Deathspell Omega: A Sketch on "Chaining the Katechon"

The author is trying to wriggle his way out.

In Galatians 5:13-15 we can read that

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh^, rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.

The cover of 2008’s “Chaining the Katechon” suggests that we aren’t doing very well—and Timo Ketola’s drawing, which resembles the well-known image of a snake eating its own tail, suggests that things aren’t likely to change for the better:

No matter how long I stare at this cover, I get the feeling every time that these people—once set in motion by their hatred—will keep rolling on forever, suspended in a strange weightlessness suggested by the void surrounding them¹.

Anyway, on “Chaining the Katechon” we’re dealing with a single track—specifically one side of a split with S.V.E.S.T.—but the song is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, so there’s a lot going on and it’s damn, I mean damn dense. From the title to the lyrics to the artwork, everything is packed with content and references to things that would each deserve their own essay. So before we get down to business, we’re going to circle around a bit. I can’t promise the conclusions will be perfectly clear, but everything should come together in the end, and I hope that one way or another, it’ll be worth your time and patience.

But I’ll also say right away that if you were wondering what interesting things happen in the Bible in verse 22:12, in Revelation you’ll find:

And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.

#1: Freedom

“You were called to be free,” says Saint Paul in the letter quoted a moment ago—and it’s an interesting observation, because we’ve had to travel a long road just to reach it, and it’s not a given that we’re even capable of handling it.

According to the Book of Genesis, it was only after eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that we received something that could be considered actual freedom—including freedom of choice and a broad “freedom to,” rather than the “freedom from” that life in paradise could be seen as. We became like gods and, as punishment, were condemned to both suffering and eternal exile.

At the same time, as Erich Fromm notes,

Acting against God’s orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act.

I won’t write too much about all of this, as countless books have already examined the issue of human freedom and how the approach to it has changed over the centuries, but I want to point out one interesting spot that is always worth pausing at.

It is, of course, the aforementioned fact of achieving freedom through an act of disobedience—questioning an authority that might seem impossible to challenge. However, what’s interesting isn’t the mere fact of the rebellion itself or that it happened; while that’s a very energetic symbol which explains the Devil’s career in our imagination, we don’t actually gain much from it alone.

What is far more interesting is what ultimately resulted from that rebellion—the vector of the force that was unleashed in this way. Every time I think about it, I’m reminded of Žižek, who stated: “I am ready to sell my mother into slavery in order to see V for Vendetta, Part 2: what would have happened the day after the victory of the people; how would they (re)organize daily life?”.

And that is exactly the interesting question that I think is worth dwelling on whenever we deal with any story about heroic rebels, revolutionaries, or an upcoming social transformation: WHAT NEXT? Hardly anyone has the courage to tackle this topic in modern culture—whereas in the materials we are dealing with here, the answer is quite tragic.

Reconfiguring and expanding the boundaries of human freedom can lead to all sorts of things—and of course, we will discuss some manifestations of these changes later on, because we obviously have to get to the wars and tragedies of all kinds—but before we head in that direction, I want to mention some more down-to-earth matters that shouldn’t escape us. As above, so below—so how do we practically describe this same mechanism, but in a way that we can easily relate to our capitalist reality?

Fromm describes it better than I ever could:

We fail sufficiently to recognize, however, that although man has rid himself from old enemies of freedom, new enemies of a different nature have arisen; enemies which are not essentially external restraints, but internal factors blocking the full realization of the freedom of personality.

We believe, for instance, that freedom of worship constitutes one of the final victories for freedom. We do not sufficiently recognize that while it is a victory against those powers of Church and State which did not allow man to worship according to his own conscience, the modern individual has lost to a great extent the inner capacity to have faith in anything which is not provable by the methods of the natural sciences.

Or, to choose another example, we feel that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory of freedom. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what “he” thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself (…)

In other words, we are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers outside of ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions, and fears, which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom has won against its traditional enemies. We therefore are prone to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively that of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern history, and to believe that the defense of freedom against such powers that deny such freedom is all that is necessary.

We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life.

So, like I was saying: rebellion as the starting point for anything is fine, but what is ultimately supposed to come of it? Which way is that energy meant to be channeled afterward? Freedom, whether regained or newly won, has to evolve into something—in the passage I quoted, Fromm points out that you can’t just “have” it: you have to actively sustain it so it isn’t swept away by external forces, or by (increasingly active) internal ones.

On top of all that, Paul tells us that even though we’ve been called to freedom, we have to be careful about what we do with it, because we might use it the wrong way. If at some point we were saddled with a burden that could break us because we have to carry it constantly—well, I think that’s where we can start looking for the root of our back problems².

#1b: Digression on flesh

And to wrap up the topic of the Epistle to the Galatians, I’ll quickly mention that in the quoted passage, Paul distinguishes the flesh from the spirit, thereby drawing attention to a powerful rift in human nature—as if there were two inconsistent beings within us, two needs or desires that are unable to form a harmonious whole. And it is the spirit, from which “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” stem, that is in danger and constantly yielding; the spirit is weak, the spirit must be protected from the oppression of the flesh, from which are born: “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.”

However, it is worth noting that the problems listed by Paul do not necessarily stem directly from the flesh as such—so he is not talking about a hatred of the human body (which he, and Christianity as a whole, is often accused of), but rather about a resignation, standard for religions of all stripes, from worrying about our metaphorical body—the earthly order, our daily profanum—because ultimately it doesn’t matter. But it’s also not a problem as long as it doesn’t interfere with taking care of what is important: the spirit.

Regarding matters of material reality, the words of Christ come to mind, who stated to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, which can be perfectly summarized in this way:

To the question of the Scribes ‘whether’ the tribute should be paid, Jesus responds just as though they understood neither his preaching nor his deeds. Do you not see I have left everything? Have you not heard that those who follow me are called to abandon even their mother and brother? And yet you want me not to abandon, not to reject what is Caesar’s? Not only my soul but my body and will are absolutely alien to Caesar and to his State. Caesar asks me for a coin? Here it is – it was always his and I had already freed myself of it. I do not in the least contest the authority of Caesar in this field. Indeed, I fully acknowledge it precisely because it has nothing to do with whom I obey and whose part I am.

