X. Wedding [From The Gospel According to Mary, as translated by C.T. Edwards, A. Healy, L. Moresco, and S. Wise] Our Rabbi loved my family in Bethany, my brother Lazarus, my sister Martha, and myself. It happened that Lazarus became extremely ill, and Martha and I sent word to Joshua about our brother’s illness. When Joshua came to Bethany, one of his students came to me secretly and said, “The Rabbi has come and calls for you.” I arose quickly... Read more
In this passage from Epiphanius, we see that a young woman explained her sincere beliefs to the young doofus and offered to initiate him (or maybe work sex magic, or maybe just have sex as an act of worship), and, being a devout heretic, he turned her down! We have a moral responsibility to read these ancient documents and revise our map of what Christianity was all about. Read more
IX. The Work Continues “Okay,” I said. “Has everyone here had a chance to read everybody’s rough drafts?” Some but not all hands went up “Not most of my people,” Megan said. “As courtesy we should at least summarize what we’re looking at,” I said. “Two of these are probably, at least in general, what we classify as Gnostic or apocryphal gospels, but a gospel for witches is almost unprecedented. Before we go riding in among the trees, can anyone... Read more
VIII. The Beginning of the Gospel According to Mary [Excerpt from the translation by C.T. Edwards, A. Healy, L. Moresco, and S. Wise] I, Mariamne, wife and apostle to Joshua, Mashiach by the grace of our Father and Mother in Heaven, to my beloved daughter, Sarah. This is the testament you and the others have asked me for, that my memories of your father, the Mashiach of our people, should not be lost and that his own teachings not be... Read more
VII. The Work Begins To Zeus all things are beautiful, just, and good, but men have supposed some things to be just, others unjust. At eight o’clock on Saturday night, I walked up the steps to Brendan and Megan’s house on the hillside behind the campus, the sort of Tudorish half-timbered mansion you might expect a college professor with lots of kids to have. The members of the ad hoc translating committee were already filling the circle of overstuffed... Read more
VI. The Redemption of Sophia [Excerpt from The Gospel of Simon and Helen, as translated by S. Dugan.] The man lay on the ground, unable to stand. Sophia breathed her life into him, and he stood and walked. The angels became angry and turned on Sophia, saying, “Who is this that confounds us and interferes with us?” They began casting all their powers of darkness and ignorance upon Sophia, until she became confused, for she had spent so much of... Read more
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, my academic studies progressed from mathematics to poetry, then to theology. What tied those foci together is that each is a system for working with abstract symbols in order to generate maps of possible realities, something like Marianne Moore’s description of poetry as imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Likewise, I conceive of a genuine novel—that is, a story that is genuinely novel—as a simulation model of an alternative history, which sometimes... Read more
V. Burgled By the will of Fortune all things are conscious. . . . At times Love makes one out of many; at others, Strife makes many out of one. Empedocles After the Jesuit community Mass in Bob’s honor, I went up to my office. Opening the door, I gazed upon chaos. All the drawers in the desk and file cabinet were open. Paper was strewn everywhere. All the books on my shelves had been swept onto the floor. At... Read more
II. Destruction [From the Poetic Epistemologies of Apollo.] They tied her to the tree, and lit the fire. You taste its ashes in your mouth. No one tree escapes the forest fire. Abandoned hills erode, stones topple, No one dances, and fires are not allowed. Not just the tree, not just the seed: The ground itself has been destroyed. The smoking silence pales the barren sun. Summer solstice comes and, measured, goes. Midsummer brings no terror, thus, no... Read more
Flames leaped up around the accused witch. Suddenly she shouted, "Ubaldo Allucingoli, hear me! The fire you have lit to burn me will burn down your church, and no one will ever rebuild it, not in three days, not in three ages of the cosmos. But you will not be rid of me: I shall return to haunt you." Read more
Aidan Kelly: Including Paganism
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