textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp000535.txt

JUBILEE SAINTS PROJECT
c/o Koehnline
POB 85777
Seattle, WA 98145-1777

Every fifty years the Ancients observed the JUBILEE - a time
of renewal when all slaves were freed, all debts were
cancelled, all prisoners were released, all fields lay
fallow, and all laborers observed feast days and festivals
of ZEROWORK!

For 500 years the 'New' World has been sentenced to life at
hard labor, death in the fields, mines, big houses, schools,
prisons & factories of competing cabals. But the
Capitalist/Socialist Planetary Work & War Machine will not
rule forever! In the cracks and on the margins of this
Wetiko-diseased world, Temporary Autonomous Zones flourish!
Sound the ram's horn! We call for a celebration of the Grand
Jubilee of the New World's discovery. In advance of the
feasting and revelry we are preparing a Calendar of Saints,
with each and every day a Feast Day! We invite your
nominations! Sponsor a saint today!


THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER JUBILATION

An Introduction to the Jubilee Sainthood Project

COLUMBIAN JUBILEE

In 1984 the United States government established the
Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commision to plan
and co-ordinate nation-wide celebrations of the 500th
anniversary of Columbus' first landing in the so- called New
World, the traditional starting point for the European
Invasion of the Americas.

Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, or, as he liked to call
himself, the Christ-bearing Dove, was a religious nut of the
first order. He had two great obsessions. The first was to
loot the gold of the heathen world in order to finance a
triumphant Crusade by the Roman Church to retake Jerusalem,
the center of the Christian world. The second was to sew-up
the world for Christ, in preparation for the Millenium.

If Columbus had had the slightest interest in the
possibility that he had discovered a "New World," we would
most likely have continents named North and South Columbia
today. He had no such interest. The last thing he wanted was
a New World to worry about. It was a considerable
complication for his simple-minded faith. He wanted to show
that the world was of manageable size; the aging world made
whole, holy, harmonious - a small world after all. A "New
World" with countless lost and scattered tribes to find and
convert was a serious set-back, forcing unavoidable delays;
a major pain in the ass. In his will he directed his son to
establish a fund for the reconquest of Jerusalem. Someone
else's children could shoulder the burden of a "New World."
Chris was disgusted with the whole business.

We, in turn, are disgusted with the official Quincentenary
hype designed to celebrate one of Europe's premier
imperializing cannibals. But we take some ironic pleasure in
the fact that the U.S. government has settled on that far
more convivial Biblical tradition, the Jubilee.

JUBILEE

It is quite likely that the Christian conception of the
Millenium evolved out of ancient Hebrew Jubilee legislation.
In the Gospel according to Luke, especially, the coming
Kingdom of God has very much the character of a
divinely-ordained, universal Jubilee, a great social
leveling. When Jesus went to Nazareth to begin preaching,
the first thing he did was open the scroll to the words of
the prophet Isaiah which proclaim the "acceptable year of
the Lord" - in other words, the year of Jubilee. Then he
said, "Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your
hearing." Jubilee evolves in the Bible from the legal ideal
of social justice in Leviticus, through the poetic prophecy
of Isaiah, to the fulfillment announced by Jesus in Luke.

Historically, Jubilee began as an ancient prerogative of
kings, a kind of social safety valve. Later it was codified
as law, though probably never fully enacted. Finally, with
Jesus, the trumpet (ram's horn or jubel) is sounded for all
who have ears to hear; for all who are in touch with the
spirit within; the Millenium, the kingdom of God is here and
now - a timeless, universal Jubilee. The Empire of Lies is
exposed and the chains of the law are broken.

Needless to say, this is no way to run a profitable Church,
and so the official line has always been "Look sharp, it's
coming soon! It's right around the corner!" And a hundred
generations have dutifully watched for signs  of the coming
of the Paraclete, rather than discovering the divine spark
within; rather than saying, with the Ranters, "All is ours
and all is well!"

The spirit of the here-and-now Jubilee never died. It is a
nourishing underground stream, the "Medicine of the Mole."
It tends to rise to the surface amid the most desperate and
mean-spirited Millenial hopes and fears. The time has come
again for a long, clear blast of the ram's horn! Let the new
Jubilee begin!

GRAND JUBILEE

In the ancient Hebrew tradition, Jubilee was celebrated
every fiftieth year. It was supposed to be a great festival
of social leveling, a time when all debts were cancelled,
lands were returned to their traditional inhabitants, slaves
and prisoners were set free, all taxes were suspended,
fields lay fallow, gleaning rights were extended to all,
people quit their labors and joined in all manner of
feasting and revelry.

Those with a mundane and practical turn of mind will protest
that the feasting could not have gone on for long, with no
one in the fields or the kitchens.