Massimo Cacciari

All of these, however, are attempts to solve a problem that lies much deeper—specifically, in the fact that it is so easy to even think about dividing body and spirit. The career of endless debates on how to keep the body “pure,” on “having vs. being,” and even modern attempts to find some harmony through coaching based on paraphrases of misunderstood pop-Buddhism, must have come from somewhere—and for some reason, it is something that feels intuitively obvious to us.

This, in turn, leads us to a topic central to the entirety of “Chaining the Katechon,” namely…

#2: The Division

From the note shared by End All Life before the album’s release, we know that this record offers a glimpse

into the primeval fracture, the suppurating wound at the heart of everything, the fissure undermining up to the least attempt at harmony.

More specifically, we’re supposed to go back to

the first of all divisions, the mother of all scissions and the annunciation of woe and affliction to come.

The most obvious step, then, seems to be going back to the third and fourth verses of the Bible³, from which we learn that:

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

This is a problematic passage, especially when reading quickly, because labeling something as “good” clearly suggests an interpretation that light is okay while darkness is not necessarily so. However, “it was good” in this context means something more like “it turned out exactly as it was supposed to,” because at this moment God is operating like a craftsman who appreciates what he has created, rather than evaluating it against something else.

A less obvious, but potentially just as sensible, reading would be to see this primal division as a division within God himself, which ultimately leads to creation—we can draw parallels here to Jakob Böhme, the Kabbalah, or various philosophers active from the late 18th century onwards. For example, a fragment from Philipp Mainländer, who decided to bring his philosophy to life and hanged himself in 1876:

That we must ascribe to it will and mind and not will alone is clear, for God was in absolute solitude, and nothing existed besides Him. He was un­ able to be motivated from without, but only by means of Himself. In His self­ consciousness were mirrored His essence and its existence, nothing more. It follows from this with logical compulsion that God was able to exercise his freedom in only a single choice, namely: either to remain as He was or not to be. (…)

Thus, only one deed was possible for God, and specifically one free deed, because He was subject to no compulsion whatever, because He was able to forgo that deed as well as carry it out, namely, to enter absolute nothingness, the NIHIL NEGATIVUM, i.e., to annihilate Himself completely, to cease to exist.

How did a world in a process of eternal becoming emerge from the suicide of God? Mainländer explains, in a nutshell, that the divine essence itself blocked the possibility of this act occurring instantaneously—so we can conclude that all of creation is simply the remains of God, heading toward an inevitable, albeit very, very long-lasting death, which requires the dissipation of the energy generated by that act (life itself, meanwhile, is a clever way of achieving this, because its inherent dynamics simply dissipate energy faster).

And whichever way we go from here, the important thing is that the story of creation begins—in one way or another, in perhaps every religion and myth in the world—with division and contrast. The primordial God could have split himself into pieces or split something else: what matters is that Something was divided and set against Something Else.

Returning to the Book of Genesis—this primordial rift is visible practically at every turn; at the beginning, it even unfolds before our eyes. Along with the separation of light from darkness, the further logic governing the dynamics of creation is set in motion, leading to the creation of the sun and moon (intended to separate day from night), and as a result of the division of the waters under the firmament, dry land is formed (separated from the remains of the waters henceforth called the sea). Even the trees created later, bearing fruit according to their kind, mean that division begins to exist even within a single type of creation, thus applying on an ever-smaller scale.

Of course, man is also created with two sexes—whereby the woman is taken from the man’s side, separated from him in the most literal way possible. A moment later, our ancestors ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thereby dividing their consciousness... And so on and so forth, and we will learn the consequences of this simple act several hundred pages later in the Revelation. Suffice it to say that in the meantime, even God will split into three persons.

At the same time, it is worth noting that only in the story of man do we get a commentary suggesting that along with us, a kind of desire to become one again also appeared (”That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh,” Gen 2:24). Echoes of this also appear in the famous parable about searching for one’s other half in Plato’s “Symposium” (it’s worth reading in its entirety, it’s a very strange story), but also, of course, in Bataille⁴.

But, returning to the subject, we must finally mention the shattered vessels—

In Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah, in short, God took a breath / diminished himself to make room for Creation. He said “let there be light,” and along with the light, ten vessels (Sefirot) appeared to contain it. However, these vessels were unable to hold it; they shattered, and their contents scattered in all directions—and in one way or another, it was as a result of this breaking that Evil appeared.

In wiser words:

The cause of this “breaking of the vessels,” which releases the whole complexity of the cosmological drama and determines man’s place in it, appears in Luria’s and Vital’s doctrine under varying aspects. In the immediate sense, the event is traced back to certain technical flaws in the structure of the Sefirotic atom-cosmos from which the ‘accident’ follows with necessity. In a profounder sense, however, the event is due to what I propose to term, with Tishby, the cathartic cause.

For Luria, the deepest roots of the Kelipot, or “shells,” i.e. the forces of evil, existed already before the breaking of the vessels and were mixed up, so to speak, with the lights of the Sefiroth (…). What really brought about the fracture of the vessels was the necessity of cleansing the elements of the Sefiroth by eliminating the Kelipot, in order to give a real existence and separate identity to the power of evil.

The Zohar, as we have seen, already defines evil as a by-product of the life process of the Sefiroth, and more particularly, of the Sefirah of strict judgment. According to Luria, these waste products were originally mixed with the pure substance of Din (sternness), and it was only after the breaking of the vessels and the subsequent process of selection that the evil and demonic forces assumed real and separate existence in a realm of their own. Not from the fragments of the broken vessels but from the “dross of the primordial kings” did the domain of the Kelipah arise. (…)

This cathartic interpretation of the meaning of the Shevirah was accepted by all the Kabbalists of the Lurianic school. For some of them, however, the idea (…) seemed to suggest a dualistic conception of God, i.e. one of the most serious heresies. They therefore held to the view that the powers of evil developed out of the scattered fragments of the vessels which have sunk into the lower depths of the primordial space and there constitute the “depth of the great abyss” in which the spirit of evil dwells. (…)

Taken as a whole, it is the cause of that inner deficiency which is inherent in everything that exists and which persists as long as the damage is not mended. For when the bowls were broken the light either diffused or flowed back to its source, or flowed downwards. The fiendish nether-worlds of evil, the influence of which crept into all stages of the cosmological process, emerged from the fragments which still retained a few sparks of the holy light—Luria speaks of just 288.⁷³ In this way the good elements of the divine order came to be mixed with the vicious ones.⁷⁴ Conversely the restoration of the ideal order, which forms the original aim of creation, is also the secret purpose of existence. Salvation means actually nothing but restitution, re-integration of the original whole, or Tikkun, to use the Hebrew term.

