“And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” - Matthew 11:12 (NKJV)
“To assert that there is nothing to be gained by seeking out the function and origin of ritual is to say that the language of religion is destined to remain forever a dead letter, a kind of gibberish — cleverly codified, perhaps, but devoid of any real meaning.” — René Girard, Violence and the Sacred
Depp v. Heard: Violence in the Blindness of Modernity
At the time of writing, the Virginia defamation trial of the celebrity actor Johnny Depp against his ex-wife actress Amber Heard for her allegations of domestic and sexual abuse published in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed has garnered global attention, with the case recently having been submitted to the jury for final deliberation. The short-lived relationship between the pair seems to have been punctured with excessive levels of drug use at its best and a sordid, twisted violence rife with hatred and emotional wounds at its worst. The tumultuous denouement of the marriage of the high-profile couple has become a show of its own, in a phenomenon that Russell Brand named “celebrity eating itself.”
The now well-publicized violence between Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard, evidence of which lies strewn across numerous audio recordings, text messages, and photographs, illustrates many issues of modernity, but one stands out above all, and that is the insistence of modernity on ignoring fundamental laws of human nature against all evidence to the contrary.
At the opening of Du contrat social, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, “L’homme est né libre et partout il es dans les fers.” Lines like these gave birth to entire schools of thought in modernity that restrictive institutions like religion, culture, and the state were binding to man, and that this man was free, Matrix-style, to “unplug” from these invisible prisons and at last become a self-determined being, free from chains, only to his own liberty and will bound. This notion of a free, self-determined man who can dispense with religion (and its shameful undercurrent of the lower classes) without consequence is a key tenet of understanding the perspective of the moderns. God is not just dead: He is unnecessary.
However, the telling picture shown above, in which Mr. Depp lies prone in a stretcher, his finger severed in the aftermath of a violent altercation with Ms. Heard, merits a closer look at its context. While no one familiar with Mr. Depp and the aura around him would hazard a guess that he is a Watchtower-carrying Jehovah’s Witness, he has spoken on the record with statements that suggest he does not align with any religious tradition, including in one interview with Larry King given around the time that Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard began their now-infamous relationship:
LARRY KING: "Do you have faith?"
DEPP: "Yes. I have faith in my kids. And I have — I have faith, you know, that as long as you keep moving forward, just keep walking forward, things will be all right, I suppose, you know. Faith in terms of religion, I don't. Religion is not my specialty, you know."—Interview, "Larry King Live" (Oct. 16, 2011) (via The Freedom from Religion Foundation)
To an outside observer sizing up Mr. Depp in the early 2010s, he might seem the epitome of the liberated man: a man whose considerable wealth, cachet, and fame gave him license to operate beyond the bounds of the law and religion, with unlimited access to designer drugs, together with a fresh-faced new blonde from Texas dangling off his arm.
But, one ex-wife, a lifetime’s career, millions of dollars spent on lawyers on either side of an ocean, and one severed finger later may suggest otherwise.
The Pagan Wisdom of Megan Fox
One wonders about an alternate universe of the Depp-Heard relationship, a universe in which Ms. Heard befriended and embraced the lessons of fellow starlet Megan Fox. Ms. Fox caught some attention recently, when she casually mentioned in an interview with the U.K.’s Glamour magazine that she and her fiancé, the rapper Machine Gun Kelly, regularly “drink each other’s blood.” She quickly clarified that it was “for ritual purposes.”
Nor does Ms. Fox’s Instagram does not shy away from these topics: while the photos she posts of herself and Mr. MGK are often enticing and at times even shocking, what is more interesting is Ms. Fox’s commentary, which provides insight into how she understands their relationship. In the caption to one photo of the couple (mimetically looking at themselves on a phone while snapping the photo in front of a mirror), she includes two knife emojis surrounding a black heart emoji. In another caption accompanying a GQ Style magazine cover in which Fox holds a handgun close in the vicinity of Mr. MGK’s reproductive organs (a subtle reference to the controlled violence of their highly sexualized relationship), she notes that they are in "the throes of a torrid, solar flare of a romance” that features “guns,” “lots of blood,” “binding rituals,” and “the kind of sex that would make Lucifer clutch his rosary.”
