Lady Gaga, Gnostic Bard

In the spring of 2010, I remember driving my car around town on errands. I often listen to the radio, so that I can know what songs and artists are most popular, and what people are hearing. It has proven an especially effective tool when visiting parochial schools or talking with the young. It also alerts me to trends in the anti-culture which begin in the realm of the sub-conscious, and then percolate up to the conscious mind. I will never forget when I heard the words blasted, like a secular kerygma, for the first time on the radio: “It doesn’t matter if you love him, or capital H-I-M. Just put your paws up, ‘cause you were born this way, baby.” These were the first words for Lady Gaga’s song Born This Way, which, although it is justly mocked as a rip-off of Madonna’s Express Yourself and lacks true artistic merit, still firmly put Lady Gaga on my mind as a singularly influential performance artist in today’s world. In 2010, I understood that what I was listening to was no longer the silly, vacuous sentiments of Just Dance or the lascivious provocations of Poker Face; a new anthropology was being proclaimed to young people, who were learning ‘queer theory’ in university and dancing to these songs in the clubs at night. The educational-entertainment complex was in high gear, and I felt an experience akin to something which Peggy Noonan once wrote, when she heard “walls falling” in the applause of a New Jersey public high school; a taboo was not just about to be broken. It was going to be shattered, and then reenshrined as the template of things to come.

I became intensely interested in Lady Gaga after that point, if only because she became so nakedly (pun intended) a mouthpiece for the ‘new humanity’. What I found most interesting, however, are her music videos. Music alone, as has we have known since at least Plato’s day, has a singular power to form the intellect and the appetites. Music with imagery, however, is even more powerful. Perhaps it is because fewer people look at music videos as compared to those who only listen to music, that Lady Gaga and her handlers felt that she could express a more aggressive metaphysical vision. Consider, then, the prologue to her video to Born This Way:

“This is the manifesto of Mother Monster:

On GOAT, a government owned territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite, it was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race; a race within the race of humanity; a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom. But on that same day as the eternal Mother hovered in the multiverse another, more terrifying, birth took place: the birth of evil.

And as she, herself, split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance. It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate, instantly and unwaveringly, towards good but she wondered, “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?”

I am constitutionally resistant to conspiracy theories and things that sound “tin-foil hat”, but this prologue alone, with its accompanying imagery, demands an analysis. First, Gaga calls herself a “Mother Monster”. In other words, she views herself as a ‘progenetrix’ who is also in some sense deformed or fearsome, which is usually how we would define a ‘monster’. Then, we hear that a “territory owned in space” is called “GOAT”. “Territory in space” sounds a lot like the Biblical “principalities and powers”, and “GOAT” is of course the archetypal Satanic animal. A “birth” is described, which is described as “infinite”. In other words, this is a birth on the order of the quasi-divine. Such language is extremely reminiscent of Gnostic cosmogonies, where a Demiurge or supreme being gives birth to other subordinate beings. Like most Gnostic mythologies, it is ontologically and logically incoherent, but it provides a sort of ‘origin myth’ to the cult or Gnostic belief in question. In this case, it is the idea of a “race within the race of humanity, which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom.” What does this sound like? Firstly, it sounds like Nietzsche’s ubermensch, the “over-man”, who would be the supreme man, freed from the ‘shackles’ of conventional morality, and above all, ‘freed’ from belief in God. Secondly, this sounds like the absurdly incoherent ‘postmodern man’, which claims, like the old philosophes, that the only thing “forbidden is to forbid”.

This same “mother” is then described as having given birth to “evil”. Let’s analyze this: if the “good” is a “new humanity” free of prejudice and judgment, and possesses boundless freedom, what is “evil”? Logically, it would be that which opposes this modus vivendi. Thus, even eight years before Obergefell v. Hodges, the minds of young people by the millions were prepared to equate those who oppose this “new humanity” with the forces of evil. This perfectly encapsulates why the current turmoil holds not only the tensions of ‘normal’ social upheaval, but also the epochal overturning of an entire metaphysical consensus.

The last question, especially in light of the video’s imagery, is most chilling: “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?” As she says this, the Demiurge/Lady Gaga fires an automatic weapon into the air. Thus the clear answer is that the only way to usher in and defend the new humanity is by means of violence. Lady Gaga still calls herself “Mother Monster”, and her fans still sometimes call themselves “Little Monsters”, especially those who are of the LGBT persuasion. The entire song is based upon a gnostic cosmogony and anthropology. Scholars have been saying this for years regarding the Sexual Revolution and the proliferation of privileged and unique ‘sexual identities’, which are multiplying faster than the imaginative progeny of a second century Hermetic scribe: the postmodern anthropological project, if it can be called that, is predicated upon the doctrines of the ancient nemesis of Christianity, which is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, the pinnacle of spiritual enlightenment the attainment of hidden knowledge. The moral perfectibility of man by God is a mirage and ultimately futile; man must remake himself in order to ultimately find his potential. All the Abrahamic Religions to varying degrees advocate the view that God and his Law ennoble man, because man, by obeying the Law, fulfills his own nature. Christianity of course adds to this the revelation that God has become Man in Christ Jesus, in order to uplift our condition by grace through divine filiation. Gnosticism turns men from children of God into children of the serpent. And as the serpent in Genesis began by sowing confusion between the sexes, so now, in the name of achieving superior knowledge, a great part of humanity is being tempted to cast off even human nature itself as an imposition, rather than a gift.

Returning to Lady Gaga, although she has withdrawn somewhat from the overtly Gnostic imagery, she still enjoys at least a part of her fame as a sort of artistic chaplain to the LGBT+ movement. One may even call her an ‘early adopter’, since she not only endorsed the precepts of the movement, but enshrined them and promulgated them through media which influence the subconscious assumptions of millions. For all the complaining the ‘sexual left’ may do regarding their ‘oppression’ by the Judeo-Christian ancien regime, it is nothing short of astounding to see the alacrity with which multi-billion dollar corporations and the ultra-wealthy compete with each other in their superlative, breathless endorsements of any of the new tenets which reinforce the myth of the ‘new humanity’. What Lady Gaga could not say with her lips, she said with her gun; similarly, what the cultural leftists have not been able to promote with rainbow flags and aggressive cultural proselytization, they are now doing by intimidation and violence.

The Gnostic March still continues apace in the West today, backed by all the treasure and power that the world can muster. Anyone who publically resists them will experience rejection and persecution. Many of us have been disowned by family and friends as a result of our holding to the ‘old ways’. For far too long, conservatives and traditionalists have tried to promote political and legal agendas in order to prop up the decaying corpse of Christendom. Yet, none of our efforts will prevail so long as we do not have a counterpoint to people like Lady Gaga, the Gnostic Bard. The places to exercise our influence now are precisely where they have hegemony: the arts and education. The architects of the Sexual Revolution first attacked art, architecture and music before they were able to dismantle our social mores. They subverted and corrupted before they were able to supplant and invert public morals. Lady Gaga’s vision, beyond the technobeats and synthetic, algorithmically addictive music, is the blueprint of the new origin myth for the ‘new man’. Just like the Gnostic myths of old, they are intrinsically incoherent, and end in the dissolution of the self and of society. We have a myth of our own, but as G.K. Chesterton said, it is a fairy tale that also happens to be true: that the new humanity began, not as the progeny of a monstrous demiurge, but in the humble stable of Bethlehem, in the heart of a human family. The true light began to shine there, and the darkness will never overcome him.