Subj : Kill 'em all; let god sort 'em out
To   : All
From : Nacho Catorce
Date : Wed Oct 06 2021 07:19:27

I remember seeing bumper stickers and tee shirts with this phrase back in the 80s, especially on the boardwalk, and then later in military surplus shops.  There was usually some kind of skull and an American flag involved:

KILL 'EM ALL.  LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT.

I always wondered who would wear a shirt like this, and what it meant, to be the sort of person that would choose this, of all sentiments, to express to passing strangers.

I have a life-long neurosis, especially about clothes: I don't display messages.  I don't care that you know that, for example, My Parents Went To Sierra Leone And All I Got Was This Stupid Tee Shirt, or that I'd visited the Hard Rock Cafe or that I saw Metallica on tour.  

These sorts of things start conversations, and if there is anything I am never up for it is a spontaneous conversation with a stranger.  I have brooding, daydreaming, and staring blankly at the suburban spectacle to do.

And what kind of conversation do you have with a person who says Kill 'em All, Let God Sort 'em Out anyway?

"I saw your shirt and I, too, wish to express my profound disappointment with the Rambo knife knockoffs; that hollow handle and lack of a tang is a total letdown."

I didn't think too much about it.  It's just American trash culture after all; the kind which morphs only ever so slightly as the decades pass.  A whole lot of people out there want to play 'sojer but are scared to fucking death of Basic Training, is the best I can surmise.  

Be a prepper, be a survivalist, grow the beard, wear the tac gear.  Everything black; flashlights black so when you drop them at night you can't find them, black Glocks, black knives with black handles and blacked-out blades so no one sees you coming.

I didn't have any time for that.  I was too busy being alienated, bored, horrified, and masturbating furiously, as one does, to feel something amid the consumerist hellscape of American society since the end of World War 2.

I mean, it sounds like I'm complaining, and I am, but what really turns your stomach as the years go by is that all of the rebels, the people who insist they challenge the status quo, are either completely part of it (McPreppers and McAnarchists and McCommunists and McProtesters and McTrumpies), or else represent an alternative so reprehensible and dark you suck it up and resolve to remain satisfied with the status quo.

There's nothing worse than when the rebels are bigger gigglemuppets than the suits.

In the last few years I've been trying to understand people into the occult. On one hand I get why Christian morality can be kind of rough, opposed as it is to the fun and non-procrative kind of sex, the guilt, the perverts in the clergy, or else as a result of what the performative religious rebels, the Satanists, regard as a tyrant God pushing a slave religion.

The deeper I dove into things like Thelema and these books everyone in the occult reads (the Kybalion, the Secret Teachings of All Ages, the adolescent and insipid Satanic Bible, and many others), the more all of these things seemed, whatever their more enthusiastic relationship with one's genitalia, insipid to the point of moronic.

Aleister Crowley, in particular, is quite a character.  He created a whole religion in which his addled followers consume "Cakes of Light," a kind of obscene riff on communion, in which bodily fluids (semen, menstrual blood) are baked into cakes and handed out during what Crowley calls the Gnostic Mass, which involves naked preistesses and phallic lances.  At the moment of Thelemic "communion," the congregant says, "There is no part of me that is not of the Gods!"

(Those of us who grew up Catholic simply respond "Amen" to the "Body of Christ" declaration by the priest or Eucharistic minister).

I'm trying to figure out whether this prank of getting people to wank into cakes others freely ate of was (a) a pervy turn-on to Crowley (b) truly represented a twisted gnosis of some sort of (c) misanthropically hilarious. Anton LaVey, by comparison, was fundamentally a misanthropist who hated mankind, and tried to build a private aristocracy around him.  I wonder about Crowley, and people who rubbed shoulders with him, like L. Ron Hubbard.

Happy Little Clam that I am, I found myself rejecting as ludicrous tome after tome, grimoire after grimoire.  I wasn't looking to join the occult or believe in the occult anyway.  I was just hoping to understand it better.

Christians who fear and loathe the occult, by avoiding it entirely, can be forgiven for understanding what a deep well it can be.  It's more than hocus-pocus and more like deviant psychology.

LaVey, the Satanist, cautions practitioners to always credit magic(k) after a ritual.  It is sort of like the way the Powers That Be in the United States want people to keep repeating "We can't rely on Social Security" when we get old.  This is more a Jedi mind trick than it is a statement of fact.  The more people believe it won't exist for them, the easier it will be to abolish it.

So too with magick, in which, whether or not one is able to cause "Change to occur in conformity with Will" in the sense of summoning supernatural or psychological or egregoric forces, one should always regard a ritual only within the context of the ritual itself: a thing fails because the magick was not done properly; one was lazy about banishing, or, a thing happens, on account of a successful magic(k)al working.

Thus, one performs a ritual to obtain money, and then, all wound up from the magickal act, drives down to an Indian casino and strikes it rich on a slot machine.

The win may well have been completely random chance, but the magickal practitioner *must credit magic(k)*, the aim is to emphasize in the practitioners subconscious that he *can, in fact, muster the forces of the netherworld,* is *powerful because of it*, and so on.  This change in mindset is likely to cause a change in action.

An incel dweeb undertakes an occult working, and by random chance a thing he expressed an intention for shows up, well, now he's a magician.  Now he carries himself differently.  He's got something other than his weeb anime shit and video games on his side.

Could pay dividends.  People are attracted to power, or the "glamo(u)r" of it.  

So you always have to credit magick so you start believing you're some kind of wizard or something.

