Gotthard Base Tunnel Opening Ceremony Prompts Satanic Panic

Ibex manFrom the BBC:

From the World Cup to the Olympics, it is not a significant event if you don’t have an unusual opening ceremony to go with it.

This was also the case when the Gotthard base tunnel, the longest and deepest in the world, was inaugurated on Wednesday.

Here are some of the most striking moments from the ceremony – we have tried to explain what is going on as far as possible. It was not always possible

The ceremony “represented different aspects of Swiss culture”: elements included a milk float; “a topless woman decked as a bird” who “hovered above actors representing the nine construction workers who died during the building of the tunnel”; ” lots of people rolling around in white underwear”; and a man dressed as an ibex, native to the Alps.

The show (sorry, “artistic actions”) was staged by Volker Hesse, a German theatre director “known in Switzerland from his tenure as director of Theater Neumarkt in Zurich from 1993 to 1999 and through his work on productions in Bern and Basel and large-scale amateur theatre projects in Central Switzerland”. Attendees included Matteo Renzi, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande.

The ibex figure, and the less prudish elements of the display, have now exercised the feverish imaginations of conspiracy theorists. A site called Vigilant Citizen observed:

Attended by Europe’s most powerful people, the opening ceremony of the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland was a dark, disturbing, weirdly satanic ritual.

…As I discussed in my article on the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics, the occult elite enjoys putting on full display its agenda and philosophy symbolic, dramatic displays which are reminiscent of dramas re-enacted in secret society rituals. Furthermore, there is no better way to showcase sheer power than putting the “Illuminati stamp of approval” on massive mega-projects such as the Olympics or major constructions.

This article was then picked up by Michael Snyder, author of The Economic Collapse Blog and a frequent contributor to Charisma News, which is run by the Strang evangelical media empire. Snyder, who previously warned that a plan to reconstruct an ancient Syrian arch in London and New York would open a portal to Baal, inevitably asked: “Was the Gotthard Base Tunnel Opening Ceremony an Illuminati Ritual Intended to Honor Satan?”. Synder’s article in turn inspired WND‘s Leo Hohmann, who reported on the “bizarre ‘demonic’ ceremony”. Hohmann also discerned an embrace between two female actors as being a simulation of “lesbian sex”.

Also unimpressed with Hesse’s efforts is the John Birch Society, which has uploaded a rumination on the “Satanic Ceremony at Opening of Swiss Gotthard Base Tunnel” by its CEO, Arthur R. Thompson. Thompson suggests that the show is an example of “how crazy the Europeans have become”, and that this is another reason for Britain to vote in favour of leaving the EU.

Vigilant Citizen previously caught the attention of Dorian Lynskey, the Guardian‘s music writer. Noting the site’s obsession with finding occult references in pop music videos, Lynskey observed in 2010:

Although the Vigilant Citizen insists he is neither a political conservative nor a religious fundamentalist, he is heir to such off-piste 60s pop critics as the Reverend David A Noebel, author of Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and Gary Allen, who theorised that post-Rubber Soul Beatles material was so technically sophisticated that it must have been “put together by behavioural scientists in some think tank”.