The ludiau
crgifies
An ooflue


A N OUTLINE 0 F
THEINDIAN CRUCIFIXION
MAURICE ROWDON


CONTENTS
THE THEME.
1. A 'dark? agee
2. The kundalini and flight'.
3. The 'Indian' Christe
THE SUBJECT MATTERe
BY THE SAME AUTHORO


THETHEME
1. A'dark' agee
That a Christian civilisation was never attained, and that we
are living teday in
of the climaxes of a prlonged dark ageo
oijo
From the time of the first monasteries in the desert behind Alex-
andria two or three centuries after Christ there was conflict,
with the hope and the plan for a uivilisation which never took
placee In the so-called middle ages this conflict was accompanied
by relative social stability (based on imperial organisation)
but little refinement in manners compared with the ancient worlde
From the fifteenth century onwards manners become refined, the
social stability .collapses. 'Civilisation' comes to mean a mode
of behaviour, following on the Spanish Church's need to define
a Christian behaviour distinct from Jewish and Arabo With this
we enter the present era of contant financial crisis and ware
Christian society has indeed been from the beginning a war-
society. The conversion of the barbarian races pressing on
the Roman empire (and ultimately takingit aver) was (and is) a
slow process, and today we have a society which is still in the
throes of the barbarian preliminaries of civilisation.
2. The kundalini and "light"
That what differentiates a 'dark' age from its opposite lies
precisely in its sex-conduct and sex-understanding, The kundalini
techniques of the east have been largely lost even in Indiae They
survived in the desert fathers (before the monasteries came into


being , and lingered on hore and there throughout Christian history
though in a crude and esserntially barbarian form of brutal sexm
deprivation and rather bogus 'fest days'. But throughout Christian
history there haf been an ewereness of the importance of the sexe
arca and its connection with 'light' and 'illumination'. In the
'dark age 'light? was said to come from the isolated monasteries
for that reasone
Unce 'converted', the barbarian (in his role of both teaching
monk and pupil) made a cruds analysis of God as rewarder and punishm
er (heaven and hell), saw himself as dark (original sin) and asked
that nature, the only area of action ha knew, should perpetuate
itself for all time (personal inmortality). St Benedict, setting
the tone for all Christendom in his third and most successful mon=
astery at Cassino (from AD 529) wisely substituted for his uncouth
followers ruminatio or reading aloud for the traditional Greek
haesychia or meditation' of the desert fathersa
This popular version of the Christian cosmos was never accepted
by the real thinkers of the monasteries or the universities. But
thinkoss
these mEA were no less barbarian for being more complicatede Their
barbarianisation of the religion emerged (from a reading of Ariste
otle and the Arab thinkers Avicenna and Averroes) in the idea of
a logical and rational study of nature as the path to illumination.
Rationalism and empirical science, far from being a climax of civil=
ised thought as the history-books tend to talk about them, were in
fact barbarian reversionse To a society which did not know what
civilisation was, and mistock itmin the barbarian mode-for a
way of behaviour and an assertion of power (*knowledge'), the crude
'ingentions' and 'discoveries' of post-fifteenth-century society were
ths highest things to which the human mind could aspiree Printing
and logarithms, anatomy and steam, the banking system and Copernicus,
new techniques of war and exploration-they turned sixteenth-century
society upside-down in the most spectauular waye The last twomo
war and exploration--were identified in the empire-making that
characterised this new phase of society, and in 'New Spain', as the
recently discovered Americas vere called, the Christian showed a
barbaric ferocity towards the Aztecs and Incas which a millenium
of careful discipline by monks and teachers and priests had failed
to curb, and proved how little that vast social operation of con-


