How do we believe?
We choose to believe.
It is immaterial whatever the designated entity is. All is allegorical. All is the work of the spirit of god, which is not the work of god, or any Lord, but of the spirit of things inherited by us through the ages.
The leavings of faith are coordinates discovered and established over many generations, for us to orientate ourselves and our interpretation of the world upon.
The statement, ‘god is dead’, is a joke. Of course he isn’t dead, he just went into hiding.
“Truth does not come,
Into the world without robes;
It enters through words and pictures.”
“So, there is rebirth
And an image of rebirth.
We are born again through the image of resurrection.
There was no resurrection. We were given the idea of resurrection by its created image.”
***
We have always been of the image. This is our only way to god and the manna we invented. The image of rebirth is ours but not rebirth itself, which belongs to gods and the dead. Everything in our world is images. Because humans are the image makers, the iconographers, the reflectors of the world’s own holy light.
How can we have come to be here still, after so many contortions and generations, contemplating what on earth has happened – what on earth is happening? Because none of it, still, makes any sense — it is fantastic. A rock, you say, in infinite space? What is that? The same numbers of people then and now ask these same questions and will forever. There will never be an answer. The same mystical proportions of questioners and ignorants, souls of the strange ratio.
But modern god was still the work of men and women who abstained from sex and through the accumulation of lust saw visions, changed history and invented reality. Think what they could have done with cocaine.
For example, the story of the Potato Men: who, after a surfeit of potatoes, slept, and did dream, and in their dreams beheld pototatoeish visions, inducing them to build a civilisation based, in many intangible ways, on said potatoes. Imago potato. What fine potatoeish proportions! And this, said the potato men, is a lot like the men to come many years from now, fed on a diet not of potato the life giver but all manner of mixed and confused things, and they too shall create and become these mixed and confused things. For you build what you eat. If you eat shit, hyper processed food and are estranged from the earth from whence it came, then you will build shit, hyper processed things estranged from the earth. Such as our glorious skycrapers: the inverted glass sphincters of capital.
“The Supreme Perfection!
We can only meet
You in silence:
The unspeakable, unsayable,
Inscrutable, unknowable.”
So this is god.
He is (or they are) everything we do not know and cannot explain. For several people this has been everything. True wisdom acknowledges that we know little; little of what moves things. So therefore if god is what we do not know and never will, they become The All (because that is what his summoner sees is the province of what he does not understand).
All this explanation explains nothing. The icons are there and so is the absurdity. Our icons never match our ideal, such that eventually we turned away from them into art, and then when that failed to explain the universe, into drugs and hedonism – seeking after the ecstatic divine. This is an explanation of a human process. Human processes are interesting to humans. But to the inhuman or the godly they are not.
What Baudrillard has described is a type of sliding societal apocalypse, exacerbated by the fact we do not have a god any more to bring it about and perform the last judgment. An apocalyptic state, the apocalypse of second order production, of rentier capitalism sustained by zombie ideologies that refuse to die, shielded by a world of fascinating images and image worlds; of deterrence, twinned with a peace-spouting criminality (the American world policeman); an obese, obscene and hegemonic whole-world-processing-system at work. This system, as he describes it, has created a copy of the world – the digital, the image world, the world of the hyperreal – which said world is now going to be primarily concerned with ‘updating’, itself, with no scheduled end in sight. This copy is the bureaucratic, simulatory, virtual reality we see achieved in things like trans-humanism, in our cloned world and work, and the Californian techno fetishist movement that has colonised the human interface. (A cult so childishly naive it would be quaint were it not so vicious and dangerous.) It is the endless reproduction of shapes and forms through technology, which was intended as a perfect, efficient, bureaucratic paradise. And as an infantile projection of the world’s forms, it is analogous to heaven. Unfortunately for its creators and for the rest of us in the ‘real’ world its creation meant the old human model and idea, and the idea of the natural world it is supposed to inhabit, has been cast in the figure of hell, or at least purgatory. The digital is disgusted by the physical, the earthly. It casts a spell to charm us away from the world and into the abstractions of our whirring, schizophrenic minds. And in this way it defeats reality with hyperreality. We can’t say when it was achieved, but we quite suddenly and simply left reality and entered this apocalyptic stage, with the virtual heaven above operating in ‘the cloud’, and its purgatory below supporting it as managers of the machine system. It therefore looks, quite ingeniously, like we have an apocalypse on our hands without a god or a final eschaton to look forward to. An apocalypse without a scheduled end date in which we are forced to endure the state of unending real time present-ness of servitude, banality, operational redundancy in our service economies, and then extreme technological violence driven by the algorithm on the periphery of our geopolitical mind map (the Gazas of the world). In perpetuity. So, if hell has been achieved and god abolished with no remedy besides a few disappearing philosophical concepts (the event.., err, la revolution..? Err, that’s it? Rapidly fading memories) then are we to simply endure it all forever? Quite possibly, until some definitive violence occurs. But the apocalypse and the principle of permanent crisis tempered by perpetually delayed end-time has always been delicious. It is one of our most closely held sexual fantasies: the grand mort.
