The poster suggested that the intention to weave sexual imagery with Christianity was more important than whether the song was literally about the Holy Mary, calling it a “perverted mockery of the Christian faith”. Jesus.rescues went a step further, with a line-by-line breakdown of parts of the song. Christian TikTok called out the song, with one user calling themselves stand_.with._jesus, declaring that, ‘This sound is horrible and is disrespectful to the beauty of Christianity’. The song’s success brought with it some unwanted attention. Then I was summoned to a label meeting and they were like, ‘Are you aware of what's going on?’, and they started presenting stats.' 'She said, 'I heard Mary On A Cross on TikTok.' She's done that before with other songs. 'I think it was my daughter who spotted it first,' Forge told Metal Hammer. But it was TikTok that amplified the song’s profile - something that Forge admits he never saw coming. “So it has very little to do with the mother of Jesus, because I don’t want anyone to believe that she was not a virgin,” he quipped.ĭespite its status as a lowly b-side, Mary On A Cross instantly became a fixture in Ghost’s live set. He went to reveal that the song was “more about friendship and how, together with someone else, you might have been something at one point and then you ended up just not being like that.”įorge also archly pointed out that his stage name in pre-Ghost death metal band Repugnant was Mary Goore (actually a play on late guitar hero Gary Moore). “It might mean Mary Magdalene, the proclaimed whore who might have been the wife of Jesus – just as a symbol for someone who came off as one thing but actually had other intentions and did something else.

“Mary doesn’t necessarily mean Mary, mother of Jesus,” he continued. ‘Go down’ doesn’t necessarily mean as in a 69 sense of the word… it can also mean go down as in go down in history, your own ascent. The chorus is written very tongue in cheek of course. Speaking to Mastodon’s Brann Dailor on a recent livestream, the singer explained: “There are multiple layers in the lyrics that it might be important for people to understand. “But besides all the stardom, all we got was blues.” Most striking lyrically is the chorus: “You go down like Holy Mary/Mary on a cross”, a seemingly provocative mash-up of Biblical and sexual imagery.įorge himself has been loathe to strip away the mystery, though he admitted one his daughter’s friends had heard the song was “perverted”. “We were speeding together down the dark avenues,” sang Forge. The song’s lyrics are ambiguously evocative. It was only when Papa Nihil made his 21st Century reappearance with the band – declaring himself to be Papa Emeritus Zero – that Mary On A Cross and another song, Kiss The Go-Goat, were exhumed and re-released as the 2019 single Seven Inches Of Satanic Panic. Despite being fronted by a swaggering, handsome clergyman known as Papa Nihil, this groovy 60s incarnation of Ghost failed to set the world on fire. It also propelled the band into the US Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time, subsequently becoming the band’s most listened-to song, currently sitting pretty with more than 210 million streams on Spotify.Īccording to the band’s own mythology, Mary On A Cross dates back to 1969, when an early version of Ghost dipped its fingers in the psychedelic waves of the dying decade. It blew up and before long there were more than 300,000 TikTok vids using either the original or alternative iteration of the track. In September 2022, a TikTok user uploaded a slowed-down, reverb-heavy version of the three-year-old song to soundtrack a compilation of Stranger Things scenes.

And so it proved with viral success of Mary on a Cross.

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