How Dark is the Con of the Son of Man?

HOW DARK IS THE CON OF THE SON OF MAN

Half my life ago,
I remember
Reading a book by Nikos Kazantzakis, called
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST;
And I vividly recall
After it was made into a movie,
The long lines of Christians
Picketing movie theaters,
Chanting and holding signs,
Calling Martin Scorsese
The Anti-Christ.

In the great scheme of things
It was time for that book.
We all found ourselves rethinking
The dogma and hoary traditions,
The ecclesiastical mandates and edicts
We had patterned many
Of our lives after,
And suffered for;
Some more than others.

Jesus said,
“A prophet is the one who
When everyone else despairs,
Hopes,
And when everyone else hopes,
He despairs.
You will ask me why.
It’s because he had mastered
The great secret;
That the wheel turns.”

“What are dreams, Rabbi?”
She asked softly,
“What are they made of?
Who sends them?”


Jesus responded to her
Just as softly,
“They are neither angels or devils.
When Lucifer started his revolt
Against God,
Dreams could not make up their mind
Which side to take.
So God hurled them down
Into the inferno of sleep.”

Kazantzakis postulated further
That most of the disciples were weak,
Other-directed and vacillating.
Only Judas had the strength
To confront the Master,
And the intellect
To let love unclench
His angry fists;
And to let his heavy heart
Take him where his mind
Did not want to travel –
To go up to the Pharisees,
To force himself
To actually bow before
Their posturing arrogance,
Even though
He certainly would have preferred
To race among the robed throngs,
Letting his long knife
Cut dozens of perfumed throats;
Then to still have the will
And the courage
To bring back the strutting Temple Guards
To the Garden of Gethsemane
Where Jesus waited,
Shivering with his very human fears
While the other apostles slept.

One last time
The redbeard’s lips touched
Those of the Rabbi;
One last time
Their eyes would meet
As Jesus was being bound and dragged off
For his fearsome date
With thorns and scourging.

Judas Iscariot
Remembered when he roamed the mountains
With Barabbas
And the other rebels,
The Zealots.
What an atmosphere
Of ferocity and freedom.
What a splendid leader of cutthroats
Was the God of Isreal.
That was the kind of leader
He needed;
Not this clairvoyant
Who was scared of blood,
And constantly shouted,
“Love! Love! Love!”

When Barabbas struck Jesus
In the face
During their first encounter,
Just before Judas intervened,
Restraining his revolutionary compeer,
Barabbas asked,
“What is this man?
This offering of the other cheek?
Only an angel could do that,
Or a dog.”

John, called the Baptist,
After he pressed Jesus
Beneath the muddy waters of the river,
And then hauled him up
So that he could embark upon the grand journey,
The great adventure, but
Only after he went
Out onto the desert
Alone,
To confront God, or Lucifer,
Or whatever, or whomever he would find,
To still the strident voices of the imps inside.

The tall lanky hirsute prophet
Whispered to Jesus,
“Take care.
The desert is full of sweet voices
And death.”

But John was unsure
That this pale slender youth,
This passionate worker of wood,
Could actually shoulder
His spiritual contract.
“How can you love the unjust,
The infamous
And the shameless? I say
Strike!
One of man’s greatest obligations
Is his anger.”

“Anger?”
Replied Jesus,
“Are we not all brothers?”

A mere decade ago
I lay supplicant
In my recliner
Meditating within
My basement,
Facing a portal,
Struggling against the process
That was disabling me;
Perhaps even
Killing me.

Dynamically,
I had been stopped
In my tracks,
Struck down, dazed, numb, left
Very angry,
For in my mind,
Such as it was in those times,
I had given up freedom and mobility.
I felt held fast,
In the deadly grip of some invisible power,
And I was made to have to consider
And confront
My own mortality;
To conjure up
The Grand Vicar,
The Death head itself,
And conduct a dialogue.

I was relatively sure
I had prepared
For that confrontation;
I had studied my Casey,
Seen my UFO,
Read Seth, Ramtha, and Kryon,
Connected a few
Of the cosmic dots;
Yes, I was ready
To peek through the veil,
And to consider
My next transition.

There in my basement,
The 8’ walls began
To grow taller,
Rising up brown like sea mounts
From the spectral magma
Beneath my house.

