This isn’t for the normies, I’ve given up trying to write for them. They don’t read me, anyway. So forget about persuasion. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you hear it too, the clatter of flying hooves: pale horses careering all over the place.

This one was a street mural in Brixton, South London.

This photo was taken in 2015, so pale horses have been on my mind for quite some time. I must have read William Cooper’s Behold A Pale Horse at least ten years earlier. And I’m not the only one sensitized to this kind of symbology. Earlier this year in London a number of the King’s Household Guard horses mysteriously ran loose in the streets, one of them pouring blood, and people certainly found something ominous in that early morning apparition.

Of course the ‘pale horse’ of the Book of Revelation isn’t actually white. The first horseman rides a white horse, carries a bow and is sent forth to conquer. The second horse is red, and its rider carries a sword, sent out to take peace from the earth. The third horse is black, and is usually interpreted as portending famine. The fourth is the ‘pale’ horse, and I read that the original Greek word χλωρός, chloros, has connotations of sickness — the word can convey a sense of pallor or weakness: a pale, sickly green. The rider of the pale hose is Death, says the book, and Hell follows behind.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are very much part of the zeitgeist, the collective dreamscape of our times. I read the Book of Revelation (KJV of course) early in 2021, soon after finishing Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. I’m sure you can guess why — a certain detail I was looking for. The Four Horsemen appear fairly early on, with the breaking of the first four Seals, and foreshadow the rampaging horde of two hundred million horsemen to be loosed by the four Angels of the Euphrates, “having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone” — the poisonous breath with which they are to kill one third of the human race.

To be honest, this kind of imagery — surreal, apocalyptic, sublime — is something of a relief from the banality of evil in our actuality, the tired ubiquity of the lie, the apathy of the masses in the face of extermination, the mundanity of the monsters we are faced with in the real world. The most depressing thing about living through these times, so far at least, is the sheer bathos of it all. This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang, but a whimper. The apocalyptic imagery at least registers the horror, the enormity, gives it some drama, unlike this slow iatrogenocide of the unconscious masses. What would you rather read about, the creeping holocaust of cancer, the white octopus-clots building inside the arteries and strangling their victims from inside… or a smoke of locusts rising from the pit, with lions’ teeth, women’s hair and scorpion tails, their stings so tormenting that “⁶ … in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” (And who can read that without muttering a quiet prayer to Santa Muerte?)

It’s escapism, then; a predilection for psychedelic imagery. But more than that, a sense that the conflict playing out in these times is so deep that it can only be expressed in archetypal terms, a symbolic lexicon, the language of end-times. It’s not the end of the world, of course. But it is the end of an epoch, a transition of empire, the fall of a civilization, and quite possibly the extinction — through forced evolution — of a species.

I was drawn to the details — those strangely modern details, to my mind, which occur around the Beast — the second Beast, that is, from the Earth, directing the people to worship the Beast from the Sea, which has been granted the power to rule for a strictly limited period and is usually associated with the figure of the Anti-Christ. He directs them to make an image of the Beast, which he then has the power to animate:

[He] deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

¹⁵ And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

This living, speaking image of the beast seems like something from our own era. While moving statues are known from the time of Solomon, a living image that speaks suggests a foreshadowing of television or even ‘deep fake’ technology, as if John is glimpsing things he cannot understand.

The image has two powers — it can both speak, and cause those who do not worship it to be killed. So it must have the power of surveillance, observing who worships and who does not. This was one of the details I found remarkably contemporary — shades of the telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which itself seems so quaintly outdated in the era, announced by Yuval ‘Noah’ Harari, of under-the-skin surveillance. It’s a cliché that knowledge is power. The corollary, as argued half a century ago by Michel Foucault in Surveiller et Punir, is that power is also knowledge.

And then there’s the Mark itself.

