Exorcism

In the olden days, primitive people laughably believed that mental illnesses and epileptic fits were caused by evil demons possessing the bodies of humans. They ridiculously treated these maladies with exorcism, a one-time process in which the demons were expelled, allowing the person to return to normal life.

In these enlightened times of course, there is no “cure” for mental illness, which is now humanely treated with neuron-destroying drugs, involuntary commitment, neverending codependency with psychoanalysts and intermittent lifelong bouts of hospitalization with other raving lunatics. Thank God for progress!

Exorcism is one of the most widespread practices in human history. Almost every known religion has some context in which possession is considered possible, although the interpretation of such possession can vary widely. Various religions, such the ancient Greeks and practitioners of Voudoun (or “voodoo,” if you’re a neanderthal, non-PC bastard), actually embrace possession as part of their religious rituals. The difference in voudoun, of course, is that the possessing spirit (known as a loa) politely and considerately leaves at the end of the ceremony, with the possessed person’s body in pretty much the same shape as he or she left it.

When an invading spirit is not so polite and considerate as a loa, exorcism is called for.

By far the most famous form of exorcism is the Christian form of the practice, specifically the Roman Catholic ceremony famously depicted in the 1973 schlock horror fest, “The Exorcist.” While the details of exorcism are generally not thought to be so Hollywood friendly, the general thrust of the movie gives a pretty good idea of the basic components. Exorcism generally involves a lot of telling the bad spirit to go away. When the bad spirit fails to comply, the exorcist might slap it around (or rather, slap around the body of the person unfortunate enough to be acting as host), splash holy water or other sanctified stuff, invoke ancient rituals and, as a last resort, fall down the stairs.

The Catholic exorcism ritual has been largely unchanged since the 17th century, with most of the revisions pertaining to raising the standard for determining when exorcism is a preferable treatment to Thorazine, but the Church rather stridently insists that exorcism remain a viable option, in light of the canonical absolute insistence on the existence of Satan. In fact, the Vatican’s chief exorcist is on the record saying it is heretical to deny the reality of possession and exorcism, so disbelievers are just begging to have a Crusade land on their heads.

In the case of really tough possessions, the pope gets involved. The number and nature of these incidents are a closely guarded secret in the secret archives of the Vatican, but one can presume these cases are on a Hollywood scale, with victims floating over the bed, projectile vomiting and ominous statements about what the pope’s mother might be getting up to in hell.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the movie. “The Exorcist” is based on a “true story” of a possession in Maryland in the 1940s. In the real-life case, a boy somewhere between 12 and 15 was allegedly the subject of a full-blown Hollywood-style exorcism, complete with special effects and plot twists. In reality, the details of the story are much contested and several versions of the tale are circulating. Highlights include the infamous “floating over the bed” routine and poltergeist activity of various sorts.

Author William Blatty took these sketchy stories and wove them into a novel, which then became a movie. His protagonist, a 12-year-old girl, performs a long string of various blasphemies, including masturbating with a crucifix, spitting blue and purple bile across the room and famously informing the attending exorcist that his mother “sucks cocks in hell.” In addition to permanently scarring the young actress, Linda Blair, the movie’s borderline snuff-pedophilia-religious-porn overtones warped a generation of viewers and spawned an unholy slew of inferior sequels.

Catholic icon Mother Teresa is perhaps the most famous victim of demonic possession (aside from baseless speculation regarding Wayne Newton). She requested the ritual after a visiting archbishop suggested her insomnia might be demonically inspired.

The ritual worked miracles, just like a half-tab of Halcion. When asked if the presence of dirty, filthy, unsanctified devil spunk in her frail body might be considered a negative for her posthumous sainthood campaign, the archbishop told the Associated Press, and I quote, “No way!” Right on, brother!

The ultimate uber-exorcist, of course, was Jesus Christ himself, who reputedly cast out bunches of demons on general principal, with the side benefit that it qualified him as the fulfillment of various biblical prophecies. One particularly colorful tale has Jesus casting out multiple demons from a single victim and banishing them to death in the bodies of pigs.

