Post by Blu on Apr 28, 2005 15:43:50 GMT -5
www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/africanavatars.html
Just when you think you have heard it all someone comes along and introduces you to something new.
Few Westerners are aware of the spectacular religious activity that has been thundering with incalculable exuberance through the hearts of millions of Africans in our just-passed century. Men and women have been seeing vision after vision, sign after sign, and wonder after wonder. There are national holidays commemorating miracles--not from centuries ago by some old saint whose paint has long since peeled, but within the last few decades and witnessed by thousands of ordinary citizens still walking among us.
Religious scholars whom I have contacted as independent sources have been recording the activity with intense fascination. Relatively little is known, and scholars are quite eager to learn more. They may be gathering information that could eventually form a "new" New Testament. It may well be that we are viewing the beginnings of a new civilisation formed around a new Christ, which, like the occasion that started our present one 20 centuries ago, remains relatively unknown in the world until some time after the events that then inspire so many millions for centuries to come.
This book extract featured here is primarily about a man named Simeon Toko, who died in 1984. Simeon Toko appeared before people in an apparitional body and in dream states while he was physically alive, and continues to do the same among certain selected people 17 years after his willing, natural death. At least one witness says that he, personally, killed this man--quite professionally, as a hired killer--and saw him alive again a few days later. Others still living at the time of this writing say they saw Toko physically slaughtered, and watched him bring himself back to life before their astonished eyes. There is a very large body of testimony, of which only a little has yet been recorded or written down from eyewitnesses.
Much of the media news from Africa in the past 80 years has been presented as political rebellion and tribal warmongering or as a battle between "good" civilised countries versus "evil" communists over the souls of Africans who are still considered uncivilised, superstitious and too immature, individual by individual, to be left to themselves...what with all those raw materials and diamonds yet needing to be dug up. This is the general bias of news reporting from Africa as I remember it since my own childhood. It's not much different now. We tend to think of the African peoples with a distortion somewhere between a bouquet of jokes about banana republics and a vague, distant horror of unexplainable war and slaughter.
The first slave traders who came to Africa in the 15th century CE found an advanced society dominated by a monotheism with a powerful code of ethics. They did not find half-naked people in grass skirts with bones through their noses. They did not find rows of fat little stone fertility goddesses and voodoo fetishes. They found an intelligent, friendly, dignified people who had created beautiful avenues, pleasant buildings, well-regulated agricultural fields and fine clothing. They found a people who practised the old Mosaic code, essentially (students of Mosaic law will note how much of it resembles the Egyptian code). They found a people whose language (Kikongo), linguists have shown, contains scores of words found in biblical Hebrew and in later European languages and thus pre-dates these. They may well have found what happened to the so-called lost tribes of the kingdom of Israel.
Except that the subsequent four centuries have proved out the following statement to a deplorable degree, we could otherwise be incredulous at a surmisal of the main difference between the "discoverers" of central Africa and the people they divided and traded like objects and cattle over the ensuing generations: the difference between the civilised dark-skinned peoples and their conquerors is measurable in intensity of greed and the will to murder to fulfill greed's endlessly wearisome demands. This behaviour has not ended in modern times. Slavery still exists in Africa, for instance.
Now, centuries after the first slashes into the belly of the African land and peoples, predominantly white-skinned countries still allow predominantly white-skinned corporations to assist insane warlords in killing each other, helping with helicopters and technology simply to keep company profits going. So reported Global Pacific News not long ago.
There is no question that the peoples of Africa, millions and millions of descendants of the ancient Ethiopians and Egyptians among them, have been methodically dehumanised for centuries. No peoples have met with such enormous psychological and material destruction in recorded human history. If they can be said to be blamed for allowing any of it, then their fault could only lie in a willingness to trust fellow men who come preaching principles.
The damage that Christian missionaries have done to the psychology of human kindness in Africa over the centuries is untold. Missionaries routinely accompanied soldiers who came to steal lands and loot for their home European country. The procedure went as follows: the missionary would stand and read aloud an edict in Latin to whatever villagers had gathered. The edict, completely incomprehensible to the villagers, ordered that each of them must at that moment convert to Christianity or be killed or enslaved. After it was read, the guns and swords were put to work. The soldiers felt justified in their murders through the benediction and authority of the Roman Church. Through varying interpretations of the works of Church fathers, the Roman Church developed a system of permissible murder and looting, and it was used routinely.
The missionaries would then go to work on the remaining people. The children were taught that their parents' intelligent, peaceful beliefs were "from the devil" and that they were to accept poverty "for the good of their souls", whereas the conquerers were supposedly blessed by God with superior might and wealth and so had to be obeyed.
