[...] Since the time of my childhood, I have a score to settle with Mussolini and Hitler’s flapper, the harlot of harlots, the strumpet of strumpets, the whore of Babylon, unavenged for two thousand years, and I’m here to collect.
Fernando Vallejo, The Whore of Babylon.
As soon as history is learned, we forget to what extent the losers wind up being seen as the unfavorable side, upon which, according to some divine will, all kinds of adversities are showered, as forgotten as the countless cases of savages generously annihilated by other more evolved and edifying peoples, or the oppressor who, in the end, deserved to be perpetually deprived of his liberty, not to mention the twisted individual who, by work and grace of the Holy Spirit, fell, naturally, into his own trap, etc.
It is to such a faction of the defeated that, almost as a rule, “the bad guys” belong, to the detriment of those pedagogically used as anti-examples, making it feasible to conclude all sorts of chronicles with the same infantilizing morals that so fabulously conceal direct threats to the inconvenient condition of not being one of “the good guys”.
Thus the illusion of a supposed happy ending continues, hidden behind lies repeated until shiny, like some monolithic, totemic and increasingly dazzling historical truth at the end of a darkness resembling obscurantism that has managed to hover over any possible Age of Enlightenment, until today, and like a long shadow that is somehow unable to filter the depths of a more suitable darkness, where it is still possible to feel about for the seeds of certain fruits that were at one time forbidden by superior wisdom. As synthesized in an aphorism repeated by certain Luciferian voices: In the inner depths burns the light of the Black Flame.
Not surprisingly, the origin of all evil coincides with the hunger for knowledge offered by the Serpent of Knowledge, that creeping, poisonous animal that has infused a prehistoric phobia ever since and, according to Genesis, was “cursed above all cattle”. Or do not most people, even in this very advanced year of our Lord, fear the mere idea of “The Evil One”, his kingdom of intra-earthly darkness, and a certain counterculture exiled there, of which they would prefer to know nothing?
In fact, in the progress of a spiritual life, led so lightly by so many who profess that, at the end of it, the most important thing in life is the destiny of the soul, although there is a certain minority that considers itself to be agnostic, atheist, or even Satanist, it is unfortunate to confirm, especially directly, as we have had the opportunity of doing, that without a doubt and all the same, most people appear to adhere to Christian ideology. Evoking something akin to the feelings of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who, descending the mountain and meeting a hermit, asks himself: “Is it possible? This old saint in his forest has not yet heard that God is dead!”
All this despite the fact that from early childhood, abusing that lack of agency suffered by all minors under the law, we were arbitrarily initiated under an unquestioned proper noun most likely of biblical origin into the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church! This in addition to other equally fortuitous reasons, such as the fact that the territory where we were born was conquered under the reign of Isabella I, known as the Catholic, etc. and other facts that rarely produce sufficient arguments to dispute a belief system adopted by force such as the dogma in “The Word of God”, the compilation translated and edited for centuries into its dubious but unquestionable current version, whose misrepresented accounts are currently irremediably spun through the use of multiple contradictions.
Even so, how to avoid questions that should seem as basic as: How much has been researched since the time of that original angelic rebellion, beyond the hackneyed story of the winners? What honestly can be learned today from pre-Christian thinking and practices? To what extent do we include ourselves among those who do not believe in witches but say, they’re out there, they’re out there, and, while making fun of those who believe in a mystical dimension, claim to have seen ghosts, had premonitory experiences, and consulted the horoscope, among other oracles? Is it not in fact true that most of us, naturally, do not believe in hell but strive to behave morally, in the hopes of entering the kingdom of heaven? And, while questioning the rectitude of someone like former Attorney General Ordoñez, we conceive our own “personal Jesus” as the entity to whom we must answer while preaching the opposite by blaspheming, fornicating, aborting, being homosexual, etc.? Are there not currently many who uncritically praise the living mannequin known as Pope Francis, conjured as if by art and magic out of some advertising agency in response to the alarm bells signaling the impending decline of this institution, amid innumerable justifications, in keeping with policies meant to conceal its characteristic pedophilic habits?
So much so that myriad others who claim to not believe in the holiness of the Church will honor it as such when at a given age, and incapable of conceiving any other option, they marry in one of its temples. In the same way that these dearly beloved practiced baptism, violating the freedoms of association, worship, conscience, development of personality, etc. and were happy to witness first communions and confirmations until, finally, no matter how little they have really worshipped, they allow themselves the “anointing of the sick” before their families bury them on “hallowed” (of course) ground in a ceremony carried out by a spiritual corporation, the congregator of the largest herd-like crowds comprised of zombies, like their resurrected shepherd, innocent in their ignorance thanks to the traditions they profess and indoctrinated into complicity with the perverse usufructs of their own offerings and payments for religious services.
