I’m back with another installment of Forteana, and covering one of the things that first brought me back from the dark years of silence. At the end of 2016, I became aware of something different from the usual election propaganda. It was being said that there was an organized movement of criminals and deviants engaged in kidnapping and abuse that supposedly centered on a Washington, DC area pizza joint. It was further claimed that members were identifying themselves with certain symbols, particularly a sort of triangle/ spiral hybrid symbol that was actually featured in the logo of another pizzeria in the same area. The chief further evidence offered was that the symbol was previously reported in use by child abusers and traffickers in a report apparently issued by the FBI. It was this oddity that developed my interest, and to me remains far more interesting than anything else to emerge from the affair.
Now, one may ask at the start what this has to do with Forteana. In fact, the use and distribution of symbols has figured prominently in anomalist research, including otherwise orthodox anthropology. A notable example is the swastika, used in many cultures including native American tribes that apparently used it well before Columbus. In this case, it’s relatively easy to discern a range of prosaic explanations, beyond the simplistic one of misdating and forgery. The symbol may have already existed among the Paleolithic common ancestors of the American and Asiatic peoples, or the two groups may have been in contact with each other more recently than is known or believed. (The tragic story of the native Siberians will make it clear just how little chance we have of sorting this out.) Barring these scenarios we can still allow the possibility that multiple peoples independently developed this and other symbols. On this vein, one might further apply Jung’s model of archetypes, or his more problematic concept of synchronicity. Or, there is always the purely pragmatic explanation that there are so many symbols in existence that it is easier to reproduce one by “coincidence” than to create a new one.
Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists’ bubble burst relatively quickly. Evidence quickly piled up that the symbol was in use well before and after any allegation of criminal associations. I personally discovered it in a native artifact shown here, reportedly pre-Columbian (again!), that must have been on display for years at a local museum without attracting attention. The more fundamental problem, which anyone familiar with advertising could have anticipated in advance, was that those actually responsible for the offending designs were invariably small graphic design firms and independent artists, by definition among the fringes rather than among the “elites” of business and media. Those with a minimum knowledge of profiling will have no trouble recognizing further parallels to art forgers, who are stereotypically driven by resentment of the art community and a deeper inability to create truly original work. It can easily be allowed that one or a few such individuals might use a provocative icon just to make trouble for their employers and patrons. On the other hand, it would be equally in character for those without ethics or creativity to copy a symbol blindly without knowing or caring where it came from.
That still left that report, however, and that was a doozy. (You can learn enough from a Snopes article predating Pizzagate itself.) To begin with, no evidence emerged that the FBI had approved it for release to the public, though the agency would clearly have intervened if it had not been authentic. What was just as curious is that it was dated very early 2007 and known to the public not long after. It was clear from this alone that the symbol was not in serious use at any recent date, and may have been in decline even when the report was published. As for the information, the document did little more than state that the “hybrid” symbol might be used by human traffickers and pornographers to identify each other. Tellingly, the examples given of the symbol in use consisted mainly of jewelry that could have been made by commercial and semi-professional sources with no involvement in their activities. The two more specific examples given were a coin engraved with the icon and an offensive caption and a website that appeared to represent a group on the infamous but generally legal lines of NAMBLA. Most noteworthy was a further attempt to interpret the symbol as representing relationships between adults and teens or children, which for the wary scholar is exactly the kind of “explanation” that is usually tacked on after the fact.
At this point, we can again consider how this compares with what can be known of criminal subcultures. First and foremost, criminals and deviants are going to be even more intellectually shallow than ad men. They have no incentive to create visual symbols new or unique to themselves, nor would the vast majority have the intelligence and creativity to do so if they wanted to. Second, identifying symbols are quite different from “codes” conveying actual information. As seen with gang signs, the former serve mainly to avoid “friendly fire” as well as confusion with casual civilians. By comparison, coded communications are invariably rudimentary and temporary, typically on the lines of an “idiot’s code”. Third and finally, any collective “lore” among these groups will have the shallowest of roots. In hard reality, most of those who get involved will be gone within a few years at most, leaving little more than a thin layer of hearsay for the next, equally short-lived generation. At this point, we reach a paradox: Most of the time, the iconography of a group will be of recent origin, regardless of what they say or believe, but once in a while, there will be something much older than they would know.
With this in mind, the document becomes more inscrutable than the symbol itself. Of course, the FBI would have known that anything they revealed would be as good as obsolete. Therefore, they most likely suspected the report was outdated, at best, even before it was released. Even so, the question remains, where did their information come from, and was it ever any good? To address that, we need only look back to the considerations already outlined. It would undoubtedly gratify any persecuted or marginalized group to make believe that anyone using a semi-random symbol was really on “their” side. In practice, however, they would presumably be just as satisfied to let the “civilian” population go into panic and false accusations over a minor or wholly fabricated bit of lore. They would also most certainly have any number of nuances and tricks to sort out infiltrators, curiosity seekers and the odd casual sympathizer from the legitimately informed. In theory and in known reality, outsiders who casually flash a marginalized group’s icons will usually be ridiculed or ignored by actual members.
This is where we get back to Jung. Many of his ideas have become shrouded in borderline mysticism, and Jung himself bears much of the blame. To clear the air, we must step back. The model of archetypes clearly has merit, while synchronicity is at least grounded enough to describe common experience. We might get somewhere if we accept the premise of universal appeal, independent of any theory or model of origin. Finally, the “pragmatic” approach has room to breath without invoking the tautology of the “random”. Perhaps, on a certain level, symbols look like other symbols for the same reason hammers look like other hammers: In any time and place, people create and use what other people like and respond to.
At this point, I will leave you
and wind this down. In the end, the one surprising development here was that
the conspiracy theorists actually let it go. That, in turn, was part of the
transition to “Qanon”, which replaced the search for esoteric clues with vague
and contradictory pronouncements of an online personality. But I would not be
the least bit surprised if the same symbol causes an identical panic even
further down the line. Symbols never die, and neither does fear.
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