What Lies Below: Part 4
Exploring the Depths of the Conspiracy Iceberg
Welcome back, explorers of the esoteric! I’m someone who spent decades learning about weird nonsense instead of learning how to play an instrument, and now you’re the beneficiary. This is Day Four of what will be a nearly 100-day trip down the increasingly bizarre depths of the massive “Conspiracy Iceberg”. This first Tier has been mostly mainstream topics, but today we start to see our first glimpses of the weirder things to come.
SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE — Generally speaking, this is the idea that people are being abused as part of some sort of Occult or Satanic ritual. The victims are usually children. The term “Satanic” covers a lot of ground within this theory and in general when it comes to Conspiracy Theories. The rituals may also be in the name of other malevolent spiritual entities or even aliens(almost always the Reptilian variety). The exact sort of abuse happening varies from grisly specific incidents to lifelong torture, though it usually involves the alleged sacrifice of the victims.
This one comes and goes, with its first major incursion on the modern world being the ‘Satanic Panic’ that held sway through the 80s and held a strong grasp on culture even into the 90s. Back then, this was more the idea that sketchy stereotypical bad-movie Satanists were actively recruiting in Small Town America to do dark rituals with drugs and blood. As time went on, it became more common to accuse politicians and other world leaders of having secret deals with Satan(you’ll see the name “Moloch” used interchangeably a lot, here). Lots of conspiracies of the last 40 years have drawn on Satanic Panic with minor tweaks; PizzaGate and its spiritual successor Qanon are basically built on Satanic Panic, just with a bunch of frills and the ‘preying on children’ aspect cranked all the way up.
Even as Qanon faded from the limelight, the Satanic Ritual Abuse aspect of it survived and likely always will. A couple years ago, the online retailer “Wayfair” was accused of being instrumental in all this. Theorists found large items on the site with astronomical prices and reasoned that these were false listings that sinister “Elites” could use to order abducted children anonymously. With another Presidential election nearing as I write this, I’d guess we’ll see a significant uptick in Satanic Ritual Abuse allegations.
SHAKESPEARE — It’s often alleged that he didn’t write any/all of his attributed plays. That’s a thing that a very specific set of conspiracy theorists are very into, but it isn’t terribly noteworthy beyond their sphere. It’s also sometimes alleged that he has undiscovered manuscripts hidden here or there, like at Oak Island. If there’s some hidden deeper conspiracy, I’m unaware of it. Not very spicy. NEXT!
MAX HEADROOM — ‘Max Headroom’ was an 80’s television character; a sort of semi-cyberpunk A.I. television host. The character had a certain cult following and is still pretty recognized in the modern day, albeit as a niche pop culture memory at best. While the character did some biting commentary, there’s nothing particularly more sinister attached to Max Headroom himself apart from being a spokesman for “New Coke”.
In the mid-80s, however, someone dressed up as Max did create a small disturbance. Whomever it was managed to briefly hijack television station signals in Chicago. This occurred twice in one evening and was mostly just the person wiggling around and babbling. After an accomplice swats “Max” on the bare ass with a flyswatter, the signal goes away and that’s that. This isn’t a huge deal, but it was no small accomplishment to hijack major city television like this. Adding to the mystery: no one was ever caught. There’s no known connection to anything else, but this incident is slowly working its way into being better remembered than anything the fictional character did. In a way, that was kind of the first shitpost.
HYPERSIGILS — I wasn’t expecting to see something like this so high up. A sigil is a symbol generally used for occult/magical practices. The production of sigils can come from a few techniques, and some practitioners will be a little more strict about what type of symbol qualifies as a Sigil. They can represent entities, can be a sort of condensed spell, or can be imbued with other powers. For our purposes, consider them a symbol charged with specific intent.
Sigils are a popular topic in occult circles. The concept of Hyper-Sigils is the next step — in which the sigil isn’t just a symbol etched on a wall or page, but an entire piece of music or a book or an entire series of books. This is, of course, something much harder to pull off and also much more powerful. Occultists will often compare modern branding to hypersigils — the use of specific logos and carefully curated ‘Brand Personalities’ and color schemes and ‘experiences’ and so on, all put together purposefully or accidentally into a self-perpetuating magical force. For the more esoteric conspiracy theorists out there, hypersigils are one of the tools the Powers That Be use to control us and enact their plots right in plain sight.
TSUKI — Tsuki(and “System Space”, which they created) is, or I guess was, a strange internet phenomenon that’s a little hard to pin down. The main website appeared in 2017 but had an ‘old school internet’ aesthetic and featured a lot of imagery from the anime “Lain”. The project had the feel of an ARG(Alternate Reality Game) with a lot of strange writing, links to garbled images that seemed to contain codes, and so on. It first appeared on 4chan but got a lot of attention, soon gaining a cult vibe.
The basic thrust of the project was that everything we know and see is a simulation-theory style program, and the universe consists of a great many of these programs. Our universe was alleged to have faulty programming, but Tsuki claimed to be able to help people ascend to a kind of cyberpunk heaven dimension. The website allowed you to “sign up” and had a prominent countdown clock. As you have to die in this world to go to ‘LFE’, the cyberpunk heaven dimension, it was hard to miss the suicide-cult implications.
The site and its attached forum are gone now except for Wayback Machine captures. The countdown ended and a new site appeared and then also went away. Any organization or creator related to Tsuki seems to have moved on. Tsuki as a whole appears to have fallen off the radar, but these things always reappear at some point. Mark my words.
MJ-12 — This stands for “Majestic 12”, one of the oldest conspiracy theories on this list. The story goes that in the 90’s, the FBI was given alleged Government documents from the 1940s and 1950s. These documents were meant as a brief for the then-newly-elected President Eisenhower. The documents themselves are available online(including through the FBI’s own website) and look very authentic. They deal with a secret committee(The MJ-12) who are looking into UFO’s and extraterrestrial activity.
The Air Force investigated and declared it was a hoax. Believe it or not, that didn’t close the case for a lot of people. I’m not going to get into all the various incidents allegedly under the purview of the Majestic 12, but I suspect some will appear later on in the Iceberg. If not, I’ll do a retro roundup someday. MJ-12 was a cornerstone of pre-Internet UFOlogy.
MCFLY CODE — You may have noticed by now that there are certain tropes in the Conspiracy Theory world, or broad categories that most of them fall into. One of these that I imagine will be coming up a few times by the end of the Iceberg is the idea that movies or television shows have predicted future events. You’ve probably heard about this phenomenon being pinned on “The Simpsons” from time to time.
The McFly code is a “Back To The Future” flavored version of this trope. The original film allegedly contains various dates like 9/11 and 10/4, hinting at future events. Sorry that it isn’t more fun; I know this one probably sounded like it would be way cooler than it is. This isn’t a very widely known or believed theory for such an early spot on the Iceberg!
WRESTLING IS FAKE — Nonsense. A lot of things on the Iceberg beggar the imagination, but I’m not going to legitimize this particularly absurd notion with further attention. Next!
WICCA — It feels a little weird to just have a modern religion on the Iceberg at all, but I guess it deserves a place for how often it gets blamed for things or associated with other topics. A modern sort of catch-all Pagan belief system focusing on nature and magic, Wicca was less a brand new thing and more a re-contextualizing and reorganization of scattered pagan traditions into a modern style of witchcraft.
The basic ingredients are older, but Wicca as now packaged first appeared in Britain in the 1950s. A man named Gerald Gardner was considered most responsible for this, and you’ll still here the phrase “Gardnerian Wicca” used to refer to a specific style. Wicca was heavily demonized during the Satanic Panic of the 80s — which certainly wasn’t helped by Wicca’s regular use of the upright pentagram(as opposed to the inverted one associated with Satanism). Later, it experienced a big popularity boom with the growth of the internet.
Wicca is a generally peaceful, nature-based belief system and is often a starting place for young pagans, though there are lots of ‘traditions’ within it that can sometimes get very catty with one another about whose lineage traces back in what way.
JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES — A principle of psychology that suggests certain archetypes(like ‘hero’ or ‘trickster’) are innate pieces of collective unconscious that we are simply born with. I think. This is very complicated and not really a conspiracy, so don’t yell at me! If I could write eloquently and academically about things like this, I would probably be too busy being rich to be writing blogs about UFOs. Not every “weird psychological/philosophical theory” is a conspiracy! More cryptids instead, please! NEXT!
MYZIAM — “Myziam” was the name of a user who appeared on 4chan in 2017 claiming to be an extraterrestrial currently stuck on earth. Now, people showing up on image-boards and sort of role-playing as this or that is not a particularly unique phenomenon. It happens all the time and wouldn’t warrant inclusion on the Iceberg if that was the whole story.
Myziam’s performance was a little iffy at first but the thread soon ballooned. As people played along, they started to ask Myziam to fly their ship to various coordinates and take pictures as proof. In some cases, Myziam actually came through! Photos began to appear showing grainy images of various places on earth and, allegedly, the moon. One user even claimed to see Myziam’s ship. The thread FELT like it was all a goof and yet, I mean, Myziam was posting those pictures! Myziam only posted for a few hours and the thread went inactive the next day. To my knowledge, they never returned.
HOTEL CALIFORNIA — I didn’t know of anything beyond a ton of “the song actually means ____” things, and dug into this to see if I was missing something. I was hoping for something more interesting, but all I could find were alleged secret messages.
As a personal anecdote: I don’t see this being mentioned anywhere online but I definitely remember this being one of the “if you play it backward you summon the devil” songs in the 90s. Virtually every very famous song has some kind of conspiracy attached to it, but I think the iceberg mostly avoids that.
ARKEOLOGY — A general term for studying or conjecturing about Noah’s Ark. There have been dozens of expeditions, a lot of analysis of various mountains, and a number of hoaxes. It seems the majority of, sigh, “arkeologosists” think it wound up in Turkey, a dormant volcano in Turkey. People have been arguing about the location and actively looking for it since not long after Christianity picked up steam. It’s still a hot topic in evangelical circles today and you never need to wait long for a new rich guy to lead a big showy expedition.
That’s all! We’re still ticking off a lot obligatory stuff, but some obscure bits are finally starting to appear. We’re about halfway through the first of twenty tiers; see you soon!