Finance, Religion, & Drugs (Part 4)
Time is the lost connection between finance, religion, and drugs.
This essay is the fourth in a five part series. Part 1 is about the ubiquity of debt forgiveness in pre-Greek and Roman societies. Part 2 connects debt to the idea of an apocalypse. Part 3 relates apocalyptic religion to psychedelic drugs. Part 4 focuses on the twin illusions of time and ego. And finally, Part 5 reveals the true meaning of the Holy Grail.
Christianity is a blend of much older traditions. First, there was the ancient custom of forgiving debt to stave off societal collapse. Then, there were the pagan intoxication cults that dissolved egos with psychoactive drug compounds. Both got rolled up into the Christian faith. The third and final leg of the original Christian stool was the personification of the sun. All the major elements of Jesus’ life match up to ancient stories about sun gods; stories that predate Christianity by thousands of years. We’ve saved this connection for last because it illustrates the lost connection between finance, drugs, and religion: time.
Jesus + The Sun
The tale of Jesus is really an allegory for the sun. This fact is hidden in plain sight on Presbyterian crosses, like the one pictured below. We’ve all seen these crosses—they’re the ones with circles behind them. They look like the crosshairs of gun sights. But circles whacked up into 4 pie slices have been around much longer than Christianity. This is the age-old symbol of the sun; the circle symbolizes a year divided into 4 seasons. It’s a simple and obvious way to represent a single annual cycle of the sun in the sky. The stroke of an ancient pen elongated the lower arm of the cross, converting that ancient sun symbol into a ubiquitous Christian icon.
Twelve
The number 12 has always been associated with the sun. And so it was associated with Jesus too. The reason Jesus has 12 disciples is the same reason the zodiac has 12 signs. It’s the same reason that there are 12 months in a year. Or that there are 12 hours that repeat twice daily. In fact, the word “hour” comes from the name of that old sun god, Horus, from dynastic Egypt. Our words “horizon” and “horoscope” also bear this guys’ name. All this just goes to show how much the sun figures into our conception of time.
We visualize the passage of time on a circle like the one behind the Presbyterian cross; think of a circular clock face. Clocks are laid out the way they are because they’re derived from the sun dials of old. On a clock face, the 12 hours are arranged around the perimeter just like they were on ancient sundials. The sun always comes with its 12 disciples.
Da Vinci
Leonardo Da Vinci understood that the Jesus story was a retelling of the old sun god story. That’s why, when it came time to paint his Last Supper mural, he laid it out as an astronogical allegory. Da Vinci took care to cluster his 12 disciples into 4 groups of 3, evoking the seasons of the year in the same way the Presbyterian Cross does. Once you see it, it can’t be unseen. The Jesus legend is as much about the sun and the passage of time as anything else.
The Sky
It was clear to the ancients, from gaping at the sky, that we live out our lives inside some cosmic system of perpetual death and rebirth. That’s why sun gods are usually said to have been resurrected. The sun seems to die each evening when it sets and to be born again each dawn.
In addition to this daily cycle, there’s also an annual cycle. During the autumn, the sun gradually disappears from the sky as the days get shorter and colder. Until the winter solstice. That’s when the sun reverses course and gradually starts coming back. The days get longer, the weather warms back up, and the spring flowers bloom. This cycle is why sun gods are always said to be born on December 25th. The winter solstice is when the new year is born. That date was the birthday of the Egyptian Horus, the Greek Helios, the Persian Mithras, and the Roman Sol Invitcus. And of course Jesus Christ, too, was born on Christmas.
Calculus
Sir Isaac Newton, a man who emulated Jesus by remaining a virgin until the day he died, was also born on December 25th. Newton was an odd guy, to say the least. He was most likely somewhere on the autism spectrum. He was also a genius, a noted alchemist, and a man who was keenly interested in time. So interested, in fact, that he invented a little thing called calculus.
Calculus is the math of rates—and rates of rates. It gives us a peek behind the stage curtain of reality. A key notion is that time and distance are really the same thing. Measuring with a stopwatch versus measuring with a ruler seem like totally different experiences. But saying that it’s 150 miles to Boston or that it’s 2 hours to Boston are actually two ways of relaying the exact same piece of information. Time is the same kind of measurement as length, width, and height. Calculus winks at us. It hints that reality is really some kind of multi-dimensional manifold which our brains interpret as a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Time + Money
Calculus concerns itself with compound rates. Distance over time is speed, for example, and speed over time is acceleration. Another compound rate is money over time. That’s finance. Think about it: financial institutions are in the business of distributing future money in the present. That’s their function in society. When you need to borrow money to buy a house or start a business, you visit a bank. And that bank sells you your own money from the future. Having all the cash at the beginning of the Monopoly game, as they do, means they can set up a toll booth on access to our future money. The toll they charge is the interest on the loans they make. This practice of charging interest was vehemently opposed by Jesus and forbidden by the church up until the time of the Renaissance.
Time + Ego
There is also a connection between time and ego. To understand how time fits into the picture, imagine a cluster of broccoli. The main stem of the broccoli divides into many smaller stems. If you chop your broccoli near the florets, you get a cross-section of many small stems. The number of stems in the cross-section depends on where you take your 2D slice. Only in the fullness of 3 dimensions are those apparently individual stems revealed to be a part of one continuous whole. In exactly the same way, all us humans share a common ancestor somewhere in the distant past. Our apparent existence as individuals is an illusion caused by the way we perceive time.
Salvation
The insight that individuality is an illusion has always been pharmacologically available. Your ego is just your mental conception of yourself. The ancient Greeks and Romans would temporarily shut off the part of the brain that gives rise to the ego by making use of naturally-occurring psychoactive compounds. That experience feels like death and rebirth. They called the experience “salvation” and interpreted the loss of ego as immortality. Surviving your own death is a simple matter of changing your conception of what “you” are. The Greeks put it this way:
Death + Rebirth
By the time the Roman government took over the church, the psychoactive drugs were phased out. The state always wants people associating with their bodies as closely as possible. That’s because it’s the only part of us they can get their hands on. If people stop identifying as their bodies, the state has a real control problem on its hands. At the end of the Jesus tale, he allows the state to publicly destroy his body and forgives them in advance for doing it. That’s a pretty dicey message for the Roman government to be endorsing. It’s easy to see why the drugs had to go.
Besides the control problem, access to god is a lucrative business. The Roman church couldn’t have people finding god by eating plants readily available in the forest. Monopolies are very profitable, just ask the gatekeepers who charge us a toll to access our future money. All in all, the delusion of individuality does a lot of heavy-lifting for the powers that be. But death-and-rebirth is how we can transcend that delusion.
Worship of the sun is really the worship of that part of us that transcends time and individuality; that part of us that identifies as a species—or as a progression of beings—instead of as individuals. And Christianity is ultimately about that too. It’s not that the legends of Jesus and the other sun gods are literally true. They’re more true than that. They’re hyper-true—like a skeleton key that fits many locks instead of just one. And the central theme of Christianity, redemption via death-and-rebirth, is broadly applicable:
Stay Tuned…
For the last essay in this series, we’ll follow the intertwined stories of finance, religion, and drugs by tracing the Holy Grail along its path through history. According to legend, the grail makes its first appearance at The Last Supper along with a sacrament of bread and wine. Oddly, Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t paint any cups in his mural. That’s because the grail is yet another allegory. One that throws history into a whole new light…
Amazing work! L