The Devil’s Chord, the devil’s interval, the tritone, the triad, and the diminished or flatted fifth are a combination of musical notes that are designed to create a chilling or discordant sound that makes for a foreboding atmosphere.
After all, music is hypnotic and activates specific neuro cortical structures in the brain inducing whatever emotion the musician desires in their listeners.
This is why the interval has been used for centuries as a way to scare people or subvert religious music. In medieval times, it was associated with the Devil and referred to as Diabolus in musica (the Devil in music) – so much so that some composers have tried to banish it entirely from their compositions.
It has been said that in the Middle Ages people were forbidden from using flattened fifths because of the evil tone it creates and brings demonic forces.
The devil’s tunes were the antithesis of godliness. It has been called the Devil’s Interval since at least the 16th century.
Over time, the sound has wound up in classical music, jazz, rock, heavy metal, rap, and even Broadway musicals in some of the most popular songs of the 20th and 21st centuries.
THE SCIENCE OF THE DEVIL’S TRITONE
It is used to create tension, discord, or suspense in music and more importantly, it has also been connected with inducing a ‘hypnotic state’ in the listener.
The use of music and sound for inducing ‘hypnotic’ and ‘subconscious’ states and capacities etc. is used to artificially produce a build up of emotions, energy and tension within the listener. Meaning, it is the musician controlling the energies and we can say the minds of their listeners with hypnosis via certain musical tones rather than the listener themselves.
Musicians can be compared to the flute playing snake charmers of people.
They have the ability to charm women to become raving lunatics who will do anything to see or get a piece of their favorite musician and command men and women to act like their porn stars and gangsters. This is why corporations use music in advertising and why they employ musicians to sell worthless consumer items to the masses.
They are magicians who through their music control their “raving mind controlled fans.”
The Devi’s tri-tone invokes an automatic and mostly un-noticed tension and energy in a being who in turn may themselves invoke this same kind of tension in themselves through various means. If the listener is unaware or unconscious of what is happening, they may misdirect and misuse this energy towards their own self destruction and that of their family or the community and nation to which they belong.
You can clearly see this in the punk rock and rap music scenes whose adherents regularly destroy themselves through their destructive and violent lifestyles.
The lyrics and music have now been programed into their minds to the point that their thoughts, words and actions play like a schizophrenic tape recorder of their favorite playlist. In a sense, their minds and spirits have been purposely inverted by music which is manipulating their unconscious thus increasing ‘egoism and selfishness’.
Musical tones that have the potential to be used for both suggestions for inducing a sleep like trance state to mind control people as well as for awakening conscious development.
The Devil’s Tritone is meant to do the former by inducing an artificial tension and friction that builds up of negative emotions in the listener that can lead to destructive behaviors if not able to be expressed in a positive way.
Scientists have found that emotions induced by music activate similar frontal brain regions compared to emotions elicited by other stimuli. Fearful and sad music is associated with increases in right frontal EEG activity and joyful and happy musical segments were associated with increases in left frontal EEG activity and the more intense the music, the more frontal brain activity.
It is interesting to note that when unpleasant music is played, the posterior cingulate cortex activates, which indicates a sense of conflict or emotional pain in the listener which is associated with the right hemisphere of the brain. Anyone who has listened to heavy metal, punk rock and even gangster rap understands that it invokes certain emotions and energies.
This is why since the days of Anceint Greece, emotion has been linked with tonality. For thousands of years music has been viewed as being both potentially creative and destructive to the listener.
A powerful creative force that can implant thoughts and ideas into people’s minds unbeknownst to the ignorant listener who is unaware of this knowledge and science.
HOW IS THE DEVIL’S TRITONE PLAYED?
The tritone is made up of two tones that are six half-steps apart. It consists of two notes that are three whole steps apart, such as “C” to “F#.”
For example, if you take any note on a piano or guitar and play it along with its fifth (a half-step above) or seventh (a half-step below), you’ll hear a tritone.
In classical music theory, it’s called an augmented fourth (two whole steps plus a half step), a diminished or flattened fifth (a half step more than a whole step).
In music theory, consonance refers to sounds that fit together well. A major third — the distance between two notes on a piano keyboard — feels pleasant because it’s in harmony with nature: The sounds we make when we hum or sing are based on harmonics that have a frequency ratio of 2-to-3 (for example, A to C).
Consonance also has to do with how stable or unstable a sound is — whether it feels permanent or fleeting. This is why minor keys often seem sadder than major ones; they’re less stable because there isn’t enough consonance to create a sense of resolution after each chord change.
WHAT MUSICIANS AND BANDS PLAYED THE DEVIL’S TRITONE?
The tritone is often heard in classical music when composers want to create tension or foreshadow danger — like in the Dies Irae section of Mozart’s Requiem Mass to symbolize the descent into hell or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre.
In 1666, German composer Heinrich Schutz wrote Cantata No. 12 “O süßes Jesulein” (O Sweet Little Jesus), which includes a passage using a tritone called “the Devil’s interval.” The piece caused such a stir that the Catholic Church banned it from being played during mass services.
Beethoven’s 1805 opera Fidelio is flush with triads, as is Richard Wagner’s 1848 composition “Gotterdammerung.” French composer Claude Debussy loved using tritones in his music and used them heavily in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902).
The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams used them extensively in his symphonies and concertos. Modern composers like Hans Zimmer have also used them extensively in film scores like Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014).
In jazz terminology, it’s often called an “outside” chord. That’s because it tends to sound dissonant against other chords in a tune — especially when played by a saxophone player who has been improvising too long without knowing where he is going to end up .
It was used often — especially Miles Davis and John Coltrane who used it frequently in their recordings together.
For example, Miles Davis’ use of the tritone in “So What” from Kind of Blue is considered one of his most important contributions to modern music.
The blues were regarded as the Devil’s music. Talented people like guitarist Robert Johnson were considered to be influenced by dark forces like the faustian myth that the musician disappeared to Highways 49 and 61 in Mississippi, where he met the Devil and exchanged his guitar for the bluesman’s soul.
The godfathers of metal, Black Sabbath built their music careers using the Devil’s chord. The primary riff used in “Black Sabbath” from the band’s 1970 self-titled first album, which is based on (and begins with) the tritone interval, can be credited to guitarist Tony Iommi.
“He came to rehearsal one day,” Ozzy Osbourne remembered of Iommi’s innovation in 2001, “and said, ‘Isn’t it funny how people pay money to watch horror films; why don’t we start playing scary music?’ And then he came up with that ‘Black Sabbath’ riff, which was the scariest riff I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Iomni developed Sabbath’s sound after listening to a piece of classical music he and bassist Geezer Butler enjoyed by Gustav Holst called “Mars, The Bringer of War” from the suite The Planets (written in 1914).
Iommi began experimenting with the sound on guitar by slowing it down to a crawl, and he liked the unsettling feeling it created. Then he added a trill to the flatted fifth, repeatedly wavering from Db to D and added vibrato to the other notes playing at different speeds and with varying chord combinations to emphasize the tension of the music.
“I was particularly interested in The Planets and ‘Mars’ by Gustav Holst. There’s a sort of tritone in that and I was always playing that on bass funnily enough before we even started writing songs and I think subconsciously it may have influenced Tony,” Butler recalled.
Iommi recalled, “Just one day we were in the rehearsal room and I started playing, as I did, ideas and this riff came out and I thought, ‘God!’ I really liked it and the other guys said, ‘Ah, that’s really good. We really like that.”‘So, I put more to it and that was it, it became ‘Black Sabbath.'”
“We built it up, but that was immediate — once we’d done that song, that was the direction and we knew where we were going then from that first riff. It just gave us a certain feeling,” the guitarist continued.
The feeling that was instilled in him when he first played that riff is quite vivid as Iommi looked back, “I remember when I first played that riff, all the hairs stood up on my arm and I knew that was it. ‘That’s it, this is where we’re at, this is what we’re doing.’ It was just like being told, ‘This is what you’re doing and this is where you’re going.'”
Iommi used the Devil’s tritone in many Sabbath songs, and when the band became successful, the tritone became a staple of the heavy metal genre.
Countless bands such as Judas Priest, Metallica, Slayer, Marilyn Manson, and Slipknot have all used this technique to their music.
Slayer even named their 1998 album Diabolus in Musica in homage to the technique.
Dave Mustaine, founder and frontman for the metal band, Megadeth, was featured on ABC News’ Nightline for an episode called “Battle With The Devil,” which detailed the occult, and belief in the devil.
Mustaine, who is a Christian, now, shows the ABC host the chord progression of the Devil’s Tritone and says; “The devil’s tritone is made up of these three notes, and this note right here drops down one, so it goes…
So listen to the difference. It just sounds evil, doesn’t it.’
‘It sounds darker.’
Which is why the progression is used so frequently in death metal.”
Mustaine says he is a Christian now, but wasn’t always.
The opening bars of the Beatles song “A Hard Day’s Night” feature a tritone progression: C# – F# – Bb – D
Today, we have examples like Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” and Trent Reznor’s “Something I Can Never Have.”
This sequence is basically a dissonance, that is, an apparently “unstable” sound that needs to be resolved into a more “stable” consonance.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) is one of the most celebrated science fiction writers of the 21st century.
He published 44 novels and 121 short stories in his lifetime and his books have been adapted into video games, television shows, and films including Total Recall, Minority Report, Blade Runner, The Man in the High Castle, and A Scanner Darkly.
Dick was an American who has been described as a Gnostic, a countercultural figure, a philosopher — and at the same time, he’s been called crazy and a drug addict. For example, he admitted that almost every book he wrote was done under the influence of amphetamines (Meth or Speed).
But as with many of the world’s greatest thinkers, a touch of madness and personal life issues are no reason to throw this authentic baby out with the dirty bathwater.
As was the case with Phillip K. Dick (PKD).
Dick once described all his novels as books that “try to pierce the veil of what is only apparently real to find out what is really real.”
And that is exactly what he did, which I believe has made him one of the greatest modern Gnostic thinkers of our time.
One of Dick’s most famous Gnostic theories was that of the Black Iron Prison (BIP), which he described as an invisible complex life form (organism) that was a criminal virus and was self perpetuating.
Its human representatives were the Roman Empire, which he claims never ended, they just went underground.
According to Dick, the Black Iron Prison was not just a living parasitical organism that could commandeer our minds and bodies to make us its puppets, it also had also managed to weave its filamental web into a totalitarian world government ruled by an elite consisting of powerful corporations and individuals who have enslaved most of humanity for thousands of years.
Think of the Black Iron Prison as a synonymous term to the Matrix to describe our world and the hidden realities which govern it as it exists today.
Dick shares through his many novels and his own personal story about being a prisoner trapped within it.
DICK’S VISIONS
In 1974, while Dick was recovering from the after-effects of prescription drugs for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth, he received a home delivery of his meds from a beautiful young woman.
When he opened the door, he was awestruck by the dark-haired girl’s beauty, and was especially fascinated by her golden necklace with fish-shaped design.
He asked her what it meant, and as she was leaving, she replied: “This is a sign used by the early Christians.”
Dick called the symbol the “vesicle pisces”.
After the mysterious woman had departed, Dick began experiencing strange hallucinations.
Dick said that the sunlight reflected off the gold pendant, forming a “pink beam” of light that mesmerized him as if it imparted some special wisdom and clairvoyance, and he also believed it to be intelligent. On another occasion, he claimed that the pink beam gave him information that his infant son was ill. He rushed his son to the hospital, where the illness was confirmed by a doctor.
Dick spoke of it as a revelatory event that made him sane. He told Charles Platt:
“I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.”
Carl Jung’s Influence on Dick
Dick said that his thinking and much of his work was heavily influenced by the writings of fellow Gnostic, Carl Jung. It was his thirst for this secret knowledge that had drawn him to Jung’s writings.
“I was reading Jung in the forties when the only book of his in the U.S. was, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul,” [1933] he wrote Patricia Warrick in 1980. “I bought one later book and tried to translate it. I went to the library at U. C. Berkeley and read their translations.
They had translated only the introduction… a few mimeographed pages. Pat, I felt such a hunger for knowledge,” Dick wrote. (pp. 202-203)
His former wife, Anne R. Dick, wrote in the Search for Philip K. Dick;
“About this time [1961] I started reading some of Carl Jung’s writings. Dorothy Hudner had been deeply influenced by Jung’s works, and when she heard about my interest she sent us one of the beautiful Bollingen editions. Both Phil and I read it and soon acquired and read the whole set….Phil studied Jung’s volumes Alchemy Symbols of Transformation in the Mass.
He was interested in Jung’s idea that a new world religion would soon arise, a religion based upon a quarternity instead of a trinity. The fourth force will be, Jung said, the force now regarded as demonic.
This statement had a big influence on Phil.” (p. 60)
@ 103:40 Dick talks about Jung….
The Black Iron Prison’s Most Wanted Crusader
For Phillip K. Dick, the Roman Empire was not only real and still alive, he was a wanted man by its enforcers who wished to silence him.
In a 1977 interview, he claimed that he was followed by the police and that the US government had broken into his home, stealing his work. Dick said;
“As far as my reputation in the United States, I don’t expect ever to have any reputation in the United States except, well, the police once told me that I was a crusader, and they had no use for crusaders.
But unfortunately they didn’t tell me what I was crusading for. I was afraid to ask,
“But what was I a crusader for?”
And they told me that if I did not get out of the county I would be shot in the back, or worse, some night. And I merely took their advice. I left the United States and went to Canada for a while.
But I never found out what I was crusading for. It may have had something to do with my writing. It may have had something to do with my lifestyle, or a combination of both.
But I was too afraid of the police to ask what it was that I was doing.”
Dick stated, “It is impossible to tell how much of our fears were justified. I mean, there were illegal entries, my house was broken into, my files were blown open, my papers were stolen.
We never found out who did it. My attorney said it was the government.
There was no doubt that it was the government. But what they were looking for, I don’t know.
What they thought I was doing, I don’t know. I don’t even know if it was the government. But there were many such illegal entries.” He said.
Later in the interview, Dick claims that CIA and FBI agents were watching his every move – surveiling his home and opening his mail. He said that he even saw his own CIA and FBI files proving so;
“In March of ’74 the CIA operation CHAOS, which was to harass, disrupt and keep surveillance on American dissidents was officially abandoned. So the kind of paranoia which Michel Demuth noted, which was real, was based on the fact that we were harassed, we were under surveillance.
We really were.
There was no doubt about it whatsoever. I’ve seen my CIA file. I’ve seen my FBI file under The Freedom Of Information Act. I was legally allowed to see both files.
The CIA opened my mail. The FBI had a file on me. I’ve seen both,” Dick said.
“I no longer have the sense of the police activity. It depends a little on what you mean by paranoia.
If you mean a psychotic conviction that you are being persecuted, which is not in accord with reality, I don’t think I had that. But, boy, I sure thought the cops were watching everything I did.
And I was correct. I was tipped off by the criminal underground that my house was being watched.
The license plate numbers of every car that stopped in front of my house was taken. And these were not part of my imagination, these were actual events.
Anyone who visited me, their license plate number was written down by the people next door. And I was told that the house was being watched, and eventually that my house would be hit, my files would be opened, my papers would be taken, and so it came to pass.
As I said in the Rolling Stone article on me, when I came home and found my house consisting of nothing but rubble, ruins, chaos, broken windows, smashed doorknobs, blown open files, I said, “Thank God, I’m not crazy. I have real enemies.”
It’s a tremendous relief to discover that somebody really is after me.”
In his book The Penultimate Truth, Dick describes a society in which the Empire rules over time until they control all aspects of human life – from birth to death.
In this world, life has become meaningless and people are confined to small rooms where they spend their lives watching a screen that shows them images of the past, so that they can have at least some illusion of freedom.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for example, he describes an Earth where many people have emigrated to Mars, leaving behind an overpopulated planet full of poverty and crime.
Apparently, Elon Musk is a Dick fan. In 2016, he said he wanted to build a rocket capable of taking people to Mars and supporting a permanent city on the planet.
In another novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dick describes a future where Earth has been transformed into a commercialized planet run by megacorporations who use drugs to control their customers’ minds.
A world that sounds very much like what we see today with massive pharmaceutical companies who have sovereign status and are pulling in billions of dollars as the Empire requires vaccine mandates for its prisoners citizens to travel and work.
BOOKS BY PHILIP K. DICK
Solar Lottery, 1955.
A Handful of Darkness (short stories), 1955.
The World Jones Made, 1956.
The Man Who Japed, 1956.
Eye in the Sky, 1957.
The Cosmic Puppets, 1957.
The Variable Man (5 short novels), 1957.
Time Out of Joint, 1959.
Dr. Futurity, 1960.
Vulcan’s Hammer, 1960.
The Man in the High Castle, 1962.
The Game-Players of Titan, 1963.
Martian Time-Slip, 1964.
The Simulacra, 1964.
Clans of the Alplhane Moon, 1964.
The Penultimate Truth, 1964.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1965.
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got A long after the Bomb, 1965.
Now Wait for Last Year, 1966.
The Crack in Space, 1966.
The Unteleported Man, 1966.
Counter-Clock World, 1967.
The Zap Gun, 1967.
The Ganymede Takeover (with Ray Nelson), 1967.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968.
The Preserving Machine (short stories), 1969.
Galactic Pot-Healer, 1969.
Ubik, 1969.
Our Friends from Frolix 8, 1970.
A Maze of Death, 1971.
We Can Build You, 1972.
The Book of Philip K. Dick (short stories), 1973.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 1974.
Confessions of a Crap Artist, 1975.
A Scanner Darkly, forthcoming.
Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny), forthcoming.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
“The great affairs of the world, wars, revolutions, etc. were conducted by those who, while maintaining the public interest, acted from selfish interests, whatever they may pretend.” – Benjamin Franklin
In 1976, peace negotiations had begun during the civil war and America’s founding Fathers were debating on how to resolve the conflict.
One of the most outspoken members of the group was John Adams who believed that Benjamin Franklin’s ideas of how the country should operate were not only at odds, Adams believed that Franklin’s policies would divide the country rather than unite it.
Adams wrote:
“Franklin’s cunning will be to divide us; to this end, he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will maneuver.”
This is an image of Benjamin Franklin, statesman, philosopher, scientist, and framer of our Declaration of Independence. As portrayed on the Broadway stage in the inspired musical drama, “1776,” he wins ovations at every performance and sends the audience home feeling warmed and re-Americanized.”
Why would John Adams make such a claim about one of the most renowned figures in American history?
Most Americans know Benjamin Franklin as one of the Founding Fathers of our country. He was a genius polymath who dabbled in many different fields, including science, politics, writing, and invention. Franklin is best known for his work as an inventor, creating such devices as the lightning rod and bifocals, as for his roles in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States.
What many people do not know about one of the greatest Founding Fathers was that he was also a British Spy.
During the formation of the American Colonies and throughout his career, Franklin maintained a close relationship with several British officials, including Lord North, the Prime Minister at the time, and regularly corresponded with British Army officer John Burgoyne. He would also spend a significant amount of time in London during the early stages of the American Revolution.
In 1776, at the height of the Revolutionary War, Burgoyne wrote a letter to Franklin asking for intelligence about American troop movements. While there is no definitive proof that Franklin complied with this request, some historians believe he may have passed along information that led to Burgoyne’s eventual defeat at the Battle of Saratoga—a turning point in the war.
He then became close friends with Edward Bancroft in 1768 who was also working as a spy for Britain. The two men exchanged information with each other about their respective countries for many years. It is not known for sure how much information Bancroft gave to Franklin or vice versa, but it is certain that they were both spying on their respective countries during a time of war.
Bancroft also introduced Franklin to several members of British intelligence, including John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, and Sir Joseph Yorke. It is possible that Yorke used Franklin as a conduit to pass information about American military plans to the British government during the Revolutionary War.
In addition, when Franklin returned to America after the war, he was given a very generous pension by the British government. It is worth mentioning that pensions were actually quite common at the time, and many other Americans who played key roles in the Revolution were also given pensions by the British government.
This pension given to Franklin and other key players in the Revolution has been cited as further evidence of his alleged spying activities.
According to the CIA publication, Studies in Intelligence, the British knew almost everything that was going on in America:
“The British had a complete picture of American-French activities supporting the war in America and of American intentions regarding an alliance with France. The British used this intelligence effectively against the American cause.”
One of Franklin’s fellow commissioners, Arthur Lee, was outraged over this lack of security.
“[Lee] wrote that a French official “had complained that everything we did was known to the English ambassador, who was always plaguing him with the details. No one will be surprised at this who knows that we have no time or place appropriate to our consultation, but that servants, strangers, and everyone else was at liberty to enter and did constantly enter the room while we were talking about public business and that the papers relating to it lay open in rooms of common and continual resort.”
While employed as a spy, it appears Franklin was involved in various projects for the British government.
First and foremost, he was tasked with spying on the American elite on behalf of the British government, while maintaining his public display as a diplomat that was directly opposed to British interests.
For instance, he negotiated an alliance with France— Britain’s arch-rival at the time—that ultimately helped lead to America’s victory in the Revolutionary War.
Once Franklin had gained the confidence of the American elite, Franklin’s second task was to infiltrate, recruit, and corrupt them with some of the oldest indulgences known to humankind such as power, money, food, alcohol, and free sex. By doing so, they could be more easily manipulated and controlled.
To accomplish this simple task The British government created a special “secret society” for these devilish activities called the “Hellfire Club.”
The Hellfire Club was founded in London, England in 1746 by Sir Francis Dashwood and originally included 15 members. Dashwood was a wealthy man who also held important positions in the British government. He used his influence to recruit other wealthy and powerful men to join the club.
Under the auspices of their motto, Fais ce que to voudras (Do what thou wilt), the club engaged in neoliberal acts that were distinctly immoral and some would call Satanic rituals.
