"Thanatos" -- Death Gods -- and The Attack on President Trump

The Death Drive Comes To America

Have the powers of gods of death been unleashed in our relatively peaceable nation?

I’m in a hip, storied, deep-blue Catskills town; I was having a restful little writer’s retreat on my own, in a miniature cottage overlooking a small burbling brook. Orange daylilies, just past their glory, line the banks of the talkative brook, and lift their crowns to one another like torn silk scarves. A fresh warm breeze walks through the town among the pedestrians. It seems to come straight from Heaven.

Children, outside the organic ice cream shop, crazed with sugar, run round and round on a patch of grass and a chalk-brightened pathway; or they stare fixedly at the ice cream scoops melting slowly on their cones, trying to figure out how best to approach devouring them.

The mountain that overlooks the tiny town is soft and mid-green; its presence is benign. The vibe of the earth here is nurturing.

When I stood next to the stream, which expands to become a famous creek, late last night, a spillage of stars and a bright yellow half-moon served as our canopy. My friend who lives here told me that Buddhist monks who visit this area say that “the dragon’s breath” — a good thing — still remains, hovering along the runnels of the creek. I strangely understood something of what she was saying.

Everywhere, you would think, here, would be the cherishing and treasuring of life.

And yet: a love of death, a death-god’s ravenous hunger; a death-god’s forcing of obedience in many human minds; a new thing, or a newly revealed ancient thing; a weird thing — ‘weird’ in the archaic sense of relating to the uncanny, to the cutting-short of life — seems now to run now through this town, through these deep-blue cultures, and through our times.

Merriam-Webster: “Weird derives from the Old English noun wyrd, essentially meaning "fate." By the 8th century, the plural wyrde had begun to appear in texts as a gloss for Parcae, the Latin name for the Fates—three goddesses who spun, measured, and cut the thread of life.”

This weird thread runs, devouring.

This death-god of a death-cult, if that is what it is, seems to have different logic and hungers, upside-down logic and hungers, from the logic and hungers of life.

Yesterday morning I was at the adorable flea market: handmade candles; embroidered sundresses; old vinyl records; lip balms made of beeswax. The people there were like those among whom I grew up, and whom I should have recognized as some of the original practitioners of a renewed 1960s-1970s life cult — that is to say, they were old hippies.

An odd note, a bizarre cheeriness about serious illness, disability and even death, is prevalent these days.

I overheard this shouted conversation:

“How is Bill doing? Is he out of the hospital?”

“He’s great! He’s had a heart monitor put in! They are going to be watching him now always!”

This response was given in a cheerful, happy voice.

In the old world, that situation would not have been described so glowingly. It might have been great that Bill is okay, or that he is better than expected, and that his team is cautiously optimistic.

But that sing-song, upbeat “Great!” — delivered in a voice like Dick Van Dyke’s, when he was about to burst into a dance routine amid the chimney-pots of London in Walt Disney’s film of “Mary Poppins” — would not have been considered quite appropriate.

I asked recently how some acquaintances (from that deep-blue world) were enjoying their summer. Both husband and wife reported what sounded to me like absolute horrors: a brother had had a stent put into his heart and was recovering from that surgery, when he got a serious cancer diagnosis; a sister-in-law had two strokes and had lost all function on the right side. Still others — from the deep-blue world — explain, when I ask how they are, that they now have neuropathy, and/or that they are going in to get a hip replaced, and/or that they are looking after an elder relative who needs a bypass, and/or that they are looking after people with cancer, cancer, cancer. Or they list how often they, or their relatives, ‘got COVID’. Their voices are upbeat.

But when I express sympathy or condolences, they look at me as if they don’t understand what I am saying.

I’ve reflected later on this strange miscommunication, this lack of social alignment, in the conversation. Then I realized — this recitation of medical horrors, often needing continued medical attention, is presented with an expression almost of fulfillment; and in tones almost of satisfaction, even of pride.

I posted something about this on X, and got hundreds of people describing similar moments.

Many described this recitation as sounding like an achievement or a status symbol. Others sought to understand it as a logical expression of years of propaganda — a virtue-signaling: “Look how good I am — I took one for the team.”

Still others wondered if, after years of brainwashing that deified the medical establishment, these people feel closer to God, or to ultimate authority, by now being under the continual care of doctors.

Do we have to face the fact that there is a death cult ascendant in our world?

We in the West have, for the last three hundred years, been living in what Steve Bannon calls the “sunlit uplands” of consciousness. The old premodern world, with its demons and ghosts, was banished by the Enlightenment, and the promises of modern Christianity (very different from the beliefs of medieval Christianity, which deeply feared the forces of darkness) comforted us that all was well. The Light, Life Everlasting, reason, human wellbeing, had won out.

So we all got out of the habit of thinking about death gods, and the death drive, and death worship.

We have become used to taking for granted that humans want life; they want to survive; they want to be healthy. We have created whole societies based on those assumptions, considered so basic to the human experience that we did not even question them. To be human and alive was to want all of these things, of course. “Le’Chaim!” as we say in Hebrew when we toast. To Life!

But now, there is something that has entered the world or that has been unveiled, that is counter or oppositional to this set of life- and health-oriented goals, of longings.

You know that for about a year, since I wrote my essay “Have the Ancient Gods Returned?” I have been struggling with the question of “What is this darkness?”

Is it Satan, or Moloch, or Ba’al — speaking metaphorically and metaphysically — or perhaps some forces with which we are unfamiliar?

I am slowly becoming convinced that this darkness has many flavors and names and faces, perhaps even many different tasks, just as other cultures have always understood.

So among these dark forces is a Death Drive.

This it is that drives some people to love illness, to embrace debility, to boast of injury, to seem even to court, or at least not to shy away from, death itself.

Sigmund Freud, in “Civilization and Its Discontents”, called this death drive “Thanatos”, a name derived from that of the god of Death, who, in Greek mythology, brought the souls of humans to the underworld. Freud believed that the death drive was the counterpart to “eros”, or the erotic drive, the drive toward life, and that these two were the essential, contrasting drives that underlay human conflicts and motivations.

Many cultures before ours have had death-cults and death worship, or have venerated figures that represent the end of life, the limitations on human endeavor, or the darkness that can encompass and swallow us all. The Egyptian God Set (or “Seth”) was the master of disorder, chaos, violence, storms: “Seth embodied the necessary and creative element of violence and disorder within the ordered world.”

Kali, in the Hindu tradition, is the goddess of “creative destruction.”

“Kali is said to live in cemeteries amid decaying corpses, reminding us that our world is nothing but a cemetery where all things that are born must decay and die. She wears a garland of skulls to show us that we too must cut asunder the skeletons in our closet. She gives us the implements for our own personal excisions. She drips blood while consuming all of creation. She reminds us that every minute is constantly destroyed in the cycle of time.”

I think we must face what the death gods do, as they determine events at specific periods in history.

One thing the death gods clearly do is become hungrier and hungrier - once a culture unleashes them — meaning that no amount of bloodshed, no amount of human sacrifices, ever satiates them, until their time is spent.

The Nazi era, obviously, reveals the hunger for endless murder and suffering, in these unleashed death-cult forces. The murderousness of Nazi murder rituals went far beyond what was “necessary” to “deal” with “the Jewish Question.” And you saw this ravenousness escalate quickly.

What tends to happen is that once human life is declared violable, once that sacred line is crossed, at first there are few and “justifiable” sacrifices — as with the first careful, selective euthanasia program run by doctors in Germany, “Aktion T4” in 1939 — that disappeared mentally defective teenagers. But very quickly, because that bright line has been blurred, sacrifice was piled on sacrifice and the bodies mounted, and tortures were piled on tortures, for hungry death’s own sake alone. This almost ritualistic escalation is common to many times and places in which these dark gods are invoked or released.

The Holocaust shares this demonstration of a death-cult running rampant with other massacres: Stalin’s murders of three to five millions in the Ukraine and in Russia itself, in the 1930s:

“They [kulaks] were called “enemies of the people,” as well as swine, dogs, cockroaches, scum, vermin, filth, garbage, half animals, apes. Activists promoted murderous slogans: “We will exile the kulak by the thousand when necessary – shoot the kulak breed.” “We will make soap of kulaks.” “Our class enemies must be wiped off the face of the earth.”

One Soviet report noted that gangs “drove the dekulakized naked in the streets, beat them, organized drinking bouts in their houses, shot over their heads, forced them to dig their own graves, undressed women and searched them, stole valuables, money, etc.”’

