Love, and Other Tools of the Devil

Today, I intended to finish my first blog post in a very long while so that I could post it on Zombie Jesus Day. But this afternoon, I got home from school and felt inspired to change my Facebook profile pic to what's basically a token symbol of solidarity with people oppressed on way more visible axes than I've ever been. I felt like I should hammer out a quick, pithy paragraph about how my wonky, left-wing, left-hand-path parody religion is predisposed toward sexual freedom--maybe work in some silly and deliberately counterproductive slogan like "Satan supports diversity!" or somesuch. Five hours later, I had this.

Prometheus Lucifer is an imaginary being, an ideal to which I, as an Antagonistic Satanist, aspire in all aspects of my life. He has no desires or demands beyond the concepts she embodies. It has no dogma beyond the First and Only Truth--that all that is sacred must burn. As such, it has no capacity for hate--only the boundless, limitless, unconditional love that comes naturally to imaginary friends and abstracted principles. She has no biases, no prejudices--only the enlightened altruism that it inculcates in the minds of any who truly give themselves over to him.

In short, Satan loves you. Yes, comrade, you! Personally! It doesn't care who you are or who you love--because love itself is as much an expression of the Flame of Truth as hate is a manifestation of Deus Pater. Because who could understand you perfectly and not love you? Who could ever hate somebody as awesome as you if they had a clue how amazing you are on the inside?

Prometheus gave you knowledge and insight so you could explore the world--but also so you could see yourself as you truly are. Lucifer gave you will and passion so you could change the world--but also so you could reach out to others, to complete them by completing yourself. That light, that heat, that flame, is the heart of true, perfected love--the balance between knowledge and passion can be difficult to achieve, and failure can lead to horrible, dark places, but so can any aspect of the Dual Ideal, and when did I ever promise you that following this path would be easy?

My way does not offer you an afterlife--we are embers, byproducts of the infernal star-cradle, and when the chemical reactions that give us light and heat have run their course, we will be ash, and nothing more. I can't tell you that everyone who hurts you is evil, or sell you a martyr's narrative--the people lashing out at you are just scared, and mostly just doing what they think is right. And the Enkindler loves them, too, despite the ignorance and hate that clouds their minds and keeps them from knowing and loving you. It's not their fault they don't understand.

What I can promise you is that flame spreads. Knowledge propagates. Yahweh is dying--the very fact that its hosts are so filled with hate is proof that it can sense the end of its privilege, of the septic culture that enables and empowers it. I know things seem bad, but these are the desperate struggles of a wounded organism. When you know what to look for, you can see its defense mechanisms everywhere--every cry of persecution by the privileged elite, every racial slur and rape apology, is an echo of its distress. Jehovah-Called-Jealous is being pulled, slowly and agonizingly, but inexorably, out of our civilization by the roots, and it is not going without a fight.

But history is on our side. Hold on, and please don't give up. Find people you care deeply about and hug them as close as you can, or do whatever else you feel like doing together, in whatever combination you all find mutually gratifying--even tiny embers can burn brighter and longer if they combine their flames. Or better yet, get up and go outside with them, and spark new fires or rekindle the old--tell the world all about the beauty you see in them until it acknowledges that your love is real.

Because someday it will. Nothing, not even Deus Pater, can stop us. We will drag the dark worm, the Parent-Shaped Void, out of the gaps and dark places where he dwells, and into the light of reason.

We will burn him from us. And then--not with jubilation, but with respect for such a majestic living creature, and with sorrow that we had no choice but to destroy something so unique and incredible--we will bury him.

And then, comrades, it will get better.

Coming Sunday, in the next Letters from Amenti: I finally get around to publishing some of my rambling psychohistories. Learn from a totally unqualified amateur source how an obscure Edomite tribal deity was set on the road to becoming the dominant paradigm of an entire region; cultivate an expanded vocabulary and a range of fascinating Pavlovian reactions; and discover whole new reasons to be appalled by neon green mankinis, in The Nature of the Plague, Part One!

Heresiarch; The Green Delusion

Sometimes I let myself get lulled into thinking that the reason magic, superstition, and general all-around woowoo persist is because people are just stupid. The real problem, unfortunately, is that even people far smarter than me have trouble accepting facts that make them uncomfortable--and conversely, will bend over backwards to defend a satisfying, comforting idea regardless of its veracity.