My essence,
My point of view
Rose up high
To see orange-amber parapets,
Sporting long yellow banners
And streamers,
Decorated with swords
And the massive heads
Of lions, dragons, and bears;
And then back
To the chair.

And from the floor
I could look up and see
Small arched windows
Up about 30’ above,
And smoke,
Or perhaps thick gray-white mist
Billowing and rolling into one
Of the windows
Like a fat spiritual snake.
That thing of smoke
Gathered girth
And length
As it slithered lazily
In the air
From north to south,
From my right
To directly above my head,
Holding
South by southwest,
Hovering at the maw
Of my portal.

Something touched my left hand, and instantly
I became “aware” of a visitor,
About my height, but
All silver and translucent,
All shape with no particular features,
Like the Silver Surfer
From my old collection
Of Marvel comics.

The figure moved swiftly,
A mach blur as it
Swung around in front of me,
Grasping my right hand
As well,
Our hands being interchangeable,
And I was not
Afraid
Of this marvelous apparition, for somehow
It seemed familiar.

In a heartbeat
The silver figure thrust itself directly
At my chest
And entered,
Or re-entered
The husk that I am.
My chest heaved just once,
And a tiny audible sigh
Left my fevered lips.

Was it a prodigal entity,
Returning,
Called back to duty, perhaps
My higher self
That may have vacated
My diseased body
Earlier,
And now was back
To resume what was left
Of my little life?

Before
I could fully surmise
The completeness
Of my situation,
I caught a glimpse
Of that strange smoke
That had gathered
Fat and feathered
Directly over me.

WHAM!
In half a blink
Twin bolts
Of thick white light
Arced jagged and true
Into my
Eyes, chakras, heart
And every goddamned pore of me.

My sad body lifted up
Like someone had blown
On a feather,
But no, more intense, like
The body of a convict twitching
Directly after it received
A massive jolt
From old Sparkie,
The chair Electric.

Jesus Christ,
I thought
I cried,
What the hell—
Then
WHAM! WHAM!
Twice more
The spiritual bolts
Of purist white light
Burst forth
From the cloud
And penetrated my body.

Was I dying?
Was this the sparks
And spectral fireworks
Of transition?
“No “,
That gentle voice
Inside
Said,
“You are certainly not dying.
You are
Living “.

Later, after contemplation
And study,
I came to call those mute
White bolts of energy
By their true name;
Kundalini;
The kiss of the Dragon.

The doorway had
Yawned open
And I passed through,
But stayed squarely
On the mortal side.
Something akin
To a classic epiphany
Had transpired,
Without Magi,
Without farm animals;
It was my own
Personal
Twelfth Night.
Even I
Could figure out
I still had more to learn, more to do,
And more to teach.


Nearly a decade ago,
Enter three wise men;
Michael Baigent,
Richard Leigh, and
Henry Lincoln.
After five years of exhaustive
“Research“,
They published a “non-fiction” book.
They called it
HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL.


It certainly did read
Like several kinds of accurate documentation
And super-studious research.
It postulated four burning questions,
And couched them in reams of “factual” rhetoric.

Is it possible,
They inquired,
That Jesus did not die
On the cross?

Is it possible that Jesus
Married Mary Magdalene
And fathered a daughter,
They named Sarah?

Is it possible that Jesus
Went into hiding,
While his family fled
To Gaul?
[Ironically the Latin name
For Gaul is
Gallia.]

Is it also possible
That Sarah married
Into the local population,
And began the genetic formation
Of first the Morovee clan,
Which led to the creation
Of the Merovingian Dynasty;
Who, it is reputed
Were the actual and rightful founders
Of the Medieval State of
Francia?

The triumvirate of ersatz scholars
Further presupposed
That there once existed this obscure French priest,
Berenger Sauriere,
Who while snooping about
An abandoned church
In the village of Rennes-le-Chateau,
Uncovered “ancient documents”
In the cob-webbed catacombs.

Being a dutiful Catholic,
He showed these “documents”
To his French Bishop,
Who in turn dispatched
The priest to Paris
To consult with “experts”,
To verify the validity
Of said “documents”.

As the story goes,
Sauriere became mysteriously
Wealthy,
As did his parish,
And those “documents”
Went to ground again,
And disappeared.

