They Are Laughing at You
How humiliation rituals work, why they need a crowd, and what you are agreeing to every time you wear the costume.
There is a t-shirt at Walmart that says blessed. It is on a rack, in the women’s section, between the leggings and Cookie Monster pajama pants, priced at $16.98. The shirt was sewn by a woman earning two dollars a day in a country where she will never afford to buy what she made. It is being sold to a woman whose grocery bill has doubled in three years. The word blessed will sit across her chest while she does the math on whether she can keep her car another year or even afford the gas to drive it.
A few rows over, in the seasonal section, there are Mountain Dew Baja Blast Croc rip-offs. The film Idiocracy put everyone in Crocs in 2004. As director Mike Judge has told the story many times, the costume designer found a small startup selling cheap plastic shoes, and they agreed the shoes were too horrible to ever become popular in real life. By the time the film came out in 2006, everyone was wearing them. The shoe Judge picked to signal a debased future became the actual shoe of the actual present in the two years it took the studio to release his film.
Something is happening. It has a name and a long lineage.
What you are seeing is a humiliation ritual.
I have almost 20 years reading the historical and anthropological literature on the occult and the symbolic architecture of power. Almost none of it shows up in present-day political commentary. Modernity has lost the language for what is being done to us. The older sources kept it and I am going to walk you through it so you can recognize it in mundane life.
A ritual is not a habit or a custom. A ritual is a patterned action that produces an effect by being performed, whether or not the people performing it understand what they are doing. The Roman who whispered memento mori behind the conqueror at the triumph did not need to believe in the gods of mortality for the whisper to do its work.
A humiliation ritual is a specific kind of patterned action with a specific purpose. The purpose is to produce a degraded condition in the person being mocked, in public, in such a way that the person being mocked is asked to participate in their own degradation. The shirt at Walmart is a clear example. The garment names a condition the wearer is being denied by the same economic system that produced it. The naming is the mockery. The wearer is asked to walk around with the inversion stitched across her body. If she objects, she is told it is just a shirt. It isn’t that deep. If she agrees, she has signed a contract.
The Roman Repertoire
The Roman triumph is the case study every classicist returns to. A general who had won a major military campaign was awarded a triumphus. He wore the toga picta, rode in a four-horse chariot, and was treated for a single afternoon as a stand-in for Jupiter himself. Behind him, in the chariot, stood a slave. The slave’s job was to hold a golden crown above the general’s head and whisper, repeatedly, into his ear:
respice post te, hominem te memento.
Look behind you. Remember you are a man.
The crowd, meanwhile, was permitted, even encouraged, to insult the conqueror. They sang carmina triumphalia, mocking songs, often obscene, often about the general’s sexual conduct. The Roman historian Suetonius records that during Caesar’s Gallic triumph, the soldiers themselves sang verses calling Caesar a bald adulterer. That was the point. The triumph elevated the man to a god for an afternoon then the mockery reminded him, and the city, that the elevation was a costume.
Now flip it.
The Roman Saturnalia was held in late December, the dead point of the solar year, the moment the sun appears to stop moving in the sky. The festival was named for Saturn, the devouring god of time and limitation, and the rite reversed the social order for the duration of the feast. Slaves were served by their masters at table. A Saturnalicius princeps, a mock king, was crowned from among the household, and his absurd commands were obeyed. For a few days, the bottom of the social order wore the costume of the top. Modern anthropology likes to read this as a safety valve, a release of social pressure that made the rest of the year tolerable. The Romans themselves did not read it that way. They read it as inversion. The crowning of the false king was deliberate. The whole apparatus was designed to draw down the presence of Saturn into the household for the duration of the feast, and to release it again when the costume came off. The slave who had played king was not freed by the inversion. He had been used as the vessel through which the god was summoned, and when the god departed, the vessel returned to its original station, marked by the experience of having held the deity for a week and lost him.
