The Golden Ass

 

Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. 2 Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. 4 Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you. 7 Be patient, therefore, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. 8 You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. – James 5: 1-8 (NRSV)

Facing reality is a difficult thing to do. If any of us are honest, we can attest to that fact without hesitation. On the other side of it, though, is beauty, goodness, and truth. This is the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac on Mt. Moriah. I would like to suggest, whether we realize it or not, that it is also the story of the Epst&!n files. This blog series is to be my articulation of what I mean by that.

As Rainer Maria Rilke said in Letters to a Young Poet: “it is clear that we must trust what is difficult…that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.” If any of us desire anything good, or simply to be human, facing reality is not only required but inevitable. In his encouragement towards this, Rilke does not name our Judeo-Christian tradition. Rilke’s message, however, is the eventuality of a beautiful fruit whose seed has been buried deep in the tradition in question. By “buried deep,” I mean to indicate that it’s been hidden. Living the Christian life is not possible without facing difficult things. In fact, facing difficult things is inevitable and required as one crosses the threshold into discipleship. That discipleship has been turned into something easy and cheap is what I mean when I say a seed has been hidden.

James’ words in the opening verses of chapter 5 are obviously difficult, and partly because they can sound harsh. But they are tied to a seed of gentleness and care without which they could never be uttered. And, not only that, our human journey towards that gentleness and care is precisely what renders James difficult. That seed was first planted on Mt. Moriah. The reality of the story of Mt. Moriah, however, is so difficult that the place where the story happened could not have possibly had its name until after said story’s climax. This is because the human characters in the story were utterly incapable of knowing where the story was heading from its outset. And that is part of the difficulty. Of course, that is the case in any story. But, it is not the case in every story that this is because what the characters are to come to face through the course of the story is too difficult for them.

I mean to say that Abraham had no idea what was going on when he started his journey towards and up Mt. Moriah in Gen. 22. Not only that, but he was so clueless that he thought he knew exactly what was going on, but reality turned out to be precisely the opposite of what he not only imagined but actually was capable of hearing. I also mean to say that the story, as we have it handed down to us, is told not from the eye of God but from the ear of Abraham. In this sense, it is a human rather than a divine story. In this sense, too, it is a story in which we all participate. And, as we all inevitably must face difficulty if we want goodness and truth, so also are we all, like Abraham, relatively clueless as we are in the midst of the actuality of our own story. As Abraham took for granted the land from where he had come, from the Land of Towers (Gen. 11), so do we.

Dream Building Ensemble, by William Christenberry, 2001.

And, as Abraham didn’t know where he was heading at the outset of Gen. 22, neither do we. As Abraham didn’t know where he was, neither do we. Mt. Moriah didn’t receive its name until after the divine revelation that was given in that moment and in that place. As Abraham didn’t know where he was going, we, in reality, also don’t. And, as Abraham didn’t know where he was, neither do we. We can all recognize Gen. 22 as a story of child sacrifice. We do not, however, all readily recognize our contemporary story of the Epst&!n files as such. I submit that our contemporary story of the Epst&!n files is a contextualized re-living of Abraham’s moment of child sacrifice on Mt. Moriah. And, as the ritual sacrifice of Isaac was Abraham’s participation in a creation story, so, too, is the sacrifice of girls in the story of the Epst&!n files. Trigger warning: to say what I mean by all of this will obviously require a telling of the story of the Epst&!n files. To begin, then -

One person who appears repeatedly in the Epst&!n files is Steve Bannon. One of the revelations there is their mutually bound relationship to shared goals. While Epst&!n helped Bannon shape our larger shared environment in the image of his far-right populist project, Bannon worked to rehab Epst&!n’s public image by means of a film production (ref. here). Do note the mirror images presented to us by, on the one hand, Bannon’s description of the media’s exposure of the truth about Epst&!n to public view as a “sophisticated op” and, on the other, the film projector extending Epst&!n and Bannon’s shared image for the world out into it.

What the doubling in that mirror presents to us is that, while thousands have been r*ped by Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epst&!n's sex cult of sacrificially ritual shaming, all of us are immersed in their environment of abuse and lies. Each of us is left to respond or react in some way, whether towards healing and presence in grace and truth or towards dissociation that mirrors the abusive violence. We are not all only witnesses to Epst&!n’s child abuse. We are immersed in a cosmos made by attentive devotion to sacrificially violent idols made by human hands.

