druidpath

The term 401(K) comes from the tax status of the earnings.  A 401(K) is a type of adjacent bank account that siphons savings away to play the stock market.  Supposedly this form of gambling is safe.  

Though the term Black Friday has come to be associated with Christmas shopping orgies in late November, the "black" part of the moniker used to apply to stock market crashes.  September 24, 1869 was one such crash.  It was said to be caused by two greedy investors named Jay Gould and James Fisk.  The investors bought obscene amounts of gold, driving up the price due to scarcity.  President Ulysses S. Grant tried to put a stop to the shenanigans by selling a large amount of the US Treasury's gold which in turn caused the stock market to crash.  More crashes came and went during the Belle Epoque until the Great Crash of 1929, which led to the Glass Steagal Act of 1933.  Glass Steagall was a set of banking reforms that put the kibosh on any bank's ability to use its customer's money to play the stock market.

Glass Steagall was repealed in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, which

"opened the door to an orgy of financial mischief so arrant and awful, and to a plague of corruption so broad and deep, that American life is now pitching into a long emergency." -James Howard Kunstler in 2015

The Bathroom Class

The middle class that President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to protect in 1933 is clinging on for dear life in 2025.  In one corner, we have the lower eighty percent comprised of the working poor and their dependents such as the elderly, children, the disabled, and those on welfare.  All of the above (or should I say below?) live hand to mouth and paycheck to paycheck if they are lucky enough to have one or more jobs and hustles.  Theirs is a game of robbing Peter to pay Paul for the last thirty years; an exhausting runaround of managing debts.  There is no "saving money" for the lower eighty percent.  It does not exist.  Every time they get ahead enough to maybe purchase a one month backup supply of off brand Kleenex, the car needs a three thousand dollar overhaul or a tooth decides to go full root canal.  Every time they go to the grocery store, the products either shrink in size or inflate in price.  A loaf of bread cost seventy five cents in 1992.  Nowadays a half loaf of bread costs $3.50.  Wages have not risen in a way that is anywhere near commensurate to what life costs.  Anyone who still works retail or fast food, and there are quite a few working retail and fast food, is making $13-15 dollars per hour.  I worked in the local shopping mall in 1990 and I made $12 an hour... that was considered poverty wages back then and bread only cost seventy five cents.  

The upper twenty percent has many names: Professional Managerial Class, salary class, stockholders, laptop class.  They are truly in a class to themselves.  Unlike those below them, they feature retirees who do not have to work until they die.  They are shareholders and trustees.  They enjoy safe neighborhoods with good schools that are perpetually on the up and up, with older, more modest homes being gutted or outright demolished for spacious new construction and the latest in countertop trends.  They always have luxurious, new bathrooms.  We might as well call them the Bathroom Class because they have more luxury toilets per person than any clique in history.  As much as I castigate them, I count the Bathroom Class among my friends.  Many of them are hardworking, helpful souls.  Many of them have earned their retirements, and the only difference between them and the non-Bathroom class is that they actually have money to retire.  Whatever virtues the Bathroom Class might possess do not hide the fact that investment dividends are not earned wealth.  Investment is speculation for financial gain.  Speculation for financial gain is gambling.  Unless the investment is a personal and uncontracted agreement of trust, it is what the Bible calls usury.  The repeal of Glass Steagall and a list of other factors means that investing in the stock market, including with the "safe" 401(K), is playing fast and loose with the meager pennies of the lower eighty percent and their earned wealth. That sort of usury may not hold any consequences in the present incarnation where all subsist in a spiritual Dark Age of ignorance and Greed as God, but it does not bode well for future incarnations as things balance out.  

Most investment dividends come indirectly or directly from private equity firms such as Blackrock and Blackstone.  These firms are corporate goliaths that control the media, drive up home prices, and perpetuate the System of child trafficking that keeps the world trapped in low vibrational consciousness.  There is nothing inherently good about the System or the private equity firms that keep it running.  

Quiznos and Smashburger, a Tale of Private Equity

In the early 2000's, Quiznos was the fastest growing sandwich chain in America.  Though I always thought their sandwiches were mediocre, my husband loved their new (at the time) concept of roasting the sandwich under a broiler before adding the final lettuce and sauces.  Quiznos, like many fast casual strip mall restaurants, was a franchise.  Each store was run by someone who had bought into the franchise with his or her own money and in return gained the suppliers, the name, and the opportunity to up their class status by ostensibly becoming a business owner instead of an employee.  Quiznos took off and its franchises began popping up on every corner.  There were approximately 4500 Quiznos franchise locations at the restaurant's peak. Sometimes a Quiznos would pop up across the street from another Quiznos, literally within three to four hundred yards, as if they were competing gas stations.  The private equity firm that owned Quiznos not only allowed this, they encouraged it, wantonly pitting franchisees against each other in a race to the bottom. My husband noticed that our local Quznos degraded in quality, often running out of ingredients, skimping, or substituting with poorer quality food.  Little did he know what was going on in the background.  The private equity firm allowed many Quiznos to cannibalize other Quiznos, following the catastrophic failures and losses with a promise to reform, which was (of course) a fake out.  The private equity firm lured its surviving franchisees into an exclusive supplier contract, which at first brought back affordable purchasing for those left standing.  If you guessed the private equity firm also owned the supplier and promptly jacked up prices so more franchisees went under, you guessed correctly.  Once Quiznos was fully cannibalized and transformed from the leading sandwich seller to a barely-there also ran of closed restaurants and broken dreams, the private equity firm consolidated and sold off its debt, offshored the profits, filed for bankruptcy on all except the intellectual property, which it kept.  These ill-gotten gains from Quiznos franchisees's hard work, sweat, and tears was repackaged and used to open a fancy burger chain called Smashburger.  It was like Quiznos never happened for all except the franchisees.

Young couples who wish to buy homes and start families nowadays cannot because a private equity firm has either already bought the house and turned it into an eternal rental or Blackstone has raised the overall price of housing around the globe.  I am reminded of a scene in the first Resident Evil movie, a film about an evil Umbrella corporation that unleashes a zombie virus.  In one scene, a group of characters is forced through a laser room where they must play a macabre version of twister to avoid lasers slicing off various body parts.  Spoiler alert: in the end of the laser room scene, the cleverest guy gets sliced into neat little cubes when the laser turns into a mesh.  It is the movie equivalent of a brute smashing the chessboard because he was losing the game.  Private equity is the Umbrella Corporation.  It owns the laser room and it does not like to lose.  

A rising tide raises all ships, but it devours any who cannot afford a boat.  I know many people who regularly go on fabulous international vacations and who have trained their children to embrace the same grandiose lifestyles.  These people are not the direct trustees of private equity firms, but their wealth is private equity money all the same.  Private equity is invested in almost every major company at this point.  It is rarer to find an area of life where private equity is not in the process of cannibalizing wealth.  When people derive income from investing, they give the private equity firms more license to roam free and unchecked in their cannibalistic benders.  Since private equity is the latest form of wendigo, no amount of misery or destruction will ever be able to glut its appetites.

When Covid rule descended and small business owners like me were cannibalized so that more wealth could be transferred to the Bathroom Class wendigo, stockholders sat in their well-apppointed homes and ordered food delivered to their door while bingeing on Netflix, Hulu, and online games.  The Bathroom Class benefited from Covid rules and the lower eighty percent footed the bills and did the work once again.

They Say the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

I could be wrong but I don't see things going well for some of our current high riders in the far future.  The infuriating bit is that for now, those who choose to enjoy wealth that was earned by those they considered beneath them are not about to change status.  The consequences of human behavior seldom if ever play out at the human scale... at least not immediately.

I believe that everyone who does serious spiritual work eventually comes to the realization that there is a Law of Wealth that exists for humans and perhaps any species that develops an extremely abstracted wealth system.  The Law of Wealth states that the person who amasses and keeps unearned wealth merely agrees to earn that wealth in a future lifetime.  There are a ton of mitigating factors that get thrown into this seemingly simple karmic equation.  Generosity, for instance, sublimates by exponents.  If your actions were compulsively generous in one lifetime, you can manage to repay major chunks, if not all of your unearned wealth.  Generosity pays with compounding interest of the soul.  If you fill your life with good works, gratitude, and humility, you can rectify a massive amount of "bad" karma.

As I have speculated and hypothesized in other essays, I believe many human-incarnated souls are going to wind up in animal forms as the current Holocene extinction is followed by the next great explosion of life on Earth.  The unique part of our era is its prolific number of incarnated human souls.  In the stripe of Hermetic Druidry to which I subscribe, this means that there are many formerly animal beings running aroud the planet at the moment.  The cycle of evolution is not just for matter, it is for spirit.  I was standing by my piano one day when I asked a wandering entity "What's it like to be a god?" The being, which I believe was a god though it's anybody's guess which one, gave a cryptically comical answer:  "It is like turning an amoeba into a pianist".  In other words, it is a long, slow process in geological scales of time to gradually complexify a spark of life in a tiny amoeba and put it through existence after existence until it is a human being who can manage a piano sonata.  When a being gets to the pianist stage, it is a true coming of age.  Not that the pianist is the final event in the chain -- of course not! -- but what has occurred is that cellular consciousness has become animal consciousness and then human animal consciousness.  This takes many, many trips around the sun.  The addition of fine motor skills such as music means that layers of sediment have built to mountainous heights.  The etheric body became an astral body and now the astral body develops a mental sheath.  Gods went through this process long ago, possibly in other universes.  They earned their mental bodies (body is a terrible, inadequate, and primitive word for the phenomenon of which I speak) as well as spiritual bodies that are much more intricate and masterful than our fledgling mental bodies.  Some gods deign to take an interest in human slugs like you and me.  From my experience, they are far more likely to interact with those who do not presume to speak for them personally or through a book or to be on equal footing with them, but I digress.

With such an excess of human-incarnated souls as we have now, we have a natural excess of humans who were wild or domestic animals fewer than a hundred years ago, which is not much in the span of geological time.  Though I believe vaccination and its aluminum adjuvants has been the primary gasoline on the autism dumpster fire, there may be other, deeper reasons why so many autistic people are being created.

The development of a full etheric body is the precursor to the development of the astral body, which is the body that animals are working on and the one upon which humans have a fairly decent grip.  Complex astral skills include written language, architecture, philosophy, music, computing, and large scale urbanization and warfare.  None of these phenomenon make humans any better than rocks, trees, animals, or bugs, but they indicate we may be more skilled in the astral plane than some of the previously mentioned things.  

So if you've made it this far in a long essay by a fringe occultist who talks to her toilet, you may be one of those who feels surrounded by stupid people.  Please keep in mind many of those people were quite literally cows, sheep, birds, cats, mice, crocodiles, fireflies, and squirrels a mere five to one hundred years ago and keep sympathy in your heart.  Like you, they are doing the best they can.  Energy is neither created nor destroyed.  It only changes form.  This is true for soul sparks of billions of animals who die are are quickly reincarnated as humans in the frenetic, overpopulated schedule of today.  

There is nothing wrong with being an animal.  It is neither inherently better nor worse than being a human.  Though our Faustian culture wants to push us to see reincarnation as success or failure where the superior human "wins" by ascending to non-embodiment, the kind of Buddhism and gnosticism that craps on all incarnation as essentially worthless is toxic.  Human life is hellish.  Being an animal is also hellish.  Both are also heavenly.  It depends on where you focus.  In my own case, human blackness and despair had me wanting to end my life.  I have fond memories of being a goose.  I was flying with my flock, the wind lifting my wings and my beak straight ahead.  We knew where we were going.  

