The Ceremony of Innocence

The Hero's Journey, and Why Thanksgiving Matters

Yesterday, I walked Loki, our little dog, out of the house in the country where we are spending Thanksgiving.

It was a grey, blustery November day. The turning of time was manifest around us. Our neighbor had hunted and killed a beautiful stag. The animal was hung upside down, for processing, on a cross-bar that our neighbor has erected on his property for just this purpose. The creature looked both majestic and sacrificial, as Loki and I passed by.

A few minutes later, on the road, we paused. Seven gorgeous brown-orange deer, with white tails, leaped across our path. They bounded in perfect time, like music. They paid no attention to us: Loki stared in wonder. On our way back, we saw a lone deer standing still, in a high field. The animal hovered against the yellow-grey of the meadow, its outline visible above the roofline of a white colonial house, as archetypal as a cave drawing.

Photo by Laura College on Unsplash

I felt that the deer — or its universal essence —would still be here in a thousand years, long after the colonial house will have fallen into ruins. Did that living deer know that one of its tribe had been caught up in human plans and was now dead? Did it mourn?

Or was something larger than all of us at work in a rhythm I could not quite trace?

We were all, human and animal, just passing through, in our physical forms; but something eternal and larger than each of us, a rhythm, a plan, was also at work — in our spirits, in our world.

The last time I wrote a Thanksgiving essay, “Thankful”, a year ago exactly, Loki had been just a puppy.

I vowed then always to try to react to the blessings of this world, the same way that puppy Loki greeted the morning; leaping out into piles of autumn leaves each time, as if every day was an unimaginable, astounding miracle.

This year, his puppy phase is over. Time has had its way with all of us. Loki’s excitement is still palpable, but, as he tugs at the leash and looks back at me to observe my response when there is a moving car, or a standing cow, in our walk’s periphery, it is now a more experienced, young-adult doggishness.

I feel the past year’s weight on myself as well. I feel my exhaustion.

It was a grueling year; the fourth in a series of grueling years, in which every single day we went into battle to fight the forces of a darkness we could never have imagined before 2020.

The evil was like a mighty serpent lazing and luxuriating with impunity across the path of history. It was like a voracious dragon that grew stronger and more terrifying every day.

2020-2024 felt as if the maws of Hell had cracked opened. You could see the flames; you could smell the sulphur.

This malevolence sought for four years to grab hold of and swallow up every blessing: children and babies. Pregnancy and lactation. Love and intimacy. Families. Holidays. Music and theatre.

This evil sought — and still seeks — to poison the very skies above our heads, who knows with what, and the very cattle in the fields.

This evil sought to close any open church and mosque and synagogue.

What is this malevolence? I have teased out the bad actors behind it in my books The Bodies of Others and in Facing the Beast. Our team of scientific and medical experts has also documented the henchmen and methodologies of Hell’s own workings, in their compendium The Pfizer Papers.

Yes, it is the WHO, it is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and countless aligned nonprofits, it is the WEF and its henchmen in the CCP, and its network of wicked and spiritually hideous gnomes and trolls in Big Medicine and Big Pharma.

But these, as I have argued before, are just the human and earthly manifestations of something larger and unearthly.

Many have productively labored from 2020-2024 identifying who is doing the bidding of, essentially, the underworld — that dimension that we sophisticates thought did not exist, but that has revealed itself in the past four years to have somehow manifested abruptly, onto earth, to cohabit with us. This evil sought to seduce or intimidate those caught in the middle, unsure of what to believe and with whom to side; and to press to death, in effect, using threats, censorship and economic pressure, if not worse, the small band of resisters who saw this evil for what it was and fought it bravely from Day One.

It turns out that this malevolent dimension does not only exist, but that it deploys earthly armies: bureaucrats, functionaries, entire ad agencies, for God’s sake; scientists, physicians, hospitals, Presidential candidates.

But now, now, you can feel, the earth has turned. History has somehow shifted again, and the light is balancing the darkness.

I’ve written about how I could not understand the dark presence on earth that manifested from 2020 on, except, ultimately, metaphysically. The same is true of the slow, gradual, but unmistakeable, reappearance of the light.

Can’t you feel it? Can‘t you feel the sane, blessed state of our nation, perhaps eventually even of the West - returning?

The horrors of the past four years were not only that elders were euthanized for money in hospitals and that they died alone; or that babies were sacrificed near birth, or that laws were passed to allow them to be neglected to death. The horrors of the last few years were not just that Canada and now the UK created spiffy ad campaigns to encourage people to kill themselves.