Gershom Scholem⁵

This perspective differs greatly from what we read in Mainländer, yet it leads to similar imagery: with Mainländer, we can imagine our reality as the rotting fragments of God; with Luria, we can imagine the stench of rotting eggs reaching us from the abyss.

One way or another, creation was tainted from the very start—even if only by the fact of losing its unity, which we can perceive as a wound—and the further consequences of this primal division, this cosmic segmentation, can be observed in how it radiates further fragmentation into everything else.

#3: The Time

A primal division, some kind of rift in the cosmos, a tear in the nature of all things—all this, in the context of a world that either persists or is constantly becoming or creating itself, suggests to us that a wound was formed back then, and it either remains invariably in the same form or is continually expanding. After all, its scarring over would signify some form of an end.

The very idea of the “end” is, for that matter, quite interesting in this context. Mircea Eliade points out that before the “historicization” of time by Jewish monotheism, we were dealing with eternal repetition: everything died at night and was born again in the morning, the entire world was recreated every year, and its history unfolded in endless cycles. It was only monotheism—taking God’s interventions in human life very seriously, recording them in the calendar, and treating each of His revelations as part of a history moving in a certain direction—that began to straighten these circles. Christianity brought this way of thinking to perfection, because

“A straight line traces the course of humanity from initial Fall to final Redemption. And the meaning of this history is unique, because the Incarnation is a unique fact. Indeed, as Chapter 9 of the Epistle to the Hebrews and I Peter 3:18 emphasize, Christ died for our sins once only, once for all; it is not an event subject to repetition, which can be reproduced several times. The development of history is thus governed and oriented by a unique fact, a fact that stands entirely alone. Consequently, the destiny of all mankind, together with the individual destiny of each one of us, are both likewise played out once, once for all, in a concrete and irreplaceable time which is that of history and life.”

Henri-Charles Puech quoted by Eliade in “The Myth of the Eternal Return”

Christianity, however, still has another ace up its sleeve:

But even from the viewpoint of apocalyptic eschatology, there was a decisive change: Jesus was an apocalyptic messiah who had already come and was yet still to come! The decisive event of his rising from the dead was taken as the beginning of the new age, though not as its definitive triumph. Implicit in this is the fundamental eschatological perspective that distinguishes Christian views of history, both apocalyptic and nonapocalyptic, the pattern that New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann described as the “already and not yet” character of the Christian present.

Bernard McGinn

Notice that in the last few paragraphs, we’ve moved from the idea of cyclical time to time flowing in a straight line, to events that function as “had already come and are yet still to come” and “already and not yet.” Corruption and division haven’t even spared time itself.

In any case, according to the Book of Revelation, we know that this longed-for end will finally come, and the wound from the beginning of creation will heal, bringing us the New Jerusalem. And the emergence of the concept of this city in Christianity is interesting, because it is another of God’s arbitrary decisions regarding creation—this time, however, it is final and ends all history and all dynamics of potential further creation (but, really, who’s to stop Him from changing His mind?).

Theoretically, the end of a broken world can logically be only two things. Either it is a return to the original unification, that is, to a state in which there is no division, and thus to the first verses of the Book of Genesis, according to which “earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters,” or the destruction of one of the elements of division (and the creation of a new reality in which only light or only darkness exists).

In the New Testament, we learn that God chooses the path of annihilation—those who have no desire to join the new order end up in the lake of fire, and everyone else is resurrected in the New Jerusalem, where “there was no longer any sea,” “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away,” and “there will be no night there.”

Reading the Apocalypse, I imagine how this original wound, separating light from darkness, opens up completely and floods the world with the radiance of God, which nothing can stop or calm. Fortunately for those who make it into the New Jerusalem, John of Patmos tells us that the resurrected people worthy of the city will finally be able to gaze upon that divine radiance without dying or going blind.

In the context of freedom, time, and the end itself, it is probably worth adding only that

Apocalyptic piety is marked both by fervent hope in the coming reward and by absolute conviction regarding the justice of one’s cause. Thus, apocalypticism can be seen as a way of dealing with what historian of religions Mircea Eliade called “the terror of history,” the human fear of consciously and voluntarily creating history. Apocalypticism provides believers with an already determined structure of meaning within which they can deal with the crises, the evil, and the absence of meaning they encounter in the world around them. Apocalyptic eschatology is profoundly deterministic on the level of universal history—God’s plan for the ages and for the end of time cannot be altered—but it usually stresses individual freedom by emphasizing how believers are called to affirm the divine plan by their adherence to the good and their willingness to endure suffering for its sake. The divine vindication upon which apocalyptic hopes are based is no partial reward but a complete and ultimate one—the transcendence of death conceived of both individually and collectively.

Bernard McGinn

#4: The Conflict

With the beginning and end established, we can move on to what they contain—returning to Saint Paul, who warns that after achieving freedom we must be careful, because “if you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”

This is an interesting warning also because one of the first stories of murder in the Bible is the story of a brother killing a brother—and it unfolds solely because of jealousy over the favor of God, who preferred a meat offering over plants. We can look for the sin of man in this, who at this stage should already know what is good and what is evil (unlike, for example, Eve, who ate the fruit NOT yet knowing that disobeying God’s commands is morally wrong, for how was she to know that if only after eating was she able to distinguish good from evil?⁶), but nevertheless we are talking about beings in direct contact with their creator: a being that eclipses them in every possible way and whose potential approval is, after all, unimaginably important.

René Girard treats Cain’s crime as a perfect example of mimetic desire—that is, a desire that “comes into being through imitation of others”, and “almost always leads to conflict, and this conflict frequently leads to violence”. All because “if our desire to be like a model is strong enough, if we identify with that person closely enough, we will want to have what the model has or be what the model is. If this is carried far enough and if there are no safeguards braking desire (one of the functions of religion and culture), then we become rivals of our models. Or we compete with one another to become better imitators of the same model, and we imitate our rivals even as we compete with them.”