The “documents” revealed,
It was reputed,
That in 1099
During the First Crusades,
Some Knights Templar,
While in the holy land,
Found some kind of proof,
Scrolls, parchments, and the like;
Written proof
That Mary of Magdala
Was in fact
Wife to Jesus,
And cornerstone
Of the true church,
And that Merovingian descendants
Have lived among us
Secretly,
Mantling the JC bloodline.

There was speculation
That several Templars
Boldly approached the Vatican
With their findings,
Their new truth,
And per papal decree,
They were bought off
With fabulous wealth, extravagant favors,
And political power;
In return for their guaranteed
Silence.

But their silence
Was sealed in legend,
As they formed
The Brotherhood of Zion,
Later becoming
The Priory of Scion,
Who accepted the responsibility
Of being the sacred and sanctified
Protectors
Of Mary’s legacy, her truth,
And of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene,
And of the Holy Grail,
Her sarcophagus.

Later it was discovered,
Or revealed
That past Grand Masters
Of the Priory of Scion
Included
Leonardo Da Vinci, Gallileo, Boticelli, Issac Newton, Victor Hugo,
And Jean Cocteau;
Quite a rogue’s gallery.

HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL
Was selling well
Until one day someone
Discovered
That in 1956
A Frenchman named
Pierre Plantard
Had created the Prieure de Sion,
And had completely fabricated
All of the fabulous data
Regarding the Knights Templar,
The discoveries during the Crusades,
The documents,
And the “secret”.

Although some parts
Of this fabulous tale
Still resonated with many of us.
Mary of Magdala
Must have occupied
A place of reference
And affection,
With Jesus
And in history;
For just the mere suggestion had
Set off lights and bells
Within the cortexial catacombs
And buried memories
Of our personal veil of forgetfulness.

But most people quit
Purchasing the book,
Accepting the debunk.
Time passed,
And many folks forgot;
Reinforcing that old adage
That if one tells a lie
Long enough,
It will pass itself off
As the truth.
Politicians prove this
Daily.

Enter an author
Named Dan Brown,
He of several fanciful novels,
Like ANGELS AND DEMONS,
And THE SOLOMON KEY.
He pored over
The bogus data within
HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL,
Extracting its essence
Like a clever vampire does
To a maiden;
Spiced up the story
With murder, intrigue, anagrams, pedantic parallels,
And intellectual double-speak;
And he published
THE DA VINCI CODE.

A horde of fresh minds
Were aroused and alerted,
And tongues began wagging.
My God, sir,
It was now “time”
For this book,
Time
For more awakenings; the book
Was popular, was necessary,
Not precisely for what “proofs” it offered,
But more exactly for
What questions it raised.
It reset the fires
Of controversy,
Seemed to compel
People to question
All the archaic articles
Of faith;
And teeming millions
Of them had not
Read the debunking data on
HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL.
So, God help us,
It was dusted off
And began to sell briskly once more.

Dan Brown is a clever writer.
His protagonist, Robert Langdon,
Was a symbologist,
Capable of disciphering
The most turgid of anagrams.
Brown dug deep,
Polishing off the Gnostic mythos and gospels,
And adding much of their symbolism
To his plot of murder and intrigue.

His heroine, Sophie Neveu,
Was a trained cryptographer,
Who cut her teeth on anagrams,
As a child being raised
By the Louvre’s head curator,
Jacques Sauniere,
Fictional kin to the maverick priest,
Berenger Sauniere;
As the plot thickens.

Sophie was fictional kin
To Sophia, goddess and
Symbol for Wisdom,
Who from the Gnostic perspective
Was the primary culprit
For creating chaos and disorder
In our tiny universe;
As she descended hungrily
To this plane of existence,
Even conjuring up Jehovah
To supervise her new brood;
And further
Becoming the parallel myth
Needed for the Old Testament
Tale of Eve,
The fall,
And original sin.

So Brown’s Sophie
Was also the new Eve,
N”eve”u, you see,
And as we later discover,
She was the heir apparent,
With holy blood connected securely
Back 25 generations or so
To those messiahanic corpuscles,
The real deal;
Merovingian DNA.

That rascal,
Sir Leigh Teabing
Was yet another anagram
For all three authors
Of HOLY BLOOD.

Brown’s little book
Sold millions upon millions
Of copies,
And many Christians called Brown
Blasphemer, heretic, distorter, liar, con man,
Master of smoke and mirrors, and
Slight of hand artist;
Some of which, of course,
He was proud to be.