D a
verting the barberien reces had developed along its necessary time-
spane THE INDIAN CRUCIFIXION argues that 'barbarian preliminaries'
involve a timemepan of many thousands of years, and that a new civilm
isation in which enything comparable to the composure that was at the
heart of the eastern civilisations will take many more thousands of
years to transpire, given the spectacular barbarian reversions' of
the last fe w centuries.
These 'barbarian reversions' which characteries Christian history,
both in private livas and in society, are onlygeemingly negative, howo
ever, just as the concentration on sex-manifestation today is only
seemingly about sex-pleasure,
Like psycho-analysis, with its theory
of sublimation and the libido, 'intellectual' or 'media sex is a
fascination not simply with an area that FI omises pleasure but one
that is dimly and vaguely felt to contain stupendous dynamic energies
which can be tappede
The deeper the barbarian reversion, in fact, the deeper the
plunge into sexwactivity, precisely es the poison-sprayed fly will
often copulate in the death-throes, and precisely as the hanging man
ejaculateso The whole problem of the 'independent action* of the
genitalia absorbed Leonardo da Vinci, and his own hermaphroditic
constitution led him far nearer kundalini preoccupations than to
the homosexual ones uaually ascribed to hima The marriage of brutality
and sex in the media is not incidental. In the barbarian, during
his earliest and tribal stage, sex-desire made rape a component of
victory, and seminal ejaculation was both a reward and a revenge,
a contemptuous liquid bombardment of the enemy's innermost citadel.
Anyone who has been terrified in battle is aware of the sex-irritant
encapsulated in feare Farmegirls and soldiers made quick contact
on a battle-front, with death standing close bye This does not
come from any intellectual desire to 'propagate the race' or even
an instinctive desire for self-projection, but from the body's
recognition of the sex-area as a powerful energy-raleasing zone,
defiant towards the immobilising dangers all rounde The Church's
hope that people would copulate only when they wanted children was
a hopeless one since progeneration was only one of the considerations
in the manifold ecstasies of the sex-greae Sex-desire and sexwacts
have for this reason toppled states, caused murder and suicide and


lifelong penitences So far from progeneration has it drifted that
it has involvad men with meny women whth women, and both with animals.
There is clearly more to this area at the base of the spine than a
simple act of conception could account foro The imagination is
deeply involvede Lifelong pining, lifelong self-restriction may
follow a glimpse of someone in the street who is never seen again.
Powerful and mysterious forces are involved, and the kundalini
teaching of the need to rouse this force from its dormant position,
'coiled at the base of the spine and closing it', to climb the spinal
column and, through bitter turmoil and somatimes great sickness, to
reach an 'illumination' which blinds and outshines all other pleasures
is clearly close to the very source (as it claims) of human evolutiona
The barbarian's SeX activity in peaceful or 'refined' circumstances
is not so diffcrent from what it was in the early or tribal setting.
It is related to his own pleasure, and receives stimulants from
death and danger-contents, and from crueltys as the media demone
strate every dayo Now barbarian reversion' in this connection
does not refer to a tribal relepse, supposing such a thing possible.
For the sex-cruelty identification goes on in the least healthy,
tha least tribal of the urban populationse On the contrary, here
we meet the paradox of acute intellectuality as a barbarian manifem
estatione And the sex-cruelty identification derives from an
from
intellectualised state of removal from the bodys rather thenjan
excessive absorption in it. It is the accompaniment of masturb-
ation, and sexe-images SO compelling that they may make sex-perform-
ance impossible or disappointing. Sex becomes one of the 'blueprints'
held in the barbarian mind, actually standing in the way of sexual
pleasuree For tha whole barbarien development in its sophisticated
stages is toward the exclusive use of the intellect, as the body,
no longer understood in its new inactive role, neither murdering nor
raping, fails also to understand its own processese Yet it knows
of no other arena than the body, than nature. It took centuries
before an intellectual theory of 'hygiene' displaced the deep Christ
ian connection between filth and godlinesse
This perplexed separation from the body is simply a characterist-
ic of the refinement of manners which has been going on since the


