What to Do When Your Empire is Dying

The Good News

Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836

Friends, fellow members of the genus and species, Homo mythologica, we are trapped in a story, a mythic archetype so potent, so ancient, it’s bigger than all the players. Especially those arrogant ones who think they rule. In this story, the seemingly powerful are taken through the unavoidable process of death and rebirth.

Back in November ‘24, when Trump was elected, I predicted our culture would die; I saw no way, mythologically, psychologically, or archetypally, to avoid it. I shuddered to think on this, because whatever was going to happen to put the STOP on our empire, it was going to have to be as big as a world war, something to cause a deafening silence in everyone’s mind.

The ancient Medusa found at Didyma

I wrote a 13-part series on mythic death-and-rebirth narratives, speculating then that we were about halfway through our descent to the Underworld, which we would finally enter, “naked and bowed low,” because at each of the seven gates on the way down, some egoic superpower would be taken away. And, after all that loss, the divine feminine rises from her throne to slap us all dead. Back then, I didn’t know what this death would look like.

Now, I think I do.

Why did we make a Hell of Earth? It isn’t natural. Nothing forced us to whip up our terror of death in order to separate from Nature and set up systematic oppression. And this is what patriarchy is: the terror of death masquerading as power over it, controlling the world through systems.

And when those men, working the system, flexed their unchecked power over terrified little girls (we now fear to the point of death), there was someone looking through a camera lens waiting to flex an even more superior power over the pedophiles.

Blackmail.

International kompromat over powerful people being made to do what even more powerful people demand. Blackmail is a form of patriarchal superiority, a top dog telling a bottom dog what he will do, whether the bottom dog likes it or not. In this analogy, it’s another form of rape. That’s what Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson are accused of. Giving financial secrets, high-level insider secrets, to Jeffrey Epstein. Why would they do such a stupid thing?

Kompromat, and the threat of death.

Two people have died in police custody so far. Jeffery Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel of MC2 Modeling Management - associates in the sex trafficking trade. Epstein set Brunel up in business. And he bragged to Virginia Guiffre that he’d raped (my word) one thousand of Brunel’s girls. That was their on-the-job training.

One convenient suicide that halts a powder-keg trial is suspicious. Two, following an identical pattern screams “execution.” Will Andrew Moutbatten-Windsor have a sudden attack of conscience and kill himself in police custody, too? How about Mandelson? You might think it would be too much, but Epstein’s death, and then Brunel’s, were too much, and we swallowed that.

Zorro Ranch, New Mexico

And where are the caretakers who worked at Zorro Ranch for twenty years? I hope they’re hiding out somewhere safe. I only wonder how there can be such a thing as somewhere safe, because those two know where the bodies are buried.

And it’s all coming out. There’s no stopping it now. There’s a Truth Commission looking into just that property, and who among the powerful of New Mexico looked the other way or participated. Shadow secrets have a way of rising up through the chimneys, grates, and ventilation shafts, overtaking the whole culture in a miasma, like the toxic yellow smog that enveloped London in December 1952.

The truth will out.

And when it does, we will have the opportunity to say no to patriarchal dominance. Men, of course, must reject the poison, but also the women who have sought safety through proximity to powerful men. They are invited to a Gisèle Pelicot moment of their own, Sleeping with the Enemy style.

This, coupled with ecological collapse, could be the Divine Feminine’s death-slap, and it’s global. It goes through New York, yes, D.C, of course, Hollywood, too, and more, the rich and powerful of every industry, the real influencers. Sorry, social media and self-help gurus, you aren’t the real influencers, though you are guilty, too. It’s not just the rich and powerful, and as Celeste Davis pointed out this week, it’s the everyman, too. I would just add the everywoman. If men were the only ones holding up patriarchy, it would have collapsed long ago.

It’s a system of control and oppression, as Dina Honour pointed out this week as well. A system that runs on autopilot, which I would name: unconsciousness - our refusal to see all the harm we are doing because, like an addict, we just can’t see any other way to live. But there is another way. Anyone who has been through their suffering and out the other side will tell you it’s filled with joy.