As this era of overpopulation recedes like a tide -- and I would argue this is already happening -- some souls will bubble off into non-incarnation, stepping off into a new set of responsibilities that likely do not include anything like holding down a job or harvesting food.  This is not to say they won't have responsibility; I am almost certain they will and those could be difficult to handle.  In my own case, if I ever leave incarnation (I do not believe this will happen anytime within the next six hundred years at the minimum) I think I will become a Bodhisattva.  If I go back to being a cat or a goose as I was thousands of years ago, I don't foresee having a problem with it.  

I have spent a few years looking into what might happen to the vaccinated in their afterlives, and I was recently intrigued to find a couple of other people who are doing the same thing, Bernard Guenther and Thomas Mayer.  Guenther and Mayer are both heavily influenced by the work of Rudolf Steiner and hold him in high esteem.  Steiner had odd things to say about vaccines long before they were as de rigueur as they are today.  He said that vaccines will be responsible for the retardation of spiritual development in many humans and I believe he is correct.  Guenther and Mayer mainly that they can cause separation, detachment, and damage to the subtle bodies and they can make it much more difficult to engage in spiritual work.  For many years, I have had dim perceptions of the same phenomena. Guenther and Mayer speculate that recipients of Big Pharma protocols like MRNA vaccination and chemotherapy face becoming earthbound in the afterlife, which is to say that their etheric and astral bodies seem to end up tethered to the incarnation in which they vaccinated or became inundated with drugs via chemotherapy for an unusually lengthy period, but not forever.  Because these speculations are about the dead and based on unreliable communications with them, nobody knows if any of it is true and there is no way of proving it.  

From my own experience of communicating with the dead, I believe there is a glut of possibilities in the afterlife for the average Joe and Jane that is so vast, a retard like me could not hope to speculate it with any accuracy.  Obviously this has not stopped me from trying.  One possibility is that a large number of human-incarnated souls will return to non-human animal incarnation as wilderness subsumes Gaia.  Another possibility is that many souls will choose the accelerated evolution of spiritual work and become an army of non-incarnated beings themselves, having evolved beyond the need for physical manifestation.  

A Special Kind of Stupid

Somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of the world's population vaccinated, and many who did either died while still in the salty phase of trying to force and coerce others into the vaccination pyramid or are still pushing the vaccine narrative today.  Due to the nature of vaccination dislocating the subtle bodies as well as the karmic consequences of forcing others to do what you want (you will be in turn forced to do what you don't want to do) it seems logical that many vaccinated individuals will become earthbound after death.   But even they have the possibility of being redeemed and spared depending upon their vibe and openness to change. 

There is a special set who embody the rejection of spiritual evolution.  For instance, I have often said Sean Combs, also known as Diddy, seems doomed to reincarnate on a comet.  When I gave it some thought, I could easily see him ending up earthbound, almost content in that state because his etheric body would be able to wander its local area (provided he was not cremated) and vampirize people much like he did when he was still alive.  Diddy's astral body is most likely to remain earthbound, which will give him plentiful opportunities to enter nightmares and wreak havoc.   There are plenty just like him.  This is why everyone needs a banishing ritual.  Those who reject the Light at the end of human life and its companion, the Darkness of Judgement, stymy and delay the reincarnation process.  The Earth is currently teeming with formerly human spirits of this nature who could not let go and who also cannot pass into the next realm: that is how we get the most common of negative hauntings.  All of these stuck spirits had a choice.  They were shown (as you will be shown) a glimpse of the higher planes without so many blinders.  Like you, they were given a choice to go towards the light, which represents the higher self along with the higher selves of their particular soul swarm.  The cosmic ushers known as Bodhisattvas were there showing the path towards a natural progression of lives.  Their souls were given the chance to rest and digest the hard lessons of Meatworld among friends.  

