Las Vegas as a ritual

A hybrid piece on the transgressive occult spirit of the Las Vegas strip.

Pipe dream

I’ve lived in California my whole life. When you’re a Californian bored of your own state, you visit Las Vegas. It’s the closest tourist town that’s far enough to feel like a trip but close enough to reach by driving. Every so often my family would pack ourselves and four suitcases into our Acura RDX and take to the I-15. By the age of 18 I’d been to the Vegas Strip maybe five times despite most of it not being carved out for anyone under 21. There’s a stereotype that anyone who visits Las Vegas does so to gamble and do drugs, which I guess is true to a degree. There’s certainly a more than sizable population of passionate clubbers and Wolf of Wall Street types. The city is unglamorous: gamblers passed out in casinos, ambulances flying down the Strip, hundreds of “mole people” living under Vegas’s skin. But beyond that rests an almost ritualistic character that elicits intrigue not for what it is on the surface but for its qualities of transience.

Vegas is home to scattered aesthetics. It’s a fluorescent settlement in the middle of the deserts, luxury cars pouring down its veins and swirling around designer malls and five star hotels. In one swift glance you see a pyramid, the Statue of Liberty, and King Arthur’s palace arranged in close proximity. The city breaks away from all concepts of time and aesthetic cohesion. It is not a carefully curated upscale neighborhood. It is a lunatic’s pipe dream, the result of two drunk guys in a bar going, wouldn’t it be funny if we put the Eiffel Tower next to a pyramid? It’s a dream sequence in which nothing makes sense and you lose your bearings, teetering on the borderline between sleep and wakefulness. As you R.E.M. your way through the whole thing you ask yourself, where am I and what is all of this? like Alice navigating a bizarre wonderland.

Vegas ends abruptly. Looking down at it from a departing plane at night, there’s a sharp, clean edge where the lights cut off to make room for desert land. I’ve ventured out into the surrounding wilderness a couple of times to the national parks and craggy cliffs. It reminded me that all of that land was supposed to have been desert. The city had simply encroached on nature’s cheek and festered there. As you gaze out the plane’s window you get the impression that Vegas is a simulation, a liminal space among the ranks of gas stations and hospital rooms.

Vegas is home to plenty of these liminal spaces. The halls of the Wynn are littered with the footsteps of visitors trickling in and out. The Strip is covered in rental cars, hundreds of fingerprints from renters before smeared across the steering wheels. You meet a girl in the Caesar’s palace bathroom and make small talk knowing you’ll never see her again. You wonder if anyone lives here permanently and what they would even do all day. The Strip seems to have been constructed for people who want to leave no trace, people who want to move about the city’s circuits and let a thousand others cover their tracks as they go.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, says a tee shirt on sale at a novelty gift shop. So maybe in the smattering of lights you, too, can blink out like a star.

Sin city

Right outside the strip is where you’ll find a sex shop next to a family restaurant. Despite its blacked-out windows, curious passersby sneak peeks past the open door whenever someone enters or exits. At night, passing trucks advertise strip clubs and burlesques that your parents surreptitiously pull you away from. Welcome to Sin City, the souvenirs say, because here, shame is unconceptualized. This is a world of transaction and scandal, of illicit affairs.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my favorite novels. As main characters Duke and Gonzo, high on LSD, hallucinate massive bats flying around their car, the American Dream withers around them and vanishes into the lights. “You better take care of me Lord. If you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands,” Duke says. In Vegas, you throw everything into the void and hope something will catch you. I think that’s what freedom is to some—jumping without worrying about the fall and relishing in your own hedonism, living outside of the fringes of social acceptablity. Vegas is a chemical orgy of businessmen and bachelorette entourages and Californians that don’t know any better.

There’s a link between transgression, sexuality, and magic which offers perspective on this otherworldly sensation. Religious studies professor Hugh B. Urban describes the relationship between sex and magic and the transmission of magia sexualis, or the idea of sexual acts as a source of power. He discusses the modern period’s fascination with sexuality as the innermost essence of human nature, citing occultist Aleister Crowley and philosopher Georges Bataille. They define sexual magic as a source of transgression, overstepping moral boundaries and engaging in nonreproductive sex acts. Magic draws from these transgressive acts and inverts religious practice.¹

If Vegas is a ritual, then sex is one of its components, and the live-now-think-later attitude that permeates its structure becomes a religious practice. Vegas stands in opposition to the canon, allowing the participant to give into the animalistic and hedonistic parts of themselves. On the Strip we all unravel into chaos and fleeting pleasure. I’ve always thought that magic stands both in opposition to the secular and the religious worlds, existing on its own axis. The Vegas Strip follows this vein, cutting itself away from the convention.

