Travis Scott, Astroworld, and a World without Christ

This weekend’s headlines were devoted to the mass casualty event which occurred at Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert in Houston. At least 8 are confirmed dead – apparently passing out from the heat and being trampled by the crowd – and some are claiming that the body count was much higher. I was unfamiliar with Travis Scott prior to this, but after seeing some video clips of the concert – the omnipresence of the All Seeing Eye, the demonic imagery on the screens behind him, the Hellmouth which participants needed to walk through to attend, and the discordant, autotuned, vocals of Scott himself – I’ll happily bet dollars to donuts that the deaths were no accident. By all appearances the concert was a full-on Black Mass, and the people who died were intentional human sacrifices.

By saying as much I can’t help but see myself as one of those ridiculous Satanic Panic busybodies who were the scourge of the 1980s. My mind immediately goes to the Season 3 episode of The Simpsons, The Otto Show, which featured Spinal Tap – the eponymous heavy metal band depicted in the 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap – swearing allegiance to a ‘half-inflated Dark Lord’ because their rubber devil-balloon was running at half-mast at the run-down Springfield venue.

It’s all a joke isn’t it? Nothing but musicians putting on dark and edgy leather outfits, and behaving outrageously in the spirit of youthful rebellion. Chill out fogey, stop trying to cancel Halloween. How is a rapper pretending to be a member of the Illuminati any different than a goth kids with his murder paraphernalia?

Tragedy has often struck at large venues like this; safety standards are written in blood, after all. Why invoke spiritual forces when the mundane will suffice?

One way of answering this question would be to point towards the rampant occult symbols, and predictive messaging (“Feast this Friday”, “SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE”), or how Scott was wearing a t-shirt that depicted people turning into demons as they travelled through a portal… but all of this is circumstantial (even if damningly circumstantial), and misses the larger point. That point being: what did you expect to happen when you eliminated God from our society?

Let’s step away from the pop music scene for the moment, and consider what the haute couture has been up to. After all, learning that prole culture celebrates vanity, gluttony, and lust should come as no surprise; but if the elites are crafting similar artistic rituals for themselves, then maybe we should start paying attention.

I happened to stumble upon this article describing the Gotthard Base Tunnel opening ceremony (to date it is the longest tunnel ever built, 57 km long, cutting through the Swiss Alps) from back in 2016 (thanks ConspiracyBot). Here’s a short, curated video of the event, which was attended by some of the most powerful people in Europe, including the leaders of Germany, Italy, and France:

Oh Lord, what the Hell was that?

Well; obscurantist, avante garde, pretentious bullshit for one. And there’s the rub; it’s easy to hide messaging under obscurantism. The more elite the entertainment, the more layers of misdirection it contains. As Prof. Peterson once noted, there’s really no fundamental difference between opera and professional wrestling. They both contain the same Hero’s Journey – the only real difference is that the latter is easy to understand, while the former has layers of complexity. Take Eraserhead for example; it’s the simple narrative of a young man who feels unready for fatherhood… buried under moutnains of David Lynch’s fever dreams. Fantastic stuff, if you’re into it.

The point being that all art contains narrative within it, and all narrative conforms to the Hero’s Journey. You just need to know how to spot it.

But while this core rhythm of narrative is inherent and inevitable – baked into our species at a primordial level – any given art piece is going to replicate it under certain constraints. On the one side, you have the medium and the purpose of the message; on the other you have the fundamental metaphysical assumptions of the society which manifests it.

To illustrate this, let’s use an example which is deceptively simple, but which nonetheless contains hidden layers of complexity to it. The 2012 Ode to Joy flash mob:

Inspiring, isn’t it? Now let’s ruin it through analysis.

On the one side, you have the constraint of context. It’s an ad hoc flash mob video. Spontaneous, unpredictable, with minimal investment; the goal being to create an organic phenomenon while only a few of the pieces are controlled. On the other, you have the primordial assumptions. Set in the ancient Spanish city of Sabadell, while singing – what exactly?

Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly one, thy sanctuary!
Thy magic binds again
What custom strictly divided;*
All people become brothers,*
Where thy gentle wing abides.

