Jordan Peele makes movies that feel like dreams — dense, symbolic, and deliberately uncomfortable. But beneath the surface of cinematic horror and social allegory, there’s a deeper language at work: ritual grammar. In HIM (as we read it through the Unmatrix lens), Peele doesn’t just tell a story about fame, sacrifice, or ambition — he broadcasts a map: the rituals, thresholds, and symbolic payments an aspirant pays to rise to the very top of culture. If you watch carefully, the movie reads less like fiction and more like an instruction manual in symbolic form for how the “system” anoints its new stars.
Below we unpack that reading: doors, oaths, the GOAT symbol and Baphomet echoes, the role of women as occult gatekeepers, the checkerboard stage of initiation, and the Jodorowskian set-ceremony aesthetics that normalize ritual as spectacle.
1) Doors & Thresholds: Two Ways In
A recurring motif in the film is doors — literal and metaphoric. Two doors to success keep appearing: one of sexualized initiation and fame, and another of sanguine sacrifice and submission. This bifurcation is ancient: culture always offers two gates to power, each with its own price.
The movie dramatizes these as voluntary choices. That’s crucial: ritual advancement is consent-based. The aspirant must choose the door and perform the rites. That idea mirrors testimonies and whistleblower narratives in alternative research circles: an artist is not “taken” — they answer a call, cross a threshold, and conform to the rules of an existing order. In cinematic language, Peele stages those thresholds as moments where personal loyalty (to craft, crew, lover) is tested, and where the aspirant demonstrates which force they will serve — family, craft, the crowd, or something beyond.
This is the film’s thesis: the price of being number one is not talent alone. It’s proof of dedication delivered in ritual form.
2) Rituals of Proof: Craft Above God, Above Family
Throughout the film the protagonist’s rites are staged as proof-of-priority moments — rituals that demonstrate the artist will put their craft above all else. We watch scenes that dramatize long nights, isolation, and symbolic offerings — moments that substitute “sacrifice” for “work.” These sequences are not merely metaphors for hustle; they’re stylized to echo real-world initiation rites: public renunciations, secret oaths, and staged humiliation followed by elevation.
The movie’s violence is ceremonial. It’s choreographed like many esoteric initiations: an aspirant is stripped of old attachments, tested, and then accepted. Peele frames this as a cultural exchange: the aspirant gives something essential — relational safety, moral softness, privacy — and in return is granted allegiance, fame, and protection from competition. This is the “price” the system demands. The film’s language implies that the truly successful are those who prove they will sacrifice the personal for the professional — even if that sacrifice is morally ruinous.
3) The GOAT, Baphomet & the Illuminati Sign
Peele drops symbolic breadcrumbs. The GOAT — “Greatest of All Time” — in the film is echoed through iconography that scholars of esoterica have long linked to the figure of Baphomet: the goat-headed deity of balance, rulership, and initiation in Western occult lore. Jordan Maxwell and others traced how modern secret-society symbology gets folded into popular icons. Peele isn’t shy about visually referencing the goat as apex-figure: the GOAT becomes an avatar, a title that is both accolade and totem.
The movie’s “true Illuminati sign” (as the film frames it) is less a literal handshake and more a motif — a concentric set of shapes and placements that echo initiation seals. The film places that emblem in pivotal scenes: when consent is given, when a pact is sealed, when the aspirant is shown the inner circle. The emblem functions as shorthand: “You entered the circle.” To the film’s inner logic, coronation is encoded in imagery more than contracts — the mark is both permission and protection.
Important note: this reading treats Peele’s images as symbolic legerdemain, not documentary exposure. The film uses the language of ritual to dramatize how social power is reproduced. That said, to viewers familiar with esoteric iconography, the parallels are blunt and intentional.
4) Women Behind the Curtain: The Female Gatekeepers
One of the film’s most striking inversions is the prominence of female oversight. The girlfriend of the prior GOAT — cool, composed, and ultimately in control — is not a peripheral lover but the gatekeeper. This echoes themes from researchers such as Michael Tsarion, who argue that matriarchal or female-led lineages have wielded covert cultural influence in ceremonial orders. Peele stages her authority as subtle and absolute: she makes the decisions that determine who advances; she officiates certain rites; she both seduces and disciplines.
