The Solar Seminar

"NEBET-HET GISH": An X-FILES X-EGESIS

2010-08-09T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here's the piece that started it all. The Secret Sun, Our Gods Wear Spandex, the upcoming book- none of it would exist without this X-Egesis, which I did in 2004. I'd been meaning to revise it but realized that if I tried it would never get back up (I also want it back up as a primer for my upcoming I Want to Believe blowout) It's a very naive piece in many ways and betrays a limited concept of this kind of symbolism and what it ultimately means. But it inspired me to write my sci-fi film manuscript, which got me the deal for Spandex, which led to the Complete X-Files gig. Funny how those things work out.

So I'm reposting this primarily as a historical document, though there's a wealth of symbolistic booty to be found. I'd recommend that neophytes refer to the X-Files and Alien Dreaming posts on The Secret Sun to go deeper into what I think this is all about (and no, it has nothing to do with any of the nonsense you might come across written by fear-mongering hucksters).

The usual caveats apply- this is an interpretive work and doesn't necessarily reflect on the intentions of the writers and producers of The X-Files. But my gut tells me that the point of it is a comment on some kind of eternal return- that the stories of the Egyptian gods are the stories of the ancient alien engineers, and that the myths of our genesis are replaying themselves in the context of the apocalyptic scenario of the late-period X-Files Mytharc. I could be right, I could be wrong but one thing is certain - we'll never know for sure.

In its seventh season, The X-Files transformed from a show about a conspiracy (ending with "One Son") to a show about a very specific mythology. The writers and producers of The X-Files ingeniously recast the show, starting with "Biogenesis" to retell one of the most ancient and influential myths in history- one that also informs films like The Lion King, the Matrix films, the Star Wars series, and many would convincingly argue, the New Testament of the Bible. In "Biogenesis", Fox Mulder reaches his apotheosis and becomes an alien or a "god." And from the seventh season of the show into the ninth, the mystery play unfolded.

GODHOOD
The central myth of Ancient Egypt, particularly the later kingdoms and in the Ptolemaic Age was that of Osiris and Isis. Here is the short version- Osiris ("Strength of the Eye") and Isis ("Throne") were brother and sister and husband and wife. Osiris was the ruler of Egypt and Isis was his queen. Isis' sister was Nephthys ("Mistress of the House"), who married to yet another sibling, the evil Set ("Pillar"). The dominions these gods ruled over changed over the years, and indeed, changed after the telling of this story.

THE SEDUCTION
In her quest to bear a child (either Set was sterile or Nephthys was infertile, depending on the version of the myth), Nephthys, disguised herself as Isis and seduced a drunken Osiris. Their union bore a son, Anubis ("Young Dog"), the dog-headed god of the dead and embalming.

THE FIRST ABDUCTION AND MURDER
Set learned of this and hatched a plan to kill Osiris and take his throne. He built a magnificent coffin fit just for Osiris and with the aid of a multitude of conspirators (72 in the story), offered the coffin to anyone whom it fit. Osiris was tricked, entered the coffin, where it was sealed and cast into the Nile. Alone, Isis searched the known world for the coffin and she finally found it lodged in a tamarisk tree somewhere in modern day Lebanon.

THE SECOND ABDUCTION/MURDER
Isis freed Osiris from the coffin and had him brought to life by Thoth ("Balance," god of wisdom and the gods' scribe), but Set found out and had Osiris hacked to pieces. He scattered the body parts.

THE SEARCH
Isis, aided by Anubis, the dog-headed god and Nephthys (who had left Set because of his cruelty) searched the world for Osiris' dismembered body. All the pieces were found except his penis, which was eaten by a crab. Thoth and Anubis restored his body and Osiris was magically revived by Isis.

THE MAGICAL INSEMINATION
Isis then fashioned a penis out of either earth or wood (depending on the story), descended over him in the form of a kite and impregnated herself. Osiris then descended in the Underworld, where he became Lord of the Dead, a title formerly held by Anubis. The fruit of Osiris and Isis' magical union was Horus, ("the Avenger").

He was a magical child raised by Isis and Nephthys in the wilderness, and in some stories also by a grandmotherly version of Hathor (Hathor was an incarnation of the goddess, most often intertwined with Isis, but married to Horus. Her name comes from the Egyptian Het-Hert, "House of Horus." It is believed by many scholars that Hathor was a precursor of Isis and was recast to be Horus' wife as Asian influences changed the Egyptian religion. The Holy Trinity- Osiris - Lord of the Dead, Isis- Heavenly Mother and Horus- Pharaoh of Pharaohs is believed to have been imported into Egypt by Asiatic invaders from Mesopotamia.)

HORUS ENDANGERED AS A INFANT
Horus faced many dangers as an infant, as a wrathful Set sent scorpions and other beasts to kill him. The magic of Thoth and Isis revived the child. Horus later grew up to challenge and defeat the evil Set, whose rule had brought Egypt to ruin. After a long series of 'contendings', Horus defeats Seth, restores the throne of Osiris and banishes Set to the Libyan desert.

OK, there's the original story. An obsessive X-Phile would probably hear bells and whistles going off while that tale was told. For the retelling of this ancient story, let me first introduce our cast...

Fox Mulder will be playing the part of Osiris
Dana Scully will be playing the part of Isis
CGB Spender, Alien Bounty Hunter, Jeffrey Spender and Alex Krycek, and DD Kersh will all be playing the part of Set
John Doggett will be playing the part of Anubis
Diana Fowley and most importantly, Monica Reyes will be playing the part of Nephthys
Walter Skinner will be playing the part of Thoth
and appearing for the first time as Horus is William Scully-Mulder

The chronology and some of the details will be shuffled a bit, but let's walk through the Osiris story and it's retelling in The X-Files . Germane details will be added.

GODHOOD
By exposure to the divine ship in "The Sixth Extinction", Mulder becomes fully alien and Scully's fertility is restored and her possible immortality (prophesied in "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose") is granted. In this story arc, they become Osiris and Isis. Mulder is of otherworldly biology, and in the context of the show's eschatology, he is a god.

DR. BARNES: You're wrong. There is no God. What's out there on the water... is only what we call "God"... What we call "creation"-- the spark that ignited the fire that cooked the old primordial soup... made animate from inanimate... made us.

AMINA NGEBE: I believe he is mad from the sun.
DR. BARNES: Mad? I'm perfectly sane... because today I understand everything, beginning and end, alpha and omega, everything in between. It's all been written. But the word is "extraterrestrial."
SCULLY: You're sick, Dr. Barnes. You need to get off your feet, lie down.
DR. BARNES: You think you're going to take the credit? This is my discovery.
SCULLY: I'm only here to help my friend.
DR. BARNES: You can't help him. You're wasting your time reading it.
SCULLY: It has power.
DR. BARNES: It IS power... the ultimate power. Your friend just got too close.

Shape of craft is clearly an inverted Eye in Pyramid

THE SEDUCTION

Again in "The Sixth Extinction'', Osiris' tryst with Nephthys is foreshadowed as Mulder is in bed and is being nursed by Diana Fowley. Almost extraneously in the context of the exoteric narrative, Fowley is pictured about to seduce Mulder sexually while he, like Osiris, is not at his full capacity.

Diana Fowley's identity as Nephthys is again cleverly depicted. Just as Nephthys seduces Osiris while he was drunk, Diana goes to seduce Mulder as he is intoxicated by the alien radiation. Nephthys' name ("mistress of the house") is depicted as Diana stands in front of a picture of a house while talking to CGB Spender-Set and then undressing. Her status as a "mistress", that is adultress, is illustrated by the presence of Scully-Isis in the scene.

THE FIRST ABDUCTION AND 'MURDER'

Just as Set sought to usurp Osiris' power, so does CGB seek
after Mulder's "godhood"- his alien physiology

In a first cycle of the story, Mulder is abducted following his tryst with Diana-Nephthys by Cancerman-Set (symbolized by his father/brother CGB- the brother connection made through Jeffrey Spender-Chris Owens played both) and "dies"-the Christ imagery drawing a clear parallel to the similarities in the Christ/Osiris myths.

In the "Sixth Extinction: Amor Fati'', Diana-Nephthys helps Scully-Isis find him and "revive" him, though she discovers Mulder-Osiris on her own as in the ancient myth.

ABOVE: Scully enters, a solar eclipse behind her, another foreshadowing of the coming Horus. Mulder is bound and imprisoned and Scully frees him.

As a revived Mulder-Osiris embraces Scully-Isis, the final sequence of the Sixth Extinction story prophesies William/ Horus, unmistakably signified by the Eye of Horus pyramid.

William/Horus proclaims his identity by emerging from the Sun and wearing it as his crown.

THE MAGICAL INSEMINATION

Shuffling the order a bit: In "all things", Scully is inseminated by a post-apotheosis/CGB-abduction Mulder in the opening "teaser". Isis' insemination by Osiris using the artificial penis is neatly mirrored in the visual metaphor of Mulder's faucet. Scully's insemination by Mulder (pictured sleeping or "dead") is signaled by the faucet.

In Scully's vision in the Buddhist temple, an image of Mulder morphs into Scully's dying former lover. The clear implication is that Scully's relationship with this man was a torrid sexual affair, and the opening and closing scenes of Mulder and Scully's intimacy in this episode act to further the sexual innuendo and therefore the connection to the Isis/Osiris mythos.

Scully's lover's death (and revival by Scully-Isis) is another reminder of the death of Osiris and he is linked visually to the dead and resurrected Mulder in a scene in a temple.

THE SECOND ABDUCTION/MURDER

Details from Osiris' first abduction/murder are alluded to in this second story, but the story retains the same curvature of meaning.

The action takes place in the episode Requiem.

During a case returning Scully and Mulder to the site of their first case together, Mulder is lured into the alien ship by the assembled multitude of abductees, and is soon confronted by Set, here in the form of the Alien Bounty Hunter.

The '72 Conspirators' of the myth is cleverly alluded to by the episode number- 7.22. Even the title of the episode "Requiem" ("to search again" in the original Latin) fits the narrative perfectly. Notice the "pillar" of light, referring to Set.

"Having first assured himself of 72 accomplices, he invited his brother to a banquet. A marvelously fashioned coffer was brought in. This chest, would belong to whomsoever it fitted exactly. Osiris lay down in the coffer and the conspirators closed the lid and nailed it firmly down. They threw it into the Nile, whence it was carried to the sea and across to Byblos, south of nowadays Lebanon. "

SCULLY: There was something out there in that field. It knocked me back. Because it didn't want me. Mulder thinks that it's me that's in danger of being taken.
FROHIKE: When it's Mulder who's in danger. ----"Requiem"

The scenario of the crashed ship "fits" Mulder's quest exactly.

• Mulder is further enticed by the assembled abductees but the trap is sprung and the Set character appears.

• Instead of being carried into the Nile, he is carried into it's celestial counterpart, the Milky Way of a rural night sky.

• In what is likely a homage/clue, the idea of Set laying an invisible perimeter in the forest was used in Doctor Who and the Pyramids on Mars in 1975.

Again, this more serious abduction/murder scenario borrows from both the first and the second scenario of the Osiris story.

• Just as Set constructs a coffin just for Osiris, the ship constructs a force-field that repels everyone else but Mulder.

• Just as Osiris imprisoned in his casket is washed into the sea in the first murder, Mulder imprisoned in the alien ship is flown out into space.

• Just as Osiris was cut into pieces by Set in the second murder, so is Mulder cut and mutilated by the alien stand-ins for Set.

THE SECOND SEARCH

Isis and Anubis, meet Scully and Doggett

"This time she had helpers, for Nephthys left her wicked husband Set and came to join her sister. And Anubis, the son of Osiris and Nephthys, taking the form of a jackal, assisted in the search. "

This time, Scully doesn't search for Mulder alone. In the episode "Within", the entire FBI is also searching for him, but their search reminds one more of Set's 72 accomplices. Scully/Isis already has her Thoth in Walter Skinner. Skinner is the administrator that handles the X Files, signifying his role as Thoth, scribe of the gods. (note pens)

In "Within", following the second murder and the search for the mutilated Mulder-Osiris, she gets an Anubis. At their first meeting, Scully splashes a cup of water given to her by Doggett in his face.

Isis-Scully splashing water into Anubis-Doggett's face is a reference to two apocryphal legends of Anubis. First is that the god was Anubis was baptized as a Christian and became identified with St. Christopher by Coptic (Egyptian) Christians.

Second is that Anubis himself was a baptizer and baptized Horus. This "baptism" also brings to mind the similarity between the name of Isis and Jesus' Greek name "Iesous", a fact that caused early Christians considerable grief.

