Cured in the Underworld – Killing Joke in Perspective

By David Metcalfe (originally presented on The Eyeless Owl)

The initial symptoms have escalated into a monstrous plague. It does not require much
imagination to locate the underworld within a scarred, butchered landscape. Industrial
wasteland, inhumane concrete hovels, resembling rabbit hutches stacked up on top of one
another. “

- Jaz Coleman, The Courtauld Talks

“For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the
wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to
the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do these things when
the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

- Luke 23:29-31

One of the first cd’s that I bought was Killing Joke’s Pandemonium. This, along with
Psychic TV’s Force Thee Hand of Chance, a recording of French Motets and The Orb’s
Orblivion album, formed the core repeating repertoire of albums guiding my young mind
on a Euro-mystic journey into the cultural abyss. While my friends where dosing
themselves on Marylin Manson, Metallica and NIN, I was dreaming Druidry and the
synchronistic sublime.

Now 15 years later I’m encountering those formative experiences in a different light.
Killing Joke’s latest album Absolute Dissent, the first since 1982 to include the original
line up, is a violent purgative for the paranoia that’s been eating its way into the
collective consciousness. Applying the Paracelsean maxim, “the dose makes the poison”,
their incendiary musical exorcism of mediocrity, repression and the irresponsible whims
of Western culture returns to take on the infection of the Infowars contingent reminding
us we really do have a choice in changing the path we’re heading down.

Their positivity is lost on a media quick to declare them dark and sinister ministers of
doom. For Jaz and Co. this stilted categorization couldn’t be farther from their goal. Why
is the music often so brutal? “It is a homeopathic principle. The cure for a sickness is
accomplished by dosing the patient with minute quantities of substances which in larger
doses would actually create the very symptoms of the sickness. Such a cure for a sickness
involves experiencing a little of the essence of sickness” Coleman explains in the lecture
he presented at the Courtauld Institute of Fine Art in 1987.

As I read through the reviews in the U.S. press I was struck by just how far we are from a
rational cultural narrative. Is it really necessary to keep flipping the fundamentalist or
science coin, watching for which limited viewpoint lands to call the next shot? Does this
idiocy have to filter in to the arts as well? If we take the media’s view of Killing Joke’s
philosophy we’re presented with fallow choices, they’re a bunch of cunning satanists,
violent musicians or they’re conspiracy kooks. The cognitive dissonance in this
presentation is lost on writers bent on exposing imaginary satanists, marketing a niche or
grappling with the low hanging fruit of criticizing contrived conspiracy theories.

If you dig deeper the real story starts to unveil itself.

It’s hard to understand the full impact of Killing Joke without an understanding of the
Western Mystery Tradition. It’s all about fire, fire and cleansing, kao et order, solve et
coagula, Coleman describes it in Aristotilean terms, Killing Joke is about “catharsis”.
 We live in trying times, facing climate change, a
fractured economy, nuclear proliferation, mass
starvation, wars and disease, “We’re hurtling towards
disaster, the scientific community is saying that if we
don’t change what we’re doing immediately we’re
going to need a new planet by 2030,” unfortunately,
as Coleman puts it, “human beings don’t change
unless they get a big jolt.” Killing Joke is that jolt, a
controlled dose of the violence that surrounds us
acting to inoculate those capable of being tried by
fire. The bands violent presence intends towards a
homeopathic cure for the decline of Western society,
a safe dose of the hatred, vitriol and pollution that
corrodes our culture.

At the World Futurist Society conference in 2010,

global thought leaders gathered to discuss how
advanced technology is reaching a point of no return.
The positive implications, from helpful Artificial Intelligence, life extension, cognitive
enhancement, genetic engineering and advanced robotics, are balanced by a darker side in
decreased privacy, the potential for division between those who choose enhancements
and those who don’t, and global catastrophe from designer diseases and out of control AI.
Stuck between the post-human parlour tricks of Gaga, and the banal fear mongering of
fundamentalists, our society has very few potential solutions being offered to measure a
reasonable reaction.

