Part One. Prelude to the Exaltation.

Radiance cannot be fully appreciated before catching a glimpse of the Darkness it dispels. We shall Exalt Saint Steven and The Prophet, Rebecca Sugar, my diamond, but only after a preamble that will allow us to appreciate their infinite divine luminosity. 

Our mythologies are poisoned.

Our belief systems are not at our service; on the contrary, they actively harm us.

When I speak to my friends and acquaintances I hear the same words. Strangers on the internet and memes. Nobody seems to be doing quite alright. Uncertainty, anxiety, low self steem and lonliness seem to lay over our heads. We’re lost and purposeless as a generation, and I am more and more convinced that our collective crisis is of a spiritual nature, it’s a crisis of belief.

Consider, everything we percieve goes through our system of beliefs. Our beliefs modulate the way we receive and process information in the world: our experiences and relationships, the way we interpret the physical world, the way we build out goals and desires, what we value and what we don’t value.

This is universal for every human being. It’s inescapable.
Our mind generates symbols and these symbols direct our psychic energies, our thoughts and emotions.¹

Historically, organized religion has been charged with streamlining symbols and beleifs, by writing sacred books and appointing religious leaders, priests, shamans to handle those symbols. But, what happens now when organized religion is in shambles? Who creates and directs our psychic symbols, our spiritual guides now that these structures have crumbled?

Rationality has destroyed ancient mythologies, and rightly so, they have been rendered obsolete. They don’t respond to out current ways of living and have slowly withered away but have left nothing in its place. Like poison weed, our woes have taken root in this Waste Land. 

What do you worship? What do you aspire to? What guides you? What’s important? Why are we here? How should we live? We must be cautious with the stories and myths we consume because they are the tools with which we build meaning and worth.

A psyche flooded with housewives tv shows and reality television, with movie stars and Kardashians, may generate systems of worth based on external appearances. To create value it would have to impress and showcase, to seem to be instead of being, to live under a mask in perpetual fear of being unveiled.

A mind pickled in an idea of perfection based on a scalpel, injections and hormones, of a prosthetic infinite youth, in pills to have on demand erections may create ideas that disconnect it from its body and its real desires. If worth is  having an eternally young, high performance, desirable body, not having it is being worthless.

A spirit bombarded with ideas of individual success, of girlbosses and scammers, of myths of tycoons and economic success might create ideas of worth based on obtaining economic or political power. Those who consume stories that celebrate wolves who exploit others and run away with all the fame, those who worship Elon Muska and Berlusconi, won’t create ideas of worth based in community and mutual aid, but in amassing money and influence.

Additionally, when people with these beliefs don’t amass wealth and influence, feelings of inferiority and contempt might well up. If you don’t have money, you’re worthless. Under these mantras of abundance and individualism, pettiness flourishes. People start looking for someone to blame for their lack of abundance. The growth of the far-right isn’t a coincidence. 

These mythologies create people who are isolated, alone, sad. Our ideals of what success looks like will never substitute the most important needs of the soul.


Our mythologies will always guide us, the problem will always radicate on who has the power to direct them and who benefits from that power. Our new church is media. Our saints are the Madonnas and Miranda Priestlys of the world, the Jeff Bezos and Donald Trumps. Our worldviews are infested by binarisms based on productivity, beauty, performance and they make us feel inadequate.

A useful mythology must inspire, direct and guide. Our mythologies deflate us, they dissilusion us and make us stray away from the paths of happiness.

We find ourselves enveloped in the most absolute Darkness. 
In a Waste Land of the spirit.
But there’s hope!

The Prophet, my diamond, shone her radiant light, her Gospel and revealed the mystery of the Gems, the lustrocity of the Diamonds , the Mystery of Humanity. The answer to our prayers.

          Let us now, at last, proceed to the Exaltation to Saint Steven.

notEs

- I, once again, recommend the book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino. It’s a brilliant book, full of valuable insight, but I gotta highlight a specific chapter, The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams,  of the most enlightening things I’ve read in the last few years.

¹ As a reference to this article I heavily leaned on some passages from the book Myths to Live By written by Joseph Campbell. This is some of the parts relevant to this specific part in case someone wants to read it. (Bantam Books 1988, 11th printing, pages 219-220):

“ [...]Every mythology is an organization, consequently, of culturally conditioned releasing signs, the natural and the cultural strains of them being so intimately fused that to distinguish one from the other is in many cases all but impossible. And such culturally determined signals motivate the culturally imprinted IRMs of the human nervous system, as the sign stimuli of nature do the natural reflexes of a beast.

A functioning mythological symbol I have defined as “an energy-evoking and -directing sign”. Dr Perry has termed such signals “affect images”. Their messages are addressed not to the brain, to be interpreted and passed on; but directly to the nerves, the glans, the blood, and the sympathetic nervous system. Yet they pass through the brain, and the educated brain may interfere, misinterpret, and so short-circuit the messages. When that occurs the signs no longer function as they should. The inherited mythology is garbled and its guiding value lost or misconstrued. OR, what is worse, one may have been brought up to respond to a set of signals not present in the general environment. [...] Such a person will never quite feel at home in the larger social field, but always uneasy and slightly paranoid. Nothing touches him as it should, means to him what it should, or moves him as it moves others. [...]

[...]
And so we have this critical problem, as I say, this critical problem as human beings of seeing to it that the mythology - the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs - that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is to be tiers for life, and not to some period of life already past, some piously desiderated future, or - what is worst of all - some querulous freakish sect or momentary fad. And I call this problem critical because, when it is badly resolved, the result of the miseducated individual is what is known, in mythological terms, as a Waste Land situation. The world does not talk to him; he does not talk to the world. When that is the case, there is a cut-off, the individual is thrown back on himself, and he is in prime shape for that psychotic break-away that will turn him into either an essential schizophrenic in a padded cell, or a paranoid screaming slogans at large, in a bughouse without walls.”