Replacing CGB Spender and the Alien Bounty Hunter is Deputy Director Alvin Kersh, who does all he can to hamper Mulder-Osiris' recovery. Kersh's identity as the new Set ("pillar") is clearly depicted in the small pillars placed behind his desk. The alien bounty hunter also makes an appearance as Set, impersonating Mulder-Osiris at the episode's conclusion.

And in the opening credits, Mulder's identity as Osiris ("Strength of the Eye") is visually indicated as he falls into the X Files eye.

THE SECOND DEATH

In "This is Not Happening", one of the most crucial episodes in the new mythology, the agents/gods search for UFO sightings across a number of places in the country, symbolizing the search for the scattered body parts of Osiris.

A new Nephthys is introduced- Monica Reyes/Nephthys' identity as Set's wife is signaled by her pack of Morley's in "This is Not Happening." This symbolically 'weds' her to the first incarnation of Set- CGB Spender, the Cigarette Smoking Man.

An incredibly clever bit of occult cryptography was used in casting Annabeth Gish as Monica Reyes. First of all, the character's name recalls Monica Lewinsky's role as Nephthys in the Osirian farce known as the Clinton impeachment. ("what the meaning of Is is", indeed!)
Secondly, Nephthys' Egyptian name was Nebet Het. There is an immediate homonymic similarity between Annabeth and Nebet-Het, but it goes deeper. 'Annabeth' is encoded into 'Nebet Het'.

Nebet Het- N-e-bet- Het
N- E- BETH- et = 'Ehn'- 'Eh'- BETH = Annabeth

At the conclusion of "This is Not Happening," Mulder-Osiris' body is found at the compound of the good alien cultists, and Jesus again makes a cameo in the form of faith-healing alien, Jeremiah Smith. Smith is taken by the evil aliens, echoing Jesus's ascension into heaven, and also the death of a character in the Isian drama. Here is the historic parallel:

"Set and his companions took the chest which held the body of Osiris and cast it into the Nile; and Hapi the Nile-god carried it out into the Great Green Sea where it was tossed for many days until it came to the shore of Phoenicia near the city of Byblos. Here the waves cast it into a tamarisk tree that grew on the shore; and the tree shot out branches and grew leaves and flowers to make a fit resting place for the body of the good god Osiris and very soon that tree became famous throughout the land."

LEFT: Scully (as Isis), Doggett (as Anubis) and Reyes (as Nephthys) search for Mulder, whose body is finally found underneath a tree in a far-off land. Again, the details are juggled from the first story, but the essential story is the same.

RIGHT: Realizing that Mulder is dead and Smith has ascended, Scully-Isis let's loose a blood-curdling scream, "THIS IS NOT HAPPENING!!! NOOOOOO!"Again, back to the myth-"When the chest which had become the coffin of Osiris was given to her, Isis flung herself down on it with so terrible a cry of sorrow that little Dictys* died at the very sound." Plutarch - Isis and Osiris

* Dictys--Fisherman or shepherd of Seriphos. Dictys gave shelter to Perseus and his mother Danae when the tide washed them up on his island. 'Fisherman' and 'Shepherd' are both terms for Christ, symbolizing that the Christ-like Jeremiah Smith, who was taken by the aliens at the time of Mulder's death (presumably to be killed himself), plays the part of Dictys from Plutarch's story.

ABOVE: Just as Nephthys, Anubis and Isis find the body of Osiris, so do Monica, Doggett and Scully find Mulder's body

RESURRECTION

"Yet Isis would not despair. She implored the help of her sister Nephthys, kind Nephthys, to guide her and help her find the pieces of Osiris. Long did they search, bringing each piece to Thoth that he might work magic upon it. When all the pieces were together, Thoth went to Anubis, lord of the dead. Anubis sewed the pieces back together, washed the entrails of Osiris, embalmed him wrapped him in linen, and cast the Ritual of Life. When Osiris' mouth was opened, his spirit reentered him and he lived again."- The Legend of Osiris

In "DeadAlive", Billy Miles is found to be alive when his mouth moves, paralleling the ritual of the opening of the mouth. On this information, Skinner (Thoth) recruits Doggett (Anubis) to have Mulder exhumed.

DOGGETT: I'll say it again. We're opening up more than a grave here.
SKINNER: I respect that, Agent Doggett, but under the circumstances I think not digging it up would be far more regrettable, don't you?
DOGGETT: No. I think this is insanity.
SKINNER: Yeah, well, personally, I couldn't live with the doubt.
DOGGETT: That what? That we buried a man alive? We found Mulder, you and me together. We saw the same body. Mulder wasn't just dead, he'd been dead for days. Had to have a closed casket. For crying out loud, the body was too far gone and that was three months ago.

SCULLY-ISIS IMPLORES SKINNER-THOTH FOR MAGICAL RESSURECTION POWERS

"She then went to Thoth, wise Thoth, who knows all secrets, and implored his help. She asked him for magic that could bring Osiris back to life. Thoth, lord of knowledge, who brought himself into being by speaking his name, searched through his magic. He knew that Osiris' spirit had departed his body and was lost. To restore Osiris, Thoth had to remake him so that his spirit would recognize him and rejoin. Thoth and Isis together created the Ritual of Life, that which allows us to live forever when we die."

from "DeadAlive":

SKINNER: What are the chances this could be due to an alien influence? Could it be a virus?
SCULLY: Why are you asking me this? Sir, if you know something... look, we-we're working against the clock here. This, this could happen to Mulder. And until we know what it is we have to do everything to control it.
SKINNER: There may be a vaccine.
SCULLY: Where?
SKINNER: It doesn't come without a price.
SCULLY: This is about saving a man's life.

Skinner was referring to an alien antidote offered by Set-Krycek, who demands that William-Horus be aborted in exchange for his help.

As Mulder lay in a death-like state, Skinner-Thoth and Doggett-Anubis fumble with the details, but ultimately set the stage for Mulder's resurrection by failing to administer Krycek/Set's antidote.

In the end, just as in the myth, Mulder is resurrected by Isis-Scully's magic. She has already impregnated herself with Mulder-Osiris child after the first abduction, again reversing the chronology.

BIRTH OF HORUS/WILLIAM

"Isis managed to escape and was forced to hide in the swamp of the Delta, for she was carrying a child, Horus, destined to grow up and defeat Set; thus avenging his father's death. As an infant, Horus was watched over by various gods and marsh-nymphs in a place in the swamp called Chemmis. Among these was Nephthys, the sister and wife of Set-as she had left her husband due to his cruelty."

http://www.touregypt.net/DeltaCy.htm

William/Horus is born in the episode "Existence" in circumstances echoing the Egyptian myth.

LEFT/MIDDLE: Just as Isis and Nephthys flee to the marsh so Horus may be born, so do Scully and Nephthys flee to the ghost town so William may be born. It is John Doggett's birthplace, linking to Nephthys' own maternity and signifying Anubis' role as Isis' protector.

RIGHT: In some versions of the myth, Horus' birth is attended by a host of other gods. In "Existence", William's birth is attended by the alien replicants.

Again conflating the Osirian myth with the Jesus stories, The Lone Gunmen appear as the Magi, bringing gifts to the world's savior. Horus was also known as the savior in Egyptian religion.

"Yet nothing that has died, not even a god, may dwell in the land of the living. Osiris went to Duat, the abode of the dead. Anubis yielded the throne to him and he became the lord of the dead. There he stands in judgment over the souls of the dead. He commends the just to the Blessed Land, but the wicked he condemns to be devoured by Ammit."

So here Osiris leaves the world of the living. Soon after Horus-William's birth, Mulder goes "underground", paralleling Osiris' descent into the Underworld. The last we see of him in this cycle, it's as a silhouette in a shower. This harkens back to the fact that Osiris was identified with moving water.

As if the creators wanted there to be absolutely zero doubt as to William's identity as Horus, the preceeding image was followed by this one, in the episode "Nothing Important Happened Today."

In ancient Egyptian symbolism, the obelisk and the reflecting pool were symbols of Osiris impregnating Isis. The rising sun on the horizon is a symbol of Horus, "horizon" taking it's root word from Horus.

In the same episode, William is seen turning the star mobile over his crib, a symbolicreference to Horus being "Lord of the Sky."

HORUS ENDANGERED AS AN INFANT

In fear of Set, Isis raised Horus in seclusion. The boy was bitten by beasts, stung by a scorpion, and suffered intense pains throughout his childhood, and only his mother's witchcraft managed to save him.- Cliff Notes on Mythtology

"Isis took refuge in the swamps and there gave birth to Horus. But she had no means to support herself and the child, and was therefore forced to go out begging. One day, when she had been out all day, leaving the baby Horus hidden in the reeds. Set, who was unable to enter the marshes in his real form, had taken the form of a poisonous snake and had crept up on Horus and bitten him. She came back to find him writhing about and half dead. Isis was in despair, seemingly alone in the world: her father, her mother and her elder brother (Osiris) were dead."-Plutarch

In "Provenance", Set appears in a new guise. The "beasts" he sends to kill William/Horus are represented in this episode by rogue FBI agent Robert Comer, who tries to kill the infant to prevent him from reaching his inheritance as the alien Messsiah king, just as Set tries to prevent Horus from ascending to his father's throne.

In the story, Scully is out rking with Reyes and Doggett trying to decipher documents concerning a new "Eye of Horus" spaceship found in Canada, and William is attacked by Comer. The parallel is clear, deprived of her "queenship" (signified by Mulder's absence)

William's identity as Horus the Sun is indicated here when Scully screams at her assassin that William is "her son," a fact obviously not in dispute.

However, this strange outburst is merely a set up for our next look at Comer's face, on the front page of the SUN. This is a way of using audio-visual juxtaposition to show that William is her "sun" as well as her "son."Notice how bundle of paper's above the Sun have the ON, seperated from OPIONI.

ON is yet another epithet for Osiris, father of the Sun.

In the sequel to Provenance, "Providence'' (episode 9ABX11), Set makes his new appearance as an inept, death-obssesed, Christian cultist named Zeke Josepho who, after getting all his men killed in Iraq, encounters the evil supersoldiers in the desert and mistakes them for angels. His opening monologue contains a Biblical verse, 'Behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, and a brightness was about it.'"

The desert setting where we Josepho is transformed signifies him as Set, since the desert was the domain of Set. The "whirlwind" reference reinforces the point since Set's Greek name "Typhon" is the root word of "Typhoon" a Pacific hurricane or whirlwind. He has discovered an Eye of Horus ship and wants to kidnap William and raise him as the king of the evil supersoldiers. This represents, again, Set's usurpation of Osiris' throne.

Again in Providence, Josepho-Set later meets Sculy-Isis and again demands the death of Mulder-Osiris. However, the Eye of Horus ship is activated when William is brought to it, incinerating all the Christian cultists and their "house" and Scully-Isis and Reyes-Nepthys recover William.

This is an echo of Isis and Nepthys finding Osiris and reviving him. It also foreshadows Horus' later triumph over Set in their "Contendings." In those stories, Horus is at one point brought into Set's house as well. Josepho confirms Mulder's identity as Osiris when he says to Scully: "Bring me the head of Fox Mulder" This of course is a reference to John the Baptist, identified with Osiris by secret societies.

HORUS ENDANGERED, CONT.

The X-Files' impending cancellation in it's ninth season led to some plot strands being tied up quickly. Because the mythology would be too cumbersome for stand-alone feature film, William/Horus had one last storyline, "William", where he is adopted by a family in Wyoming. His identity is driven home in the opening scene. His adoptive family has a Wyoming state flag flying in its front yard, which features a buffalo...

This symbol is a stand in for the Apis bull, a syncretic stand-in god for Osiris, created when the conquering Greeks adopted the Egyptian religion.

In what could warrant its own exegesis, the Wyoming flag incorporates Osirian symbolism quite strongly. There is the Apis bull, the sun disk of the state seal (note sun disk on Apis' head) and an uncanny echo of Isis and Horus (the eagle) in the center of the seal.

