John Lamb Lash – Feb 6, 2021 – (transcribed audio talk)

Not In His Image – LA Times Review

Salutations once again to the Truth Corps, whoever, and wherever you may be on the planet. I’m here today on February 6, 2021, to consider a review of my book, Not In His Image, that appeared in 2006, right after it was published in November. The author of this article, this review, is Jonathan Kirsch. And the review appeared in the Sunday supplement in the literary section of the LA Times, on December 3, which happened to be my birthday, my 61st birthday to be exact. Any of you who take an interest in obscure events that happened way back in the Middle Ages might want to make a note of that.

Lately, I’m preparing a number of talks in anticipation of the release of the 15th anniversary edition of Not In His Image, which will come out from my publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing, in the summer, say August. And I want to say to start that from the beginning, and over these 15 years, I have not seen any reviews of Not In His Image coming from the usual suspects. As far as I know, this is the only legitimate review in the mainstream press of my book. So it’s worth some attention. I came across a printed copy of it a couple of days ago, and I thought, hey, what the hell? Maybe I’ll share that with my listeners and friends out there in the Truth Corps. So I’ll read the article. It’s not very long, couple of pages. And now and then I may stop and interject a comment. He begins:

Not In His Image is perhaps best compared to Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, an earlier and only slightly less eccentric effort to find and explain the linkages among the fantastic variety of religious experiences in the ancient world. Like Graves, Lash is a self-invented scholar who has read widely and thought deeply. He is the author of Quest For the Zodiac, The Hero and The Seekers Handbook, and cofounder of Metahistory.org with his former wife, Joanna Harcourt Smith, who lived with Timothy Leary in the 1970s. And he is a general executor of the estate of Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, to whom he was also once married. He confidently issues pronouncements about what he calls, “the wholesale genocide of Pagan culture,” and prescriptions for the spiritual salvation of the world.

Comment: Just to set the record straight on biographical details, Joanna Harcourt Smith, who died recently, in October I believe, was not the cofounder of Metahistory.org. I founded and created that website entirely on my own. Neither was she the founder of her own website, or what became her own website and podcast platform, Future Primitive. I also constructed and set up that site for her. It is true that we were married briefly. And it’s also true that I was married to Jan Michele Kerouac. So the dirty news is, I have actually been married twice. I wouldn’t recommend it. To continue:

Lash offers this work as a corrective to the “scholarly specialization” that condemns the Gnostics to “an obscure and uncertain place on the margins of the history of religion.” Along the way, he seeks to repudiate what he sees as the pigheadedness of the academic establishment. Thus, for example, he condemns biblical scholars who do not see the continuities that Lash detects between the early Christians and the religious community at Qumran. He calls them “Zaddikites,” but they are better known to the lay reader as the custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls. “They fail to realize that the message of love in the charming miracle tales of the New Testament is a sugarcoating on the bitter cyanide of Zaddikite ravings.”

Comment: That last sentence pretty much sums up my view of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I’m not the only scholar, by any means, who have argued that what is found in the writings of the Zaddikim, the zealots, contains the foundations of Christianity, at least in some of its key ideological aspects. I’m not the only person who’s argued that. The point I’m making in that one sentence that he quotes is that the Zaddikim were an apocalyptic sect driven by intense hatred of everyone who was not part of their covenant, and their covenant went back to Abraham and Melchizedek, and the mission or mythogen, as I now call it, of the chosen people. So I was simply pointing out that the message of love in the New Testament is just sugarcoating over a pill of hateful genocide. To continue:

But Lash is not concerned merely with scolding biblical scholars. His goal is to melt down the religious and philosophical ideas of antiquity and recast them as a serviceable faith for our world. In place of the Judeo Christian Islamic tradition, which he links to “the religious schizophrenia of the ancient Hebrews,” and which he flatly condemns “annihilation theology,” he proposes that we embrace Gnosticism and what he dubs, Gnostic or Gaian Ethics, which he describes as “not a call to faith in God, but faith in the human species.”

