Heroes Rise // Monsters Fall

Invocation

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"Medusa with the Head of Perseus" is a statue created by sculptor Luciano Garbati depicting a nude and triumphant Medusa bearing the severed head of Perseus. Originally created in 2008 as a direct response to Cellini's Perseus in Florence, photos of the work, which inverts the original Greek myth, circulated widely on social media in 2018 after the Argentine Senate rejected a bill to legalize abortion in that country. At the time, the striking image of Medusa with the head of her attacker seemed to express the same kind of rage that animated the #MeToo movement, and, in the words of the artist, the work “took on a life of its own.”

Medusa With The Head of Perseus is unveiled in Collect Park, Manhattan. October 2020

In October of 2020, with the help of an anonymous donor, a seven-foot-tall cast bronze reproduction of the statue was unveiled in Collect Park in Manhattan, facing the New York County Court where Harvey Weinstein stood trial. Conceived as an expression of a kind of violent vision of justice, not only was the statue deliberately situated facing the courthouse in challenge to the men tried there, but came wrapped in a green cloth symbolizing the pro-abortion movement of Argentina. Reactions came from all over the world, with hundreds of reviews in media, a brisk trade in reproductions, and millions of related posts on Twitter, Instagram, and reddit. Some went so far as to even have the image tattooed on their bodies. Negative reactions were limited to small and angry contingents who decried the maleness of its sculptor, the whiteness of Medusa's features, and the nakedness of the statue itself. Besides these usual complaints, popular reception was overwhelmingly positive. Medusa, after thousands of years of slumber, was back.

Who is Medusa? Originally, a monster, and later a victim, her story is considerably more complicated than fans or art critics at the New York Times would have you believe. Here we are interested in Medusa as monster; we are on the hunt. Her facade of innocence is not believable, she comes into the world again with already blood-stained hands. We must pursue. If we are willing to peel back the layers there is a history here much more interesting than modern-day #MeToo tales. But we must move quickly; we are hunting the old gorgon on her own territory, the realm of myth. This is not an academic exercise; we intend to stalk and kill her.

First, like Perseus, we begin with reconnaissance. We must understand monsters and their powers, what they eat, and where they make their haunts. In online spaces there is the idea of the egregore, which is an "occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people." An egregore is a set of beliefs and behaviors that inhabits the lives of groups of people who, in turn, perpetuate it. An example of a particularly damaging and pernicious egregore might be the complex of culture surrounding opiate drug use, which revels in the aesthetic of romantic self-destruction. An egregore might be understood in purely material terms, as an expansive manifestation of human group culture, a memetic anti-pattern, but many spiritual traditions would identify them as malign beings with real metaphysical existence: in other words, demons.

I encountered an egregore directly once. I was in my study one night some years ago, reading about the story of James Younger, who is a boy taken from his father by the State of Texas and is now being raised as a girl by his mother. James, caught unfortunately in the middle of a divorce dispute, formed an interest in female characters in children's cartoons when he was three years old. On this basis, his mother, Anne Georgulas, a doctor and activist, enrolled him in gender therapy and began socializing him as girl. According to Jeffery Younger, James told him that his mother, among other things, when he protested her efforts, would lock him in his bedroom and tell him "monsters only eat boys." When the boy's father initiated court proceedings to stop these interventions, Georgulas enlisted the representation of powerful law firm Koons Fuller to have Jeffery Younger gagged and stripped of paternal custody. According to court documents, James' initial choice, when prompted by his mother for a girl name, was "Starfire," after his favorite cartoon character.

