"Only things that one could imagine happening to real people, I guess, remain in a person’s memory." Buster Keaton
"I am master of the Stochastick Art, and by virtue of that, I divine that those Greek Words have crept from the Margin into the Text." Jonathan Swift
Abramism--"From the God of Abram to the Children of Abraham"
(Excerpted from the Encyclopedias Aeternitatis)
Introductory Background – The Abrahamites were a sect of theists in Bohemia in the late 18th century, who professed to be followers of the precircumcised Abraham (Abram). Eventually early Hegelian through a lineage of Basilidian dualism*, they enacted a synthesis of two antithetical and ancient precursors by "thoroughly identifying the scholastic and the stochastic." The first forerunner was "Anti-Abramite," believing Abram was not divinely inspired, and the second was "Abramian," claiming the three faiths stemming from Abram became irretrievably defective when Moses, Paul and Mohammed "defected" from Abram, Jesus and Mani, respectively. Believing in one God, Abrahamites contented themselves with the Decalogue and the Paternoster. Declining to be classified Jewish, Christian or Muslim, they were excluded from the edict of toleration promulgated by Emperor Joseph II in 1781 and were deported to various parts of the country, the men being drafted into frontier regiments. Some became Roman Catholics, and those who retained their "Abrahamite" views were not able to hand them on to the next generation. As a religious sect (by now calling themselves "The Faith Underground"), they disappeared by the end of the century, some leaders purported, in the last years of diaspora, to have tended to a gnostic "Abramism." The second movement expressed a "sacred English," denigrated by remaining Abrahamites as derivative of "Abraham-Men," vagrants feigning insanity in England during Tudor times.
"I am master of the Stochastick Art, and by virtue of that, I divine that those Greek Words have crept from the Margin into the Text." Jonathan Swift
Abramism--"From the God of Abram to the Children of Abraham"
(Excerpted from the Encyclopedias Aeternitatis)
Introductory Background – The Abrahamites were a sect of theists in Bohemia in the late 18th century, who professed to be followers of the precircumcised Abraham (Abram). Eventually early Hegelian through a lineage of Basilidian dualism*, they enacted a synthesis of two antithetical and ancient precursors by "thoroughly identifying the scholastic and the stochastic." The first forerunner was "Anti-Abramite," believing Abram was not divinely inspired, and the second was "Abramian," claiming the three faiths stemming from Abram became irretrievably defective when Moses, Paul and Mohammed "defected" from Abram, Jesus and Mani, respectively. Believing in one God, Abrahamites contented themselves with the Decalogue and the Paternoster. Declining to be classified Jewish, Christian or Muslim, they were excluded from the edict of toleration promulgated by Emperor Joseph II in 1781 and were deported to various parts of the country, the men being drafted into frontier regiments. Some became Roman Catholics, and those who retained their "Abrahamite" views were not able to hand them on to the next generation. As a religious sect (by now calling themselves "The Faith Underground"), they disappeared by the end of the century, some leaders purported, in the last years of diaspora, to have tended to a gnostic "Abramism." The second movement expressed a "sacred English," denigrated by remaining Abrahamites as derivative of "Abraham-Men," vagrants feigning insanity in England during Tudor times.
Recent Development – Today's translations of the Triptych ("Book of Books") throw light on the Abramist effort to both extol and equalize the Children of Abraham. By reducing their three Abrahamic referents from Torah, New Testament and Koran to one book, the Abramists radically give equal volume to the consequent faiths. Further, by the simultaneous credence given the "holy heretics" (Spinoza, Arius, and Avicenna), Abramism forms a gnosticism cleaving the conceptions of the religionists' God beyond reason and the philosophers' God within reason. Abramism is essentialized by a hermeneutic maieutic, bringing forth an "inner text" portraying, for example, St. James ("Second Jacob") as a messiah, Jesus of Nazareth as a "buddha of Judah." Exegetic figures of Melchizedek, Jethro and Thomas emerge from their "Philo-Sophia" with new primacy. Harkening to their "present as past" and "God's imminent immanence," Abramists lastly attained to "penultimate rhymes of unnumbered times."
(See GERSHONITES, GERSHOMITES)
*Undertaking the risk of asterisk to enter that entertainment of the mythic, mystic, base Baal, the "son of Basilides": "Now here (nowhere?) I foment the momentous moment--know these abracadabras to show Abram as Abraxas!"
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