Or, we return to the idea that god has not died but merely gone into hiding.
“God has changed his skin again
They live now in secularism
Atheism and the totality of all this recently freed liberality,
condoning everything
allowing nothing.”
“God was not the idea of a transcendent creator
But a figure, a form, an archetype in the human psyche
Not a character and a personality
But a necessary relation we all have.”
God did not die, they simply took another form. This was their expedient genius.
***
We have been too limited in our conception of god in the transcendent form. Because at some point we, as the inheritors of a fading Christian metaphysic, forgot that it has always been the province and privilege of gods to change their shape, to assume new forms. An ancient right and rite. Gods have traditionally done this for far longer than the last age of ‘his’ conception, in which it was decided for some reason that ‘he’ be immortal, invisible and total, utterly changeless: Beyond transformation. Boring!
But Gods are always being born. They change shape with their people, they match their summoners and believers: so during the age of total systems we had a total god. It took a long time for this to become clear. He has transfigured, alongside our transfiguration to the age of appearances, into one who plays very well with appearances. Hence his disappearance. (We can say that god was certainly too cunning to suffer defeat at the hands of his subjects, but certainly had to up his game under onslaught from the Nietzsches of this world – from us via Nietzsche – and from our technology, which dispelled many of his illusions).
The pronunciation ‘god is dead’ is naive. In fact, it’s ridiculous. What a ludicrous statement. Oh, the arrogance of syphilitic germans.
Gods, as figures, cannot die, their place is always taken in the circle of exchange. Apparently energy cannot die but is recycled and expressed some other way. If it is possible for energy to do this then we must be willing to permit the possibility of god performing the same sleight of hand.
So we as inheritors of this crumbling, statist, bureaucratic, technocratic (generally cratic) system look back at it and see that at some point during it god was said to have died. But this is because a cratic system of totality took god’s old place as a transcendent, guiding, divinatory figure, an essential figure in our repertoire of needs.
Time was, god was where the buck stopped, where the final answer was supplied. No other viable reason? God’s will. Now it is the system who supplies the answer, and it is just as inadequate an answer as the one god gave. Why did the system do this? It was the system’s will. It was the market’s will. It was the final will of the combination of capital factors.
We simply must know that we are moving in the right direction – and we don’t need psychology to tell us this – we have always had need of someone to tell us we were, on behalf of the invincible figure at whom the metaphysical buck stopped. The uncaused cause, the taker of the accursed share, the unanswerable answerer. It didn’t matter who it was so long as they said it and said it in all good faith. To think journalism and the cult of information under secularism, fully licensed as the priests and bishops once were, could placate and sustain that eternal and omnivorous appetite is also naive. It simply doesn’t, we all know this, and we all secretly suspect the ambivalence of the information network.
Perhaps we can say that Jesus died, or his legacy in the catholic tradition, which recently fell from favour, died (again), but we cannot say that the total idea of god died when the age of holy empires fell.
***
There is a peculiar condensing that is described by the ease with which we say, ‘god died, he was replaced by men. And about time!’
What we mean when we say this is that god died and was replaced – that is, in the tradition of deity succession, was killed and supplanted – by secular technological orders of hegemony and representation that no longer needed him. (The same way Zeus supplanted Cronos.) But this is to make a categorical error, because only our dominant system, in whose image we have been thinking (inevitably, and particularly since it established ‘mass’ education) these last centuries, and which became profoundly total and immobile in form (though this totality itself comes from constant change and adaptation) only this could characterise its predecessor in such unimaginative terms, such reduced, total, frozen terms. A System is total, so it thinks the ideology it took over from was total too. History always thinks itself in two directions. We remake the past just as it remakes us. Only a profoundly human centric system bounded by the integrism of a metaphysic of mortal, temporal, human lineaments could say a god “died”. Dying is what men do. Of course he – modern man – should begin to conceive that god “died” (and went where? heaven?): these are ‘manly’ terms after all. “Yes,” we say, “god died and we held a minute’s silence.” Human, all too human… But to think that gods can die is absurd, borne out of a very particular idea of what a god is or can do, or even should do. They are an imaginative projection of our psychic requirement for familial, ethical and poetic guidance and, more importantly, because politically, the cornerstone of our legal juridical systems. Social systems were founded or managed – since the invention of city states – by supremely violent and occasionally benificent monarch-gods in the first instance who bequeathed their increasingly irreligious successors a system of governance first and religious storytelling second.
The many gods of the world, past and present, never merely ‘died’, gave up the ghost when men got bored of them. They transformed into different forms. Why? Because gods serve a purpose, and a dead god serves nothing and no one. In the past societies always had need of god, so they swapped their god for another, usually by beheading the priest who spoke for them (for predicting the weather incorrectly, presumably). To think even that gods could not exist at all is very recent indeed. They simply have, and to the peasants who believed in them (there have after all only ever been peasants on earth, besides a few lunatics who called themselves kings) it was obvious. Why bother changing that – gods serve an excellent purpose, they take away the burden of responsibility from the follies of men!
