ENDING THE COSMIC WAR PART ONE: THERE IS NO COSMIC WAR

BUT FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS WE'VE BEEN FIGHTING IT

The cosmic war was one of humanity’s most genius inventions, and it has permeated all the great religions from Zoroastrianism to Islam. We’ve had it for about four thousand years. The cosmic war swept animist and indigenous spiritual practices before it. It is now so baked in to our spiritual and historical imagining that we can’t get by without it.

It is now time to relinquish the cosmic war. It is time for the cosmic war to end. It was a good idea gone bad. It does not serve us. It harms us. We can, and must, do better. My task here is explaining the Cosmic War, its history, why we have it and why it is still being fought, and how to end it and what are the alternatives. It is an important task. I am working with very big and very old ideas, and longstanding Stories that will be hard to replace, even if we want to.

I honour here the World, in all its realities. I love the world and I want to live here.

I honour the green hills before me, and the tree on the skyline, and the lamb I see racing towards its mother and lying down beside her. I honour the desacralized and the specific, for therein lies hope. I honour the pale flat sky and the light pouring out of it. In all that I honour here today, there is no war. There is a myriad of spirits, layers of reality, peopled and awake, but there is no war.

The realization that there is no cosmic war puts me at odds with much of religious thought, and with anyone who thinks of history as illumined, which is pretty much everyone I know in the new age/new thought/wellness world. I am writing this because I have only had a few useful and important (to me at least) thoughts in my life and this is one of them. This is a kind of anti-manifesto, written by the light of burning boats.

Kia Ora Tatou and Welcome to Ending the Cosmic War. I am Karen Effie. Over time I will talk with you about the long history of the Cosmic War and how influential it becomes. I will describe how religious truths are relative to their time and context, and how they change over time. I will talk about why the USA thinks  it’s a city on a hill, how we get the idea of individual salvation, heaven and hell, witch hunts and satanic panics, conspiracies and secrets and stigmatised knowledge, how come we want to be good, haunted video games, why nobody is coming to save us,  the end of history, the end of capitalism, the end of the world, and climate catastrophe. And more! Look out for fascinating interviews with some of the Cosmic War’s most colourful characters.  And I will review some books, along the lines of reading them so you don’t have to, because some of them are books I did not want to read. I will also discover some brilliant people, brilliant alternatives, good works and good futures.

So, who am I? Well, nobody much, that is kinda the point. I have kicked around many religious and spiritual communities since I was 15, and I am now old enough and educated enough to know a few things. I have jokingly announced “Elderly call centre worker and occasional house sitter declares Cosmic War over”, because what I am speaking and writing about seems so ridiculously grand. During the pandemic I noticed people I had formerly respected, scooting down some really sketchy rabbit holes. When one of them said something especially egregious online, I thought to myself, my goodness, they think they are in a Cosmic War. And there came a sudden insight, that many people think they are in a Cosmic War, and many who don’t think that, find themselves in it anyway, that it has become so backgrounded we can’t see it. I compared it with Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism, where capitalism has become so totalled everything gets sucked into it, and we can’t escape it, and we can’t even see it. As Frederick Jameson says, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. (He is dead wrong by the way!) Capitalism takes up the horizon. Only when we can lift up a corner of the horizon can we see beyond it, and only then can we have some hope of new ways of doing things. I have lifted up a corner of the horizon. I have seen four thousand years of the Story of the Cosmic War, and what it has given us, and where it has led us, and how to end it, because it needs to end.

So I began some concentrated reading and thinking and I talked to some sensible people and went back to university for a bit. It is a big topic and there is lots to get a grip on. None of these ideas are mine. My job has been to stick them together and make a new thing. And to call for action, because I believe the Cosmic War may have once been useful but now it is a liability. We need to declare it over, and get on with solving the true problems of our age, which are enormous and urgent. Most important of all, the way we think about the CW affects how we think about the end of the world, and the way we think about the end of the world affects how we think about the climate catastrophe. So, I will talk about that too, about alternative stories to tell and who is telling them.

Throughout, I am speaking about things we take for granted, things we might think have always been this way. The Cosmic war is like that; it is so old and so pervasive it is hard to see it at all. But things have not always been this way. Some of the ideas we think are age-old are in fact quite recent in origin. Ideas have histories; they have beginnings and antecedents and sometimes we can even point to one event and say, that is where it started.

That goes for religious ideas too. I am going to treat religious ideas as if they are mutable and up for debate. Because they are. Scholars have spent a good few centuries unpicking the Bible, for example, and we are the better for it. I don’t mean to offend anyone who sees their religious scriptures as unchanging and inerrant. But religious scriptures have changed over time, as well as the ideas behind them.  

Being the intellectually promiscuous creature I am, I want to talk not just about history but about the present as well. I will talk about how the Cosmic War affects us now, particularly in the North world. I will talk about US Christian nationalism, Fascism, ecofascism, longtermism, accelerationism, lightworkers and Satanists and witch hunts, and clear up for ever the debate about whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Really, we have no excuse when we say oh my goodness how the hell did THIS happen. Today’s events and ideas have histories. Part of the Story of the Cosmic War is the bit that tells us we are always just about to hit the end times. The important time is always now, and that is weirdly ahistorical. We forget that many generations before us have thought the same thing, and somehow the end times get nudged forward ever so slightly, so that we keep on living in that liminal time/space just before it all hits the fan. We get stuck. When we have a good look at history, we unstick ourselves and we are able to see our own times more clearly.

I will use Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances to discuss ideas that bleed into other ideas, or concepts that don’t stand by themselves. Sometimes religion is considered analogous to sport. We know what is a sport, or do we? Here in Aotearoa New Zealand we like Rugby union, thirty people playing with a ball. That is most definitely sport. Tennis is also sport: two people, one ball. But there are sports with no balls, like gymnastics. It gets fuzzy round the edges. Is video gaming a sport? Is ballet? So, with a very old religion like Zoroastrianism, which I will talk about with great respect, starts off as one thing in one place, and then some of it ends up a diffuse kind of thing you can call Zoroastrian-influenced.

I will also talk a lot about Stories. This is with a capital S. The Cosmic War is a Story, by which I mean it is a founding myth, or a narrative so old it has founded other narratives, or that it is basic to our sense of ourselves.

Some Stories are old as. What is the oldest Story we know of? The Epic of Gilgamesh? Wrong! (probably). We make the mistake of privileging writing. The oldest Story in the world might just be from the Gunditjmara people of what is now called south west Victoria, Australia. They told a Story about how their ancestor became a volcano, called Budj Bim. This Story might relate to a volcanic eruption that took place 37,00 years ago. Imagine, if you can, being of a people who have lived in a place for at least 37,00 years. Imagine telling a Story that is largely intact and possibly that old.

Maybe we can go older. The Lowenmensch dates from 40,00 years ago. It was found in a cave in what is now Germany, in 1939. It is a figurine of a cave lion, 31 centimetres tall, fashioned from a mammoth tusk. It would have taken months to make, months of time set aside for just the making. When you look at its face you can see how alive and aware it is. It is the earliest sign we have of theriomorphic beings, beings that are combinations of human and other animal. The Lowenmensch was found in the very depths of the cave, where it seems to have been placed away from where humans lived, a special place. It has been handled a lot. And it is not the only one. One other similar, smaller lion man, and other smaller animal figurines have been found nearby. It may be that this was a Story that spread. Imagine, because I know you can, sitting by the fire, and someone begins to tell the Story of the Lion Man, and the figurine is passed from hand to hand while you remember the important thing, the Story of a human who was like a lion, who was sometimes a lion, who was a human and a lion, of the lion who was a human, of how we are never just one thing, of how we transform ourselves, of how we are in relation with the world and the non human people in it. And you know that others tell this Story too, so it marks you out as Lion Man people, as Cave Lion people, it puts you in relation to cave lions, it helps you find a place in the world.

I love the Lowenmensch very much. I would love to make a kind of pilgrimage to the museum of Ulm, where the museum website, rather badly translated into English, describes the Lowenmensch as a ‘guest’. Which is fitting somehow.

Ok so reveries over, back to this particular Story, not the oldest story but one with so much reach, I think. The Cosmic War.

WHAT IS THE COSMIC WAR

The Cosmic War has to be two things. It has to be cosmic, and it has to be a war. Not all wars are cosmic. Not all cosmic events are wars.

By cosmic I mean that the war is between two (and only two) metaphysical powers, between absolute Good and absolute Evil. Often other metaphysical beings are ranked against each other, such as angels and demons. The Cosmic War does not just take place in heaven or outside of ordinary reality. It influences the material world and the lives of people. The Cosmic War is one way God works in history, and for some believers, even in the lives of individuals. It is important to be on the side of Good in the Cosmic War, not just for the salvation of individual souls, but for the sake of the cosmic order. Fighting in the Cosmic War is only sort of a choice; we can choose what side we are on, but choose we must. Also, there can be only one Cosmic War, although there are many battles within it. It has gone on since creation, and will only stop when the world ends. It shapes history.

