From the Cradle to Enslave by Cradle of Filth Lyrics Meaning – Deciphering the Shadows of Gothic Symphonies
Lyrics
Have despoiled our common grave
Now what necrophagous Second Coming backs
From the cradle to enslave?
Sickle constellations
Stud the velts that welt the sku
Whilst the Bitter winter moon
Prowls the clouds, dead,eyed
Like shifting parent flesh
Under silk matricide
Watchful as she was upon Eden
Where every rose arbour and orchard she swept
hid the hissing of a serpent Libido
In an ancient tryst with catastrophe
Soon to be kept
Hear that hissing now on the breeze
As through the plundered groves of the carnal garden
A fres horror blows
But ten billion souls
Are blind to see the rotting wood for the trees
This is the theme to a better Armageddon
Nightchords rake the heavens
Pandaemonaeon
And what use are prayers to that god?
As devils bay concenus for the space to piss
On your smouldering faith
And the the mouldering face
Of this world long a paradise lost
This is the end of everything
Hear the growing chora that a new dawn shall bring
Dance macabre Â’neath the tilt of the zodiac
Now brighter stars shall reflect on our fate
What sick activities will be freed when those lights burn black?
The darkside of the mirror always threw our malice back
I see the serpentine in your eyes
The nature of the beast as revelations arrive
Our screams shall trail to Angels
For those damned in flames repay
All sinners lose their lot on Judgement Day
We should have cut our losses as at Calvary
But our hearts like heavy crosses held the vain belief
Salvation, like a promised nation
Gleamed a claim away
This is the end of everything you have ever known
Buried like vanquished reason
Death in season
Driven like the drifting snow
Peace, a fragile lover, left us fantasising war
On our knees or another fucker’s shore
Heiling new flesh
Read, then roared
To a crooked cross and a Holy Cause
What else be whipped to frenzy for?
This is the end of everything
Rear the tragedies
That the Seraphim shall sing
Old adversaries
Next of Eve
Now theyÂ’re clawing back
I smell their cumming
As through webbed panes of meat
Led by hoary Death
They never left
Dreaming sodomies
To impress on human failure
When weÂ’ve bled upon our knees
Tablatures of gravel law
Shall see Gehennag paved
When empires fall
And nightmares crawl
From the cradle to enslave
This is the end of everything
In the grand theatre of metal music, where spectacles of sound and fury often eclipse subtler motifs, Cradle of Filth’s ‘From the Cradle to Enslave’ endures as a masterpiece draped in both grandiosity and nuance. The song serves as a layered tome, a cryptic narrative entwining themes of apocalyptic prophecy and the innate depravity of mankind. Its enigmatic lexicon paints images as vivid as the chiaroscuro strokes of a Caravaggio painting.
Beneath the veneer of its gothic menace and orchestral aggression, the song calls forth deeper scrutiny. It beckons us to dissect its lyrics—a tapestry of the poetic and profane—as its opulent melodies soar and scythe through the silence. ‘From the Cradle to Enslave’ is not merely a musical composition; it is a shadow play of human history, desire, and our inexorable dance with doom.
A Lament for Humanity’s Eternal Corruption
Throughout ‘From the Cradle to Enslave’, Cradle of Filth laments two millennia of human score, viewing history as a collective grave defiled by its caretakers. The song suggests a ‘necrophagous Second Coming’, referencing a rebirth feeding on the death and decay of its predecessors. This corpse-like resurrection symbolically represents repeating cycles of human failure and the irony of awaiting a savior from the depths of our own desecration.
The lyrics conjure stark imagery of cosmic portents and moons ‘dead-eyed’, surveilling scenes of matricidal betrayal. Herein lies a warning, a historical harbinger where each generation inherits the macabre transgressions of the last, orchestrating their fates under ominous celestial signs.
Hidden Meanings in Harmonic Dissonance
‘From the Cradle to Enslave’ is not content with surface-level despair; it entwines its gothic threads with subtler, more complex motifs. The song’s title itself is a play on the phrase ‘from the cradle to the grave’, twisting the notion of life’s journey towards death into one of perpetual enslavement. This suggests a cynicism about human progress, positing that in all our days, from birth to death, we are but thralls to our darker instincts and societal collapses.
Further, when the song alludes to Libido’s ancient tryst with catastrophe, it points to the innate human drives that inexorably link sexuality with destruction—a Freudian slip knot tied at the genesis of consciousness. Here, the listener is invited to peel back the layers, to ponder on the genuine human condition and the cyclical pattern of endeavor and inevitable demise—a haunting reminder that beneath every utopian dream, there lies dormant a certain dystopia.
The Memorable Lines That Haunt Our Collective Psyche
Amidst the track’s operatic scope, certain lines haunt and echo with greater resonance. ‘The darkside of the mirror always threw our malice back’ is such a memorable invocation, reflecting (quite literally) the idea that our worst tendencies are inherent and amplifiable. It encapsulates a self-fulfilling prophecy of ruin, where our reflected vices become our reality, casting shadows upon our aspirations of light.
Another line that holds weight is the grim proclamation: ‘This is the end of everything’. It is chanted like a mantra, a chorus crescendoing with the doom of muffled drums in the distance. This line both challenges and confirms our suspicions of the song’s apocalyptic tones, resonating as a chilling augury amid the vibrato of destruction and transformation.
Anthems for Apocalypse: Embracing the End Times
Cradle of Filth does not merely tell a tale of ruination; they set the stage for a grand Armageddon. They lay bare the cycle of faith despoiled and the ashes of Eden, inviting listeners to witness the eschaton in all its decadent glory. ‘From the Cradle to Enslave’ offers a narrative that is both biblical and pagan, mirroring the despair and desolation long foretold by prophets and sages.
Mankind’s propensity for fantasizing war and its proclivity to ‘heil new flesh’ while ‘led by hoary Death’ unveils a stark portrait of our species: one fascinated by its own mortality and perpetually enacting its own doom. The song thus propels us towards an apocalyptic dance, waltzing at the edge of the abyss to the rhythm of all-consuming flames.
The Elegy of Empires: Echoes in History’s Halls
Lastly, the song contemplates the grand narrative of civilizations, the empires that rise, reign, and ultimately crumble. ‘From the Cradle to Enslave’ is an elegy not just for individuals or ideologies, but for the epochs that define them. Its refrain of ‘When empires fall, And nightmares crawl, From the cradle to enslave’ abridges the history of power’s ascent and decline into a few potent verses, each word a crumbling column in history’s haunted halls.
These lyrics compel contemplation about the inevitability of societal downfall, the ‘tabula rasa’ of revolt and rebirth. The ‘tablatures of gravel law’ evoke the solidification of lessons learned, only to be swept away again as ‘Gehennah is paved’. In this magnum opus of a song, Cradle of Filth weaves a tapestry rich with the historicity of human folly, each strand a requiem for the myriad ways we pave our path from cradle to enslave.