In a flash back, Set appears as Jeffrey Spender, brother to Mulder-Osiris and played by Chris Owens, who also played the original Set, CGB Spender in a flashback episode. He is disguising himself and wears prosthetics.He is seen assaulting William-Horus with a syringe containing something Scully-Isis, Reyes-Nepthys and Dogget-Anubis suspect is poison. The syrum turns out-quite unsatisfyingly- to neutralize William's alien godhood powers. But the symbolism is unmistakeable:

"As an infant, Horus was watched over by various gods and marsh-nymphs in a place in the swamp called Chemmis. Among these was Nephthys, the sister and wife of Set-as she had left her husband due to his cruelty. Snakes were his biggest source of danger, as they were Set in disguise. At one point, Horus was bitten and poisoned. He was saved by the gods because the power of the "high god" could protect him from Set and his followers. It is interesting to note here that this power was said not to extend over natural hazards. Thus, if it had been simply a poisonous snake bite, Horus may have died, but because it was Set’s evil in disguise, the gods were able to cure Horus."

In the conclusion of the story, William is happily ensconced in his new adopted home. Perhaps one day the story will continue in another form.

Comment on the X-Egesis back at The Secret Sun!

"Show Me the Magic": Pop Culture and Occulture

2010-04-02T19:30:00.000-07:00

What is creativity? Where do ideas come from? What separates good art from great art? What makes art magical and how can we tell the difference, given how little we understand about consciousness, never mind creativity? Why is so much great - and magical art - so obscure and inaccessible? What is the difference between a child's dream, a shaman's vision and a great storyteller's work?

This is the core of so much of my work- how art can take those ineffable, transitory experiences from the other side and bring them into this world to be shared and stored.

I spent a lot of time trapped inside my head when I was young- vivid dreams, feverish hallucinations, a whole litany of enhancements- and comics were always close at hand. That led me to pursue image making and storytelling as a career, and certainly led to my writing and blogging.

This piece is a edited version of an article I wrote for a long-lost comics fanzine and played a major role in the development of Our Gods Wear Spandex. I'd go so far as to say this was its starting point. Some of the references are a bit dated and the writing is a bit strident, but it still speaks to what I've been chasing all of these years and continue to do on these blogs, as longtime readers will certainly recognize.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Alan Moore lately. Not least because I recently received the gala Alan Moore issue of CBA-- also because there is a veritable deluge of material out there dedicated to the Bard from Northamptonshire, released in anticipation of his “retirement” from comics. I first became familiar with Mr. Moore 20 years ago, since I was one of the 34 or so souls who was a regular reader of Saga of the Swamp Thing. Alan replaced Marty Pasko and, of course, took the title on a rocket ride into the ether. I was along for the ride for a couple years, eventually losing interest around the time of the menstruating werewolves story.

I kept hearing about the Watchmen series, but since I was spending my time--- morning noon and night--- reading and re-reading Frank Miller’s Batman, Daredevil and Elektra work, the book didn’t make much of an impression on me. The missus liked it and I picked up the series for her, and read them when she was done. But in comparison to the zeigeist-seizing work of Frank Miller, it was weak tea to my palette. I had no involvement with fandom at that time, and wouldn’t until I went online in the early 90’s. The next work from Mr. Moore to catch my eye was of course The Killing Joke, a book deserving its classic status (more about that book later). But after that both Moore and I seemed to drift away from the Comics mainstream, and I didn’t catch up with him until much later.

I’ll lay out my prejudice on the table-- I lean much more heavily towards the gut-bruising emotionalism of Miller’s 80’s work than towards the dry, intellectual nihilism of Moore’s work from the same time. I’m not a terribly intellectual character, and my left brain is surely vestigial at this point. But the searing power of “Swamped” and “Another Green World” was tattooed into my memory, even if their followups were so less important to me. It wasn’t until the dawn of America’s Best Comics that I truly fell under Mr. Moore’s spell. Tom Strong, Promethea and Tomorrow Stories hit the spot for me. The nihilism and preachiness of Moore’s 80’s work was joyfully absent and in their place was fun, humor, wonder and joy, qualities that were altogether absent in 1990’s comics.

My favorite title was Promethea, since that was the book where Moore seemed most likely to take the gloves off and really bring the reader on a trip somewhere else. He did both those things, but where he took us was to a multi-issue meditation on the Tarot and the Kabbalah, which I found to be as entertaining as a marathon teach-in at a Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn summer camp. Promethea was no longer a comic, it was a lecture. Promethea was reduced from a fascinating spin on Wonder Woman to a wide-eyed naif lost in Crowley Land. As Moore’s energies focused on this journey, the other ABC titles lost steam and now we are nearing the end of the line.

Now, this is not to bash Mr. Moore, a man whom I have tremendous admiration for. But as brilliant a technician and craftsmen as he is, he is a human being just like you or I. And like you or I, he feels the need the follow his passions wherever they may take him. And where they are taking him is out of comics. Mr. Moore feels that “magick” is far more important and meaningful to him than comics.

Although Mr. Moore would have us believe he woke up one morning a few years back and decided to become a magician, I believe this process was a long time in coming. Certainly there were hints of it in Swamp Thing. But the title of his most famous Batman graphic novel shows just how early on this process began to manifest it self. I don’t think he called that book the "Killing Joke" on a whim. I think it demonstrated a powerful influence on his personal evolution.

Killing Joke is the name of a British post-punk band who emerged onto the scene in 1980. Led by Jaz Coleman, classical composer and serious lunatic, Killing Joke were one of the bands who picked up where Led Zeppelin left off, bringing Anglo-Celtic mysticism and Crowleyean Occultism into their music. Killing Joke’s music and philosophy was far more dark and brutal than the Mighty Zep’s ever was, however. Killing Joke also can be blamed for pretty much the last 15 years of revisionist metal (eg., stripping out the guitar solos and operatic vocals and concentrating on a bludgeoning backbeat and perussive guitar riffs). Coleman brought a lot of Crowleyite flibbity-floo into his lyrics, but that wasn’t what makes Killing Joke’s music magical.

And there may be a lesson here for comics fans and creators.

What makes Killing Joke's music so distinctive from its countless army of imitators is the guitar playing of one Gregory Walker, aka Geordie. If the some band of religious fundamentalists ever did take power here, Killing Joke is the only band in the world whose records would be burned for the guitar playing alone. Playing insane, jazz-derived chords on a detuned guitar through an wall of electronic effects, Geordie’s guitar speaks to you in terrible ways. His guitar leaves you with the same feeling a good Lovecraft story does: profoundly disturbed, but somehow energized and hungry for more.

A master of minimalism, he can say more with a fragment of a chord than most guitarists will ever say with their endless 64th note solos. Sort of the same way Mike Mignola can say more with a handful of lines and a chunk of black than most artists will ever say with all their dazzling detail. In fact, Geordie’s guitar playing is pretty much the musical equivalent of Mignola’s drawing.

Now there is a lot of loose talk about magic about these days. We’ve seen the popularity of films like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, as well as shows like Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Magic is a wonderful dramatic device, and entertainments with magical themes can not only be wonderfully entertaining, but instructive and wish-fulfilling as well. Traditional religionists are horrified with all this, and with no small degree of justification. Interest in magic and the Occult usurps the monopoly of religion on supernatural experience, and democratizes paranormal in a very Promethean sense. After 2000 years of the unchallenged supremacy of the Abrahamic religions in the Western World, we are seeing what may well be a return to the natural order- a polyglot of mutating beliefs and practices that overlap and often, clash.

Now this is all very -to use another word I despise - empowering. For feminists and gay folk, the goddess-centered Wicca religion helps to celebrate the Sacred Feminine archetype so degraded and repressed by Middle Eastern monotheism. For young, insecure kids, a belief that they might have latent magical powers can help them negotiate the horrors of adolescence. And whole new communities are forming on the Internet centered around philosophies and gods the World had hitherto forgotten. But Magic....magic.

Hmmm.

Magic is humanity’s perpetual problem child. It is something we all wish to experience, but something that is at the same time so elusive, and often-- disappointing. We all have experienced moments of some strange kind of grace, where out perceptions or our physical limitations themselves are momentarily taken out of everyday reality and into a place or state where dreams come true, wishes are granted, laws of physics are broken, and we get a peak under the dress of big 'R' Reality. And although we cloak this concept in Sci-Fi drag more often than not, it is exactly the longing for these moments that all Superhero comics are based upon.

Now magic exists, we all know it. We just call it by different names. Christians call the kind they like the work of the Holy Spirit, and the kind they don’t like the work of the Devil. Jews and Muslims have slightly different terminology, but its roughly the same thing. Scientists even acknowledge its existence by giving it a hoity-toity name- anomalous phenomena. Miracles, Grace, Sorcery, Necromancy, Spells, Prayers, Invocations, delusion, witchcraft, hallucination, the Paranormal, Fortean Phenomena-- there are any number of terms with any number of shades of meaning that all, ultimately, boil down to one thing: magic.

Superheroes and mutants and all the rest of the miraculous creatures parading through the funny pages have no basis in science or ordinary reality: they are all magic. If you were bitten by a radioactive spider, chances are good that’s you’d get a horrible rash, go into toxic shock and die, not wake up the next morning buff and ripped. Mutations usually are not pretty, nor powerful, nor very long-lived.

However you come down on the evolution debate, one thing is clear: we haven’t seen too many contemporary mutations, and certainly never anything remotely like the X-Men. The X-Men are fantasy, not science fiction, per se.

But there are a lot of folks in Comics giving lip service to magic lately. Which is right and good. People who write and draw comics should be thinking about magic, it’s their job. But it gets problematic when you make the leap from Kirbyean Magic to Crowleyean Magic. Aleister Crowley seems to be the well-spring for most of today’s interest in magic, particularly that of the “ceremonial” variety chatted up by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

Now, this is not altogether wholesome, considering that Crowley spent most of his time taking drugs and f**king and f**king with people’s heads to the point that he drove many around him to their various destructions. And ultimately Crowley’s magical prowess did little to save him from dying broke, despised and addicted. I’ve read some of his writings, and found them to be distinctly of the navel gazing variety. I’m not even sure how seriously he took any of it either, nor am I convinced that he wrote all of it himself. I think his “magic” was drugs and f**king, and the rest of it was just for the rubes.

And there is the problem with all this magic talk. Anyone can say anything, regardless of the facts, make up any old prattle, call it magic and end the discussion there. Certainly Moore is not guilty of this, if anything he errs on the side of fidelity to received tradition. Promethea’s journey from Kether to Malkuth was actually Moore’s personal journey. Fascinating and valuable as a document of discovery, just not terribly entertaining as a comic book.

Which brings me to the central tenet of this essay. I don’t want to read comics about magic (I’d rather watch spaghetti boil) I want to read comics that are magic.

I’m not talking the soapy, sentimental “magic” of our idealized memories of comics gone by, I am talking about comics that do what magic is supposed to do- take you out of the everyday world and put you somewhere else. Comics that offer what life supplied to us when we were young-- new experience. Rejuvenation. A sense of real wonder.

Too many comics suffer from what every other pop culture media is presently suffering from. Too much emphasis on technique, too many gee-whiz digital pyrotechnics, too much sweat, too many committee-driven decisions, too little magic. And I’m here to tell you that comics is the last citadel for magic. There’s too much money at stake with every other form of mass entertainment for magic to thrive.

And the kind of magic I believe comics needs is not the charts-and-graphs magic of Alan Moore, nor the make-it-up-as-you-go-along magic of Grant Morrison, it needs a more primal magic. The magic of the shaman, of the seer. The magic of the prophet, of the holy man. This is the magic that I bank on. This is the magic that you can do more than read about.

It is the magic of an inspired creator, who throws him or herself into the primordial ooze of the imagination. Who ventures forth into those places in the Collective Unconscious where the gods dwell, speaks to them and then brings back their secrets to us. It is a true form of magic to make a bunch of random squiggles and symbols coalesce on a page and give the reader a true, immersive experience. Not just a momentary diversion, not simply a riveting entertainment but the kind of experience that pulls one out of their everyday experience and then takes them somewhere so radically new that the journey changes the reader forever.

The Big Dog and the Meaning of "Is" is ISIS

2010-02-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

Eleven years ago at high noon, when the sun was at its apex in the sky over the Capitol building, the United States Senate acquitted Bill Clinton on impeachment charges which were the culmination of various investigations that dogged the “Big Dog” throughout his term in office.

If you weren't there, it's kind of a long story. I suppose it all started with some bogus land deal the Clinton's were involved in (are there any other kind in Arkansas?), then expanded into a sexual harassment suit filed against the Big Dog which then went haywire when the Big Dog’s DNA was found on the infamous blue dress of another one of his paramours, the voluptuous young intern Monica Lewinsky.

After an eternity of contrived partisan wrangling and lascivious gossip, the whole charade ended the only way it was ever going to- with Clinton off the hook and his enemies in the Congress licking their wounds and/or looking for work. Clinton was destined to be a one-termer before this ridiculous clownshow began but then spent the last two years of his second term basking in record-high approval ratings. Now he chums around his adoptive family, the Bushes. George and Barbara say the Big Dog is “like a son” to them.

