I grew up in Florida near Orlando, and my family and I had season passes to Disney, so we would visit often. In retrospect, I’ve stated before that my first truly religious/mystical experience happened in those theme parks. Yes, Disney represents many things that people find deplorable – the compulsive and fraudulent “wholesomeness” of 1950s America, an excessively middlebrow sensibility, dumbing-down and profiteering off of public-domain stories and characters, decadent displays of wealth and landed-ness in a poverty-stricken world, a sticky tourist trap where people are milked of their money via overpriced goods and an abundance of gift shops… However, something in me when I was younger, and to this day, recognized intuitively a deeper truth about this place – it was a temple to the Imagination. In an era when most of America has been converted into a noxious coast-to-coast shopping mall, Walt Disney attempted and often succeeded to manipulate land and wealth in far more imaginative ways, to bring a touch of wonder and excitement to the masses who shuffle through his plastic wonderlands day in and day out. As I began to learn and study more about the Occult and Hermeticism, and began to understand the alchemical principle of the refining of the Spirit within matter, it seemed to me Walt Disney was putting his own whimsical spin on this very principle. The Disney parks create not images, not even buildings or places – they are crafting whole subjective experiences within which you can roam, opportunities to become lost within absorbing imaginative realms.

Now, I recently moved back to Florida, and decided I was going to drop some LSD and go to the Magic Kingdom, to see if I could divine any alchemical wisdom from the Disney technique. On a whim, thinking about how the word “magic” was so crucial for the “branding” of these parks, I decided to Google “Walt Disney and the Occult”. I found 2 or 3 mostly disreputable-seeming articles, based entirely on speculation, about Walt and the Disney corporation’s connection to the Occult. There were a couple pictures of Walt in what was apparently Freemason garb , and mostly what seemed like typical paranoid schizotypal Satanic-panic conspiracy junk. I didn’t think much of their conclusions, but I kept these ideas swirling around in my head. Something did strike me as peculiar that a company which had mass-marketed the meme of “magic” had become so wealthy and influential within the culture. Regardless of whether or not Walt was an accomplished magician, a low-level dabbler, or oblivious to real magick, he definitely represents a huge accomplishment in the manifestation of human Will into the external world.

So here’s where things got weird. The next day I’m at the Magic Kingdom. My mind is coursing with cannabis and the LSD is starting to come on full-force. I’ve already ridden and thoroughly enjoyed a few rides already, without noticing anything really esoteric or odd. I make my way over to the Buzz Lightyear ride, and something catches my eye – there are pentagrams “hidden in plain sight” (bringing to mind the Occult symbols “hidden” in the cathedrals of Europe) on the signage and the murals near the entrance to the ride.. Innocuous enough – they’re only 5-pointed stars on a space-themed ride, right? They did convince me to pay closer attention. I started thinking about just how many people come to these parks daily, how they are herded through the lines like cattle, and if there might be more design than meets the eye to the circuitous path that Disney had people winding through their buildings, if they may be magically harvesting human energies in some strange manner. As these thoughts arise, the line takes a turn and I’m suddenly facing a wall with two pillars labeled “Battery”. Of course I understand the magical significance of the cylindrical shape (wands, pillars, the Hindu lingam, phallus, etc.), so combined with the pentagrams some alarms start to go off in my mind.

And then, the piece-de-resistance. I get on the ride, and what is it but a target-shooting game. This means the whole ride is absolutely riddled with the same Z-shaped target and the goal is to aim your laser right in the center. Focusing with laser-intensity at the center of a peculiar image – could this ride, in fact, be some kind of ingenious Occult battery constructed of sigil magick??

Now maybe these are all just wacky coincidences and stoned-out connections, but the combination of the pentagram, pillars, and repeated sigils which you’re encouraged to focus onto, makes me think that someone hid this all in plain sight, very purposefully. What exactly do you folks make of this? Is the “magic” of the Disney brand more than one man’s megalomaniacal alchemical whimsy? Are they surreptitiously dispensing magical thinking and bits of Occult wisdom into the collective unconscious of the world? Are the Disney parks Walt’s version of the Temple of Solomon, manufacturing joy and wonder, superscribing a human order on top of the natural order for the betterment of mankind? Or is the Disney corporation more of an elitist “Illumanati” style organization, manipulating and placating the masses, harvesting their energy for more nefarious purposes? Was Walt a white or a black magician, or even a magician at all? Is there any truth to the rumors that he understood deep truths of Freemasonry and/or Rosicrucianism? And what about the fact that the other major theme park in Orlando now has their own “magic” brand with Harry Potter, selling thousands of ceremonial robes and magic wands to the American public on a daily basis?

Revelation 13:15 ” The second beast was given power to give breath to the statue of the first beast, so that the statue could speak …”

Anyway, perhaps these are just the mad ramblings of a man finding connections where there are none. But a gnawing feeling keeps telling me there may be something hidden at work here, and that perhaps the power I sensed at Disney World, both as a child and now, may have been more than childlike wonder and naïveté…