January 10, 2022 January 12, 2022 WHIPPET
THE TORAH: The Brown Goat
This is a follow-up to our continuing series on the important aspects of goats in Judaism, for why not be a Solomonic magician? It is all kinds of Charlotte's Web as well as RAPPING. Let us examine the two previous posts, if necessary, to follow the thread of important Rabbinical commentary which I freely admit to riffing on without much experience or knowledge but a divine inspiration and a gut feeling that I KNOW WHAT THIS STUFF MEANS. Here are the links for review.
https://buildingtheunderworld.com/2021/08/25/jacob-iaakov-trade-secrets-and-the-poplar-tree/
https://buildingtheunderworld.com/2021/09/29/yaakov-jacob-more-on-the-poplar/
Today's musing will be on Rambam's statement that "goats are not usually brown." Rambam is the moniker of Maimonides, a.k.a. Moses ben Maimon, a medieval Sephardic Jew whose commentary became the basis of much that came later.
So when Rambam says that goats are not usually brown, this is a gift that must be unwrapped, and these days, what better place to do so than the Tex-Mex Marrano world of chivos?
I had a friend who grew up in Texas in a very special place that, in the 1950s, was in some kind of electronic rain shadow between television empires, so they had no television.
What did they ever do?
They made up games to entertain themselves pretty much all the time. It was outhouse races, crop duster turkey drops, endless romance, and all kinds of things. One of the games I recall is that they would stay awake for an entire week. This one took place in the summer, and by about day 3, everyone would start hallucinating and walking around the town getting into each other's houses and being predictably unpredictable.
Those of us who lived in the Latter-day Saint world, especially in Utah, know that when someone is chastised from the pulpit at the highest levels, there is always a real thing that happened in Utah that it is being responded to by the Brethren. You just have to be in the know and to grasp these very subtle clues about the events of THE SCENE and their theological after-effects. Here we are imagining that Rambam is probably chiding a particular fellow over his vanity with the brown goats. Ouch!
We must consider how Judaism maintains itself — and I include my own excessively spiritual life here — and it is by being FAMOUS IN CHRISTIANITY.
Look at all those other ancient sects that are now defunct, or nearly. What of Mithras? The veneration of Isis and Osiris? The shining world of Greece? It is now in the college department of Humanities, if it exists at all, but on we slog with the Seder plates, and we marranos not even very much a part of that, my family probably having joined the vecinos in dropping that stuff after those 1945 newsreels of all those skinny people coming out of Auschwitz. Now is time for the Torah called college degrees, and that is a very fine thing. I don't know much about it. I just know that my father was called "The Mexican Jew" and that my childhood nickname was "La Marrana." So there.
But Judaism is known about in the Big Town, so on it goes, by reference to Europe, and in the dearth of something to do, and out in the country, we are tempted to replicate Yaakov's sneaky stuff with the brown goats as a special status symbol in the neighborhood, and Rambam is onto it.
So here we are turning the goats brown by selective breeding as a SIGN that we are, indeed, talked about by G-d and not just Jesus. It is thus that the Bible has made brown the color of the best and most holy goats, whereas the little people have to content themselves with the usual and dominant phenotype which is kind of a cream color in most places, and giving perfectly good milk.
Let's say the crop fails — and for reasons that we now know to be microorganisms — but in those days, it was considered some kind of evil spirit, perhaps by the KILLERS OF CHRIST, and there we are, showing off with a bunch of brown goats. What is next?
Violence.
I recall in my youth that every time I drove through the ritzy neighborhood of Houston down a particular street called Memorial Drive, seeing, without fail, a cop pulling over an African-American man in a Mercedes or BMW. It was not just Driving While Black, but driving the best car through the best neighborhood while both black and male, and clearly college educated, and how I wished that we could 1) change the police and, if that doesn't happen in 1986, 2) stay off Memorial Drive, please, it is full of racists.
This is where Rambam is clearly coming from.
Now, let's move the whole thing into Graeco-Egyptian filters — LOOK THE OTHER WAY, YA'LL — where we have the godform of PAN and THE GOAT OF MENDES pictured in our image of the Baphomet, so dear in Thelema, and to myself as well, for why not have TEMPLAR THOR and keep the COWS? IT WAS FANDANGO THOR WE LIKE. I am clear about that. JMG's course on Eliphas Levi's The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic has caused us to notice reference to "the embarrassing embracement of a goat" with respect to ceremonial magic(k).
This image was found in Herculaneum and I traced it. No doubt such IKONS were largely destroyed in the intervening centuries, but the whole business of what PAN represents and how magicians might have used this godform are, thankfully, far from modern conceptualization where the godform is kind of about having a party on GREEK ROW, whereas Rosicruciana is very clear that when you fool about with these old things you must deal with the icky bits symbolically OR THEY MANIFEST — hence this blog.
https://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/staff-blog/sti-day/
We must expect that the scarcity of privacy, the lack of contraception, the long months out in the fields with the grazing animals and no women, the stresses of hunger and other privations, such as injury, illness, the ever-present specter of death, would have made the neurological WEALTH of erotic pleasure a wonderful thing while also causing the STIs that result in sterility and birth defects among human and beast alike.
What to do when the animal is the perfect SEX DOLL?
Could this be part of the reason that Saul was commanded to slaughter all of the existing animals when he came into a new territory and his refusal to do so was an infraction of extreme caliber?
Normal diseases are also implicated, but the Hebrews were always required to practice endogamous marriage, to the point of having one of the highest rates of congenital birth defects in the world. It is a scourge that followed me into Mormonism and has caused much mischief as well as an interesting life of celibacy on the West Coast, for how to marry 3% of a Jewish guy when you're not really a Jew?
The magicians figured out how to do all kinds of interesting things with the situation of the amorous goat, and shapeshifters abound, and if you do the wrong thing WITH YOUR NEIGHBOR'S WIFE, you might find yourself in perpetual union with a goat, and that is POWER.
But consider the privations enjoined upon the Jews and upon all people who take upon themselves the CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, and that is, you can't HAVE everything if you want the peace that brings clean water, wide streets, houses that don't get blowed up, and everyone neighborly with a kind culture that involves the WIT OF WOMEN? For that is what we are on about in THE WAR ROOM. The great eras of invention are also of the soiree, the grande dame, and her finest loves — cleanly, we think, if we are to have a pure heart.
The little dog blowing it on your leg is merely funny, but when the magnificence of a bull rises in power to breed a cow, or the stallion races the mare across the misty moors, how we long to be OUR WILD SELVES.
It is not fair that I have to be this trudging person, and that is exactly the DEAL we have made as we schlepp it to prayer THREE TIMES A DAY IF MALE, and once if female and tending a swarm of little beasts. Let us consider what ARK has previously said about the matter: https://buildingtheunderworld.com/2019/11/18/the-torah-jacob-and-esau/
It is to ride a greater wave than that of "Nature, red tooth and claw."
For the aggregate society BUT NOT RACHEL who died young and greatly mourned.
And so it is that we must slyly look away when the ram mounts the ewe, and note it only watchfully in the toss of the lad's head, the ducking of the lass's, the slightest arching of the back, the tension in the shoulders, the lateral movement of the neck, first yes, then no, then why not? I will HOWL with you — and trundle them off to marriage and the whole WEB of social beingness. https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/crazy-jane-grown-old-looks-at-the-dancers/
Thus the Reverend Father in our last blog post was WISE to counsel BUNDLING over the KRAMPUS OF VIRGINITY, for there is no way to father without getting past the elders who are fools but not the elders who are wise.
Just let the cows make babies and do not tend it overmuch for THE LAW is arrived and not just in the formative world.
Here we are back to the outhouse races, the crop duster turkey dumps, the NARCS of country music — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoVNMa29lgg — be reasonable and do not tempt yourself overmuch.
We live now and not in the Bronze BIBLE Age, whenever Now is.
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