It was a naive, inhibited form of god that enabled us to say he kicked the bucket. He was inhibited by ‘his’ totality, his ridiculous power and his immortality and invincibility and omniscience etc (even, dare we say, his gender: men invent men-gods; totalitarian men invent totalitarian men-gods…) In short, He became too big for His boots. And he couldn’t survive with such a technologically enabled people – to whom he’d provided the stimulus to invent technology itself in the first place! And so in our renunciation of him we clipped his wings, forcing him to find another form. Of course he was a little too quick for us and did such a good job we couldn’t see him, his camouflage was so excellent. But he is becoming visible again, even in the belly of so called atheism, even in the belly of secularism. Especially in these. We are seeing that he perhaps merely assumed a greater and more ingenious form, and no doubt more ‘evil’ too, because taking the form of the system of hegemonic power and money itself.
Or rather, the form of the current figure that hovers over all of us and which we believe decides human affairs, or which we consent to believe decides human affairs. All in lieu of any real and binding regulatory quantity. Is it the market? Is it politics, is it logic, science, etc? No doubt a combination. It is the State of Things itself: it has no name. But god is always ready for these with a more ingenious bag of tricks. He allowed all these to step into his position as the god figure, the one who you cannot give back to except by sacrifice. In our case the sacrifice is not of blood, but the invisible interminable banality and servitude of our own lives engaged in processes of pure, operational absurdity. The pandemic showed us all that there is a bedrock of ‘key work’ and workers upon which our social survival depends. Beyond, below and above this is a necessary sacrifice of usually more profitable, or completely dejected and penniless, time and attention. But so much of it is wasted time, bullshit jobs. A constant sacrifice, the sacrifice of consenting and creating this system everyday, contributing towards it with every breath and gesture.
And we derive very little from this sacrifice, and we are only dimly aware of it, and our awareness becomes sublimated into all the forms of hate and negation we see in society, which Baudrillard has described as the response of silent majorities to refute that which binds them. Even, tragically, to spite their own face, in spiting the beautiful face of The Other.
God allowed secular hegemony to take his place, to take the heat for a while. A deft manoeuvre, because he must have known people would eventually tire of hegemony and kill it, in time honoured tradition… and who would be waiting at the end but god himself?
Secular hegemony took god’s place as ultimate arbiter. And it has the cheek to not even allow its own subjects to call it god! Though they must treat it as god all the same… What more ingenious way to change your skin than into the skin of your own enemy and successor? No better disguise has ever been imagined.
But, to suppose all this is true is to require a belief in god and the system. But we know both are a ruse. So again we might venture a third hypothesis:
We shall have to discover living gods among us again if we are to escape hegemony. (And then no doubt, as with Jesus, set about killing them as quickly as possible…)
At the most we might have humbled god, forcing him to chase a new shadow, but we didn’t kill him. That work is still to come (again) (and again) (probably forever).
We are scarred with the memory of god. We cannot eliminate his image and appeal. To do so would be a mistake. But not to try to do so – try to blot out our worship, our scarring, to forget our memory at all – with gods like ours – is a serious piece of madness too. We are cursed by our pre-vision, our precession of god.
The thing is to invent new gods.
Nineham’s commentary of St Mark outlines the clear, cleaned process of prophetic fulfilment that Jesus
Nazareth and John Baptist took to inaugurate the Christian cult. Like Moses with his transubstantiatory stick, and old Abe before him, Jesus could heal and perform tricks – whether of mind, spirit or deed, it doesn’t matter. His deep learning of philosophy and ethics, and the overwhelming confidence – the ultimate self possession: “I am the living god” – which he decided one day to embody gave him the necessary charisma and credibility to inspire – to compel – others to do his bidding. To guide others of his day of their own, as yet undiscovered, best interests.
The narrative of Jesus’ mission, life, and times, outlines a necessary sequence of travel and activity that Jesus (and Joseph, and others) were required to meet, in alignment with the course of a Christ origin myth, or re-origination myth. Jesus, John, and their motley cru, duly visited all the places of prophetic delineation – the geo-spiritual coordinates of a well-fulfilled prophesy – to give themselves authority and the necessary genealogy required for such an undertaking as proclaiming a Self-as-God. As a living god no less, and fulfilment of Tradition, establishing a new Kingdom, Temple and Covenant with God. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss… but with a generous sprinkling of inclusivity, plurality, and true wisdom.
Or, the evangelists retroengineered it to be so. Either way the point is Jesus had to conform to the prophetic coda outlined by Isaiah, Daniel, Jacob, and their ilk, in order to appropriately manifest as the reincarnation of prior spiritual leaders in that particular tradition.
