The Occult Technology of the Rollercoaster
#thoosieposting
A machine must have a purpose.
Machines without a purpose can exist only in the kind of tension with their nature that renders them Art Objects instead.
Usually the purpose of a machine is evident: it will produce useful work cranking out cars to sell to commuters or it will propel itself along a railway track to move people from one place to another or it will turn fossil fuels into megawatts of power where it will be used by millions of smaller machines, transmitting faxes or washing clothes or using algorithms to mimic intelligence and to sing to us in the uncanny tones of the other than conscious.
A rollercoaster is different - it is a machine that is not defined by its usefulness. It is quintessentially useless. It produces no goods and facilitates no conversations. It propels a train along a track as though it were a mode of transportation but it returns its passengers to their point of departure with no interim stops. These huge, industrial scale machines cost fortunes to create - engineers spend months designing every inch of them and teams of workers spend many more months assembling them with cranes and bolts and cables. They are a vortex of creative activity - but they don’t really do anything.
Most machines are definable by the activity they were designed to replace. A teasmade is defined by its automation of the process of poorly making tea, a car by the obsolescence of the horse. The rollercoaster makes most sense as a machine designed to automate magickal ritual for the mass market. Like a cathedral or a stone circle, the rollercoaster is an occult technology. It packages sacred rites and makes them available to all for the price of a theme park admission.
The Wicker Man Rollercoaster at Alton Towers is located 13 miles from the great convergence of Ley Lines at Arbor Low Stone Circle near Stoke-On-Trent.
Rollercoasters are subject to multiple schemas of classification - be they kiddie, family, family thrill, extreme; or launch coasters, out-and-back, inverts, etc - but the most visceral of them is the number known as the ‘height requirement’. Every machine is built to safely handle guests above a certain height, a number which is then adjusted upwards by the theme park where the ride is housed to account for local convention and any thematic elements that make a ride scarier than the manufacturer might have accounted for. The precise details vary by country, but in the UK ‘extreme’ rollercoasters almost always have a height restriction of 1.4 metres. This is a height that children can be expected to reach somewhere between their 8th and 11th birthdays.
Unusually, The Wicker Man’s height restriction is only 1.2 metres. This marks it out as a ‘family’ coaster - designed, not for a younger audience as such, but for a wider one. It is a rollercoaster that invites children who are very likely to be too afraid to ride it.
This is understandable - it is an intimidating thing. The ‘kingdom’ level division of rollercoasters is between wooden and steel constructions and, while steel coasters with their smooth tracks and balletic possibilities for movement, inversion and variety are undoubtedly the dominant of the two - the rarer wooden coaster has its own particular appeal - they feel wilder, sound different - the whole structure creaks and flexes like something alive. The Wicker Man leans into its status as the park’s only Wooden coaster by exploring the nature of its own substrate.
Wood, after all, burns. It is of the earth. It is our first building material. We touch it to reconnect ourselves with reality and ward off misfortune. In particular, when we pile up a great mass of wood, it is usually so that we can burn it. Bonfires are a defining feature of english ritual - we can make a show of remembering some old catholic who tried to blow up the king, but - as the tinsel of Christmas is hung to disguise our fearful celebrations of the winter solstice - every trudger in a late night procession to the November firesites of England knows in their bones the dark old truth of their endeavour. We burn wood in defiance of the encroaching dark as an act of appeasement to the departing sun.
So the Wicker Man creates a stunning illusion of burning. Smoke billows from it and screens display flames to lick eternally at its wild and primitive-looking structure. At its centre a towering two-headed idol rises - the head of a man on one side, his wooden face straining as he gazes martyr-like and skyward, and, at his rear, the great, ferocious, horned head of a ram-like god. Because this is located in the North of England, the idol is called ‘Big Bob’.
