Cherchez le Juif: Satanism as the Hidden Grammar of America (3)

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Protestantism may be the hidden grammar of the American Empire, but Satanism is the hidden grammar of Protestantism. Herman Melville understood this. In Moby Dick, First Mate Starbuck rebuked Captain Ahab for the “madness” involved in taking “vengeance on a dumb brute that simply smote thee from blindest instinct” by describing it as “blasphemy.” Ahab, who seems predestined for destruction at his own hand, doubles down, like a good Emersonian, and says, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

As they are getting ready to sail on the Pequod, Ishmael and Queequeg are confronted by a strange figure who “levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question” and asked them: “Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?” The name of the “ragged old sailor” is Elijah. When Ismael admits that he and Queequeg have signed a contract binding them to sail on a whaling expedition with Captain Ahab, Elijah follows up Ishmael’s admission by asking “Anything there about your souls?”

It’s a question Americans have been asking about the ship of state for a long time. The question became especially relevant when Stockton Rush’s aptly named submarine the Titan imploded with all hands-on board near the wreck of the Titanic, which each passenger paid $250,000 to view.

Rush has been described as “a cowboy who cut too many corners,” but he is really an avatar of Captain Ahab. Docile to the conventional narrative, Ishmael thinks that Ahab is “a good whale hunter and a good captain to his crew,” but the stranger knows that he is more than that. Ishmael and Queequeg have made a pact with the devil, but like most Americans they don’t understand how. After signing the contract, everything is “all fixed and arranged” in a way that mirrored covenant theology and Calvinist predestination.

Like his namesake, Elijah is a prophet without honor in his native place. The Pequod is the ship of state; Ahab is the psychopath who sits at the helm as it sails to its doom. Stockton Rush is Captain Ahab. All CEOs are psychopaths and narcissists, and before you raise any objections, it is always the exception which proves the rule. A psychopath is now captain of the ship of state, which is America, which is the world’s fourth great religion, as Yale Professor David Gelernter has pointed out. David Gelernter failed to point out that Satanism is the hidden grammar of the religion known as America. America was a Protestant colony, and so it should come as no surprise that Satanism became the hidden grammar of England, America’s mother country, at the time of the Reformation. Shakespeare pointed this out in Ulysses’ speech in Troilus and Cressida, when he describe the aftermath of the Reformation as well as its inexorable trajectory:

“Take but degree away untune that string
and hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnacy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be the lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right, or, rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resided,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey
And last eat up himself.”

Shakespeare’s play is set in ancient Greece, which means that he is really talking about the situation in Elizabethan England in the aftermath of the looting operation known as the Reformation, when the crown had lost all legitimacy but retained its hold on power by transforming Catholic England into the world’s first police state. Shakespeare’s genius lay in his ability to describe accurately if poetically the novel form of government which the Reformation ushered in in England.

Todd calls it Nihilism, which is closely related to Satanism. Because nature abhors a vacuum, the void created by the disappearance of Protestantism was filled by “nihilism,” which Todd defines as “an amoralism stemming from an absence of values.” Nihilism, he tells us at another point, “denies reality and truth; it is a cult of lies.” Nihilism leads to Narcissism, both of which are based on a denial of reality that has become pandemic in societies which claim that “a man can become a woman, and a woman can become a man,” an affirmation which Todd describes as both false and “close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism.” Because “right and wrong have lost their names,” a man can become a woman if the powerful decree it possible. That has political ramifications because it also means that a nuclear treaty with Iran under Obama can transform, overnight, into an aggravated sanctions regime under Trump.

Todd indicates that Satanism is the hidden grammar of the Zero State obliquely when he claims that a “satanic ritual” (“une sorte de rituel économico-philosophico-satanique”) served as the demarcation point between the era of the WASP elite and the moment when it was succeeded by the Synagogue of Satan as America’s ruling class. Blinded by the superficial categories he has appropriated from Max Weber, Todd fails to see not only that the hidden grammar of Protestantism is Satanic, but also, and more importantly, that America became the Great Satan when the Jews took over its culture.

