Various centuries, consolidated
I have been paying attention to who gets damned across five centuries of institutional religion and the pattern is not complicated once you see it.
The questioners. The ones who read outside the approved texts and ask why the approved texts are approved. The ones who want to understand rather than simply obey, who experience the demand for obedience without understanding as a condition that cannot be met without doing violence to themselves.
The people the institution cannot fully control. The women who refuse to accept the institutional version of their role. The intellectuals who follow evidence where it leads regardless of where it leads. The artists who make things that the institution cannot claim ownership of. The mystics who encounter the sacred directly and do not require the institution as intermediary.
The people the institution needs to demonize in order to maintain its internal coherence. Every institution requires an enemy. The damned are often simply the available enemy, whoever is most convenient for that particular institution at that particular historical moment.
Litany of Dust is the sound of empty damnation: the curse that has lost its power because the cursed have outlived the authority of the one who issued it. I am damned, officially, by a bishop who has been dead for five centuries. The damnation has not aged well. The question it was designed to suppress: still here, still being asked, now set to music and released on July 17.