Brian Jason Wagner believes he and Taylor Swift have a child together.
This is the fixed delusion of a 45-year-old Colorado man who has allegedly broken into Swift’s Los Angeles home multiple times, changed his driver’s license address to her residence, and currently remains missing as of this writing, having evaded private investigators and a five-year restraining order .
Swift now carries QuikClot bandages “for gunshot or stab wounds” and moves through public life behind bulletproof screens typically reserved for presidents .
For what seems like centuries, we have been witnessing the collapse of a psychological architecture that once kept us safe when we chose to touch the divine.
And it is happening because we have decoupled the technology of ecstasy from the architecture of return.
The Container That Was
Two thousand years ago, if you wanted to meet the goddess, you did not download her discography.
You walked the Sacred Way to Eleusis.
You fasted.
You drank the kykeon, which was likely an ergot-based psychedelic brew similar to LSD.
And then you descended into the Telesterion, an underground ritual space designed specifically to hold thousands of people in simultaneous altered states, while a Hierophant guided the encounter with the mysteries of Persephone and Demeter.
The Eleusinian Mysteries lasted for twenty centuries without a single recorded death or psychotic break – the container was unbreakable.
The ritual encoded what anthropologist Victor Turner called “bounded liminality”: a structured space for the unstructured mind.
You could meet the gods because you were guaranteed a return ticket. The Hierophant was the original trip-sitter, but more than that he was a guarantee that the archetype would not eat you alive.
This is what we have lost. The katabasis, the structured descent that ensures you can come back up.
The Digital Pantheon Hypothesis
Social media has created an environment where celebrities function as unwilling hierophants for a culture that has banned the mysteries but not the religious impulse.
When Brian Jason Wagner fixates on Taylor Swift – the blonde, billionaire, bard of desire, the object of millions of male projections – he’s not “just” stalking a pop star but experiencing an unbound archetypal possession.
Swift has become, in the psychospiritual economy, an unwilling vessel for Aphrodite.
The difference between Wagner and an ancient devotee isn’t the intensity of the vision but absence of the container.
In clinical settings, psychedelic-assisted therapy maintains a strict container: screening, preparation, medical oversight, and integration.
The result?
A 2024 JAMA meta-analysis of 3,504 participants found zero deaths by suicide, zero persistent psychotic disorders, and serious adverse events in only 4% of patients with preexisting conditions.
But in the wild – recreational use without ritual structure – studies show 44.8% of users experience flashbacks, 25.4% suffer long-term adverse effects, and 4.2% develop Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD).
The substance is the same. The difference is the container.
And Wagner, like so many others, took the kykeon without the Telesterion.
Case Files in Failed Katabasis
John Hinckley Jr. & The Taxi Driver Script
In 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.
Sounds like a South Park episode’s premise. Stifle the laughter, though.
The forensic details reveal a mind that had lost the boundary between narrative and reality, but not in the sense of believing he was Travis Bickle.
Hinckley knew he was Hinckley.
What he believed was that the script would work for him: that by reenacting the violence of Taxi Driver, he could force Foster (who played Iris, the child Bickle “saves”) to love him.
This is a crucial detail.
Hinckley was not psychotic in the classical sense. Instead, he was scripted.
He had encountered an archetype (the Savior, the Avenger of Innocence) through media, but without the ritual container to process it, the archetype colonized his reality.
He became a method actor in a role that had no exit.
The prosecution noted his “narcissistic personality disorder” and his inability to distinguish between cinematic narrative and social reality.
What they could not name was failed initiation: a katabasis into the underworld of the psyche with no Hierophant to guide the return.
Mark David Chapman & The Catcher in the Rye
Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon in 1980, carried a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in which he had written “this is my statement,” signing it “Holden Caulfield”.
At his sentencing, he read aloud the novel’s most famous passage: “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye… I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff”.
Chapman believed Lennon was a “phony” and that by killing him, he would become the “catcher in the rye” of his generation via the preservation of innocence.
Preserving innocence, to him, meant destroying it’s corruptor.
This is archetypal logic:
the Phony vs. the Authentic,
the Adult vs. the Child,
the Fall vs. the Rescue.
But without the boundary of ritual, Chapman could not distinguish between the collective archetype (the need for purity) and the personal target (Lennon).
He was possessed by mimesis – the Greek concept of ritual imitation – without the katharsis that would have released him from the god.
Brian Jason Wagner & The Digital Bride
Which brings us back to Wagner, and to Swift, and to the particular horror of the digital age.
Wagner does not merely believe he loves Swift; he believes they are married, that she is the mother of his child, that his driver’s license should bear her address.
This is erotomania in the clinical sense, but it is also something older: the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage between god and mortal that was once enacted symbolically in mystery cults.
In the Mysteries, the marriage was symbolic, temporary, and collective.
The initiate “married” the god but returned to the polis.
Wagner’s tragedy is that his psyche is attempting to enact a mystery rite for which his culture provides no exit protocol.
There is no priestess to say:
“The god has departed; you are yourself again.”
There is only the endless scroll,
the algorithmic reinforcement of his fixation, and
the vanishing point where his love becomes indistinguishable from violence.
Swift is not the first.
She carries QuikClot because she knows she is not a person to Wagner; she is a theophany, a physical manifestation of an archetype he cannot integrate.
And Wagner is not “evil.”
He is lost in a liminal space that has no boundary, no Hierophant, and no return.
The Integration Crisis
Stanislav Grof, the psychiatrist who coined the term “spiritual emergency,” described these states as “non-specific amplifiers” of the psyche.
In a supportive container, they lead to transformation.
Without containment, they lead to “psychotic” behavior that is often better understood as failed transcendence.
Calling it madness is an easy cop out.
What this is is an epidemic of unreintegrated liminality.
The substances are available (or the psychospiritual conditions that mimic them—sleep deprivation, isolation, parasocial immersion).
The screens provide the icons. But the rituals like structured descent and return have been stripped away by a century of prohibition, by the collapse of religious frameworks, and by the reduction of mystery to content.
The result is that the religious impulse, denied its sanctioned vessels, flows into whatever containers are available.
Sometimes that is a celebrity.
Sometimes that is a conspiracy theory.
Sometimes that is a violent script that promises, like Taxi Driver or Catcher in the Rye, to make sense of the chaos by assigning the self a divine role: Savior, Avenger, Beloved of the Goddess.
Toward a New Telesterion
If the problem is the lack of container, the solution is better architecture.
We cannot recreate Eleusis.
LARPing ancient rites is not the point, despite what many of my contemporaries seem to believe.
But we can recognize that psychedelic integration, celebrity stalking, and spiritual emergency are points on the same spectrum: the spectrum of unbound transcendence.
What is needed is a recognition that when someone like Wagner fixates on Swift, he is not “crazy” in a vacuum.
Wagner was/is experiencing a genuine psychospiritual event with no cultural vocabulary to process it.
We need:
- Integration protocols that treat celebrity fixation as a potential spiritual emergency, not merely a security threat
- Ritual structures for the processing of archetypal experiences (mystery schools for the digital age)
- A forensic humility that recognizes Hinckley, Chapman, and Wagner not as monsters, but as failed initiates who encountered the gods and were not shown the way back
Taylor Swift deserves to be safe.
Brian Jason Wagner deserves to be found and healed.
And we deserve a culture that does not force us to choose between the agora and the abyss.
The Mysteries lasted two millennia because they understood that ecstasy requires architecture.
We have spent a century knocking down the walls and wondering why the gods are eating us alive.
It is time to build new containers or admit that we are all, in our own way, wandering the Sacred Way without a map home.
-Brett W. Urben
Gnosis Under Fire 