At the Olympic opening ceremony, hidden Satanic imagery and antisemitic conspiracy theories

The Olympic opening ceremony was chaotic. It was surreal. It was extremely, aggressively French. A beheaded Marie Antoinette sang opera, Lady Gaga did the can-can, cartoon minions attempted to steal the Mona Lisa and, of course, mimes were arrayed on the banks and bridges of the Seine as boats full of athletes floated by in the pouring rain.

It was not, to put it mildly, to everyone’s taste. And the ceremony drew particular ire from the Christian right for, apparently, making light of their religion.

The attention fixated largely on a fashion segment, during which drag queens and dancers vogued down a table-cum-runway on one of the pedestrian bridges over the Seine. As the camera first zoomed into the scene, a central figure in blue wearing a halo-like headdress sat in front of a table, with drag queens and models posed around her. It looked unmistakably similar to The Last Supper , Leonardo da Vinci’s famed fresco of Jesus’ last meal.

Catholic bishops, American politicians and various online talking heads criticized the scene. But the creator said the scene was not inspired by The Last Supper , and was intended to be a celebration of Greek gods that hearkened back to the roots of the Olympic games in Athens — if any painting inspired the scene, it was The Feast of the Gods by Jan van Bijlert. Indeed, a nude blue man sitting on a platter of fruit on the table in front of the drag queens certainly seemed more like Dionysus than Jesus. (Admittedly, it did look a lot like the da Vinci painting before the blue guy appeared, but The Last Supper is not a sacred object; it’s been recreated by the likes of The Sopranos and The Simpsons .)

It didn’t really matter, though; the online anger, once it got going, found plenty more material to stoke outrage, thanks to other supposedly anti-Christian elements of the opening ceremony.

There was the horse ridden by a rider wearing the Olympic flag as a cape, which some saw as the “pale horse” ridden by death from the Book of Revelation. A golden bull’s head apparently evoked the Golden Calf. The music number featuring French-Malinese pop star Aya Nakamura angered the French right wing because, as Marine LePen put it , her “ style is influenced by the hood and Africa” and represents a “multicultural” France instead of “a nation with Christian roots and European culture.”

Even the headless Marie Antoinette death metal scene managed to make it into many of the roundups of anti-Christian parts of the ceremony, though the problem there, as far as I can tell, is nothing more concrete than feeling that the performance, which included giant flames, had sort of Satanic vibes.

Boiling down the conspiratorial tone behind the complaints was convicted child trafficker and leader of the alt-right manosphere Andrew Tate, who posted: “ The opening ceremony, planned and orchestrated by a gay Jew, was disgusting.”

Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the ceremony, does not seem to be Jewish; an article from French newspaper Le Monde shows pictures of him at a family Christmas celebration and mentions that his grandfather taught catechism classes. Nevertheless, the idea that he is Jewish has gained traction on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, where numerous users angry about the ceremony pointed to its choreographer’s supposed Jewishness. When one user asked for proof that Jolly is Jewish, one comment replied “gay and big nose” while another said “his physiognomy and behavior leave little doubt.”

It’s not surprising that the anger and conspiracies that the entire opening ceremony was anti-Christian quickly turned to antisemitism. Its segments may not have meant to reference The Last Supper , but they did clearly intend to promote diversity and multiculturalism, values that are anathema to white nationalists. And white nationalists always end up blaming the Jews.

The thing is, the ceremony was extremely nonsensical. It was crammed with every French reference I could think of — there was even a dancer dressed up as a croissant — but whether you took it as parody, celebration or a mix of the two is entirely up to you. That’s what made it good art — it was experimental, not didactic. That means that those who saw it as an attack were probably already poised to feel like victims.

Besides, if the opening ceremony had been some kind of Jewish plot, it probably wouldn’t have rained the entire day. The real witchcraft we should be investigating is how the drag queens’ hair still looked good throughout the torrential downpour.

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