The Elephant in the Room

We are at a cozy family get-together. The whole family might be all too aware that Uncle Bertie is having a fling with that bedroom-eyed hottie from the typing pool, but no one wants to hurt the feelings of dear Aunt Phyllis, who might or might not know about her husband’s wayward adventures. We all have experienced such situations at one time or another. It might be at a family gathering, or perhaps at some round-the-table business meeting, when everyone present knows some awkward or embarrassing fact, but no one dares to mention it for fear of disturbing what might actually be a fragile peace.

The logo of the American Republican Party. An innocent design of chance or something rather darker?

Such a situation we call an elephant in the room: a glaring fact known to all, but tiptoed around and left unmentioned for fear of causing upset or disturbance. What is ironic about the elephant in the room under scrutiny here is that it is an actual elephant. The American Republican Party, commonly referred to as the GOP (‘Grand Old Party’) has been using its logo of an elephant since a political cartoon of 1874 depicted the Party as this animal battling the subterfuges and evils of the land. That much is clear enough, and a matter of historical fact. That the colors of the logo came to be red, white and blue to match the colors of the American flag is a given, and that it came to contain three of these stars from the Stars and Stripes was perhaps seen and approved of as adding a patriotic flourish. So far, so good.

The idea that an upward-pointing pentagram is ‘good’ while an inverted pentagram is ‘evil’ is now deeply ingrained into our culture. But all ideas come from somewhere, so where did these particular ideas come from?

The problem is that these three stars are not those on the American flag. The elephant in the room so plain to see on this elephant is that the stars are actually inverted. Why? I have struggled to find the reason, but no one seems to know what brought about this crucial change. There apparently has been some suggestion that the stars were changed to point downwards around the year 2000, but whether this is so or not, still no explanation has been forthcoming. Now, perhaps I should make clear what I have said elsewhere on this blog: I am not an American citizen. I do not have a vote in the States, and so do not have a say in the coming mid-term elections or in any other elections held on U.S. soil. This post is more about symbolism than it is about political persuasion, but as symbols are everywhere in politics then the two subjects are bound to be linked.

This seal is based upon the original drawing of Stanislaus de Guaita, which has served as a blueprint for all subsequent versions of the ‘evil’ inverted pentagram. In Jewish tradition, Lilith was the first woman created before Eve, and Samael was one of the names of the misshapen creature who also was called Saklas or Yaldabaoth.

The name of Stanislaus de Guaita might not be one which readily springs to mind when discussing American political parties, but de Guaita was a French poet, mystic and occultist who in the 19th-century first drew a figure which was published in his book La Clef de la Magie Noire (‘The Key of Black Magic’). The drawing depicted a goat’s head with horns pointing upwards and superimposed upon an inverted five-pointed star or pentagram. This drawing of de Guaita’s seems to be our source for all of our associations with an inverted pentagram being ‘evil’ – an association which has cheerfully been seized upon by practitioners of the dark arts and by heavy metal bands everywhere.

An early logo for the Swedish metal band Tiamat incorporated an inverted pentagram into its design, and other bands such as Katatonia, Slayer and Venom have also used this device.

This association of an inverted five-pointed star with evil is now so widespread that it would seem to stretch all credulity to imagine that whoever took the decision to invert those three GOP stars was not aware of it. There they are on the GOP logo as bold as brass: three inverted ‘evil’ pentagrams. And unlike the four upward-pointing ‘stars and stripes’ stars on the Democratic Party’s donkey logo, there clearly are three of these stars. Why is this doubly significant? While inverted pentagrams are widely seen to be ‘evil’, what is perhaps less well-known is that any sequence of [1]three ‘malign’ things – in this case, those three stars – is viewed as a Satanic mocking of the Holy Trinity.

Could things get any worse for the symbolic prospects of the GOP? It also is seen (or it likes to be seen) as a party which upholds Christian values, and yet here it is marching under a banner of Satanic portents. In the eyes of the law, being unaware that something is criminal activity is a shaky defense at best, and being unaware of the full symbolic significance of something does not lessen the potency of that symbolism. The dark way of these things is that they tend to destroy from within those who use them, and by their own actions. The GOP might yet escape the fate which its logo might have invited, but with the current political scene in the States being what it is, it does rather look as if that fate could well be unfolding.

Hawkwood

A note: I feel that I owe my regular visitors an explanation for my lengthy absence. It has nothing to do with any waning interest in posting about these subjects, but to do with health issues which have had to be coped with combined with the considerable demands of other projects which have made hefty claims upon my time in the last years. My thanks to regular readers for their patience, and my wish is that new readers will find previous posts of interest.

Hawkwood


Notes:
[1] Other examples to consider, all of them connected in some way with fire or burning, are scratches by presumed evil 'entities' manifesting on the skin of paranormal investigators, often actually on camera. The victims first complain of a fiery burning sensation, and the scratch marks then appear as three visible red welts. Two cases concerning fire would be the three films which all included demonic elements: William Friedkin's The Exorcist, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Ridley Scott's Legend. The costly sets of all three films caught fire and burned to the ground, and no cause for any of these three conflagrations has ever been determined. The second case of a 'fiery threesome' might well include the three fires which have broken out at Trump Tower in New York, and you can make of that what you will!

All Things Bright and Beautiful

Seeing the hand of God in creation is not difficult. One has only to look at the magnificence of a sunset, or the splendour of a rainbow after a shower of life-giving rain, or the intricate beauty of a butterfly’s wings. At least, that was what someone once reassured me. My answer was that if he accepted these things as part of that creation, then he must also accept that the spirochetes which form syphilis, the rogue cells of cancer, and the bot fly are also part of that same scheme of things.

The eyes of a leopard. We tend to think of such predators as being at the top of the food chain, but titanic struggles between predators and prey are constantly taking place at the microscopic level as well.

The bot fly (I explained to him) injects its larvae into the nestlings of [1]birds. The huge growing larvae, crawling their way through living flesh, eat the baby birds from the inside out, causing slow and excruciating death before they [2]burst through the flesh to continue their own life cycle. He thought for some time about this, then carefully responded that those sorts of creations cannot be God’s, but must instead be the work of the Devil. He seemed not to be aware that, in ascribing equal creative powers to the Devil as he gave to God, he was committing what from an orthodox standpoint was an extreme heresy.

An electron microscope image of the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus. This exclusively carnivorous and highly-predatory water-dwelling bacteria eats flesh – any flesh, including that of humans. Wounds on the victims resemble the massive and ragged-edged bites of a shark attack.

Perceiving the mechanisms of the natural world as a blind force with no supernatural agency involved removes this gnarly moral problem at a stroke. It is only with the introduction of supernatural creation that seemingly-insurmountable moral ambivalence is introduced into the mix. If God created everything, then he also consciously created some very nasty stuff as well as those butterfly wings: things which were deliberately created to make other things suffer, which makes God’s own moral stance anything but ‘loving’. But if you accept that God created rainbows, but don’t accept that he created everything, well… then you’re a dangerous heretic by default. Ah, the dilemma!

The magnified scales on a butterfly’s wing. The colours are not formed from pigment, but from minute prisms which refract the light. Much that we perceive as beautiful is not even visible to the naked eye.

And what a strange creation it is. It exists by consuming itself, with a large percentage of all the organisms sustaining themselves by eating other organisms, from big cats on the Savannah right down to predatory microbial life – and often-enough with processes involving considerable pain, stress and suffering to the consumed. It has been the unenviable task of religious belief to iron out this paradox, which becomes a moral paradox as soon as it is linked to a consciously intelligent creator. The person with whom I was in conversation had opted, quite unknowingly, for a scheme of things which was proposed in distant centuries by the Gnostics.

A common dandelion head festooned with dew and spider silk on an overcast morning. The human mind perceives the beauty while the natural world remains indifferent. The delicate lace of a spider’s web is an efficient trap spun by a predator for ensnaring prey, which it then paralyzes and keeps alive to consume.