sixteenth centurys culminating in the Victorian Man at the height
of the British Empire, who was not unlike the Conquistador Man at
the height of the Spanish Empire under Philip 11, in his brutal
confidence in his own narrow ideas. For moralism is another mark
of the barbarian psychologys which demands that the who does not
believe as mey should never be'.
Moralism and empire are in this sense interchangeable terms,
and it was perfectly natural that Spanish expansionism across the
seas should go together with the fierce catholic-protestant argument
in Europe, which saw a religious opponent as having no moral right
to life, so that his body could be disposed of without mercye
In other words, there was a tremendous burst of intellectuality
in and around the Church, and men would murder and torture each
other over the word 'transubstantiation'. Both the protestants
and catholics turned against the 'ecstatics' and the 'spiritualists'
and the 'illuminated ones' in their own ranks, and the result was
the reduction of words like "God' and 'soul' and spirit to the
artificial status they have in our languages todayo The clinical
mind was another result, and accordingly much berbarian reversion
takes place unseen in animal-experiment laboratories throughout
the world todaye
The intellectual emphasis in the barbarian (it was his way
of freeing himself from the hot demands of the body) is responsible
too for the fact that Christian society has always planned and
dreamed and looked forward to a world it has never realisede
This can work backwards too, and backward dreaming is one of the
chief reasons why we get so little real history in history books,
as opposed to 'blueprint thinking' which divided the Christian
past up into quite imaginary epachs called the 'dark' and the
'middle* ages, with a Renaissance or 'rebirth* which actually
followed the worst plagues in Christian history and preceded the
worst massacres and persecutions. 'Blueprint thinking' leads
to a society aimed at 'optimum production' which simultaneously
destroys the earthp just as it can quite sincerely describe
soil erosion, bad teeth, atmospheric and oceanic pollution,
a devastatingly high incidence of heart failure and cancer and


7 (a) en
essential hypertension among the young, and altogether the
degeneration of the species, as 'the effects of civilisation'.
Traditionally, since the twelfth centurys the universities
have been the great blueprintemanufacturing centres,and were often
for this reason hotbeds of criminality and drunkenness. In the
light of this, tha modem correlation between mass-cducation and
mass-war is easier to understande The masturbation and prostitution
in the modern mass-school are simply reflex actions from the artifes
iciality of the whole barbarian definition of 'education' as intell-
ectuality. The fact that most of the organisers of terrorist
groups are 'educated' and from middile-class families should not
docs.
cause the surprise it invariablyk This surprise, incidentally,
is another result of the "blueprint thinking', For centuries
now shocked surprise has grected the assammination of dukes,
presidents and princes, and financial crashess and suddent wars,"
and massecres, and sex-murder. It is because the artificial
hostory in which we all live has not prepared us for the fact that
barbarian society survives by the skin of its desthe More surprise
ing are its areas of peace and order which are not obtained by
threat and forcee
THE INDIAN CRUCIFIXION is simultaneously, therefore, an exam
ination of history to find the barbarien root, and a handbook of
modern life by which barbarianism may recognise itself. It cannot
use the word 'barbarian' or 'reversion to barbarism' in a stignatis-
ing, much less emotional, way but only as comprising a certain psy-a
chology which is in necessary turmoil as it seeks forward to the
self-promi.sed civilisation or 'light'.
3. The "Indian' Christo
The crucifixion of Christ was an 'Indian crucifixion' iri the
sense that it crucified the Indian experience which he brought to
the Jewish worlds There is the story that 'Christ went to India
and came back dressed in white's But there was no need to go to
Indiae There is plenty of evidence that India cama to hime
There were large numbers of Indians in the Persian army in Greece


in 480 BC. Modelled heads of Indians have been found at Memphis
from the same period, which.could indicate a settled community of
Indian traderse Buddhism was being actively preached in many parts
of the Mediterranean by 259 BCa The doctrine of renunciation (the
monastic ideal), quite foreign to Israel, showed itself before 170 BC
in the form of the recluses of Serapaion near Alexandria, and the
Therapeatae and the Essenes of Israele There was a Buddhist mission
at Antioch.
The Jewish world saw in Christ, when he expounded doctrines
levelled against closed institutions like the family, a threat to
its survival, a form of subversion it politically coujid not afford.
The officers of the Roman occupation army were quite perplexed by
the sight of a manifestly pure and good man being led to his execas
ution in the rompany of common thievese The fact is that a 'univer-
sal' doctrine which related God to any and every man, and even to
women, simply through an inner act of self-recollection (today,
'meditation'), would if successful have strippad Israel of its
important identification between SeX (race) and God (priests),
which identification was the key to its dramatic and miraculous
survival.
But the 'Indian experience' was carried by Jews to Alexandria,
to Greece and Rome and Byzantiume The dsepest influence of all
radiated from the desert fathers, and here the kundalini techniques
inherited from the Indians came into play= In Rome aristocratic
ladies had heard of St Antony 'the hermit' (AD 251-356), who was
thirty-four when he went to live in an abandoned fort between the
Nile and the Red Sea, emerging many years later 'shining with health'
and with a head full of excellent teetha He was consulted by the
Church in Alexandria, and spoke of 'seeing God', as centuries later
St Simeon on his column was consulted by an emperore That was in
the Greek traditione In ancient Greece the "philosophers'
were not intellectual or academic but wandering 'holy men' who had
changed their bodies as well as their heads, and who seemed to have
achieved a knowledge far beyond that of books. St Antony and Paul
of Thebes learned their disciplines from village 'fathers' much
like the yogis we hear of today who have their devotees and initiate


9 E
them in the techniques of. meditation or whatever 'path' they have
chosen. It was through these men that kundalini techniques survived
in some form in the Christian worlds
The books on the desert fathers by Palladius and John Cassianus
and Pachomius were eye-witness accounts, and give ample evidence of
men who were not superstitious nor interested in healing stunts,
only in 'perfection'. The Greek concept of the 'perfect man' had
been 'realised' inChrist, hence Alexandra with its Greek background
was an ideal soil for the new Christian ideas, and the lectures of
Plotinus became one of the inspirations of the sof-called Renaissanca
centuries latero
But Alexandria was not alone, nor was she powerful enough to be
the capital of the declining Roman empire, or defend herself against
barbarianso There were two barbarian davastations in the desert
behind Alexandria during the fifth century, and the monks fled for
their livesa That was long after the tradition of the desert
fathers had degenerated to organised monasteries where homosex-
uality became rife (*When you see boys, take yp your mantles and
withdraw', advised Macarius the Egyptian). 'Ascetic' practices
become
had been a sort of corruption tooe Monks would stagger under
loads of iron for penitence. They would compete with each other
in self-mortification. Meanwhile in Alexandria the Church split
upe A monk murdered the imperial prefect and was canonised for
it. Fierce arguments about doctrine coingcided with the barbarian
influxe The city divided its strength between two bitterly oppsed
patriarchs so that it was easy for Islam to walk in latero The
'barbarianisation' of Christ had startede
In Greek askeo meant simply 'exercise', of the kind taught by
the yogi. Christian 'asceticism' was really a barbarianisation
of this which settled into monastic tradition, a shadow of the hard
aspects of kundalini discipline. But not only the hard aspects
survivede As late as the sixteenth century a monastery under Canon
Pandolfi Ricasoli. and Abbess Faustina Mainardi was investigated in
Florence. Their confessions revealed an 'old heresy' which claimed
(on Indian lines) that 'no sin was possible in the perfect'. Ric-
asoli taught his nuns that carnal acts betwee n men and women were


meritorious if one kept one's mind on God (the shadow of another
Indien teaching). He and the nuns made love freely, and 'he called
such exercises an exercise of purity'. He called the sexual organs
'holy and sacred parts'. The hair around them 'was like the veils
around holy and precious images'. He would ask the girls to say
their Pater Noster while they made love, and said that they should
thank God for the gift they had received, and shougid practice it
with other women. On Christmas Eve he slept with two girls 'in
order to greet the day with greater devotion'. To the barbarian
psychology these practices could only be frankly ribald or frankly
licentious, and certainly remote from anything divine, precisely
as the 'divine sexwact' depicted on the walls of Indian temples
would strike the same psychology as evidence of 'tantric rituals'
or even idol-worship. And indeed 'Tantra' is historically the
nip.
root of even Ricasoli's monastic practices. It refers to perhaps
the most exquisite emenation of Indian thought, the doctrine of
the 'Divine Mother? who both destroys and creates, and U sports
with the world', making the human mind believe in its own mirages,
namely 'objective reality'. As Mother Shakti on the island of
ghen
jewels (mistaken, in the barbarian mode, for a cemetery, whereas
it is 'situated near the heart') she sits on the corpse-like body
of Sakala Shiva (coloured white because he is the latent energy
behind all life), while beneath Sakala lies Nishkala Shiva, coloured
a nondescript grey to denote the absolute inertia that is the source
even of the energy-source of life. Coming into contact with the
white Shiva (she sits on him or dances on himp and is sometimes seen
in copulation wi th him, always above) she brings maya, the illusion
that is called our reality, a play of veils, out of his energye
She is coloured red because of this creative role. When she is
coloured black she is Mother Kali (the feminine form of the word
for time, kala)and sits eating entrails or drinking warm blood,
with a necklace of skulls. The flames round her denote the cons
flagration that will consume everything at the end of a world-
period (the present being one of Kaliyuga, or 'the age of destruction
and conflict', when the buman mind is concentrated on the three area
N 2 SES


