SPECTACLE IN BABYLON

by Mark Hackard

As the West disintegrates, its frenzy of self-affirmation becomes more grandiose and grotesque. Our elites, the manufacturers of what passes for culture, arrange mass rites that attest to their greatness and benevolence. The people stand in awe, and just as critically, they are entertained. Nowhere in the United States is this more evident than at the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is not simply a profit bonanza for casinos and network television or mere proletarian distraction; it embodies a potent means of social control. Played in the first week of February, the National Football League’s championship game sets the tone for advertising and entertainment in the coming year. It is also a useful platform to propagandize and condition a population of 300 million. America clearly enjoys its indoctrination, as all too many revel in this spectacle’s base nature. People who have not the slightest interest in football will excitedly gather around billboard-sized TV screens to watch the unveiling of a new commercial for erectile dysfunction pills.

Beyond its heavy dose of social programming, the Super Bowl functions as a pseudo-religious festival, one that only a degenerated civilization could produce. In his excellent work In Tune with the World, Catholic philosopher Fr. Josef Pieper writes regarding the phenomenon of the pseudo-festival:

Wherever in the course of history we encounter artificial holidays, we may conclude that they point to a particular interpretation of man’s being: to the claim that man, especially in the exercise of political power, is able to bring about his own salvation as well as that of the world. Proof of such lofty powers can always be simulated, provided political propaganda tries hard enough. The semblance can even be kept up, at any rate for a while. And on the basis of it artificial festivals, likewise for a time at least, can thrive or even exert a more or less convincing spell- especially if the combined powers of the pseudo-arts, entertainment, sensationalism, and manipulated illusion are brought to bear, and if in addition the political rulers command and control such ‘spontaneous festive gladness’. 

Our cultural controllers offer cheap knock-offs of Transcendence. Where the ancients once held games to honor the gods, denizens of the Brave New World now pay obeisance to “freedom”, the oligarchic regime that administers it and a pantheon of celebrities. Glorification of corporate packaging, the physical prowess of the human animal or some deviant pop star is a mindless attempt to stave off the crushing absurdity of life without meaning. Death still looms over us unvanquished, and in its shadow men prefer desolation and nothingness to God. Fr. Seraphim Rose traces the logical course of Western man’s turning away from Christ, the universal and eternal Logos:

Men have rejected the Son of God Who, even now, desires to dwell in men and bring them salvation; and finding intolerable the vacuum this rejection has left in their hearts, they run to madmen and magicians, to false prophets and religious sophists, for a word of life. But this word, so readily given, itself turns to dust in their mouths when they try to repeat it.

Surrogate deities rise from the void and demand worship. At times these gods assume patently ridiculous forms, if only to accentuate our abasement. Such has been the case with Madonna, the Super Bowl XLVI halftime show sensation. Madonna Ciccone is a 53-year-old woman who in any healthy society would be relegated to its more sordid undersides. In this degraded age she is crowned songstress to the world, a tawdry prefiguration of the scarlet harlot from St. John’s Apocalypse. A veteran perpetrator of three decades of cultural subversion, Madonna executed yet another lewd, insipid musical extravaganza before a global audience. And while execrable in its exaltation of this “goddess”, the show seemed to fulfill another very specific purpose.

Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance projected a barrage of occult and Masonic imagery. The arcane symbols seen during the concert cannot be consigned to the realm of fantasy; indeed, they were blatant enough to be easily spotted by astute observers. Vigilant Citizen, a website covering the interplay between occultism and popular culture, published a rather convincing exposé on the esoteric undercurrent of the whole spectacle. Perhaps it’s tempting to dismiss such claims as conspiracist paranoia, yet Madonna’s wardrobe and set art, as well has her very biography, suggest more than a passing acquaintance with secret societies.

Having built her fortune on blasphemy, Madonna is also a high-profile practitioner of Kabbalah, Judaic magic rooted in the mystery schools of Babylon and Egypt. One reason among many for Hollywood’s suspension in unreality is that “the industry” has an extensive history with cults, so it should come as no surprise that a number of stars and their handlers might be participants in such activity. How remarkable that Madonna, the Material Girl, devotes herself to contact with unseen forces from the astral plane! The more refined work of radicals past, particularly the invocations of Bakunin and Proudhon, confirms that atheist materialism soon enough begets demonolatry, implicit or overt.

So if the media-entertainment complex has been embedding occult symbols into the popular consciousness, what exactly has been the point of it all? Vigilant Citizen and other commentators would speculate that the Illuminati, a globalist cabal of banking clans, are now revealing themselves to the stupefied herd they rule.

Revelations or no, serious mention of the Bavarian Illuminati is a sure ticket to ostracism from polite society. This revolutionary sect, founded in 1776 by Jesuit-educated Adam Weishaupt with suspected Rothschild family backing, did indeed operate in the late eighteenth century, but attempting to verify its continued existence in our time is a journey through the looking glass. We can, however, assert that sociopathic financial elites dominate the international political economy, do engage in all manner of predation and war profiteering, and quite possibly adhere to occult doctrines that underlie and justify their drive to a unitary world-state. One could, for example, easily imagine former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn at a ritual orgy of the kind depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut.

Incontestable in the debate over any hidden hand in history is the triumph of Illuminism, the ideology that defines the modern West. From the Enlightenment to the present day, we have witnessed “progress” in regicide, the near-total devastation of the Church and the institution of liberal democracy. The very blood-memory of Christian Europe must be wiped from the face of the earth, and in its place equality will reign in a cosmopolitan market system. The family is to be liquidated, and human identity, man made in the image and likeness of his Creator, will be perverted and destroyed through Promethean desire and technology. Divine love shall be banished from paradise.

Planning for the overthrow of the Old Order, the Illuminatus Weishaupt called for infiltration and control of media, education and the arts to comprehensively shape the worldview of the populace. In this directive we find perhaps the true purpose of occult propaganda, to bring the masses, in C.G. Jung’s formulation, under the power of oppressive archetypes. The result of such a program in America is both ludicrous and sinister; the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show resembled a bizarre hybrid of Lucifer Rising and Idiocracy.

What, then, would be the grand secret behind a campaign to initiate the nations into occultism? Certainly the powers of this world aren’t looking to share any special knowledge they’ve acquired- rather, they conduct ruthless psychological warfare against us. In manipulating the collective subconscious, the plutocracy sets out to engineer a deracinated, hedonistic and irredeemable sub-humanity. Their more perfect union is our perfected enslavement. Yet this reality must not serve as a temptation to despair. In his rebellion against Logos, even Satan is no more than the ape of God, and can fashion only vapid counterfeits to authentic Being and salvation.