Prophets and the concept of the ‘Virgin Mother’ demystified

In the process of elaborating on the truth of the great spectrum of alienation in the human race, a number of religious concepts have already been demystified. With a deeper appreciation of the great differences in alienation between people it is now possible to demystify the major religious concept of ‘prophet’. (Some of this explanation was provided as a necessary part of deciphering Plato’s cave allegory in the essay of that name, under the heading ‘There were people who could live in the sun’s light, but they were unbearably condemning for the cave prisoners.’)

Considering the spectrum of alienation amongst the billions of people on Earth, there were always going to exist a few people who were sufficiently nurtured with unconditional love, and sheltered from alienation during their infancy and childhood, and who were thus uncorrupted. Such people were sufficiently free of divisive competitiveness, aggression and selfish egocentricity to not feel condemned by the integrative cooperative, loving, selfless, Godly ideals of life, and who thus did not have to resign themselves to a life of living in denial of those ideals and, as a result, become alienated from their soul and all the truth it knows. Not condemned by ideality they did not have to block out ideality to cope with their reality; if you are not at odds with the ideals you do not have to deny them. It was pointed out in the Plato essay that Plato hypothesised such innocence thus: ‘But suppose…that such natures were cut loose, when they Page 384 of
Print Edition were still children, from the dead weight of worldliness, fastened on them by sensual indulgences like gluttony, which distorts their minds’ vision to lower things, and suppose that when so freed they were turned towards the truth, then the same faculty in them would have as keen a vision of truth as it has of the objects on which it is at present turned’ (Plato The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.284 of 405).

It follows that the more a person’s soul was hurt during infancy and childhood, and the more intelligent they were, the earlier resignation occurred. This occurs because the more intelligent were more likely to challenge their instinctive orientation to life and thus become corrupted, and also were faster to realise the need to adopt evasive denials to avoid any depressing, unjust criticism. These factors could contribute to resignation occurring as early as 12 or as late as 17, and in a few rare cases never occurring at all.

The people religions referred to as ‘prophets’ were these unresigned individuals who were capable of confronting and talking truthfully about the human condition.

Prophets have at times been thought of and referred to as superhuman, even supernatural figures, and, in some cases, as divine beings. The truth is, there has been nothing mystical or supernatural about prophets—as a group they were simply one of the various types of people that occurred along the immense spectrum of alienation that existed amongst all humans. They were not better or worse than other people, simply unresigned and thus able to think and talk truthfully. While everyone else was living in denial they remained ‘truth sayers’. They were from the uncorrupted end of the alienation spectrum, sound in self, not separated from their true self. In fact the word ‘holy’ used to describe prophets literally means ‘whole’ or ‘entire’; it has the same origins as the Saxon word ‘whole’, and thus confirms the prophet’s wholeness or soundness or lack of alienation. (With regard to the earlier comment about intelligence contributing to alienation—this is not to say prophets are not intelligent, merely that if they were they had to have been especially nurtured to stay innocent.)

The renowned Australian poet, Les Murray, recognised that when the truth arrives it will simply be the truth that resigned minds have repressed, rather than something supernatural. In the poem, First Essay on Interest, he wrote, ‘What we have received / is the ordinary mail of the otherworld, wholly common / not postmarked divine’ (The People’s Otherworld, 1983, p.8).

Page 385 of
Print Edition The psychiatrist R.D. Laing once said, ‘Each child is a new beginning, a potential prophet’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.26 of 156). This strongly argues the point that if a person were sufficiently nurtured and sheltered during their upbringing for them to remain unaware or ‘innocent’ of hurt, that person could avoid resignation and thus remain an unevasive or denial-free thinker or prophet as an adult. (It should be explained that the ‘ships at sea’ category of people, mentioned in Resignation, were also people who did not resign; however they should have resigned because, unlike prophets, they were not sufficiently innocent to live safely, uncondemned in the presence of the cooperative ideals of life.)

