The Show was great so what’s the catch? A look into the man behind the Golden Age of the Grotesque

A S a member of the Church of Satan, and holding certain occultish aspiration myself, I guess the one thing that holds my fascination about Marilyn Manson, is why did Anton LaVey choose him? The criteria for such selection in any other instance being so particular as it is.

As it is that this man must be the philosophy of the Church expressed in art as swords of death, surely this must be the reason. Yet that this may be so, I nevertheless again, ask why?

Why and how can this be so? He never even tried, never sought it out, never wanted to be anything other than what he is. But there, that Satanists born, not made, that fate chooses greatness rather than the other way around, the accusation is it’s own answer is it not?

Is it not that this latest charade of Grotesque Burlesque does not deride the trendy sham of the shallow façade of which stage-craft was borne. Is it not that all he pours forth is not blasphemy of all those things held sacred to the Theatre of Hate that is the Cabaret called entertainment?

Perhaps I am biased. I hear the cynics cry, do I not see the Gimmick. That I a citizen of this consumer society, where all things reduce to commodities to be bought and sold, have made such a choice? What are they buying this week, some multi-cultural delight developed entirely in a western laboratory?

Are they themselves not biased in their spite. The old story of the failed artist becoming thus for having nowhere else to go and nothing more than resentment left. That he is something that they will never be.

Maybe they don’t care. Maybe what he is being the last thing they would ever want to be, that he still draws the adulation of a crowd. It must as anathema to they who have no such talent.

Sacred cows make great eating. That a Satanist should be ever aware of past orthodoxies packaged as something new. I’m sure no Moulin Rouge features in his make-up, and oh that make-up..

I half expected him to break in a rendition of ‘Swannee’. That he could be his own god, does he tell us he is also nobody else’s nigger but his own. Could I do worse than to bow down to such a false idol as this?

Maybe I could. Maybe I could buy into the idea that what is offered me by the mass produced bottle really is of "the purest artesian well water", or I could I dip my cup into the font of a Catholic church. What is holy and what is sacred but to the individual anyway?

The path of Satanism isn’t always easy. The path that our journeys take us on sometimes being more challenging than any other we might take. That the path of these two men crossed, and I stand at that crossroads now, looking upon them, I also look behind me and draw from the well of Christianity to ask: