Interview:2003 Madonna Wayne Gacy interview with Boyd Rice

Once A Catholic Always A Catholic (Dagobert's Revenge Vol 5. Issue 1 )
Interview with Madonna Wayne Gacy
Date	July, 1998
Source	RX Drone/Pigist Christ

Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

Pogo: aka Madonna Wayne Gacy

Interview by Boyd Rice (Dagobert's Revenge)

DR: I remember when Columbine happened and the media blamed your band. You guys canceled the Denver show, which was scheduled for just a couple of weeks after. And then it turned out that the media had just jumped to conclusions in implicating you guys. But they never said, "Oh we were wrong", so there's still this general consensus that these kids listened to one of your records and went on a rampage.

Pogo: I don't believe that's so. Ultimately, the music they listened to had nothing to do with what they did. I wish music was that powerful.

DR: Well, do you think people overestimate the influence of music, or are they underestimating it? The influence can be profound.

Pogo: But the action is up to the individual. I mean, you can be profoundly influenced by a lot of things, but your ultimate actions are your decisions, your choice, and they're completely separate from your influences. Some people are completely ineffectual, and have lots of grandiose ideas, but never do anything. Other people are a little bit overactive. They sometimes take those things which should be fantastic and introspective and make them appear on the outside world. I mean, everybody has dreams of doing terrible things to other people all the time. I know for a fact.

DR: And you didn't as a teenager?

Pogo: I did more as a teenager. I was way more mean-spirited then.

DR: I talked with Marilyn Manson at the time of ACSS and that's the one where he credited you with formulating some of the numerological principles which were used in the record. What exactly were you trying to accomplish with that? Was it just an experiment?

Pogo: I think that's the true name of God. Math is like the mind of God. Numbers are the mind of God. That's why music is so beautiful and harmonious.

DR: That's something Pythagoras got from the antediluvian forgotten race.

Pogo: I don't know where he got it, but Pythagoras was the MAN. I love that guy. He knew that music and math were the same thing in the mind of God. It's like, universal in a strange way. It sounds so cliche To say that music and math are the universal language, but it's true.

DR: You can't refute it.

Pogo: It's such an abstraction of the universe. You know 0 is illegal, because if God is everywhere, then he can't not be somewhere. And 0 is a place that doesn't even have God, so it's heretical. And people used to be so freaked out about infinity. Everyone accepts zero with such ease, but not infinity. I mean, the calculator still goes "Eeek!" when you try to do anything with it. All you're doing is dividing by zero. That's all you're really doing, because they are full reciprocals of each other. 1 over infinity is zero, or the limit of it as it approaches, and 1 over zero is infinity. So you have infinity to deal with as soon as you bring in zero. It's the same concept, the concept of every number. There are more numbers that are irrational between zero and one then there are prime numbers in the universe. One infinity is bigger then another infinity. It's just so insane. The set of all positive numbers is infinite. But I know that at any given point, one infinity is smaller then the other infinity. It just goes to show you that math is still truly mystical and magical. It's still cabalistic when you get into higher math. People don't realize that this was shit that you weren't allowed to know in the past. You're lucky that the Church lets you read this. You're lucky that you're allowed to know all the secrets of math. And I think people go to school, and they don't want to learn about, and they don't want to know about it. They don't realize that people died just to have the chance to look upon this information. It's tragic in a strange way. The appreciation of knowledge has decreased so much in my lifetime. It's very sad people like information more than knowledge. And they're not the same thing.

DR: Now it's like disinformation.

Pogo: Everything's been reduced down to the easiest decision-making process, and computers make that especially easy. It's binary. It's 'yes' or 'no'.

DR: Have you ever read The Book of Enoch? It was kicked out of the Bible. And it's obviously something that was written exactly after the Babylonian captivity, because it is the first book that sort of has the Luciferian thing going on. It has symbolism that is precisely like the symbolism of Revelation. It's like Zoroastrianism, where there's this everlasting conflict between light and darkness, good and evil. And it describes 'the Watchers', which are these angels that fell to Earth, that fucked the wives of men...

Pogo: Yeah yeah, when giants walked the Earth. The fields of Nephilim. I remember that.

DR: Absolutely. The Watchers are prototypes of Satan.

Pogo: There's so much of that stuff out there like that, too. Like the Gnostic stuff. It's much related to that, where Christ is very different from Jehovah and Yahweh. Like the Yezidi, and that weird Luciferian Christ. Yahweh was the demiurge.

DR: He was the Lord of the Earth. The Gnostics very much thought that.

Pogo: And Jesus is closer to the Old Testament Lucifer in some ways, as a rebel, someone who was even above and outside the demiurge.

DR: The only thing that I thought was cool about the story of Jesus is that it's funny that God couldn't forgive us until he had to walk in our shoes. You know, in a way, Jehovah was real arrogant. He was a real dick. But then after God became man, then he could forgive us for the sin of Adam. It's a strange story of a father having a Freak Friday and turning into his daughter. A Disney movie, like Big or some shit. It's strange territory. God makes man, man goes and eats and becomes as smart as God, with knowledge of good and evil. God gets freaked out. "Oh my God, don't eat from the Tree of Life. Get the fuck out of here." Then he sent these fucking badasses to kick us out, curses us forever, then says "Oh, I finally forgive you because I didn't realize how hard it was not to be a pig and fart in public, and not rape people, just 'cause there's a law against it." God was a really harsh judge until he got to be a person and then he realized, "Hey, I need to calm down and go to the desert."