In this context, it’s easy to see how Cain might have wanted to be appreciated by God just as much as his brother; he couldn’t handle it, and tragedy struck. Girard bases practically his entire philosophy on this type of desire, proving it to be the source of nearly—if not all— of our problems. He cleverly weaves the Devil into it as a factor that, to some extent, regulates this conflict born of desire: when it reaches absurd proportions, it’s the Devil’s role to toss a scapegoat to the people (who are on the brink of a war of all against all) to redirect their energy toward one specific target and thus dissipate it in some way. As the accuser, he is able to bring a charge against someone or something that might be completely innocent, but allows for the elimination of a substitute for the actual problem—in this way, “Satan as “the “prince” or “first one” of this world is the “principle” or “first thing” of both order and disorder: of disorder because he is a figure representing rivalry and scandal, of order because he represents the mechanism that is triggered at the height of the disorder”.

Returning to Cain—let’s note that after killing his brother, he was terrified that now anyone would be able to do the same to him (implying that there are already other potential murderers in the world, or people who might want to kill, infected by mimetic desire for whatever that first murder gave Cain). God marks him, however, and promises that whoever harms him will be hit seven times harder. This marking is an interesting case in general, because it resembles the exiles from primitive human societies who were marked, while simultaneously being a marking—and a promise of protection—by God himself, which elevates Cain above all other people.

As James G. Williams says:

The sign of Cain is the sign of civilization. It is the sign of the murderer who is protected by God. Since Cain does not have a proper mode of sacrifice to protect him against violence or to protect him from acting violently against the other, against Abel his brother, God intervenes with a sign. It is with this sign that civilization begins, for under its protection Cain finally settles—in the land of Wandering!—and builds the first city.

And although in the Bible (in Gen 4:17) it is mentioned somewhat casually, according to its narrative, it seems that we can actually thank Cain for that first city and the beginning of our civilization—a human culture based not on the sin of knowing good and evil, because that makes no sense, but on the sin of murder, which will come full circle the moment we murder even God himself on the cross.

Girard says this:

The account of this murder is not a founding myth; it is rather the biblical interpretation of all founding myths. It recounts the bloody foundation of the beginnings of culture and the consequences of this foundation, which form the first mimetic cycle narrated in the Bible.

But just so things don't get too pleasant—murder is an act committed by one individual against another. Saint Paul, on the other hand, would’ve undoubtedly been thrilled that we currently exist in a reality that has survived the invention of the atomic bomb, concentration camps, and two world wars, which pushed the scale of potential human cruelty into realms unimaginable to anyone living before the 20th century. All we’ve learned from it is that since then, we can count about forty more “known“ “conflicts” and there's no sign that we'll ever actually draw any conclusions.

And I could write a bit here about the escalation of murder into war according to the will—or perhaps rather the preferences—of God, but

a) a billion books have been written about war and its causes and they are easy to find,
b) I would have to spend a long time tracing this argument to the links between murder and divinity,
c) I won’t do it any better than Joseph de Maistre:

In short, gentlemen, the functions of the soldier are terrible, but of necessity they belong to a great law of the spiritual world, and we must not be astonished that all the nations of the world have agreed in seeing in this scourge something more particularly divine than others. You may believe that it is not without a great and profound reason that the title GOD OF HOSTS shines forth from all the pages of Holy Scripture. Guilty mortals, and unhappy because we are guilty, we ourselves make necessary all physical evils, but especially war. (…)

Notice, moreover, that this law of war, already so terrible, is nevertheless only a chapter in the general law that hangs over the world.

In the vast domain of living things, there reigns an obvious violence, a kind of prescribed rage that arms all creatures to their common doom. As soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom, you find the decree of violent death written on the very frontiers of life. (…) As soon as you enter the animal kingdom, the law suddenly becomes frighteningly obvious. A power at once hidden and palpable shows itself continually occupied in demonstrating the principle of life by violent means. In each great division of the animal kingdom, it has chosen a certain number of animals charged with devouring the others; thus, there are insects of prey, birds of prey, fish of prey, and quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when some living thing is not being devoured by another.

Above all these numerous animal species is placed man, whose destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to nourish himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill: a superb and terrible king, he needs everything and nothing resists him. (…) He knows how many barrels of oil he can get for himself from the head of a shark or a whale; with his sharp pins he mounts for museum display the elegant butterfly he caught in flight on the summit of Mount Blanc or Chimborazo; he stuffs the crocodile and embalms the hummingbird; at his command, the rattlesnake dies in preserving fluids to show itself intact to a long line of observers. The horse carrying its master to the tiger hunt struts under the skin of this same animal. Man demands everything at the same time; he takes from the lamb its entrails to make his harp resound, from the whale its bones to stiffen the corset of the young girl, from the wolf its most murderous tooth to polish his pretty works of art, from the elephant its tusks to make a child’s toy; his tables are covered with corpses.

The philosopher can even discover how this permanent carnage is provided for and ordained in the great scheme of things. But will this law stop at man? Undoubtedly not. Yet who will exterminate him who exterminates everything else? Man! It is man himself who is charged with slaughtering man.

But how can he accomplish this law, he who is a moral and merciful being, who is born to love, who weeps for others as for himself, who finds pleasure in weeping and who even invents fictions to make himself weep, and finally, to whom it has been said that *whoever sheds blood unjustly, by man shall his blood be shed.*¹¹ It is war that accomplishes the decree. Do you not hear the earth itself crying out and demanding blood? The blood of animals does not satisfy it, nor even that of criminals spilled by the sword of the law. If human justice struck down all criminals, there would be no war, but it can catch only a few of them, and often it even spares them, without suspecting that this cruel humanity contributes to the necessity of war, especially if at the same time, another blindness no less stupid and no less blind works to extinguish atonement in the world. The earth did not cry out in vain; war breaks out. Man, suddenly seized by a divine fury foreign to both hatred and anger, goes to the battlefield without knowing what he intends nor even what he is doing. How can this horrible enigma be explained? Nothing is more contrary to man’s nature, yet nothing is less repugnant to him; he does with enthusiasm what he holds in horror. Have you never noticed that men never disobey on the field of death. They might well massacre a Nerva or a Henry IV,¹² but what the most abominable tyrant, the most insolent butcher of human flesh, will never hear is: We no longer want to serve you. A revolt on the battlefield, an agreement to unite to repudiate a tyrant, is an unheard-of phenomena. Nothing can resist the force that drags men into combat; an innocent murderer, a passive instrument in a formidable hand: *he plunges head first into the abyss he has dug for himself; he bestows and receives death without suspecting that he himself prepared it.*¹³

Thus, from the maggot up to man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living things is unceasingly fulfilled. The entire earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated without end, without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.

