A brain-crushing collage of music and video presented in the form of a religious recruitment video. The topics covered (in deadpan narration) are basic psychology, the origin of the human race, spiritualism, religious dogma, UFO's, the end of the world, and the group's figurehead, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs.
The Church of the SubGenius is a parody religion that satirizes better-known belief systems. It teaches a complex philosophy that focuses on J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, purportedly a salesman from the 1950s, who is revered as a prophet by the Church. SubGenius leaders have developed detailed narratives about Dobbs and his relationship to various gods and conspiracies. Their central deity, Jehovah 1, is accompanied by other gods drawn from ancient myth and popular fiction. SubGenius literature describes a grand conspiracy that seeks to brainwash the world and oppress Dobbs's followers. In its narratives, the Church presents a blend of cultural references in an elaborate remix of the sources.
Ivan Stang, who co-founded the Church in the 1970s, serves as its leader and publicist. He has imitated actions of other religious leaders, using the tactic of culture jamming in an attempt to parody better-known faiths. Church leaders instruct their followers to avoid mainstream commercialism and the belief in absolute truths. The group holds that the quality of "Slack" is of utmost importance, but it is never clearly defined. The number of followers is unknown, although the Church's message has been welcomed by college students and artists in the United States. The group is often compared to Discordianism. Journalists often consider the Church an elaborate joke, but some academics have defended it as a real system of deeply held beliefs.
The complex story of Otto Rahn (18 February 1904 – 13 March 1939), who grew up amidst the ruins of Germany following its defeat in World War One. His parents awoke an interest in nature, myth and legend in him. At the time in Europe, the narratives of Christianity were being challenged and changed. He took up the legend of the Holy Grail and the heretical Christian sects that lasted up until the Inquisition from the 12th to the 15th centuries. The nature cults of the early 20th century that developed in northern Europe also no doubt fed into his thinking. Rahn wrote books about the Grail and the Cathars, one of the last mass manifestations of Gnosticism in Europe.
It seems Rahn was an outsider queer poet who was given a blank cheque by the Nazis to do his research. Of course, the Nazis wanted a particular result from the research; Aryan primacy and the negation of the dominant Christian morality. Himmler was vehemently opposed to Christian sexual morality and the "principle of Christian mercy", both of which he saw as dangerous obstacles to his planned battle with "subhumans". Rahn's work proved to be more complex and ephemeral than that. Rahn was also expected to participate in the theatre of horror that was developed by the Nazis. Rahn was a poet who dwelt in myth, a product of people like James Frazer and Robert Graves (who's book The White Goddess would not be published until 1948). But at the same time Rahn was within the inner circle of the SS, he participated in the establishment of the vast death machine that is now called the Holocaust and in the Nazi eugenics breeding program. But his mother was Jewish.
Rahn's homosexuality had been known to Himmler but, in 1937, it became the subject of difficulties with other SS officers, who had long contrasted their conduct with the open homosexuality common in Ernst Röhm's Sturmabteilung. Following a "drunken homosexual scrape", Rahn was assigned guard duty at the Dachau concentration camp in order to "toughen him up".
Deeply concerned by what he had witnessed in Dachau, Rahn offered his resignation from the SS in February 1939. This was accepted by Himmler. On 13 March, Rahn's body was found by local children in the forest near Söll (Kufstein, Tyrol), in Austria. Sixty years later, in an interview, one of those who found Rahn's body described finding "two empty bottles" next to it. He had frozen to death while under the influence of the sleeping pills. Rahn's death was privately ruled a suicide but was presented by Himmler to the SS as having occurred following a "mountaineering accident".
The film is made by Richard Stanley, a South African filmmaker, known for his work in the horror genre. He began his career making short films and music videos, and subsequently directed the feature films Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), both of which are considered cult classics. He was the original director of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), but was fired early into principal photography due to creative differences, an episode recounted in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. In 2019, he returned to feature films after more than 20 years, directing the H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space.
Jesus is a Palestinian (Dutch: Jezus is een Palestijn) is a 1999 Dutch comedy written and directed by Lodewijk Crijns (b.1970). The parody on religious fanaticism and millennialism, which involves the topics of self mutilation, incest, and euthanasia, is the director's first full-length movie. Click on the image for the film.
Ramses (Hans Teeuwen) is a dorky twenty-something who has been living in a commune in Limburg for eight years. Piercing from head to toe and dressed in a shapeless robe, he practices the teachings of Kahn-Guru. Just before his rather painful (genital) initiation, his sister Natasha (Van Kooten) appears on the scene with the message that their father (Mascini) is dying in Amsterdam. Together they go to the capital where Ramses is introduced to the female gender and to a Palestinian prophet in the Bijlmer who has decorated the roof of his apartment as a landing place for the Messiah.