Souls like theirs rebelled in the worst sort of way in life and they continue the path in death.  Having betrayed their soul swarm while in Meatworld, they run away, thinking there is someplace else to go.  As in life, they try to take the lazy way out in death, believing themselves to be entitled.  It is at that point where they are thrown to whatever demons they are tied to via the bargains they made while alive.  Demons, infection, disease, and narcissism overlap.  One leads to another.  For instance, a propensity towards alcoholism may be exacerbated by a little voice inside the future alcoholic's head whispering "Have another drink... it will be fine".  If you think that voice always came from the person's own head every single time, you are too naive to be helped.  Before long, the alcoholic's benders make her prone to both physical and nonphysical infection: disease.  On the more subtle planes, she is host to colonies of etheric larvae that feed off her diseased energy. She is also a vector of astral infection as she pleads for others to join her alcoholic astral pyramid in the form of drinking buddies.  Her energy is hungry and wants joiners.  

Unearned wealth is the ultimate addiction, which brings us full circle to the private equity firm CEO owner of Quiznos and Smashburger.  It's not that his human soul will ever amass enough power to become a demon, nor will that happen for Diddy after he dies.  As much as a power and money hungry human wants to assume the mantle of a superbeing in life or death, the hungry human is never going to be the owner of the casino.  Instead he will be merely another player.  The following, like the rest of this essay, is pure speculation.  The CEO of Quiznos/Smashburger (there have been several) is going to have the usual reception by their soul swarm shortly after dying.  They will be given a brief glimpse of rest and bliss before being sent to feel all that they put others through, and to sort wheat from chaff when it comes to the lives they touched.  If they had many good works that we know nothing about, those will be taken into account and balanced against the wealth they stole from their franchisees.  The balance between those things and their attitude towards it will determine where they will spend time between lives.  I believe people with obscene amounts of unearned wealth cannot hope to balance the scales in their favor, and it is also my belief that the CEOs of private equity firms will spend an inordinate amount of time earthbound and caught in a limbo as a result of running from accountability.  They will act in death as they did in life, avoiding responsibility for what they have done.  They are going to be against the natural law that forces them to earn every penny they stole, and that will mean finally becoming empathetic to emotional pain of the sort they inflicted and a lineup of existences as everything from a sweatshop slave to a dray horse.  Earn it back, earn it back. They will haunt the earth as hungry ghosts until they incarnate as humans in a much different and harder era, and they will not be born as queens and kings.  If they don't get enough redemptive human incarnations in before the Holocene era wraps, they will be reincarnated as non-human animals for the foreseeable future.  If they piss off the gods and powers well enough, they just might end up having to start over as plankton.  Now you see why I want nothing to do with unearned wealth!  I could be wrong, but I also could be right.



 

We dwell in the decay of a Great Industrial Age. We would like to think we are the first and last hi-tech era to blight this planet, but recent discoveries reveal that ours is neither the alpha nor the omega when it comes to humans harnessing the Earth’s energy for their own highly specific and intricate purposes. Recent lidar (light detection and ranging) discoveries reveal that not only were ancients up to something under those pyramids, they clearly understood currents and patterns of force far better than our mid-brained Scientism-ists ever will. Surely their approach to getting energy from sky, water, and ground was more sophisticated than oxen and plows.The end of this empire is here — the systems and infrastructures we depend upon are sclerotic, elderly, and clearly doomed. The upper middle class is a rapidly shrinking set of musical chairs accompanied by ever-quickening rounds of the monkey chasing the weasel. Despite the upper middle class ideal being a trap, there is no shortage of people willing to die trying to fall into its jaws. Conspiracy theories are quietly renamed conspiracy facts. The idea that a wholly corrupt, overarching System of pedophilia, murder, mutilation, and money laundering dominates the loftiest echelons of power is not as easily dismissed by normal people as it was even five short years ago. Nobody knows if the System and its participants are as diabolically hegemonic or powerful as they seem. What we do know is that regular life for the citizens of empire is not getting any better, that politicians are uniformly trash, and as the Rush song Freewill states:


Like it or not, we are in a phase of politics where the only effective political action is the kind that comes out of the end of an automatic weapon or at the edge of a sharp blade. Before anyone suggests I am advocating for violence here, no, I am not. I have no plans to go gonzo unless situations truly degrade to the point where I have nothing left to lose. I am nowhere near that point, but many are.