Anyway. As in a Via Crucis procession, double standards truly constitute a dead weight that ought to cause the collapse of its very carrying structure: morality. And yet this burden that, according to the laws of gravity, ought to prove increasingly exhausting for those who, in the words of the popular saying, “sin and pray, and [therefore] are ‘even’”, seems not only manageable but becomes, cynically, through habit and given the mediocrity of this vicious cycle, quite bearable.
This is even more true in the land of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, where, nailed up with the utmost superficiality in some privileged corner of almost every Colombian home we find one of the family’s (and the nation’s) most traditionally aberrant objects: Christ Crucified. This trophy of the man himself, which, unlike any other, boasts a uniquely permanent expression of martyrdom while simultaneously serving as an example to a selfless, overwhelmed, and sorrowful population taught to suffer all kinds of abuses from the moment it became a nation and adopted its eternal colonial spirit, including personal sacrifice in the form of a generalized reduction of the minimum power of survival or suffering-for-the-good-of-others while waiting for a savior who, in this cruel world, could not even save himself. In this case, we were born of sacrifice to aspire to post-mortem redemption.
And yet, faced with designs as tragic as the holy sacraments, is there no real alternative beyond simply ceasing to celebrate them or, what might be seen as the same thing, respecting them indifferently as insignificant rituals which we ultimately fulfill as our destiny?
As for us, with this question in mind, and now that the original sin of hunger for rationalist knowledge (which taken to its limits denies the existence of a god) has been recovered, let us speak of a group that rallies around the initiatives of Ateos de Bogotá (Atheists of Bogota), Colombia Atea (Atheist Colombia), and Comunidad Secular (Secular Community), who scheduled a day of collective apostasy soon after Holy Week this year at ArtVersus. We had already hosted events such as the launching of the esoteric order known as Dragon Rouge; the new release of grimoires, or magical texts, published by Ophiolatreia and Manus Sinistra; seminars featuring the Latin American Black Pope, a direct successor to Héctor Escobar Gutiérrez; not to mention miscellaneous pagan rituals and other meetings of the Left-Hand Path and those of the open circle of the Great Church of Lucifer, etc. when, for example, we were generously asked if we would care to be initiated into this Church, in order to belong to its closed circle. We replied by asking ourselves how we could possibly enter into a process they refer to as self-deification based on a previous edification of self that, in keeping with the analogy, was itself constructed in the image and likeness of a Christian temple? Our response could perhaps be best explained as the redemption offered by the anarchist slogan, “The only church that illuminates is the one that burns,” or C.G. Jung’s “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”. In the end, “deicide will be consummated in the proud sphere of the spirit.”1
Going one step beyond the assumption that, based on the above, it is truly right and necessary to seek a way of demystifying oneself, eventually moving away from the sacraments, we also believe it is possible to desecrate the mortuary monument to individuation that is the Catholic ceremonial in order to achieve a certain self-determination with regard to ritualistic expression as something truly significant because of its personal importance, while questioning the “flock” mentality of rituals in general as well as the cornering of contemporary individualism. As with our eleventh anniversary celebration of the name Don Nadie (Mr. Nobody) –eleven being one-third plus one year of the thirty-four years each of us had lived at that time– with the exhibition “Once… Older than Jesus” at the Valenzuela-Klenner Gallery, where the main work was a broken crucifix arranged on a swastika titled The Genealogy of Morality. The image had occurred to us a good ten years earlier, but only after experiencing the things that came later did the work take on a meaning of its own, in an implicit process that can be referred to here as the “deconstruction of the I”:
The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean. That the gods die from time to time is due to man’s sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone. In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls “reason”—which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-total of all his prejudices and myopic views.
Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.
As redundant as it may seem, it may in principle be necessary to point out that in this “subversion of the crucifix”, it is not a physical body (that probably never even existed) that is martyred, but its image. And rather than taking pity on ourselves by trying to heal sacrifice through guilt, we continue its laceration, betraying the condition of object and even the artificiality of such suffering in a kind of actualization, according to the dynamics of movement represented by the swastika, for example, which at the heart of Nazism celebrated the return to Lemuria of the Atlantean race and was symbolically related to the original Nordic cross (a swastika turned counter-clockwise that represented the atomization and subsequent racial mixture of this race with the Aryan race). These racial characteristics, which in the case of the most popular image of Christ, even here in Colombia, seem peculiar, given the blond features that contradict his supposed origins in what is now the Middle East and that allude to the belief in racial superiority inherent in Christian evangelization which, among other things, entailed territorial conquests resulting in ethnographic extermination; a true Christian holocaust, extensively worse than that of the Nazis.
