The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  The coming “wrath” is the spiritual harvest, the “gathering-in” of God’s people; there will be purging, threshing. The righteous, destined for the divine feast, will be winnowed from the unrepentant heading for destruction. Regardless of their ancestors’ part in the Mosaic or Abrahamic covenants, should the fruits be unacceptable, the whole tree will be torn up, roots and all, as farmers must do periodically if they wish to maintain the health of crops and livestock. If representative of his actual position, John’s words would have made a powerful, shocking impression on even the most hard-hearted and stiff-necked of his hearers. As John’s message is presented in Matthew’s Gospel, there is not an inch of room for compromise. John was on a collision course with the “way of the world.”

  John the Baptist, if not necessarily the “Lord of the Harvest” (as he must have appeared to our medieval ancestors), is certainly presented in Matthew’s text as an overseer and initiator of the divine harvesting process and the stand-alone herald of its completion.

  Churchmen in the past presumably read the account of John’s prophecy of the great and terrible “gathering into the garner” and observed that its language made most obvious sense around the time of the feast of first fruits, the Feast of Weeks. Since we may surmise that it was not liturgically appropriate to confuse John the herald’s message with, arguably, the spiritual fulfillment of that message at the Christian Pentecost, it made sense to place John’s birthday at Midsummer. Further justification for positioning the holy day at Midsummer may be found in Luke 1:36 where the angel Gabriel not only informs an astonished Mary that she is about to become pregnant, but tells her that her elderly cousin Elizabeth is already six months gone! Taking six months after John’s birthday on June 24 brings us nicely to the traditional Christmas and the hopeful winter solstice as the sun begins to come closer to the Earth once more. The herald’s birth and the birth of the promise’s fulfillment neatly divide the Christian liturgical year.

  If it be cavilled that the date of the Jewish Feast of Weeks and of the Christian Pentecost may fall in late May or early June, it should be considered that the Western wheat and barley harvest occurs in late August and September, with wine being harvested as late as October. In this respect, it seems hardly a coincidence that the Catholic date for celebrating the beheading, as distinct from the birth, of John the Baptist is August 29, a date that should give us pause, tying in, as it does, the entire body of symbolism that links John the Baptist to the Great Harvest, not only as prophet and herald, but in himself, and in his own bloody “fruit”: the sacrifice of his life for truth.

  John the Baptist’s head was traditionally severed from his body, and God accepted his blood, while the shedding of that blood, as we shall see, became a judgment on his and God’s enemies. The beheading of John became linked to a profound archetype, rooted in ancient conceptions of the head of wheat and barleycorn being severed to fulfill the promise of life and abundance for the people, to provide thank-offering to God, and as the necessary act in the cycle of birth and rebirth, of life and death.

  Death is life’s door.

  English folklore preserves songs both solemn and knowing for the necessary death of the symbolic John Barleycorn. “John Barleycorn must die” goes the ballad, known once, tellingly, as “The Passion of the Corn.” He—the barleycorn—is beheaded, as the Bible tells us that the Baptist was beheaded at the behest of a maiden fair.

  Readers may be familiar with the version of the lyric that opens this chapter. It was set to music by Stevie Winwood and his friends in the group Traffic and has entertained and influenced folk seeking a spiritual harvest rooted more in nature than in orthodox theology.

  It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the “John” of the mythic John Barleycorn is in some profound sense a projection of John the Baptist, who, like Barleycorn, “must die,” who though dead, rises again and annually must die to be raised once more:

  They’ve let him lie for a very long time, ’til the rains from heaven did fall,

  And little Sir John sprung up his head and so amazed them all.

  They’ve let him stand ’til Midsummer’s Day ’til he looked both pale and wan;

  And little Sir John’s grown a long long beard and so become a man.

  They’ve hired men with their scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee.

  They’ve rolled him and tied him by the waist serving him most barbarously.

  They’ve hired men with their sharp pitchforks who’ve pricked him to the heart—

  And the loader he has served him worse than that,

  For he’s bound him to the cart.

  They’ve wheeled him around and around a field ’til they came unto a barn,

  And there they made a solemn oath on poor John Barleycorn.

  They’ve hired men with their crabtree sticks to cut him skin from bone—

  And the miller he has served him worse than that,

  For he’s ground him between two stones.

  We can clearly see why the song was once known as “The Passion of the Corn.” We have the themes of death, sacrifice, and resurrection played out in nature, just as St. Paul insisted that the “type” for Christian resurrection could be seen in the seed that must first fall to the earth and die before being raised in a new form (1 Corinthians 15:36–44). What held as law in nature was held most true of nature’s source and living sustenance, the world of spirit.