Or that highly-paid influencers on TikTok or Instagram whipped up family division and estrangement; that they told young women not to have children, and that they told young adults to divorce their parents, and that former superstars such as MSNBC’s Joy Reid told people who voted for Harris to shun having Thanksgiving with relatives who voted for Trump.

The horror beyond that horror was that all of this madness, this anti-human evil, was normalized — even glamorized. That normalization and glamorization added the feeling of our being existentially alienated from the culture at large, to those of us who clung to humane values.

Magically, that curse seems to be lifting — at least in the US. Maybe even, from what I hear from liberty activists worldwide, in the UK and Ireland; in Europe, and elsewhere.

There is a sense of the lights being turned on, and of evil things slithering back into the shadows where they belong. Craziness feels crazy again, which is a sign of cultural sanity.

It’s not just politics. That is, this shift in history cannot be explained away purely by secular analyses of mortal politics.

Is it Pluto moving into Aquarius, which took place — for the first time in 248 years — on November 19, 2024? This astrological shift is supposed to portend visionary transformation and to be about evolution and liberation. I both do and I don’t “believe in astrology.” I am aware that many of my Christian readers warn me against it. But at the same time, it is hard completely to ignore a discipline — especially the more complex, sophisticated Vedic version — that has been informing leaders for 3500 years. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius, was in 1777 and 1778 — transformational years for all of humanity, and especially for the West.

Or — perhaps this palpable shift is not the result of movement of the planets. Perhaps the shift is “ not in our stars but in ourselves”, as Shakespeare put it in The Life and Death of Julius Caesar.

Could this shift be a result of prayer and repentance? Could God simply be relenting?

If you read the Hebrew Bible, this shift in human history is in alignment with God’s pattern, and indeed with His “management style”.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God will simply give up on what had been a chosen group of people, weary at last of their utter fecklessness and their stubborn resistance to His simple moral requests. Disaster will loom.

But at the last minute, either the people’s prayer and repentance, or the pleadings and virtuous actions of just a few righteous men and women or even of just one righteous leader, will stay His hand, or lead Him to create a way forward for the people who choose Him, and for His people of the future.

This approach of God’s saved Noah and his family after the human disobedience that led to the Flood (Genesis 6-9). God saved some, not all, of the Children of Israel after their collective disobedience at the foot of Mt Sinai in worshipping the Golden Calf (Exodus 32); and so on, time after time.

So — have we, Americans, and maybe even the West, and maybe even the world — been saved from the brink? Have we been given a typical-of-YHWH, if reluctant, second chance?

It kind of feels that way.

Again, I am not just talking about human politics here.

President Trump, of course, has any number of human flaws. But my classical and Biblical education has made it impossible for me to look at recent events without seeing a manifestation of deep archetypes.

We are all at this moment, it seems, both ordinary mortals, and also participants, whether we welcome this or not, in great archetypal battles.

It is impossible not to see the classical Hero's Journey — what author and teacher Joseph Campbell in his classic analysis of mythologies, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, saw as the central mythological narrative arc — in what brought President Trump to power again, and indeed in what brought all of us to this moment:

The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward […] intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).

The Hero With A Thousand Faces

I feel as if that narrative arc describes the past four years. We were all brought into the nadir of darkness. We were all forced to look at evil intimately, to feel it in and around us, intimately.

Did we align with it, or succumb to it?

Did we resist it, in a battle almost to the death?

We were all severely tested. Some of us made it back to the everyday world with new blessings; others did not, and are now being pursued in various ways by the Fates, or by what might be called Karma, or Nemesis.

Even recent political history seems to have an archetypal or mythological dimension.

Did President Trump survive at least two assassination attempts (and no doubt others of which we have not heard) by his own agency alone? Did he impossibly turn his head from a sniper’s bullet at a critical moment, by chance alone?

Remember, according to merely human planning, President Trump was supposed to be dead by now.

The Fates, of course, or Karma, or Nemesis, had other plans.

Did a conspiracy among one set of DNC insiders to unseat President Biden, fall apart in messy, Shakespearean infighting? Did one legal case after another against President Trump, collapse? Are these cases still weirdly collapsing?

Did the Democratic Presidential candidate say, to Christian students who shouted such things as “Christ is King”, “ “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally […] No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street”?

Did she really say that?

As a former political consultant, I can tell you that that response from a candidate is so very wrong, so bad, so dumb, that it borders on a metaphysical manifestation.

Did her campaign categorically fail to attain any momentum after that? Was she simply unable to come back after that?

You look at the timeline. You tell me.

Did one of President Trump’s most adamant supporters, survive prison — literal banishment to the netherworld — and emerge, in Joseph Campbell-esque fashion, asserting greater strength than he had before?

