In the world we know, the so-called gossip magazines or pink press have been well established for decades, and now proliferate on the internet. They exist, in one form or another, throughout what we call the western world. Spaces where, with a more or less measured self-confidence, any banality of the ‘gente guapa’ or ‘beautiful people’ is reviewed, those people who range from their own and foreign kings, to the chic aristocracy and various celebrities: actors and actresses, models, influencers – what a word to use for such a job. In short, those who raise their heads in this society in which the most intimate things about others must be known, and not so much about oneself.
The phenomenon has been amplified today in social networks which, it seems, are the ones that really rule and dictate what has to be said, by whom and at the right time and place. For ruin or glory.
Deluded me, I always despised these media, because of what they basically mean, the human and psychic capital they moved, and the levels of interpretation that they hide.
It is well known that that for which we do not forgive ourselves or hide with great zeal – infidelities, tax entanglements, high-flying parties, lax or very lax morals – we happily forgive whoever shows presence and figures in these privileged spaces, some sustained with public money.
Well, but what kind of fascination is offered by the private life of people who, by appearing in the public media, enjoy the prestige of what I’m going to call royalty? Royalty, as the status and privilege of kings and queens, and their intimate environment at all times, those who led “kingly lives”. In addition, of course, the image that was held of them and the attitude that the non-sovereign people adopted: submission, fear, reverence, admiration, envy, imitation… and, not a few, hatred, aversion and so on.
In other words, what is appreciated in these gazes – positive or negative – has to do with feeling, emotion, the subconscious, the heart, that which has a life of its own and which we rarely dominate. In other words, emotions rule.
I have often wondered why this admiration and reverence of such distant origin, which has gone through revolutions, beheadings and royal exiles, radical changes in the roles of women, people of other races or different sexual conditions, continues to survive in us as a profane liturgy, sometimes so close to religious liturgy that we could not distinguish them.
In the absence of religions whose postulates to be followed -such has been the discredit in which they have fallen- it is necessary that this sacred space of our conscience be nourished in one way or another. In our time, the tribunes, altars and canopies have been replaced by spaces where everyone – for the individual is sacred and the people sovereign since the French Revolution – can freely express themselves, either in fact or opinion, or by the pure and simple creation of the so-called post-truth, defined by the RAE Dictionary as the “deliberate distortion of a reality, which manipulates beliefs and emotions in order to influence public opinion and social attitudes”.
There was a time when kings were both priests and prophets, which gave them an aura and power over the people as if they were divinity itself, whose designs they transmitted to their people. Let us think of the judges and kings of Israel – Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, etc. – whose anointing came directly from God through their priests, which meant being in the proper place of truth and power. It was a time when human beings were more primitive and tribal; they lived with collective patterns and beliefs. It derived from Christianity in the Roman Empire and, before that in classical Greece, when a prototype of individuality was developed in the West that assumed the existence of an individual soul with free will; whether you were patrician, commoner or slave, male or female, Jew or Gentile, you had a soul and idiosyncrasy of your own.
We have referred to sacred places, well, let’s talk about them.
Already in the sixties of the last century McLuhan said, “the medium is the message”, that is, you are where you “show yourself”. And the private space, now turned public, is the place where the sacred is exposed.
What is exhibited in a sacred space of media diffusion has that power of fascination, because by occupying that privileged place where we put our hearts, which is the main impulse, we long, if only for an instant, for that pedestal that the new sacred places give. Because we want, in the depths of our soul and with every right, to be kings, although we almost never aim for the true throne and, out of pure ignorance, we fill the stage with out-of-focus figures, with real or plasticine heroes or monsters, with many shapes of shadows in the cave. Fortunately, we exit these places as quickly as we enter them; for what used to be a temple becomes a carnival.
Why are these places considered sacred? Because they have the word or in them the words of the tribe are spoken, those that reach the majority. Before it was said “the scriptures say so” or likewise a book when it was printed with authority, then “TV says so”, and now “it has appeared on the internet”. It is the circus of life today.
Taking into account that the media and networks have today taken the place of the sacred and those who appear in them represent the anointed beings, the sacred has been gradually discredited, not for lack of audience, but for lack of sacred content. We could say that, as in Plato’s cave, we only see and act under the impulse of shadows, and rarely from the light that makes them possible. Why? A series of obstacles or intervening entities cause the original light to become a shadow or a simulacrum.
The weight of this world is love.
Under the burden of loneliness,
under the burden of dissatisfaction,
the weight we carry is love.
This is the beginning of a poem by A. Ginsberg, the American Beat generation or Beatnik poet.
That love that the poet has glimpsed is cosmic, divine energy, universal love, even without passing through human filters that disfigure its power and clarity; and so our thirst for a source of pure light is quenched by a representation of characters in media spaces: royalty.
Universal energy is one. It depends on our state in which we absorb it, on the state of consciousness with which we perceive it, for us to see a clear path or a cloudy space. And I am not speaking with moral criteria, but pure and simple energetic criteria, of the simple scale of purity of the air we breathe, as of the different octaves of a musical scale.
In general, today it is thought, almost exclusively, that the ideal of the tribe is the accumulation of power, money, glory. The simulacra of the true light, which is discernment, compassion, detached love. We are dealing with the one energy of life, only in different degrees of vibration and representation.
In The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosycross (1616), the work of Johann Valentin Andreae, there is talk of “incarnating royalty”, that is, of achieving, through an alchemical process, the union of the king and queen, the masculine and feminine aspects of our being, the Soul and the Spirit. The liberation, through the first-hand understanding of what we are and what life really is.
The alchemical process entails the possession of a yearning, a touch or call, and the setting in motion of a path of inner purification in which, through the fire provided by the forces of the path – the Gnostic forces, of knowledge – all past and present ghosts are deleted. Then, we can glimpse something of what we really are: the original human being, the king who knows who he is, the Odysseus returned to his green and humble Ithaca.
This seems to be the destiny of all human beings: to be kings in its most primal sense. Sons of God, kings of themselves. The royalty that occupies the sacred media spaces is only a faint reflection of the true royalty that we are called to be. That is why they attract attention, because they are a mirror of what we want to be: free and eternal.
Time will speak for all of us. Because, deep down, it is just a matter of to be or not to be.