Again: deity succession. Zeus from the thigh of Cronos. Christ from the thigh of Judaism.
Now, it was John Baptist, on his diet of locusts and honey, who invented that technical device – the ‘process’ and mechanism – for spiritual liberation, transfiguration and release from life’s troubles in the present, and the snares of the past: preaching a gospel of Baptism for the Remission of Sins.
A device that enabled people to move forward from past sins, or griefs, or inherited woes, freely, and in peace, conforming to a new thought system that promised them eternal life and, more importantly, enabled them to forgive psychic pangs and anguishes that render life unlivable. They offered the succour of alignment with the divine, and with the divine inside.
Through forgiveness and spiritual transfiguration we could recentre and re-align ourselves with the workings of the spirit, the divine, the unknowable, that resides inside all living beings.
Through this boon to humanity, and signal achievement of that cult (whether it was in practice before, or not, nonetheless, Jesus and John took it up and ran with it in a very serious way) they established the means and mechanism to effectively convert-capture other lost weary souls on life’s journey, and more importantly, enabled their apostles and acolytes to do the same on a much larger scale, at first incrementally (cf the Epistolary correspondence) then in increasing factors, particularly since Constantine and the Roman empire succumbed; whereupon, the necessary comingling of a nascent church with a world spanning empire was achieved, sufficient to enable the lasting survival of said church, and all its mutant variations (and their preposterous, wonderful squabbles of the past thousand years) after. (Squabbles, which included, amongst others: whether god was tripartite or otherwise, whether Mary or the other Mary were chaste, whether Jesus was left footed or right footed, and whether John Baptist was a solid centre forward, or indeed a false nine…)
Call it the Conspiracy of Divinity. The mechanism by which Jesus and John colluded to invent a new god, a living god this time round, and a fulfilment of all the dreaded sexual dreams of their ancestors. Again, extremely capable men, working within their means, and the means available to them of their time, to disseminate revolutionary ideas into the discourse and propel a political enterprise.
The secret: it’s all just politics. All the rest is propaganda.
By which we mean, the enterprise of faith is always politics: coalitions of the willing to enact necessary change on the path of a group in a struggle with other groups to greater inner and outer peace, and hopefully, survival (if not prosperity).
Brilliant propaganda; propaganda of great beauty, wisdom, and piercing insight into the fundamental ethical and spiritual motions of human existence.
But, nonetheless, a motivating story necessary to compel belief. And through belief, human action.
God, the Spirit, the Word, the Kingdom, the Covenant: these refer more pertinently to the unknowable object(s) of which we know not. Not truly. For we know nothing truly, except ourselves, and even then, thru a glass darkly, as the saying goes.
The God, Spirit, Messiah, the Word – whatever – these are simply cyphers, coordinates, the invisible grey matter of un/conscious existence. And all images still. Reflections, concepts, because not experienced literally (except in literature). If they are experienced at all, they are believed.
Believed into Being. A quintessential feature of the human condition, and our shared history.
And in doing so, the Prophets accessed the divine inside, channelled it, and bequeathed it to humanity as a gift.
***
One core truth and teaching of the bible and of Jesus the so-called living god, is: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”
So, it’s time we listened to the wisdom of the ages carried down through these transmissions from the past.
Therefore, politically speaking: have faith, in god, in self, in truth, in calling, in being called. The lesson of the bible is Belief itself.
Believe. And choose to believe.
Believe in what? In gods, phantoms, miracles?
No.
Believe in yourselves, dammit.
***
Let us turn then to the end times, briefly.
The Times are always Ending – for those who are alive. Eschatology is merely another tool of political science.
Nineham: “Apocalypticism was a means of sustaining hope and perseverance among an oppressed people during periods when direct reference to oppressors and their approaching downfall was dangerous or impossible…
“Despite the highly coloured, often obscure, imagery of these [prophetic] visions, the reader could always see in them a picture of contemporary or impending events, and the drift of the visions was to encourage him by showing that, however black things might look, they were in fact fully under the control of god, who would shortly, dramatically, vindicate himself and his faithful servants…
“The effect of the visions was enhanced by the fact that they were almost always attributed to some great religious figure of the previous epoch…
“Thus making it clear that contemporary disasters, so far from being out of god’s control, had been foreseen and foretold by him many years previously.”
… To aid the feeling that the fulfilment of prophesy was so signally revealed that subsequent salvation would receive like fulfilment.
And this from a Christian theologian, mind…
…
The Messiah is a human invention. A wish fulfilment. A political expediency and tool in cultish times to coalesce and compel a collective into disciplined action, observation, and preparation.
The Times are always ending, then. And currently there are a bunch of very dangerous, very evangelical people gripping the world, that are demanding a reckoning, and inaugurating a technological reproduction, of their own preferred End Time.
