Where are You Coming From? Where are You Going? On Art and Reading Paintings

Gavriil Pavlovich Kondratenko, Moonlit Winter Evening with Solitary Figure, 1903

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check a couple times a day and it will be up there.






This is a short post that isn't part of any of the ongoing series, but responds to something interesting that came up elsewhere. In a way, it's part of all the series, because it has to do with making sense - "reading" - images.

And it may become the start of a new one.







The Band is built off the idea that images are information vectors as well as aesthetic experiences - both, not either/or. In this post, we are going to look at a pair of images that complement each other and explain how they communicate their complementary messages.

But before getting into that it is necessary to address some basic points around art. These have come up in regular posts, but those are long and the scattered points aren't always easy to pull together or link to. And it's worth taking stock of why art matters and why the enemies of the West have tried to take it from us.

Franz Marc, Small Composition II, 1914, color on canvas, Sprengel Museum 

The Band is at odds with modernism, which falsely proclaimed "art" had to be self contained. Like this piece of crap. And if it did communicate, it had to avoid anything "traditional" like beauty, truth, or history and fixate only on "modernity" as defined by a sliver of dyscivilizational European perverts. 

Lawrence Weiner, Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, 1991, by laser-cut aluminum typography on brick. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

It also puts us at odds with Postmodernism and its aftermaths, which falsely claimed that aesthetics aren't part of "art" since they don't exist and are racist or something. 

This pretentious garbage is typical output from the sort of artworld creature that lives off the teats of govenrments, debased unaccountable institutions, and globalist "foundations". Apparently it's "meta" because it's a stenciled message you can put anywhere that describes the creative process...

These bodies gatekeep Art! with no checks other than their own perverse hatred of truth and beauty. They don't even talk like normal people, preferring a stilted, meaningless "discourse" that marks a place in their human centipede. Click for an example referring to the crap on the left.





Look past the atavists and the reality is that the visual arts are a subset of imagery. All visual arts are images, but not all images are art. The Modernists and Postmodernists are right to point out that this distinction is arbitrary. But they're morons and or liars because they believe that that observation somehow matters. All language is arbitrary in that it assigns unrelated phonemes or graphemes to concepts and objects.

Even the word "arbitrary" is an arbitrary assignment. Why on earth should we care if the term "art" is as well? It's dishonest to even pretend this is noteworthy.

But why single art out for a dishonest criticism. It's a puzzler. Might it have something to do with a desire to destroy standards and replace it them with anti-human cultural poison? 







All human activity is arbitrary in that we choose forms and set hierarchies of meaning. We pick names, colors, sizes, and lay-outs - designation and distinction are essential building blocks for the civilizations that allowed us to live better than animals. We can think of the civilizing process of as a ongoing clarifying and refinement that began when the first person named the first thing.

The reverse of drawing distinctions is entropy. Chaotic goo where communication and understanding dissolve into a meaningless pink slime. When you look past the specifics to the underlying pattern, this is what the atavistic inhuman globalist left - call them SJWs - want. They oppose enculturation and the refinement of meaning that comes with it. They desire entropic chaos where protoplasm twitch to subjective stimuli. The fact that without the distinctions and refinements of civilization the protoplasm die horribly escapes them because they're stupid. And their position is fundamentally evil.

Maerten de Vos, God Creating the Birds and the Fishes, 1600-1602, oil on copper.

From a Biblical perspective, Creation is a series of distinctions and designations. Drawing boundaries and defining things. And why do the designated things look the way they do? Why, it's arbitrary!









Innovation and artistic creation express the divine impulse in us and put us in the footsteps of God. Materially of course. When we build on the creations that came before, we advance refinement, diminish chaos and reduce indeterminacy. And we do so in ways that are constrained by the laws of nature, but are otherwise arbitrary. The morality of our creations is a separate thing.

A generically altered bioweapon designed for stealth transmission and maximal impact on health care and economic systems is a creation. It's innovative, but not moral.









For artistic creation, specific media may come and go and choices differ culturally and contextually. This is the part that is "arbitrary" in the sense that preferring tapestry to mosaic or stained glass to wall painting are issues of taste. But what matters for civilization isn't what arts are chosen but that there are specific arts. That there are skilled processes for creative distinction, refinement, and sophistication. And this is not arbitrary, unless you consider elevating our quality of life above the savage state to be so as well. It is the necessary expression of cultural refinement, of pushing away chaos, entropy, and indeterminate slime with divine creation. On that level, it is a moral imperative.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Collection of Pictures at the Time of Augustus, 1867, oil on canvas

Alma-Tadema was an academic artist best known for melodramatic scenes of ancient Greece and Rome. But he was an excellent technician. This painting captures the important place of art in ancient Roman culture. 

Every healthy civilization and many unhealthy ones express themselves and their values through the visual arts. Out current situation, where our "art" aggressively opposes our culture, our standards, and our identities is utterly bizarre. It is hard to think of another example. 

Kalachakra Shambhala, 19th century, Buddhist thangka painting from Sera Monastery, Tibet, private collection

Even cultures with abstract art traditions use them to express their values and identities. This picture diagrams the Kalachakra Shambhala - the final stage on an inner search for a new awareness of the world in Tibetan Buddhism. 

It isn't a realistic depiction of something in the world, but it doesn't spit on the culture where it came from either.








One Postmodern trick is to ask what art is, then pretend the impossibility of providing a concise and definitive answer disproves the concept. All liars have are tricks in the end, but they can be effective if you're unaware of them. The reality is that art takes on many forms and roles - even in the West, let alone the world - and there is no concise answer that will sum up everything you see in a major museum. But that's the trick - the correct definition of "art" is conceptual, not a list of art forms. And the answer is easy - art is structured making according to cultural norms. If you want something more specific, you have to refine the question.

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Gravestone of Poniński's Children, 1842, marble,  Gallery of Art in Lviv, Ukraine 

Like what is a sculpture, or relief sculpture, or Neoclassical relief, or funerary art, etc. 

Art is a higher order term with a lot of constituent subsets. Precise definitions are subset-dependent. 








Since the Band writes from a Western perspective, we are considering a Western notion of art. We've found that a definition based off a set of Greek terms best fits the art of the West on the broad level. This isn't perfect - definitions never are - but it captures the main assumptions from antiquity to the dawn of Modernism in the "art world" and still fits what the non-retarded and morally healthy tend to think art should be today.If you're interested in the reasoning behind these, click for a link to the post this was worked out. But this recap of the basics are enough for this purpose.

Art isn't either the making or the ideals being expressed - it is the coming together of the two in a visible material form. The Greeks used the term techne for skilled craft and episteme for the higher truths that art communicated. Art itself is phronesis - the marriage of the two. It looks like this:

Techne is skilled craft. It’s material-level on the ontological hierarchy, and follows culturally-specific customs rather than universal rules. The key is that it is skilled. Art isn't easy - it's talent refined to mastery. Otherwise you get the modernism where a perverse "art world" anoints talentless dyscivic garbage. 