The trains are pulled up an unusual lift hill with a kink in it that allows the vehicles to reach the necessary height while also providing a long, slow climb. They then enter a dark wooden tunnel before turning round and accelerating into the ride’s first drop. From then on the experience is one of intensely felt speed and the out-of-control pull of gravity as you take steep dives, crest sharp hills and pass three times through the burning torso of Big Bob himself. Prior to boarding, the lore behind the experience is explained by way of a film that is projection mapped onto a replica of the great Ram above. Riders are left in no doubt that the experience they have been ‘chosen’ for - the chance to ‘feed the flames’ - will involve their ritual sacrifice to the Wicker Man. It is spelled out explicitly: “To start that ritual”, the voice-over declares, “We must present Him with a gift - and that gift… is YOU”.
The speaker is one of the ‘Beornen’, a confected cult living in the woods outside the theme park cut off from the modern world who have developed their own language and customs of sun worship. They may or may not be a satirical nod to the local residents of nearby villages who consistently frustrate Merlin Entertainments’ planning applications. There is a meta level at work here.
All the same, for the rider the Wicker Man is an unambiguous narrative: this is a ritual and you are the subject of it.
Because it is a family coaster with a 1.2 metre height restriction, and because completing a circuit of the track does not, in fact, result in your immolation. This ritual is best understood as a symbolic sacrificial rite of passage. We feed children into this machine and it spits out teenagers.
The ride is designed to terrify. As the queue line seems to spiral ever closer to the heart of its darkness, the tension of innocence is ratcheted to breaking point - then that slow kinked ascent offers a new perspective on the site before the baptismal plunge carries your burden of fear and dumps it into the flames. It automates the shedding of innocence and the acquisition of experience. A sort of Blake-o-matic for the pre-teen soul. It has the capacity to sacrifice 952 riders per hour - but every rider, especially those riding for the first time, especially especially those riding for the first time who exist in that tremulous hinterland between 1.2 and 1.4 metres high, feels like they are the centre of the world, lambs become tygers, burning bright.
The best Theme Parks are always beloved. Disneyland is beloved. The Efteling - The Netherlands’ richly strange and beautiful park of Sprookjes (fairytales) and adventures is treasured by the country. Phantasialand near Köln is adored by enthusiasts for it’s sense of boutique excellence. Alton Towers, in common with most British theme parks, is often poorly run, charges insulting prices for bad food and has a tendency to leave things untended long past the point of ugliness and decay - but the sheer force of imagination behind its lore and its sense of place have made it the one truly beloved British park. Beyond Wicker Man, Alton Towers offers the demented 14 inversion tangle that is The Smiler, The black hole plunge of Oblivion and the secret witch-woods of Thi3teen.
Most significantly, with Britain’s defining 1.4m coaster - Nemesis - the park veers away from folk horror into the unspeakable realm of the cosmic - the fiery eye of the unearthed beast at the coaster’s heart very much ripped from the cathode rays of classic British sci-fi.
The lore of this psychic elder being with its powers to control the minds of locals and its refusal to be thwarted by the shadowy government organisation that built the twisted, inverted Bollinger & Mabillard track to contain it would not be out of place in episode six of a Nigel Kneale serial.
Nemesis is special. Part of the reason is that it is a masterpiece. Planning restrictions prevent the park from building above the treeline so Nemesis travels through canyons and pits that had to be blasted from the rock beneath. It is an inverted coaster (among the first in the world when it opened in 1994) which means that the riders’ feet dangle freely as the train is suspended from the track above. Ordinarily a ride like this would be front-loaded - the first drop would be steep and the first elements would be intense but the effect would trail off as potential energy dissipated and each continuing second was subject to diminishing returns. Nemesis somehow avoids this altogether, the drop begins almost gently, curving through the trees and then continuing to accelerate over an extended drop before flipping riders into a corkscrew and then down into a descending helix that just keeps going, keeps piling on pressure. People say the world goes grey. It manages to keep up the intensity as it rolls and banks and executes a beautiful vertical loop.
Recently, having been closed for over a year while the track was mostly replaced and the theming reimagined, the ride reopened. Partly as a result of YouTube the hallmarks of the ‘rollercoaster enthusiast’ as they (We) call themselves (ourselves) - or ‘thoosies’ as people sneeringly call them (us) on reddit (a term guaranteed to go the way of ‘Tory’ and ‘jesuit’ and become the accepted name for the thing it is insulting) - have become codified and explicit in the last decade; the vagueness of an interest has coalesced into an identity.
