Category Archives: Religion

Divine Quandaries

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Divinity, at least according to followers of Abrahamic religions, involves five essential attributes: eternal existence, the divinity must have always existed and will always exist; omnipresence, i.e., the divinity must be ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; omniscience, the divinity must have permanent and eternal knowledge concerning absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; omnipotence, the divinity must necessarily be all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, the divinity must be omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity.

Other religions, more ancient religions as well as contemporary religions have been more realistic.  Deities, where they existed, were just more powerful than humans albeit not omnipotent, especially when they were plural.  If not ubiquitously omnipresent, they were perhaps not bound by the rules concerning time and space that apply to us and could show up when least expected.  Omniscient?  Not at all, although perhaps they, or some of them, were more cognitively gifted, at least sometimes.  Eternal?  Nope, they somehow came into being, usually sequentially, and in most cases, eventually expired, although the expiration was sometimes temporary.  And omnibenevolent?  Hell no!  They were willful and selfish and prone to emotional outburst.  Hmmm, that all sounds a great deal like the Abrahamic YHWH.

Still, to be fair, omniscience and ubiquitous omnipresence would seem possible if one eliminates time and space, treating them as illusions.  If time did not exist, then eternity would be either irrelevant or merely a natural state.  Perhaps in that context, since nothing would really exist, omnipotence might also be possible although not all that potent. But omnibenevolence is subjective although, in the absence of time and space and anything at all (other than perhaps, a sentient singularity), it might well be either irrelevant or natural, there being no choices to make.  In the foregoing context, an idealized divinity such as that imagined in Abrahamic religions might be possible, but only until time and space arrived, only until decisions became, not only possible, but necessary, even if any such decisions were merely illusions.

So, where does that leave us? 

Perhaps pondering on the nature of quantic phenomena and how they might impact the foregoing.  As I understand it, everything and anything is possible at a quantic level, sort of like the concept of chaos where, rather than consider it a negative, chaos is merely the confluence of every possibility; however, quantic activation would require an observer which would create a sort of bootstrap cosmogony.  Kind of like the ones were it is the worshippers who create the worshipped.

Or would that involve cosmology?

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Thanksgiving Day 2025

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I am drawn to the concept of giving thanks rather than asking for boons from the divine.  It was something I felt strongly at times of spiritual longing while I was still more of a traditional believer, times long gone.  I am still drawn to the concept, albeit in a more generic form while concurrently more specifically.  While reflecting on towards what and towards whom my thanks should be directed.

A deity is evoked by most for purposes of giving thanks on this holiday, at least in the parts of the world where I’ve lived, in Europe and in the Americas.  It is an Abrahamic deity worshipped by three antagonistic branches, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that deity is purported to possess five principle unique attributes.  He (the deity is identified as masculine for the most part) is eternal, he has always existed and will always exist; he is omnipresent, i.e., he is ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; he is omniscient, knows absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; he is omnipotent, all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, he is omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity. 

I guess, if we humans did not exist, if our world did not exist, the concurrence of such attributes might conceivably be possible.  But we do exist, our world exists, and evil certainly exists and, on this Thanksgiving Day, evil seems to predominate, especially in the so called Western World.  And that evil seems to emanate directly from the purported Abrahamic Holy Land in the Middle East.

Today and for many years, decades really, It has been difficult, actually, impossible for me to be thankful to that incoherent complex of attributes that purportedly constitute “our” deity.  Or to believe that such an entity exists.  The three attributes most impossible for me to reconcile are the “omnis”: omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.  When effective, logic, a premise based form of analysis that purports to lead to accurate conclusions, could accept an evil or amoral omniscient, omnipresent omnipotence; or, it could accept an omnibenevolent, omnipresent and omniscient but impotent reality.  But not the confluence of all three attributes.  In general, the logical exercise in which we claim to believe and which we use, or more accurately, misuse and abuse, rarely works because, when its conclusions are put to the test and fail, rather that reexamine the premises and the analysis which led to the deficient conclusions (as tested against reality), we rationalize and make excuses.  We do so with respect to our Abrahamic concept of divinity by introducing the concept of purported “free will”, an oxymoronic absurdity when its exercise is subject to horrific and perpetual punishment.

The Abrahamic faiths are, not surprisingly given the forgoing, fratricidal, albeit usually sequentially so.  And hypocrisy reigns among at least two of them, Christianity and Judaism, the polar aspects of Abrahamic religion with Islam, strangely, being the bridge between them but, frequently, the most despised, belittled and calumnied by the other two. 

Take Christianity for example.  It was purportedly founded by followers of a gentle and loving Hebraic Palestinian from the small town of Nazareth during its Roman era but in reality, the religion as it has almost always existed was the creation of a misogynistic Hellenized Jew, Saul of Tarsus who eventually used a more politically convenient Roman name, Paulus.  The original Nazarene variant was centered in a small communist community in Jerusalem led by a certain James, cognamed “the Just” and comprised of the original disciples and apostles of his brother, a certain Yešu (today Latinized to its Hellenic variant, Jesus). The bastard Pauline variant quickly deformed into a traditionalist hierarchical control mechanism used to accumulate wealth and power, so much so that it eventually became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Today, “evangelical and other so called Christians have completely rejected the communist economic premises of the original followers of Yešu, in part, because of the distortion of a statement by the founder of modern communism, an atheistic Jew, Karl Marx, to the effect that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, a statement contextually related to Marxian dialectic theory concerning economic evolution rather than to criticism of religion by which he meant that, at a certain point in economic history, religion was essential to survival making terrible conditions tolerable in the way that modern medications and medical treatments aid in our survival.  Through distortion and manipulation, modern Christianity, at least in the United States, has become the opposite of what Yešu espoused.  It has become a selfishly capitalistic, xenophobic philosophy apparently enamored of mass murder under the guise of capital punishment and perpetual war.  Judaism has also undergone drastic devolution with a significant component splitting off into an atheistic political Zionist variant espousing genocide, ethnic cleansing and even rape as a legitimate control mechanism for dealing with non-Zionist dissidence.  To those Abrahamic variants, Thanksgiving Day has become a de facto celebration of injustice, inequality and inequity, but that is something the original celebrants of the holiday in New England, the religiously intolerant Puritans would likely have ascribed.

That version of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, the one celebrated today, Thursday, November 27, 2025, is not one I can subscribe to, although I do enjoy some of its incidentals, like football games designed to draw our attention and energy away from our quotidian problems.  Thus, while in my moments of most intensely positive feelings towards divinity during a time long ago when I accepted the traditional Abrahamic version of divinity as possible, back when I gave thanks to “whatever gods may be” (a phrase from the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley), today, my attitude is profoundly different.  Today, my thanks are limited to more tangible subjects.  To people I’ve known and to people I’ve never met but admire.  To those among the subjected and abused and downtrodden and tortured and maimed and killed who struggle to protect those they love and to stand for principles of equity and justice and compassion and generosity and peace, today something that applies most clearly to the Palestinian victims of Zionist genocide as it once stood for the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, or to the Armenian victims of Turkish genocide, or to the indigenous victims everywhere of European genocide.  To all the economically deprived parents who work constantly to provide for their families as best they can.  To the Quixotic who struggle for “the right” against invincible odds, knowing that they themselves will never see the fruits of their labors.  But also to those who, for whatever reason, earned or not, I just love.  Those special people who were my classmates at the Citadel, and those fellow Citadel graduates who preceded and followed me, the same being true with respect to the now long departed Eastern Military Academy.  But also to my former students and colleagues everywhere. 

Today I give thanks to and for my family, especially my late mother Rosario and my late grandmother Juanita and my late aunt Carola.  To the many fellow travelers in the quest for a more equitable, more just, more peaceful, more compassionate, more peaceful and more loving world; those I know and who I can call friends as well as those with whom I am only acquainted and those who I’ve never met but who I know exist, have existed or will exist.

That seems a great deal for which to be thankful, even in these truly terrible times where orchestrated polarization for fun and profit regardless of the cost is the rule.  When the United States I love, indeed most of the Global North, is ruled from abroad by an ethics free elite.  Perhaps it always been this way.  But perhaps, the wonderful has always coexisted with the horrendous among the strange life forms who now refer to ourselves as humans.

So, … about the poem “Invictus”, one of my favorites.  It seems appropriate to close out these reflections by sharing it, albeit reformatted into a more narrative, rather than verse format:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.   In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.   Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.   Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet, the menace of the years finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

 
Thank you William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903).

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Poetry and on the Nature and Uses of Prayer

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Sam Hamill

It came to me as I read indigenous reflections written in 1976, almost half a century ago, by Arthur Amiotte, then an artist and teacher who lived among the Teton Sioux in South Dakota, that I have never understood the nature or functions of prayer.  Not strange given how few if any priests or pastors or rabbis have ever grasped them.  Prayer had always seemed superficial to me, ritual repetition of sounds directed at one or more beings to whom we seemed little more than insects, inferior objects to be scorned and disdained, albeit in a strange and twisted, masochistic way, loved as well. 

An observation attributed to a gentle Nazarene whom the Hebrews and perhaps the Romans may have tortured and perhaps hung or crucified has always made a great deal of sense to me: his suggestion that direct communion with the divine, without ritual or intervention, without prayer, was really the only legitimate and effective means of touching divinity but, reviewing Arthur Amiotte’s indigenous reflections, something I’ve been doing while concurrently reading the probably fictitious writing of Carlos Castaneda (fictitious not being synonymous with useless),  another alternative occurred to me.  Ironically occurred to me who, if not an atheist am at best a panentheist.  It came to me in the form of an epiphany: Prayer may well have a positive purpose but it is unrelated to the ritual repetition of sounds the meaning of which few really consider as they utter them, and fewer still understand. 

In that instant of epiphany, it came to me that ritual prayer does have a role and a meaning and a use and a purpose but that it is very different from the meaningless collective rote exercise that takes place on designated days at designated hours in designated places under the leadership of designated men and sometimes, although rarely, designated women.  It is, or perhaps, better stated, it should be, an isolated, personal reflective instrument that properly tuned and used can lead to introspection, contemplation, meditation and self-examination, all in a quest for insight, perhaps totally novel insight, and through such insight, to both elucidation and pragmatic solutions. 

That makes sense, or made sense to me; finally.  Prayers, correctly used, can be catalysts for internal communication in which, perhaps, a spark of the divine (if a spark of the divine exists within each of us, as some among the Gnostics tend to believe), may, at times, be present.

“Poetry” Sam Hammill (a great friend, a great poet and a great translator) once told me “is meant to be spoken and heard”.  As much as I admired him and still do (though he is long gone), I did not agree.  For me, reading poetry rather than listening to it permitted me to transcend the music of the words in order to wrestle with the layers of meaning involved, not all of them layers the author intended.  In that sense, it seems that poems are “written on mirrors”, i.e., they have different meanings for everyone who really delves into their depths based on the reader’s personal experiences, context and perceptions.  I’ve shared my observation with another poet I admire but who is as different from Sam, in many but not all ways, as two poets can be.  Sam was a big man, a former United States marine, with a booming voice, an adventurer in every sense, while the second poet, Carlos Mario Uribe Alvarez, is a fairly diminutive and soft spoken Colombian, but one who annually gathers poets from all over the world to declaim and share perspectives in the sky-high Andean city where I’ve now lived for almost two decades.  Despite their differences, as is the case with many poets, they both share a taste for variety in women, each of whom they love in their own way, and for strong intoxicants, whether drunk or inhaled. 

As it was for Sam, poetry for Carlos, at the numerous events he organizes, is an oral exercise.  I dutifully attend the readings performed by earnest and talented artists who have profound truths to share but I get little out of the readings.  Indeed, I’ve urged that each reading be preceded by contextualization and a sharing of the motives and reflections and introspection that gave birth to each poem presented.  Sam would have argued with me.  Carlos agrees, but seemingly superficially.

I now feel the same way about prayer after my epiphany.  But perhaps that’s just me.  Writing and reading call to me much more than does listening to prayers or poetic expositions.  Reading permits me to dive and delve and reflect while writing seems a means of communicating with my inner self, with the me who’s been and the me that may someday be, and perhaps, at times, with echoes and shadows of divinity that have made their way, if not to me, at least towards me.

Interesting.  But perhaps not novel except for those of us who have been long misled by Abrahamic delusions.  Perhaps my epiphany is an echo of something lost by those of us who have misplaced things that our ancestors understood well and perhaps used and perhaps some among us may still understand and practice it, albeit alone and in personal places in a manner such as that of which that gentle Nazarene once spoke.

Thoughts on a pleasant autumn day high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Of Butterflies and Bibles

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I’ve frequently wondered as to what motivated the inept linguist or translator who turned the word “flutterby” into “butterfly”.  That usually brings to mind (at least to my mind) the inept Catholic “saint”, Jerome of Stridon, who made a mess of his Latin translation of the Greek version of the Hebrew Tanakh.  Poor Lucifer, demoted by the purported saint from the Roman god of truth and light into a rebellious archangel and the patron of evil (a role that belonged to a Hebrew “entity” whose name was Hel-El).

Flutterby is obviously the correct term to describe the fluttering, flying insect, often beautiful, that has nothing to do with butter but is stuck with that appellation. I don’t suppose Jerome was responsible, he knew nothing of English, but who knows.  The absence of knowledge never stopped him.

And as to the “Latin” version of the Bible on which the St. James and other mistranslations are based, what can one say other than perhaps, …

… “Oy Vei”!

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Apples, Karl Marx and Zionist Ethics

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In Abrahamic mythology (which billions treat as revealed truth) Eve, the primordial mother, enabled herself, her husband and their descendants to discern between good and evil, for which, the petulant Abrahamic divinity punished them by afflicting them and all of their descendants with mortality and perpetual misery. 

Strange that it was so essential to the purported Abrahamic divinity that its creations remain ignorant as to the difference between good and evil but, ironically, given Zionist perspectives, both of the Jewish and Christian variant, it seems that those two groups have taken it upon themselves to correct Eve’s indiscretion and lo and behold, evil flourishes, not only in the purported Holy Land but in Europe and North America as well.  And it flourishes purportedly in a quest to re-attain the immortality once lost.  What a strange spiritual philosophy, what a weird (in the original sense of the word) form of spirituality.

It makes some of us wonder at what motivated Karl Marx to postulate that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, today a deliberately misconstrued reflection as, when it was uttered, opiates were considered a positive blessing that permitted those afflicted with painful diseases to survive, rather than, as suggested by critics of Marx’s economic and political perspectives, as a criticism of religion.

The problem with opiates is, of course, that they distort perceptions of reality and make users numb to pain.  Does Zionism do the same with respect to morality and ethics?  Has the reflection concerning divinity by Karl Marx attained added relevance given the current Zionist proclivity for genocide and ethnic cleansing, for theft of Palestinian lands and assets, for rape of Palestinian hostages as a legitimate instrument of control and even for the involuntary harvesting of Palestinian’s human organs and skin, all purportedly in the name of a promise made by their strange divinity, although not to them but to their victims?

Or is it perhaps past time for a new mother Eve, in her gnostic variant this time, to arise and to feed us all apples?
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Evolutive Monotheism

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Prior to the advent of egotistical monotheism in the Arabian peninsula, the goddesses Al-lāt, Al-‘Uzzá, and Manāt were believed, as once portrayed in Salman Rushdie’s infamous Satanic Verses, to have been the daughters of Allah and back then, before the rise of Islam, Allah was one among many members of the caste of the divine, as was supreme Canaanite divinity El and as was El’s errant son, YHWH, and as were YHWH’s sixty-nine brothers and their Sumerian cousins and many, many others.  And they cohabited, not quite in peace, but neither in a state of perpetual genocidal animosity, as, all too soon, came to be.  Came to be, if not the norm, at least the custom among those ghoulishly gullible Abrahamic humans who chose to follow and emulate ghastly YHWH.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Panentheistic Reflections on Evolutionary Structure

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Within the diverse variants of hypotheses concerning the concept of transmigration of souls (including but not limited to the concept of reincarnation) karma occupies an important role.  However, an alternative related karma-free concept appeals to me, that of panentheistic monism.  In the variant of panentheistic monism to which I am most drawn, a hierarchy of self-aware intelligences exist which include us, evolving constantly based on experience, but based on a concentric form of collectivism.  Thus, in our case, we are comprised of diverse collectives; one includes our cells, then, on a higher plane, we are a collective comprised of our organs which are collectives of our cells, then, we are bodies comprised of a collective of our organs and our cells.  Further up the concentric ladder, we perceive of ourselves as individuals but also as members of collectives in which we are parts, e.g., our bond pairings, our families, our clans (extended families), our social groupings (religions, social communities, racial and ethnic identifications, etc.) culminating in our belief that we are part of a collective that we identify as humanity.

The interesting thing is that the collectives of which we are members, albeit subject to numerous variable tensions, seem to have identities of their own, a concept central to sociological hypotheses where groups act in a manner significantly different than would their individual members, willingly sacrificing the interests of individual members for what the collective perceives as a “greater good” (but which much more often seems to involve the interests of elites capable of manipulating the group for their benefit through coercion, very much in the manner that cancers function in our individual bodies).  That is a phenomenon that seems omnipresent in human collectives, at least as far as we know.  An open and critical question involves whether or not the collectives of which we are a part culminate at the level of our species, or whether our species is itself a part of an aware and volitional series of more complex entities such as the complex varieties of life found on our planet and, perhaps, the complex of biological and non-biological components of our environment, including air, water, weather, etc.  If so and, if we are just incapable of perceiving the levels of sentience of which we are a part (for example, the concept of Gaia), perhaps our planetary system is itself only a component of a series of greater sentient wholes, wholes such as our solar system, the group of solar systems of which our own is a part, the galaxy, the universe, etc.

Panentheism is generally viewed as a religious or spiritual concept but that may be misleading.  It may also involve an organizational reality where the omniverse (the total of all multiverses which, in turn, involve the organizational structure of individual universes, each with its own laws of physics and evolution) is sentient and self-aware, sentience being the extra-physical factor that separates the concept of panentheism from the related concept of pantheism.  In their religious variants, pantheism is the belief that divinity is the sum total of everything to which panentheism adds sentient self-awareness.

Monism adds an evolutionary element thus, each component of the pantheistic omniverse is deemed to be evolving and, in evolving, is assisting its superior structures to evolve so that, in a sense, inferior structures (inferior in terms of their level rather than their abilities) are the engines that drive the evolution of the structures of which they are components.  In a sense, there is a striving towards never-attainable perfection at all levels, a striving that is not always constant or successful so that evolution does not involve constant progress, although progress, in the long term, tends to be consistent.

The foregoing applies to the function we refer to as the transmigration of souls as it is apparently through experiences during myriad lifetimes that the systems of which we are components learn and evolve.  We are the tools for their perception of experiences, experiences that test their own evolutionary hypotheses, testing them and converting them into theories, and perhaps, eventually, into natural laws, laws being concepts impossible to violate.

Good and evil are hypotheses which we, in our diverse human groupings, develop, develop as guideposts, but they probably do not, except perhaps in very rare cases, rise to the level of theories and certainly even more rarely to the level of laws, although we tend to treat them as such.  Concepts involving good and evil tend to involve evolutionary processes that start as a practices, evolve into traditions, then customs and then, perhaps, into social norms which may eventually become codified into obligations whose violation is subject to penal sanctions.  But, since violations are possible at all levels and exceptions prevail, they do not really, regardless of how denominated, evolve into real laws.

The foregoing, at least for me, explains the incoherent societies in which we live and in which humans have always lived, where deceit, treachery and hypocrisy seem to be the norm, especially when we describe them in patriotic and religious terms.  But, on the brighter side, we are parts of an infant omniverse taking baby steps which perhaps in time may produce an evolutionary structure worth admiring.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Of Synchronicity

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Synchronicity:

Apparently a Jungian term that seems related to coincidence, i.e., in the sense of co-incidence, but nexus free although meaningfully connected.

Perhaps a toy in divinity’s tool chest meant to confound and confuse even as it enlightens.

Interesting.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Shadowy Sepulchral Echoes

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Or perhaps, the title should be “echoing sepulchral shadows”, or “echoes of sepulchral shadows”.  For some reason, a melody with the phrase “lions and tigers and bears, oh my” comes to mind but that was from an allegorical fairy tale translated into film, first black and white and then in color, and this is quite a bit different, and not allegorical at all.  Nor is it metaphorical.  Indeed, at least in parts, it’s clearly historical.  At least in part, it’s inspired by some of my son Alex’s work, although not by his novel The Old Breed: Haxan.  A shameless plug, I admit it.

The place name “Jericho”, apparently originally “Yəriḥo” (although the concept of “originally” is, of course, as suspect as it is relative), is believed to derive from either the Canaanite word “rēḥ” meaning fragrant or from the Canaanite lunar deity Yarikh once worshipped there.  In Jericho, in the land that during more recent millennia has been called Palestine, in the part of Palestine now referred to as the West Bank, within a cavern, there’s a special spot, perhaps ten meters square (although it’s actually sort of round, or perhaps sort of spherical might be more accurate), “sort of” being the operative element.  It’s reputed to be the oldest place continuously inhabited by Homo sapiens on Terra although not necessarily inhabited by the living.  A number of places in Africa, however, would surely dispute the foregoing, as might a number of places in Asia and in the Indian Subcontinent.  Perhaps even in the Americas.

Be that as it may, that special place within the confines of Jericho is deemed sacred not, only to adherents of the three fratricidal branches of the Abrahamic family of religions, but by the shades of what might have been among the first humans to imagine and thus empower proto-deities tasked with protecting us, … mainly from ourselves.  Thus, truths better left untold may well dwell there, … muttering. 

Within that tiny circle resonate the primordial shades of presences who consider themselves a “family” of sorts.  Guardians of beginnings and of endings.  Of many, many beginnings and of many, many endings, although, many of the endings are indistinguishable from beginnings and many of the beginnings seem to meld into earlier endings, kind of like a spiraling Worm Ouroboros.

It’s a comforting spot for the souls of ancient gods and for the spirits of their ancient priests and priestesses and for the ghosts of the select among their ancient followers.  In short, it’s a comfortably haunted spot, haunted by souls and spirits and ghosts who, in some cases, realize that their former hosts have expired while in other cases, they refuse to acknowledge their expiration.  Still, generally, it’s a friendly sort of haunting, more like a cohabitation. 

Dreams there tend to be astounding and hard to forget whether one would want to forget or to remember them.  Lately though, they’ve tended towards hyperbolically apocalyptic themes featuring trumpets blaring and four terrible dark-winged equestrians charging.

Dead gods sometimes corporeally congregate there.  Indeed, all but one of the seventy sons of divine Ēl still meet there in Divine Council from time to time, although sometimes, they merely gather to play and wrestle and gossip.  To gossip about the incomprehensibly irreconcilable doings of their sons and daughters, and of their sons’ and daughters’ sons and daughters and so on, ad infinatum.  And of the course, they gossip about the deranged conduct of their missing sibling and about the echoing conduct of his purported followers.  That particular sibling struck out on his own a bit longer than three millennia ago and, asserting that he is a “jealous god” has done his best to eliminate all echoes of divinity other than his own.  Rumor has it (although with rumors one can never vouch for their accuracy) that the remaining members of Ēl’s Divine Council have taken to heavy metal music although melded with ancient Middle Eastern rhythms.  Could be I guess.

Anyway, “ancient” is a relative term there. 

To many of the elder gods, the most ancient of the primordial echoes we the living sometimes recall are still little more than the yelps of young interlopers.  What the eldest of all gods think, the ones who were hoary long before the advent of divine Ēl, none living elsewhere now know, although there, in that primordial habitation, echoes of their voices still sometimes seem to resonate, to resonate among the darkest shadows.  Dusky shadows from somewhere beyond the realms of time and space. 

Interlopers have always arrived there in waves.  They still do, as though drawn by a primordial gravitational well.  Indeed, for many, many millennia, many interlopers have found themselves trapped there by a strange event horizon and then, have found themselves drawn into tiny but very complete universes, or perhaps multiverses, although the correct term may be more akin to a sole omniverse.  Evidently some sort of spell is involved, or magic, or miracles, or arcane laws of physics.  Those concepts are difficult to distinguish there, primarily differing, like beauty, in the eyes of the one doing the beholding.

Syncretism plays there at times.  Meddlingly melding echoes of personalities long gone into new souls, souls that then scatter to the four winds, left free to find their own mischief, mischief bereft of memories and of guidance.  An amalgam that may explain why we find ourselves where we now seem to be. 

But who knows. 

The “family” does not share its secrets, or its intuitions or its suspicions.  And if any of its members dared to do so, no one would believe them or, perhaps more accurately, very few would believe them and they would probably be considered no more than peculiar conspiracy theorists by their peers.

In Jericho: where the genocidal Hebrew leader Joshua once murdered so many and where mayhem and murder echo still.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Canaanite Salem

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Photo copyright: Michael Ventura / Alamy Stock Photo

Salem: the Jebusite city whose name was debauched and became Jeru-Salem and then, the focus for genocide, animal sacrifice and the mother of blood libels (sacred to the fratricidal sons of Avram).  Divine El, the principal deity of the Canaanites, must surely have cursed them all.  Or, at least, he should have.

I wonder what Canaanite Salem was like before all the hatred and all the blood was shed.  Before patricidal David came.  The Canaanites were apparently a pleasant and generous people but then, Joshua (political heir to Moishe) came to slaughter all their men and women and children and flocks and pets, all in the name of Avram’s unholy god, YHWH, the younger, black sheep son of El. 

Then, the Canaanites were just … no more. 

Sort of how Zionists aspire that the Palestinians will “just be no more” and that everyone will forget what happened.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025 (photo excluded); all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution. Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.