  Before we leave John Barleycorn raised again in the barley-life of bread and beer and life and joy, we should take a look at a version of the song penned by poet, and Freemason, Robert Burns (1759–1796). Burns’s version is very similar to that above, but there are, I think, a couple of Masonic giveaways that make one wonder if Robbie was not himself, in heart at least, one of “St. John’s Men.” For a start, the necessary attacks on poor John are presented with more emphasis than is usual as being acts primarily of premeditated murder. When John begins to look “wan and pale” before harvest, his “enemies” begin to “shew their deadly rage”:

  They laid him down upon his back,

  And cudgell’d him full sore;

  They hung him up before the storm,

  And turn’ d him o’er and o’er.

  They filled up a darksome pit

  With water to the brim,

  They heaved in John Barleycorn,

  There let him sink or swim.

  They laid him out upon the floor,

  To work him further woe,

  And still, as signs of life appear’d,

  They tossed him to and fro.

  The treatment of John has a decidedly ritualistic air to it. One is reminded of the eighteenth-century accounts current after the appearance in Grand Lodge of England lodges of the Masonic Third Degree. Practiced by about 1730, a Third Degree ceremony apparently featured “Hiram Abif,” the central hero of Grand Lodge Freemasonry. Hiram Abif was understood as the master craftsman who, having given his best to Solomon’s Temple, gave also his life. Refusing to part with his master secrets, Hiram was progressively struck about head and body by three jealous, wicked underlings: a series of three symbolic and finally fatal attacks. Burns’s reference to John being thrown in a pit is reminiscent of old Scottish Masonic practice of lowering, or even casting, the Third Degree Candidate into an open grave, a ritual reenactment of Hiram’s allegorical death and burial.

  The Masonic “festive board” following the ceremony is perhaps suggested in the following lines:

  And they hae ta’en his very heart’s blood,

  And drank it round and round;

  And still the more and more they drank,

  Their joy did more abound.

  John Barleycorn was a hero bold,

  Of noble enterprise,

  For if you do but taste his blood,

  ’Twill make your courage rise,

  ’Twill make a man forget his woe;

  ’Twill heighten all his joy:

  ’Twill make the widow’s heart to sing,

/>   Tho’ the tear were in her eye.

  No Mason could miss that last reference to the “widow.” Masons have long been known as the “sons of the widow” in honor of master craftsman Hiram, called in the Bible “a widow’s son,” while also remembering that it was the lady of Tammuz, Astarte or Ishtar, who was left a grieving widow at the annual death of her consort Tammuz, at least for a season or two. Furthermore, we may read of the actual raising of the widow’s son from the dead by the Prophet Elijah in 1 Kings 17. Elijah is of course completely identified with John the Baptist in Matthew 11, the messenger of the coming “harvest.” The widow’s son is raised by Elijah’s stretching himself over the dead boy’s body thrice in a movement reminiscent of modern 3rd Degree ritual. John is profoundly linked to the idea of resurrection and rebirth.

  John Barleycorn must die so he may live again, raised in bread and beer.

  John must face his 3rd Degree.

  We should know that according to the Bible, Solomon’s Temple—the House of God first erected on Mount Moriah—was built on the site of a threshing floor bought from a Jebusite, a fitting place to receive the blessing of abundance after the symbolically suggestive process of cutting, threshing, winnowing, chaff burning, and grinding—or separation, rejection, acceptance, and transformation.

  In the words of Psalm 24, “Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? He who has clean hands and a pure heart.” Could this explain the age-old practice of Masons wearing gloves? The pointing of a pair of dividers to the heart to assess the heart’s purity is a well-known part of the ceremony for taking an “Entered Apprentice” into masonic fraternity. Would we be wrong to imagine that the old “St. John’s Men” might, in such a circumstance, have thought of John the Baptist, Lord or patron of the Midsummer threshing?

  The wrathful threshing of which Matthew has the Baptist speak is prefigured in the text of Daniel 2, where we find a reference not merely to “clean hands” but to a stone so supernaturally cut as to be the work of “no hands” at all: “Thou sawest that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and break them in pieces.” The “image” represented the might of a worldly empire that had turned its back on God. Note that all the power of this world, the iron, the clay, the brass, even the silver and gold “became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.”

  Was Jesus thinking of this prophecy, I wonder, when he renamed his follower Simon, “Cephas,” a stone? (John 1:42)

  The God declared by the Baptist is not content with the image; he wants the sacred reality, whatever it takes. In the desert everything is burnt clean to a bareness, a clarity. There is day and night, hot and cold, life and death. It seems that the older freemasons respected St. John. For where did the Masons first call their lodge?

  “At the holy chapel of St. John.”

  The wilderness is where the path will be made straight. Have we reached it yet? John stands straight in the wilderness, pointing the way of return to the divine temple. And the path, being really an ascent, may be very hard—though never so hard, in the end, John tells us, as the path of not finding it.

  Is John a forgotten “Masonic Exemplar” extraordinary?

  It might seem so. But what has history to say of him?