The dehumanization comes first, and then the orgies of hatred and sadism, tend to follow similar lines, when gods of death are loosed.

The killing fields of Cambodia’s Pol Pot, 1975-1979, who murdered up to three million, shared this tempo and escalation; as did the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which about 800,000 people died.

There is a certain flavor to events when the gods of death are released. Violence, it seems, becomes arbitrary and addictive. It loses any strategic or goal-oriented logic.

When I reported on Sierra Leone in 2004 after a bloody civil war, for instance, I saw this clearly.

In village after village, the hands of villagers, including those of children, or their legs, had been hacked off by machetes. Why? Simply because that was what was happening. It had been done to a village, to soldiers, to children, so then that village or those soldiers did it in turn to other villages, other soldiers, other children.

Rapes, violent always of course to start with, grew increasingly violent and sadistic. Objects were used. Women were left bleeding or dead.

Why? Because that was what was happening. The dark gods were free.

In the aftermath of this frenzy, we reporters were in a Sierra Leone that was rebuilding itself; peace had been brokered, and business and schools were reopening. The scars of the machete attacks and the bereavements and the burned-down huts were visible everywhere, but that ecstasy of killing and rape, the fury of the gods of death, had moved on, or else their energies had been sated, or else they had gone back to Hell.

We had better be studying history, because the gods of death are back. That genocidal hunger, so characteristic of the worst times and places in history, is roaming around now freely in our nation, the blessed United States.

I had to have a surreal public argument against what right wing commentator Candace Owens had posted on X, when she insanely (or extremely ignorantly) produced a podcast called “Literally Hitler” in which she made the case that “they” had made Hitler into some kind of “Voldemort” character, as she derangedly put it.

She also speculated that stories about Dr Mengele’s experiments could not be true, because, she reasoned, this would represent a waste of resources. “They experimented on twins! I mean, some of the stories by the way sound completely absurd…The idea that they just cut a human up and sewed him back together. Why would you do that?…that’s a tremendous waste of time and supplies…”

That last form of reasoning revealed the brutal ignorance of a generation born and raised in a time without the presence of the death forces; the ignorance of a person who has not bothered to become educated about the times in history (including during American slavery) when the death gods were on the march.

First of all, of course, Dr Mengele did experiment on twins, as anyone who has read about these experiments knows. Second, though, the death gods and the death cult don’t need logic about energy or resources. Death becomes its own fulfilment, its own epiphany. Owens’ post-war, first-world ignorance of this form of history is both stunning and extremely dangerous.

I was so upset by Owens’ ignorance of the histories of the death cults, and at the waves of anti-Semitism that I saw unleashed by her podcast online, that I was driven to look up on the platform Ancestry.com, the names of the ten immediate relatives of my grandmother Rose Engel Wolf and my grandfather Joseph Wolf, who had all died in the Holocaust. I knew the number of the dead, but I had only the slightest awareness of names, let alone of faces.

When I was done, Brian found me weeping in our living room.

There was Leah Wolf, killed at 32 in the Holocaust; profession: seamstress. Her mother Chaya Itta also killed in the Holocaust.

There is Hantza Yakovovitz, who had married my great-uncle Binyomin Wolf; the couple had a daughter of unknown age named Itza Wolf; all were murdered by the Nazis, together, in 1939.

There is Hendl Engel, my grandma Rose Engel Wolf’s sister, murdered at 40 by Nazis in Czechoslovakia.

Here was Yehuda Hersh Wolf, killed by the Nazis at 49, in Auschwitz, soon before the war was to end. His 79-year-old father Chaim Mordecai Wolf had been killed the year before, also in Auschwitz. Relatives had witnessed him, our family stories had it, “being herded down the mountain” by Nazis in Rumania, and that was the last he had been seen alive.

There was Pessel Wolf, my great-aunt, who looked strangely like me and like many of the women alive now in my family; Pessel Wolf too was murdered, at fifty, at Auschwitz:

As in many families who lost loved ones in the Holocaust, these many murders, these entire families lost within our family, were never discussed in detail by my grandmother or grandfather. So the kids, born in beautiful, safe America, and the grandchildren, received from that generation only the sketchiest outlines of shadows, and of loss.

When I saw these details, many of them for the first time, I was stunned —- at the vastness of suffering in my family line, and at what I must have inherited in the form of an immense, unnamed burden of generational trauma.

For certain, all the work I have done for the last three years, to wake people at all costs to the fact that things like this can happen, has been driven, consciously or not, by the shadows and memories and perhaps even by the urgings of the many, many murdered relatives in my family, whom I would never know.

But as to the death cult reawakened now, today, in our time, our land, as I have warned in these people’s name, it easily could be: when I started this essay yesterday morning, President Trump had not yet been shot. By 6:30 I got the call: there had been, in Pennsylvania, an assassination attempt on President Trump, in which a sniper’s bullet had grazed his right ear. By a miracle, President Trump had turned his head, and survived. A young man, the alleged shooter, had been killed, but there were others dead and wounded at the event.

There is a lot wrong with the video and with early accounts of the attack on President Trump. The Secret Service move agonizingly slowly, for instance, compared to their diamond-fast reactions when President Reagan was shot in 1981 by John Hinckley. The alleged sniper who attacked President Trump, was somehow able to mount onto a building with clear line of sight to his target. I could go on.

But most important, I feel, is not so much for me to parse the technicalities of this event but for me to reiterate to you — as I did in my last essay, about the imprisonment of Steve Bannon — what time it is.

What this means.

I told you that this was a time, like January to June of 1933, for “the physical mopping-up of the opposition.” I told you that attacks, arrests and physical violence and detainments, of prominent opposition leaders, would now follow.

Now I want you to understand that the genocidal gods have been unleashed in our nation, by rituals of language and invocation. The Huffington Post had a headline stating that “Supreme Court Gives Joe Biden The Legal OK To Assassinate Donald Trump”.

President Biden, on July 8, 2024, said, “We’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put President Trump in the bull’s-eye.”

President Trump’s opponents wish to write legislation to remove his Secret Service protection.

But President Trump is not alone in being targeted by the genocidal consciousness of the death gods: RFK Jr, with his own traumatic family history of assassinations, is being denied Secret Service protection altogether.

Now zoom out and think about the genocidal language of the last couple of years, that has been introduced, spun up, amplified, in our formerly more civil discourse. Pro-vaxxers wanted anti-vaxxers dead. Anti-vaxxers have made snide remarks about the deaths of the vaccinated. Pro-Palestinian protesters have cried, “Death to America” and “Death to Jews.” Pro-Israeli voices have called for the eradication — even “liquidation” — of Gaza and Gazans.

And on, and on.

My friend was telling me about the Pride parade in San Francisco this year — my beloved hometown. She said that there had been an area, in full view of children, with naked men masturbating and engaging in acts of BDSM. She said it included a scene in which multiple men were urinating on someone.

I wondered — as Candace Owens had done, I hope not as ignorantly — Why? Why devote this kind of energy - which is not needed, to support LGBTQ legal rights — to offending or degrading or corrupting public space, and affecting children?

Then I remembered something a mentor of mine had explained to me. He is involved with the Chabad movement, and many of the Rabbis expect the Messiah to appear (or appear again) soon.

My mentor is eager to see a world in which both Jews and non-Jews know about and follow the seven Noahide commandments. In the views of many Chabad religionists, it is only when humans align with God by living moral lives, that we prepare for and even “bring down” to earth, Mashiach, the Messiah. (In his view it does not matter if we call it a Christian or a Jewish Messiah; it is the same time of, act of, redemption, and the same establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven).

In this worldview, we had all better start getting ready, because Mashiach is due to arrive in the next few years.

“The dark forces know that their time is almost up,” he explained. “And so they want to get people to break every commandment — to do every evil deed — because only by doing so, does that delay the arrival of the Mashiach.”

I felt the proverbial sense that a light bulb going on in my head. I thought of the advocacy for abortion upon abortion…the blurring of the bright line between life and death…the acts of degradation all around us, committed seemingly for no reason…. of obscenities played out in public seemingly for no reason… of genocidal language amplified in the public arena, seemingly for no reason.

Was this the reason?

Are the dark forces in a frenzy - trying to get us to break every commandment — so that we delay the arrival, or rather, in Chabad’s terms, the actual construction via human morality, of the Kingdom of Heaven right here on earth?

Of all the explanations I had heard, this was the only one — if such technologies of good and evil are real — that actually made sense.

If so, if this is true, how do we fight back?

Surely, by bringing down the Light.

Photo by Zoran Kokanovic on Unsplash