Purification
The West is a hybrid culture; it is a work of art that always has sought to establish and sustain its identity by images and artifacts. Its core organizing element is a passion play whose cast of characters is well known. The imagery is backed by armed force, burnings and terror because history and logic expose the play of fictions.
But the radical (“from the roots”) instability of the West stems not only from its project of yoking together Hebrew and Hellenic cultural elements. The origins of the magic and imperial ambitions of the cult of aesthetics inhere in its Hellenic-Roman roots, especially in the emphasis on metamorphosis (usually unnatural, magical) and its frequent location in erotic trauma and ensuing displacement and transmutation. These elements define the demonic; define, too, Greco-roman ‘rape,’ capture and appropriation of Hebrew culture (and land) and its subjection of Jews and Judaism to the status of a dispossessed host.
Because the West is a compulsive and essentially irrational construct, it was inevitable that its last phase would produce an ideology called postmodernism, the notion that nothing is genuine or integral, that everything is a collage, an adulterate and arbitrary mixture, a classic definition of “impurity”[i]. The denial of any truth but the reigning cultural dogmatic clichés ally postmodernism with communism and the Church: universal utopians who back their absurd (illogical) claims with brute force, professed compassion and mountains of lies which the West dresses in gorgeous rhetoric and imagery, now amplified and made ever more insubstantial and unreal by the mass media, a ritual that negates the four-dimensional humanity of ritual: art as surface, as illusion.
Because the West’s main ingredients negate each other like oil and water, the passion of the West is a play for purification, for clarity of identity. Purification means adoration of the self, both the individual and the corporate collective body or persona ficta in the form of images. Thus, in his famous Confessions, Rousseau defined and re-made himself as a fiction: “the more I lie, the more I am true.” Moreover, this fictional self was a model, a point of comparison for the humanity of everyone else. This merging of identity with fiction and the egomaniac, tutelary aspect of his project took shape in his definition of the corporate collective “Sovereign” in which “everyone will be forced to be free”[ii]
The ambiguities, contradiction, ideological, economic and military rape are part of the dark matter in the heart of the West that must be sanitized, glorified and worshipped. This “mire and complexity of human blood”[iii] does not consist only of the possession, displacement and transmutation of Jewish matter into Greco-Roman and then into feudal-gothic civilizations, the former moribund and decadent, the latter chaotic, fanatic and irrational. The darkness in the core of the West also is essentially Mesopotamian (the Devil) and above all Hellenistic. Those who study Hesiod, the first compendium of Greek thought, Homer and the Greek tragedians[iv], and the summary of their material by Ovid in Metamorphoses find that erotic trauma, demonic possession, transformed identity and form is the essence of the Hellenistic world view. The insistence on this terrifying nexus of events literally is embodied in the fiction of Aphrodite and her violent formation from the private parts of Ouranos, “the starry heavens” who was both consort and son of Gaia, the earth. “The sweetnesses and deceptions” of Aphrodite show the shifty nature of life as attested by “Pre-Socratic” philosophers like Heraclitus and Empedocles as well as in the dramatists and Ovid. Aphrodite’s description by Hesiod (c. 600 BCE) as “a modest lovely goddess” is in effect the first and ruling artifice-deceit of Hellenism in its veiling of the violent, perverse horror of her formation and substance fused of ocean brine and ‘divine’ male members.[v] Postmodern feminism shows the Aphrodite complex surging to dominance, glorified by showers of media imagery and academic-legal fictions.
The impulse to re-present in images and art the violent, metamorphic cultural substrate of Hellenism joined with the need simultaneously to use and transform Jewish material –while vilifying the Jews — as the dynamic, unsteady core of the West’s image project, its cult of aesthetics. As this process is a disembodiment, a separation of the perfect ‘head’ or image from the boggy cultural substrate, it is aptly represented by Orpheus and termed ‘the Orphic project’ after the singer of harmony who was torn apart and decapitated by the maenads (followers of Dionysus) whose rebellious rage is a symbol of disorder and the resurgence of fertility cults that achieve communion by eating a human god and drinking his blood. Adonis, beloved of Aphrodite (Venus) is one such avatar, himself born of an incestuous union. After his loss of Eurydice, Orpheus preferred “young boys” and was himself the eromenos of Apollo[vi]; so ambiguity inheres in his ‘pure’ song too.
With this unstable cultural matter at its heart, Western civilization will disgorge rituals of heterogeneous commingling, multiculturalism and fictive purification, the strictures of the ‘Welfare’ or Nanny State, the current form of Aphrodite. The drive for purity expresses itself in two main forms: dogmatic aesthetic movements and utopian social ideologies each of which have a universalizing, imperialist bent; and the need to assimilate the Jews in a grand “humanitarian solution”[vii] or, in the alternative, to exterminate them outright. If the West achieves the latter, it will get rid of the ‘spoil sport’ that exposes the flaws and magic in the rules of its game[viii]; it also will lose the last aspect of its coherence that does not have a petrifying, totalitarian thrust. The holocaust (shoah) was the climax of the West’s drive to clarify and untangle the hybrid, forced, traumatic union at its core; the ‘peace process’ is the denouement, a slow motion erasure of Judaism as a national-cultural identity and its absorption in the last and total grand project or the West: a world state ruled by a new “universal church,” a “Faith Foundation” that will mingle all religions in a new puree that can be poured, like Proteus into any form its ‘gods’ desire, — the better to mould the product.
