The Catholic church has
increasingly been accused of attempting to conceal
repeated incidents of priests sexually molesting
children. While more and more people are accepting the
likelihood that the church has been harboring
pedophiles, few people are willing to believe that the
sexual molestation of children is a fundamental part of
church doctrine. In his new book,
Original Sin:
Ritual Child Rape & The Church, Dr. DCA
Hillman strikes at the foundation of Christianity,
providing evidence that early priests ritually sodomized
young boys during their catechism. Hillman argues that
this practice was part of a cultural war early
Christians waged against
a
Roman society that praised sex and nubile girls.
He claims that early priests sodomized these boys in
order to "save" them from serving in oracle cults, as
these popular pagan religions required that the children
who participated in their ceremonies be
sexually
inexperienced. I caught up with Hillman to
question some of his radical ideas.
On page 26, you write, "The mystery of the
catechumen's initiation was a ritualistic form of
sodomy, designed by the church to turn young
believers away from the ills of sexual desire." What
is the most condemning piece of historical evidence
proving that early Christian exorcists ritually
raped boys during their catechism?
The most nauseating smoking guns of the child rape
ritual are the actual written works of the
Catechetical schools that the Christians, in
hindsight, probably should not have preserved. Read
through the treatises of Cyril of Jerusalem;
when you end up in his basement with a room full of
naked kids being blindfolded, oiled, fondled and then
bent over by some priests and their bishop who
ardently apply the "fires of temptation," you will
experience a bit of the horror firsthand. The
Christian author Prudentius fills in the gaps by
telling us the "fires of temptation" are acts of anal
sex — the most dreaded enemy of the Christian pilgrim.
It will also make you ill to read Cyril's
post-initiation counseling advice, where he instructs
his priests to make sure these young men — after they
are bathed, or baptized — are told that submitting to
a sexual encounter does not mean you have sinned if
you didn't actually enjoy it; from a textual
standpoint, it appears that the majority of them
didn't.
On page 94, you write, "The war on sexuality
under the Christian hierarchy was not a war on
masculine sexuality; it was a war on everything
feminine." In the book you repeatedly make the point
that Christians saw attractive young women like Eve as
the ultimate evil, as they could tempt young men to
contaminate themselves with sex. You also point out
how the Greco-Roman world praised sex and women,
particularly beautiful, young female goddesses, or
korai. Did the early Christians not worship Jesus's
mother Mary to the degree modern Christians do? Also,
if women were held in such reverence in Roman society,
why were they not allowed to vote or hold public
office?
It is a historical half-truth — a fragment of the
Christian lens of modern academia — to say that women
were not allowed to vote or hold office in antiquity.
For example, ancient priestesses were highly visible
public authorities who presided over festivals and
holidays, directed public performances, and were given
titles that carried genuine civic, social and
political power. The oracles alone, in places like
Delphi and Dodona, granted permission for war
campaigns, endorsed the founding of colonies, presided
in cases of extreme judicial difficulty — like an
ancient supreme court — and even practiced medicine.
They also founded colleges where the first westerners
were educated — they called them Museums. Priestesses
initiated the overthrow of dictators, guided military
expansion, and created careers for unheard of people
like Socrates, a man who would have died in complete
obscurity if not for the public endorsement of a
certain female oracle. We believe women were oppressed
in antiquity because our society concentrates power in
the hands of voters and the officials they elect. We
have no equivalent of the ancient priesthoods, with
their extreme social and political influence, so we
often fail to grasp the profound impact of women in
the ancient world; we lack their perspective.
In modern times, the
condemnation of abortion and birth control by
Christian leaders makes sense as a political
strategy, as it leads Christians to procreate at
higher rates, potentially creating more followers.
In a society like Rome that celebrated sex, would
not the condemnation of sex and women be a huge
tactical error in terms of enticing new followers
and attempting to grow the religion?
As the pagans who lived during the rise of the early
Church said, the draw of Christianity was its fear and
exclusivity. Followers of Christianity, in its early
years, were not born, they were forged in the fires of
temptation. The idea of being bred into Christianity
is distinctly post-classical. Nineteen centuries ago,
Christians didn't enter the kingdom of heaven by
post-natal sprinkling or baptism; they earned the
right to sit next to the throne of God by rebuking the
Devil and banishing desire. Birth control had nothing
to do with Church recruitment in antiquity; it was all
about indoctrination and the rejection of the "flesh."
After all, (as the pagans pointed out) the Christians
were preparing for the imminent return of their
messiah and the wholesale slaughter of the Romans.
Breeding the next generation of believers took a back
seat to recruiting soldiers for Armageddon.
How does the ritual rape of boys by early
Christian priests compare to the practices of
pedophilia that occurred in the Greco-Roman world,
such as in Sparta where older male mentors had sex
with the boys they trained?
It's about consent. Laws and customs vary
significantly from city to city but you can get into
trouble in Greece and Rome for forced intercourse with
any age group; you can even be prosecuted for forced
sex with a slave. Children were especially protected;
as a matter of fact, Artemis and Apollo, two of the
most commonly celebrated gods of the ancient world,
who had temple complexes everywhere, were the
guardians of pre-pubertal children. If you assaulted a
kid, you not only brought down the wrath of ancient
civic judicial systems, but you could also be dealt
with by the religious authorities and their own laws.
But again, the focus in the texts and the famous vase
paintings seems to be on consent and post-pubertal
goings-on. Ancient physicians even argued that teenage
girls who did not have intercourse within the first
few years of puberty ended up with psychological
damage — so their sexual ethic is based on a natural
model and therefore puberty and consent driven.
However, assault ("hubris" in Greek) is assault, and
what the Christian priests were forcing upon pubertal
and pre-pubertal converts bears no resemblance
whatsoever to what the Greeks and Romans did — and
that's why the Christians were so afraid of the pagans
finding out.
On page 103, you write, "Under [the priests']
direction, sexual abuse became a potent means of
cementing doctrine in the psyche of new members by
reinforcing their teachings with physical and mental
trauma." If these priests were willing to physically
and mentally brutalize these boys in attempt to save
their souls from being contaminated by sex and
women, why do you think these exorcists did not
simply castrate these boys to achieve the same end?
Ancient priests, bishops and specialized exorcists
attached to catechetical schools had to walk a very
fine legal line. They were still members of the pagan
societies in which they lived and the pagans had been
complaining for many decades that the Christians did
not respect their laws or their government. Pagans
publicly condemned Christians and their leaders for
their odd sexual behaviors and the priests — as we see
in Cyril of Jerusalem — were forced to keep many of
their activities on the down low; otherwise they could
be prosecuted, as they freely admit. Origen, a leader
of the Christian faith who was also associated with
the catechetical school in Alexandria, cut his own
dick off to avoid contaminating himself with a woman.
Why didn't the early Church castrate en masse?
Probably because the Romans had them under constant
scrutiny and would have brought charges against them —
as they did numerous times.
If sex and women were the ultimate evil to early
Christians, why do you think satyrs
became the visual archetype for Satan as opposed to a
beautiful, young woman, which were depicted with even
more abundance in Roman
art? Similarly, why do you think women, as
opposed to male exorcists, were not employed as the
physical embodiment of Satan and used to molest these
boys in order to imprint them with a negative
association of women and sex?
It's all about beating the competition. When
Christianity was young, it was competing with some
very heavy religious hitters. Romans, Greeks,
Egyptians, Etruscans, Phoenicians, and many Middle
Eastern cultures — including the Arabs — worshiped the
ancient power couple known by the Greeks as Aphrodite
and Dionysus. Pan and his rowdy satyrs — who promoted
the use of a crazy, designer sex-drug concoction that
contained opium, cannabis and hallucinogenic
nightshade plants — were the popular guardian figures
and functionaries of these universal cults; they
promoted the veneration of the Queen of Heaven, or
Aphrodite-Urania, the source of sexual desire in the
world — Mother Nature, if you will. The symbols of
their devotion were the huge erections
they dragged around and the dildos
that were actually used in their religious practices.
It made perfect sense to the Christian authorities who
steered Church doctrine that this horny, intoxicated
half-goat figure was the obvious equivalent of their
masculine woman tempting Devil. Pan and his satyrs
literally got demonized so that pagan cult members,
who competed with the Christians, could be absorbed by
this new religion. It's all about beating the
competition.
Considering how controversial this book is,
why did you not include a list of bibliographic
references at the end in order to point your
objectors directly to the first hand evidence in
their own doctrine? Was it just a matter of the cost
of printing?
I did better than that. At the request of my editors
I submitted footnotes with sources for my major
assertions and the direct quotes used in the body of
the text for the first manuscript. So why didn't the
notes make the final cut? Ronin Publishing is well
aware that footnotes, endnotes and references scare
people away from books, and they knew that the
findings of "Original Sin" were so important that they
should be made available to the public at large —
rather than the dozen or so academics who would have
bothered to purchase a heavily referenced dissertation
of the subject; if I had provided an analysis of all
my sources, the fact that the early Christians
ritually sodomized children would have been completely
ignored. Ronin Press wanted the findings to reach the
public; and I think they were right.
If humans are simply animals with oversized
brains existing without a god, and such concepts as
good and evil are only ideas, what does the repeated
occurrence of child rape throughout history reveal
about human nature?
I have no idea. Maybe some anthropology grad student
should figure that out. All I can tell you from the
texts I've studied is that child rape is an integral
aspect of Christianity. As I work on the sequel to
ORIGINAL SIN, it's looking more and more like ritual
rape was not even performed exclusively by pedophiles.
What? Is that possible? Yes it is; ancient Christian
priests actually believed their own theological
justification for sodomizing children, and don't
appear to have always acted out of prurience — they,
like their victims, were motivated by fear. Don't get
me wrong, some of them clearly enjoy talking about
naked boys in a way that betrays they are pedophiles,
but some seem to be just taken up by their faith. And
if fucking a kid into heaven works, then I suppose
they were just doing their jobs. What does that say
about human nature?