(…)

War is therefore divine in itself, since it is a law of the world.

(…)

War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it, and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it.

#5: The Exhaustion

Deathspell tells us on “Si Monvmentvm” that “every human thought is based upon the fundaments of putrefaction, which the church of our Lord gave him,” and it seems to me that now, at this point in their discography, it begins to resonate even better than it did back then.

Whichever way we look—the original fracture seems to be reaping its harvest. “Chaining the Katechon” feels like a very specific moment in Deathspell’s history, because on no other record do I feel as much exhaustion as I do in this single track. While it can be considered very closely linked “narratively” to what happens on “Drought,” it seems to me that where “Drought” is more of a sad reflection on the end and what “Chaining” will lead to, “Chaining” itself is a weary tale of a pattern repeating to the point of boredom, one from which we cannot—or are not allowed to—break free.

This impression of exhaustion is likely due to, among other features, the paraphrases of Paul Celan’s poetry that Deathspell weaves into the lyrics in several places. For instance, one of his most famous works, “Tenebrae,” appears in an altered form, which is an interesting move, as the original poem itself is a paraphrase mirroring various hymns of praise directed toward God:

The poem “Tenebrae,” for example, is a carefully constructed refutation of Hölderlin’s “Patmos” hymn, which, as Götz Wienold has shown, negates the (Christian/pagan) hope for salvation (…); simultaneously the poem inverts and negates the (Judaic) hopes regarding God’s promises as expressed in the psalms, specifically Psalm 34, and in other places in the Bible that are alluded to, mainly Isaiah 43:20 and Leviticus 17.

Pierre Joris

In Celan’s poem, we reach a point where God himself is meant to fear his own creation, because it has been driven mad by what he has inflicted upon it:

It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.

It gleamed.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.
Our eyes and our mouths are open and empty, Lord.

We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord.
We are near.

With Deathspell, however, we see a reversal of this motif — we went on our knees to the trough, from which we drank the blood poured for us, in which we saw a divine image that broke us completely.

We went to the trough, Lord.
We went bend and convulsed.
We saw blood, Lord. It was glittering.
You dispensed it and we drank it.
We saw your image.
The gap of our eyes and mouths is void.
We went bent and convulsed.
It broke us and dissolved us.

Similarly, the recurring summary (“Still, a temple stands / And a star shines”) and the overall conclusion (a broken “Hosanna”) are taken straight from Celan and his “Engführung,” known in English as “Stretto.”

This is a poem where language and meaning fall apart before our eyes—as those wiser than me put it—at that point in his life: “Celan seems to have lost his trust in language, and he was experimenting with a vertiginous poetic idiom, as if the bottom has dropped out of the world. His language grows spare, inelegant, even harsh. Every poem becomes a shipwreck, the aftermath of an explosion”, which fits perfectly with the fact that “at a writer’s conference in 1958, Celan explained that “Stretto” was written as a response to the contemporary debate over German rearmament and what he called “Atomtod,” atomic death”.

We can, of course, connect the light of God flooding the Earth with the artificial light we created in the form of the atomic bomb, but we don’t have to—what seems more important to the overall tone is the syllable-broken “Hosanna” that appears at the end of “Chaining the Katechon” and just before the end of Celan’s poem. It means roughly “Lord, save us!” and only after Christ did it change—from an Old Testament cry of submissive despair, usually in the face of approaching death—into the shout of adoration and joy we know it as today. But broken into syllables, even into individual letters, as in Deathspell’s case, it no longer seems to be a cry in any way—rather a weary plea, in which there is no longer any energy or will to continue anything.

#6: The Binding

Before we get to the titular Katechon, which is the most convoluted aspect of the whole thing, there’s one more topic worth mentioning: Léon Bloy⁷. He entered Deathspell’s orbit in earnest back on “Kenose”—which I’ll eventually get around to writing about—but it’s on “Chaining” where we can see he’s already taken Bataille’s place as the reference point that will frequently recur throughout their lyrics.

The track begins with a paraphrase of a passage from the novel “The Desperate Man,” in which Marchenoir—who is really just Bloy himself—says:

I leave your house in absolute ignorance of what to do, but with the most adamant resolve not to leave the Truth without a testimony. It is written that the hungry and the dying of righteousness will be saturated. I can therefore hope for immeasurable intoxication. I will never be able to accommodate myself or console myself for what I see. I do not claim to reform an irreformable world, nor to abort Babylon. I am one of those who cry out in the desert and devour the roots of the bush of fire, when the crows forget to bring them their food. Listen to me or not listen to me, applaud or insult me, as long as I am not killed, I will be the agent of Vengeance and the servant very obedient from a foreign Fury who will command me to speak. It is not in my power to resign this office, and it is with the most bitter desolation that I declare it. I suffer an infinite violence and the anger that comes out of me are only echoes, singularly weakened, of a superior imprecation that I have the astonishing disgrace to echo.

Bloy was a unique herald of the apocalypse: he couldn’t wait for the moment of the kingdom’s return, the moment when the prophecies would be fulfilled, and his faith burned constantly with a fire that scorched everything around it—especially his interpersonal relationships, as few could stand to be around him. He lived in total poverty, either because he refused to take on work that went against his conscience, or because he gave his last penny to those even poorer than himself. His life was a series of tragedies—the deaths of his children and his wife—interspersed with very brief episodes of peace when he wasn’t at war with someone. This fire is evident even in the quoted passage, which makes the paraphrase opening “Katechon” all the more painful, as it no longer contains any of that fire or energy:

In a place beyond all resistance
Devouring the roots of the bush of fire
Forsaken even by the crows
The dream of the abortion of Babylon shivers
And stuttering words
As mere echoes in the desert
Vanish in those lower spheres
Where shame is unknown.

At the same time - I promised that it would all slowly start coming together! - towards the end of the text, we come across a passage that beautifully connects human freedom and the rift in reality, while also adding another reference to Bloy (which was already outlined earlier on “Kenose”):

The act of a free man
Connected to the balance of the world
Projects itself into the infinite
But the fracture
Its ontological ballast
The dispersion and the overcoming bring a harvest
Of increasing conflict
A descending spiral of splinters
Lacerating the meridians.

