Daniel Jupp

On 17th July 2015 a curious art exhibition took place with the unveiling in Detroit of an 8 and half foot tall, over 3,000lbs bronze statue. The statue had been created by an artist called Mark Porter. 700 people had tickets for the event. A smaller number of protestors had also gathered, but the event was successful enough that the statue went on a nationwide tour. It was seen by thousands upon thousands of additional viewers, and generated enormous media coverage and interest far in excess of what most artists and their works receive. This was the statue of Baphomet, based on an illustration by occultist Eliphas Levi, which originally appeared on the cover of his book Ritual, and like much of modern paganism and occultism was a synthesis of pre Christian sources and modern, synthetic, entirely novel and artificial play with those sources. Levi created a Sabbatic Goat figure more florid and extreme than any European pagan deity or Christian devil.
Herne the Hunter had the body and face of a man and the horns of a stag. The Wild Hunt of Celtic mythology, the god Cernunnos, the Roman Pan, and the maenads and Bacchae of Ancient Greece prefigured Satanic revelries. Animal headed deities were common in a number of ancient religious traditions, especially those of the Near East. Nevertheless, a hermaphroditic Goat Man-Woman figure surrounded by pentagrams and often seated on a throne were Levi’s unique interpretation of these genuinely mythic sources.
Goats were associated with sin long before the Levi Baphomet image popularised goat like qualities as aspects of Satan. The Bible expresses this several times, and for a religion that grew first among people where herding animals was commonplace, it makes sense. Sheep were useful, docile, easily managed. They represent the peaceful, the flock, the followers. Goats were herded just as often, but were far more troublesome. Goats are voracious consumers, as hungry as a locust. They are wilful and disobedient, and stubborn like mules. Male goats, bucks, are priapic, ‘horny as hell’ and will very happily display that. So they are fairly understandable symbols of sin, lust and disobedience-ev

erything that Satan himself is, in fact.
Levi’s image was enormously popular but in a very narrow ambit. It was repeated purely within occult circles and the New Age movement, the part of the counterculture that was into spells and rituals. It repeated a little in roleplaying ganes, with no serious intent, but enough to cause a ‘Satanic panic’ in the 1980s, when spotty teenage boys gathering to roll dice, pretend to be wizards, rogues and warriors battling orcs, dragons and (yes) demons too, was at its cultural peak. A little earlier than that, Satanic imagery featured heavily in the prog rock and heavy metal music industries, again with a largely camp, harmless, theatrical spin to it that used it as shorthand for breaking the rules, getting laid, getting drunk and not worrying about the mortgage or the electricity bill.
People who took those depictions of Satan as serious were themselves usually pretty troubled, like the guy who claimed that Judas Priest records played backwards sublimely instructed people to Hail Satan and commit murder.
Nevertheless the difference between the heavy metal era or D&D era of Satanic imagery and the Baphomet tour commencing in 2015 is representative of a notable cultural shift. In the 1980s religious and specifically Christian disapproval of things was still an active force. People were worried that Christians would be offended. People were using the images to mean not much more than ‘I’m a hedonist’ or ‘I’m having fun’. This was like children sharing ghost stories, or in a few instances just clever marketeers spottting ways to make themselves look edgy and dangerous and therefore cool. There wasn’t any serious intent to it, back then. It was just an aesthetic, like the goth movement, or like being a dandy in the 18th century (one that didn’t attend orgies at the Hellfire clubs). Ozzie Osbourne or Rob Halford were on tour, not a statue of Satan, on its own, with no musical excuses, commisioned and created by the actual Church of Satan.
However fake modern Satanism is, having no historical continuity with witchcraft and being more about nerds who read Crowley than about any real pre Christian belief system, it is however serious in intent. It’s not merely play acting.
In this sense the 1980s flourishing of Satanic imagery and the Baphomet tour are wildly different, and it’s the difference between playtime and real ideological agendas. It’s the difference between dressing as a Nazi for comic affect (as in the British sitcom Allo Allo) and actually being a Neo Nazi who, for example, worships Stepan Bandera, forms a paramilitary group that actually does kill people, and puts Nazi badges on his helmet whilst fighting Russians and obliging our oh so honest western media to conceal that.
