Then said I: 'For what object is this blessed land, which is entirely filled with trees, and this accursed valley between?' Then Uriel, one of the holy angels who was with me, answered and said: 'This accursed valley is for those who are accursed for ever: Here shall all the accursed be gathered together who utter with their lips against the Lord unseemly words and of His glory speak hard things. Here shall they be gathered together, and here shall be their place of judgement. In the last days there shall be upon them the spectacle of righteous judgement in the presence of the righteous for ever: here shall the merciful bless the Lord of glory, the Eternal King. In the days of judgement over the former, they shall bless Him for the mercy in accordance with which He has assigned them their lot.
-The Book of Enoch, Chapter 27
I’ve never had anything real taken from me, as far as I can tell. I was born on American soil — in Delaware it was seized from the Lenape — and I now live comfortably in the Appalachians, which were seized from the Seneca. Maybe I have some Seneca in my bloodline, given that I’m descended of Fayette County and West Virginia hill people if you go back far enough. However, bloodlines are the kinds of thing Nazis think about, so I focus elsewhere. Besides, any trace amount of American indigeny in my blood has been removed by centuries at the teat of western hierarchies, and the only way I’d identify it is by spitting in a tube and sending it to some Mormon in a lab to analyze for me.
Whatever else that Mormon found, I know there’d be some Irish in there. Sometimes I think about how I grew up around the fantasy that we were connected to Scotland or Ireland, all because of our family name and the fact that my grandfather still had letters from his grandfather who moved here during one of the Troubles. Mostly that manifested for us as it did for many other Scotch-Irish American families of the 1990s: maniacal fandom of the film Braveheart.
My parents were more into the faux-nationalism than I was because I was ten, and mostly thought it was cool that people got their heads cut off. When Mel Gibson got pulled apart by horses at the end, I remember mostly thinking that there was no way someone could like anything enough to be down for that. At that age I wasn’t allowed to watch gore or violence when it was in horror movies, but if an antisemite wanted to dress up like a Scottish guy and kill Catholics on camera that passed my parents’ censorship board.
It’s only now — as a parent myself — that I see how I was raised around a sense of loss that was never real. This isn’t the fault of my parents, because American culture is primarily centered on profound melancholia, as long as the melancholy is never focused on what we’re really sad about. When my dad would get melancholic it was often about his glory days playing basketball, but the stories were usually about his hometown before it became a wasteland in the 1980s, like every other fucking mining town in Southwestern PA once the Whores of Babylon got their fill. I’m sure my dad wishes he played ball for longer, but hoops never felt like the true source of any lingering sadness.
Unfortunately for those of us here who like to sell ourselves on the idea that Pittsburgh was paradise before the collapse of steel, even the ancestors working the mines and mills were whores, too. They didn’t come upon this paradise naturally, and there were already thriving civilizations here when the first white boy with a musket showed up. The Americans stole it out from under from the British and the French — two nations with history I find more abhorrent more than America’s — and my natural competitive instincts sometimes use that reality as a way of tricking my mind into a weird form of pride. Pittsburgh may be a racist nostalgia trap, but at least it ain’t Britain’s racist nostalgia trap.
I embarrass myself with these thoughts, but I document them so that I can kill them. That might be the only thing that still appeals to be me about Christianity: it’s the only religion that’s realistic about the fact that violence is an unavoidable consequence of chaos, and chaos is the only constant. I just wish more Christians understood that violence of thought is more effective when accompanies by abiding commitment to Earthly peace; that the Dharma of chaos is not an excuse for chaotic action.
I’ve found that it’s easy to forget chaos when looking backwards with the clarity of material outcomes rather than processing events through the fog of what the fuck are we gonna do. The signs and the symbols all add up to something, because that something is manifesting right in front of us. I know what I think when I look at Israel today and the escalation of its occupation of Palestine. I have spent years now deeply embedded in theological and material research about His Majesty Haile Selassie I and Ethiopian ethnoreligious history. It is impossible to have a normal opinion about Israel, or Christianity, or Islam, or just about anything else related to God after that. That’s not to imply I lack an opinion — I morally reject settler colonialism, but am otherwise impotent to do much about it — but more to say that my opinions are not constructive, given that the United States can’t undo decisions its state department made in 1973.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if Ethiopia is my version of my parents’ Scotch-Irish mill town Zionism. I’m saving most of my thoughts about His Majesty for the upcoming book (The God Flower, St. Martin’s Press, 2025; I am told I will have to promote this fucking thing), but Rastafari is undoubtedly a theology of loss and a melancholy for a version of Ethiopia that may only exist in the mind. Modern critics of Rastafari often point out how their conceptions of Ethiopia are based on legend rather than reality, but that’s never stopped Americans from making up silver linings bullshit about U.S. history. When it comes to feeling sad about things that may have never happened, the Rastafari are not alone in their melancholy.
In Freemasonry, Ethiopia has stood for liberation long before the coronation of Haile Selassie I or the preaching of his divinity, reflected in the writings of Samuel Johnson and his seminal Rasselas. Much of this is rooted in Orientalist fantasy — Johnson still refers to Ethiopia by its insulting Abyssinia exonym — and is therefore quite difficult to take seriously as prophesy. Unfortunately for those unwilling to entertain the idea of God, it is also quite difficult to ignore just how cosmically weird it is that after hundreds of years of speculation about Ethiopia as the unkillable dream … at the exact time that colonial powers made their play to divide the Horn of Africa … and at the exact same time that men thousands of miles away were preaching his coming divinity … it was Lij Tafari Makonnen’s leadership and shrewd decision-making that kept Ethiopia free and the flame of the African gospel lit.
For the modernist who views the world through the lens of politics, Haile Selassie I was an autocrat and the last king in a dying feudal economy. For those who know God, Haile Selassie I is a symbol of what can never be seized. There is no freedom without dignity, and dignity is a birthright. Prolonged denial of dignity to an entire group of people is not just ethically disgusting, but a rift in the moral arc of the Dharma that the Fudo Myo-o will repair. His methods are not kind, but wrath is a form of love, and must therefore be a form of the Light.