The death and resurrection of the savior is probably the least Christian element in Christianity.

Most strange indeed to be a Catholic Jew at Christmastime but I am not nor have ever been a Tammuzianite – Tammuz being the dying and resurrecting god Jews so honored in Jerusalem centuries before the birth of Christ.

I was 30 when I found out my ancestors were Jews – having fled Spain to Mexico City to escape the Office of the Holy Inquisition. Having fled Mexico City to Santa Fe.

The main cathedral of Mexico City was consecrated to St Francis – St Francis! – where the Aztec empire had sacrificed thousands of virgins to Huitzlopochli. In this selfsame place but within another empire, holy and Catholic, 1649, judaizers were burnt at the stake. I try to imagine the terror of it. The political terror of the Inquisition arriving at one’s doorway from across the sea. But also the archetypal terror – Jews burnt like candles over the bones of the war god. The fires blessed by the seraphic saint, Christ and the Virgin.

This sent my ancestors north to the garrison city of Santa Fe, 1694. That was the year after the reconquest from the Pueblo Indians. I think of Nicolás Ortiz, exactly my age now, trekking north, burying his five year old Ana in Zacatecas. North with 36 families to the Promised Land. Up along the Rio Grande past where I would be born almost 300 years later. I doubt we will ever know why this small cluster of Jews became Catholic beyond sheer terror.

I was raised by a Catholic mother and a Buddhist father and I've been honored to be initiated as a medicine man by Bantu people in central Africa.

The new covenant/old covenant schema is the oddest of fictions. In Judaism, moschiach (Messiah) was much the son of man but the idea of the incarnate son of God is far from Jewish. I’ve tried to explain to Jews (and Muslims) the idea of Trinity, to no avail. My sister Claire, who is a Catholic hermit in France, once told me that traditional African monotheism isn’t monotheistic in the sense of the “one God of Abraham and Isaac” but of course neither is Catholicism.

The Christian Messiah seems closer to the dying and resurrecting redeemer god man Tammuz than anything remotely Jewish. Or rather the rites of Tammuz were judaized long before Christ was born and messianized in Christs’ passion as a very pagan scapegoated god.

On the Jewish Day of Atonement in the month of Tammuz, the sins of the community would be transferred by a priest into the bodies of two goats. One was slain and the other chased into the wilderness so that the wildness within the village could return to its proper domain. That the Jews picked this ritual up from the Syrians is revealed by the name of the month. Tammuz was the dying and resurrecting god of Babylon.

As disturbing as the idea might be to fundamentalists, the death and resurrection of the savior is probably the least Christian element in Christianity.

Each year on the Day of Atonement Tammuz was sacrificed in the form of a lamb, son of the Holy Eve. On the occasion of the god's death, temple women raised ritual howls which the Babylonians called alalu.

The Roman colonialists took Tammuz to be the chief god of the Jews in
Palestine, and there is no question that he has prefigured much in the Christ story. Called Healer, Savior, Man of Sorrows, he was the Heavenly Shepherd who "tended the flocks of stars" which were considered souls of the dead in heaven.

Redefining “Messiah” by appropriating Hebrew scripture as “old covenant” that prophesies the coming of the god man and then persecuting Jews for not submitting to the redefinition – well what can one possibly say?

I was in Israel (doing water spirit rituals at Yardenit where it is said John baptized Christ) at a remarkable moment of reconciliation. The then Pope had just apologized for 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitism. (He had also apologized for what the Church had visited on indigenous people: his jubilee gesture at the turn of the millennium).

Regarding the two worlds with which I have cast my lot I can only quote Christ: “Even as you have done to the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.”

Michael Ortiz Hill, who is of Latino and Anglo descent, lives in Topanga. He is a registered nurse and tribal healer among the Bantu people in South Central Africa. His books include Gathering in the Names(co-authored with Augustine Kandemwa) and Dreaming the End of the World. Both are available at Amazon.com. Read more about Michael’s work and writings at www.gatheringin.com

Child abuse has so many faces doesn’t it?

The horror of pederast priests and the Church covering for them is one thing but the molesting of a childs’ soul with received teaching gets under the skin and persists.

Century after century the doctrine of Hell and Original Sin has been institutionalized child abuse – a way to “control” the wild souls of children (and other primitives) by preaching a loving God alongside His Infinite Brutality

This came vivid to me when, to call on my fifth decade, I went to the forests of Big Sur to be alone for a few months to meditate and pray. I’d occasionally been a freelance hermit over the years but these months were initially quite rigorous.