There is a third case, and it is the one Western civilization spent two thousand years thinking about, even when it pretended it was thinking about something else. After the trial, before the crucifixion, the Roman soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium. They stripped him. They put a purple robe on him. They wove a crown of thorns and pressed it into his scalp. They put a reed in his right hand, knelt before him, and said Hail, King of the Jews. Then they spat on him, took the reed, and struck him on the head with it.
Every element of that scene is drawn from the Roman repertoire of mock kingship. The purple robe is the toga picta. The crown of thorns is the parodic corona. The reed is the parodic scepter. The genuflection is the parodic adoratio. The greeting is the parodic ave. The Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer noticed this in The Golden Bough and could not let it go. He saw the same pattern across cultures, across centuries, in places that had never spoken to each other. The mock king is crowned, mocked, and then killed, and the killing is the end of a rite that began with the laughter.
Christ was mocked before he was killed. The mockery and the killing were not separate. They were part of the ritual.
What the Demonologists Knew
The theological tradition has had a great deal to say about all of this, and most of it has been forgotten by the people who repeat the tag lines. The line every Christian seminary student eventually hears, the devil cannot endure to be mocked, traces to the English statesman Thomas More, and C.S. Lewis put a version of it on the title page of The Screwtape Letters. Martin Luther said the devil is a proud spirit who cannot bear scorn. He was being practical, not poetic. The advice was: laugh at the thing, and the thing loses purchase.
The tradition runs the other direction too. In medieval and early modern demonology, the demon mocks first. Possession accounts from the period are dense with descriptions of demons laughing at the afflicted, mimicking their voices, parodying their prayers, returning their words back to them in twisted form.
The Greek diabolos means slanderer. To slander is to throw an accusation, but the older meaning carried mockery inside it. The slanderer is the one who makes you a joke before you can make him one.
The third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry pushed this further than any of his successors were comfortable with. In On Abstinence from Killing Animals, he argued that the entities that demand the blood and the laughter and the suffering are not the highest divine powers. They are lower spiritual entities, daimones in his vocabulary, that impersonate the gods in order to secure their food supply. The blood feeds the wrong table. The laughter feeds the wrong table. The mockery, performed long enough and at scale, feeds something that grows on the signal and demands more of it. Porphyry’s framework is one the modern reader recognizes under a different name. The occult tradition calls it the egregore: a collective entity produced by the sustained focused attention of a group, which begins as a product of human consciousness and, once charged enough, acquires its own agency and its own appetite. Millennia of blood sacrifice, in Porphyry’s reading, had created and sustained entities that demanded more of the same. The philosophical and prophetic revolutions of the Axial Age were attempts to break the feeding cycle. They mostly failed. The cycle continued. The signal kept being sent.
If both of these things are true, the picture comes clear. Mockery banishes the demon. So the demon mocks first. The pre-emptive laugh is defensive. They are laughing at you so you cannot laugh at them.
The Body Knows
The cognitive science fits the theology exactly.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his successor Arthur Schopenhauer worked out the incongruity theory of humor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The thesis is plain. Laughter happens when something violates expectation in a way the brain reads as non-threatening. You can feel this in your own body. Someone tells a joke and you can sense the punchline coming a half-second before it arrives. The laugh is already loading. When the punchline lands, the laugh fires, and the firing is involuntary because the body has already decided the violation is safe.
I used to teach this in a classroom of young men, and the example that landed every time was the one almost all of them recognized from their own kitchens. Mom is angry and yelling. She’s mad that your room is not clean. The expected response is contrition, or at least quiet. What happens instead is that the son starts laughing. He cannot help it. He knows he should not be laughing. He knows the laugh is making it worse. He laughs anyway. His mother escalates. She accuses him of not taking her seriously. He swears he is taking her seriously. He keeps laughing.