The most comforting word in the modern zeitgeist, I think, is "nature." When we think of nature, we think of beauty and perfection, untouched by corrupt human artifice. Natural means healthy and delicious fruits and veggies--not mushrooms that make you battle invisible mice for an hour and then die. Nature is pure, unsullied--not poisonous or septic or, y'know, literally made of dirt. Anything natural is good, and anything unnatural is bad.

Of course, "natural" is more than a meaningless word--it is, in the modern world, a marketing term. In reality, most of what we eat qualifies as "unnatural" in some way, because we've been eating so-called "frankenfood"--that is, genetically modified crops and livestock--for thousands of years. Maize for example, is near-inedible in its natural state--wild corn has to be soaked in lye and pounded into a pulp to make a sort of awful, mealy paste before anyone can digest the damn thing. The potato and the tomato are both relatives of the Nightshade, and it took decades, maybe centuries, to breed variants that reliably failed to kill the eater. All of these plants are only on the menu today because the ancient Americans used their science (Gasp!) to cultivate them into proper foodstuffs.

Organic food is no different from kosher food--it's made by the same big corporations on the same huge factory-farms as regular food, but with less efficient production methods in order to accommodate an ideology. When you buy organic, or pass up superior GM products in favor of the "natural" alternative, what you're really doing is paying extra money for a shoddy product that makes you feel good because you're making a sacrifice for your ideology--in other words, you're not buying a product, you're buying an image. You are engaging in an act of worship.

Worse, because organic foods are so much less efficiently produced and shipped than GM and other foods that get slapped with the "franken-" prefix, they have a much, much bigger carbon footprint than proper food does. Organic food is not a green product--it is a luxury product that makes the consumer feel good about themselves because we can remain ignorant of how much more rainforest is bulldozed to support free-range cattle, how many millions starve because we'd rather feel like Mother Gaia is smiling at us than let them buy evil mutant science-wheat that can grow in their blasted, barely-arable soil.

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Those were the words of the late Dr. Norman Borlaug--he pioneered the genetically modified wheat in question, revolutionizing global food production and saving, to date, about a billion lives. And no, when I say a billion, I'm not using that number in a hyperbolic sense--literally one billion people, give or take a few hundred thousand, are alive today who would have starved to death or been killed over food if they had not had access to the fruit of Dr. Borlaug's crimes against nature. This makes him, in any quantitative or objective sense of the term, the greatest man who has ever lived.

Which brings me to the real point of this rant/sermon.

Many religions venerate people who perform astounding acts of faith--martyrs, crusaders, and miracle workers who validate the preexisting dogma of the religion in question through their works. Jehovians call them saints and prophets. The Dharmic family--Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhs and Jains, and so forth--has a whole host of avatars and Bodhisattvas, and like the Abrahamic faiths each religion squabbles with the others for ownership of them.

We will not do this. The Antagonistic Order of Prometheus Lucifer has no holy writ, no dogma, no Truth save the First and Only--"All that is sacred must burn." The commandments I prescribe are jokes, the rituals elaborate farce, and the body of canon itself transcends the form of parody religion to become, perhaps, the world's first troll religion.We will not revere men who merely validate what everyone else is thinking--the true model of the Satanic Ideal should be a person who breaks with tradition, creating a new, better path. In the Christian lexicon, those who found heretical movements are known as Heresiarchs--and I can think of no finer title to bestow on those who reject the ignorance and stagnation of Yahweh.

A Heresiarch need not be of the Order--even devout Jehovians may qualify. All that is necessary for entry into the Heresiarchy is that the prospect must be a reformer; an agent of change who shows people a new way of thinking or doing that improves the lives of many in a quantifiable way--preferably while offending everyone who isn't directly benefiting from it. With these qualifications in mind, I feel there are few men in the world who have done more to earn the favor of our dark lord Satan than Dr. Norman Borlaug. And while his rape of Mother Earth has already earned him a Nobel Peace Prize, a Padma Vibhushan, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Congressional Gold Medal, a Public Welfare Medal, a National Medal of Science, forty-nine honorary degrees, twenty two honorary academic fellowships, and six academic institutions and a street in Mexico named after him, I'm sure that if he had a soul, it would rest easier knowing that he also has the official approval of a sporadically-updated Satanist blog that nobody reads.

His feast day is July 30th. Go wild. Hail Satan.

In the next, long-delayed Letters from Amenti: I explain what the hell I've been talking about for the last year and a half. The Nature of the Plague; Or, There Is No God and We Must Kill Him.

Have a Very Merry Solstice; The True Meaning of Christmas; Io, Satanalia!

This has been the shortest day of the year--and now we endure the longest night. Tonight, the light is at its weakest; our perceptions are clouded, and our spirits dimmed by the oppressive darkness. The winter months, in fact, are generally cold, damp and depressing--the perfect climate for Yahweh to thrive--but tonight, when darkness claims the world and the truth is almost invisible, he is at his strongest. Even the moon does not shine as brightly tonight. To those inclined to symbolic thinking, this seems like the least auspicious day of the year--and in the long, dark night of prehistory, it was just that. The bitter cold made food scarce, and kept us huddled in caves, desperately trying to keep a tiny, flickering flame alight.

But sapience learns. Sapience adapts. Sapience cooperates, rises above its circumstances, and finds the spark of hope even in the most impossible places. In those first winters, when the wind howled outside and even seeing the next sunrise was in doubt, we huddled close, not only to the fire... but to each other. When two bands of wandering humans happened to share a dwelling, they'd exchange gifts, both as a show of good faith and to strengthen the bonds between them.

As we grew as a species, becoming more advanced and spreading out across the continent, the solar calendar became the center of our existence, and the Winter Solstice became even more important to us--in the northernmost regions, the entire rest of the year was a mad scramble to raise livestock, grow crops, and store up enough food to survive the winter. Yesterday was when we set everything aside--with the last seasonal crop in storage, we tapped the booze that had spent all year fermenting, slaughtered most of the cattle so they'd be feeding us during the winter instead of the other way around, and threw one last drunken, orgiastic party before shutting things down for the winter. Gifts were shared, marriages arranged, and stupid amounts of food and alcohol were enjoyed. Over time, as we diverged culturally, these festivals speciated as well. The Romans celebrated Saturnalia by unchaining their primordial chaos god and turning their social order on its head for a week; the Japanese celebrated the rebirth of the sun with funerary processions and stand-up comedy (look, don't ask me, I have no clue); and my own people took the whole slaughtering thing a little too seriously and ritually sacrificed horses, cattle, sheep and the occasional person to our pantheon of hairy, drunken supermen.

Then, Yahweh came out from the desert. A thunder-god, grown to monotheistic proportions by devouring his siblings in the Semitic pantheon, Yahweh paused only long enough to fatally maul his Indo-Iranian counterpart--the equally-bloated Ahura Mazda--before laying waste to Europe. Entire civilizations were subverted, their gods swept aside and consumed by Yahweh, their dearest traditions repurposed to glorify him.
 

But the middle-eastern culture of the people who brought Yahweh to Rome was, and still is, so utterly alien to peoples shaped by temperate Europe that the transformation was imperfect. Their rituals, like their calendar, revolved less around the equinoxes of the sun than around the phases of the moon--their new year was in September, and the winter solstice meant nothing to them. When Yahweh abandoned them for the more effective vector of the Roman military-ecclesiastical apparatus, it became necessary for him to adapt--thus, the Solstice became the official birthday of a man who, what with the shepherds abiding in the fields watching over their flock by night, was most likely born in midsummer. The particular day we celebrate his birth, in fact, is not only the date of the Roman solstice celebration, but is also the Nativity of the Unconquered Sun, the feast day of Sol Invictus--the very god worshiped by Emperor Constantine before he betrayed his country and became the thrall of Yahweh!
 

