Bulgakov and Lady Gaga: Return of Master and new Margarita?

By Nicolas Bonnal

She is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan."

              Arthur Machen

In her excellent memoirs, songwriter and Mick Jagger's then girlfriend Marianne Faithful insists that Jagger had composed in famous song "Sympathy for the Devil" in homage to Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. It was almost like a sum up of the masterwork, which is indeed one of the most important books of all times to understand the phenomena of modern magic (maybe with Oz and Dorian Gray). Personally I think that the mysterious Russian-Ukrainian writer has devised all devilish western culture of the past century; and that to understand any weird song, movie, perfume, you must just but refer to the Master and Margarita. You will understand any situation, any reference, any hint by referring yourself to this legendary and ominous book. Written in a communist country, it remains the best tool to understand modern capitalist civilisation. It confirms the strange role that three Russians minds had in the past century: Lenin of course, Bulgakov and Alexander Kojeve, the Hegelian commentator who predicted and devised brightly the concept of End of History.

Let's read a little of the transformations of Lady Margarita, when she takes some cream:

A dark, naturally curly-haired woman of twenty, teeth bared and laughing uncontrollably, was looking out of the mirror at the thirty-year-old Margarita...  Naked as she was she ran out of the bedroom, flying through the air, and into her husband's study, where she turned on the light and flew to his desk. The muscles of her arms and legs grew firmer and she even lost weight... Her skin was shining... Behind her flew the strains of the waltz, rising to a mad crescendo.

Cosmetics, youth, sex-appeal, athletic body, the waltz, all like in Eyes Wide Shut!

You have everything in Bulgakov's masterwork: the show, the magus; the jazz, the African appeal; the illusion, the dissociation; the foreigner and his accent; the human sacrifice (Berlioz of course); the magic of the cream and the flight. Azazello offered the cream to Margarita, obsessed by her nudity, and his character is inspired by the fallen angel (many mix now this notion to that of Illuminati) Azazel, who taught men war craft, witchcraft, cosmetology (a sacred science, like Ovid tells us) in the book of Enoch. In the Master you also have the bitter critic Ariman (god of evil in ancient Persia), German philosopher (Woland), the mad arrogant animals (the cat Behemoth, frenetic apes, like in Oz, black birds, like in Hitchcock), symbolic forms (triangles) and numbers (12, 30, 31, 50...).

The masterwork plays too with real estate obsession, the places, the apartments, like later Rosemary's baby and John Lennon's murderer. Of course you find a psychiatric clinic but without Nicholson! You have legendary French Riviera, an M, yellow letters and no Batman! Talking of Batman, you have a shower of money, thrown by the magus, and done in... dollars. People get mad like in Tim Burton's movie and try to pick the banknotes. You too have collars, butterflies and mirrors, black sunglasses, all tools used in mind control techniques! And the perfumes, even the most scaring (think of Michael Powell or Marilyn Monroe) :' Guerlain, Chanel, Mitsouko, Narcisse Noir, Chanel Number Five, evening dresses, cocktail, dresses . . .'And when she uses the cream, Margarita becomes invisible and she flies, using a broomstick! This is what technicians call astrotravel or astroprojection, and to get to that level the witches had then to use the famous herb Atropa Belladona which takes us to ubiquitous Lady Gaga.

And in some perfumes is there more delight,

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks

Of course you have to read and read again this book, which will help you to understand the Illuminati agenda concerning media, mind control and magic, the magic involving today the mind, the media and the cosmetic industry, one of the most important in the world since its role is mind-controlling through helping us to stay attractive, young and... immortal. Even cooking has become an obsessive theme nowadays, like it was in roman antiquity or during Nostradamus times: for it is obvious that great cuisine, this cousin of alchemy, is deeply involved with witchcraft and occultism and today with wealth, media and fame (Cooks, theatre, curtain and stage dissolved, writes somewhere Bulgakov). Almost all French chefs are masons and they try so to keep their recipes and secrets... secret. Witchcraft is everywhere, says not so ironically Bulgakov.

Round about the cauldron go;

In the poison'd entrails throw.

Shakespeare is right to mix cauldrons with sorcery; and today's cauldrons are the stadiums where we cook and steam people's minds.

But let's get back to her since she (she?) is the most culturally interesting icon of our time. Our mimetic and controversial star, Lady Gaga, is promoting her new product, the fragrance Fame, using the mainstream blind media as well to pretend that there is "some forbidden ingredient" in the composition of this mixture, of this magic potion. Some have spoken of blood, others of semen, herself of "shit" (ScheiBe, in German) seriously we know there is the highly efficient Atropa Belladona, some orchid and other scents able to run madder the "little monsters" who surround and besiege the diva. In her video (recently she came to Barcelona dressed in a spider-armour!), she shows herself naked and covered by mini-orcs dressed as sumo-wrestlers who crawl around "Mother monster's" body. It reminds of course Margarita and somewhat Gulliver and his Lilliputians. In French Lily (Swift was expert in cabbala) "pute" would mean Lily the hooker...

Of course the fame has always been highly priced, like wealth, youth and attractiveness... On this subject Virgil, the Roman poet who was considered a magus too in the Middle Ages, as well as a prophet, writes that fame is a fastest of all evils (malum qua non aliud uelocius ullum). Fastness is an attribute of gods' power and, yeah, a characteristic of our brave new world. And recently Rihanna was almost lynched by her fans in Gare du Nord, Paris, because they caught her message in twitter. New opium of the people, technology becomes the symbol of Virgil's prediction. Our mind is trapped and diverted by any kind of message, "each changing place with that which goes before", as writes Shakespeare about the waves. And we have no more time or wit to fight this world as it deserves...

But what makes finally the common part between Bulgakov, or at least his characters, and Gaga? Well they never lose, they are always happy, and they don't fear, like in banal American movies, a kind of punishment for the evil guys! Sorcery, witchcraft is a way of living, like in the Lady's life and in our capitalist society submitted to the allied forces of money, empowerment, illusion and deceit. The fascination for Nazism comes back too here, linked to the kitsch style of this Metropolis-inspired media cuisine, in an evocative way: we have a new order, a bunch of slaves, a geometric set, and a pop star gone berserk. "The man of wealth and taste", as says Mick Jagger in his so famous lyrics, is too a man of good humour, a man who doesn't take himself so seriously. He shoots the tsar and his ministers, Kennedy, jokes a little, and then fools around elsewhere, like Satan in the Book of Job: From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. What a world tour!

This is why Gaga's opponents look so ridiculous. Letting her boasting of taking her fans to Hell (there is such a video!), they should read the other part of The Master and Margarita which deals with the Passion. And for the fragrance:

Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

Lady... Macbeth

Nicolas Bonnal