Not long ago, Pope John-Paul II issued a public statement apologising for the behaviour of the Roman Church during the Inquisition, centuries ago. Over a period of about 400 years, Church authorities humiliated, ostracised, tortured and murdered about half a million fellow Europeans over "matters of faith". As these atrocities in the name of God mostly occurred centuries ago, the apology seemed a little late in coming. However, no apology seems to have been offered yet to the estimated 100 million Africans who were categorically enslaved, tortured and murdered into submission in the 400 years that the Roman Church itself assisted this activity, quite officially, benefiting from it materially and politically.
SIMON KIMBANGU: A PERSECUTED PROPHET
One would wonder also why there is as yet no apology forthcoming from the Vatican for its role in intent to murder one Simon Kimbangu. This did not happen so long ago that the descendants have long been unaware of the wrong done and the property confiscated, as is mostly the case with the Inquisition.
There are thousands of Africans alive at the time of this writing who remember Simon Kimbangu very well. Kimbangu's name is celebrated throughout the great expanses of central Africa, and his fame continues to increase. He stands as far more than a mere national hero. A short history of his life can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He and his followers are also the subject of more detailed scholarly research. Simon Kimbangu was a prophet. He was tortured and left to rot in prison, where he died in October 1951 after 30 years.
There are Africans alive at this writing who were brought back from the dead by Simon Kimbangu, and there are people still living who watched him do it. The claim is that Simon Kimbangu healed the sick, made the lame walk, returned sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and even brought back to life an infant who had been dead for three days. Kimbangu performed these miraculous deeds over a period of five months, from May 1921 through to 12 September 1921. Scholars do not dispute that this man performed these miracles. There is simply too much testimony about it.
On 10 September 1921, Simon Kimbangu gave a speech. He announced that the colonial authorities were about to arrest him and "impose a long period of silence on my body". He announced that one day a "Great King" of tremendous spiritual, scientific and political power would arise, and that he himself would return as a representative. Before this event, a certain book would be written that would prepare the people of Kongo (not "Congo") for this event. This book would be resisted, but slowly it would come to be accepted.
Two days later, Simon Kimbangu was arrested by colonial authorities--on his 42nd birthday, 12 September 1921--and curtly sentenced to death. The authorities for the Roman Church had recommended his execution, and so had various other Christian missions.
According to noted scholar Dr Allan Anderson, the Baptist mission alone protested the execution of this man whose apparent crime was to have stood in a village daily for five months and healed, consoled and revitalised people. The joy and the amazement of the gathering crowds had left the prophet open to supposed charges of sedition by jealous missionaries. Punishment for alleged sedition was death.
Just as Kimbangu had predicted two days before his arrest, he was instead given an indefinite prison term, a "long silence of his body". Each morning he was taken from his tiny cell and put bodily into a tank of cold salt water for lengthy periods in an attempt to hasten his death. His prediction that his body would be tortured and humiliated came true.
He had also predicted that day that Africa would be "thrown into a terrible period of unspeakable persecutions". For the next 40 years, Africans were indeed put through a terrible period of unspeakable religious persecutions. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, deported, separated from their families, subject to atrocious tortures and simply persecuted for new religious beliefs.
These new religious beliefs, triggered by the few words of an African man who performed miracles among his own people for "only a little while", sent out great psychological rays of hope to a continent of peoples who had long become accustomed to misery and poverty under centuries of colonial abuse and deliberately oppressive religious instruction. These powerful beliefs are still in development and will reach around the world even in their beginning stages. The appearance of the book this essay reviews marks one of many such beginnings.
THE FATIMA PROPHECIES AND RELIGIOUS CODES
The title of the book this essay introduces is The True Third Secret of Fatima Revealed and the Return of Christ. The author is Pastor Melo Nzeyitu Josias, and additional research was done by Rocha Nefwani. Both men are native Africans, both highly educated. I edited the book myself, here in America, and added a little general historical knowledge.
The book was meant to be available on 13 May, to commemorate the first of six visits of the Lady of Fatima, Portugal, who appeared on that date in 1917. She was visible to the three shepherd children who repeated her words to the world, yet was invisible to the crowds of thousands who were drawn to come to see her. The Lady made astonishing predictions. Her two sets of predictions, made in 1917 about events of the coming decades, proved true. Among other things, she prophesied the fall of Russia to communism, the end of the First World War and the coming of the Second World War.
There was a Third Secret, however, which the Lady instructed Lucia dos Santos to reveal only after 1960, after certain events had passed which would have made it more understandable. It was read to Pope John XXIII in February 1960. When the Pope heard it, he fainted dead to the floor; when he arose, he ordered the Third Secret sealed up in a vault "forever".
Are we in the "end of times"? Are we at the hour in which Jesus Christ has already returned and gone? It would seem that appearances of men acclaimed to be God incarnate have increased greatly in the past century.
Whether a human being can be said to be God made flesh, let alone whether a particular individual can be said to be this, can be debated into meaninglessness.
Those few who are said to have become "god-realised" and who have made themselves known to the public for divine purposes and missions, seem to attract material fortunes from a public that is either inexpressibly grateful or is too gullible. Although some Hindu religious branches speak of "five Ascended Masters" who live invisibly on our planet, there are many quite visible gurus or proclaimed avatars, around whom devotees have formed practical organisations of high material worth. Monies are collected and practical advantages, such as political contributions, keep the organisations going, while their intent is to "enlighten" the masses--who, we must assume, are "endarkened" without them.
Sincere or fraudulent, authentic or imitation, each event of the appearance of a man (usually a male) said to be God or god-realised represents a new bud of one size or another upon a very ancient vine. The vine would be human consciousness, and the bud would be civilisation.
A civilisation forms through codes of knowledge and behaviour that allow each of its members, relatively, the broadest opportunity for value fulfilment. The codes seem most often to have originated with a single man who is also revealed as God's prophet, if not God Himself in fleshly clothing. New knowledge, or interpretations of it, is added in that Man-God's name.
I wonder about the nature of the human experience itself, as I cannot think of any civilisation which did not attribute its foundations to a single man at its cornerstone. Even the "godless" communist attempts at a new and sensible kind of civilisation quickly became personality-worship cults. Nor should we forget Germany's abortive attempt to found a "New World Order" around Adolf Hitler. However, neither Hitler nor Marx nor Lenin nor Mao nor Kim could walk on water or rise from the dead.
Christianity, of all religions, has come closest to uniting the peoples of the entire world. The emergence of avatars in Africa in the 20th century maintains a continuity with the ancient prophecies found in the Bible. The True Third Secret cites biblical passages that make a case that Simeon Toko was Christ Returned--at least, different Christian ministers who considered the interpretations did not scorn their logic. The following is an excerpt I have culled from chapter VII of the book, with permission (some of the writing has been edited so as not to confuse the reader who will be reading this out of its context).
Just when you think you have heard it all someone comes along and introduces you to something new.
Few Westerners are aware of the spectacular religious activity that has been thundering with incalculable exuberance through the hearts of millions of Africans in our just-passed century. Men and women have been seeing vision after vision, sign after sign, and wonder after wonder. There are national holidays commemorating miracles--not from centuries ago by some old saint whose paint has long since peeled, but within the last few decades and witnessed by thousands of ordinary citizens still walking among us.
Religious scholars whom I have contacted as independent sources have been recording the activity with intense fascination. Relatively little is known, and scholars are quite eager to learn more. They may be gathering information that could eventually form a "new" New Testament. It may well be that we are viewing the beginnings of a new civilisation formed around a new Christ, which, like the occasion that started our present one 20 centuries ago, remains relatively unknown in the world until some time after the events that then inspire so many millions for centuries to come.
This book extract featured here is primarily about a man named Simeon Toko, who died in 1984. Simeon Toko appeared before people in an apparitional body and in dream states while he was physically alive, and continues to do the same among certain selected people 17 years after his willing, natural death. At least one witness says that he, personally, killed this man--quite professionally, as a hired killer--and saw him alive again a few days later. Others still living at the time of this writing say they saw Toko physically slaughtered, and watched him bring himself back to life before their astonished eyes. There is a very large body of testimony, of which only a little has yet been recorded or written down from eyewitnesses.
Much of the media news from Africa in the past 80 years has been presented as political rebellion and tribal warmongering or as a battle between "good" civilised countries versus "evil" communists over the souls of Africans who are still considered uncivilised, superstitious and too immature, individual by individual, to be left to themselves...what with all those raw materials and diamonds yet needing to be dug up. This is the general bias of news reporting from Africa as I remember it since my own childhood. It's not much different now. We tend to think of the African peoples with a distortion somewhere between a bouquet of jokes about banana republics and a vague, distant horror of unexplainable war and slaughter.
The first slave traders who came to Africa in the 15th century CE found an advanced society dominated by a monotheism with a powerful code of ethics. They did not find half-naked people in grass skirts with bones through their noses. They did not find rows of fat little stone fertility goddesses and voodoo fetishes. They found an intelligent, friendly, dignified people who had created beautiful avenues, pleasant buildings, well-regulated agricultural fields and fine clothing. They found a people who practised the old Mosaic code, essentially (students of Mosaic law will note how much of it resembles the Egyptian code). They found a people whose language (Kikongo), linguists have shown, contains scores of words found in biblical Hebrew and in later European languages and thus pre-dates these. They may well have found what happened to the so-called lost tribes of the kingdom of Israel.
Except that the subsequent four centuries have proved out the following statement to a deplorable degree, we could otherwise be incredulous at a surmisal of the main difference between the "discoverers" of central Africa and the people they divided and traded like objects and cattle over the ensuing generations: the difference between the civilised dark-skinned peoples and their conquerors is measurable in intensity of greed and the will to murder to fulfill greed's endlessly wearisome demands. This behaviour has not ended in modern times. Slavery still exists in Africa, for instance.
Now, centuries after the first slashes into the belly of the African land and peoples, predominantly white-skinned countries still allow predominantly white-skinned corporations to assist insane warlords in killing each other, helping with helicopters and technology simply to keep company profits going. So reported Global Pacific News not long ago.
There is no question that the peoples of Africa, millions and millions of descendants of the ancient Ethiopians and Egyptians among them, have been methodically dehumanised for centuries. No peoples have met with such enormous psychological and material destruction in recorded human history. If they can be said to be blamed for allowing any of it, then their fault could only lie in a willingness to trust fellow men who come preaching principles.
The damage that Christian missionaries have done to the psychology of human kindness in Africa over the centuries is untold. Missionaries routinely accompanied soldiers who came to steal lands and loot for their home European country. The procedure went as follows: the missionary would stand and read aloud an edict in Latin to whatever villagers had gathered. The edict, completely incomprehensible to the villagers, ordered that each of them must at that moment convert to Christianity or be killed or enslaved. After it was read, the guns and swords were put to work. The soldiers felt justified in their murders through the benediction and authority of the Roman Church. Through varying interpretations of the works of Church fathers, the Roman Church developed a system of permissible murder and looting, and it was used routinely.
The missionaries would then go to work on the remaining people. The children were taught that their parents' intelligent, peaceful beliefs were "from the devil" and that they were to accept poverty "for the good of their souls", whereas the conquerers were supposedly blessed by God with superior might and wealth and so had to be obeyed.
Not long ago, Pope John-Paul II issued a public statement apologising for the behaviour of the Roman Church during the Inquisition, centuries ago. Over a period of about 400 years, Church authorities humiliated, ostracised, tortured and murdered about half a million fellow Europeans over "matters of faith". As these atrocities in the name of God mostly occurred centuries ago, the apology seemed a little late in coming. However, no apology seems to have been offered yet to the estimated 100 million Africans who were categorically enslaved, tortured and murdered into submission in the 400 years that the Roman Church itself assisted this activity, quite officially, benefiting from it materially and politically.
SIMON KIMBANGU: A PERSECUTED PROPHET
One would wonder also why there is as yet no apology forthcoming from the Vatican for its role in intent to murder one Simon Kimbangu. This did not happen so long ago that the descendants have long been unaware of the wrong done and the property confiscated, as is mostly the case with the Inquisition.
There are thousands of Africans alive at the time of this writing who remember Simon Kimbangu very well. Kimbangu's name is celebrated throughout the great expanses of central Africa, and his fame continues to increase. He stands as far more than a mere national hero. A short history of his life can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He and his followers are also the subject of more detailed scholarly research. Simon Kimbangu was a prophet. He was tortured and left to rot in prison, where he died in October 1951 after 30 years.
There are Africans alive at this writing who were brought back from the dead by Simon Kimbangu, and there are people still living who watched him do it. The claim is that Simon Kimbangu healed the sick, made the lame walk, returned sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and even brought back to life an infant who had been dead for three days. Kimbangu performed these miraculous deeds over a period of five months, from May 1921 through to 12 September 1921. Scholars do not dispute that this man performed these miracles. There is simply too much testimony about it.
On 10 September 1921, Simon Kimbangu gave a speech. He announced that the colonial authorities were about to arrest him and "impose a long period of silence on my body". He announced that one day a "Great King" of tremendous spiritual, scientific and political power would arise, and that he himself would return as a representative. Before this event, a certain book would be written that would prepare the people of Kongo (not "Congo") for this event. This book would be resisted, but slowly it would come to be accepted.
Two days later, Simon Kimbangu was arrested by colonial authorities--on his 42nd birthday, 12 September 1921--and curtly sentenced to death. The authorities for the Roman Church had recommended his execution, and so had various other Christian missions.
According to noted scholar Dr Allan Anderson, the Baptist mission alone protested the execution of this man whose apparent crime was to have stood in a village daily for five months and healed, consoled and revitalised people. The joy and the amazement of the gathering crowds had left the prophet open to supposed charges of sedition by jealous missionaries. Punishment for alleged sedition was death.
Just as Kimbangu had predicted two days before his arrest, he was instead given an indefinite prison term, a "long silence of his body". Each morning he was taken from his tiny cell and put bodily into a tank of cold salt water for lengthy periods in an attempt to hasten his death. His prediction that his body would be tortured and humiliated came true.
He had also predicted that day that Africa would be "thrown into a terrible period of unspeakable persecutions". For the next 40 years, Africans were indeed put through a terrible period of unspeakable religious persecutions. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, deported, separated from their families, subject to atrocious tortures and simply persecuted for new religious beliefs.
These new religious beliefs, triggered by the few words of an African man who performed miracles among his own people for "only a little while", sent out great psychological rays of hope to a continent of peoples who had long become accustomed to misery and poverty under centuries of colonial abuse and deliberately oppressive religious instruction. These powerful beliefs are still in development and will reach around the world even in their beginning stages. The appearance of the book this essay reviews marks one of many such beginnings.
THE FATIMA PROPHECIES AND RELIGIOUS CODES
The title of the book this essay introduces is The True Third Secret of Fatima Revealed and the Return of Christ. The author is Pastor Melo Nzeyitu Josias, and additional research was done by Rocha Nefwani. Both men are native Africans, both highly educated. I edited the book myself, here in America, and added a little general historical knowledge.
The book was meant to be available on 13 May, to commemorate the first of six visits of the Lady of Fatima, Portugal, who appeared on that date in 1917. She was visible to the three shepherd children who repeated her words to the world, yet was invisible to the crowds of thousands who were drawn to come to see her. The Lady made astonishing predictions. Her two sets of predictions, made in 1917 about events of the coming decades, proved true. Among other things, she prophesied the fall of Russia to communism, the end of the First World War and the coming of the Second World War.
There was a Third Secret, however, which the Lady instructed Lucia dos Santos to reveal only after 1960, after certain events had passed which would have made it more understandable. It was read to Pope John XXIII in February 1960. When the Pope heard it, he fainted dead to the floor; when he arose, he ordered the Third Secret sealed up in a vault "forever".
Are we in the "end of times"? Are we at the hour in which Jesus Christ has already returned and gone? It would seem that appearances of men acclaimed to be God incarnate have increased greatly in the past century.
Whether a human being can be said to be God made flesh, let alone whether a particular individual can be said to be this, can be debated into meaninglessness.
Those few who are said to have become "god-realised" and who have made themselves known to the public for divine purposes and missions, seem to attract material fortunes from a public that is either inexpressibly grateful or is too gullible. Although some Hindu religious branches speak of "five Ascended Masters" who live invisibly on our planet, there are many quite visible gurus or proclaimed avatars, around whom devotees have formed practical organisations of high material worth. Monies are collected and practical advantages, such as political contributions, keep the organisations going, while their intent is to "enlighten" the masses--who, we must assume, are "endarkened" without them.
Sincere or fraudulent, authentic or imitation, each event of the appearance of a man (usually a male) said to be God or god-realised represents a new bud of one size or another upon a very ancient vine. The vine would be human consciousness, and the bud would be civilisation.
A civilisation forms through codes of knowledge and behaviour that allow each of its members, relatively, the broadest opportunity for value fulfilment. The codes seem most often to have originated with a single man who is also revealed as God's prophet, if not God Himself in fleshly clothing. New knowledge, or interpretations of it, is added in that Man-God's name.
I wonder about the nature of the human experience itself, as I cannot think of any civilisation which did not attribute its foundations to a single man at its cornerstone. Even the "godless" communist attempts at a new and sensible kind of civilisation quickly became personality-worship cults. Nor should we forget Germany's abortive attempt to found a "New World Order" around Adolf Hitler. However, neither Hitler nor Marx nor Lenin nor Mao nor Kim could walk on water or rise from the dead.
Christianity, of all religions, has come closest to uniting the peoples of the entire world. The emergence of avatars in Africa in the 20th century maintains a continuity with the ancient prophecies found in the Bible. The True Third Secret cites biblical passages that make a case that Simeon Toko was Christ Returned--at least, different Christian ministers who considered the interpretations did not scorn their logic. The following is an excerpt I have culled from chapter VII of the book, with permission (some of the writing has been edited so as not to confuse the reader who will be reading this out of its context).