During the Reykjavík International Film Festival (RIFF) I finally watched Antichrist, Lars Von Trier's last work. I was well prepared for it, and it didn't shock me too much; I knew enough about the plot, the genital mutilation(s), the psychodrama, the talking fox. And of course I knew that Von Trier is fucked up. So, the film didn't surprise me too much, and although I left the cinema with a very weird feeling about my genitals, I wasn't too much disturbed about it. I still don't know whether I liked it or not, though; that's something I'll have to think about over the next days. I really liked the photography and the technical choices of many scenes, but my overall judgement of the film is kind of suspended as to now. I probably expected the plot to be a bit more complex; for instance, I would have expected the murderous instinct of the female protagonist to have developed in a much more complex way, although probably that would have been what I would expect from a book and not from a film.Beside liking it or not, a couple of statements from the film gave me enough to think over. There was something in the film that was just ages far from the way I think. Beside the love/hate/madness relationship shown in the film, Von Trier displayed as background witch hunt and Satanism, and I found that weird, namely because I never believed that witches had anything to do with Satan. But it was the female character in the film that uttered something about the "bad nature of women", almost justifying witch hunt, that highly disturbed me. I guess that was the prelude to her madness and homicidal instinct that followed in the film, but still I believe that Von Trier put it there because he wanted to say something about it. The most disturbing element was that their trip to the summer house in the forest was depicted as too negative an experience for my taste. The forest itself was clearly a beautiful place, that Von Trier and his character distorted into "Satan's Church", as they themselves state.Forests and non-anthropic places have always been the domain of the divine for ancient people. Even to us modern people, they inspire a sort of holy terror, but not a demonic one. Satan is a construct of Christianity, and even in Judaism it was often not related to what we call "evil"; it often referred to foreign gods (such as the Phoenician god Ba'al, or the Philistine Beelzebub), and in many cases, Satan was just one of God's angels whom He would send around to test people's faith, notably Job and later, Jesus. In Judaism there is little notion of any absolute evil or Devil, that was developed at the time when Christianity spread across Europe, gradually turning Christianity into a sort of new Manicheism. It was an easy tool for converting people, and gradually habits, practices, beliefs and places that were connected to the previous religion, became "satanic". This is what happened to the forest, home to forces that humans had to deal with carefully.Lately I've been a lot interested in magic mushrooms and I've read quite many things about them. It seems to me very likely that the mushroom was humanity's first deity, and where the concept itself of divinity and otherworldness came from. In shamanic belief, everything is regulated from beyond the threshold: deseases are caused by presences, that need a trip to the other world to be dealt with. This is not far from a modern Christian exhorcism, i.e. the belief of a demon occupying someone's body has definitely shamanic origins, and it resembles all in all a "bad trip". When you take a mushroom, you feel its presence within you. It's like being a host to a divine presence, that is taking you to another world, can could be either good or bad. And since Christianity came, much of this belief system has been labeled as "devilish". And the relationship between man and nature, and especially the forest, which is home to the mushroom, has radically changed. I believe that the broken link between man and nature caused by the advent of Christianity is in the aftermath responsible for the great damages that people have inflicted to the planet.Something has been saved though, usually in places that have been less heavily affected by Christianity. The whole Christmas symbology is related to Shamanism. Originally a Roman holiday of Sol Invictus, celebrating the sun being newborn after its death in the winter, lately it acquired its modern symbology from Northern European shamanic belief. Santa Claus himself resembles a shaman, and wears the colours of the Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria), the most powerful allucinogenic mushroom. He flies up in the sky like the shaman-god Odin (he was recorded to lead a great hunting party through the sky at Yule), and has reindeers which are extremely symbolic for Northern shamanic tribes. The symbology of the Christmas Tree is not related to Santa Claus (as in many places gifts were put into boots, and even in Italy socks were used until a few years ago), but eventually it spread a bit everywhere, as the tree as the place for gifts recalls the tree as the place at whose bottom mushrooms grow.I don't know how people can still think that witches in the middle ages and later really were "Satanic women". In a way, they were, but since I don't believe in Satan, this doesn't make sense to me. I also think that Satanism is just an act of protest, an anti-Christianity that uses its own symbols turning them upside down and "perverting" them, but it can neither be considered a real religion nor a threat. Most importantly, it forgets about where everything started, i.e. in traditional, pre-Christian religions (what I call "natural religions" as deeply rooted in the culture that practices them and were not "imported"), that had no distinction between good and evil. As I wrote above, Christianity itself as a run off from Judaism had little or no notion of good and evil, and the concept of sin was rather anthropological than religious, i.e. it involved clean and unclean things and practices, like eating pork, marrying relatives, dealing with blood, and so on.
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