As mentioned passim, magic is real—not just illusions, actual magic. The most powerful actuator for magic is blood; and so it follows—given that it is not that hard, after you have vaulted the modernist psychological barrier, to see magic is real—that human sacrifices have been made in recent times. This is a common trope on the right, but I do not think that it is very widespread—I do not think Biden or the Clintons have sacrificed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people and have chambers filled with skulls beneath their various mansions and estates.
It makes little sense that it would be so: in the first place, the number of people who break through the materialist illusion is relatively small and then you would require someone with the evil intent to kill in order to actuate their spells, another reduction in the pool. If the sacrifice were made successfully the effect would be so powerful that there would be little need to undertake the operation repeatedly; further, the number of people who are so constitutionally disordered and with sufficient nous and connections to avoid the police and who are convinced that magic is real cannot be large—yet it is large enough, I think.
So I would hazard that there have been perhaps six to a dozen human sacrifices in the West over the last thirty years—after all, a certain proportion of the population goes missing every year, not everyone has a family to make a fuss about them, and a well-organised and well-connected group could easily acquire someone and disappear them. I am pretty sceptical about human nature, so I am sure there are people who would have no scruples about a murder to enrich themselves—or, more likely, to gain power.
Michel Houellebecq alludes to a similar idea in his novel Atomised, though I think, as a strict atheist, he would see such activities as weirdo self-delusion and not actual magical acts. Within this context, I remind you once again that the unicorn—when presented alone, without a lion—has long been considered a symbol for Satan, as attested in Guénon; and the unicorn appears everywhere in contemporary media, particularly from the West Coast (it’s even the first emoji that appears on my iPad emoticon selection panel)—so it would be no surprise if a human sacrifice had been conducted in some secluded California valley.
A collateral issue: consider the so-called “Satanic panic” in the 1980s—an event that saw allegations that there was organised Satanic ritual sexual violation against children conducted in certain nurseries and preschools (the tales included underground tunnels beneath the schools). I think this contained considerable truth. That is not to say every accusation was true—the accusers included women and women like to fantasise about rape to get attention. Yet the grounds to think the “Satanic panic” was real lie in the way the respectable media and academia responded to it: they responded as they did over Covid-19, the Iraq War, and the Twitter files—in other words, they covered it up; and the fact they reacted in such a way indicates that there was substance to the Satanic panic.
Even the term “Satanic panic” was coined to delegitimise the accusations. It derives from a work by the Jewish sociologist Stanley Cohen; he coined the term “moral panic” in his studies into the brawls between Teddy Boys and Mods at Britain’s seaside resorts in the 1960s. For Cohen, the tabloid concern about such issues—the concern among religious and social leaders—is a paranoid delusion created by the hysterical media (Cohen wrote before postmodernism, but the way conservatives stigmatise postmodernism is itself an illusion—Cohen effectively said the actual brawls between delinquent youths were a “constructed” event, an ideological construct by right-wing law-and-order fanatics).
So there was no “youth crime” boom in the 1960s, there were no “juvenile delinquents”; it was all a manufactured panic, just as the medieval accusations that the Jews kidnapped Christian children to sacrifice in secret rituals was a “moral panic” (the so-called “blood libel”). It was doubtless such accusations Cohen had in mind when he coined the term “moral panic”—the way in which the tabloid press, caped crusaders, and charismatic politicians can mobilise the public against “secret conspiracies” (to think there are “secret conspiracies” is, per Cohen, a demonstration that you have fallen into “moral panic”).
The term “moral panic” has been used to suggest that the assertion Aids was linked to homosexual men and drugs addicts was false, that the assertion Muslims were associated with terrorism was false, that the notion there is a widespread campaign to encourage transgenderism is false—in other words, to cover up true assertions.
From the development of the atom bomb to the 9/11 attacks, the world works in a conspiratorial way. Top-secret government projects are broken down into sub-tasks that are individually innocuous or meaningless; hence, you could be involved in a Satanic conspiracy and not even know it—your assigned task could be, taken alone, totally innocent; just as the reticular spline gizmo you work on could be a part for a new sports car or a nuclear bomb. That’s why you need people who take in the big picture—take a sight interest in everything, like aristocrats—to keep an a eye on what’s going on; of course, as democratic specialists we’ve done away with those people…we all work in the dark now.
The media and academia, aside from actual complicity in conspiracies, tend to cover up certain events for two reasons: 1. they’re inherently perverse and irresponsible; 2. it is true that, as Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”—they would rather think about something more cheerful. Indeed, modern people are clever and cynical in a superficial way and yet in some other ways are totally naïve and gullible. You can say to them, pretty much, “I’m off to do a Satanic ceremony in the woods, we’re going to stab a virgin through the heart,” and they’ll just laugh at you, since *obviously* that’s not real, *everybody* knows it’s not real—months later the bodies emerge.
The respectable media just wouldn’t credit it, only the much-maligned tabloids—so disdained by Cohen—would consider such an “oddball” story. It’s similar to the serial killer Fred West; he used to joke to one daughter that she’d better behave or he’d bury her under the patio like her sister—of course, West had done just that; and at a certain level the living daughter knew that—just as at a certain level you know human sacrifices and Satanic ritual child rape are real too.