Neither a fan of post-human rhetoric, nor fearful lamentations , Coleman channels the
same fire that pushed Giordano Bruno to expound the virtues of de gli eroici furori, or the
heroic furies. Songs like Here Comes the Singularity , which find their inspiration in
these debates, are not closed ended messages of doom, but warnings, and calls to action.
“I don’t think this biotech/nanotech is going to turn out very well. People living in a post-
human world for 400-500 years, their souls will have died years ago.” While others face
global catastrophe with a worried blink, Coleman is firm in his conviction, “it’s just a
change, we haven’t reached the final stage of evolution yet.”

How could a band that uses the figurehead of the Fool take any other course? Step off the
edge smiling, there’s no other path to take. “Life is the location of your gift, and the
development of it” according to Coleman, “we were all really angry when we were
younger, feeling outside of everything, Killing Joke’s given us the opportunity to find our
path and supported us the whole way.”
The media reacted with disdain when Coleman and Geordie canceled obligations in 1982
to head to Iceland, an event that caused the break up of the original band. This wasn’t a
holiday however, Coleman and Geordie were looking for some peace of mind and space
to enact the Abramelin Working and contact their Holy Guardian Angel (or what
Socrates called the ‘genius’; a connective consciousness to a person’s role in a unified
vision of life.)

It’s a powerful ritual, rumored to have proven too difficult for even English Adept
Aleister Crowley; for Coleman, however, it provided the full flowering of his gift, the
vision and presence of a high priest of the sacred flame. What many have mistaken as
demonic possession is better understood as a sacred calling to purify the soul of the West
from centuries of slow decline. People often invoke the appellation of shaman for Jim
Morrison, in Coleman this vocation is more than just stage pageantry.

Conspiracy bloggers have said that Coleman is a “shape-shifter”, his willingness to

explore the outer edges of culture for the sake of the Sacred isn’t something easily
swallowed by the status quo. It’s interesting to see what this means on an archetypal and
mytho-poetic level. The archetype of the shape-shifter as portrayed in the Archive for
Research in Archetypal Symbolism’s recent publication, The Book of Symbols, shares
none of the negative or paranoid qualities assumed by the mainstream dialogue:

“The world is interconnected and always changing; shape-shifters amplify, reveal or

hide this process; that is their magic…with an affinity for “decontruction and
reconstruction” (they) share the ability to separate and regroup elements of
psychological process, ultimately in the service of renewal”

When looked at in that light, Coleman fits the bill. As he points out in the Courtauld talk,
“the fundamentals of such performance are clearly routed in the venerable healing magic
of the ancients, I assure you. Central to this very old form of therapy is the idea that if
you suffer from the underworld you can only be cured in the underworld.” There’s a
problem when the chorus of our culture can’t differentiate a healing balm from a blast of
brimstone.

Journalists often fixate on Coleman’s stage presence, in an interview for the website
Invisible Oranges he describes the purpose of his altered persona on stage:

“We put on the mask and take off the mask. It’s very important. When I go onstage, I’m
seeking transmission and I get in a trance-like state. The idea of taking the mask off…if
you don’t take the mask off, you take that world into your own life…We are well aware of
the energies that surround us in Killing Joke and the peculiarities. The mask isn’t for
other people’s benefit. It’s for my own protection.”

From the casual reader’s stand point the conspiranoia rampant in our culture is nothing
more than info-porn, what we miss is the pain of being on the other side of someone’s
paranoia and the poison this puts in the mental reservoir of our culture. “David Icke said
that my friend Laurence Gardner was a reptilian, that some woman had seen him
sacrificing babies, that’s complete crap,” Coleman remembers with sadness, “Laurence
was suffering from a prolonged illness and at the end of his life he’s got a bunch of
people harassing him with that shit.” Gardner and Coleman’s friendship formed when
they collaborated in 2001 on an opera,The Marriage at Cana, commissioned by the Royal
Opera House in Covent Garden London and they met again in 2003 at the Occulture
Lectures in Brighton, UK, to publicly exchange works.