Comment: He quotes the term annihilation theology, and I actually use that as the title of an article I wrote on Metahistory.org 12 or 14 years ago. I explained that the premise of annihilation theology is that you must destroy the world in order to save it. So you find that narrative clearly stated in the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible. So the Messiah, the only begotten Son of God and the Father God himself, stand in judgment over the world, at the moment of the Last Judgment, which is also the moment of salvation, and they destroy the world in order to save it. That’s annihilation theology. Well, obviously you can see where it goes next. What’s happening in the world today with the Coviet regime is that the populations of the world are being asked to give up their lives so that others can live. That’s another version. That’s the biomedical version of annihilation theology. To continue:

Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and Pagan Mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight. At moments, however, he slips into a kind of New Age rant as baffling as any mystical text. “What we seek in ‘Gaia theory’ is a live imaginal dimension,” he writes in one such passage, “not a scaffolding of cybernetic general systems cogitation.” Or “Gnosis taken as a path of experimental mysticism and the Sophianic vision taken as a guiding narrative for coevolution can provide the spiritual dimension for deep ecology independently of the three mainstream religions derived from the Abrahamic tradition.”

Comment: Let me read that sentence again without breaking it. “What we seek in ‘Gaia theory’ is a live imaginal dimension, not a scaffolding of cybernetic general systems cogitation.” Now, fast-forward 15 years to today and look around, and do you see anything that looks like “cybernetic general systems cogitation?” Well, isn’t that just exactly the mindset behind the Great Reset, to run the entire world on IT, to use cybernetic general systems theory to change the world, and even to change the meaning of what it means to be human, you see? This is one of a number of sentences that I noticed in the book, more than I could count, sentences written over 15 years ago, which apply to the point of excruciating obviousness to the Great Reset and the evil plan that is unfolding in the world today. As I say, it is a crime against humanity, but it’s not a crime accomplished. It’s a crime in progress. To continue, I’m about halfway through:

Even he acknowledges that his book can be “a long haul and a lot to follow,” and that his line of reasoning “demands exceptional concentration from the likes of us, many of whom cannot stay in the moment for three minutes at a time.” Lash’s arguments are often lively and entertaining even when they aren’t convincing. When he contends that Celtic civilization spread to the far corners of the world, “An apocryphal legend claims that John the Baptist was a Celt,” he writes, “and Mary Magdalene was Circassian, half Celt, half Jewish,” he is reduced to citing the film Lawrence of Arabia to support the proposition that “Celtic half-breeds survived in the Levant down into the early twentieth century.”

Comment: Well, he’s quite correct on that. Those were trivial allusions, which I have actually taken out of the current edition. However, I do insist that traditional art and paintings and the Golden Legend about Mary Magdalene provide evidence that she was not half Celt, half Jewish, that she was not Jewish at all. So in fact, Mary Magdalene, a figure to whom I have devoted many years of my life, in one way or another, Mary Magdalene ought not to be really identified with a character in the New Testament. If there was a “Mary of Magdala” in that narrative, or if there was a corresponding historical person, no one can say. She’s a character in a narrative. The character of Mary Magdalene, who is said to have come from Palestine to France, and landed at a place called Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and then is said to have lived in a cave deep in the forests of southern France, that Mary Magdalene is a character created by the imagination of the Celtic peoples. So you see, I’m drawing a really sharp distinction here. There are two Mary Magdalenes, one in the New Testament narrative, and the other one described in the Celtic legends. They are not necessarily the same. So you can say that the Celtic Mary Magdalene was a female figure of that time, who carried an association or an allusion to the biblical events or so-called New Testament narrative, which is a work of fiction, but she stood on her own terms as an independent figure of legend. Important distinction. So yeah, he’s right there. He caught me on some trivia, which as I say, I’ve deleted from the current edition. Coming around the bend to continue:

And when he considers what he calls “sci-fi theology” of the ancient Gnostics, he comes uncomfortably close to affirming that the other worldly “Archons” of Gnostic myth were authentic extraterrestrials. “It is worth noting that the first great UFO wave of the twentieth century occurred in the summer and fall of 1947 when Jean Doresse was in Cairo examining the Nag Hammadi Codices, at the very moment the first Dead Sea Scrolls were found.” Lash writes, “This was also the year that the CIA was founded with the dual intention, according to UFO conspiracy buffs, to co-opt alien technology and cut a deal with the aliens, allowing them to experiment covertly with human subjects. In fact, a CIA agent named Miles Copeland was dispatched to Damascus to examine and photograph some of the first Scroll fragments to be unearthed.”

Comment: Well, what I say in these quotations, and in the passages from which he takes them, is all completely factual. And I back it up with evidence. There was a CIA agent named Miles Copeland at the site in Jerusalem when these documents were discovered. And something that I don’t think I added, is the fact that the Nag Hammadi Codices, which are in a museum in Cairo, were actually purchased by the wife of the head of the Bechtel Foundation, which is a huge military industrial organization deeply linked to three letter agencies. So there is that angle, there is the CIA angle that comes into the story about the discovery both of the Nag Hammadi Codices and the Dead Sea Scrolls. And that angle also goes to the theory, which is not that the theory is a theory, but the fact that the theory exists is a fact. So when I say that many people believed that three letter agencies, including the CIA, had made a deal with ETs in order to adopt alien technology for warfare purposes, and in turn, allowing them to experiment covertly on human subjects, I’m not making that up! You can find dozens of books. I’ve read many of them that state that viewpoint, that interpretation. I don’t say that I agree with the interpretation that I’m describing there. But the existence of that interpretation is an evidential fact, you see?

Also, I’d like to point out once again, and I was really struck by this throughout revising the book, it’s the same book. I haven’t changed the book. I haven’t changed the arc of the message. But I was struck by how much of it is relevant to the Coviet scam today. For instance, what about this phrase, “to experiment covertly on human subjects?” Well, that’s an old idea. You may have heard about it. There are hundreds of clips on YouTube claiming that there were ETs, alien greys, performing covert experiments on human subjects in collusion with three letter agencies, nothing new about that. There was enormous chatter about that over a whole decade. But when you consider that phrase, “to experiment covertly on human subjects,” and you bring it ahead to you-know-what today, isn’t that exactly what is happening? So, it’s fair to propose, it’s plausible to presume, that the same Archontic agencies that were behind the ET UFO phenomenon are now behind the Coviet plandemic.

And, of course, I’m sure you caught this, to bring that phrase up to date, you would have to say “to experiment overtly on human subjects.” The Press Secretary of the President of the United States, if you can believe that joke, just said this week, “no, it’s not a preventative vaccine. It will not prevent anyone from getting the Rona-bug. It will not cure you if you have the Rona-bug. In fact, it’s an entirely new miracle medicine. And once you take it, the world will still be required to follow all the existing restrictions of masking, social distancing, self quarantining.” They’re actually overtly saying this. So you see much of what I said about the Archon problem in Not In His Image is now on your face, if you’ll excuse that allusion! To continue, final paragraph:

At one telling moment at the outset of the book, Lash describes how his life was transformed when, in early adolescence he was reading a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in the backseat of the family car on the way back from an orthodontist appointment in upstate New York. “I swore to finish what Nietzsche had begun,” he declares. “I vow to think through and live out his critique of Christianity to the end.” With Not In His Image, he keeps that vow. But when Lash invites us to embrace the “high strangeness” of what he calls the ET-Archon hypothesis with the Gnostic theory of alien intrusion, and he says, “the stranger it gets, the more sense it makes,” he passes wholly through the looking glass. And that’s his conclusion.

Comments: In the first place, it was not an orthodontist – I had buckteeth and I had to wear braces – in upstate New York. It was in Bangor, Maine, up the coast of Maine. Now, some of the things that he quotes here regarding “the Gnostic theory of alien intrusion,” okay, that’s my language. But some of the other things he quotes, remember previously he used the term “sci-fi theology,” well, that’s not my term. It’s actually a Gnostic scholar who wrote the Afterword for the Nag Hammadi Library in English, who called Gnosticism “sci-fi theology,” you see? And also, “high strangeness,” I think is also a quote from some other author or a term similar to what authors have used, those who have attempted to penetrate and decode this whole ET-UFO phenomenon.

