Just You, Babe

Initially the earth was first formed out of molten lava and eventually cooled to form a crust and then the first life forms began to appear followed by photosynthetic life and eventually more complex multicellular life. The great apes didn’t arrive until about 20 million years ago. The first man-apes, Homo Erectus Erectus were followed by Neanderthal man who made his entrance about 100,000 years back. Homo sapiens didn’t show up on the scene until about 38,000 years ago …..

….. and there was still no religion.

Before the Egyptians named their country Kemet, meaning Black Land, and regarded mummification as essential to the person’s continued existence after death; before Islamic Art held a ban on depicting life forms for fear of rivalling God’s creative power; before Africans made use of divination as a reliable method of obtaining answers to particular questions; before the ancient lore of Norse mythology gave us Freyr, Loki, Odin and Thor; before the Book of Isaiah announced the Good News of the Jews restoration after the Babylonian exile; before Yahweh was worshipped South of the Dead Sea; before the multitude of Hindu religious movements spread throughout the Indian subcontinent; before Ramakrishna, before Aztecs sacrificed captured warriors to feed the sun; before Mahatma Gandhi was influenced by the Jain doctrines; before the perfumed flowers became our sisters; before the Maui fished up islands and stole fire; before the prophet Muhammad was born in the West Arabian trading town of Mecca; before the Sikh ritual of Gurdwara, where sweetened water is stirred with a two-edged sword and administered by five devout Sikhs; before Marco Polo, Alexander the Great and Vasco De Gama; before Salvation Army brass bands marched down the high street; before the karma of life-after-life; before Gods and Spirits first entered the Native American sweat lodge after the sharing of the sacred pipe; before heresy was regarded as treason by the Roman Catholic church; before hostility by slave owners in French and Spanish colonies hindered the missionaries; before the Beat Generation; before older magical traditions were integrated with Hermetism, Kabbalah and Neoplatonism; before the magician could attune himself to the great universe and thence to celestial and divine powers; before the White Eagle lodge based their doctrine on a gentle but profound philosophy; before the Quran condemned wine drinking; before the Sun Dance of the Blackfoot and Apache Plains Indians; before Mist and Dew became the daughters of the Rain God Ba’al; before Hare Krishna jangled their bells and worshipped Vishnu; before the Hebrew Bible was known as the Old Testament; before the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles of the New Testament; before Lowry painted kids who had nowt on their feet; before Voodoo arrived on West African slave plantations; before the calendar stone of Mesoamerican religions; before jaguar claws held human hearts; before Tibetan refugees established Buddhist monasteries in India and Northern Afghanistan; before Egyptian Gods could manifest themselves in sacred species of animal or dwell in cult statues; before Chief Seattle stated “I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo;” before the brainwashing of cults in North America; before it was realised that most religions began as cults; before anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism; before the 12 chosen followers of Jesus witnessed His resurrection; before colloquial and Classical Arabic existed in the vernacular varieties and was written right to left; before the sacred ceremonies of the Australian Aborigine; before Pan, God of the forest and rustic music, was used to represent paganism; before sin in Islam was named khaṭīʾa, meaning a wilful transgression which is to be punished in the afterlife; before the Hindu monkey-God could wield rocks, remove mountains, fly in the air and seize the clouds; before Halakhah; before John the Baptist; before Nag Hammadi; before the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn; before Arab merchants with their long caravans of camels traded Indian spices, hemp, opium and Chinese silk along the Incense Route; before the Rosicrucians studied Alchemy; before White Buffalo Calf Woman came to be associated with the Virgin Mary by the Lakota; before the Earth-Mother cults of the Aztecs; before statues of the ferocious Goddess Coatlicue were depicted with sacrificed hearts, skulls, hands, claws and giant snake heads; before the Unification of World Christianity; before members of Voodoo congregations entered trance and were possessed by the invited Loa spirits; before the Christian and Muslim people south of the Sahara articulated their faiths by interacting with each other; before pain and fear were the spices that made you cry; before Haile Selassie was the living God; before Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X built up The Nation of Islam amongst black Muslims in the United States; before Christians substituted Christmas for the Pagan festival of the Winter Solstice originally held on