On the links between Satanic symbols and progressive values
“The first and substantial element of the old as well as of the new Olympic movement is: to be a religion. Hence I believe I was right when I tried from the beginning to awaken religious feelings by the renewal of Olympic movement.”
— Baron Pierre de Coubertin
Ever since the first edition of the modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the event has been a vehicle for the propagation of a religion of global humanity, and recent years have seen this messaging broadcast in increasingly aggressive terms. But the 2024 iteration, which was the first to be screened by AMC and IMAX movie theaters, and the first after the International Olympic Committee changed the traditional Olympic trinity of “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger) to include a new term: “Communiter” (Together), has intensified this programming to a previously unimaginable degree by combining obscene and violent imagery in the service of an extremist message.
One moment was shocking enough to draw a sharp backlash: a tableau featuring DJ Barbara Butch, a self-described “fat, Jewish, queer lesbian” and “love activist,” adorned with a halo and surrounded by a group of drag queens and other hyper-sexualized ‘queer’ figures. Audiences immediately registered this imagery as a mockery of The Last Supper, and ultimately Christianity. The artistic director of the ceremony, Thomas Jolly, was unrepentant. “We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that,” he said.
Jolly, who himself is gay, cited another element of his program, in which singer Philippe Katerine, painted blue and mostly naked, portrayed the god Dionysus, to claim that the scene wasn’t intended to evoke the Last Supper, but to present a positive depiction of pagan spirituality. “It’s not my inspiration and that should be pretty obvious. There’s Dionysus arriving on a table. Why is he there? First and foremost because he is the god of celebration in Greek mythology and the tableau is called ‘Festivity’… He is also the god of wine, which is also one of the jewels of France, and the father of Séquana, the goddess of the river Seine. The idea was to depict a big pagan celebration, linked to the gods of Olympus, and thus the Olympics.”
Katerine himself remarked that “with Thomas Jolly, we never talked about religion, nor about the Last Supper.” Yet the notion that the strong resemblance to the famous scene was purely a coincidence was contradicted by others involved with the ceremony. In a now-deleted Instagram post, Barbara Butch juxtaposed the tableau with da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with the caption “Oh yes! Oh yes! The new gay testament!”
Meanwhile “Piche” (Mike Pierre Gautier), one of the drag queens flanking Butch, claimed that the tableau was “not a provocation” but a “biblical representation that has been reused in pop culture for decades.” Piche’s defense aligned with a statement from Paris 2024 producers, who said that “clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief… [Jolly] is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous work of art. From Andy Warhol to ‘The Simpsons,’ many have done it before him.”
“In France, we have freedom of creation,” Jolly claimed, “artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are a republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshipers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.” In the same breath as avowing his lack of specifically anti-Christian intentions, he articulates an intention to celebrate the sexual liberation of a society no longer bound by traditionally Christian morality: a message he elsewhere equates with the celebration of a debaucherous pagan deity.
Here we see a favored tactic of propagandists for the ideology of the new globalist religion: the stance that advancing orgiastic public sexuality is not a cultural position at all, nor is the celebration of paganism a religious position, but are simply realities that must be accepted uncritically.
Jolly augments this tactic when he feigns ignorance about the resemblance of his tableau to the Christian imagery unmistakably associated with da Vinci’s Last Supper. The emerging globalist spirituality seeks to override the historical Christian understanding of divine revelation, in which an immutable paradigm of morality and theology is imparted by Christ to His Church. To accomplish this, they launch a double-pronged attack on the uniqueness of the Christian tradition. In one moment they claim that Christianity is irrelevant to their project: they have not provoked anyone, and scandalized Christians are in fact the aggressors. In the next, they claim that repurposing and even inverting Christian rhetoric and symbolism are a valid means of venerating their own beliefs.
We can see the latter move in the statement of another drag queen participant in the ceremony, “Paloma” (Hugo Bardin). “What bothers people isn’t that we’re reproducing this painting, what bothers people is that queer people are reproducing it.” Paloma seems to think that he has caught critics of the display in a contradiction. As someone whose life is centered upon celebration of unrestrained desire, and whose politics demand the state enforce his values, it is inexplicable to him that Christians would object to the Eucharist being replaced by queer sexuality as the content of the Last Supper. A similar line of thinking is at work in remarking the Last Supper has already been referenced by Andy Warhol and the Simpsons. The painting has already been assimilated into the pop-culture matrix, meaning that it’s up for grabs and drained of all theological particularity. So, what’s the problem?
After Philippe Katerine enters the scene as Dionysus on the table before Butch and the others as Dionysus, he performs the song ‘Nu’. Translated from French, the lyrics read: “Would there be wars if we had remained completely naked? / Where can you hide a gun when you’re completely naked?… No more rich people, no more poor people when we go naked again.” The notion that sexual liberation is linked to a political utopia is a classic revolutionary theme which has been repeatedly used as a tool of political control. “The best way to control a man is to do so without his awareness that he is being controlled,” writes E. Michael Jones, “and the best way to do that is through the systematic manipulation of passions, because man tends to identify his passions as his own.”