Episteme refers to higher abstract principles - the metaphysical ideals that a culture holds most important and that are immaterial. Truth, Beauty and the Good. These don't change.  

Phronesis is the coming together of the two - techne guided by, serving, and expressing episteme in artistic form. This is the art of the West. Technical skill to express abstract values. 

What makes this definition so good is that it can distinguish art from "craft" or "skilled labor". Since the purpose of art is to communicate episteme in material terms, which is different from the purposes of craft objects. Both require refined skill or techne and be aesthetically pleasing but craft has a primary functional purpose other than purely communicating episteme in some way.

The formula:

This is so effective because it combines several key ingredients in a concise formation. Modern simpletons dislike this because it means entertaining more than one thought at a time. But art is a refined cultural activity and as such, consists of more than "orange man bad" level linear idiocy. First, there has to be the idea of a higher principle or truth. The image can be negative, but it needs to be truthful on some level.

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War, 1871, oil on canvas, 127 × 197 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

It's not an attractive picture, but it is truthful. It's skillfully made - techne - and conveys truth - episteme - so it is art.  








Then there is the idea of skilled making - the most obvious casualty of the satanic inversions and applied idiocy of the modern era. Again, art types are cultural preference, but regardless of what types are preferred, they have to be skillfully made. Skilled making in the service of truth is a requirement of worldly beauty.

The Band refers to visual attraction without the higher principles of episteme as allure. Allure can be amoral - neutral subjective pleasure - but it won't be moral because if it were, it would channel epistome and become beauty. More often than not it's immoral - visual seduction that plays on emotional response to draw one onto a dark path.

Alexandre Cabanel, Albaydé, 1848, oil on canvas, Fabre Museum

Cabanel's picture is rich in techne - the fall of the garments, the exotic setting, the creamy skin, and seductive insouciance of the expression are signs of a master painter. But there is no episteme to speak of, other than perhaps the appeal of the female form. But even that is presented in a tawdry way - the figure is a herem girl or courtesan. The only purpose other than the display of techne is to stimulate emotional desires - base feelings that may be "true" in a hormonal sense, but not in a higher one. It lacks logos.

Perhaps that is sufficient - there are shades of gray in qualitative judgments. But the painting is more alluring than beautiful. It has its value perhaps, but as ornament, a moment of seductive pleasure rather than "art" in the purest sense. 






This is why techne alone is not sufficient to define art. Allure and seduction also require high level craft skills.  It's the presence of episteme that separates the art of the West from pretty pictures.

To clarify, this is a broad generation. The material-level truths of human existence cover a lot of ground - everything from Biblical revelations to natural processes, to human relations. But the litmus test is simple:

The history of the arts of the West include many forms, but traditionally, painting is probably the preeminent one. The versitility and nuance of painting gave it a wider range of effects, subject matter, and contexts than any other art form. Because of this, the West developed more sophisticated attitudes and refined understanding of painting than any other art form. The history of painting almost is the history of post-Medieval art in the West, with a wing for sculpture and another for the rest of the arts. But even there, painting set the stage.

Media like collage or embroidery were thought of in painted terms.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Landscape with a Greek Temple, around 1900, stained glass window, Cleveland Museum of Art
Mehitable Starkey, Embroidered Chair Back, 1755-65, linen embroidered with wool and silk threads, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York


This is because art in the West represents things, and painting is the most versatile and sophisticated representational tool. Art doesn't have to be realistic, but it does have to be representative on some level if it is going to convey episteme through techne. A Gothic cathedral isn't a depiction, but it conveys the material logos of it's construction and abstract logos about beauty and the glory of God through its arrangement and impact on the viewer. But depiction is the easiest and most direct way to communicate visually, and painting is best at that. Which is why most painted art depicts something recognizable.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, November, 1879, oil on canvas, private collection

The range and nuance of the power of painting to depict things comes through in a technical virtuoso master of expression like Grimshaw. His incredible moonlit skies, varied light sources, and textured foregrounds are testimonials to the ability of oil paint to represent. 
















One of the most diabolical aspects of modernism was the notion of autonomy [click for a post]. This is the false premise that art has no purpose other than to be art. That it exists in complete isolation from any function or expectation other than itself - paint on a surface, form in space, in a disconnected cultural space called art. Even after Postmodernism restored the idea that art represents things, it kept it locked in the stunted, self-referential discourse of "art" and focused on perverse "critiques" of the culture and history of the West.

On the surface, autonomy seems simply retarded, but we've come to realize a more diabolical purpose. Consider: the art of the West is purposeful, but the purpose is to express episteme - abstract truths that aren't obvious in the world around us.

Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), 1862, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art 

This can be explicitly spiritual. But it can also be as basic as the truth of natural beauty shining from creation and the healthiness of man's place in it. Logos in a material sense.

Gifford, like Grimshaw above, made art that made us aware of the wonders of the world around us with ideal visions of what that could be. The beauty comes from the ordered perfection that is implicit in the natural world, but rarely seen directly. 

Carl Bloch, The Daughter of Jairius, 1863, oil on canvas, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

A picture like this one wears its truths - faith, salvation, and the actual Logos - openly. Bloch depicts the moment before the miracle to capture the sorrow and loss. Jesus' arrival in the background is electrifying.

"Autonomy" eliminates all of this - even the logos-free allure of the Cabanal. It cuts art off from it's most essential cultural function - manifesting the True, the Beautiful. and the Good in visible, meaningful forms. Autonomy bars us from what has always been an essential vector for encoding wisdom, values, aesthetics, and discernment, and replaced it with hideous idiocy. Viewing art shifts from perceiving logos through phronesis to an act of humiliation - the self-abasement of capering around rooms filled with detritus while degenerate blurbs and audio guides tell you what to like. In other words, licking the globalist hand as it slaps away your fundamental identity.

Atrium of Daniel Libeskind's Museum of Contemporary Art in Milan.

Postmodern architectural darling designs a house of trash. 

Because Italy lacks decent art to look at...


















Simply calling artistic autonomy retarded sells this way short. It is evil. Pure satanic inversion of the bedrock identity of the art of the West. Representation, communication - enculturation - are not aspects of art, they're fundamentals. The reason for its existence. Without this purpose, there is no art.

Julius Klever, Winter Evening in the Forest, 1897, private collection, oil on canvas

Like the connection between people and the land by a Russian artist. Globalist filth deny the reality culture in order to transform people into fungible units of debt and consumption. A painting that communicates the logos of a unique identity based on shared experience opposes that. 

That's why globalists are evil - they're satanic liars who invert what it true for personal gain.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum

Or the civilizing message of the triumph of reason over animal savagery that's the subject of this mythic scene by an academic painter. The Sphinx is a murderous beast with a perverse nature signified by her hybrid form. Contrasted with the well-formed Oedipus, she embodies the violation of distinctions and boarders that reduces life-preserving civilization to primordial chaos.

Globalists wish to invert the logos of civilization and reduce us to manipulable pink slime - it's clear in their endless attacks on clear definitions and differentiation. A painting that reiterates reasoned clarity and distinction over bestial emotion and whim opposes this.  