According to Author and Political Philosopher, Dr. Nicolas Laos:
Francis of Wycombe, and its motto was “Fais ce que tu voudras” (“Do what thou wilt”), indicating a way of life inspired by François Rabelais’s fictional abbey of Thélème, which later also inspired the influential British occultist and spy Aleister Crowley. In general, those clubs served as the meeting places of members of the elites who wanted to indulge in what were socially perceived as immoral acts.
Both at that time and later, such clubs provide the opportunity for spies to manipulate target persons through the manipulation of the central nervous system (e.g., through psychotropic drugs and heavy drinking and eating) and through the manipulation of the reproductive instinct (through various sexual practices, including sexual magic and paraphilias).”
The name “Hellfire Club” is thought to be derived from one of Dashwood’s residences known as Medmenham Abbey, which was adorned with satanic imagery. The club members referred to themselves as “Devils,” “Knights of Bad Luck,” or “Children of Ill Fortune.”
The club met in a building that was once an old monastery, and periodically at various locations, including underground caves, an old monastery and Dashwood’s country estate. At these meetings, the members would engage in drinking, gambling, and sexual promiscuity. The members practiced black magic and would dress up as monks and celebrate “the Black Mass” which featured nude women as “priestesses.”
They would also take part in sexual orgies that were accompanied by mock religious ceremonies with the rites of Satan worship in which they indulged. This included sacrilegious readings from the Bible, praying to devils, and netherworld orgies involving simulated sacrifice rituals.
Other popular activities included smoking tobacco from human skull pipes while sitting atop coffins and dressing up like monks or nuns for nun-themed dinners. Live animals were reportedly sacrificed during some rituals and it had been rumored that some members engaged in necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophilia. The club’s library reportedly had the largest collection of pornography in England at the time.
Seemingly no taboo was considered off-limits for this club of human debauchery.
Hell, that was the whole point of this secret British intelligence operation.
The activities of the Hellfire Club scandalized polite society but Dashwood and his friends were largely immune from criticism because of their wealth and power.
The list of high-ranking British and American officials who were members of the society is impressive. It included the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Paymaster-General, a former Prime Minister, three members of Parliament, and the former Chancellor of the Exchequer le Despencer. Even Frederick, the Prince of Wales, was reputed to be a member.
According to Dr. Nicolas Laos:
“Some of the members of Dashwood’s Hell-Fire Club, or Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, who were involved in British politics and intelligence was John Wilkes (a British radical journalist and politician), the Chevalier D’Eon de Beaumont (a French diplomat and spy, who joined English Freemasonry, enjoyed dressing like a woman, and, much to the delight of his British hosts, disclosed French government secrets);
John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (who held various military and political offices, including Postmaster General, First Lord of Admiralty, and Secretary of State for the Northern Department), Thomas Potter (who sat in the House of Commons between 1747 and 1759), Paul Whitehead (who was a British satirist, spent a number of years in Feet Prison, became a secretary of Dashwood’s Hell-Fire Club, and, was appointed, though Sir Francis Dashwood, to a Deputy Treasurership of the Chamber), and Robert Vansittart (an English jurist, antiquarian, and notorious rake) An occasional participant of Dashwood’s Hell-Fire Club, or Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, was Benjamin Franklin, especially during 1758, when he spent a long period of time in England.
Moreover, during the period that he was serving as the United States Ambassador to France (1779–85), Benjamin Franklin allowed his friend and chief assistant Edward Bancroft to organize a British secret service cell within the U.S. Embassy in Paris. In fact, Edward Bancroft was a Massachusetts-born physician and chemist, spying for both the United States of America and Great Britain while serving as secretary to the U.S. Embassy in Paris during the American Revolution .
Thus, the information that Benjamin Franklin received from Washington, together with a great deal of intelligence passed by French authorities, found their way to London. While relations between Great Britain and its rebellious American colonies were deteriorating, Benjamin Franklin passed on information to London regarding the sailing dates and cargoes of ships bound for Washington’s army,” Dr. Laos wrote.
The club continued to operate until 1766 when it disbanded after Dashwood’s death.
However, the age-old secret intelligence business of corrupting the corruptible and using power, money, sex, and drugs continues to this very day.
Whether if it is done through debauched secret societies like the Hell Fire Club that have been created by intelligence agencies to corrupt and control their targets or simply using paid hookers and drug pushers on the government payroll.
It is the oldest and simplest method of human mind control and corruption making people say and do stupid things they would not normally do when like when they are sober, healthy, and mentally fit.
That is why the Hell Fire Club exists with their motto Fais ce que tu voudras” (“Do what thou wilt”) and as you will see, why this exact same blueprint was copied 100 years later by the British Spy and most famous Satanist ever, Aleister Crowley.
Dr. Nicolas Laos Research see: Eric Evans Rafalko, American Revolution to World War II, U.S. National Counterintelligence Center, online: https://irp.fas.org/ops/ci/docs/ci1/ch1c.htm; George D. K. McCormick, A History of the British Secret Service, London: Frederick Muller, 1969, reprinted in paperback, London: Grafton, 1991; Richard Deacon, “Famous British Historian Claims Benjamin Franklin Was a British Spy,” Argosy, July 1970, online:https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/fc/deacononfranklin.html).
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a phenomenon known as the “Satanic Panic” swept through America.
This was a time when many people believed that Satanists were trying to take over the world.
There were rumors of cults sacrificing children and drinking their blood. Many people became convinced that satanism was a real threat, and they were terrified of what might happen next and others thought it was lunacy fueled by religious zealots.
One thing is for sure, it’s a period of history that is often misunderstood.
It was a time when people believed that Satanists were conducting rituals and sacrificing children all across the country. This religious fear was stoked by serial killers such as the Son of Sam and Richard Ramirez who openly professed they were Satanists who sacrificed their victims to Satan.
This is where the true Satanic Panic originated and it spread from here like hell fire.
It was events like that of Ramirez flashing an upside down pentagram on his hand at his murder trials that helped fuel the fear of the American nation.
This is why when the words Satan and serial killer are used together, it strikes fear deep into the hearts of most good people and especially devout Christians who are taught to fear and fight Satan.
Parents and religious leaders were convinced that a satanic cult was targeting children, and they did everything they could to protect their kids. There were even allegations of Satanic cults infiltrating daycares and schools such as the McMartin preschool, which led to a number of high-profile criminal cases across the country.
Parents became terrified of what their children might be exposed to, and many began to homeschool their kids or take them out of public schools altogether.
This was also the time when Satanism, the devil and the occult became deeply embedded into the minds of Americans and pop culture. Movies like the Exorcist, role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons debuted in 1974, scandalizing pastors and giving parents nightmares of their children falling under demonic spells.
A 1988 documentary about Satanism and ritual abuse by Geraldo Rivera called Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground became the highest-rated televised documentary to air up to that point. The documentary further fueled the worries of concerned parents and Christians across the nation.
This hysteria led to some pretty bizarre incidents, and a fierce cultural debate in the media and even congressional legislation was put forth to make Satanism illegal.
All the while, Satanists like The Church of Satan capitalized upon “some of these allegations,” by focusing ONLY on criminal cases where the defendants were found not guilty.
By doing this, they could divert the attention of an uneducated media and concerened American citizens to the Satanic crimes that were proven to be false, while completely ignoring the true stories.
It didn’t help that some ridiculous conspiracy theories helped bolster the Satanic Panic cause.
For example, in 1978, a conspiracy theory claiming that McDonald’s was secretly funding satanic enterprises gained so much popularity that the company had to release an official statement denying it. The founder, Ray Kroc had to reassure frightened customers by telling them that he was “a God-fearing, God-loving man.”
