15th
of July this year a mob of neo-Pentecostals invaded a terreiro of Candomblé in Olinda,
Pernambuco, Brazil screaming for casting out Satan and threatening to kill the
people in the terreiro if their evil ways where continued. This is not a unique
incident – but one of the more grave ones so far as the aftermath revealed,
torture, persecution and violence. These Pentecostal formations seem to be the
more fresh branch on the tree of Inquisition and intolerance, continuing a
putrid legacy of self righteous wardens of ‘divine law’.
This is perhaps not such a great mystery given the
obsessive occupation these neo-Pentecostals have for Satan, it is like the God
of Love has been relegated completely to the shadows of neglect and turned into
a cruel protector of wrath and intolerance. Love thy neighbor has fallen out
from the commandments and is replaced with ‘slay the infidels’ – and in a world
like ours, we all are standing with a foot and an arm in Hell.
Seeing the nature of charismatic Jesus worship in
these small churches claiming apostolic succession – while having none – is
quite baffling. In their ceremonies angels and spirits of divine judgment are
called upon in darkness to take possession of the adherents – just so they can
be filled with the spirit of vengeance and bloodshed. They do perform acts of
sorcery, but instead of resorting to demons they use angels – or simply Jesus
Christ for these purposes. Their theology is not a faith of the mind – but a
faith of passionate experience where the reception of Christ in the heart is
the law itself. In other words, there is just the law of what you feel is right
that reigns with no mediation by reasoning or contemplation. The heart is the
throne for the realm of the soul and passions – and naturally they get occupied
with Satan, because after all he is the Lord of passions and all what is
pleasurable and sexual. It is here at the throne of Satan the fire of passions
fetters their kinky souls as they condemn in the name of an intolerant and
angry idea of God. As any hypocrite they are farting words of love while their
soul is veiled in the oils of wormwood, well baked in lustful sulfur. This fire
they are brooding and cuddling, understanding to be a form of Christ love, is
nothing else but a host of malefic parasites from some sordid spirit realm that
moves them into politics, to proselyte castrated theologies and guilt
venerating morals.
The moralistic wrath they impose on God is in truth a
fetish – a kink – but contrary to the personal exercise of our kinks and
fetishes these brutes clad in suites made red with the blood of lamb and goat
twist the kink into a religion that should be embraced by all. As the blood runs and trickles and enflame
their putrid soul they are getting it off by condemning all those who do not
have received Jesus in their heart – and mind you – this reception must be
according to their rules and in conformity with their witless idolatry of
wrathful spirits of harm.
Certainly there must be a rush and a tickling in the
groin by seeing yourself as the moral guardian of this sinful world. Sin is the
stuff dreams are made of; sin is dabbling with the forbidden. It is a
transgression re-enacted in the way a fetish or a kink might be harnessed and
exercised as we cross over and take our chance on the poisoned apple, or fig.
We know from the time of the Inquisition that God and
sex walks hand in hand but we also know as Michael Gira shouted in ‘Children of
God’ that ‘the sex in your soul will damn you to Hell’. It should also be well
established that sexuality suppressed demands new – and often more wicked –
forms of manifestation. Sexual inclinations established do not simply go away, they
just mask themselves.
For these people sex is Satan’s gift to the world;
hence the world of passions is the world of Satan and its gateway is sex. By
focusing on Satan they need to use the same gateway, but instead of walking in
with open eyes they stare at this world in excitement and disgust – and by
attacking the world of non believers they seek to cleanse the sex from their
soul – but alas! The sex just turns sadistic.
This sadism is evident in the modern witch hunt going
on daily in Nigeria and the lower West Africa where neo-Pentecostal preachers
infested with paranoia and denied desires have resorted to the ‘Hammer of the
Witches’ to cast out Satan and torture kids and women based upon vague
accusations so they can satisfy their own malefic inclinations and make the
denial of desire justified.
The neo-Pentecostal movement is all about the ecstasy
of sin, a form of Eroticism the great Georges Bataille would have loved to
investigate.
It is fetishism of an eroto-religious orientation.
Fetishism is defined by its power to arouse someone’s passions, a fetish can be
directed upon any form or object –and the stronger this object is connected
with philosophy or religion, upbringing and early relationships along a bond of
excitement, negative or positive, the more potent will the fetish affect its
venerator. The dictionary also defines fetishism as an excessive – even irrational
– devotion to some activity or object. And certainly, the pompous and self-righteous
condemnation of the world of lustful Satan by these passionate and arrogant
judges of the world does invest excessive devotion to their activities.
It is an example of dislocation and how evil begets
evil in foolish and dangerous ways.
