[Daemonic Dispatches] • In the Republican presidential primary debate in South Carolina, only two of the ten candidates (John McCain and Ron Paul) repudiated torture. Prompted by Fox News moderator Brit Hume’s positing of a “ticking-bomb” scenario, Rudy Giuliani said interrogators should “use every method they can think of” to get information. The audience applauded wildly, in a chilling gesture that seemed to suggest that many contemporary Americans are happy to have torture performed in their name.
Torture has a long history on this Turtle Island continent. Centuries before the KKK employed torture in its terror arsenal, and before the CIA’s School of the Americas spread the gospel of torture around the globe, Columbus, Cortes, Cartier, Champlain, and other early European visitors to North America left vivid accounts of native rituals of human torture — along with sometimes introducing their own practices of torture. Historians and anthropologists invariably describe European torture as a method to extract information or to inflict punishment, while native peoples are seen to have utilized torture as part of elaborate religious rituals aimed at gaining spiritual power.
Though Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto recently brought attention to the horrors of Mayan torture practices, their neighbors the Mexica (or “Aztec” as they were mistakenly called after Alexander von Humboldt introduced the term in 1810) could be said to have “industrialized” torture, in the century or so before Cortes and the conquistadores arrived in Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Mexica empire. Popular explanations of Mexica heart sacrifice, which was unmistakeably a form of ritual torture, continue to suggest that the Mexica priests tore out the beating hearts from their victims “to ensure that the Sun would continue to rise.” To be fair, this myth can be traced back to the architect of the modern Mexican empire, Tlacaelel, who in 1428 destroyed all the ancient manuscripts, simultaneous with the creation of a new mythology, and a new cultural motivation — the “Flower Wars,” which provided the rationale for both Mexican imperial expansion and ritual torture and sacrifice. The Mexica proudly claimed the ancient Toltec (ca. 700 – 1100 AD) as their ancestors, and the Toltec also practiced ritual torture.
Sacred texts the world over teach that demons feed on fear, and there are few human actions that generate as much fear as torture. When the revelations about the torture practices by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib first appeared, I wondered about the occult dimension of these crimes: was it possible that the same demons who fed on the horrors conducted in Saddam’s prison were now being fed by the “interrogators” of the occupying “coalition forces.” Might they even have helped to inspire the barbaric treatment of detainees?
But the cruel laughter and applause of the audience in South Carolina suggests that we must look closer to home for a history of haunting related to torture. Demons pay no heed to nation or party or politics, and their lust for the black nectar of fear is immortal; they can wait for centuries for new allies to bring them their longed-for nourishment. In 1916, in Dornach, Switzerland, Rudolf Steiner gave a series of lectures entitled “Inner Impulses of Evolution,” in which he describes –from his reading of the Akashic Chronicle– a set of black magical mystery practices in ancient Mexico, during the first century AD.
Steiner’s lectures are extraordinary first and foremost for the light they shed on North American history in relation to world history, but they also are particularly helpful for anyone attempting to understand the deeper, daimonic implications of America’s contemporary countenancing of torture. Steiner suggests that the heart (and stomach) sacrifice executed by the Toltecs allowed them to seize upon the violently extracted etheric heart forces, to steal future secrets from out of the etheric realm. The Toltec priests aimed at nothing less than hijacking the entire goal of Earth evolution. Steiner tells a jaw-dropping tale of how this hijacking was averted, but of course, the subsequent history of America — the dramatic rise of the Mexica empire and its culture of death– suggest that the black magical rite of torture still had full demonic sponsorship on Turtle Island.
Today, a full five centuries after Mexica bloodletting was curtailed by the arrival of the conquisadores, it appears that the ancient demons who inspired and directed the Toltec and then their Mexica descendants have a firm grip on new proxies to do their bidding. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and Gonzalez do not wield the instruments of torture themselves, but they are themselves instruments of even darker, more powerful adversaries. We Turtle Island inhabitants would do well to consider what new secrets are being ripped unlawfully from out of the etheric, and who the “candidates” are who are directing this. . .