But we don’t care about all of that here, we’re in it for the semiotics. And boy, the whole thing was lousy with them - truly fascinating parallels to all of the myth-themes we puzzle over here. Where should we start?

How about here- in the Egyptian Mysteries, Osiris was trapped and murdered by Set, the god of chaos. Bill Clinton was entrapped by Kenneth (“born of Fire”) Starr (!) who had him impeached. Set had 72 co-conspirators, that parallels the "vast and organized Right Wing Conspiracy" Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke of.

Bill Clinton had been in office 72 months when he was impeached.

The constellation of Taurus was seen as in opposition to Orion, which was identified with Osiris. Ken “Starr” brought his first indictment in May of 1998 (666x3), the month of Taurus in the Zodiac.

Monica Lewinsky came to the White House as a intern after the 1995 government shutdown, a kind of symbolic death that signaled Clinton’s political rebirth after the disastrous 1994 elections. But then things get a little, uh, delicate, so sensitive readers are encouraged to look away.

Clinton got busy with Lewinsky in the Oval Office. Not much more need be said about that, other than its alignment with the Washington Monument and Obama’s nifty new carpet for it. Clinton and Lewinsky never got to the horizontal bop, preferring oral and manual stimulation. Any symbolic parallels there? As if you need to ask....

The Egyptian creator god Atum created the Universe by autoerotic means, both oral and manual. In ancient times, a pharaoh’s sex slave would often help her sovereign start his day in a similar fashion, in a ritual symbolic of the creation of the Universe by Atum.

In the ancient mysteries, Isis cannot find Osiris’ thingy so she magically creates one from the earth. Speaking of which, remember the cigar incident? If not, go do a search on it, this is a family blog (in some depictions, Isis uses the phony phallus to give Osiris the breath of life, nudge-nudge).

Fans of the Sun know all about the 17 meme- well, Monica was subpoenaed on December 17, 1997 and Clinton gave us the infamous “meaning of IS IS” line during his January 17, 1998 deposition. Clinton then becomes the first sitting president to testify before a grand jury on August 17 of that year. On Aug. 17 of 2000, Starr’s successor, Robert Ray (!), empanels a new grand jury that never goes anywhere.

On November 19, 1998, Kenneth Starr outlined the charges against Clinton before the House Judiciary Committee. The very next day the first module of the new International Space Station (IS(I)S) was launched on the Zarya rocket from launch pad 333 at the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakstan, 3,300 miles from the Giza Necropolis. Hoagland was all over it:

Zarya, which translates into "sunrise" or "rising sun" in English, was launched from pad 333 at its precisely scheduled time despite Russian requests to have the launch delayed. NASA, citing a number of minor technical considerations, refused the Russian request and the launch went off as originally scheduled and was witnessed by NASA administrator Dan Goldin. Considering that the IS(I)S program was already a year behind schedule, another minor delay would not, despite NASA protestations to contrary, have led to a significant problem. Only when you consider the symbolic significance of the moment does this steadfast insistence make sense.

"Rising sun" of course, is Horus in the ancient Egyptian pantheon of gods. "Horus in the Horizon" or more literally "Horus-rising," is symbolic of the transformation between the dimensions of life and death.

On the 16th of December, US and British forces dropped some bombs on the 33rd parallel (Iraq, to be precise). The House Impeachment took place on the 19th of December. Thirteen (13) House managers ran the clownshow. December 19 was the day Licinius abdicated his role as Roman emperor. It was his wedding to Constantine's half-sister in 313 AD that served as the occasion for the Edict of Milan (which he co-signed), that set the stage for Roman theocracy. Strangely enough, It’s also the day that Apollo 17 splashed down.

The Senate trial opened on 1/7/99, which gives us the requisite 17 and 9s. After the 13 House managers spoke in the opening arguments, the next lawyer was was Cheryl Mills. Here’s what the BBC has to say about her:

White House Deputy Counsel Cheryl Mills, the first woman to address the trial, is widely regarded as the shining star of the defence team, and gave an effective presentation on President Clinton's behalf on the second day of defence arguments.

She slapped down both the obstruction of justice charge and the House case that leaving Mr Clinton in office would undermine the rule of law.

A 33-year-old African-American, she is known as a devoted protector of the president and first lady, having served in the White House since Mr Clinton came to power.

After opening arguments, there were three (3) witnesses for Clinton.

Speaking of 3, in between the open and close of the hearings was the 33rd Super Bowl, which saw the Atlanta Falcons (Atlanta is on the 33rd parallel) lose to the Denver (site of the Masonic International Airport) Broncos. The final score was 34-19. 3+4+1+9=17.

Funnily enough, there were at least five 33rd Degree Freemasons in the Senate at the time- Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, Arlen Specter and Strom Thurmond (all Republican) and Robert Byrd (Democrat). Did I mention that 33rd Degree Masonic muckety-muck Albert Pike called Little Rock, Arkansas his home?

Clinton himself was a member of the Order of Demolay back in Arkansas, the Masonic youth group named for the last Grandmaster of the Knights Templar whose oppressors- King Philip of France and Pope Clement- both died under suspicious circumstances not long after DeMolay’s execution.

Strangely enough, the king and pope of this charade- House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Speaker-Designate Bob Livingston- both suffered political deaths when their own indiscretions were outed during the trial, sending both men out of Congress forever. The exact nature of Livingston’s naughtiness was never publicized, but it was widely reported he had been married for 33 years. He confessed on Dec 17, 1998. His successor Rep. (now Senator) David Vitter was a client of the late DC Madam, as well as the Canal St Madam.

And just like the three unworthy craftsmen of the Masonic Hiram Abiff ritual, Representatives Henry Hyde, Helen Chenoweth and Dan Burton were themselves humiliated when they were revealed to be adulterers in the press, thanks to the tireless efforts of Larry Flynt.

In the end, Monica’s testimony during her 23rd time on the stand absolved Clinton by saying she had never been asked to lie. This whole episode unfolded over a period of 13 months, from the first revelation of Monica Lewinsky on the Drudge Report to Clinton’s acquittal.

After the trial Clinton emerged from the oval office and gave a press conference in the Rose Garden. It was the 190th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, whose own Vice President was the last Chief Executive to be impeached.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The Stairway to Sirius, Revisited

2010-01-30T16:14:00.000-08:00

Note: Around the same time Obama was making his Nobel speech in Norway, I was struggling with a post on the semiotics of the Will Smith film, I Am Legend. In the midst of all of that we saw that bizarre aerial display the day before the speech, which all fell together into this series, ultimately retracing an astonishing chain of connections and synchronicities linking to the iconography of the 'Stairway to Sirius' that we saw in the 2008 Election.

Bookending the series was that aforementioned aerial spiral and the revelation of the gate of Isis from the depths of the Alexandrian Harbor. Quite a start and finish, don't you think?

Synchronicity - significant coincidence - is a powerful thing. I've come to realize just how powerful it is and how unacceptable that power is to many people, even though they experience it themselves. A lot of people dismiss it (as a lot of you are aware of) and others strain for agency; acausality (or apparent acausality) contradicts everything we're conditioned to believe. I think a lot of people aren't wired to process it at all.

For the past couple of weeks I've been wracking my brains trying to work up an very untimely analysis of I Am Legend. The film is incredibly dense with symbol, and has parallels to a number of different mythologies and belief systems.

But what caught my eye about the film was the ubiquity of stairs, as well as that beautiful German Shepherd both my wife and I fell in love with. Of course the way my brain works, I think stairway, dog: Stairway to Sirius. Not a symbol non-Secret Sun readers generally look for, but those who do realize just how powerful it is. All well and good, but I wasn't sure if it was enough to warrant anything but a minor post for a two year-old film.

Of course, the big story this week was the bizarre aerial phenomena just prior to Barackobamun's Nobel War Prize speech. There's a lot of theories as to what the event was, and the generally-accepted theory now is that it was a failed rocket test. But it got me to pay attention to Barackobamun's Nobel speech, most importantly the visuals.

The picture above is cropped, but shows Barackobamun at the Oslo City Hall accepting the prize. What caught my eye was- again- the staircase, but also the enormous mural that hung above his head. We'll get back to that momentarily.

While in Oslo the Obamuns stayed at the Grand Hotel- the hotel's site has that pic on it's front page. I thought the design was interesting (vaguely reminiscent of a winged sundisk) but the next page I clicked on - the "About" page- had an even more interesting symbol....

...a stairway.

And even more sync worthy were the spiral designs, given the spiral in the sky over Norway (Andre has more aerial spirals on tap at The Alien Project). Not having visited the site before, I can't say when that photo went up, but I'm going to assume it was well before the rocket even the other day.

And when you zoom in on the spirals, there's an interesting solar design, with what could be interpreted as a point in circle design. This cuts right to the heart of the issues I'd been mulling over with I Am Legend- the strange connections of our Sol with the star Sirius, at least as pertains to the ancient symbology I'm struggling with.

And of course that aerial event had a bright sphere at the center of the spiral as well, which then seemed to turn into a black hole (or black hole sun, as the old song goes). All well and good, but a minor sync, maybe for an offday post.

But tonight as I was pondering both the Nobel events and the I Am Legend post, I took a break to check the news. And as if summoned there's Will Smith, with his daughter Willow. As you can see, the headline really gave no idea what the context of the story was here...

...but it turns out that Smith and his family are in Oslo, and hosted a peace concert on Friday night.

I got a chuckle out of this picture, because it spoke to one of the themes of the theoretical I Am Legend post, that the film (as well as Hancock) primed America to identify Obama - a thoroughly uncharismatic political plodder- with Smith, probably one of the most preternaturally charismatic personalities in American history. Obama was so surrounded by starpower during his campaign (Bruce Springsteen, to name another) that America was unprepared to discover Obama's utter lack of charisma once the campaign ended.

But of course, the campaign was filled with strange symbolic manipulation, some of which dealt with Sirius. What exactly this symbolism all means I can't say, but I am starting to suspect that it's simply a kind of obsessive-compulsive (or even superstitious) behavior, in which politicians (their handlers, rather) play out these symbolic rituals the same way that baseball players do. Of course, Politics is itself about the manipulation of symbols. The real decisions aren't made in Congress, a fact a lot of people are quickly waking up to.

That being said, I was fascinated to see young Willow Smith wearing a five-pointed star (identified with Sirius/Sothis/Ceres) at one of the Nobel functions.

And just to refresh everyone's memory, all of this started when I noticed that taken together the elements for the hieroglyph for Sirius were embedded in the campaign logos for Obama and McCain. I noticed the stairway after the fact. Some other sites hijacked my work without crediting me (which happens too often for my liking), but long-time readers heard it here first.

And of course, we had the charade with Obama and the "major issue" of the dog, who had to have "star quality" and all of the rest of it. You can read (or re-read) the whole election series here.

The symbolism got me looking at the Masonic first degree tracing board, which has angelic beings descending from the "blazing star" of Sirius. The Masonic literature is pretty useless in explaining the meaning (or history) of it, but the picture speaks for itself. Especially in the context of ancient astronaut theory, which probably isn't taught in the lodges. Well, the ordinary ones, at least.

Which brought me back to that Oslo mural. Apparently the mural is meant to symbolize various aspects of Norwegian culture and history, but I couldn't quite account for the blue people in the top center. They don't look like Norwegians- they look like gods. They also look like the angels in the tracing board, and if you look in the lower right corner there's a stairway as well.

The blue people in the center are a mother, father and child- a trinity, if you like. Their skin color rung a bell, since that is more associated with Hindu gods than Nordic ones. But this all tied back to the central conundrum inspired by I Am Legend- the common ancestry of the ancient pantheons, and how a core revelation occurred somewhere in Mesopotamia and rippled out to the rest of the Earth Island- including India, Egypt and Scandinavia- and became mythology. This sounds like standard stuff, but only when safely tucked away in the realm of history. Once you start making connections to current reality, that's when things get ugly.

And if you scroll back up you'll notice that aerial phenomena was a blue spiral.

The Smiths meet the "evolutionary flashpoint"

Synchronicity as Research Tool

We saw Barackobamun making his appearance in Norway preceded by that strange aerial phenomenon, which may or may not have been a failed missile test. The funny thing is that I'd actually considered ignoring the blue spiral story when it first appeared. Why? Because I'd been wracking my brains trying to decode the dense layers of ostensibly contradictory symbolism in the 2007 Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend.

Sounds silly, right?

But something struck me about the Oslo story- a gut feeling that somehow these two stories were connected. Imagine my shock when I discovered that Will Smith was in Oslo with Obama, hosting a Peace Prize concert with his wife and kids in tow. The syncs didn't end- or start- there.

I was poking around the web yesterday for material for the series and took this screengrab, picturing Will Smith and that beautiful, awesome, amazing dog, Sam. Note the visual conjunction to the Sun-shaped mirror- Sam seems to emerge from that 'blazing star'.

So I hope skeptics will forgive me for tagging Sam as a stand-in for Sirius, the Dog Star.

Right on schedule- here's a screenshot of the Yahoo! front page, also taken yesterday, showing us the Sun and a dog in a oddly similar visual conjunction to the IAL grab (almost Hoaglandian, you might say).

I gave the 'Celeb' headline a double take- Caleb means 'dog' in Hebrew. In the Bible, Caleb was part of the Exodus from Egypt with Moses. The connection is even more interesting given that like Egyptian, Hebrew doesn't have vowels. So practically speaking, Celeb and Caleb are identical.

Even stranger, 'celeb' here is a synonym for 'star'- so we have a kind of etymological pun:

Celeb - Caleb -Dog / Celeb- Star = Dog/Star

Hell of a sync there, no?

In this case Sam is short for Samantha, as we discover in a heart-ripping scene (can you tell I'm a dog person?). And as mentioned before, this film is jam-packed with stairs. We see Sam atop them at Neville's* Washington Sq townhouse door...

...and here atop the USS Intrepid in the Hudson River, which is also featured in National Treasure and the Flight 1549 ritual drama....

...and most importantly, here in the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dendur made a previous appearance here on the Sun, back when I Am Legend appeared in the theaters.

Jake Kotze and I were subconsciously synching at the time, putting up similarly-themed posts almost simultaneously, which inspired the Dendur-themed post "K2= Kotze/Knowles," which not only has pix of the missus and I frolicking around Dendur, but also has a central Sirius theme as well.

Here's Mrs. Wibble (lower right corner) admiring the Met's astonishing Dendur display, which I later learned was dedicated to Osiris, Isis and Harpocrates.

The entrance to the Dendur temple not only has the ~~flying saucer~~ winged sundisk, it also has what very much looks like two Kundalini snakes guarding the doors, side by side with stylized depictions of the human spinal column.

But Osiris, Isis and Harpocrates, eh? The appearance of Anna and Ethan in the film did catch my eye, especially since Ethan doesn't seem to have a word of dialogue in the theatrical cut of the film. And both An-na and Eth-an have the AN cognate, AN being the Sumerian word for Heaven.

Or outer space, if you prefer.

Lo and behold, here are Neville, Anna and Ethan in Dendur, taken from the alternate cut. As far as I can tell, this is the only time Ethan speaks at all.

Did I happen to mention Harpocrates was seen as the god of silence and personification of the Mysteries?

And in that alternate version, ~~the Trinity~~ Neville, Anna and Ethan escape to Bethel ("House of God"), Vermont ("green mountain") on which route?

Route 17, of course.

That sound you're hearing is all kinds of cans of worms being opened...

I mentioned the strange synchronicities that coincided with Barackobamun's Nobel speech, as well as Will Smith's appearance at the Nobel festivities at a time when I was struggling through an analysis of his 2007 film, I Am Legend. Additional syncs pertaining to spirals (the odd aerial event the day before the speech) and stair imagery tied into the "Stairway to Sirius" meme I saw repeated throughout the Will Smith film.

But perhaps the reason I was struggling was that there was a missing piece to the puzzle- the spiral. Luckily, the Russians or HAARP or God knows who else were kind enough to bring that one to my attention...

In the second part of this series we saw Will Smith's character Neville in the real-life Temple of Dendur- which was dedicated to the Egyptian Trinity of Osiris, Isis and Harpocrates. And in the alternate ending we see him in the temple with his new companions- a woman and young boy, both in from Mary-land.

What's more, both of his new friends have the AN cognate in their names, AN meaning "heaven" in Sumerian. And they responded to Neville's calls to meet him at Manhattan's South Street Seaport "when the Sun is highest in the sky." Interesting symbolism there as well.

So are Neville, ANna and EthAN the film's new Holy Trinity? After all, Neville is working for the salvation of all humanity (through the manipulation of DNA, no less). Let's run the symbols...

We first see Neville hunting deer running through the streets of Manhattan...

...and Osiris was identified with the star Orion, also known as the Hunter.

We also see Neville growing cereal grains (corn, in this case) in a vacant lot in Midtown (just like in the colonial days)...
...and cereal grains were said to grow from the body of Osiris.

We see photos of dead vampire-zombies (or whatever) up on the wall of Neville's wall, which he uses to judge the effectiveness of his various vaccine formulas. In other words, he's evaluating (read: 'judging') the dead in his underground lab.
...and Osiris judged the dead in his underworld kingdom.

We see Neville caught in a snare at Grand Central Station (a temple of Hermes, remember) and suspended in a pose much like the Hanging Man trump in Tarot...

...which has been identified with Osiris by many occultists, including Aleister Crowley. Note the green sun motif at the top there.

Distraught by the death of his incredibly awesome dog, Neville tries to commit suicide-by-zombie. Here we see the car-as-coffin motif we saw in the latest X-Files movie, as well as the car/river conjunction we saw in Pushing Tin (Osiris' first death came when he was locked in a coffin and thrown into the Nile).

Just as Osiris was rescued in his coffin by Isis, Neville is rescued in his about-to-be-coffin by ANna (read: Inanna) and EthAN. Note that ANna and EthAN used ultraviolet lights - sunlight, in other words - to drive away the zombies. Familiar yet powerful symbolism there.

...and ANna then fixes him up some eggs, also sacred to goddess figures - particularly those like Inanna/Ishtar/Easter.

Continuing the Sumerian motif here (which we'll see is vital to the story arc), we see ANna dressed in the sun....

...which was also identified with Inanna. Note the lion- they appear out of nowhere in this film as well.
I knew exactly where this scene was going right away- EthAN watches Shrek in the living room...

... and Neville identifies himself with the "green man" by mouthing his dialogue. Remember that Osiris is green, and the ancient Celts worshiped him as the "Green Man", a trenchant fact given Shrek's Scottish dialect.

Osiris died and rose and died again (by dismemberment) and descended to rule the Underworld. After his symbolic death, Neville has his actual death (dismemberment, surely) in his underground lab as he sacrifices himself (in the theatrical version) so that ANna and EthAN can get his vaccine to the sanctuary in Bethel, VT.

Again, the central motif here is DNA, which Neville is depicted as the master of.

Here we see ANna hand over the vaccine, which Neville created on 9/9. Fascinating to see those numbers again (there were nine major gods in the Egyptian pantheon), particularly in a sync-string that ties back to Barackobamun, the man Smith recently referred to as an "evolutionary flashpoint." A bizarre choice of words and another fascinating sync, as we'll see later.

In the alternate version, Neville escapes with ANna and EthAN to Bethel and takes what road? No surprise there.

SNAKES AND LADDERS

But Bethel is fascinating, not only because it lies near the birthplace of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, it's named after the place in the Bible where Jacob had his vision of the ladder reaching into heaven. Jacob's Ladder may or may not also be the original inspiration for the Masonic First Degree tracing board.

Note here that Gnostic visionary William Blake depicted Jacob's Ladder as a spiral staircase, which was obliquely referred to in the first part of this series.

So maybe now we can understand the meaning of all of the stairways and ladders and steps in I Am Legend. Neville's profession is a microbiologist, and what's the primary focus of people in that line of work?

DNA. The original spiral staircase.

Even though the DNA double helix wasn't discovered until 1953, double helixes show up all over the place in ancient art, more so the more ancient you get. And unfortunately for denialists, this icon of intertwined snakes show up in very specific instances, often to do with medicine and/or royal bloodlines. So it can't be dismissed it as random coincidence (though, of course, it always is). This particular image is identified with the Sumerian god Ningishzida, who shares many attributes with Osiris.

And here is a caduceus of Osiris himself. This is part of the reason why ancient mythology - the Egyptian Trinity in particular - is still so important in our culture. We don't realize exactly why just yet, but with the rise of highly advanced science - genetic engineering, space travel, cybernetics- all of the old mythologies are starting to resonate in our subconscious in ways we don't fully understand.

It could also be why Fundamentalists - both scientific and religious- are circling the wagons and readying themselves for a protracted propaganda war (and both spending millions of taxpayer dollars to do so). Perhaps they sense that a massive paradigm shift is coming pertaining to human origins, and are trying to muddy the waters as best they can to protect their own power.

Maybe the story of our true origins is the real disclosure.

Stairway to (the house of) Heaven

Back to the stairs- as we saw, there are several shots in the I Am Legend film that picture the dog Samantha at the top of steps or stairs, signifying the Stairway to Sirius. And the penultimate battle between Neville and the zombie vampires takes place on his seemingly endless staircase, which, though not spiral, is certainly winding.

But my conclusions about I Am Legend sent me back to first principles. My interest in the election or in Obama himself was the symbolism being tossed out like confetti- the Hercules temple, the Victory column, the Phoenix and so on. The Sirius symbolism in the campaign logos turned my attention to the Sirius meme, and the symbolism in the First Degree Masonic tracing board.

So, despite what the Masons themselves believe is the AAT narrative - the descent of alien beings from Sirius or Nibiru* - somehow encoded in that tracing board? Mind you, answering "yes" doesn't necessarily mean you subscribe to AAT yourself.

If so, what about the second part of the story- the alien manipulation of protohominid DNA? Could I find that in any of that in Masonic iconography?

Well, these things are always subject to interpretation, but there is a spiral staircase on the Second Degree tracing board.

How's that for a coincidence?

PARALLEL NARRATIVES

The basic story of I Am Legend is this - an Army microbiologist named Robert Neville is working to reverse a plague that wiped out most of the Earth's population, and left many of the plague's survivors in a feral, cannibalistic state, totally lacking in higher brain function. Using his own blood Neville is trying to develop a vaccine, which he perfects just prior to his death in a lab explosion (shades of Jack Parsons). He hands the vaccine to two survivors, a woman and a boy- to take to a mountain sanctuary where plague survivors are working to restore humanity.

We looked at the Osiris symbolism in relation to the film, but there is also the more obvious Christian symbolism as well, itself preceded (if not derived) from the Isis and Osiris Mysteries. But Osiris/Asar and his equivalents (Ashur, Anshar, Ahura, Arthur), and his wife Isis/Aset and her equivalents (Asherah, Astarte, Ishtar, Inanna, etc), as well as his son Horus/Heru and his equivalents (Helu/Helios, Surya, Mitra, Heracles/Hercules) are themselves drawn from even more ancient archetypes from Sumer and other cultures in Mesopotamia. Those antecedents themselves might be mythologized renderings of even earlier characters.

When you look at the iconography of these figures, you can't help but notice that A., a lot of them are winged, B.. others are identified with flying disks or boats, and C., many of them are associated with strange apparatuses that look like machinery.

Which in this day and age makes the whole prospect of studying these characters a bit touchy, since if you even bring up the possibility that these figures may not have been "gods" but technological-advanced extraterrestrials, you face the prospect of being forever branded a heretic by the scientific establishment. Even though the science for AAT exists - at least in theory - by this point.

Even so, starting with Charles Fort, up through Morning of the Magicians and Chariots of the Gods?, heretical freethinkers have been looking at the ancient myths in the context of modern science and drawing the obvious parallels. And thus "Ancient Astronaut Theory" was born.

AAT was widespread in the 70s (TV stars like Rod Serling and William Shatner both starred in AAT documentaries), but then a funny thing happened: at the exact time that AAT gathered momentum, hundreds of millions of dollars - if not billions- began pouring into Fundamentalist religious movements, as well as into very powerful telecopes and other space detection technology.

Then an army of so-called "skeptics" arose bashing memes like AAT, but conspicuously avoiding any criticism of established (read: 'majority') religious systems. Following them was a coterie of Fundamentalist conspiracy theorists who demonized not only UFOs and AAT, but UFO and (particularly) AAT researchers as well. Almost as if someone wanted to study this mystery but scare everyone else off.

Wholly unrelated phenomena? Maybe.

But here's the thing- after years of near-total invisibility AAT has begun creeping back into TV shows, movies and video games in the past few years, concurrent with the implosion of the Fundamentalist movement in America. Coincidence again? Even stranger, we've also heard pronouncements from the Vatican about the spiritual nature of ETs, even though they've not given us any evidence that said ETs exist.