The art of the West is the opposite of autonomous - if it were autonomous, it would cease to be the art of the West. Which is what has happened in the sham "art world" of today. The irony is that modernists decry the so-called arbitrary standards of the past while dishonestly promoting the most arbitrary perspective of all - a meaningless bubble filled with talentless hacks, self-promoting sociopathic liars, and money-launderers trying to outdo each other in praise of garbage. It's hard to imagine something more purposelessly arbitrary than that.

Its no surprise that the wicked invert reality, then project that inversion on the targets of their wickedness...

William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent, 1799-1800,  tempera and gold on copper, Victoria and Albert Museum

...they learned from their master. 

In reality, artistic forms are culturally arbitrary, but the purpose is not. Art communicates truth visually by showing us things that we can't see in everyday life. But because of the modernist assault on our heritage and identity, many don't know how to see the communications. They don't know how to read or hear what art has to say. And worse than that, they're so turned off of art in general by the modernist-globalist-luciferian garbage surrounding it that they'll never look closely enough to figure it out.

The pretension, moral ugliness, and dishonesty of the modern art "scene" and the self-abasement needed to subscribe to its nonsense make it a non-starter for most. Healthy people tend to avoid weird creeps and liars. Then the historical art that actually is appealing gets buried under the discursive blather from the same. And things like this go unnoticed:

Johan Christian Dahl, View of Dresden by Moonlight, 1839, oil on canvas, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Imagine if the art appreciation types really put the full scope of the beauty of the West against the Modernist hacks?


This site was the first hit on a duckduckgo "art appreciation" search. Notice how talentless modern garbage predominates on their landing page. They're typical for the way the conventional modern institutional definition of art is simply taken at face value and presented as fact. Great works and trash are put side by side as if they share anything beyond designation by anti-human globalist freaks. There's no mention of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. There's no consideration of the relationship between art, culture, and values. Just the mindless parroting of the atavists, poseurs, and frauds that choke our institutions like the plaque in a diseased artery. We aren't singling them out for criticism - they're simply an example of what passes for "art appreciation" in the cultural cesspool that is Art! 

Here's a question:

The answer is obviously that you can't. Which is why you'll get nonsense descriptions of movements and the importance of technical terminology and nothing about communication. How artworks encode logos in appealing visual forms that can make the soul soar. Nothing about how those techniques arrange that wisdom for emphasis and reliability. Nothing about the interplay of the old Aristotelian terms of dialectic and rhetoric, or pathos, logos, and ethos in lines and colors. In short, nothing to let you connect with the real artistic heritage of the West and let it show you what we are, where we came from, and where we need to go.

The Band came together to fight back against the lies. Since then, it's become apparent that reconnecting people with their artistic and cultural heritage is a major component. This is a big project - what is peddled as "art" needs to be completely reconsidered in light of logos. Modern history needs to be scrapped altogether and a reality-facing alternative set up in its place. How to look at, understand, and yes, appreciate art needs to be built from the ground up.

Jonas Lie, The Old Ships Draw to Home Again, around 1920, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum

A history where 20th century art actually relates to the life, people, and culture of the time rather than theoretical nonsense and talentless hackery.

Aleksandr Averin, Walk #3, around 2017, oil on canvas

And contemporary art is distinguished by mastery of techne and the logos of beauty - of both nature and human nature. 










This isn't going to happen overnight, or through the work of one small site. But we can start.

With that in mind, this post will look closely at two pictures as a demonstration of what art says and how it says it. It won't be the systematic, ground-up, "how to read a picture" that needs to happen - that's a project that will unfold over time, and will involve other platforms as well. But it is a start. And once you start thinking about what art says, you become empowered to read other pictures, make your own judgments, reject the cultural emasculation of the liars and globalists, and begin to wake up to the incredible heritage that you're part of.

A new dawn. Sort of like this:

Frederic Edwin Church, Coast Scene, Mount Desert (Sunrise off the Maine Coast), 1863, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT


The two pictures that we're going to look at are an uncommon pair. One came from the daily paintings that the Band posts elsewhere and the other was contributed by an ally and associate. Both were popular, but come from different periods and address very different subjects. They share Slavic origins but it is unlikely that they have any direct connection beyond that. But this is the difference between reading paintings and building histories of style or defining movements - the direct connections matter much less than the logos that shines through them. Once you can see that, the entirety of Western art opens up to you.

What they do do is communicate opposite messages in similar ways.

 

Gavriil Pavlovich Kondratenko, Moonlit Winter Evening with Solitary Figure, 1903

Pre-Communist Russian painting is fascinating. It shows some influence of European movements like Romanticism and Impressionism, but had a unique quality that we can call fantastical realism. That is, realistic art with a fantastical quality. 

It is especially good at capturing the feel of the land and the relationship of the people with it. See the Klever painting up above for another example. Not surprising, considering the size of the rugged Russian landscape, but other places were quicker to toss their heritages for modernist lies. 

This painting is impressionistic in its grainy blurry quality but doesn't share the Impressionist interest in making images out of color dots. What it does is capture the feel and beauty of a bright moonlit snowy night where the noises are muffled and edges blurry. The light in the church is the point of warmth that draws the traveler forward. 







Our second picture is an untitled piece often called the Valley of Death or of the Dead by a Polish master of surrealistic hellscapes. The dimensions of the painting are such that we can't fit a large version with text beside it given Blogger's format constraints, so we'll introduce it, then blow it up into a larger view after.

Zdzislaw Beksinski, Unntitled, 1972

The Band generally dislikes Beksinski's work. He's a skilled technician, but wallows in horror and depravity in the nihilistic "moral vacuity of modern life" cliche that isn't so much wrong as a dead end. Endlessly pointing out how vile the contemporary world is quickly crosses over into debasement porn without starting to show a way forward. At the same time, he did live through the Communist system and was knifed to death by a teenage "friend" looking for money, so it is possible that his hellish visions were true to his inner life. But this isn't that. 

Untitled is an excellent depiction of hope and resolve in a dark world. The monstrous figures loom but don't threaten, leaving a clear path without a clear beginning or end. Crows circle, but the figure moved forward, guided by the brightest light in the scene. 






Here is the large-scale view for comparison with the Kondratenko. Note the lighting - it also only illuminates vague forms, but it is more monochrome and has no obvious source. Just a grim haze that recalls distant fires reflecting off an ashen sky. It's the light of pyres or hell - the opposite of the pure light of  the moon on fresh snow.

We should note that Beksinski denies giving meaning to his works: "Meaning is meaningless to me. I do not care for symbolism and I paint what I paint without medating on a story." But art expresses the world that it is drawn from. If the artist wishes to include explicit meanings, that's great. But it isn't necessary for insight to be communicated to us.

So why look at these together? What makes them jump out? First, look at the overall compositions. Both feature solitary walkers, single points of light, and diagonal pathways through uncertain terrain. Composition or arrangement is how the paintings are put together. Not the materials used, but how the elements in the picture are arranged or composed. It's like music or writing that way. There are many ways to organize a scene, and how the artist does so determines not only what it looks like aesthetically, but how you will understand it conceptually.

Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, 1653, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here, Rembrandt obscures the background to push your attention onto the figure and the bust. The diagonal light connects them and especially illuminate's Aristotle's face to enhance the impression that the great mind is deep in thought. Dressing the philosopher in 17th-century clothing made him more accessible to Rembrandt's contemporary audience. 

Composition is a huge part of a meaning - a reflection on the legacy of the classical tradition that the West was built on.

Consider two versions of the same scene from eminent academic painters. They depict the moment when the great Roman poet Virgil was reading his masterpiece to the Emperor Augustus and his family and referenced the death of the emperor's nephew Marcellus. Augustus' sister Octavia, Marcellus' mother who was devastated by the death of her son, faints at his mention. The emperor's second wife Livia was married to him for over 50 years but they had no children. She was accused of having Marcellus killed so her children from her first marriage would become heirs to the throne, though the rumors were never proven.

Angelica Kauffman, Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia, 1788, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum 

Kauffman was a rare female history painter and a founding member of the British Royal Academy whose art is defined by Neolassical clarity. 

She depicts a moment of dramatic action, rushing to the aid of fainting Octavia, while Livia looks reproachfully at the somewhat worried poet. 

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Virgil Reading from the Aeneid, 1864, oil on canvas, private collection

Ingres was president of the French Academy and combined Classical and Romantic themes on the way to becoming the preeminent artist of his day. 

He downplays the physical action to focus on the psychological intensity of the scene. Augustus locks eyes on Virgil and commands him to stop while to advisors communicate nervously behind him. The focus in on the poet and emperor while between them Livia sits unconcerned beneath the statue of Marcellus, emphasizing the crux of the drama. The lighting ratchets up the emotional tension, while Kauffman uses more natural illumination to create a more realistic scene. 

This is how composition determines the nature of the story you're seeing. The position and interaction of the figures, the expressions and gestures, the light and color, even their locations in space all shape the viewer's experience. Both pictures depict the same moment and are carefully structured with figures locking together into integrated groups. This allows both to show this as a Classical ideal rather than a random snapshot - you can see the conscious thought that went into the planning. But one opts for action, the other for psychological nuance, with the result that your impression of the scene is completely different.

When reading a painting, it is important to focus on the subject. But it's just as important to focus on the composition and be attentive to how the subject is put together.  The similarities - the solitary walkers, single points of light, and diagonal pathways through uncertain terrain - indicates that the paintings might be presenting information in comparable ways. So we look closer.

Start with the figures, because it is human nature to focus on the figures in paintings that include them. We don't necessarily see ourselves in them, but they do give us something we can relate to as an access point.

Two things jump out:

1. The are going in opposite directions. Kondratenko's is moving inwards - away from us - and Beksinski's is heading out.

2. The relationship to the warm light source is different. Beksinski's carries his like a torch while Kondratenko's is moves towards his. One lights his own way and the other is drawn to the light.




These differences are significant, especially when taken together. One follows the light inward, towards something known. The other has to light his own path and is moving out towards the unknown. Which poses the next questions - where are they coming from and where are they going?

Kondratenko's destination is a church. Where he is coming from is unclear, but this is unimportant, given where he is going.

He follows a light that he doesn't have yet, but will soon reach. His journey is from the exterior world to the Logos, to the Christian community and salvation that is the only antidote to the chaos and evil of a fallen world. We can see his destination because it is a destination - the endpoint of wandering in the wilderness. Just as it was for Dante in his dark wood.

Beksinski's comes from the mysterious depths of the scene and his destination is unknown. The lurid light darkens ahead of him, suggesting that he is finding his way out of the hellscape he knew, but the future is uncertain. There is no light to guide him other than his own - his wisdom, discernment, resolve.

If there is a refuge of faith and Logos, he can't see it yet. It's a secular, material world, where fallen man is on his own.













Bringing us to the next question - where are they?

Kondratenko's world is cold and obscured, but natural. There is a bright moon and harsh beauty.

The perspective funnels our - and the wanderer's - attention to the warm light from the church, and the alignment with the moon tells us that this light is natural in its own way - the natural culmination of a journey through the metaphorical wilderness of the spirit.

The wander will soon be home.

There is nothing natural about Beksinski's. This is an artificial hell, a man-made one. The path isn't through nature, but between monstrous, anthropomorphic forms. The lighting is not a natural source like the moon, but a dirty glow. The way forward vanishes into darkness, rather than culminating in a house of Logos. And the only direction is the figure's own tiny light.
















Taken together, the opposites are complementary inverses. The inversion point being the presence of Logos in the represented world. Beksinski's is the monstrous secular hell of materialist tyranny. Where there is no clear path of righteousness, just lurid depths where you're on your own. Survival demands some kind of escape but the light of your own powers promises nothing. Kondratenko reminds us that Logos restores the natural human condition, and that with it, we are never alone. We don't have to bear the overwhelmingly daunting task of navigating the valley of death that is the fallen world because the pathway through is assured.

Look at them together.

One is the promise of globalism - the tyrannical collective lie that crushes the spirit and stacks the bodies. There is no logos here - just a road into darkness that goes as far as your own spirit can take you and where you can't even see the sky. The other is the natural order of man in creation. A world where beauty prefigures spiritual wholeness. It's possible to imagine them as the same path - a journey out of the evils of vanity and inversion and into the light.

When we read these paintings, we see why the art of the West is purposeful. Although some 70 years apart, they describe mirror-image conditions that in the modern world must consider. And they don't just explain them like our narration - the show you them in a real visceral way. You can feel the oppressive gloom and the menace of one and the warm hope and promise of the other. You can see the difference between trying to light your own path through darkness and death and seeking your place in the Light. Between standing alone against the hopelessness of a fallen world and taking your rightful place as part of something bigger, no matter how what the world around you is like.

Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape with Church, 1811, oil on canvas, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund


This is the cultural heritage that the satanic globalists would steal from you.

We think otherwise.

Prometheus and the Occult: Modernism, Postmodernism, Prometheanism

Constantin Popovici, Prometheus, 1965,  Vidraru Dam, Romania

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Occult posts like this one - posts on the history and meaning of occult images - have their own menu page above. All  posts are in the archive on the right. 
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry.



The last few occult posts have been looking at Prometheus. It's been a long historical journey because he's an old figure with a lot of associations.

Now it's time for modern Prometheus. Not just to recap the symbolism, but to consider a fundamental inversion at the base of modern thought.



No one really believes in Prometheus anymore, and the elites don't care about Classical culture and history. But Prometheus has become a modern symbol that ties into the de-moralized luciferian occult that plagues contemporary culture. We can even call it Prometheanism. Start with the lessons we have learned about the historical Prometheus and see what made him such a compelling symbol.

The myths have no fixed form - just general associations. From ancient times the Prometheus story had different parts that could imply different things. These include the creation of man, the education and enlightenment of man, rebellion against the gods' authority, and punishment for pride and hubris. When we take these together, we get more of a set of possibilities than a single character. So later people can use him for different purposes, even contradictory ones.

Alexander Kapralov, Monument to Prometheus, 1998, Orlinye Skaly (Eagle Rocks), Sochi

If the story focus on creation and education, he is a symbol of knowledge and progress. If it ends with his torture, he is a cautionary tale about overreaching. If it ends with his deliverance, it becomes the triumph of human initiative and will. And so on. 

Like this Russian version where the titanic figure breaks his chains with no eagle or Hercules in sight. Modern Prometheus often stands for the idea of human overreach as a good thing - that we can somehow overcome our physical and socio-psychological natures by tech and will. And if this sounds like luciferian magical thinking, well the good thing about art is that you can make it represent whatever you want. Reality doesn't matter.





Renaissance Prometheus ties into human vanity. Prometheus was transformed from a mythical character to an allegorical symbol to be applied to humanity in general. He was already just a set of associations - this just detaches these from any ancient context and makes him applicable to any time and place. This symbolically subverts the traditional Western Christian understanding that objective, transcendent truths are known by faith and pretends that they can be acquired by our own power.

Hendrik Goltzius (after), Prometheus Forms Man and Animates Him with Fire from Heaven, 1589, Metamorphoses by Ovid, plate 2, engraving, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

You can see the conflation with Prometheus starring in a creation scene where the arrangement is very close to Christian versions. The visual connects the two in ways that the stories do not. 






There were two parts to this Renaissance subversion. The first is seemingly innocent - that ancient culture was better, so it offered lessons that Renaissance Italians could use to improve their lives. But these lessons included a boatload of metaphysical nonsense that vain court sycophants humanists claimed on their own authority could modify and improve things that are by definition beyond our natural limits. And with this move, raw human desire starts to masquerade as objective truth - an intellectually monstrous inversion that will have terrible consequences. With Prometheus as a symbol.

Jacques Réattu, Prometheus Raised to Heaven by the Genius of Liberty and Protected by Minerva, 1792, oil on canvas, Musée Réattu, Arles

"Freedom" is an empty word that Enlightenment demagogues loved to throw around without ever really defining what it means in physical reality. Making Prometheus the centerpiece means that the "liberty" here is freedom from natural constraints through self-generated knowledge, or "wisdom", as represented by Minerva. As if things within the box can tell you what's outside the box.

Overreach - impossibly "escaping" an inescapable material existence inanely redefined as an "earthly prison" - becomes inverted. An impossibility - a lie - is transformed into not just a virtue, but a goal. The failure of the Enlightenment and the cultural wasteland that we inhabit in its wake was literally inevitable. You can't build on falsehoods and empty vanity.








In the modern era, soundly reasoned faith gets pushed aside and infantile magical thinking based on desire and vanity takes over. The Band has addressed this de-moralization in other contexts - click for the post where we explain the concept, and, if interested, for the post where we introduce it [the early posts didn't use the hyphen. This was added to differentiate the removal of morality from the lowering of morale]. The basic pattern is that advances in technology and knowledge are fraudulently presented as "proof" that humans can overcome their subjective, finite natures and reach transcendent Truths. This is the myth of Progress! - that we can endlessly improve in wealth, knowledge and capability in an observably finite system. It's so retarded it's irritating. But people are so drunk on their own vanity that they will propose patent absurdities like terraforming Mars rather than confront our objective limitations. Like this garbage:

Artist's concept of a terraformed Mars (left) and an O'Neill Cylinder; Artist’s concept of a possible Mars terraforming plant, from the article linked below.

Like this absurdity entitled "The future of space colonization – terraforming or space habitats?" from something with a name that suggests empirical rationality: physics.org. A good rule of thumb when assessing nonsense claims is whether or not the Science! is dependent on fantasy art to make its case rhetorically. It's amazing how much jibber jabber goes poof! when this test is applied. 

And as for terraforming Mars, consider that we can't terraform Antarctica. And space habitats? Watching them explode on the launch pad may provide some dark humor. But the real benefit of imaginary science is that you can imagine as diverse a team of imaginary scientists as you want...




We can see how we've stalled out now - burgeoning third world population, skyrocketing housing costs, education, media, and government replaced by webs of lies, perversion as mainstream culture. The list goes on The falseness of Progress! in human nature as a promise is obvious now.

Looking at current trends, a self-selected elite living apart and off of teeming struggling masses looks more realistic. Though even this fails to account for the massive population reduction that would follow the collapse of widespread advanced infrastructure and logistics.


















But it wasn't obvious to the turds in the Enlightenment who thought that their little theories could usher in Utopia. And when it quickly became obvious that they couldn't, it wasn't obvious to the fresh turds who declared everything subjective and ushered in Romanticism. And now the collective delusional vanity is such that modern turds actually will argue that that the limits imposed by human subjectivity means reality is unreal rather than admit that there are things out there that are beyond us. At which point irritating becomes pathetic and then self-destructive.

And so we get to modern Prometheus.

Ossip Zadkine, Prometheus, 1956, bronze, Paris

Like this ugly, late Cubist mess. Modern art is an expression of the modern Promethean perspective on culture - rejection of wisdom or legacy from the past for the deranged fantasy that we simply make up our future whole cloth. 

Humans are shaped by environment and genetic limits, just as art is a product of skill and beauty. The Promethean fiction is that we are "liberated" from external constraints - and empowered to do what we wilt. The result isn't pretty. Turns out just making up whatever we want doesn't yield much of value. 



















We'll set the stage with Modernism's extension and antithesis, and a central theme in this blog. That is Postmodernism, and what it has to say about the nonsense claims that the Prometheans live on.

In the perfect Postmodern irony, the all the links on the site where this bit of Postmodern graphic design came from are broken.


An occult post isn't the place to get into the philosophical underpinnings of Postmodernism - regular Band posts are where we deal with that web of gibberish. It's enough for this post to point out the familiar characteristics - that there's no objective truth or meaning, everything is subjective, etc. What's important for us here is to distinguish the basic Postmodern conclusion that nothing is objective from the vile ideologies that make objective claims while professing to be Postmodern. Or post-Postmodern, if anyone gives a toss. Retarded fake belief systems like "social justice" are second-order effects - authoritarian scum taking advantage of the voids created when Postmodern cleaned out the old fake rules to introduce new fake rules of their own. Even the names - Post-postmodernism, meta-modernism, pragmatic idealism - are mentally-stunted faux intellectualism.

Simon Martin, Carlton, 2006, video, projection, colour and sound (stereo), Tate London

In practical terms, this distinction is irrelevant. No one cares if a cultural termite is a "true" Postmodernist or a "post" Postmodernist any more than whether a murderous thief is a true communist or democratic socialist. Or whether of not "the materiality of the object is subjugated to its historical context and cultural resonances" in a if a film of a bookcase taking up space in an art museum. They have to be opposed regardless. 



But the distinction is important if we want to understand what is going on, because any substantive cure needs a diagonsis.

If there is a Postmodern "logic"  it is oppositional. It both extends from and refutes the inane lies of Modernism that have progressively undermined Western culture for over a century. It is true that Postmodernity is anti-nationalist, anti-Christian, anti-human, and anti-truth, but in terms already laid out by Modernist anti-nationalism, anti-faith, anti-humanism, and anti-truth.

As an oppositional position, Postmodernism can't offer anything positive to replace the web of lies that it eviscerated. The nihilism of Postmodernism is specifically the destruction of Modernist faith, Modernist truth, Modernist objectivity, Modernist meaning, etc. It was the logical endpoint of nonsense Modernist claims - the demonstration that these claims were inherently fake and meaningless. If we call it a system of thought - which it really isn't - its conclusions are only relevant if we accept its Modernist starting point as a frame of reference.

Modernism sets the terms and Postmodernism deconstructs them. But deconstructing them is still taking them up - is still accepting the frame of reference that Modernism created. The answer to the Modern artists' claims of genius was "no you aren't". 










But in practical historical terms, the problem is that this is what happened. Our cultural institutions all did accept Modernist idiocy on faith, so when Postmodernism took a weed-wacker to it, there was nothing left to stand on. But the institutions continued as physical entities - buildings, staffs, budgets, etc. - so something had to fill the void. Modernism had already made our institutions anti-Western culture first and foremost - consider modern art, literature, social sciences, etc. The acceptance of Modernist ideology already meant that truth had been actively rejected. And an anti-Western, anti-truth orientation is independent of any one specific ideology, so Modernism could be expunged without changing this overall perspective.

Institutional carcasses aren't animated by arguments against Modernist idiocy. It's incoherent screeds in place of the now-debunked Modernism that share the same opposition to truth and Western culture. 






But the underlying vanity of Modernism isn't gone. If anything, it dominates our false beliefs that techno-utopias and state power can transform human nature. Put generally, Modernism is the objectively retarded claim that technical advancement gave humans access to pure objective Truth. That a never clearly defined "Reason" could define absolute laws of morality, control human nature, and unlock the secrets of the universe. The argument seems to boil down to this - logic is objectively true within it's own domain, and humans can perform logical operations like math, so "reason" gives us universal objectivity. It's literally that stupid, but incredibly seductive because it appeals to our vanity. And it's nothing new - Modernity just used new technology to supercharge it.

Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois, Adam and Eve, 19th century, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Besançon

That somehow knowledge can make us gods is a delusion as old as the human species.














Compare this to the traditional West, where there are no human generated absolute "Truths". We acquire circumstantial knowledge through experience and draw conclusions inductively. Objective, transcendent, big picture truth are known by faith and applied to our circumstances deductively. These are the only paths to the respective domains. Empirical observation can't tell us anything about objective, universal, capital T Truths, and faith doesn't navigate the physical world for us.

Jadwiga Hawrylak-Grabowska, housing complex, Wroclaw, Poland. Built 1968-1973

From this perspective, Modernism inverted on both ends - it elevated our material impressions to the level of faith, then insisted that that fake faith determined the nature of the physical world despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Like this being an ideal way to live. Or pretty much any conclusion of the "academic" social sciences in general.










Postmodernism annihilated Modernist claims to absolute Truth with the sort of ease you'd expect, and revealed the fundamental inversion at the heart of it. Our language, perspective, formation, and context are all flawed, finite, and subjective. Our perception is conditional and our collective memory Swiss cheese. Modernism was the inversion of subject-object relations - contingent humans professing transcendent mastery. And none of this should cause a sensible person to even bat an eye.

Of course there is no transcendent truth available to our reason. Only a mentally-crippled Modernist ever believed that.

But where Postmodernism did become toxic is with how it replaced the Modernist nonsense in our dying institutions. Rather than returning to sound Western principles of empiricism and faith, it kept the Modernist lie that we master our own natures, even after destroying the arguments that that lie was built on. This opened the way to a fragmented and chaotic do what thou wilt - one where you could make up anything you want, and if you had institutional status, it was accepted as true. This was how chimera like oppression, hate, and diversity were simply declared articles of faith and replaced empirical observation and logic in in decision making. But there was no cogent reasoning - only whims enforced by state power. And the notion that power can force acquiescence to whims is neither modern nor postmodern.

Triad of Ramses II with the gods Amon and Mut, around 1270 BC, granite, Egyptian Museum, Cairo

It's as old as the first emperor claiming to be a god. 


And a quick note on deconstruction. The Postmodern argument against texts and images having objective meaning is often misunderstood and deliberately exploited. Obviously language is a form of reliable information transfer. We see that every day. 

What deconstruction shows that this information transfer is limited by the subjectivities of the language system and the people using it. It's not that there isn't meaningful communication. It's that the communication can't achieve pure, objective, transcendent Truth. We can't, so how could our tools?







Prometheus is the poster boy for the Modernist lie.

He was and remains, the pure symbol of human transcendence, in both Modern and Postmodern contexts. To the Modernists - the notion that human knowledge can overthrow the gods and usher in a state of rational perfection. To the Postmodernists - the notion that human striving and ingeneuity can impose our wills on an otherwise meaningless cosmos. But the irony is that in both cases, he is shaped by a fundamentally Christian thought pattern - just inverted in the typical Satanic way. This is the idea that humanity can fall or be saved, only fall and salvation are brought about by ourselves and not something external. And if that sounds familiar, it's because we're back in be your own god country.

To the Romantics, he symbolized the dangers of the human knowledge that the Enlightenment pretended would usher in a Utopia of pure reason. Our ability to bring about our own Fall, you might say.

Sir Luke Fildes, Houseless and Hungry, wood engraving from The Graphic, 4 December 1869

For example, those aspects of the Insustrial Revolution and Enlightenment that introduced the sprawling slum with new diseases and choking air.








Consider Rousseau - a pioneer of Romantic "thought" and a hollow gasbag with a knack for making up absurdities and selling them to other poseurs. His Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) [click for a translation], put him on the French intellectual map - the most intellectually overrated map in human history - for the "insight" that the advancement of human knowledge comes with a downside. He was typical of uni-dimensional Enlightenment darlings - a one trick pony whose one trick was empirically wrong. In this case, the idea that man in a "natural" state - without any trappings of civilization or technical knowledge - lived in a state of benevolent bliss. This is so stupid, so historically ignorant, that it is difficult to take seriously.

It is as if he saw a mythological Golden Age painting and mistook it for a true history.

Follower of Abraham Bloemaert, The Golden Age, early 17th century, oil on copper, private collection
The mythical "Golden Age" was a Greek fiction that was no more real than Avatar.