James Younger with his father. Facebook

I read in my darkened study, well past midnight, and the wind rose against the windows. I contemplated with mounting horror how completely all the edifices we depend on to protect young children; the state, the medical system, the courts, a mother's protective instinct, had conspired to destroy this little boy. His interest in sports, his love of play sword fighting with his brother, his relationship to his father, his uncontrollable boyish exuberance which is the frustration of tight-lipped public school teachers everywhere, would be permanently squashed in favor of a lifetime of pharmaceutical dependency, reproductive sterility, and probable sexual grooming at the hands of a parade of experts in "child sexuality." Then I prayed an oath that all of it; the courts, the useless legislatures, the billionaire funded non-profits, the idiot academics, the dithering conservative politicians, the sicko media, our vaunted traditions of governance, that all of it should be swept away. All of it! For the cause of one little boy. For if these things do not protect, and are in fact malevolent, then they must be cut off.

This was my prayer, and in the moment I finished, the French doors to my study blasted open and a dank wind howled through the house. With the darkened room suddenly exposed to the void of the midnight storm, it felt as if the combined weight of all those malign systems of power had found me and beat down my door in rage at my challenge. It was several days before I felt completely comfortable again to be in my study late at night.

I share this anecdote not only to give you a spooky story or to convince you that I had a supernatural encounter, but to give you some idea of the kinds of monsters we are discussing here, and their enormous scale. Once I read a Twitter thread explaining the mechanisms behind the debasement of American currency, a system where members of Congress hold stocks, then allow the Federal Reserve to issue trillions of dollars from thin air, which becomes available to companies as cheap debt not available to the public. These companies subsequently expand, driving up stock prices to the enrichment of the ruling class and the immiseration of everyone else. The public, with the currency now rapidly losing value, seeks out novel and risky investments with which to preserve their life’s savings, pumping money back into the stock market and the housing market in particular. This corrupting financialization of every material good is why it is now impossible for most young people to buy a house and form a family. These are the kinds of monsters we are talking about here. They are incestuous snake-pits. They gorge at every stage in their circular life cycles, and they grow at every stage, finally achieving such ludicrous scale that they smother entire nations. For our discussion here, we will call these “social-scale monsters.”

Who then, is Medusa? Most of us know her through Ovid's offhand account, where he casts her as a proud and beautiful woman who was violated in the temple of Athena and subsequently punished by the gods. You must understand however that this was a late development in her depiction; Ovid in re-writing Greek myths for his time was making the equivalent of sexy Hollyweird reboots to titillate wealthy Roman womens. Really Medusa has her origin in the gorgoneion, the image of a monstrous face with staring eyes found all over the Greek Mediterranean, which far pre-dates even the coming of the Greeks themselves. Scholars believe that Medusa’s two sisters are a later elaboration: the image of the gorgon’s face pre-dates the myth, then Medusa is invented, and the personalities of Stheno and Euryale are subsequently added to make a trio and complete the balance of narrative forms. Because Medusa came first, we will use her here as shorthand to refer to the complex of gorgon imagery that was used before the Greeks.

Three gorgoneia, 6th-5th century B.C.

In the Perseus myth

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, Medusa is said to be mortal, but there are many inconsistencies in the narrative and other further clues that suggest she was something more: an ancient goddess who pre-dated the Greeks, whose origin perhaps begins in the Neolithic. We explore these here. First, her power to petrify is inherited by the later Olympic gods, indicating divine association. Then at the conclusion of the myth her image is transferred directly to Athena, suggesting a relationship of equality with the grey-eyed goddess. Medusa also has particular association with temples and her image is used for protection, akin to a deity. Her eyes are said to be a conduit for “divine power.” Even late into the age of Alexander, several hundreds of years after the formation of the myth, the gorgoneion was seen as a symbol of royalty and divine favor. Finally, while she is said to be mortal, her head retains its powers even after her decapitation, a kind of life that persists even after she is said to be dead, a clear violation of mythic norms.