Bloy (in “Pilgrim of the Absolute”) explains this mechanism as follows:

Our freedom and the world’s equilibrium are mutually dependent, and that is what we must understand if we are not to be astounded at the profound mystery of Reversibility, which is the philosophic name of the great dogma of the Communion of Saints. Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveler dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind.

The whole of Christian philosophy lies in the unutterable importance of the free act and in the notion of an enveloping and indestructible mutual dependence. If God, in some eternal second of His power, willed to do what He has never done, annihilate even one man alone, it is altogether likely that creation would thereupon crumble into dust.

But that which God cannot do, in the strict fullness of His justice, He being voluntarily bound by His own mercy, weak men, by virtue of their freedom and within the limits of an equitable atonement can accomplish for their brethren. To die to the world, to die to themselves, to die, as it were, to the terrible God by annihilating themselves before Him in the fearful solar radiance of His justice—that is what Christians can do when our ancient earthly vehicle creaks within the appalled heavens and almost no longer has the strength to endure sinners. Then what the breath of mercy sweeps away like dust is the horrible creation which is not of God, but of man alone, is man’s vast betrayal, is the evil fruit of his freedom, is a whole rainbow of hellish colors spread over the dazzling abyss of the divine Beauty.

I could have kept it shorter, but I couldn’t help myself. Read Bloy.

Anyway—the logic generally holds up, except with Deathspell we have to add a slightly different face of God to it, which—following their other paraphrase of Celan—sticks toward us his “tongue of light caressed by the silent leprosy of his palate”.

#7: Katechon, historical

Researching the Katechon is generally a huge pain in the ass. First off, it’s not really clear what the concept is ultimately even about, and second, in the Christian tradition, it unfortunately involves reading about the Antichrist—and there’s no biblical concept more boring than all that whining about him, because for the last two thousand years it has mostly boiled down to moaning that your current political opponent is the Antichrist:

The nature of Antichrist’s malice as the image of absolute human evil has varied over the centuries, as we have seen. Still, it is clear that the dominant view of ultimate evil has not been one of cruel tyranny so much as one of deception, the masquerading of the lie that perverts the good that saves. Each age has had to contend with its own forms of deception. These deceptions have done more than anything else to shape the development of the Antichrist legend.

Bernard McGinn

And as for what’s up with the whole complexity of the katechon—let me explain.

See, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 2, 1-12), in a passage where Saint Paul talks about the circumstances of Christ’s second coming, he drops this bit:

Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.

And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

The whole problem that hasn’t been solved for two thousand years revolves around the words τὸ κατέχον and ὁ κατέχων—that is, “(h)o katechon,” or “that which/he who now restrains”—people just simply haven’t known what to do with this for centuries while interpreting the Bible (and officially, they still don’t really know).

Even Saint Augustine throws up his hands in “City of God” while trying to explain it:

As for the statement, ‘and you know what now restrains him’ – that is, what is stopping him, what is the cause of his delay – ‘so that he will be revealed only at the right time’, Paul did not choose to speak explicitly, because, as he says, they knew it. And that is why we who have not their knowledge, are anxious to arrive at the Apostle’s meaning; but we find ourselves unable to do so, for all our efforts, especially as his next statement makes the meaning still more obscure. For what does he mean by saying, ‘For the secret power of wickedness is already at work; only let him who now restrains, restrain him until he is removed from the scene, and then the wicked one will be revealed’? I admit that the meaning of this completely escapes me.

Augustine reports various contemporary interpretations, and others who tackled the subject did the same—brainstorming that it was about the Roman Empire, the church, the Holy Spirit—and generally, nobody reached any concrete conclusion, and some of those interpretations were completely nonsensical. Ultimately, instead of overthinking what is doing the restraining, the focus shifted to who is being restrained—unable to define the katechon, they decided to redefine the Antichrist over and over again, which, in turn, finally allowed them to define potential ways of restraining him and thus somehow interpret that katechon.

And so, we’ve reached the point where for almost two thousand years, the Antichrist has served as a convenient bogeyman—a boring political weapon—and the Katechon was resurrected mostly just to do it some intellectual harm.

#7b: Katechon, problematic

One of the interpretative problems presented by the figure of the katechon is that it holds back not only the arrival of the “Lawless One,” but above all, the second coming of Christ. It is a force that restrains the end of time—which is strange insofar as this end, as we have already established, is the core content of the entire Christian religion.

Christianity, as we have seen, gained power as an apocalyptic religion—the end of the world was to come soon, and Christ was to manifest within the lifetime of the people who met him. This carried a form of mechanism allowing one to endure the evil of this world and the hope of improving one’s fate: it perfectly fit the needs of followers who, at the beginning, were recruited from the lower social strata. And no matter how we spin it, we arrive at the fact that the end of the world, and thus the end of suffering, is a desirable event in this context—both for those who cannot wait for salvation and those who theoretically face damnation. The Apocalypse is synonymous with breaking free from the earthly treadmill, finally achieving some form of eternal peace, and those who demand destruction instead of salvation do not, after all, believe in eternal torment in hell (because it won’t be worse than what life on Earth has to offer).

St. Paul’s tone, however, feels quite surprising in this entire context—as if this restraint were something good. The only interpretation I have come across regarding a positive approach to the katechon among Christians, which explains this benevolent attitude at all, is treating it as a conscious act of the believers: prayers to delay the end so that the Good News can reach more people. In this understanding, the katechon becomes a conscious action aimed at showing mercy to sinners or gentiles who, in one way or another, still have a chance to convert. Logically, no other version of support for the katechon fits a religious approach for me (but perhaps I missed something).

On the other hand, many interpretations fit among those who take great pleasure in the profane—those who might not want the end of the world. From their perspective, the katechon is a very positive power and should be supported in its efforts. The key problem, however, is that it is damn hard to define or identify it in any meaningful way, and the answers reached by people trying to do so actually tend to say more about them than about the katechon itself.

As I said: this is not a concept that has seen as much deep thought over the centuries as the concept of the Antichrist—in practice, after Augustine, it appeared here and there, only to practically disappear and manifest again in philosophical-religious debate around the mid-20th century thanks to Carl Schmitt. He sought in it a force acting within history—that is, any force that restrains the coming of the end of the world. In the case of his book “The Nomos of the Earth,” it is, as befits a confused member of the Nazi party⁸, mainly a narrative about the Empire/Kingdom/Reich, whose power is capable of protecting civilization from collapse. His way of reasoning persists to this day and is regularly vomited out in one form or another by various “intellectuals,” such as Peter Thiel (who, complete moron that he is, even managed to compare Greta Thunberg to an antichrist masquerading as a katechon).