When political action of any sort becomes futile and all markets are rigged so heavily that the average person is laden with the burdens of Atlas to simply exist, choices present themselves. The first choice that most opt for is status quo, the second is to become a killer, and the third is to choose an alternative to the binary of status quo and killer. I plan on treating all of these themes to at least one essay a piece.

Briefly, status quo is the path of least resistance. To opt for status quo is to seek out the dwindling rewards of the System in order to amass more of them for oneself and potentially one’s brood. The status quo seeker wants popularity and clout within the dying system and hopes to exploit it as it has exploited him. He fails to understand that unearned wealth must come from someone who earned it and that by amassing unearned wealth, he merely agrees to pay for it somewhere down the line. Somewhere down the line could mean several or even hundreds of lifetimes of subsistence farming in times of famine. Perhaps it could come in the form of devastating illness and excruciating death. Or it might be several helpings of each. Perhaps it involves running the mazes of Purgatory for a glacial cycle or two until it becomes apparent that the hell world is of one’s own perverse creation. I believe status quo is by far the worst of the three choices, far worse and more likely to lead to hell than the Path of the Killer I am exploring today. Ironically, many who see themselves as killers are actually status quo seekers. They are little boys who fancy themselves as grown men.

Though mainstream System media is desperate to pretend it isn’t so, the Path of the Killer has arrived on schedule. The prognosis is doubleplus ungood for billionaire CEOs, grinning politicians, and status quo tops who make the mistake of being visible on the internet. Whoops! For many years, I wondered why school and theater shooters didn’t march into the boardrooms of Monsanto, Bayer, and Nestle instead of a fifth grade classroom. Many school shootings are false flags, meaning the government mass murdering real fifth graders in real time and then claiming the dirty deed was not done by the CIA in order to ram through anti-Second Amendment legislation.

Insurance adjustors

Luigi Mangione was, as we all suspected, the first in what will be a long line of adjustors to terrify and purge the political class that sits prettily above the common people on their heavy thrones. Luigi allegedly took out United Health CEO Brian Thompson in late 2024. A combination of lax security measures and good timing enabled Thompson’s gratuitous slaughter in front of the Hilton in midtown Manhattan. The opening ceremony of our new era of killers was brazen and showy. Mangione is supposedly being treated like a prison king, with nobody allowed to mess with him and his hair carefully crafted by another inmate in an expert fade. Sean Combs, a.k.a. P. Diddy, who is in the same prison at the moment, is reportedly very jealous, because his prison slop allegedly is full of bugs, poop, semen, and pubic hair. Awww.

There was a brief respite for status quo overlords and their media mouthpieces until June 6, 2025, when Nicholas Manning, the CEO of West Valley Medical Center in Idaho was found dead in a Baltimore, Maryland hotel room. It’s interesting that the Mangione family owns several hotels in Baltimore (though not the one where Manning was found) and is heavily involved in the politics in Maryland, but I digress. Manning was 46 when he was found dead, supposedly of a drug overdose. His family adamantly claims that he was murdered. West Valley’s parent company is the Health Care Corporation of America, which operates an 86 billion dollar network of for profit hospitals across the US and UK. Manning allegedly made 21 million per year. Manning’s family insists fraud was involved in Nicholas’s death, which is currently under investigation.

