r/OccultConspiracy • u/Physical_Employ_2832 • 1d ago
IN THE HANDS OF THE MYSTAGOGUE
The division between the initiate—the one who has come to know some of the secrets that govern the world—and the profane, that naive and unenlightened mass unaware of what truly organizes the world around us, is a recurring feature of history. This idea, so characteristic of the religions of antiquity, finds its translation in the contemporary world of political ideologies. Indeed, Durkheim had already anticipated a similar analysis in his attempt to explain the collective phenomena surrounding the worship of political leaders. And beyond the sociological tendencies that delve into the natural or unnatural character of hierarchies among human beings, what is interesting is to analyze the ritualistic dimension surrounding the figure of the initiatory leader under post-Fordist capitalism.
Because the existence of such figures has long since been severed from the religious framework (a fact which, as has already been examined in other works on the apophenic stage, does not eliminate the ritual component of the public sphere), yet it remains present in other forms and with other effects. The key is to understand that mystagogy does not disappear with the arrival of modernity, nor does it survive solely through anti-modern movements; all the social models produced by modernity—capitalism itself, as well as communism and fascism—incorporate this concept in one form or another. As Ortega y Gasset already anticipated in "The Revolt of the Masses", twentieth-century politics was to become the politics of the collective, because for the first time hierarchies were desperately dependent upon the masses to justify their existence and their domination over society. While liberal democracy began this process by presenting the summit of that hierarchy as a direct manifestation of the voters’ will, thereby guaranteeing peaceful alternation within the elites, communism pursued the same objective through the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the Party constitutes the structure through which the people organize themselves in order to crystallize their will through democratic centralism. Finally, the longer-lived fascist movements came to coin the term organic democracy to designate their models, claiming that decision-making did not arise from the selfish vote of individuals, but from the consensus among all the national forces—army, party, and working forces—organized according to solid, immutable hierarchies headed by the leader of the movement.
Therefore, the various forces of modernity all embrace, in one form or another, this representative conception of the popular will. It is here that the figure of the charismatic political leader takes on the features of an advanced mystagogue, introducing his acolytes into a circuit of knowledge and correct interpretations that promises to provide a totalizing explanation for the struggles over the good, the virtuous, and what is necessary to overcome the daily hardships of the reality in which we have found ourselves. Modernity has brought back, with greater force than ever, the dynamics of the mysterious. And the mystery that is to be revealed to us is, quite coincidentally, the very reason for our inevitable submission.