I was thinking about this.
First, it seems that this amounts to a public outreach campaign. You have one place anyone can go to get tickets, and a second location where, presumably, existing members of the Satanic Temple can go to meet their new members. I wonder if some of those people might not have been prominent members of the community. Certainly, they could have been.
Second, it seems the news media was being manipulated, in that the statue is not actually getting unveiled “in public”. It was unveiled in a private location, but pictures were provided to the news media, which actually provided significant advertising for the cause and presumably caused a lot more people to show up.
Third, I find it interesting that they wanted to make the tie-in “controversy”, as if there were not something inherently wrong with Satanic pedophilia. I can’t help but feel more and different feelings would have been on display fifty years ago. The reporters seemed to have no reaction at all. Our sensibilities have become jaundiced to all but those certain situations involving race, sex, or sexual orientation where we react like Pavlovian dogs to start salivating and barking at the usual targets.
Fourth, I GET these people, I think. They have horrors in their lives, traumas in their lives. They feel lost, isolated, alone, different. They feel weird, disconnected. Some of the worst hurt of them have likely already lapsed into sadism, but all of them feel a need for connection through pain. What Baphomet offers them is a release from loneliness and solitude. That is why so many of them are smiling. They are anticipating a community of like-minded people, and a ceremony where they are a part of something bigger.
As I have said, I think sacrifice speaks to the gut self, the animal self, the predator. This is where trauma hides, and where it can be released, temporarily. The “high” religions of antiquity turned sacrifice into a spectacle and contained it within cultural limits. To this I would oppose the headhunters of the world, who when they felt rage or grief would simply go kill someone, and take a trophy to recollect that feeling of release.
As I have said before, too, I think serial killers are enacting on a personal level the same dynamic which sacrifice does on a social level.
It has been my sense since college that an understanding of sacrifice–again, an “act of the sacred”–is essential to understanding the human condition itself.
And what is the difference between human and animal sacrifice? According to this analysis, the level of detachment, which is to say hurt. The Carthaginians I mentioned in the previous post threw children live into an enormous fire, just as Elie Wiesel reported the Nazis did 2,000 years later.
I will remind you as well that the word Holocaust is a religious word, used to refer to an animal sacrifice which is entirely consumed by fire.