Ironic. Because end times do not, will not, refuse to, come. They were always just a device to compel belief and human action. They are willed into being by subgroups of peoples to explain their own homicidal tendencies, or their own oppression, or who are prepared to manufacture a technological reproduction of their own political demise on an apocalyptic scale. Using the apocalypse as a cypher to inaugurate it. To believe it into being
***
We have been shown countless times that faiths, cults and religions are constructed business and idea systems that are founded by people after their particular Sage came and changed the world. Prophet, warrior, whatever, they were current to their times and the concerns of their times – and end times.
And, without wishing to sound churlish, should probably as a general rule of thumb, be put to bed the generation after the generation in which the figure emerged. That is, after the children of the people who encountered or experienced the teachings from the prophet-seer, died, who had opportunity to hear of their miraculous – that is, groundbreaking and dangerous – deeds and teachings first hand. Because by the time the Second Generation die out the living memory of the experience of the First is very hard to capture and transmute through either verbal or written discourse – though the evangelists and others were extraordinarily successful in using their knowledge of narrative form to construct a compelling narratology that enabled Jesus’ particular doings and ideas to disseminate and linger for a very long time after his passing.
The reason why is that, in typological terms, the First Generation were privileged to experience, roughly speaking:
A Teaching Venture (and some associated miracles)… And having been sufficiently Inspired (divinely or
otherwise), planned and delivered,
A Writing Venture… (the collation of the gospels by the evangelists, and this exercise has been repeated consistently
every time a new theology has emerged) that was followed by an
Apostolic-Conversion Venture, for many years, with great energy and application by said apostolic converters, and
thence, to a,
Church Founding venture.
And, finally, to a series of other Feats and Ventures – in the time honoured Storytelling Tradition – that laboured on for a while, as their followers and successors interpreted their law/lore and renewed it for their own subsequent times.
Note: this doesn’t discount the validity of the Teachings, the manifest divinity of the Prophets, and the achievements of the subsequent schools and generations. We all admire their great works. But the sand of the hourglass always runs away from the epoch in which the deity was visited or embodied on earth. The deity figure, who, himself, themself, did not, could not, have performed the supernatural feats of natural law-breaking described in these great works of literature and men.
Why? Because those feats themselves were what the human mind, and storytelling instinct, required to aid belief. We stiff necked people demand sufficiently worthy vehicles of inspiration to pledge our support, our will, our faith, to Just Causes. Miracles therefore are a post-facto requirement to enable us to give ourselves permission to consent and back a spiritual figuration, and enterprise. To the confused locals, hearing of Jesus’ great exorcisms and healings, that were mystified by the presence of divinity, or the appearance of divinity through inspired intellectual teaching that formed Jesus’ mission – it certainly aided Belief when they were reliably informed that he had recently made a blind man see, and a deaf man hear, or resurrected the dead. And to those who came before, and after, the self possessed teachings of other divinatory figures were always aided by reports of the supernatural. The Miracle is a generous admission, and invitation, to a necessary commitment on the part of the disbelieving or doubting – the Un Believer: you. More pertinently, miracles are required for the people of the second generation and those who come after, who never met the deity figure themself, who have far less to go on to trust the apostles. They are just a belief device. A snare. A trap. A ruse.
Miracles are a required narrative object to pledge our belief in The/A System.
A wonderful invention of self manifestation. Jesus and the Abrahamics, in performing their miracles, in moving their mountains, and feeding their five thousands, prove not their godliness, but prove the types of stories that compelled faith and compliance within different generations of jews and gentiles – thousands of years ago. And, somehow, even, up to the present time. They illustrate the devices necessary for the pledging of human faith across time. In another epoch, Jesus might have single handedly beaten the Chicago Bulls in a game of basketball, snatching the ball from Michael Jordan midair and ally-ooping himself, backwards, upside down. But he didn’t, sadly. Because he couldn’t. We must be willing to admit, after all this time, that Michael Jordan was better than Jesus at basketball…
Miracles are credibility machines dressed in the robes of the superman. The Americans went on to secularise the phenomenon for adolescents. And rightly so: we all love a caped crusader waving a magic wand. Another tool in the shifting sands of our chosen Belief.
It is we who always, always, write the books.
Most instructive books. Take note of them. The work of the law and the lore is just human jurisprudence. Jurisprudence, bed time stories, and propaganda. To whit: first, we need the regulatory framework. Second, we need to go to sleep with someone droning on in the background. And third, we need super thought systems to remind us, eternally, that it’s all going to be okay.
Even though it isn’t. (Death.)
Despite the fact that it is. (Release.)
***
Traditionally, kings founded city states and kingdoms, and politics followed, was required to follow, in order to continue to compel cohesive cohabitation. Over time, and presumably after a prolonged period of prosperity, faith systems emerged in the king’s name and image. If the king did well and was intelligent, they gathered their laws and suggestions for how to live a good life into a consolidated ideology that was passed down to subsequent generations.