You can play with allegory, symbolism, metaphor, planets, spagyrics, minerals...whatever convinces you of the thing you need to be convinced of.

I got bored.  I got bored like I got bored of everyone "getting around to it," as I used to call it, which was this tendency of every conversation I ever had in college winding up in someone expressing a desire for revolution, the destruction of the current system, and actual or implied mass murder of whoever the person I was talking to thought was responsible for our current condition.

Indeed, politics became boring as I realized that people into practically every political ideology will eventually use their reasoning to decide under what circumstances they may attack or exterminate another human being.  Left, right, doesn't matter: what really links all ideologies together is the insistance that, ultimately, a given ideology will possess the moral authority to murder, on the basis of its essential *rightness*.  

Hence, either the capitalists, or agents of the state, or tyrants, or taxmen, or CEOs, or communists, or Jews, will be "up against the wall" when the right kind of revolution comes.

What horrified me was the degree not to which I found this appalling, but how utterly boring it was that every ideologue, wound up enough, on the right day, ripped to the tits on the right outrage, would turn into this kind of sanctimonious monster.

Raskolnikov, the main character in Crime & Punishment, allows himself a similar trip when he commits the murder that sets the events of the book in motion: he believes himself to be of a superior caste.  So too, ideologues who will eventually believe themselves to be more moral than their opposition, and, since their cause is just, the normal rules of human behavior would not apply to them.  

Given the right kind of mob that they can hide in, of course.  It is amazing what mobs enable the spineless to do under the cover of the herd.

What I did find interesting in the occult -- also full of often cryptofascist elitism, especially the left-hand path enthusiasts, were the heretics and schismatics who challenged mainstream Christianity for reasons other than a desire to fornicate themseleves into a stupor.

It took me awhile to really grok gnosticism, which is the process by which one experiences the divine, rather than merely believes in or has faith in it.  It's the difference between reading about sex, and actually having sex.

It flares up throughout history, only to be wiped out by the orthodox, only to re-appear sometimes centuries later in a different part of the world. This aspect of human experience is interesting to me.  

Chinese alchemy proposed a lot of principles identical or similar to Western and Egyptian alchemy, for instance.  That this complex tradition (for those who only understand alchemy through the lens of Harry Potter and that anime series, trust me, it's complex as hell) could arise in different civilizations at different times with synchronous principles speaks to Jungian prejudices about archetypes and collective unconscious: in this case, one sea of human unconscious as a common construction set from which both alchemical systems were created and which, being built with the same psychological bricks, represented each other.

So too with gnosticism: this need to Know God by experiencing Him or It.  Crowley's Thelemites seek something called Knowledge and Conversation of their Holy Guardian Angel; a connection with the higher self, the higher self being made of god-stuff.

It is unclear whether these gnostic flare-ups have any knowledge of the other; but there are several instances of what Ghost in the Shell termed Stand Alone Complexes.  The Rosicrucians are a perfect example of something left on the ground, picked up, and recontextualized for the modern world.  Rosicrucianism historically was never as wound up about Egyptian stuff as neoRosicrucianism is, but it makes sense.  When Harvey Spencer Lewis founded AMORC, he did so an age of Egypt fever in which people had a specific fascination with ancient Egypt, pyramids, and the like (the passing of this cultural fad is also why it seems so goofy now).

Reading about gnosticism, one eventually winds up reading about phenomena like the Bogomils, and the Albigensians/Cathars, the latter of which play roles in some Templaresque conspiracy theories.

I probably would never have gotten here except through trying to unwind the twist and turns of esoteric and occult history.

The Catholic Church was not a fan of the Cathars, who lived in southern France.  Among other things, the Cathars believed that the physical world was basically evil (compare to the older gnostic ideas about the Demiurge straying from the Pleroma and creating the physical world of suffering, separation, and density).  I mention this because when you want a contrast between the occult traditions that are all about sex, the Cathars did not seem to be fans, on account of the carnal earthliness of it, and eventual procreation, damning another human being to inhabit this physical prison.

(They were gloom cookies.)

There are a lot of interesting things about the Cathars -- they are, for me, probably the most interesting strain of gnosticism -- but I had to laugh a bitter sort of chuckle when I came across this bit:

The Catholic Church of the time, drunk on its righteousness which is a tradition of nearly every religion and ideology, sends a bunch of crusaders to do violence to the Cathars.

This is from Wikipedia.

The Crusaders captured the small village of Servian and then headed for B‚ziers, arriving on July 21, 1209. Under the command of the papal legate, Arnaud Amalric, they started to besiege the city, calling on the Catholics within to come out, and demanding that the Cathars surrender.  Neither group did as commanded. The city fell the following day when an abortive sortie was pursued back through the open gates. The entire population was slaughtered and the city burned to the ground. It was reported that Amalric, when asked how to distinguish Cathars from Catholics, responded, "Kill them all! God will know his own." 

700+ years later, I'd be standing on a boardwalk at the Jersey Shore, looking at a tee shirt that said, "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out."

Because all of life and history relates to itself, in this manner.

"Raphael Lemkin, who in the 20th century coined the word "genocide", referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history".   Mark Gregory Pegg writes that "The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His sacrifice on the cross."

I don't know how I feel about Catharism or gnosticism in terms of my own beliefs about the way the universe is structured.  It's complicated.  But the Cathars were right about a few things.

Seamus Heaney once said:

"It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir..."

And we are living in history.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/09/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (46:10/195)

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