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criticallyannoying · 2 years ago

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‘Kaisarion’ is the best Impera song and I can prove it

So I was fixated on the song Kaisarion a couple of weeks ago and I got to over-analyzing, as one does (Ghost brain rot is real y'all) and I think Kaisarion is a fucking masterpiece??

I present to you the fruits of my very autistic brain:

Here’s a lyrical analysis of the song “Kaisarion” by the band Ghost.

I propose the song is about a Christian being disillusioned with the Church after learning about the ugly side of it.

This song is incredibly complex and there’s a lot here, so this will be long.

First, we need some context:

The title “Kaisarion” is in reference to the Caesareum of Alexandria, where a woman named Hypatia was killed.

The Caesareum was an ancient temple in Alexandria, Egypt, first conceived by Cleopatra VII and finished construction by the Roman Emperor Augustus. It was used for many things in history, including a pagan temple, a learning center and after the late 4th century, a Catholic church.

Hypatia of Alexandria was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer and mathematician. She was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. Hypatia was very much a pagan, and she lived as a perpetual virgin.

In her time, there was a lot of religious tension in Alexandria between Christians, Pagans, and Jews. She was known to be very tolerant of different religions, though. Hypatia was awesome.

So, why was she killed?

Being the wise counselor that she was, she started counseling one important politician man and it bothered some people. Then, a group of extremist Christian men architected a plan to murder Hypatia.

What happened was: multiple men waited for her to come home, snatched her from her carriage, dragged her into the Caesareum, stripped her naked (there’s no way to know if this meant rape or not), killed her, tore her body to pieces, dragged the pieces around town and then burned them. There’s no consensus if she was stoned or slashed to death, since the word translates as ‘oyster shells’ but could mean a number of things. Some accounts say the flesh was scraped off her bones with these shells, but we can’t be sure. In any case, it’s a terrible way to die and a very brutal murder.

The murder of Hypatia is a sensitive topic because religious christians were responsible for this crime, and there’s not a strong consensus if the murder was religiously or politically motivated. There are, however, historical accounts that show she was thought of as a satanist and a witch among some people at the time.

As we’ll see in a bit, the band Ghost holds the strong opinion it was a mix of religious intolerance and good old-fashioned misogyny, and I’ll take this stance as well when interpreting the lyrics.

links for historical accounts: it was political / it was religious

Now, depending on where you look up the lyrics for Kaisarion it will differ in some words, but it doesn’t really change much and it’ll be addressed when we get there.

The verses are in the pov of Hypatia’s killers:

“Kaisarion - let’s us know right away where we are and what this is about.

A prophecy told - refers to the Christian idea that the religion was prophecized to be great.

We are building our empire From the ashes of an old - can mean the idea that Chistianity rose from the fallen previous religions, or the literal rise of the Holy Roman Empire from a crumbled Roman empire. This also references the christian practice of turning pagan temples into churches, as they did with the Caesareum.

Kaisarion

The fruit of the womb - in Christianity, “fruit of the womb” literally means children. Here it refers to the newly-formed religion (a baby still)

Our brotherhood of good faith Sealed an apostate witch's doom - the men who killed Hypatia, the ‘witch’, thought themselves as doing a good thing.

Here we get to the first bridge, and we move away from the pov of the killers. Here we begin a series of statements that structurally parallel the Christian song “He Reigns”, by the Newsboys. In that song, the statements are used as things that make you ‘fear’ God. In contrast to that, the statements in Kaisarion have a negative feel, so the idea here is that those represent the reasons the singer fell out of love with religion.

It is the sound of another deadline Whistling past your ears - historically, a “deadline” is the line around a prison beyond which prisoners would be shot for crossing, sometimes being shot at just for approaching it. Here it’s about being reprimanded/attacked for getting too close to something you shouldn’t.

It is the sight of a million regrets Mounting over years - the catholic church has done terrible things over the centuries, and they always release statements apologizing for it.

It is the words that were never spoken That echoes through the times - the words never spoken refer to the real reason those terrible things were done in the name of the church/christianity. From how the song portrays the Christians who killed Hypatia, we can assume the reason was intolerance. It was never admitted that intolerance was the motive behind so many atrocities, but we can clearly see it throughout history.

It is the smell of the burning temples Swept away by rhymes - ‘burning temples’ here is a stand-in for the many other bad things the Church did, and the ‘rhymes’ are beautiful art and theatrics of the Church used to distract the faithful from the bad stuff.

Now the chorus really drives home the disillusionment we touched on earlier:

Far away from the stench of the heavens - heaven is undesirable, it’s dirty, and we’re now far from it

(Hypatia) - calls for Hypatia, a person who saw firsthand how ugly christianity could become

Long ago yet too close to forever - self-explanatory. It’s been ages but it’s still too soon.