For those who remember the iconic Mary Tyler Moore Show episode “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” the gap is the whole episode. Chuckles the Clown, dressed as a peanut for a parade, is killed when a rogue elephant tries to shell him. Mary spends the first half of the episode scolding her colleagues for laughing about it. Then she goes to the funeral, and during the eulogy she begins to laugh and cannot stop. The minister, kindly, tells her to go ahead and laugh, that Chuckles would have wanted it. At which point Mary bursts into tears. The 1975 audience recognized every beat of that sequence immediately, because the sequence is in all of us. The body knows something the situation does not authorize, and the body insists on knowing it anyway, and the more inappropriate the moment, the harder the laugh comes.
What is happening in the nervous system is what the behavioral scientist Peter McGraw at the University of Colorado has more recently called a benign violation. The frame has been broken. The brain reads the broken frame, computes that the violation is not actually dangerous, and releases the laugh. When the violation IS dangerous, but the body cannot escape, the same circuit fires anyway, and you get the trauma laugh. The funeral laugh. The laugh that arrives at the worst possible moment. Soldiers laugh at terrible things. Nurses laugh at terrible things. Children laugh when their mothers are about to slap them and laugh harder after.
There is a clinical name for the fear of being laughed at. Gelotophobia, coined by the German psychologist Michael Titze. People who score high on the gelotophobia scale show measurable physical stress when they suspect they are being mocked, even when no one actually is. Cortisol rises. Heart rate climbs. The body braces for a predator that is not there.
Mockery is exploiting a real biological vulnerability. The brain treats being laughed at as something close to physical threat. The body responds the way it would respond to an animal predator. You can see why the mock crowning was so devastating. You can see why a blessed t-shirt on the back of a woman who cannot afford to be blessed is doing more damage than a slap would do.
Two Ladders, Two Laughs
Here is the thing the tradition knew that we have forgotten. It is the hinge of everything that follows.
Mockery has a direction.
The Roman triumph mocked up. The soldiers were beneath the general. The crowd was beneath the general. The slave in the chariot was beneath the general. They were all permitted, for one afternoon, to drag him back down to the human floor by pelting him with songs about his bald head and his bedroom conduct. The mockery was corrective. The general had been elevated to the position of a god for a few hours, and the carmina triumphalia were the social technology that prevented the elevation from becoming permanent. He was given the costume of Jupiter, the painted face, the chariot. And he was sung at, by his own men, in obscene verse, so that he could not forget which species he belonged to. Look behind you. Remember you are a man.
Mockery aimed up the ladder humanizes. It pulls the deified back into the human community. It is the oldest anti-tyranny tool we have. It is older than voting. It is older than law. It is the reason every working monarchy in history kept a fool in the throne room. The fool was permitted to say what no courtier could say. His mockery was a vaccine against the king’s elevation.
The Saturnalia inverted the ladder for a week. The slave was permitted, briefly, to mock his master. Same direction, same function. The week of inversion was the safety valve that made the other fifty-one weeks tolerable. The mockery flowed up during the inversion, which is what made it corrective rather than cruel.
Now turn the arrow around.
Mockery aimed down the ladder is something completely different. It does a different kind of work in the body of the person it lands on. When the powerful mock the weak, the laugh is no longer corrective. The weak are not in danger of becoming gods. They are already at the floor. Pushing them lower does not return them to the human community. It removes them from it.
This is humiliation ritual proper. This is what the blessed shirt is doing. The corporation that printed it is above the woman who is wearing it. The corporation has named her blessed inside the same economic system that ensures she will not be. The mockery flows down. That downward laugh confirms her position at the bottom of the ladder by dressing her in a word she cannot afford to embody. She is being mocked into place.
The mockery of slaves throughout history follows this exact pattern. The slaveholder’s Christmas gift. The company-store scrip stamped with the company’s smiling logo. The minstrel show, in which the people who had stolen black labor and people dressed up in the costume of black faces and performed laughter at the people they had stolen from. None of these were corrective. They were confirming. The laugh was traveling the wrong direction down the ladder, and the function of the wrong-direction laugh is to keep the person at the bottom from rising.
