Weirdness watchers will be only too aware that the occult has seeped into the media mainstream over the last few decades. The nexus of strangeness that was once high occultism has a history spanning many millennia, but over the 20th century it passed from being the exclusive preserve of (mostly English) eccentrics into a commercial media phenomenon.
The word ‘occult’ itself means anything hidden and sinister – but how hidden is the occult these days, when you can buy pre-written spells and cheery beginners’ guides to magic in almost any high street bookstore? And just as bookshop shelves were colonised by titles written to flatter teenage witches, primetime television slots were filled with imaginary vampire-slayers and professional ghost-hunters. The image of the occult became domesticated and tamed – defanged, as it were. Where the subject once had the power to shock and terrify the uninitiated, now only a vestigial
frisson of danger remains.
But recently the conspiracy world has started to redefine the occult, reinventing its darker origins and relocating it in more mundane settings. The devil hasn’t so much ridden out as moved into fashion, films and pop music. The old imagery of goats, virgins and scrappy chalk pentagrams has been replaced by a subtler and more sophisticated language. Virgins continue to be abused, but rituals no longer rely on bodily fluids collected from altars in old churches. Spells are no longer chanted or drawn on parchment. Instead – so the newly minted history goes – rituals are promoted in the media and played out to packed audiences in giant stadia, with international satellite coverage for those watching at home. Like millions of other people, you may have taken part in an occult ritual without even realising it…
At the apex of the occult pyramid of new world evil are the
Illuminati – less a coven of hammy Victorian ritualists, more a dynastic network devoted to the moral and psychological destruction of their victims and the promotion of terror, sociopathic selfishness and bestial sexuality. Endowed with a finely honed sense of dark irony, the Illuminati particularly enjoy flaunting the very symbols of their control in public to influence the collective unconscious.
A key part of the new conspiranoia is a radical restatement of the Illuminati’s aims, methods and mission statement. Older forteans are likely to have fond memories of the Illuminati’s earlier popular exposure in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s
Illuminatus! trilogy. Wilson – who was or wasn’t a high-level initiate, depending on whom you ask – portrayed the Illuminati as something like a grim secret society of occult middle managers. Their recent reinvention is very much darker. Promoted by conspiracists like David Icke, the 21st-century view of the new black magic ties together CIA mind-control methods with both overt and covert military and political operations. While military and political authorities plan and execute acts of economic and physical terrorism, a public propaganda machine channels distracting, destructive and degrading influences through the fashion world, the music business and the endlessly shiny and disordered lives of Hollywood’s rich and famous.
LIZARD-PEOPLE Claims of Satanic influence in rock music are hardly new. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page notoriously bought Aleister Crowley’s Boleskine House beside Loch Ness, and the Rolling Stones were promoting “Sympathy for the Devil” through the 1960s and ’70s. But the recent revival of interest in occult-influenced media has moved the focus away from individual performers and towards an invisible network of handlers, managers, psychiatrists and supporting ‘creatives’. In this new view, celebrities and famous performers are victims of the conspiracy, not its leaders. According to conspiracy investigators, many actors and performers, including almost every famous name in the business, have given up their freedom involuntarily. They now live in a kind of twilight world where their actions are controlled and their media presence is carefully stage-managed to promote Illuminati imagery – and to keep the public focused on consuming it.
The means of control and coercion used by Illuminati handlers are more psychological than physical. According to Icke, the Illuminati are obsessed with ritual, cold-blooded abuse, territorial possessiveness of resources and people and top-down political and economic power. Icke has walked back from his claims that the Illuminati are literally alien lizard people, morphing into their true form when angry or stressed (see FT129:30–31). His current view is that the alien lizards live in a nearby dimension and manipulate the Earth via their hench-people, aristocratic bloodlines literally wedded to political and financial privilege and dedicated to personal, political and financial degradation and amorality. According to one self-proclaimed bloodline member who posts regularly on the David Icke message boards, abuse also conditions the next generation of Illuminati bloodline leaders so that they’ll be ready and willing to continue that agenda. The cult is managed internally through a dramatic ethic of ruthless conflict and internal assassination. Only the most predatory individuals survive to reach positions of power and influence, and they can be replaced at any time by a more successful and ruthless competitor.
These occult crime families employ forced prostitution, deliberate mental breakdown, and total psychological control to further their agenda. Some of the most controversial suggestions come from individuals who claim to be former victims of the mind-control cult, and offer tales of systematic and ritualised pædophilia and sexual abuse, designed to deliberately shatter the minds of victims into compartmentalised and compliant sub-personalities called ‘alters’.
Icke associate Arizona Wilder claims to have been involved in organising ritual abuse for the Illuminati until she left to become a whistle-blower on the conspiracy scene. According to Wilder, abuse is ritualised, symbolic and systematic, and plays a key role in promoting the Illuminati agenda. A similar story is repeated by Cathy O’Brien, who claims to be a victim of a CIA mind-control programme called MONARCH, which was – and supposedly still is – a subunit of the notorious Cold War MK-ULTRA. This programme is a matter of historical record, backed up by official documents, but in O’Brien’s two books,
The Tranceformation of America and Access Denied: For Reasons of National Security, she claims that individuals are deliberately tortured with drugs and other forms of both sexual and psychological abuse until they dissociate into multiple personalities which can then be moulded at will.
CELEBRITY SACRIFICESo is the music business controlled by inter-dimensional lizards? Apparently so.
Unlike most corporations, the Illuminati have occult skills and arcane knowledge, as well as an advanced understanding of psychology which goes beyond the feeble marketing boosterism of positive thinking and PR. The Illuminati run everything – including the music, TV and movie industries. By incorporating trigger images and developing projects which promote their own form of amorality, the Illuminati can influence entire populations and promote their reptilian values of systematic abuse, pathological self-centredness and ruthless competition.
This makes celebrities very useful to them. The marketing value of celebrity is worth billions, which is why famous names appear on the packaging of everything from breakfast cereals to cars, seducing their followers into buying the officially approved choices of their idols. But less positive occult leverage is also possible. Rather like voodoo dolls, Illuminati magicians and psychiatrists stick psychological pins into their pet celebrities, both for the instant gratification of immediate sadism and because the mass attention focused on celebrities transfers and amplifies the torture for the public at large. If the conditioning starts to slip, as sometimes it does, celebrities can always be sacrificed to create an upwelling of popular emotion that’s immensely useful in ritual magic.
Central to this new form of conspiranoia is the belief that imagination and attention are the most precious of occult commodities. According to conspiracist Matthew Delooze, music festivals and other media events provide opportunities for the harvesting of human energy. In the same way that David Icke’s reptilians bear an interesting resemblance to the lizard people shown in the 1980s sci-fi series
V, Delooze’s human-harvesting echoes scenes in the 1970s TV series
Quatermass, where aliens compel young people to gather in large groups and then harvest them for food. The Delooze re-imagining assumes that emotional energy is more useful to invisible entities than physical body parts, but the theme of humans as willing prey remains recognisable. Appropriately enough, in the TV series, the most attractive locations for public ritual sacrifice are sacred sites like Stonehenge and Glastonbury, and giant stadia like Wembley.
Delooze believes that music festivals and very public deaths like those of Princess Diana and Michael Jackson are equally valuable. Glastonbury may be the ultimate feel-good festival, but the existence of a pyramid stage and the presence of ‘ley lines’ suggests that it’s up to no good. This may confuse survivors of the original festival scene, who saw festivals as venues for free expression away from the rigid values of a Cold War culture. It may also surprise survivors of the 1980s and 1990s, who saw festivals and raves as places where ordinary people could escape from work and authoritarianism at none-too legal gatherings; not to mention historians of popular culture, who have traced the lineage that leads to modern-day festivals back to rowdy public fairs and markets, some of which date to mediæval times.
To Delooze-ians this is all part of the plot. Participants think they’re having fun, when really they’re being mind-controlled and manipulated. Mass media promotion of festivals and celebrity news traps viewers inside an emotional world where they can be herded from experience to experience like farm animals. Others have suggested that all media content is Illuminati-controlled for maximum occult benefit, whether it’s Live Earth or coverage of Britney Spears’s latest breakdown.
STEPFORD STARS The constant and deliberate reinforcement of occult symbols in the media has the double effect of increasing their impact and also flaunting the controllers’ intent before their unwitting victims. But none of this is entirely secret, and it’s a feature of the new occultism that the signs are visible to those who can interpret them. Conspiracy watchers such as the
Pseudo Occult Media blog have become obsessive followers of celebrity news, deconstructing music videos, fashion photos and movies to reveal hidden Illuminati symbols.
Most of this symbolism isn’t obvious to outsiders. Traditional pentagrams and pyramids do occasionally appear, but colours, shapes, corporate logos and other motifs are just as prominent and powerful. Even photographic lighting techniques can carry a message: for example, a face in shadow, which emphasises the duality and splitting of dark and light personality elements. Similarly, a monarch butterfly symbol on clothes, graphics or tattoos reinforces the MK-ULTRA MONARCH programme.
Devotees of occult celebrity-spotting argue that not only are celebrities programmed and brainwashed, they’re also cloned and genetically engineered to manifest a pleasing combination of good looks. Illuminati science is decades ahead of our own, so their scientists can create genetic celebrities to order, blessed with a perfect eye-catching combination of sexual charisma and physical attractiveness.
Where conventional fans try to keep up with the relationships and lifestyle fads of their idols, occult-spotters look for evidence of failing programming. The ritual of celebrity rehab is taken as a sure sign that conditioning is breaking down, and reinforcement urgently needed. If the situation is left unattended to, then a famous name might start acting irrationally, perhaps even leading to a public event that reveals their abuse. The ultimate success for spotters would be a tell-all public confession – but this never happens.
Instead, most celebrities are successfully re-conditioned and “Stepforded”. Just like the Stepford Wives in the book and movies of the same name, Stepforded celebrities acquire conventional family values and become pliably robotic. Unlike the movies, this process isn’t limited to women. Any individual who can’t be reprogrammed can always be replaced by a more obedient clone, or sacrificed in public with a faked suicide or assassination.
This may raise a question or two in the minds of sceptics. There’s no evidence that cloning is possible, never mind likely. And sceptics might also wonder how it’s possible to tell the difference between the fashions and accessories available in any clothing store and official Illuminati-approved mind-control apparel. It doesn’t take an expert knowledge of fashion to see that many of the claimed symbols and images are common to the point of being mundane. Butterfly images and leopard-print fabrics are widespread enough to be clichés in their own right. So how can these be images of mind-control?
The secret seems to be that what celebrities wear is proof of their mind-control, and ordinary women – and sometimes men – copy them to reinforce their own slave status. Sporting a butterfly tattoo or a leopard-print miniskirt might seem like harmless fun, but in fact it shows a willingness to conform and to support the Illuminati agenda of pædophilia and programmed mental destruction. Mind-controlled celebrities are dressed deliberately by minders to display these images, both to reinforce the conditioning of the celebrities themselves, and to symbolise the existence of their conditioning to the rest of us.
TRANCEFORMATIONS For non-believers, this new occult conspiracy theory sounds like paranoid delusion, but conclusively disproving the beliefs of Icke and Delooze turns out to be harder than it might seem, because historical reality is at least as strange as some of the stories being told about it.
The MK-ULTRA programme certainly existed. Documents prove that for nearly two decades the CIA experimented with hypnosis, hallucinogens and other drugs and a process called “psychic driving”. Invented by Dr Ewen Cameron, who went on to become the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association, psychic driving used audiotape loops combined with drugs to ‘suggest’ behavioural changes. Cameron eventually developed a more intensive technique called de-patterning, which added electro-convulsive therapy and insulin coma to the noxious mix of psychiatric abuse. Cameron’s interest was in treating schizophrenia; but he experimented freely, with CIA funding, on individuals with relatively minor psychological problems, including mild depression and anxiety.
Cameron’s grisly research and other parts of the MK-ULTRA programme are a matter of historical record, but in 1973 CIA Director Richard M Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed. What’s known about MK-ULTRA is known almost by accident, as a cache of documents, most of which were financial rather than operational, survived the cull because they were kept in a separate location.
Critics of mind-control lore state categorically that there is no evidence of a programme called MONARCH. But when most of the primary sources are no longer available, it becomes impossible to be sure which techniques were used and which weren’t. The MK-ULTRA research seems to have been distinguished by a significant lack of interest in medical or psychiatric ethics. When a professional psychiatrist fries the brains of patients with voltages 30 times higher than those used in conventional ECT, and does this without their consent, it’s not unreasonable to ask just where MK-ULTRA experimenters were willing to draw the line between ethical and unethical behaviour.
More recently, stories of systematic torture and abuse in military prisons have forced the current US administration to appoint a special prosecutor. At the same time, former US officials have admitted that terror threat levels were deliberately manipulated for political reasons. So, from one point of view, it’s clear that the promotion of fear and abuse have sometimes been supported at government level. And if you believe Delooze, torture has an occult purpose too. The aim of torture isn’t to acquire intelligence, but to debase its victims, create terror, and, most of all, to focus public attention on the threat of irrational and all-consuming abuse.
FASHION VICTIMS The fashion and media worlds are similarly unwholesome. Rumours of sexual favours, not always voluntary, are common in modelling, acting and fashion photography. There’s also no doubt that these are inherently risky professions. Creative media can boast a long list of famous names – most recently Michael Jackson and David Carradine – who were either murdered or committed suicide, often in bizarre and questionably convincing ways.
But how much of the historical record is conventional decadence and dysfunction, and how much is evidence of organised conspiracy? Conspiracy theories can only flourish when facts are either absent or deliberately ignored. Narrative logic always reflects public hopes and fears, and at the moment the public has plenty to feel fearful of. In the same way that conventional Satanism and the occult were the unnameable night terrors of previous generations, modern anxieties live both in and behind the media. Celebrities are fascinating because they’re envied and need to be brought down from their pedestals; but they also stand in for our idealised image of how life should be, and our fears of how it really is.