To engage in such violent acts and even drink each other’s blood “for ritual purposes only” is hardly a modern thing to do. Modernist-Rationalist-New Atheists would shudder at the barbaric, primitive nature of such rituals. “Don’t these people understand that drinking each other’s blood doesn’t do anything, other than introduce a vector for disease to enter the body?” one could imagine the M.R.N.A. arguing. Moderns are attached to odd narratives about human nature, seeming to see humanity as somewhat improved because it has jettisoned the need for the prison of religion, so that we can all watch Real Time with Bill Maher and sip our fair-trade sourced coffee inside streamlined interiors as we clickety-clack away on our Surfaces. There’s no need for something as savage and uneducated as blood rituals, the moderns exclaim as they clutch their diplomas. We have science.
However, moderns are ill-informed in this as they are in many things. In their addiction to science and rationality (themes that can only be explored in depth because of Christianity), they fail to realize the supra-rational, the elements of survival encoded into the human frame that allowed humans to exist in groups successfully for so long. Religion is one of these codes.
Unlike Ms. Fox, who regularly references in her public life her own neo-pagan practices, Ms. Heard does not seem to have professed any religion. Her public comments indicate that she was raised Catholic but turned atheist as a teen, around which time she discovered the works of the atheist Ayn Rand. “Ever since then,” she told USA Today in 2007, “I have been obsessed with her ideals. All I've ever needed is myself.”
Indeed, none of the audio or text messages that have emerged from the torrid trial of Depp v. Heard have reference to God or religion, outside of using the Deity’s Name as a swear word, let alone references to crystals and chakra-cleansing, neither of which one can imagine remotely in the vicinity of the formidable Ms. Heard. It’s reasonable to assume from the available evidence that the duration of the Depp-Heard relationship was not marked by any particular religious fervor, and was relatively modern in its character.
And therein lies the problem. The crystal-wielding Ms. Fox, with her blood-drinking “for ritual purposes only,” seems to have far outsmarted Ms. Heard, for whom Atlas Shrugged has not served so faithful a guide through the travails of intimate relationships. René Girard might well say of Ms. Heard:
“Because modern man clings to the belief that knowledge is in itself a ‘good thing,’ he grants little or no importance to a procedure, such as the one involving the surrogate victim, that only serves to conceal the existence of man’s violent impulses.” — Violence and the Sacred
In an intriguing review of this interview, professional rad-trad Catholic author and YouTuber Dr. Taylor Marshall, who constantly asserts his desire to return to “old-time religion,” circles shockingly close to the theory of the sacrificial mechanism.
Dr. Marshall notes that Ms. Fox and Mr. MGK are “feeding off not the life-giving blood of Jesus Christ, but feeding off one another.” He highlights that, “all pre-Christian societies […] all their rituals, their magic, was related to blood, centered on blood. Even the ancient Jews, as they practiced the true religion instituted by Moses and Aaron, it was a religion of blood atonement.”
“For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” — Leviticus 17:11 (KJV)
Dr. Marshall correctly notes that this predisposition to a “blood religion” is why “Protestantism doesn’t really make sense,” because it lacks the “blood,” as Protestantism has historically de-emphasized the Eucharistic meal. Further: “What Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly are doing […] is witchcraft. They’re doing ritual magic.” However, Dr. Marshall fails to pick up on the effect of this “ritual magic,” approaching it only as some sort of demonic influence and infestation (which it is), but does not appreciate its salutary effects, which is why sacrifice has emerged among multiple cultures and endured, even in ameliorated forms, throughout millennia. Sacrificial mechanisms, like them or not, exist because they work.
It’s clear that Ms. Fox and Mr. MGK have controlled their violence through the use of neo-pagan rituals, defining clearly set apart times for shedding each other’s blood and drinking it. She tells Glamour: “I do rituals on new moons and full moons, and all these these things. And so, when I do it, it’s a passage or it is used for a reason,” and also notes that their relationship is “a very intense relationship, and it’s cyclical, so it gets to these points where, like, we have to do cleansings.”