Documentary presented by Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones which explores the huge number of ancient Christian texts that didn't make it into the New Testament. Shocking and challenging, these were works in which Jesus didn't die, took revenge on his enemies and kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth - a Jesus unrecognisable from that found in the traditional books of the New Testament.
Pete travels through Egypt and the former Roman Empire looking at the emerging evidence of a Christian world that's very different to the one we know, and discovers that aside from the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, there were over seventy gospels, acts, letters and apocalypses, all circulating in the early Church.
Through these lost Gospels, Pete reconstructs the intense intellectual and political struggles for orthodoxy that was fought in the early centuries of Christianity, a battle involving different Christian sects, each convinced that their gospels were true and sacred.
The worldwide success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code sparked new interest, as well as wild and misguided speculation about the origins of the Christian faith. Owen Jones sets out the context in which heretical texts like the Gospel of Mary emerged. He also strikes a cautionary note - if these lost gospels had been allowed to flourish, Christianity may well have faced an uncertain future, or perhaps not survived at all.
The documentary, although a great feat of scholarship falls short of exploring some other important manuscripts such as the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Barnabas. It also fails to explore the evidences in the gospels of the other possibility of Christ's nature: that he was entirely human.
The interpretive and rhetorical elements of this program build in intensity. It chooses its issues carefully. It only mentions once the political and state related issues that were being played out as a backdrop to the early history of the Christian Church (You guessed it, Constantine and his efforts to unite the Empire). In short, building a hierarchical state or imperial apparatus on the mystical elements that defined so much of the Gnostic branch of Christianity would have been impossible. But Pete mostly limits his examination to the textual and then leaves out the most heretical ones, and only uses those he does discuss to clarify orthodox Christian belief today. For example the neglected "The Thunder : Perfect Mind" begins
I was sent forth from the power, and I have come to those who reflect upon me, and I have been found among those who seek after me. Look upon me, you who reflect upon me, and you hearers, hear me. You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves. And do not banish me from your sight. And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing. Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard! Do not be ignorant of me. For I am the first and the last. I am the honoured one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am <the mother> and the daughter. I am the members of my mother. I am the barren one and many are her sons. I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband. I am the midwife and she who does not bear. I am the solace of my labor pains. I am the bride and the bridegroom, and it is my husband who begot me. I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband and he is my offspring. I am the slave of him who prepared me. I am the ruler of my offspring. But he is the one who begot me before the time on a birthday. And he is my offspring in (due) time, and my power is from him. I am the staff of his power in his youth, and he is the rod of my old age. And whatever he wills happens to me. I am the silence that is incomprehensible and the idea whose remembrance is frequent. I am the voice whose sound is manifold and the word whose appearance is multiple. I am the utterance of my name.
How can this intense introspection, almost meditative and Zen-like, be reconciled with the sort of Christianity we have today, where the Pope wrote so recently as the 2013 encyclical, Lumen fidei against “a model of salvation that is merely interior, closed off in its own subjectivism. In this model, salvation consists in elevating oneself by knowledge beyond “the crude faith of the masses” and “the flesh of Jesus” towards “the mysteries of the unknown divinity” (n. 47). The Church of Peter is still very much in control of doctrine. The idea of a lessened Christianity if the doctrine had not followed the path it had, as this video argues (see 1:19:16), is not particularly relevant to understanding the Gnostic texts. I would like to see more examination of the connections to Platonic and eastern thought.....maybe next time.
The Baul or Bauls (Bengali: বাউল) are a group of mystic minstrels of mixed elements of Sufism and Vaishnavism from Bengal region, comprising Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Barak Valley. Bauls constitute both a syncretic religious sect and a musical tradition. Bauls are a very heterogeneous group, with many sects, but their membership mainly consists of Vaishnava Hindus and Sufi Muslims. They can often be identified by their distinctive clothes and musical instruments. Lalon Shah is regarded as the most celebrated Baul saint in history.