So that’s the review. And I won’t make demands on your attention any longer, except to add a closing comment. The Gnostic expose’ of the deceit and evil in Abrahamic religion was essential to their mission in life, and for that they were attacked, demonized, hunted down, murdered, driven into exile, and vast, untold numbers of their writings and works were destroyed. They were heretics. And they were willing to come out in public from the Mystery centers and openly debate with the early Christianity ideologues, and Jewish ideologues, about what they saw in their belief system. So there is nothing in the world comparable to the Gnostic expose’ of the Christian, Judeo Christian faith, the ideology, and all the other baggage. And when you read my version of that, my rendering of that critique and expose’ in Not In His Image, it is an absolute massacre. I intended in every word and every sentence, that that belief system, and the values that go with it, and the make-believe assumptions about the Savior and the Messiah, and the psychotic, murderous insanity concealed within it, would be exposed to the core, so that it could be overcome. That was one of my purposes.

In Not In His Image, I argue against something, and I also argue for something. So the second half of the book is the argument for the Living Gnosis Today, Sophianic Animism, the revival and recovery of reverence for the earth, the communication with the intelligence of the earth following the Telestic Method. And I described the Telestic Method, which was a secret of the Mysteries that was never given out in those times, never given out publicly. But all that could be perhaps matter for another talk.

I just want to concentrate on the ET-UFO phenomenon, and how I handled it in this book. I also want to give you a little advice on how to look at that phenomenon, especially if you read Not In His Image. You see, it is true that I propose that the so-called Archons are an extraterrestrial species that inhabits the solar system. And I follow the Gnostic materials in developing this profile of the Archons. So it is plausible, it is acceptable as an hypothesis, let’s say, just a way of looking at the phenomenon, there are many angles to look at the ET-UFO phenomenon. But just as one way, from the Gnostic angle, yes, you can say that there exists in the solar system, a cyborg locust-like predatory species, the Archons. And they have their own existence. And the Sophianic Narrative describes how they came into existence. How Sophia herself, produced the Archons inadvertently, and without the intention to do so.

And so, you can entertain that description of the Archons if you like, but don’t let it get in the way of the more significant view. What is significant about the Archons is their mindset. Carlos Castaneda called them the Flyers or the mud shadows. And he described how they give us their mind. They insinuate their mind into the human mind. So they don’t actually attack the earth in some science fiction scenario, like the War of the Worlds or Independence Day. No, they attack us through our own minds. And what I pointed out in Not In His Image is that Judeo Christianity is an ideological virus. I called it an ideological virus.

Now, in the 15 years since I wrote that, I’ve come to understand a little bit more about this Archontic virus. I couldn’t put that into the revised edition because it would have skewed the development of the entire book. And I didn’t want to do that. But I assure you that the real threat of the Archons can be seen and detected in an act of psychological warfare that is unfolding in its last battle on the Earth right now. And the agents of that psychological war on humanity are the Archons, but more importantly, their human proxies. So attention needs to go to their human proxies, that is to say, those human animals living among us who are entirely Archontified, whose minds have been entirely possessed by that ideological virus that originated in the mandate of Hebrew religion, which is a mandate of master-race domination. So the technocrats and transhumanists running the Great Reset, are Archontified. They are no longer genuine human beings. They have become transformed into the Archontic presence, living in our midst. And they are obviously intent upon carrying out a program of master-race domination. It’s so obvious.

Finally, let me return to that troublesome point about, well, what are the Archons physically and do they actually have bodies, the grey archons, the grey ETs of Whitley Strieber? Who, by the way, were initially described in 1905, initially portrayed by Aleister Crowley. Who are they, you know, are they really, do they really have bodies, insect-like bodies, or the bodies of prematurely born children with gangly limbs and big heads and big eyes, composed of silica and mercury, as the Gnostic has claimed? And where are they? And can they get into the solar system? Or they are in the solar system according to the Gnostic narrative? Can they actually get into the atmosphere of the Earth? The answer is no. And they can for very brief periods of time. And all of that is interesting, maybe, but it’s not what matters.