Celeste Davis said, quite rightly, that the word the mainstream media is missing in all their analysis of the Epstein trafficking ring was patriarchy. Yes! I say. And blackmail.

It goes through Moscow, Tel Aviv, London, Paris, Ankara, Eastern Europe, Brazil, and institutions like Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and the idyllic Seychelles Islands - all over the world. It controls senators and congresspeople who won’t or can’t say no to Trump, even though they know how many times he’s mentioned in the Epstein Files better than we do, and that what he’s doing to our country is treason. Why would they give him such cover? I don’t think the desire to be reelected explains it.

Even if they personally have never raped a little girl, they’ve accepted PAC money from people who have, or who’ve refused to investigate storage spaces, or insist on a search warrant, or follow the Epstein Files Release Act, or release the other two-thirds of the files. Maybe like other kinds of addicts, they have a story running about how everything can still work out if they just keep their secrets a little longer.

Why was there never a search of Zorro Ranch when there were two credible independent FBI tips, four months apart in 2019, and another credible tip from a former employee after Epstein died? Why has it taken three decades to get into the unacceptable position we are in today? Denial. We weren’t willing to let everything fall apart. We were afraid to let our way of life die. But it died anyway, thanks to the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the corporate billionaires, media appeasers, DOGE, and ICE. All the Barbies and Kens.

This time, the whole thing is going to unravel anyway because that’s the way of secrets and the way of this archetype. And it’s the way of the collective unconscious, too. There’s a synchronicity that’s larger than any of these tech billionaires who want to put all of us under Chinese government-style surveillance. And just as the cover-up artists fear, the truth will topple governments. And we will have a moment, collectively, that slaps us dead. The sheer scope will stop our minds and explode our hearts.

We are in an apocalypse, the ancient Greek word meaning "to reveal" or "to unveil." We are being revealed to ourselves in a you-can’t-look-away moment, which is also a you-can’t-avoid-this moment.

So what do we do while our empire is wheezing, our culture is thrashing about in death throes, and the diagnosis is terminal?

We suffer.

Consciously, willingly, and with open hearts. If you die before you die, then when you won’t die, you won’t have to die. This phrase, attributed to Rumi, is also inscribed on the Mt. Athos Monastery in Greece. The patriarchs would do well to heed it.

I have died and been reborn many times, some truly terrifying. And now, I trust suffering so much, I’ll lend you some. It’s counterintuitive in this death-phobic culture that wants to medicate suffering to the point of insensibility. If you sit with dying people, and I do, you know the lengths our culture is capable of, driven by our terror of death and our avoidance of suffering - and the inevitable. But there is another option.

We can suffer consciously. Then, we are present to make choices. For example, we can choose to love rather than seek personal comfort. We can accept that we are dying and become as beautiful as Andrea Gibson. We can love out loud as they did. We can do what’s right no matter how expensive it is. Because we know we are going to die, we don’t need to hoard. In the face of our monumental death, money doesn’t matter. Love does. We can accept our own death.

According to the mythic archetype, we’ll only be dead for three days. How long is three days collectively? I don’t know. It could take years, or it could literally be three days. Not knowing if we survive death or not is part of the suffering. After that, we’ll be reborn, but not as who we were. That culture, thankfully, will be dead.

I hope we make something beautiful, life-affirming for humans and non-humans alike. Something Earth-supporting, because she, Nature, is the divine feminine. I hope we take our roles as stewards very seriously and begin really taking care of our environment and one another (no matter our pigmentation or sexual orientation), for future generations - for we are Nature, too. I hope we can embrace our impermanence and release our terror of death, for that is how they control us. Death is a friend. I hope we build a genuine matrifocal egalitarian culture, geared toward supporting the next generations, rather than the momentary greed of a few adolescent billionaires who think they can live forever if only they can harvest our collective energy, suck it out of our lives, and into their offshore bank accounts.

We can have a culture that values members for how much they give away, because no one lives forever. We could value interconnectedness. We could accumulate wisdom rather than stuff. If we embraced the fact that we are going to die, we wouldn’t waste our lives working ourselves to death to make other people wealthy.

I hope we learn to worship life instead of our terror of death.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.