I want to clarify and specify, however, that abuse is only one term for what's happening right now. Abuse is a psychological or neurobiological term, as well as a sociological one. In theological terms, however, the reason I referred to it as a sex cult of sacrificially ritual shaming is because what we're all witnessing by giving attention to the very public news of the Epst&!n files is child sacrifice. I take framing it in such terms to be important for a number of reasons:

First – the larger picture by which we understand who we are, and how we know our knowing in the first place. We are not the ground of our own being, and we are not left to figure out what’s going on by ourselves. Second – story and framing. Theology offers explanations of things we’re otherwise left either curiously wondering or interminably and reactively furious about. It helps us interpret what’s happening. Third – response. What to do? The sacrifice of Isaac teaches us how to respond in this moment. We need guidance, and it actually requires revelation. The revelation is of the previously referenced seed of gentleness and care. And, the revelation itself is an alternative act of creation that invites us into a response.

1.1. WHO ARE WE?

Metaphysics and epistemology. It is true that we're immersed in a patriarchal environment of male violence. But these men are not the evil. They are men, and they are utterly banal. Trump is literally sh!ttin in diapers in the White House on national television. The evil is not flesh and blood. The masks and gowns they wear carry a terrifying brightness, but the eye holes have always struck me as strangely disjunctive for a reason. It is merely a mortal man under the hood. The wrestling with which are tasked, however, is against principalities and powers. Yes, it turns out there really is an elite cabal pulling strings. But the cabal itself is governed and engulfed by vain fantasies whose promises only make for destruction. The scriptural name given to these fantasies is idolatry.

Portrait, by William Christenberry, 1983.

This is not to decleave the evil from the world we inhabit. It is not to separate soul and body, world and spirit. It is to properly order the things and categories to which we give our attention. It is thus to properly direct our attention. To wit -

2.1. WHERE ARE WE?

Why is our response to public disclosure of the Epst&!n files is so woefully insufficient? Why is nothing happening? What the h@ll is going on? How is this being swept under the rug!? Why does it seem like authorities are speaking as though they live in another world? Why are the regime’s supporters imitating their same language? Where are the voices of the victims? If it is true that we are immersed in an environment of male violence, it is also true that the truth is being actively covered up. If it is true that these men are utterly banal, they are also actively working to envelop their deeds in darkness. They have agency, and they are using it. Predominant secular categories offer pathologized explanations as to why, but I take these to be too neat and tidy, and with answers and solutions that are too easily and freely chosen. Secular political explanations of partisanship or ideology follow a similar pattern that churns out simplicity, ease, and free choices. These men have agency, but their choices are not the whole story. And, their actions are hardly "free." All who sin are bound to sin.

Abraham ascended Mt. Moriah to offer his only child to what he had understood since he was himself a child to be a powerful Master from above whose full truth was terrifyingly cloaked in darkness on the other side of the horizon of what can be sensed by humans. Abraham's offering was bound to the altar in order to obtain blessings of fruitfulness and life from this terrifyingly powerful Master. And, it was said by all that this Master brought the world into order by way of sacrificial slaughter of its enemy and rival, who was depicted as a chaos-serpent.^[1] This was the language of Abraham’s ascent up Mt. Moriah. The Master's Law was violent victory over chaos, and the means of victory was blood sacrifice. Not only that, but the language of the land from which Abraham sojourned decreed that the shamed and vanquished enemy-chaos was what the Master then used to make the ordered world Abraham inhabited. This is to say that the slaughter of blood sacrifice constituted the creation of the world, and to practice the child's immolation was not only appeasement of the Master but participation in said Master's original and ongoing act of creatively bringing order out of chaos in the world. This is obviously a difficult thing to bear but also, if you represent the heroic victor, a matter of reverent devotion and celebration.

2.2. WHERE ARE WE NOW?

If we frame Epst&!n’s, Bannon’s, and Trump’s banality inside Abraham’s ascent up Mt. Moriah, then, some key things come to light that are otherwise hidden. These men don’t know what they are doing. They have been on a trajectory towards appeasing an unknown and terrifyingly powerful Master since they were themselves children. As Abraham was born into, formed inside, and came from a land of figures towering towards the heavens, so, too, did Epst&!n and his cabal. That is why William Christenberry’s “Portrait” makes clear that the fantasies of bright light in which these idols clothe themselves take a similar form to that of the Babylonian Towers that dominate the horizon of the world we all inhabit together. Our character takes form in relation to the forms of our environment.

As Abraham was bound to terror of darkness from the other side of the horizon, so is the cabal of banality. Abraham was once a child in a similar position to Isaac’s. So were they. As Abraham sought blessings of fruitfulness and life – sought “the precious crop from the earth” (James 5: 7) - so do these banal men grasp for it in the only way they know. “The only way they know” is why the term “bound” is key here. They are bound to the only confused language they’ve ever known. They are thus also bound to the world that language decrees and references. As I said, their choices are not as free as we tend to imagine.

