While in Manhattan this past week, a friend who’s leaving the city after 37 years invited me to search his huge collection of old books and pick out a few titles I might like to keep.

Since I’m not a fan of fiction, I settled on two pagan/New Age books he said dated from his beatnik days in the ’60s when he attended Berkeley and went on to live in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.

The one book was Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti’s Commentaries on Living (1956) and the other was English poet Robert Graves’ The White Goddess; A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1966). I’m finding they’re both extremely cunning in their demonic propaganda.

Graves, for one, has a ton of biblical references and distortions in his 511-page treasure trove of myth/occult origins and traditions.

In one particular passage that my friend had penciled brackets around, Graves writes, “So the poetic answer to Job’s poetic question: ‘Where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding?’ which his respect for Jehovah and the All-wise prevented him from facing is: ‘Under an apple-tree, by pure meditation, on a Friday evening, in the season of apples, when the moon is full.’ But the find will be Wednesday’s Child.”

*****

Graves has many references to the Apostle Paul, writing in one, “St. Paul quoted a Greek proverb: ‘All Cretans are liars.’ They were called liars for the same reason that poets are: because they had a different way of looking at things.

“Particularly because they remained unmoved by Olympian propaganda, which for the previous thousand years or so had insisted on an Eternal, Almighty, Just Father Zeus—Zeus who had swept away with his thunderbolt all the wicked old gods and established his shining throne forever on Mount Olympus.

“The True Cretans said: ‘Zeus is dead. His tomb is to be seen on one of our mountains.’ This was not spoken with bitterness. All that they meant was that ages before Zeus became an Eternal Almighty God in Greece, he had been a simple old-fashioned Sun-king, annually sacrificed, a servant of the Great Goddess, and that his remains were customarily buried in a tomb on Mount Juktas.

“They were not liars. There was no Father God in Minoan Crete and their account squares with the archaeological finds recently made on that very mountain.”

*****

Describing Apuleius’s Golden Ass as “the most comprehensive and inspired account of the Goddess in all ancient literature,” Graves quotes a passage from a 1566 translation of the work by William Adlington:

“Then very lively and joyfully, though with a weeping countenance, I made this oration to the puissant goddess—‘O blessed Queen of Heaven, whether thou be the Dame Ceres which are the original and motherly source of all fruitful things on the earth . . . or whether thou be the celestial Venus, who, at the beginning of the world, didst couple together male and female with an engendered love, and didst so make an eternal propagation of human kind . . . or whether thou be called Proserpine by reason of the deadly howlings which thou yieldest, that has power with triple face to stop and put away the invasion of hags and ghosts which appear unto men . . . which dost wander in sundry groves and art worshipped in divers manners; thou, which dost illuminate all the cities of the earth by thy feminine light . . . by whatsoever name or fashion or shape it is lawful to call upon thee, I pray thee to end my great travail and misery and raise up my fallen hopes . . . Thou indeed are rightly named Great Mother of the Gods . . . Thou art the source of strength of peoples and gods; without thee nothing can either be born or made perfect; thou art mighty, Queen of the Gods. Goddess, I adore thee as divine, I invoke thy name; vouchsafe to grant that which I ask of thee, so shall I return thanks to thy godhead, with the faith that is thy due . . . ’ ”

On and on it went, ad nauseam. This was all I could take of the book.

*****

Recently, when I mentioned to a group of people from my church that I saw an item in the newspaper about a Roman Catholic Church in Cicero called The Queen of Heaven, the response was, “Oh, there’s Queen of Heaven Catholic churches all over Chicago.”

As Jordan says in an old study, “You know anybody who goes around in the 20^th Century talking about the Queen of Heaven? ‘To pour out drink offerings unto her’? (Jeremiah 44) Certainly not in the 20^th Century . . .

“You know what the problem with the Bible is, folks? It isn’t that the Bible’s so hard to understand and you gotta have a modern translation just to get it at all. You know what the problem is? It offends people. It just stomps all over everything they hold dear and honorable and have highly esteemed.

“Jesus said ‘that which is highly esteemed among men is an abomination to God’ and that old Book, it just stomps right on through. And when you’ve got an idol or a thing that you worship . . .

“People say, ‘I don’t talk religion and politics.’ You know what they mean by that? ‘I don’t talk about how I make my money and I don’t want to talk about my relatives.’ You study that a while—you’ll find that to be true.”

“In Jeremiah, Judah is in total religious apostasy. They’re worshipping Baal and they’ve got the male god Bel, and the female god Ashtoreth, and she’s the Queen of Heaven. He’s the sun god and she’s the moon underneath his feet. And that’s an interesting symbol if you know what you’re talking about in religious circles. . . .”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued . . . )