Deathspell Omega - Imitatio Dei

How fondly we remember 1523 and the league of the Elect… tiny seeds that turn hundreds into the millions in the blink of an eye, as Man makes outstanding progress. Let’s sing to the memory of the league of the Elect! Let’s sing to seeds of hope and their harvests, they will shatter the core of the earth and make the heavens shiver in horror!

The only truly malignant evil is hope, we shall therefore fill the hearts of the masses with hope and ever more hope. The unspeakable shall then become a certainty.

As a whole, we shall prefer to take a shape that possesses neither depth nor demonic dimension. It can henceforth lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads on the surface, barely noticed, like a
fungus. The smaller and trivial the causes, the greater the magnitude of the consequences. Banality makes for a vague target whereas defiant greatness galvanizes opponents.

Our actions shall reveal their rotten cores only after meticulous peeling of layers and layers of benevolence.

The mere existence of conflicting opinions means that the Truth has yet to triumph. Diversity is an outrage, freedom of thought will be terminated. Everything is a lie but that which we feed you, believe me. If your thoughts collide with what we say, these thoughts can not be yours. We will rip your mouth open and stuff you with Truth, like a goose. The Truth will blossom in the end, be it over your swollen corpse.

The leader, the man whose feet you crave to lick, trembling in awe, shall be the personification of the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of a power that will purify the world, born to last a thousand years, and whose beloved infant, the new Man, shall be the end of all.

While we will pretend that there is but one leader, we will prepare a host of leaders, for every one of them is but one accident in a series. While the road is indeed straight, there is a multiplicity of them.

The roar of our flaming masses sounds like the voice of a God unleashed in fury. The face of the mass is as the face of the deep out of which, like God in times you are henceforth forbidden to speak about, we will bring forth a new world.

We shall conquer the World at first by mastering and spreading the Word; we shall discredit the powers that are and instil doubt everywhere with flamboyant derision.

We shall then fill our ranks with the fanatics, without whom there can be no new dawn, for they are masters of chaos and revel more in rubble than in blooming orchards.

Finally, we shall make room for men of action, the dams of entropy, the bearers of the Law; they shall provide infinite supply of opiates to the souls of the restless masses and a sweet lullaby.

We will demand you to speak and within yourself shall blossom the potential for demagogy; your mouth shall utter words that flatter the ego, words that will bring your audience into motion by befuddling their
minds. The seed to deception is within all of you, waiting for a fertile moment. We shall frame the world so as to make it a giant stage; the feverish gaze of thy contemporaries shall fill your mouth with ardour as you spit out the poison of the Atrax.

We will turn this world into a cemetery rather than not regenerate it our own way. We will clean out the marsh at all costs, make a clean slate from the old spectral world. We will cause a collective trauma that will
vomit out a magma upon which we could reach for the stars.

From the legion of those adrift to the legion of One, from lively chaos to sterile order, from life to death: what a triumph!

Year ∞
Our order shall be one banning self-sufficiency, installing an all encompassing dependence sanctioned by constant betrayal; you shall not even be entitled to your own thoughts, submission and misery are internally related. Our natural order is now equal with the highest possible Justice.

The naysayers will call the crowning achievement of our system omnipotence gone mad. The System does what it wants, break all the laws including those of reason. It is the beginning and the end, it is the
unrestrained exercise of power. Sheer randomness, even for a mere minute, would be a respite.

Both knowledge and penance shall be banned, the Liquid of Life flows from only one Source exclusively. The iron bones and diamant-made spines of our world grow from one nutrient exclusively. This intricate
maze shall look like bars and cages on the horizon and give you comfort and warmth of heart. The manifold and the unexpected rest in graves made sterile by acrid tears.

Good behavior and rewards shall be luminously connected, so that every one of you become masters at instrumentalizing charity within the System. Nothing ought to be disinterested, everything ought to happen
according to grades decided by those sitting in the chairs of the floor that scrapes the clouds. We shall preclude the possibility of morality and bury decency to the sound of bawdy songs.

Those who nourish the famished shall be left to starve. Those who heal the wounded shall be maimed. Those who console the lamenting souls shall be buried alive, their stomachs filled with ignominious larvae. Rats
shall feed on the eyes of those guilty of empathy towards their fellow men. That which is not our credo is not to be.

