20 June 2006
the empire never ended
In the new issue of the Wire (apart from an Invisible Jukebox with Kode9 and a namecheck in the leader for a certain 'excellent blog K-Punk'), there's an interview with David Tibet from Current 93 in which he slags off the Roman Empire: 'I think that we're living in an artifice that's been created, that perhaps is a dream of Satan...and Christ is continually suffering on the cross at this very moment whilst we're wondering around in this fog. I refer to it as a Satanic imperium. It's the Roman Empire continuing with all the wickedness and evil and inhumanity.'
Now this is very close to Philip K Dick's 1974 revelation, triggered by the ancient golden Christian fish symbol on the necklace of a pharmacy delivery girl bringing painkillers for PKD's toothache. The phrase 'The Empire Never Ended', unleashed somehow by the necklace, haunted PKD for months, revealing to him that the world around him and everyone else was a fantasy, a film projected on a prison wall (as Carrere puts it in I am Alive and you are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick), and that it was really AD 70.
Tibet and PKD's love of the Gnostics might be the clue to this shared insight, but I wonder how many others are convinced that 'the empire never ended'?