President Trump was supposed to be dead by now; Steve Bannon was supposed to be broken.

But the DNC were not reading their Bibles, or their classics.

As in the scene in The Odyssey in which Odysseus returned in disguise to his home in Ithaca, to terrorize and ultimately to destroy the corrupt suitors of his wife Penelope — men who had disrespected his house and family and, worst of all, the larger moral order, and who had assumed that Odysseus was lost — real-life narratives unfolded differently than the DNC had planned.

Odyssey 22 makes clear that the suitors “having [had] no fear of the gods, who hold broad heaven” was what brought ruin and retribution — “the cords of destruction” — upon them:

“Then with an angry glance from beneath his brows Odysseus of many wiles answered them: “Ye dogs, ye thought that I should never more come home from the land of the Trojans […] having no fear of the gods, who hold broad heaven, nor of the indignation of men, that is to be hereafter. Now over you one and all have the cords of destruction been made fast.” So he spoke, and thereat pale fear seized them all, and each man gazed about to see how he might escape utter destruction.”

Steve Bannon came back, to wield his platform like a weapon, and to warn the agents of chaos, who had trusted in their own human powers, about coming retribution.

Most importantly of all, did American citizens themselves rise up to do their duty by their country at last? Did they finally show their collective “agency”, Bannon’s favorite word?

Did they photograph and document their ballots, as we at DailyClout had urged them to do, wherever it was legal (and we posted a map to help them understand the legalities)?

Did they photograph and videotape anomalies at their polling places — and alert grassroots watchdogs put in place since the last, now clearly proved to have been stolen, Presidential election?

They did. By the thousands.

In other words, ordinary citizens also stepped up to take on their own Heroes’ Journeys. They also stepped up and battled the forces of darkness.

I am persuaded, knowing the Democratic establishment as I do, that massive cheating was planned by the DNC, for Election Day. I believe it was to be secured via the machine-readable code that we identified that was printed along the perimeter of many ballots that were sent in to our Election Integrity database at DailyClout. Dozens of ballots we received had this machine-readable perimeter — especially ballots from swing states, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

As we demonstrated on videos we produced on Election Day (my own ballot in New York State had that machine code on the perimeter) — and as our developer explained — the algorithm in the voting machines, which is proprietary and secret, can read that code any way it is programmed to do.

In other words, you can fill out whatever you wish in the circles on your machine-read paper ballot; but if that paper ballot has the machine code around the perimeter, and if the program in the machine is instructed to read that perimeter code rather than your selection in the filled-in circles, it will read the code and ignore your filled-in circles.

Here is my Election Day video of a Democratic poll watcher explaining that he has no idea what the barcode means and that the software code that reads it is “proprietary.”

Knowing the DNC as I do, I am convinced that there were people in place designated to cheat widely, using this and other methodologies; but, as citizens exposed anomalies such as these and others in real time, those assets lost courage and peeled away.

So I think we can conclude, this Thanksgiving, that we partnered with Fate, or with “the gods”, or with God Himself, by taking our Heroes’ and Heroines’ Journeys — resisting passivity; and by showing our “agency”, at last, as a collective chosen people, against the forces of darkness.

We beat the darkness back with God’s help.

At least for now.

And that is everything for which we should be thankful today.

*****

What we almost lost is more than a partisan victory. (And let me stress that being on the right side of history is a moral, and not a partisan, matter; this group of leaders, now victorious, can lose the moral high ground in an instant.)

What we almost lost is the sense of civilization itself.

What does it mean to be civilized? To be not-animals? To be not-demons?

The appointment of Dr Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH — the agency which funds most of “the science” in America and also in many other countries — is causing joy among people from all walks of life. There are many reasons. But one has to do with people’s sense that this appointment is a vote for more than just accurate science; it is a vote toward rebuilding a civilized norm again.

I am proud to say that I know Dr Bhattacharya a bit, and that Brian and I would like to call him a friend. I understand from that acquaintanceship, I think, the larger dimensions of this sense of celebration.

In a video that Google has now erased from search, I interviewed Dr Bhattacharya in early 2021, from my fellowship berth at Great Barrington Declaration convener Jeffrey Tucker’s then-stronghold, the American Institute for Economic Research, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Dr Bhattacharya explained that millions of children in the developing world will starve to death due to “lockdowns”, if they continue, and that low-income kids in the US will lose academic time that they will never be able, in their entire lives ahead, to regain. Of course, in every detail, he and the other Great Barrington Declaration signatories were correct.