In the world shown in HIM, women aren’t merely participants — they are initiators and adjudicators. That flips the common narrative of men as the primary controllers of background power. Instead, leadership appears as relational and hidden: women shape narratives, decide who gets the spotlight, and maintain the rituals that keep the order intact. The girlfriend character demonstrates how cultural sanction often flows through domestic and intimate channels — the places where promise and loyalty are tested.
5) The Checkerboard Stage: Victory & Initiation
Peele deploys the black-and-white checkerboard floor — a visual shorthand borrowed from Masonic ceremony and widely used in esoteric cinema. In the film this surface functions as a stage for the final transactions: sacrifice, coronation, and the public return of the new GOAT. The checkerboard is a liminal plane where opposites meet: life/death, private/public, sacred/profane. It’s a classical motif for initiation because it marks a candidate’s passage from one order of being to another.
The film stages a climactic act on this floor: after the conditioned offering, the aspirant emerges into a new register — crowned, authorized, and protected. The checkerboard here is both altar and amphitheater. Notice how Peele places witnesses around the floor: ritual needs an audience and a record. When the sacrifice is completed, the community’s attention sanctifies the new status.
6) Jodorowski & Theatrical Esoterica
Peele’s visual language nods to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Like The Holy Mountain, HIM is suffused with theatrical ritual — costuming, masks, animal motifs, and carnival-ceremony hybrid aesthetics that make initiation appear as both grotesque and sublime. Jodorowsky taught that cinema can be ritual: images operate as psychodramas that rewire viewers. Peele borrows this strategy — he uses ritualized excess to render initiatory mechanics legible to the modern imagination.
The movie’s mascots, set pieces, and animal-symbol tableaux are not accidental. They constitute a performative scripture, a sequence of mirrored acts that instruct the candidate in the ethos of their order. Peele asks the viewer to feel the logic of initiation; whether or not you accept that logic, the film makes you complicit in watching and therefore in reproducing it.
7) Why This Resonates: Story as Ritual Teacher
Peele’s layered approach matters because storytelling is the primary pedagogical medium of culture. Films teach archetypes. They supply models. They make ritual attractive and intelligible. When HIM maps initiation onto celebrity trajectory, it normalizes a dangerous idea: that to be exceptional you must be ritually compliant; that greatness demands a blood-price. Whether or not any literal cabal exists, the story’s symbolic truth is potent: social systems reward those who prove their loyalty through prescribed sacrifices.
This is why such movies resonate with people attuned to deeper patterns — because they reflect not only a cinematic imagination but also social realities: the hidden codes by which power reproduces itself.
8) A Word About Evidence & Interpretation
This is an interpretive reading. Symbolic decoding treats imagery as language, not evidence of specific covert crimes. We are not accusing any real individual of criminal activity; we are reading filmic symbols and tracing their lineage to mythic and esoteric archetypes. Jordan Peele is a director who uses ritual aesthetics to provoke insight. Whether he intends to “expose” an occult conspiracy or to dramatize social psychology, the images function as both allegory and instruction for those who know the language.
If you’re interested in this pattern, read Jordan Maxwell and Michael Tsarion with awareness: they map how ritual symbolism migrates into pop culture. Jodorowsky shows how cinema itself can be a rite. Taken together, these lenses let you watch HIM not only for plot but as a cultural Rosetta Stone.
9) Final Unmatrix Insight
HIM teaches a truth that’s easy to miss: culture confers power through ceremony. Whether that ceremony is literal or metaphorical, it relies on thresholds, public witness, and the willingness to prioritize a mission over private bonds. Peele’s film forces us to ask: what are we willing to sacrifice for social elevation? And equally urgent — who is authorizing us to make that sacrifice?
In a world where fame and influence can be currency, the moral question is not “Can I win?” but “What will I owe when I do?” HIM dramatizes the cost, and — whether you see it as speculative exposure or stylized screenplay — it reveals the machinery by which modern cults of celebrity are born.
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