The Skill of Recognition
By: Draško Miletić
Abstract
This paper advances a rigorous and often unsettling inquiry into what the author terms the skill of recognition: a disciplined capacity to interrogate inherited religious, symbolic, and linguistic structures rather than passively accept them. Drawing on Biblical texts, apocryphal traditions, philosophical critique, and cultural reinterpretation, the work challenges foundational assumptions within Judeo-Christian narratives, arguing that meaning has been repeatedly distorted through translation, dogma, and institutional authority.
Beginning with the Johannine concept of the Logos, the paper identifies a “primal error” in privileging abstract reason over primordial human experience, particularly emotion. It proceeds through a sequence of symbolic reversals, Lilith’s erasure and the loss of feminine ontological equality, the transformation of Sinai’s silence into prohibition, and the reinterpretation of Revelation as numerical and ideological construction, each serving as a case study in how meaning is manipulated or inverted.
Central to the argument is the claim that recognition requires confronting semantic inversion: betrayal disguised as loyalty, resurrection as doctrinal imposition, and prayer as a vehicle of passivity rather than agency. Through analysis of figures such as Judas, St. John, and artistic representations like Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb, the paper emphasizes the dignity of mortality and the primacy of transformation within life, rather than reliance on metaphysical promises.
Ultimately, the work reframes the Masonic and philosophical task as one of radical discernment. The individual must reclaim authorship of meaning, resist imposed narratives, and accept responsibility for ethical and existential orientation. Recognition, in this sense, is not merely interpretive, it is initiatory. It demands the courage to confront error at its origin and to act without reliance on external absolute.
The Word and the Primal Error
The last Gospel, according to John, begins with the sentence: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Although in this case the Word is an emanation of the Logos and can be extended to mind, speech, property, sense and principle, to truth, order, will and reason, to thought and the germ of becoming (the number came later and therefore is not in this statement!), if we pass that first statement of the New Testament through the mind of Stagiran, we will have proton pseudos, the primordial error.
And quite naturally, that error can immediately cast doubt upon everything that follows, for all definitions of Logos exclude feeling – yet emotion is what precedes every Word. It seems that the cold, absent, and indolent God, ever since Epicurus, that full mind and pure will, is so alien to emotion that the endless, unbroken suffering of infants on this planet becomes inescapable.
After all, this is what Ivan Karamazov warns us about when he tells his younger brother, Alyosha, a novice monk, that the existence of God is incompatible with suffering in the world, that the temptation of some people to inflict evil, even on their own children, is undeniable, and that “It is utterly inconceivable that the suffering of little ones should purchase harmony.” In any case, in the agony of infants, there is no providence. There is only Dread, everlasting. Ours. His. Whoever it is, the supreme deity or the Gnostic Demiurge.
Lilith and the Theft of Personhood
A greater skill of recognition turns to the Book of Genesis and the first woman, Lilith, Adam’s unwedded partner, whom the Demiurge, just as he had shaped Adam (the Golem), formed from the dust of the earth. Thus, creation achieved equivalence: man and woman were ontologically equal.
However, because Lilith proved bold and indigenous, refusing to exist solely as a womb and kitchen concept, she was declared a bloodthirsty demon and cast into the depths of the sea, never to emerge from that water. Hence, in the history of painting, she almost always appears with wet, tangled, black hair.
What followed is well known: the woman and the feminine principle have lost the place that primordially belonged to them, and the shameless falsification of the First Couple occurred. A new woman, Eve, was offered as a reserve. The supreme principle of Adam’s rib, the principle of derivation, began to emerge.
Thus, a masculine paraphrase, a masculine statement, a man’s utterance breathes into women. Here, in our cultural landscape, that utterance manifests all too clearly in the fact that many women carry the noun “son”, and this is not only a distortion of identity and submission to the opposite sex, but it is a shameless theft of Personhood. It should be especially remembered that Adam and Eve failed in their role as true parents, which is why the history of humanity is burdened with fratricide. However, it is quite reasonable to assume that the story would have had a completely different beginning if the bold and willful Lilith had not been prevented from becoming the mother of Cain and Abel. Hatred would not have arisen as the primordial feeling between the brothers. There would have been no murder. Individuality would have prevailed. The quest for virtue would not have failed.
In addition to what I already stated, the first chapter of Genesis contains a notable translation error in its reference to the Spirit of God:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
Such a mistake, in which the Spirit of God hovered over the water at the moment when the earth was formless and empty, rather than of the darkness deep, completely changes everything: the symbol itself and its semantics, inception, and understanding. It seems that the translation, obviously, was subordinated to desire and striving and not to a mere original.