Catholics and movie-makers don’t have a exclusive lock on exorcism, however. Evangelical Protestant have a thriving exorcism practice as well. The evangelicals have a less formal approach however, without the Latin pedigree and the chrism. Evangelical exorcism is a lot like evangelical healing — a lot of smacking people on the head and crying out the name of Jesus. Some evangelical preachers perform exorcisms over the radio, TV or telephone.

Banned Cartoons

If you squint your eyes long and hard enough, any fictional character on any animated cartoon begins to develop its own offensive, socially improper qualities. Even the dynamics inherent to seemingly innocent cartoon settings and situations can appear sinister when scrutinized by qualified armchair cynics.

Belgian cartoonist Pierre “Peyo” Culliford’s Smurfs, for instance, copyright 1958. Two hundred tiny blue males harmonizing amongst themselves in a woodsy, European hamlet polka-dotted with mushroomy phallus cupcakes. The setup alone might be sufficient enough cause for concern – but the fact that there’s only one female to pass around? That can’t be right. Never mind the fact that Peyo also wrote and drew a short-lived comic called “Poussy”.

And hey now, what about Inspector Gadget’s bulbous, nodular profile? Doesn’t that lead some people to believe he’s ten times the Jew SpongeBob’s Squidward Tentacles ever was? Even though we all know in our heart of hearts that Mr. Krabs is in fact Bikini Bottom’s primary penny pincher?

Between 1928 and 1950, America’s premiere animators across the Walt Disney Corporation, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Merrie Melodies, Looney Tunes and R.K.O. Radio Pictures painstakingly assembled brilliant and offensive animated vignettes requiring no undue stretchery of the imagination. Hundreds of reels, thousands of cartoons, millions of individual frames sketched and watercolored by hand – and more often than people care to admit, content which directly ridiculed the behavior and appearance of blacks, homosexuals, southerners, the mentally ill, Arabs, Candians, Eskimos, Italians, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Germans, Russians, Australians, Indians, the Scottish, the French, the Irish – and yes, even Martians.

This was the golden age of animation, after all. Illustrators and comedy engineers were only too delighted to inject healthy doses of social tension into the public meme. Colorful, extended virtuoso sequences were married to Carl Stalling’s sprawling, frenetic musical score and Mel Blanc’s hyper-enthusiastic vocal characterizations. Together, this massive ensemble yielded some of the most respected entertainment products our planet has ever produced. The sheer output, the quantity alone staggers the imagination. These were people working in an exploding new field, individuals genuinely married to their work.

In the early days, cartoons were screened before feature films at fancy schmancy “moving picture” theaters – often social engagements where men and women were inspired to wear their Sunday best. Later, these same cartoons would cycle endlessly for decades on broadcast TV or cable syndication courtesy of modern inventions like the tel-o-vision.

And later still – after the innovation of the video cassette recorder – these priceless artifacts would be made available for home rental, so future generations (and their children, and their children’s children) could bear witness to each and every blessed key frame.

Actually, no. Sorry. As the result of objections by parents, overly sensitive sponsors, timid corporate policy, and “changing” cultural niceties, a substantial portion of these classic cartoons has been lost forever, and some may never again see the light of day.

Animated features with even the slightest reference to alcohol (including rum cake), adultery, breasts, chewing tobacco, cross-dressing, gambling, marijuana, pornography, profanity, “rim jobs” (i.e. dogs licking each other), vaguely sexual or flirtatious situations, recreational sex toys (i.e. Tom from Tom and Jerry sticks a vacuum cleaner up Mammy Two-Shoes’ skirt, producing giggles), smoking of any kind, suicides (i.e. a flusterated Daffy Duck blows his beak around in circles with a shotgun) – and even baby ducklings emerging from their shells in demure strip tease were deemed unacceptable. What’s left to laugh at? Dora the Explorer? Rotten Dot Com is confident it speaks for all of us when we say screw that edumacational bullshit.

Chow Hound (1951) directed by Charles M. Jones was a real classic – the story of a muscular dog who exploits a cat and mouse, concluding with a vicious turn of the tables: the dog is planted belly-up on a countertop and force-fed gallons of gravy (“…And don’t forget the gravy!”) through a garden hose. Well, consider those childhood memories stricken from the record. These days it falls under the category of imitatable behavior, i.e. too masochistic for children and families with pets.

Merrie Melodies chose to portray Australia as a desolate, sparsely-treed landscape populated by bouncing kangaroos and portly aborigines who communicate with one another by chucking boomerangs or screaming UNGA BUNGA BUNGA. That’s what critics had the good sense to label an unflattering portrayal, and it too was yanked from public shelves.

And pardoné moi, but has anyone heard from Speedy Gonzales lately? The Mexican rat? Yipa yipa, andele arriba? Nor have we. The Cartoon Network, which since 1999 has been the only television venue for vintage Looney Tunes, removed the Hispanic heretic from their day and nighttime schedules. Perhaps executives forgot Speedy actually won an Academy Award in 1955. Phone calls to Speedy’s dimwitted cousin Slowpoke Rodriguez (the world’s slowest mouse) went unanswered.

Today, the most popular racial phobery (and war-inspired propaganda) has a new impetus: South Park, with its remarkable and timely depictions of both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Swiping cultural cues from featurettes pioneered by Disney and Warner Bros., South Park manages to massage attitudes and manipulate the American agenda by unleashing brilliant leaflet campaigns of its own design.

Osama is illustrated wearing “farty pants,” mincing and prancing about the stage like a young gazelle. Saddam is portrayed as- well, quite frankly a goddamn little faggot who refuses to keep his pants on. His voice is squeaky and ridiculous. His head flaps up and down like Canada’s own Terence and Phillip. In South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, Mr. Hussein is observed wigglin

g an oversized jelly dong in Satan’s face.

Yeah, Barn – up front where it counts, in front of the pure white filter. Winston packs rich tobaccos specially selected and specially processed for good flavor and filtered smoking. Winston tastes good… like a cigarette should!

WHASSUP, doc?? Oh, that wascally wacist. How could America’s best-loved wabbit be so blacktose intolerant?

“Japs!” screeches Bugs. “Hundreds of them!

The cartoon archetype of American smart guy / foreign dumb guy is a time-honored crucible best served during a war, and the Walt Disney Corporation concocted a few classics as well.

The Swastika-dotted landscape of Der Fuehrer’s Face (1942) was the perfect brass band musical vehicle for Donald Duck, a Nazi munitions worker who “alternates between screwing nose cones onto bombs and saluting framed portraits of Adolf Hitler”. The Japanese make a cameo appearance too – and wouldn’t you know it, they’ve got lime green skin, big bulbous eyeglasses, Tupperware haircuts and protruding, jaggedy-ass dentures rivaling those of Bugs Bunny.

The title song, performed by Spike Jones and his City Slickers, won an honest-to-gosh Oscar for Best Short, beating out veteran animator Leon Schlesinger’s wheezing, preachy and pedantic Pigs in a Polka. Other big winners that year: honkabilly big mouth James Cagney for Best Actor in Yankee Doodle Dandy and Irving Berlin, who penned the music and libretto for White Christmas.

Donald T. Duck would later redeem himself as an air ranger in Commando Duck, a deftly animated farce combining traditional Disney magic with anti-Japanese tomfoolery. The premise: he parachutes into enemy territory during World War II. It’s treacherous terrain, marked by snipers hiding inside myopic, bucktoothed tree trunks which speak in pigeon-toed English, alternately bowing respectfurry toward one another and offering endress aporogies.

A-prease and a-thank you! Time to shooting now prease I hope! Japanese custom say always to shooting a man in the back prease! Ah so! Ah so! And so on. Donald’s target coordinates on his map are F-8. Fate, get it?

Donald’s mission: contact the enemy, surround them single-handedly, and wash them out. After a series of slaphappy bumbling mishaps, he manages to direct an avalanche of tumbling boulders down a gushing waterfall toward a Japanese military facility. The airfield is flooded. Hundreds of Nipponese soldiers drown, and dozens of red-spotted planes hang like limp turkeys from dead, drooping trees. Sad, squawky trumpets wup-wahh across the horizon. But not in a hate crimey kinda way! This comical vignette, for all intents and purposes, eagerly delivers the very quintessence of merriment.

German adults are portrayed in classic Disney “sinister bulldog” style: barrel chest, small rear end, bowed legs, and no neck. The bellowing, red-faced instructor’s jowls flop around like coattails as he berates a kindergarten classroom full of Bambi-eyed waifs in lederhosen, whose pluckish heads are delightfully oversized. The military professor’s singular goal: get these scatterbrained kids to appreciate Hitler’s way of thinking.

As Education For Death descends toward its bloody climax, the animation is bathed in murky red tones. The viewer is urged to “listen closely to the fanatic cry” of the German people. What follows is a pounding orchestral soundtrack and a relentless montage punctuating all things fire and brimstone.

Classic hardbound volumes of literature and philosophy are piled high, fanned at the spine and set ablaze. Flaming torches cast violent, flickering shadows as the Holy Bible morphs into a limited first-edition Mein Kampf. Crucifixes hung by the chimney with care are zapped by swift arcs of lightening from the heavens, and transformed into unfurling Swastikian flags or bladed Iron Crosses.

Delicate, stained glass church windows are smashed out during drunken antisemetic protests – and endless squadrons of squat, pear-shaped children in silhouette are seen goosestepping in grids for miles across the globe, arms outstretched toward the sky as they Heil Hitler over and over. Today Germany – tomorrow the world!

Nine times out of ten, a person won’t even notice racist or hateful overtones in a cartoon unless the idea is planted firmly in head. By refusing to unearth and revive historical artifacts, societies sustain immeasurably more damage than brief exposure to racial toxins from old-timey cartoon doodles. Novelist Kurt Andersen (Turn of the Century, 1999) muses, “If we don’t know our history in all of its complicated detail, how are we supposed to understand the present?”
To allow ourselves only a bland, repackaged version of the past is – how do you say – kind of a Mickey Mouse approach.

“Marching and heiling, heiling and marching. In him is planted no seed of laughter, hope, tolerance or mercy. For him – only heiling and marching, marching and heiling. The grim years of regimentation have done their work. Now he’s a good Nazi. He sees no more than the party wants him to. He says nothing but what the party wants him to say. And he does nothing than what the party wants him to do. And so he marches, with millions of comrades, trampling on the rights of others. For now, his education is complete. His education..

Kabbalah

aka Qabala, Cabala, Kabala, Qabballa, etc.

Imagine you’re Madonna. You’re too smart for Scientology, but not calm enough for Taoism. You’ve pretty much burned your bridges with Catholicism. And Methodism was never really an option. So where do you go for your religious fulfillment?

If you’re thinking Hinduism, well, actually she was over that back in the ’90s after it failed to catch on as the Next Big Thing. Her current fixation, kabbalah, might have more potential.

Technically, kabbalah is not a religion, and it never was. It originated around the 11th century as an outgrowth of earlier Jewish esoteric-occult traditions. Kabbalah is mainly based on two texts, the Sepher Yetzirah (“the book of creation”) and the Zohar (“the book of enlightenment”).

Sepher Yetzirah is a collection of secret traditions supposedly passed down from Abraham. It describes the structure of the universe and the method of its creation, including an extremely convoluted series of planes of existence, based on geometry and key numerical sequences derived from the Hebrew alphabet. While probably not dating back to the time of Abraham, whenever that actually was, it is the older of the two texts and probably runs at least as far back as the second century B.C.

The Zohar was first seen in public during the 13th century, offered up by Moses de Leon, a Spanish Jew who claimed it was the work of a second-century miracle-working rabbi. After de Leon’s death, there were numerous charges that the work was a forgery. There is quite a bit of legitimate controversy around the book, but the scholarly consensus is that the Zohar legitimately conveys a tradition that predates the 13th century, including several elements found in Jewish and Christian Gnosticism.

The Zohar is a commentary on the Pentateuch, the first five books of both the Jewish and Christian bibles. OK, maybe “commentary” isn’t the right word. The Zohar claims that the words of the Torah are simply a smokescreen behind which the real meaning of the Jewish scriptures lurks, like an ancient stereogram: you can’t see it unless you’re looking past it.

Together, the books outline a sweeping vision of the structure of reality, including guidelines on how to alter it in nontraditional ways, which more or less amount to magic. Based on the two key texts, medieval occultists and Jewish mystics created a massive body of writings about metaphysics, alchemy and magic. Because it covers material related to the Old Testament, kabbalah was adopted by both Jews and Christians. Kabbalism also led to the development of Hasidism among Eastern European Jews.

The most readily identifiable concept in kabbalism is the Tree of Life, a diagram that is essentially a map of reality. The Tree of Life consists of three columns known as “pillars”, and 10 sephiroth, or spheres, each of which represents an aspect of the process God used to create the world.

At the top of the diagram is Kether, “The Crown”, which represents the divine intelligence of God, from which all of creation emanates. The three pillars emanate down from Kether all the way down to Malkuth at the bottom. (The word means “Kingdom”; the bottom sephira is also sometimes called Shekhinah.) Kether is the angle at which reality points toward the creator; Malkuth is the angle at which is points toward His creation — the earthly world.

In traditional kabbalism, there are 10 sephiroth, although some schools teach of a “hidden” 11th in the middle of the diagram. Each sephira has different characteristics and is represented by a different Hebrew letter, which also corresponds to a number. The 10 sephiroth are connected by 22 lines, known as “paths,” each of which carries a specific meaning. Some occult traditions teach that the paths correspond to the major arcana in the Tarot.

The chart comes to life as a result of emanations, a concept which covers the movement of will, force, divine spark, light, energy and reality from God to creation. Emanations are the manifestation of divine intelligence as a material or metaphysical thing, such as an angel or a soul.

Because the shape of emanations is outlined by the Tree of Life (supplemented by information contained in numerous other kabbalistic writings), the Tree and the Hebrew alphabet can be used to calculate the “true names” of things. If you know the true name of something, you can control it, which quickly led medieval kabbalists to become ritual magicians (as well as inspiring medieval ritual magicians to become kabbalists).

With kabbalistic secrets firmly in hand, the well-informed can construct magic words that presumably empower users to command the very forces of the universe. Angels and demons, in particular, are susceptible to this sort of control.

Truly ambitious sorcerers also sought the true name of God, the most powerful magic word imaginable. The search for God’s true name took on epic proportions during the middle ages. The name was referred to as the Tetragrammaton, because it was believed to have four letters.

The Torah provides one version of this name, of course, which practicing Jews are forbidden to speak — YHWH, pronounced as Yahweh (or JHVH, Jehovah) by those who are not especially worried about eternal damnation and a divine curse. YHWH is derived from the first letter of each Hebrew word God spoke to Moses from the burning bush story found in Exodus. The rough English translation of the statement is “I am who am”, “I am who I am”, or “I am that I am.”

Finding the name in the Bible, of course, was far too easy. Obviously, recipients of secret knowledge would have a better name, a more powerful name. Unfortunately, no one could quite agree on what that name was, although a number of alternatives were proposed, such as AGLA or ADNI.

None of these names hold up to the obvious test: After pronouncing them, neither divine wrath nor infinite power arrives within any reasonable time frame.

Other esoteric concepts were covered in some depth by the kabbalists. Many kabbalists were also alchemists and scientists. As a result, some kabbalistic texts about the nature of emanations and the behavior of light (as a divine power) have a remarkable power even to this day. For instance, one Latin kabbalistic text from the Middle Ages discusses the properties of spirit and body in some detail. If you substitute “spirit” for “energy” and “matter” for “body”, the text looks suspiciously like a sneak preview of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

To a greater or lesser extent, kabbalism is the basis of nearly every tradition covered under the general heading of “occultism”. Kabbala

h is the basis for the rumored occult practices of the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Knights Templar, the stylings of the O.T.O., the antichrist rituals of Jack Parsons, and the creation of mystical beings such as the Golem. Scientology is also roughly modeled on the kabbalah, albeit filtered through a Battlestar Galactica sensibility.