And it isn’t of course just about the Baphomet tour. We saw a similar, deliberate and spectacular expression of the way nobody in the cultural elite fears a Christian backlash anymore in the 65th Grammy Awards, where Sam Smith performed a song titled Unholy whilst dressed as a non-binary Satan and attended by whorish boy/girl/ indeterminate imps and devils. I’d argue, as Dinesh D’Souza did, that this performance was not play and not mere art or musical expression. It was a confident and mocking ACTUAL Satanism precisely because Smith and whoever controls him genuinely does want to mock Christianity and replace traditional views on sex, public decency, gender and morality with a purely narcissistic but ideologically identifiable belief system.
When the Satanic imagery bands came out of Birmingham in the UK in the 1970s, or when kids like me were rolling dice and honouring Gary Gygax in the 1980s, none of these entertainments were linked to actual political movements and institutions that wanted to do things and encourage things that are essentially Satanic. They weren’t contiguous with documents from the UN telling us that kids between the ages of 0-4 should be told about masturbation, or parties that want full term abortions, or child sex trafficking rings thst everybody actually knows about but only two people were ever jailed for. Ozzie Osbourne wasn’t also saying that he was actually a woman and believing that, and Gary Gygax wasn’t also wanting sex with kids legalised. But today, it seems that organisations like the UN and the WEF are and that the same people who love sick transnational bodies in the political sphere love trans role models in the entertainment sphere.
Of course the decline of Christianity and its self belief and power goes back a long way. Think of the journey we have taken. There was a crisis of faith as early as the 1890s. The avant- garde art movement was full of people who rebelled against Christianity. Crowley was active and famous long before Sam Smith, Levi too. But really until the 1960s Christian ethics was still the baseline, the expectation, the norm. Britain transformed away from this and into a secular nation faster than the US, but is a little slower in terms of replacing Christ with Satan as the default religious figure to follow.
How does this relate to tyranny? Well, traditional Christians have a belief system that was born in opposition to tyranny and that inherently opposes tyranny. Some might find that a strange assertion, given the witch hunters and inquisitors of the past. It is nevertheless true. There is far more in Christianity encouraging defiance of tyranny than there is encouraging the Imposition of tyranny. The entire history of Christian martyrdom, for a start. The belief in man being created in God’s image, and therefore having some sacred rights of his own. The strong Baptist and Methodist opposition to slavery. The earlier Protestant rebellions against various Catholic autocracies. Unlike Islam, theological tyranny is a contradiction of the life of the central figure of Christianity, who was the victim of it, not the instigator of it. Unlike Islam, the faith proselytised, rather than conquered. It converted more by speech than sword. It sent out more missionaries than armies. Even it’s most famously militant phase, the Crusades, were reactions to by then centuries of Islamic conquests.
What did we have, when we were firm Christians? We had a set of traditional beliefs that supported strong communities, homogenous and internally peaceful nations, low crime rates, high social capital, and established, objective ideas about good and evil. We had people who knew what political corruption was, and why it was evil. We had people who couldn’t be told that their bodies and minds belonged to the State, because their souls already had a higher loyalty than that. We had strong backing for the family, for marriage, for all the social ties and loyalties that make people defend themselves, their kin and their neighbours from tyranny. We had the church as a social hub, linked to two thousand years of prior wisdom, rather than the Hubs of the WEF, linked to a new feudalism with no spiritual comfort or meaningful community or God given solace allowed.
What do we see, now, as well as the celebration of Satanism as perverse entertainment? We see the return of the persecution of Christians, those who unlike church leaderships still adhere to actual Christian values. We see that Christian children are being slaughtered by trans activists, Christian populations are destroyed entirely in the Middle East witn no western care or concern, Christian children are raped by Muslim gangs, Christian men and women and children are blown up by Muslim terrorists, Christian churches are burned in France and Canada and the UK, all whilst the elite mock 2,000 years of identity and community and Christendom, all the values that made us successful in the first place, and categorise defenders of Christianity as lunatics and throwbacks and simpletons.
We see Isobel Vaughn-Spruce, to give one specific example, stopped, questioned, searched and arrested. Her crime? Silently praying within sight of an abortion clinic.
And the places where we took solace are silent and empty. And the bones and graves of our ancestors are neglected, their wisdom too. And the faith that would have once guided our resistance to tyranny and our hope for a better society is replaced with fresh absurdities that are useful to the elite, like the apocalyptic climate cult or the hypocritical Scientism that makes technocrats and bureaucrats in white coats the priesthood of the Almighty Covid and the missionaries of Pope Fauci or Pope Gates.
The tyranny can make synthetic, fake religions with sacred figures like Saint George of Fentanyl or Saint Greta of the Autistic Annunciation precisely because true Christian faith was a higher loyalty they hated and removed first.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:43 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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