When the laugh goes up the ladder, it does good work. The peasant making fun of the king. The comedian roasting the senator. The Roman crowd singing dirty songs about the general. This is how a free society reminds powerful people that they are still human. No one at the top should be too important to mock. The minute we decide a class of people is off-limits to laugh at, that class has already crossed a line we should not let them cross.
This is also why your friends or family teasing each other at the kitchen table is different. The ladder between you is short. Everyone is laughing at everyone else, no one is bleeding, and the laugh travels in every direction at once. Bullying between peers is real and it is its own problem. This piece is about something different. It is about the institutional structure and the occult workings behind it.
When the laugh goes down the ladder, something different happens. The corporation above the woman in the blessed shirt. The studio above the conscripted clown. The billionaire class above the working population they sell costumes to and stage jokes for. The laugh only flows one direction. The people at the top are laughing at the people at the bottom, and the people at the bottom are being asked to wear the joke and laugh along.
That is the difference. Equal-to-equal is communion. Top-down is harvest.
The phrase punching down has been weaponized to confuse this. People use it to lump every kind of asymmetric joke into one bad category. The result is that ordinary teasing between regular people gets policed the same way as a corporation mocking its own customers. They are not the same thing. To confuse this allows the powerful to keep their power.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote the answer to this in 1837 in The Emperor’s New Clothes. The emperor parades through the streets in his new clothes, and the entire crowd pretends he is dressed because the swindlers told them only stupid people cannot see the cloth. It is a child who finally laughs and says he is naked. The child is at the bottom of the ladder. The emperor is at the top. The laugh is moving up. Punching down would call that child a bully. The fable calls the child the only honest person in the kingdom.
The diagnostic is the ladder. Look at who is above whom. Look at which way the laugh is moving. Friends? Family? Coworkers at the same level? The laugh is fine. It is good. Keep going. Powerful people who got too comfortable? Mock them. They need it. The boss who pulled rank? The politician who lied? The billionaire who bought your town? Mock them all. That is how a free people stays free.
It is when the powerful aim the laugh down at the rest of us, on screens and shirts and shoes and shows that none of us would have made for ourselves, that the laugh becomes a ritual of humiliation.
The “Holy Fool” and the Refusal
The direction is not always single. The court jester was permitted to mock upward in exchange for wearing the cap and bells. The patron extracted both: the corrective mockery he gave them, and the visible humiliation of his body in the costume. The holy fool, the yurodivy of the Eastern Christian tradition, the jongleur de Dieu in the Western, was the figure who refused the cap. He could not be made to wear it, because he had already walked away from everything the patron could offer. His authority came from the refusal. Basil the Blessed mocked Ivan the Terrible to his face in sixteenth-century Moscow, and Ivan would not touch him, because Basil owned nothing the Tsar could take.
This is the older tradition the contemporary comic stands inside. The diagnostic is not whether he mocks upward. Most comics mock upward at least some of the time. The diagnostic is what he has walked away from to keep mocking. The cap is offered. The dress is offered. The deal is offered. Whoever has refused them is inside the lineage. Whoever has accepted them is doing different work, and that work has a different name.
Keep that in mind. The simple direction, up or down, is the diagnostic for almost everything that follows. The doubling is the deeper reading underneath it.
Now apply this to the case running on every screen.
In late March, the comedian Druski posted a video titled How Conservative Women in America Act. He wore prosthetics, white makeup, a blonde wig, and a white pantsuit that resembled the outfit Erica Kirk wore at her late husband Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. The character danced to Katy Perry, held a Bible, did a mock press conference about Iran, and said, in front of a black security guard, that we have to protect the white men of America. The video reached over four hundred million views across platforms within days.
Trump, asked about it at an Easter event, told Erica Kirk to sue. Jake Paul announced he would respond by doing a blackface skit, missing that this was not the equivalent move. Candace Owens, who had been publicly feuding with Kirk for months, laughed along on her own podcast and reposted a TPUSA spokesman’s joke saying now do conservative black women. The podcaster Jennifer Welch posted her own video dressed as Kirk, in black, mocking Kirk’s habit of taking time off and then returning to work.