Sinai and the Birth of History
Furthermore, the skill of recognition inexorably points me to the broken tablets of Sinai and their contents. The first pair of clay tablets given to Moses slipped from his hands – most likely because they were blank, and left to humankind to inscribe: with thought, with will, with deed. But man, confronted with that terrifying emptiness, let them fall.
Then, amid the storming protest of the heavens, the Ten Commandments occurred. So, the prohibitions were imposed, and a vast condition of negation came to us: humans need to be governed by bans. Yet man could not endure it. And so, history was born – history still faint in the Fellow man, still bound by the shallow breath of peace between two colossal hatreds.
The Revelation and the Fate of Wandering
Moreover, the Revelation itself is also open to question. For its offerings – whether presented through deeds and events, signs and marvels, overthrows and persecutions, the unveiling of beasts and the clairvoyance of demons, or through the roll call of those destined to live in the final days, one hundred and forty-four thousand and not a single Jew – all of these captures the posture of rigid catechism, which conceive man as infantile and obedient.
But where did these numbers come from? It is a game of pure numbers, in which each of the twelve tribes of Israel is multiplied by 12 thousand times. This number in John’s Revelation was not understood as a statistic, but as a symbolic code for “a perfect people described as servants of our God who bears the seal on their foreheads” (12 tribes x 12 apostles x 1000 as a symbol of multitude).
However, what is particularly interesting is the continuation of the prophecy: and not a single Jew, which speaks of the anointing of all and the conversion of Jews into Christians. It speaks of proselytism.
Within such a divine disclosure, Jesus bears the titles “King of all Kings” and “Lord of all Lords,” which unequivocally suggest that His father and mother were deities and that Jesus was in the care of the custodians, the barren Mary and the humble Joseph. That in Judea at that time, He was, in fact, sheltered from the angry Roman emperors, Octavian and Tiberius.
Indeed, His sorcery seems to flow from that divine parentage. Along with that, the semantic precision of the Revelation itself – its Sealedness with a ruinous resolution – resounds in the very title of the text: the lifting of the veil (from the future), the Apokalypsis. Life in sin is its emanation, and the Book of Wandering – our fate.
The Crucifixion and the Copy That Must Not Be
I now direct the further skill of recognition to the comparison between the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis and the New Testament. For if the Tetragrammaton (JHVH) created man in His own image at the very beginning, evolution has taken its course in due time: thus, Jesus does not belong to that primordial Fact.
His words on the cross: Father, Father, why have you forsaken me, were a moment of divinely granted doubt. Although often perceived as pathetic, these words could mean quite the opposite: as a statement about Jesus’ life in general, his boldness, and therefore a vivid sign of purpose.
The Heavenly and the earthly Father – that biblical opposition, that completeness, that perfection in itself – He who is defined, deliberate, and precise, thus fulfilled His great design.
He finally abandoned His own replica; He renounced self-love. He rejected his narcissistic credo. For creation must never be a copy. Man, contingent and random, has taken the place of the blind, obedient one – the follower, the slave.
Anything else is misinterpretation, and worse still: a flagrant and brutal trespass, a gross offense, against the All-Seeing One, and against the man’s selfhood.
The Kiss of Betrayal
As an example of semantic inversion, indispensable in the skill of recognition, I cannot bypass the Last Supper. There, the kiss denied the very principle of closeness and turned into wickedness.
Before Pilate’s centurions, the Sadducean temple guards, and the gathered ones at the table, the instruments of semantics known to man, the entire repertoire of human meaning, had collapsed. If the supper had truly been secret, the history of the Christian world would unfold otherwise: no arrest, no crucifixion, no Resurrection. Without that kiss, the history of Christianity would be void.
In the mentioned scenario, the Nazarene (or was Jesus, after all, from Bethlehem?) would most likely have been devoted to the slow steps of patience, until His nervousness of the discourse would ripen at last into the flowing calm of knowledge.
But, as we know, the Imperator mundi followed, and the earthly Jesus appended the title, Christ. He gained a celestial principle. He became close to the Zoroastrian Doubleness of the Same – a notion particularly emphasized by the Nestorians. That is why one must exclaim: Long live Judas!
