Amyl and the Night Rite

Some twenty years ago, in my little cowtown megalopolis by the mountains, there was a fellow of some fame called "The Bathroom Tenor".  He was a street performer of decent talents, who would sing for hours every weekday, in all seasons, sticking mostly to the post-Verdi Italian repertoire.  He got his nickname because he would warm up his voice in the bathroom of a restaurant for two hours before he hit the street to sing.  As a fan of opera, I would sometimes stop and sing along with him, although I do not believe my talents were appreciated.

Somehow, making small talk with this much older gentleman, I let slip that I was a musician--a trained  pianist.  At once he tried to rope me in to a volunteer position as musical director for an amateur Christmas production he was staging.  If I remember correctly, the roles in this production were to be played by "boy scouts", and the rehearsals would take place at the "Christian Science" center.  The whole thing had an air of weirdness.  I opted out.

However, I did not forget the name of the opera to be staged.  It was called Amhal and the Night Visitors, by Gian Carlo Menotti, and it tells the story of the so-called Magi and their visit to witness the birth of Christ.

The recreational drug called a popper is always a nitrite and some times called amyl nitrite.  In Ridley Scott's film Hannibal, Dr. Lecter offers a popper to his victim/protege Mason Verger.  Under the influence of Lecter's drawling pronunciation, popper sounds like poppa.  Verger does the popper, which is depicted as an inhalant broken under the nose in the manner of old school smelling salts.  While Verger gets high, Lecter proceeds to eat his face.

Later in the movie, a mutilated Verger plots his revenge on Lecter.  He will feed Lecter alive, from the feet upwards, to a number of pigs he has raised to be especially fond of human flesh.  Of course, the heroic Lecter will turn the tables. Verger gets chewed up instead.

This little piggy had roast beef

The Hebrew letter Peh, analog to the English P, is also a word meaning mouth.  The letter-form is a coil similar to a pig-tail.  The conflation of Peh/Mouth/Pig is common to Hebrew Language and Mysticism.

This week, in Florida, a young man named Rudy Eugene, rumored to be under the influence of the pop-up drug called bath salts, attacked a homeless man called Poppo and ate away much of his face.  Before he could complete his repast, Eugene was shot dead by police.  Poppo survived--barely.

Meanwhile in Canada, pretty-boy Luka Magnotta is tipped by the press as the likely suspect in the murder of a young Asian man.  Magnotta is believed to have dismembered the body of his victim and mailed it in parts to members of the Canadian Federal Government.  These horrific events follow by only a few days new details in the case of the 2008 Greyhound Bus Cannibal.  It seems the Bus Attacker, Vince Li, is to be released on day parole from psychiatric care.  There is a reversal of themes here: Magnotta is a European who kills an Asian man which recalls that the Greyhound perpetrator is an Asian who kills a young European man. Both men are on the lam.

Luka Magnotta

To add texture to the Canadian platform, actor Ezra Miller is a striking double of killer Luka Magnotta.  Miller's big break on the big screen, as the titular young psychopathic murderer in We Need To Talk About Kevin, is released to Canadian DVD market on the same day the Magnotta story first breaks.  It seems that these days, the story hits the big screen as fiction before it materializes in the fleshy matrix.

Ezra Miller

Are we going backward?

The sub-Abrahamic Christian Mystery Play is scored by the twin blemishes of cannibalism and the rape of young boys.  Cannibalism is established in the manger, at the birth of Christ.  The term manger is the Latin contraction to eat.  This theme continues forward to the Last Supper, when Christ urges his brethren eat of his body and drink of his blood.  The sexual abuse of boys is more subtle.  First is the implication that the appearance of the Magi (pedophile priests) is paired in pop-myth with the simultaneous visitation to the scene of a younger boy.  The Little Drummer Boy is one such example.  The Menotti opera Amhal and the Night Visitors is another less famous example.  The motif repeats in the NT, when a young follower of Christ is seduced and/or raped in Gethsemane (Mark 14:51-52).  Today, the theme is apparent in the well established naughtiness of the Roman Priesthood and the hyper-sexualization of world youth culture.

These same themes are explored again and again in Kubrick, reaching a critical mass in The Shining, which carries overt reference to pedophilia, incest and cannibalism.

The completed image is that of a Satanic Rite--a Night Rite--in which a young male subject, drugged into a state of relaxed and conscious euphoria, is raped, murdered and cannibalized.

Here is the final equation.

Amhal is a young boy who witnesses the visitation of the Magi.
Amhal and the Night Visitors = Amhal and the Night Rite = Amyl Nitrite
Amyl Nitrite = Popper = Poppa (Pope) = Poppo
Repeated letters P (Peh) = Mouth of a Pig
Composer Menotti = Killer Magnotta (Italian letter g is given soft articulation)

Western Culture is massively sub-Abrahamic Messianic and therefore founded upon ritual rape, murder and cannibalism. This manifests in the metaphorical rape and murder of children by media hypnosis; the sacrificial rape and murder of (mostly) boys by the process of war, agriculture and industry; and the strange and Fortean occurrences described here and by other researchers of so-called synch phenomena.  It is also probable that these manifestations emanate from an actual ritual practice of the kind described in this article and hinted by a raft of artists down through the Common Era, most notably, Stanley Kubrick.

There is much discussion about the origin of synch, which is widely perceived as a mystical emanation of personal enlightenment. I suggest something quite different.  The tape is rolling backwards.  Personal Synch is not a spiritual kaleidoscope of archetype, it is a regurgitation of temporal phenomena.

Time is Eating Itself.

This article is inspired by eugene--here.