I haven't watched the video. Joke or not, the way it's been handled stinks. I'm detecting the stench of plain old rotten garbage. There are fishy overtones, but then, rotten garbage can have a fishy smell, but just be garbage. Tough to tell, here.
But it makes me wonder about the quality of work coming out of CERN. I'm trying to fight the picture in my mind of a bunch of adult children playing scientist games with very expensive toys, in an academic atmosphere akin to Animal House. Good work, scientific community.
Really I'm posting because I want to throw my two cents into the Crowley blood sacrifice discussion. What I get out of it is he's speaking purely symbolic metaphor here, and always. If you don't get it, you misunderstand him, and he's not going to explain it to you. 'Magick' is seeing through appearances to the substance, and acting with a firm grounding in that clear view. 'Blood sacrifice' is cutting down cherished wrong ideas.
The Rosy Cross stuff is both sex, and also interaction between the self and other. Also the continuous act of falling in love, like Rumi and his beloved. It depends on how you look at it. These are poetic concepts, they make 'sense' when looked at poetically.
Reading 'the formula of the rosy cross' as sex with someone you love is particularly insightful, I think. Throws a passage like this in a very different light:
"It is unwise for him to attempt it until he has received regular initiation in the true Order of the Rosy Cross, {97} and he must have taken the vows with the fullest comprehension and experience of their meaning. It is also extremely desirable that he should have attained an absolute degree of moral emancipation, and that purity of spirit which results from a perfect understanding both of the differences and harmonies of the planes upon the Tree of Life.
For this reason FRATER PERDURABO has never dared to use this formula in a fully ceremonial manner, save once only, on an occasion of tremendous import, when, indeed, it was not He that made the offering, but ONE in Him. For he perceived a grave defect in his moral character which he has been able to overcome on the intellectual plane, but not hitherto upon higher planes. Before the conclusion of writing this book he will have done so."
Here's some relevant material, I think. I googled 'Borges blood as symbol,' then clicked through to The Mythmaker: A study of the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, by Carter Wheelock at google books.
https://books.google.com/books?id=fmOsAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=borges+blood+as+symbol&source=bl&ots=3DsGpuIATW&sig=TM98yhyye0BVlJiINB0SgR9aaCA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjStoaJ_9LOAhWENSYKHQJeC2kQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=borges%20blood%20as%20symbol&f=falsePersonally, I apply this blood sacrifice thing to writing. The knife is the editing blade. Edit what I cling to as the 'good ideas.' The energy released is the substance beneath the ideas, which I incorporate into better writing. Because I'm growing, what I write now is always better than what I wrote last week. When I wear my editor hat, I have to be dispassionate, brutal.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.