Nemesis’s reopening day became, therefore, something of a thoosiepalooza (lollapathooser? idk). I was there. My son (just barely 1.4m at the time of writing) and I waited four and a half hours in the queue to ride her. People pull faces when you tell them this - but the time passed like a dream, everyone was there to show a kind of devotional love to the returning machine. We admired her from every angle, talked about her endlessly, at least half of the queue made YouTube videos. When she broke briefly we willed on her resumption as a collective, and when trains ran around her track again we clapped. The queue passes under the first drop and as each trainful of riders passed overhead they made eye contact with those of us waiting and grinned while we applauded them, when we finally boarded it was a sacrament. This is Britain. The queuing is part of the ritual.
Nemesis is a horror story. Horror stories, like pop music and alcohol, are designed first and foremost to make sex possible. Horror stories let young men place their arms across the shoulders of young women. They let anyone else adopt these archetypes for their own use. They raise the adrenaline and increase the heart rate and let people re-enact the evolutionary pressures that form the material of attraction.
Courting has become dispiritingly textual in the social media era, but horror stories reseat us in our bodies - they are the realm of the bodily where bravery and submission and rescue and gallantry are available to break the barriers between potential lovers and permit them the liberties of romance. A rollercoaster like Nemesis condenses this whole fertility rite into two minutes of extreme heightened experience.
Rides like Icon and The Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, classic 1920s seaside coasters like the Coney island Cyclone or Margate’s Scenic Railway, icons like Busch Gardens’ Loch Ness Monster, Kingda Ka, Python at Efteling, Connecticut’s Boulder Dash, modern classics like the Velocicoaster or Taron (my favourite) or Steel Vengeance - they have all excelled over the years at providing fertility rites for teenagers and rites of passage for 8-11 year olds. People speak of them as they would of a pantheon. Fabled fearful names. There is one called Pantheon - it’s in the same park as the Loch Ness Monster in Williamsburg, Virginia. They are the gods of Youth, the sites of core memories to be incanted in trembling tones. Every one the site of countless hedge baptisms and the originating spark of countless future pregnancies.
These fearsome machines automate Campbell’s belly of the beast to turn novices into journeymen and maidens into mothers. They are chapels perilous built as attractions beside the Road of Trials and, in a sanitised age of safetyism and cocooned youth, they are more vital to our well-being than ever. We need to feel the fears they face us with.
Fear has been the defining emotion associated with rollercoasters for so long that it is fascinating now, as the artform matures, to see new rides open that dispense with it as the main draw and instead recognise the needs of the thoosie adept. This new breed of sacred technology still offers rites of passage and fertility but the focus is shifted to a third magickal process.
Just across the English channel, in the Belgian town of De Panne 40 minutes from Calais, in an unassuming theme park called, somewhat unfortunately, Plopsaland - a rollercoaster opened in 2021. Before then, few considered the park a destination to go out of one’s way for - it was charming, family focused, better kept than most British parks, not as good as German ones, a long way down the family wishlists that had Disneyland Paris at the top.
All of a sudden, however, on thoosie YouTube, people were saying that this new rollercoaster was something really special. Not everybody had it ranked as their favourite in the world - this is not a community that settles questions like that - but several high profile thoosie YouTube celebrities did and certainly, if asked, it was a respectable answer to give. The distinctly regional, mid-tier Plopsaland De Panne joined the ranks of Universal Orlando with its Velocicoaster, Cedar Point with Steel Vengeance and Busch Gardens with Iron Gwazi as the site of a genuinely world-class rollercoaster that every thoosie with a YouTube channel was required to have an opinion on.
The Rollercoaster was called The Ride To Happiness. It is a Mack Rides Xtreme Spinning Coaster - the second of its kind in the world. The trains are made up of four cars, each with four seats arranged as pairs placed back to back.