Why we imagine it that way is itself a difficult matter of our own binding, a matter of the language we speak in the world we inhabit. Many point to downstream effects of the US’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as key triggers to our current populist moment that’s characterized by fears of cultural loss attributed to mass immigration. Those wars being retributive responses to 9/11, it makes sense that our fears of loss are not at all exclusively but definitively from and of Muslim “sand n!**ers.” The story of the current moment, then, cannot be told without accounting for the fact that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too, were religious acts of child sacrifice enacted at systematic scale. Thus, that we imagine our choices to be less free than they really are is a matter of our own binding to a world and its storied language is precisely part of why this theologically storied framing of creation and cosmology is important. Brian Tyler Cohen posted: "BREAKING: Ghislaine Maxwell PLEADS THE FIFTH when asked about Donald Trump." To be clear, the specific question was whether Trump ever engaged in sexual activity with anyone introduced to him by Maxwell or Epstein. The presumably divine story by which St. Paul refers to our shared environment as “the world” was created and brought into order should not be a breaking surprise. The reason it is “breaking” is because the reality of it is difficult to face and bear. It can break us.

Besides the obvious need for accountability, part of why we are frustrated in this Epst&!n (and Trump) moment that “nothing is happening” is because we imagine that we freely choose everything that’s happening. If we are confused by the regime’s language, it is because the languages of this place in which we are all immersed together are themselves confused. I do not say this to downplay the need for accountability but to explain why it appears toweringly impossible. The language of Abraham’s ascent up Mt. Moriah is a confused language of the Land of Towers from which he is sojourning. Because the languages of this place are confused, the place’s purposed end can never see its completion. That’s why the handing over of Iraq to their own governing structures was not only so awkward but violent. It’s also why the story of withdrawal from Afghanistan was not only so confused but also characterized by contested stories told by warring parties who speak different languages. The current “sophisticated op” of the populist far right will likely see a similar end.

The terrifying Master from above, after all, resides at the unreachable head of the Tower. And, this divine, all-powerful Master is the first hero. His violence establishes the difficult way the world works. His is not the rule of law but Law and Order. The reason why 70% of those rounded up by ICE having no significant criminal background is irrelevant here in this environment is because of the story being told in the first place by that language of Abraham’s ascent up the mountain of the world. In their banality, Bannon, Epst&!n, and Trump are all seeking to ascend towards an ensemble of dreams closer to the Master. Like the rest of us, Epst&!n and friends want to know what is, if not for their cultic rituals, otherwise cloaked in the tempting brightness of terrifying darkness.

It is no wonder, then, that their deeds are mirrors to and extensions of their divinity’s sacrificial violence that brings order out of chaos in the world. It is no wonder that their wonder is consumed by images of enemy bloodshed, of sacrificial violence. As Tawny Dragon said it on Threads: “It's f*cking wild we need a dead man's emails to believe the testimonies of 1000 women.” The women and the dead man are not even speaking the same language. Interestingly, Ms. Dragon also posted this: "They don't care about child sacrifice because the god that they worship killed his own son and called it love." I, of course, don’t take that to be what happened at Golgotha. Ms. Dragon does, however, seem to know her role in the (creation) story the dead man tells about himself, about the world, and about her. I am confident she knows the dead idol’s story far better than I, in fact. To the point of her knowing, the chaos-serpent is often depicted as a Dragon. The story of St. George slaying the fire-breathing dragon to return the village to proper order didn’t appear out of thin air.

2.3. WHERE ARE WE? COMINNG AROUND TO SOME ANSWERS

The reason it seems “nothing is happening,” then, is because something is happening. There may very well be an “Epst&!n class,” but it was the children of the lower classes who were sacrificed among ancient Israel’s neighbors, too.^[2] To call it a class war is to place ourselves in a different story and to thus invite a different response. The story on which Gen. 11 and 22 constitute a commentary is that the shamed and vanquished enemy-chaos that the Master used to make the ordered world Abraham inhabited appear before all of us is being made to appear before all of us by those who are bound in devotion to the One who invites shaming humiliation of enemies. This invitation is commanded by the Master by not only doing it first but by creating the world with it. We seem to be enveloped in darkness, because the “sophisticated op” of a projected world we inhabit is constituted by the darkness of a sacrificially vanquished enemy’s shame.

Yes, this is to say that 14 year-old girls tied up and blindfolded, shamed and insulted in horse stalls in underground dungeons, bound ones who are expected to “perform” well enough to obtain the blessed privilege of instead being r*ped upstairs in a higher level of the Tower (ref. here) represent the shamed and humiliated chaos-enemy who the Master not only sacrificially vanquished but who constitutes the very world we inhabit. “Why is nothing happening? What the h&ll is going on?” “Why does the language spoken by authorities not seem to give a proper account of this?” “Why are women’s voices being unheard and distrusted?”