In the Latin word malus [bad] (to which I juxtapose [the Greek] “dark” or “black”), the common man could be characterized as the dark-skinned and especially the dark-haired man (‘hic niger est –’) [this is black], as the pre-Aryan occupant of Italian soil who could most easily be distinguished from the blond race which had become dominant, namely the Aryan conquering race, by its colour; at any rate, I have found exactly the same with Gaelic peoples, – fin (for example in Fin-gal), the word designating the aristocracy and finally the good, noble, pure, was originally a blond person in contrast to the dark-skinned, dark-haired native inhabitants. By the way, the Celts were a completely blond race; it is wrong to connect those traces of an essentially dark-haired population, which can be seen on carefully prepared ethnological maps in Germany with any Celtic descent and mixing of blood in such a connection, as Virchow does: it is more a case of the pre-Aryan population of Germany emerging at these points. (The same holds good for virtually the whole of Europe...)
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality. First Essay: “Good and Evil”.
An exhibition of The Genealogy of Morality gave rise to the inadvertent publishing of its image on Don Nadie’s Facebook page. Although we were aware of the risk of denunciation by one of the local art critics, who we had recently accused (using memes) of being reactionaries, we never dreamed that this would cost us several years of posts, lost after [these critics] denounced, first of all, the Don Nadie account (for not being registered in anyone’s real name) and, secondly, the work’s page, which we opened using a photo of the work itself (specifically, according to Facebook, for using the account to spread content deemed “disrespectful of religious feeling”), to the point that we currently have no presence on this platform beyond each of our personal profiles.
Of course, the sudden fatality of this censorship makes one distrust these social networks, which unite people around a regime of generalized surveillance, political correctness, leveling of differences, and restriction of any controversy that does more than create a noise, barely scratching the surface of issues such as the fundamental bases of these same sacred images, apparently and ultimately, structurally untouchable.
Paradoxically, the media outlet that did give the issue wide diffusion on its web, television, and print platforms was Casa Editorial El Tiempo, which, submerged in the current crisis affecting traditional media, today seems to be suffering from a decadence so apparent that, in this case, rather than setting an example of pluralism, for the most part, it showed its true colors by offering a degree of visibility contingent upon controversy.
And when the same image reproduced in poster form and posted along a section of the route that Pope Francisco was to travel the following day was censored (the posters were taken down almost entirely before the Pope drove by), it seemed to us conclusive of the fact that society in general has rigorously inherited standards of disapproval suitable to a religion that has legitimized itself to the point of becoming uncensurable, precisely through all types of censorship, including the burning of books and texts such as this one, which even today and due to its very nature, can be cause for excommunication.
However, rather than cause a public uproar, and subsequently create an image beyond the limits of the explicit –to the point of also justifying per se our “automatic excommunication for heresy”–, and even better than concluding this text with a conceptual reading of the work in question –a kind of period at the end of it–, we seek something more than is measurable in words, something that can be considered an internalization, based on the act, quite suggestive to the subconscious, of breaking with one’s own hands, literally but above all figuratively, the sacred symbol of an archetype so decisive and, therefore, contrary to the desire for sovereignty over oneself, that it may in fact imply an overthrow of paradigms like the Christ in the depths of the I, following a descent into the dark areas of one’s own shadows, where these supposed luminous figures are concealed. Particularly after having confirmed from experience and in the flesh C.G. Jung’s maxim: “Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it destiny”
* Text initially based on an article written for El sendero de la mano izquierda (The Left-Hand Path), an event created in the company of the Great Church of Lucifer and later attached in this version to the Reconocimiento de Apostasía (Recognition of Apostasy) document signed by its authors following the Noche secular: Apostasía Colectiva (Secular Night: Collective Apostasy) conceived in conjunction with an atheist leader from the Comunidad Secular (Secular Community). Both these events celebrated by Don Nadie in Espacio ArtVersus defined the beginning and end of a transcendental cycle for us in this place.
@EspacioArtVersus
The following document was used during an apostasy session in the cultural and art space ArtVersus in Bogota, Colombia.