Pandeism or pan-Deism (from Ancient Greek: πάν pan "all" and Latin: deus meaning "God" in the sense of deism), is a term describing beliefs incorporating or mixing logically reconcilable elements of pantheism (that "God", or its metaphysical equivalent, is identical to the universe) and deism (that the creator-god who designed the universe no longer exists in a status where it can be reached, and can instead be confirmed only by reason). It is therefore most particularly the belief that the Creator of the universe actually became the universe, and so ceased to exist as a separate and conscious entity.^[1][2]

Through this synergy pandeism claims to answer primary objections to deism (why would God create and then not interact with the universe?) and to pantheism (how did the universe originate and what is its purpose?).

A pantheistic form of deism[link]

Pandeism falls within the traditional hierarchy of philosophies addressing the nature of God. This use of the term is a blend of the Greek root πάν ( 'pan' ), meaning 'all', and the Latin deus meaning God. These differing roots make pandeism a hybrid word, like automobile, hyperactivity, neonatal, sociology, and television. Pan is used in this same way in pantheism and panentheism, while deism is derived from deus. Pandeism shares these roots as a variation of the term "pantheism", and of "deism".

The words deism and theism are both derived from words for god. While the root of the word deism is the Latin word deus, which means "god", the root of the word theism is the Greek word θεóς (theos), which also means "god".

The deist movement adopted that name to refer to a God not knowable by revelation, but who could only be found by rational thought. Perhaps the first use of the term deist is in Pierre Viret's Instruction Chrestienne (1564), reprinted in Bayle's Dictionnaire entry Viret. Viret, a Calvinist, regarded deism as a new form of Italian heresy.^[4] Viret wrote:

Pantheism, in turn, came from the term "pantheist" purportedly first referenced by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work, Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist. The word "pantheism" was first used by Toland's opponent Jacques de la Faye in de la Faye's Defensio Religionis ('Defense of Religion') a 251-page critique of Toland published at Utrecht in 1709.^[5] The earliest use of the actual term, pandeism, may have come as early as 1787, with another use related in 1838, both discussed below, though it is possible that the relative authorities were really discussing pantheism. The unequivocal 1859 coining of "pandeism" explicitly in contrast to both pantheism and Deism by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal is discussed below.

Thus no-one used the term pandeism or pandeist before the 18th century, because these words did not exist. However, many earlier writers, schools of philosophy, and religious movements expressed essentially pandeistic ideas.

The concepts of pantheism and deism can each be used to cover a wide variety of positions on a wide variety of religious issues. Thus, pandeism may theoretically cover a wide variety of positions, so long as these logically fall at the same time within some form of pantheism and some form of deism. Like many Deists (and some pantheists), pandeists may refer to "God" as "the Deus" to avoid confusing pandeist conceptions of the creator with those of theistic faiths.

Compatibility with scientific and philosophical proofs[link]

Scientific proofs[link]

In 2009, Robert G. Brown, a professor of physics at Duke University with a background in philosophy, published a scientific proof asserted to demonstrate the truth of pandeism under information theory.^[6] Titled "The Pandeist Theorem", the theorem states that "If God exists, then God is identical to the Universe. That is, the theorem is a statement of conditional pandeism. If God exists at all, God must be absolutely everything that exists."^[6] The basic premise is that a being properly defined as God must have absolute knowledge of the universe, and that no method except existing as a real-time map of the whole content of the universe would permit that. Brown's conception does not accept a created "Universe," (he is careful to distinguish the "Universe" to mean all that is, including God, from the "Cosmos" which is simply our physical experience of galaxies and other physical phenomena) but one that is pandeistic without having been created (as "God" can, and indeed must, become the Cosmos) although he allows for the possible consciousness of "God" - the universe itself - at n-dimensional levels.^[6]

Stephen Hawking's recent determination that our universe (and others) needed no Creator to come about inspired the response from Deepak Chopra, interviewed by Larry King, that:

"he says in the book that at least 10 to the power of 500 universes could possibly exist in super position of possibility at this level, which to me suggests an omniscient being. The only difference I have was God did not create the universe, God became the universe."^[7]

Chopra insists that Hawking's discoveries speak only to the nature of God, not to its existence.