Todd insists that the disappearance of Protestantism is “the decisive explanatory key” to understanding “the current global turbulence” without telling us who succeeded the WASPs as America’s new ruling class. Todd claims that “religious extinction,” (l’extinction religieuse) led to “the disappearance of social morality and collective feeling; to a process of centrifugal geographic expansion combining with a disintegration of the original heart of the system” as if it were an impersonal act of nature without human actors at the helm.

Satanism has been the trajectory of the Anglo-American empire ever since Satan gave his famous speech at the beginning of the Protestant epic poem Paradise Lost. England’s Romantic poets, as we have already indicated, knew that Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost. When Percy Bysshe Shelley wanted to light the fire of rebellion in Ireland, he could find no better phrase than the one Satan used to rouse the demons in hell when he said at the conclusion of that speech: “Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.” Milton’s heroic Satanism becomes apparent at the beginning of the same speech when Satan, who has been expelled from heaven, wakes up in the sea of flame which is now not only his eternal home but his kingdom as well. In that speech, Satan begins by saying farewell to heaven, but soon gets to the point:

“Farewell happy Fields
Where Joy forever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.”

“Here at last,” the Puritans said when they arrived in America, “we may reign secure.” After the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell died in 1660 a wave of revulsion at the excesses of Puritanism swept through England, which was best symbolized by the mob which exhumed Cromwell’s body and hanged it. Crowell’s head popped off during this act of desecration, and its whereabouts remain unknown to this day, but his revolutionary spirit had departed from England while his head was still on his shoulders and migrated across the Atlantic to Massachusetts, where it became the spiritus movens behind the American Revolution a century later.

The man who understood this best was the Methodist William Fletcher. In a letter denouncing the “seditious sophism” which Rev. Richard Price, the nonconformist supporter of both the American and French revolutions, espoused in his sermons, Fletcher compared Price to Satan with specific reference to Milton’s epic. Price’s wicked patriotic speech could have been made by:

“Satan to the Son of God, when, according to Milton’s fancy, they encountered each other in the heavenly plains. I meet thee in the field to defend my freedom and assert the liberty of these heavenly legions. Before I pierce thy side with my spear, let me pierce thy conscience with my arguments. In a free slate in heaven, where liberty is perfect, everyone is his own legislator. To be free, is to be guided by one’s own will; and to be guided by the will of another, is the character of servitude. They call the Messiah The Prince; but for as much as thou sayest, I do nothing of myself, and art not ashamed to add, Father, Not My will, but thine be done; and to teach the mean Spirits who follow thee to pray, Thy Will be done in heaven and on earth; it is plain, that thou the power of self-government, and introduces Slavery.”

Satanic liberty is another word for slavery. Fletcher echoes Satan’s speech directly when he ascribes to Price and other supporters of the American Revolution, the notion that “self-government and supremacy in hell, are preferable to servile obedience and subordinate grandeur in heaven.” Fletcher concludes his argument by claiming that the “speech of the patriotic Seraph,” otherwise know as Satan, “is formed upon the [same] principles laid down in Dr. Price’s pamphlet.” It is that Satanic spirit “which deluges America and threatens to overflow Great Britain itself.”

A century after Milton wrote his epic, Satan’s speech became the basis for America’s Declaration of Independence. Even though all of the signers of that declaration were in full rebellion against the Calvinism which inspired Milton, the signers of the Declaration of Independence expressed the gist of Satan’s speech when they wrote:

“when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

America was destined to become what the Ayatollah Khomeini referred to as “the Great Satan,” the moment Milton’s co-religionists stepped onto the shores of Massachusetts Bay. The sons of those Puritans were the best interpreters of that spirit as it morphed into Unitarianism and then apostasy over the course of the 19th century. Ralph Waldo Emerson most certainly read Paradise Lost. We know this because his most famous essay, Self-Reliance, resonates with the same Satanic spirit and cadence. Having learned from Milton that

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

Read the fourth part of the article

Author: E. Michael Jones

yogaesoteric
April 14, 2024