What if the City on a Hill was made of Magic Dirt?

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts have their own menu page above.

Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway


The last post was a graphical look at the what the Band calls Satanic Inversion. We didn't come up with the name, but use it because it captures the two key features of this kind of deception - it reverses truthful relationships for personal gain and has a pattern of historical consistency over generations that seems metaphysical. Earlier posts often pointed out the philosophical bait and switch - offering up something conditional and subjective as a universal - which is basically the same thing. It would be fair to call the bait and switch a subset of the Satanic inversion that appears in certain kinds of discourse. 

Human nature is self-serving, so it isn't hard to see variations on do what thou wilt being appealing. It's just incompatible with the technical demands and high-trust social order of Western culture. Pretending personal preferences are absolutes presents domination as some "natural order". 

The problem, as always, is that the pretend principles are fake, and at some point, their limits become impossible to miss. That's when elites equipoise is threatened and a reboot is needed. 




World War I was the blood-drenched reboot after the inherent falsehood of the imperial nation-state crashed into its limits. At this point we recognized the need to consider America, since it had a different relationship to the notion of Progress! that was subverting Europe. But first a couple of observations on the consequences of the War. 

Mindless slaughter at Verdun. 

Leftist histories pitch World War I as a new beginning. This elevates something circumstantial - the destruction of Imperial Europe - to teleology - a new age of "democracy". This notion of an epochal change meshes with the utopian fake teleology of the Marxists, who were bankrolled by the same financial players that facilitated the War. 




The reality is that Marxism appears to be desirable to the global elites. This is easy to understand once the equalism squid ink is wiped away, and the cultural virus is revealed for the centralized totalitarianism that it is:

The USSR is the socialist state for factory workers and peasants, 1945, Soviet propaganda poster

Victims of Famine, Kharkiv, 1933, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine 

The trial of the members of the Suzeon Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Mensheviks), Moscow 1931





The appeal is central control. A common mistake is to judge agents by their professed ideology, when the empirical thing to do is to look at what they do. By their fruits... In practice, Marxism is the opposite of equality since it is predicated on a mechanism of absolute authority in the hands of a few. Neither globalists nor Marxists care about their messages - those are chosen for their rhetorical efficacy on the path to total power. What matters in the big picture is bringing humanity to heel by any means possible. Once the power structure is in place, the ideology is comfortably jettisoned for basic totalitarian brutality.

Trotski, Lenin, and Stalin

Centralize power and the biggest psychopath grabs the ring/ Tolkien made this quite clear. 

One thing the West seemed to miss was that the Trotskites and Soviets were different, and were launching Marxist attacks from different vectors.

Marxism and Globalism are just different fronts for central control. 

Which requires one's will be imposed on others.

Which is Satanic.










Ignore the ideologies. Empirical facts are the only path to human knowledge. Ye shall know them by their fruits. The Satanic inversion is to place oneself - the will - over any natural or moral constraint. Better to reign in Hell, as Milton put it, and the more centralized the systems of control, the easier it is to do. Want to find where the power-hungry deceivers lurk? Push the rhetoric aside and look for efforts to centralize power - especially in the name of "fixing" the world.

It should surprise no one that the industrial scale slaughter and devestation enabled by the globalist elites in World War created great opportunities for both the spread of Marxist radicalism and the intrusion of "democratic" governments into areas like economics, education, and health care. 

But that's a topic for a future post. This post needs to look at American Progress!, because it followed a different path than the European mythology that we've been examining and is as important for understanding the Postmodern cultural hellscape that we live in today. The American experience was unique in important ways, and as was generally the case, those unique circumstances were imagined into a fake faith. This turned out bigger than planed and will break into two parts. 

The Band wrote a long post looking as some fundamental errors in American Enlightenment thought, and while the tone is a bit angry in hindsight, the premise is sound. The Roots of Globalism section in red is especially relevant. So there is no sense recapping that stuff; We will just address a few important points in relation to more recent posts and the aftermath of the War. 






First we need to look at the difference between a nation and an empire. Obviously these terms have picked up a lot of baggage over the years, but it is not hard to fix basic definitions that work for the purposes of our discussion. From Infogalactic:

Links: nation, empire, Liberty Barn, A Roman Triumph


In some early posts, the Band broke down the difference between empirical/bottom-up and rationalist/top-down epistemologies (links included) as a major factor in understanding where the lunacy of contemporary Postmodernism hides. The former is the only way for humans to obtain reliable information about the world around them while the latter is a satanic inversion that elevates desire over reality. Quick graphic recap:

Nation and empire follow the same inverted pattern:

It is true that the colonial population of America was not homogeneous, but the founding values of the new country clearly reflected the Anglo-Christian national character of the majority. Meanwhile the abundant space and clear state and individual rights provided room for the regions to retain their local flavor while coalescing the shared sense of national identity that would be satanically inverted into the "melting pot".

Billy Ireland, We Can't Digest the Scum, Columbus Dispatch, March 4, 1919, 

The melting pot was only possible because Americans built their state on their own satanic deception - that there was an occult property in the American environment that fundamentally alters human nature to the point that even the Christian notion of a fallen world can be wiped away because people don't like it. 












American Exceptionalism is one common term for this idolotrous vanity, but it goes back way before that label. Why is this significant? Because a house built on a foundation of lies has terminal flaws baked into its inception that will present problems, regardless of the personal quality of the individual citizens. 

We might as well start with an ontological whopper, the Shining City on a Hill. Let's look at the original quotation from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew with attention to the context:

The image is a metaphor, not an urban plan. Jesus is charging his listeners to let their faith shine forth unhindered into the world rather than keep it to themselves. This obvious when you see that he follows one figure of clearly visible, unconcealed light - the hilltop town - with another - the lamp on a stand - that is more overtly personal. The charge is individuated, the second-person imperative "you", rather than a collective first-person "we". Note also, who is making the charge.

The passage was first applied to America as a place by Puritan John Winthrop in a 1630 address to his followers and was revived in the 20th century by Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. But notice how this serpent perverts the words into idolatrous self-agrandizement and collectivism: Click for the full text - we'll be looking at excerpts for convenience, but context is important. Don't just trust the Band when we claim not to cherry-pick - look at the source material and confirm.

The first shift:

Anonymous, John Winthrop, circa 1630, oil on canvas (transferred from panel), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA


Note the opening highlights. Jesus's charge to the individual conscience has conveniently transformed into a leader commanding all others to submit to a collective order. Pay attention to the rhetoric, because this is something we see all the time. Winthrop frames his rant in Christian terms, but the actual content of the words is totalitarian. Because we may be "knitt" together as one man, someone has to set the course. Guess who? Consider again who is making the charge. 

The last highlight is where the idolatry becomes overt.

The "Citty on the Hill" takes the notion of living openly in your faith and twists it into the self-pedestalization of his worldly community. The goal is not for YOU to be the praise and glory - there is a word for that brand of vanity.  

Who is making the charge?

The equation is clear:












Put another way, who is it that lights the way?

Idolatry. Thought that looked familiar. 

It is relevant the Bible is clear on collective efforts in this world to override the personal nature of salvation and impose ourselves on God on our terms:

Cornelis Anthonisz, The Fall of the Tower of Babel, 1547, etching

This is also a sort of city built on a hill under human supervision. 

It was shining here...













This is not to impugn the sincerity of the individual Puritan, but to point out a fundamental error in a founding American nationalist myth: that there is some mystical property in the land that enables humans to transcend their nature. More on magic dirt in a moment. 

The image lay fallow for a couple of centuries before it's repackaging in the 20th century. Kennedy's use:

Andy Warhol, Flash–November 22, 1963, detail: Campaign Posters, 1968, silkscreen, Telfair Museum, Savannah, Georgia


Now it's big government! To be fair, Kennedy was referring to integrity in government, but what is significant is how the meaning of the city on the hill transforms. This sort of distortion is so effective because the metaphor retains its original connotations as its message inverts. "City on the Hill" has a Biblical sound and aspirational quality that keeps resonating even if it is now just a front for an ever more rigid pattern of central control.

Then there's Reagan, in many ways the perfect president for his time - a slick, superficially reassuring actor who offered a debt-fueled puff of "prosperity" to mask deep state malfesance and the multicultural prelude to globalist cultural Marxism. But his greatest sin was to present blatant falsehoods as if they were timeless truths in a manner simultaneously so moronic and comforting that sheer inanity has an almost hypnotic effect. We have to look closely because this is an example of old myths coming home to roost. From his farewell address:

A freedom man... One of the worst thing about Reagan "conservativism" were the simplictic and inaccurate formations. Winthrop may have sought a kind of freedom from one political authority, but not the platitudinous "freedom" that 80's conservatives were trumpeting in lieu of thought. Dishonest oversimplification is easy to attack, making you a liar and/or idiot.






Then the explanation of his recurring theme of the city on the hill:

Reagan Country, jelly bean portrait


This city is the apotheosis of Kennedy's ideal government - a polyglot mass of consumers, devoid of identity beyond the economic, who wish away realities of human biodiversity. Note the slippery rhetorical inversion from the amnesty president: the border may be walled, but it is still open. The notion of defense is raised, creating a reassuring feeling that the safety of the nation is in resolute hands, but the actual words deny that right or desire to protect. And what God is this? There is nothing overtly Christian about this city on the hill, no interest in the moral rectitude that most would consider the indicator of providential blessing. 

This is the same epistemologically absurd notion of blank-slate equalism that first crawled from the sludge in the Enlightenment, complete with a deist Masonic God. Although Reagan never formally joined Masonry.

Garth Williams, illustration for “The Land of Counterpane”, in The Tall Book of Make Believe Tales

And the grounds for selling the right on invasion? It's how he "saw it". 

Imaginary worlds can be sweetly charming. Just not as a political agenda.

















He then goes full Zangwill...

Notice the complete absence of a national culture or identity. The platitudes are as hollow as the Pedowood movie roles he played.











...before a final pat on the back. 

Good hands. 


Speaking of which, Obama trumpeted the open borders truth in 2006:

Logic suggests that the institutions built and supported by American effort and money ought to serve Americans, unless the goal is to deny the existence of the American nation and flood it beneath hordes of Cloward-Pivan barnacles. Chuck Norris breaks it down.


The problem with false premises is that they have no substance. You can't build on them. By now, it is beyond obvious that earthly Utopias are beyond us. Cultural values take long periods of time to develop. Communities and people need stability to thrive. It doesn't matter what the face on the screen says or thinks - empirically, globalist churn is toxic to the health of the nation. But ensconcing a fake myth as a national goal means failure is inevitable, and the consequences something other than a shining city.

The outcome is built into the fake foundation.

But there is a big gulf between Winthrop and Kennedy, and a lot of Progress! had to happen for a compelled fake Christian idol to morph into a compelled statist one. There is no need to rehash the Enlightenment here - there is any number of earlier posts exposing that fake epistemology - but what we are seeing is an example of the inverted faith that defines that ball of deception. The mischaracterization of Christian faith that Winthrop used to justify the imposition of his Utopian vision was replaced by "rationalist" faith in central control without changing the implications at all. What bridges the gulf?

That's were the Magic Dirt comes in. 

Anonymous, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, St. Johnsbury, Vermont

We already met J. Hector de Crèvecœur, the 18th-century traveler, gentleman farmer, and Enlightenment fabulist who introduced the notion that there was something special inherent in the American environment that allowed humans to transcend their natures. 

You can see the Enlightenment ideology at work. Replacing Winthrop's Providence with earth magic gets rid of God while maintaining the supernatural force needed to support the narrative that humans can supersede reality. 

The allegory of a city for Christian life actually does have a long history - it was the central motif in St. Augustine's magnum opus, The City of God. Click for a brief post on the structure of allegorical expression. Here, one of the great thinkers in the Western tradition weaves Biblical and Classical history, Greco-Roman philosophy, and Christian theology into a complex tapestry where different kinds of allegory combine into a unified figure of Christian life.

Christianized Neoplatonic allegory: the earth as a lesser, debased "image" or figuration (figura) of the eternal perfection of God/heaven. 

City Of God is a painting by Michael Z Tyree which was uploaded on May 21st, 2013.

Heavenly things - like Plato's forms - can't be perceived directly down here in the world of decay, but can be represented conceptually through symbolic processes.











Typological allegory: a concept from Biblical exegesis that interpreted the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New, thereby tying them together into a single, unified message. 

T. Schluenderfritz, Into the Sea, Out of the Tomb: Jonah and Jesus by Maura Roan McKeegan, 2016

Jonah's three days in the whale ais a foreshadowing of Jesus' time in the tomb. This is temporal, in that the pre-Christian, unsaved world becomes a shadowy projection of a Christian future.

Note: these are the Band's broad categories for the sake of discussion. Allegory was too well-developed and widely used in late antiquity to sum up so simply. The point is to look for basic conceptual structures - in this case, the typological logic of the pre-Christian world signifying the Christian, and the Neoplatonic connection of the eternal and the temporal.

If you apply typological logic to Neoplatonic figuration you get Augustine's two cities - earthly figurations of metaphysical states that project a Christian future.This is often misinterprted because his City signifies along multiple allegorical lines at once and, he follows Jesus in using a collective metaphor for a personal charge. 

The easiest way to put it is that the City of God is both a relatable image of heaven and an approach to living for the individual Christian in a fallen world. The first is Neoplatonic in structure because it uses something that we can conceptualize as a representation of something metaphysically beyond us - it's like a golden fantasy city only better!

The problem with the Neoplatonic allegorical structure is that it is atemporal, or steady-state - it\s a representational relationship between two things across levels of reality.

The second uses this as a "roadmap" to guide a Christian life. One "lives in the city" figuratively in this world in order to live in the city in the afterlife. This is typological because it uses flawed Christian life in this world to prefigure the union of the soul with God, just as the limited faith of the Old Testament prefigured the Gospels. 

This is individuated and therefore based in a personal experience of time. What is shadowy now points to future clarity.

Or, in Augustine's words: "One portion of the earthly city became an image of the heavenly city, not having a significance of its own, but signifying another city, and therefore serving, or "being in bondage." For it was founded not for its own sake, but to prefigure another city..."


One thing that should be clear in this construct is that the City of God is not something that you build in this world. It is an attitude led by an allegory, and Augustine is explicit that it is a compliment to the nations and not a replacement. 

Simon Bening, St. Augustine of Hippo from the Da Costa Hours, circa 1515,  Morgan Library, New York

It preserves national cultures because it is an individual orientation towards the next life. You are not supposed to try and implement here. He refers to "residents" of the City of God as pilgrims passing through this world.

Claudio Coello, The Triumph of St Augustine, 1664, il on canvas, 271 x 203 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid

He makes this distinction explicitly. In this world, the Heavenly City is a religious attitude. It is in the next life that one lives there fully.

This image of the Heavenly City as a symbol of personal journey and heavenly reward is more or less the same as Bunyan's Celestial City in his allegorical Pilgrim's Progress. It's quite different from Winthrop's plan to collectively impel divine blessing through denying Christian freedom of conscience. And it is diametrically opposed to the descent into secular, no-borders globalism of Obama's monstrous hilltop hellhole. 






So magic dirt brings the city on the hill down to earth - taking it from something to strive for in the next life to something for power-hungry sociopaths to strive for in this one. The sublime landscapes of the 19th century capture something of this by visually implying that the transcendence that correctly belongs to the realm of faith is somehow inherent in the material world. 

Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, 1866, oil on canvas,  210.8 x 361.3 cm, Brooklyn Museum

The lengths people go to deny the transcendent but keep transcendence. Is this what magic dirt looks like?






There are no transcendentals, heavenly cities or magic dirt in the American landscape. But the need to pretend that America can somehow contravene human nature and finally realize the Enlightenment is an infuriating delusion that would not die. The problem is that this exceptionalism is based on myths all the way down, making it easy for enemies to undercut and subvert. A collective delusion works so long as everyone buys in, but agitators, especially mocking ones, can quickly puncture confidence in a weakly-held conviction How can you make a stand when the fortress is a sham?

Hollow culture destruction in three easy steps. Remember that we are talking about popular images transmitted along influential centralized media vectors. 

Define traditional masculinity as an emasculated mime in a nice suit.

This is the empty materialism of the civic nationalist. It makes a great way of life, so long as there is a substructure of assumed cultural values that civic nationalists pretend they can leave out of their ideology. 

Here's the problem - implied values aren't lasting. A generation can outwardly reject their values while still benefiting socially from them because they were internalized as basic assumptions. But internalized assumptions aren't conscious, and aren't passed on with the same emphasis as actual principles. Empty materialism has no principles to stand on, making it a cultural house of cards. 

2008 edition of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published 1968.

Bowie hanging out in London, 1960s

Promote and enable dyscivic behavior as aspirational, or "cool".

Move the Overton window.

We can follow the myth downstream. 

The city on the hill needed a clean slate - a new land, untainted by the residue of centuries of error and decadence. Enter "the New World" - a "virgin" land to birth the worldly salvation of mankind. Unfortunately for the myth, the land wasn't actually empty. The native inhabitants of the Americas may not have fit the European model of nation-state, but they did possess a form of social organization that played out within a contiguous area. And the reality is that this land was taken by force. 

This print captures the idea of a "providential" deliverance of a "new" land...

Theodor de Bry [engraver], village, 1590, The historie of travaile into Virginia Britannia expressing the cosmographie and commodities of the country ... early 17th century, British Library

Even though it was known since Elizabethan times that the the Americas were populated. The "First Thanksgiving" is part of American myth. But that one can't be pushed too far before it starts raising unpleasant questions about the providential gift of a virgin land. 

Stock pictures of Winthrop and a more woke revision from a duckduckgo search. 

In this case the "inclusive" upgrade is enlightening. Look at the difference the change in figures on the left makes to the symbolism. You can actually see the difference between fake utopianism and imperial reality






















The uncomfortable history is that as the population and hunger for resources grew, the American state broke treaty after treaty, harrying and killing their overmatched adversaries onto the tiny reserves that they occupy today. Even the "positive" stories are imperialistic.

Benjamin West, The Treaty of Penn with the Indians, 1771 to1772, 190 x 274 cm, State Museum of Pennsylvania 

Assume Penn's Treaty came about in the manner captured in popular history, and that Penn treated with the Delaware with scrupulous fairness. He was there specifically to acquire land for powerful backers to establish colonial ventures. 

John Smith’s Map of Virginia, 1627

Early Virginia - abundant tribal lands but no fixed boundaries that the Europeans would register as national territories. 

These transactions are fundamentally different than a sale between Englishmen. The latter is an exchange within a shared, socio-cultural and economic frame of reference. There is no change in the nature of the land as a legally and culturally defined entity. 

Peter Bell, Antique Map Of Colonial America, 1771

Where did the Indian nations that surrounded Virginia and that Penn treated fairly with go?

When land "ownership" moved from Indians to the English, the land was removed from the native understanding of territory to an English one. It was shifted permanently from one system to another. 

This is conquest.

Ultimately, the political nuances of colonial land deals were moot, as population pressure made the conquest and displacement overt. It was even called the "British "Empire". 

The is no "city on the hill". Just another empire.

This is not leftist anti-Americanism. But a positive national identity isn't based on feel good myths. It faces the realities of the past and considers them as historical circumstances rather than a litmus test for the reality of fake metaphysics. Pretend that the foundation is built by thanksgiving pilgrims from magic dirt and simple facts shatter illusions and rock cultural confidence. All advanced cultures exist atop something else. All advanced cultures evolve organically, over time, with "positive" and "negative" inputs. Lose the fake metaphysics, recognize what you are, and promote your culture. It sounds like a platitude, but the history of this mythology suggests otherwise:

or perhaps even care for your own lawn...

The brutal outcome was no different from any historical encounter between "civilized" and nomadic peoples vying for the same space. But that's the point. America wasn't a magic city, nor was it an empty new land. It conquered its territory like anyone else. This would be uninteresting if so much mythology hadn't been built on top of misrepresentation, making it too easy to expose. When convictions are built on sand, you see things like our current pathological guilt over actions that are both set in the past and historically banal. 

The moral high ground is lost when it is claimed on false grounds

This is also not an attempt to deny that America actually was exceptional. But it was exceptional because of circumstances, not literally impossible national metaphysics. The English cultural norms, lack of aristocracy, and Christian morality are top-flight starting materials, then throw in a relatively tiny population with continental resources. From Infogalactic:

The colonial economy differed significantly from that of most other regions in that land and natural resources were abundant in America but labor was scarce.... From 1700 to 1775 the output of the colonies increased 12 fold, giving the colonies an economy about 30% the size of Britain's at the time of independence. The free white population of the colonies enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world. 

Population growth was responsible for over three-quarters of the economic growth of the British American colonies. There was very little change in productivity and little in the way of introduction of new goods and services

From even before independence, the colonies were blessed with abundant resources that a high-trust, cohesive population could shape into an exceptional place. But as is so often the case, fake faith transforms the circumstantial into fake transcendence, and what is really a very fortuitous set of conditions is misidentified as an inherent property of living here. 

Given this starting point, there are really only two main historical paths forward:

The answer next time!