The pandeistic universe is just as the universe described in naturalistic pantheism, with the distinction that the belief necessarily encompasses a sentient being that existed before the formation of the universe. Panentheism also suggests a universe designed by a sentient deity, and composed of matter derived from that deity. The belief systems part on the point that panentheism asserts that God is greater than the universe, and therefore continues a separate existence alongside it, while pandeism asserts that everything that was the Deus became incorporated into the universe.

[edit] The God Theory

Physicist Bernard Haisch has published two books expressing a pandeistic model of our universe. The first was the 2006 book entitled The God Theory, in which he writes

Haisch published a follow-up in 2010, "The Purpose-Driven Universe." Both books reject both atheism and traditional theistic viewpoints, favoring instead a model of pandeism wherein the deity has become the universe, to share in the actualized experiences therein manifested. Haisch provides as proof of his views a combination of fine tuning and mystical experiences arguments.

Alan Dawe's 2011 book The God Franchise, though mentioning pandeism in passing as one of numerous extant theological theories, declines to adopt any "-ism" as encompassing his view; Dawe's theory includes the human experience as being a temporarily segregated sliver of the experience of God, but incorporates panentheistic elements as well.

Comparison to Eastern philosophy[link]

The ideas described by pandeism in the West have resonance with certain Eastern philosophies, particularly with some expressions of Hinduism. Robert G. Brown, in his Pandeist Theorem, identifies Hinduism as "perhaps surprisingly, remarkably compatible with the theorem," and specifically observes that "pure Vedantic Hinduism as described in particular in the Upanishads is monist and either pandeist or panendeist...."^[8] Similarly, Warren Sharpe wrote:

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, as well, had previously observed this:

Development[link]

In mythology[link]

Many ancient mythologies suggested that the world was created from the physical substance of a dead deity or a being of similar power. In Babylonian mythology, the young god Marduk slew Tiamat and created the known world from her body. Similarly, Norse mythology posited that Odin and his brothers, Vili and Vé defeated a frost giant, Ymir and then created the world from his. Later Chinese mythology recounts the creation of elements of the physical world (mountains, rivers, the sun and moon, etc.) from the body of a creator called Pángǔ (盤古). Such stories did not go so far as to identify the designer of the world as being one as having used his or her own body to provide the material.

But, one such example exists in Polynesian myth, for in the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity manifests in a divinity that New Zealanders call Tangaroa, the Hawaiians Kanaroa, the Tongans and Samoans Tangaloa, the Georgian and Society islanders Taaroa. A native poetic definition of the Creator relates: " He was; Taaroa was his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus he himself is named."^[11]

In Jesus and the Lost Goddess the authors claim that some Gnostic Christians held to a pandeistic idea (while acknowledging that most believed in an a celestial disaster and an ignorant/evil demiurge).

Ancient philosophy[link]

Religious studies professor, F. E. Peters traced the idea of pandeism to the philosophy of the Milesians, who had also pioneered knowledge of pantheism, in his 1967 Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, noting that "[w]hat appeared... at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism that is the legacy of the Milesians.^[12]

Milesian philosopher Anaximander in particular favored the use of rational principles to contend that everything in the world was formed of variations of a single substance (apeiron), which had been temporarily liberated from the primal state of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, stated that Anaximander viewed "...all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance."^[13] Anaximander was among the material monists, along with Thales, who believed that everything was composed of water, Anaximenes, who believed it was air, and Heraclitus, who believed it to be fire.

Gottfried Große in his 1787 interpretation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, describes Pliny, a First Century figure, as a pandeist as well,^[14] though this may be a misunderstanding on Große's part, no other historian having proposed the same as to Pliny the Elder.

Origin of modern pandeism[link]

In the 9th century, Johannes Scotus Eriugena proposed in his great work, De divisione naturae (also called Periphyseon, probably completed around 867 AD), that the nature of the universe is divisible into four distinct classes:

Johannes Scotus Eriugena was among the first to propose that God became the universe, and did so to learn something about itself.

1. that which creates and is not created;
2. that which is created and creates;
3. that which is created and does not create;
4. that which neither is created nor creates.

