An Elementalist Interpretation Of Marilyn Manson's 'Wormboy'

An Elementalist Interpretation Of Marilyn Manson’s ‘Wormboy’

‘Wormboy’ is one of Marilyn Manson’s creepiest songs. From the album Antichrist Superstar, it covers typical Manson subjects like death, despair and psychological destruction, possibly in the context of a person who has discovered that Christianity has driven them to ruin. There’s more to these lyrics than goth themes, though. Buried within is some deep esoteric wisdom.

One line in particular stands out, and demands explication from an Elementalist perspective: “When you get to heaven, you will wish you’re in hell.” This is an extraordinarily strange line, but from an Elementalist perspective it makes perfect sense.

The Christian heaven (Manson’s mockery is limited to Christianity; he avoids mentioning Eastern religions) is supposed to be a place of perfect and eternal bliss. For many centuries, ignorant fools have yearned for this heaven, believing it to be a place where they are liberated from all the sufferings of the Earth. But as the lyrics of ‘Wormboy’ suggest, things aren’t that simple, especially when it comes to Christianity.

From this eternal bliss in heaven narrative, one question naturally arises: why would someone wish they were in hell?

Mainstream philosophy has difficulty grappling with such a question. Because even our metaphysical thought is infused with materialist logic, it’s hard to imagine someone desiring anything for non-materialist reasons. Thus, we understand the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But we don’t understand spiritual motivations nearly as well.

As such, we can understand what would motivate a person to want to get to heaven. The eternal bliss of heaven seems like a never-ending Oxycontin buzz to materialist cultures such as ours. We can all understand wanting pure pleasure.

Most people associate heaven with the ultimate final goal, the victory condition of life. If owning a home with a million dollars in the bank equals success in the physical plane, getting to one of the heaven realms equals success in the metaphysical plane. To get to heaven is to win at life. So why would a person who got there wish that they were in hell?

An Elementalist can readily explain: boredom.

The Fourth Tenet of Elementalism holds that the natural state of consciousness is one of perfect bliss. Following from this tenet, Elementalism teaches that this perfect bliss soon became excruciatingly boring. This boredom was what motivated God (understood in Elementalism to be the same thing as consciousness) to dream up something other than perfect bliss.

Elemental Elementalism 21.2 states: “It was in order to alleviate boredom that God forgot some of Godself, and, in so doing so, dreamed up the Great Fractal.” All of the various worlds in existence were dreamed up in order to alleviate the boredom of eternal bliss.

This includes the lowest of the hell realms.

It’s hard to realise, while on Earth, that any world must eventually become boring after enough time spent there. Earth is such a desperately miserable place that the vast majority of beings who incarnate here come to wish they were somewhere nicer. So, for the vast majority of Earthlings, the entire will is focused on getting to heaven. But when you get to heaven, you’ll get so bored that you will wish you’re in hell.

Infinite suffering is preferable to infinite boredom. At least infinite suffering has variety. Being forced to endure the infinite non-variety of the highest of the heaven realms is a form of suffering that is, in its own way, greater than the suffering of even the lowest of the hell realms.

So few of us appreciate the magnitude of the disappointment that awaits us in heaven!

Appreciating facts as esoteric as these is the preserve of a small number. Marilyn Manson may have seen aspects of reality that very few other humans have seen, and encoded references to this arcane knowledge in the lyrics of his songs.

It has long been known that Marilyn Manson is a fan of esotericism, and references to that are everywhere in his lyrics. Could it be that Manson himself has experienced, on occasion, such perfect bliss that he understands that there’s more to life than mere pleasure? If so, does it mean that Manson has cleared the Third Hurdle, transcended egotheism, and become a Luciferian?

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Growing Roots Within

All attention you spend on the interior journey is valuable, and encourages the growth of roots within. It is all too easy for this to simply become talk. The fact is, this awakening business isn’t some step by step program for self improvement or self development. This is about pointing you back to what is real, what has always been real, and then dispensing with actors such as myself. When we speak or write, there is a brief role to play in life, and then it is done. This isn’t the vector of wisdom. The vital wisdom of the response, at best, is elicited in you. Engage your own interior journey: that is the encouragement.

Now, I’m not saying leave your job, your partner, your family – this is not about the radicalisation of your outer life. This is simply about your direct discovery of what it means to really be you.

