In the Elder-Miller version Baha'u'llah does not specify "wives" in his "go beyond" phrase, but tersely says "go beyond two." It was the objective translator Elder, seeking to make the sentence comprehensible, but also showing us that "wives" was not in the original -- who inserted "wives" in parentheses. However, the official version does not retain this detail. It uses "beyond two wives" as though that's what Baha'u'llah wrote. Thus they end up with two instances of words for wives instead of Elder's one "handmaidens." Why do you think they did this? The reason is that Baha'u'llah saying a terse "go beyond two" reveals undesired contextual information to the reader. Baha'u'llah had no need to specify "wives" and did not say "spouses" because he was not speaking to a mixed audience: He was addressing himself to men. Evidence that the Kitab-i-Aqdas is directed to male ears crops up in other places of the Aqdas, such as his travel rules: "You and the women are to sit..." (See image below.) The truth is that the Kitab-i-Aqdas was directed to males and the Baha'i administration did not want you to know this. It's one more instance of the chronic Baha'i problem of effacing their own true history. In similar manner Baha'i officialdom has re-engineered another similar verse:

"After completing the prostration, you and the women are to sit at the temple of Unity (haykal al-tawhid)..."

Elder-Miller, 1961

Baha'u'llah refers to "the women," indicating his words are directed to men. Look what Wilmette/Haifa did with it:

"Upon completing your prostrations, seat yourselves cross-legged--men and women alike--"

Official Baha'i, 1992

How clever and artful. What invention. Compared to the naturalesque construction of the Elder verse, does the Official verse sound natural? Do you think Baha'u'llah would have used that cold, obtuse, bureaucratic "men and women alike" as he spoke to the men? "You and the women" is an intimate, 2nd-Person construction. "Men and women alike" is detached, formal, like a government manual. This phrase was concocted for only one purpose: To obscure the fact that Baha'u'llah addressed himself to men!

Is it not rather disgusting? It is clear that Baha'i Officialdom changed Baha'u'llah's words, changed reality, and decided what he "should have said." Oh well. Why not do as you like with a text if it was never important enough, in the first place, to even transmit to your constituents for your critical first 120 years?

No Mystical Yogic or Sufic Asanas for Baha'is -- Rip it Right Out of There!

I also find it very sad -- ugly really -- that the materialist Baha'is of Wilmette/Haifa removed the unique Islamic and Sufic religious term for a  religious sitting posture. From a sitting term that meant "The Temple of Unity" it has been made crass and material, and stripped of the genuine spiritual potential associated with worship postures, the straightness of the spine, religious asanas (sitting postures) -- and what little potential the Baha'i Faith had to make conceptual common ground with the mystical content of Hinduism, Yoga, and Buddhism! Just imagine: The prospect of experiencing unitive consciousness or encountering "the temple within" through religious chanting in a particular religious posture. The Baha'i image controllers obviously said: "Can't have that!" The religion marketers were thinking, "Calling a sitting posture the "Temple of Unity" might seem too woo-woo or strange to our target demographic. And anyway we want to be a practical, utilitarian religion now that raises up "science" as supreme. Thus let's not call the sitting posture anything too mysterious." In point of fact, such language -- associating one's worship and one's body with ideas like "temple" or "unity" -- is one of the elements that makes worship, prayer, and chanting divinely effective; attitudinal secrets of worship that bring one into God-contact within. It is another example of the anti-mysticism that took up residence in what was originally, indeed, a highly mystical and devotional religion.

And it's very sad. And it's truly enough -- in my mind -- to convince me that those who ride herd on the Baha'i Faith and act as its "lords" have no spiritual or religious legitimacy. But the life-corruption continues...

Killing out "handmaidens" (or women who serve their men)

Baha'u'llah refers to the Baha'i women as "the handmaidens" in the Elder-Miller book. This very term has been commonly found in official Baha'i translations for many a year. But here in his intimate guy-talk "handmaiden" distinctly conveys the reality-of-view that both Baha'u'llah and the Islamic men comprising the movement had toward women. It also evokes the idea of wifely service to a husband, and I think this is the real-life and human sense in which Baha'u'llah used the term.  That is, I think he used the term "handmaidens" in a very human, patriarchal, and comfortable sense and only secondarily in a euphemistic, put-a-shine-on-them, religious sense. "Handmaidens" was the way the Baha'i men viewed the women through natural manly desire and the masculine authority they enjoyed. "Handmaidens of God" was an edifying, but secondary, thought. This sense of "handmaidens" here can be further assumed from the casualness of the conversational Elder-Miller rendering.