As she notes, it appears that Ms. Fox and Mr. MGK engage in rituals for “cleansing” when the relationship gets “intense,” perhaps after a time of high conflict. Conducting the sacrificial rite cyclically allows for the relationship to resettle, for the wheel to turn again as it always does in pagan practices. Compare that practice with the evidence available from the relationship of Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard: text messages that read, “Let’s not fight again,” or audio recordings in which the couple plead with each other that neither wants to fight, and weakly assert that they will never have such an intense, physical fight again, very shortly before they do. Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard certainly seemed to have wanted for some mutual blood drinking, and perhaps on some level they each held for the other a kind of love-hate so deep that they actually wanted the other person to bleed out. The lack of a functional sacrificial valve in the relationship may be the very reason that the violence between them never seemed to end, and quickly rushed to consume the entire relationship, the low point of which seems to have been Mr. Depp writing messages to his wife on a mirror sometime around the window of time at which his finger became severed (the account of the severance remains in dispute in Depp v. Heard).
While of course, Instagram is not reality, it is remarkable to compare the photographs that have emerged from the relationship of Ms. Fox and Mr. MGK to those from Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard. As Dr. Marshall highlights from Leviticus, “the life is in the blood.” To act as if violence is not truly inherent to human nature, and to fail to appreciate the need for rituals that address this, is to waltz right over a deadly trapdoor.
The pagan wisdom of Megan Fox recognizes, even if not consciously, that humans are deeply wired to violence. She also expertly — even if unconsciously — picks up on the cyclical nature of violence that ties in perfectly with the pagan rituals constructed around this cycle. Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return has some truth to it, even down to a relationship the ebbs and flows of which can be at least somewhat determined by the hormonal experiences of both partners.
In contrast, moderns fail to appreciate the deep-seated nature of human violence, and certainly fail to appreciate all the social constructs that have emerged to contain this unspoken known.
But the extremely short-lived arc of the modern world is evidence enough that humans may not be wired for long-term success in the cold scientific materialism that modernism brings. Humans are violent: this is inescapable. While this violence can certainly be alleviated to some degree, it is still ever-present. Humans are wired to violence with or without air conditioning, Twitter, or Starbucks. In the past, humans have mediated the problems of violence through religion, through ritual and sacrifice. Modernity, again only made possible by Christianity, swept all that away and Christianity along with it. But religion is coming back in style, and the moderns, who have no meaningful alternative to offer, may find themselves quite literally consumed.
These Violent Delights
To look at Depp v. Heard is to shudder at the idea of intimate romantic relationships, an experience not unlike gazing upon a pile of regurgitated and partially-digested filet mignon smeared in stomach acid. If we are to pursue a life with an intimate partner in spite of this, and eager to avoid the outcome of Depp v. Heard, why should we not all take a page out of Ms. Fox’s Instagram and begin regular shared blood-drinking rituals with our intimate partners timed around the cycles of the moon?
The deeply real and disturbing aspects of trying to out-Lucifer Lucifer aside, Ms. Fox’s neo-pagan sacrifice is still sacrifice. Ms. Fox and Mr. MGK are still practicing the shedding and consuming of blood, and even if they are both consenting to it, this very act takes its core root in human sacrifice: it is a ritual founded on the sacrifice of an innocent. While Fox-MGK, unlike Depp-Heard, have taken measures to regularly ameliorate any brewing tensions of their romantic relationship with blood-drinking rituals, they are still practicing a form of violence. Their controlled violence acts as a vaccine against larger eruptions in the relationship, but anyone who practices violence even ritually — outside the very specific context of the Christian Eucharist about which I will discuss later — runs the very real risk of something going awry, and the violence leaving the lab to bring a plague on the entirety of the relationship. It may sound overly cute in its phrasing, but according to the Violence Policy Center, approximately 50% of all females murdered by males in the U.S. in 2019 were or had been in a romantic relationship with the man who murdered them, so the risk of violence in a romantic relationship going awry, for both partners, is considerable. We will fervently pray for the conversion of Fox-MGK to the Holy Roman Church; to toy with neo-pagan rituals, especially in a modern and post-modern world that does not have meaningful support for it, runs a risk of an outcome worse than Depp v. Heard. To see your own partner’s blood regularly, to consume it and allow yourself to be consumed, is to practice a very dangerous form of violence that, once it has taken root, can quickly be scaled up.
