Downard's pamphlet 'King-Kill/33' (1978; Hoffman edition 1987) is the genre's founding document: the killing of the 'King' near the 33rd parallel, in a plaza Downard mapped onto a trinity of underworld sites, as an alchemical rite for mass mind control. The historical critique is documented: the parallels are selective, the numerology retrofitted, and the evidence for the assassination itself, the Warren Commission record and its critics, concerns ballistics and intelligence failures, not liturgy.
The modern genre, typified by large Instagram and YouTube accounts, applies the frame to concerts, eclipses, and halftime shows: crowds as congregations, symbols as invocations. Academically this is a conspiracy hermeneutic; anthropologically it mimics Frazer's sympathetic magic, resemblance equals causation, the very move The Cambridge Ritualists diagnosed in myth.
The claim inverted is almost mundane: mass events are rituals, in the sociological sense, synchronized emotion, costume, sacrifice of attention. Durkheim documented collective effervescence (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912) as what crowds do. The conspiracy frame adds only one ingredient: a hidden priesthood that knows it.
If a shooting can be a sacrament, what evidence could ever show an event was only a shooting?