(Hypatia)

When a paradise is lost go straight to - the play Paradise Lost tells the story of the fall from heaven from Satan’s perspective, where he claims they unjustly lost their paradise and were cast straight to Hell, where Satan decided to rule and turn it into a kingdom bc fuck god. This line of the song suggests that there’s only one option for when you ‘lose your paradise’ in religion: going the opposite way. The song never says the word hell, which shows it’s a natural conclusion, we all know that losing paradise means going to hell.

Verse 2, we’re back to the killers’ POV:

Kaisarion - takes us back to that time and place.

A matter of love - an attempt at justifying the murder: it was about love for God

When Mother Earth is calling For a father up above - This is about nature calling for divine intervention, but the meaning is a little complex. There’s a belief in Christianity that nature will malfunction as a sign that people need to turn to God (rain refuses to fall, crops rotting, etc,). This concept is often extrapolated to mean human nature as well, and if you believe the most perfect state of nature is close to God, people rejecting Christianity is a big malfunction. The main idea here is that the existence of an influential pagan like Hypatia was nature’s cry for help, and the killing was actually divine intervention through the hands of those men.

Kaisarion

Put on the smiles - “don’t be sad, you’re doing a good thing :D”

And throw your holy rocks right at her - ‘holy rocks’ embody the sense of divine justice, the same idea behind holy wars and such.

For her satanic wiles - direct quote from a historical document stating this as the reason why Hypatia was killed (same link as before)

Second bridge, change of POV back to the list:

It is the truth of candor shown Through a prism of deceit - the honest, ugly truth is still visible through the deception of the church

It is the continence of bishops With their choirboys en suite - celibacy is a must for any catholic religious figure, and yet sexual abuse of minors is incredibly common inside the institution. The church covered it up for decades, and it’s still rare to have those incidents investigated and the abusers punished.

It is the tongue soiled in adulation That licks to no avail - Here we have a lyrical inconsistency: some sources say ‘selling adulation’, others say ‘soiled in adulation’. Either case is about religious figures and their empty words, but I believe the correct lyrics are soiled in adulation (for grammatical reasons + that's what I hear). tongue = spokesperson; “that licks to no avail” = the actions of the tongue is meaningless ‘selling adulation’ = religious figures make you feel important and promise so much but deliver so little ‘soiled in adulation’ = means ‘dirtied by’ adulation, aka religious authorities who were corrupted by the ego boost they got and ended up not being genuine, giving only enough to get people to come back and feed their ego some more.

It is the noise of the righteous dogma That hides the handmaid's tail - Another lyrical inconsistency: some sources say ‘handmaid’s tale’ (like the book) but most say ‘tail’. Now, both words are pronounced the same so there’s no way to tell. Let’s look at both possibilities. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a book by Margareth Atwood that portrays a theocratical patriarchal society in which women's rights and bodies are heavily policed by the religious state and the men around them. Now, Atwood stated many times that she only included historical occurrences to avoid criticism that her book was exaggerated. It wasn’t; the horrible things that happen to women in The Handmaid’s Tale are things that happened in real life, to real women, at some point. With this line, the song is saying that the ‘righteous dogma’ of the church actually perpetuates the oppression and abuse of women, like the very real things shown in The Handmaid's Tale. It claims to be a good thing but it’s actually an oppressive system. If he actually says ‘tail’, the references to the book still holds, and we get an additional meaning: the tail represents the true animalistic reality of the system.

From this point forward the song just repeats the chorus and the first and second bridge together as one.

In conclusion:

'Kaisarion' is about a Christian (likely catholic) who is faced with the ugly truth about their religion: hatred and intolerance were present from the very beginning. Using the tragedy of Hypatia at the Caesareum, the song makes a point that the Church is a shining shell with a rotten core, and it was like that even before the actual founding of the Catholic Church. The underlying message is that there’s no hope for Christianity, your only option is to nope right out of it.

Now, that parallels perfectly how many religious conversions happen: the missionaries first challenge the integrity of your beliefs, then they present the arguments of why that doesn’t make any sense, and they finally show their own religion as the only logical explanation for the questions they raised.

Why is that relevant? Because we can’t look at this song apart from the lore of the band:

The head of the Satanic Church is singing about how violent Christians are, highlighting the atrocities committed by them, and the song closes with “when a paradise is lost go straight to…”.

The song is about religious conversion, y’all. Papa’s appealing to the people who left Christianity after realizing the wrong in it, but are struggling because it all still feels too close to them. By referencing Paradise Lost, he is creating a parallel in the listener's mind, he’s offering them the solution. What do you do after Christianity fails you? You know exactly what to do. You do what Satan did when God failed him: you go to Hell, you join the Satanic Church.

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