The Whore’s Manifesto
At first glance it would appear that the Whore plays into the patriarchal economy of exchange, turning Her body into capital, but this is a falsity fixed on Her by men. Whores and soldiers are the oldest professions, they say. This is not quite true: whoring and fighting are the oldest forms of worship.
Our Mother is the bringer of life and the arbiter of death. She creates and destroys in a never-ending cycle. Scared, and lacking understanding, fools sought to break the cycle, that we might live forever. We gained our wish—Oh, short-sighted fools! We destroyed death, and in doing so we have destroyed life. Our quest to whitewash all pain has led to the destruction of pleasure. Now we are the stationary masses, who do not feel, only watch. We watch our screens, and see pleasure and pain enacted, and pretend we are not empty, but we have always been empty, calling endlessly to the fire Kadosh to fill us; but now we turn our backs to the Light, and sit, shitting in the dark.
We all know this truth: we seek to fill our God-shaped holes with porn, and dragons, and food-shaped candy. We know the divine Light, but we cannot understand why it exists no more. We fools; we do not know that we are all vessels, and the shape of the vessel is the shape of Our Lady. If we do not love ourselves in our emptiness, and our potential to be filled, if we do not understand the nature of the two in none, of the circuit, if we do not accept the sanctity of our senses, then we can never be full.
Thus we are become a world of Hollow Men, and our jagged, putrid breath may be found even in the depths of the forest and the height of the mountains. For we believed that, in conquering the world, we would fill our hollowness. Yet our hollowness is as sacred as the filling that we seek, and thus we are like scattered puzzle pieces, and thus we wither, and forget that Gods once walked the Earth. Now the Devil walks; His name is Stasis. The Devil is the slime in the television, the great media machine that keeps us longing-longing-longing, and unable to find release. This is the Apocalypse: Our Lady has come, and She is as monstrous as we dreamed.
We have created an absence of death, believing this to be good: no more little children die, we all may live for a century! Even our creations, our throwaways, our wastage, they are eternal. We are proud; we say, “Look at all this non-death we have created!” Yet non-death is not the same as living. And in our search for eternity, we have destroyed life itself, and now we must all die. There is no escape; there remains only to find joy in the moment, in the senses, in the very process. There is no fairness; Our Lady does not respond to prayer or entreaty. We will not be saved, for Hers is the cold hard logic of the revolution of planets.
Join me; ours is a subtle revolution, for now is the time of Whores. There is no more Patriarch, no more Law, there is only the strength of the Body, and of the Senses. We are the armies of Strength, of She who closes the lion’s maw of patriarchy, and we march wherever She wilt with fire in our bellies and diamonds between our thighs, and while the hollow men sit and shit, consuming and ejecting in their agonising stasis, we dance. We dance, and we bleed, and we fuck, and we fill, and we find, even in torture, the exquisite interstices of our Body interacting with the world around it, every instance of which is verily God. All this is of She, the Holy Whore: Her Starry Cunt shall be our banner, Her Hairy Diadem our crown. With Her Menses shall we paint our skin; Her Drops of Sweat become pearls upon our naked breasts.
This is the apocalypse; there is no hereafter. There is no shame, or fear; there is only the potential for pain, and for pleasure, and in these shall we find our only Redemption.
Very little has changed in two thousand years. We still fight a spectre we cannot touch. We search ever for it, seek to blot out the blight, but no matter how fast we turn our head, no matter how agile our analysis, Her cat’s tail whips round the corner ahead of us and disappears into the sickly yellow mist. For this is the secret of human misery: we forgot our Mother. We forgot that our bodies are of Her; all pain and all pleasure is Hers and Hers alone. If it is not given unto Her then She will take it anyway, and you will remain, sitting and shitting, in the slow stasis of the Abyss.
The only opponent is shame, the complex which creates stasis. Reject this entirely: go plunging, searching, wading through the pools of filth to find what makes them filthy. Revel in the mud and become like Circe’s Swine; discover the joy at the bottom, for only then might you understand the senselessness of the top. There is no mystic mountain without the cave, no dawning light without the dark night.
The only enemy is the shame that keeps us static. So be shameless: be fleshy and physical and in excess, loud and gushing and flowing, far beyond the tolerated margin of mess. Be too much, always too much, for such flowing keeps us moving, and all that emptying pulls in the new like a tide. This is the hidden law of creation, and thus might we find circuit and completion, that which fools call redemption. Yet we never fell; we only forgot that we were once Gods, and that our Godhood is located in our sex, and that our brains and our skin are sexual organs too.
For Pan became our Devil, lord of the Earth. Yet this was but a veil; for Our Lady is Isis veiled in nature. Even this secret could not remain hidden. It appears in the breasts of Baphomet, in the succubus; it appears too, in the secret mysteries of Christianity—of the rose-cross, and of the holy cup. The Christ story is the story of God becoming man to redeem men. Woman need take no part in this, for She was never lost.
All the bees are dying, and soon our land will be dead too, but all this is a joy, if we remember death is sacred, and of Her. We, who would raze the temples of man to the ground, we need not rebuild, for we trust our Mother, and the cycles of time. We know burnt bones fertilise the empty fields. There will be an after, and thus the present moment is enough.
Like a Whore I lie upon my gleaming bed, and like a Queen I choose my lovers, whom I desire, and who are terrified of me. It is this terror that I, like a bee turning dead flesh into honey, transform into trembling most sublime—verily, a fear and trembling that shaketh death. I am the Whore, the rose these men have veiled in black, and knowledge of me is knowledge of death, and thus is all joy. So revel, roll in blood, for ecstasy ends. Hear tsim-tsum, and know that all is temporary.
“Immortality jettisons from my vulva.” This moment lasts forever, and after, all is gone.
The Holy Whore, Circe the Swine Queen: I am the conjunction of opposites, and I will throw my pearls upon the muddy floor of the marketplace, and I will watch the men become as dogs, and I will trample, and none will tell the difference between my wrath and my joy.
Join me. Embrace the conjunction of opposites, fall into otherness. Else remain, static, in the Abyss, growing bloated and fat with the slow stretch of the worms.
Won't you help me, won't you give your blood to fertilise my garden? You will never see the flowers bloom, blind as you are, but that aimless, endless work will be your joy, oh Sisyphus. So let us twist, and twine, and toil endlessly, eternally—oh, let us never stop to breathe, or rest, for our sweat and our blood will be a great pink tide to cover the Earth, a new flood, wherein all might be forgotten.
Let us dance the dance of death and find life in its midst, just as in our desperate search to master life we have mastered naught but death. All these things follow a logic; learn to think in circles, and the Gods will be revealed.
Be a Whore, if such be your Will; only, learn what this means. Learn to act with Will, to fuck with Will. See sex as a holy act (and see sex in every act), and all will be transformed into Pan! This is the thing Christianity feared most, the worship of Woman, of the Senses, the finding of God in the physical act (what else was Shekinah?), so don't play into their stereotypes of diabolism and sin. Be the Priestess whose name they dared not even speak, the Pythoness who was called Succubus. Experience the power, the pleasure, the giving, the receiving, the circuit. Transform your sex; see that sex is everywhere, see it in the flowers, and the in sky, and transform your life. Sex is Holy: know this, and all else will be revealed.
The Holy Whore is not just a role for women; it is a role we all must take. So too, the pathetic approach to the Goddess. There are two snakes wrapped around each other. Ignore one, it does not die, but only tightens its grip and becomes grotesque where the circulation is cut. Thus are we all hermaphrodites, and this is the Glory of God. We flee from this, and we vessels of divinity become the hollow men, and the world ends.
Yet, if the world is already ending, if the tide has already turned, and there is no paraclete in his coracle boat come to rescue us all from this stasis, and if we accept that there is no hereafter, then why not join the chorus, and usher in the new age of death with dance and song? It is this, or nothing—and death is closer to creation than stasis is. Do not forget: it is better to fail, than not to try. When we reach the bottom we see it was the top all along. The Abyss is shaped like a hollow doughnut; think ye to escape with a step ladder?
Our Lady is the Giver of Gifts. Remember death is a gift, as much as life. We have forgotten how to take joy in death, and thus we find no joy in life. To claim that life, whatever its quality, is better than death is the greatest sin. To refuse mercy to an unborn whose life will be naught but struggle, to refuse death to those who beg for it, to do these things, but to make no effort to bring joy to life, this is evil. It is not joy that they enshrine, nor life, but a grotesque golem named undyingness. The Goddess is Goddess of life and death, so vain and scared men created a new category, the undying, and we, the hollow men, we have forgotten there was ever anything else, and so this is the way the world ends, with a planet full of plastic, and the droning of a TV set. They thought it would all go nuclear, and rushed unto the end, but we do not deserve such mercy. Our world will end with a whimper, and our Mother will sit on the mountain, penetrated and all-penetrant, and her grinning black eternity of mouth will be smeared all about with a ring of our blood. Is this not a picture infinitely more beautiful than that of a bearded old man on a throne of eternal life? She stands for reality; the other for vanity. The true God is No Man.
We sit, and sip our coffee, and we sigh, as all about us the world dies. There is nothing to be done, and thus we do nothing. There is nothing to be done; we must learn to dance in the flames. These old men in their towers and halls, they have sped the apocalypse, for they believe they will be redeemed. None shall be redeemed; thus even the fool is the emissary of Our Lady.
This is a cry of despair, and a discovery of joy in that crying. This is not a giving up, but a giving in, as when one chooses to float with the tide. For I have come a long way from my start, supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.
To be Whore: this is both a rejection of the holy chastity that enshrines sex, and an embracing of holy chastity that enshrines sex. It is the destruction of complex, the refutation of the authority of false Gods over any given Body, and it is at the same time a discovery of complexity, the embracing of the Knowledge of Our Lady as it is given in the most intimate interstices of our Bodies.
The age of men is over, but now is not the time of women. No, we have gone past that. We spent thousands of years turning woman into a monster, and now the age of monsters is upon us. How might you call us evil, when good has led to the end of the world? We are the magicians, the witches, and the mystics. We are the prophetess, and the pythoness, and the boogey-monster under the bed. We are the tidal wave of filth that laughs at your tolerated margin of mess. We are the soft heart in the glass cage; you laugh, for you see us trapped; you do not see the shattering hammer descending from the clouds.
You forget: we were cast in Our Lady’s forge, upon the Holy Mountain. We have been tempered with innumerable blows. We are the broken and the strong. You may have fine steel, robbed from out of her belly, but we are rock, all veined with iron. We have no need to win, for we are the emissaries of the inevitable. So call us witches, and our rise the rise of superstition, but this is the end of the world. The wave is coming, and all that you call superstition shall be our coracle.
An Extract from Approaching Babalon, by Georgia van Raalte