Michael Tsarion is a man with a mission. Like many conspiracy researchers, his mission is to “wake people up” to the hidden power dynamics at play all around us. In particular, Tsarion seems to see himself as sort of a real-life counterpart to The Da Vinci Code’s “professional symbologist” Robert Langon. Where Langdon cracks codes and messages in paintings and artifacts left by classical masters, one of Tsarion’s specialties is uncovering the covert transmission of occult symbolism in ordinary advertising and graphic design.

The Subversive Use of Sacred Symbolism in the Media is a recorded speech and PowerPoint presentation which can be viewed in it’s entirety on Tsarion’s Taroscopes website. The lecture rounds out at about 100 minutes and was originally delivered at the Conspiracy Con 2003 conference.

While I enjoyed some of the thinking in Tsarion’s video, it is roughly what you’d expect from a presentation at a conspiracy conference. It is big on outrageous connection-making and small on factual accuracy. And it goes without saying that it’s extremely paranoid.

One of Tsarion’s main theses seems to be that graphic designers and marketers the world over have access to secret occult archives, from which they are consistently drawing visual and thematic inspiration in a concerted effort to subjugate the human spirit. It’s exactly as preposterous as it sounds - especially if you’ve ever done any graphic design work yourself, or have friends in the business. Like any business, graphic design and marketing are about maximizing your time, effectiveness and profits. With scattered real-life exceptions, esoteric concerns simply do not enter into the picture.

In any event though, the real message that I took away from this video is one that I agree with: that advertising is manipulative (if not always evil). It plays on people’s insecurities, and it attempts to hurl useless and sometimes dangerous products and services into the gaps we all have in our lives as humans. To seek spiritual salvation through consumerist avenues only opens you up more and more to this system of deprivation and domination. So, for that reason, I find Tsarion’s efforts to pull people out of this negative spiral both noble and worthwhile.

I also do think that there is something to the chaotic way he just slams together symbolism and weird imagery from media and occult sources. It shows how the same themes important to humanity have essentially never changed. And it very effectively shows you how to think not in rational/linear terms, but in clusters and by chains of (loose) associations. This can be a very valuable skill for creative thinking and the exploration of truth - or it can simply make you snort in derision as your rational mind is violated again and again. Either way, it is unfortunate that the only explanation he chooses to employ is one of shadowy international conspiracies controlling the media.

However, if we ourselves were to apply this same level of creativity to the meta-narrative he’s employing as to the symbols themselves, we could come up with any number of equally “plausible” possibilities:

1. That graphic designers haven’t got a clue about any of this
2. That graphic designers are intentionally and covertly injecting sacred symbols into mundane media to wake people up and spiritually enrich their lives
3. That media and pop culture nowadays are the natural containers of spiritual symbolism and transmitters of value systems today in the same way that mythology and folktales were in ages past
4. That it’s all evil - business, advertising, etc - but that God or the gods have begun a secret spiritual invasion to transmute this lead into gold, and that the symbols of the divine appear initially in the trash stratum.

The point of all this conjecture is simply this: if you’re going to go in and tinker with your belief systems and worldviews using the methodologies of conspiracy theory or occult investigation, then you owe it to yourself to explore all possible explanations - not just the ones that are sinister and paranoid. And remember that life is more convoluted and confounding and complex - and downright beautiful - than any theory or thesis could ever account for.