Erica Kirk, on April 29, posted a video that did not name Druski but described what was happening to her as dehumanization. Donning her Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation costume, she said: “if you strip someone of their humanity long enough, you arrive at the chilling conclusion that they don’t deserve to exist at all.”
Erica Kirk is the CEO of one of the most influential political organizations in the country. She has been appointed to a federal board and has had the President of the United States on the phone offering legal advice. She runs a podcast. She has a stage with fireworks. She is on the chariot. Druski is below the chariot. His parody is the carmina triumphalia. It is mockery flowing in the direction the older tradition recognized as corrective. It exists to remind the figure on the chariot which species she belongs to.
What Kirk does next is what I want you to watch. She invokes the language of dehumanization. She uses the framework that exists to describe what powerful people do to the powerless, and she applies it to herself, who is the powerful party in this exchange. She converts, rhetorically, an upward-flowing corrective mockery into a downward-flowing humiliation ritual, so she can claim the protections that belong to people at the bottom of the ladder while continuing to operate from the top of it.
This move is the one I want to name, because most of what passes for political commentary right now will not name it.
It is the inversion of the laugh itself, dressing up as the slave while standing on the chariot. It works on the audience because the audience can see that there is genuine grief and genuine vulnerability in the figure performing it. The grief is real but the vulnerability is selective. A widow can be a widow and a CEO at the same time. The mockery of the CEO does not become mockery of the widow simply because they share a body.
Watch what happens to the cycle once the inversion lands. Each new participant has to claim a higher quotient of victimhood than the last to remain visible inside it. Trump performs aggrievement on Kirk's behalf. Jake Paul performs aggrievement on white people's behalf. The cycle rewards whoever can convert their position into the appearance of being mocked from above, even when the mockery is actually flowing the other way. The cycle rewards the inversion and has a vested interest in confusing the direction of the laugh.
What Kirk is doing has a deeper register and the readers who followed me through The Dark Kabbalah Behind the Kirk Assassination will recognize it.
The widow who emerges from a violent public death as the carrier of the next phase is not a new figure. She is one of the oldest figures in the Western symbolic archive. In the rabbinic tradition she is Rachel weeping for her children. In Lurianic Kabbalah she is the Shekhinah in exile, the divine feminine separated from her source, mourning, waiting for restoration. Her grief has cosmic power. Her mourning is the precondition for what comes next. Jeremiah promises her: Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded. She does not get to keep weeping. The weeping is a phase, and the phase has a function.
Erika Kirk has stepped into that archetype. She is also, on the symbolic path, the mourning vessel through which the donor architecture and the political infrastructure her late husband’s movement carried forward continue to flow. The mourning is what authorizes the continuation. Without the mourning, there is no transfer. With the mourning, the transfer becomes a sacred ritual.
This is why the parody hit so hard. Druski did not parody a CEO. He parodied a Rachel figure, a Shekhinah-in-exile figure, a publicly performing widow whose grief is doing institutional work. The reader's confusion about whether the parody was satire or cruelty is a confusion about which figure was being mocked. The CEO is fair game. The mourning vessel is sacred. Both occupy the same body. The costume changes depending on which question you ask. In the archetypal framework, Erika is playing the wounded feminine. Most of the audience sees her as having power. The cognitive dissonance is real, and it is the engine of the cycle.
The humiliation ritual works on the CEO. It cannot work on the Rachel figure, because the Rachel figure is supposed to be mocked. Her mourning is supposed to be public. Her grief is supposed to be witnessed. The Saturnalia inverted the household for a week. The widow’s mourning inverts the political order for a season, and the season ends when the next phase begins.
