Into the heart of darkness

Heart of darkness by Creepy Substack AI

“You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.”

― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The best film of 1979,” but may be echoed as one of the best films of all time.

Apocalypse Now is usually listed top ten on most people’s lists, and if you haven’t seen it, then set aside 3 hours on a late weekend to privately indulge, but only if you have an appetite for war films that descend into the depths of psychological horror.

While the majority of the film features a performance by Martin Sheen as the hired assassin US Captain Willard, the last act by Marlon Brando, who plays the disgraced Colonel Kurtz, is unforgettable and haunting; something that perturbs a deep and menacing truth underneath the grotesque facades of war.

The film takes place in 1969 during the Vietnam war, opening with a violent artillery bombardment on Viet Cong insurgents. After a brief exposition, headquarters summons Captain Willard to receive special orders to quietly navigate up the Nùng River. His mission? In eastern Cambodia, at remote jungle outpost, US Colonel Kurtz has gone rogue engaging in barbaric assaults against enemy forces in the region.

Willard is ordered to terminate Kurtz’s command with “extreme prejudice,” and travels up the river, through various battles and outposts, until reaching the river’s end.

And in an abandoned Khmer temple, Willard is immersed into Kurtz’s Horror.

Human sacrifice before Tohil by Diego Rivera (1931)

Human history is stained with ritualistic human sacrifice and cannibalism.

This world demands sacrifice. Every meal, every day, life was sacrificed for you to survive. The ancients composed this idea into their spiritual practices aimed to influence events or appease the perceived anger of the gods. With a greater sacrifice came a greater reward, ranging from ritualistic dance, festival, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice to child sacrifice; now correctly deemed savage, uncivilized, barbaric and evil. Most modern societies relinquished these practices long ago, which is reflected in religious tales like the Binding of Issac in Genesis 22.¹

However, some cultures still indulge.

In South Africa, Muti is a practice that sacrifices human children to excise body parts for witchcraft ingredients.² In West Africa, Juju is a spiritual belief system that uses animal and human sacrifice as payment for invoking spells.³ At the turn of the century on September 21, 2001, the dismembered body of a young boy, aged between four and seven years old, was found by the bank of the River Thames in London, whose cause of death was determined to be violent trauma to the neck. Although the head and limbs were never recovered, investigators suspected the child was trafficked from South Africa to the UK for Muti human sacrifice.

“The victim may be a blood relative or one of their own children, but is never a stranger and definitely never an enemy. The child is not killed because they are angry with it. They are thankful to the child.

The child is actually being sacrificed so that these people can have something of an advancement. It is to attain a goal that is unattainable by normal sacrifice (the sacrifice of an animal), whether that goal is prosperity or high political office.”⁴

Practitioners believe blood has secret a meta-physical power.

The purpose of these rituals vary. Some intend to restore energy to primeval entities in exchange for power, where others believe consuming human meat as gourmet or medicine yields a reinvigorating effect. In each case, sacrifice is made to the perceived benefit of the practitioner, clearly not to its victims. Throughout its long and ancient history, the continent has seen many cults and secret societies practising these heinous rites, as evidenced by this grisly case in the West.

The boy’s murder still goes unsolved to this day.

Heart of Darkness and Other Tales by Joseph Conrad

Apocalypse Now is a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness.

The novel is considered one of English literature’s greatest classics, and perhaps one of the most analyzed texts in high schools, colleges and universities, particularly for its poetic use of prose, ambiguity and striking themes.

The work has both its proponents and critics. Some claim the work chastises colonial brutality by referring to the savage degradation of Europeans in Africa, while others claim it perpetuates xenophobic racial stereotypes by dehumanizing African society. Stan Galloway compared Heart of Darkness with the Jungle Tales of Tarzan claiming “the inhabitants [of both works], whether antagonists or compatriots, were clearly imaginary and meant to represent a particular fictive cipher and not a particular African people.”⁵

In the book, Marlow is sent by a trading company to travel up the snaking Congo River to an important trading post run by Kurtz, a respected first-class agent. Upon reaching the trading post, he’s greeted by a Russian wanderer who strayed into Kurtz’s camp; falling into admiration with his power. The local tribe had come to worship Kurtz as a god, despite his illness, and decorated the area with severed heads on posts.

The trading manager tells Marlow that Kurtz was to be relieved of company business immediately since his methods had become “unsound.” Along the journey back down the river, Kurtz deteriorates and faintly whispers before his death “The horror! The horror!” According to Harold Bloom, Conrad drew on his own experience working for a Belgian trading company in the Congo between 1890 - 1899.⁶

Despite Galloway’s chastising of events as a “particular fictive cipher,” another non-fiction book was released around the same time, Benin: The City of Blood (1897).

Cows in a Pond at Sunset by Sanford Robinson Gifford (1860)

The Benin Expedition of 1897 is subject to much controversy.

Although I consider Wikipedia to be a source of strategic disinformation, on this account it appears to counter the Netflix-washing angle of the Benin Expedition.

Which is further corroborated by Reginald Bacon’s account in Benin: The City of Blood.

Following this road for about two hundred yards, we came upon the first evidence that we were approaching Benin in the shape of a human sacrifice.

Laid on the grass where two paths met was a young woman horribly mutilated, a rough wooden gag tied in her mouth was clenched tightly by her teeth, which, with the expression of her face, told of the agony of her murder.

At her feet lay a goat with its knees broken. I asked the guide what it meant, and he said it was to prevent the white man coming farther; a queer idea!