The standpoint of the Order is not the standpoint of men; its wisdom is incomparable; what may seem to be against your interests may be in fact the best means of realizing them; unlike the Order, we cannot judge
what is best for the whole.

We shall leave sufficient doubt about the Laws - or change them on a whim - so as to breed superstition, therefore turning adults into insecure, foolish children, stuttering panicked words of flattery and idolatry in a vain bid to tip the scales. We shall make sure that the smallest of your dreams is guaranteed to turn into a nightmare so that your thoughts never wander from the here and now. Today we protect, tomorrow we abandon you.

Behold the fatal process of human civilization, and let’s raise a glass as the hour of redemption has come.

Your revolt against meaningless suffering will not remain unanswered, we shall give you meaning and answers.

We shall inoculate you with revolutionary palingenesia, give you a taste of how today’s mass grave is always sweeter than yesterday’s; your eyes will shine with the ecstasy of the initiated.

We shall teach you that the bullet of the slave is not the same as the bullet of the oppressor and you shall bear that conviction high, dispensing blazing light to frail silhouettes wandering around in mazes they cannot break. The bloodshed that is to come shall happen in the name of love.

The hand dispensing salvific murder is absolved of responsibility for it is the expression of a common will, the sacrosanct will of the Just. The Just, those righteous few that rose from the catacombs, view the world in manichean terms: there is only the purity of love and the purity of hate, that which lies in between is a mud made of the ashes of yesterday’s humanity and the fetid fluids of compromise.

Primum Movens:
Nothing from the world of yore deserves to be preserved, every particle is infected and corrupt. The great cleansing shall take as long as necessary, for power exclusively stems from the gun barrel: on a glorious dawn, the odour of tear gas shall replace the scent of fresh-brewed coffee, the dust of crumbling buildings shall darken the horizon and fill your lungs as the sun reaches the zenith, victorious chants will resonate at dusk to the rhythm of cracking necks and the gunfire of mass executions. Behold the glorious beauty of unrestrained, fraternal compassion and love!

In the beginning, thou shalt segregate thyself from the impure and live in retreat in the catacombs of today, far away from temptation and deviant thought. Thou shalt nourish an ever increasing outrage, an indignation without end, a fire that feeds on fire: nothing shall be pure enough. Thou shalt relish every form of persecution; in the absence of persecution, thou shalt invent persecutions which will nourish the ever avid fires of frustration, paranoia shall be a most revered companion.

Doubt shall be met with death. Hesitation shall be met with death. Critical thought shall be met with death. The gift of mind shall be complete, failure yields annihilation. The gift of body shall be complete, failure yields annihilation. We will empty a barrel in your face so as to erase everything that you were, if you fail.

We shall ask you not to climb the small mountain but only the highest and most unattainable peaks, those that lie well beyond the horizon, those that no eyes ever saw. As you will rise above the fractured bones of your fallen brothers and sisters, we shall fill your heart with hope: at the very least, someone will be able to stand upon your own bones.

What is the present but a bridge between a glorious past and a glorious future? Those petty things in the here and now, how do they compare to our Holy Dead and our unborn Heroes? Should it come to your death - isn’t it but a token of appreciation, a mere toll on the path to Paradise?

The perfectibility of human nature is infinite: we shall therefore nurture infinite dreams with infinite amounts of blood. Failures are therefore successes and mere steps on the triumphant march towards bliss.

Here is a blessing for the Children of the Light, the harbingers of the Great Cleansing:

Your ability to ask the right questions shall be unequalled under this Sun, for you are our Children. Your answers, however, shall be fraught with imperfection, infected by the purulent rot of your vanity.

Here is a curse for the Children of the Light, the harbingers of the Great Cleansing:

You shall defiantly insist on absolute infallibility. Such hubris will cause pain of a magnitude unseen before, ridiculing all barbarian conquests throughout the ages hitherto.

We shall make you so impervious to the world that should all the Angels descend upon you and prove you wrong, you would simply shut your eyes and stop your ears, for they would not deserve to be either seen or heard. Our teachings shall shield you from the world and turn you into an island in dead waters with high cliffs and no coves.

The key to our doctrine shall be given only in the heavenly futures, those that lie beyond the boiling shores of struggle. Simple words shall be uttered, then placed in the midst of a tortuous maze, and rendered full of mystery.

The System is born, the System provides answers. You shall renounce to sincere understanding so as to gain absolute certainty. You will stand unmoved by the pleas of reason, knowing that within the heart lies the
conscience of the Order.

Thou shalt become a species that sooner dies than yields aught of that which it hath not yet.

We shall breed the brothers and sisters of Erysichthon, cursed with eternal hunger; the self has vanished in full and left behind nothing but a craving, jaws chewing forevermore on mangled pieces of nothing, devoid of nutrients. This breed will feel in league with eternity and its enemies will be plagued with the burden of opposing what seems to be inexorable fate.

Our world is stripped of wonder and hesitation for all things are happening according to that which is contained in our Book of Revelations. The road, while slippery with the blood of that which is Other, is straight.

We shall make you pray not only for your daily bread but also for your daily illusion, for nothing within the realms of the ordinary, that which once was, can relieve you; only a miracle would. You beg to drink the
sweet milk of imposture, moaning like newborn lambs.

We will make you unstable, like a chemical radical, deprived of inner balance. Your longing for belonging will become so great as to be insufferable, ending in your total surrender. You shall henceforth fight not with the white gloves of the gentleman, but without sentimentality.

This world contains neither meaning nor justice!

That is, the world of yore is unintelligible, unless God conceived History as the History of the crimes and misfortunes of the human race. Therefore, the here and now shall be torn down and we will bless this world with meaning and justice.

Arranged as they have been in all eternity, Man and the natural order cannot have been made for each other. We shall dissolve Man and mould him into a new shape, as you would mould a malformed limb, into a shape that fits the aforementioned order.

We will act as though the principle of our actions were to become, by our will alone, a universal law of nature. We shall bear a world so perfect that its realization will undo us, we shall name it NEDE. This is the promise of our Providence.

Hearken now: «Everything is degenerate as it leaves the hands of the Author of nature; everything becomes good in the hands of Man».

Whither the direction, so long as thou guidest us!

We shall march and march and the sound of our boots on the asphalt shall fill our hearts and minds entirely. It is only within the collective body that you are whole, outside of it you are incomplete and maimed.
Walking over the precipice in communion is easier than to acknowledge yourself as the cripple that you truly are.

Disobedience shall be judged a sin worse than murder, unchastity or theft. Obedience is the first law of the Order. Whilst wearing the frightening cloth of the wolf, thou truly art the epitome of submission.

Suspicion shall be your companion, for if you conceal blemishes, your comrades must certainly hide blemishes even more severe. Your glance shall always be on your brethren and you shall weigh their worth
constantly; which one of them shall be found wanting today? Do not fear to denounce an innocent and have him sentenced, thou shalt only fear to be too lenient with a deviationist. The mouth of the dissenter shall be filled with spiders and his heart cut out and fed to the dogs.

Loneliness is a feeling we will relieve you from; from the barren shores of the north to the heart of the empire, thou shalt always feel the scrutiny of the Eyes.

Thou shalt smile to the murderer as if he were of your kin but you will give a terrible death to the deviationist - our Words are holy and immutable in all eternity.

Our doctrine is the one and only eternal truth. The indifferent shall be given a single chance to convert but the deviationist, he who once was saved and spat in the face of his brothers and sisters, shall be terminated.

We will eradicate any shades of grey: we drew a partisan line and you shall stand either on its left or on its right. Everything is legitimate that at any given moment is useful to the Order.
The traitors ought to be punished but even those who are indifferent ought to be punished, you have to punish whoever is passive and dares not take sides. Whatever is outside the sovereign body of the Order is an enemy.

Our holy duty is not to govern the City, nor the fight to gain power: it is the attainment of perfection on earth, the instauration of an Order so perfect as to last a thousand years and then forevermore. Therefore,
anyone turning their backs on this blessed mission renounce their right to life.

We will give you a fierce and very tangible enemy for this shall be the root of our cohesion and strength. We shall maw the innocents like weed for if they are not among the unjust now, their fall is unavoidable. You shall make your ears deaf to their supplications. Murdering them is an act of love towards your kin.

Thine enemy shall be one: their distinctiveness thou shalt negate and with rhetoric thou shalt make them one. Simplicity is your virtue and your strength.

You will stack accusation after accusation on their shoulders and refrain from no excess: a lie repeated again and again will grow deep roots and blossom into a magnificent monstrosity surviving many a generation.

Thou shalt decree that thine enemy comes from shores unknown to the man of virtue, strange lands that breed beings devoid of any redeeming qualities.

To relieve the faint of heart of their weakness, we shall strip our adversaries of all humanity: they’re either vermin, rabid dogs, or abstract symbols, a function. They are nothing like us, no bonds can exist, they are an error of History waiting to be corrected. They are dead men walking, they’re already gone, a mere formality. Rejoice, we will build so much joy upon their bones!

The farther you will advance in the pool of guilt, crimson with the blood of those you wronged, the more brazen your hatred shall become in the vain hope to silence the echoes of their accusations.

Our doctrine shall be the pinnacle of all that is sublime, for by being made of extreme perfection, it will constantly remind you of your failure to be worthy and, in turn, cause deep waves of anguish that you will
channel into hatred, directed against more of the innocent.

Thou shalt not feel confused when our enemies begin to resemble us, mirroring us, mimicking us, for by doing so they are marching to the beat of the Lost, toward the pits of History.

The hostility of thine enemy shall be the yardstick of the sincerity of your conviction: thine enemy can never hate you enough. Should the quintessence of their hatred fill the Mariana Trench, you would still yell for more with a defiant voice.

We shall infuse you with the fumes of spirituality so that your violence shall spring of the firm grounds of fanaticism. Eventually, when all of you have melted into One, you will be ready to run the torture chamber.

Thou shalt follow our precepts but when in doubt, thou shalt imitate the example of those that are purer than you. Do not think nor innovate but imitate that which has been consecrated.

We shall deprive you of any satisfaction being yourself so that the greatest of your desires is to become one of us. To attain this goal you will shrink from no sacrifice and smell with exhilaration the curls of smoke rising from the ashes of that which once was precious to you.

He that loveth father or mother more than us is not worthy of us!

We will impose universal and unconditional love, so as to shatter the pillars of the past and let the very idea of family glide into oblivion. We will feed your children and turn your beds into a cold place; there shall be no retreat, no shelter from the great movement of History.

We shall uproot you and make you live in hundreds of sprawling Babylons and forget the smell of humus and the ways of yore. Your children will wear necklaces made of splinters from their mother’s spines as they turn on their parents, accused of subversion and weakness.

They shall crave for rigid control and overthrow the ruler whose hits are not harsh enough, they shall worship at the altar of their bruises.
As the next step in the ladder of our evolution, they come to us unrepentantly and demand to be freed from their ineffectual selves, from the barrenness and anxieties of individual life. They shall be provided with comfort to the point that they’d rather be raked over glowing coals than to ever face their gaping inner voids again. The chief passion, the utmost demand of the frustrated is to belong and there is never too much cementing or binding to satisfy this howling passion.

We know your souls and inner musings intimately. Therefore, our songs and sonorous refrains to the glory of that which is to come shall be as familiar to you as the lullabies your mother sang when you were but an
infant. Those unwilling to lend an ear will face coercion by the Sword.

We shall give you a stage and you shall perform your prescribed heroic roles in front of ancestors, contemporaries and posterity, present even in the sands of the desert or the heave of the boiling oceans: the
scorching spotlight is on you, how could you possibly walk back from the precipice now?…

You shall aim to resemble the heroic Achilles, at war under the walls of Troy: a godlike figure, possibly Death incarnate. To those begging for mercy at your knees, you shall answer with a blade through the throat,
to the defeated you shall show no respect: their bodies will be desecrated. When you fall, we promise you remembrance, immortal glory: kléos áphthiton. After all, what wouldn’t men do, only to escape oblivion…

We shall trick you into believing in the idea of progress by replacing outright torture with subtler forms of domination, far more pervasive and efficient: even the Voice from the Whirlwind shall be struck silent by
stupor. We shall increase your suffering, for the more you suffer now, the less suffering, we promise, there is to be found in the future. You shall become addicted to suffering as a means to a radiant future.

