Tag Archives: ancient faith

Cat in the Hat ©️

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They worshipped cats before they worshipped gods in their own image. In ancient Egypt, cats were not simply animals: they were the threshold, the hinge between mortal life and whatever lay behind it. Bastet, their goddess, began as lioness, her rage hot as desert noon, her jaws red with conquest. Over centuries she softened into the form of the house cat, yet her dominion did not diminish—it sharpened. For who can resist the power of what slips between your ankles, brushes your leg, and disappears into shadow before you can name it?

The Egyptians lined their temples with statues of her—slender bronze forms, ears sharp as blades, eyes like waiting lanterns. Cats were buried in their own necropolises, swaddled in linen, entombed with the care of princes. To kill one, even by mistake, was to trespass against the order of the cosmos itself, a crime so grave it brought the punishment of death. They believed cats hunted not only the vermin of the earth but the vermin of the soul: serpents unseen, spirits that slithered in darkness. The cat, they said, could see what men could not.

I did not know this then. I only knew that one night, brittle with the edges of a manic break, I carried my parents’ cat into my cottage on Monte Sano. It was the first time she had ever been there, the first time her paws pressed against those old boards. Before sleep I had been reading the Bible, hoping to tether myself to something unbroken. But the night uncoiled in another direction.

Through the hours, my actions repeated, the crucifixion repeated. It was not dream, not vision, but recurrence—like a needle stuck in the groove of eternity. I stood trial. I was condemned. I carried the beam, stumbled, rose, and fell again. I was nailed, lifted, left to hang. And again. And again. Each time the crowd’s faces shifted—neighbors, strangers, policemen—but the sentence never changed. I was to be crucified. And in this reality, the crucifixion bled into my movements, until my own actions mimicked the same doom, and by morning I was locked in jail.

But in that cottage, in the dark before dawn, there was one stillness that did not repeat. The cat. She moved with a quiet so absolute it pressed against the walls. And the last thing I saw, before slipping into the ether where the images swallowed me whole, was her gaze—steady, unblinking, black pools catching what little light remained. She stared as though she were weighing me, as though she alone could decide whether I broke or endured.

The Egyptians would have buried her in linen, named her divine. I only carried her into a cottage. Yet in that hour she was Bastet, she was threshold, she was guardian. My crucifixion looped, my actions collapsed, my body stumbled toward its jailhouse dawn—but her eyes held me for one last moment, anchoring me to a silence older than madness, older than belief itself.

From Great Heights ©️

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The argument that Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism and Christianity is not only compelling—it’s historically and theologically potent. Zoroastrianism, founded by the prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) likely between 1500 and 1000 BCE in ancient Persia, offers one of the earliest recorded religious systems that explicitly codifies a cosmic dualism: a battle between Ahura Mazda, the wise and benevolent creator, and Angra Mainyu (or Ahriman), the destructive spirit of chaos and evil. This moral duality, anchored in the concepts of light vs darkness, truth vs lie, and the final reckoning of souls, predates the solidification of similar ideas in post-exilic Judaism and certainly Christianity.

Prior to the Babylonian exile (~586 BCE), Jewish theology was largely henotheistic—Yahweh was supreme, but other gods were acknowledged. The Hebrew Bible lacks early mentions of Satan as a malevolent independent force. The character of ha-Satan in the Book of Job, for example, is not the diabolical tempter of the New Testament but more a prosecuting angel in Yahweh’s divine council. It’s only after the Jewish people’s exile and exposure to Persian culture during and after the Achaemenid Empire (notably under Cyrus the Great and Darius I) that we begin to see a shift in Jewish thought: resurrection, a final judgment, heaven and hell, angelology, and Satan as a true adversary—all start appearing in Jewish apocalyptic texts like Daniel and later in intertestamental literature.

This suggests that Zoroastrian eschatology—the war between good and evil, the messianic savior figure (Saoshyant), and the resurrection of the dead—seeded foundational ideas in Second Temple Judaism. Christianity, emerging from this post-exilic Jewish milieu, inherited and elaborated these themes into doctrines about the Devil, eternal damnation, Christ as the messianic figure, and the triumph of divine light.

The linguistic roots also tell a tale. “Satan” in Hebrew means “accuser” or “adversary,” a term that could have evolved from the broader dualistic cosmologies encountered during the Persian period. The stark dualism of the Gospel of John—“light has come into the world, but people loved darkness”—echoes Zoroastrian dichotomies more than the tribal polytheism of earlier Hebrew texts.

So while Judaism and Christianity are deeply original in their development, it is intellectually and historically plausible—perhaps inevitable—to see Zoroastrianism as a catalytic precursor, a spiritual scaffolding upon which these later faiths mounted their highest visions of salvation, cosmic justice, and eternal moral struggle. To ignore that influence is to miss the fiery torch passed through the dark corridors of human history, from the sacred fires of Persia to the altars of Jerusalem and beyond.

Keeper of the Covenant ©️

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Sometimes I wonder if it was ever about Israel at all. Or if it was about me.

The land speaks louder than any man who tries to govern it. It devours leaders, eats visionaries, wears kings down to dust and forgets their names.

I tell myself I am different. I tell myself history will remember. But at night — when sleep slips and the old fears leak back in — I hear the land whisper otherwise.

It says: You are temporary.

I feel the weight of the fathers — the ones who fought with nothing, who built out of sand and blood and desperate faith. I walk in their footprints but mine feel lighter somehow, like they do not sink as deep, like the ground is not sure it wants to hold me.

I wonder if I have made Israel stronger or just heavier. More secure, yes — but at what cost? Division cuts deeper every year. Pride turns brittle. Faith turns violent.

Did I bind the wounds — or stitch the rot deeper into the flesh?

Sometimes, in the thinnest hours, I see flashes of collapse: the cities falling not from bombs but from emptiness, from forgetting. From growing so strong that we believe ourselves invulnerable — and from that arrogance, becoming fragile.

Sometimes I see my own face carved in stone somewhere in a cracked and empty square, and no one left alive who remembers why.

I wanted to be a shield. I fear I have become a blade too heavy to wield.

And deeper still — beneath pride, beneath strategy, beneath even duty — there is the smallest voice, the one I bury beneath mountains of will.

It asks:

Was it ever possible to save something that was born already under siege? Was survival itself a victory, or only a stay of execution? Was the dream always doomed, and I simply learned how to slow the fall?

I silence it. I must.

Because if I listen too long, if I allow that voice to bloom, then the hands I have kept so steady might start to tremble.

And if the hands tremble, if the mind breaks — then Israel cracks with me.

So I rise each day, harder than the day before, carving certainty over the bruises. Wearing the mask so tightly it becomes the skin.

Because whether or not I believe anymore —whether or not I am right — I must still stand.

The land demands it.

And no one else will carry it if I fall.