Imagine wanting to gravitate towards blame, an accident, an argument, someone else getting in trouble. To want a problem, to feel the desire for there to be drama and trouble. Have you observed this others? Yourself? It is quite prevalent, so chances are you have crossed paths with this phenomenon many times. This represents a kind of dysfunctional energetic ecosystem, a pathological twist in the psyche. It is both an inner and outer ill. People become entrained by society to actually desire and seek pain and conflict, and the false self is primed to take this programming onboard as a matter of course. As a common example, have you ever said something to someone and they ‘took it the wrong way’, almost as if on purpose?

If you examine this, it could of course be the case that you perhaps said something inflammatory, but that is by the by. What really matters is that this person had the option to minimise their upset, but they chose to become aggravated. Maybe you baited the hook, but they took it.

Why would they want to be upset, to adopt the role of the incensed victim? Psychology refers to the value perceived in this type of martyrdom as ‘secondary gain’ – which is really just a way of pointing out that when someone acts out personal drama, they do so on the basis they are getting something out of it. There is a neurochemical satiety associated with being incensed, offended, or cast into the role of the victim. This is rooted within the brain and body, and is certainly capitalised upon by the separate sense of self. The notion that secondary gain is of personal value is only viable because someone has shallow roots within – if any at all. It is all too easy to be swept up in the drama if you are not grounded.

The drama on offer, as miserable as it is, outcompetes any value in peace for one without roots within. For the one so divided, it feels fleetingly better to be in conflict, butting heads and playing out the personal drama of being a separate ‘someone’ in competition with everyone else. This can only be possible when someone is so lost, so deluded and indoctrinated by culture, that they aren’t even aware that real peace could exist. If they were, they would never abandon peace to play out these minor dramas.

This process may affect someone in scarcely noticeable ways, and yet even a small degree of seperation entertained in this way is sufficient to create vast rifts between the you and the perception of your true nature – there cannot be any actual separation, but I don’t want to go into that here. The point is that you do not have to be in the throes of being a total drama queen in order to suffer the consequences of perceived separation. Even just permitting yourself to be slightly irritated by the way someone else in your household puts something away in the fridge can be enough to hurl you out of the gates of the kingdom and lashed onto the spokes of the wheel of becoming.

There are those inclined to think this is all very abstract, out of reach, or that such minor attention to the relationship between one’s inner and outer environments is inconsequential.

It really isn’t. All of this is not only very basic, but it is also of direct and immediate consequence. You wouldn’t know unless you went inside to directly investigate the nature of this experience. It isn’t theoretical, it is phenomenological – only *you* can show up to observe this. The greatest teacher in history could only at best meet you halfway in this. You are asked to walk the final leg of the journey alone. Because that either appears intimidating or isolating, and with no clear material advantage promised, most people won’t ever bother over the course of a lifetime. In the absence of a teacher, you nevertheless have ordinary people around you who have taken up the torch and encourage you to try doing the same – not because it will make you noble, good, or morally correct, but because you haven’t yet gone outside your limited perspective. If you had, your life would unfold completely differently, even if no one else should ever notice.

Growing roots within is very simple. The more attention we give to our true nature, our deepest inner silence, the more this presence naturally takes root within us. A plant doesn’t need to be directed and micromanaged about how to take nutrients and develop, nor does your true nature. You simply give it the attention and nourishment it asks for, and just allow the entire miraculous process to unfold from within.

The remarkable thing about this is that what is undesirable in you is crowded out by the internal growth taking place. Again, not to make you holy, but to make you whole. All of this inner dysfunction is fuelled by you seeing yourself as separate, not whole. All of that is illusory, but there is no way someone can tell you that and have it blossom into full effect. It is the case that you must come to a meeting with this in your inner space so that enough soil is there for the seed that is always already there to take root.

You may be wondering if all this is simply about the time you spend in meditation. I’d like to clear this up, because meditation as an exercise can easily become misconstrued. Meditation is one avenue by which you may be involved in listening deeply to the music of your own inner world. Like anything, a practice of meditation can easily become an obstacle rather than a help. If you think you are being a good person, a hygienic entity, a spiritually well-behaved person, then you are likely to be entering meditation with an erroneous view to improvement. The notion we need fixing or betterment can be obstructive to our relationship with inner truth. The key ingredient here is listening deeply, intently, without imposing your mental interpretations upon that which you perceive. You don’t need to specifically set time aside in sitting meditation in order to listen deeply. You can do this out walking, or at work as you perform tasks.

