Terrorist Chatter: Twisted Messiah, the world's worst nightmare. In The Grail Conspiracies

Fr. McDufferin pushed his empty plate away, and said, “Katje told me of
your encounter with the minions of Twisted Messiah, which prompts
another line of thought.”

He leaned back in the chair and spoke quietly, as if addressing the
ceiling. “As you no doubt know, there is a certain theme that carries
through most of the versions of the Grail legends: the Wounded Land, a
land that is barren, the people dispirited and demoralized. Why is that
aspect of the Grail story relevant even today? Because, I suggest to
you, we are still living in the Waste Lands of modern times, where
people are demoralized despite prosperity. Again why? Because their
minds have been clogged with negativity, hopelessness, defeatism. I
think, even more to the point, that they are feeling trapped in the here-
and-now, and have lost any real sense of meaning and personal
potential. That, of course, is where my interest in Twisted Messiah and
its cultist followers comes in.”

“I’m not clear on the link.”

“It’s my contention that not only do the Twisted Messiah kids wallow in
negativity and destructiveness, but that the Twisted Messiah leadership
encourage those mindsets of anger, negativity, destructiveness.”

“They want the followers to be angry and demoralized?,” I blurted.

He nodded. “Demoralized, imbued with the sense that they are
worthless, indeed that all of human society and life itself is worthless.
The leadership wants to stoke anger, bitterness, hatred—because it
seems they have plans to use the negative emotional energies that are
generated.”

He looked up, and eyes probed Katje’s and mine. Then he said, “To be
more blunt, I am convinced that the people behind Twisted Messiah
deliberately set out to engender that demoralization, that sense of
ultimate futility, in the followers.”

He finished the last of his beer, then added, “In short, I think those
pathetic young people have lost touch with the possibility of the higher
potentials. And I think that is no accident.”

“No accident? I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I think it’s not by chance that so many of us today have lost touch with
the higher potentials latent within us all. Just as the establishments of
the past were terrified of the supposed occult knowledge allegedly
possessed by the Templars and the alchemists and the others, so also
are many of today’s establishments equally terrified that the populace
would begin to recognize the existence of these higher powers . . . and
perhaps even begin accessing them.”

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Fr. McDufferin paused to peer at me over his glasses. “There is another
aspect. Twisted Messiah’s various spokespersons and apologists have
disavowed any link with the Nazis. That, of course, was belied by the
fact that it was obvious to even the most historically illiterate viewer that
the whole spectacle of that concert the other night was a deliberate
hommage to the massive rallies the Nazis staged at Nuremberg before
the war.”

He shook his head. “Whoever choreographed that show understood the
real appeal of Twisted Messiah. It’s not the music. What’s ultimately
drawing these millions of young people is the devilishly clever way
Twisted Messiah taps their unconscious craving for meaning, for a kind
of spirituality, for a yearning to ally with something larger than
themselves. They don’t know what it is they’re looking for, but they do
sense that there is something. The Twisted Messiah leadership, as did
Hitler and others before, are attempting to capture that drive and twist it
to their own ends, turning the young followers into a kind of human
batteries.”

“Batteries? Literal batteries, somehow tapping this Latent Miracle
Power?”

McDufferin nodded. “In one sense literal—witness the way we saw Jesse
come to life on stage, just as Hitler drew on the energies of the crowds
to become more and more animated.”

Again he paused before adding, “But there’s another aspect to it that I
fear even more. The impressionable young fans, still searching for a
way to bring meaning to their aimless lives, still searching for something
greater than what they see in themselves, can easily be manipulated to
translate the energies of that quest into dark ends.”

Larkwood back in Oxford: This old man sees chilling similarities to what
the Nazis did, stirring up the deeper, darker emotions, harnessing the
energies of the unthinking, aimless, ungrounded rabble. They are after
the same effects, translated to today’s idiom and today’s media.

“Dark ends? What are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting that it would not be difficult for Jesse Cripes and the
others to convert those energies to a political force, even a subversive
force. Perhaps that is already happening, given today’s news.”

“That sounds like a cult. The first worldwide cult, a media-driven cult.”

“Alas, that is precisely what I see. And I don’t like the implications, not at
all. The cult at Jonestown ended badly—group suicide by Kool-Aid.
David Koresh and his cult ended fatally. The members of the Heaven’s
Gate cult saw suicide as their ticket to the great spaceship in the sky.
Members of the Solar Temple coordinated group suicides in both
Quebec and Switzerland. Beyond all those, of course, are the terrorist
groups espousing their twisted views of Islam for their own dark ends. I
could go on, recalling others that ended up like that.”