  Chapter Three

  JOHN THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY AND TRADITION

  FINDING THE “REAL” JOHN THE BAPTIST is rather like looking for a particular triplet in a crowd of look-alikes. We have already encountered two rather distinct Johns. We have brushed shoulders with the John of mythology whose role is a mythic one, concerned with eternal cycles and subconscious archetypes. This John has something of Hermes, Dionysus, Hiram Abif, and the “Green Man” about him. If his nostrils are not exactly bursting with chlorophyll-pumping tendrils of burgeoning vigor, they are not really filled with the fresh, rushing air of the morning mountains of first-century Judea either.

  In addition to “mythological John,” we have also become lightly acquainted with “theological John.” In Christian theology, John plays a role as “support act,” if I may use the phrase, for Jesus. John points men toward Jesus and offers a quick introduction to the imminence of crisis for Israel and the world: a coming judgment. He calls his nation to “repentance” while simultaneously, according to the Gospels, denigrating his own role in the impending drama. In the Gospel narratives, John can’t seem to wait to write himself out of the play, as though subject to a theological curfew.

  Before his apparently timely departure from this world, John introduces us to the concept of baptism, which, after him, will acquire its status as a fundamental feature of the lives of millions and millions of Earth-born souls.

  Baptisms happen because John existed.

  For the majority of Christians, baptism is the moment when the newborn receives a name, an identity, and a promise. We do not hear much about baptism in the Old Testament, apart from the story of Naaman being healed by seven immersions in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:10–14), but the New Testament is rooted, if not immersed, in baptism. Baptism appears as John’s “thing,” his métier.

  The Baptist has become possessed by a church of which, we may presume, he knew nothing.

  Now, both the mythological John and the theological John are manifest to us as reflections of the historical John. This third John, the John of historical actuality, is extremely elusive, as historical figures must be when, already in their lifetimes, they acquire mythic, legendary, spiritual status. Such is the case with the remarkably anti-status quo Baptist, the outsider who, like Moses, called the people out. Even as he spoke, people, powerful people, asked who he was, rather like the soldier on the motorcycle by the Nile who, catching sight of a distant Major T. E. Lawrence in David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, shouts repeatedly at the prophet-like figure emerging from the Sinai desert: “Who are you?” Lawrence himself is not sure how to answer, and neither are we.

  People wanted to know who John was even when they could see him with their eyes. His identity mattered deeply to them. Who was he? Where had he come from? Questions of history, we might think. Even as he lived, John evoked in people the power of mythic imagination. You would think such a mystery man, such a great man, would stand head and shoulders above the dross of time and compel, if not inspire, the scribe to make historical record of him.

  And such is the case.

  The difficulty, as usual in such cases, lies in trying to assess the motives of the scribe, who, in this case, is Josephus, Jewish historian and pro-Roman collaborator.

  No man looks the same to the enemy as he does to the friend. Men “like John,” men who attract a large following, are perennially exploited to serve the interests of other persons and causes indifferent to the authentic nature of the “man himself.” It should be observed that in the history of the Middle East, a man is defined chiefly by his adherence to the cause to which he has attached himself, or has been attached; there is little interest in the “hidden man” or self-conscious psyche as has become familiar to the aficionados of modern biography. The archetypal hero has no right to a private life. The life of a saint will tell us of the saintly things we should expect, the devotion to the cause, and not anything that might obscure or detract from that. Saints are censored by their celebrants. In the ancient world, especially in the East, records of people’s lives generally tend to portray people as being either good or bad, we hear nothing of ambiguities or why they were good or bad. There is no sentimentality about “tragic failures.” You’re either in or you’re out.

  Here is just one hitherto unnoticed example of a tension between theological John and historical John. I hope it helps to illuminate the problem faced in seeking the “real John.”

  In Matthew’s Gospel, John declares God can make children of Abraham, that is, inheritors of Abraham’s promise, from the stones of the ground if ne
eds be. If the promise is to be fulfilled, the “children of Abraham” must turn again to God. This is all familiar territory.

  However, by the “children of Abraham,” if the saying’s historicity is granted, John would almost certainly have included Idumaean Arabs who were ruling parts of Israel, with the consent and under the control of the Romans. Known as the Herodian dynasty, King Herod the Great and his sons and grandsons were of Idumaean-Arab stock who intermarried with Judean, Nabataean, and Egyptian aristocracy—as well as with their own. They were circumcised and accepted the Jewish religion. As being of Arab descent, they could trace their ancestry to Ishmael, Abraham’s first son. You would not notice this inference without hard knowledge about the political facts of Palestine in the first century. It is not apparent from the text of the Gospels.

  As a result of the gospel writers’ point of view, and that of their audiences, the political facts of the period are, in very many important respects, ignored. So, in the case described here, no one who lived after the collapse of the Herodian (Idumaean-Jewish) dynasty, and who was ignorant of the political history, would think of asking the question, Who was John referring to when he spoke of “children of Abraham” being raised from the stones? Was it, as we usually take it, an attack on Judean apostasy and alleged sins of Sadducees and Pharisees in particular, or was John specifically threatening the ruling dynasty, who, we know, were both proud of and defensive about their Abrahamic roots? Or was John warning both rulers and ruled together?