The Dr Francis Collinses and Dr Anthony Faucis of the world were trafficking then in what they knew were pernicious lies.

Dr Collins also sent emails — again, Google has deleted most of the historical record of this — encouraging the destruction of the reputations of this Stanford professor of public health, along with those of his co-signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Dr Sunetra Gupta of Oxford.

I pressed Dr Bhattacharya to tell me why he was willing to endure so much personally: to be attacked and smeared at the direction of then-NIH leader Dr Collins; why he chose to face censorship and opprobrium. A tenured faculty member at Stanford, Dr Bhattacharya did not have to do this; he had nothing to gain and everything, in human terms, to lose.

After I had pestered him quite a bit, he conceded quietly and modestly, something like, “I am a Christian.”

In other words, he could not do otherwise.

Now — he has Dr Francis Collins’ former job.

This script, surely, goes beyond human, professionally-satisfactory, meme-worthy outcomes.

This reversal of fortune is, again, classical or Biblical; certainly, archetypal; Matthew 20:18: “So the last shall be first, and the first last”.

This “reversal script”, with its beautiful, symmetrical upendings, could have been written by Moses, or spoken by Homer; or penned, with divine afflatus, by William Shakespeare.

The widespread joy attending Dr Bhattacharya’s appointment, again is more, I would say, than a political or careerist happiness. It is a larger, even metaphysical, sigh of relief.

Science matters. Science is the purely secular unwinding of material reality.

But science is also, to many of us, the interpretation of God’s speech and method within His creation. And for everyone serious, secular or religious, the search for a Platonic Truth that underlies the scientific method, is also a metaphysical search, one that valorizes the idea of an impartial, transcendent Truth.

The perversions of science and of the scientific method that we have seen for the past four years, are also attempted perversions of the very nature of reality and of its interpretation.

This perversion of science is an alignment with the darkest of forces; it is the handing over of Creation, and of the human search for its deepest laws, to the Father of Lies.

Perverting the scientific method and ignoring or misrepresenting objective evidence, betray the very principle of truth and the very motive of truth-seeking which underlie our Western and post-Enlightenment ideals.

When scientists abandon the truth — objective evidence itself — as their guiding star, what is left to the rest of us but chaos?

So again, Dr Bhattacharya is an ordinary, if very gifted, human being; but he is, weirdly, as so many of us are these days, also part of an inexplicable dramatic allegory.

His leadership represents a return not just to scrupulous methodology, but to an aspect of a larger civilized moral order.

#####

Finally, this brings us full circle: to Thanksgiving.

Yesterday we shopped and cleaned. We cooked.

Today, if we are lucky, we welcome friends and loved ones and we are grateful that we have enough, if not more than enough, to eat.

We give thanks for material abundance.

But I think celebrations such as these, lead us to be aware as well that we are civilized; we are part of a moral order; families and communities and societies predicated not on bestiality, on murder, on mutual exploitation, on trafficking of one another, as in the last four years; but on dignity and decency and grace; on recognizing the face of God in one another.

So it is not just about being thankful to have enough food, today. It also about being thankful that we have — a civilization.

Again.

We can be thankful that we are not sitting on the floor, eating with our hands (this degradation was actually forced upon schoolchildren in Canada, during the “pandemic”).

We are not beasts, eating from a trough. We light candles. We say a brachah, or we say grace.

We eat. But we also offer to clear the table.

We drink. But we also listen to the stories of the elders — for the tenth time, perhaps, patiently, even if we know exactly how they will end.

We tell the big ones stories of when they were littler. We take picture of the little ones for them to enjoy, and to help them remember, when they are bigger. We may not all be here together again, next year. We try to remember to cherish one another.

Hopefully, we reconnect with one another, despite demon-helper Joy Reid; and hopefully, we heal from the horrific divisions of the past four years.

Hopefully, before the day is done, we will hug one another goodbye: human warmth to human warmth, woven together again in our hearts, against the chill outside.

William Butler Yeats, in his poem “The Second Coming,” spoke about “the blood-dimmed tide” being loosed to drown “the ceremony of innocence.”

That was what they wanted for us — the evildoers whom we scarcely, and only just now, seem to have defeated.

The last four years have been about the intentional destruction of ceremonies of innocence — including holidays — “holy days”; because those are at the core of civilized human society.

Poet Denise Levertov’s The Mutes describes the degradation of the human:

“Life after life after life goes by

without poetry

without seemliness,

without love.”

#####

They tried to turn us into animals, into demons.

They did not ultimately succeed.

Poetry, seemliness, love —

Science, truth, kindness —

Happy Thanksgiving.

Let us reclaim them all.