The Costume
For at least four decades, a specific pattern has run through American comedy. A black male performer, usually one whose comedy is sharp enough to threaten the system that elevated him, is offered a major role or a major opportunity contingent on doing one specific thing. He has to put on a dress.
Martin Lawrence in Big Momma’s House. Tyler Perry as Madea. Eddie Murphy in Norbit and across the Klump family. Wesley Snipes in To Wong Foo. Jamie Foxx in In Living Color before he refused to keep doing it. The Wayans brothers in White Chicks, which is the same operation in inverted costume. Dave Chappelle has talked about this on stage and in interviews for almost twenty years. So has Katt Williams. They do not call it humiliation ritual. They call it putting the dress on. The terminology in the comedy world is exactly that specific.
The same pattern runs through the music industry. Britney Spears spent her childhood being made to perform sexualized choreography at fifteen and was passed through a public collapse, a head-shaving incident framed as madness, a thirteen-year conservatorship, and a slow public reclamation of her own voice. Kanye West has spent more than a decade on stages and in interviews trying to articulate something he variously calls a contract, a deal, and a system, in language that gets him called crazy by the same press that benefits from the calling. Kesha sued her producer in 2014 and described her years inside the contract in terms that map directly onto humiliation ritual. Megan Thee Stallion has described being passed through a label structure that demanded specific transactions before it would release her work. Frank Ocean walked away from his contract by releasing an album the label could not own, and he has not made a major label record since.
The dress shows up here too. Harry Styles on the cover of Vogue in a Gucci ball gown. Sam Smith at the 2023 Grammys in horns and a top hat performing Unholy. Lil Nas X in pregnancy photoshoots, giving birth to his album. Bad Bunny in skirts at the 2020 awards circuit. Machine Gun Kelly in pink dresses on red carpets. Jaden Smith fronting a Louis Vuitton women’s campaign in a skirt at sixteen.
This is not an argument about creative expression. The artist who wakes up one day and chooses a dress is doing something different from the artist who is offered a contract conditional on wearing one. The diagnostic is not the costume itself. The diagnostic is who chose it.
The doubling explains the rest. The performer, on the visible axis, looks like he is on the chariot. He has the deal and the budget. He has the platform. He is famous and wealthy. By the simple up-or-down reading, mocking him should be corrective. The dress should be carmina triumphalia.
It is not. The artists who have lived inside it know it is not.
The reason is that the visible axis is not the only axis. The performer is also, on a second axis, a client of an apparatus he does not own and did not build: the studio, label, network, agency, algorithm, and the patron. The performer was elevated by the patron and can be unelevated by the patron. He serves at the patron’s pleasure. On that axis, he is below the people who put him on the chariot in the first place.
The costume operates on the second axis.
To the public, it looks like a wealthy famous artist putting on a costume for a paycheck or for liberation. The actual transaction is downward, from the patron to the client. The performer is being required to perform his own degradation, in public, on his own body, as the price of continued access to the chariot.
This is the conscripted clown. The court jester wore the cap and bells in exchange for the license to mock upward. The conscripted clown wears the costume in exchange for the license to make the patron money. The patron extracts both: the comedy or the music, which generates revenue, and the humiliation, which keeps the performer in his place no matter how high his visible position climbs.
Chappelle saw this. He has said so, more than once, in language anyone paying attention can decode. In 2006 he walked away from a fifty-million-dollar contract with Comedy Central and went to South Africa. He has described the moment that made him leave as a sketch in which he was asked to wear a costume and play a character he sensed was being used to do something other than what the laugh appeared to be doing. He did not articulate it cleanly at the time, but has spent the years since articulating it more and more directly. The walk-away is one of the most significant refusals in contemporary American culture, and the reason it lands so hard on the artists who follow him is that they recognize the pattern. He turned down the patron. He left the chariot. He did the holy fool’s defining act on the largest possible stage.