Cacciari offers a counter to all this Schmittian imperializing, stating that:

For empire, epoch-making cannot be just the exercise of a restraining power since its own sense of power is productive. It is indeed within the ‘body’ of empire that the new must produce itself. It is the very same ‘own body’ of its sovereignty conserved through its own transformation. All novitas must already be a priori contained in it. In so far as the empire contains its own transformations, it also seems to be catechontic energy: a Proteus who is always equal to himself. Here then lies its essential difference from messianic time: the latter is properly catastrophic; it imposes a radical change of scene by virtue of the eruption of the transcendent on the horizon of history. Empire, though, renews itself, reproduces itself by renewal and the forms of this renewal have to be inscribed in the empire’s nomos that is valid erga omnes.

In an imperial sense, we can imagine the katechon as a dam that eventually bursts, and the water that rushes out reshapes the landscape it encounters (leading, perhaps, to the creation of a new dam). This can be both an end and a new beginning—the creation of some new order, a new empire, which will also require a new katechon.

But:

The katechon cannot fail to participate in the most intimate fashion with the principle it strives to withhold and delay, if not bring to a halt. It is impossible not to retain what you seek to contain. Every catechontic power must constitute itself within the dimension, even the cosmic dimension, of the principle of anomie that is destined to triumph.

In this sense, we can imagine the katechon as an eggshell, which might stop us from making scrambled eggs, but also protects us from the potential stench of a rotten egg.

#7c: Katechon, chained

And with all that in mind, let’s add another layer of complexity, because the “chaining” in the title of Deathspell can be understood both as shackling something in chains—binding something that shouldn’t break free—or, by extension, as linking something to something else.

However, this leads to an interesting linguistic breakdown, because in translations, the katechon is something that holds back—in English, the word “restrainer” is probably used most often—but in practice, this word is used in Biblical Greek in several different ways. One of them is indeed restraining, but it also appears as preserving (for example, faith) and holding (onto something, like one’s convictions).

It seems to me, however, that the most sensible approach in the context of everything we’re discussing is the restraining of that which restrains—in practice, getting rid of the shield that protects the world from the end—a purely apocalyptic vision that can be carried out both consciously and unconsciously. After everything we’ve already gone through, we can also assume that consciousness is not our species’ strong suit—it’s not for nothing that gnōthi seauton, or “know thyself,” can be treated as one of the most important maxims at the center of practically every religion and philosophy trying to somehow improve human life.

In this flawed consciousness of ours, over the last few centuries, something new has emerged, something that no one in the time of Christ thought of or even, generally, imagined:

Homo sapiens has been around for two or three hundred thousand years, yet it is only over the last couple of centuries that members of this species have begun to acknowledge that it might one day cease to exist forever. (…) The ‘end of the world’ is not the same as ‘human extinction’. Extinction means that the wider universe continues without our species. This is generally not a feature of apocalyptic narratives: in eschatological traditions, the termination of humanity and that of nature as a whole are usually coterminous and coeval.

(…)

In fact, what makes human extinction special and unique as an idea is that it marks a historical culmination and acme of our awareness that human values are not rooted in independent nature, and that those values would not endure without our being around to uphold them—whereas the concept of Judgement Day rests upon the opposite presumption: that the universe has an inherent and indwelling sense of narrative justice.

Thomas Moynihan

We can identify 5-6 mass extinctions that have wiped life from our planet—if another one occurs during the existence of our species, it might be unique in the entire history of the Earth, because for the first time, the dominant species is capable of bringing about its own extinction (having the means to prevent it, but choosing not to use them).

Anyway, Deathspell’s statement in an interview for Cult Never Dies fits this perfectly:

Allow us a digression covering something very central to our work. A naive witness may find it somewhat puzzling that those who claim to have the best interests of the human species at heart rarely dare to think strategically beyond the next tweet or electoral cycle. If they did, they would probably come to the conclusion that, beyond the usual and somewhat repetitive jolts of history that receive excessive attention, merely two topics stand out in terms of magnitude, novelty, and life-altering consequences.

The first is, as you have guessed, environmental devastation on a global scale resulting from man’s ever-expanding hubris, unfettered anthropocentrism. Should anyone want to tackle that issue at the core, then the challenge is global; requiring coordinated answers and sacrifices from a species that is increasingly navel-gazing and which will, of course, rely on scape-goats and diversion tactics instead of shouldering responsibilities. A species who claimed the throne of God and has since accumulated countless wonders, no doubt. The attentive reader will immediately notice that this theme is as much about devilry as any of the other topics we work with. It is a question of morality on multiple levels, a statement on cosmogony even: it speaks of the profound nature of man. For the secular inclined person, it revolves around the consequences of complex human-made systems that place the human species at the core of everything, unquestionably. The Katechon has been chained, indeed.

Whatever the katechon might be in this particular case—the context points to a force capable of curbing human pride or hubris—according to this diagnosis, it has already been itself restrained, and the “man of sin, the son of perdition” is increasingly revealing himself, and with him, the end of the world.

Or, at the very least, the extinction of mankind.

In summary

I intentionally left the quote from the Deathspell interview for the end, because it leads to a the summary that will have to do for now—and the various themes that appeared here will need to be revisited with both “Drought” and “Furnaces of Palingenesia”—namely, the judgment.

The album actually opens with a fragment from Kafka: “The verdict does not come all at once, the proceedings gradually turn into the verdict,” and it seems to me that the story of gaining consciousness and freedom only to struggle within a reality warped from the start, without clear reason or end, is a rather vivid way of showing that this verdict does not sound—never did and never was meant to—optimistic.

I think an important thing to convey in this understanding of the subject is that regardless of whether the world was warped at its beginning by accident or with full awareness—it is precisely this flaw that is the reality we must face. In this context, the Katechon can be—as I mentioned a moment ago regarding the interview —something that protects us from ourselves. It doesn’t have to protect us from God and other cosmic forces, but rather from what has defined human culture since we decided that God is dead and man began to

exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

2 Thessalonians 2:4

If we treat the Antichrist, the Son of Perdition, or whatever other moniker for the one who brings about the end of the world we want to use, not as a being specifically summoned for that purpose, but as a model of functioning that is a potential mode of being within each of us, then in this sense, the Katechon is that which protects us from ourselves.