And so we have this sudden, organic appearance of unity and brotherhood, stretching back through time, and manifesting in the happiness of children and an affirmation of life. Christianity made manifest. That is why a simple video of people playing Ode to Joy in a public square is so gripping: because of all those hidden elements that make the whole more than a sum of its parts.

Now let’s consider the Gotthard ceremony. The context, a rough summary of the performance, and what this can tell us about the foundational assumptions which led into it.

Self-evidently, it’s a ceremony about a historic accomplishment. We should expect elements befitting a military parade, a statement of purpose and destination, and an acknowledgement of the costs as well as European symbolism; we get all of that. But while there’s a distinct sense of the mystical, what’s wholly absent is the divine.

• The workers are depicted as ashen, and unnecessarily ugly. Their uniforms are regimented, but depressingly asexual. Many of them are old and – unlike the dignified cello player – ugly.
• Those who represent the travellers through the tunnel are sexual without reproduction, almost infantilized.
• The nature spirits aren’t merely capricious; they’re untamed and undirected, violently chaotic.
• The Machine God is both a creation and a slave master, divorcing man from his context to serve the machine.
• The ‘honoured dead’ are broken, abused corpses, needlessly sexualized.
• The All Seeing Eye is pitiless in all it surveys.

The metaphysical assumptions of this work can only be described as the most vicious interpretation of Mystical Darwinism imaginable. Existence as a raw, unbridled appetite; an all-devouring Will to Power in which all must participate, else face extermination. Workers who frenetically obey orders, rushing into dangerous situations like soldiers from the Great War charging into machinegun fire – but not even death grants true peace. Even after having their bodies mangled and destroyed, their spirits rise as shades to serve those who managed to come out on top.

This isn’t a worldview that includes mankind having a shared destiny. It is one that believes in the zero sum game; that the only path to advancement is to leech off the lifeblood of those below you, while making certain that your peers don’t cast you down into perpetual bondage. The only thing you have to be thankful for is that, no matter how low you are on the hierarchy, there’s always someone below you to torture; the only true form of entertainment in this world. Mankind is not an end in itself; man is but a means to an end for other men.

Are you starting to see the problem with all of this?

The Gotthard ceremony was a massive production. While it might look chaotic, it was extremely choreographed, and while certain elements might have been ‘randomly’ chosen, the overall messaging was succinct. The procession carrying the bull’s skull, for example – was that referring to Mithras? Pastoralism? Good economic times? All three at once? Or was it simply chosen for the fact that it looked creepy and dramatic?

Did the breathing chicken breasts in Eraserhead mean something specific, or were they just weird for the sake of weird, adding to the alienation felt by the protagonist?

While an in-depth analysis of the ceremony would be interesting in its own right, we don’t need to understand every single detail to understand the underlying worldview of those who organized it.

Their allegiance lies not with the font of all life, but the eternal oppressor.

They believe in energy theft, not in creation.

They’re fully willing to tyrannize other sentient beings for the sake of their own advancement.

Power is their only true god.

Whether or not demons exist as supernatural entities is irrelevant at this point. Whether or not these people explicitly believe in Lucifer is likewise irrelevant. Even if you’re fully convinced that magic and the supernatural is nothing but superstition and a waste of time, these aren’t the sorts of beliefs that go away after they’re done eating aborted fetuses at their Eyes Wide Shut orgy. This is something that carries over into the practice of how they administer our societies.

So finally, let’s return to Travis Scott. He invited his fans to a feast, had them enter it through a Hellmouth, suffused the entire event with demonic imagery, and walked out of a Hell portal surrounded by burning angels. He stood atop an inverted cross watching the corpse of one of his fans being body-surfed out of the event while moaning in an incoherent auto-tuned wail, and then carried on the concert, indifferent to the lives that were lost. See you on the other side.

Did he sacrifice these lives to the devil? Did he turn the entire audience into a spiritual battery to empower his enchantments and gain him power over the world?

Or were these people killed because he’s utterly indifferent to those who are beneath him?

Was it a spell? Or was it just a spiel?

Did those souls willingly give themselves over to Satan, and are now being tortured eternally as their just reward? Or did they merely give themselves over to a reprobate mind, an followed a degenerate musician into a pit of death?

In many ways it’s academic. Pascal’s wager still applies whether or not the supernatural exists. At the end of the day, Travis Scott has killed dozens with his music…

…while Beethoven has inspired billions.