Now, a wife is, indeed, supposed to give service to her husband in natural life, just as husbands give service to their wives and families. That is the natural order of life. They serve each other. But Marxist feminism, promoted long now by the Baha'i golem, teaches women they should serve nobody but themselves. Or maybe "the man" at work (boss) who doesn't care about her. Or perhaps serve the NWO by becoming selfish and breaking up the family. Anybody but your husband! 

The Muslims have this charming, cosmic concept that when a woman serves a Good Man and serves her children -- she's serving God. And that a husband, always so willing to serve his wife and family, is also serving God by doing so. It's the kind of God-service most accessible to women and the sort of world-service that gives them the most personal fulfillment. But the hardcore feminist Baha'i translation teams over the years -- which probably included not a few western women -- had to get rid of any roiling thought that wives should serve their husbands. Thus the Official version changes "handmaidens" (serving men and husbands) into "maidservants of God." It converts the Baha'i women into women who don't serve their men, but only serve God. 

My view is that the average woman will be dissatisfied with this life. My view is that it goes against the natural womanly nature, which wants to be devoted to husband and family, and have their devotion in turn -- and not primarily devoted only to Abstract God. The textual change is a disgusting, anti-woman and anti-human change in full analysis. It is in the service of Marxist family-killing feminism that took up residence in the Baha'i Faith. Strangely, it's one of the rare instances in which Baha'i Officialdom ceases rejecting the mystical, ascetic content of their religion. The Marxist types who translated the text are telling them: 'Don't love and serve your men or families: only love God.' By shooting "handmaiden" from the sky (and their newly bereft, maiden-stripped men), a rare instance occurs where Baha'i women are finally encouraged to be mystics, ascetics, and world-renouncers. 

Now of course women "serving God" in the Baha'i context would tend to translate itself one way: Baha'i woman should become worldly devoted to "the world" instead of serving their husbands and children. This means, as usual, serving Marxist/Jewish deracination, nation-killing, and family-killing agendas. Indeed, destruction of the family is a top goal of the Communists/Marxists/New World Order bankers. By telling Baha'i women to "serve the world" instead of their families, the Baha'is continue to play their part in weakening the family, at least in, their own little subculture, while it continues to poison us. 

Notice an interesting contradiction: When it came to the sitting posture for chanting, Baha'i Officialdom stripped the mystical language away because, in Marxist fashion, they want to present a religion that downplays mysticism and plays up "practical science" despite its real roots and textual content.

But "handmaidens" has been handled using the reverse approach: The word has been made mystical. For the sake of maintaining a hard feminist posture foreign to the religion's founding texts Baha'i officials were happy to insert mystical language, turning women into mystical maidservants of an unseen God, only.

Does it not disgust? Yet it gets worse even so...

Making marriage optional for neo-Baha'is

I didn't notice the next official distortion until some time after starting this text. Along the way I discovered the Wikipedia page on the Kitab-i-Aqdas. I always avoid that place because it tends to be a leftist agenda infection. There I found Baha'i activists swarming all around the "Kitab-i-Aqdas" page for damage control, misrepresenting the book to the public. That was to be expected. They seemed to to have taken up permanent residence there, carefully watching over the page.

One of the strangest items was how the anonymous Baha'i Wikipedia activists would say, in describing the contents of the Aqdas, "Marriage is strongly recommended in the Kitab-i-Aqdas but not obligatory." By my life, I knew of no statement in the Aqdas saying "marriage is not obligatory" or anything to the effect. I corrected the site, and while doing so, used the words of all three translators in the case of the marriage verse: That marriage was "ordained" (Elder), "enjoined" (Haddad), and "prescribed" in the "Authorized" version. This to make it clear that the language of the Aqdas contrasted to their statements about marriage being "not obligatory." I was astounded to find the Baha'i activists repeatedly deleting my innocent and honest correction!