Theologists, historians, essayists,
And even Joe Public
Dug deep into research,
And they raised their hoarse voices
Together,
Like crackling thunder,
Like the hiss of very distant lightening,
Saying:

The Jesus papers,
Those sacred documents mentioned,
Do not exist,
And never existed.
During Constantine’s reign,
The Council of Nicea
Did not settle on the “specifics”
Of the Christian canon,
Did not dictate or decide
What were to become the 20+
Gospels of the New Testament.

The Priory of Scion,
As described,
Was a total fantasy, a distorted,
Possibly even perverted pipedream
Of a Frenchman who craved
Political power;
So much so
That he related himself
To the Merovingians,
And twisted the long extinct
Brotherhood of Zion
To meet his personal ambitions,
So that he too
Could claim kinship to Jesus Christ;
And then threw in the dashing Knights Templar
For good measure,
And promulgated those falsehoods
About fabulous wealth, conspiracy, papal tributes, murder
And political machinations.

Opus Dei
Does in fact
Exist,
And they do flagellate
Themselves
(gently),
But 80% of their membership
Are lay persons,
And they are just too conservative,
And politically savvy
To be, or become
The sinister society Brown
Imagined.

Dan Brown,
From on high,
Atop his hillocks of cash, said,
“Hey, what’s all the fuss?
My book is a fiction,
And as such
My “historical data”
Had absolutely no obligation
To be accurate!”

In the meantime,
The book is Topic One
Around every water cooler and pub
In God’s country,
And Dan Brown,
Like J.K. Rowling before him,
Has become literary royalty,
And wealthy beyond imagination.

Enter Ron Howard,
Mainline Hollywood Director;
A damned good one,
Whose ambitious eyes saw all, read all, and
Counted box office receipts
Long before the first
Camera cranked,
And the first actor
Was cast.

Howard made his preparations
Meticulously,
Shooting the film in Europe,
In England and France, and even in
The Louvre itself,
And then he went about
Casting the movie excellently.

Tom Hanks played protagonist Robert Langdon;
Played him thin
And long-haired,
Infusing that shallowly-written character
With Oscar-winning humanity;
When he wasn’t being
The clever pedant
Or a Harrison Ford clone,
Driving backwards
In a smart car at night
Along sidewalks and down staircases,
Eluding the misguided vicious gendarmes,
Constantly running, not walking, as he led,
Was led by, and chased
Sophie.

I don’t think any other living actor
Could have portrayed Langdon
Better, it’s just
That there wasn’t much there
To play.



Audrey Tautou played Sophie Neveu;
Played her bright and beautiful,
And fashion-conscious.
As an actress,
She almost convinced us
To buy into Brown’s preposterous proposition
That Sophie could have disowned
Her grandfather, Sauriere,
Because one dark night in the rain,
She peeked in on a hooded
Priory of Scion ritual.

Brown left her a thin literary legacy,
All flashing eyes
And cleverness,
But empty of emotion, of heart.
Yes, her back story
Was fascinating,
Compromising most of the actual intrigue
Within the twisted plot,
And although her witnessed epiphany
Was spectacularly speculative,
As she assumed the mantle
Of Ms. Messiah;
Still something was missing;
Perhaps passion, that steamy stuff,
Rather than her
Childish petulance;
Maybe romance,
Rather than her arrogant naivte.

Sir Ian McKellen played Sir Leigh Teabing,
The crippled genius,
Hunter of the Holy Grail;
Played him bloody clever,
Part Sherlock Holmes,
Part Morierity;
Playing all sides
Against the middle,
Spinning intrigues within intrigues,
Spouting Brown’s revisionist history
One moment,
And holding a gun on people
The next.


McKellen was all twinkle and intellect,
Masking the malevolence,
The megalomania that is always set aside
For the worst of villains.
His just desserts,
Within Brown’s universe,
Was incarceration, shackles,
And disgrace;
Never the find
The Grail,
Never to know
The “Truth”
According to the Gospel
Of Daniel.

Alfred Molina, an extraordinary actor
With a thousand faces, truly
Our modern Lon Chaney,
Played Bishop Aringarosa,
Monarch of Opius Dei,
Mesmer and Machiavelli mixed,
Dispatching Silas the Albino
Out into an unsuspecting world,
To deliver death,
To seek information
And to chase the Grail
Like an idiot child chases
A fleet butterfly, always
Always fluttering its beautiful wings
Just beyond his bloody white grasp.
We find that Aringarosa was not
Master though;
That would be the Teacher,
The puppetmaster,
Who had attached invisible strings
To all of them;
So many
That it was inevitable
They would tangle together
And trip him up.