DR: Well, it seems like in the Old Testament the Devil was a bit player. I feel that the Lucifer/Satan figure hadn't fully been coalesced yet. The Watchers in The Book of Enoch were the prototype of it. In the Old Testament, God had this dual nature. He would bless people, he would curse people, he was loved, he was feared. Jehovah was the good cop and the bad cop.

Pogo: I agree. He started out being bipolar. Because "I am the father, and the father is me." That sounds like that Charles Manson rap. The Trinity is a weird thing. When the New Testament came out, Jehovah became this triple personality, instead of just a dual personality. And I agree with that, because I'm into Freudian stuff, and I myself have a triple-split personality: an emotional being, a physical being, and an intellectual being.

DR: Eliphas Levi essentially said that there are two powers that control the universe. One is positive, one is negative, and the equilibrium between the two is the third power.

Pogo: In the Tao Teh Ching, that's the first thing he says. First came the One, the Thing. Then the Thing and its Unthing. Because as soon as you create the thing you create the Unthing. And then besides the two things, the yin and the yang, is the equilibrium between the two, and that's the third thing. And that's exactly what Lao Tsu says in this first verse. And it took me so long to understand this. When he drew the symbol of the two [the yin-yang], they weren't static, they were moving. The heart of the yin is the yang, the black dot, and they heart of the yang is the yin. So each in itself contains the seed of its opposite. And you suddenly go 'Whoa, crap.' It's amazing.

DR: But this is the primordial archetypal symbol of every religion on Earth, whether it's the yin & yang or the seal of Solomon. This was the primordial archetype. This was the basis of every major world religion. They all retain the symbols, but they've forgotten what they mean.

Pogo: You know what's a weird bit of trivia that I didn't know until not too long ago? The minimum amount of lines that it takes to make a Star of David and a swastika are the same: 6. I don't think that's just a coincidence. And it's kind of creepy that six black lines can be rearranged to turn into such opposite things. I love how the word "Vodka" just means "water" in Slavic, and "Whiskey" means "Water of Life" in Celtic.

DR: Have you ever heard this story about how people have something translated from one language to another, and then they have it translated back?

Pogo: Distortion, like making copies from copies. Like that whole entropy fact or, the degeneration of the quality of information the more it passes through a point, a nose, information corrodes inherently. That's fuckin' creepy, man.

DR: Well, this had to do with vodka, which you were just talking about. And they translated it into Russian "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." And the Russian came back, "The Vodka is good, but the meat is rotten."

Pogo: Humans can't correctly perceive things, or translate them, or carry them without adding their own imperfections at some minor level. Because no one can pronounce a word exactly the same way as the person who told you the story pronounced it. You distort everything you say inherently, because you can't produce an exact copy. So anything that's word of mouth is going to be twisted in some crazy way, and that's why written text seems to have some sort of value. We look for the oldest written text, 'cause at least all you have to worry about is understanding the connotations. But for a human being, even with an inflection they can change a question to a statement, or a statement to a question. At least with text there's a symbol to let you know what the person meant. Think about how in the future, when people watch an episode of The Jeffersons, and they say "That's bad". nobody will know that it actually means "good." You can translate slang of any kind. That's one reason why I still think the Protestants were wrong against the Catholic church. I still don't think that everyone has the right to read the Bible. Idiots should not be allowed to read it. How can you understand what the Bible is saying if you don't understand the history of the time in which it was written? If you can't find Sumeria on a map... You know what I mean? Where' Carthage, where are the pyramids, where's Mount Sinai, and where is Babylon, and where were the Assyrians at? You can begin to understand some of these nuances by just knowing where the map looked like at the time, and who was were and when, and how these different empires came and passed. They're crammed all together, because it's so many thousands of years of history compressed. And it's really sad, 'cause people will read it and do really fucked up shit. I mean, you thought the Catholic church sucked for ripping off your aunt for money, and St. Vincent de Paul and whatnot. But then you see Protestant preachers on TV with ties and suits begging for money, it makes the fucking Sistine Chapel look like a great investment. At least the Pope's got a nice hat. This guy has a bad suit. Instead of having one jerk, like the Catholics, they have numerous popes in their own little churches. It's just a multiplication of evil. I guess, for me, once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

DR: Have you seen the new official Catholic depiction of Christ? He looks kind of a Rasta guy.

Pogo: I swear to God, Hank Williams and Rastas are the only people who make me like Jesus. I think the only thing that's good about Christianity is that it gives hopeless people hope. I don't think that's necessarily good, but it's a drug, and I believe in drugs.

DR: Hope is a lack of information.

Pogo: It's not real, but it's like God or UFOs or those things. Whether it's real or not, it's helpful for you to get through your life with it.

(At this point Marilyn Manson pops into the room.)

MM: That's what I said on TRL the other day. Some woman came up to me and said, "My daughter doesn't believe in God anymore because of you." And I said, "Well at least she doesn't believe in UFOs."

Pogo: How come every time they do a Bible reenactment they never get to Lot and his daughters? Remember that Lot and his daughters left Sodom and Gomorrah, and they got destroyed, and the wife looked back and turned to salt? What happened was, God had promised to keep the seed of Abraham alive, and Lot was the only one alive, along with his daughters. And so as to perpetuate the seed without Lot being guilty of incest, his daughters secretly got their father drunk and fucked him at night. And these were the only honest, noble, good people in Sodom and Gomorrah. Now that was a party town. I wish I was making this up. This is better then Oedipus. Two daughters conspire with malice and forethought to get their dad wasted and fuck him, so that they can preserve the seed of Abraham, because they are the only decent people left in Sodom and Gomorrah.

DR: In ancient mythology, that is a tradition, to have sex with your sister, to have sex with your mother...

Pogo: That's supposed to be the purest love of all, between a brother and sister.

DR: It's in all of the ancient mythologies. It's in the Egyptian mythologies, and the ring cycle. In ancient times it's pervasive. You'd be hard pressed to find anything that didn't have it.

Pogo: What I think is weird is how Europeans go around the world imposing their culture on people, when it was a culture that was imposed on them in the first place. We use the Roman alphabet, and all of our pillars of faith and thought come from Athens and Jerusalem. Jesus would be a lot cooler if he didn't rise from the dead. Because he's a real hero then. DR: But death and resurrection is part of every culture's mythology. It goes back to Isis and Osiris. The kind dies, the sun turns black, he goes into the underworld, he rises as a God.

Pogo: I agree with you, but I think that's something that was imposed. I think the early European stuff was not that way. It was much bleaker, I think. To me, it seemed like something based on effort, not result. What made it great was the fact that evil wins and good looses at Ragnarok. The reason I think that's cool, though, is the realization that evil is inherently more powerful than good because they can cheat to win, and good can never cheat to win. So evil will always beat good because it doesn't have to play by the rules. Good has to play by the rules to be good. So it's an inherent disadvantage always to be good. If you're evil you have more options. I like the idea of going out and meeting defeat. And Jesus was about that. The Christians being fed to the lions, being heroic. That's one of the things that's great about Christianity is all of that martyrdom shit. Snake handlers kick ass. They get it. Christianity has got to be the weakest excuse, in a strange way, because you can do whatever wrong you want, and He's gotta forgive you if you ask Him.

DR: That's Catholicism.

Pogo: Aren't Protestants like that too? Yeah they are. That's what all of those Chick booklets are about. If I take the Lord as my savior, and admit that I'm a sinner, and all this bullshit, then they have to let me into heaven, no matter what I've done.

DR: It's been years since I've read a Chick booklet. Pogo: But you know what I'm talking about. That contract that's in the back? As God really needs a contract, just like the Devil. He needs it written down. He doesn't settle for word of mouth anymore. How easy is that, though? I don't know of any other religion where you're allowed to screw up that much, and the gods just let it go. It makes it easy to be a much more sinister person, 'cause you always have an out.

DR: That's what Tiny Tim was like. He was the darkest, most lustful person on the face of the Earth, and he had that out. He could always ask for forgiveness, or do some "Hail Marys" or something, and it's like, he can have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl and - boom -it's all wiped off the slate.

Pogo: I would like a God who was actually like that. That's a very reasonable person. That sounds so opposite of Jehovah.

DR: It's almost like you have some contract with God, and there's a loophole. I could never understand the deal between God and the Israelites.

Pogo: It's a land-for-penis-skin deal.

DR: For me it's that keeps going back and forth between being angry and being nice. And you want to say "Jesus Christ, make your mind up Mister!"

Pogo: It's crazy. And who would want a jealous God? This guy's, like, actually envious and stuff, and really has some of the most base proclivities. I don't see that Jehovah guy as being that enlightened. The Old Testament God is a really spooky guy.

DR: No, I think he was more enlightened. What I think is that there are a number of gods that are just grouped together, and they're Jehovah, God, Lord, etc. Because in one instance he'd very jealous and angry, and in another he's beneficent. Sometimes he's said to live in the heavens, sometimes he lives inside Mt. Zion. What's that all about? 'Cause everyone agrees that God exists in Heaven. God and Heaven are synonymous.

Pogo: But the Catholic church has said that the definition of Heaven is being in the presence of God, and that's where he lives.

DR: But then they're all these references to God living inside a mountain. Living inside the Earth would be synonymous with Hell, Lucifer, the demiurge.

Pogo: It's so complex. I can never read enough. God's supposed to be everywhere, in Heaven and Earth. In Hell even. His enforcing power is there. 'Cause if his enforcing power is not there, why do black angels torture souls? They should be giving you donuts. "Thank you for raping somebody. Welcome to Hell!"

Special thanks to bat for transcribing this interview, and RX Drone for archiving this interview.