New foundings, eras, synods, epochs, cultural windows followed, in which we subjects renewed our pledges to the founder or its mutated articulations, and completed other good deeds. Through this, our foundings lasted longer, amongst Hobbesian forces and fears – forces and fears that gobble at and gobble up followers – and so on, in a process of missionary capture and counter capture till the Empire(s) evolved, inflated, then degraded, and finally, fell. Or sank into another successor system.
And beyond that, as we have seen through history, super thought systems successfully detach and float freely, disseminating and proliferating in mutant strains. Today, in a secular market hegemony, our System picks up and dispenses super thought systems at its discretion (such as Christian Zionism) to serve its particular end. Which looks currently like eternal survival twinned with eternal collapse. And which materially boils down to resource capture for increasingly autocratic nation states.
And yet, we all know this systemless system of World Market Hegemony is a complete ruse, having no empirical vision, or agitating force, or ideological base, in listless drift, in search of a need it can’t acknowledge.
The universe, and we, are unknowable. And that is the only proof we require that God exists. We must therefore choose to believe God into being, and in doing so, serve new, better, political enterprises.
***
Let us pause for a moment and be crystal clear about the era in which we are entering:
The zombie theocratic powers return (if they ever left us), without end, fulfilling their own prophetic end-timeism: of zeolotry and bloodshed, enacting and exorcising their curse upon the weaker nations of the world. And, to be specific, on brown bodies.
Brown bodies being destroyed, in myriad forms. This is the white endgame in lieu of any other motivating principle. Look around. Look ‘online’. There is a lot of evidence for this.
In the absence of a motivating principle or ideology history shows the desperate revert to racial supremacy. Enforcing their will with purpose, expertise and mission. This latest incarnation is just another sordid union: of christian evangelist techno fetishism with fascism in the ‘holy’ land.
Race war is the clearest example of a weak mind (cf Naziism). It is the lowest common denominator of all thought systems. The reversion to the singular, the total, and thereby, the totalitarian, is simply the manifestation of fear of selfhood multiplied into an equation it can only resolve by mutual suicide. I murder you, terrifying Other, and in doing so, I kill myself, which is my real, secret preference, because I cannot bear the state of fear I have been born into, and am myself birthing, in mortal apprehension of the vagaries of reality. Particularly so, at the top of the human status chain, where white peoples have operated since at least the last crusades invented or properly inaugurated the disease-concept of spiritual Supremacy itself. Supremacy which is the opposite of the innate (and more properly divine) instinct of Submission, which is the existential concept of letting go, and ‘letting god’, or nature, or whatever, run its course, rather than trying to control everything, which is our – or the masculine’s – usual default. Submission as an idea was not given to us by a god, but invented by men to help us live better, in what is hopefully becoming a familiar pattern of behaviour.
And also, bear in mind, the Crusades were just a piece of ‘divinely’ inspired – that is, politically expedient – theft and piracy, by men, kings, and their drunken, despoiled baronetcy (and no doubt, inevitably, the Masons) who sought to literalise and convert their own confusion, spiritual wanderlust, lust for adventure, white supremacy, and intellectual poverty into a psycho-dynamic enterprise: the capture-conversion of ‘holy’ relics – sticks, hair, cloths and shrouds, crosses, shields, cups, armaments (grenades? Nice invention!), etcetera etcetera,- and in capturing these literalised forms of their metaphorical ideas, turn imagination into a bloody reality. A sordid enterprise. Crusades are about affirming a particular, ideological, social and systemic set of fears (and their associated lusts and dreams), and believing them into being to avoid our own problems at home. And any shyster will sell you a piece of old rope that resembles the slingshot of David, King of Kings, or a Turin Shroud that wiped the face of Jesus on his trudge to Golgotha, or Abraham’s withered foreskin (such things are highly, highly venerated – secular people need to recognise and appreciate this). Black marketeers prey on the desperate, and a crusading Knight Templar, the scion of desperation himself, would be quite the solid ‘mark’. Crusades are a reality we make manifest, will into being, believe into being, by going and killing some people in the place where all the holy relics are said to remain. ‘Look, we brought back the holy cup, mother. Aren’t we brave.’
To clarify: consider the possibility of the ‘Holy Land’ being in the South Pole (where it probably belongs). Would Christians have flocked there in their millions? No. Of course not. Napoleon tried to invade Russia once, and failed, because it was too cold. The Holy Land is warm and accessible. It has a multitude of religious peoples who have settled in it and invested it with meaning over generations. It is a cypher. It is ‘Holy’ because of the tradition of men’s adoration of mystical mountains and perfect places. Because we need to invent places that are the most perfect. Where miracles can indeed occur. That is why Jesus chose to visit the holy places in the holy land, that had been helpfully outlined to him by previous seer prophets (Isiaiah and so on) who delineated the coordinates of a future divine visitation.
