And lo! How we long to free our ships

From sublime shores

Yet what foul ground might we breach in our crossing

To return to the gods of that time?

Those principles and principalities:

Enslaver and Devourer alike who

When pressed by priests in exorcising rites,

Scatter pearls before them like swine:

“If the human eye could see us, we would blot out the sun!”

The old gods!

Much romanced by flies on their web

Spheres full of twits into

Black frocks and #witchtok…

At what price do we purchase a spirituality free of religion,

When our only currency is power and the will to use it?

No more or less than sacrifice of the innocent,

Pitting neighbour against neighbour and tribe on tribe:

New strains of violence, tyranny, and remaking the moral order in our image – for what, truly, can stop us partaking of that fruit now?

If the truth is clay for us to mold. If people whose values we hate can fold…

They say the revolution will not be televised,

But the suffocation of virtue?

The rebranding of right and wrong

As bigoted and justified?

And who could forget The Golden Rule: Not to damn others while damning oneself…

Witness then, the nerve of me

Sat complacent in the future

And watching my culture tumble ass over yoni

Into the neopagan fatalism

The Galilee Druid died to deliver us from

Anointing us, His bride with His very embalming oils, kneeling to wash our feet clean

Begging us not to turn and watch

As Sodom and Gomorrah burned in his wake

Setting in terrible motion a spiritual revolution

Through the church, to the world…

But what of creation? That church of the wild?

Surely our planetary peril owes something to this Man’s insistence

On right thought and deed,

On the wholesale regulation of instinct…

As if through faith alone, we might redeem these bodies,

And let loose an industrial, top-down zeitgeist to reign over the earth;

So that “Man shall have dominion”!

Say what you like about the Council of Nicea,

No one can argue they greenwashed the bible…

In lofty moral predilection

Like so many floating heads

We avoided all talk of blood and soil

Lest we rouse those slumbering thunder gods of old

Ever baying

For us to pay the piper…

So that repressed, Christians decried a return to embodied realities

Our “fallen nature”, shrilly exclaimed

And Gaia that whore

To whose bosom, the New Age now suckles

The pendulum over-correcting:

Same as it ever was.

For Oedipus knows,

What projection has cost

Our relationship to Mother

Our very lifeblood and harbour…

Yet what of this is Christ’s doing

And what blood have the Enlightenment Thinkers on their hands?

Masonics all!

Cooking up a science-dogma in the lab, materialist parallel to the occult,

Until now intuitive only;

Our pyramid blocks moved not by minds but machines.

A new old religion to replace the old new one

And the rise of brute utility – every ounce of 20^th century social engineering owes it its due.

For if Man is free at long last

To create godless utopia,

Will it be Heaven or Hell?

Soviet Russia or Fascist Germany?

Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab?

Free from the animal tedium of dis-ease, of sourcing food, fire, and offspring

Will we truly “own nothing and be happy?”

The centre cannot hold…The falcon cannot hear the Falconer’s cry…

How might we hope to thrive indeed

With the perfection of science

As applied to human life?

When man “will not be played like the keys of a piano”

And kicks up a bloody fuss…

Why does every cult fail?

Why every patriarch a predator, a charlatan?

Every Trudeau, Ardern and Biden resented by half,

For all their algorithmic phrasing and biopic fame?

For people will not be arranged into lines on such a scale

Their values melded and molded outside of what nature demands…

Short of overwhelming force or farce,

Such a project lies uneasy

In a Basket of Deplorables.