If these divine associations are valid, and Medusa was indeed a god, then her death is a singular event, presenting even deeper contradictions. There is no other instance in Greek myth in which a god is destroyed. According to the Greeks, gods are defined precisely by their immortality and indestructibility. Even the Titans are merely confined to Tartarus after their defeat. The resolution to this problem lies in a provocative theory put forward by Robert Graves and other scholars: that the story of Perseus and Medusa refers to an actual historical destruction remembered in myth. The idea is that at some point during their expansion into the Greek peninsula the Hellenes “overran the temples of the gorgon goddess, stripped the priestesses of their masks, and took possession of them,” effectively destroying her cult and replacing it with the worship of their own pantheon. The unprecedented nature of this cultic destruction would explain the many inconsistencies in the myth: according to the Greeks, because Medusa was in fact destroyed, she could not have been a god, but a monster. Her death proves her mortality, contradictions notwithstanding. I find this explanation persuasive; the myth has the verisimilitude of trauma imperfectly remembered. It is the implications of this proposed history, encoded in the Perseus myth, that we will explore here.

The image of a society ruled by the gorgon mask presents fascinating implications. In form, this is a theocracy whose legitimacy is derived from religious mystery and terror. Recall that for Medusa to petrify, it is not necessary that she should gaze on a victim, rather the petrification is accomplished when the victim observes her. The experience of fear and paralysis is a subjective state in the mind of the viewer, and that this power of the gorgon should be transmitted so powerfully through the myth speaks to a ruling class possessed of powerful mechanisms for the cultivation of the “terror and awe of true belief” in its subjects that BAP identifies as absolutely necessary for the creation of political legitimacy.

When the Greeks begin to arrive in southeast peninsula of the Balkans, they are already populated by tribes who have occupied the area since time immemorial. To the Greeks, young and wandering newcomers, the cities they find are already unbelievably ancient, dating to the very beginning of human settlement in the eastern Mediterranean. When they find this culture, it is already weighted down with millennia of the accumulations of a sedentary society. Its practices, rites, traditions, and norms form a deep residue of precedent. Imagine a 1,000 year old civilization centered around the face of Hillary Clintong. The gorgon mask is therefore a projection of state power; to observe it too closely risks an unequal encounter with dangerous complexes of authority hostile to any scrutiny whatsoever.

There is no question that the Greeks saw the gorgon image as something malevolent. Aeschylus characterizes Medusa by her “hatred for mortal man.” The gorgoneion itself combines human and animal features: eyes, nose, fangs, snakes, and lolling tongue. It suggests an identity much more commingled with nature, in which the human form can still easily acquire animal characteristics, and the boundaries of separation between the worlds of man, nature, and the gods, are much more indistinct. There are unsettling implications as well: the emphasis on the mouth area in these early images, a huge grin full of animal teeth with the extended tongue of a mammalian predator, suggests the capacity to devour. Certainly, the Greeks confronted the practice of human cannibalism in their origin myths; Saturn’s paedophagy is presented as a horrifying act, and moral justification for his overthrow by Zeus. We can only speculate with regards to the gorgon and any cults that may have been centered around her, but to this day it well known that monsters must sustain themselves. In the words of Anne Georgulas, “monsters eat little boys.”

We now begin to see the outlines of a “social scale monster.” This is a female state which uses the image of a monstrous goddess as a means of control. This society has many similarities to ours, not in the sense of a feminist paradise as envisioned by Marija Gimbutas, the kind of academic who stocks books in “independent bookshops that sell enamel pins,” but in the sense in which the vast majority of women were provided for by the state and reserved for use by the state. We infer these relations from research that suggests that after the advent of agriculture, in every area of the globe, only 1 in 17 men reproduced compared to every woman.

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The centralizing and binding systems of administration that rose with agriculture created hierarchies where a few powerful men were capable of sequestering the majority of women for their exclusive access. An example from the New World illustrates such a system:

“The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many “houses of virgins” throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor’s concubines. Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size. Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. “Principal persons” were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa’s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.”

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These massive systems of polygamy, rather than having a masculine character, are in fact organized around feminizing principles of control and surveillance, for they are impossible to sustain without systemic suppression of male impulses to challenge and reproduce. Furthermore, they can only be possible in sedentary societies with centralized control of food distribution: only where ostracism is death and no exit is possible can the majority of the male population be kept in subjugation. Powerful men rule and enjoy, and the women, being under the protection of powerful men, with their free time and proximity to power, devote themselves to creation of religious structures of opinion and taboo, like how wives of wealthy men work at non-profits and NGOs, or a childless middle class woman becomes a social worker.

