Happy Easter from "Satan 1"
I've never had a difficult relationship with Christ — but that's because I know the "devil" can manifest in anything, even the most holy. A meditation on Easter from a moderate Catholic.
I remember sitting in church as a kid, an experience that I actually have warm recollections of in spite of my innate resistance to dogma. At a fairly early age (certainly by my mid-teens), I was able to hone-in on the controlling impulses that serve as the engine for organized religion, as well as the yearning for obedience that seems to attract people to the idea of submitting to a set of prescribed rules. Nevertheless, my feelings towards my Catholic upbringing are mostly positive.
Due to a confluence of factors, I was raised in what I can only describe as a strongly religious household that was also moderate. There was certainly an emphasis on ritual, and certain rules mattered. I can still remember my mother’s distress when she discovered that I’d eaten meat on Good Friday. I never admitted to her that I did it on purpose, going so far as to order bacon on my cheeseburger at the neighborhood diner. I also never admitted to the friends who egged me on that I felt guilty about it.
Overall, though, what I was able to take away from religion was mostly the energy of tapping into something greater than ourselves. Do I still have baggage? Sure. Was there friction between my outlook, my mother’s, and my late grandmother’s? Of course. Is there still a (somewhat unresolved) dissonance between my sense that all of us has the seed of “divine” consciousness within us and the image of a controlling, punitive god figure to whom we basically go begging? For sure. But for the most part, I didn’t have the repressive experience that not only scars people, but inclines them to spend the rest of their lives resisting.
There’s very little about my direct contact with Catholicism that I feel a need to resist. Even after learning in high school about the rampant corruption of the Church during the Middle Ages, or in my thirties about the genocide committed against women accused of being witches, or of the modern-day molestation scandal, I’m still perfectly capable of sitting inside a church and reveling in the atmosphere. I love the stillness, the way the light plays on the stained glass, the way the architecture literally aspires towards something higher, the fragrances, and — most of all! — the acoustics.
Few things are as pleasing to my ear as the way the thud of a closing hymnal book carries in the space of a church. Or the way voices become simultaneously more muted and yet more reverberant, more expansive — more musical — as they ring out under the grand archways, sound mingling with light and ambience to sublime effect…
It was in such spaces — though I often felt dragged there — that I was afforded quite a bit of latitude in drawing my own conclusions. And, because I was inquisitive by nature and had developed my own sense of what we might call spirit, I had my own line of dialogue with this “god” whose name was so often invoked. Well before my teens, for example, I sat in church and reasoned with this god that, “Well, if you can hear me cursing out of church, I’m not going to censor the cursewords from my prayers since you can hear them anyway.” By a certain age, there was just no getting in the way of my conviction to chart my own course.
These days, I look at being Catholic the same way one might look at being from a certain country or ethnic background — it’s a shared culture that unites me with people from that same background. And with that, of course, comes a certain measure of ambivalence. There are aspects of this background I either do and don’t buy into. Undoubtedly, there are also aspects that are so deeply woven into my outlook that I don’t see them operating at all — which, honestly, I kind of like. It reminds me of the knowing that, even as I might rail against certain characteristics of America, I can’t help but do so from a distinctly American perspective.
Still, I feel like I’ve staked-out a powerful sense of agency with my own belief system. And core to this —- one of the reasons I can feel so free and comfortable in my semi-detachment — is that, to this day, I’ve never bought into the whole concept of Christ, at least not in the sense that Christians place so much emphasis on. As a kid looking up at this giant crucified figure at the back wall of the church behind the altar, I can remember having a distinct feeling of “I can’t buy into this — I wasn’t there, so I just don’t know.”
Religion, then, never operated for me as a literal endeavor. And my mom — pro-choice, unapologetically divorced from my brother’s dad, never married to my dad, to mention just a few of the rules she flouted — provided the ultimate example that with religion, you can only take-in what feels right for you. Later, in college, I came to meet people for whom this was a foreign concept. And it dawned on me that my circumstance was atypical, or at least that’s the way I see it now. From where I sit, either people tend to have deeply religious backgrounds that emphasize rules and rituals, or they lean in a secular direction that lacks a spiritual anchor. My upbringing was infused with the best of both.