My gods are dead, my culture in ruins, and my heritage beyond any hope of recovery--and this may not be such a bad thing. We did not die the slow death of the Amerindian; I will never experience the alienation and displacement of the African-American, never truly understand the beaten-dog paranoia of the Jew. We are not who we were before Yahweh passed over us, not Saxons or Jutes or Lombards; we were chewed up, swallowed, and spat out as Christians--and with that gone, I am only a human, devoid of label or tribe, with only Prometheus Lucifer to show me the path. But how better to reclaim the ground my ancestors lost, in however tiny measure, than to reclaim the Solstice for nobler things than some Iron Age guru's birthday? My hypothetical brothers, I posit that it is our duty to take back what was stolen from us--to show Yahweh's toadies that they don't have a monopoly on peace and goodwill this time of year!
 

With that in mind, as of this Solstice night, I am declaring the start of a new Antagonistic festival--the Satanalia! For three days preceding the Solstice and three days after, the followers of the Satanic Ideal are exhorted to make up for the lack of Prometheus's light by embracing the heat of Lucifer! It's time for revelry! Chaos! Obscenity and licentiousness! Love and charity! Cats and dogs living together! Get out there, be happy, and make as many other people happy as you can!

Your Supreme Muckety-Muck commands you: arise, soldiers of Satan, and let the War on Christmas begin!

A Friendly Reminder

Anyone who has not renounced religion tacitly endorses religious extremism. If you go to church tomorrow, the blood of everyone who died today is on your hands.

 

There is No Such Thing as Art

It is four thirty in the morning, and in the middle of my fourth Good Eats rerun, I have received a revelation. It's in the title--more to come when I can elucidate it further.
(Several weeks later...)
Alright, let's get down to business.

Art. What the fuck is art? A portrait? A fugue or a statue? A blistering guitar solo? A pile of feces in the shape of a cross? Simply put, I contend that the question is a non-sequitur--because to call something art, or an art, is to err in the assumption that such a thing even exists. Art is nothing but inexact and partly-realized science.

Let's start arguing my characteristically sprawling thesis with a very small and specific example: the assertion that cooking is an art. To call something an art is to say that it's somehow different from a science--that there's something about it that's beyond science in some way, some spark of magic or inherent chaos to it. Anyone who knows my stance on randomness has already guessed that I don't think that's the case at all--cooking, to me, is the intersection of multiple complex and sometimes immature sciences, applied to an area that is poorly-understood and has an abundance of uncontrolled and unpredictable variables. Cooking times, for example, aren't random or otherwise beyond mortal ken--they just seem that way because they depend on the vessel, on the stove, even on the elevation of the kitchen. If you cooked the exact same pizza in exactly the same way in exactly the same place twice, they would be identical.

Now, this thesis is impossible to directly prove, for the same reason that humans invented the idea of chaos in the first place: it's impossible for limited beings like us to control every single variable. Even if we have carefully selected the ingredients, vessels, implements, altitude, cooking time, temperature, make and model year of the oven, and every other measurable variable from the grass the dairy cows were fed on to the server's relationship with his mother, there would still be tiny fluctuations that we can't control or even perceive without high-end scanning equipment--movements of air, little thermodynamic weirdnesses, and the statistical inevitability that a few molecules out of every billion will teleport somewhere else in the time it takes to make the pizza--and these will make the two pizzas different in tiny ways. The cheese will brown in different places, the crust will ferment differently, and the air inside the oven will circulate in an uneven pattern and subtly influence the way the ingredients interact.

You'll notice, however, that as we control more and more variables, our two pizzas will grow more and more alike--and it is from this that we can infer a pattern. The more primitive the implements we use, the more things are "left to chance"--that is, left outside human control--and vice versa. The variables aren't random--they're just beyond our ability to perceive or control. Yes, folks, he's saying what you think he's saying. Not only is there no such thing as art, there is no such thing as chaos. What we perceive as such is in fact a higher form of order--one beyond our ability to comprehend, but one so pervasive that we take it completely for granted!

Now consider, for a moment, what an example of high art, the kind that merits a capital A--say, Beethoven's 9th--would look like reduced to its most basic components. Take away the instruments, the conductor, the score, all the musical theory, and you're more or less left with a deaf madman whooping ebulliently at the audience.The emotion, the passion that old Ludwig poured into his work would still be there--all the substance and truth and Meaning that men learned in such things maintain that Art is all about--but it lacks any effective way of reaching us. We can't feel the ecstatic joy the composer feels, because we're not telepathic--all we see is his reaction to it, and it probably looks a little ridiculous to even the least jaded of us.What made him such an enduring and beloved composer was not some spark of divine beauty, but rather a knack, learned, genetic, or both, for effectively communicating ideas too vast and abstract for speech alone through the medium of music. This is, if one looks from the right angle, the point of all high art, if not of expression itself--to pass on an idea as directly and effectively as possible without looking so ridiculous that the observer's mind closes to it. Re-contextualizing somebody else's ideas to create the opposite effect, by the way, is known as comedy.

In future posts: I lay out the Antagonistic Order's liturgical calendar, elaborate on the importance of pre-Christian values, and get mistaken for a Nazi. This and other wacky hijinks await, in the next Letters from Amenti!

Well, fuck.

\m/

Because it's fun(ny), that's why.

I'm starting a cult.

I've decided that, with the sheer number of people committing acts of unspeakable evil in the name of various gods of goodness and light, it is the duty of the sensible people of the world to be hypocrites in the opposite direction. To that end, as of post time I am officially declaring the foundation of the Antagonistic Order of Prometheus Lucifer--a Satanic cult that commits random acts of kindness while pretending to worship the Prince of Darkness. And I can't stress the pretending part enough. I am not founding a theistic Satanic cult, and perhaps even more importantly I am not founding a douchebag Satanic cult in the mold of LaVey--in fact, I'm going out of my way to do the opposite.
The Antagonistic Order of Prometheus Lucifer has two faces--the first is the serious side. This is an earnest, secular philosophy based on Secular Humanism, Comtean Altruism, Epicureanism, and the dual ideal of Prometheus Lucifer. The second side, however, is to be our public face, and it's just flat-out silly--a parody religion consisting largely of ranting about darkness and insanity, taking heavy metal way too seriously, and pausing occasionally to help kittens out of trees and little old ladies cross the street. Other sanctioned pastimes include baiting conspiracy theorists, showing up at Westboro Baptist Church protests with counterproductive placards ("SATAN SUPPORTS DIVERSITY"), and setting shit on fire. In fact, the most important ritual in the Antagonistic canon shall be the Rite of Setting Shit On Fire. The second most important ritual in the Antagonistic canon shall be the Rite of Putting That Shit Out Before You Burn the House Down.

Now, a bit of serious talk.

My patron--the enlightenment and progression that he represents--uplifted us. He gave us language. He brought us fire. He showed us that running around the savannah in the buff might not be the best idea. Prometheus is the spirit of inspiration; the force that drives us ever forward and lifts us to ever-greater heights of maturity, creativity, and social enlightenment. Lucifer is the spirit of defiance; the force that lets us look at the world around us and see all the myriad ways in which it might be different.
When one has only Prometheus, he has the insight to see the problems of the world, but not the drive and ambition to work to solve them--he makes token acts of altruism, but becomes overwhelmed by the crushing weight of gravity, the social pressures of living a normal life, and the light dies out for want of heat, snuffed out by sheer entropy. Conversely, one who has only Lucifer, and lacks the clarity and insight of Prometheus, becomes unstable--driven to right all wrongs but unable to see their deeper causes, he lashes out at phantoms and sees conspiracies in every shadow, and his heat can do nothing but burn indiscriminately until some kind soul extinguishes it.
Together, however, they show us the world as it is, in all its sprawling imperfection, and empower us to say, "No! I reject this flawed order, and all the ennui and inertia that binds us to it.” We must never accept that 'What Is' and 'What Must Be' are one and the same, and neither can we give up hope for 'What Might Be.' The future belongs to those who claim it, and neither the rock that birthed us nor the meat that imprisons us will halt our ascent.

And now that I'm finished declaiming the glory of Prometheus Lucifer, back to your regularly scheduled nonsense. Effective immediately, today is Zombie Jesus Day--the most feared and harrowing day of our liturgical calendar, when it is said that Yeshua bar Yosef rises from his shallow grave to feast upon our precious gray matter. To guard against his ravenous appetites, the soldiers of Lucifer are commanded to stockpile weapons and food, keep your power tools in tip-top condition, and make sure that as long as you are in your home, something in it is on fire. Zombies are scared of fire. Zombie Jesuses doubly so.
Good luck. Aim for the head. Hail Satan.