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!

Are You Ready for The Rapture?

From 13th-century Europe comes the legend of the Wandering Jew: a hapless figure who, according to the story, mocked Jesus as he was being led to the place of crucifixion. For this ultimate lack of compassion this individual was cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. Later embellishments of this story give the man’s name as Ahasuerus – although why Ahasuerus was singled out from the [1]mocking multitudes who lined the way to Golgotha is something which the legend leaves unclear.

At the limits of his strength, Ahasuerus is himself mocked by the very Death which is denied to him.

What the story contains, and what concerns us here, is the unspecified time for Jesus’ triumphal return. Assuming the legend to be true, and with no Second Coming yet in sight, we must also assume that Ahasuerus is wandering still. How unimaginably strange and alienating the experience of witnessing the past two millennia must have been for him. He would have witnessed the growth of a religion which, for all its strength of numbers, has become deeply factionalized into thousands of different denominations, all with their own doctrines which differ from each other - sometimes radically so.

Twisted city: tornadoes demolish San Francisco.

But when will the Second Coming happen? At the time, it was fervently believed that this momentous event would take place within a [2]generation of the events of the crucifixion, in which case Ahasuerus would have lived a reasonably normal if rather lengthy life-span. There were many texts then in circulation about the coming end times, many revelations, all with appropriate signs to watch for that would signal the imminence of the event. As it turned out, only [3]one of these doom-laden texts finally made it into the canon. We know it as the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine.

Los Angeles slides into the Pacific Ocean.

That John’s text originally was only one of many such [4]eschatological texts then in circulation says as much about our preoccupation with such scenarios as it does about any specifically religious context. How else to explain our hunger for the sort of graphic scenes that we eagerly watch in any number of blockbuster disaster movies? We look on spellbound (but nevertheless safely nestled in our armchairs) as whole cities are engulfed by mega-tsunamis, by planet-rupturing earthquakes, by collision-course asteroids, by super-volcanoes, or even by out-of-control unreasoning monsters, all of it presented in the convincing fidelity of detail which state-of-the-art [5]CGI technology can now conjure forth.

That something in our nature actually seems to relish these images is evidenced by the box office takings of such films. And human nature being what it is, it’s a hop-skip-and-jump away from placing these things in a religious context – as in a pre-disaster movie age John of Patmos and others of his time actually did. We still have these hankerings for a spiritual disaster scenario. In our own time such a scenario is known as The Rapture.

Yellowstone Park heads skywards as the supervolcano erupts from beneath it.

The Rapture, the bodily ascent of believers into heaven which heralds the Second Coming, is an evangelical Christian concept, the details of which, inevitably, are contested between different evangelical groups. Is The Rapture concurrent with the Second Coming, or will the loyal faithful be raptured up into the realms celestial to greet the returning Christ? There can be no certainties for an event which, by its very definition, is supernatural. Not that certainties are not claimed, of course. Any number of signs for the end times are proposed, and any number of predictions of the precise time and date have been made in the last century and a half. As you are reading this, you can comfortably conclude that all such predictions have proven to be inaccurate.

A contemporary version of John's beast from the sea: the Cloverfield monster attacks New York. 

I will make a modest prediction of my own: The Rapture is like the future. It is and always will be something that is about to happen. I have, you see, a basic objection to the concept itself, and that objection crystalizes in the word ‘selectivity’. Any idea which smacks of spiritual elitism is an idea that needs to be questioningly scrutinized. If only believers who have [6]prepared themselves (specifically: Christian evangelical believers) are going to get raptured up, where does that leave the rest of us? Are all the non-evangelical Christians, Jews, Hindus, Bahais, neo-Pagans, Jains, Taoists, atheists, Buddhists, Sikhs, animists, you name it, going to be cut loose to roam a post-apocalyptic [7]dystopia, guarding precious fuel dumps like they were Fort Knox and praying that Mad Max is out there somewhere?

