2:9:23

Let’s play Devil’s advocate (pun intended). If this image, song, and Grammy performance is not a celebration of the Satanic, if it’s not abnormal (because that notion is no longer allowed to exist. Anything goes, remember? This is all merely the healthy expression of the no-longer-repressed individual), what kind of meta-aesthetic is this? What is its intended purpose? Message? Why is it using/celebrating these tropes, symbols, and themes? Some argue the Grammy’s was merely “hell-themed,” but why celebrate hell? Where does that lead when the winners of these Grammys are continually advocating for “kindness” and “acceptance”? What is kind about their aesthetics, their messaging? Their music? In a doublespeak world, words lie about images.

Study the above image (video and Unholy Grammy performance) carefully.

Why this choice? Why this theme? Why this color? Weren’t these images and symbols once used strictly in horror movies, in the dark occult? Have we forgotten their source? Their context?

What does the choice to represent and align with these symbols and themes, which clearly have their sinister associations and connotations, mean? Simple question. Do not be afraid to unpack it simply because you are not religious or concerned with theological questions. You must address its moral meaning, for it wants you to address it. It wants your total attention and advocacy. These are celebrities, after all. America’s Kings and Queens. America’s Gods. They want your fandom, your total approval.

These choices cannot be arbitrary (at the end of the “Unholy” performance, we’re told this year’s Grammys is “brought to you by Pfizer,” if you can believe it), too much time and planning and money goes into them. Nothing you see is by accident. To say this is denial.

In his 1973 sermon on Good and Evil, Fulton J. Sheen, whose sermons I’ve been studying for days for research on the evolution of the Devil, from religion to psychiatry (see my earlier posts), states: “For the essence of the demonic from the Biblical point of view is contempt of the cross.”

So, for arguments sake, let us say that there is no contempt here, just an absence of the cross, the way many have long claimed it should be absent. But that isn’t what is happening. It is more than an absence, it is a replacement of the cross with contempt for the cross. It is the contempt and degradation of divine light and divine order. In the early days of her career, Madonna, a Catholic, employed a strategic mix of the two. She employed the cross in order to tamper with its moral meaning. Contrary to the backlash she suffered (looking back, perhaps this was simply controlled opposition, who knows), she could not have gotten away with pushing for the social acceptance of contempt had she not featured the cross in her music videos while pretending to be devout to it at the same time that she was blaspheming against it as a lapsed Catholic. Madonna (and her handlers) had to submerge her deeper agenda in the iconography of the cross. Her contempt for (and so called subversion of) the cross is blatant now, though she is still pretending to worship God, which in this case, is herself. God is a pretense, a cover for diablerie.

Now we are beyond that. We’re in a new phase. The final phase.

In her post on the 2023 Grammys, Sasha Stone notes:

“How to shock a generation that has pretty much seen it all by now — that’s the question and the line must keep moving to keep them entertained. By now, it all feels like the debauchery that captures a society just before the world changes, you know, like Berlin in the early 1930s?…They must continue to blur the line of what everyone is supposed to be okay with and then test people’s reaction to see if they’re bigots or not.”

“Must everything good be destroyed, because we have dared to be animated and inspired by it?,” Celia Farber asks in her Substack post on traditional dress and costume in Spain.

In December, I watched a video with Eckhart Tolle. I am not a subscriber to his ideas per se, and have only listened to him once or twice, but in this video he talks about the dual meaning of Christ, the “archetypal human” and the crucifix. The crucifix, he says, is both a torture device and a symbol of the divine. The Exorcist (1973), for example, exploits it as both—for evil and against evil, like 80s Madonna. Tolle explains that the “path of human evolution is through suffering,” so that “suffering eventually awakens us.” At some point, quite recently it seems, we decided this was no longer true. Like the cross, the Buddha, Tolle points out, tells us: “I teach suffering and the end of suffering.” I thought that was interesting. How can we learn to suffer and transcend pain, if we are taught that everything bad and weak about us is good? Sheen says the cross makes us nervous because it “points to us,” it implicates us. We feel its moral burden. Its moral call. Or we did.

In a televised appearance in1957, Sheen ends a sermon by telling the audience, “The greatest cross in the world is to be without a cross. And love makes peace.”

Contempt is also a torture device. It destroys our ability to love. It teaches us to forsake love. To hold it in contempt. To be kind and decent and honest, to be strong internally, to be unswayable, to be whole, is “hateful.” In the 2023 Grammy’s, there is no divine symbolism. Not only is it absent, there is only contempt for it. There is a continual celebration of its direct opposite.

When we lose ourselves, we become prone to anything and everything. We do not know who we are. We became many.

Sheen: “Forget souls, forget salvation, forget guilt, forget sin. Just politics.”

Sheen saw the future.

What forms does the demonic take in the non-Biblical world? That is Sheen’s question. And it is mine now. What is Sam Smith’s song, and the video he made for it, teaching us? Showing us? Don’t be afraid to ask yourself this question. Sheen: “Satan said theology is politics.” (See the Omen, 1976). Which means, no values and principles are left except for the values of politics. That is, the politics of identity. To have many identities (the more the better) is to be fractured, split off, torn apart. Anything can enter. Anything can change. Nothing is stable. Everything is simulated.

Offering God a shortcut, Sheen tells us that Satan tells God, “Do not go to the cross. This is not the way to win men.” He is tempting him, given him the shortcut of fame and power. He wants him off the cross, a high place. A place of sacrifice. Of course this is the parable of all Faustian packs. Celebrities live by this rule, though it is still hidden. On the surface, it appears they are “high up.” God knows what they have really done all these years to get up there, but it is starting to show. Celia Farber refers to this as the Beast System, another great term I will now employ.

Here is Celia Farber on the Grammy question. She also offers a brilliant deconstruction of Miley Cyrus’ global pop-hit, “Flowers,” and the destruction of the love song (something I have been talking about for years. Where is the love in today’s love songs?): “[At Spin magazine], I was surrounded by the well entrenched belief that edgy pop culture was good, and objections were ‘far-right’ ‘Christian fundamentalist’ and de-facto bad. I always felt dull, un-hip, and faintly ashamed…I internalized most of my observations, knowing they were ‘wrong.’ But today I see that I was not so wrong after all.” In an interview about Hollywood’s deep ties with the occult and secret intelligence agencies like the CIA, film and esoteric scholar Jay Dyer confirms Farber’s suspicions, “People think it’s just degenerate people trying to make money. No, it’s warfare.”

As a native New York writer and critic, I always felt like Farber, until I liberated myself. This liberation was in part foisted upon me by the COVID Culture War, the Covidian regime, the mandates that took my old life away. But in the end, thank God, no pun intended. Being an outsider, or more of one, has freed me. When it comes to Christianity, there is no space to be an intellectual and an artist and a person of faith and morals. To feel enchantment. That is not cool. You are endlessly shamed and discouraged for it. I learned that the hard way. I always felt it, but never quite understand why I did. Or what it was about. Now I understand. And it feels so much better. Truth is always obtained through sacrifice. You must lose something to gain it.