What the Gnostics believed was that the ultimate godhead is unknowable, unfathomable, and defying any attempt at description by mere humans. The first emanation from this Mystery is [3]Sophia – Wisdom – the feminine creative force. Sophia, rashly experimenting with her own creative powers, begets a monster known as the Demiurge – the ‘Craftsman’ – who is sometimes depicted as a serpent with a lion’s head. The Demiurge in his turn also rashly forgets that his powers are not his own, but are loaned from Sophia. In his hubris the Demiurge then creates the world, and all the creatures in it.

The veined traceries of fallen leaves in Autumn. The human mind’s ability to create patterns of its own seems to make it hard-wired to assume intelligence behind naturally-occurring patterns in the wild. Since such an assumed intelligence would by definition have to be a supernatural one, it lies forever beyond proof in the realm of personal belief.

It is this [4]Demiurge who resembles the creator god of scripture – a god who creates the world and its creatures. We consider the scriptural God as supreme, just as the Demiurge, in forgetting the higher powers above him, also thought that he was the supreme creative force. Knowing this ‘back story’ readily explains why the world is flawed, violent and ambivalent, why it survives by consuming itself in ways that are often savage and the cause of suffering to its denizens. This makes sense if the creator god is a lesser god who acted out of arrogance. But attributing the world and its creation to a god who is loving and all-powerful immediately gives rise to disturbing moral issues. If God is all-powerful, why does he allow such suffering to exist? And if he is loving, why did he consciously and willfully create the natural mechanisms which cause such suffering in the first place? You cannot cite sin as a reason, because the [5]natural world is not subject to sin.

A Dutch winter landscape, photographed not far from where I live. Our senses respond to the snowy white silence and purity of nature in winter, but for the animals which live in it, it can mean a time of hardship, starvation, and even death. 

In a recent earthquake that occurred in Peru a church collapsed, tragically killing many of the congregation who were at worship inside. What are we to think of this incident, if we consider the presence of an omnipotent god? Weren’t they praying hard enough? Such speculation hardly comforts the bereaved, and leaves us floundering in a moral morass.

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful:

The Lord God made them all.

So go the words of the well-known Sunday school hymn. But this squeaky-clean version of the creation only tells half the story. And Gnostic beliefs might have been vilified by the Church for centuries, but at least Gnostics managed to come up with a more feasible explanation for why things are the way they are.

Hawkwood   

Notes:

[1] Potentially any warm-blooded animal, including humans, can become a host. But with nestlings I’m using the example which I have seen.

[2] Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and yes, such earthly parasitic life-forms were indeed the inspiration for the alien’s life cycle in Ridley Scott’s film.

[3] Hence the term ‘philosophy’: ‘love of Sophia (Wisdom)’.

[4] Although a unique entity, the Demiurge tends to be confused in Christian thought with the Devil, which is why the Christian claim that the Gnostics believed that Satan created the world is a misunderstanding.

Tyrannosaurus rex, the superlative-defying predator at the top of the Cretaceous food chain - and of the dinosaur popularity stakes in the human imagination - flourished at the very end of the age of the dinosaurs for a comparatively brief two million years.

[5] Even your familiar four-legged household friend lacks the enzymes necessary for the digestion of a vegetable diet, so please spare me the Christian fundamentalist claim that animals only became carnivorous after the Fall. Such a line of thinking leads inexorably to the idiocies of creationism, and creationist claims that Tyrannosaurus rex (above), whose bite force has been calculated at a staggering 2,900 pounds per side of the jaw (the most powerful of any animal known), was on board Noah’s Ark and ate coconuts. You think I’m making this stuff up? I wish that I was, but Kenneth Ham, the founder and CEO of the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, is on record as saying this. But then again, how do creationists know what dinosaurs looked like?


Sources:
Sources are untraced for the leopard, the Vibro vulnificus bacteria, and the butterfly wing scales. All other photography and T. rex skull drawing by Hawkwood for the David Bergen Studio © All Rights Reserved.