Africa is the mother of the human race.

"Everyone" knows that by now, as much as science (and ancient literature) have pounded it into our brains. Yet just knowing it means nothing if the reality of it is not somehow internalized and applied. Wisdom must be lived. Our Euro-centered civilization has proved itself, time and again, anything but civilized.

God is dead was the conclusion of those over-enlightened, over-rationalist, overly intellectual nineteenth century Europeans. It was civilized Europe that concluded that they had outgrown the myths and superstitions of biblical believism and primitivity.

Instead of learning from Africa, the Enlightenment made up its mind that all evolution had one purpose, the survival of the fittest, that is the survival and flourishing of white man, the epitome of human development and natural selection. In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin declared: "At some future period, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world."

In fact, evolution -- especially the Darwinian and Lamarckian varieties -- has long been used as the supposedly scientific basis of racism. All of the nineteenth-century evolutionists, in fact -- Darwin, Huxley, and the rest, well up into the first quarter of the twentieth century -- were convinced proponents of white supremacy. It was the spirit of the age. "Look what we have accomplished. We must be Nature's favorite child." The spirit of self-congratulation crept into intellectual accomplishment, and the result was a conscience-less arrogance and condescension.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. "We are the educated ones. We are the possessors of Civilization and Enlightenment." Yet look at how much this socalled Civilization fell short of the values it professed. Thomas Traherne, the Puritan, wrote: "verily there is no savage nation under the cope of Heaven that is more absurdly barbarous than the Christian world." The best and brightest that the white intelligentsia had to offer have stumbled on the moral issue. Instead of walking in the steps of sages and prophets, white man has sought rationales for domination. The nineteenth century, for all its accomplishments materially, colonially, economically, industrially, seemed to go astray in rejecting superstion and backwardness (and God), and in defending white supremacy. See Allen Chase's "Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

The history of white civilization in modern times has been at the same time a history of the subjection of women and of the subjection of non-white peoples. Even well-meaning whites have been at a loss about the dilemma. Norman Podhoretz wrote of the Black Man:

His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing
the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.

I feel like Podhoretz tossed in the towel before he needed to. Certainly when he wrote (1963) things were far less hopeful than today. Podhoretz did much of his thinking about the problem, to be sure, prior to the days of the Civil Rights movement when changes began to happen. I am not sure if anyone can pinpoint the turning point of that movement. But momentum had been building for decades into the past, generations in fact.

Moreover, the black man's past is far from only stigma. The story of the GLORY has only begun to be told.

Africa is the mother of the human race. Not only do we learn this from paleontology and its sister sciences, but we learn it from ancient literature itself. Where was the primeval Garden of Eden? We are told in Genesis that a triver went out of Eden to water the Garden, and the river parted and became four heads. Including Pison which compasseth the whole land of Havilah and Gihon, which compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. Genesis 2:13

The patriarchal Father of Genesis, Abraham, had recourse or intercourse with Africa, and sojourned in the land of Ham. At the time calling himself Abram, he even offered his beautiful wife Sarah (Sarai) to the king of Egypt. "The Egyptians beheld the woman tht she was very fair." Discreetly cuckolding himself seemed a small price to pay compared to getting killed by this powerful man. Genesis 13: 10-20

In Vedic literature, the primeval civilization of India was Black. When the nomadic Aryan pastoralists drifted into India, their fair maidens were smitten by the divine Black Man-God KRSNA. Their sexual ardor was a religion, a worship, and Krsna clearly was not merely a youthful "father figure" to the love-sick Gopi maids, but in Freudian-speak, a phallic symbol.

The Bible of the Jews (and of Jesus), what we call the Old Testament, had its origins in, you guess it, Egypt. Sigmund Freud cited an ancient rabbic tradition that Moses was an Ethiopian, a Cushite. Freud himself fully believed this tradition.

From Édouard Schuré: going back via both Philo and Strabo, both of whom cite Manetho (Manethon) regarding the real personage of Moses, who (according to Manetho), was Hosarsiph, son of the royal priestess who herself was sister to Pharaoh Rameses II. Hosarsiph was first cousin of Menephtah, whose father was Rameses II. While Memephtah was instructed in the cult of Ammon-Ra at Memphis (Noph), Hosarsiph was dedicated to Isis and Osiris by his mother, and trained in sacred knowledge, He had been dubbed "the silent one," so intense and almost quiet was he. Often he stammered while speaking, he appeared shy till of a sudden, like a sharp thunderbolt, a terrible idea would burst forth, leaving behind it a trail of light (these words are Schuré's). Hosarsiph became an initiate in the religion of Isis, but he was destined for something greater. He became the Deliverer, the Law-Giver, of the children of Israel. We know him as Moses.

Jethro was high priest of Madian or the Raguel (the watchman of God). He was a Black Man, a "Negro" in our language. Schuré says he belonged to the purest type of the ancient Ethiopian race which had ruled Egypt for four to five thousand years before Rameses. [Schuré. p184]

What Christians call the old testament contained, in the Hebrew of Ezra, twenty four books, corresponding to the twenty four letters of the Alphabet. But in addition to these twenty four, there were seventy books of secret teaching, which have at some point subsequently disappeared. Elements of those lost works, however, seem to have survived in other forms.

The first martyr of the early church, Stephen, reminded his enemies of the Egyptian origins of their faith, their enslavement in Egypt and their eventual deliverance. He pointed the founder of the Jewish religion, Moses, that he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. Acts 7:22. So ancient Egypt is where we got the (Hebrew) Bible, and it's also, in part at least, where we got the Testament that Christians claim as their own.

Apparently the civilization of the Nile offered itself to the biblical Hebrews time and again as trading partners, or as places of refuge or protection, and sometimes as threats. Thebes, which in the Bible is called No or No-Ammon, was known as a city of great population, great wealth and splendour. The site of Karnak and Luxor, Thebes was reputedly the oldest city in the world, and was the capital of upper Egypt.

Memphis, which in the Bible is called Noph, also claimed for itself great antiquity. The capital of lower Egypt, it dominated over the land of the pyraminds, over the Delta, over the lower Nile. Owing it all to the Great River of Egypt, it truly was the gift of the Nile, and like Thebes, also had great population and wealth. Yet for all its glory and might, the demise of Memphis was scathingly foretold by the both Isaiah (chap 19) and Jeremiah (chap 46). The predicted event finally came at the hands of the Persian Cambyses, son of Cyrus.

Out of Egypt have I called my son, the prophet declared. Traditional interpretation was clear that the "son" spoken of was Israel itself, but early Christians, once the facts of Christ's childhood were known, declared that the years spent by the boy Jesus in Egypt were yet another proof of his messiah-ship, the resonance of his own life with the prophecies of Hebrew Scriptures hundreds of years previous.

Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile, was the first center of Christian missionary success, but this achievement grew out of the earlier concentration of Jewish settlement and intellectual ferment there. The city was built directly opposite the island of Pharos, 12 miles west of the Canopic branch of the Nile. It was founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, and its ground plan had been traced by Alexander himself. After Alexander died at such a young age, the work continued under the Ptolemies. Before long, the population and wealth of Alexandria were enormous. Its importance as one of the chief corn-ports of Rome secured for it the general favor of the first Caesars.

According to Josephus, Alexander himself assigned to the Jews a place in his new city. By the time of Philo, the number of Alexandrine Jews was pushing one million (1,000,000). Philo adds that two of the five districts of Alexandria were called "Jewish districts" and that many Jews lived scattered in the remaining three.

Philos says, "For a long period, Alexandria was the greatest of known cities."

After Rome became the chief city in the world, Alexandria ranked second only to Rome in wealth and importance, and second only to Athens in literature and science. Its collection of books grew to be the greatest library of ancient times, and contained at one time 700,000 scrolls or volumes. Here was made the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, begun about 285 BC.

Thus, when the early missionaries of the church went forth to spread the gospel, it was no wonder that the focus of Saint Mark was immediately Alexandria, that prime city of the Jewish diaspora, a "New York City" with respect to its very high concentration of Jews. Here Saint Mark "preached the gospel in Egypt, and founded the first church in Alexandria."

But almost from the beginning, there was trouble. Independence and individualism were branded as heretical and rebellious. Conformity was demanded at the cost of honesty and conscience. The big issue was Christology. Was Jesus merely messianic and Judaic, or was he God himself. Pagan gods like Osiris had been sacrificed, dying gods associated with the ancient resurrection cults of fertility and sacrifice. Was Jesus merely the promulgator or Prophet of a divinely inspired ethical system, or was he the Saviour of mankind?