And yet, as jurisprudence observes: Were He tried today, He must again be found guilty. It seems anarchism – that arrogance of a free mind – has always been regarded as a political malignancy. And so the empire, monarchy, or state – and the realm is death – inevitably reaches for the scalpel.
St. John, H. Holbein the Younger, and the Dignity of Death
At this point, the skill of recognition obliges me to join the beginning and the end of the parable, shifting the story of Jesus’ birth six years earlier, for it was in the fourth year before the new era that Herod the Great ordered the massacre of Bethlehem’s two-year-old infants.
Fortunately, the stepmother and stepfather were already on their way to Misir with the Child. Such a sequence, I emphasize, gnaws at the entrenched historical illusion. Yet Herod’s significance is not revealed merely by this desirable calendrical correction, but above all reflects the fact concerning the severed head of Saint John.
Here, the primary objection to the very concept of the Resurrection was stated directly: a failed, belittled death does not exist. In short, the being, knowledge, and death of that gifted Essene disciple, St. John, are pure as a crystal. All his summons to freedom – to mindfulness and resistance, to the vigilance of mind, the building of will, the awakening of consciousness – form, non plus ultra, an Opus homini. In it, there is no ontology of Resurrection.
With Jesus, however, the story takes a different turn. Although Longinus’ spear thrust was, they say, low, beneath the sixth rib, outside the lethal zone, sparing the vital organs – thereby showing the Roman centurion’s subconscious attachment to the Judean king and to the Christian idea – Renaissance painters remained deeply attached to dogma, in the unquestionable certainty of the Resurrection.
Fortunately, Hans Holbein the Younger painted Christ’s body in the tomb: after such beatings, blood loss, and open wounds, the spear thrust of Longinus barely mattered. The upturned eyes and the gray pallor of the body are plain to see. And above all, the middle finger of the right hand – stretched by the torn tendon from the driven nail – testifies. Finger as a claim.
In short, stand before the painting and at once the unambiguous stench of death seizes you. The painting overwhelms the whole of men. Or as Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot:
The painting is so powerful that the observer may lose his faith. It demonstrates the victory of “blind nature” over everything, including the most perfect and most beautiful of beings.
Hans Holbein the Younger, unskeptical of a botched crucifixion or the possibility of mere fainting, never questioned death (nor the giving of death to another – donner la mort aux autres, as Jacques Derrida put it). He was unequivocal: there is no rising from the dead, no grave as womb. He resisted the canon and placed himself within an incorruptible apology for doubt. Holbein underscored the dignity of death.
More importantly still, initiated into the esoteric secret of the acronym INRI (Igne Natura Renovatur Integra – By fire the whole of nature renewed), as well as into the hermetic verse: Ioithi, Nain, Rasith, Ioithi – a hymn to the eternal metamorphosis of all that exists – Hans Holbein the Younger suggested that Resurrection is a category of life: To become better while alive! To reorder oneself toward the virtue!
Kunstmuseum Basel, Hans Holbein the Younger: Christ’s body in the tomb, presumed period of painting creation 1520-1522
IMAGE CREDIT: wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
The Primal Prayer
I continue the skill of recognition with a gaze fixed upon what is known as the primal prayer: the Our Father. The humanity’s immanent need for an Absolute to rule over it, expressed in the verses, Thy will be done/On earth as it is in heaven, is an Absolute that denies human responsibility, and demands submission. The following verse concerning bread abolishes the Future: Give us this day our daily bread.
The materiality of food is subsequently associated with the concept of multiplied debts, which evokes a natural sense of guilt and reflects the subconscious human desire to identify with the divine, as expressed in the phrase: And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
The fatal will-lessness before evil, in the prayer’s closing lines, inevitably summons a shattered life – people without structure, people as particles, powerless, unable to resist, unable to be, so that life itself thins, hisses, and vanishes before the whisper of malignancy: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Moreover, according to apocryphal Gnostic hints, the Original Prayer was in fact a contest between life and death, with no preference for either side. It was a kind of whiteness: beyond measurement, beyond proof. Without a period. For who would dare to place a period upon life – or upon death.
A third possibility is the anthroposophical claim that the primal prayer contains ten words: Creator, allow the Holy Spirit to pour into my Grail. Yet this, too, like the Our Father, conspicuously highlights the passivity of man. Let man himself arrive at the essence. Let him not be a mere vessel. Let it be without any pouring – from Above or from Below. That belongs to external intervention. And that makes man’s defeat. Still, it makes a man’s existence questionable. There is no ousia, there is no being: human concreteness.