The first is God as the ground or origin of all things, the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns. One particularly controversial point made by Eriugena was that God was "nothing", in that God could not fall into any earthly classification. Eriugena followed the argument of Pseudo-Dionysius and from neo-Platonists such as Gaius Marius Victorinus that because God was above Being, God was not a being: "So supremely perfect is the essence of the Divinity that God is incomprehensible not only to us but also to Himself. For if He knew Himself in any adequate sense He should place Himself in some category of thought, which would be to limit Himself."^[15] A more contemporary statement of this idea is that: "Since God is not a being, he is therefore not intelligible... This means not only that we cannot understand him, but also that he cannot understand himself. Creation is a kind of divine effort by God to understand himself, to see himself in a mirror."^[16]

Eriugena depicts God as an evolving being, developing through the four stages that he outlines. The second and third classes together compose the created universe, which is the manifestation of God, God in process, Theophania; the second being the world of Platonic ideas or forms. The third is the physical manifestation of God, having evolved through the realm of ideas and made those ideas seem to be matter, and may be pantheistic or pandeistic, depending on the interference of God in the universe:

The divine system is thus distinguished by beginning, middle and end; but these are in essence one; the difference is only the consequence of man's temporal limitations. This eternal process is viewed with finite comprehension through the form of time, forcing the application of temporal distinctions to that which is extra- or supra-temporal. Eriugena concludes this work with another controversial argument, and one that had already been scathingly rejected by Augustine of Hippo, that "[n]ot only man, however, but everything else in nature is destined to return to God."^[15] Eriugena's work was condemned by a council at Sens by Honorius III (1225), who described it as "swarming with worms of heretical perversity," and by Pope Gregory XIII in 1585. Such theories were thus suppressed for hundreds of years thence.

Pandeism from the 16th Century on[link]

The ideas of Spinoza lay the foundations for pandeism.

Giordano Bruno conceived of a God who was immanent in nature, and for this very purpose was uninterested in human affairs (all such events being equally part of God). However, it was Baruch Spinoza in the 17th Century who appears to have been the earliest to use deistic reason to arrive at the conception of a pantheistic God. Spinoza's God was deistic in the sense that it could only be proved by appeal to reason, but it was also one with the universe. As one critic states:

Unlike Eriugena, Spinoza's pantheistic focus on the universe as it already existed did not address the possible creation of the universe from the substance of God, for Spinoza rejected the very possibility of changes in the form of matter required as a premise for such a belief.

Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn was the first to articulate a pantheistic deism.

18th Century British philosopher Thomas Paine also approached this territory in his great philosophical treatise, The Age of Reason, although Paine was concentrated on the deistic aspects of his inquiry.^[18] According to the Encyclopedia of American Philosophy "Later Unitarian Christians (such as William Ellery Channing), transcendentalists (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), writers (such as Walt Whitman) and some pragmatists (such as William James) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."^[19] It was Dutch naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn who first specifically detailed a religious philosophy incorporating deism and pantheism, in his four volume treatise, Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke, und sein innerer Bau (Images of Light and Shadow from Java's interior) released anonymously between 1850 and 1854. Junghuhn's book was banned for a time in Austria and parts of Germany as an attack on Christianity. In 1884, theologian Sabine Baring-Gould would contend that Christianity itself demanded that the seemingly irreconcilable elements of pantheism and deism must be combined:

Within a decade after that, Andrew Martin Fairbairn similarly wrote that "both Deism and Pantheism err because they are partial; they are right in what they affirm, wrong in what they deny. It is as antitheses that they are false; but by synthesis they may be combined or dissolved into truth".^[21] Ironically, Fairbairn's criticism concluded that it was the presence of an active God that was missing from both concepts, rather than the rational explanation of God's motives and appearance of absence.

Literary critic, Hayden Carruth, said of 18th century figure Alexander Pope that it was "Pope's rationalism and pandeism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature"^[22] In the 19th century, poet Alfred Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism",^[23] integrating deism with the pantheism of Spinoza, and Spinoza's predecessor, Giordano Bruno.^[24] Friedrich Engels var also pandeistic. Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels By Tristram Hunt. 2010. Page 43.

Developments from the 20th Century to today[link]

Understanding of pandeism was much advanced in the 1940s by the process theology of Charles Hartshorne. Hartshorne identified pandeism as one of his many models of the possible nature of God, acknowledging that a God capable of change (as Hartshorne insisted God must be) is consistent with pandeism. Hartshorne preferred pandeism to pantheism, explaining that "it is not really the theos that is described".^[25] However, he specifically rejected pandeism early on in favor of a God whose characteristics included "absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others" or "AR", writing that this theory "is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism."^[26] Hartshorne accepted the label of panentheism for his beliefs, declaring that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations".^[26]