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:¹⁷ And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

The ‘Mark’ is a strangely specific detail in the context, and for a long time there have been those who have understood it with a plausible futuristic twist as representing the microchipping of the population, long an ambition of the financial elite. The Christian commentators (‘right-wing’, ‘paranoid’, etc) who built this interpretation over the decades envisaged the use of sub-cutaneous RFID chips the size of a grain of rice, inserted in the hand or forehead. It’s only the technical details that have to be updated: the technology now is wireless, nano-scale, injectable. The vaccine, with its scannable luciferase signature and Bluetooth MAC address, can only be the Mark, signifying incorporation into the Beast System which arises after the fall of Babylon.

Oh, and by the way, the word ‘covid’ or ‘Covid’ as most people write it (why?) is I believe an acronym, and so should be written like this: COVID, or CoVID, standing for Certificate of Vaccination ID.

And 19? The first letter of the alphabet is A, and the ninth is I.

Certificate of Vaccination ID — Artificial Intelligence.

The Mark of the Beast.

∆

It wasn’t just buying and selling. It was leaving your house without permission. Going to work. Training at the gym. Participating in society. Having a life. It was the right to travel. To visit the sick. Even to walk your dogs on the moors, go running in the woods or sit on the beach. They were hostages in an empire of the absurd. Lockdowns and exercise periods: this was prison terminology. In some countries it was explicit, but everywhere the subtext was clear: this is the New Normal. Submit your body to the sting, or this is your life now. Across the English-speaking world, concentration or ‘quarantine’ camps were being built or renovated. In the UK, the construction of four new mega-prisons, each the size of a small town, was begun. There were calls for the unvaccinated to be refused even emergency healthcare. Let them die, they wrote.

In other words a return to the medieval social ritual of ‘civil death’.

Civil death — mors civilis — is a legal doctrine or penal paradigm which has expressed itself in various overlapping forms historically and anthropologically, but I suspect it’s omnipresent in human societies. In Civil Death in Early Modern England Ross Lerner defines it as “the state’s capacity to render a criminal inanimate before the law, stripping him of not only rights and possessions but also the capacity to will.” [My emphases.]

In his 1670 law dictionary, Nomo-lexikon, Thomas Blount defines civil death as a particular kind of interdiction, a “legitimum exilium” or banishment for a crime that results in the civilly dead being banned from all houses and denied “Fire and Water, (the two necessary elements of life)” (Blount 1670, s.v., “Interdiction of Water and Fire”). [Ibid, my emphasis.]

Once “attained,” writes Lerner, a criminal loses the capacity to own anything, even himself, and that incapacity instantiates civil death.

In our own times, up until recently, the main form of civil death has been penal labour and imprisonment.

Early American theorists of punishment used the doctrine of civil death to conceptualize prisoners as slaves of the state (Smith 2011,29–41; Dayan 2011, 39–70). Dayan describes civil death as a “ritual” that “came into prominence in the United States as slavery was abolished, [and] resurfaced as a literal and legal via negativa” meant to render the prisoner “outside the boundary of human empathy: no longer recognized as a social, political, or individual entity” (Dayan 2011, 55). The idea of prisoners as the living dead shaped and was shaped by sentimental and gothic literary genres, which respectively solicited and blocked the empathy that civil death, according to Dayan, was invented to make impossible (see Smith 2011, 29). (Ibid)

But as Lerner argues, there are “lesser known but no less influential form[s] of this phenomenon […] used not to render the criminalized as animals but instead to depict them — and legally constitute them — as undead.”

One of those lesser forms, I would say, must be accounted the ‘cancel culture’ that has arisen in the internet age, the silencing and social exclusion inflicted by the dictatorship of the majority within families and friendship groups over the ‘vaccine’ issue, which mimic totalitarian censorship and internal exile on an inter-personal level.

Civil death is a broad category, in fact a gamut of varied “strategies for rendering criminals among the dead even while they still have life” (Lerner). It’s not just criminals as in thieves and murderers; it depends what’s being criminalised at the time, of course, and that might include religious minorities among the undead: political dissidents and artists who oppose or merely offend the powerful, from Ovid, to de Vere, to Mandelstam and Solzhenitsyn — all have suffered the pain of civil death in different forms. And it’s not only individuals: in many societies whole classes of people enter this form of ‘death’ — even soldiers, whether pressed or voluntary, give up their civil rights and become civilly dead. And monks, who renounce their civil rights when they subject themself to religious discipline. This was even recorded as ‘monastery death’ in early modern England. Like the soldier, the monk relinquishes personal sovereignty and the capacity to will.

This reminds us that civil death doesn’t have to be victimhood — it can be a choice. Some civil deaths are ascribed to simple ‘abjuration’, and that’s pretty much where I am now. Right at the beginning of this I swore I would have nothing to do with it. I channelled Solzhenitsyn. Let it come into the world, let it reign supreme, but not through me. I will not participate in the lie. It meant I couldn’t continue to travel and teach, but there was absolutely no way I was getting injected — or tested, either. To this day I have never had a covid test of any description, never mind an injection. So that’s what I told people who asked if I’d had the vaccine. No, I’d say, I’m not participating, and leave it at that.

As 2021 progressed, a whole new category of people was added to the civil death-list: the unvaccinated, so-called, though in fact no one was vaccinated, because it wasn’t a vaccine. Loss of the right to work, travel, participate in leisure activities. Threatened with indefinite lockdown for continued refusal to test. It was shocking to observe the Othering of vaccine-refusers across politics, media and society at large; and indeed the studied ignorance, somehow maintained by the vaccinated, of the suffering and deaths of so many who, like them, trusted their doctors and the simpering puppets on television.

Lerner’s essay, published in 2021, uses the context of civil death to explore Milton’s Samson Agonistes and makes interesting reading, but I wonder if it’s dawned on him how explosively relevant his topic suddenly became as that year, and the next, wore on. There’s a great book waiting to be written, Mr Lerner, about what happened in 2020 through 2022 and beyond: this latest iteration of the phenomenon of civil death, and on a mass scale. And it could be built around this monster question: isn’t a legal definition of totalitarianism the extension of mors civilis to an entire society? From the death of the social, socialism will emerge.

They tried every threat, every inducement they could, but something like one in every three people in Britain, my country of origin, just wouldn’t take the injection. Why not? I can’t speak for everyone, and I wasn’t there — I was on a farm in North-East Thailand watching it all unfold from a distance. By 2021-22 I was hiding in a forest (in a nice bungalow overlooking the sea) coming out only to make music.

But I know there are people like me in large numbers across the West who ignored the TV doctors and the politicians, the social pressure and the medical advice, because they knew it wasn’t medicine, and when they pictured this ‘vaccine’ they didn’t see nice sterile syringes, but big, fat locusts with scorpion tails, billions and billions of them, darkening the sky.

And of course it wasn’t the Unmarked who started dying, but the Marked. Seven horrible plagues descended on the Beast’s kingdom. People suffered injuries of every imaginable and unimaginable kind. And then they were shunned and cancelled too, and many could find emotional support only among the unvaccinated — the physically dying were comforted by the civilly dead.

While I found its literary argument as regards Samson a little strained, Lerner’s essay contains some wonderful nuggets — for instance, Milton’s posthumously discovered (1825) ‘necro-ontology’, De Doctrina Christiana, which is a taxonomy of different kinds of death, including bodily death, living death, spiritual death, and civil death. But there’s a thread running through the legal-philosophical argument which lifts the whole essay, and this is the double-sided nature of civil death, which can incarcerate or liberate.

“My analysis of early modern civil death […] provides an unexpected genealogy for a revolutionary transvaluation of legal self-unmaking for liberatory ends.” (Lerner)

This ambiguity in finding yourself civiliter mortuus is encapsulated in a snippet I picked up on Wikipedia, that under the Holy Roman Empire, a person declared civilly dead was referred to as vogelfrei (‘free as a bird’).

“Preis gegeben und vogelfrey” [lit: given away and free as the birds], noted thus as a pair of terms in Constitutio criminalis Theresiana [Maria Theresa‘s Criminal Law], from 31 December 1768.”

That meant you could be hunted like an animal. But in one word it captures the essence of “a revolutionary transvaluation of legal self-unmaking for liberatory ends.”