The bleak highway which Mad Max rides. The future, it seems, is a road to nowhere.

There is another side to this. With me, there always is. In the hypothetical situation of me being offered a ticket to ride (I said it was hypothetical), I assure you that I would turn it down. Somewhere inside me there lives a [8]bodhisattva. I would elect to stay behind and do what I could on earth. And if you are one of those who is getting ready for The Rapture, knowing that in so doing you are preparing yourself to be among the chosen elite who will leave so many of your fellows behind to suffer, then I would suggest that you might discover that heaven could well apply rather different criteria for selection than mere denominational doctrine and Rapture-ready preparedness. Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew who must wait for the Second Coming, could be continuing his wanderings for quite a while yet.

Hawkwood      

Notes:

[1] Using the same rationale we must also wonder why Pontius Pilate, the soldiery who scourged Christ, and the entire cynically derisive crowd who chose to free the thief Barabbas were not also visited by the same curse which condemned Ahasuerus. Curses in legend, apparently, are irrationally selective. Another example of such a selective curse is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (left), whose worldly sufferings seem out of all proportion to his original act of shooting the albatross and thus precipitating the curse against him. Such curses in stories and legends can be devices for both driving a narrative forward and underscoring a moral point.

[2] In Matthew 24:34 Jesus says: "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled".

[3] At the Council of Nicaea, presided over by Emperor Constantine, The Book of Revelation only just scraped through the selection process to become canonical. With its intense visions both wondrous and bizarre, it has been inspiring artists (myself included), writers and End-of-Days conspiracy theorists ever since.

[4] Eschatology is the study of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios from all cultures.

[5] CGI: computer generated image.

[6] A Rapture-Ready Check List: What being Rapture-ready actually entails can involve a whole check list of do's and don't's requirements, with the don't's including: don't sleep around with your girlfriend or boyfriend, don't work on Sunday, don't put the needs of your wife or husband and family before your faith, don't fail to truly repent of your sins, don't commit idolatry (which, as the website Divine Revelations makes clear, includes praying to saints, just to cut out all those idolatrous Catholics) and, rather mysteriously, you apparently can forget about being raptured up if you are merely ‘Worldly or Lukewarm’ (whatever that might mean).

All the stringent requirements (and the Divine Revelations website lists many more than the six I have mentioned here) when taken together would ensure that a negligible minority (if any) of evangelicals would pass muster. And human fallibility being what it is, this in turn prompts the curious scenario of The Rapture happening – and no one actually being raptured up. All in all, this laundry list of requirements catalogued by the Divine Revelations website, which would seem impossible to fulfill by all but the most neurotically stringent and religiously obsessed individuals (who presumably would be considered too unstable to be suitable Rapture candidates anyway), is merely another example of that perennially favourite ploy: a reward-and-punishment system of faith through fear, the ‘fear’ part in this case being the dire consequences of being one of the multitudes who will be left behind in a world which will descend into the stuff of nightmares.

[7] Dystopia: a future dysfunctional society in which the social order has broken down, which is the opposite of the ideal society as originally envisaged in the 16th-century book Utopia by Sir Thomas More.

[8] The Buddhist term bodhisattva has evolved in Western interpretations to mean a soul who declines to enter the bliss of Nirvana, electing instead to remain behind and help other sentient beings.

Sources:

Elaine Pagels: Revelations: Visions, Prophesy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. Viking, 2012. Professor Pagels’ book puts John’s text in the context of the times in which he was writing: in the despairing aftermath of the crushed Jewish Revolt, and pointing out that each succeeding generation has seen its own sufferings and trials reflected in John’s visionary writings. The book also makes clear what I have mentioned here: that John’s text was only one of many of its kind then in circulation.

The top image is a detail of the painting Ahasuerus at the End of the World, by the Hungarian artist Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl, 1888. Left behind by the angel of Hope, mocked by an indifferent Death, Ahasuerus struggles on through an icy and forbidding wilderness as scavenging crows scatter around a comotose woman - the desperate epitome of all of fallen humanity. Other images are taken from the feature films: The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Cloverfield, and the Mad Max online game.

