Path: kudonet.com!kudo20!tyagi From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (boboroshi/CoE) Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.satanism,alt.pagan,alt.mythology,talk.religion.misc,talk.politics.animals,talk.euthanasia,alt.consumers,alt.cows,alt.activism Subject: The Frontier Mentality, Backdrop for American Satanism Date: 14 Mar 1997 05:26:46 -0800 Organization: KudoNet On-Line Services Lines: 202 Sender: tyagi@bjt.net Message-ID: Reply-To: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (boboroshi/CoE) NNTP-Posting-Host: kudo20.kudonet.com Xref: kudonet.com alt.magick.tyagi:8850 alt.satanism:49774 alt.pagan:163927 alt.mythology:27497 talk.religion.misc:230175 talk.politics.animals:91421 talk.euthanasia:5088 alt.activism:230044 49970311 AA1 Hail Satan! [herein find first the lurid history of co-option rooted out in the Christian tradition and, subsequently, the description of American Satanic background mentality for the arising of a Satanism which opposed an onslaught on nature, especially that of the wild wild west. it is this which informs my Satanism, seen from the perspective of one who was raised to love this wilderness with intensity and directed to follow my intuitive battlecall.] nocTifer -------- The Mithraic religion shared many features with Christianity making the two powerful competitors. Both cults believed in the duality of good and evil. Both believed in Heaven and Hell and everlasting salvation for those baptised in the faith. The Mithraic cult might have triumphed over Christianity had the Emperor Constantine not converted to the faith. Still, Christian clerics felt compelled to expropriate many of the Mithraic rituals in order to gain a popular following. Conrad points out that Christianity borrowed the sin-cleansing blood bath from the Mithraic cult, substituting the blood of the dying Christ for the blood of the bull. The Christian religion also took over the Mithraic holy day, Dec. 25, which celebrated the birth of the sun, and made it the birthdate of Christ. In a final *coup de grace*, the new Christian cultists transformed the Mithraic bull god into the new symbol of darkness. The god of its adversary became the devil incarnate. At the Council of Toledo in A.D. 447, the church published the first official description of the devil. According to the prelates he is a large black monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hooves -- or one cloven hoof -- ass's ears, hair, claws, fiery eyes, terrible teeth, an immense phallus, and a sulphurous smell. ... Many of the early pioneers who trekked west over the Alleghenies saw themselves less as refugees and more as a chosen people. They were Israelites in the desert, escaping from the tyranny of the Old World, braving the vicissitudes of the wilderness in search of a promised land. The American environment was viewed, in turn, as a fallen world, a chaotic wilderness that needed to be beaten back, tamed, and harnessed. The conquest of the American frontier took on all the trappings of an ancient morality play, with the forces of light battling against the satanic underworld. The slaughter of the American buffalo and the genocidal assault on the native population were recast in milennial terms as life-and- death struggle against evil itself, a battle of epochal proportions in which Christian faith, favored by God's grace, would inevitably triumph. In his book _Wilderness and the American Mind_, Roderick Nash writes: Wilderness not only frustrated the pioneers physically, but also acquired a significance as a dark and sinister symbol. They shared the long western tradition of imagining wild country as a moral vacuum, a cursed and chaotic wasteland. As a consequence, frontiersmen acutely sensed that they battled wild country not only for personal survival but in the name of God. Civilizing the new world meant enlightening the darkness, ordering chaos, and changing evil into good. In the westward expansion wilderness was the villain, and the pioneer, as hero, relished its destruction. ... The devil's terrain was transformed overnight into God's earthly garden. The wild buffalo was replaced with the domesticated steer, the native grasses of the prairies were replaced with the familiar grasses of Europe, and the Indian "savage" was replaced with the "civilized" cowboy, the errant knight of the new Christian order. The winning of the west was viewed by many historians and moralists of the day as a victory for Christianity. If Winthrop offered "salvation," it was Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical heirs who offered "betterment." It came in the form of the operating principles of the European Enlightenment. Making God's garden fruitful required a new form of husbandry, one grounded in the utilitarian framework. For every act of revelation, the pioneers were administered a dose of utilitarian rationality, making Americans, at one and the same time, the most fervently religious and aggressively pragmatic of the Western peoples -- a status they retain to this day.... Enlightenment thinkers were convinced that the world around them was designed by God in a rational manner to serve the utilitarian ends of humankind.... Enlightenment thinkers turned their attention and their considerable intellects to the task of prying open nature's many useful secrets, believing that once nature was known, "it may be mastered, managed, and used in the service of human life." Centuries of Christian dogma extolling man's privileged position in the created order provided the theological justification for the "rational" conquest of nature. Subduing nature, said Bacon, "never burdened a conscience with remorse."... The mechanistic utilitarianism of the Enlightenment helped ease the burden of guilt of European farmers, pastoralists, merchants, and landed gentry busily engaged in draining lowland marshes, clearing forests, shooting "game", slaughtering livestock, and enclosing commonly held lands in the early modern era. Enlightenment thinkers became far more interested in making nature productive than in restoring a fallen nature. The wilderness was less and less viewed as an evil terrain that needed to be redeemed and more as an unproductive resource that needed to be harnassed.... In Europe, the utilitarian thinking of the Enlightenment outgrew its theological roots, transforming the culture of a continent from a spiritual to a secular order in less than 200 years. In the United States, however, passions of newly arrived immigrant groups, many of whom were fleeing the religious oppression and secularism of Europe. The new spirit of utilitarianism also found a welcome home in America as immigrants set about the task of taming a continent, transforming a wilderness into a productive resource. The combination of Christian evangelical fervor and utilitarian ardor proved a powerful force on the American frontier.... Less anchored to the past than their European ancestors, and far more concerned with the immediate advantages that lie just over the horizon, the Americans adopted a wholly new time orientation, becoming a kind of temporal nomad, living only for the morrow. Their future-directed temporal orientation played well against he spatial realities of the American west. The American frontiersman learned to use time to best advantage in the open plains. Opportunities needed to be seized, situations quickly grasped and exploited, to survive and prosper on the prairies. Men and women needed to be inventive, quick- witted, and manipulative in the taming of a continent. Here was a new man and woman in the making, unfettered by tradition or sentiment, unresponsive to past allengiances and obligations, cued to the utilitarian needs of the monent. [quoting _The Significance of the Frontier in American History_, by Frederick J. Turner, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, Inc., 1894.] The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and with all that bouyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom -- these are the traits of the frontier. The characte traits of the frontier man and woman reflected the Enlightenment view of the world, with its emphasis on material acquisition, naked self-interest, autonomy, rationality, entrepreneurialism, scientific prowess, mechanization, market efficiency, and social mobility.... By the 1890s the frontier was gone, but the frontier mythology continued to live on, embellished and reworked from time to time, to suit the psychosocial needs of successive generations determined to hold on to the core values that formed the American character. For a nation unused to limits or restraints of any kind, the frontier image continues to be the most powerful and evocative of our national symbols, helping us to maintain our belief in unlimited material progress and the future perfectibility of the human race. _Beyond Beef_, by Jeremy Rifkin, Plume/Penguin, 1993; pp. 22-3; 252-8. ================================================ this demonstrates the clear connection between 'wild nature' and what puritanical Americans have long identifed as 'Satan', and provides substantial rationale for the co-option of this terminology in the establishment of ecological religion. EOF