So last year we looked at all of this in light of all of the Sirius double-entendre and Phoenix symbolism thrown about. I said last year that there seemed to be a subliminal effort to identify Obama with King Tut, which certainly was confirmed on his Egypt trip. Assuming this isn't all pure coincidence, it may in fact speak to an uncertainty on the part of some of these players- ritual behavior is usually the result of anxiety.

Call it a hunch, but I genuinely believe that the PTB have no real idea what's going with UFOs or with the possibility of alien visitation, but like the rest of us they sense something might be coming. I won't argue here whether that sense is justified or not, but the rush to build all of this new space hardware during a worldwide economic crunch may well be a contigency move, at the very least. I've been through all of this before, so I'm not keen to make any predictions. Partly because predictions on UFOs are almost always wrong and partly because I've no real idea what's going on.

So what does this crazy-talk have to do with I Am Legend? Well, we looked at Will Smith here before, and the explicit connections to Horus in his superhero (read:Heru) film Hancock. And we looked at the Osiris symbolism in I Am Legend, or at least the Osiris parallels. Given that some of the same people are involved in both films, it's not unreasonable to wonder if the two films are companion pieces.

What's important here is that Osiris was seen as the creator of civilization in the ancient mythology, and was often identified with Oannes, the fish god of the Persian Gulf that we've also looked at. Both these characters figure into the AAT continuum (as well as John the Baptist lore, which we'll look at another time).

And if you look again at the basic plot of IAL, you could make the argument that it's an Intervention Theory allegory: an alien scientist using genetic engineering to create thinking human beings out of feral protohominds, exactly as Neville is trying to do with the zombie/vampires in IAL.

Again, that's my personal interpretation, but not an unreasonable one. Let's at least agree that the parallels are there, intentionally or not.

Now, back to the Obama synchronicity in Norway. All of this Sirius business began for me with Obama's campaign, and the strange UFOs floating near the Franklin Institute (where I saw the Tut exhibit in Philadelphia) during an Obama rally. And now we have another odd - if not unexplainable - aerial phenomenon over the skies of Norway just prior to his acceptance of the Nobel prize. Something which I'm happy to say people are generally skeptical of. But we still don't know it was and we still don't know what it might have meant to whomever was responsible for it. Wouldn't it be funny if it was in fact some kind of extraterrestrial manifestation?

Equally important for my syncstream was the mural under which Obama delivered his speech. Not only did it picture decidely non-Norwegian looking blue-skinned deities, but the composition was highly reminiscent of Egyptian murals, particularly those that depicted everyday activities in a tiered fashion, all lorded over by the gods who are often situated in the same spot that those strange blue creatures were as well. Again- maybe all a coincidence, but the coincidences keep piling up, don't they?

What also fascinated me is the sync of Will Smith tagging along with Obama in Oslo and then his odd statement that "the idea of Obama" represented an "evolutionary flashpoint for humanity." I still have no idea what he meant by that and I can't help but wonder if it was scripted by somebody else.

But for our purposes it ties right into both Intervention Theory (literally) and I Am Legend (figuratively)- the genetic transformation of feral prehumans into thinking human beings certain represents an 'evolutionary flashpoint', no? And again, the parallels to Sirius symbolism with the two celebrities is pretty astounding in the overall memestream we're wading in here.

But while working on all of this I suddenly remembered another reference to the Stairway that we've looked at in the past, and how that ties into this overall constellation of symbolism and scientific speculation.

Ancient Astronaut Theory is just that - a theory. We obviously don't have access to the ancient astronauts themselves, so it's up the various researchers to present their theories based on the evidence as well as the gaping holes in orthodox theories of human civilization and evolution.

In Secret Sun parlance a theory is a query, and I don't view any of the various AAT researchers as authoritative. I'm not always interested in their answers, either- it's the questions that fascinate me. Those questions that keep the denialists and the theologians up in their beds at night, sweating and grinding their teeth.

Opinions vary, but the basic narrative behind Intervention Theory- the term many researchers prefer to AAT - is that a technologically-advanced race traveled to the planet Earth, perhaps in search of precious minerals like gold, platinum, and diamonds. Or maybe just for the adventure of it.

In some accounts, the space-race needed an intelligent race of workers to help extract resources. None was available, so the space-race experimented with primates/protohominids to create a thinking, manually-dexterous race of workers and trained them. They did so by recombining their own DNA with the apes' over a long period of time (millennia actually). Eventually modern humans emerged and were taught the rudiments of civilization by aliens who were eventually worshiped as gods.

Researchers point to civilizations all across the world- North Africa, Mespotamia, Mesoamerica- but most of these alleged visitations seem to have happened in hot climates, often near large bodies of water. From there there are a host of different theories and variations, depending on the author.

For our purposes, here is the basic AAT narrative in three easy steps:

1. A race of alien beings with unimaginable advanced technology comes to the Earth.

2. Through the genetic engineering of primate DNA, they create an intelligent, dexterous race of workers.

3. At some point the aliens either destroy each other in a terrible war, or simply return to their home planet. Either way they are gone- the alien "gods" are dead, but they have left behind their advanced knowledge in their myths and artifacts.

It all gets a lot more complex from there on in, but various researchers have also pored through those ancient texts and claim that not only are those alien gods due to return, they left behind a secret class of priestly servants, who are responsible for preserving the legacy of the 'gods' in lieu of their return. This ties directly into the Shemsu Hor- the Followers of Horus, the last god-king of Egypt- who we've discussed several times on this site as being the spiritual descendants of groups like the Dionysian Artificers and the Freemasons.

The apparent goal of the Shemsu Hor was to guide humanity back to the Zep Tepi- the 'First Time', the time of the Rule of the Gods. For some reason, architecture and stonework- as well as the use of arcane symbolism- was the primary interest of the Shemsu Hor, though their exact secrets have been lost to history- orthodox history, at least.

Now, here are your typical modern Freemasons. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I think it's a safe bet these boys aren't the guardians of the great secrets of antiquity, And for those of you who've read The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown doesn't seem to know much about those secrets either.

But what if some trace of the original revelation - the teachings of the Shemsu Hor - remained in Masonic symbol, but had been lost to corruption and misinterpretation even to the most advanced Freemasons? Let's go back to the tracing boards for evidence.

As we've discussed here before, the First Degree tracing board depicts a stairway descending from the star Sirius, upon which are a group of angelic beings coming down to a lectern or altar. In other versions symbols of learning and technology descend down a ladder.

So, what was the first step of the AAT narrative again?

1. A race of alien beings with unimaginable advanced technology comes to the Earth.

As we discovered recently, there is a spiral staircase- now used as a symbol of the DNA double helix- in the Second Degree board.

This lies inside what looks to be a temple or castle, or even the entrance to a royal laboratory - and there are two armed guards at the building's entrance. Outside we see a waterfall. Remember that the protector god Ea/Enki/Oannes/Osiris - was identified with water (we've also see the waterfall in other, similar contexts, haven't we?).

So here we see here a symbolic parallel to the second stage of the AAT thesis:

2. Through the genetic engineering of primate DNA, they create an intelligent, dexterous race of workers.

This is a good time to take another look at the DNA helix alongside a Second Degree tracing board created by Lady Freda Harris, designer of Crowley's Thoth tarot. Unbelievable.

Created well before Crick & Watson's discovery of DNA, in case you were wondering.

The Third Degree depicts a casket, alongside some of the sacred symbols of Masonry. This implies an inheritance; the spiritual leader (Hiram Abiff, in Masonic mythology) is dead, but has left behind the tools, information and laws vital to human evolution.

Waldo, if you will - the third AAT step...?

3. At some point the aliens either destroy each other in a terrible war, or simply return to their home planet. Either way they are gone- the alien gods are 'dead', but they have left behind their advanced knowledge in their myths and artifacts.

Let's review the parallels again:

AAT01 - Landing of alien colonists
First Degree - Descent of winged beings from Sirius

AAT02 - Genetic engineering of primate DNA
Second Degree - The spiral staircase, resembling the double helix

AAT03 - Gods 'die' but leave behind knowledge, artifacts
Third Degree - Coffin, sacred symbols of knowledge, law

You still with me? Let's proceed, then...

SET IN STONE

Leaving aside Freemasonry (which, after all, has only a symbolic connection to actual masonry), we have a long tradition of sacred stonework throughout history, particularly in Egypt. So the obvious question becomes, why this obsession with stonecutting and megaliths and all of the rest of it? Why has carving gigantic structures in stone been the highest expression of devotion in religious traditions all across the world- Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and on and on?

Let me answer that question with a question. Hypothetically, say you were yourself an intelligent, space-faring being who zoomed around the cosmos, leaving colonies and settlements in your wake. You're aware that the Universe is a violent place, especially on water planets close to their star like the Earth. All trace of your presence could be wiped away in a heartbeart.

But still, you want some trace of your planetary accomplishments left behind. Either that or you want your 'children' to know about their 'parentage', or you may even want to leave messages for them whether about your existence or even your eventual return. How would you do that on a violent planet like the Earth?

You'd write your messages in stone.

Maybe you'd carve gargantuan blocks at precise angles difficult for modern machinery to achieve and move them for distances that no pre-industrial race could possibly dream of doing, no matter what the ridiculous denialist shills might claim. Stones sometimes weighing hundreds of tons apiece, I might add.

Or you'd design massive structures set to precise alignments, whether geographic...

...or cosmic. Cosmic and geographic alignments we are now just discovering the existence of, I should add.

You might even leave behind traces that your progeny might only be able to discover once they'd mastered the art of high-altitude flight. It might take a long time to decipher (and might be buried under centuries of message-corruption) and the shills and the stooges might muddy the waters and make the process more difficult, but maybe your message would eventually get through.

And then what?

No matter how far afield things might get here sometimes, I want to reiterate that The Secret Sun is a pop culture blog, that explores esoteric topics in the context of entertainment. Why do I cover political topics here? Well, I agree with the late Frank Zappa, who said American politics is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex.

It's no surprise then that all of the strange symbolism we've seen in entertainment over the past 30 years or so begin to manifest itself in the political realm, as we explored in the Very Sirius Election and Stairway to Sirius series. Of course, that process has gone supernova with the rise of Barack Obama, or Barackobamun as he's known around these parts.

Now, the symbolism behind the Obama election got me looking at Sirius symbolism, which led me to study the Masonic tracing boards. Yesterday, I showed you that that the tracing boards seem to mirror the basic steps of ancient astronaut theory- arrival, DNA manipulation and departure and legacy. I say 'mirror' rather than 'symbolize', because the Masons have a totally different explanation as to their meaning.

The funny thing is that all of this sprung from two strange UFO-type events- the appearance of strange orbs over an Obama rally in Philadelphia and then the blue spiral over Norway before Obama's Nobel speech. All of this has been surrounded in time by all sorts of semiotic insanity. As I've said the ripples are always bigger than the splash.

Now, it seems like forever ago, but at the same time that Barackobamun was nearing victory in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the long-awaited Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull premiered in theaters. The film was savaged by some critics (and fans) but was a monster box office smash. And as we discussed here the film was a Synchromystic goldmine- Roswell, remote viewing, interdimensional aliens, AAT, you name it.

But there was another aspect to the film we looked at here, something not in the script itself. And that was the weird parallels of key plot points in Crystal Skull to, yes, the Masonic tracing boards.

Only in reverse.

The reversal motif always fascinates me, since it was an important part of the rituals of the Shemsu Hor- guiding the soul of the Pharaoh backwards in time to the Zep Tepi, or first time. As Hancock and Bauval wrote in The Mystery of the Sphinx:

An awareness of the effects of precession on the part of the ‘Followers of Horus’ (and the later priests of Heliopolis) would have included an intense focus on the stellar background at the vernal equinox and an understanding that the sun’s ‘journey’ towards Horakhti-Leo, as calibrated at this ‘governing moment ‘ of the year, would by definition have been a journey backwards in time through a succession of ‘world-ages’—i.e. from the Age of Taurus, circa 3000 BC (when the sun on the vernal equinox rose against the stellar background of the constellation of Taurus) to the Age of Leo, circa 10,500 BC, when the sun on the vernal equinox rose against the background of the celestial lion.

So when we read in the Pyramid Texts that the ‘Followers of Horus’ are urging the Horus-King to travel from Taurus to Leo it is possible that they may have had in mind something rather complex and clever.

