Cowboy Buddy Meets The Blues
April 16, 2023
Cowboy Buddy Meets The Blues
A Short Story
by
R.E. Prindle
The United States us usually spoken of as one country while it is not; the US isn’t even uniformity of culture within each State. The country is a diversity. The races have different agendas, the nationalities can barely speak to each other knowingly. Class divisions while denied are one of the most prominent features of the US.
To take only one State as an example, Michigan, In Michigan its metropolis is Detroit which has nothing in common with upstate, or the Upper Peninsula , the East Side or the West side of the State. Indeed, at one time the dividing line between Eastern Standard Time and Central Standard Time ran right through the middle od the State. One foot could exist at 10:00 o’ clock and the other foot at 9:00.
Saginaw the key city of the Saginaw Bay has nothing in common with Grand Rapids of the West. My head was in Michigan and my feet were in Del Rio Texas and my belly button in Waterloo Iowa where the great country radio stations were.. I was a son of Dixie though I had never been below the Mason-Dixon line.
California is an entirely different country, once briefly one, to any other State in the Union, it includes Oregon to the North and Arizona to it’s East, all enclosing Nevada.
The populations themselves were diverse and unrelated to each other as different as Black and White. Religions are so different that they can’t speak to each other. Even the climates are total contradictions, deserts and swamps, hot and cold. Cold. And that brings us to our story.
Minnesota, contains the northern most point of the Lower Forty-Eight, and if not the coldest there can only be a miniscule difference from second place. The winters in Minnesota are cold and brutal while seemingly interminable. Up there a few miles from the Canadian border is the little town of Hibbing. Sixteen thousand people strong. It sits at the center of the 110 mile long Mesabi Iron Range.
The Mesabi is the greatest open pit range in the world. When it became too difficult to follow the subterranean ore veins they just ripped the top off and dug it up wholesale. A pit train runs up and down the range a couple hundred feet down into the bowels of the earth. Then in the fifties of the twentieth the high grade ore was depleted. This is the time this story takes place They took most of it to Europe for the big wars and blew it up.
The pit yawns empty but the rains are slowiy filling this great gash in the earth. It may one day be the smallest of the great lakes.
It was there in Hibbing in 1941 that a child was born, a boy child. As he lay there in the cradle he was christened Shmuelly Sabbatai Goldenbargain, a little Jewish lad. He would not remain Shmuelly all his life but a different name under which he would become of world renown, from this little place in the wilds of Minnesota that barely merited a name, Hibbing, Minnesota. Ask someone to find that place on the map.
Shmuelly’s people in the 1950s numbered about four hundred, but they ran the town which was mainly Scandinavian and Christian. Shmuelly’s family owned the businesses from movie theaters to heavy equipment. His father operated the town’s grocery store that, as a monopoly did very well, unfortunately his father’s three brothers were partner’s so the profits were divided four ways, but Shmuelly’s father managed the money.
Enough of this background.
I think you have the scene sitting pretty well in your mind, except for one thing, the main drag through town was a hundred yards wide, nearly as big as a four lane highway giving it a kind of ‘High Noon’ quality.
If it’s alright we’ll call Shmuelly by the name he would take for his career as a musician. I’ll start calling his Buddy, his ‘real’ name, that which he would legally adopt was Cowboy Buddy Wright, but I’ll drop the Cowboy part of his moniker until it’s time.
Hibbing is a school town, education is very important. The magnificent high school, you’d have to see it to believe it, contained all grades from kindergarten through twelfth. That building is a real monument, as glorious as a castle, so Buddy knew his whole class for twelve years while many of us changed our schools several times. There were never any fresh faces for Buddy.
Buddy’s father was an Orthodox Jew even though the synagogue was Reformed. His father led the Anti-Defamation League in town. He ruled with an iron hand. His dad’s name was really Abram but he was known as Jack at both the synagogue and the lodge. He was the leading member of the congregation, made frequent trips to New York City, that is Brooklyn, while his mother lived downstate in the St. Louis Park suburb of Minneapolis that Buddy often visited, sometimes for relatively lengthy stays when things heated up between Jack and Ester.
