We can now reveal that Papa Emeritus,
leader of the Swedish doom metal band Ghost,
is not a zombie anti-pope.
But what he is may shock you,
so we must ask anyone prone to existential crises
to stop watching immediately.
In the 1930s,
the same era that Ghost's Meliora album evokes,
Portuguese philosopher Fernando Pessoa said that
" We are death.
" This thing we consider to be life
" is just the sleep of a real life,
" the death of what we truly are.
" The dead are born, they do not die.
" The two worlds have been switched.
" When we think we are alive, we are dead.
" Let us live while we are dying."
That same year,
the thrice-great Charles Fort also theorized
that spiritualists were correct but in reverse—
that when spirits die they become human beings.
Fort said, "Once upon a time,
" we were real and alive,
" but we departed into this state we call 'existence'.
" We've carried over with us from the real existence,
" from which we died,
" the ideas of Truth—
" ideas that really meant something
" when we were really alive,
" but that now, in our phantom-existence—
" which is demonstrable by any X-ray photograph of any of us—
" can only have phantom-meaning.
" So, then, our never-ending,
" but always frustrated, search for our lost reality.
" We come up chimera and mystification,
" but persistently have beliefs,
" as retentions from an experience
" in which there were things to believe in."
Fort didn't go so far as to say that
all of us are directly ghosts:
most of us may be descendants
of those departed from real existence,
who, in our spook-world,
pseudo-propagated.
A hundred years earlier, in the 1830s,
the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle noted
that a ghost is a spirit that has taken corporal form
and appears for a while among men.
And so the multitudes at Papa Emeritus' concerts
are themselves ghosts—
spirits that have taken corporal form briefly
and then disappear.
What is anyone if not a ghost?
Papa Emeritus is like a magic mirror that reflects you,
and the skull face is your own death.
He's not a zombie anti-pope,
unless, of course, you are yourself.
But what a blessed implication,
that we were once real and alive,
or at least perhaps one of our ancestors once was.
To the pseudo-phantoms out there,
shadows several-times removed from reality,
keep reaching for something to believe in.
I'm Prof. Oddfellow.
For more infomation >> RACHEL MADDOW:President Trump is under investigation, but not as a criminal target says Mueller - Duration: 20:45. 
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