In the memoir, Michelle Smith, Michelle Remembers, introduced readers everywhere to satanic ritual abuse in a story about being caged, tortured, and sexually molested by members of a satanic cult. The story and the author were eventually debunked.
It is cases like there that became the focus by Satanists on the “false allegations” and “uneducated religious zealots” became the perfect calling card for the “Satanic Panic” and their main defense strategy that they still employ to this very day.
By doing so, they could claim that these were ALL false allegations made by crazy Christians causing social hysteria fueled by fearful media depictions of godless teenagers listening to deviant music and wearing heavy metal t-shirts.
Over thousands of years, magicians have developed the ability to control attention, to distort perception, and to influence choice. This is done in advertising and marketing by corporations who use false images and deception to influence our decisions.
The fear of a Satanic Panic eventually faded from the American collective consciousness, thanks in part to a public relations campaign conducted by the Church of Satan.
I contend that one of the main reasons the hysteria died out was because the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton Lavey, and his High Priest, Peter Gilmore, stepped into action to combat the negative publicity with their own PR campaign.
According to Peter Gilmore, he spent many hours combatting their foes and educating the public about Satanic philosophy. Gilmore said:
“The Satanic Panic” (80s-90s) there was proposed congressional legislation to make Satanism illegal. During that time Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, had encouraged me as a spokesperson for the organization and the means for combatting this proposal was to educate people about what Satanism really was, rather than the, then current, fantasy of Devil worship, child abuse and sacrifice promulgated by evangelical Christians and gullible journalists.
Lavey did not have the Church of Satan issue statements rallying its members to sally forth. Instead, he felt that fulfilling the purpose of the Church of Satan—educating others as to what it represents—would serve to dissolve the false definition of Satanism fueling that proposed law. And so it did and I spent many hours accurately representing the reality of our philosophy in all forms of the media to that end.”
But several prominent authors and scholars who are not part of some Satanic sect or get paid to be a Satanist like Peter Gilmore would disagree with the Church of Satans and other people who claim that the Satanic Panic was the purely result of false allegations, religious fantasy, and irrational beliefs.
Sure, there was definitely a lot of that going on but there were also a lot of true stories that were being swept to the side or ignored all together.
In the midst of the Satanic Panic, author and Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Denver, Carl Raschke was asked by his publisher to research and write a book about Satanism. What Raschke discovered was that there was in fact credible evidence and a plethora of stories to support the narrative that Satanists were committing murders and other criminal acts.
Raschke’s book is really more about mind control and how during the 1960’s, various occultists like Anton Lavey tried to overturn mainstream religious and political beliefs. America’s youth and young adults were being manipulated by Satanists who were putting their message out through the media with art, books, music, movies, and drugs and free sex.
As Raschke eloquently points out, the 60’s was a time in our country when it was encouraged for both the father and the mother to work outside the home leaving a whole generation of kids at home alone.
This phenomenon created a new psychological term to describe their abandonment called latchkey kids – school age children of working parents who must spend part or most of the day unsupervised (as at home),
The kids of this generation had a vacuum to be filled that was once their parents, and Satanism would happily take their place.
Out of these abandoned kids, there were children who had been physically and sexually abused, rejected by parents and were never taught any moral values.
These kids would be on the fringes of society. They were angry and needed an outlet for their hate for the world and the violence they wanted to unleash upon it.
This is why Satanism and the neoliberal lifestyle of extreme freedoms, drugs, sex, music and media that came with it would be the perfect home for these wayward youth.
The kids thought that Satanism was going to lead to power, wealth, fame, and anything else that their little hearts desired. But once they got addicted to the lifestyle and vices of drugs and sex, they became under the mind control of their very Satanic doctrines they foolishly thought would be the answer to all their problems.
This can be seen time and time again by many people who take this path. A Satanic road that is littered with lost souls and ruined lives everywhere you look.
From drug addicted gurus like Aleister Crowley who died penniless and addicted to heroin to Ozzy Ozzborne’s open display of decades of hedonism, family turmoil and constant drug use and Church of Satan members like Marilyn Manson who in recent years has been accused of a long list of crimes.
As Raschke notes, there is no dabbling in the occult because depravity and bondage quickly develop.
Satan may promise much, but never delivers.
In 2021, I interviewed Carl Raschke and asked him about the Satanic Panic and his book. He believes to this day that there was a massive PR campaign to sanitize the bad press and he actually became a target of Satanic propagandists.
Raschke said:
“There was a whole PR campaign to try to sanitize what was happening and I was the target. A lot of these groups had the kind of intellectual authority. Satanism was not my thing. I knew a lot about it. I’d heard a lot about it on the ground.
The narrative, let’s call it, the PR campaign, was actually pushed by less than reputable academics who were just kind of in it to protect themselves and to protect their research clients.
I’m not saying there was necessarily a thing corrupt about it though. There have been rumors that it’s kind of like the tobacco industry.
How they tried to tell you in the early days that tobacco is not as harmful as they got their authorities together and they created this narrative,” Raschke emphasized.
He said, “That Satanism was a panic, based on the idea of a moral panic, that term was posed by a guy. I can’t remember his name, but it was called satanic panic.
It came out in the nineties and it was a sociological term that basically tried to look at the whole phenomenon as if it were just a bunch of spooked out people who didn’t really understand what was going on, who were panicking.
That’s totally false because the thing emerged kind of organically and slowly.
There must be this pure thing, purity you call Satanism, which is being slandered and abused and blah, blah, blah. And you know, so the whole thing was literally a shit show.
I got caught up in the middle of that and the book I didn’t expect that I was just trying to honestly write from the notes and the interviews and the stuff I read,” Raschke noted.
Similar to what Carl Rashke found, I also discovered the facts that people have been murdering people all across the U.S. for several decades that claimed to be either Satanists, demon possessed or did so under the orders of Satan or the Devil.
To a person outside the occult world of black magic and Satanism, they might ignorantly think that these stories are just crazy journalism and part of some type of Satanic Panic propaganda. But they could not be more wrong.
It is important to note that the people who commit serious crimes they claim their allegiance to Satanism are just a tiny fraction of the Satanic movement as a whole. But due to the serious nature of the crimes that some of these people commit, to say it is not a problem or factor is simply a lie.
I have found that both the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple have made these public statements about the ordeal,
The Church of Satan has stated;
As Satanism is a recognized “New Religious Movement,” it’s important for an understanding of what is and what is not Satanism to be maintained. “The Satanic Panic” in the 1980s-90s is evidence of a willful distortion of this religion as the concept of a conspiracy of murderous “satanists” was promoted primarily by evangelical Christians and taken-up by the media worldwide.
Law enforcement debunked the claims of the evangelists but not before many people had become victims of false accusations of ritual child abuse, sacrifice, and kidnapping.
Some Christians—despite the five decades of a clearly defined belief system called Satanism expounded by a worldwide organization—still use this term to reference any acts or beliefs they consider to be “evil” or simply contrary to their own beliefs.
Ill-informed members of law enforcement agencies and journalists, often believers in some form of Christianity, also continue to misrepresent the religion of Satanism.
If the definition of Satanism is not kept clear, any unstable or insane person working from a Christian context could claim their actions were due to self-termed “satanic beliefs,” thus criminally implicating actual open adherents of Satanism to the public at large, people who are not generally familiar with the beliefs and tenets of religious Satanism.
The recent case of murderer Amanda Barbour, who along with her boyfriend murdered one person but claimed to have murdered many others as part of an interstate “satanic cult,” is another example.
The Church of Satan works publicly to maintain a clear understanding of the atheist, individualistic, and law-abiding nature of Satanism and regularly consults with law enforcement as well as journalistic researchers and academicians to this end.”
It appears that the Church of Satan is making a valid claim that these killers are just lunatics and even though they may be “affiliatd with some form of Satanism,” in no way is this some vast conspiracy of an organized Satanic cult. The reason I say that is valid is because I agree with them on this point.
What I do not agree with is the entire claim that these killers are in their words “any unstable or insane person working from a Christian context could claim their actions were due to self-termed satanic beliefs.”
While I agree with the truth that these people are unstable and or insane, the reason I don’t entirely agree is because there are many different sects of Satanism and also personal Satanic beliefs. People will kill innocent people and abuse babies in the name of Satan and or no God regardless of what anyone says or what press release is issued.
The Satanic Temple claims that the Satanic Panic was mainly about Satanic Ritual Child Abuse such as the McMartin Preschool Trials, which occurred a few years later during the late 1980s.
Here is their general statement on Satanic Panic;
“We then see an unconvincing attempt to justify this petty and undignified public temper tantrum with the claim that “it’s important for an understanding of what is and what is not Satanism to be maintained.
“The Satanic Panic” in the 1980s-90s is evidence of a willful distortion of this religion as the concept of a conspiracy of murderous ‘satanists’ was promoted primarily by evangelical Christians and taken-up by the media worldwide. Law enforcement debunked the claims of the evangelists but not before many people had become victims of false accusations of ritual child abuse, sacrifice, and kidnapping.”
Apparently, this “understanding” can only be gained by dogged insistence that only the website of the CoS defines Satanism. This is particularly infuriating as TST, unlike the CoS, has been actively fighting against the Satanic Panic which still exists, nor is it “promoted primarily by evangelical Christians.”
One need only look at our Grey Faction campaign to recognize that actively fighting back against anti-Satanist propagandists is one of the primary functions of TST.”
On the Satanic Temple’s website via their Grey Faction initiative, they state one of its main purposes is to “document, expose, and aggressively seek to bring to an end pseudoscientific mental health care practices that contribute to harmful conspiracist Satanic Panic delusions.”
I agree that pseudoscientific mental health care practices should be exposed and put an end to, but the facts are that this is just the small tip of the Satanic Panic iceberg. While there is definitely some validity to these claims by the Satanic Temple, it is only one of the reasons for the Satanic Panic.
In our present culture, religious Satanism exists primarily as a decentralized subculture. It does not appear to be an organized front on the surface but I contend that Satanists are united by their ideologies and thus united by an inherently “selfish and evil state of mind” that often (not always) leads to the practitioners unhappiness, destruction, and sometimes death.
What I’m simply claiming is what they are failing to address are the various crimes and murders that have been committed over the last five decades by people who claim to be aligned and or influenced by Satanism in some fashion.
With that said, let me state again that not all Satanists are evil, child abusers, and or criminals.
The facts are that 99% of the Satanists in the modern world are people just like you and me but who have chosen the Satanic lifestyle i.e.: individualistic, carnal, selfish, and materialistic life over the spiritual as their chief aim. You will find a hell of a lot of good people in this movement and the vast majority are certainly not all evil child abusers and or killers of innocent people for Satanic sport.
In fact, many of the people who I might call “good Satanists” would enjoy nothing more than killing the evil Satanists like child abusers and killers for sport. I have seen it happen in prison and it happens all the time behind bars.
The reality is that to the average person and even the hardened criminal, it is unthinkable how any one person could become so diabolical and evil that a good night for them is to go hunt for little children or women to abuse, rape, torture, and kill for sport.
Many people would say they are not human. Religionists may call them Demons. Like the Christian Scripture says, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
Please keep in mind that when I use the words demons, Satan, and the devil when speaking about some of these brutal killers, these names are not something I dreamt of for a script or religious sensationalism.
No, these are the actual words used by many of the Satanists and murderers themselves after they are caught.
In no particular order, I would like to give you some real-world examples of cold-blooded killers who have said they worship Satan and or were Satanists.
It is important that you understand that the stories I present are just a small example of the number of cases that I could have reported on. This could be a book spanning several volumes.
But my goal is not to list every crime or murder committed by a Satanist. It is to prove a point that it does happen and that a Satanic State of Mind may not only lead someone to self destruction, it can also result in murder.
You will find that each killer who was involved in Satanism were in every single case young men and women who had terrible childhoods and were abused
They found that Satanism was the perfect ideology to not only accept their damaged and rebellious souls, it was the ideal philosophy to unleash their internalized rage against a society who had abandoned them.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
Many scholars from different religious persuasions have believed that the Antichrist will likely be a unique individual who appears during the end times. The French mystic and Traditionalist thinker, René Guénon also believed that the Antichrist would likely be a specific person.
In The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guénon says the modern world is a realm of pure materialism because of the “Western deviation” from eternal truth. This resulted in the “reign of quantity”. This was not just about economics and politics, it was also a spiritual war.
He wrote of the current age – “the word ‘Satanic’ can indeed be properly applied”.
Guénon, uses the word satanic to represent the negation and reversal of order and denial of traditional truth. He says the spirit of negation is the spirit of lying that is often disguised by the unexpected, in order to avoid being recognized, and in even in order to pass itself off as the very opposite of what it is. The adversary naturally will try to pass himself off as an angel of light.
For Guénon, the Antichrist would be who he called an imposter who comes at an opportune time when everything traditional is inverted (upside down), which brings about his coming – the Great Parody. His rule will bring about the end of the reign of quantity, and he will claim it will be the Golden Age.
A counterfiet messiah that promises the people heaven on earth. But it’s a lie in the form of a pseudo traditional restoration and counter initiation.
According to Guénon, the counter-initiation is the expression of the counter-tradition in the social order, which is precisely the reign of the Antichrist. This will be the time we have a reintroduction of quality, but of quality inverted with respect to its normal and legitimate significance.
Guénon says the Antichrist will be a person who will be at the head of the thing as the incarnation of what it will represent. He will establish a new visible counter hierarchy, the summit of which will be occupied by this being. He wil be less an individual than a symbol, a synthesis of all the inversion of tradition that has led upto his time.
We could interpret this event that Guénon describes as the Last Great Illusion to end all illusions for the people. As if the Antichrist will be a natural outgrowth of modern society at the agreed upon End Time, but he is also chosen or annointed to assume his role as the defacto leader of the last act.
Guénon said the Antichrist will also have specific physical traits and deformities showing inwardly that he is the closest to hell – bearing the mark of the devil. He will have neither a predecessor nor successor. (326)
In The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guénon wrote;
“He [the Antichrist] will be an ‘imposter’ (this is the meaning of the word dajjāl by which he is usually designated in Arabic) since his reign will be nothing other than the ‘Great Parody’ in its completest form, the ‘satanic’ imitation and caricature of everything that is truly traditional and spiritual.
His time will certainly no longer be the ‘reign of quantity’, which was itself only the end-point of the ‘anti-tradition’; it will on the contrary be marked, under the pretext of a false ‘spiritual restoration’, by a sort of reintroduction of quality in all things, but of quality inverted with respect to its normal and legitimate significance.
After the ‘egalitarianism’ of our times there will again be a visibly established hierarchy, but an inverted hierarchy, indeed a real ‘counter-hierarchy’, the summit of which will be occupied by the being who will in reality be situated nearer than any other being to the very bottom of the ‘pit of hell’.” (pg. 271)
René Guénon wrote in The Reign of Quantity that the rule of the Antichrist marks the end times where the modern world and evil will vanish. But this does not mean it is the end of humanity.
Like a bad dream, it is simply the end of an illusion. Guénon had wrote;
“….the end now under consideration is undeniably of considerably greater importance than many others, for it is the end of a whole Manvantara, and so of the temporal existence of what may rightly be called a humanity, but this, it must be said once more, in no way implies the end of the terrestrial world itself, because, through the “reinstatement” that takes place at the final instant, this end will immediately become the beginning of another Manvantara…..it can be said in all truth that “the end of a humanity” never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.
Evil is effaced in the presence of the total order into which it is finally merged, and this seemingly excuses all crimes as mere negativities, as simply limitations, like contingent existence itself.
The evil vanishes completely because it was inreality only an illusion [a mere phantasy, like a bad dream] inherent in separativity.” (335-336)
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
“It can be used by anyone, so to speak, as a form of socialization to evil. And they don’t necessarily call it that but that’s what happens, in effect.” – Robert Jay Lifton
Menticide is the destruction or undermining of a person’s mental independence in order to alter his or her mind. It is also known as mind control, brainwashing, coercive persuasion, and thought reform.
The word menticide comes from the Latin mens (“mind”) or mentalis (“mental”) and -cīda (“killer”), which is an analogy to homicide, or genocide on the brain.
Mental independence is the ability to think for yourself and make your own decisions about what you believe or want. Mentacide is a psychological science that is used to break people’s ability to think for themselves.
The goal is to destroy the mind or the will of an individual or group of people to abandon their ability to reason, use logic, and deliberately alter an individual’s personality or beliefs. It is also often compared with cognitive dissonance – when people change their beliefs because they don’t want them to conflict with their actions or feelings.
“The concept of “menticide” indicates an organized system of judicial perversion and psychological intervention, in which a powerful tyrant transfers his own thoughts and words into the minds and mouths of the victims he plans to destroy or to use for his own propaganda. Modern psychiatry may deliver him several tools for this perversion.”
This is normally accompanied by indoctrination about the superiority of the captors’ (tyrant’s) ideology or system and lessons intended to obstruct their ability to think independently. Your own people, culture, and your very being are demonized as the mental assailants issuing the mind control propaganda are held up as saviors and demigods.
The methods used vary depending on the desired outcome, but they generally fall into two categories: psychological and physical methods.
Psychological methods include:
Brainwashing (school, media, politicians, and corporations)
Chaotic Inormation
Manipulation or behavior modification techniques
Hypnosis
Sleep deprivation
Sensory deprivation and isolation
Malnutrition;
Propaganda campaigns
Mind reading machines
Behavior modification techniques
Physical techniques include:
Torture
Sexual abuse
Drugs
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and other forms of shock treatment
Brain implants
It has been used for education and political purposes such as brainwashing prisoners of war or indoctrinating children into becoming good citizens. As an example, during World War II, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services used various techniques including sleep deprivation and physical torture to break down prisoners of war in order to make them more compliant with interrogation techniques.
Menticide is not just a problem in war, politcis and the classroom, It happens all around us every day, from the moment we wake up until we go to bed at night. We are constantly bombarded with messages by corporationsabout what is good and bad for us, who we should be patterning ourselves after, what we should be buying and selling — even what kind of body image we should have!
The term was introduced by Viktor Frankl in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl described the systematic destruction of hope and the denial of meaning as “the primary cause” of mental illness and neurosis, which he called “menticide”. He argued that the core feature of mental illness is a distorted perception of reality, and that it can be cured through an active search for meaning.
American psychologist William Sargant wrote in his book, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (1957) that certain brainwashing techniques could be used to increase suggestibility and produce complete subjection to an authority figure. He also concluded that such methods were most effective if they targeted and destroyed a subject’s own personality before introducing new ideas.
According to Sargant, this process could be achieved through isolation, psychological exhaustion, domination and control over all aspects of daily life.
The victim would then be reprogrammed with new beliefs and values that were completely incompatible with their previous way of thinking.
Sarant wrote;
“Much human behavior is the result of the conditioned behavior patterns implanted in the brain, especially during childhood. These may persist almost unmodified, but more often become gradually adapted to changes of environment. But the older the person, the less easily can he improvise new conditioned responses to such changes; the tendency then is to make the environment fit his, or her, increasingly predictable responses. Much of our human life consists also in the unconscious following of conditioned behavior patterns originally acquired by hard study.”
Sargant postulates that ordinary the person is much more easily indoctrinated than the strong willed, abnormal or crazy people. But even they can be susceptible to suggestion and mind control when their brains are fatigued by uncertainty, anxiety, and stress. He believes that every brain, no matter how strong the individual, eventually gets fatigued. Saragnt wrote;
“It is not surprising that the ordinary person, in general, is much more easily indoctrinated than the abnormal. Even intensive psychoanalysis may achieve very little in such severe psychiatric disturbances as schizophrenia and depressive melancholia, and can be almost equally ineffective in certain settled states of chronic anxiety and obsession.
A person is considered “ordinary” or “normal” by the community simply because he accepts most of its social standards and behavior patterns which means, in fact, that he is susceptible to suggestion and has been persuaded to go with the majority on most ordinary or extraordinary occasions.”
Sargant says;
“Ordinary people, let me repeat, are the way they are simply because they are sensitive to and influenced by what is going on around them; it is the lunatic who can be so impervious to suggestion.”
Later he writes;
“The most kindly, generous and humane of men have in fact been conditioned, throughout history, to commit acts which appear horrifying in retrospect to those who have been differently conditioned. Many otherwise sensible people cling to strange and cruel views merely because these have been firmly implanted in their brains at an early age, and they can no more be disabused of them by argument than could the generation that still insisted on the flatness of the earth, though it had been circumnavigated on several occasions.”
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It.
In the 1961 book, Rape of the Mind, Author Joost Meerloo claims Menticide is used by the ruling class to control the thoughts of those they intend to destroy. Joost was the Chief of the Psychological Department, Netherlands Forces, and writes from personal experience because he himself spent some time in a Nazi concentration camp. The preface of the book reads;
“The seduction of the mind and stealthy mental coercion are among the oldest crimes of mankind. They probably began back in prehistoric days when man first discovered that he could exploit human qualities of empathy and understanding in order to exert power over his fellow men. The modern words ‘brainwashing’, ‘thought control’, and ‘menticide’ serve to provide some indication of the actual methods by which man’s integrity can be violated. When a concept is given its right name, it can be more easily recognized — and it is with this recognition that the opportunity for systematic correction begins.”
Joost wrote;
“Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which a [ruling class] can imprint [their] own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those [they] plan to use and destroy.”
In 1983, Robert Jay Lifton published Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, in which he introduced the concept of “coercive persuasion.” He described how political prisoners in Chinese labor camps were subjected to intense indoctrination and coercive persuasion techniques that destroyed their ability to think independently. Examples included physical torture, sleep deprivation, hypnosis and drugs such as scopolamine.
In the book, Lifton details how the Chinese government systematically attacked and destroyed the spirits of Chinese intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He describes it as “the systematic and forcible replacement of individual psychology by group psychology” and “the calculated destruction of a person’s capacity for objective thinking.”
Ultimately, he says this leads to the “socializtion of evil.”