close to the base of the spine-the genitalia, thw anus and the
stomach---and whe we derive energy from food, the weakest of the
energy-supplying forces in. the universe).
She belongs to a great period of Indian thought, from the time
of Shankaracharya, and Christianity hes never achieved such a bold or
subtle description of the pleasure-pain cycle in which life is caughto
On the contrary, it became lost in a popular God-Devil mythology
where the Devil was both created of God and independent of him and
even foreign to him, in a contradiction that generations of Christians
swallowed like those sailor boys who once had to swallow a lump of
pork-fat at the end of a rope as part of their initiation. The
Divine Mother in her destroyer aspect is not 'evil', just as in her
creatar aspect she is not 'good', since good and evil are two of the
veils of illusion, and aspects of pleasure and paine She allures
and excites us with her maya, which is time, or nature, or the body,
or our desirese Christianity never succeeded in really piercing
this illusion, or analysing the mind sufficiently to discover that
it was thought that constructed an 'objective world', out of what
Kant called 'a phantasmagoria of sensations'. Only today, two
centuries after Bishop Berkeley was looked on as a crank by the
English, and a century after Kant described space and time as
'in the perceiver', and a handfull of decades after Einstein
argued that the theory determined the observed and not vice versa,
has the barbarian rationalist edifice begun to crumble, and the
creative role of thought or perception, carrying within themselves
the apparatus to manufacture the subjective/objective context in
which we live, become recognisede
That. objective/subjective context is intimately connected with
the sex-area, so much so that disturbances in the seX-area at once
show their effect in the victim's confusion of subjective with ob-
jective, and his failure to judge people and situations with the
balance that often seems to remain intact in unlettered people.
The acute intellectuality displayed in certain 'barbarian reversion'
periods was both the result of disturbed sex-function and a new
provocation of further disturbance. The 'objective world' seems
to collapse in strict proportion to the degree of the sex-disturbance:
self-created situations are attributed to 'others' or 'outside


circumstances'. There is plenty of evidence of such disturbance
during the decline of Rome in the imperial period, when a new selfos
definition was being awaited. During a later period of marked
barbarian reversion' Philip 11 of Spain wore out four young wives
with his obsessivs fornications, while governing a vast empire from
a tiny bare room, where he read his council's minutes until his eyes
were red with the straine While not a cruel man he watched the
funeral of his rebellious son from a palace window unmoved, and
different
sent a relative to the flames for the crime of having views/from
his own on the eucharist. The acute intellectuality, the acute
remoteness from the body (he never hunted like his father Charles
v, and he ténded to faint at jousts), were both a symptom and a
stimulant of the SeX-exCess. In the case of more acute disturbm
ance, as in some forms of homosexuality, even the ectual forms of
objects may change: that is to say, the actual objectifying apparat-
us in the mind may be corroded, precisely as drugs corrode ite
This relation between the objectifying apparatus and the sex-area
is an aspect of the claim (made by those who have mastered the
kundalini techniques) that the sex-Function is simply a part of
a dynamic energy-supplying zons at the base of the spine in
which lies the key to all consciousness, and to all human evolution.
This, and not sexmparties, is what the tentra is all aboute
The meaning of the scissors often seen in one of the four pairs
of hands belonging to the Divine Mother in her creative aspect refers
to the need to cut 'attachment' to the desires, to nature, to "illus
ion'. This does not mean attaing 'detachment' in the barbarian
sense of coldness towards the body, or aloofness from others, or a
denila of natural functions. It means simply the realisation that
the real self does not lie in nature, but in the strangest way
creates it and may therefore control it. When that realisation
becomes a living experience, Indian thought argudd, the self is
liberated from its coils of pleasure and paino The light' breaks
the barbarian is dead, the man alive.


