Controlling the American Mind: The Viral Liturgical Psychodrama
In order to successfully navigate the raging sea of media shit storm, one must be ever-mindful of the overall designs of mass media without getting lost in endless details and rabbit trails that will be forgotten in a month.
Remember Bowe Bergdahl? Remember how media was furiously researching his back story to make details match-up, all of which ended up being a futile effort. Remember the Malaysian planes?
I continually bring these recent reality television news events to mind because they are so illustrative of the present Ebola frenzy, playing in all theaters 24/7 near you. Just as the details of the stories of Bergdahl didn’t match up, as he went right back to a military post, so Al-Ebola, our new, very minuscule terrorist organization’s details, in regard to its victims, do not and will not match up.
AL EBOLA: US media and politicians couldn’t resist merging external threats of ISIS and Ebola (Image: Elnuevo Herald.com)
Al-Ebola will probably fixate the mass gaze until vaccination season ends, when a new lineup of all-stars for Team Fear are announced.
In usual form, I intend on analyzing the emergence of the formation of the mass consciousness through mass media from its ritual and cultic connections, paying close attention to the pop symbology, but this time around, I will consider ritual itself. Let us travel out of the media circus for a moment to the realm of liturgy, or communal ritual working.
Comparative religion luminary Mircea Eliade sheds light on this primal art in the following section of his work, The Sacred and the Profane:
“…[S]ince religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find large number of techniques for consecrating space. As we saw, the sacred is preeminently the real, at once power, efficacy, the source of life and fecundity. The religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact his desire to take up abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in real and effective world, and not in an illusion….But we are not to suppose that human work is in question here, that it is through his efforts that man can consecrate a space. In reality the ritual by which he constructs a sacred space is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the work of the gods.” (pg. 28)
Eliade is invoking the primal urge in man to consecrate sacred space – a space where the gods of old come to communicate meaning, morality and telos to mankind, where upon the high places, the heavenly realm of celestial intelligences might make a theophanic manifestation to shape earth into the form of the above, imposing order upon unruly chaos. Yet modern man is no longer superstitious, we are told, and with the dawn of the “Age of Reason”, he abandoned ritual and liturgy for the reasonably rational life of being an “informed citizen” of his Enlightened Democratic Republic, intimately involved in forming and shaping his local, social-contracted propositional government covenant. However, if we reflect a little further on Eliade’s comment, we begin to see that space age man is just as religious, if not more so, than ignorant, savage ancient man. The difference emerges as merely one of form and medium, not substance.
Most of us do not seek out the village shaman or hierophant for messages from the spirit realm, yet do we not daily gaze into our handheld magical mirrors and screens that transmit the messages of the priests, shamans and ascended media masters, with little opprobrium? The liturgical icon of old is now become the moving icon of vivacious info-babe, the holy mothers of Channel 5 Monastery. From the towering cathedrals of the major films studios, CNN and Fox, the word of the gods issues forth to guide we supplicant masses with a bevy of tales of lives of new patron civic saints and mythologies of Hollywood heroes that subsist in the realm of the unattainable forms.
Our new gods do not always issue messages of hope and salvation, unfortunately. Our devas are very much gods of wrath and vengeance, inflicting upon the mass psyche a continual barrage of spells and incantations geared toward confusion and hysteria. Just as the priest’s ritual dagger divides the sacrifice, so the priests of our day divide the psyche on the edge of the ritual athame, with endless channels of channeled fear and destruction. As the sacrifice is cut in half and “doubled,” the mass psyche sacrifice is divided into incoherent doublemind and doublethink.
Rather than concern for the virus of media mythology and mind control, the populace is concerned about a few cases of so-called viral Ebola.
Few are those concerned with the virus of programmed liturgical psychodrama their magical mirror screens enchant them with, as they are lulled under the vodoun spell of the zombie.
Read the rest: 21st Century Wire