That’s the Cosmic bit. The Cosmic War also has to be a war. The Cosmic War makes history, and also ends it. It is there for the long haul. It has been going since the beginning of history. We are always in it, and its end is always imminent. Good will always win, and the ending will always be catastrophic and dramatic. It is not just a battle or a conflict or a falling out among friends. It is total, it is total good versus total evil, God versus Satan, or their equivalents, there is no diplomacy or compromise or understanding. Evil can only be vanquished. Sometimes the war takes place primarily in the metaphysical realm, but often it takes place in ordinary reality, in the world. It is a real war with real casualties. People die of it. The Cosmic War is responsible for some humanity’s worst atrocities.

I have described how the Cosmic War takes place in the metaphysical realm and in the physical world. There is a third place: the human heart. The Cosmic War marked the beginning of religious introspection. Religion and the culture that went with it were advanced by moral choices made by individual people. Not just priests or monarchs: all of us. Even now we are taught we all need to choose a side, and to choose constantly the side of good over evil. Our salvation and the progress of the Cosmic War itself depend on it. So the Cosmic War is happening in the heart of the young man who picks up a gun for the first time for ISIS. The Cosmic War is happening in the heart of the woman who knows she can’t tell anyone about the violence in her home, because her marriage is sacred and her safety is not. The Cosmic War is happening in the hearts of the teenage Christian lovers who fear where their first kiss will lead them. The Cosmic War is fought over real human bodies, in real time, in the real world.

You may be one of many people who believe the Cosmic War is real. You may be a sincere Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Zoroastrian. You may have genuine intuitions about the battle in heaven between the angels of light, and those dark entities that are trying to stop the earth ascending. You may engage in spiritual warfare with demons. You may be a dualist for proper philosophical reasons. You may think that I am on the side of evil, because I am trying to undermine your sincere belief and the belief of those around you. I can understand that, and I absolutely mean no disrespect to anyone with sincerely held and humane beliefs. You believe it because you have been told to believe it, and because, well, everything around you bears it out, doesn’t it? That is what I mean about a Story that is so old and so pervasive it takes up the horizon. Our cultural and religious history is soaked in this idea. I think that in the past it worked well for us, and I will spend a bit of time here explaining how and why. But, and here is the main point, it does not work for us now. It divides us, and causes us to (sometimes literally) demonize those who are not like us. It makes us always right. It makes us talk in capital letters. We can’t afford to do that now. We face problems that are complex and global and catastrophic. We are all we have.

You have probably heard the story about the Japanese soldier who was isolated on a Pacific island after World War Two had ended, and he didn’t know the war had ended. He just fought on in the jungle. I imagine his fight was very meaningful for him. I imagine he thought he was among the last true patriots. He had no reason to believe otherwise. When he was found and repatriated, he was treated with honour. He was thanked for his service, because he was sincere. We can be wrong, but sincere. I think those who believe in the Cosmic War are like that. They are fighting a battle that is over. It is time for them to come in and be honoured for their sincerity.

You may also be someone who does not believe in the Cosmic War, in which case I am making this for you, because although you may not believe in it, it has recruited you. One of the first people I told about this big idea, was an old friend. We were in a crowded food court, on a Friday evening, before a movie. I was banging on about angels and Nazis and climate change and the end of the world, shouting over the noise. As soon as they could, the couple sharing our table, who were looking at me very sideways, got up and left. At the end of it, my friend said, Well I don’t believe in the Cosmic War. And no, he doesn’t, because he wasn’t brought up religious and he doesn’t think like that. Much of what I am about is explaining how the Story of the Cosmic War has affected us, whether or not we believe in it.

Nevertheless, I want to be a bit parsimonious in how I talk about it. That is why I gave my criteria previously, for what is and is not Cosmic and what is and is not the War. Not all wars are the Cosmic War, even though they may be thought of as just or necessary wars. Sometimes politics is just politics. Not all major trends or ideas in history are a result of the Cosmic War. I am always suspicious of single solutions, or single causes.

Next time, we will iluminate the deep history of the Cosmic War. You will hopefully see how it comes together. Thank you for listening, if you got this far. Credit for the birdsong is the Department of Conservation of Aotearoa New Zealand. Ma te Wa.

The photo is of the Port Hills, Canterbury, at midnight, and this is the place I had my realization about the Cosmic War.

Further Exploration: Norman Cohn “Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come”, and the lovely new translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh by Sophus Helle