I’ve been trying to put my finger on the Taylor Swift phenomenon for some time now. Evidently people pay obscene amounts of money to see her, and she is breaking world records on her latest tour. By all accounts (well, not quite all) it’s worth seeing, as Miss Swift parades out on the stage in outfit after outfit and dazzles swarms of people with a show like Superbowl halftime on crack.

What’s going on here really, though?

In ancient Babylonian mythology, the goddess Inanna gets kicked out of the Babylonians’ version of the Garden of Eden, then returns to exact her revenge on its inhabitants and their god. For a brief time, Inanna was the chief goddess of the pantheon. When King Sargon the Akkadian appointed his daughter high priestess over the first Mesopotamian empire, she dedicated herself to the glories of Inanna. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly this included a lot of ritual sex.

Many Iterations

Inanna was the sex goddess not only of Babylon, but all the world. The Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and pretty much everyone else recognized that they all worshiped this same goddess, though she had different names and slightly different origin stories depending on the culture. She was Aphrodite, Venus, Astarte, Ashtoreth, Isis, Lillith, and a host of other names. Yet everyone saw that she was really just the one spirit of illicit sex.

Moderns don’t believe in spirits, demons, and goddesses — officially at least. We still have our myths about them, though, like Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell, the sexy fairy. Even in the 1950s Disney cartoon, Tinkerbell’s miniskirt is always just about ready to get hiked up too far. She cannot tolerate Peter’s interest in a sensible girl like Wendy. She would rather kill Wendy, in fact, than give up Peter to the pleasantries of a family life and devoted love in the bonds of marriage.

Tinkerbell is one of the best pictures of Astarte in recent years, who comes to bring her flirtatious delights, stays to keep men in a state of perpetual adolescence, and would (if she could) kill the women who might possibly make us into men.

But I was talking about Taylor Swift, or maybe I have been all this time. Her show strikes me on one level as one of those things that would be worth seeing, but that I always seem to miss. I regret not seeing U2 in their heyday, a Trump rally pre-2021, or a Kanye West “Sunday Service.”

These were spiritual events, not just musical or political. Every populist movement is essentially spiritual. It is essentially the cry of souls who long to be part of something bigger and truer than themselves, in a world where we keep hearing that we are the greatest and the truest. Why else would “Be true to yourself” be the highest advice one can give? And there is no God or god, we’re told, so populism is, in other words, an attempt by the many to touch the realm of the spirit outside the boundaries of organized religion.

Populists have a supernatural energy that is obvious to anyone who encounters them. Evangelists like Billy Graham and George Whitefield could cut through to the eye of the soul, it was said. (For opposite purposes, the same was said of Adolf Hitler.) Trump cuts through the distance between himself and the marginalized by saying what no one else will in a funny way. Kanye is larger than life in almost every way possible. But what, I wondered, is going on with Miss Swift?

Taking on a Character Like That of Astarte

I finally realized while listening to “Anti-hero” that she is the embodiment of the ancient goddess Astarte. The title alone sparks curiosity, but the lyrics are fantastic. Miss Swift has always been a top quality artist, and she has never lacked something interesting to say. Unfortunately, she seems to have wasted too much of her life on a series of “next mistakes.” She has thus dulled her earlier innocence with the kind of sexual boredom of the woman who has seen it all. (And she’s not even 40 yet!)

“Anti-hero” is different, however: Still centered on sex, but on a more spiritual plane. (Not all that is spiritual is good.) Here Miss Swift puts herself not in a lover’s bedroom or on the world stage, but above it all in the spiritual temple to which she has arisen. She is older but not wiser, haunted by all the men she has ghosted. She connives, writhes in the terror of a nightmare, then wakes up for the chorus and admits her guilt as the great anti-hero.

She admits that “at teatime” (which is when people are sane) everyone agrees that she represents a serious problem. Then she says the most interesting line in the song: “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.” It’s fascinating because she has just admitted that she is a creature of the night for whom midnights are just afternoons, and it’s pretty obvious that she looks at the mirror a lot.

Thus, “the sun” is less about daytime and more about the heat of power. She knows that in some sense she is soaring up into the heavens on waxen wings. Still she refuses to look at herself as she truly is.

Nonetheless, in verse two, Miss Swift is haunted by the thought that everyone else is a “sexy baby,” but she’s just a “monster on the hill.” She is no longer even the temple prostitute of Astarte who can at least “hang out” and (in her imaginings) have a good time. Now she is Astarte herself, who cannot rest but slowly lurches “toward your favorite city” to put on a good show for the fans.

She is “pierced through the heart but never killed,” i.e. she can only bleed on everyone else, but never die. She is an immortal goddess, who can suck the life out of humans and even give them a good time in their dying, but who can no longer enjoy the pleasure herself.

The last verse is funny: She is a ghost laughing up from Hell at relatives who murdered her hoping to gain from her fortune. Here she sings her glimmer of hope that in the next life (which will surely be in eternal darkness) she will be able to laugh at the idiots in this life who wanted to get rich off her. She will share her wealth and power with no one. She has no children. At this point she starts making a few little seductive noises, as if to draw us in one more time before she ends this disturbing fun.

Demonized and Searching for God

How can she be both demon-goddess and muse of the masses at once? I suspect it’s because she is just like all other incarnations of Astarte, from the original Inanna, to Tinkerbell, to pornographic actresses. Each one delights in her power over men and is at the same time begging to be saved from herself by one of them. The trouble is that she can never seem to find a man who values her for anything but her baser talents.

In Miss Swift’s case, this fact is borne out by the true story of the time she fell in love with the lead singer from Owl City, Adam Young, who was different from any other man she’d ever met: He refused to use her. She dedicated a song in her next album to him, in her fascinating secretive fashion. What did she see in him? More than likely she saw Jesus Christ, because Mr. Young is a devout Christian.

The tragedy of all the Miss Swifts in the world, and probably not a few of their followers, is that, like Mary Magdalene, they have many demons that they would love to have cast out. They are in a sense searching for that true incarnation of God Most High, the true myth made flesh, but sadly they continue to throw their lot in with the old pagan gods and tear themselves apart with capricious demons and demiurges who act out of rebellion rather than from love.

Miss Swift is a brilliant musician. I hope that one day she finds the One who can bring her back to Eden and heal her soul.

Mike Littell is the pastor of South Dayton Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio.