Cocoa Oatmeal Niblets

While reading Ulysses, I stumbled across the word heresiarch, which got me thinking, great name for a metal band. In fact and deed there exists a band named Heresiarch. Not to my taste, though they’ve merited mention on some top n of 2011 lists. More interestingly, upon above list I stumbled across an occult blackened death band going by the name of Necros Christos. Instead of worshiping Satan or obscure Egyptian/Sumerian/Teutonic/Celtic gods through their music, they worship Christ, the blood drinking lord of suffering who demands of his worshippers blood sacrifice, torture, violation of the dead - the regular catalogue of Satanic rituals. Necros Christos actually are heresiarchs. 

Blasphemous good times with cult mysteries

Through reinterpretation of Christian iconography as well as the events of the bible, they render an image of Christ collapsed into and confused with the image of Satan. And they manage to convey the ideological structure of their heresy, a summoning of Christ as one might summon a high level demon, a description of the ritual binding and unbinding of Christ through sex magic, and numerous prayers to their lord all in musical form.

This seems a more virulent insult to Christianity than mere Satanism. One of the reasons Satanism has always remained naught more than a source of humor to me is its resemblance to and dependence upon Christianity, a paradigm I reject. Speaking of Stephen Dedalus while echoing a phalanx of thinkers, Andrew Gibson puts it succinctly, “For antagonism traps him in particular structures of thought and feeling: melancholy, sullen hatred, spiritual violence, a Manganesque despair of soul, the intimate complicity born of polar opposition.” (13, italics mine) Rather than allying with the enemy, the heretic enters into the sanctuary and shits on the altar. No wonder the church burned dudes like these guys at the stake. And here I always thought of heretics as rational men whose ideas were often later proven correct by history, scholars brought into conflict with a backwards church. You know, like Copernicus.

Is this really how you treat someone who invented
such a delicious form of chocolate?

Yet the list of heresiarchs contains some very odd, very dark men and women who saw in Christ and his teachings elements of evil and chaos. God, after all, is all things. Cathari, for instance, believed that God was two, a higher being of love and light, and the lord of the world, a filthy, chaotic tormentor. Wikipedia has a handy list of Christian heresies.

Some of these grew large enough to raise armies and to merit extinction by crusade. The Cathari were taken out in the Albigensian crusades; the Waldensians massacred subsequently in the 17th century by Catholic forces. 13000 of the 18000 strong army of the Taborites were slaughtered in a single battle. The last execution of a heretic was carried out by hanging in 1826. The Waldensians are largely credited with the invention of gianduja.

And as the last factoid suggests, not all heresy breeds darkness. According to the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther was a heresiarch. Indeed all protestants participate in heresy. Arius advanced the scrupulously researched scholarly opinion that the Father was of a different order and unknowable to the Son in the 3rd and 4th centuries. His ideas competed with what would become the dominant Roman Catholic doctrine. When young, Christianity was a collection of Christ cults varying in their interpretation of Christ’s teachings and the texts they accepted as scripture. Arius united an impressive following under the banner of one interpretation.

The idea of Christianity has been set in my mind as a single, static interpretation of the bible. Sure, Pentacostals may handle snakes and speak in tongues, but they still believe in Jesus as the son of God, the trinity as three aspects of one substance, and God as necessarily good. It’s interesting to remember that Christianity was once a scattering of cults believing and practicing wildly different things. And more interesting to be reminded that it still is. Many heresies are alive and well today.

Texts live and breed. Previously I’d referred to them as dead but dreaming, and certainly the image of library as mausoleum carries much currency. Yet the bible and apocryphal texts are reread and reinterpreted giving rise to vital new thought. Scholarship on even one aspect of Ulysses is bound up in more volumes than a person could hope to read in a lifetime. Ulysses has spawned millions of words, thousands of ideas. In writing, Joyce may have arrested words on the page, the text may not be manifold in the way each oral telling functions as a metonym of the tradition, but the act of interpretation creates version after version of the story. Any rich text lives, a thousand faced being that sires offspring with its disciples.  Damn, academe is sexy and it’s not just the tweed!

Anyway, in the interest of keeping academe sexy, I developed this recipe for low fat snacking while banging out scholarship in the wee hours.  Cocoa Oatmeal Niblets.  Invoke.

Mix together:
1 cup whole wheat flour
⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon salt

Cream together
4 tablespoons margarine
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix flour and fat adding 1 cup of oat milk and using as few strokes as possible.
Fold in 2 scant cups of rolled oats
Mix in 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar

Drop in ping pong ball sized clumps onto a greased cookie sheet.
Bake at 350 F for 7 minutes

Scratching at one of Mystery's portals.

Makes about 32 cookies.  You can eat 8 of these a day and not feel gross.  The result is an odd combination of chewy and cakey that appeals to my need to scratch the persistent itch at the back of my esophagus with whole grains and other textured foods.  Consumers without this neurotic compulsion may enjoy their mild sweetness and rich cocoa flavor.

Gibson, Andrew. Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.