However, I would like to point out to Jonathan Kirsch, if he’s still around, that my notion, my description of the Dead Sea cult of the Zaddikim as the flying saucer cult, is supported by very solid evidence. The evidence today, I’ll give you an example of the evidence today, two examples. There was this weird couple called Bo and Peep who started this cult. And a dear and close friend of mine was sucked into that cult. And eventually, they all killed themselves. It turned out to be a suicide cult. And in a place called Santa Fe, I think, in California. They eventually all committed suicide together. And they were a flying saucer cult. I think it was called the Heaven’s Gate cult. Do you remember that? And so they believed that there was a flying saucer coming to save them and take them away, and save them from an evil and horrible world. And that ain’t the end of it.

There’s a book called The Children of Ezekiel, I can’t remember the author’s name right now, in which he gives solid documentary evidence that the Nation of Islam is a flying saucer cult, by their own admission! The inner circles of Farrakhan’s cult believe in the mothership and they are in fact today in the world a flying saucer cult. And there have been other examples, too. So if there are flying saucer cults evident in our time, flying saucer ET religions, why couldn’t they have existed in previous times? You see? So I do give close attention to that aspect. Even though, as I say, it’s more essential to look at the mind control system of the Archons.

Finally, again, with a nod to Jonathan Kirsch, let me read you this paragraph from the chapter called “Unmasking Evil.” You want to know the evidence I used for my conclusion that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by religious fanatics of a flying saucer cult? Well, listen to this:

“The Dead Sea Scrolls present graphic evidence that the Qumranic sect looked for rescue to come from the skies beyond the earth. At the moment of the apocalyptic showdown, they expected the intervention of the Kedoshim, radiant warrior angels who would appear in shining round chariots. The celestial host would be commanded by a supreme overlord, whom scholars identify with the eerie, clonelike figure, Melchizedek. Numerous passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls describe the flight and formations of the celestial rescue squad. In the fragmentary columns of 4Q405, The Songs of the Sacrifice of the Sabbath, an observer of the Kedoshim gives this eyewitness account:

Now, I’m quoting from the Dead Sea Scrolls (there are breaks in the manuscript):

“They do not sit still, the glorious chariots, the shining ophanim … spirits of Gods … purity … holy. The works of [its] corners …of kingship, the glorious seats of the chariots … wonderful power …. When they move [they do] not turn aside to any … they go straight up …. When they rise the murmuring sound of gods [is heard], and there is an uproar of exaltation when they lift their wings, the [murmur]ing sound of gods …. And when the ophanim move forward, the holy angels return; [they emerge from between] its glorious [wh]eels, with the likeness of fire, the spirits of the holy of holies. Around them is the likeness of streams of fire like electrum, and a [lum]inous substance, gloriously multi-colored, multi-colored, [purely] blended…. And there is a murmuring voice of blessing in the uproar of their motion, and they praise the holy one on returning to their paths. When they rise up, they rise wonderfully; when they settle, they [st]and still.

So that’s quotation from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I concluded or commented with this paragraph:

“This passage hardly requires comment. Anyone who has read even lightly into the voluminous eyewitness testimony of UFO sightings, will recognize the frequently reported details: erratic and mysterious movement including fast glides and sudden stops, the play of colored lights, rushing and murmuring sounds. The description of how the Kedoshim chariots pause and float, then slide away, in total defiance of known scientific laws, is particularly striking, and accords perfectly with countless modern reports of UFO activity.”

So I’ll conclude on that note, ran a little longer than I thought. I’ll try to keep the other talks coming about Not In His Image down to half an hour or so. But that’s the way it goes today.

‘Nuff said, and I’ll be seeing you in the Beauty to come.

To order: Chelsea Green Publishing

Nemeta.org Sophianic School of Arts and Sciences

The Sophianic Myth https://sophianicmyth.org/

Note: The video thumbnail shows a draft of a proposed new cover for the 15th Anniversary edition of Not in His Image. It is not the final version.