Craving the Whiteness of Snow in a World that Sees Red
“Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood remains in Me, and I in him.” — John 6:56
Given the reality of human violence, we cannot fail to recognize it, like Depp-Heard, and run the risk of the violence overtaking and destroying the relationship. Nor do we wish to roleplay an Ann Rice novel ala Fox-MGK, knowing the risk that runs, too. Faced with the choices presented by modernity and neo-paganism, what alternative do we have?
James Alison explains at length the proper understanding of Jesus Christ’s saving work on the Cross at Calvary as fulfilling the ancient Jewish ritual of the Atonement. In this rite, after expiating his own sins with a sacrifice, the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, and donned a white robe:
From that point he would cease to be a human being and would become the angel, one of whose names was “the Son of God”. And he would be able to put on “the Name”, meaning “the name which could not be pronounced”, the Name of God. [...] The rite of atonement was about the Lord himself, the Creator, emerging from the Holy of Holies so as to set the people free from their impurities and sins and transgression. […] [It] was actually God who was doing the work, it was God who was coming out wanting to restore creation, out of his love for his people. And so it is God who emerges from the Holy of Holies dressed in white in order to forgive the people their sins and, more importantly, in order to allow creation to flow. […].
The priest emerged from that and then he came to the Temple Veil. The Temple Veil was made of very rich material, representing the material world, that which was created. At this point the high priest would don a robe made of the same material as the Veil, to demonstrate that what he was acting out was God coming forth and entering into the world of creation so as to make atonement, to undo the way humans had snarled up that creation. And at that point, having emerged, he would then sprinkle the rest of the temple with the blood that was the Lord.
Now, here’s the interesting point: for the Temple understanding the high priest at this stage was God, and it was God’s blood that was being sprinkled. This was a divine movement to set people free. This was not – as in our understanding – a priest satisfying a divinity. The reason why the priest had to engage in a prior expiation was because he was about to become a sign of something quite else: acting outwards. The movement is not inwards towards the Holy of Holies; the movement is outwards from the Holy of Holies.
So the priest would then come through the Veil – meaning the Lord entering into the world, the created world – and sprinkle all the rest of the Temple, hence setting it free. After which, as the person who was bearing the sins that had been accumulated, he places them on the head of what we call “the scapegoat”, Azazel, which would then be driven to the edge of the cliff and cast down, where it would be killed, so that the people’s sins would be taken away.
As Mr. Alison goes on, Christ becomes the high priest-divinity offering His own Blood to the bloodthirsty humans. The Christian ritual of the Eucharist enters into the reality of humans needing, by their very nature, to consume human flesh and drink human blood, to devour the body of the innocent: the dead and risen God who allows Himself to be given up. When we enter into this reality and recognize the full truth of our own violence together with the perfect remedy for it — consuming divinity itself in the Innocent Victim — it is only then that we can begin to resolve our own violence. The “Sunday obligation” imposed by the Roman Catholic Church, which requires Catholics to attend Mass each Sunday, allows the faithful to enter into a regular rhythm that helps reorder the human propensity to scapegoating violence. The faithful come to the altar, knowing their own guilt in tandem with the innocence of the victim that they are about to eat. Having consumed the Innocent Victim in full knowledge, our violence becomes more and more rightly ordered within ourselves, and we become more and more free to leave behind this problematic piece of our human puzzle to pursue something different — a communion of love that transmutes creation.
And maybe, one fine day, those once pagan and modern will find themselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder in that very same communion line, stepping toward the altar of atonement, humming with the choir that old-time hymn:
What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.