Lilith: Spirit of the Night

She is a demon. She is a monster, a wraith, a vampire. She is everything you fear when the sun dips down below the horizon and your world slides into darkness. Both scorned and feared by men, her name is Lilith, the spirit of the night.

Lilith: Spirit of the Night

This is the way in which Lilith has traditionally been portrayed in folklore, and it is an image which endures into popular culture even today. Goth, metal and post-rock bands continue to get mileage out of referencing her in lyrics, and she has reached our own age via the Romantics of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, who were happy-enough to turn her into an alluring Victorian femme fatale. At times her identity has been blended with that of Lamia, that other predatory being of legend, half serpent, half female. But how did this legend begin?

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Book of Genesis is that, in just its first two chapters, it relates two separate and conflicting accounts of the creation of the first humans. Chapter Two is the familiar version of God forming Eve from a rib of the comatose Adam. But in the previous chapter the first couple, who now remain unnamed, are created at the same time, and from the same prima materia. It might at first seem like a minor adjustment to this story, for such stories already were an inherited oral tradition, and must have varied with subsequent retellings. But this difference has impacted folklore, and spawned a legend.

This Babylonian relief carving of a winged and bird-footed female is a reminder that Hebrew texts were influenced by the lands of Hebrew exile. In Babylonian beliefs lilitu were a class of female demons.

Later Jewish folklore names the nameless woman in Chapter One (which also is the first chapter in the Jewish Torah) as Lilith, the first wife of Adam. Since Lilith is created in the same moment as Adam, she is not, as Eve was, formed from a part of Adam’s flesh. Eve, who was Woman, already was a second-generation product. Lilith contrastingly is an autonomous being, and as such is in every way Adam’s equal. Adam expects his new mate to be subservient, also in her sexual role. Lilith has other ideas, and protests mightily both to God and to Adam that she also has rights and expectations. Having scorned both man and deity, Lilith storms off into the night. Unlike Eve, Lilith is not ejected from Eden. Instead she keeps the power to herself, and leaves of her own volition.

Two Victorian lamias (left, by John William Waterhouse, and right, by Herbert Draper) both draped in the shed skins of their serpent selves.

In her wanderings and in legend, Lilith becomes a creature of the darkness associated with vampires, monsters and night spirits: associations which have endured into contemporary popular culture. But whatever she has become since, in folklore she originally was Adam’s equal partner – a state of affairs about which both God and Adam apparently had regretful second thoughts. The all-too-masculine deity did not make that mistake twice, and with the feisty and assertive Lilith out of the picture, Eve was created to be subservient to the man.

This serpent-entwined version of Lilith by John Collier would seem to be little more than an excuse for some exotic Victorian titillation.

Lilith’s punishment for doing nothing more than assert her equal gender rights was to be transformed in folklore into a predator of the darkness. It seems that what men feel threatened by, what invokes male insecurity, is not so much a woman’s sexuality, as a woman’s sexual autonomy. What also seems to be underscored by Lilith’s story is another simple but stark reality: that although we might not know the identities of the writers of these ancient texts of scripture and folklore, their pro-male story lines are in themselves enough to persuade us that they were written by men.

Hawkwood

Sources:

Lilith: Spirit of the Night painted for this post by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio, All Rights Reserved. For those interested in the sources of such things: the geomantic symbols which are painted on the body of my model are those meaning 'great good fortune' - a visual statement which I feel in itself redresses in some small measure the gender injustice of these pro-male stories which have become so entrenched in our culture, whether or not we are 'believers'.

Babylonian carving: British Museum, London. The blue on the manes of the two beasts is the original surviving pigment with which this carving was painted. Lamia, by John William Waterhouse, 1909 (collection untraced). Lamia, by Herbert Draper, 1910 (collection untraced). Lilith, by John Collier, 1892, in the Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, England.