ISIS: abject and sacrilegious liturgy of evil

(To Alessandro Ghinassi)
09/08/16

Interviewed, Adel's mother, the murderer of the priest from Rouen, an integrated lady even though a believer and a practitioner but not particularly fervent, released some sentences that explained the attitude of her nineteen-year-old son before the attacks: he said that Adel had been another person for some time, he spoke with expressions that did not belong to him and appeared to be bewitched.

A phrase that obviously says nothing and much less resolves the problem, and that we always find in the traits of fanaticism even political, however it is useful for me to address an argument that our contemporary society, which tends to be rationalist, no longer knows how to grasp . 
But to make a minimum of reasoning about the anthropological aspects of the IS and how these are pernicious in the crisis of the West, I need to introduce some basic concepts: that of "ritual" and that of "communion".

In all religions the ritual is a moment in which the faithful, through recited formulas and the dramatization of an event, recognize themselves in the communion of the faithful.
Formulas can be linguistic like prayer or chants, or movement like kneeling or processions, while the dramatization of an event can relate to a historical or collective event such as a saint pouring water from the stone and saving thirsty children. 
It is often the main figure of religion that is represented in dramatic form. In Christianity there is the death and resurrection of Jesus, in the Jewish religion it is the entire people of Israel who live the eternal drama of the diaspora and persecution. In Buddhism there is the death and the ascent of the Buddha and so on.

In ancient religions we can remember the death and resurrection of Osiris or Mithras, not to mention the Greek-Roman religion from which all Western dramaturgy developed.

The ritual therefore makes us experience a dramatization of something and leads us to focus attention on the divinization of that something, in the proper sense of the term (deification literally means to attribute to someone or something divine powers because it is transcended, it has gone beyond reality). The faithful of a religion join together if they live the same ritual and the same dramatization. This means that in part (obviously) the difference between the various religions can be taken starting from the rituals and dramatizations that are practiced there. A Catholic Christian knows that even if he goes to the Philippines or Chicago, he finds (or could find) the ritual in which he identifies himself, and knows that he can live with the Filipino or the American who sits (or could sit) close by to be in Catholic "communion" with him.

The IS leaders know these things very well, you can see how they use the symbols, and they are doing the reverse operation. That is, the IS is establishing a new "communion" of the faithful by making mass "rites" by calling to themselves new believers, also skilfully exploiting the media. Faithful in certain aspects unaware because manipulated by a religion in some respects new and unexpected. Of course, the root is Islamic radical and takes advantage of the pre-existing symbols and words of Islam, but if you study Sufism, the ancient Shiite or Sunni events you notice that we are facing a different phenomenon, an Islam that does not start from zero but that is new (although in some respects ancient) compared to what was there previously.

The use of the "ritual slaughter" to reach a communion of the faithful, in the Judeo-Christian culture was abandoned in the pre-Israelite age. In the book of Genesis, reference is made to everything that preceded the birth of the people of Israel, considering the birth of the people of Israel with the arrival in the holy land following the escape from Egyptian slavery.

In Genesis we find the story of Isaac and Abraham (Genesis 15-35), in short, Abraham had to slaughter Isaac to pay homage to the Most High, but Jahve decides to spare Isaac's life and make Abraham a saint in life.

Let us now leave out the fundamental anthropological aspects of the story of Isaac, let's limit ourselves only to saying that in antiquity (about 1000-500 years BC) it was normal to sacrifice living forms, that is "blood" towards the divinities, because Man was a slave to nature and afraid of what he could not control and his dramatization towards the sacred was total, as was life in nature total. In the blood ritual the dramatization is total, there is no fiction, there is no fake cross that reminds us of the true passion of Christ, there are no fake arrows that pierce the design of the body of St. Sebastian, there is it's real pain, real blood, with all the emotional impact that goes with it.

It must be clear, the IS uses these rituals in the most distorted way possible and with a purpose that is sacrilegious (understood precisely as: one who steals sacred things) but the ritual thus obtained achieves the same results.

Adel's mother says he was "as bewitched". Yes it was, in the sense that he had already been called to the communion of holy war on a "religious" and archetypal level to use a Jungian term, as the Pied Piper calls to himself the mice. It is not - in my opinion - a case that in recent times the attackers are emotionally fragile and therefore easily suggestible. It also turns out that the contact with the terrorist organization is fleeting, reduced to the minimum essential or in any case reduced over time, this means that the bomber was already "emotionally" ready, already enmeshed, even if he did not know or did not he was conscious to the point of sling, and whoever contacted him with little was able to "bewitch him" permanently and make him ready for martyrdom.

The "communion" with the holy war is obviously not achieved only with the blood ritual, propaganda sites are needed, messages against the decadent and immoral West, it is necessary to rely on the frustration of the misfits and the marginalized (marginalized in the broadest sense , who have problems with social relations) and then surely with the final contact and the availability of money, arms and supply chain.

It is a set of techniques if we want, but extremely pernicious because the West does not seem to see the problem at 360 ° degrees and focuses attention only on military and logistic aspects, at the limit understands propaganda and counter propaganda, but less the mystical ones .