And so it should come as no surprise that creative reinterpretations of media influence now abound. During the Bush years, paranoid reality became stranger than fiction. But even before then, the traditional Bohemian role of celebrity was becoming redundant. Sex, drugs, and the occasional high profile police bust have become formulaic waypoints on the path to notoriety, and the only people still shocked by them are likely to be elderly or unusually religious. The rest of the population has moved on, and many people are now wilder in private (and sometimes in public) than the subversive stars of 40 years ago ever were. Morals, as well as becoming laxer, have also become more nakedly exploitative.
So perhaps the biggest clue to the new paranoia is the extent to which distrust of the authorities and the media is endemic. Supposed authority figures such as bankers and politicians have proven themselves to be corrupt at best, and psychotic at worst. It’s not hard to see how movie imagery – from interdimensional fear-eating lizards to robotic spouses and secret societies – can be assembled into a consistent narrative of top-down malevolence and media control. In this view, sacrificial celebrities aren’t special people, or even special victims – they’re just like the rest of us.
(See especially the Stepford Wives thread in the Symbolism/Mind Control/Subliminal Programming folder)
Are you facing the prospect of being alone on Valentine's Day? It's not too late to make someone fall in love with you. Science fiction's full of handy ways to make someone swoon into your arms, and here's a list. 
Love Potion 
Batman And Robin, the best superhero movie with "And" in its title, features Uma Thurman's vamp-tastic version of Poison Ivy. Unlike the comics, whose Poison Ivy has mind-control spores and lipstick, Uma's version of Ivy has "Love Dust," which she can blow on people (including Robin, I guess) to make them fall for her. And in the 1960s Batman series, there's an episode called "Marsha, Queen Of Diamonds" in which Marsha uses love darts to make Commissioner Gordon and Chief O'Hara fall in love with her — and then does the same to the Dynamic Duo. Batman must agree to marry her or her friends will be killed.
Star Trek: The Animated Series, "Mudd's Crystals" features Harry Mudd, who's gotten hold of some crystals that contain a substance that make anyone fall in love — and he convinces Nurse Chapel to use them to make Spock have the hots for her. The crystals end up breaking and affecting everybody on board the Enterprise, and there's even a moment where Kirk and Spock talk about how much they care about each other. (But it's brief.)
Also in Star Trek, the Dohlman's tears are a love potion, in the episode "Elaan of Troyius." Kirk gets them on his skin and his plans to spank her get derailed — or at least, the context in which Kirk will spank the Dohman is radically altered. Good thing Kirk loves the Enterprise more than he could ever love any woman.
In Brian Stableford's story "A Career In Sexual Chemistry," a scientist named Giovanni Casanova develops a kind of "aphrodesiac sweat" that you can secrete through your fingertips. When you touch someone and get this psychotropic protein on them, they feel a sense of euphoria, tenderness, affection and lust. This aids in "operant conditioning" that will make the other person fall in love. This works great, at first — but eventually too many people have access to this technology and it becomes so widespread, it loses a lot of its effectiveness. But in a world where people only have to touch each other to love each other, violence, crime and wars slowly disappear.
Lois And Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman, 
Smallville's "Devoted" features cheerleaders who — bwa ha ha — are brewing a kryptonite-enhanced love potion that makes all of the football players their obedient love slaves. The cheerleaders experimented in the bio lab to create a "love molecule," which they enhanced with meteor rock. Or something. Chloe comes under the influence of this love potion and attacks Lois, who knocks her into a furnace. It turns out that heat counteracts the effects of the potion, and Lois totally knew that. She wasn't just planning to burn Chloe alive or anything. Also, in the episode "Crimson," Lois puts on kryptonite-laced lipstick, which makes her totally go after Clark, who in turn is struck with desire and goes around kissing all the women he's attracted to. Clark and Lois almost hook up in this episode.
Stargate features a couple of different love-mojos. In 
The Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Him" features a magic letter jacket that makes anyone of the opposite sex fall in love with the wearer. People are willing to kill, steal and commit suicide for RJ, who has the jacket — and Willow is even willing to turn RJ into a girl so she can be with him.
The Twilight Zone episode "The Chaser," based on the story of the same name by John Henry Collier, features a man who buys a love potion for $1 and uses it to make the girl of his dreams fall for him. Eventually, though, her love becomes stifling and oppressive to him. So then he has to buy the antidote to the love potion — which costs all the money he has in the world. Just before he's about to administer it, the girl confesses she's pregnant.
The Tales from the Crypt episode "
Alien Nation has two episodes, "Fifteen with Wanda" and "Chains of Love", featuring a Tectonese drug called 
Oh My Goddess! features 
The Harry Potter books are 
The Harry Dresden book Storm Front by Jim Butcher features a love potion which Susan Rodriguez 
Fallout 3 features "
The Kim Possible episode "The Cupid Effect" 
Darkwing Duck's episode "My Valentine Ghoul" involves 
Even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 
