Christianity is back and it's more violent than ever. I speak of course of the late capitalist tent house revival of Christian Nationalism amongst the decaying ruins of Washington DC. Using the demonic, Caligula-esque Emperador Trump like a pedophilic battering ram, a bunch of millenarian lunatics with a barely literate interpretation of the Bible have found themselves in the highest echelons of political influence in this country and their vulgar reach can be felt throughout the decidedly big government and hyper-interventionist policies of MAGA 2.0, from the transgender genocide to the Zionist reinvention of the Middle East.
But there's a catch and it's one likely to catch up with the Evangelical set with a vengeance far sooner than later. The Christian Right may have succeeded in renting a pitiless, scum-fucking White House, ready and willing to make all their nightmares a reality for the right price but their numbers among the unwashed masses continue to dwindle as many churches are having to choose between rainbow welcome mats and shuttering their doors for good. These are wealthy zealots with a powerful lobby, but they have a rapidly shrinking army in an age of imperial decline and ascendant national debt and that could very easily make their throne a downright dangerous place to languish on.
Meanwhile, the number of people identifying as Queer, feminist, and/or pagan like me is slowly on the rise and being very affectively radicalized by the excessively statist abuse of the totally out of touch Evangelical fascists who've managed to rig a failing system into giving them an absurdly outsized presence in every state, court and federal office in the country. The blowback of related political violence has been grotesquely overexaggerated by Trump and his handlers, but it isn't non-existent either and it will likely expand with their demonization deliberately amplifying its presence. I don't believe any of this to be a coincidence either. In fact, I don't even believe this to be all that shocking as I tend to view history like most things as being largely cyclical in nature.
While most mainstream American commentators seem to interpret the rise of "radical transgenderism" as some new pillar of progressive liberalism, I see it along with a persistent drive towards more overtly matriarchal institutions as being more of a return to the tribal diversity of the ancient heathen third gender mentality which I also honestly believe Oswald Spengler himself would have probably begrudgingly embraced on some level.
In other words, the Christian nationalists are playing a desperate and dangerous game, and they will have no one to blame but themselves when it continues to blow up in their face in increasingly violent ways. Believe it or not, as much anguish as I carry from a childhood of abuse suffered at the hands of these people, this is not a fait that I promote or relish in. I actually still consider myself to be something of a Folk Christian, blending a more Gnostic interpretation of the Gospels with Celtic strains of pantheistic Druidry. I am also no ally to the use of initiatory violence as a means of retribution.
However, my own obsessive compulsive research on the topic of collapse has rendered me a well-read student in the social physics of karma, and I feel that I owe it to the Virgin Mary, mother goddess of the New Testament, to warn my wayward Christian cousins that the biblical violence they are currently reaping with their petty despotism is likely to come back to them in plagues if they don't confront the devil in their mirror.
I could recite you reems from the Norse Eddas, but I think it would be far more affective for me to speak in terms of the modern folklore of horror cinema, especially considering that I am delivering this sermon during the season of Samhain, and what better vehicle than the ascendant subgenre of folk horror to do this with.
For those of you who are not familiar with the works of Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, folk horror is a medium tracing its roots back decades and its influences back centuries. It is a variant of horror cinema that uses pre-Christian folklore to tell stories of decadently modern Christians and secularists who find themselves at the mercy of the ancient, sacred, natural world which they foolishly attempt to govern into submission.
Many occult cinephiles interpret such movies as being somewhat exploitative towards heathen traditions do to their frequent portrayal of such cultures as being far more violent than actual recorded history would suggest, but if Queer theory has taught me anything it is that one person's grindhouse can very easily be transformed into another person's temple when viewed through the lens of radical cultural reclamation and I tend to see the better movies of the folk horror milieu as trenchantly anti-colonialist parables about the dangers of puritanical patriarchy and its discontents.
Take the genre's cornerstone and veritable Citizen Kane, Robyn Hardy's 1973 masterpiece, The Wicker Man. On the flimsy evidence of an anonymous letter, a chaste and devout Christian police officer named Sargeant Neil Howle travels to the remote Scottish Island of Summerisle to investigate the alleged disappearance of a young girl. Upon discovering to his horror that the inhabitants of this island had returned to their heathen roots, the Sargeant becomes convinced that the child has fallen prey to a human sacrifice. To spoil one of cinema's greatest twist endings, Sargeant Howle discovers the child to be alive and well, and that he is in fact the human sacrifice, meeting all the requirements as a man coming of his own free will while carrying the power of a king along with the purity of a virgin and the ignorance of a fool.