Katt Williams has been telling us about this for fifteen years on every podcast that will have him. He names the operators and the specific transactions. He has been mocked, deplatformed, sued, and called crazy for it. He has continued to work, in smaller venues, for less money, because the patron’s offer was conditioned on a transaction he refused to make. He walked away from the dress.
The late-night television hosts are the foil. Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers, Oliver. The work varies in quality but their position is identical. They are permitted to mock the political opposition every night because that mockery serves the patron. They are incapable of truly mocking the patron: the network, the parent corporation, the advertising base, or the apparatus that elevated them. They can only mock in the directions the patron approves, which are the directions that increase the patron’s revenue and consolidate the patron’s position. They are wearing the cap (often as a suit and tie). The cap is invisible because the patron has done excellent work hiding it, but the cap is on every one of their heads, and every comic in their orbit can tell you the cap is there.
The dress and cap are the real costume, but so now is the blessed shirt or the Mountain Dew “Crocs.” They differ in cut, fabric, and the price the patron paid for them, but they do not differ in what the costume is for: control.
However, there is a deeper esoteric level, as there often is.
What the Laugher Gets
What does the laugher get when the laugh is flowing downward rather than up toward the people with real power?
The clearest answer the tradition has ever offered is that the laugher gets the energy that the laughed-at loses. Pleasure-based extraction needs cooperation. Suffering-based extraction needs duration. Downward mockery extracts on contact while upward mockery does not. Upward mockery redistributes. The general is dragged back to the human floor and the soldiers walk away no richer or poorer than they started. There is no harvest, because there is no actual fall from the pedestal.
The downward laugh is the steady signal. It runs on shame, helpless rage that produces more shame, and on the social isolation of the laughed-at, who learns that their tribe will not protect them and that the only way to rejoin the tribe is to laugh at the next person.
The Saturnalia summoned Saturn for a week and released him. The downward laugh, run continuously through every screen and every aisle and every joke nobody finds funny, summons something that does not get released, because the festival never ends. Porphyry called it daimones. The modern occultist calls it an egregore. The ancient demonologist called it a demon. The vocabulary differs. The signal is the same. Something is being fed, and the feeding is constant, and the appetite is growing.
The crowd is already laughing in the wrong direction. There is no purchase left for the victim’s laughter, because all the laughter has been used up flowing the wrong way.
Comedy is power. The power flows in one direction or the other. The direction is the working current of the ritual.
The Crowd Is the Engine
There is one more thing the ancient tradition knew.
The ritual requires you.
The Roman triumph did not run on the general alone. It ran on the crowd in the streets, singing the carmina, throwing the laurel, watching the slave whisper into his ear. The Saturnalia did not run on the mock king alone. It ran on the household that bowed to him for a week and then put him back into his collar. The mocking of Christ in the Praetorium did not run on the soldiers alone. It ran on the crowd outside the gate that, a few hours later, chose Barabbas. Every humiliation ritual in the historical record requires the laughing crowd. The crowd is the engine.
When the laugh is flowing the wrong direction down the ladder, the crowd is what makes the engine run. The patron at the top sets the cycle in motion. The victim at the bottom is where the harvest lands. The crowd in the middle is the mechanism that converts an isolated act of cruelty into a working extraction system. Without the crowd, the slaveholder's mocking gift is just one cruel man. With the crowd, it is an institution.
Every documented form of ritual human sacrifice required a witnessing crowd. I traced this in You Are the Crop: the Aztec pyramid, the Roman amphitheater, the medieval public square were all extraction architecture. The crowd was never just an audience, but rather, the active agent without which the rite did not function.
The shirt is the crowd’s signature. The Crocs are the crowd’s signature. The laugh at the office joke nobody finds funny is the crowd’s signature.
Every time a person at the bottom of the ladder agrees to wear the slop the corporation above them designed for them, the hierarchy laughs all the way to the bank and eventually, their bunkers.