Lifton’s concept describes thought reform or mind control as a process that undermines a person’s mental independence, and he argued that this process could be applied to an entire society. He believes that it is not just the deliberate attempt to destroy someone’s mind; it is also the less conscious ways that people are made to feel dependent on others, or how they are persuaded to accept certain beliefs without question.
According to Lifton, menticidal techniques include “thought stopping” (suppression of unwanted thoughts), guilt inducement, hypnosis, double binds, love bombing and other techniques which tend to destroy a person’s sense of identity. These methods are often employed with the intention of creating clones of those who use them.
In this work on the Nazi doctors your focus on historical processes and psychological processes come together as you account for the way the medical profession participated in the extermination of the Jews at the Auschwitz camp. Let’s talk a little about the psycho-historical principle of the Nazi regime and how it combined with the psychological processes within the doctors which you call “doubling.”
In an interview with Harry Kreisler, Lifton describes the process of the indoctrination of the Nazi doctors, medical killing, and the psychology of genocide as the socialization to evil and what he came to call “doubling.”
Lifton said, “One reason that I embarked on a study of Nazi doctors was that in this personal journey, I had the feeling increasingly that I did want to do a Holocaust study and that increasingly I wanted it to be of perpetrators, which I thought was more needed. I was involved with ideas about survivors but a lot of work had been done on them and very little on the psychology of perpetrators.”
KREISLER: So you moved from survivors to perpetrators.
LIFTON: That’s right, in studying Nazi doctors. And when somebody, in fact, who had been my editor part of the time for my study of Hiroshima survivors called me up and said he had some interesting materials on a trial of doctors, it involved mainly doctors in Frankfurt, and wanted to show them to me, I really jumped at that opportunity to make that the beginning of a study of Nazi doctors, because they were revealed to me to have been very important in the killing process.
And the way that I came to see it as I studied it more was that the Nazis, especially Hitler and his inner circle, really viewed their whole movement as mainly biological. One Nazi doctor whom I interviewed put it in words like this: “I joined the Nazi party the day after I heard a speech by Rudolph Hess in which he declared National Socialism was nothing but applied biology.” And the applied biology for the Nazis was finding some way to heal or cure the Nordic race.
The idea was, partly in Hitler’s writings, the Nordic race was the only creative race, that could create culture. The other races could sustain it but not create it. And the Jewish “race” was a culture-destroying race. But the Jewish race had infected the Nordic race and something had to be done to get rid of that infection.
So this is, in a sense, a biological kind of process and I called it in my work, a “biomedical vision” at the heart of Nazism. And that was a major reason why they focused so centrally on the doctors as a group, which Hitler emphasized very early on: doctors were especially important to the whole Nazi project. And it turned out to be that way, as I found in my work.
KREISLER: And so this Nazi ideology lifted up the doctors but internally. Tell us a little about this process of “doubling” and how healers became killers at the Auschwitz camp.
LIFTON: One dimension was the large psycho-historical dimension we just talked about, that biomedical vision. But the other dimension was what you are raising now, the nitty-gritty way in which a doctor who is trained to heal instead becomes part of the killing mechanism. A lot of things made it happen, and there’s a process that can be called “socialization to evil.”
Nazi doctors joined the party seeking the promise of revitalization that Hitler offered. That’s joining the medical profession, which is a group of its own, and then the military, and then being sent to a camp — all those were groups they became part of and were socialized to. The socialization to evil, I discovered, is all too easy to accomplish. These doctors had not killed anybody until they got to Auschwitz, so they weren’t extraordinary killers to start with.
They were ordinary people who in that way were socialized to evil.
And a key mechanism in that socialization to evil was what I came to call “doubling.” One can understand that if one sees that these Nazi doctors were at the heart of the killing process in Auschwitz. They did selections, they selected in the camps. They were in charge of declaring people dead. In a sense, they ran the killing process, although their assistants more and more did it for them.
So when they were in Auschwitz they had an Auschwitz self, which was responsible for doing all of this, as well as for the very vulgar life that one led in Auschwitz. Very heavy drinking and vulgar jokes, and the whole combination of things that made up Auschwitz. But they would go home to their families, from Poland to Germany, for weekends or for leaves and they would be ordinary fathers and husbands where they would function in a relatively ordinary way, calling forth a non-Auschwitz self or a prior, relatively more humane, self. And each of these selves functioned as though it were a separate autonomous self.
And that’s why I called it “doubling,” even though, of course, they were part of the same overall self. And doubling has more to do with the work of Otto Rancke, one of the early psychoanalysts, than with Freud himself, but that kind of process is talked about in his work and in some other early psychiatric practitioners and psychological practitioners. But it became a mechanism of socialization to evil, as I saw it, in Nazi doctors, and of course it was a very worrisome kind of insight because it didn’t have to stop at Nazi doctors.
It certainly was embarked upon in many ways by Aum Shinrikyo, the destructive murderous cult which I studied more recently. So it can be used by anyone, so to speak, as a form of socialization to evil. And they don’t necessarily call it that but that’s what happens, in effect.
Educator and author, Sol Gordon used the term as a way to describe what he believed was happening in America’s schools. In his book, The Tyranny of Testing (1974), he describes how schools were undermining students’ ability to think independently by teaching them to memorize facts and regurgitate information.
In 1984 Philip Zimbardo published an article titled “Mental Health Practice: Ethical Issues in Diagnosis and Treatment” where he discussed what he termed “thought reform” methods used in prisons (Zimbardo & Boyd 1979). These were methods designed to induce extreme stressors in prisoners which led them to question their own identity.
Peter R. Breggin, M.D., who wrote the book Toxic Psychiatry in 1991 (which was later revised and updated). Menticide is the destruction or undermining of a person’s mental independence in order to alter his or her mind.
In Chapter Three of Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Breggin explains that psychiatrists use drugs to treat symptoms rather than identify and treat their causes. He also explains that this practice of treating symptoms rather than causes is called symptomology. He says that there are three main types of symptomology: pharmacologically-induced (drug-based), neuroleptically-induced (antipsychotic drug-based), and psychosurgery-induced (lobotomy-based). Dr. Breggin writes that these types of symptomology are all forms of menticide because they destroy mental independence by altering the way people think about themselves, their surroundings, and others around them.
In his book The Future of Human Nature (2003), Peter Singer describes menticide as “the deliberate attempt to control what people think about themselves and their world.” Singer argues that menticide has become commonplace in modern society because it is possible for governments or corporations to manipulate people through mass media or advertising.
Joost Meerloo claims modern technology is making iot worse:
“Modern technology teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect. Technology lures him on, dropping him into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation – the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli. [Man] doesn’t learn to question his world anymore; the screen offers him answers-ready-made.”
Even the people who are in control of their own minds who Joost called the normal people can be affected by the constant barrage of brainwashing and the human maniacs who help perpetuate the madness.
“It would be a vast oversimplification to stick an easy psychiatric label on all such feelings of mental persecution, for there are many real, outside mental pressures in our world, and there are many perfectly normal people who are continually aware of and disturbed by the barrage of stimuli directed at their minds through propaganda, advertising, radio, television, the movies, the newspapers — all the gibbering maniacs whose voices never stop. These people suffer because a cold, mechanical, shouting world is knocking continually at the doors of their minds and disturbing their feelings of privacy and personal integrity.”
Today, we can see the menticide everywhere with the pathological totalitarian brainwashing that is now globalized and digitized. As we sit on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to passively allow our thoughts and social interactions to be managed, manipulated and recorded.
I will leave you with some hope with a quote from Victor Frankl
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