In 2001, Scott Adams published God's Debris: A Thought Experiment, in which he explicitly set down his own variation of pandeism, a radical form of kenosis. Adams surmised that an omnipotent God annihilated himself in the Big Bang, because God would already know everything possible except his own lack of existence, and would have to end that existence in order to complete his knowledge. Adams asks about God, "would his omnipotence include knowing what happens after he loses his omnipotence, or would his knowledge of the future end at that point?"^[27] He proceeds from this question to the following analysis:

Adams' God exists now as a combination of the smallest units of energy of which the universe is made (many levels smaller than quarks), which Adams called "God Dust", and the law of probability, or "God's debris", hence the title. An unconventional twist introduced by Adams proposes that God is in the process of being restored not through some process such as the Big Crunch, but because humankind itself is becoming God.

Adams is hardly the first author to incorporate pandeistic doctrines into fiction. Robert A. Heinlein, in his Stranger in a Strange Land, a 1967 novel, so identifies a character who appears to other characters as identifying humanity as God. Heinlein's pandeistic bent in that novel is encapsulated in his use of the phrase "Thou Art God", and in key passages in which the protagonist of the story, Michael Valentine Smith, explains how, "Thou art God, and I am God and all that groks is God," God being that which is in all things (even the "happy blades of grass") and having no choice but to experience all things. Smith sets humankind on the course to releasing itself from its physical limitations, and thus truly becoming God. The idea of humankind becoming God is also fundamental to the 1950s Isaac Asimov short story, "The Last Question", in which human and computer knowledge is merged before the heat death of the universe. The computer, which continued to exist in hyperspace, had been asked how to stop entropy. It finally figured out the answer and implemented it, saying "Let there be light!" This is not a necessary element of pandeism, but correlates with it well.

The 1976 Simon Raven novel, The Survivors includes an exchange between characters where one observes, "God became the universe. Therefore the universe is God." while the other counters:

Another notable pandeist is documentarian Bruce Parry who spoke of how his experiences among primitive tribes led him to adopt the more skeptical form of pandeism:

Parry has since been described, with his apparent approval, as a "Christian turned sceptical pan-deist turned reluctant atheist" who "sees himself on a spiritual journey."^[32]

History of use of the term[link]

Some inconsistent uses of this nuanced term has been made over time. It has occasionally been used to refer dismissively to pantheism alone, from the presumption that pantheism is deistic. It has been used to mean simultaneous belief in all religions (omnism or omnitheism), or some elements thereof.

Etymology[link]

The term pandeism is a blend of the Greek root word πάν or 'pan' meaning 'all' and Latin word deus meaning God. These differing roots make pandeism a hybrid word, like automobile, hyperactivity, neonatal, sociology, and television. Pan is used in this same way in pantheism and panentheism, while deism is derived from deus. Pandeism shares these roots as a variation of the term "pantheism", and of "deism".

This can lead to criticism because it goes against the Classical compound method of creating words. Technical English words should only be constructed from Latin or Greek words not a combination. Indeed, in The Pilgrimage from Deism to Agnosticism, Moncure Daniel Conway stated that the name is "an unscholarly combination."^[33] Pandeism holds that at some time or in some way the universe was sentient so it is separated from pantheism. It bears similarities to the god of the Watchmaker analogy which is commonly found in arguments for Monotheism.

Earliest use[link]

1787 use of the term "Pandeisten" to describe a God that is one with the divinely designed world.

The earliest mention of pandeism found to date is in 1787, in a footnote of Gottfried Große’s translation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History:

English translation:

What's described here appears to be a description of Pantheism rather than Pandeism. There is no mention of God existing before creation, but rather of a God synonymous with Nature.

Pandeism was next mentioned in 1838 by Italian phrenologist Luigi Ferrarese in Memorie Risguardanti la Dottrina Frenologica ("Thoughts Regarding the Doctrine of Phrenology"):

Ferrarese was unequivocally critical, as he attacked the philosophy of Victor Cousin as a doctrine which "locates reason outside the human person, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual Pandeism, absurd for us, and injurious to the Supreme Being." Though Ferrarese's target, Cousin, has often been identified as a pantheist, it was said that he repudiated that label on the basis that unlike Spinoza, Cousin asserted that "he does not hold with Spinoza and the Eleatics that God is a pure substance, and not a cause." ^[35]

A more optimistic note was struck in the 1859 German work, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft by philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, who wrote:

This is translated as:

Earlier in the 19th century, some figures (particularly religionist Godfrey Higgins, later echoed by occult figure John Ballou Newbrough) used an etymologically distinct variation of the term to describe the beliefs that they attributed to a particular cult or sect (see Pandeism (Godfrey Higgins) for this use). Higgins, in particular, used the term "Pandeism" as early as 1833 to describe his theorized cult of Pandu and the Pandavas.^[37]

Another view expressed is more by way of comparison:

It is certain that this concept [universal brotherhood] forms one of the fundamental moral bases of religions whose believers are more than two-thirds of the world's population, while it [that concept], at the same time, is influenced by the unique temperament of each of them; that is to say, by a superhuman idealism in Christianity, by an anti-human nihilism in Buddhism, and by an incipient but growing (progressing) pandeism of Indian Brahmanism. Furthermore, to this set of beliefs, all of which admit an ideal principle of universal brotherhood, it makes sense to include naturalism in all of its forms – aesthetic, scientific, Greco-Roman, and modern - which naturalism influences, to a significant degree, all of the public education (conducted) in Europe, and against which (all) orthodox Christians, from Pope Paul II to Joseph de Maistre, always protest with perfect logic (always and very logically).

Use of the term in the Twentieth Century[link]

The term appears to be used to describe a synthesis of pantheism and deism by William Harbutt Dawson, in his 1904 biographical work, Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Thought of Our Time. Dawson used the term "Pan-Deism" as a comparative reference point, writing:

Early in the 20th century, Pandeism, with its sweeping reinterpretation of the nature of the Deus and the purpose of mankind, was viewed as a threat to Christianity and possibly a force for the positive reorganization of human civilization. Towards the beginning of World War I, an article in the Yale Sheffield Monthly published by the Yale University Sheffield Scientific School commented:

A similar concern was raised by Charles Anselm Bolton in a 1963 article, Beyond the Ecumenical: Pan-deism?:^[41] "I first came upon this extension of ecumenism into pan-deism among some Roman Catholic scholars interested primarily in the "reunion of the churches," Roman, Orthodox, Anglican." . . . . "We may perhaps ask what is the ultimate aim of the Curia in promoting the pan-deist movement."^[42]

An early 19th century German philosopher, Paul Friedrich Köhler, expressed the skeptical view that all of these religious labels were referring to the same thing. Köhler wrote:

Roughly translated, this means that Pantheism, Pandeism, Monism and Dualism all refer to the same God illuminated in different ways, and that whatever the label, the human soul emanates from this God.

In 1997, Pastor Bob Burridge^[44][45] of the Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies^[46] wrote an essay titled God Is Not the Author of Sin, also identifying pandeism-described as a deistic refinement or subset of pantheism-as a threat to Christianity:

Burridge disagrees that such is the case, decrying that "The Creator is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism."^[47]

Burridge concludes by challenging his reader to determine why "calling God the author of sin demand[s] a pandeistic understanding of the universe effectively removing the reality of sin and moral law."^[48]

There is marked contrast in a 1995 news article quoting this use of the term by Jim Garvin, a Vietnam vet who became a Trappist monk in the Holy Cross Abbey of Berryville, Virginia, and went on to lead the economic development of Phoenix, Arizona. Garvin described his spiritual position as "'pandeism' or 'pan-en-deism,' something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit..."^[49]

Variations on the concept[link]

Some uses to which the term has been put are etymologically disjunctive, as they ascribe a meaning to the term that does not reflect the roots of what is an obvious portmanteau within a well defined family of similar terms.

Conversely, the term may describe a deistic pantheism, in which a God that has always been pantheistic has ceased a previously active interaction with the universe. The term has been used in some instances as a restatement of pantheism (the concept that God and the universe are one) or panendeism (the concept that God both is the universe, and transcends the universe). Others have specified that it is a concept distinct from pantheism, and have used it instead to describe a universe which combines elements of pantheism (for example, that God and the universe are one) and deism (for example, that a creator God created a self-regulating universe, but subsequently ceased to actively intervene in its operations).

