When we look to the early life pattern of the dominant killer, we find a person who grows up a loner and misfit, births a deep sense of frustration and alienation, and reaches a point where a mission requires them to kill. Intriguingly, a cult guru has an exact early life of lonerdom, alienation and frustration. They also reach a crisis. But instead of going on to kill, the crisis becomes spiritual and sends them on a path of change, born out of an almost magical charisma.
Such a life pattern can be seen clearly in cult gurus such as David Koresh and Jim Jones, who led their followers to their deaths. A similar trait can be found in world leaders such as Adolf Hitler, who also had an early life of lonerdom, alienation and frustration. His spiritual awakening came alive in a new role of the Germanic peoples as a super race. And despite being an ugly little squirt, he realised a form of magical charisma that could lead whole peoples.
Icons, too, have this similar life pattern. Marilyn Monroe led an early life of lonerdom, alienation and frustration. But when she was put in front of a camera, this plain looking, overweight woman became so charismatic that it hid her plainness, giving us memories only of a beautiful woman. Nowhere is the process better identified than in the life of Christ. He, too, was brought up a frustrated, alienated loner. His crisis came in the wilderness where he faced his demons, and it turned him into a charismatic leader.
We seem to have, here, an identical life path which, on the one hand, leads to greatness, and on the other leads to the most abject evil. And the same pattern is followed, not just by the dominant killer in killer couples, but in serial killers in general. In practically every case we have a frustrated, alienated loner who reaches a crisis through which a mission ensues.
Some serial killers become what are known as ‘evangelical killers’, such as The Yorkshire Ripper, who felt a need to remove prostitutes from the street. And one of the most disturbing, but hardly mentioned, factors in the serial kill is that there is rarely evidence of the victim struggling. It is as if the serial killer has a unique charisma which hypnotises the victim, just as a victim is hypnotised by the snake. And as we have already seen, if the killer has a partner in crime, the partner is really a spiritual disciple.
We still lack the required knowledge to find serial killers before they begin to kill. We may find the answer in an understanding of the saint. For saint and demon seem to be related.
IT'S MY OPINION
So you’ve got an opinion?
What? An opinion?!!! How dare you. Are you bright enough? Do you know your subject? Are you an … expert?
We all have opinions today, with expertise having nothing to do with it. We’re fed up of experts, ‘cos we’ve realised the con that if you put six experts in a basket, you have six varied opinions. So expertise? Load of rubbish! But what do we tend to replace it with?
I’ve got an opinion. We all have. The world is relative, history is relative, Einstein was even relative! And we all have an opinion, and no one’s opinion is better than anybody else’s. Which is, of course, total rubbish.
Man on the street stood next to heart surgeon in operating theatre. ‘Well I think we ought to cut that bit.’
‘But the man would die.’
‘In your opinion …’
So okay, some experts we need. Let’s face it. But in those relative subjects, such as life, philosophy, psychology, media studies, fishing … Now that’s a different matter …
Man in the street stood by the river next to expert fisherman. ‘Well I think we should cast there.’
‘There’s no water there.’
‘Oh …’
I’ve got an opinion. Some experts we need. But more than that. Some people have more experience than others, so shouldn’t their opinion be more important than someone who doesn’t?
But no, you say, of course not. ‘Cos, you see, their experience is relative, innit.
Well, no. Actually, it’s definite. They got the T-shirt.
‘In YOUR opinion.’
Infact, people who specialise, whether as expert or amateur, may constantly disagree with each other, because maybe the world IS relative – subjective, at least. But whether they agree or not, they DO have more knowledge of the subject than the man in the street. So it’s commonsense that, in the end, they know more about the subject that him. But you can guarantee that when this is proved, the man in the street will utter: ‘He’s just an opinionated bigot.’
Well, he could be – relatively speaking in a subjective sort of way. But I reckon I’ve got it sussed. To call someone opinionated is an opinion usually placed by opinionated people who know nothing and who don’t like this fact to be proved. And that man is usually the man in the street, who spends so much time giving HIS opinion that he never gets round to learning anything.
Relatively speaking, of course.
IT'S HIS CASTLE
An Englishman’s home is his castle. It’s a long time since I’ve heard that statement. It used to imply that when the Englishman got home, he could pull up the drawbridge and no one could intrude upon him, his home, his lifestyle or his family.
Those days appear long gone, with constant interference by this authority or that in all our lives. And changed even more is our appreciation of what we call our home. What with inflated mortgage and mania for DIY, our home has become not so much a place to live, but a status symbol and lifestyle in itself.
I am tempted to turn round and say this is madness, crippling people to an enterprise culture to fund the house, but in reality it is you funding the enterprise culture. Yet I won’t – except, of course, I already did. Now that’s eccentric.
I won’t say this because what is going on with our mania for the house is actually part of a social process that has existed throughout history. The barons of old didn’t just build their castle to protect them. They were also status symbols. A castle meant power.
This was required because their king had an even bigger castle, so their smaller castles went some way to allowing them to be king-like. When the feudal system collapsed so did the castles, but the need to be ‘grand’ in brick or stone remained.