Although Bauls comprise only a small fraction of the Bengali population, their influence on the culture of Bengal is considerable. In 2005, the Baul tradition of Bangladesh was included in the list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
Klaus Kinski’s infamous intensity and lunacy are both on vivid display in Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior, a recently recovered record of a 1971 theatrical performance by the Aguirre, The Wrath of God star. On a German stage outfitted with only a microphone stand, Kinski steps into a lone spotlight and begins reciting an extended monologue about a persecuted, angry Jesus Christ: “Wanted: Jesus Christ. Charged with seduction, anarchistic tendencies, conspiracy against the authority of the state.” From the outset, Kinski’s own god-complex association with his divine subject, whose role he soon assumes via speaking in first-person, is clear, and immediately rankles segments of the crowd who’ve attended simply to heckle. As audience members cry out, “I want my 10 marks back!,” and call out Kinski for what they see as the hypocrisy of his performance (the wealthy star extols anti-materialism and nonviolence, while also railing against his tormentors with threats of physical aggression), the show’s powder keg atmosphere ignites. Kinski storms off stage, albeit not before screaming, “You stupid pig!,” to a young man who tries, and fails, to command the mike before being removed by a security guard—to predictable audience objections to Kinski as a “fascist!”
A version of this scenario repeats throughout the night, as Kinski returns to the mike, only to be browbeaten by certain audience members convinced that they have a role to play in the evening. Director Peter Geyer’s archival footage, comprised of material from a select few cameras, has a fixated gaze that mirrors Kinski’s ferocity, which escalates as his performance forcefully mutates hallowed scripture into messages about contemporary flashpoints, be they Vietnam, hippies, or a more general strain of post-Woodstock opposition to institutional government and church power. Confronting taunts and ridicule with disgust and fury, Kinski becomes a bipolar figure, at once justified in his rage and clear-sighted in his condemnations, and yet the antithesis of the very virtues he so extols. Jesus Christ Savior, however, is mostly the portrait of the artist as an empathetically committed zealot and hotheaded madman, of a star attempting to communicate (and expunge from within) ideas and emotions that seemingly animate and torment him. And it ultimately proves a quite riveting one at that, even if its dynamite volatility and hypnotic momentum drains by Kinski’s third walkout and final, triumphant, post-credits recitation of his divine dissertation.
This documentary highlights a Jewish religious leader and preacher known as Jesus Christ—but it also suggests he was a Buddhist Monk. What’s more, it is argued that Jesus wasn’t actually crucified; instead, it is said that he travelled far and wide for many, many years. According to the documentary, Jesus was laid to rest at Roza Bal Shrine in Srinagar, Kashmir. Much about Jesus has been unknown due to a lack of information regarding his life between the ages of 13 and 29; in Palestine, these are sometimes referred to as “The Lost Years.” However, in 1887 a Russian doctor named Nicolas Notovitch went to India, Tibet, and Afghanistan in order to write The Unknown Life of Christ.
Notovitch soon found himself recovering from a broken leg at the Tibetan Buddhist Monastery of Hemis, atop India in the city of Leh. Two large, yellowed Tibetan volumes were presented to him: The Life of Saint Issa. He read that Jesus (or Issa, the son of God) was born in the first century in Israel, and that Vedic scholars tutored him from the age of 13 to the age of 29.
A lama explained that, “Issa is a great prophet, one of the first after the twenty-two Buddhas. He is greater than any one of all the Dalai Lamas, for he constitutes part of the spirituality of our Lord. It is he who has enlightened you, who has brought back within the pale of religion the souls of the frivolous, and who has allowed each human being to distinguish between good and evil. His name and his acts are recorded in our sacred writings. And in reading of his wondrous existence, passed in the midst of an erring and wayward people, we weep at the horrible sin of the pagans who, after having tortured him, put him to death.”
I am quivering like a delirious child. Godspeed at the height of their powers. Cascading walls of sound of infinite depth. Nothing can stop them and nothing should. Just magnificent. Happy Equinox!!
This BBC 4 documentary examines the question "Did Jesus Die?". It looks
at a bunch of ideas around this question until minute 25, where this
examination of ideas takes a very logical and grounded turn with
surprising conclusions that demonstrate that the three wise men were
Buddhist monks who found Jesus and came back for him around puberty.
After being trained in a Buddhist Monastery he spread the Buddhist
philosophy, survived the crucifixion, and escaped to Kashmir,
Afghanistan where he died an old man at the age of 80.
This documentary examines the missing years from the life of Jesus. The unknown years of Jesus refers to the period between Jesus childhood and the beginning of his ministry as recorded in the New Testament. The term "silent years" is sometimes used as well. The phrase "lost years of Jesus" is also encountered in esoteric
literature, but is not commonly used in scholarly literature since it
is assumed that Jesus was probably working as a carpenter in Galilee
from the age of twelve till thirty, so the years were not "lost years".
In the late medieval period Arthurian legends appeared that the young Jesus was in Britain. In the 19th and 20th centuries theories began to emerge that between the ages of 12 and 30 Jesus had visited India, or had studied with the Essenes in the Judea desert. Modern scholarship has generally rejected these theories and holds that nothing is known about this time period in the life of Jesus.
The phrase "lost years" is also found in relation to theories arising from the "swoon hypothesis", the suggestion that Jesus survived his crucifixion.
This, and the related view that he avoided crucifixion altogether, has
given rise to several speculations about what happened to him in the
supposed remaining years of his life, but these are generally not
accepted by mainstream scholars.
"A religious text written in stone"
The Khajuraho Group of Monuments in Khajuraho, a town in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, located in Chhatarpur District, about 620 kilometres (385 mi) southeast of New Delhi, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. Khajuraho has the largest group of medieval Hindu and Jain temples, famous for their erotic sculptures.
The name Khajuraho, ancient "Kharjuravāhaka", is derived from the Sanskrit words kharjura = date palm and vāhaka = "one who carries". Locals living in the Khajuraho village always knew about and kept up the temples as best as they could. They were pointed out to the English in the late 19th century when the jungles had taken a toll on the monuments.In the 19th century, British engineer T.S. Burt arrived in the area, followed by General Alexander Cunningham. Cunningham put Khajuraho on the world map when he explored the site on behalf of the Archaeological Survey of India and described what he found in glowing terms. The Khajuraho Group of Monuments has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is considered to be one of the "seven wonders" of India.
The Kumbh Mela, believed to be the largest religious gathering on earth is held every 12 years on the banks of the 'Sangam'- the confluence of the holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati. The Mela alternates between Nasik, Allahabad, Ujjain and Haridwar every three years. The one celebrated at the Holy Sangam in Allahabad is the largest and holiest of them. The Mela is attended by millions of devotees including Sadhus. A holy dip in the sacred waters is believed to cleanse the soul. The Sangam comes alive during Kumbh and Ardh Kumbh with an enormous temporary township springing up on the vacant land on the Allahabad side of the river.
Becoming a Woman in Zanskar recounts the moving story of a friendship shattered by destiny, when two best friends have to part and leave their families forever. Tenzin will be married to a man she hasn’t chosen, while Palkit will become a nun.
English Subtitles
France, 2007, 87 minutes
Directed by Jean-Michel Corillion
Produced by Manuel Catteau
Production company: ZED
"Sita Sings the Blues" is based on the Hindu epic "The Ramayana". Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina Paley is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Ramayana. Set to the 1920's jazz vocals of torch singer Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "the Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told." It is written, directed, produced and animated by American artist Nina Paley.
"Sita Sings the Blues" was released in 2008 only after long negotiations with the copyright holders of the 80-year-old songs recorded by Annette Hanshaw. Following the experience of almost having her film blocked from distribution, Nina Paley released it freely under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, and now devotes a significant portion of her time to free culture activism. She is Artist in Residence at the non-profit QuestionCopyright.org.
If you'd like to help pay off the $50,000.00 loan she took out to pay the music monopoly fee, you can donate to the Sita Distribution Project (tax-deductible in the US) at http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution#donate . Donations to that project go exclusively to that purpose and other expenses Nina incurred in releasing the film. You can also purchase DVDs, prints, shirts, and other Sita-related merchandise at http://questioncopyright.com/sita.html ; revenue is shared with Nina Paley.
For more about the film and about Nina Paley's other work, see http://sitasingstheblues.com .
Sufism, an intellectual and enquiring offshoot of Islam, is deeply rooted in Islamic cultures across the globe -- the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian subcontinent particularly -- and in each region it takes on local characteristic. The famous whirling dervishes of Turkey are Sufis, the yearning qawwali sound of Pakistan as performed by Ali Khan is a different manifestation of the same thought.
While anti-modernist Islamists would ban singing, dance and musical instruments as diversions from the true path of devotion and subservience to Allah, Sufi cultures are rich in these traditions -- and that is the subject of this doco by the noted English travel writer, historian and longtime resident of New Delhi, William Dalrymple.
A scholar who is knowledgeable about the great religious, philosophical and cultural aspects of Islam, Dalrymple makes a journey through half a dozen countries to explore the peaceful and pluralistic nature of Sufism -- and uses music as the framework. The subtitle of this doco is “the mystical music of Islam”.
