The Trans to Cenobite Pipeline

Choose your hierophants wisely.

Yesterday I learned the new Pinhead, pictured above, is “trans”. Trans what, you may ask, not just (as I do) to summon the real answer — transhuman, as I told Tucker Carlson not long ago — but because Pinhead, the starring “Hell Priest” leading the “Cenobites” in the myriad films and sequels and reboots of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise, is not just a cyborg of sorts but a walking, talking threesome of a seemingly more… sophisticated type, part man, part apparatus, and part demon.

Understand please that I know this development invites, we could say, an awkward conversation — one that, in particular places and times, could result in more-than-spectral violence, evidently included, and possibly not even limited to, getting yourself killed. But it has been thrust upon us, that much is clear, and so, very well, God wills it. We’d better get on with it before the hour grows still later than it is.

The material our worship of our technology has brought us to confront herein is the kind of thing that tempts us to nervous laughter and ironic distance, lest we lose our nerve or even our minds in the face of its horrific sadness — which, indeed, we are sure to do amid travesties against God as profound as these without the protection of His loving mercy.

KNOW YOUR CENOBITES

I’m afraid those unaware of the details of the Hellraiser “universe” will have to endure a tldr, which I’ll try to keep mercifully brief—although suffering can be a mercy as those well acquainted with the living God know well. This is no time to shy away from seeing evil as it is.

We begin with some introductory gifs. First, neo-Pinhead:

Now, Pinhead of yore:

And a word from the brains behind the ‘22 Hellraiser:

Novices to this topic will be enlightened to learn the provenance of the word “cenobite” which Barker applied to his lords of evil. In preparation, consider these interesting details about the creatures:

The Cenobites are extradimensional beings who exist in an extra-dimensional realm… They can reach Earth’s reality only through a schism in time and space… The Cenobites all have horrific mutilations and/or body piercings, and wear fetishistic black leather clothing that often resembles butchery garments or religious vestments. The clothing also serves to support their piercings and tools… In their original incarnation, they manifested as devoted followers of a supernatural hedonism with unorthodox definitions of pleasure; although vaguely described, this form of pleasure endorsed by the Cenobites involved two distinct forms: the expansion of sensation to an extremely painful point of sensory overload, and enduring excruciating pain through incessant tortures that transcend traditional laws of physics…

In the film adaptation (Hellraiser) they exhibited a more severe tone: impatient, stern, humorless, and almost intractably officious towards their duties, as well as capable of duplicity… They are revealed to be former humans who have been converted into Cenobites by the supernatural power native to their home dimension…

According to the wiki, “Barker drew inspiration for the cenobite designs from punk fashion, Catholicism (the overall design is a modified cassock, the traditional garment of a Catholic priest until the sixties) and by the visits he took to S&M clubs in New York and Amsterdam,” as makeup and wardrobe for the nightmarish crew suggest:

But it may not surprise you to learn I can’t help seeing—however accidental—a more direct inversion of the Great Schema, and the Orthodox schema monks who wear it:

After all, the schema monks are true cenobites.

Yet Hellraiser’s false cenobites are priests, making up “the Order of the Gash” and serving “Leviathan”, a god of desire that appears as an enormous rhomboid object, hovering over an enormous labyrinth, imbricated with the same sort of geometric patterns visible on the puzzle box that calls them forth into our world. These are priests bearing the epithet of “The Surgeons”; according to the costume designer following Barker’s specifications, they were “magnificent super-butchers” embodying what she terms the “very Clive turn of phrase” repulsive glamour.

THE SHAPE OF SOULS TO COME

It is all too easy to get caught up in the meta of it all, shivering intellectually from the frisson of contemplating, at a certain remove, the repulsive commingled so sadomasochistically with the glamorous. But these details, mirroring those of the all-too-real surgeons and butchers of living human beings ritualistically “transitioning” them across the border of their given humanity and into a hellish cyborg space, strike at the heart still more than the mind. They are transitioned as our institutions, our culture, our lives themselves are being transitioned by the present priests of our ever more borglike regime, who intone through their transitional figurehead that those at the vanguard of our posthumanization “shape our nation’s soul.”

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