These religious systems create beliefs which reinforce the regime and structures dedicated to detecting and stamping out any spark of assertion or male rebellion. Men are inculcated into these systems and made to believe in their legitimacy; the greater their dispossession, the more powerful these systems of suggestion, and the greater their required reverence. Therefore they are made to participate in their subjugation and are denied the possibility of accumulating wealth or creating a family. Some, as many as possible, are made eunuchs. The rest are enslaved through force and taboo. Perhaps this INCEL class is even pacified with pornography. The numerous clay images of fertile females found in Neolithic settlements would then not be female goddesses, but ancient C-GIRLS (clay girls!) intended as substitute wives for un-partnered men. You see the enemy has always been the same! In this way the ruling class, extended to include almost all women, cements its power and protects itself from challenges. Does this seem familiar to you???

Indeed there are hints, in the Perseus myth, of a transition from polygamy to monogamy. Polydectes, the king who desires Danaë, the mother of Perseus, hatches a plot to marry her, which involves the pretense of a wedding to Hippodamia, but this spurious marriage only makes sense in the context of polygamy, where the king would be free to marry Danaë as well, after Perseus is disposed of. We see here the tensions of a polygamous system, in which the ambitions of the young are frustrated to support the desires of the old and powerful. It is this system which Perseus rebels against, and whose downfall is a precondition for the triumph of the Indo-European peoples who hold, as Fustel de Coulange elaborates in The Ancient City, that each man has the right to build an altar to his ancestors on his own land, take one wife, and pass his patrimony to his primogeniture upon his death. However, if Polydectes is his oppressor, why then, does Perseus begin his quest seeking the head of the gorgon?

Perseus correctly identifies that the center of power for the gorgon culture, and the means of destroying, lies not with Polydectes, but with the Medusa image. In addition to being a symbol of state power, the gorgoneion is a mask. A mask has a secondary function besides presenting an image, which is to obscure the face of the wearer, and this has interesting Moldbuggian implications. What do we make of society ruled by priestesses, or even priests, who hide their faces behind masks? Curtis Yarvin says:

“[P]ower likes to hide. Power is always desired and always a target; power that is not seen cannot be attacked; power hates to admit what it is. Power loves a decoy.”

In this case, we would define the gorgon society as an oligarchy masquerading as a monarchy. The individuals of the ruling class subsume their identities behind the face of the goddess and present an image of singular divine rule. In this way they legitimize themselves and shield themselves from scrutiny. Like all effective oligarchies, they have mechanisms to distinguish ruling individuals, and those ruling individuals inhabit institutions marked by power, wealth, and divine favor. Like the “social scale monsters” we discussed previously, Yarvin identifies oligarchies with circular life cycles: “The prestigious institutions in oligarchies are prestigious because they are in power, and in power because they are prestigious.” If the mask of power can be stripped away, and its cycle of prestige can be somehow interrupted, the oligarchy will dissolve. If Medusa is to be destroyed, it is here that we must make the cut.

Cellini’s Perseus

Therefore comes the great Perseus, born in a shower of gold, second after Cadmus in the first trio of Greek monster-slaying founders. From the beginning he is a soldier: his name carries the active "eus" suffix and means "sacker of cities." He will eventually go on to found Mycenae, a great city and one of the earliest centers of Greek culture, but he must first endure many trials beginning from humble origins. You must understand that Perseus was a ZOOMER. He is found in the sea and raised by a fisherman; he begins his life smelling of fish. He is oppressed by King Polydectes who, like all boomers, demands tribute at the expense of the young. Perseus is incensed at this injustice and his youthful spirit of defiance shows through. He boasts that he will return with the head of Medusa as a wedding gift.