Criticisms[link]

Some theologians have criticised particular points of pandeism. An example is William Walker Atkinson, in his Mastery of Being:^[50]

He claims that if God were evolving or improving, being an infinite being, it would have to be traceable back to some point of having "an infinitely undeveloped state and condition."^[50] But, this claim was made prior to the rise of scientific knowledge pinpointing the beginning of the universe in time, and connecting time with space, so that time would not exist as we know it prior to the universe existing. In Islam, a criticism is raised, wherein it is argued that "from the juristic standpoint, obliterating the distinctions between God and the universe necessarily entails that in effect there can be no Sharia, since the deontic nature of the Law presupposes the existence of someone who commands (amir) and others who are the recipients of the command (ma'mur), namely God and his subjects."^[51]

Notes[link]

See also[link]

• Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson, Chapter IV

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Pandeism

Look up pandeism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Institute for Pandeism Studies
• The Pandeist Theorem by Robert G. Brown (excerpt from A Theorem Concerning God)
• The Parallels of Pandeism by Bernardo Kastrup
• Discussion of Creative Evolution (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

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The Tongue
Birth name	Xannon Shirley[1]
Also known as	Lil' Teezy, Osama Bin Rappin
Origin	Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Genres	Hip hop
Years active	2004-present
Labels	Elefant Traks[2]
Associated acts	Astronomy Class, Urthboy, The Herd, Ozi Batla, Spit Syndicate, Horrorshow, Hermitude, Thundamentals, Bag Raiders, DJ Skoob, Joyride[disambiguation needed ]
Website	Official Webpage

The Tongue (born Xannon Shirley) is a Sydney music artist signed to Australian independent label Elefant Traks. He has recorded with Dudley Perkins, Ozi Batla, DJ Diaz,^[3] Urthboy, Bertie Blackman, The Bag Raiders, Gift Of Gab (Blackalicious), Katalyst, Braintax, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and Muph & Plutonic.^[4]

He has released an EP (Bad Education), two LPs (Shock And Awe and Alternative Energy) and three mixtapes (Redux,^[5] The Tongue Is Dead and "The Sextape).

Biography[link]

The Tongue is an emcee/songwriter from East Sydney, New South Wales, also known for his live freestyle ability. He represented Australia in the "Battle 4 Supremacy" competition/DVD against New Zealand in 2005 and won the Revolver emcee battle the same year.

As a recording artist, he went on to sign with independent Sydney record label Elefant Traks and immediately embarked on a national tour with The Herd. He has had songs on rotation by national broadcaster Triple J.^[6] To date he has released an EP and two albums. His second album Alternate Energy features production from El Gusto (Hermitude) and M-Phazes.^[7] He has toured extensively around Australia since 2006 and from 2008 to 2010 he also toured as a backup vocalist with Sydney group Astronomy Class (Ozi Batla, Chasm and Sir Robbo). He released three free mixtapes in 2008, 2009 and 2011.^[8]

In 2009, The Tongue hosted and performed on the "Elefant Traks 10th Anniversary Party Live DVD" which was released nationally the same year and showcased the Elefant Traks roster's live show.

He has performed at major Australian festivals including Big Day Out, Good Vibrations, Groovin The Moo, Sydney Festival, Peats Ridge, Sounds Of Spring, Coaster and Park Jam.^[9][10] He has also completed national tours with Drapht and Pharoahe Monch.^[11]

Discography[link]

EP's[link]

• Bad Education - Elefant Traks (2006)^[12]

Albums[link]

• Shock & Awe - Elefant Traks (2007)^[13][14]
• Alternative Energy - Elefant Traks (2010)

Mixtapes[link]

• Redux - (2008)
• The Tongue Is Dead - (2009)
• The Sextape - (2011)^[15]

Compilation appearances[link]

• Triple J Hip Hop Show - (2005) (song: "Counterfeit Cheques")
• Trampled - The Elephant Traks Remix Album - Elefant Traks (2006) (song: "Corruption Dub")
• Elefant Traks 10th Anniversary Party DVD - Elefant Traks (2009)

Guest appearances[link]

• "Wrong One" by Urthboy (The Signal (2007) Elefant Traks)
• "Catch Of The Day Remix" by Bias B (Beemixes (2007) Obese Records)
• "All You Got Remix" by Katalyst (All You Got 12" (2007) Invada Records)
• "Superpowers" by Chasm (Beyond The Beat Tape (2008) Obese Records)
• "Today" by Muph & Plutonic (And Then Tomorrow Came (2009) Obese Records)
• "War Of The Worlds" & "Award Show" by Astronomy Class (Pursuit Of Happiness (2009) Elefant Traks)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Elefant Traks artist profile
• Official website