And it makes sense. In the morning, Mount Sinai, and Olympus, Table Mountain – all mountains near dynamic, free thinking peoples – are shrouded in a very mystical looking fog. This gives men
ideas…
From well before Plato, and particularly since him, men project a ‘platonic’ version of the real world in image, in their minds, to create a story they tell themselves, and others, to explain, and make meaning of, the said mystical looking fog. In a like manner, holy places are a requirement of the human mind in a genealogical and philosophical process for the concept of holiness and its fulfilment. We require, and invent, a place of ‘holiness’ through time in which we give ourselves permission for oddballs to come along and fulfill prophetic teaching in mystic traditions. We do this because our political systems are usually insufficient to the political ideas that emerge in the time in which we are alive. For example, feudalism is a preposterous and pernicious political system, so, some bright soul comes along and says, ‘we must restrain the power of the sovereign. I know, because I have seen it in a vision. This vision came to me from a higher authority of some description you are familiar with, who supersedes the sovereign’. Jesus not only lived under a foreign, Roman occupation, he also lived in a time where the prevailing religious thought system was prohibitive (the Pharisees). So he talked about liberty, charity, turning the other cheek against all odds, etc., all of which was true and therefore heretical in that time. And he used god, faith, his own ‘divinity’ as a vehicle to disseminate said revolutionary ideas into the political thought system of his time.
… Absolute heresy…
Holy lands are just Platonic versions of the dirty and disease ridden cities in which we humans have lived for the last however many thousand years. They are a better version of the ones we inhabit, and the locus for the historical investment of human space with human meanings through time. We simply must have a holy place: the Holiest of Holies… But these are just black boxes (cf the Hajj). Spaces that in themselves are void of content or meaning: if you ever go in you will notice it’s just an empty room. They are meaningful because we need to feel meaningful about something. So over time meanings accrue and enough people visit, come together to observe and witness something important, bearing witness, if nothing else, to our collective need for importance itself. Until suddenly, we’re all walking around it in a circle. And are all the better for it: we have something to pray to, and now the box has historical invested meaning and significance – people have died to be here – and I can see that everyone else here is praying and deriving meaning from the black box. Lo and behold: we’ve invented meaning.
We are much less inclined to prophesise holy and perfect cities now, or recently, because thanks to medicine, public sanitation and hygiene, we have less need of them.
Despite the fact we clearly really need a god right now to save us from some errant and misguided peoples currently jeapardising our tenuous ‘international rules based order’.
***
Errant, misguided, idiots. Useful ones too. And, trapped within the confines of their prophetic tradition and its essentialist mutations, the mind traps that make sense to those who have been properly inducted and initiated into said traditions. As such, they believe they mean well. And we must forgive them for it. Whilst also taking appropriate action to prevent them from practising their errancy, on a global scale. Tragically, it takes dangerous people to raise the stakes exponentially to shake us out of our collective tendency to avoid our problems until it gets very, very, very bad. And then, we act. Or, we sink.
They have already gone too far. Indeed, they will never tire of reminding us of it – the continual crowing of the hollow men. America has allied itself with crackpots, wingnuts, and is itself a demented state led by a demented pervert. The beast waxes and wanes. But the beast is entrenched. And it has secured, and will continue to secure, some of the most useful idiots history appears capable of producing. Manly history produces men in its image, and a lot of our imagery of the past few hundred years has been tawdry messianic drivel, and complacent, wishful thinking. The diet of desperate
minds. And we have two bleak inheritances that conspire against clear thinking: the collapse of 19th century empires built on and sustained by spurious notions of racial purity (respawning out of prior empires and slave trades, all the way back to the Crusades, and beyond); and, a Holocaust. The horrors of the holocaust inspired its subsequent generations, following the near destruction of their ancestry, to get organised, and weaponise their fear and shared experience of total trauma in a relentless political process of self affirmation, to ensure it never happened again. It has subsequently morphed into an affirmation of white supremacy using religious devices and cyphers to make sense to itself. You can’t commit horrors without a firm, and usually messianic, undergirding belief system.
And so the game continues, spiralling, into new visions of autocracy.
Notable people have started talking about the end of the so called rules based order. No doubt true. But more pertinent, historically speaking, we are more likely simply re-entering the King / Hero / Nation builder phase of the thought system cycle again, if we ever left it.
And, either we stand by, and let these king-gods (your Putins, your Trumps, the usual brutes) become gods in their own time, just as Stalin did… And let dementia spiral to our mutually assured distraction, and then destruction.
Or we restart the quest for human belief and mission.
Because the extremists in the zombie ones are coming for you. The 5000 year, the 2000 year, the 1300 year ones, the – etcetera, decreasing in proportion until a big bang at year Zero, whenever that is determined to be by the founders of our new orders and faiths, whatever they may be, whenever those people choose to take that necessary leap of faith. The same leap of faith all our beloved Fulfillers took when they declared themselves gods, or fulfilments of gods, in a process that dates back to the darkest ages.