Charges and counter charges flew as the factions battled it out. Jesus himself had emphasized his words, his teachings, the Judaic core of who he was. Not one jot or tittle of the Law would pass, he declared, till all be fulfilled. He did not come to deatroy the law or the prophets, he declared. Salvation is of the Jews, he declared. But as the new church drifted into the Roman world, the Judaizers were branded as legalists, though their leader, we are told, was none other than James the brother of the Lord.

The other main faction seemed concentrated among the Hellenizers principally, what Saint Luke called the "Grecians." Turning Jesus into the Saviour of the world, this faction downplayed the ethical teachings of Jesus, and the Jewish "straight and narrow" road. Instead, Jesus Christ was the true sacrifice of which pagan ante-types had been merely a shadow. Christ was the true Osiris, the true Orpheus, or Dionysus Zagreus, and salvation consisted in the cleansing effected by the expiatory sacrament offered by faith in the blood of Jesus.

To those who rejected what appeared as pagan syncretizing of the god-makers, the evolving theology smacked of heresy, gnosticism, and turning a simple but lofty Hebraic ethics into a mystical cult after the manner of the heathen atonement religions.

Yet it was the god-makers and hellenizers who won out. Christianity was made a religion, not a way of life. It was ripped from its Hebraic and Semitic heritage, and the kith and kin of our Lord were treated as enemies. Anti-Semitism grew, the words of Jesus conveniently ignored: what ye do it to the least of these my brethren, ye do unto me.

Saint Augustine, himself an African of Numidia, is surely more accurately the founder of Protestant theology than any of the reformers, or than Jesus himself.

Douglas Morgan is a modern student of the Bible who decries how Chritian theologizers have distorted biblical simplicity beyond its honest Hebraic roots. It was saints like Augustine who treated "erotic-sexual love [as] different in kind, weaker, sin-inclined" compared to agape or philia love. Morgan is critical of "The puritanical and ascetic traditions in Christianity." He contrasts the more wholesome attitudes of the Judaic heritage with what the major theologizers of Christianity taught (Saint Paul; Saint Augustine, etc) "human flesh as such is weak and likely to lead us toward sin; this life on earth is to be endured; sexual behavior is a distasteful reproductive duty rather than a human pleasure; all or nearly all fleshly temptations are to be repressed for the sake of the greater glory of the spirit. Joy of any earthly kind, especially bodily joy in sexual love, is always suspicious and usually condemned as pernicious."

Morgan writes:
"Comparing [Christian] puritanism with the Hebraic acceptance of sexuality, we have a most interesting example of how the force of love is set to the service of religion. The prophets, from Moses to Hosea, although sternly forbidding sexual immorality -- adultery, sodomy, incest -- do not ever directly or indirectly condemn sexual activity itself as immoral. On the contrary, they themselves are lusty men. They love life and they love love-making. They feel the force of desire keenly, and treat it naturally as healthy human evidence of the Lord's love. So powerful is sexual love in human experience that they use it as a basis for teaching the intimate morality of our duty to JHVH. Human sexual love, in its moral manifestations, is welcomed and approved and extended in the direction of God himself."

The influence of Dr. King as theologian has been more suggestive than direct. Considering how far, in so many ways, that historical Christendom has strayed from its Judaic roots, the nudge provided by Martin Luther King, Jr is a refreshing one indeed. King, theologically, seems to be pointing the Church away from the convoluted morass to which it has come, and back to the biblical simplicity of a more Judaic early church. In his deeply personalist ethical mysticism, King is closer to the Apostolic Fathers than either Protestant or Catholic permutations have been.

The remark of Jesus that salvation is of the Jews has somehow rubbed Christians the wrong way. By the time such saints as John Chyrostom and Jerome began to have an impact, an anti-Semitic flavor tainted much of their thought. How sad, in fact, how ruinous to later Christianity. Jesus had said Clean the inside. But the theologizers had turned the Church into more or less of a club, and all that mattered was what people thought of you, what is your image to other Christians. People worried about cleaning the outside, the outer appearance, and forgot about the inside, that God sees, and rewards.