Iran, the Wicker Man and Human Sacrifice

Podcast version available here

Lord Summerisle: ‘It is time to keep your appointment with The Wicker Man.’ 

Sergeant Howie: ‘Now, wait! Now, all of you, just wait and listen to me. And you can wrap it up any way you like. You are about to commit murder. Can you not see? There is no Sun god. There is no goddess of the fields. Your crops failed because your strains failed. Fruit is not meant to be grown on these islands. It's against nature. Don't you see that killing me is not going to bring back your apples? Summerisle, you know it won't. Go on, man. Tell them. Tell them it won't.’

Lord Summerisle: ‘I know it will.’

The opening quotation is from the 1973 cult classic film, The Wicker Man. It is in the final moments, when Sergeant Howie has realised his fate: he has become embroiled in an elaborate hoax and is now due to be sacrificed to the mighty god of the sun in order that the Scottish island’s orchards may bear fruit once again. 

Human sacrifice has been practiced throughout the ages, as a ritualistic killing to gain favour with or appease the wrath of a deity. It has supposedly fallen out of favour in recent years—in our now more moral and rational age.

The Aztecs are often held as the undisputed champions of the practice, sacrificing unknown thousands of people each year. They believed that the sun would stop moving unless it was fed with blood. The killing was an offering to the gods to keep the cosmos alive; in recognition of the sacrifices the gods had made to bring it into being.

The Spanish put an end to this particular form of barbarism. Back home, however, they engaged in their own sacrificial rituals, burning Jews and other heretics to appease their wrathful god. 

One question that always perplexed me about The Wicker Man was: in what sense were the islanders actually making a sacrifice? They sacrificed ale to the god of the sea, and burned several farmyard animals alongside Sergeant Howie. These acts are sacrifices, as they are giving up valuable items. Howie himself, however, is of no value to the islanders at all. He is simply an outsider, who they do not care a hoot about, who they have decided to murder. If they believe his life ‘feeds’ the sun in some way then that could make sense, but still, they’re not really sacrificing anything.

Or are they?

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film is that the islanders appear utterly unperturbed by what they do. At no point during the lead-up to the murder do their faces display even the slightest bit of moral angst—not the men, women or even the children. As the flames rise and Howie screams, they swing and sing about the coming of summer. 

It could be said then, that the thing being sacrificed is not the virgin/fool Sergeant Howie, but their own morality. The film presents this as a contrast between Christianity and Paganism. The devout Christian Howie represents a belief in a transcendent God who gives us moral laws. He symbolises a spiritual sense of oneness we share with all humanity.

Burning him represents a rejection of that god, that morality and oneness. It is not a rejection made with mere words, like an edgy atheist who holds onto spirituality inspired ethical principles. This is a far more profound rejection through action. It is the severing of a cord. There’s no going back. It is succumbing to the temptation Christ was subjected to by Satan: give up on God and all that he represents in return for material abundance. 

Howie rightly points out that if the ritual fails to work, if the fruit does not return, then an even bigger sacrifice will need to be made next year. Symbolically, this can be taken as the immediate consequence of the islanders’ crossing of the Rubicon: any sense of humanitarian oneness they possessed is now gone. If things don’t go their way, they will have no recourse but to become ever more vicious. They have sold their souls to the Devil himself, and will maybe receive a bag of apples in return. 

What does this have to do with Iran?

On February 28th, 2026, the first day of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, missiles hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school. At least one hundred and twenty children were killed with nearly a further hundred wounded. You can imagine that the extent of those wounds would be horrific. Twenty-six teachers, and four parents were also killed.

Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that the elite engage in public blood sacrifice rituals to traumatise the population and draw whatever occult power can be drawn from such things. David Icke has made this claim about Waco; that it was a blood sacrifice to the Fire God Ba'al. He sees great significance in the date on which the fire took place, April 19th, as it is also the date of the Oklahoma City bombing two years later, and the Warsaw Ghetto fire fifty years earlier.

As much as we might like to say that there’s absolutely nothing in these ideas at all, when Alex Jones snuck into the elite playground of Bohemian Grove, he found the most powerful people in the land dressed in robes and performing a mock human sacrifice to a forty-foot stone owl. These theatrics are supposed to facilitate attendees temporarily abandoning their cares, but Jones sees it as, much like in The Wicker Man, the sacrificing of the very concept of care itself. 

There are, of course, good reasons to not take Icke and Jones literally. Any study of these events paints a picture of random actions coming together, which no person or group could possibly control. At the same time, it feels hard to write them off as just being random. There is something that feels symbolically ‘true’ about what conspiracy theorists observe.

Many people have observed that, either literally or symbolically, the Trump Presidency has carried an anti-Christ energy with it. From Donald using AI to present himself as Jesus, to Pete Hegseth swopping the Bible with a script from a Quentin Tarantino film, Jesus is being replaced. Should we be surprised then, that this latest fool’s errand into Iran has been consecrated by an act of the most appalling evil imaginable? 

The mass murder of children is simply the worst thing that happens in a society. From Columbine onwards in the United States, to the Dunblane and Utøya massacres in Britain and Norway, these events scar communities and nations. We cannot take in that such evil, directed at innocence, can exist. 

This is not to say that the Shajareh Tayyebeh massacre was consciously planned by anyone in the administration. Whilst I’m reluctant to offer any benefit of the doubt, I do not suppose that was the case. It seems perfectly plausible that the strike came from a marriage of outdated intelligence and pathological indifference. It is also interesting that, true or not, AI is copping the blame. We are being initiated into an acceptance of the dystopian future so many sci-fi films have cautioned us about.

The US Government’s response to the incident has consisted of obfuscation and denial. Kicking the can as far down the road as possible, in the hope people will just forget (depressingly, this is probably true). Donald Trump has effectively acted as a Lord Summerisle figure: selling to his supporters the idea that the mass murder of children, the most heinous anti-Christ action imaginable, is now actually okay. 

Trump initially claimed that the strike was ‘done by Iran’, with the Tomahawk missiles they don’t possess. When this would no longer hold, he fell back on the claim it was ‘under investigation’ and that mistakes are made in war and ‘nobody did that on purpose.’ Rightly or wrongly, no one was accusing anyone of doing it on purpose. 

Like Lord Summerisle and the islanders, anyone still supporting Trump has been drawn into participation in a ritual sacrifice of their own morality. They accept that killing children, then lying about it and excusing it, are acceptable actions to take. 

Irrespective of whether they are planned by any particular individual(s) or not, it is essential for empires to engage in these sacrificial rites. They must corrupt the morality and spirituality of the nation. The mechanics of exactly how they come about are downstream of that need. Callous indifference alone, left to act for long enough, will give rise to them. Central planning is not necessarily required. The Empire requires human sacrifice, so human sacrifice arises. They must shatter that shared sense of oneness we possess in order to engage in their campaigns of mass murder. They must bait and switch Christ with the Devil.