New gods and new faiths, can always burst into World like gas particles out into the vacuum of our ideological void. Much like our Honourable Big Bang…
(And again, we see how this last proposition conforms to a prior formulation. In this case, the scientific: because we as humans cannot not find precedent upon which to overlay our solutions. These are the products of a sense making mind after all…. All our words and ideas are just a rubix cube that makes sense to and within itself. As a bunch of ape resembling humanoids running around in terrible confusion on the face of a large, atmospheric rock, clinging to phantasmatic projections of our familial archetypal relations whose soundings make sense exclusively to us – not to anyone or anything else other than us – other things who do not, will not, cannot, speak our language, because our language is a thing we invented to get more food and have more sex, amongst other things…
… Whether or not we should release new gods into the system, remains unknown. We can only ask for god’s mercy at the advent. And we must leave this to the agitators, and the subsequent squabblers.
Indeed, knowing the rapaciousness of the human consciousness, it’s almost certainly a terrible idea;
BUT
But if we do… If some brave souls heed their own particular call…
Then we must hope that it will be accompanied by an invocation not to harm each other; to love above all, and protect our right to exist and to be plural. To multiply just governance with teachings of virtue, respect and tolerance.
And, crucially, to commit to teaching and celebrating and revering (without violent fear or favour, or prohibitionism, in all its many forms) the Teachings of the combined family of gods, arrayed before us throughout the centuries, each in their great books, and in their glorious achievements and traditions: our great Pantheon of deities and all their beautiful words and stories. Which are, it should be reiterated, only the accumulation of all human wisdom throughout the ages.
Separate the doctrinal mania and rule making and breaking of faith traditions from the spiritual, poetic resonance these systems have inaugurated – the boundless possibilities of love they have expressed and consolidated as a gift to the children of the future throughout time. All this has been the true human intuition of accessing and manifesting our own innate emotional resonance and alignment with our true selves and callings, and has been the inauguration of greater union with ourselves through a process of self and other Belief.
***
Nonetheless, sadly, again: there are no Messiahs. And if they come, which they won’t, until they do, they’ll inevitably be “a very naughty boy!”
Or Girl.
To whit: if we are to genuinely consider inaugurating a new world order, shrugging off the yoke of the zombie religions (and particularly the rabid Christian Zionists currently embarked on roughly their twenty first Crusade – if you count the ‘Western’ interventions since Kuwait, following on from the first fourteen Crusades proper…) who are rapidly spiralling in shrinking vortices within and around ‘The Holy Land’ (again, ‘holy land’; just another cypher: we need a place to be designated ‘Holy’, and that is why our next faiths simply must come from different geographical ancestral prophetic centres, if possible…) to our mutually assured destruction; if we are to inaugurate a different, more plural, more inclusive, world order, in which all gods are created equal before some somehow non-gnostic anti-god (i.e. a new formulation), then, should the Messiah of that Order not be a Woman?
Gentlemen, we have had Patriarchy now for going on ten thousand years…!
And, in time-honoured fashion, and despite some signal successes (medicine, the printing press, some excellent paintings, etc.), do continue to rather bugger it, this business of world, male and female administration.
Please. Therefore. Let it be a woman.
And thence, to Matriarchy.
What else have we got?
***
Remember: Gods are discovered by men. Not the other way around.
Remember: It was always this way. This is The Way.
Remember: John Baptist was a Signpost and Jesus Nazareth was a Politician.
Remember: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Castro: Prophet-Seer-Teacher-Healer-Magician-Warrior-King-Politicians.
Consolidators of the Wisdom of the Ages: Love, Submission, Justice, Truth, Forgiveness: Daoist Warriors of The Way.
Remember: More or less bloodthirsty or peaceful precepts. More or less hectoring, more or less liberating, haditha.
Remember: Their cults were forged in blood. Their deeds and teachings were consolidated by institutions. Institutions take decades, diets, decrees, creeds, bulls, and millenia of consolidation and mutation, and control. All the thousand localised contortions that followed, were simply time and blood well wasted.
Remember: All the Abrahamics were, to a man, heretics.
***
Oh God, deliver us from politicians.
God, deliver us true politicians.
Oh God, deliver us from evil.
God deliver us heresy again.
And always, always remember ~ ~ ~ The Dao ~ ~ ~.
***
So instead, we have a revision of Pascal’s wager:
Believe not in god, odds on, so that you may enter heaven at the point of death, and receive eternal life.
But instead Believe that men and women might be living gods, and can be if they so choose (angels at the very least), so that they might build a heaven here, on earth, within the only life we know exists.
Remember to remember to Believe.
You are gods, children, for you are of the Company of Men, who are the ones responsible for god, and not the other way around. The only god on earth is yourself, through your relation with the world… There is no god but you. There is no creature on earth that exists outside of you, except as objects, which you also are. No images, no icons, just things, and all running around pretending to look busy.
Change your belief. Believe in the willing of god, yourself, you divine model for gods; believe that the world is what is made of it, and it is better to be a god and an angel in a living kingdom of heaven than a slave to a godless world..
“Absolute heresy!”
“At last!”
******
Paris, 10 March 2026
Squidditas 