It is at this point that Perseus sets off from his island and becomes what must have been a sea-borne raider. His extraordinary Hermetic mobility and hardened weapons suggest the life of a bronze-age pirate, with the freedom to roam where one wishes and make one's fortune at will. When the proto Into-Europeans found the shores of the Mediterranean, these men, possessed of the new technology of bronze-making, left behind the chariot and took to the sea in swift ships. Therefore, shipborne, Perseus is accompanied by an unseen but implied WAR-BAND.

The fearsome reputation of the gorgon culture is widely regarded, but the exact center of its power and means of approach are unknown, leading to an extended reconnaissance involving the Greae. Preparations must be made with care; the city still possesses an enormous amount of prestige and will be guarded with terrible magic. The assault will take the form of a daring raid. The mission: destroy Medusa and seize her head. The concept of the operation: to enter under cover of stealth, secure the treasures of the gorgon cult, and exfiltrate unscathed. Supporting the main effort will be an element who will form a rally point at the beach head and cover the escape by sea. The main element will be the raiding party commanded by Perseus himself.

Perseus and his men, therefore well-prepared, infiltrate the city and to their astonishment, find the guardians sleeping. The narrative state, trusting in the reputation of its magic, has left its gate unguarded. Imagine their hair standing on end to find themselves treading the halls of power unopposed, in the eerie silence, knowing that eternal fame and fortune await if they can only avoid alerting the alarm. Careful of the gorgon's power, they gather themselves for the final approach with a whispered prayer to the gods. The priestesses slumber in their chamber. Perseus springs the assault not with a word, but with action. His decisive stroke, the cut that kills a god, is the signal. Within an hour the grim night-work is done. The chief priestesses and eunuchs lie slaughtered in their temple, the sacred masks are secured, and the raiding party is already making their escape. By morning Perseus and his war-band have already put safely out to sea bearing the symbols of divine political power.

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This victorious war-band will go on to scour the Mediterranean. They have assumed the favor of heaven, its powers are now theirs to wield. They win brides and take revenge on their former oppressors. They destroy other monsters, especially those having to do with human sacrifice. They win crowns and found the palace-citadel of Mycenae. They establish great dynasties, which will themselves be the fount of many heroes including the mighty Heracles. From the line of Perseus' daughter Gorgophone will come Helen of Troy and the faithful wife of Odysseus, Penelope. Meanwhile behind them the gorgon culture, denuded of its prestige, collapses in on itself. From Medusa's death emerges Chrysaor, father of the men set free by Perseus' sword stroke, and Pegasus, who stands for horsemanship. In short, what Perseus has achieved is the transition of the proto-Greeks from a frustrated island-dwelling raiding culture existing at the fringes of a dominant culture into a noble race of kings with permanent belonging in the heart of the Greek peninsula, therefore laying the foundation for the subsequent flowering of all Greek culture.

In fact what has been accomplished with Perseus' adamantine stroke is a great "cutting away" of state power from the thicket of custom that cultivated, but also immobilized it. The great body of the narrative state, which rules through manipulation, is left behind. The myriad rules that govern life and commerce, the hysterical webs of public opinion, the taboos, the eternal deference to precedent, the serpentine organs of surveillance and censure, the enormous and sclerotic institutions, the mouths of the mob: all these that were thought to be essential are amputated, and yet the head lives on. They were never necessary in the first place. Therefore, the body of the narrative state reveals its extraneity, and is humiliated in favor of a leaner challenger who wields the efficiency of force. This great act will be echoed centuries later when Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot, solving a seemingly intractable problem with the focused, organizing power to set things apart, to discriminate between essential and non-essential, and thus open new avenues for action. The whole arc of the European Faustian spirit begins with this cut.

