by William Skink

There’s this post I’ve been trying to write for awhile now, but every time I start it I get a few sentences in, then trash it. I can’t seem to find a way to articulate the direction my recent reading has taken me.

Instead of jumping in to the books I’ve been consuming, I’m going to start with The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance, a prequel to the 1982 movie currently running on Netflix.

For those unfamiliar with Jim Henson’s puppet wizardry, here’s a brief description of the world Henson created–called Thra–and the creatures that inhabit it:

The native species of Thra include a multitude of critters and beasts, giant worms and flying stingrays, adorable Podlings and, most important of all, the Gelfling. These vaguely humanoid creatures are the primary species of Thra. Seven clans of Gelfling exist, scattered about the world—in its deserts and caves, its deep forests and shining cities, even out on its glimmering seas.

But then, two thousand trine ago, the Skeksis came to Thra. This bird-like alien species fled their own planet and came to Thra, where they tricked its guardian, Aughra (Donna Kimball) to leave the Crystal of Truth under their protection. They gave her a device that allowed her to send her spirit out into the universe, to travel the stars while she slept. And while she slept, they began to draw upon the power of the Crystal of Truth, slowly corrupting it until it became . . . The Dark Crystal.

They also subjugated the Gelfling and other species of Thra, bending them to their will and titling themselves the Lords of the Crystal. By the time the story picks up, pretty much all the Gelfling revere and worship the Skeksis as something akin to gods. They serve as their guards and pay inordinate tithes. The Podlings do the more menial labor, and so a sort of caste system exists, with the deplorable, hideous, disgusting Skeksis at the very top, led by their cruel Emperor.

One of the main protagonists, Rian, witnesses his friend drained of her very essence at the beginning of the series. The Skeksis eagerly consume this essence to maintain their supposed immortality. This incident is such an atrocious contradiction of everything the Gelfling have been taught to believe about their lords that the initial struggle for Rian is to survive long enough for him to directly communicate what he witnessed through a sharing of memories called dreamfasting.

Right now I feel exactly like Rian, but without the ability to effectively share what I think is happening in the world today, in part because I can’t find language that avoids figurative landmines. You’ll know what I mean by that by the end of this.

In Thra the planetary imbalance created by the Skeksis is called the darkening. Deep down I feel something like that is happening here, but terms like climate change don’t come anywhere close to getting at the underlying imbalance and how to address it.

The language problem I am having is echoed in the strategy of 1984:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

An oppressive power structure doesn’t need to disappear words to maintain control, some words and terms can be so loaded with baggage that they become weaponized. Obviously the term conspiracy theory comes to mind.

A term that keeps coming up in the books I’m reading, books like Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry and Rabbit Hole by survivor David Shurter, is Satantic Ritual Abuse. That term alone will get most people to shut down, stop listening, walk away. Keep talking about this kind of stuff, and you’ll just look like a crank.

Even if people do accept the possibility of SRA being a real thing, the scope that starts coming into focus the more one researches this topic is incredibly difficult to accept. To go further and assert that Luciferianism is a commonly shared spiritual belief among the 1%, and that it produces actual results in terms of acquiring power, well…are YOU still reading?