Not participating.

Free as a bird.

Heaven and hell, I’m still alive!

∆

13 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

So that’s what I was looking for. The vaccine passport is the Mark of the Beast, and there’s enough here to suggest the outlines of a totalitarian ‘Beast System’, a geo-fenced, hyper-surveilled, blockchained social-credit panopticon, which is taking shape around us — and within us. Like every totalitarian system, the coming technocracy must attempt to create a ‘new man’ designed to fit the system: a man who is technically alive but has no free will. Inanimate before the law. Undead. And the technology to do that is taking shape, metastasizing, growing. John’s vision underlines, over and over again, the dire spiritual consequences of taking the Mark. Once free will is or destroyed, any connection with the divine must be lost.

Catherine Austin Fitts put it well in an interview back in 2020. “If you’re going to maintain control of people on a machine model, you need to stop them resonating with divine intelligence and resonating with living things and resonating with each other, and get everybody hooked into the machine. And that’s what this is really about. Are we going to be governed by God, or are we going to be governed by central powers who are controlling us through the machine?” 

Thus the profound consequences of taking the Mark, in Revelation 14.

⁹ And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand,¹⁰ The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:¹¹ And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.

Nor do the followers of the Beast prosper in this world — rather they are pummelled and decimated by seven great plagues, as they double down in blasphemy, unable to repent. It is impossible, knowing the vicious corruptions Western society has descended into, not to identify Babylon with the Western world’s vampiric empire of lies.

18 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.² And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

18 ²³ And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

The verdict resonates prophetically, especially when one realises that the Greek word that is translated here as “sorceries” is “pharmakeia“.

You don’t have to believe in the divine origin of St John’s revelation to feel the power of this language; you don’t have to believe in spiritual warfare to understand that only a spiritual lexicon can truly evoke the gravity of what has been done and what we are bringing upon ourselves. The rider of the pale horse brings Hell in its wake, and I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a rather clear picture of what this particular Hell on Earth looks like.

For me, the transhumanist path is the darkest of all possible paths; a steep tragic arc. It represents the denaturing of the human phenomenon and the final divorce from reality. It is also the ultimate elitism, of course — transhumanism for the elite will mean subhumanism for the mass of humanity, or what is left of it. Something essential is at stake, the essence of the human being, the human noumenon itself. What we really are. 

One final question — something that has always puzzled me.

⁸ And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

To kill with sword… and with hunger… and with death. To kill with death? Is this mere tautology, or are we missing something here? Is there a death without physical cause? To just die, suddenly and inexplicably? The silver thread severed while the body still lives? The Second Death inflicted while the body still breathes? I don’t know, but it’s ominous. It suggests something missing in our own necro-ontology.

Those who’ve given themselves body and soul to the Beast will never understand what’s happening. Their fate is not even tragic, then, since there can be no anagnorisis. They have become part of the blasphemy. Because that’s the point we’ve reached, with the advent of synthetic biology and Artificial Intelligence: our science and technology have become blasphemous. The bio-digital convergence is not just about the human body; it’s about everything, the infiltration of all living things, the digitalisation of Nature itself. This is the doppelgänger-mindset which cannot create, only recreate: which can map, simulate, infiltrate, subvert, and displace, but cannot truly make. It can engage, that is, in all of Baudrillard’s phases of the image except the first, the order of sacraments.

And I don’t think you have a religious faith to understand that synthetic biology is a blasphemy against Nature, against life itself. The etymology is blasphēmein — to speak evil of, though the blax root originally means stupid. So, “stupid utterance”. A good definition, to my mind. A stupid travesty of the divine Logos.

I don’t know how humanity resolves this, whether it can ever go back — I suppose I take it as set in stone at this point that the species must at the very least go through some deep purge. It might have to wander in the desert of the real for many generations before it can find its way back to God. In Revelation the Beast is given just forty-two months, three and a half years.

I think it might take a while longer than that. The Book of Revelation may yet turn out to be a work of quiet understatement.

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Revised 29/9/24