Their mutual admiration was based on a shared respect for chivalric virtues that most of
society has long left behind, protection of the Earth, upholding of peace, support of the
downtrodden, defense of the feminine (taken in the occult sense as the matrix of creation
and the Holy Mother Earth), and the pursuit of knowledge. Laurence Garder is best
known for his explorations of the Gnostic themes that Dan Brown borrowed and made
popular in his Da Vinci Code trilogy. It deeply troubles Coleman that someone who was
so focused on freedom would be accused of being involved in a conspiracy against
humanity.

Again we find some mytho-poetic truth in Icke’s identification, Gardner was a member of
the Ordo Dragonis, The Imperial and Royal Dragon Court and Order, which is described
as “(providing) a fraternal rallying standard for those of all creeds and cultures who are
dedicated to preserving the rights and values of others.” The question becomes, if all of
these ‘sinister forces’ stand against tyranny and control…who do the journalists and
conspiracy mongers support?
It’s a cruel irony that shortly after the death of his close friend, and oft times Killng Joke
bassist, Paul Raven, conspiracy blogger Chris Knowles wrote even more disparagements
and accusations alleging Coleman’s untoward involvement in an occult conspiracy
against Raven. By presenting this information with the breathless malevolence of a
masturbatory voyeur these critics expose the fragile basis for their claims. If truth were
ever to emerge in their critiques it would be mired by their uncritical experiments in
chimerical bullshit.

On Absolute Dissent the bonds of friendship form a

central theme. This focus recommends a positive
solution to the poison of conspiratorial whispers. In
the song The Raven King, an apotheosis (a raising to
divinity) for Raven’s spirit is presented, in which he
becomes the symbol of freedom and brotherhood
that is all to often missing in our time. “Forever in
this moment, Rejecting those who would control us,
Touched by a common genius, All bound by fate and
common purpose ,” Coleman’s lyrics speak to his
deep respect for ancestral spirits and for the presence
of allies in the present walk. Death is not the end,
something lives on., and Raven has become a
guiding force for Killing Joke, spiritual symbol of
their true purpose.
Killing Joke’s legacy, as Coleman likes to see it, is one of self education, the bonds of
brotherhood and unflinching motivation. Inspired by the Rosicrucian ideals that arose in
Europe during the 17th century, they focus on the dream of an interconnected web of self
reliant villages and self educated polymaths, a global republic with “every citizen
required to debate.” For Coleman a one world government is necessary to curb the
irresponsibility that’s grown from corporate manipulations of the populace, and to some
how control the dangers of over population and wars that have marked the 20th century.

Again from the Invisble Oranges interview:

“The only logical answer is to divide the world into four blocks. The Americas, the
European Union, The African Union, and the Asia-Pacific Union. Then a world council
that will be annexed onto the exiting U.N. That’s the only way to solve all of these
problems effectively at once. And now you see! It could still go two ways. It could be the
dream of Beethoven and Schiller, the brotherhood of man. Or it could be an
authoritarian model. We have a choice there also.”

Coleman has been working with ILC Productions / Coffee Films on a documentary, The
Death and Resurrection Show, to explore the journey that Killing Joke has taken over the
past 32 years. It promises to provide a more rounded picture of the band and their unique
philosophy of social renewal. “We call it the mirror effect in Killing Joke, people come
to the show and see a bunch of assholes on stage who’ve done all that we’ve done, and
realize ‘If they can do it…I can too.”

Production on the documentary involved Coleman’s direct involvement, and if the trailer
is any indication it will be one of the most interesting documentaries on a band that’s
been made. For all his showmanship, in person Coleman couldn’t be farther from the
malevolent force he’s so often accused of being. He lives an austere life with few
possessions, and enjoys spending time on his land in New Zealand where he dreams of a
sustainable future and an enlightened society renewed by a respect for the cycles of
nature. “Think of it,” he says, “every village must be self reliant. Cafes with art galleries
and live music, outside a farmer’s market with locally grown produce.”

So that’s the sinister plot my friends, self reliance, responsibility, and a life lived in the
beauty of the natural cycles that surround us. If there is something sinister it’s the
fantasies of our culture’s demented chorus who’ve forgotten that the mask means
protection, without it they’re blinded by the sun’s illumination, and all we can hear are
their feeble mutterings against the red light of dawn.