The Mountain Dew Baja Blast Crocs are not a neutral object. Idiocracy picked Crocs because the people making the film could not imagine anyone choosing to wear them. Twenty years later the actual shoe exists in the actual seasonal aisle, painted in the colors of a beverage that is poison, and selling out. The shoe is the costume. The costume is the consent. Wearing it is the signature on the document the cycle needs to keep running.
This is not a lecture about consumer choice. It runs deeper than that. The slave in the Saturnalia who agreed to play king for a week was signing a document. The general who climbed onto the chariot was signing a document. The woman who buys the blessed shirt is signing a document. The man who pulls the Baja Blast Crocs onto his feet is signing a document. They do not know they are signing. That is what makes the rite work. If you knew what pact you were signing, you would not sign it.
So I will tell you what you are signing.
You are signing the document that says the blessed shirt is just a shirt and the Crocs are just shoes and the joke is just a joke and there is nothing happening here.
There is something happening here.
The Latin word for what is being stripped from you is dignitas. It originally meant a person’s standing in the public order, the recognition of where you belonged and what you were owed. The modern English word dignity inherits that older meaning and adds a Christian one, the inherent worth of a person regardless of station. Humiliation ritual works by attacking both at once. The shirt names your worth and the price tag confirms your station, and the contradiction is the wound, and the wound is the harvest.
Dignity is the thing they are taking. Reclaiming it is the only response that ends the cycle.
The way out is not protest and it is not silence. The way out is refusal. Refuse to wear the costume. Refuse to laugh on the wrong side of the laugh. Refuse to carry the patron’s mockery into your own house on your own body for the patron’s benefit.
Your dignity was never theirs to give. It is not theirs to take.
Take it back.
Why is Erika Kirk being humiliated now?
She lost her husband seven months ago. The grief is not new, nor is the CEO position or the political alignment. Druski did not parody her in October, when she was newly bereaved and the cycle would have been read as cruelty. He parodied her in late March, after a specific window of mourning had passed, and the cycle that followed has been intensifying ever since. None of this is random. It is sequenced.
Public humiliation cycles of this intensity and duration have a name in the older literature, and the name is one the mystery cults of antiquity used. The candidate is stripped, mocked, ridiculed, and exposed before she can emerge as the vessel for what comes next. The Eleusinian aischrologia, the ritual obscenity directed at the initiate, was not incidental to the rite. It was the rite. By the time the initiate emerged, she was no longer the person she had been when she entered.
Saturday, paid subscribers get the full framework. The mystery-cult precedent. The four-phase pattern that turns a mourning widow into the vessel for the next phase and the blood sacrifice of Charlie Kirk, which some of you have been asking me to follow up since the day it went live.
This one goes deeper into the occult ritual magic behind the cycle. The Lurianic Kabbalah, the mystery-cult precedent, the four-phase working that began in September and is running on schedule. The names of the figures who have been tracking it. What I could not say in the free version.
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Bibliography and Suggested Reading
Beard, Mary. The Roman Triumph. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults. Harvard University Press, 1987.
Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Harvard University Press, 1985.
Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Macmillan, 1890.
Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford University Press, 1987.
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. 1790.
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. Geoffrey Bles, 1942.
Luther, Martin. Table Talk. Compiled posthumously, 1566.
McGraw, Peter, and Joel Warner. The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. Simon and Schuster, 2014.
More, Thomas. A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. 1534.
Otto, Beatrice K. Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Porphyry. On Abstinence from Killing Animals. Translated by Gillian Clark, Bloomsbury, 2000.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 1818.
Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. Translated by Robert Graves, Penguin Classics, 2007.
Titze, Michael. “Gelotophobia: The Fear of Being Laughed At.” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 2009.
Versnel, H. S. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion: Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual. Brill, 1993.
Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian and educator tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.
Subscribe to The Midnight Academy: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn
Balenciaga's outrageously priced garbage bag purses and other "designer" products that look like garbage immediately sprang to mind
I can't hep but wonder if you would even consider accepting if you were invited onto Candace Owens podcast? I feel you would blow her mind with your research.