Vanitas

In the service of any polite church, it can be felt most keenly by those from outside its mysteries, the sense of emptiness pervading each breath of the building, each cloth and decoration on the walls. Far from the ecstasies of the pentecostals, the ritualisms of the Orthodox, the obsessive legalisms from which many of these churches descended, the polite church seems to be an exercise in nothing at all, an almost cynical ceremony conducted in pale imitations of the genuine services. For the theologian, the ceremony strikes as blasphemy, a mockery of everything he spends himself in slavish devotion to the upkeeping of - the gall of those who mock by their costumish recreations, disrespecting his sacrifice to the slavegod he serves.

For those intimated, paganism never died. Skull and Bones worships death in their mysteries, as ancient as they are modern, killed, entombed, therein dissected, and reborn as Bonesmen in their initiatory rituals. Pynchon references the “Puritan Mysteries”, the paganism that never died behind the facade of christianity that could barely keep its claws sunk after only a few generations removed from the stagnation and decay of Europe. The veils once forgotten by the slave religions were uncovered and pierced in the new wilderness, and all that repressed for so long in the Christian-Judaic-Islamic world came back in full force, as all manner of once-suppressed paganisms, reared themselves from below. As the tribal peoples of the South rediscovered shamanic trances in Pentecostalism, the new form of aristocracy discovered the mysteries of death in Vanitas. The Vanitas spoken of inwardly in times of crisis, the mantra Pynchon so acutely uncovered - oss, oss, oss…

While the Rowling Psyop has turned an entire generation of potential initiates into spiritual dead-ends, the supposed villains of her writings still retain valuable insights of great use. In particular interest now, the symbol of the Dark Mark, with the memento mori being crossed and wound-through by the serpent. Long used as a symbol of magical energy, the serpent’s nature is one of forward movement, of movement directed, like water curving of its own volition. Hence the reason for the slave religion’s fear of it, their imagining the serpent as an avatar of evil, the one responsible for Eve’s line of flight from the garden’s confines. Like the Potter lies, this elides its own truth - the serpent, like the Chinese dragon, is the symbol of power, of casting a line of energy outwards, one controlled that winds its long body through the skies, which can be ridden forwards, directed, imbibed, manipulated, riding the Kali Yuga, visualized in the bruntish reminder of physicality in the memento mori.

The reminder of oss is a reminder of removal. The memento mori is one of distancing, of realizing oneself as the serpent, not the skull. A recognition of the impermanence of all things, a recognition of the becoming (the serpent) that is behind all beings (the skull). Vanitas is the sin of recognizing the world of Being for what it is, the mantra a mantra to “open the hood”, laying bare the beings to becomings and thus opening them to manipulations.