The opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games resembled a ritualized mockery of the sacred. From an ethical-religious perspective, it was a ritual of evil. In an earlier essay for my Substack, I discussed the implications of the ideology embodied by the ceremony’s symbolism. Now I return to the topic to discuss the parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
Quite a few people found the parody blasphemous and perverse, an open manifestation of the decadence of globalist institutions. The reaction to the mass uproar was both interesting and typical.
Here’s how it went. The mainstream media believed that they could instantly dismiss the outrage over the alleged blasphemy. They made a quick call to the artistic director of the ceremony, who immediately revealed the Truth: the performance in question during the opening ceremony had nothing to do with The Last Supper. It represented a pagan feast of gods. Fake-news spreaders on X and other conspiracy theorists found themselves debunked once again.
The army of fact-checkers, digital first responders, and other zealous supporters of progressivism sprang into action. They posted references to the artistic director’s words under claims about The Last Supper and even added Bellini’s painting, The Feast of the Gods, to show everyone which painting it was actually about. The only slightly odd thing—which surely the defenders noticed—was that Bellini’s painting didn’t really resemble the grotesque theater staged in Paris. But who cares? The artistic director had spoken; there was no more reason to doubt. The outrage was based on delusion and illusion.
The painting that the performance alluded to was not Bellini’s The Feast of the Gods, in fact, but rather The Feast of the Olympian Gods by Jan van Bijlert. That painting does align in composition with the staging at the Paris ceremony. One might ask, then, what’s the fuss? Does it matter which painting it was? It wasn’t about The Last Supper, so the performance wasn’t mocking Christianity.
Of course, it does matter. Jan van Bijlert painted his Feast of the Olympian Gods around 1635, about 150 years after Da Vinci painted The Last Supper. And Van Bijlert’s painting is clearly a pagan variant of Da Vinci’s painting. Whether the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games directly mocked Da Vinci’s Last Supper or did so through a parodic imitation of Van Bijlert’s painting, what happened was indeed mocking The Last Supper—and thus Christianity.
The most remarkable thing is that the fact-checkers and woke enthusiasts did not see that the ceremony was indeed about The Last Supper. They mocked those who did see, calling them lost and misguided. The more someone is gripped by this kind of progressivism, the more he accuses those who think differently of madness. In itself, it remains one of the most remarkable effects of the phenomenon of mass formation: an enormous narrowing of perspective, accompanied by a radical blindness to anything that does not align with one’s own fanatical beliefs.
The representatives of the dominant narrative are not the only ones who fall prey to this. Fanatical conspiracy thinking essentially suffers from a similar problem. Those who break free from the grip of the dominant narrative, in a sense, wander unprotected in the world of the real and often seek refuge in another illusion, or at the very least, another narrative that irresponsibly reduces reality to a simplistic story.
None of this debate involves whether there should be sexual freedom in society or whether it should be forbidden to mock religious tenets, beliefs, or views. What it involves is how institutions use symbolism, as seen at the opening ceremony of the Olympics (or the recent Eurovision Song Contest), to situate their essence in mockery and perversion. That is precisely the function of a ceremony of a major social event: it represents the essence of a society, the principles that support the social system. That is certainly a good reason to protest and refuse to participate in the ideology on display.
The mainstream reaction missed the mark completely. The opening ceremony’s producers confirmed in an official statement, contradicting the artistic director’s claims, that the particular part of the ceremony indeed parodied The Last Supper. When it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.
That the mainstream then remains silent reveals its inability to admit mistakes. That is, in itself, human, but it is especially pronounced among representatives of the dominant narrative (and typical of totalitarian systems). Consider the Covid crisis in this regard. Every crucial aspect of the dominant narrative has been shown to be wrong: the origin of the virus, the mortality of the virus, the effectiveness of the mitigation measures, the level of effectiveness of the vaccines, the (supposedly nonexistent) side effects of the vaccines, and so on. Name an issue, and the dominant information authorities got it wrong.
How many fact-checkers and mainstream journalists have you heard admitting that they have suppressed the truth in the name of Truth? How many have you heard apologize for degrading people to second-class citizens, based on pseudoscience? Those who crown themselves as Ambassadors of Truth and profile themselves lavishly as fighters against fake news and disinformation suppress the truth with a stream of the very thing that they claim to oppose.
Why is it always Christians who have to endure mockery? Indignant suggestions that some group should try to stage such a parody about the prophet Muhammad at the Olympic Games flow from that reasonable question. Woke adherents will think twice before directing their extraordinary heroism at Islam. Yet this moment should not be an opportunity to sow division between religions and worldviews—between Jews, Christians, Muslims, or agnostics or atheists who try to stay connected with principles of humanity. There exists an ideology that mocks ethical awareness and manifests itself as an anti-ethical force. That is what we must oppose. We don’t want to become the monster we fight.
Photo by LUDOVIC MARIN/Getty Images