The inexplicable popularity of Rousseau has two factors: hollow nature of Enlightenment-era "intellectuals" and their place in the de-moralized naval-gazing academic world that followed. At a time when most people had to work hard just to make ends meet, this intellectual was were a small, incestuous group supported by parasitic aristocrats living off inherited wealth and others' production. Success had more to do with satisfying patrons and impressing gatekeepers than any real intelligence or meaningful contribution to human understanding. Which is why Rousseau's Discourse reads with such a blend of pomposity and banality - he was writing for a vain and vapid audience where pretense trumped insight.

Pierre Louis Dumesnil, La conversation de salon Couleur, 1739, oil in canvas.

It's hard to imagine a bigger crowd of self-promoters, poseurs, and gammas, than a French "salon". Modern academics love these collective ego rubs because they tended to be organized by rich, do-nothing women. Symbols of feminist enlightenment! All the sycophants like Rousseau would compete to be noticed by some self-proclaimed doyenne in a home she didn't buy. 




The level of thought that emerged from the salons is about what you'd expect, and intellectual minnows like Rousseau should have disappeared with the passing of time. But that's where Modernist institutional ideology comes in. Because the Enlightenment was declared fundamentally important to modern de-moralization, this self-appointed intelligensia became immortalized by later self-appointed intelligensia. It didn't matter if his idiocy was wrong, because it was held up as "important".

All you have to do is go to a search engine - Google Books, an academic database, a university library - and search for Rousseau. Here's Princeton's on-line catalog for example.

Look at the numbers. Literally thousands of books and articles wasted of a self-promoting fool who, if he hadn't existed, would have made no difference to human knowledge whatsoever. Though there is an outside chance that things would have been marginally better without the influence of his moronic blather. And consider this - the authors of all these books and articles aren't all idiots. Most were bright, hard-working, successful types with an aptitude for academics - the sort of people who could be useful to a society if productively engaged. Think of the aggregate brain power wasted on the endless recycling of Rousseau's asinine scrawl. One of many reasons why the modern university is actually harmful to society and needs to be replaced rather than reformed.

Prometheus appears on the frontispiece to the Discourse - Rousseau's first major work.

It's the fire bringer version of the character - he appears to be animating or enlightening a human figure - only there's a half-human satyr coming in from the right who isn't part of the story. And there is a caption underneath that says: "satyr, you don't know that". The text includes a description of the picture:

"It is easy to see the allegory in the fable of Prometheus: and it does not appear that the Greeks, who chained him to the Caucasus, had a better opinion of him than the Egyptians had of their god Theutus. The Satyr, says an ancient fable, the first time he saw a fire, was going to kiss and embrace it; but Prometheus cried out to him to forbear, or his beard would rue it. It burns, says he, everything that touches it."

First, he gets the legend wrong. It's true that the Prometheus story is has different forms, but in no version is it the Greeks who punish Prometheus for his gifts. It's humanity that benefits and the gods that punish. But Rousseau wants Prometheus to match his idea that the Egyptians disliked their god of knowledge Thoth, so he just makes something up. Same with the "ancient fable", which is neither. The message is pretty much his usual one - that Prometheus was the knowledge bringer, and knowledge takes us away from the blissful state of nature. He adds: "our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved."

The first thing to note is the switch from the gods punishing Prometheus to the Greeks.

José Clemente Orozco, Prometheus, 1930, Fresco, 240 x 342 inches (610 x 869 cm), Pomona College, Claremont, CA

Mural that captures the idea of Prometheus, fire, and humanity as a closed circuit. No divinities required.








The whole inversion of modernism is based on pretending humanity makes its own fate, rather than existing in a reality that is outside and beyond our mastery. The luciferian inversion of what is rationally best described as "mortal" and "divine". That we can be our own gods.

Then there is the danger of knowledge idea. Apparently it isn't dangerous for everyone. Several years later, Rousseau explained the frontispiece in his “Lettre à Lecat” [taken from Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (Yale University Press, 2010), page 120]:

“Prometheus's torch is that of the Sciences, created to inspire great geniuses; that the Satyr who, seeing fire for the first time, runs to it and wants to embrace it, represents common men seduced by the brilliance of letters, who surrender indiscreetly to study; that the Prometheus who cries out and warns them of the danger is the Citizen of Geneva.”

The "citizen of Geneva" is Rousseau himself - a "genius" who can see past the dangers of knowledge that seduces and burns the common man. He distinguishes between geniuses who are inspired by knowledge, likely to flatter his peers, while emphasizing the negative effects on humanity at large. Humanity makes its own Fall, but also possess the potential for it's own salvation. Just have to listen to genii like Rousseau.

It's the negative aspect of Promethean knowledge that will be the Romantic pattern. A modern mural visualizes this better than any Romantic era picture.

Harold Freedman (designer) and Tony Barese, Joe Attard and David Jack (mosaicists),  The Legend of Fire, 1980-1982, mosaic,  Eastern Hill Fire Station, Melbourne

The Melbourne Fire Brigade mosaic is an impressive bit of public art that includes the divine source of Prometheus' fire, but takes an otherwise pretty negative view of his gift

The lower panels tell the story - the left one shows both sides of the gift and the importance of firefighters in dealing with the negatives. What you'd expect from a firefighter mural.

But the right panel brings Pandora onto the scene and the fire is nothing but negativity and destruction.
















A more straightforward Romantic era warning than Rousseau comes from Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (1818). It was even subtitled The Modern Prometheus. This refers to the famous scientist's creation of an artificial life that turns against him, killing those he loves before driving him to his own death.

Title page to the first edition of 1818

Victor Frankenstein becoming disgusted at his creation, frontispiece of the 1831 edition, engraving,  Colburn and Bentley, London 1831











Here, Prometheus is a reference to creation, and to knowledge in the Rousseau sense - as something that leads to a bad outcome. The idea is that human science will reach a point where it can replace what had been seen as divine - the creation of life - but the consequences will be deadly. It's a warning about overreach, about pushing past our "natural" place, and the consequences that will follow.

There's an almost endless number of stories on similar themes since - everything from new lifeforms to AIs - and the theme is always the danger of "playing God". Kind of ironic, since these stories always tend to be atheistic. It's almost as if the impossibility of creation ex nihilo is something even the most devout fingers in their ears and shouting retards can't help but sense subconsciously. Then again, the Modernism we're looking at is the inversion of divine creation.


An insidious contemporary version would be Ridley Scott's Pedowood trash Prometheus.

Prometheus, 2012, directed by Ridley Scott

This is a chapter in his Alien slaughter porn franchise - a long-running litmus test for moral emptiness. Here, the name refers to a spaceship piloted by a group of explorers seeking the "origins of humanity" only to be graphically butchered to titillate emotionally depraved modern culture victims the audience. Presumably the message is akin to Shelley's - don't overreach beyond your place or you'll suffer horribly like Prometheus - although there's really nothing linking the stories. At least as far as we can tell from summaries. The Band doesn't watch Pedowood slaughter porn.

This is the sort of fiction that is contrived to undermine the central place of humanity in creation - as made in God's image, and morally responsible for our own fate. By pretending we're second-rate offshoots of some other random species, it simultaneously denies that we're anything special while also lifting any spiritual responsibility. Created beings are what create life and the means of our own Fall. 



This is the Postmodern version of Prometheus. There is no dominant narrative of Progress! - just a random universe, but one where random sentient humanoids create life and we bring about our own damnation. The only thing that makes the "creators" important is that they created us - a purely subjective meaning to reality. But what none of these nonsense-peddlers ever address is the real physics problems that they space stories would need. This sort of creation story is utterly impossible just by the standards of the physical universe as we understand it. Simply the size of the power plant and the durability of atomic structures are sufficient to relegate this drivel to fantasy. But in the de-moralized world of idiot materialists, the materially impossible is preferable to the spiritually real.


There are "aliens"...

Gustave Doré, Lucifer, King of Hell, 1861–1868, engraving from Canto XXXIV of Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno, by Dante Alighieri


They just don't come from space.


The more common modern Prometheus is superficially positive, but logically retarded and, not coincidentally, another bit of inversion. This is the symbol of man's limitless potential to challenge the divine and overcome limits with by the power of our intellect. This is the luciferian Prometheus - the firebringer that elevates us above our finite natures. And the punishment doesn't really factor in with this one. It's more fundamentally wrong than the physical impossibility of pushing a material lattice across interstellar space - the logical impossibility of infinite progress in a finite environment.

Maxfield Parrish, Prometheus, 1919, oil on panel, private collection

Parrish is a good artist. Here he captures the gist of this version of the Modern Prometheus. There is no punishment, and the figure of Minerva/Athena that represents divine wisdom in the myth has been added to the firebringer in the form of the symbolic helmet. 

Note how the torch of "divine" wisdom Prometheus touches names associated with technical and scientific Progress! He couldn't make the inversion of our place in the universe clearer if he slapped you across the face with it. 

We replace the gods through our own mastery of Promethean knowledge.

But this is the key to the modern symbol of Prometheus and the Promethian perspective. It is a rejection and attack on the basic Western understanding of human nature and salvation. It inverts the empirical and Christian notion that we are inherently flawed and require an external divine power to redeem us with an empirically false claim that we manufacture our own nature and destiny. The cautionary tales are that we bring ruin onto ourselves. So the implication of the positive version is that we'd be fine were we don't overreaching and do it right...

Consider: Kant called Benjamin Franklin the ‘modern Prometheus’ for his experiments with electricity and the use of scientific reason to control nature in the 18th century. Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is dismissive of divine power and its hero the ideal man that leads humanity to a better state in the 19th century. Prometheus Books was founded by the same self-deifying buffoon that gave us the "Council for Secular Humanism" to publish self-deifying buffoonery in the 20th. A successfully cloned horse was called Prometea in the 21st.

LO Wenckebach, Prometheus, 1953, outside the Chemical Engineering and Chemistry building, Delft Technical University, the Netherlands.

Shimmying nude fire dancer lights the torch of knowledge above the entrance to institutional bloat. 
















We will damn or save ourselves on our own power - not just in a technical way, but that our technological advancement will fundamentally change what we are. We are the gods that write our salvation or damnation. We hold the occult power over the universe. Or so the Prometheans tell us...

Prometheus relief on a house in Dresden-Neustadt, 1900

What was once a symbol of man's treatment by and rebellion against the divine has become man replacing the divine. 

Doesn't really answer how we got here though. But Promethean globalists pretend the past doesn't exist. Every day is day one, and every tomorrow is Progress! towards the the Utopia to come.















As if our technology isn't bringing us a surveillance state, cultural degredation, unhealthy diets, parasitic globalist grifters in government, lying media, social justice in education, and every other cancer that comes with centralization. We may eventually destroy ourselves, but you don't even have to look at the logic to see we're not saving ourselves. Just look at the pattern trajectory.

How's that IQ decline over time graph shaping up?

Design Toscano Prometheus lamp, replica of 1864 sculpture John Bell

Perhaps a Prometheus lamp could brighten up the objective degradation of the species.



















Alternatively, ignore the logical and the empirical and just read Prometheus Rising (1983) by epic charlatan Robert Anton Wilson. Or don't. Infogalactic describes it as "an amalgam of Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness, Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, Sociobiology, Yoga, relativity, and quantum mechanics". In other words, the same old occult spray of symbols that we've been dealing with in these occult posts all along.

This would be the Postmodern version - no particular line of truth, just you making up whatever pastiche suits you out of whatever nonsense appeals to you. Instead of "human divine" wisdom making up collective salvation, subjective whims make up your own. Be your own god in a fragmented individual rather than collective way. So maybe don't read it. There's no truth to be found there. But then again, there is no truth to be found in globalist Prometheanism either.


Coming back to the Rockefeller Center where we started this journey, we can see the message in the golden statue more clearly now.

Paul Manship, Prometheus, 1934 gilded, cast bronze, Rockefeller Center

This Prometheus flies through the heavens carrying the gift of fire - no symbol of divinity or hint of punishment included. Placed in a prominent area in a complex built by and named for one of the architects of the modern beast system, it is the Modern Progress! version of the figure. This is made more obvious when we consider the figure visible on the building behind it - Lee Lawrie's Wisdom above the entrance.

Lee Lawrie, Wisdom, 1933, Rockefeller Center

Clearly a take on God the Father in the heavens, right down to the compasses that were an old symbol of divine creation [click for a post]. Only the creation is an abstract mechanical mess - the world of technological Progress! rather than any organic human existence. 

So the divine wisdom that Prometheus brings is the wisdom of the machine. Of human creation and ingeneuity. The collective message is that we are the creators of reality. And the globalist elites call the shots. 













Who are the Prometheans? The would-be masters of the world who seek to remake it in their own materialist, de-moralized image. To damn and save by their own means. To appropriate that which is logically divine to their own venal and contingent desires. In other words, the scum on the top of the globalist turd milkshake.

Maybe the best depiction of this collection of empty myths can be found in the Ukraine of all places - a statue where Prometheus teams up with another empty symbol of man claiming complete control over his nature and reality.

Prometheus and Statue of Liberty, Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine

We haven't been able to track down the artist or date, but the symbolism is too perfect to pass up. Promethean wisdom is the path to "freedom". But freedom from what? Not globalist control. Not anti-human one-world fictions. Not fake morality, fake science, and fake institutions. Not censorship in the name of a Promethean agenda for everyone.




That's a good place to wrap, though we are going to have to look more closely at the symbol of the torch at some point. It's also worth considering if there is something in the Prometheus story that can be flipped around and turned against the occult masters of the world. But for now it's enough to see what Prometheus has come to represent.

We are finite, subjective, material beings. We are physically situated in a world of time and space that vastly outstrips us. It isn't a question of whether we "accept" that or not - it simply is. But we can pretend that it isn't, and in doing so tell lies that our surroundings aren't known empirically and our higher Truths taken on faith. It's wrong, it's inverted, but with enough wealth and power it can be forced by the elites through media and direct coercion. The lie is obvious when you need idols to fake gods to pitch it.