No attention given to your inner world is ever lost or wasted. I say this, but you will not know this for yourself until you taste it directly. These roots within produce fruits of stability, connection, resilience, peace and joy that if you only tasted them once, you would be certain that never again would you trade them for the madness of diversion the conditioned world offers. You must be willing to place what you have thought, believed, concluded upon the altar of sacrifice. You must be willing to withdraw every tiny habit of revenge, resentment and personal superiority. In one shining moment, you might just see that this was all the product of a conditioned personal history, a history that doesn’t even exist except as an etheric record of what has been chosen prior. You are not bound to repeat inner or outer history. This is remarkable good news for freedom. The tragedy is, very few people are even capable of conceiving that such freedom, such a deeply beneficial inner expansion is even possible.

This is the meaning behind the myth of the Bodhisattva. There are those who have for all intents and purposes left this world behind, yet they remain among us. They return again and again into the darkness, not because they are still stuck upon the wheel of becoming, nor because they have to somehow earn nobility through some moral crusade, but because it is actually their deepest joy to extend this help to others. They completely understand that their own well-being is inseparable from the well-being of all.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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Elon Musk: Kshatriya

In the ancient Laws of Manu, a quadripartite division of society is made. Known in the West as the “caste system”, it divides people into prescribed social roles based on the type of person they naturally are. There are few more controversial ideas in the West today than the caste system, but there’s an esoteric truth to it that cannot be ignored.

In this conception there are brahmin (the scholars, priests and teachers), kshatriya (the warriors, rulers and administrators), vaishya (the merchants and farmers) and shudra (servants and labourers). Each person can be assigned into any one of these castes depending on the gunas they inherit, where gunas are understood to be properties, qualities or attributes.

This essay contends that this caste system reflects the true alchemical divisions of humankind.

Plato, in the Parable of the Metals in Republic, wrote about a division of human souls into gold, silver, bronze and iron. These are very closely analogous to the four castes, such that those with souls of gold are brahmins, silver are kshatriyas, bronze are vaishyas and iron are shudras.

These divisions are not as arbitrary as they might first appear. They come very close to a natural fourfold division of the Great Masculine Axis, namely into two precious metals and two useful metals, wherein the two precious metals represent the wealth of the royalty and the wealth of the gentlemen, and the two useful metals represent the commerce of the merchantry and the tools with which the peasantry works the soil.

This division, much like the cycle of energies represented in the Quadrijitu, is natural and archetypal. As such, it can be found in the West today even if not acknowledged. Not only can the souls of people be placed along this four-step axis, so can the spirits of times and places.

The current problem in the West is that we have sunk into a dark age, deeper and darker than any before. As such, there are no longer enough brahmins or kshatriyas for quality government. Society now mostly produces shudras, with the vaishyas forming the ruling caste.

In situations like these, what’s needed is for a kshatriya to rise up – a man of silver above the men of bronze and iron – and to lead the people to somewhere greater. It’s necessary for a higher man, with a higher vision, to lead the way, and for the masses to follow. This kshatriya must open the space for a new generation of brahmins to thrive before a true Golden Age can begin.

Enter Elon Musk.

The West today is marked by a complete collapse in spiritual values. The vast majority of us are soulless, nihilistic consumers, and most of the rest are clinging to the corpse of a religion that no-one really believes in any more. Nietzsche’s prediction that widespread atheism would lead to widespread misery comes more true every year.

We’re primed to enter a new spiritual paradigm. Never before has the West been more ready to receive a new interpretation of the perennial philosophy. All that’s needed is for some great king to make space for the priesthood of that new interpretation.

In purchasing Twitter, and in firing most of the censors, such that Twitter has become the Internet’s premier free-speech platform, Musk demonstrated to the whole world that there are values higher than profits. Free speech is such an important value that, without it, society is lost, and he understands this. Musk has raised a middle finger to the totalitarians and to their attempts at curtailing free speech.

This essay also contends that Musk is the first of the great kshatriya souls that will be born into the West as we pass out of our Iron Age and into a new Golden Age. These kshatriyas will create the conditions for the brahmins to expand into. That the brahmins have souls of gold means that, once enough of them are present, a class of philosopher-kings can be formed.

There are few things kshatriyas like more than making merchants seethe, which is why Musk trolls the money-worshippers so hard. Merchants can’t understand Twitter being used for a higher purpose (i.e. more than mere profit), hence why they’re so upset right now. But this is only the beginning.

If Elon Musk would form the provisions for a new spiritual school – one that is tasked specifically with bringing genuine spirituality back to mankind – the seething would be unprecedented. He would truly be the kshatriya king that created a portal for brahmins to re-enter the world.

The foremost sign that such a thing might be possible was when Musk smoked cannabis on the Joe Rogan show. Rogan is one of those who are aware that cannabis, along with other substances, is a spiritual sacrament. How long until Musk walks the pathway from cannabis to psilocybin and DMT? From at least one vantage point, that seems like his fate.

Elon Musk could be more than merely an heir to an emerald mining empire. He could be the spark that sets off a new spiritual era. The way he has run Twitter suggests that he is aware of higher values, something above the prime vaishya value of profit. Could he be the conduit through which higher values return to Western life?

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Narratives Of Life Vs. Narratives Of Death

There are two types of narrative that an individual or culture can tell themselves about the meaning of life. Although there might be an infinitude of specific narratives, they all share enough features in common to divide them into two groups. The first are life narratives and the second are death narratives.

Life narratives are the original human spirituality. All natural spiritual traditions emphasise the passage of life through the four corners of the dharma wheel: through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. They also emphasise that these four seasons apply to the life of humans as well. In fact, this quadrichotomy describes the natural life path of everything that exists.

Narratives of life are all circular. This is why the holy symbols of all life religions are circular. The ouroboros, the Taijitu, the Quadrijitu and the dharma wheel are all circular. From this circularity the core spiritual truths of reincarnation and karma can be derived. After the Winter always comes another Spring.

Or, as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, “death is fixed for those who are born, and birth is fixed for those who die.”

Life narratives also emphasise gratitude. Being natural, being vital, one is grateful for life. As such, there is no desire to escape life, or to escape reality. There is no resentment, no slave morality. So life narratives celebrate the return of the Sun after the Winter Solstice, and they celebrate the peak of the Sun at the Summer Solstice, and in either case they are grateful.

Death narratives were invented later, for the sake of political control. Death narratives all promise the same thing: that you can escape the misery of life through obeying those pushing the narrative (usually a priest). So in order for a death narrative to catch on, there has to be widespread suffering.

Death narratives mostly arose after the advent of civilisation. Civilisation leads to the survival of individuals who would not have survived in a state of Nature. Most of these individuals can intuit that they are defective, and as a result they desire oblivion. This is especially true if, as is often the case, they were born into slavery.

When you have an overpopulation of useless eaters, promoting life narratives is dangerous. It can lead towards a total collapse of the ecosystem. Much better to promote death narratives, so that the population can return to a balance with Nature.

Narratives of death are linear. This is why the holy symbols of all death religions are made of straight lines (such as the Star of David and the Christian cross), or circles reduced to a minimum (such as the Islamic crescent) or both (such as the hammer and sickle).

All religious narratives that have an end times belief are narratives of death. A will to escape the world is a longing for death and thereby rejection of the world. Therefore it is a naysaying, a mental illness. Believing in an Armageddon or hoping to escape Samsara are both a rejection of the reality that the gods dreamed up for entertainment.

Materialism, with its Big Bang and Heat Death of the Universe concepts, is another linear narrative, and therefore another death narrative. Because it’s a death narrative, it belongs in the same category as the Abrahamic religions. Indeed, it was a Catholic priest who came up with the idea of the Big Bang in the first place, possibly to delegitimise the esoteric belief that all conscious beings are co-creators of the Universe.

Ultimately, materialism offers the same solace to those who hate life as the Abrahamic cults. The only difference is that there’s no priest to obey (perhaps scientists are the priesthood of materialism). All one has to do is wait until the physical body expires, whereupon the warm embrace of oblivion will envelop one for eternity.

Marxism, as Sri Dharma Pravartaka Archaya realised, is another form of Abrahamism. The narrative that the bourgeosie have to be destroyed before a Golden Age can begin is a relative to the narrative that Amalek/the heathens/the infidels have to be destroyed before Yahweh will return to Earth.

Marxists also share a personality type in common with Abrahamists. The vicious, petty, dishonourable conduct of both types is infamous. The predilection towards becoming a two-faced backstabber is shared by all who resent the world.

Gnosticism is yet another death narrative. The idea that the material world is inherently evil is borne of the same kind of resentment that motivates the other Abrahamisms. Gnosticism might be a step closer to the truth in that it recognises Yahweh as the Principle of Evil (a belief shared by Elementalism). But it is still a narrative that repudiates life in the physical world.

Believers in life narratives and believers in death narratives could not behave more differently. Believers in life narratives feel kindness for all other life and for the life process. Believers in death narratives invent practices like kosher and halal slaughter, and infant genital mutilation. That life narratives promote compassion and death narratives promote sadism is perhaps their most salient difference.

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