"Kaisarion" is a song by Swedish rock band Ghost. The second track from the group's fifth psalm IMPERA, it premiered live in Reno, Nevada on January 25, 2022.
Live Performance and Recording[]
During most of the live performances of "Kaisarion" Papa Emeritus IV (now Frater Imperator) would sing the lyric, "when a paradise is lost go straight to..." and would either say the city they were performing in (such as Los Angeles) or "hell" to finish the lyric during the Imperatour.
The song was featured lived in the Rite Here Rite Now movie and soundtrack.
Background and Release[]
“There was a building called Caesareum in ancient Alexandria,” vocalist Tobias Forge explains to Kerrang! magazine. “Roughly what happened was that the teacher and philosopher, Hypatia, was murdered by Christians. She was molested and murdered inside the building, because of her pagan beliefs, because she was a believer in science and real things. This was in the beginning stages of Christianity, when it was just an insane cult, before it got the mandate of a book put together by Romans in 325 to harness that shit. This was like an underground group of terrorists, basically, who couldn't stand to see some female smartass preaching or telling people that the world wasn't flat. And it didn’t happen at the same time, but they also burned down the big library in Alexandria, which must have been an enormous, enormous loss for mankind in terms of knowledge and historic accounts. There you go – for the greater good.
“I think that’s a nice symbol for what you can see now,” he ponders. “You can see likenesses of it in public book burnings and stoning and killing everything that doesn't match with a sort of a flat Earth reality that some people live in. Or storming the Capitol and wanting to hang people. It's a symbol for those sorts of movements that are always targeting smartness and enlightenment, and thinking.” [1]