In my mid-thirties, I came to embrace the idea of Christ, but as an abstract all-forgiving force. I recognized at the time that the image of Christ could be so persuasive that it could establish a vice-like hold over people. I was fresh from reading historian Laurence Bergreen’s book Over the Edge of the World. With its accounts of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the globe, Bergreen’s book contains accounts of Magellan’s party converting people to Christianity literally overnight.
These people had never even encountered the idea of Christ and yet they found it sufficiently compelling. There’s something profoundly scary about that — to say nothing of the things I’ve witnessed in my own lifetime in terms of how far people will go in Christ’s name.
So I may not need to resist Jesus, but I certainly feel the need to be wary of containing and safeguarding against a thoughtform that has such corrosive potential to mutate into something pathogenic. What strikes me most is how Christians can be so reverent about Jesus and incant all the rhetoric that’s attributed to him while at the same time espousing views that directly contradict his tenets. Which means that Jesus function as an empty vessel into which one can freight all sorts of other explosive and dangerous materials.
I don’t quite understand how this happens — how people can be so rapt about reciting sacred ideas while being in disharmony with those ideas — but I’ve observed this same mechanism outside of religion as well. People, I’ve come to conclude, are “religious” in their orientation toward their values and principles. But the principles themselves become diffuse in the glare of their adherence to those principles — in other words, people can speak principles while working against the very words they’re speaking.
It’s as if people need a kind of rhetorical launchpad that serves as a kind of artificial proxy for an idealize version of what they think they’re striving for, but when they actually build up the momentum from the launch, they end up going… wherever they go. And they seem completely blind to the dissonance between what they’re saying and what they’re doing…
In 2006, I interviewed Martin Eric Ain, late bassist of the seminal heavy metal band Celtic Frost. In our conversation, which went on for over two hours (and which I promise to eventually post the audio of), he had this to say:
"For me, religion didn't have a redemptive quality. It didn't help me to have a more positive outlook on life. It was a negative, oppressive kind of thing. I remember that traumatic experience of being in a church, with this life-sized cross with this tormented human figure nailed, its limbs twisted and turned… I must have been about 5 or 6. That was really bizarre, having all those people around me being solemn in a way, but then, on the other hand, really getting joyous toward the end of that ritual about this person dying. And then going to the front of the church and coming back having devoured part of the body of that person. As a child, you take something like that quite literally, you know? And it was never really explained to me in a way that seemed really logical. I had nightmares. So Christ became a symbol of utter failure and absolute totalitarian control."
In 1985, the iconic Swiss painter H.R. Giger — creator of the monster and the aesthetic for the film Alien — gifted Celtic Frost his Satan 1 painting to use on the cover of their second album To Mega Therion. I still have a t-shirt of that album cover that I bought in 1992. I love the shirt so much that I’ve hardly ever washed it in 30 years, so it smells like rust — literally metal.
Of course, I never would’ve dared wear the t-shirt around my mom and grandmother — nor would I have wanted to be so blithe about desecrating something that has such profound meaning for them. Again, there’s nothing about the Church that I feel the need to destroy. Also, I might’ve been more inclined to be overtly disrespectful had I grown up in Puerto Rico. But growing up on the U.S. mainland, my family’s Catholicism felt like a strand of something precious to preserve.
The flicker of candlelight, the images of Saints, the Rosary beads, the cadence of the prayers — all of those things mean as much to me as, say, my maternal grandmother’s kitchen apron, or her beautifully sonorous accent, or the warm glow of affection that I felt simply being in her presence. Those things somehow contain the living essence of my mom and grandmother, but it goes further than that. There’s a fabric of sensations that religion kind of envelopes you in. And in that lies embedded a cultural and cosmological outlook whose recognition of the transcendent has been all but annihilated by the cold, deadened brutality of American-style secular rationalism.
Still, I’ve always worn my Satan 1 t-shirt with pride. To me, it represents how any ideal can become a tool of something darker that lurks behind it — or, perhaps, even lives within it…
As far as I’m concerned, Easter, with its pre-Christian echoes of fertility, represents a more universal kind of “resurrection.” I’m less interested in the supposed journey of Christ from death back to rebirth — again, I wasn’t there — but in transmogrification more generally: the practice of evolving from one state to the next. I feel that when humans finally come to terms with our inner paradoxes, with our drive towards attaching ourselves so vehemently to concepts we then work so fervently against, then maybe we’ll experience a collective kind of resurrection of consciousness.
Until then…
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<3 SRK
Wow. You really explained well how I feel about my own Christian upbringing. Great read.