Reich published The Murder of Christ in the early 1950s. It was billed as Volume One of The Emotional Plague of Mankind, and dedicated thus: “To The Children of the Future.” Gethsemane is the fourteenth chapter, subtitled “True Justice; the Meaning of Christ”.
When the Emotional Plague strikes its victim, it strikes hard and fast. It strikes without mercy or regard for truth or facts or anything else except one thing: to kill the victim.
There are public prosecutors who act as true lawyers, establishing the truth by evidence from many sources. There are other prosecutors whose only goal of the prosecution is killing the victim, no matter whether right or wrong, just or unjust.
And this is the murder of Christ today as it was two thousand and four thousand years ago.
When the emotional plague strikes, its victim is exposed to everybody’s eyes and judgment; all accusations against it are spread out in full daylight. The victim stands naked before its judges like a deer in the open clearing in a forest ready to be shot by the hunter well hidden in the bushes. The real accuser rarely appears on the scene, his identity is kept secret until very shortly before the final kill. There exists no law to punish the sniper from ambush.
To be standing in the middle of an open clearing in a dense forest, widely visible to everyone, and to be shot at from the bushes on all sides is the situation of the victim of the emotional plague, no matter what form it has.
When the emotional plague strikes, justice quietly recedes, weeping. There is nothing in the ancient books for justice to call upon to prevail. The sentence of death is perfected before the investigation of the crime. The true motive of the prosecution never meets the cleaning force of God’s daylight. The reason for the killing remains in the bushes well hidden from anybody’s eyes.
When you meet the accused but not the accuser, the charge but not the defense, the exact point of formal law but not the true reason for the accusation, you are dealing with a killing by the plague.
When the plague kills, it kills for wretched reasons. Therefore, to assure the murder, it will not permit weighing accusation against the true, full being of the victim. It will tear down the victim’s honor, besmirch every bit of innocent intention or act; it will pronounce innocuous details in a tone and with a slant of intonation which is meant to kill the last vestige of love or esteem for the victim in the hearts of most devoted friends.
When you hear the deadly, poisonous intonation of the prosecutor, you know a Murder of Christ is going to happen again.
Who in this world has not at any time dreamed of removing a king, or of living a forbidden love, or of cursing God for injustice suffered; or who has never touched his genitals or thought of “adultery” or seen in his dreams the temples of the whole world tumble together with their emperors and kings and dukes and fuehrers and God-sent liberators? Nobody has not done all this except the image of a Babbitt, manufactured for the purpose of making thoughtless obedience and deadly conformity the idol of a wretched nation.
The victim of the plague has done all this, one way or another, early or late, with or without real intent to execute the dream. And this, together with the exclusion of justice from the court of justice, renders the victim mute and helpless.
When you see in the victim a gentle face and a sad, helpless look in his eyes, you may be sure that another Murder of Christ is about to be committed.
True justice operating according to the laws of life and truth does not tear down the victim’s honor. It tries to understand how it came about that a Son of God (and all men are sons of God) got himself into the predicament of being brought to court in the first place.
True justice will find the particular setting of living Life in which any man or woman has violated an existent law.
True justice will even judge the very law it is about to apply. Does it fit the case? How old is the law? When and under what conditions was it made, and who was it who made this law? Are the conditions still valid that created such a law? Were there specific reasons at the time of the making of the law which are no longer alive nor valid today?
When you meet a court which does not judge the law itself which is to be applied in a living case of human fate, which does not ask for its history, its function, its maker, the reasons for its existence at the time of the new application, you are dealing with a potential or actual tool of the plague which is intent on committing another Murder of Christ.
When a law was given two hundred years ago at a time when nobody knew anything about the love of God in the child and in the adolescent, a law that made it a crime to love before reaching a certain age; and when two hundred years later such knowledge is widely available and well secured in the mind of man, and a judge refuses to apply this gap in his judgment, you are dealing with a law made to secure the Murder of Christ by the emotional plague. And the true criminal is not the victim but the law itself which refuses to change in accordance with the change of living Life.
When you meet with a law that was given six thousand years ago, you must be six thousand times more careful in applying it. How otherwise shall true justice ever be done? Such laws are the most powerful tools in the hands of evil men to be used against Christ which is Love and Truth and movement onward with the rest of the Kingdom of God. Here are rooted the reasons which keep man in bondage, which make the dictators because people are afraid to talk and to say what they so well know, deep down and well hidden, to be true and just.
If you hear somebody talk of progress and freedom and happiness and peace and the brotherhood of mankind, and he does not say which law is to stay and which is to go, he is a hypocrite and he means nothing whatsoever. He is only out for votes or riches or power or a seat in this or that chamber, or he is out to continue the Murder of Christ.
Christ does not hide from the law and the prosecutor, as the prosecutors hid their true motives for the killing, and the ancient law hid its actual meaning from Christ. He does not try to escape. Whereto shall he escape? Why should he escape? He would carry his way of Life everywhere with him and he would meet the same fate in any place on earth.
Therefore, he does not hide or flee. Neither does he conspire. He has nothing whatsoever to hide. When he tells his pupils not to talk about his healing power, he does not hide, he only tries to curb their fantastic thirst for miracles.
Christ knows the soldiers will come and get him. He awaits them and meets them. And Life knows so perfectly well how the plague works, that it says to the captors:
Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled. {Mark 14: 48,49)
Two thousand years later, the discoverer of the Life Energy will be held for police investigation of his activities, to find out whether he was a spy of this or that country. They could simply have asked him, since he had nothing whatsoever to hide and would have been glad to tell them what he was doing. So they themselves sneaked around like thieves to neighbors who knew little, to find out what he was doing. They avoided the clean air of his workshop. And nine years later they still did not know what he was doing, in spite of thousands of pages written and published by him. They did not know because they were not capable of understanding. They had no organs to know about Life. And therefore they sneaked around like thieves in the night to see what was cleanly and clearly to be seen in full daylight. They lay hidden in bushes with gun muzzles pointed, while he stood on the meadow to be seen by all.
And this again is how the plague works and thinks and acts.
Christ is Life. And Christ was manhandled just as Life was manhandled long before him and long after the crucifixion and is still manhandled today.
And all his admirers fled and forsook him while he was captured, just as they all had fallen asleep again and again before he was taken and while he went through the agony of the innocent one in supreme distress.
And even his God seemed to have abandoned him. But Life within had not abandoned him. His Life within kept acting as Life acts, up till the last breath. And this is so because God is Life within and without. God did not abandon him at all, except as an image of misled men, corresponding to no reality.
Life had known who would deliver it to its enemies. It had known it for a very long time. It saw the traitor step up to it and kiss it on the cheek as he still said, ” Master! ”
And this, again, is the plague.
Christ’s story has moved and stirred humanity to tears and sorrow and great art because it is humanity’s own tragic story. Men are Christs and victims of the plague, helpless before their own courts and fleeing disciples and sleeping admirers and Judases kissing the Master with a kiss of death, and Marys who give Christ a forbidden, godly love, and deadened bodies that seek in vain God’s sweetness in their frozen limbs, but never cease to sense his presence within and without themselves. Men, basically, in spite of all armoring and sin and hate and perversion, are living beings who cannot help but feel the Force of Life within themselves and without themselves.
Christ is Life, dying innocently for many millennia at the hands of a Life that had lost and could not restore God’s ways, and therefore kept guarding the ancient laws with glowing, murderous eyes, and swords ready to kill whoever has lived God’s life.
Christ is the infant tied down or filled with nuisance drugs until it vomits, not knowing why all is so terribly painful, and slowly settling down into a living death, to grow into a future murderer of Christ.
Christ is the agony of a boy or girl of four lying in his bed in the darkness, desperate because God is stirring in its little body, terrified that mother or father might come and yell or hit because the hands are not above the covers.
Christ is the nightmare of a suppressed God in God-made genitals in infants and children in the first puberty, returning from suppression as terror of ghosts and robbers with knives, and bleak shadows at the windows, as multiarmed octopuses and devils with glowing forks, and a fire burning in hell to engulf the little, poor souls jammed in between God’s stirring in their bodies and the parents, the representatives of God on earth, who punish for feeling God in the limbs. This is the source of all sin punished in Dante’s inferno, a man-made, madman’s nightmare.
And the Judases are the educators and the councils for mental hygiene and the doctors and the priests who guard the entrance to the knowledge of God with threatening words and flaming swords. Did you ever think of how many billions of small children on this earth went through the nightmare of Christ at Gethsemane and Golgatha over the millennia? Did you? You did not. You were ” social” and ” good to your neighbors ” and ” liked your enemies like yourselves ” and you sent prayers up to heaven for salvation and redemption of your soul, and you knelt before altars of many kinds to obtain forgiveness of your sins. But never, never did you think of the billions of babies and children who bring the very sap of God’s fresh life from your endless universe into this miserable world of yours; and you maimed and punished and frightened these children, and do to this very day, for knowing God and living the Life of Christ. And you guard well every single entrance to the houses of knowledge against intrusion of the truth about these countless Murders of Christ committed by you and your appointed ones in the name of God.
And you, defender of the honor of God in some darkened room in some village in some country, don’t you think right now, hard, of how you could get at the writer of such ” blasphemies ” and tar him and put feathers on his skin and put fire to the tar and feathers and make him run screaming with agony through the streets, a warning to every good citizen? You are doing this this very minute. But the times are against you. Some well-guarded gates at the entrances to some of the palaces of knowledge have been broken down and we begin to get an inkling of what has been committed in the name of God for such a horribly long time on so great a number of innocent little Christs, sons of Life and God.
The knowledge of God as the love in your body, which you persecute, is breaking down your guards at the entrance to paradise, which you yourself have put up in your dreams, and your obstruction of living Life on this earth.
You kept brooding over the riddle of the Murder of Christ for centuries and it is your failure to find the answer which revealed you as the true and only murderer of Christ. You kept hiding this well and for a long time. But not much longer will hiding be possible.