I’d meditated for several weeks before the obvious was at all obvious. From Catholic catechism onward – since I was seven – I had lived every gesture under the gaze of an omniscient and punitive God.

Not “believing” in hell as an adult was apparently irrelevant. Until I “saw” - and saw through the pervasive and tacit “fact” of this merciless impostor of a “God” - I was stained with His relentless Presense.

I was among the damned.

In some ways I’d intuited as much years before.
Phrase by phrase the terza rima of Dantes Inferno showed how familiar I’d been with the geography of hell since I was a kid and my years as a homeless teenager confirmed.

Like the church, the commercial world (of which some brands of Christianity are a variant) forever seeks to snatch the soul of a child and render it unrecognizable. Every parent knows this and the feeling of helplessness itself erodes you. Conspiring with the powers that be is common enough – adults are far from immune to the seductions of consumer imprint. And our “Amish” impulse to shelter the young’ns are far from convincing.

Long, long time ago when I was a recovering hippie single dad with a six year old girl, I knew it was my duty to preserve my daughter’s soul from the banal violence of American culture. I didn’t quite know the measure of the stink of hell that lingered around me – didn’t know how much I saw America as a place of damnation – so I was perhaps too much a flamboyant. “fundamentalist.”

Specifically regarding this fellow claiming to be Jesus and that plastic babe of all babes, Barbie.

Jesus himself was a precocious young rabbi but daughter Nicole had come home once from playing with a born again friend asking me about sin and I begin speculating how to save her from the savior. And so in my early days of creating shamanic ritual, I cooked up some Kraft macaroni and Jesus.

The recipe did not even tax the culinary imagination of single dadhood. Take a crucifix and boil it a few minutes till His plastic body was soft enough to know His eucharistic essence had been imparted. Remove Jesus, boil until squishy macaroni and mix in the cheese powder. Voila” – macaroni and Jesus. I d read some choice scripture over the sacrament, like God being love and all that, and then we chowed down.

The transmogrification of Barbie was another matter. No way at all to make her edible.

And no scriptural redemption.

What to do?

Well we went to the Salvation Army and got a cheap used Barbie and decapitated her so we could invite her cousin from New Guinea into the house to live with us.

“Barbarella,” was a mudwoman from the Garoka Highlands. After we affixed a clay head to Barbie’s body and painted her naked body, Barbarella told us -or so we sensed as we went - how it was that when neighboring brutes chased her into the Asaro river she emerged covered with mud and they ran off.

“They thought I was a ghost!” she laughed

Barbarella was not in the least interested in Ken, thank God, and I set her on the altar as a protective spirit to shield Nicole from the demons that haunt American pop culture.

All of this was a bit much for Nicole who really didn’t think much of Ken either and was much more into the Care Bears anyway.

Was I to decapitate a clan of Care Bears? And replace their heads with what? When I found myself fulminating about the Bears - “What do those sentimental twits know about feelings?” –
I could see my efforts to protect Nicole had an edge.

Girls, after all, just want to have fun, don’t they?

I conceded to trusting my daughter’s good sense and to play with my own damn Barbarella.

* * *

This essay was just visited by a necessary post script.

I was recently telling the story of Barbarella to Ki’na Darkcloud, an Arikara woman who grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona.

As a child her Navajo brothers used to get her all sorts of used Barbies which she’d melt on a barbecue and bury. “I imagine the archaeologists of the future excited about the find: melted Barbies with their eyes sliding off and such.”

And there it is – a full meal of Barbecued Barbies and macaroni and Jesus served to you by a mudhead. What indeed might the archaeologist make of post apocalypse America?

Michael Ortiz Hill is the author of Dreaming the End of the World (Spring 1994) and, (with Augustine Kandemwa) Gathering in the Names (Spring Journal books, 2002). The companion to this essay, The Looking Glass War, is posted at www.gatheringin.com. He can be reached at michaelortizhill@earthlink.net.

Michael Ortiz Hill, who is of Latino and Anglo descent, lives in Topanga. He is a registered nurse and tribal healer among the Bantu people in South Central Africa. His books include Gathering in the Names(co-authored with Augustine Kandemwa) and Dreaming the End of the World. Both are available at Amazon.com. Read more about Michael’s work and writings at www.gatheringin.com