Two years ago last month, I wrote an article entitled, The Ascendancy of the Devil. In it, I described various accounts indicative of a surge of demonic activity in the world, which has since only been confirmed as a continuing trend by various sources of mine, including priests on the front lines of the spiritual battle.

This week, 1P5 contributor William Briggs has a related story at The Stream that is, I think, very important. In it, he describes the alarming increase of blatant occult imagery — some of it overtly satanic — in popular culture, from music videos to advertisements:

Who’s up for some child torture? No, seriously. Wouldn’t strapping a boy into a chair and frightening him with satanic rituals, then electrocuting him, then doing something worse be loads of fun?

It’s what happens in the new video LA Devotee by a band called Panic! At the Disco, perhaps the most unapologetically evil entry of pop culture today.

The video opens with a girl being abducted by what appears to be a witch. The view switches to a boy being strapped to a chair by more witches. The chair is in a dungeon filled with gruesome images, like a bloody skull, Baphomet-like masks, and so forth. A video camera is shown to be filming the affair. Who is watching? Witches terrorize the boy, and at one point display a large knife before they disappear behind the boy, emerging later with a fresh heart.

The girl who was earlier kidnapped feeds the boy a drink; after drinking the boy goes in and out of a trance. Later, witches strap electrodes to the boy and then — what else? — electrocute him. The boy is shown in great pain.

Now throughout all this are interspersed images of Panic’s singer, who appears on a screen in the dungeon, sometimes with a maniacal look, sometimes with Satanic imagery overlaid on his face. The video closes with the singer, demonically grinning, emerging from the screen while snapping on rubber gloves. The last scene shows the singer lurching towards the boy, clenching his gloved fists.

Except perhaps for the lyric hinting of “the black magic on Mulholland Drive,” the music is utterly incongruous with the video. There is nothing redeeming in it. Nothing. It is pitiless, brutal, boastful. It is immoral.

It is evil.

[…]

What is plain is that occult symbols, whether based in reality or only imagined, are showing with greater frequency. These are a mixture of the Satanic, of tokens from secret societies like the Illuminati, and of mind-control programs, all of which are mixed together in some black soup, and which are most popular in the music industry.

[…]

If one wanted to characterize the dark framework around which Hollywood and the rest of the ephemeral industry is coalescing, not necessarily by design, but by merely copying what is popular, it is this. The Illuminati, a secret Satanic organization, uses mind control techniques on the innocent, especially children, because of the pain it causes them, and women, for sexual purposes. The aftereffects of mind control is the theme behind Katy Perry’s Wide Awake (notice the butterflies and her imaginary young, innocent self).

If one wants to become a success, one must be initiated into the occult world. This video by The Weekend, the first of a trilogy (part two, three), tells us the (necessary) deal made with the Devil is irrevocable.

I emphasize that this is the story they are telling, and am making no claims whatsoever about its veracity.