Eventually, commitment to ignorance shall be the first lesson taught to children, as obedience will then come as naturally as night after day. We shall make your thought patterns predictable, for if your behavior is
predictable, it marks the death of freedom.

We shall nurture indifference, for it is a prerequisite to Great Things that demand the retreat of the Self. Banal bureaucrats pave the way to the riches of an abominable victory whereas Saint-Fond is merely a nonactionable icon.

It is our immaculate faith that shall allow us to exercise coercion effectively but also to resist coercion when confronted by the impious. When confronted with facts that would contradict our credo, we shall speak out even louder, invoke our Order with brazen words and march forward with the arrogance of the doubtless.

You will be made to deny the dissonance and conflict that is at the heart of the experience of our World. You shall join the chorus of praise that flows from the absolute perfection we have created by the sole power of our will. We shall bleed you white, but you will think that it is an act of unconditional love.

As an educational tool, pain has a value nothing can replace. It shall therefore be the cement of our society. We shall build monuments that will last a thousand years upon the wailing of the multitude, upon the labour of the slaves. Everything in this immense, beautiful machine shall be wheels, pulleys and cords. The connections, however, shall seem fortuitous to you.

We will pretend to have peace in our hearts yet, knowing that blows will avail, we shall keep the dagger near. We are therefore certain to overflow.

When the final resistance hangs on the gallows… Oh yes, I promise unto thee, when the final resistance hangs on the gallows, love will then blossom with the ardor of flowers in the midst of spring, place your faith
in this promise!

Hear our voices, all of you, Men of resentment; whose stomachs and souls are aflame with the poisonous hatred of impotence; you whom have been wronged again and again; wiping your face clean, day after day, from the spit of those sitting unjustifiably above you.

We will grant you freedom from freedom.

As thou cometh unto us, we shall ease your sense of frustration and isolation: from your mouths will flow endless rivers of black bile, you will regurgitate the quintessence of failure and, in the depths of the night,
feel the warmth of equality recovering your shivering body.

We will feed the illusion that, by merely mastering some of your base impulses, you can aim for the world - that your failure with common affairs all but guarantees your success with the unattainable and the splendid. Your indisputable competency to direct the fortunes of the many is herewith consecrated.

Your longing for flames engulfing the desirable things of yore and the drowning of the successful in crimson oceans are tainted by the aching premonition that your marches to the cries of « all or nothing at all » will, of course, yield the latter for you.

We shall reassure you of our warm paternal love, tell you with gentle yet virile words that a place exists that was yours of all eternity, that you won’t have to conquer it nor to redeem you worth with strenuous effort.
Eventually, we are to arm and turn all of you into the expendable hounds of our Order.

We shall base our ladder of dignity on things that are innate, things that require no skill nor exceptional aptitudes, so as to rally the masses of the inept and the interchangeables.

We will burn and not explain, and this will feel ecstatic.

We will give you just enough of a taste of paradise to feed your insatisfaction and turn you into feral dogs. There’s a grave at the other end of this metanoia, a grave large enough for your former and future self.

We will dissolve your individuality in the multitude, you will feel free after relinquishing the burden of responsibility; you will feel free while obeying orders and swallowing the chewed leftovers of those ranking
above you.

We shall answer to your longing to be but one thread of the many which make up a tunic, indistinguishable from the others; so as to conceal your weakness as you cannot bear another minute the ruthless testing that comes with freedom.

O hound, feral dog, we shall grant you freedom from freedom, relief from frustration.

You cannot even find the ruins
of the jewels of yesterday
they’re ashes gone
memories wiped clean

You cannot find any jewels
among the ruins of today
everything’s stale
muffled silence
for a thousand years

You cannot even find the ruins
of your breath
Too much love to bear
Reborn sterile and dead

Whatever is now, is right

You cannot even find the ruins…
You cannot even find the ruins…