Even as a kid I sensed the scandalous nature of this apparatus, the way the city’s entropy creates pockets for gamblers and drug users to disappear into. The way it felt more like a hallucination than a family vacation. I lacked the terms to describe it at the time, but now I understand that I am constantly seeking escapism into abstractions of the world. In Vegas topics become concepts become shapes and color, and people default to their animalistic forms. Vegas is a land of sex and drugs I find a vicarious release in it despite my discomfort and fear. A return to the creature.

The opening bars to Viva Las Vegas, a song frequently played at Bellagio’s fountain shows.

Of the sun

When I was ten or so I saw Cirque du Soleil for the first time in Bellagio. Performers dressed head-to-toe in glittery skin suits flew over the stage on trapezes. They clung together like paper clips and shuffled to the other side. Up there they looked less like people and more like creatures from fairy tales. From the pool, mermaids lept and twirled into the air, while women dressed like swans spun on hoops suspended above them. An actor dressed as a bird flew through the air on invisible strings. Beside him man twirled a fiery stick with his feet, bridging fire and water, the heavens and the earth.

The show was all about circles, too. The pool below the actors was carved into a perfect circle, as were the hoops the acrobats twirled on. The word “circus” shares roots with the word “circle,” referring to an enclosed performance area. In the 1700s trick rider Philip Astley discovered that riding a horse in a circle during his shows helped keep his balance, and before that, the Roman amphitheaters took on the round shape to center the show.² Cycles encapsulate the spirit of Vegas, the way each day restarts to make room for the same events all over again. People pile in, people pile out, and the little blemish on the desert’s cheek flattens and swells like a tide. Beyond that, performance creates a liminal space that no one quite belongs to, complementing the essence of Vegas.

I am reminded of the way David Lynch utilizes performance and liminality in his works. Club Silencio in “Mulholland Drive” utilizes the aesthetics of spectacle as the characters enter a surreal breakdown of reality. In Lynch’s interiors, structures break down and lea to existential crisis, and Club Silencio is a theater that distorts temporal perception, creating a disruption in the narrative.³ Like this, the circus space is a breach of reality, trapping the viewers in a fleeting fantasy.

I’d like to think that these disruptions of time and place help dismantle the fabric of society and its divisions. The circus, according to Mihkail Bakhtin, originates in medieval times, taking on aspects of carnival folk culture and the culture of the “marketplace,” meaning that in it, hierarchies dissolve and the participants and observers become one in the same. The carnival is lived by the people, not merely seen, and it embraces everybody regardless of what their lives are outside of it.⁴ In the middle of a degraded city we become one in the same, all the businessmen and the strippers and the Jordan Belfort wannabes and the mole people. The grotesque body is degraded, brought down to earth, moved to the bottom half of the body with the belly and the reproductive organs—Vegas’s sexuality is both a cause of horror and liberation. Here we subject ourselves to what is impolite that frees us from societal conduct and expectation.

Bakhtin also says the grotesque body isn’t a closed circuit—it’s constantly flowing out of itself, gaping open and vulnerable to the outside world. The body is a representative of all people rather than a private form, becoming immeasurable and all-encompassing.⁵ Vegas reminds me of this: the way the monuments from different places and time periods flow into one another, the way people pass through the streets and hotels without belonging to any of them. Vegas is one big creature, and we are bacteria simply passing through it, reaching our grubby hands to feast on pieces of its open wound. When I realized this, bridging the profane nature of the city with its fleeting interactions, it became clearer to me why I was drawn into it. The magic of Vegas lies in its liminality and its transgression, the way it departs from compartmentalization and conceptualization. It is a degenerated life form itself.

When I think about Vegas now, I picture it as a freezing of time, a departure to a world where nothing makes sense and everything matters. The strip is ritualistic in the way that it enters a timeline of its own where every day is the same and nobody belongs to anything. The entire apparatus is one big, explicit performance. In this part of the desert we break away from what we think characterizes the human experience and become as transient as the space we occupy.

This was part of my final paper for a class on occultism in the arts this quarter (I hope it’s ok for me to post this lol). A couple of people wanted to read this after I mentioned it in a q&a last week. I hope it makes sense even without the context of the class.

1. Urban, Hugh B. “‘Magia Sexualis’: Sex, Secrecy, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 3 (2004): 698-711. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005912.

2. Parkinson, R.L., Hoh, L.G., Saxon, A., Coxe, A.D.H. “circus.” Encyclopedia Britannica, October 1, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/art/circus-theatrical-entertainment.

3. O’Connell, Mark Joseph. Liminal Lynchian Spaces: Colour, Interior & Fashion as Visual Narrative in the Oeuvre of David Lynch, 2025: 19-20. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14921002.

4. Bakhtin, Mikhail, and Helene Iswolsky. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, MN: Indiana University Press, 1984: 9-10.

5. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 26.