AUF WIEDERSEHEN!
Let us go back in time to 960 years before the birth of that other guy. Imagine if you can the preparations for the consecration of the Temple of Jerusalem.
If we were in Guatemala with the Mayans — where we always end up after a few chutzpahs — for one of the village’s seasonal festivals, the entire town would be involved with the preparations, and the rich fellow would be picking up the tab for it a la potlatch. History records that King David asked his father’s friend Hiram for the wood to build the temple and in return, David gave him enough wheat for his family and 20,000 baths of olive oil.
That is 115,000 gallons.
Let’s imagine what it takes to get a gallon of olive oil together. You have to pick about 100 pounds of olives to have a single gallon of oil. All this by hand with wood ladders and probably wood bushels. Then you have to press and collect it.
The construction of the Temple would have been some undertaking, what with Egypt right down the road and all of those ghastly expensive pyramids that we used to build for months on end and now here we are with our own ghastly expensive pyramid that looks more square.
Thanks a lot, new G-d.
What does it take to charge up a new ghastly expensive religious building?
And wasn’t Judaism supposed to be a modest undertaking with a tent? Perhaps this is a hidden reason we have trouble hanging onto these temples.
My childhood Bible, the King James Version, states it thus: (1 Kings 8:5) “sheep and oxen, that could not be told nor numbered for multitude” and (1Kings 8:63) “two and twenty thousand oxen and an hundred and twenty thousand sheep.”
It seared into my soul that this is one of the wyrd reasons that Judaism exists to this day, that dedication at the temple, all those thousands of animals and the profusion of gold and silver and grain and oil and the billowing CLOUDS of frankincense, myrrh, and marijuana! Many days of stoned chanting. I am almost transported to that moment!
Boom boom boom boom. The people out in the street. The bullocks lowing and the sheep bleating as they are dragged down the road to their destiny. The chanting and the singing going on for two solid weeks as those thousands of animals are slaughtered, their blood collected and thrown over the Temple furniture, and their bodies removed to be cooked and fed to the masses, I hope, for the only protein they get in five years after all that pyramid building.
We can only imagine the seating of even your average Santero that involves many chickens, a couple of goats, some sheep, and possibly a calf and costs well over $20,000 when you throw in gallons of rum and piles of plantains. In the words of Dolly Parton, “It costs a whole lot of money to look this cheap.”
This is why we like the lodges, where your lodge dues start out at $20/month and the higher in STRIKING ZONE you go, the more your lodge dues remain $20/month. It is a nice power without many sheep.
That is where we are, thousands of years later, still looking back in longing for JERUSALEM which was kung fu’d by a bunch of COWS.
What will the new religion bring with its profusion of FIRE-BREATHING CHICKENS?
I can hear it now. Boom boom boom boom all the way down to the Space Needle where we are searing onto the soul of Seattle the pattern of SHAOLIN ELEGUA.
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