Thomas Gebremedhin, a VP at Penguin Random House, recently got in hot water when he tweeted about the alleged murder of Wesley LePatner, a female, Jewish CEO of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust and married mother of two. Gebremedhin pointed out that LePatner made $9000 per minute while making home ownership difficult to impossible for nearly everyone else and expressed that she should “rest in piss”. LePatner’s company was called out by none other than the United Nations for massively inflating rents and home prices around the globe more than six years ago, and of course the private equity firm’s response was to do much more of the same. LePatner and her family lived in a tacky, multimillion dollar penthouse overlooking Jay Z and Beyonce’s building in New York.

Many gods, and not half of them pacifists

Ours is not an openly warlike civilization, as that would take a level of honesty most of us do not possess. We like to hide our hatred and veil it with a veneer of virtue signaling. As John Michael Greer wrote, hate is the new sex, and the repression of hatred as a natural force has become a leitmotif in public and private life.

The most perfunctory of studies of ancient Greece reveal the rivalry between Athens and Sparta. Though we modernites like to stamp ancient cultures with our own generic brand of materialist atheism, Greek city states were deeply enamored and embedded with the gods they worshipped. In Athens, the primary deity being worshipped was obviously Athena, but the entire pantheon constantly occupied minds and hearts. The gods were involved in everyday Greek life in a way no modern person will ever understand. Ares was not the only god of Sparta as Hollywood might presume. Apollo, slayer of Tityus, was revered as well as Artemis the huntress.

Furthermore, the Greek gods weren’t nice. Niobe, the Queen of Thebes, boasted about her superior fertility compared with the goddess Leto, mother of Artemis and Apollo. Niobe had fourteen children and Leto only had two. A kinder, gentler pair of gods would have let it slide. Instead, Artemis killed each one of Niobe’s seven daughters with her arrows and Apollo caused Niobe’s sons to sicken, shrivel, and die. Niobe’s husband then died of plague. Niobe wept until she was transformed into a stone on Mount Sipylus.

Unlike monotheist retards, I don’t believe myths actually literally happened, however, this tale gives us some hints to the dark nature of a solar god and a lunar goddess. The gods killed Niobe and her presumably innocent children for her egomania. They slaughtered her and her family because she was an uppity, arrogant insect who became too annoying not to stomp, and personally I don’t have a problem with it.

There are more not nice gods than nice ones. The brutality of the Iroquois was legendary, and I guarantee they weren’t even close to atheist. Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas were also not atheist, and they had plenty of warriors, slaves, and human sacrifice. The Abrahamic religion’s gods are typically brutes as well, with Allah marrying a seven year old girl and considering it fine to force Islam on the rest of the world by any means necessary. Yahweh is no slouch when it comes to hideous murder, and despite his admonitions to be fruitful and multiply, it seems that deity has never met an abortion he didn’t like.1

To the Vikings, Hel was both a goddess and a place where people went after they were dead. Earth and incarnation was the third station between two afterlife worlds: Valhalla for warriors and those who died honorable deaths in battle and Hel for everybody else. This is not to say Hel wasn’t restful or pleasant for some souls, it is only to say it was not considered as special or grand as Valhalla. Valhalla’s etymology is “hall of the battle-slain”. For those who died brave deaths, it is a sort of heaven, much closer to the gods and their world than Hel. They rest in Valhalla, fighting, feasting, dying, being reborn, and repeating the cycle again and again until Ragnarok, the final battle. Hel, on the other hand, is a land of mist and shadows. Hel is a female goddess who reaps souls to populate her gray sepulcher underneath the earth. Valhalla is in the sky.

Different strokes for different gods and different peoples

Monotheism had a good run. The gods of the last two thousand years each tried to create their own monopolies: Buddha in the East, Christianity in the West and South America, and Allah in the Middle East and Africa. The trouble with monotheist gods is they are all seemingly vying to be Highlander. There Can Be Only One in the monotheist purview, yet it does not appear as if a one-god model is going to happen on Earth or her Universe. During each of their respective peaks, Buddha, Yahweh/Jesus, and Allah commanded large respective populations. None has proven strong enough to take the entire world for himself at this point, and I don’t believe it is going to happen. Of course I could always be wrong.