In a universal State there is no room for genuine difference, only controlled dissent. The metamorphic impulse of Hellenism flows into virtual reality, into demographic and economic displacements.
The upshot of the “rational” theology of Anselm and Aquinas in the era when the cult of aesthetics asserted its European form was that the Jews were not just out of date and misguided but willfully ignorant and, therefore, needed to be ‘corrected,’ by preaching first (including in synagogues), and if that didn’t work by burning all their books, and then them. A review of Hesiod and Ovid will show that the mass hysteria of Christian formation from the First Crusade 1095 to the blood libels (beginning 1142), book burnings (starting about 1230), dress regulations and pogroms reveals the hysteria and terror inherited from ancient Hellas, demonstrated recently in the shoah and now in the ‘peace process’ and ‘war on terror.’ “I hail the superhuman,” Yeats wrote late in 1930 as a new era of hysteria gained head: “I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.” The forces of cultural morbidity and murderous confusion were aligned[ix]; the hysteria in the ‘bed of trauma’ of the image cult peaked as its leading image-makers willed themselves into a rapture and “agony of flame,” into mad passion over apocalyptic beasts “slouching to Bethlehem to be born.”[x] The shoah was an aesthetic project and not only a German one.
An example of the ability of images to beget images in the attempt to ‘purify’ a fictive or ambiguous identity is the ostensible appearance of stigmata on Francis of Assisi in 1224 near the core of the era in which Chrétien wrote and the Dominicans invented “host desecration” to incite massacres of Jews in the name of the fiction that Francis imitated.
Chrétien de Troyes also was attuned to the temper of his times, the century when the cult of aesthetics established its post-Mediterranean identity with Arthurian Romances, Crusades, Gothic architecture and dogma that only through the Roman church and its Pontifex Maximus[xi] can a human being escape ‘hell.’ A group of penitents cry to Perceval on Good Friday, “the wicked Jews whom we should kill like dogs…damned themselves when they raised him on the Cross.” This is the logic of Aquinas and those who celebrate “the Glorious Father who made His daughter His mother.”[xii] Traumatic transposition is the essence of the demonic and the core of artifice, the construed ‘purity’ of the cult of aesthetics.
The preaching of globalism by the clergy of the media, a new treason of the clerks,[xiii] its progressive legislation by court hirelings and enforcement by hi-tech knights is the last passion play of the “universal apostolic” church proclaimed almost eight centuries ago. It is the end in petrifaction of the cult of aesthetics whose metamorphoses henceforth will be of a highly controlled, increasingly artificial and untenable nature. “Images that yet fresh images beget” describes the functioning of the electronic media, the distraction machine crucial to the power structure that holds together the new Byzantium or Rome. The fact that it is radically impure in content follows naturally from its essential nature as artifice, as a scrim of imagery, a modern Aphrodite, beautiful allure with a perversely violent substrate. As with Lancelot and Orpheus, purification means madness and death.
[i] Mary Douglas, Purity & Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution & Taboo (NY 1966)
[ii] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, chapters 6-7, “The Social Compact,” “the Sovereign”
[iii] W.B. Yeats, “Byzantium” 7-8, 24, 33
[iv] See for a prime example the venomous “sickness” of Aphrodite as treated by Sophocles in his Herakles play, the Women of Trachis
[v] Hesiod, Theogeny (U Michigan, 1959, Lattimore translation), lines 95-253
[vi] As was Hyacinth, see Ovid, Metamorphoses book X; eromenos is a male pupil sexually initiated and partner to his teacher (erastes).
[vii] Alice Bailey, “the Inner Source of the Outer Turmoil” 1939 in Externalization of the Hierarchy
[viii] I’m paraphrasing Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938; 1945; 1955 English trans); Huizinga’s text is a paean to “the play spirit” as the essence of civilization whose peak he sees in chivalry, its tournaments and cult of Beauty. Huizinga celebrated war as a form of play in 1938…
[ix] “Byzantium” (Sept. 1930), 15-16, inter alia for the domination of life by aesthetics & image-work
[x] Yeats, “The Second Coming”; the 1st stanza laments the mire and confusion; the 2nd offers a fiction whose monstrous, “pitiless” ambiguity contains and continued what Conrad called “the fascination of the abomination.”
[xi] The Pope is the “Great Bridge” between the pagan and Jewish worlds; the church the grand synthesis whose “complexity of mire and blood” naturally cloaks itself in elaborate aesthetics, fictions that veil its radical incongruities and pollution.
[xii] Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, “the Story of the Grail (Perceval)” (NY 1991), 458, 486; on the transposition of family-biological roles, see Lear 1.4.176-82 for a sober corrective.
[xiii] See Julien Benda, La Trahison des Clercs (1928; Norton 1966)