A Christmas Story

by Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry		print version
		print version (graphics)

We want to wish all of our friends in the Satya Center community a Blessed Season of Light. May you & your loved ones receive the many Blessings pouring out upon the Earth at this time of year. May the Blessings of the Holy of Holies comfort you & your families, may the star of Peace reborn enter all of our hearts.

A Christmas Story
by Curtis Lang

The Roman star had risen; Augustus Caesar was ascendant. He had become both ruler of the Empire and pontifex maximus of the Roman religion.

The stage was set for the deification of state power. After his death, Augustus, called the Son of a God, would be worshipped as a Divinity in his own right. The Roman Senate declared the military dictator of the world’s mightiest empire a heroic deity, then named him a God incarnate, establishing his own priestly hierarchy, combining church and state officially in one person.

Under Augustus, Rome and the provinces had become, in essence, a police state. The military presence throughout the Empire spread the Roman language and Roman culture throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.

The mystery school initiates of Egypt, Gaul, Greece, and Persia were powerless in the face of the ubiquitous Roman legions, led by standard-bearers wearing wolf-skins over their elegant armour, carrying banners bearing the image of the Roman she-wolf as they spread fire and iron across Europe and Asia and the Middle East.

This triumph of raw Roman power solidified the rule of predators in the Italian state that birthed the victorious Imperial legions. The institutions and internalized signs of oppression included: wars waged for profit and glory, hereditary aristocracy, institutionalized slavery, widespread greed, unbridled hedonism, casual cruelty and the exaltation of decadence.

A master of politics, Augustus spread the wealth of Empire widely. He displaced poor farmers from their lands and gave that land to his legions as a reward for their faithful service. Augustus rigged elections to favor his personally selected candidates, chosen for “merit” and loyalty rather than bloodline. He placed Imperial colonies in the hands of pliant surrogates who would further Roman interests. Augustus built the foundations for a long-lasting Empire by creating entire new privileged classes at home and abroad. These predatory Roman elites were naturally loyal to the Emperor who enriched and elevated them, and together the Emperor and these newly privileged social classes profited from the sweat and blood and taxes of the peoples of the Empire around the world.

Rome stood for religious superstition, authoritarian, militaristic rule by a fractured elite engaged in continuous infighting, materialistic, egoistic philosophy and spiritual agnosticism.

All this was in stark counterpoint to the mystical, prophetic philosophy and highly spiritually charged worldview of the tiny nation of Israel, whose people had been oppressed for long generations. Israel had endured the yoke of Babylon, the lash of Egypt and now the double oppression of Imperial rule and an ossified priesthood, jealous of its privileges and beholden to the Roman governor charged with extracting maximum value for the Empire.

During this time of global turmoil and conflict, there was a widespread awareness, subliminal for the most part, that the world had reached a turning point of the ages.

In Greece, Aeschylus, fashioner of ritual dramas elucidating the ancient mysteries and son of a priest of Eleusis, had risked the wrath of the mob for putting a speech into the mouth of his Titanic hero Prometheus declaring the imminent end of the reign of Jupiter.

In Rome, the visionary prophet Virgil, in a poem ostensibly part of a cycle of works dedicated to the glory of the coming of the great God-man Augustus, declared, “The last great age, foretold by sacred rhymes, renews its finished course, Saturnian times roll round again, and the mighty years begun from their first orb in radiant circles run, the base degenerate iron offspring ends, a golden progeny from Heaven descends – Oh! Chaste Lucia! Speed the mother’s pains, and haste the glorious birth, thy own Apollo reigns!” St. Augustine, and other Christian scholars, would later interpret Virgil’s words as a prophecy of the coming of Christ.

photo by Jane Sherry

In Israel, the coming of the avatar of a new spiritual dispensation had become an integral part of the people’s consciousness. Isaiah had long prophesied that “There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots; and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the sprit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge. . .For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form or comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. . .He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”