Adolph God

Dancing with Myths: An A – Z
IX: I is for Ialdabaoth

When I was a teenager, attending St Joseph’s Academy Grammar School, I edited a Sixth Form magazine which, while being published with the wary consent of the Headmaster, was by no means an ‘official’ school magazine.
A previous effort on the part of me and my friends had been a humour magazine, largely inspired by Punch and Private Eye (with just a hint of Mad Magazine, which had permanently affected my sense of comedy). Its first issue came out in December 1968 and featured jokes about Pop Art, ‘Enoch Growl, MP’ and contraception. Highlights included a spoof Awards Ceremony at which a sculpture by Henry Moore, “closely resembling a woman holding her baby under a sycamore tree, or an orang-utan with a hangnail, depending on which way you look at it,” was presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury “on behalf of the Pope, who was unable to appear in person, as he was suffering from a brain disorder, which had first made itself apparent when he issued a new encyclical banning all artificial laxatives.”
The new magazine, entitled Batrok! (after a Marvel Comics villain, with the ‘c’ changed to a ‘k’ as in 'Amerika'), was heavily influenced by the underground press, which was fairly easily accessible in the early Seventies, even in South-East London (I had bought my first copy of Oz from a news-agents in Bromley South Station!).
The first issue (Collector’s Item Edition! Fun! Thrills! Academy Larks!), despite its cheap (stencilled) production values, was something of a succès-de-scandale, quickly selling out when it was published in October 1971. Articles criticising the school’s prefect system and rules about long hair jostled with surrealist poems, album reviews and an attack on the Festival of Light by yours truly.
The second issue, along with lengthy rebuttals of articles in the first issue, featured Poem From A Coffin, a piece of free verse I had written, inspired by Allen Ginsberg and Jeff Nuttall (whose Bomb Culture was reissued in a fiftieth-anniversary edition in 2018). My poem ends with the lines:

Will the real Adolph Hitler please stand up
and be counted?
Will the loud minority please sit down
and shut up?

PART THREE Almighty Who
Q: How did I get into this coffin?
A: God put me there
Q: Why did he put me there?
A: God put me there to know him, love him, serve him in this world and be happy with him forever in the next so shut up and stop moaning.
Q: Who killed 6,000,000 Jews?
A: Adolph God

I was called in to see the Headmaster, who wanted to know whether I was claiming that God was responsible for the Holocaust. Amid discussion of the inadequacies of the Catechism for understanding complex theological issues, I explained that the immediate inspiration for the poem had been a chance encounter at a bus-stop with someone who thrust a leaflet into my hands which, he claimed, would explain why God permitted evil to flourish in the world.
Needless to say, it didn’t.
The Headmaster was satisfied when I explained that what I had meant in the poem was that Hitler had assumed to himself godlike powers…with disastrous consequences. He entrusted a supportive teacher with oversight of the magazine before publication in future; and we managed two more issues before the Head finally lost patience with me. A few months later I would produce the one and only issue of the South East London Free Press – but that’s another story…
Nevertheless, the idea that Hitler was a demiurge continued to haunt me; as did the image of the Earth as a coffin, existence as a living death. We can explain the evil that men do as a by-product of free will – but what about natural disasters? They are not all man-made; some are acts of God – if God exists…
One of my intellectual heroes at this time was Albert Camus; and I transcribed in my Journal a line from one of the characters in his novel La Peste (The Plague, which of course has taken on great contemporary relevance): je refuserai jusqu'à la mort d'aimer cette création où des enfants sont torturés. The doctor Bernard Rieux, who utters this line, has just watched a child die an agonising death; and he is talking to a priest, who believes that we should love what we cannot understand; and recognises that Rieux lacks the gift of grace.
But what is the création which Rieux refuses to love? The divine creation? Some translators here give ‘system’ or ‘scheme of things.’
The ancient Gnostics – like their medieval heirs, the Cathars – refused to love the material (as opposed to the spiritual) creation, the existence of which they attributed, not to the true God, but to a being they called Ialdabaoth or Yaltabaoth – the name means something like Child of Chaos or Lord of the Starry Hosts.
His mother is Sophia, Divine Wisdom, who is with God in the Beginning, in the Fullness; but errs in her desire to be closer to the One. Over-reaching herself, she falls into the outer darkness, the Emptiness; and there she gives birth to a misshapen abortion. Her passionate emotions of grief, fear and terror – and, running through all, her ignorance of what was happening to her – become the four elements of air, water, earth and fire – and these are shaped into the material cosmos by Ialdabaoth.
He boasts that he is the god over all but his mother reveals the spiritual reality of which he is unaware. He declares that he is a jealous god; but of whom should he be jealous if there were no other gods before him? He is the Blind, Idiot God – the fore-runner of Lovecraft’s Azathoth – and a parody of the God of the Old Testament, who wants to keep humankind enslaved in a Garden of Ignorance. To this day there are Esoteric Hitlerists who believe that Adolph God, as I called him, was the Saviour of the Kali Yuga, sent to free us from the material prison of the Jewish God…
What in Heaven or Earth is going on here?
The ancient Gnostics I would describe as those who cheer Eve on for eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In some of their myths, she is Wisdom’s daughter, a female Redeemer; and there are even echoes of this in the Grail legends, where Eve carries a twig from the Tree of Knowledge out of the Earthly Paradise and plants it in our fallen world. It blossoms into a new Tree of Life: an image of the vision of Eternity which Ialdabaoth would deny us?
In their extreme dualist cosmology, there is no mystery about the presence of suffering in the material world, since the being who created it is ignorant at best, evil at worst. This création où les enfants sont torturés is a parody of the spiritual Fullness, from which we have been thrown and to which we long to return (nostalgia for Paradise). Ialdabaoth’s world is a prison – a coffin, if you will – from which we yearn to escape – or rise again. But there is hope: from the True God, Our Father in Heaven, comes Christ to awaken us from our sleep of spiritual death; if we know His truth, then we are free.
According to the second century AD Catholic polemicist Irenaeus, in his work Against Heresies, some Gnostics claimed that it was Ialdabaoth with whom Abraham made a covenant, promising that his descendants would worship It in exchange for land. It is Ialdabaoth who guides Moses to lead his people to the Promised Land; and Ialdabaoth who fathers Jesus. But Sophia prepares Jesus to be a suitable vessel for both herself and the Logos to enter: thus, Wisdom and the Word are one in Christ. When Jesus starts proclaiming the existence of the true Father, the Parent of the Fullness, Ialdabaoth has Him killed.
It is easy to see in these myths an exaggeration of the anti-Semitism of the mainstream Christian Church; and indeed, a racist Gnosis developed among nineteenth century occultists as these ancient writings were being rediscovered. Rejecting the Judaic heritage of Judaeo-Christianity, as the early Gnostics had, these occultists took the myths only too literally; and their ideas, filtered through organisations such as the Thule Society, whose emblem was the swastika, fed into the shadowy origins of the National Socialist politico-religious ideology.
But how literally did the ancient Gnostics take their own myths? Was it matter (the natural world) or materialism which they rejected? Is it the created world or the System which keeps us in ignorance?
God knows…

Next month: J is for Jesus