#SpiritCooking

Submission 39,534

Part of a series on WikiLeaks. [View Related Entries]

About

#SpiritCooking is a Twitter hashtag referencing a leaked email hacked from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's account, in which he is invited to a "Spirit Cooking" dinner with performance artist Marina Abramović. After the email was leaked in early November 2016, many speculated that Podesta participated in an occult ritual that may have involved ingesting sperm and breast milk.

Origin

On November 3rd, 2016, Wikileaks^[4] released Part 28 in their series of leaked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chairman John Podesta. The leak contained an email from Podesta's brother Tony, who asked if he would be in New York City on July 9th, 2015 to attend a "Spirt Cooking" dinner hosted by Abramović (shown below).^[5]

Spread

On November 4th, the political news site We Are Change^[1] published an article titled "Spirit Cooking: The Most Disturbing Podesta Email," which highlighted a video in which Abramovic is seen painting a recipe for "spirit cooking" with "what appears to be thickly congealed blood" on several walls (shown below).

"Mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm, drink on earthquake nights. With a sharp knife, cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand. Eat the pain. Fresh morning urine sprinkle over nightmare dreams. Spin around until you lose consciousness, try to eat all the questions of the day."

Shortly after, the @Wikileaks^[3] Twitter account tweeted a link to the article, which gathered upwards of 9,000 retweets and 7,400 likes within 12 hours (shown below).

That day, the hashtag "#SpiritCooking"^[11] began trending worldwide on the social networking site, with many of the tweets accusing Podesta and the Clinton campaign of occultism (shown below).

Also on November 4th, Twitter user @leyawn^[2] posted a photoshopped email screenshot in which Abramović sends Podesta a pentagram symbol (shown below).

Meanwhile, a post titled "Spirit Cooking is the Nail in the Coffin" was submitted to the /pol/ (politically incorrect) board on 4chan,^[6] speculating that Clinton would lose support from Christian voters in the upcoming election due to the leaked email.

The same day, YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson uploaded a video titled "Hillary Tied to Bizarre Occult 'Spirit Cooking' Ritual" (shown below). That evening, Snopes^[12] published an article titled "Spirit Cooking," listing the rumor that Clinon and Podesta practice a "satanic ritual" as "False." In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the leaked email, including The Washington Times,^[7] InfoWars,^[8] CNET^[9] and Inquisitr.^[10]