Buddy was one of the kids who didn’t fit in it and wasn’t just because he was Jewish, he was also intellectually from a different planet, or living on a different plane. I put no negative meaning to his being Jewish but his family and people maintained a strict distance from the town folk. They cherished their separateness. And they owned the town. Everyone acknowledged that and they quietly resented it because the family shut out all competition. As a result Buddy was a shy little lad and developed a forlorn expression. The boys all laughed at him and the girls too. Could give a kid a complex and it did Buddy. It’s not easy to be forced to the outside where life’s greatest tragedy awaited him.
I’ll skip the description and get to the tragedy with maybe a couple of back flashes. All Buddy’s friends, meaning few, were outsiders like him, even his girl friend Sweet Sue. Sue’s father was a handyman, possible rum runner at one time there on the border, for certain adventures over the state border in Superior, Wisconsin, a city infected by the mob, as his family lived above their visible means. The means were slight but noticeable, so above doesn’t mean much.
But Sue’s father was the righteous sort, he had a fabulous Country and Western record collection, LPs, and they didn’t come from Buddy’s cousin’s record store, he must have gotten them downstate.
So, let’s skip a decade. We’re now in late 1958, late meaning that every thing but the air was frozen solid and you had to spoon that into your nostrils. It was in the midnight hour. Buddy and Sue were meandering down that wide main street, she holding his hand in her coat pocket when they drifted over to the Masonic Temple. Stepping into the recessed doorway to get to get out of the wind, Buddy mused that they had a nice grand piano inside that he had always wanted to play.
‘Why don’t we in and do it Shmuelly, I’ll dance.’ Said Sweet Sue.
‘But the door’s locked, Honey.’ Buddy pointed out.
‘Oh, that’s no problem.’ Sue said, pulling a jackknife from her pocket while in a deft move she inserted the tip of the blade and popped the lock. I did say she was an outsider, didn’t I? Buddy gaped but it was like magic. When his eyes focused next he was standing in front of the piano, Little Richard style. Now for the heartbreaking part; this is where Buddy’s life took a left turn. He slid into ecstasy hardly knowing what he was doing. He hammered the keys and began to play.
Buddy had been a Little Richard fan from day one when Little Richard’s scream rent the air from the radio: Oop Bop a luna…it rattled your brain and shook your nerves, a new person was born in that instant. Little Richard had burst on the scene like Jack from his box.
That entry into society was alone a life changing event. The circus had come to town. Even today if you were there the memory will still slay you. People who didn’t grow up with the music won’t understand.
Buddy put his hand on the keys and hammered them as hard as he could then began screaming Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti as loud as he could. Sweet Sue shrilled jumping on the piano to do a go go dance. This went on for ten minutes until Buddy and Sue simultaneously focusing their eyes saw two gentlemen in blue standing there with grim looks on their faces.
‘We weren’t doing anything.’ Buddy bleated.
‘It’s called breaking and entering.’ The policeman said. ‘It’s a crime.’
They put the cuffs and Buddy and Sue and marched them to the station which was just around the block. Sue was dismissed for being a girl although she was the one who actually broke in. Buddy was marched to a holding cell while his father was notified that his son was downtown in the can. He was in the jailhouse now. Shades of James Dean in ‘Rebel Without A Cause.’
So, now, Buddy came hard up against the wall. Jack and Ethel were aghast. Certain members of the city smiled a little glow of satisfaction. They were not only getting one of them, but the chief instigator. This fly in every ointment. Buddy who in his real life sometimes had his real name pronounced ‘Smelly’ because Shmuelly was too hard to say and damn hard to spell didn’t have the best reputation.
In fact, he seemed to be known in Duluth where a newspaper reporter called Walter Eldot even wrote an article about the arrest saying that the Iron Range didn’t need characters like Shmuelly. Of course both Hibbing and Duluth were backwoods towns where the news of Rock and Roll was received with extreme distaste. Perry Como was much more honored. And Buddy’s performance of Little Richard at the school assembly had terrified nearly all, the news of which had reached Duluth, ruined Buddy’s reputation forever…and ever.
And there was that one time he ran down that kid when passing down the street on his Harley, but the kid had darted out between two cars so it wasn’t like Shmuelly had been careless. Still it had cost father Jack four hundred dollars to fix it. That would have been forty thousand in today’s dollars.