Obviously with the state of the world as it is, encounters with the soul-corrupted, human-condition-embattled state are almost unavoidable, and as a result exceptionally innocent adults, individuals who are capable of avoiding having to resign and who can thus grow up as unresigned prophets are going to be extremely rare. Playwright Samuel Beckett was only slightly exaggerating the brevity today of a truly soulful, happy, innocent life when he wrote, ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (Waiting for Godot, 1955). In fact, to nurture someone with sufficient love and trust in life for them to be innocent enough to not have to resign required an exceptionally innocent mother, in fact a mother who herself had not resigned and taken up a life of evasive lying and selfish preoccupation with seeking self-justification. Only a mother who was unresigned and thus had not become part of, and familiar with, the dishonest, corrupt world could raise a child oblivious to corruption, a child uninitiated into the corrupt world and thus unaccepting of corruption in their adult life. A child who could grow up as it were ‘outside the square’ of the corrupt world, someone who could see the ‘wrongness’ or non-ideality in people’s behaviour. Once resigned, a woman knows about the world of resignation and no longer trusts in the existence of a world that is not dishonest and wayward. It is a trust in a world still ‘as it should be’ that allows a mother to reinforce in a child not only a similar belief but also an expectation of such a world.

Resigned mothers tried to hide their alienation from their children, but the reality is if a mother knew of the corrupt world, her children would invariably know of it also and psychologically adapt to it. Alienation was invisible to those alienated, but to the innocent—and children are born innocent—it was clearly visible.

Page 386 of
Print Edition Unable to acknowledge the importance a mother’s innocence played in producing an unresigned prophet without exposing themselves to the criticising condemnation of their resigned, corrupted state, humans sought a metaphor that represented the truth but did not confront them too directly with it. That metaphor for an innocent mother was ‘virginity’. As was explained in the first section of the previous essay, sex was at base an attack on innocence and so the symbol of innocence or purity in women is virginity. Of course to give birth to a child a mother could not be a virgin, but when seeking a metaphor for an innocent, unresigned mother, the concept of a ‘virgin mother’ was ideal. The real truth of the concept of the Virgin Mother of the Christ Child is that she was a virgin in terms of corruption, her soul was virginal. D.H. Lawrence recognised the essential innocence of Christ’s mother when, in reference to her, he wrote ‘Oh, oh, all the women in the world are dead, oh there’s just one’.

How much innocence and thus soundness humans retained into adulthood depended primarily on the quality of nurturing or mothering they received as infants. As the prophet Mohammed said, ‘Paradise lies under the feet of the mother.’ There is also the famous saying, ‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’ and, as Olive Schreiner noted, ‘There was never a great man who had not a great mother—it is hardly an exaggeration. The first six years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer’ (The Story of an African Farm, 1883, p.193 of 300). The expletive that describes a corrupt man—‘son of a bitch’—goes to the heart of the matter. In his 1973 television series and book, The Ascent of Man, historian Jacob Bronowski, alluded to the significance of nurturing and the purity that resulted from it when he said ‘But, far more deeply, [the brain] depends on the long preparation of human childhood…The real vision of the human being is the child wonder, the Virgin and Child, the Holy Family’ (pp.424,425 of 448).

Assigning to prophets a supernatural and even divine status was the insecure world’s way of acknowledging their difference without acknowledging their confronting and condemning innocence. By differentiating prophets in some mystical, supernatural way, people did not have to compare their own corrupted state with the innocent, uncorrupted purity of the prophet. Without the ability to understand and explain humans’ corrupted state, the uncorrupted innocence and denial-free truthfulness of prophets was unbearably confronting and created the need to at least ‘explain them away’, if not remove them physically through persecution and even murder.

Page 387 of
Print Edition The consequence of almost universal corruption in the world is that there have been very few unresigned, unevasive, denial-free adults or prophets. Considering unresigned individuals also had to survive extreme oppression, persecution and ostracism during their early and middle adult years, because of their confronting denial-free truthfulness, it is remarkable that any survived sufficiently intact to become exceptionally penetrating thinkers in later life. The loneliness unresigned individuals experienced trying to maintain a denial-free way of thinking when continually subjected to immense coercion to abandon that way of thinking by virtually everyone else on Earth was described by Christ when he lamented, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head’ (Matt. 8:20). Amongst those who survived long enough to succeed in penetrating the human situation, a significant number were murdered for their honesty before their insights could gain a foothold of appreciation and support in the world. Anthony Barnett, Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the Australian National University in Canberra, highlighted the rarity of exceptional prophets, once saying, ‘In the whole of written history there are only two or three people who have been able to think on this [all-confronting, macro] scale about the human condition’ (in a recorded interview, Jan. 1983).

The following is an account of one of the handful of truly sound and thus truthful thinkers or prophets to emerge in recorded history: ‘sometime around or before 600 BC—perhaps as early as 1200 BC—there came forth from the windy steppes of northeastern Iran a prophet who utterly transformed the Persian faith. The prophet was Zarathustra—or Zoroaster, as the Greeks would style his name. Ahuramazda [the supreme being or wise lord] had appeared to Zoroaster in a vision, in which the god had revealed himself to be the one supreme deity, all seeing and all powerful. He represented both light and truth, and was creator of all things, fountainhead of all virtue. Ranged against him stood the powers of darkness, the angels of evil and keepers of the lie. The universe was seen as a battleground in which these opposing forces contended, both in the sphere of political conquest and in the depths of each man’s soul. But in time the light would shine out, scattering the darkness, and truth would prevail. A day of reckoning would arrive in which the blessed would achieve a heavenly salvation, while all others would find themselves roasting in fiery purgatory. The concept of a single, all-powerful god was not entirely new. Egypt had flirted with the notion in the 14th century BC under the pharaoh Akhenaten, and the Jews had been tending towards it for centuries. But Page 388 of
Print Edition Zoroaster gave monotheism a powerful new impetus. And his view of moral struggle—light against darkness, truth versus falsehood—was a spiritual innovation of profound importance…promoting a standard of virtuous behaviour that illuminated the best years of Persian rule’ (Time-Life History of the World, A Soaring Spirit 600-400 BC, 1988, p.37 of 176).

In the ‘moral struggle’ of ‘light against darkness, truth versus falsehood’, where ‘the keepers of the lie’, the people maintaining the denial, were dragging humanity into ever greater states of darkness or falsehood or alienation, it was the handful of exceptionally sound unresigned individuals, the ‘prophets’, that have emerged during recorded history, who civilised humanity, ‘promot[ed] a standard of virtuous behaviour’. Prophets sufficiently resurrected the repressed truths to guide angry, upset, corrupted, resigned humans back onto a path that contained a semblance of cooperativeness, ‘light and truth’. As will be described shortly when religions are explained, this realignment brought about by prophets has been the basis of religions.

It required exceptional soundness to stand up to the ‘powers of darkness, the angels of evil’, the almost total denial or block-out of the resigned world. Typically, these exceptional individuals stood alone in the marketplaces or out in the desert and railed against all the lies, irrespective of the consequences to themselves, of persecution and even death. Free of denial, prophets were able to confront the truth of integrative meaning or God and thus think and talk truthfully all day long. For example, the Bible says, of one of the most unevasive thinkers in recorded history, the prophet Moses of the Old Testament, ‘no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face’ (Deut. 34:10). Exceptional prophets such as Zarathustra or Moses, and the others around whom the great religions of the world were formed, could think completely honestly, uncondemned and thus free of denial of the integrative, cooperative ideals or God. As Jacob, another Old Testament prophet, marvelled, ‘I have seen God face to face and yet I am still alive’ (Genesis 32:30). This ability was to the dismay of the rest of humanity whose survival from the threat of suicidal depression depended on maintaining denial. Only innocence has been able to face the cooperative ideals or God ‘face to face’, or, as the prophet Isaiah described it, ‘delight in the fear of the Lord’ (Isa. 11:3).

Moses described how ‘The Lord spoke to you [the Israelite nation] face to face out of the fire on the mountain. [Only because] At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, Page 389 of
Print Edition because you were afraid of the fire’ (Deut. 5:4,5). In ‘Exodus’ God warned Moses that ‘no-one may see me and live’ (Exod. 33:20). As has been mentioned before in this book, ‘Deuteronomy’ provides a very clear description of resigned people’s fear of the truth of cooperative meaning and the resultant issue of the human condition: ‘Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire any more, or we will die’ (Deut. 18:16). Job pleaded for relief from confrontation with the human condition when he lamented, ‘Why then did you bring me out of the womb?…Turn away from me so I can have a moment’s joy before I go to the place of no return, to the land of gloom and deep shadow, to the land of deepest night [depression]’ (Job 10:18,20-22).

Again, as Christ described the situation, ‘Everyone who does evil [becomes divisively behaved] hates the light [hates the truth of cooperative meaning], and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed…men [who are divisively behaved] loved darkness instead of light…everyone who sins is a slave to sin’ (John 3:20, 3:19, 8:34).