The neo-Pentecostal movement fills a vacuum in people’s
life, a need for the rushing of passions, a role sex and the experience of meaning
is often the cause of. In a country like Brazil it also counters the experience
of finding oneself in a place of poverty in an unjust world, because they will
be angelic co-rulers with the sword bearing Christ in the next world, but before
that, all infidels must die or burn in hell. In their ineffable love they lose
no time reminding us about this – so they can exercise their kink - and feed
their passions with hellfire and sulfuric love. It turns into a nuance,
something sticky and disgusting, not because of the passionate veneration of
Jesus and Satan, but because it is dislocated. If we take a step back and see
what is going on the neo-Pentecostals drive themselves in a constant state of
arousal – where the vilification of the empire of Satan has slide in as a
sexual pulse – a diabolic fetish that can only be satisfied by the arousal
condemnation and rage can give to the kink.
It was the same thing with several inquisitors, especially
Torquemada (1420-1498) who evidently got a rush from torture and some have
suggested, rape, as a means for exorcism and to extort confessions. So cruel was
the ways of this cleric that the ways of Torquemada drove Alexander VI, the
most vilified of popes, to see the need for restraining him by appointing four
more Inquisitors with the task of calming down Torquemada. He was apparently out
of control in his fanatic search for the whores of Beelzebub in the world. Of
importance is to mention that Torquemada had a special interest in young Jewish
girls, seeing them as the most Satanic of all Satan’s sluts, while Torquemada himself
was partly Jewish… so, what really went on here was his own lack of self
acceptance that were projected out upon objects of desire in a most wicked way
as it took the shape of fetishism, because all fanatism is at the core
fetishism. It is erroneously assumed that this fanatic and passionate inquisition
was a Catholic phenomenon alone – but alas, with reformation and Protestantism
matters just got worse. Luther was perhaps less bad – but Zwingli and Calvin
were as intolerant and fanatic to dissidents of the Church as any Catholic
Inquisitor.
Johannes Janssen in his 16 volume series of the History of Germany quotes a
Protestant eyewitness:
“The Protestant theologian
Meyfart . . . described the tortures which he had personally witnessed . . .
'The subtle Spaniard and the wily Italian have a horror of these bestialities
and brutalities, and at Rome it is not customary to subject a murderer . . . an
incestuous person, or an adulterer to torture for the space of more than an
hour'; but in Germany . . . torture is kept up for a whole day, for a day and a
night, for two days . . . even also for four days . . . after which it begins
again . . . 'There are stories extant so horrible and revolting that no true
man can hear of them without a shudder.”
This witness report harmonizes with what Rousseau observed in his time:
“The Reformation was
intolerant from its cradle, and its authors were universal persecutors ...”
Likewise Auguste Comte writes in his Philosophie Positive:
“The intolerance of
Protestantism was certainly not less tyrannical than that with which
Catholicism is so much reproached. “
It is this intolerance that followed the reformation as a dark passenger, a
parasite that feeds on sin, condemnation and the satanic illusion that sex and
pleasure are the hallmarks of the anti Christ so, by attacking sex and pleasure
in any form they give way for wrath, imprisoned
passions and condemnation. There is a curious double bind – or perhaps double blind
- in this where the arousal in presence of the object of condemnation takes on
power - because arousal is arousal, no matter how we interpret it – and this
arousal is an energy that can be used to feed an activity or an object. At the
end there is no difference between utter shamefulness and utter shamelessness besides
being pointers at the opposite ends of the same scale of arousal. The same mechanism is at play when a fetish or
kink is exercised. It tend to increase or decrease in potency in conformity
with soul and levels of arousal.
There is also the factor of ‘what goes around comes around’, do something wickedness
and wickedness start to sprout hair and multiply... Intolerance is an
unwillingness to respect others belief or activities. It is a form of pride –
the gravest of the cardinal sins that when projected outwards calls upon its comrade’s
‘Wrath’ and ‘Vainglory’ – the same sins that walks with any pride consumed fanatic
that understands his or her kink as religion.
What is disturbing with this is the proactive form it can take, where the
intolerance and wrath, the condemnation and self righteousness imposed upon
other people or groups lead to a circuit of such negative states gaining strength.
We see this in our annoyance and irritation that can give rise to a desire to
condemn the condemners, alas, this is the nature of suppression; that by
condemnation and suppression creates new suppressors. It is also annoying if
seen as a kink – because honestly, not everyone appreciates to have whomever’s genitals
rubbed in their face unwarranted – and at its nitty gritty rude base, this is
what is taking place amongst neo-Pentecostals of a fanatic and Inquisitorial
bent. The fanatic has become a victim for the hostile spirits of obsession, the
larvae’s Eliphas Levi spoke so much of as being detriment to human welfare and
the feeling of love and compassion.
I find it worrisome when such persons seek political positions so they can
provoke these values – their kink – upon a greater fold of society. I find it worrisome
to see that I, who strive to be tolerant and peace seeking, at times lose my
footing in a contamination of this obsessive and parasitic spirit of wrath and
condemnation and see the need for such catharsis as in writing this article...
Illustration: Masami Teraoka, 1997