Buddy didn’t dress other that middle class, no black denim trousers, motorcycle boots with a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back. But he still became a bohemian to the old folks. Perhaps, Eldot did overstate though.
Jack tried to fix this new charge but not only was the price out of range, the faux pas was unfixable. What the heck it was a first offence, the alibi was reasonable enough for a couple kids, maybe a couple keys did have to be replaced on the piano but how much did that cost. Buddy was cold irons bound. He was sent to Redwing Reformatory School down on Highway 61. The fabled route from the Canadian border down to the Gulf of Mexico. Riding downstate toward Minneapolis in the police cruiser Buddy was in a daze remembering when he received the sentence that Jack couldn’t fix but was at least limited to his eighteenth year a few months away in May. Jack was able to arrange things so that Shmuelly could graduate with his class.
Buddy might have been able to handle that but his own father Jack Goldenbargain stood him up and sternly advised that the a son could become so defiled that even his father would reject him but that God in his mercy would redeem him if in his future life he followed the straight and narrow. And then his mother turned on him. Lordy, lordy. Stressed and half dead he got into the police cruiser for the drive down highway 61 to Redwing. His body was tied in knots, his stomach churning, his brain whirling. Buddy could remember nothing of the next few days until he woke up one morning to realize that he was in prison. His soul had died but his body lived on in a miserable second birth.
The next year or so was just a hazy mirage that was never clear in his mind. The most apt description of this horrible period that I’ve found was recorded in a couple songs by the current recording artist Bob Dylan who was a schoolmate of Buddy’s in Hibbing although they a=had never known each other, unaware that the other existed. Just as Buddy chose a musical and performing career so did Mr. Dylan, they both went on to great success in what might be called parallel careers they were so similar.
Mr. Dylan captured Buddy’s moment in one song called ‘The Chimes of Freedom’ and the other ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ in which he surely must have had Buddy in mind. These two songs match Buddy’s experience too closely and so sympathetically that one must believe that Mr. Dylan, the same age and a schoolmate, watched Buddy in his plight carefully, almost putting himself in Buddy’s shoes. At any rate, in later life, Buddy would play these two songs until the groove’s wore out. The whole first song stirred Buddy to his chill but most especially this verse: ‘The Chimes of Freedom’ flashing
.
Starry eyed and laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hang suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ‘till the tolling ended.
Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Yes, Mr. Dylan hit Buddy’s plight on the button. As Buddy sat shocked, morose and crushed in a bottomless depression he ruminated on those feelings if not in those words to numb even to cry. He and Sue would never meet again for she was as devastated as he if not more so. And then stunned when Buddy refused to see her ever again. Never again, never again, without even a last goodbye. Just, boom, out of her life.
Of course, Buddy was not yet able consciously to put his misery into such words as those of Mr. Dylan that might have been some consolation. His other care even more debilitating than Sweet Sue was what he considered his father’s betrayal. Buddy conveniently forgot his aggravations to his father including the motorcycle incident of which his arrest capped the climax but his mind was captured by the image of Abraham in the Bible about to sacrifice his son just as God stayed his hand and saved the son.
No god saved Buddy. A few years later when he heard Mr. Dylan’s line from the song Highway 61 Revisited, ‘And God said kill me a son’, and Abe answered, Where you want this killing done?’, and God said, ‘Out on highway 61.’ There was none to spare poor Buddy. No. It was the midnight of his soul. He died the death. He now spoke of his former existence. He had been searching for an identity to relieve him of him of the lesser self of being Shmuelly Goldenbargain and he found it in prison.
He entered Redwing as Shmuelly Goldenbargain and left in a nebulous state of being Cowboy Buddy Wright. It would look better on the marquee anyway. All the Jews did it for that reason.
An Incident In Juarez
April 2, 2023
The Incident In Juarez
A Short Story
by
R.E. Prindle
Officer Smith: Look at this, face down, feet in Mexico and head and torso across the line in the US.
Officer Riley: Ya, on the Bridge of America.
Smith: Don’t see any wounds. Is he asleep?
Riley: I don’t think so. Probably just knocked out loaded.
Smith: I wonder who he is.
Riley: You don’t know who that is? That’s the folk singer Cowboy Buddy Wright.
Smith: Who’s that?
Riley: Never heard of Cowboy Buddy? C’mon, man, as President Biden would say.
