“Can do!” Brady sneered aloud.
He rescued his spiral notebook and pen from the bottom of a fallen mound of dusty books and shoved his laptop into about the only open corner of bed left in his cluttered van.
“Caaaaaaan do!” he quipped again, reaching for his Fireball.
Sure Eve, I can totally sift through thousands of years of creation myths, inquisitions, medieval grimoires, world wars, billionaire hedge funds, and internet conspiracy theories and come up with a top ten list of recycled bad guys.
No problemo!
That I caaaaaaaaaaan do!
Brady squeezed his eyes shut and ran his hands through what was left of his hair.
Shit, he’d been at this for days, and he still didn’t know where to begin.
Do you start with the Persians and ancient Egyptians and work your way forward? Or does it make more sense to deal with today’s assholes and follow them back in time?
One thing he felt sure of: The real masterminds behind this shit show, the ones who’ve been pulling all the strings since all this started, aren’t posting selfies on Instagram.
Sure, there were politicians and UN stakeholders and Big Tech bozos, but even the spookiest among them weren’t at the top of any food chain.
Names like the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, Bill Gates, the Soros clan— Even they, Brady believed, were, ultimately little more than very committed, well-connected foot soldiers, motivated, he suspected, more by greed than ideology.
Powerful? Yes. But they, too, answered to superiors.
Those, Brady knew, were the true leaders, the ones who have been plotting this cosmic coup for two thousand years. And they were way too smart to advertise their evil plan.
If we know something today, it’s probably because they’re okay with us knowing it.
Brady, he told himself, you’ve hitched yourself to a historical hamster wheel.
The way Gabriel described it to Eve, religion before the turn wasn’t something you did on Sundays. They lived it. It was part of every aspect of their lives, inseparable from medicine, architecture, agriculture, education, administration, and entertainment.
There’s no clear consensus on how the oldest religions we know about worked in the new epoch, but Brady assumed the older they were, the closer they resembled the enlightened ways of those who came before them.
But there’s a huge gap between the Great Flood and the Sumerian account of the event. Before there was Noah, there was Gilgamesh, and the similarities are too close to dismiss.
The roots of Hinduism go back to 3300 BCE, and to this day, people disagree on how to classify it. Some would say they worship a ton of gods, but others would argue that all the gods are really manifestations of Brahman, a single divine deity. And then there are those who say you can decide which of their gods to make your supreme higher power.
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Same thing with the Egyptians. Loads of gods, but they also had Amun, the god of the air, and Ra, the ancient sun god, who took center stage.
Later on, the Greeks and the Romans would roll out their gods, with Zeus and Jupiter at the top of the heap.
Around 1500 BCE, give or take a few hundred years on either side, something changed.
All the gods who represented, in one form or another, all the forces of nature, were being whittled down to a single, all-powerful deity.
In Persia, a celestial messenger from Ahura Mazda – the Lord of Wisdom — visited the prophet Zarathustra and the world’s first monotheistic religion was born: Zoroastrianism.
Prior to that, priests were getting rich off the sacrifices required too keep all the gods happy. So, clearly, organized religion was monetizing mercy.
There was only god, Zarathustra was told in his vision, and Ahura Mazda wasn’t into animal sacrifices. After the prophet miraculously healed a king’s horse, Zarathustra’s new religion took hold.
In Egypt, something similar happened, but with a very different result.
Pharaoh Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and, much to the horror of Egyptian priests, he and his queen, the notorious Nefertiti, cancelled all the ancient gods and declared Aten, the light of the sun, to be the only deity in town.
The old shrines were shut, the old monuments were torn down, and even the art changed. Images of the royal couple in family settings adorned the pyramids, and Akhenaten was depicted as an almost androgynous, oddly shaped ruler.
For their efforts, Akhenaten and Nefertiti were nearly erased from history.
Akhenaten’s reign ended, and his son, King Tutankhamun, led by power-starved priests who missed the way things were, undid all of his dad’s hard work.
It’s pretty clear the Jewish faith borrowed heavily from the Canaanites’ gods, El and Ba’al to form their monotheistic religion, and for awhile there, it seemed like there was still a tolerance for all the faiths and their many versions of a supreme ruler.
But it didn’t take long for that tolerance to crumble.
Just a 100 years or so after Akhenaten, the only god of Moses would demand the deaths of those who worshipped the Golden Calf in what some scholars say was the world’s first holy war.
Meanwhile, as far as Brady could figure, the Greeks were building a civilization that, by all accounts, carried on the ancient traditions.
Plato wrote about Atlantis around 360 BCE, so we know the old ways were still remembered. Sacred geometry, the study of the stars, the reverence for nature, and the ancient traditions, though tweaked through time, were still openly practiced. If anything, they were enjoying a comeback.
The Greek god Hermes merged with the Egyptian god Thoth and somewhere around the first century BCE, Hermes Trismegistus began discussing the connection between the Above and the Below.
That fucking Emerald Tablet.
A work of profound beauty and wisdom that, in the wrong hands, would reignite a revolution against God Himself — the one who doesn’t give a damn what you call Him as long as you know His spark of perfection is in everything and everyone you see, including the flawed mess that stares at you from the mirror.
It hurt Brady’s heart to think of how backward everything became.
Ironically, it’s when large groups of people began believing in a single, unified God that humanity started slaughtering each other in whatever name they decided to give Him.
It was bound to happen, Brady realized. If your god is The God, then every other god is a pagan poser that must be eliminated.
Convince enough people that killing heathens is the Lord’s work — that consorting with nonbelievers puts your soul in danger of a good smiting — and you’ve got a mob that can be wound up and set loose on anyone you want to conquer.
The exclusionary nature of an all-knowing god created earthly opportunities that would be weaponized to great effect for the next two thousand years.
The big question Brady had to answer was, how many of the savage wars were waged not out of good, old-fashioned, organic human bloodlust, but because a select group of psychopaths willed them into existence? How many religions were created or destroyed for the express purpose of bending faithful, devout people to their godless will?
It was such an inversion of everything good, it made Brady nauseous to think about it.
What really pissed him off was that humanity fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.
At some point you have to stop blaming the evil geniuses, Brady’s brain kept telling him, and start holding the ones who listen to them like drooling lapdogs accountable.
Was it really necessary to use early Christians as screaming candles in Nero’s court? Didn’t anyone tell the sick freak, “No, Emperor, we’re not going to dip them in wax and set them on fire for your amusement.”?
Didn’t anyone tell the Christians, “No, Señor Conquistador, we’re not going to go genocidal in a jungle we didn’t know existed last week.”?
Didn’t anyone think to mention that beheading people in the street and streaming it on YouTube may not be the best way to spread the glorious love of Allah?
There may very well be puppet masters, but we haven’t exactly been trying to cut the strings. The truly religious don’t ask questions, and the rest would rather not get involved.
Aren’t we as guilty as they are? Brady kept asking himself. Exactly what are we trying to save here?
It was 3 a.m., and Brady wanted to launch the nukes himself.