And in this sense, shackling him—whether consciously or not—will certainly lead to interesting events.

In the meantime…

The temple stands
Its walls a prison for the Katechon
While the plowshare grates
On the crystal hard and vivid tear
And blood pours from the furrows
While the star shines high
No place to cover from
Its rotten light…

Ho-
sanna

Ho-
san-
na

Ho-
san-
n-
a.

Selected Bibliography

• Erich Fromm: “Escape From Freedom”, “The Anatomy of Human Destructivness”

• Slavoj Zizek: “The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously”

• Massimo Cacciari: “The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology “

• Philipp Mainländer: “The Philosophy of Redemption”

• Gershom Scholem: “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism”

• Mircea Eliade: “The Myth of the Eternal Return”

• Bernard McGinn: “Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination With Evil”

• René Girard: “I See Satan Fall Like Lightning”

• James G. Williams: “The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred: Liberation from the Myth of Sanctioned Violence”

• Joseph de Maistre: “St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence”

• Paul Celan: “Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry” (Translated by Pierre Joris)

• Peter E. Gordon: “Poet of the Impossible: Paul Celan at 100”

• Augustine of Hippo: “City of God”

• Léon Bloy: “Pilgrim of the Absolute“, “The Desperate Man”

• Carl Schmitt: “The Nomos of the Earth”

• Thomas Moynihan: “X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction”

• Arkadiusz Górnisiewicz: “Wojna i nomos. Carl Schmitt o problemie porządku światowego”

• Mark Lilla: “The Reckless Mind”

1. At the same time, I wonder a bit why these figures look like twins—since Cain and Abel or Romulus and Remus don’t seem to fit here at all—and a twisted version of Castor and Pollux comes to mind. According to one tradition, they were born to Leda from two different fathers: Tyndareus, the King of Sparta (the mortal Castor), and Zeus (the immortal Pollux). And while you could write a harsh sitcom based on that premise, in reality, they were inseparable, and their brotherly love even guaranteed them a place in the sky as the Gemini constellation. But reversing that myth and presenting it as hatred between the earthly and heavenly orders sounds like something that would fit the album’s content all too well. Then again, maybe I’ve just been staring at this cover for too long and I’m starting to make things up.

2. I also find it interesting that through the subsequent years of capitalism’s joyful development, Fromm’s diagnosis underwent a further transformation and struck in yet another, additional way—creating a kind of invisible “bonds” that Žižek describes like this:

Since, in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on a subject’s freedom – it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. There are a multitude of examples of un-freedom appearing in the guise of its opposite: when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious position every couple of years, we are told that we are given the opportunity to re-invent ourselves and discover new unexpected creative potentials that lurked in our personality; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed) – in education, health, travel. Constantly bombarded by imposed ‘free choices’, forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not even properly qualified (or possess enough information about), we more and more experience our freedom as what it effectively is: a burden that deprives us of the true choice of change.

3. The traditional opening of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” which led us to the concept of creatio ex nihilo, is very often considered a mistranslation. There are growing arguments that the first two verses are linked and should instead read: “In the beginning, WHEN God WAS CREATING,” thereby setting the context for the story being told. In this sense (which is supported by the logic of the entire subsequent text), the first act of creation—and simultaneously of separation—is the creation of light and its separation from darkness. This is one interpretation that has its proponents and opponents, but I find it quite interesting that we can disagree even on the very first words of the Bible, finding several conflicting interpretive options right from the start. The “original rupture,” heh.

4. who opens "Eroticism" by saying that (and apologies — it’s a translation from a Polish version of the text):

Eroticism is one of the aspects of man's inner life. It deceives us by constantly seeking the object of desire on the outside. But that object corresponds to an inner need. (...) In human consciousness, eroticism is that which calls one's being into question.

Which, if you're allergic to his convoluted explanations, simply means that erotica stems from our inner need (and not, for example, the physical traits of the person we're looking at), and the need to "consume" leads to questioning the existence of the individual—because by becoming one body with someone else, we briefly stop being ourselves. In this way, one can reach the conclusion that sex is death.

5. It’s worth remembering that: “In the description given of this event by Luria’s original disciples, it has none of the characteristics of chaos or anarchy. On the contrary, it is a process which follows certain very definite laws or rules which are described in considerable detail. Subsequently, however, popular imagination took hold of the picturesque side of the idea and gave a literal interpretation, so to speak, to metaphors like “breaking of the vessels” or “world of the tohu”; in this manner, the emphasis was gradually shifted from the lawful to the catastrophic nature of the process.”

6. Of course, we could argue that God’s prohibition should have been enough and that she should have rationally understood it was forbidden, and that morality or the ability to distinguish good from evil is irrelevant here, but is it worth dwelling on?

7. Léon is actually an absolutely incredible and unfairly forgotten figure, but I’ll probably write more about him in the future, as I have more notes than the text you’ve read so far.

8. In his book “Wojna i Nomos,” Arkadiusz Górnisiewicz shares the following anecdote (citing Pieper and Bendersky): “On April 30, the day of Hitler’s suicide, Schmitt was at his Berlin home when he was temporarily detained and interrogated by a Soviet unit. (...) Schmitt explained to his bewildered interrogators that at the beginning of this century, Pettenkofer maintained that susceptibility to a disease is more important than the bacteria itself in causing an infection. To prove this, Pettenkofer drank a glass of water contaminated with cholera bacteria in front of his students; he did not get sick. ‘You see,’ was Schmitt’s conclusion, ‘I did exactly the same thing: I swallowed the Nazi bacteria, but I was not infected.’”

And Mark Lilla in “The Reckless Mind” says: “That Schmitt never considered his decision to support the Nazis to have been more than a tactical error is also entirely consistent with his political theology. His romanticizing of Catholic institutions, his praise of Mussolini, his attempts to salvage democratic legitimacy from the legalism of the Weimar system, and his work for Hitler, while not consistent, reflect a willingness to encourage any force that might do battle against the secularized liberal age. He describes himself repeatedly as a katechon (…) As for his speculations about the new “nomos of the earth,” they reflect nothing so much as the messianic longings of an aging apocalyptic thinker.”