Smith: OK, big deal, I never heard of him. Who is he? What next?
Riley: Well, we’ll pick him up and take into the station house, put him in a cell, and wait till he comes to.
Smith: Yeah, Ok, but who put him there?
Riley: I don’t know, but I know someone who might.
Smith: Miguel?
Riley: Uh, yup. Here, I’ll, pick Buddy up, throw him over your shoulder and see if can raise Miguel on my device.
Smith carries Buddy while Riley hefts his phone and pushes a key. It was a hundred degrees in the shade and there wasn’t any shade on the bridge. Smith throws Buddy in the back seat as Buddy unconsciously mutters: I can’t breathe. Neither can I Smith huffs and puffs in the heat.
Smith: Get ahold of Miguel?
Riley: Yes, I did. And he’s as chipper as ever.
Smith: Do I care about chipper? What’s his take on Cowboy Buddy?
Riley: I don’t know. Mystery wrapped in an enigma. It seems that Buddy’s presence was required by El Lobo to make a charity concert at the Sisters of Mercy orphanage. Easter time too. But they’re not celebrating Jesus but the guys on either side of hm.
Smith: The place that’s trafficking in the kids.
Riley: The same. Big to do. Lots of the Epstein crowd making merry and taking their choice. Buddy seems uncomfortable with the gig but lacks the balls to refuse El Lobo. Of course, I’m not sure that I would have the balls to refuse El Lobo. Buddy gets a little intox providing subpar entertainment and offends El Lobo from the stage.
Smith: From the stage?
Riley: Yup. Should have been there. Buddy says that he has had enough, packs up his guitar and heads for the door, unsteadily. El Lobo in his quiet way is enraged. Buddy leaves, falls down he steps, fortunately not hurting his guitar, stands up and starts yelling for a taxi. Even if taxis were standing around outside the doors of the orphanage none are in sight.
So Buddy muddled and lost is stumbling down the streets of Juarez looking for a direction home when a car pulls and up and a voice says get in. Miguel ends his story there, saying that he doesn’t know what happened then.
Our trail ends there Smitty, my lad, now we’ll hat to prove we’re real detectives, inspector Keene, tracer of lost persons.
Smith: Yeah, like real detectives we’ll get our knowing sidekick Miguel going where no gringo dares to go. Pay him another c-note and put him on the track.
Riley: Cynical bastard you Smitty. Maybe you don’t, but I’ve got a nose for this kind of work. Jeez the pervs out picking up the kiddies and it’s Eastertime too.
Time passes. Miguel the bloodhound sniffs, get on the trail and makes his report.
Miguel: Ah Senores, it went down like this. Senor Cowboy Buddy Wright of who I’m a big fan and sincerely regret his mistreatment, apparently lives in a different world when he’s one brick from completing the wall, should not have offended El Lobo, not only once but twice in the same evening.
El Lobo is very tender concerning his orphans, several of which he has apparently made so he thinks Cowboy Buddy must learn a lesson. Standing in front of the orphanage is a poor choice to hail a taxi, Buddy appears to have thought his next step was the very dangerous one of walking stoned, alone and in the dark through Juarez to the bridge.
However he doesn’t have to. A car pulls up, a door opens and Buddy is pulled inside. Sound familiar. What happened to Cowboy Buddy, I am not permitted to say but they drive him down to the place called The Rue Morgue, know that club, yes? Yes, well you know then the trouble our Buddy was in.
Riley: Oh, you don’t have to say any more Miguel, I’ve got it figured out. See, Smitty, I told you I’m a master detective.
Smith: Nevermind the self-applause, it’s disgusting. So, what’s the story?
Riley: You know the reputation of the Morgue? Buddy’s up and about now but he did have a couple punction marks. But he’s fine for now. This is a case of ‘Better dying through chemistry.’ Murder but it will never be traced. Buddy’s been injected with some chemical delayed action poison. Very slow acting. Ten, fifteen years from now Buddy will break out into a terrible rash that intensifies and will kill him. Not knowing what to call it the Docs will name it Shingles, no one will be the wiser and El Lobo, if he’s still alive, will sit back and smile. You should never mess with El Lobo he will be thinking that it was a simple twist of fate.
The Origins of Jesus
April 1, 2023
The Origins of Jesus
by R.E. Prindle
This discussion relies heavily on P.M.. Fraser’s history Ptolemaic Alexandria.
The discussion has delayed proceedings since there was a rather hot discussion concerning nationality of Jesus.
Our approach here is a psychological one while the discussion is on the macro or societal level and not the personal. It is necessary then to introduce a more detailed account of the conditions in the East Mediterranean at the time of Jesus. The great mélange of nations in Alexandria under the Ptolemies.
It appears that many of the terms we have been employing were not understood by our members.
Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern world to the Western part of India. He died on his and the Army’s return, the Hellenic Empire he created then being divided among his generals. The province of Egypt fell to the general named Ptolemy, hence Ptolemaic Alexandria, which city he founded in the conquest. Thus the Delta of Egypt from -300 to approximately the year 0 was governed by Greeks. Greek customs, mores and language.
A concept that may be hard to grasp apart from the annual calendar time is that it existed within the Ages of Aries and Pisces of the Zodiac. There are two manners of counting time involved. At this exact time the Age of Aries was ending and the Age of Pisces was beginning. That meant that the avatar of Aries, Zeus was now displaced and that there was a search for the new avatar of Pisces. In the Greek version of the Zodiac, their god Dionysus had been appointed to succeed Zeus. But, the conquest of the East Mediterranean by Alexander had created a larger Greek dominion of various gods and goddesses thus demoting Dionysus to merely a candidate.
The key players the Greeks, the Egyptians and more especially the Jews had to be placated. Rome would enter the scene near the year 0. Determining the outcome would take a few hundred years of religious turmoil and great political changes. The question will be asked, who did this? I think probably the religious schools of the time and the place Alexandria.
The great Egyptian religion that had existed for thousands of years was the focal point. Egypt had been battered by various conquerors over the last eight hundred years or so, that’s eight hundred, call it a millennium, so that the priesthood had had to be flexible and adaptive to maintain itself at all. It had done that and now on the annual level when the Greek governors assumed control about the year -300 the priesthood of Memphis had come up with a solution. They simply legislated a new god, Serapis. Serapis was a universal god becoming no longer strictly an Egyptian god.
Imagine that, creating a god. What does that say about godhood. If you can just create a god how much is being a god worth? And what happens to the old gods? There must have been a horde of gods asking: What next?
Well, there was an answer. You simply amalgamate gods with similar functions. The bigger States having the bigger say. So, Dionysus, the Greek putative avatar of Pisces was amalgamated with the chief Egyptian god, Osiris. Osiris in his original form in Egypt couldn’t be exported so he was folded into Dionysus.
In his Egyptian form Osiris was the god of the rise of the Nile. The Nile before all the dams, rose and flooded Egypt in August at the time of the Dog Star. In brief and to the purpose his story is that he had a battle with the evil Set.
Losing he was dismembered into fourteen pieces and distributed around. His wife and sister, Isis, searched and found all the pieces and put them back together while Osiris’s penis had been thrown into the Nile and couldn’t be recovered. Thus in the annual procession before the rise of the Nile celebrating Osiris the body of Osiris was carried along with a wooden penis operated by strings so that it could be raised into an erection and lowered. When erect the magical effect was that the Nile would rise and flood the land again because Osiris’s penis was in the waters. A mighty fine procession but it wouldn’t be the same outside Egypt so Osiris became the Egyptian contribution to the avatar of Pisces.
Now, I’m going to have to take this out of order. The Jewish contribution to Pisces was Jesus. Thus Jesus is a tripartite image. Dionysus/Osiris/Jesus. Now, leaping ahead let us consider the alleged birth of Jesus in the manger. That is pure Zodiacal myth that was manufactured long after the fact when the succession had become clear..
Let us compare the birth of Jesus with the birth of Zeus. Zeus was the avatar of the Age of Aries, his father Cronus was the avatar of the Age of Taurus, and his father was Uranos the avatar of Gemini. The Ages change every two thousand one hundred and fifty years so historically we’re looking at six thousand and odd years between Gemini and the end of Aries..
When Cronus heard that he was to be replaced by one of his children he attempted to evade the problem by eating them when they were born. When Zeus was born on the island of Crete he was immediately hidden in a cave and carefully watched so no signs were visible to Cronus until Zeus was grown and could do battle, and there was a tremendous battle that Zeus ultimately won thus taking his place as the new avatar.
