I do not think I will guilty of doxxing if I mention that, before paring his handle down to a single letter, "G" used to post as "Adam G."

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Apropos of nothing, except that it is another coincidence involving "G," allow me to relate a dream I had last night. I was in a park with my wife, and I pointed up ahead and said, "Look at that!" What I was directing her attention to was a large brown tabby cat in the act of pooping on the grass. (It did this like a dog, not digging a hole and burying it like a real cat would do.)

I became aware that "G" was also standing there with us, also watching the cat poop. (I've never met him in real life and don't even know what he looks like, but I knew it was him.) After watching the cat for a bit, he announced, "This has convinced me that there is no such thing as a parallel universe. This universe we are in is in fact the only universe. And that means it is real -- fully real."

And then I woke up. So much for that being the only universe!

Checking the Junior Ganymede after the dream, I found a long post by G about a dream -- not a dream he had, exactly, but one he wants the reader (in this case, me) to imagine having. It begins with "Imagine you are having a dream" and ends with "That is your dream." Nothing about cats pooping or parallel universes.