Feudal bosses were replaced by aristocracy and, later, the rich industrial middleclass. And here we find the building of huge and ornate mansions with acres of gardens, the eccentric ‘folly’ and private art collections.
There is a similar mentality going on in this process. In each case, it is the most affluent and powerful who become eccentric when it comes to their abode. For the rest of the population, the meagre hovel had to do, with no inclination to be grand.
Then the situation began to change. The west became more affluent to the point that most people could afford a decent house and enough left over to be as eccentric as the rich and powerful of times gone by. It seems, today, we all want to ape the king. Except, of course, it is even more fundamental than this.
The king of old ruled because he belonged to a supernatural system of social control, headed by a God-force. Power was grasped by virtue of that God. Go way back – to ancient Egypt, for instance – and the pharaoh was an actual god on Earth. Go to more modern times and European kings ruled by Divine Right – watered down, but really the same thing.
The outward expression of this divinity and power was the grand palace – in other words, a fancy home. And when I look at the mania for the grand, ornate house today, I can’t help thinking that this religious impulse is not dead. We may no longer understand it, but in our DIY and other homely eccentricities, we are aping the historic process of becoming god-like.
THE NATURAL UMBILICAL CORD
The history of man has been his intellectual requirement to ape nature. And nowhere is this better identified than in religion. Could religion itself teach us anything about our place in nature – so essential to a correct use of technology? One of the earliest religious images is cave art – enigmatic drawings painted on cave walls in deep chambers, reached only by going down long, dark tunnels. Found throughout the world, such drawings go ba
ck over 20,000 years.
It used to be thought this was simple graffiti, or representations of hunting cults, the animals hunted being depicted on the walls. But if this was so, why were the images buried so deep in the ground or inside hills? Some deeper meaning had to be had to explain the phenomenon. And a hint came when it was realised that the images were painted at the most acoustic locations of caves, as if singing or chanting accompanied the images.
This grounded cave art in ritual. During the 1990s researchers in Berlin carried out experiments in the deep faint and discovered that such faints incorporated mind-images similar to the near death experience, where representations of heaven and dead relatives are seen. It seems that the mind can be attuned to represent images of a particular culture’s afterlife.
Early religious forms included such deep faints through hysterical ritual. Could it be that in doing so the adherents thought they had died, gone to the afterlife, and been reborn? Such death/rebirth ideas exist throughout mythology, from Osiris in Egypt to the death and Resurrection of Christ. Going back to the earliest religious forms, we find they are grounded in the belief in animal spirits and fertility.
Could the images in cave art be representations of the animal spirits visited in this death/rebirth aspect of hysterical ritual causing the deep faint? If we are prepared to accept this as a possibility, then we can place a Freudian interpretation of the cave itself. A chamber deep in the Earth, accessed by a long tunnel, is highly representative of a vaginal tract and womb. Could it be that the adept could visit a cave to be spiritually reborn?
Later religious expressions went on to identify the Earth as female in the Mother Goddess. This deity tied the death/rebirth of man with the death and rebirth of nature through the seasons. To early man, the two concepts were one and the same. The burial mound can here be seen as a form of womb on the Earth, allowing rebirth of dead souls, the concept becoming more mathematically perfect in the pyramid. And monoliths such as Stonehenge, with their alignments to the sun, also show this marriage of man and his environment.
We can see here that early technology was part and parcel of the natural experience, being used as representation of the Divine they thought they saw about them. This technology was nature enhancing, as well as allowing man a focus for his society and culture. Today we seem to have used technology to leave behind this automatic relationship between ourselves and our environment, and in doing so we have left the human behind too.
Death/rebirth no longer seems important to us, but this is a very recent development. For even as Christianity formed and ruled for nearly 2,000 years, Christ’s death and rebirth took place at Easter, the time of rebirth of the natural world. Of course, we could ignore this possible religious past. We can call it superstition. But unlike those people of the past, we have broken our natural link, which is so much a part of who we are. Maybe, through an understanding of religion, we can rediscover ourselves, our meaning, and what we are supposed to be.
About the Author
1955 (Yorkshire, England) – I am born (Damn! Already been done). ‘Twas the best of times … (Oh well).
I was actually born to a family of newsagents. At 18 I did a Dick Whittington and went off to London, only to return to pretend to be Charlie and work in a chocolate factory.
When I was ten I was asked what I wanted to be. I said soldier, writer and Dad. I never thought of it for years – having too much fun, such as a time as lead guitarist in a local rock band – but I served nine years in the RAF, got married and had seven kids. I realized my words had been precognitive when, at age 27, I came down with M.E. – a condition I’ve suffered ever since – and turned my attention to writing.
My essays are based on Patternology, or P-ology, a thought process I devised to work as a bedfellow to specialisation. Holistic, it seeks out patterns the specialist may have missed. The subject is not about truth, but ideas, and covers everything from politics to the paranormal.
I also specialise in Flash Fiction in all genres, most under 600 words, but also Mini Novels - 1500 word tales so full they think they're bigger.
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