The revolutionary commitments of Olympian globalism were on most explicit display in another scene in the opening ceremony involving metal band Gojira performing the French Revolutionary anthem ‘Ça Ira’, alongside a decapitated Marie Antoinette singing lyrics about killing aristocrats. Asked about accusations of a Satanic component to the display, Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier replied, “It’s French charm, you know, beheaded people, red wine, and blood all over the place — it’s romantic, it’s normal.” He clarified that the selection of the French Revolutionary song “wasn’t us at all. That was the team of young people and composers and designers that decided the whole theme. We were in the dark when it came to the whole ceremony…”
Singer Aya Nakamura’s performance alongside the Republican Guard supplies another example. A Malian who immigrated to France in 2021, Nakamura employs a lyrical style that blends French with Arabic, Bambara, and other languages. As she performed in the opening ceremony, the Republican Guard were effectively reduced to background props for a recently immigrated African singer. Just as religious engineering seeks to drain Christian theology of all particularity, globalist cultural engineering seeks to demolish all claims to authentic national particularity, especially in ethnically European countries. One can also note in passing Lady Gaga’s place among the roster of 2024’s Olympic musical acts: Gaga’s next big film role is the sequel to 2019’s Joker (a major center of gravity for cultural engineering psyops), whose tagline is “All the world’s a stage.”
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In his lecture on the French Revolution, Father Seraphim Rose underscored the importance of those bloody events for understanding the spirituality of the modern world. “[Everything] which came before the French Revolution has a different spirit; what comes after has a new spirit. The period before 1789 was called the ‘Old Regime’, and the period after that is the “Revolutionary Age” which is the same now as it was in the 1790s.” Rose emphasized that it is more spiritually efficacious to track the unfolding of the revolutionary philosophy itself rather than fixate on the details of the schemes of secret societies. However, it is possible to trace the direct transmission of an Illuminist mindset to the French Revolution, a worldview that sought the global abolition of monarchy, private property, inheritance, patriotism, the family, and religion.
Rose observed that “the Revolution seceded from Christianity in everything, save in the idea of universality.” Dostoevsky described the revolution as “the last modification and metamorphosis of the same ancient Roman formula of universal unity.” It was this revolutionary dream of humanity remade through global unification which was broadcast in the 2024 Olympic opening ceremony.
Rose’s 1975 book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future details how the project of unifying humanity under the banner of a new religion will inevitably entail the remaking of humanity into unrecognizable forms. If the true religion has not been divinely revealed through a particular faith but is only now being instantiated through emerging technologically enabled global harmony, are we not on the brink of a species-wide transformation? This transformation will sell debasement presented as empowerment. In Jolly’s counterfeit Last Supper, we see a clear model.
Although lacking the shock value of the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony, also directed by Jolly, fits into the same paradigm. The key sequence centers upon an alien being called the Golden Voyager, named after the Voyager Golden Records, a compendium of human culture meant for hypothetical extraterrestrial entities to sample included on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. The character was also apparently inspired by “the Spirit of the Bastille” and “was meant to evoke creatures from science fiction and video games.”
The Golden Voyager descends to an empty earth and meets two characters from the opening ceremony: a masked man who rowed children through a boat in underground Paris in imagery reminiscent of the underworld ferryman Charon, before running the torch through the city, and the river goddess Sequana, here appearing as an avatar of the technological divine feminine, who galloped across the Seine atop a mechanical horse. After encountering the goddess Nike, in the form of the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Golden Voyager is encircled by acrobats, dressed in white, with only their eyes visible, who unearth rings which ascend above the stage to form the Olympic symbol.
All the elements of the science-fiction religion of the future are on display. The dream of a unified humanity to contact an extraterrestrial civilization is fulfilled, and a new god descends to meet the old gods, who ascend from the chthonic realm, while a new humanity divested of personhood constructs the symbol of our global religion.
Our cultural engineers want it both ways: mocking those who sense the demonic in their productions as participating in ‘Satanic panic’ hysteria, while simultaneously propagating the precise worldview that the Christian tradition has warned would cloak the rise of demonic metaphysics. Although some of the rhetoric used by religious critics of these ceremonies has been imprecise, it is directionally correct. An average QAnon suburban housewife has a more accurate spiritual understanding of the significance of such events than sophisticated cultural critics who dismiss their concerns. The 2024 Summer Olympic ceremonies are far from unique in mainstreaming the link between Satanic symbols and progressive values. Sam Smith’s performance at the 2023 Grammys and Lady Gaga’s 2017 Superbowl performance are two other recent examples among countless others. Let’s not become so numb to this pattern that we cease to be disturbed.
Thomas Millary is the co-host of Psyop Cinema. They can be found on psyop-cinema.com.