The old gods seem to be on the rise, and there are many more of them than there are monotheist deities. As monotheism falters and its gods grow increasingly remote and distant, the appeal of gods who send help and comfort in our everyday lives is overwhelming. I don’t ask Jesus to help me communicate with my loved ones because I do not sense he is around or interested. I believe I have talked to Jesus about certain things and that he has illuminated me to great truths, however, for everyday pablum, he’s not my guy. Instead, I ask Hermes, Sul, or Lady Bastet (many of my loved ones are cats). As mainstream religions impale themselves upon their own hypocrisy, it is only logical that polytheism resurges to the place it once held for most people; nature abhors a vacuum.

I am not going to speak for my gods, however, I don’t believe they like the Brian Thompsons and Wesley LePatners of the world. I don’t believe the people who rained punishment on bigwig CEOs are going to hell… at all. Valhalla perhaps, but not hell. Samurais did not forgive their enemies. To forgive or yield to an enemy was considered much more dishonorable than death.

In order to die with honor, it is sometimes necessary to kill, or at the very least to allow death to do its natural thing. I once saw a video of an old Indian street woman eating her own barf because she was starving to death. I am glad I have never known that kind of hunger, but at what point is it not worth hanging on? Especially when you come from a culture that wholly considers reincarnation to be a thing?

In spite of the hordes of pudgy, suicidal, gamer-goomers, there will always be various groups and individuals who have not had their skills bred or cucked out of them. There may be a thousand hikkiko moris content to sleep until 2:46pm or until they get hungry enough to rise for whatever meal Mom provides for them at age forty-three but there will always be one or two with enough vigor to sneak a gun into the citadel. Even in less populous times, there was no way of controlling us all.

There is a whole culture in prison devoted to the sadistic torture and murder of child molesters and murderers. In 2018, Chris Watts allegedly killed his pregnant wife Shanann and their two daughters, four year old Bella and three year old Celeste. Chris tried to lie about the murders at first and later confessed. His motive for the crimes seems to be that he was having an affair with another woman and he and Shanann were in deep financial trouble. Rumors are circulating Chris Watts is not having a good time in prison. He has been transferred from a North Carolina penitentiary to a Wisconsin one because he was beaten up and lives in constant fear of being beaten, poisoned, or raped. In other words, his fellow prisoners are punishing him because the law is not up to the job. Jared Fogle of Subway commercial fame seems to have run a child porn distribution center since his young manhood. After making it as a sandwich actor, he still was dumb enough to get caught crossing state lines with the intention of raping a kid. In 2016, a fellow inmate in the Colorado facility where Jared was being detained beat the crap out of him, punching him several times in his face.

To my mind, it is pathetic that lifers in prison are the only ones responsible enough to zero out the recidivism rate of kiddy diddlers via the only way that is effective. When a pedo is killed in prison, it is a public service that benefits the taxpayer, who no longer has to fund that prisoner’s existence.

When human garbage is in a high place, holding his or her fellow humans in thrall and subjecting them to his caprice, I am not so sure it is the Devil acting when that human trash is taken to the curb. America and other nations have entered our Insane Roman Emperor era. No matter how many emperors were killed back in those days, new and often worse ones popped up in their place. Eventually the whole construct collapsed and gave way to different gods. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Humans do not make gods, no matter what Yuval Noah Harari or Richard Dawkins wants to believe. Humans perceive gods in our own image because we don’t know what else to do and frame of reference is not our strong point. Are the gods OK with it when we take matters into our own hands? I don’t know, but I would argue they don’t seem entirely adverse to it.

 

1Exodus 21:22-23, Numbers 5:11-28, Hosea 13:16