THE FALL OF BABYLON: or, THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE DESACRALIZED COSMOS REVISITED.

By Nigel Pennick

SEEING AS THIS is the final issue of ANCIENT MYSTERIES, my final offering in this guise will be on a subject dear to my heart: the desacralized cosmos, that dissolute and disintegrated after-state in which we all have to live. The Fall of Babylon, Brixton rioters aside, has long been the rallying point of aficionados of the Apocalypse in both its guises. Babylon, as image of decadence and dissolution, is as good a name as any to describe the state of total destruction and negation I call the ‘desacralized cosmos’. Babylon, the word chanted by the blacks who looted and burned parts of the most desacralized Brixton recently, has been taken by followers of the Rastafarian religion to mean the whole gamut of place and structure that is society in the widest sense – the buildings, customs, politics, and metaphysical structure of the world as it is now. The expression ‘Babylon’ as used by Rastafarians, comes from the history of Ethiopia. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, had a foray into Africa during his routing of the Jews and others, and carried off many Ethiopians into captivity, just as he did the more famous Jews. Whilst the descendents of these Ethiopians were spread abroad on the surface of the Earth in a ‘diaspora’ equivalent of that of the Jews or Armenians, then the whole world to them is Babylon. Hence the chant as pubs and cars incinerated.

Disaffection of the Lumpenproletariat aside, the concept of Babylon is a useful one, as it encapsulates in a single word the ideas of alienation, forced removal and desecration which Babylon implies. It infers a removal of people from their rightful environment and their placement in a situation without hope and in complete alienation from their surroundings. Tellingly, the Rastafarian concept of Babylon is not restricted to Jamaica or the Front Line, but refers to the whole world, including the now-Communist Ethiopia. Everywhere is Babylon, for the ancient values and systems are destroyed. No longer can anyone cling to the old systems and values of ancient times, for they are outmoded, their powers are waning or dead, and even their holiest shrines are reduced and defiled. Just like the Jewish Temple, destroyed when Babylon overpowered Judea, there is no longer a centre of the spirit. It may be restored – indeed it must be restored – yet at present it is in abeyance, nullified and impotent, removed from its rightful place in this earth.

Babylon – the desacralized cosmos – lies all around us. In former times, the ancient science of geomancy taught that several certain places were holy, and that the earth herself was a holy receptacle of spirit, and must be treated accordingly. But no more. The desacralized cosmos, which began at the Reformation in medieval (or was it Renaissance? – take yer pick) Europe, where the concept of ‘nothing is sacred’ was first put into practice, has since then taken on a life of its own and marched inexorably towards the total desacralia – a global pattern of dissolution where parking lot is of equal holiness to football pitch, tram depot, housing project, bus stop, football ground (though some are more holy than others – vide Spion Kop!), animal torture lab, prison, school, cemetery, ‘church of your choice’, liquor store, hospital, mortuary, sex shop and TV studio. No longer does anything matter, all is reduced to the status of ‘real estate’ and measured solely in terms of financial value (and sometimes of the mineral ‘wealth’ buried deep below the desacralized surface).

Religious people of all persuasions save the modern financial wizard ‘holy men’ of the Midwest and South Korea (Sunni and Moony, Mormy and Loony, you name ’em, they’re charities), recognized that the Earth herself was a holy being, not to be blasted and ripped and hacked about for profit, no more than a civilized society allows one human being to own another. But whilst the Constitution of many countries specifically forbids the ownership of people, it positively insists that land MUST BE OWNED, either by individuals, organizations, or that non-specific disease known as the State. {5}

In 1649, the Diggers, a group of English radical Christians, the forerunners of collectivist anarchists, stated that “He who buys and sells the Earth removes his neighbour’s land-mark”, a reference to the commination service which ‘CURSES’ people for various sins, and specifically removing his neighbour’s land-mark. Now this ‘commination’ refers to the moving of land-marks being a crime not only against Man, but also against God Himself. The Diggers, who believed that all people were equal, held that land and everything else must be held in a ‘Commonwealth’ (no relation to the ex-British Empire). This ‘Commonwealth’ meant that all things were to be distributed equally between all people, regardless of the niceties or nastities of class, race, or ability – more radical than the Marxist–Leninists who sit in opulence and luxury surrounded by armed men in the Kremlin to-day. The difference between the Diggers and later so-called ‘communists’ was that they had a religious faith in the Earth, which they saw as God’s treasury which ought to be equally apportioned to all mankind. This faith in the Earth, now dismissed as ‘primitive’ was also held by pre-Westernized societies. The Native Americans, now despisingly dubbed ‘red indians’, had a faith that revered the planet as their Mother, and treated her accordingly. Not for them the dominance that may be seen at every strip-mine, every open-cast iron working. To them the sanctity of the world was so great that before digging prayers were offered, and an explanation was made that the digging was necessary for survival and a hope that the Earth would understand.

When the white settlers arrived in North America, all this went by the board. Although the continent was colonized by British, French, Dutch, Russian and Spanish colonists, their approach was as one – destroy the natives, wipe out ancient cultures and ways, and impose Babylon, though under the guise of Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholic Christianity or Russian Orthodox Christianity. In all cases, the ancient shrines were broken up, ‘witch doctors’ persecuted or killed, and holy places appropriated for the use of the New Order of the Clergy. Monasteries were set up at geomantic points in Arizona and California by Jesuits and Franciscans, and the many weird indigenous faiths of American white settlers built their ‘First National Churches’, ‘Temples’ and ‘Tabernacles’, ‘Zions’, ‘Elims’, Ertemolik’s even! Pentecostal, hexacostal, Strict and Particular, Reformed, United, everything proliferated along Main Street, whilst the native religions were relegated to museums or the tin shacks near the garbage dumps that passed for ‘reservations’ for the original inhabitants.

And it is this concept of ‘Main Street’ that is a key to this appalling desacralization that continued with the blasting of Vietnam with thousand-acre swathes ripped through forests in the shape of U.S.Army regimental crests – a sort of apocalyptic Disneyland. The Cosmic West, that destructive admixture of mayhem and buildings overlain with a thick swathe of insecurity and paranoia, started there – with the actual layout of the country. Just as a country in antiquity was laid out according to cosmological schemata that reflected the beliefs and aspirations of its pious inhabitants, so the layout of the Cosmic West reflects a quite different ethos, that of conquest and domination.

When America was seized from its original inhabitants by force, it was not laid out in saleable packages. There was no concept of ‘Real Estate’. The natives lived there, places had names, and certain places were held holy and resorted to at ritualized times when sacred ceremonies were performed. There were few towns, and those which did exist were laid out in harmony with the surrounding land, part of it, in no way intrusive or domineering, which is more than can be said for Chicago or New York!

In his razor-sharp exposition of the nature of government, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon listed that to be governed was to be “weighed, taxed, assessed …”, fundamental necessities of the apparatus of the state. In order to rule a newly-conquered country, governments have always found it necessary to list and measure all the contents of that land, like the inventory of an inherited business. In the Roman Empire, the areas were laid out in a grid. William the Bastard, or Conqueror, insisted at the conquest of England that everything {6} should be assessed – that was the notorious Domesday Book. When the United States of America finally gained the ascendancy over all of the other colonial powers vying for a continent whose indigenous population they could outgun, the powers that were set about laying out the country in a vast grid – to tax, assess, weigh and generally control the land seized from the tribes to whom the Great Spirit had entrusted it. Having gunned down the last tribesman (or woman or child), the agents of the US Government set about laying down vast survey-lines – the US Rectangular Land Survey, which set out to ‘grid’ the whole of the continental United States.

The dominant ideals were now those of ownership. The Red Man had abdicated his right at the wrong end of the gun barrel, and now the new triumphant White Man had all America at his disposal. “As much land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, enclose it from the Commons”, so wrote John Locke, in total opposition to the Digger ideals of all in common in a true ‘Commonwealth’. Ideas like Locke’s from Treatises on government went hand-in-glove with the genocide of the American natives. As these ‘vermin’ (so the Christian ministers who wiped out men, women and infant natives called them) were extirpated utterly from the face of the land, so the ‘improvers’ and ‘civilizers’ arrived to till the land and impose a literal New Order upon it. Thomas Jefferson and Hugh Williamson conceived the idea of laying out the whole of the continental possessions of the United States Government and its agents as a vast rectilinear grid, without regard for the natural features it overlay. Jefferson, who wished to ‘reform’ the ancient weights and measures (he introduced decimal coinage to the US and invented the ‘cent’), wanted to lay out the land in geographical miles, reformed so that a square mile would contain 1000 acres, not the customary 640. In accordance with the hierarchical nature of such land-division, Jefferson proposed that ex-officers and soldiers should be given ‘land grants’ – a copy of the Roman colonial system which he doubtless was emulating. A Major-General was to be given 1100 acres, a brigadier 850, a colonel 500, an ensign 450, and an ordinary soldier or NCO a meagre 100 acres. Thus the hierarchical system of the Military was to be institutionalized upon the landscape – a spiritual forerunner of the Vietnam Forest Syndrome.

After many reports and enquiries, the Jefferson plan was adopted in a modified form. It is interesting to note that an early form of Apartheid was institutionalized in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, where ‘Christianized Indians’ were allotted certain tracts – the forerunner of the South African ‘Bantustans’. In 1796, an Act stipulated that “regulating grants of land appropriated for military services, and for the Society of the United Brethren for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen” should be divided into townships five miles square. This ‘Apartheid’ system developed along such lines at the time that a grid of lines two miles apart, designated by posts a mile apart, should become the norm for layout, and later subdivisions in strictly rectilinear form should be made between them. The unit was thus the statute mile, and three posts were the minimum ‘land-marks’ to delimit the area thus enclosed. A far cry from the ‘He who buyeth and selleth the earth …’

By this time, about 1800, the extermination of the natives was taking place a few miles west of the surveyors. As the natives were driven out or killed, so the survey posts went in and the Rectangular Survey stamped the symbol of domination for ever upon the land. If some space beings could have looked down, they would have seen a grid of straight lines slowly creeping across the country, with the replacement of one brand of humanity for another, one faith and cosmology overriding a gentler and more natural way of life. In 1796, ‘Sections’ of 640 acres were designated by 3 posts erected along ‘exterior’ township and section lines, run only every other mile. In 1800, half-sections (320 acres, orientated north–south) were designated by half-section posts along east–west section lines only, and by 1804, quarter-sections were designated by posts erected every half-mile along the section lines. {7}

{8: Diagrams}

In 1820, half-quarter sections (so-designated), 80 acres, oriented north–south, were determined by the point equidistant from section and half-section posts on east–west section lines, and in 1832, the ludicrously-named quarter-quarter sections of 40 acres were laid out, being delimited by equidistant points between half-section posts on north–south and east–west section lines (see diagrams for a clearer than verbal exposition of this ‘new geomancy’). These last quarter quarter sections were to form the ‘Forty’, a modular unit of land survey, taxation and government control.

In antiquity, centralized geomantic surveys had a twofold purpose: they represented the cosmic image of the prevalent religion, and afforded access to the sacred places in the survey for the dominant creed. Thus in ancient China, Peru and many other countries the central temple was geometrically related to all other parts of the Empire. In the United States, too, this occurred. Whether Jefferson, as a Freemason, along with Washington and the ‘Founding Fathers’ of American Republicanism (and possibly Rosicrucians, to boot – vide the front cover of this issue and Anthony Roberts and Jeff Gilbertson’s The Dark Gods for further evidences), had knowledge of this use of surveys, is anyone’s guess – I would plump for the positive rather than the negative conclusion (any ideas? – will publish them in the next issue of Walrus magazine.). Jefferson remains enigmatic, but the Mormons are better known for their geomancy. In 1855 the Salt Lake City Meridian was established, at a time that much of the land to the east had not yet been surveyed (ie. not forcibly taken from the ‘Red Indians’). The Mormons had arrived in 1847, and their leader, Brigham Young, had pointed his staff at a certain point designated the omphalos of their Temple. They ran true north–south and east–west lines and measured out a ‘Forty’ around the Temple (later reduced to 10 acres as well as blocks of 10 acres surrounding the square). A plaque in the Temple wall today announces that the initial point of the Mormons’ Meridian is 11° 54′ 00″ W, 40° 35′ 04″ N. Eight years after the foundation of this omphalos, David H. Burr, Surveyor General of Utah, found that the Mormon geomants had made only a 50′ error in determining the position of the meridian.

The Rectangular Survey, Mormon geomants aside, gave rise to those aspects of Americana that have shaped the cosmologies of the West and, unfortunately, the world. When the musician and satirist Frank Zappa wanted to choose an image for all that was reactionary and stultifying in American life for his opera 200 Motels, he called it significantly, Centerville (“a real nice place to raise your kids up”). Centerville was more than a play on the concept of ‘Middle America’, the ‘Great Mideastern hardware-store philosophy’ of Norman Rockwell and his ilk – it represented a literal geomantic psychic omphalos = the centre of spiritual and psychological attention. During the implementation of the Rectangular Survey, a central location, irrespective of terrain, was considered advantageous when selecting the site of a county town. For example, Ellsworth, the county seat of Pierce County, Wisconsin, was determined in 1861 by crossing diagonals to find the centre cf the square survey – literal landscape geometry! Ellsworth is a literal Centerville.

Centerville paralleled an earlier American nightmare, localized on ‘main street’, the survey line turned road. During the latter part of the last century, many survey lines were paved to become roads after the pattern of the Roman centuriation limits, and in towns this led naturally to a rectilinear grid pattern, ideal for the car chases of Kojak or Starsky and Hutch. The tyranny of the rectilinear ruler approach to the land is most apparent in these towns, where everything is subordinated to the straight line. Many sensitive people have remarked upon the dire effects such a landscape must have upon its denizens. The Theosophical composer Igor Stravinsky remarked that the view from his last apartment in Manhattan consisted of ‘Filing cabinet architecture’. The other side of this came from another theosophist artist Piet Mondriaan whose landscape of rectilinear grids perfectly echoed the rectilinear grid – but he was a fanatic who believed that the world of the future would be nothing but human artifacts, and plants would be banished – so much for Mondriaanic biology! Willard Dixon’s painting Mondrian with Cows admirably satirizes this approach to the world. It shows a pastoral landscape with Jersey and Frisian cows, and a Mondriaan rectilinear painting in the foreground, completely out of place {9} contextThis word should probably be omitted. It does not appear in the Quicksilver Messenger version. amid the wooded hills. The rational oppression of eighteenth century European thought was forcibly laid upon a conquered landscape, transforming it forever. Centerville, Main Street and Babylon are here one. The image of Main Street in Sinclair Lewis’s novel of the same title represents it as a microcosm, representative of all ‘main streets’: “Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere”. And it is, literally and figuratively, for it is linked by straight roads to the other similar layouts in other rectilinear towns.

Main Street was in a mythical town of Gopher Prairie, but as an archetype it encapsulated the tyranny of the government-ordained landscape. In the eyes of Carol Kennicutt, the heroine, all values and life-styles are conditioned by the rectilinear environment. She regrets “the excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison.”

The effects of living in various landscapes are little studied, for in the desacralized cosmos of Babylon such things are deemed unimportant. The main virtues are hard work, keeping one’s mouth shut and obedience to the authorities (otherwise known as being ‘law abiding’). And here we have a strange phenomenon, for it is precisely in the towns laid out by government order that the worst excesses of violence of person against person takes place. The United States, founded on the destruction of the indigenous population, is perhaps the worst example of this violence, for in the last ten years over 1/3 million people have died in the course of ‘crime’ – murder by firearms in the main. Even presidents are not immune from this! The effects of landscape upon human behaviour were studied long in the orient where geomants held a harmonious environment essential for a harmonious society. The desacralized cosmos of Manhattan or Miami certainly displays all the attributes of ‘bad feng-shui’ in the parlance of the Chinese practitioners of geomancy. In these towns, planned by officials on drawing-board lines according to edicts from Washington, no regard whatsoever for the subtle balance of earth and celestial energies has been paid in the planning of these hotbeds of violent disaffection. All the attributes of the Rastafarians’ Babylon are there: alienation, dissolution, hopelessness. A whole promising life blighted by forces beyond the control of the hapless inmates of such places. They are the unwilling and impotent pawns of blind forces controlled by who knows what, if by anything other than the appalling happenstance which seems to drive such terrible disasters forward to their inevitable nemesis.

European towns, once laid out geomantically, have now been razed by wars and redevelopment to the point where their filing cabinet architecture reflects their re-planned rectilinearity in the image of the United States. As colonies copy their master’s mores and fashions, so Western Europe has copied its master across the Ocean. Babylon has come to town. The land which spawned the conquerors of the tribes of the New World has itself fallen prey to the same process that desacralized the conquered lands of the North American continent, the identical process that still marches across the jungles of Brazil and lays out Brasilia as a pseudo-geomantic car race track. European cities are rebuilt now in the image of their spiritual mentor – the business community of the United States, as the countryside, laid out centuries ago with regard to the inherent subtle energies, is ravaged at the cost-effective whims of agri-business, maximizing profits and to hell with the effects. Bad feng-shui is what we live amongst. We all suffer its effects to a greater or lesser extent, and our small attempts to minimize its effects may be set at naught when compared with the overwhelming triumph of Babylon. One appalling thought is that bad feng-shui or negative geomancy may be deliberate policy of certain adepts in high places who wish for us to suffer the dual ills of ahrimanic (manic) imbalance or luciferic (dissolute) interference, for balance – the aim of feng-shui – is the ‘middle way’, the centre point, not one side of a polarized duality, for balance can only be at the mid-point, and the main attribute of Babylon is that it doesn’t have a centre, only a series of illusory substitutes, illusions, spectacles masquerading as reality. The only wish of Babylon is to dominate and overwhelm: it has no ultimate {10} goal other than its continued existence as it is now: it wishes no improvement, no moving towards perfection, for that would involve a change in the status quo. Like the rectilinear grid upon which it is based, Babylon is immobile, static. Diagonal, let alone curved, motion, is prohibited, not so much by statutory prohibition than by physical restraint of the framework set up in another era. Its symbolic rectilinear straitjacket prohibits certain physical motion as does its psychic and psychological straitjacket which prevents certain thoughts from becoming widespread: they have great difficulty in becoming established for they ultimately threaten the very rectilinear fabric of the system.

Very few fragments of ancient systems still poke through. Like the river courses impossible to incorporate into the Rectangular Survey they stick out like the proverbial sore thumbs. The week is one of them. Formerly, each day of seven were sacred to one of the astrological planets. Thus Tuesday was Mars, Wednesday, Mercury etc. Actions to be done on those days were done in accordance with the astrological attributes of the planet concerned. Thus it was that the Emperor Akbar of India had seven pavilions, one for each day of the week. He carried on the ancient tradition whereby the monarch would live strictly according to the correct astrological and geomantic principles, lest deviation from them should cause a calamity to overtake his nation. On Friday, for instance, he would be in Friday’s pavilion, which was designed according to the colour-system, numerology and sacred geometry of Venus. His clothes would be appropriate form and colour for the day, his musicians would play the appropriate music for the planetary hours on that day, and the correct food for Venus would be served at certain fixed times. Only appropriate activities concomitant with the planetary hours for a Friday could be performed. A similar life-style was enjoyed by the Pagan Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, whose life was also ruled by the geomantic divination of the Mpsikidy.

Today such ideas are derided, if known. Akbar and Ranavalona are dismissed as ‘superstitious’, and racist assumptions are often made, The same people, meanwhile, would defend Sunday Observance from either a Christian or Trade Union stance (sometimes both), with not an inkling that the raison d’être of Sunday Observance was astro-geomantic. Like the old measures, they survive in unrecognized form (the recent Space Shuttle flight used Nautical Miles as the unit of space navigation).

But, unfortunately, like the few religions still officially tolerated, they are fragments of a once-universal system of harmony with the earth and its seasons. We are living in the ruins of this great system like the shepherds of Dark Ages Athens amid the unrecognized glories of the Acropolis. We go about our daily business oblivious that there is an invisible Realm impinging, for better or worse, upon our health and spiritual well-being. Babylon is everywhere. We can but be aware of it, and try to cut across the diagonals now and again.

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The above text is part of an as-yet unfinished book by Nigel Pennick titled Living in the Ruins – The Desacralized Cosmos (publishers please note!).

Essentially the same article, but without the diagrams, appeared in Quicksilver Messenger, issues 6 and 7.