December 25th; before the theories of Karl Marx were aligned with the development of communism; before Maria was no longer an asset to the abbey; before the Spanish discovered Paella; before devils could be found in Islamic, Hindu, Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist religions (to name a few); before Laksmi, Goddess of wealth and good fortune, is invited into the house during the Hindu Festival of the Lights in India; before the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone; before Moses could make gold from base metal; before Sikhs banned Muslim Halal meat; before Onan spilled his seed on the ground; before Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury; before King Arthur and the Round Table lived in Camelot with dragons, wizards and sorcerers; before the Celts established themselves as nomadic warrior tribes and before Druids established themselves as philosopher-priests; before Aleister Crowley was rumoured to be involved in drugs, orgies, magical ceremonies and Witchcraft; before the presence of evil was attributed to the activities of malignant spirits or demons; before Moses delivered the Jews from slavery in Egypt; before the Gelugpa established the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader; before Islamic tradition stated that “The ink of a scholar was more holy than the blood of a martyr;” before the God, Apollo, spoke through the Delphic Oracle; before Xenophanes described God as a single, disembodied mind; before the longhouse ceremonies of corn; before the Christian ceremony of harvest; before Spanish, French, Portuguese, African, Portuguese African, Italian and Native American cuisine was blended in Louisiana to form Cajun food; before K'ung Fu-Tzu - better known as Confucius - was born; before Blue Mink took that great big melting pot and kept it stirring for a hundred years or more; before salvation for Rastafarians was an earthly idea, rather than heavenly; before Christians took the image of Pan of the Forest to represent Satan; before Satan killed ten people in the Bible; before women in Muslim harems were instructed by the Qur’an to “draw their veils over their bosoms, and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands or fathers or husband’s fathers, or their sons or their husband’s sons or their brothers or their brother’s sons or sister’s sons, or their women or their slaves, or male attendants who lack vigour and children who know naught of women’s nakedness;” before busty young women bared their breasts for strings of coloured beads at Mardi Gras; before the Romani people faced discrimination because of their dark skin; before the six spheres of existence in the sensual world were listed in ascending order as hells, ghosts, animals, human beings, lower Gods and higher Gods; before Muhammad Ali knocked out Sonny Liston; before Buddhist hells resembled Roman Catholic purgatory; before artists, writers, journalists and musicians were colloquially known as Bohemians, and before that name later came to mean wanderers, adventurers and Gypsies; before Muhammad was succeeded by four ‘rightly guided caliphs’ who ruled from Medina; before much of the Islamic world came under the control of colonial powers such as Britain and France; before the Masai Mara had two main manifestations of Ngai (God) - Ngai Narok which is good and benevolent and is black, and Ngai Na-nyokie, which is angry and red; before Christian doctrine shifted from the rejection of belief in witches to an acceptance of their existence and powers, and then to eventually identifying witchcraft as satanic; before somewhere between 45,000 and 100,000 women were executed in Witch trails across Europe and the American colonies; before sorcerers in Anglo-Saxon England were known by the name Wicca; before Wise People in Medieval times were known as Wiccen; before the name Wickens was changed to Wiggins at the end of the 16th century; before the Ottoman empire extended through the Middle East to the Persian Gulf; before Shiites regarded the individual body as one’s own mosque; before the first female reform rabbi was ordained; before the Islamic view of the day of reckoning was observed to be remarkably similar to the Christian day of judgment; before the spirits of the invisible forces of life return to the Hopi Indians at the winter solstice ceremony; before that tired old man with hair like snow told northern folk it was time to go; before the good Lord came and mopped his brow; before Romani Gypsy spiritualism was influenced by the mysticism of the ancient Vedic cultures; before the Romani believed in a benevolent deity called O Devel, and a devil called, 0 Beng; before Chief Seattle asked President Roosevelt “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?” before the mystical nature of the Jewish Kabbalah was developed; before Lao-Tzu was regarded as the inspiration for Taoism; before the phallic emblem of the Hindu deity Shiva; before the Knights Templar flooded the Middle East with Jewish and Muslim blood; before the trickster Norse God Loki became the father of the monstrous wolf Fenrir; before Fenrir bit off the right hand of the God Týr; before the mountain-dwelling dwarfs made the magical ribbon Gleipnir to hold the mighty Fenrir; before the rich oral tradition of the Roma culture; before Jews, homosexuals and the Roma were targeted by the Nazi regime in World War II; before the Lord’s Prayer was derived from the gospel of Matthew; before Plato explained his Theory of Forms; before the magic of popular folk-religion; before all the major religions developed moral codes covering the issues of sexuality and ethics; before Islamic masters had sexual rights over female slaves; before God, in Deuteronomy, allowed the forceful taking of captive wives during war; before Al-Qaeda crawled out of their caves in Eastern Afghanistan to use the violent form of Jihad as an excuse to spread terror amongst civilian populations; before ISIS; before God commanded, again in Deuteronomy, that a woman accused of not being a virgin at the time of marriage is to be stoned to death, and that death is also to be the penalty for adultery; before Allah, in the Qur’an, stated that male and female adulterers must be flogged 100 times; before the so-called Islamic Law of Iran prescribed punishment for extramarital sex to be stoning to death (despite the fact that it has not been prescribed anywhere in the Qur'an); before Nimrod built the Tower of Babel; before the Gitanos migrating from Rajasthan, in northwest India, to Spain between the 9th and 14th centuries brought with them tambourines, bells, and wooden castanets, and intermingled musically with the Moors to produce the unique art form of music and dance known as flamenco; before the medley of colours that spices offer food had mystical meanings to the Arabs; before the Masai Mara version of heaven was a land of rich pastures and many cattle; before the hallucinogenic drug Peyote was legalized in some American states; before the Vision Quest; before the Jats, once powerful rulers over the vast plains of Central India, became the proud peasant-warrior caste they are today; before shepherds played the pan flute; before the life-force which vibrates through the universe was known as Prana; before Yoga was developed to free the superior, conscious element in a person from involvement with the inferior material world; before Yin and Yang; before the Hindu sage, Valmiki, penned the epic poem Rāmāyaṇa; before L. Ron Hubbard and the development of Scientology; before the beautiful, devotional hymns of the Sikhs were written; before lightening flashed from the Thunderbird’s eyes at the top of a totem pole; before Aristotle's philosophy became the foundation of Islamic doctrine; before St. Thomas Aquinas successfully made the work of the Islamic philosopher, Averroes, acceptable in Christian doctrines; before George Harrison sang My Sweet Lord (Krishna Krishna); before Odin built Valhalla to house warriors who die bravely in battle; before Muhammad received the special revelation that allowed him to marry more widely than the four wives limited by Islam; before African Spirit Dances; before the Sun God, Re, was worshipped in ancient Egypt; before the Aboriginal peoples of Australia became connected to their ancestors through The Dreaming; before totemic spirits bound each Aboriginal group together; before Puerto Ricans carrying crates of beer piled out of their homes in Brooklyn and Queens and the High Bronx to scream for the other guy; before initiation of boys at puberty; before the Canaanites belief in the God Baal; before Pythagoras taught that the soul never dies but is destined to a cycle of rebirths; Before Pythagoras teachings influenced the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and, through them, Western philosophy, before the Christians assumed that the body and soul were separate; before the soul became the central concept in all branches of Hinduism; before the Muslims viewed the soul as the psyche (or the psyche as the soul) requiring it to be altered so that it can become a ‘soul at peace’; before Thomas Aquinas held that the soul was made for the body but could temporarily exist apart from it; before Muslims believed that the soul gives human beings a deep spiritual dignity elevating them above animals and even angels; before the Sufi Mystics believed the soul to be the centre of being within any human life; before Buddha taught that what we call ego, self, soul, personality, etc. are merely conventional terms that do not refer to any real, independent entity; before the Valkyries rode out with the Wild Hunt to collect warriors killed in battle; before we viewed a rainbow as an illusion caused by certain rays of light and drops of water; before the youth culture of Great Britain woke up amidst a hangover of empty beer cans, stale cigarette smoke and rock ‘n’ roll; before you danced around your bones on the edge of extinction; and before children tried to grasp the rainbow …..

Before all of this …….

There was nothing.

There was no faith, no belief, no acceptance, no conviction, no hope, no creed, no dogma, no doctrine, no gospel, no certainty, no truth …..

Just you, babe.

Remember that.