My mind thought, "Sheesh, are the modern Baha'is now marriage-negative?" When I was in the Baha'i Faith there was high esteem given to marriage and family, and indeed that atmosphere led me to marry. It clued me in to look at the official verse more carefully, and sure enough, "prescribed" is another a corruption. Clearly, it is intended to open up a loophole in the verse for the Baha'is, as with the perfume verse. Something "prescribed" is not something one is obligated to do. (The doctor may prescribe something, but you don't have to take it.) The word is like "strongly recommended." Compare that to Elder's very strong "ordained" and Haddad's stronger "enjoined," one definition of which is "to direct or order to do something." So it seems modern Baha'i officialdom is even throwing marriage under the bus. But it gets worse, and perhaps the next corruption is related:

Baha'i Officialdom introduces the gay lexicon into The Most Holy Book

There is more strangeness in the official (Haifa-Wilmette) version: The appearance of the word "partner" in the modern version is inventive, not to mention ominous. A few decades back this would have been "wife." The recently trendy and amorphous term "partner" had never occurred in any translations of Baha'u'llah relative to marriage, but only "wife," "husband," or "spouse." 

The Baha'i Faith has long been morally conservative even in the west and, because of the morally conservative Islamic impulse of the Baha'i founders and the Christian heritage of most Baha'i membership,  resistant to the moral "reconstruction" of the Marxists and the gay agenda. The bare and generic term "partner," used in place of spouse, is a modern culture-bomb employed by those who wish to redefine marriage as any sort of amalgam and explode the natural, holistic institution of the family. Traditional people, respecting marriage, use "spouse" as the generic and this was the term used in Baha'i translations heretofore. "Partner" is especially favored by homosexuals and family-reconstruction advocates in place of "wife" and "husband" to destroy the assumption that such sexual specificity is relevant to marriage, and even discredit the concepts of "husband" and wife." It is truly disconnected from time and the word traditions of both the west and the east. I find it bizarre that this word has ended up in the Baha'i "Most Holy Book." Note also that no generic word  (such as spouse) is contained in the Elder-Miller verse, only "handmaidens," which is sexually specific. Thus it seemed that the ones involved with this Aqdas production really wanted to insert this demoralizing culture-bomb into the text. It is safe to say that even ten years prior to 1992, in cobbling together their translation, the Bahia's would not have even considered the use of this degenerate word in the Kitab-i-Aqdas. The word always serves to anticipate and accept continued degradation of natural sexual roles and traditional marriage. My, how things change.

I remember the strangeness of visiting the Theosophical Library in Ojai. Just a few short decades earlier the Theosophical movement had been a purveyor of traditional India to the west by translating Indian texts heavy with conservative and ancient Indian morality, including the ideals of austerity, renunciation, and celibacy as found in so many texts such as the Jivanmukti Viveka. But through time and cultural alchemy, this movement that represented traditional India was now the interest of cultural liberals in America. And oddly but expectedly, I found that the movement had begun to attract lesbians. They were inserting themselves into administrative positions up on the hill that overlooked the mountain town, even taking up residence in the Theosophical-only neighborhoods as official members, and likely very aware of the astoundingly valuable real-estate owned by the organization and even the value of their library. The teaching curriculum of the Ojai Theosophical Library was changing accordingly, becoming oriented toward female concerns and liberal social ideas. In like manner, the appearance of the jarring gay-agenda culture-bomb of partner" in the Baha'i text is likely a sign of new 'cultural' elements stirring in the Baha'i culture. 

When I was an active Baha'i, in the 1970's and 80's, as with so many other things the Baha'i view of homosexuality matched that of the surrounding culture: It was not morally acceptable. And I never knew of any Baha'i who openly stated that they were homosexual. The Baha'i view up to then was, in reality, even more conservative than the surrounding culture: Homosexuality in the Baha'i Faith simply did not come up. It was never an issue among Baha'is of that time. The Baha'i Faith was attracting the more liberal-minded from those of Christian heritage. However, the moral conservatism found in Islam and well-present in the Baha'i scriptural worldview, served to clarify and firm up the moral conservatism of Christian-sourced Baha'is rather than befuddle it. 

Most Christian-sourced Baha'is viewed the Baha'i Faith as a welcome bulwark against moral confusion they saw developing. After the mess created by Hugh Hefner and the so-called "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, they embraced the Baha'i Faith as a welcome delineator of clear moral values. While their Christian churches had become less explicit and clear, the Baha'i Faith offered traditional clarity. This was clearly reflected for them in the Baha'i Laws not even explicitly found in the still-hidden Kitab-i-Aqdas but developed by Shoghi Effendi. Baha'i law required that Baha'i men and women even shacking up be hit with a hard, toothy sanction called "removal of administrative rights." It meant that they could not vote in Baha'i elections, and I think they could not attend the "Baha'i Feast" (as I recall). Feasts were the social and spiritual nexus for the religion. It definitely happened. Removal of "administrative rights" applied to mere booze drinkers or drug users, and it was a terrible blow to a Baha'i, giving him or her pariah-like status. The same sanction existed, on the books, for the never-seen prospect of any Baha'i openly practicing homosexuality. 

The basis for Shoghi Effendi's regulations was well present, it turned out, in the Kitab-i-Aqdas. Baha'u'llah did make one statement bearing on the question:

 "It is forbidden you to wed your fathers' wives. We shrink, for very shame, from treating of the subject of boys."

Official Baha'i, 1992

 "The wives of your fathers are unlawful to you. We are ashamed to mention the commandments regarding boys (pederasty)."

Elder-Miller, 1961

That's pretty clear you might say! He references homosexuality in the same breath with pederasty. He was obviously saying "I find this perversity so vile, and its wrongness so obvious, that I hoped I would not even need to mention it."  Thus you can imagine how homosexuality was viewed in the Baha'i Faith, at least in the 197o's. Baha'is viewed it as "beyond the pale." 

Thus it is, in a way, amusing to see what's happening now in the Baha'i Faith. Acceptance of homosexuality is part of the cultural-Marxist idea-package that Baha'i promoters chose to emulate in the crafting of their religion. After Baha'i promoters spent decades crafting the religion into a vehicle for liberal and leftist cultural ideas while covering up the austere atmosphere of its texts, it naturally attracted homosexuals and those newly sanguine about homosexuality. It dismays these to find a religion so liberal on many fronts having an explicitly negative view of homosexuality.  They get roiled by these "archaic" ideas about perversity and thus roil the hapless Baha'i religion-inventors at the home office! So what do we have in consequence? In a text in which Baha'u'llah considered homosexuality so despicable as to be beneath his mention, Baha'i Officialdom inserted nomenclature that is trendy and explicitly gay-friendly!

What can one do but "l-o-l"?

Best-case-scenario: It's a subtle sop Baha'i image crafters threw to homosexuals and their minions to mollify them and at least appear gay-friendly, even to the extent of adulterating their Most Holy Book, without really being caught doing anything too dire. You know, more Neuro Linguistic Programming or spin doctoring for the Aqdas. Worst-case-scenario: Like the Theosophical Society, the Baha'i Faith now contains cultural activists who think they know better what the Baha'i religion should be, and the direction it should head. After all, if the Kitab-i-Aqdas was declinable for the past 120 years, it's surely declinable now. "Partner's" presence likely reflects decadence creeping into the modern Baha'i Faith and a failure of resistance to moral corruption that is spearheaded by gay activists, giving a hint as to which way the Baha'i Faith is now headed. Based on this sign I predict that this Wilmette-Haifa generated Aqdas-loathing Baha'i Faith will end up as morally liberal and degenerate as the surrounding culture. Baha'is have always, in fact, matched up to their surrounding culture. How could they not do so, never even having had their own Book of Laws from the git-go? In any case, I suspect that the Baha'i image handlers are grateful that, as with so many other realms of life and dire moral questions facing humanity, Baha'u'llah was typically vague and unforthcoming in his statement about homosexuality. Thus they can finesse something or make accommodations to social corruption. Finally, with their text, the Baha'is got lucky.

Julian Curtis Lee Mickunas

March 2012, The Saint Francis

http://kitab-i-aqdas.info/