Paul Bettany played Silas,
The murderous monk,
The ghost who walked,
Enforcer for Opus Dei;
Who killed without mercy
Or any form of remorse
Because he was on a mission
From God;
Or so he thought,
Miles deep in his delusions, while
Scourging himself
To a bloody pulp, and being a good
Hand puppet for Aringarosa;
Never blinking, never wavering,
Ready to sacrifice himself
At every turn,
Because sadly, mistakenly
He thought he knew
What Jesus would do;
As he constantly recreated
His Savior’s pain;
Spattering his own flesh
And steaming blood
Into the heavy air,
Like dirty cottonwood fluff
Settling wet and silent
In the deepest shadows.

Jean Reno, who will always
Be Leon, the cleaner, from
THE PROFESSIONAL
To me,
Played Inspector Bezu Fache.
Actually when I read the book
I envisioned the bull neck
And slicked-back hair
Of Gerard Depardieu
In the part.
But Reno was fine,
Giving it the menace and bluster
Needed
To drag us along
On his fool’s errand;
Just another dupe
For dark Opius Dei;
But, no, Brown gave him a hardened
Cop’s heart,
And allowed him to be the one
That ran down and shackled Leigh Teabing,
And during the final gasp
Of plotting,
He was able to look Aringarosa
In the eye too,
And hotly reject the role he was cast in.

All’s well
That ends well;
Or so someone famous said,
As we viewers revisit that ancient church
At the village of Rennes-le-Chateau,
And join in
The Merovingian gathering,
Welcoming Sophie
Back
Into the fold.


Langon lectures her
One last time,
About her human doubts,
Endeavoring to believe
That she could possibly be
The great, great, greatest granddaughter
Of Jesus of Nazareth,
Who may have survived crucifixion,
Only to disappear
Into the bowels of Bethlehem
All those terrible centuries before;
Or had he?

All this
Left me licking my lips,
Thirsting for more information,
More knowledge;
For another morsel
Or the Grand Puzzle
That is our lives
On this glorious plane
Of existence;
Sending me with wicked wings
On my swollen feet, up
Three long flights
Of divine dusty steps,
Within the Pythian Temple
In Tacoma,
To breathe 100 year-old air,
Inside the mystical home
Or the archaic Knights of Pythias;
Created by Abe Lincoln
To become a blue collar version
Of the Freemasons;
Linking gently to
The Olympian games at Delphi,
And the Oracle of Apollo.


I stood expectant
In the cavernous sanctuary,
Huge and domed,
Rising three stories above my head,
Paneled with the darkest of hardwoods,
And festooned with fake frescos
Of the exploits
Of Damian and Pythias;
Their shadowed faces
Very high up
In the half-darkness.

I came to sit the long day
With a handful of kindred spirits,
For the fellowship
And the study,
To project our tiny essence
BEYOND THE DA VINCI CODE;
To look lovingly at the real Gnostics,
In all their genericness;
With their gospels and documents.

Soon Brown’s Big Lie,
Carefully built
Upon HOLY BLOOD’s bigger
Fabrication,
Was all exposed,
Laid completely bare,
Allowed to shrivel
In the purist
Of white light.

I emerged rejuvenate,
Forgiving of Dan Brown’s impudence,
His playfulness,
His phenomenal success
And recent wealth.

For after all
His book has created
A whirlwind
That has blown out
The cobwebs of complacence,
And has forced plain folks
Like us,
To look to the heavens,
And question our particular place
In the Cosmos,
And what we know,
And what we’ve learned
And what we still need
To study.

I now feel like
Carl Jung,
Who in the late 1950’s
Was asked,
“Sir, do you believe in God?”
After a long moment
He peered out from beneath
His octogenarian snowy brows
And replied,
“No sir, I do not believe,
I know.”

Gnosis
Is what it is all about,
You see? And
The most direct solution
To all the problems
Of this universe
Is the simplest.
It shines from your eyes
And from your heart,
Where All That Is
Resides;
For the answers,
My friends,
Are not blowing in the wind.
Hell no,
The answers
Are an inside job.

Glenn Buttkus 2006