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Ever since they were introduced to the Western world, The Books of Terror and Longing have held a certain type of person in fascination. They've served as inspiration for poetry, music, even a film (the ill-concieved and unsuccessful "The Devil Sings Softly", 1954, now almost impossible to find). They've been the subject of several books and innumerable senior theses. None less than Aleister Crowley makes an allusion to Antiocheanism in his Book of Lies ( Chapter 29: "The Abyss of Hallucinations has Law and Reason; but in Truth there is no bond between the Toys of the Gods. This Reason and Law is the Bond of the Great Lie. Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations - Death is Truth, and Truth is Death!"). Why, then, does knowledge of Antiochus and the sect he founded remain almost entirely within the academic realm? In other words, why does practically nobody know who he is?
There are multiple reasons. The narrative presented in the Books, ending with Antiochus burnt at the stake and awakening to find himself in a grim, frozen afterlife, is hardly an uplifting one. The texts themselves are maddeningly incomplete, and the parts we do possess are often ambiguous and difficult to decipher. Then there is the mystery of the author himself - is his name a reference to the biblical city of Antioch, or to Antiochus IV, who forced the Jews to make additions to the Old Testament that made it seem as if there was no heaven beyond earth? Did Antiochus himself even exist? If he did exist, why is historical mention of him so rare, especially considering the size of the cult that sprang up around him?
And then, of course, there is the message of the text, perhaps the deepest mystery of all - alternatively one of a seemingly infinite, universal nihilism, and of a just existence containing both this world and the next, with the invisible grinding of the gears of law shuddering away just below the surface of our awareness. The modern mind finds itself both attracted and repelled by Antiochus' unintelligible world, perhaps more so because the incompleteness of what we see today allows us to project our own hopes and fears onto his teachings.
That which is incomplete can't help but seem modern.
With these books the mysteries will always be greater than the actual material. We can only attempt to lay out what we know, only be content with the outline we've been given by chance. The rest is up to the reader; only the individual can decide what it all means, or if it means anything at all.
We start at the very beginning, but here the fog is already thick. We do not know when Antiochus was born, or where. It is impossible to verify even his existence through documentation from the time, but then, he is hardly alone in this; Jesus of Nazareth wasn't exactly given a birth certificate. Some scholars have claimed that Antiochus must be taken as a symbol, an entirely metaphorical character, that is to say, the vessel for the message, not its author. The theory is intriguing, but without further evidence we must follow what we have (almost all of which is from the Books themselves), and accept him as a living, breathing, mortal man.
We have mention of Antiochus living in Italy in 1215. We are not told this directly, but rather deduce it from references made to Antiochus as "The Italian Sorcerer" during a story that appears much later in the text ( Much of the "facts" we know about Antiochus must be deduced in this way. The text's overwhelming vagueness is legendary. It is as if the reader were assumed to be already familiar with the specifics of the story, and the author simply wanted to get on to the "good parts". This has been explained in terms of everything from general incompetence, to cultural cohesiveness, to a method of escaping persecution, to a belief in the sacredness of the facts of the Prophet's life. Much of it is also a result of the strange manner in which the books emerged in the West - see the discussion of the Poetic Translation for more detail). The Books do not name Antiochus' mother or father, but instead refer to them as "The smith and his wife". Antiochus leaves home very early on to seek work in Rome, and nothing is said of his parents after that.
Much has been made of this apparent familial disconnect, but it would not have been uncommon for a boy of Antiochus' age to go off in search of work. The Fourth Crusade had brought riches from the East to Rome and Venice; the economy, kept afloat by an influx of looted gold and silk, was booming, but only in cities. The life of a farmer, vacillating in and out of a state of serfdom, would have seemed grim compared to the opportunities in Rome.
We know nothing of Antiochus' youth, and it is not discussed in the text outside of an apocryphal story of a 10-year-old Antiochus foretelling the deaths of several townspeople by talking with gore-crows. The crows reveal to Antiochus that 15 villagers, including the "Townshead" (a position similar to that of mayor in the modern day), will plummet to their deaths off a jagged cliff named Via Privare (A veiled reference to " se vita privare ", a Latin term denoting suicide). The villagers, terrified, quickly form a search party and begin exterminating any crow they can find, setting them ablaze, crushing them with rocks, even crucifying them on doorways and tree-trunks (The Crucified Crow has become a symbol, much like the "Jesus Fish", used to identify other Antiocheans during their many years of persecution, and is still used today). The mob, half-mad with terror and rage, finally came into a clearing in which a Congress of Crows has gathered (Crows have long been held in folklore to have human-like powers of cognition, and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the belief in the Crow's Congress, a political organization existing alongside human osciety, in which animals can bear grievances both against each other and against human beings. The actions of the Congress are fodder for evereal Chechen and Georgian children's tales, the most famous of which being that of the Crow And Bear War, in which a young child is drafted to fight in an apocalyptic animal war. The popular version of this tale, written in verse by Apti Bisultanov, great-grandfather of the popular modern author of the same name, is one of the best-selling Chechen children's books to this day), and, vision clouded by hatred, rushed at them with all their might, brandishing their knives and shovels, torches and nails. The crows, on command, suddenly evaporated into the sky, so many in number that they blocked out the sun. In the fumbling darkness the villagers plummeted off the cliff, which the crows had disguised with grasses and twigs, and were dashed to bits on the rocks below.
This story is widely accepted to be an invention of Sabrus the Younger, an Antiochean poet of the 15th century (An interesting figure in his own right, Sabrus is the best-known Antiochean poet. A Prussian born in Poland to parents of an unorthodox and persecuted religious sect, he did not have an easy life. A frail and thin child, he was given an education by the local Christian monastery - his family were Cryptonarlists, and so hid their religious affiliations from those around them [more on Cryptonarlists later]. It was through this affiliation that Sabrus became involved, unexpectedly, with the famous Battle of Grunwald. When the cry for reinforcements went up, Sabrus was one of the many peasants who were suddenly conscripted into the battle. Being Christian, the Teutonic Knights felt assured that the denizens of the monastery would fight alongside them, against the Pagans, for Christ, especially seeing as their presence had been ordained by a Papal Golden Bull. Sabrus, terrified and armed only with his father's pitchfork, was quickly lost within the tide of the battle, frantically stabbing anyone he coud find, regardless of which side they were on. In this way he found himself, at the end of the fighting, within a huge group of other peasants surrounding the last remaining Teutonic Knights, the peasants singing their anthems as they mercilessly cut the armored invaders to pieces. The wild slaughter continued all night, and according to some involved Pagan blood rituals and Devil Worship, though this can safely be attributed to latter-day Christian revisionism. Sabrus returned home, practially comatose, and was never the same. The fighting was officialy ended by the Peace of Thorn on February 1st, and the next day Sabrus began work on what would become his magnum opus, the Sheol Cycle, a bizarre and moving account of one mortal's descent to Helgrind, the corpse-tower at the mouth of Hell, to retrieve the head of his beloved, which he has learned has been planted in the ground and is now mother to a tree of white flowers. Sabrus maintained that the story was autobiographical, and entirely true. After his completion of the work Sabrus disappears from the historical record, and we hear no more of him).
It is in Rome that Antiochus' story truly begins. Much is made, in the Books, of Antiochus' first impressions of the city, entering through it's massive gates for th efirst time, and leaving behind, forever, the simple world that his parents inhabited. The images of Rome, the undeniable center of the world, throne of western Christianity, burned themselves into his mind; with it's "crawling arms of mortar and stone", Antiochus felt he was being consumed, devoured by "a monstrous mouth into which men struggle and are carried...a throat that never closes and never breathes". He was at once affronted and mesmerized by the sheer weight of the human presence around him. Rome was the pinnacle of all that man could accomplish.
Rome was also, however, a dead civilization; the seeds of it's destruction had been sown ages ago, and were slowly bearing fruit. Antiochus sensed this intuitively, and he made his feelings abudantly clear; however, we must remember that the Books were most likely written many years afterwards, when ANtiochus had been expelled from Rome and then returned preaching his new gospel. His views on the city, and on Roman society, were irrevocably shaped by his persecution there. It is hard to believe that young Antiochus, fresh off the farm, would not have been at least a little awed by the grandiosity that was Rome.
Whatever the truth may be, Antiochus' revulsion to Rome came to form a central part of his belief system in the doctrine of "New Rome", the sprwaling, dehumanizing city that would one day "overtake all lands, making space itself only an expression of it's own being...there will not be anywhere that is not Inside it, there will not be anywhere that is not Within it". New Rome can be seen as the thological opposite of Christ's "Kingdom of Heaven"; a literal, physical expression of the inevitable loss of grace on Earth.
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