The result is a fascinating travelogue punctuated by extraordinary voices, from the trip-hop clubland Sufi sound of Mercan Dede to powerful presences such as Adiba Parveen.
There is an exoticism here too: the nature of dances in which believers enter trance states; the colours of marketplaces and the decorative beauty of temples, homes and clothing.
At its core Islam has a common origins with Christianity, and the nature of this documentary allows for the benign and peaceful middle ground of Sufism to be revealed at a time when rather too many would set up the great faiths as polar and violent opposites.
Directed by Simon Broughton -- long a commentator on world music and editor of Songlines magazine out of the UK -- this fascinating 45 minute film (with an additional 35 minutes of separate music performances) is an adventure, a journey and a discussion.
This amazing documentary called "Living with the Dead", was shot by two brothers, Naresh Bedi and Rajesh Bedi and released to audiences in the UK and USA in 1995. They were telecast on BBC-2 (whose Multicultural Programmes Department financed the project) from London and the Discovery Channel in USA.
The following is an excerpt from an article on Hinduism Today
The Aghori called Ram Nath provided the film-makers rare moments to recall. States Naresh, "Wading through icy cold waters in Haridwar's winter, cold beyond imagining, Rajesh would stand knee-deep, rolling his camera to catch the Aghori in a moment of midnight meditation in front of the burning pyres. The stench of dead corpses and burnt flesh is more than what was bargained for."
According to Naresh, the most difficult thing was convincing the reclusive Aghori sadhu to permit his life to be filmed. "It is tough because these sadhus just do not care. You can't offer money, and you can't say 'Maharaj ji, do this for me.' "
When asked to narrate some of the spiritual experiences during the filming, a smiling Naresh said, "We all hear about ghosts, witches, spirits and so on. But at the end of filming of Ram Nath at least I was convinced that there are some kind of supernatural powers or wandering spirits which somehow these gurus can tackle, by which I mean they can release a person from the clutches of spirits. For instance, while we were filming, a girl came who was highly possessed by some evil spirit; she was screaming and shouting and talking. Ram Nath tackled this spirit, and when it was all over, the girl was absolutely normal. She was an educated girl from a fairly well to do family of Delhi. You cannot brush off all this as some meaningless kind of show."
Bön (Tibetan: བོན་; Wylie: bon; Lhasa dialect IPA: [pʰø̃̀(n)]) is the oldest spiritual tradition of Tibet. Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, has recently recognized the Bön tradition as the fifth principal spiritual school of Tibet, along with the Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, and Gelug schools of Buddhism, despite the long historical competition of influences between the Bön tradition and Buddhism in Tibet.
The syllable -po or -pa is appended to a noun in Tibetan to designate a person who is from that place or performs that action; "Bönpo" thus means a follower of the Bön tradition, "Nyingmapa" a follower of the Nyingma tradition, and so on. (The feminine parallels are -mo and -ma, but these are not generally appended to the names of the Tibetan religious traditions.)
Often described as the shamanistic and animistic tradition of the Himalayas prior to Buddhism's rise to prominence in the 7th century, more recent research and disclosures have demonstrated that both the religion and the Bönpo are significantly more rich and textured culturally than was initially thought by pioneering Western scholars.[citation needed] Some scholars do not accept the tradition that separates Bön from Buddhism; Christopher Beckwith calls it "one of the two types of Tibetan Buddhism" and writes that "despite continuing popular belief in the existence of a non-Buddhist religion known as Bön during the Tibetan Empire period, there is not a shred of evidence to support the idea... Although different in some respects from the other sects, it was already very definitely a form of Buddhism."
The story of two Sadhus, Uma and Vasisht Giri, one a Swedish woman and the other a 29 year old Indian. Together they go on a pilgrimage of self-discovery into the high Himalayas to the source of the River Ganges, searching out saints and mystics of Yoga. Filmed by British documentarian Michael Yorke, whose learning is also reflected in the film. 71 min run time. (Narration in English, with Hindi and subtitles)
The pilgrimage through the holy places of the Himalayas ends up at Gangotri in 2004, while exploring their motivations, devotion, philosophy and sadhana.
The life of a Hindu Sadhu. In Hinduism, sadhu is a common term for an ascetic or practitioner of yoga (yogi). The sadhu is solely dedicated to achieving the fourth and final Hindu goal of life, moksha (liberation), through meditation and contemplation of Brahman. Sadhus often wear ochre-colored clothing, symbolizing renunciation.
'Sādhu!' is also a Sanskrit and Pali term used as an exclamation for something well done.