Having discarded the body, Perseus then wields the head of the gorgon, the naked power of the state. He uses, but does not assume the mask; he rules in his own name. He has replaced the oligarchy merely masquerading as a monarchy with the substance of the real form; and because the ideal of the former narrative state is fulfilled in him, it withers away without even the need for a military defeat; it is no longer capable of fulfilling the promise of its own narrative (rule by divine individual) and must acquiesce to the truer, more vital successor who possesses the advantage of actual being, of incarnation. The is pure union, historical union, mythic union. This is one man, Perseus, sacker of cities, who fulfills and transmutes the substance of the power of the state. He is possessed of divine favor, his sword is justice, he is the slayer of monsters and founder of nations. His myth is a great love story, a crusade against gynocracy. His children, the Perseids, are the falling stars. This is kingship!

Therefore, when wealthy and anonymous(!) donors put a statue of victorious Medusa in downtown Manhattan, they are telling you who is boss. It isn't them, you are to believe; it is "reproductive rights," "equality," "empowerment," in other words, the gods. These are represented by Medusa

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and other manifestations of neo-liberal kitsch: the statue of the little girl facing down the Wall Street bull, an enormous sugar statue of a fat black mammy with exposed pudenda, stiff-looking statues of Princess Diana, and even more sinister things: Cybele

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with 16 tits, Pachamama, faceless snake priestesses. They are telling you they believe in classical Greece aborted in the womb; a world without Homer, without Polykleitos, without mathematics or literature, without philosophy, without even grave goods.

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They believe in 1,000 years of poverty so long as they are allowed to trample you under foot with the help of the old gods, for progressivism has lately acquired a particularly superstitious and misanthropic character. Witches fight the patriarchy by accessing "safe and effective" birth control, the media lauds a suburban mom who joins the Satanic Temple in reaction to Justice Ginsberg's death, and coastal city-dwellers, reminiscent of Medusean mask rituals, make COVID face coverings into talismans of belonging long after their efficacy has been discredited even by official outlets.

America’s new gods. From left to right: “Mami Wata” (New Orleans), “Cybele” (New York), “Oracle” (New York)

All of these innovations give the impression of a regime that, having exhausted every mundane power, turns out of frustration to occult means to finally effect its vision. Despite its almost total cultural dominance, the world-view of the American progressive left, so divorced from reality, is threatened by even the smallest pocket of dissent, and so it discards the pretense of rationality, representative democracy, even nature itself in its effort to extend itself for the final victory. In this, they unleash forces beyond their understanding. Coulange, in The Ancient City, argues that social order results from unanimously shared belief in the origins of that social order. When the belief in the originating myth is compromised, social order breaks down and conflict ensues. Therefore, when the regime begins removing statues of American founders, war leaders, and Presidents, who represent the old conception of our common history, and supersede them in the public square with strange idols having nothing to do with our origins, they threaten chaos. Old gods, once having been loosed, tend to take on a life of their own.

This chaos, however, presents a great opportunity. When the founding myths have been eroded, when disorder threatens, when the substance of the state has been replaced by a false image, a true and real instantiation of the promise of the state can utterly displace it, constituting a new founding. Coulange proposes that this re-founding can be accomplished through a process of retrieval, where elements of the origin myth that have not yet been registered are incorporated and re-stated to create a new, unanimously believed, origin myth. In our present day, where the state has grown monstrous and opposed to human flourishing while still wearing the mask of prosperity and participatory government, an alternative that offered the full promise of America would be irresistible. Not a single person voted, or was even allowed to vote, for the Great Reset, COVID lockdowns, the annual Summer Riots, mass immigration, social media censorship, gay marriage, the devaluation of the dollar, abortion, or perpetual war for democracy. These things are matters of religion for the ruling class. They are beyond question, but having to do with the power behind the mask, if the mask is stripped and seized, they cannot continue. Therefore what is required is a great precipitating act centered around the mask of power, made by an incarnation of the American promise. Together with a retrieval of our founding myths, this victory over Leviathan, the Iron Prison, the Cyborg Theocracy, the Longhouse, the GAE, would form the basis of a new legitimacy.

All that is required is a great cut. It IS possible. We should be glad that there are monsters so vast and loathsome. In myth, every monster makes its hero; the greater their powers, the greater the glory in their destruction. For heroes WILL rise. The wind is up, and the wheel of fate turns once again. In the time of change, great men step forward, as Perseus once did, to slay monsters and found kingdoms. This is the meaning of hero: to end one chapter of history and open another. Those who are unnerved by the old sense of the word, and old heroic representations dredged from the bottom of the sea, like the Riace Bronzes, will not be included in the reshaping of life after the heroes have done their work. They are not going to make it. For if the Greek heroes are intolerably hard for the present age, they were made of necessity. This is simply what is required to defeat monsters. Anyone who, like the conservadorks, are perpetually more concerned with policing expressions of hardness and the will to confront evil, than with evils themselves, are worse than useless. They will dither to you about the “Constitooshon” while our cities burn down. They refuse to seriously confront the attacks on our founding myths. They see cultural confrontations as irrelevant. David French search results for "James Younger" returns zero results. They will not take up the power of the state, so they will fail. A different approach, a different man is required, a man who knows the power of myths and understands that they are REAL.

The time for preparation for the great work has begun. The door has been opened, the gods walk the earth and spirits move once again among the people. The logic of myth supersedes now, and things which were thought impossible for mortals; to speak great words and win great victories, to perform great acts, to encounter the gods, and be transformed, and so transform the world: these things become not only possible but commonplace once again! The men who shape the coming age will seem like a new type, so different will they be from the gerontocrats, but truthfully they will be something very old, right from the root, but with the freshness of new growth. Where the mole-eyed apparatchiks suck life, they will be magnanimous, to be near them will be ennobled, to drink from fountains of hope. These men will have eyes for God, eyes that reflect the sky. They will be far-seeing, wise commanders of men, overflowing with life. Their actions will be perfected with understanding of what they do. Most of all, they will have hardness of purpose to do what is required, which is to kill monsters, take up the head of Medusa, and establish just rule. These victories over our afflictions will be the legends of a new legitimacy, their deeds will be fixed in the stars. Therefore prepare yourself. For something is coming.

1. This article and all who read it are committed to the protection of St. Michael the Archangel, Prince of the heavenly host.

2. See here for for a good refresher on the Perseus myth.

3. A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture. Genome Research, 2015

4. The Red Queen: Sex and Evolution of Human Nature, p. 172

5. This was once revealed to me in a dream.

6. For form’s sake, a short review of “Medusa With the Head of Perseus:” The statue, using the simple motif of mythic inversion, gives the impression of a sullen kind of stiffness. The posture is unbalanced but with no arrangement of contrapposto. The weight is on the back foot and the lines of movement in the body seem to suggest she is stepping backwards. At the same time, her lowered chin and soulful gaze is probably supposed to indicate determination, but this impression communicates only when viewed from the front; from other angles she appears worried or even sorrowful. The expression of the face combined with the backwards movement of the body gives a distinct impression of guilt and even fear. I don’t think the artist intended this meaning; his Medusa is supposed to be a symbol of defiance, but the symbolic meaning of the work, stamped with the subtlety of a neon sign, seems to drown out these ambiguities for many viewers. The form of the body is plausible, the artist has what passes for skill these days, but the arrangement is elementary, almost so basic as to be a student’s exercise. He presents a hard female devoid of any softness whatsoever; a grim ideal. En fin, the work draws its success more from the concept rather than the execution. It managed to sell many T shirts, necklaces, and desk statuettes for female lawyers. 4/10

7. Cybele is a particularly sinister fertility goddess whose cult in ancient Rome was associated with priests who would ritually castrate themselves as a sign of devotion. A derivative of this cult is resurgent today in Montevergine, Italy, where an image of the Virgin is revered as an “unofficial patron of LGBTQ.” The mountain of Montevergine was originally dedicated to Cybele.

8. “Not one Neolithic burial has yet been found at Sesklo. This fact indicates that either burial was performed beyond the bounds of the town or "burial" as a rite was not considered important and bodies were simply discarded.” Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology, Dartmouth