My interpretation of this climactic arch is that it does a remarkable job of displaying the willful blindness of the savior syndrome incurred when patriarchal authority lacks all respect for the human sheep they have taken upon themselves to shepherd into the light. The children of Summerisle were never in any danger and it took a bigot obsessed with governing their access to divinity to feed the flames of a human sacrifice symbolic of the Island's need to embrace the traditions of their ancestors in order to sustain a future for their children.
The dangers that puritans sow when they attempt to intervene with the necessary evolutionary milestones of childhood is explored even deeper and far darker in Robert Eggers' 2015 directorial debut, The Witch, in which an isolated puritan family banished from their New England settlement over a religious dispute finds themselves at the mercy of strange and evil forces coming from the surrounding woods only for them to make their own teenage daughter, Thomasin, the scapegoat for all their woes.
In another of the great twists of modern horror cinema, Thomasin decides to embrace these dark forces and join them in the wicked forest in order to achieve the liberation and independence denied to her by patriarchal colonialist society. The lesson here is that the children of conquistadors are always their first victims, and they often require very little in the way of indoctrination in order to realize freedom awaits them just outside the communities that fail them.
Of course, the subjugation of children in patriarchal societies never ends for the permanently infantilized class created for women by such cultures and the results of this kind of multigenerational subjugation are taken to their most extreme conclusions in Lars Von Trier's deeply unsettling 2009 masterpiece, Antichrist.
After experiencing the tragic death their young son, an unnamed psychotherapist takes it upon himself to fix his unnamed wife's crippling grief by absconding with her to an isolated cabin in the woods. Here he seeks to force her to confront her demons only to have this forest, where the woman had spent time alone with their son the year before while researching an unfinished thesis on the subject of femicide, confront the good doctor. Through increasingly sadomasochistic sessions in the dark and unforgiving woods it is revealed that the therapist's wife had deliberately let their son die after coming to the conclusion that all women were inherently evil.
Many critics struggled to comprehend this brutal piece of arthouse cinema but to me it spoke quite clearly. The patriarchy is right to view women as dangerous because what other alternative to subjugation have they given us? The system has alienated an entire gender to the point where any form of insurrection is at least as tempting as subordination and almost always far more rewarding. When you consistently cast a powerless class of people as the villain in all your fairy tales, you really have no right to be shocked when they rise to the occasion and greet you with fists.
The therapist ultimately only succeeds in pacifying a wife driven to psychosexual nihilism by murdering her, but his only reward is to discover himself lost in a forest, surrounded by faceless women. This is the fate of any man seeking to conquer what he fails to comprehend. Valerie Solanas couldn't have put it better herself. Yet not all is lost to the staring contest with the abyss.
Ari Aster's 2019 shocker Midsommar offers a slightly more hopeful outcome to this predicament. It begins like many horror films, with a group of young travelers at the mercy of backwoods savages, in this case a rural pagan commune in Sweden celebrating a 9-day midsummer festival which only occurs once in every 90 years, but as the three men in the quartet find themselves picked off and subjected to gruesome ritual sacrifices one by one, their only female companion, Dani, struggling with grief over a senseless murder-suicide that took her entire family and the turmoil of having her pain merely tolerated by her vain and self-centered boyfriend, finds herself experiencing a level of community and understanding among this supposedly backwards and wicked cult that civilization had deprived her of.
I believe that the key to understanding this film and the key to comprehending the existential question all of us find ourselves faced with in the bosom of a crumbling empire lies at the juxtaposition between the death of Dani's first family; cold, pointless and nihilistic, and the sacrifices performed by her second family which are equally horrific and are yet seen as more savage merely because they are performed with a sense of purpose. What awaits us after modern Christianity is no more utopian than what came before, but it is likely something far more meaningful because it was and will likely be the product of a society governed by community rather than industrial superstructures modeled after the church. It will also likely be influenced by a spirituality woven into the earth rather than shot into the sky.
This isn't a defense of human sacrifice. It's an argument that this unfortunate genre of ritual violence never actually left us, it simply lost all meaning beyond conquest under materialism and left us with a society in which life is cheap, and spirituality is governed by the rich. once again, I reject initiatory violence of any kind, but I also recognize as Marx once did that violence on any massive scale is the midwife of any society pregnant with a new one or perhaps in this case, an old one.
Either way, the Christian nation state has given us nothing left to lose but a ritual industrial complex that makes folk horror appear downright quaint by comparison. Perhaps we can simply embrace the folk and reject the horror. At the very least, it's worth a try and we might not have much other choice at this point.
Next year in Valhalla.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Playlist: Songs That Influenced This Post
* Birthday by the Sugarcubes
* Wrath of the Tyrant by Emperor
* Feed the Tree by Belly
* Gloria by Patti Smith
* Danse Macabre by Celtic Frost
* Plump by Hole
* The Cutter by Echo & the Bunnymen
* Down by the Water by PJ Harvey
* God by Tori Amos
* Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath
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