This 'reversal in time' motif is not unique to the Egyptians; the Greeks had their obsession with the Golden Age, Dicoletian sought to restore the old Rome with its Imperial cult of Jupiter, the Jewish messiah was to restore the throne of David, Christians have their New Jerusalem (in which Christ- the new Adam- rules the earth as Jehovah once did), radical Muslims seek to return to the Caliphate and radical Jews and Fundamentalist Christians have talked of rebuilding the Third Temple. We've seen that return motif in any number of artistic and cultural movements. In this context the reversal literally leads to the ancient gods, who just happen to be aliens.

So here's what we looked at in Crystal Skull article- this version of the Third Degree board...

...mirrored by this notorious scene (the "nuke the fridge" scene), complete with what is called a "deathtrap" coming open, revealing Indy. Note the parallel flashes of light and the branches as well. It's important to note this is a nuclear test here, something that UFO cultists in the 70s and 80s claimed attracted the attention of the 'space brothers'.

Counting down, we have the Second Degree board, which has the water and a the spiral staircase inside what looks like a temple (Solomon's Temple - revered by the Masons - was said to have a "winding staircase").

In Crystal Skull, we also have a memorable waterfall sequence, where we are told "three times it drops". This eventually leads Indy and his entourage to....

...a spiral staircase.

Last but not least, we have the angels/aliens descending their staircase from Sirius to Earth- and straight into a Masonic temple, so it appears.

Completing this reversal motif we see the aliens, now back atop their staircases, ready to return to their other-dimensional realm. In other words, the reversal of time symbolized by the backwards journey through the tracing boards takes us to, yet again, alien gods.

As silly as this story may present itself as being, there's a whole host of very obscure occult and esoteric doctrines being played out here...

...such as Irina returning the venerated Baptist head to the 13th alien (we've looked at Baptist motifs in sci-fi film here before. He we are back to the Oannes motif we looked at in the context of I Am Legend. Theosophist author G.R.S. Mead wrote this about the Baptist:

“...early apocalyptists and allegorists, who were probably Jews of the Babylonian or Syrian dispersion, could conceive of their preexistent Messiah as in such a way associated with the figure of the ancient Hani (Oannes, Iannes, Ioannes) and expected the Redeemer of Israel to arise from the depths of the great waters, it is not improbable that in those days when the interplay of mystical association was so prevalent and eagerly sought out some of the most enthusiastic followers of John may have believed that his baptizing ‘fisher of souls’ was the expected manifestation.”

Is this line the giveaway as to the "reversal of time?" The scientific name for the ox is bos taurus, which ties us back to the Shemsu Hor and their rituals tracing the Age of Taurus back to the Age of Leo. The Age of Taurus saw the glory days of Egyptian civilization, from the rule of the Horus Kings through the Pyramid Age and beyond.

We hear Indy explicitly reference the ancient Egyptians (and their beliefs) but more importantly, Egypt's early period. So "welcome back, Ox" has all sorts of interesting subliminal connotations in the context of this film.

It also saw the rule of Narmer, who we discussed in an earlier Oannes syncstream. Narmer may or may not have been the legendary Scorpion King, who we also looked at this year- and who himself has semiotic links to Obama. Above is legendary Narmer stele, whose tiered format brings us right back to where all of this insanity started...

...the Oslo mural.

The stele also gives us yet another ancient depiction of a double helix, using those strange, almost-alien animals.

DNA, yet again? Where it doesn't belong?

DECEMBER 17, 2009

There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.
There is nothing kept secret that will not come to light. - Luke 8:17

This whole semiotic/synchronistic adventure started in Norway, with a strange aerial display and a host of symbolic aftershocks in its wake. It should be no surprise then that on the 17th we found ourselves in the ancient waters of Egypt, lifting up a stone pillar from the Gate of the Gods. The symbolism is so potent, it almost seems surreal.

Some of you might have been confused about the Sirius themes we've been covering this past week, and I admit that the initial connections of the Dog star to the Norway event were more a matter of intuition than anything else. The subconscious is always making connections the conscious mind is oblivious to.

But there was a whiff of the ritual theatrics we saw around the 2008 election with the Nobel charade, and the presence of Will Smith turned out to be a synchronistic bridge between the symbolism we saw in I Am Legend and Hancock, both of which planted subconscious 'Superman' memes that bolstered Barackobamun during the campaign (and which Obama was certainly not shy about playing into himself).

But here we are - Isis-Sirius in the news on the 17th- exactly a week after Obama's Nobel speech. 17 is a number I've been talking about since the earliest days of this blog (and I still have no clue what the real meaning behind it is), but has certainly become more and more prevalent in the news in the past year.

We've also been talking about the strange symbolic conjunctions on the Yahoo! front page for quite a while now, and sure enough we see the gateway of Sirius and yet another fluff story about a dog. Moreover, CNN celebrated the 17th with a pictorial on religious stonemasonry, something we'd looked at just the day before.

The AP story itself is bursting at the seams with the kind of symbolism we've seen over and over this past year as well.

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt – Archaeologists on Thursday hoisted a 9-ton temple pylon from the waters of the Mediterranean that was part of the palace complex of the fabled Cleopatra before it became submerged for centuries in the harbor of Alexandria.

The pylon, which once stood at the entrance to a temple of Isis, is to be the centerpiece of an ambitious underwater museum planned by Egypt to showcase the sunken city...

"The cult of Isis was so powerful, it's no wonder Cleopatra chose to make her living quarters next to the temple," said coastal geoarchaeologist Jean-Daniel Stanley ...

(Egyptian authorities) are hoping the allure of Alexandria, founded in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great, can also be a draw.

(Egyptian Antiquities honcho Zahi) Hawass has already launched another high-profile dig connected to Cleopatra. In April, he said he hopes to find the long-lost tomb of Antony and Cleopatra — and that he believes it may be inside a temple of Osiris...
"If the study shows it's possible, (the underwater museum) could become a magical place, both above and underwater," Hawass said.

The underwater aspect of this story and it's connection to Sirius tie in with many of the themes we looked at this past week. Remember the links with Sirius to Oannes and the Nommo, the Sirens (Sirians) and all of the rest of water-beings Robert Temple wrote of in The Sirius Mystery. From UFOpsi.com:

...Temple describes the Nommo as amphibious beings sent to Earth from the Sirius star system for the benefit of humankind. They look like Merfolk, Mermaids and Mermen. They called the Nommo "Masters of the Water", "The Monitors", "The Teachers or Instructors", "Saviors", and "Spiritual Guardians".

The ancient historian Berossus wrote extensively of Oannes, who was based in the Persian Gulf, itself the center of so much excitement these days.

"(Oannes) was accustomed to pass the day among men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge.

- Berossus, from Ancient Fragments

Berossus describes Oannes much the same way as Plutarch describes the worship of Osiris:

That when Osiris reigned over the Egyptians he made them reform their destitute and bestial mode of living, showing them the art of cultivation, and giving them laws, and teaching them how to worship the gods.

Plutarch reports that the ancient Greeks and Egyptians identified Osiris with all forms of water, and here again we see the identification of Sirius with water:

Of the stars, they hold Sirius to be Isis’ Water-carrier, they honour the Lion, and decorate the gateways of temples with gaping lions’ heads, because the Nile swells:— "When first the Sun doth with the Lion join."

Plutarch also notes that the ancients "hold and believe the Nile the issue of Osiris, so do they regard the earth as the body of Isis." And here a whole new kettle of fish is opened...

Isis-Sirius-Demeter, kept in a Vatican Museum (where else?)

Apparently the etymology of Ceres- the Roman name for Demeter (meaning "Earth Mother") is uncertain. But considering that the Greeks identified Demeter with Isis (the Vatican holds a statue of Isis-Sothis-Demeter from Hadrian's villa, Sothis being another name for Sirius), it seems pretty obvious to me that Ceres is a Roman adaptation of Sirius:

CER-E-S = SIR-I-US.

And apparently the rising of Sirius was celebrated at the Telestrion of Demeter at Eleusis. The Romans had a Sirius ritual to the goddess Robigo meant to protect the crops from wheat rust. Wheat rust is a fungal cousin of the rye ergot that some believe was the psychoactive component of Demeter's kykeon.

But some scientists today literally believe Ceres- the asteroid, that is - might in fact actually be the Earth's mother- that life was seeded to a barren, post-bombardment Earth from DNA-laden space debris arriving from Ceres:

At the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life conference in Florence, Italy, Joop Houtkooper from the University of Giessen divulged a theory that life could have originated on an object in the asteroid belt named Ceres.

Ceres was considered to be a planet when it was discovered in 1801, but it was later downgraded to asteroid status. With the latest planet definition from the International Astronomical Union, the round object is now considered a dwarf planet. Is there a chance that this exotic world is home to extraterrestrial organisms?

Whether panspermia or AAT, DNA is the great mystery here - it may in fact be a kind of cosmic pollen travelling the Universe in search of suitable hosts.

The entheogen-inspired discovery of this cosmic contagion (short version- Francis Crick was tripping on LSD when the inspiration for the helix came to him) has sent alt-historians looking back at all of the caduecii and the trees of life and all of the other intertwined spirals in ancient art. And it seems the earlier in what we accept as human history that you go, the more you seem to find these enigmatic icons.

As we saw, this is the earliest and the most compelling - the Sumerian god Ningishzida, the "Lord of the Good Tree," who is the god of nature and fertility and "messenger of the Earth Mother."

Which brings us back to the idea of DNA as the messenger of the Ceres asteroid- or maybe some other, more exotic heavenly body that Ceres is just acting as a politically-correct stand-in for.

Francis Crick himself has been quoted as saying this:

“Life did not evolve first on Earth, a highly advanced civilization became threatened so they devised a way to pass on their existence. They genetically-modified their DNA and sent it out from their planet on bacteria or meteorites with the hope that it would collide with another planet. It did, and that's why we're here."

I have no proof as yet, but my gut tells me that a lot of powerful and influential people agree with Crick. Where this is all going, we may very well soon see...

Mindbomb: The Dreaming Mind and the Gate of the Gods

2009-06-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

Is creativity a form of shamanic communion with forces beyond our ordinary experience? Are there certain individuals who are able to tap into the deepest recesses of consciousness where the gods are waiting? Does visionary experience allow one to see traces of reality unbound by time and space?

There are the questions that lie at the heart of my own work and have led me to obsess further on an already long-standing obsession- the American godfather of the modern superhero, Jack Kirby.

Kirby was obsessed with many of the questions non-traditional thinkers are struggling with today, but may have had access to answers we do not.

In particular, there is a strange episode in his career in which Kirby seemed to foresee events long after his death, events which may well be linked to the Stargate- that portal between our world and the world of otherworldly entities the ancients saw as "gods."

These posts were originally written in January of '08. Some ideas I explore here have been discarded, some have evolved. But it all revolves around the idea of creativity as a shamanistic pursuit and how dreamwork and psychedelic experience are intimately related to this process.

I covered a lot of this material at Esalen, but I think you psychonauts out there might have a more immediate appreciation at the possibilities raised by Kirby's creative encounter with the Gate of the Gods...

Again, drawn 17 years before the Viking missions...

Silver Star, part 2: Down the Rabbit Hole

(Note: Read part 1 of this series here)

Kirby's 80's work may be generally overlooked, but that's not to say it isn't influential. I detail the numerous parallels between Captain Victory and James Cameron's Aliens in Spandex. And what is easily the nadir of Kirby's artistry, Super Powers, was in many ways DC's practice run for event books like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Cosmic Odyssey.

But let's look further into this strange, precognitive nexus between Silver Star and Destroyer Duck. So many of the thematic strands that we now see bubbling up from the conspiracy underground seem to hover around these books like a Lovecraftian spectre. It seems that nearly every major theme discussed in the more speculative branches of conspiracy research finds a synchronistic antecedent in three obscure Jack Kirby comic books. Granted, Kirby's work shows that he seemed to be very much immersed in the same themes that you see on conspiracy, UFO and high weirdness websites. But I'm not sure if that explains the...

9/11 PRECOGNITION

9/11 was like gasoline on the smoldering coals of internet conspiracy research, which had been whipped up by Behold a Pale Horse, Art Bell and the"Patriot" movement in the 1990's. The image above was taken from Destroyer Duck #5, published by Eclipse Comics in 1983. It's important to note that Kirby didn't write this story, Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber did. But it may well be what inspired Kirby to completely rewrite the end of Silver Star.

In DD#5, we see the set up for the unsettingly prescient 9/11-like scenario in this story. The CEO of "Godcorp" readies a 'suitcase nuke' (that favorite bugaboo of the neoconservative Right) to celebrate the signing of a oil drilling franchise in Hoqoom, an Mesopotamian theocracy based on Iran. The conflicts and tensions that played themselves on 9/11 are presented here in reverse, with the Islamic radicals suffering what becomes a (inadvertent) suicide attack at the hands of American plutocrats. The satirical "Pahkmani the Devourer" (yes, a Pac-Man parody) and the fundamentalists of Hoqoom find their counterparts in Darius Drumm and the Foundation for Self Denial in Silver Star.

