From John Michael Greer, for the recent April 1 day of foolery, here’s one of the most entertaining — and insightful — pieces of satire you’re likely to read this year. Note his use of a rather delightful name-coding, which runs throughout. And don’t worry: Nacil Buper, Grand Priestess of the Temple of the Night, who is mentioned in the excerpt below, isn’t singled out for an unfair solo slamming. Later in the piece Tarc Omed, the Hierophant of the Priests of the Sun, receives equal treatment. So does the average Atlantean citizen-on-the-street. All are weighed and found wanting for their heedlessness in ignoring the warning signs associated with continued worship of the Lord of Evil, Mu-Elortep.
If you’re like most Atlanteans these days, you’ve heard all sorts of unnerving claims about the future of our continent. Some people are even saying that recent earth tremors are harbingers of a cataclysm that will plunge Atlantis to the bottom of the sea. Those old prophecies from the sacred scrolls of the Sun Temple have had the dust blown off them again, adding to the stew of rumors.
So is there anything to it? Should you be worried about the future of Atlantis?
Not according to the experts. I visited some of the most widely respected hierarchs here in the City of the Golden Gates yesterday to ask them about the rumors, and they assured me that there’s no reason to take the latest round of alarmist claims at all seriously.
***
My first stop was the temple complex of black orichalcum just outside the Palace of the Ten Kings, where Nacil Buper, Grand Priestess of the Temple of Night, took time out of her busy schedule to meet with me. I asked her what she thought about the rumors of imminent catastrophe. “Complete and utter nonsense,” she replied briskly. “There are always people who want to insist that the end is nigh, and they can always find something to use to justify that sort of thing. Remember a few years ago, when everyone was running around insisting that the end of the Forty-First Grand Cycle of Time was going to bring the destruction of the world? This is more of the same silliness.”
Just at that moment, the floor shook beneath us, and I asked her about the earth tremors, pointing out that those seem to be more frequent than they were just a few years back.
“Atlantis has always had earthquakes,” the Grand Priestess reminded me, gesturing with her scepter of human bone. “There are natural cycles affecting their frequency, and there’s no proof that they’re more frequent because of anything human beings are doing. In fact, I’m far from convinced that they’re any more frequent than they used to be. There are serious questions about whether the priests of the Sun Temple have been fiddling with their data, you know.”
“And the claim from those old prophecies that offering human sacrifices to Mu-Elortep, Lord of Evil, might have something to do with it?” I asked.
“That’s the most outrageous kind of nonsense,” the Grand Priestess replied. “Atlanteans have been worshipping the Lord of Evil for more than a century and a half. It’s one of the foundations of our society and our way of life, and we should be increasing the number of offerings to Mu-Elortep as rapidly as we can, not listening to crazies from the fringe who insist that there’s something wrong with slaughtering people for the greater glory of the Lord of Evil. We can’t do without Mu-Elortep, not if we’re going to restore Atlantis to full prosperity and its rightful place in the world order, and if that means sacrifices have to be made — and it does — then sacrifices need to be made.”
MORE: “Atlantis Won’t Sink, Experts Agree“
You need to play the new Bloodborne game for PS4. It’s about the hidden world of Christianity or western religious civilization. It’s very gnostic in its presentation.
I LOVE this article!!!! thanks for posting it Matt. Good stuff indeed. 😀
You seriously need to play those games. To anyone that likes weird supernatural horror. It’s reviewed from everyone and I’ll quote IGN as “a pilgrimage” . It’s an intensely spiritual game. Sublimely numinous, bent on instilling cosmic and sacred fear the whole way through. It’s probably one of the great all time masterpieces of video games, deserving of thoughtful criticism like IGN had given it. It’s amazing period to see a video game come out that can be taken seriously as renegade avant garde art.
It’s games like Bloodborne and other weird supernatural horror films like Nang Nak or stories like Strange Manuscript Found In A Copper Cylinder that solidified a confident perennial outlook , which is above-surface, that when games or stories like that come out, subconsciously people get an intense spiritual experience from playing them that they often don’t realize is there, and I disagree vehemently that people don’t want games or stories full of human sacrifice as the gnostics had done because its all over the best art . Art is defined as sublime or not by virtue on whether or not there is ego death as a theme, when it is there even in subtle ways or more obvious ways like Rime of the Ancient Mariner, that is what Arthur Machen deemed as ecstatic art. And I also strongly recommend , his theories are not out dated in the least applied to religion, Marcel Mauss . Surprised his book is not on your recommended page for amazon because it’s literally about the idea of a haunted economy , offerings yielding mana.
Human sacrifice and ego death – it’s what the kids want. Maussian reciprocity is that when someone makes an offering as at a shrine, though his argument kind of falls apart a bit the more conventionally you try to apply it, the offering is a proxy of the person’s soul. The connection the person really wants is to give over them selves to an alien identity, which haunts and binds the entity to reciprocate to them, implicit in his theory is the idea that sacrificing your self (not just the object given, your very self), is a guarantor of your forthcoming spiritual wealth. This is how Vietnamese, Korean, shamanism work.