It’s hard to gauge the reception Pepe Escobar’s recent foray received, plumbing the murkier realms of Lynchian dystopia, Oppenheimer regret, the covert alchemy behind rocket science and the CIA’s demonically-laced appetite for destruction. (See ‘How Twin Peaks Unveils Our World’, Asia Times, September 7th, 2017). From all indications, the Internet didn’t exactly light up. That’s too bad. We need more of these elliptical excursions.
Linear narratives are like earnest breadcrumb trails left behind by the Pentagon press pool in the Enchanted Forest. If Snopes doesn’t get them by midmorning, crows devour them before sunset. We should cheer this development. The shelf-life for tissues of lies is collapsing.
No help from the eggheads either. All things academe have sold out. Dammit Professor, stop digging! Start encompassing! We’re awash in Ph.D. theses that fetishize granularity over a Theory of Every Damned Thing. The ultimate ah-ha! moment converges at the tippiest-top where grant-seekers dare not tread. Our academics are captured, beholden and kept in line by funding. Passing the empty pre-paid hours, they busy themselves with obscurata.
This leaves us some glorious eccentrics to map the expanse. David Lynch is doing his bit on the pop culture front. Pepe’s anti-globalist gonzo is stealing headlines from shadow-form (and shadow of its former self) the NYT.
You can feel the War in Heaven heating up. The spirit world has its knickers in a twist. Remember, St. Paul’s Principalities of the Air run the joint. That the Black Lodge acceded to playing possum for so long behind the duteous smocks of Fermi Labs was an Enlightenment coup. Like a protracted wax museum fire, the veneer has long since melted away. Materialism has dematerialized. Physicalism is a discredited heap of gizmos and techno-gadgetry intermingled with rivers of complicitous flesh and blood. You’re iPhone isn’t there. Neither is your carpal tunnel syndrome.
Escobar’s essay lashes the supernaturalist to the technocrat, ushering the Two Lodges into the threshold realm, or what he calls the “magician’s abode”. These are verboten connections that our divide-and-conquer overlords take pains to obscure:
+ “Enter the critical connection between ritual magic and modern science” or,
+ “the US deep state tapped into occult, uncontrollable forces as it opened unknown time-space portals”or,
+ “the cryptic, autocratic US deep state/industrial-military complex, via the first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945, opened a “crack”, a vacuum, a chasm (“between two worlds”) that allowed infernal/ metaphysical forces to enter our sphere of existence”
Forging this integrative healing process, Escobar tacitly endorses his own geo-political segue from adroit commentator on global realpolitik to globetrotting Bhagavad Gita-man. A word to the detractors: Pepe’s not cracking up. He’s coalescing!
Anxiety perpetuates the rift.
Cheerleaders for the Bernaysian mono-narrative, the Blitzers and Tappers of Tele-Pharisaic CNN-world, do their damnedest to instill the Next Clear and Present Danger with the last tool in their dwindling arsenal, neurotic repetition (Russian influence! Russian influence!)
When it isn’t cobbling war consensus, the MSM proffers a diversionary parade of Godot-esque Groundhog Days propped up with whispers of Big News to Come. Interwar periods call for little more than mass distraction and broad consumption. Until the war drums beat again. Which they are so clearly doing now. Hence the Russian obsession.
The Devil’s demonization projects always get the wrong guys killed. Case in point? Post-Bolshevist Russia is in the midst of a powerful Christian revival, having survived the Red Symphony’s full contempt only to emerge despite it all into prosperous renewal. The re-ascent of European Christendom (in an Orthodox vein) is a counter-cyclical development that casts sand in the Devil’s one good eye. After all, Babylon must first consolidate power on earth before giving it all back again at the end of history. Russophobia expresses a spiritual aversion first and foremost to which geopolitics acts as mere tablecloth.
God intervenes at the darkest hour. Might the propaganda onslaught be reaching a cognitive saturation point?
A growing cadre of regular peeps are vomiting up false consciousness and reacquainting with inner coordinates. Escobar is a torch-bearer for this movement.
The Controllers blunt our deep misgivings, demoting them to conspiracy theories. Sure there’s some paranoia in the mix. Every defenestrated celebrity can’t possibly have been tossed out the window by an Illuminati goon. Accidents still happen even among household names. This waking up stuff is a bitch. We’ll get better at it.
No less than media, Science peers from behind threadbare secularist garb. Oppenheimer’s dark underpinnings betray his true mistress, CERN’s threshold-greeter, Shiva. Science is in fact an egregoric pact the Enlightenment Lucifer hatched with Man allowing the latter to collaborate lustily in his own destruction. It’s not enough simply to destroy Man. Lucifer will only be satiated when God’s most prized creation actively destroy itself.
In yo face Y*hweh and back atcha!
The tide is turning though as we’re in the midst of an unprecedented reasserting of undisguised spiritual forces and entities. Proof? Exorcism rates are sky-rocketing around the globe and across all cultures. Did that old windbag Crowley and his whiz-kid Parsons really finagle a hole in the firmament? Jimmy Page has only one word for that: zoso.
Dark forces propelled the Enlightenment. Indeed Science’s greatest trick may have been making us believe the Devil didn’t exist. Are your keeping your eyes on the other shell ladies and gentlemen? Because that’s how superstition got repealed, that’s how souls became the stuff of fairy tale, that’s how haunted eyes became wards of the Pharma-State.
Escobar’s cross-pollination project is an attempt to paint the Biggest Picture where inky blackness plays a pivotal role. The Devil made Oppenheimer do it. In fact the former foreshadows his subtle, new role in Baudelaire’s The Generous Gambler (1864) when he speaks of his one great wish to escape superstition by destroying it.
Gone are the day of Dantean/Miltonian blustery brimstone and tacky red capes. Pressed white lab coats make the Man of Wealth and Taste. The Enlightenment relegated lurid displays of evil to the back burner in favor of the progressive flame of Bunsen burners.
Brian Reis has another name for this sly costume change: ‘satanic indifference’ or if one prefers the official euphemistic parlance, secular humanism. Scientists, oblivious to the dark underwriter of their work, insist their paymaster doesn’t exist. Yet Hiroshima (next stop, Pyongyang?) shows us how the wages of science yield a scalable, dissociative sin that puts one-on-one fornication to shame.
Here’s Baudelaire’s early scoop on the urbane gent soon to become Mick Jagger’s Patron Saint and Jean Luc Godard’s Docu-Marxo-Daemon:
“[Lucifer] complained in no way of the evil reputation under which he lived, indeed, all over the world, and he assured me that he himself was of all living beings the most interested in the destruction of Superstition, and he avowed to me that he had been afraid, relatively as to his proper power, once only, and that was on the day when he had heard a preacher, more subtle than the rest of the human herd, cry in his pulpit: “My dear brethren, do not ever forget, when you hear the progress of lights praised, that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!”
The memory of this famous orator brought us naturally on the subject of academies, and my strange host declared to me that he didn’t disdain, in many cases, to inspire the pens, the words, and the conscience of pedagogues, and that he almost always assisted in person, in spite of being invisible, at all the scientific meetings.”–from The Generous Gambler [my italics]
At first Lucifer appears wary of the looming prospect of invisibility (obsolescence) in the glare of ‘progressive lights’. (That’s an affected pose. He knows better.) Later, he comes to embrace the Enlightenment for the Deep Cover it affords him. Yes of course David Lynch, it’s the same ole BOB (it’s ALWAYS the same ole BOB) this time under cover of the Scientific Method as his apprentices work to refine the latest spiritual setback invariably cloaked as ‘a technological breakthrough’ but never much more than the latest new and improved invisibility cloak.
This is how hell surreptitiously substituted itself for our native surroundings. Absent a telltale imprimatur of arrival, it mimicked the slinking serpent only too well, enfolding us in slow, deadly coils that soon acclimated into ubiquitous atmosphere. The new generation of frogs love hot tubs and can’t understand why. The evidence of this stealth and guile are evident in the creeping advance of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and early cancer.
First, Heidegger said, technology enveloped us with irresistible convenience. This solicitousness played well to our innate laziness and hubris. However the agenda was always to beguile and then surpass us once techne could stand unassisted on its own transhuman feet. (Transhumanism is Ray Kurzweil’s rhetorical avoidance for post-humanism. What deep wellsprings of self-loathing compel a man to perfect his artilect executioners?)
So, evil adopts the stealth of dreary rationalism and consolidates the final lap in an orgy of mushroom clouds and fabric-splitting CERN colliders. Some people will die thinking it was the Dull March of Science –and Science alone– that killed them. But the Damned know better.
The low-order functionaries of the demon world, unlike Man, intuit the future. In Matthew 8 they ask presciently of Jesus, ‘art thou come hither to torment us before the time?’ It is a facet of angels, fallen and otherwise, that they are keen readers of the eschatological clock. Even for us, today, the narrowing path is becoming harder to ignore. The hour is late.
During the walk’s final mile, Pepe is wise to keep one foot in fire, one in ice. When thresholds afford the soundest footing, betwixt and between is the only way forward.