It should be explained that even amongst prophets there have been different classes of prophets. Earlier in the Plato essay I listed quite a number of contemporary denial-free thinkers or prophets. They were Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), William Blake (1757–1827), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1833), Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864–1941), Eugène Marais (1872–1936), Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), Carl Jung (1875-1961), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), D.W. Winnicott (1896–1971), Sir James Darling (1899–1995), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), Louis Leakey (1903–1972), Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), Erich Neumann (1905–1960), Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), Sir Laurens van der Post (1906–1996), Simone Weil (1909–1943), Albert Camus (1913–1960), Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), Charles Birch (1918–2009), Robert A. Johnson (1921–), John Morton (1924–2011), R.D. Laing (1927–1989), Dian Fossey (1938–1985), Stuart Kauffman (1939–) and Paul Davies (1946–).

The question is how does this list of 33 contemporary denial-free thinkers or prophets reconcile with Anthony Barnett’s assertion that, ‘In the whole of written history there are only two or three people who have been able to think on this [all-confronting, macro] scale about the human condition’? In the above material I have talked about exceptional prophets in recognition of the fact that some prophets were much more able Page 390 of
Print Edition than others to confront and think effectively about the issue of the human condition. The main distinction is between individuals who were sufficiently nurtured and thus secure in self to avoid having to resign to a life of denial—these are the exceptional prophets—and individuals who had resigned during adolescence but who were later able to find their way back to a sufficiently denial-free way of thinking to be considered a prophet.

It was described in the Resignation essay how some artists could so develop their capacity to bring out the beauty that exists on Earth, and by association bring into focus all the deeper human-condition-related issues that such purity raises, that they could take themselves to the brink of suicidal depression. One of the greatest artists, Van Gogh, became so tormented he did suicide. The point is if a resigned person happened to take up a path that led back to the world of the soul and all the confronting truths that resided there, and had the courage, determination and gifts to pursue that extremely difficult path far enough, they could manage to reveal sufficient truth to be recognised as a denial-free thinker or prophet. Of course, as described in the Resignation essay, such heroic return-trips to the world of truth could lead to extreme depression and even suicide. If someone had become resigned during their adolescence then by definition they cannot have been sound enough to face the truth without being suicidally depressed by it. Resigned people fought their way back to the truth at their peril.

My view is that of the 33 denial-free thinkers or prophets listed above perhaps only two or three of them are exceptional prophets, unresigned individuals. To escape oppression from the effects of a world afflicted by the human condition in your infancy was extremely rare. For example Sir Laurens van der Post, whom I regard as an exceptional prophet, was the 13th of 15 children and yet his siblings, despite having the same mother, apparently could not escape becoming so corrupted during their upbringing as to avoid resignation. As was described in the Resignation essay, under the heading ‘The extent of humans’ fear of the issue of the human condition’, Carl Jung had to struggle mightily to access some truth about the human situation. He was obviously not an unresigned, exceptional denial-free thinker or prophet. The difference in the ability to think freely about the human condition between someone who resigned to a life of denial and someone who did not is immense. While an unresigned mind can wander around in the world of the truth with Page 391 of
Print Edition ease, once someone has adopted denial of the world of truth it takes remarkable commitment and effort to reconnect with and attempt to again ‘walk around’ in that world.

The issue of women prophets should also be addressed. There is one woman prophet in the Old Testament of the Bible, Ruth, and in the list given above I have included Schreiner, Fossey and Weil as prophets.

As was explained in the first section of the previous essay, ‘Bringing peace to the war between the sexes’, men took up the task of championing the ego over the ignorant instincts of our soul. Our instincts were ignorant of our intellect’s need to search for knowledge. It was emphasised that women, not responsible for the fight against ignorance, and so not participating in the battle itself, did not and could not be expected to understand the validity of the effects of the battle. Women had little empathy with and respect for the effects of the battle, in particular the egocentricity, alienation and anger it produced in men. As a result women tended to be soul-sympathetic, not ego-sympathetic. In Jung and the Story of Our Time Sir Laurens related a dream Carl Jung had about a blind woman named Salome. He wrote that ‘Salome was young, beautiful and blind’, adding that ‘Salome was blind because the anima [the feminine, soul part of humans] is incapable of seeing’. Women’s ‘blindness’ has been their inability to empathise with, and thus sympathise with, the corruption of self that men’s role of having to champion the ego over the ignorance of the soul produced in men. They are not as it were ‘mainframed’, as intuitively aware of the battle as men—in the same way as men have never been as ‘mainframed’ to the role of nurturing as women intuitively are.

