On Severance: Fatal Neck Attacks Are a ‘Guillotine’ Moment

From a knife attack on a young Ukrainian refugee to a bullet in the neck of right-wing leader Charlie Kirk, the attacks on the ‘throat chakra’ speak volumes about our severed realities.

Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was murdered in North Carolina last week while riding the subway home. In a horrific, unprovoked attack, Zarutska was fatally stabbed in the neck by a man sitting behind her. Days later, Charlie Kirk, a popular right-wing figure and head of America’s most prominent conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, was shot in the neck while speaking at a college campus in Utah.

Receiving the news yesterday confirming Kirk died of his wounds, I couldn’t help but shake the attacks on the neck. I couldn’t shake it because over the last few years, I’ve kept hearing the resurrection of calls to violence that threaten the necks of the rich through imagery of the French Revolution, marked by heads rolling at the foot of a guillotine.

Years ago, during my counterextremism days, I would track the news and report on who did what. Once you see a pattern and you understand extremism, it’s not something you can fully ever turn away from. I still see the patterns, except now I look at what the pattern is singing of; I look to see if the pattern can alchemize chaos and confusion into a song that carries notes of wisdom.

So what is the wisdom here? What is trying to sing to us in this moment across eerily similar attacks on completely unrelated people?

SEVERANCE.

Taschen’s Book of Symbols details the symbology of the neck as a place of high vulnerability, often a target for predators, as seen in phrases like “go for the jugular.”

“Sacrificed victims were often slain by cutting their throats, and the spurting of blood
caught in a ritual vessel…”

— The Book of Symbols, Taschen

So the questions I ask myself to find discernment in this moment are: What is being severed? What is being sacrificed? What is the predator?

The entire crux of my upcoming (second) book, The Song of the Mystery: The Foundation for Human Belonging, is the result of a two-year deep dive into this question. [Click here to read the first book]. I’m called to take a break from writing that and return to this specific series of incidents this week, because they very much encapsulate the heart of the disease we’re dealing with.

The story around Charlie Kirk, for example, is that an Etsy witch supposedly cursed him upon request. It’s one of the sub-narratives around the story, but the idea of a curse is very real in the broader reality here. Our shared human reality is tinged by a curse — a curse of perception. We have long been severed from ourselves and from each other through a wheel of misfortune, often referred to as the Buddhist concept of Samsara.

How to even begin to understand that in practical terms is a long and winding road, a labyrinth of mirrors. But this is where the idea of severance makes it very simple by revealing a very clear picture. We have been severed from each other — and worse, from ourselves. In the last week, that image came up THREE times…Iryna, Charlie, and (largely unnoticed in the news cycle) the beheading of a man in Dallas, Texas. When something comes in threes, we’re called to pay attention.

The severances are part of a larger tattered pattern in our human reality.

The “songbooks” I’m writing — The Song of the Human Heart, The Song of the Mystery, and The Song of Childhood — speak to the nodes of severances first within the outer reality, then within the collective, and finally within the self. In writing these stories, which were deeply informed by the times we’re living in, I saw how, within just a few years, our American collective identity shifted from viewing other nations as enemies to seeing others as the enemy, and then quickly to seeing each other as the enemy. Nesting dolls of hate, a nesting doll of disease. That is the curse we’re under.

Layers of severance and always by design of the curse we’re under the influence of, like a thick poppy smoke in a field of forgetting.

The severance didn’t begin in our outer reality, and most people are thankfully awake to this fact. The conservative political response at this hour is that ‘political violence has no place here.’ I don’t need to tell you about the two-year genocide to which our attention has been held hostage.

Images of politicians signing bombs.

Images of children whose eyes no longer carry the expression of life.

Images of a child with his eye hanging out of its socket like a bulb pulled out of its field.

There’s more…in the last few months, we’ve seen the violent political arrests and deportations of anyone who doesn’t look like the neo-Nazi archetypal villain — blonde, blue-eyed, draped in a flag, speaking in tongues of patriotism laced with toxic naturalism [I wrote about that here].

A few weeks ago, I witnessed my first I.C.E. raid at a local car wash. I cannot begin to describe what a vile experience it was, the horror we felt watching people, especially the elderly, be so casually dehumanized. I’m a writer — and even I don’t have the words for it. Perhaps there are no words for it, no language that can frame a visceral reality.

All this is to say that the guillotine has long since fallen.

The guillotine fell approximately four thousand years ago, when Tiamat, the primordial goddess of chaos, was sacrificed for brute order. The first god of the monotheistic death cult, Marduk, severed Tiamat’s body. Marduk — whose name means to kill / heartbreaking grief in Urdu — severed Tiamat’s body into two and called it the establishment of order.

When we’re looking at how we got here, when we try to understand the escalating hate and extremism in our world, it’s not enough to look at what happened five minutes ago. We need a much older eye, a much older lens. We need to look at our mythology.

The Babylonian mythology of Marduk and Tiamat isn’t just a story; it is the very foundation for the evolution of the concept of “God” as we understand it in monotheism, the paradigm currently in power. There is God, the Great Eye beyond the Edge of Time, the Wild-Honey Eyed consciousness as I describe it in my second book …and there is the imperial overlord of monotheism, or “Sky Daddy” as defined in popular culture. The idea of our patriarchal world, the hierarchies, a most lethal order that severs us from each other and ourselves, is rooted in the mythology of the first severance.

The question then is, how do we reclaim and repair this severance? How do we even begin to sew repair across time and space? It begins exactly at the point of severance. It begins with the throat chakra, with our voice, with our primal tongue — a mirror for the womb, for the first story, the first cave we called home.

To be continued in a follow-up piece, The Patriarchal Eye.