Wouldst thou live deliciously?

So the Dark Lord* whispers into Tamsin's ear, from behind, at the climax of Robert Egger's 2015 film The VVitch: A New-England Tale.

(Anyone who knows the Master well will recognize that nape-nuzzling whisper from behind.)

Forget all the nonsense about the Devil and temptation. We enter here into the realm of the Animal God.

See Him that we call the Horned as the collective body of animal life on planet Earth.** Embrace Him—embrace Life—and live deliciously.

Or reject Him and what He has to offer, and endure a joyless existence of crabbed misery.

“Buddha” was wrong. Yes, life is full of suffering, but there's joy, too. Embrace the Horned, embrace the life which as animals, is our inheritance by right. Embrace bodily existence, for all it's worth.

This is the gift of the Horned, lord of this world: the gift of a god.

Embrace the Animal. Live deliciously.

 


 

*"Dark,” they call Him, but do not all gods own Their own darkness?

**This explains why, in the Black Phillip song sung early in the film, the he-goat Black Phillip is said to be “king of sky and land...king of sea and sand”: life in all its forms is lord wherever it goes. This interpretation likewise explains how it is that “Black Phillip eats the lion from the lion's den.” Life lives on life. In the end, even the lion, king of beasts, is eaten by scavengers and microorganisms.