As the ride starts, you are very, very slowly turned upside down as the train executes a kind of barrel roll. You are left hanging with your upper body free to dangle (there is no unnecessary over the shoulder restraint - just a snugly fitting t-bar between the legs and across the lap) for several seconds. It is as though the engineers are telling you: “don’t worry, we have got this, pay attention and give yourself over to what’s about to happen, you’re not going to fall out: but things are about to get confusing”.
The train then levels out. Ahead - if you are facing forwards - the track abruptly turns 90 degrees skyward and then vanishes out of sight. There is a pause - a quiet moment of anticipation that is accentuated by the Hans Zimmer score played through speakers on either side of your head - and then the train is launched by an array of electromagnets at immense speed toward the vertical incline. At some point during the launch the magnets in the train car that were slowing the rate at which they rotated freely on the base connected to the track disengage and from this moment on you spin freely according to the interplay of gravity, momentum and the weight distribution of those you are sharing the car with.
The train rockets into the sky, it dips to the side, then plunges back down. It rolls, loops, swoops. Halfway through it loses a little bit of momentum but is caught at once by a second launch uphill that catapults it into another crest before spiraling down towards the park’s central lake. Freely spinning, you travel backwards, sideways, suddenly straight ahead - no two rides are the same. Finally you crest two rapid hills in succession, momentum leaving you weightlessly floating above your seat (a sensation thoosies call ‘airtime’ describing those moments when the force of gravity exerted on the body by a ride’s movement is neutralised or reversed) and then the journey is over.
It is not a journey from place to place - the destination is the same place that you departed from - it is not geographic - it is psychogeographic, a journey of mind. You leave having reached a kind of apotheosis, you land from magical flight imbued with the freedom to live.
For all that this sounds forbidding, the remarkable thing about the Ride to Happiness is how little it relies on fear to define itself. It is themed in collaboration with the lowlands dance music festival Tomorrowland and, accordingly, is bedecked in flowers, futurist deco stained glass, hippie steampunk cogs and transcendental new age imagery.
It defines a new era of rollercoaster maturity - echoed since by the opening if the wonderful Hyperia at Thorpe Park, a ride that has based it’se entire identity on the concept of the fearless leap of faith and immediately taken its place as the barely disputed best coaster in the UK.
A you wait to dispatch on The Ride To Happiness, a big face not dissimilar to the one that prefigures the Wicker man gazes down at the departing trains - but this deity says nothing of terror or danger or horror - instead she smiles beatifically and invites you to ‘live today, love tomorrow, unite forever!’. It is clear that this is not a rite of passage - or even fertility - this is advanced magick: a rite of attainment.
The effect of the dizzying, spinning, gracefully smooth and overwhelming track layout is to leave you completely detached from your orientation in space. Those who have experimented with meditation will recognise the concept of rapid induction - a shocking descent into the depths of a meditative trance. The initial slow roll, moment of stillness and then sudden launch is exactly like that: the setting is prepared, evil influence is warded, the position assumed and then: whoosh.
In fact, every sensation that a good rollercoaster provides echoes the vigorous practice or ritual magick: The application of extreme G-Force is as immediately physically exhausting as Crowley’s eroto-comatose lucidity. The mind is freed from its corporeal prison by a total disorientation that mimics the effects of the most potent hallucinogens. Inversion simulates the temporary disapplication of physical norms.
Airtime - the holy grail of rollercoaster design - allows the body to become weightless - allows the spirit to leave the realm of gravity: to leave the body and fly like an angel. The moments are fleeting, momentary - as are any mortal glimpses of divinity - but those precious seconds when the track dives away and the momentum of your upward travel leaves you freed from mortality, hovering above your seat, flying! - this is a glimpse of godhood available to all for one low price of admission. The hero who returns to the brake run having passed the tests of courage and wisdom is truly a master of both worlds - ready to know the nature of their own will and to enact it upon the earth.
There is a lot to dislike about the human race, but at least we see the value in building machines to do that.
Ugh, you just unlocked the childhood core memory of being <1.4m until I was 13. My dad and older brother loved trips to Thorpe Park.
Wow. I feel seen. Somehow you've put into words what I have only felt. Guess I need to plan a trip to ride these European coasters!