Since women are not sympathetic to the conscious thinking self or ego’s battle with the ignorant soul they are not in an effective position to mediate in the battle, and since a prophet’s work was to reconcile the warring sides, a woman could not be a prophet in the truest sense. Women’s lack of appreciation of the battle allowed them a greater ability than resigned men to reveal the truths about our soul’s world; to breach the etiquette of denial. For example, it was, Deidre Macken who wrote the Science Friction article (referred to in the Plato essay) that was so exposing of science’s deliberate denial of integrative meaning or teleology. However, women have not been in a strong position to grapple with the issue of the human condition. Women were relatively unaware of the struggle to exonerate humanity. Page 392 of
Print Edition Being as they were relatively unaware of the legitimacy and importance of the battle they tended to condemn rather than help and enlighten. To be an effective prophet you had to ultimately be able to bring love to the ‘dark side’, rather than simply criticise it.

As will be made clear when miracles are explained, Christ was able to heal people because he was able to bring uncorrupted love to their tormented, human-condition-afflicted state. If Christ were an exceptionally sound person, but had no deep intuitive appreciation of the legitimacy of the battle going on on Earth, he would not have been able to offer people the strong, sound, honest, centring empathy that was so relieving and thus healing for them.

An exceptional prophet contained the qualities of both women and men in one being. A resigned man was virtually devoid of soul and as a result lacked any ability to communicate with the soul, but did intuitively appreciate the battle that was going on on Earth. A resigned woman was soul-empathetic but lacked a deep, intuitive appreciation of the battle. An exceptional prophet on the other hand was both imbued with soul and aware of the battle.

It was because women lacked empathy with the battle going on on Earth that they have had to work through men; women were man’s ‘helper’ (Genesis 2:20). Soul helped the intellect, it did not lead it. Christ did not choose 12 men as disciples because of the cultural conditioning of his day, as some have claimed. Christ was never influenced by arbitrary tastes and attitudes. He was only influenced by the truth emanating from his soul, and the truth is women have not been in the best position to mediate in the battle going on in the world. Humanity’s recent 2-million-year adolescent search for its identity, search for understanding of itself, particularly for the reason for its divisive nature, has been a patriarchal journey, just as humanity’s infancy and childhood was a matriarchal stage.

As was mentioned in the previous essay, the prophet Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledged women’s greater ability to nurture, that women have had to work through men and that women haven’t been aware of, or mainframed to, the deeper battle that has been waging on Earth. He wrote: ‘Woman understands children better than a man…The man’s happiness is: I will. The woman’s happiness is: He will. “Behold, now the world has become perfect!”—thus thinks every woman when she obeys with all her love. And woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman’s nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters. But a man’s nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman Page 393 of
Print Edition senses its power but does not comprehend it’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, 1892; tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1961, p.92 of 342).

The reason Ruth has been included in the Bible as a prophet, and the reason I have recognised Schreiner, Fossey and Weil as prophets, is that they have each gone a long way towards meeting that definition of a prophet as being a denial-free thinker. Even though they were not able to grapple with the human condition directly they revealed so much honesty about the human situation that they greatly contributed to the destruction of the denial. While in some of her writing Olive Schreiner railed against men and in so doing revealed her blindness to the real nature of the battle going on in the world—in her famous 1883 book, The Story of an African Farm, she has her leading character say that men are ‘fools’ (p.194 of 300) and that men’s oppression of women is not part of God’s plan, that ‘He [God] knows nothing of’ it (p.189)—her extraordinary honesty about the corrupt state of the world, such as the lengthy passage quoted in the Resignation essay, was a revelation in a world drowned in denial. It is suggested that Schreiner, Fossey and Weil were able to reveal the truth because they had women’s ability to expose the truth and possessed the exceptional courage, determination and gifts necessary to do so.

What hasn’t been explained so far is what a false prophet is and how they differ from the true prophets described above. False prophets will be explained and the distinction between them and true prophets will be given shortly under the section ‘The Apocalypse and the Battle of Armageddon explained.’