Here, we also have to remember that greed is idolatry. And, the victim is not the greedy one but their resource. To quote Alasdair MacIntyre, however, “Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.”^[3] The Greek term pleonexia, as it is used here, refers to the insatiable desire to not only acquire but accrue what is rightfully due to another. We are all tempted to such idolatrous blessings whose bestowal requires sacrificial violence. Abraham wasn’t the only one who desired ascent. We all inhabit and participate in the same world. We have from the beginning. This is a difficult confesion. The elites might be pulling the strings, but they are no more in control than you or I. Thousands have been r*ped. All of us are immersed. We are immersed in a world and the language spoken in it.

That’s why Bannon wants to envelop voting polls with ICE agents in November’s mid-term elections. As he said it: “You’re damn right. We’re gonna’ have ICE surround the polls come November. And, you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want. But we will never again allow an election to be stolen.” The Big Lie is not just a lie. It is participation in our collected testing by a fantastical idol that demands blood sacrifice. The lie is more than a lie. It is a whole script they tell, inhabit, and live. Their Master is Ba’al. Or, perhaps we can call him Molech. Bannon is his servant and prophet. Epst&!n was his priest. Trump is his kingly representative. These idolatrously deceitful fantasies cover over their banality. Their Master continues working. Bannon, Trump, and Epst&!n are not the only ones who theology frames as violently heroic victors and rule of law names criminals. But we are all immersed in the same world. It belongs to a cosmology. We are all intimately familiar with the language. It may very well be a system, but first it’s a story. Many refer to it as the scriptures.

The Epst&!n files suggest that a newborn baby was perhaps thrown off Trump’s yacht into Lake Michigan, and that a limousine driver was about to pull over, end the trip, and give Trump the beating the driver felt he deserved because he was so disgusted by hearing Trump, while talking to a “Jeffrey,” threaten to murder a girl he had r*ped. We’ve all seen potential evidence that Virginia Giuffre was threatened with binding not only herself but her family to the terror of death’s darkness *** like another girl who had been disappeared off the edge of the horizon beyond which humans cannot sense or know. These are not just the worst of what we know. They are not aberrations. Nor are they only data points that demand further investigation rather than cover in shame of darkness. They appear as graven images of the logical terminus of a linguistic script that shapes a world inside of which we’re all immersed.

"Quiet piggy" "You are the worst reporter. CNN has no ratings because of people like you. *turns away from the woman* You know, she’s a young woman. *turns back to the woman* I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. But I’ve known you for ten years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face…” Both were Trump’s responses to questions from female reporters about Epst&!n survivors. These can be said to be words of verbal abuse. But they are at least also the telling of a story of heroic victor’s shaming of the vanquished chaos-enemy. This is how we know that such acts of verbal shaming are not separate from the sacrificial slaughters of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The shared world we inhabit together is constituted by the darkness of a sacrificially vanquished enemy’s shame.

Being “graven” images, they of course make a strong impression upon us. It may be a system, or “a sophisticated op,” but first it’s a story. Whether the story is true or not, how would the image of a girl whose head had been blown off not make such a lasting impression? The reason it makes an impression is because we are all impressed with a sense of the story that governs and orders our mutually shared environment. Hence the difficulty of bearing and facing it. If the terror did or may happen in a whole separate world, to which we have no connection or in which we have no part, or if this were merely an academic exercise of objective observation, then we would be left unaffected. But we are all characters in the script, and we all have parts to play. The question is of which characters and which parts. The question, then, is of our response, to which we will turn in Part 2 (of 2) of this blog series.

Endnotes

1. Eliade, Mircea, 1981, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1, pp. 70-72. Here, Eliade is simply summarizing the Babylonian creation myth / story. I am drawing from this story in much of what follows in this blog post. For a relatively short and concise essay on the Babylonian creation story’s cultural influence today, see Wink, Walter, 1999, The Myth of Redemptive Violence. The Bible in Transmission, Spring, 1999 issue. For a helpfully generalized and short summary of the differences and similarities of the Jewish and Babylonian creation stories, as well as the scholarly fallout in the wake of the discovery of the Babylonian one, see the May 18, 2010 blog post from Pete Enns from the BioLogos website, “Genesis 1 and a Babylonian Creation Story: Found among the ruins was a Babylonian creation story referred to today as Enuma Elish. How people viewed Genesis would never be the same again” (Enns, 2010). For a concise outline of the Enuma Elish, see Webster, Michael. (Unknown date). The Babylonian Creation Story (Enuma elish). [Class handout]. For a helpful summary of the Babylonian creation story, see Wink, Walter, 1992, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, pp. 13-17. ↑
2. Herr, Larry G., 1976, “Child Sacrifice in The Ancient Near East,” Ministry: International Journal for Pastors. https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1976/03/child-sacrifice-in-the-ancient-near-east ↑
3. MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1984, After Virtue, p. 227. ↑