Killing – Moderates United

The second to last Odd Thomas novel by Dean Koontz has a Satanic cult which gathers to witness the torture and murder of children. Pleasant theme.

I would connect this with a paper I proposed writing in graduate school, and which my professor refused to allow, which compared the stages of serial killers with those of ritual activity. I forget the details, but serial killers go through a series of psychological stages in every killing. They initially enter a slightly altered state, when they start looking. Then they enter another, profoundly altered state when they interact with and eventually kill their victim. Then they reintegrate, usually taking some memento of the victim with them. This is usually very important. Here is one random link, which does not cover what I am talking about, but which is somewhat interesting: http://twistedminds.creativescapism.com/psychological-disorders/motives/

I was going to compare this with I think it was Turner’s three stage ritual theory. Yes, here is a brief description:

Turner explored Arnold van Gennep‘s threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep’s structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were “betwixt and between”: they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas.

Here is the point I want to make here: I think it would be possible and likely useful to theorize that what is happening in both actual religious ritual and serial killing/ritual killing is that we are transitioning from our social brain–our frontal cortex–to our more primitive nervous systems, and specifically the gut brain. The gut brain WANTS blood and guts and to tear things to shreds. Do you think big cats, stalking their prey, do not go through something like what serial killers do, stalking THEIR prey?

And evil and traumatic disruption of normal gut function are integrally related. I am convinced of this.

If this is true, then ritual and ritual killing are perhaps means of REMEMBERING a part of ourselves that has gone lost in civilized life.

I think there are some deep, dark, and potentially transformative ideas here.

And I will add the idea, too, that psychiatric drugs are targeted at our rational minds, with things that happen in the brain. We do not yet have anything which can work to calm down, directly, grotesque alterations of nervous system function in the gut. That would be an enormously productive field of research, in my considered view. I have no clue how one would go about it, but I would start by trying to determine if I could find a way to tell the difference between the guts (and this is a large term covering a lot of neuroanatomy I don’t know in detail) of healthy, relaxed people, and those with PTSD.

Perhaps there is a way of interrupting the signals they send to the brain?