The Apocryphal Life
Ultimately, the thoughts I am sharing require repeated consideration; they should not be taken lightly or dismissed easily. Their arrival escaped into my living memory, for it all unfolded subversively, in the night. I awoke in the morning tormented by these thoughts.
I speak to you of Him. Of Him who Is.
Of Him visited by three stargazers bearing semiotic gifts.
Of Him who learned the carpenter’s craft from his stepfather in a small family workshop filled with the divine scent of cedarwood.
Of Him who, upon reaching restless youth, fled his home after his father’s death.
Of Him who, as a pupil of the regional educational order, attended the Aramaic school of translation and the Essene spiritual gymnasium.
I speak of Him who, at thirty-one, suddenly appeared in Galilee, descended to the Jordan River, met the guru, and received baptism.
Of Him who, in the Judean wilderness, fed for weeks upon his own demons, passed beyond the threshold of consciousness, and feasted upon himself.
Of Him who performed his illusionist debut at the wedding feast in Cana, who healed the possessed, the blind, and the deaf, who raised Lazarus from the tomb, who lifted the mortal coil from the widow’s son and the little girl.
I speak of Him who, with moral force, halted the lynching of the harlot and thereafter walked with washed feet.
Of Him who gathered a dozen followers and, as homo politicus, was intolerant toward the usurers, traders, and Pharisees in the Temple.
I speak of Him who on a Friday played with His own blood.
And I tell you that to all this, indeed, one must add the profoundly dubious circumstances surrounding Him on that Great Sunday, when the most of the people, each in their own home, rests deservedly from every burden and entangelments, even from the mystification of death – rests with its whole being and pays no attention to a gaunt, long-haired figure who, in deep meditation, restores vitality to his crucified body, escapes from the suffocating tomb, and vanishes in an unknown direction.
By doing so, He imposes the following question upon the entire Judeo-Christian civilization: Was His mature age truly an age of tension and impatience? For that age belongs to the genre of unrest, with no inclination for slower steps, no devotion to the patient unfolding of idea, no long years of teaching – a time upon which the crucifixion itself placed a stop, allowing Him to continue His life beyond the boundaries known to us, outside the official performance and the advertised version – in the apocryphal spatio-temporal.
Far from noise and fury, far from false interpretations and bestial transgressions of the primal. Nearer to the cadences of thought. Nearer to the multiplicity of perspectives. Because the past mediates the present, and a glimpse of the future belongs to today’s deeds.
Thus, with our past, we ceaselessly touch our future. Parts of yesterday live within our tomorrow. That is why man must take utmost care in what he does, lest tomorrow he stand astonished and aggressive in denying the past.
The Final Word
In conclusion, I say this to all of us: The Devil is sure of himself, of us, and within us. He no longer has any need. Nor does the Lord. Therefore, the brave decision rests within each of us. It has always been, it is, and will be.
I have said!
3×3
Bro. Draško Miletić DAR
Belgrade, 6th March 6026AL
Article by: Draško Miletić
Draško Miletić was born in Kotor, Montenegro, on February 6, 1963. He graduated from Belgrade University with a BA in tourism, but later changed his vocation, working as a journalist for 15 years.
He was an editor and author in digital media, newspapers, and ART TV. Since 2001, he has been a writer and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine URB, published monthly from 2003 to 2007 by the Independent publisher Slobodan Mašić.
From 2005-2007, he used to run a literary workshop at the Center for Youth Creativity and has published three books. More than fifty literary and web magazines in Serbia and the region have published his works.
He is an independent artist and a member of the Serbian Literary Society. He wrote six novels and two books of poetry. The first and second novels are in the Washington Library of Congress. The second novel was nominated for the prestigious NIN Award (2007).
Since 2021, he has been a member of the Lodge "Michael Pupin". In 2024, he became affiliated with the Research Lodge QC. Both Lodges are under RGLS. Since 2022, he has been writing for The Square magazine and the ARS REGIA, an annual magazine published by Lodge Quatuor Coronati.
He was a panelist at the Second International Masonic convention “Freemasonry in the 21st Century: Service, Sustainability, Dignity. All about people”, held in Belgrade on June 21, 2024.
He named his work Nobility is Needed. He was a panelist at the Third Masonic convention “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, held in Belgrade on June 20, 2025. He named his work The state of being fully human. He is multilingual, speaking English and French. He lives and works in Belgrade.
Books by Draško Miletić
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