Now at the Age of Pisces the matter was handled thusly. Remember the human mind is now two thousand and odd years matured and what was possible at the beginning of Aries was no longer credible at the end. Times change. And the times were in turmoil. Also bear in mind that this myth of the baby Jesus in the manger was put together many long years after the crucifixion and backdated. That was likely real. A historical Jesus must have existed however it is impossible that he would have been recognized as an infant. Therefor we have a myth of the birth of the Age of Pisces attached to the death of Jesus.
The story goes that two obscure Jewish people with no distinctions, the woman, Mary being not only pregnant but at the point of delivery arrive at the inn. The inn of Nazareth refuses to admit them. Now I don’t know how the reader envisions an inn of a small dusty dump of a town but I see it as a small dirty building of three or four rooms and a dining room. I’m sure the inn was full, no rooms available. This is a normal situation but as Mary is in extreme labor pains at that very moment they are put up in the only unoccupied place available, that of the barn or stable. Mary drops the kid on the spot in the Manger. Lucky her. Now, this isn’t any ordinary kid, it is the child of destiny. How do we know this? Because there are three great kings from the East traveling from afar because they somehow know that a child is being born. How do they know? Because they are ‘following’ the star of the new age of Pisces, which apparently hovers over the stable in Nazareth.
Now, these guys traveled from afar, from Persia. They somehow divined some years previously, one presumes, as would be natural is they were studying the skies, that a baby, who is destined to be the light of the world will be born in a town none of them ever heard of and located they couldn’t know where.
By what magical means did they find the way to where X marked the spot? They followed a star. There is a great debate of which star that was. It isn’t even an inkling of a mystery. The Age of Pisces had dawned and the Kings followed the star of the constellation of Pisces. Worked for some reason.
These kings are portrayed to be in magnificent raiment, wearing gold crowns and carrying gifts the price of which would feed all Israel for at least a year. Now, picture these three kings walking along for months with these gifts in their hands, without a military escort to ward off bandits and here they are at the exact moment Mary drops the Babe. Her last scream of pain hadn’t yet faded away and here come the three kings though the door. This never happened, don’t even think it.
Compare this with the Zeus of two thousand years earlier. Instead of a cave like Zeus, the Babe is born in hovel with a strong aroma of urine and droppings. Zeus had to be protected so the goddesses looked after him. Cronus was not going to eat him! By the way, Mary and Joseph didn’t exist either. I don’t know about the inn.
So, in Jesus’ case word gets around that a Holy Babe has been born who will be the King of Israel. Well, King Herod says ‘We can’t have that.’ So, get this, he orders that every male child in Israel born in the last two years be snuffed hoping to eliminate his successor. Sound familiar. In order to secure the Babe from immolation he was sent out of the country. To where? Where else than Egypt, that weak reed that the Jews always relied on.
So, some many decades later when Jesus wins election to be the avatar of Pisces this myth was invented and affixed to him. The Babe never existed but in +33 a historical Jesus does and he has offended the elders of Israel. Who was Jesus and where did he come from? Let’s go back to Egypt.
Remember the Memphite Egyptian priest? History sort of deprives the ancients of personality but they were real people dealing with real problems. They weren’t stick figures. The City of the Sun was near Memphis. Real people devised the City of the Sun as a utopia while the longing for a utopia lived past the end of that dream. Euhemerus wrote his utopia The Sacred City in this era. The fact that the Memphites could invent a god out of whole cloth and impose him on the population is a sign that the gods were no longer taken viscerally but more intellectually. Jesus himself would be a new god, a manmade god as it were.
Alexander’s conquest heralded the need for a universal god for at least the East Med as their notions of geography were somewhat limited. But there was a problem that existed and had existed for a long time and that was the exclusiveness of the Jews. In our time, of course, we have been taught to revere the Jews on their own terms, but this was not the case in ancient times. The Jews were a stumbling block on all terms, they refused to cooperate with anyone.
The Eastern world accepted the conquest of Alexander and found Greek customs, attitudes and thinking amenable except for the Jews. Well, the Sadducee faction adopted Greek manners and customs but not the Pharisees. The Maccabees, more as bandits than a national army, fought the Syrian Greeks, to whom they were subject, tooth and nail and for a brief period were independent and then the Romans came and brought the Empire with them.
In Egypt they were a minority, a numerous minority, but unable to dominate, in Jerusalem they were the dominant people and not only that but within the Empire they were located in every city as a relatively large minority. The Jerusalemites levied a 10% tithe on every Jew in the Empire from Rome to Jerusalem. The gold flowed East and the Jewish province became very wealthy. So wealthy that it thought it could challenge the Empire…and win.
The problem then was what to do with the Jews. No anti-Semitism, just a stubborn block of people who wouldn’t submit to the standard but couldn’t impose their rule on the Empire.
In Alexandria and Egypt means of persuasion were sought. It was probably conceived that the main problem with the Jews was that they believed themselves a separate and superior people who their god had made his own people to the exclusion of all others. In their vision of creation their god had created the peoples of the world. Having done so he examined them all and found the Jews worthy and all others not. So he made them his own special people, not human, but somewhere between the angels and the rest of mankind. Well and good but their belief was shared only by themselves, as, indeed, it was only their fancy.
Therefore the attempt would be made to negate their exclusivity. Hence, the Memphites created the Serapis and sent him downriver to Alexandria and said something like, ‘Try this.’
The idea was to preach Egyptian values to the Jews wrapped in the bright wrapping of an individual. Now, remember, at this time the overarching astrological universal religion was changing Ages. So two things where going on. Hence, an agent was necessary to carry the word to the Jews, that the god, their god, had changed his mind and no longer needed a special people. After Jesus’ ministry it was phrased that God so loved the world at large that he sent his only begotten son to redeem not only the Jews but all the peoples of the world.
Now, who was Jesus? Forget the Babe in the Manger, that is a pure myth created later to explain the supposed divinity of Jesus while also appointing him the avatar of the Piscean Age. Sort of quid pro quo. None of this happened all at one time but was spread out over a few hundreds of years. It did not catch on easily or rapidly.
Jesus himself must have been trained in Egypt because his program was wholly Egyptian and hence was an abomination to the priesthood of Jerusalem. Was Jesus Jewish? There is no way to tell. He educated and reared in Egypt. He might as easily have been an ethnic Greek or Egyptian. There is no way to tell. At the very most he is termed Jewish because that was his ministry. The Pharisees wasted no time in giving evidence of their displeasure labelling Jesus as a revolutionary, Which he was, by the way.
So, Jesus must have been educated and trained in Egypt, hence he would have had Alexandrine appearance and manners, perhaps an Alexandrine accent. If you read biblical history there were lots of saviors running around. Jesus was only one but as it turned out he had the best organization.
I can only speculate that the Memphite religion of Serapis was organized as nearly all religions are and that they had a corps of missionaries to spread their good word, and that was that god so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son to redeem it, or at least that is what the Jews did in Jerusalem. Other missionaries would have gone to other locations with whatever success they had.
Jesus would have been recognized immediately as a Serapian missionary. His whole program was Egyptian while being by its very nature antagonistic to Jewish beliefs. Remember that these people were just as leery of innovators as today. The execution of Jesus solved no problem for the Pharisees, the ruling party in Jerusalem. The reason being that a very effective organization survived. The Pharisees persecuted them to death.
Paul rescued them by coming up with a plan to convert the goyim to the Minian religion, that is the Jewish predecessor to Christianity. It was a good plan but it would only work when Jews were in the majority. When the goyim became more numerous power naturally shifted to them and members of the dominant goy majority then took control. The role of messiah and avatar of the Age of Pisces had to be conceded to the Jewish faction for the good of all, but the Greek Dionysus and the Egyptian Osiris had to be recognized and they were combined with Jesus under the title of the Christ, to form the Christian religion. Jesus, the Christ. Jewish/Greek/Egyptian. The Christ being the Greek anointed or awaited one. That must have taken a couple hundred years to work out. The church became ecumenical at that point but the Jews remained outside the Catholic or Universal Church remaining as they were previously an irritant.
Nothing had been settled, only changed. The future would be just as troubled as the past had been.
One can’t expect all the members of a society to be convinced but the Society will move ahead on this basis.
I, Dynamo 