A few yards farther brought us to another this time a man, with his arms tied behind him, lying on his face in the path, but for some reason not decapitated, which as a rule is the second form of sacrifice.⁷

And on a separate account in Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903).

Benin City, February 19th.—We are now settled down in the above place. It is a misnomer to call it a city; it is a charnel-house.

All about the houses and streets are dead natives, some crucified and sacrificed on trees, others on stage erections, some on the ground, some in pits, and amongst the latter we found several half-dead ones. I suppose there is not another place on the face of the globe so near civilisation where such butcheries are carried on with impunity.⁸

The Kingdom of Benin was supposedly practising human sacrifice for its Juju rituals.

I understand history is written by the victors, and I’m in no position to claim if there is or isn’t any political slant in these old passages, but there’s an interesting idea to reflect on. Despite the colonial / racial biases of the aforementioned proponents and critics of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, assuming the legitimacy of the context above, the novel makes a much more important and profound point, because ritualistic human sacrifice is not unique to this time, land or culture.

There’s an ancient evil, a darkness in the heart of every man that transcends culture, race and even time. Demanding greater and more depraved sacrifice, the darkness consumes its host to maintain its magnificence and commanding power over man. Heart of Darkness alludes to those unseen primeval entities offered blood sacrifice.

And disgracefully so, that despicable and disgusting madness does not discriminate.

Because this world demands sacrifice.

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”

― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Sunset by the Ruins by Hermann David Salomon Corrodi (1844-1905)

Societies disintegrate as soon as they lose religion.

Of course, I would be one of the first to challenge such claim. As a skeptic vetted through rigorous scientific training, I’m well versed in the so-called modern truisms associated with traditional religions and faith. Etymologically, religion comes from re + legere meaning “read again,” but also re + ligare meaning “bind again,” referring to the bond between humans and the divine.

In the etymological sense, losing religion is the unbinding between humans and the divine, as if an alchemical solvent had washed through the minds of men. Although some dislike the word divine, it can be also thought of as the unknowable absolute that governs all practice of objectivity and empirical study; true science. Despite modern squabbling, there’s not much philosophical difference between faith in the divine and the hidden antecedent that governs all scientific philosophy, quite simply because Cartesian ontology is not nihilism.

Apocalypse Now alludes to this disintegrating factor through its portrayal of war encumbered by madness, and follows through using Joseph Conrad’s retelling of Heart of Darkness as apocalypsis; a revealing of the depravity that lurks below societies dissolved by war, violence and degeneracy.

If religion, religare, is the binding of man to a higher order absolute truth, then nihilism is unligare, a poisonous solvent that dissolves the minds of men for primeval monsters which feed off madness. Imagine the power to satiate any selfish pursuit, paid for through the blood of children.

In the West, how many children have been sacrificed for selfish endeavours?

Evil is banal. Trite, trivial and commonplace.

Given its unimaginable supply, who really wants it? Only modern fools.

Believing that simply having good intentions and a well-meaning virtue somehow accounts for savage and degenerate behaviour is the epitome of delusional. I don’t care what you believe, because without good works all that remains is triviality. Violence for the sake of social justice is madness, which merely offers sacrifice to merit an imaginary virtue at the alter of a colourful idol manifesting an absurd idea.

This world demands sacrifice: others for yourself or yourself for others?

While our economy rattles like a loose muffler ready to spark and dislodge, law and order has been relegated to a criminal assistance program, part-time cheerleading team and brutal enforcer of mildly funny political commentary, because we’ve been offered up as sacrifice for some enormous promise of power.

But something immaterial moves society which helps it survive.

What that something is I cannot accurately capture with a single noun. Without religare and a spiritual renaissance, we could easily descend back into our timeless nature of depravity, because the heart of darkness lives within us all.

If this world demands a sacrifice, then we best offer ourselves for the sake of our children, not offer our children for the sake of ourselves. And importantly grow a strong backbone, else have it forcibly removed. History is brutal and ugly, and hideous practices still operate beneath our illusory playtend guise of normalcy.

That inner darkness is beyond description, beyond the imagination, and it is very real; and very old. The fool blames racism, religion, or ironically other races, but never dares look inside, because they’re afraid; as they should. If you don’t like the ugliness of the world, then face the ugliness within. Good only exists when we sacrifice ourselves for others and regain our connection with the truth. Ask yourself, what good works will you offer as sacrifice for religare; the much needed spiritual renaissance.

1. Genesis 22.

2. Bhootra, B. L., & Weiss, E. (2006). Muti killing: : a case report. Medicine, Science, and the Law, 46(3), 255–259. https://doi.org/10.1258/rsmmsl.46.3.255

3. Owusu, E. S. (2022). The superstition that dismembers the African child: An exploration of the scale and features of Juju-driven paedicide in Ghana. International Annals of Criminology, 60(1), 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/cri.2022.2

4. Adedayo, Festus. (2021). Nigeria’s huge market of blood and human sacrifice. Premium Times. https://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/486817-nigerias-huge-market-of-blood-and-human-sacrifice-by-festus-adedayo.html

5. Galloway, Stan. (2010). The Teenage Tarzan: A Literary Analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jungle Tales of Tarzan. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. p. 112.

6. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2009). Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1438117102.

7. Bacon, R. H. (2022). Benin: The city of blood (classic reprint). Forgotten Books. p. 79-80.

8. Ling Roth, H. (2018). Great Benin: Its customs, art and horrors. Franklin Classics. Appendix I: A Diary of a Surgeon with the Benin Punitive Expedition, p. ix.