We will complicate your distress. Since Jubilee was
proclaimed for one year every fifty, and since there has not
been a proper Jubilee in the five hundred years since the
European invasion of the Americas began, we are proclaiming
a Grand Jubilee of ten years duration - October 1992 to
October 2002.

And now, regarding your mundane concerns, we refer you to
Charles Fourier's theory of "attractive labor," which
suggests that in a convivial and harmonious social
environment many of the activities we tend to think of as
hard labor become a kind of playful celebration for those
who are inclined towards them. We don't pretend to have
solved all of the problems of alienated labor, particularly
in a world which appears to have lost even imaginative
alternatives to the planetary work machine. But we think
things may yet find a way of working themselves out. We all
certainly feel worked out.

Of course, there may be people quite unable to hear and heed
the trump of Jubilee, unfortunates so damaged by the
machines of work and war that they mistake the ticking of
the time-clock for the beating of their own hearts. They
might go on working, oblivious to the good times rolling on
around them. Much of the work they continue to do is quite
useless - often even very harmful. Perhaps they can be
subtly steered toward more suitable machines.

In any case, full zerowork is what is called for, and we're
not backing down from that goal. A Jubilee is a Jubilee. The
Bible said it! We believe it! That settles it!

SAINTS

In the earliest days of Christianity, cults grew up around
certain individuals, and grew until that person was
proclaimed a saint. Martyrdom practically assured sainthood,
though official public honor required the authorization of
the local bishop. The anniversaries of notable martyrdoms
were celebrated by the faithful.

The worship of saints really got into full swing when the
Roman Empire, under Constantine, adopted Christianity as a
state religion. It became a profitable thing to be a
Christian, in name, at least. Gradually saints were found to
take the places of all the old deities, and the old rites
were given a Christian gloss. Icons and relics became the
centerpieces of these cults. A lucrative trade in relics
developed, enjoying a huge boom during the Crusades. Crowns
of thorns, crosses, holy coats, tears of Our Saviour, tears
of the Virgin Mary, tears of the Saints, the blood of Jesus
and the martyrs, the milk of Mary, toenails of the Saints,
holy ones, teeth and hair all became hot commodities. Wars
were fought for their possession. Monasteries raided one
another for their relics. At the height of the boom the
extant fragments of the True Cross were sufficient to build
a cross a mile high.

But then the spoilsports of the Reformation got up their own
Crusade to root out pagan idolatry, to do away with the
cults, the icons and relics, the Feasts and Festivals. Even
Christmas was attacked as an evil influence by the Puritans.
In an effort to shore up its power base, the Roman Church
officially cleaned up its act. The stone bestiary of the
Gothic cathedral was cut loose from its Holy Roman moorings
to wander the countryside along with the more marginal of
the Saints, who now seemed to resemble... well, witches. The
Church cut itself off at its living roots and hung itself
from an antiseptic Heaven, inviting the Faithful to do the
same, that they might rise from their graves about twenty
times lighter than a dehumidified air bubble.

JUBILEE SAINTS

The root of religion is the desire for accomodation with the
mysterious forces in our lives, one of the most mysterious
being the way in which our ancestors seem to be with us,
though they are gone. The ancestors are inextricably linked
to our beginnings, and, by association, with all beginnings.
Thus the ancient pantheons were essentially deified
ancestors, representing various aspects of the human psyche
and corresponding to various phenomena of the natural world.

The Saints are precisely the same thing, though placed under
the umbrella of monotheism. Looked at in this light, it
becomes immediately apparent that the Catholic Saints
reflect an extreme obsession with passive submission to
grisly torture and death by violence. This is perhaps
appropriate to the mission of the Roman Church - the
continuation of the Roman Empire - but entirely
inappropriate to the mission of the Jubilee Church -
Universal Jubilation. You may wonder where we will find so
many saints for a church that has just come into being,
especially if we stipulate that the living are, by and
large, ineligible. There are plenty of precendents. Mother
Ann of the Shakers had little difficulty converting all of
her favorite historical personages to her cause. The Mormons
do the same. The surrealists pulled the same stunt in the
secular realm. Anyone who in any way furthered the cause
seems to us a likely candidate for Jubilee Sainthood. For
the most part we have decided to rule out popes and heads of
state, though there may be miraculous exceptions.
Essentially, we are attempting to reconstruct a spiritual
family tree of venerable ancestors. Our new liturgical
calendar will be open-ended and non-repeating. Individual
Jubilators and branches of the Mother Church may feel free
to establish tradition by honoring the same saints on the
same days from year to year, but we shall continue to
encourage the growth of our tree for the duration.

JUBELA, JUBELO, JUBELUM

It is quite reasonable to describe the founding of the
United States as the triumph of a conspiracy of wealthy
Anglo-American males against the powers of Church and King.
Through a covert network of Freemasonic lodges they plotted
and carried out their bid for power, accumulating great
wealth through slave trading, smuggling, swindling, and
other forms of free enterprise. They consolidated their
position by orchestrating a revolution and by designing a
government and economic system which would ensure their
maintenance in positions of power and privilege. We
overstate the case, to be sure, but the lineaments are
clear.

We don't mean to trot out the old Masonic Conspiracy routine
again, but stay with this just a moment longer. The central
figure in the rituals and legends of freemasonry is one
Hiram Abiff, the Master Builder of King Solomon's Temple.
The temple was of course the greatest symbol of Solomon's
power and authority, built with the forced labor of
prisoners of war and "free" Israelites (under Solomon's
system of corvee, the Israelites weren't much better off
than they had been under Pharaoh). Before the Temple is
completed, Hiram Abiff is murdered by three underlings.
Perhaps they thought him a cruel taskmaster. Perhaps they
were revolting against involuntary servitude. Perhaps they
objected to this Phoenician-style monument to Solomon's
brand of state capitalism, his avarice, his disregard for
traditional tribal authority and religious tradition.
Perhaps it was a combination of all these things.

At any rate, the names of these three great villans of
masonic legend are Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, collectively
known as the Juwes. Since all explanations of masonic
symbolism are pretty far-fetched, we do not hesitate to
advance our own. The murderers of Hiram Abiff and the
greatest threat to the freemasonic project are the remnants
of the ancient Hebrew tradition of Jubilee. This lingering
sentiment was one of the reasons Solomon was so anxious to
bust up traditional tribal authority and structure. Yet
Jubilee spirit remains.

GRAND JUBILEE CALENDAR

It now appears that the United States Christopher Columbus
Quincentenary Jubilee Commision has been so battered by
storms of controversy, by scandal, corruption and
mismanagement, that it is almost sure to sink before
reaching its destination. This means that the Jubilee is now
entirely up to us. This is probably for the best, of course.
They really didn't have the slightest idea of what Jubilee
is supposed to be. We could make a great fuss and demand
some of their funding, but why bother? Instead, we are
devoting our meager resources to spreading the good word and
soliciting nominations for saints. We will be producing a
"regular" newsletter, and, some time in late summer 1992, we
will unveil the World's Columbian Grand Jubilee Calendar of
Saints, to be published by Autonomedia. The calendar will be
the first installment, covering the period from October 1991
through December 1993. Completing one or more copies of the
attached Saints nomination from is one way in which you may
make a material contribution to this project.

And the founder and Chief Iconographer of the Jubilee
Church, Frater Harpo Ben Ishmael Bey, offers his services in
return for contributions to the Mission fund. Supply him
with some form of portrait, and he will produce a holy icon
for your veneration. Spurious relics of the saints will also
be available, complete with the Church Imprimatur. He
remains open to your suggestions, and will personally answer
all mail possible. The Jubilee Church awaits your active
participation; nominate and/or sponsor a Saint today!

For Universal Jubilation,
Frater Harpo Ben Ishmael Bey
c/o Jubilee Koehnline
PO B 85777
Seattle, WA 98145-1777


NOMINATION FOR SAINTHOOD & INCLUSION IN THE WORLD'S
COLUMBIAN GRAND JUBILEE CALENDAR OF SAINTS:

Please copy this form [or make your own] to offer any number
of candidates you wish, and circulate additional copies to
friends throughout the world.

Note: Saints need not have lived in the last 500 years. They
need not have any direct connection with the New World.
Living persons may not qualify for sainthood. No popes or
heads of state please.

1. Sponsor: (you may be anonymous if you prefer)

Name: ______________________
Address: ___________________
City: ______________________    State: ___________________
Country: ___________________    Telephone: _______________

2. Name of Candidate (groups will also be considered):

__________________________________________________________

3. Proposed Feast Day: ___________________________________

4. Alternate Feast Day: __________________________________

Reason for Day ___________________________________________

5. Brief Argument for Inclusion: _________________________

6. Brief Biographical Sketch: ____________________________

__________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

7. Suggested Symbols and Motifs for Artwork: _____________

__________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

Biographic references and supporting materials are very
welcome. We especially seek portraiture and other graphic
work, original or copies, in color or black and white.
Documents, quotations or miscellaneous ephemera will all be
very helpful. The decisions of the Committee for the Causes
of Saints will be final only in the context of the first
calendar, which is meant to be spiritually nourishing and 
inspirational, not authoritative or exhaustive. Thanks in
advance for your help.