THESUBJECT MATTER
THE INDIAN CRUCIFIXION deals with those aspects of modern life
which clearly denote the barbarian or darkwage cheracteristic or are
typical of a 'barbarian reversion'. In this way it is 'a handbook
by which to recognise the barbarian in oneself.
It is drawn from notes accumulated over the last three years
while at work on other books, most of them historicale Chapter
divisions include the function of war in Christian society, the
role of the madia, the role of moneys 'Christian' medicine, deatha
and decay-preoccupation argising from the doctrine of original sin,
moralism and terrorism (linked together), education and crima
(linked together), the various forms of 'blueprint thinking',
the status of old age during a period oû 'darkened kundalini's
the idea of progress as it has developed over the last four
centuries, the modern view of time as a production-belt.
The whole idea of production is examined as a barbarian
manifestation, and its necessary connection with violence since
its first clear expression in the sixteenth century is demonstrated.
'Blueprint' thinking refers to the ideals and success-formulae and
'future'-obsessions that have increasingly dominated the Christian
mind since the eighteenth century ('the age of enlightenment").
Such blueprints as the'Black Man' blueprint or the White Man'
blueprint or the 'Arab' blueprint, whether blueprints of love or
of hate, precede the application of terroro War is described as
the key to the survival of Christian society, and its means of
self-development. The Turkish threat was the only thing that held
the turbulent society of the sixteenth century together, while today
war is the acknowledged "technological reservoir' required by society
as production- or power-machine. War plays this essential role
because it 'reconnects the barbarian to lost nature', his only pool
of knowledge, from which he draws further power-machines.


The chapter on 'Christien' medicine argies that it is grounded
in ignorance and not knowledge, in necrophilia and the study of
corpses and not the living tissuee "Ignorance' here is not emotion-
al but refers to the misintsrpretation of ancient medical thought
which lies at the basis of the 'Christian' researches. For instance,
ancient medicine maintained that the penis erected because it became
filled with vital spirit' or pneumes By Leonardo's time the
general medical belief was that it erected by air-pressue from inside.
Only the crudest barbarian society could have interpreted the ancient
concept of pneuma, which was close to the Indian prana (meaning what
we would intellectualise and render meaningless as cosmic energy') CS
Xnaphysical air'o As Leonardo pointed out, in his suggestion
that blood did the trick, the small volume of a human body would
have been quite insufficient to contain the amount of air needed to
attain that degree of hardnesse Today the results of mistaken
premises are seen in the perplexity with which Christian medicine
witnesses the success of eastern procedures like acupuncture,
which it must acknowledge but cannot 'explain', that is to says
reduce to its inflexible and narrow 'phyjscal' termse The medicine
chapter also maintains that anaesthesia was a confession of failure,
and reduced the body to a corpse-like state for the simple reason
that this was where Christian studies began: a genuine medicine
would have found other methods of curtailing sensation in the patient,
precisely as acupunfoture doese
THE INDIAN CRUCIFIXION quotes the importance of barbarian
invasion es a catalyst working on ancient civilisations. It is
seid that this process happened in Indias the richis or first seers
taught their disciplines or the Vedas by mouth, and the written
31J
documents only emerged much leter when contact with dasas or barbar
ians made self-definition necessary. The same effect worked on the
Roman empire under the impact of the Lombards and Goths and Franks
and Huns, by forcing it to a new self-dafinition as a Christian
empire. One of the most important catalystic barbarian invasions
of recent times was the British occupation of India, which proboked -
Indian mysticism into a revival, and was responsible for the introde
uction to the West of Hindu thought during the nineteenth century,


15 be
culminating in the lecture-tours of Vivekenanda in the Unitedi
Saates, and that absorption of the West in eastern thought which
Schopenhauer predicted ouer a century agoo The reverse-action
of the ancient civilisation on the barbarian intruder takes the form
of interpreting and instructing the barbarian on the nature and
meaning of his turmoile THE INDIAN CRUCIFIXION describes itself
as an example of this.
Lengtha 80,000-100,000 wordse


relevant
OTHER NON-FICTION BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
CRUCIFIXION:
THE INDIAN
Raom
COLLINS COMPANION GUIDE TO UMBRIA (1969)
THE FALL OF VENICE Weidenfeld/Praeger 1970)
LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT (Weidenfeld/Regnery 1974)
THE SPANISH TERROR (Constable/St Martin's Press 1974)
LEONARDO DA VINCI (Weidenfeld Great Lives' 1975)