THE NEPHILIM

One popular school of thought in the conspiracy underground is derived from a dyspeptic reinterpretation of the theories of writers like Zechariah Sitchin and Erich Von Daniken. It holds that human race is secretly manipulated and unconsciously enslaved by a cabal of evil extraterrestrials, who created homo sapiens as a slave race using their own alien DNA and the DNA of proto-hominids.

Sitchin was inspired by Biblical stories of the Nephilim, which are the offspring of human women and a race of "giants," whom he came to see as extraterrestrials. Kirby himself subscribed to these theories, which formed the basis of his 1976 Marvel series, The Eternals. Best-sellers like The Gods of Eden by William Bramley and Rule By Secrecy by Jim Marrs would later combine Sitchin's ancient astronaut theories with the occult conspiracy interpretation of history put forth by writers like Michael Howard.

Another popular strain in conspiracy research is drawn from James Shelby Downard's symbological interpretation of events like the Kennedy assassination. Downard collated details like place names and other geographical details to concoct an elaborate thesis that Freemasons were manipulating world events as part of a grand ritual to reorder the cosmos itself.

When I first read of Downard's theories I was deeply immersed in Jung and was astonished that this character seemed completely oblivious of the theory of Synchronicity. The types of conjunctions and correspondences Downard wrote about seemed par for the course for any neophyte Jungian. Downard's research isn't even all that impressive- others have come along and done it much better. An entire new school of thought has sprung up around a new synthesis of Jung and some of the post-Downard researchers - it's known as "Synchromysticism."

REPTILIANS

Concurrently, researchers like former BBC personality David Icke have recombined Bramley's and Downard's interpretations and taken them to the next level, claiming that the ruling elites of the world are devil-worshipping, shape-shifting alien reptiles who use symbolism as form of mind control-cum-witchcraft. In this view, popular media is a minefield of symbolic spells, created to manipulate the primitive human mind (which come to think of it, probably isn't that far from the truth...)

Which brings me to the backup story in Destroyer Duck #5...

Where the main story explored the theocratic and petropolitical motivations behind a 9/11 type event, Destroyer Duck #5's backup feature The Starling (written by Superman creator Jerry Siegel) offers a comic book foreshadowing of Icke's UFO theorizing. In florid, erotically charged language Siegel describes the origin of his character, which are identical to the modern theories of the biblical Nephilim (or The X-Files, for that matter). In turn, this human-alien hybrid who links us symbolically back to Mesopotamia, via the writings of Sitchin.

The story is filled with the brutal emotionalism that made Siegel's Superman so compelling. In this scene, the sweet-faced teenage boy learns from his mother (now a best-selling novelist) that his father was a shape-shifting alien who seduced her to create this new child.

In another foreshadowing of Icke et al, that sweet-faced boy is himself a shape shifting reptilian.

Mind you, this was written by the creator of Superman, modern history's most iconic superhero.

MESOPOTAMIA AND MARDUK

Looking at the Starling in that scene with his mother, I'm struck by how much he resembles Kamandi, another similarly-clad, sweet-faced teenager from Jack Kirby's post-apocalyptic fever-dream from the 1970's.

The mystery deepens. Mirroring the later Destroyer Duck #5, Kirby wrote his own story of a suitcase nuke smuggled aboard in airplane. In Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth# 30, Kamandi and his mutant companion Ben Boxer discover a long-dead terrorist on an airplane that had been commandeered by a UFO. The terrorist is clutching a suitcase nuke, en route to some grim destination before the 'Great Disaster,' the nebulous Apocalypse that is the basis of the Kamandi mythology.

Remarkably, we are symbolically brought back to Sitchin's Mesopotamia by the giant statue of Marduk on the cover of Kamandi #30 (story is titled "UFO: The Wildest Trip Ever"). The desert sands of Mesopotamia (or Hoqoom) were the cradle of civilization and now this alien-made "sand pit" becomes its grave. This cover is not altogether thematically dissimilar to the Sitchin cover above, either. (note: The Angel of Death in Silver Star also reduced the landscape to desert).

This also ties us back to Jerry Siegel, since Marduk was one of Superman's mythological antecedents. Again, was any of this conscious? I can't possibly see how.

THE STARGATE

As if all of this weren't enough, the terrorist, the suitcase nuke and the airliner are all drawn into a gigantic Stargate, or interdimensional portal, that opens in the sky above the sand dunes.

Kirby writes: "Where do UFO's come from? How do they get here? Maybe they don't travel through the vastness of space, maybe they just come through things like the Door." I'm sure both Freud and Crowley would appreciate the blatant symbolism on that image- a skyscraper entering a Stargate, though for different reasons. Jake Kotzke would appreciate it for another reason altogether from them.

So would Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, whose landmark work The Stargate Conspiracy was published in America exactly one week before...

9/11, AGAIN

Since everything always ties back to The X-Files somehow, I am struck by how similar the image of the terrorist clutching the suitcase nuke in Kamandi is to this image of Max Fennig clutching a part of a highly radioactive alien generator to his chest in the episode "Max." Especially since both situations deal with an UFO taking control of a jetliner. I'm even more struck by the parallels between the plane crash in that XF episode and the contested fate of Flight 93. In the episode, the airliner Max is on is commandeered by a UFO and then shot down by a fighter jet. It crash-lands in rural, upstate New York, right next door to Pennsylvania.

I'm even more struck by the gematria encoded in the tail-fin of the Kamandi plane. 'N' and 'C' are the 14th and 3rd letters of the alphabet respectively, adding up to the mystical 17. G is the 7th- add the 2 and you have 9. And we already have the 11.

The two 9/11 airplanes- Flight 11 and Flight 175 struck the twin towers 17 minutes apart.

Kamandi #30 hit the stands in March of 1975.

This story originally started as a short '2007 in Review' post. But everytime I look at it, another link comes to light. Next, we will see Kirby's prophecies of the Iraq War and the Big Brother of all Conspiracy Theories...

Silver Star, part 2: Move Over Nostradamus

Had the attacks in 2001 never happened, September 11 may have been best known as the day George Bush Sr. addressed the US Congress making his case for war against Iraq, who had invaded and occupied the oil duchy known as Kuwait. It was in this speech that the ominous phrase, "New World Order," became part of the common lexicon.

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective -- a new world order -- can emerge: a new era -- freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice.

That New World Order, where a centralized global authority keeps the peace, was presented to us by Jack Kirby in living color in his incredibly prescient 1974 series, OMAC. And then some.

OMAC prophesied a technocratic utopia lorded over by a sentient artificial intelligence named Brother Eye, who orbits the planet in satellite form. Keeping things calm were a literally faceless police force known as the Global Peace Agency. In this series, Kirby forecast Real Dolls, virtual reality, non-lethal weaponry, a kind of ramped-up organ harvesting, water wars and genetically engineered Beasts of the Apocalypse that would make DARPA drool.

Any conspiracy researcher or symbology buff worth their salt should be sitting up straight, seeing that blatant All-Seeing Eye imagery upon OMAC's chest. OMAC's mohawk haircut doesn't say "Punk Rock" (which didn't really exist then) so much as it says "New Roman Empire." Again, it's almost certain that Kirby came across the juxtaposition of occult symbolism and world government theorizing while reading conspiracy literature.

Now, scroll back up to the top of the page and look at the image the government of Kuwait used to symbolize the invasion of their country in 1990. And then look at the cover of OMAC#3, that portrays a very similar scenario- a strongman invading a neighboring country in defiance of the 'World Community.' Only in this case, A 'One Man Army' is there to defend the invaded country, not an...

In the next issue, the 'One Man Army' defeats the invading force and goes to arrest the commander of the invading army, Marshall Kafka, who is trapped in his bunker.

The bewildered look on the bearded, presumed-dead warrior's face as he is arrested by the One Man Army had a strange, real-life echo three decades later when the "Army of One" arrested another bearded, presumed-dead warrior in his underground bunker...

Here, take a closer look. Notice the mouth agape on both men...

Later, Kafka is put on trial for assorted crimes against humanity. Here he defiantly reviews the charges against him, which are essentially the same charges brought against Saddam.

Note the last charge is another way of saying "Weapons of Mass Destruction."

The full-page shot below is an uncanny foreshadowing. The hair is different- this is cartooning, not caricature - but the strong features (especially the eyes) are remarkably similar to Saddam. Especially considering Kirby's tendency towards abstraction. Or considering that millions of people predict the looming Apocalypse based on some incredibly vague old French poems...

The name "Kafka" is curious for Kirby, considering the aggressive militarism of the character. But it's worth noting that more than one commentator as referred to the trial, sentencing and execution of Saddam as something out of Kafka or 'Kafkaesque.'

Remembering we are dealing in the realm of symbol, it should be noted that Kafka's confidence during his trial is due to the oncoming attack of his bio-engineered killing machine. Symbolically, this plot-line is eerily similar to the ongoing insurrection the "Army of One" has faced in the days since Saddam's downfall.

Another Kirby cover seems like a political cartoon here, with the outmatched One Man Army facing a multi-pronged chimera appearing out of the ether, raining fire and death. Just write 'intifada' on the monster's chest and put a triangle around OMAC's chest eye and you're set. Note: The battle takes place on Mount Everest, lending an Theosophical tinge to this story.

So we have the very strong thematic links to September 11, 1990 with the New World Order themed OMAC and the synch-links to the Mesopotamian Wars. What ties this all into 9/11 and the Nephilim/Stargate links discussed in the past two installments? Well, in the DC Universe OMAC has a descendant, his name is...

THE MISSING LINKS

What is amazing in the context of Kirby's visionary abilities is that the Saddam story in OMAC and the Stargate/Marduk storyline in Kamandi came out at essentially the same time- OMAC was published in January of 1975 and Kamandi in March.

This means that Kirby was visualizing this Saddam character and the Stargate at the same point in time- which ties into the work of researchers like William Henry, who claim that the Iraq War was a pretext for this struggle over the Sumerian texts that Saddam was hording.

Amazing.

Following the Silver Star series, the Mindbomb series was a freeform meditation on the shamanic nature of the creative process and how dreams and visionary experiences fed into the process as well. The first post tied into Jake Kotze's links between Kirby's first cover upon returning to Captain America and the King Kong movie poster, which featured the Twin Towers. The first installment was titled "Stargate in the Sky"

As I mentioned before, Jake picked up the Kirby ball and took it to the semiotic endzone. Not having read the comics as of yet, he may not have been aware that the Madbomb, that infernal mind control weapon of the Anglophile Elite, was devised by the aptly-named Mason Harding.

Just prior the beginning of the Madbomb Saga, we have "Slaughter in the Sky," drawn by X-Files resonator Frank Robbins. Here we see Doctor Faustus kicking Cap out of a plane that is flying towards New York City.

Given the synchronistic currents surrounding Kirby, the presence of Doctor Faustus is fascinating, given the fact that the mad psychiatrist is obviously Kirby's parody of Carl Jung.

Given Kirby's voracious appetite for anything outre or esoteric, at some point he must have read up on Jung. This is evidenced by the fact that Jung was rumored to Goethe's illegitimate great-grandson and held the figure of Goethe's Faustus close to his heart all of his life, taking the character on as his "second personality."

Who else but Jung himself could initiate such a portentous avalanche of synchronicity and symbolism that marked the last stage of Kirby's career in comics? And his stand-in seems to have a special interest in aircraft and New York City, particularly lower Manhattan there, albeit in non-Kirby comics.

Following the various breadcrumb trails and the bizarre synergy lately between the Kirby-crazed Secret Sun and the Stargate-obsessed Blob, is anyone surprised that Kirby followed up the Madbomb Saga with an incredibly strange story of an interdimensional Stargate opening up in the sky over the Ground Zero resonating "Zero Street?" Or that the the first hero through it would be the Falcon, the 17-resonating Horus stand-in? Or that the story would involve a Texas oilman and yet another reclusive sect of mind-controlled Fundamentalist weirdos?

Reverberations

Through an quirk in scheduling, I've been spending a lot of my time delving back into the symbols. And it is having a powerful effect on my dreams, which have become extremely huge and vivid.

Last night I dreamed that an enormous, mile-wide UFO was trying to phase into this physical plane over the Tappan Zee bridge. The force of this action was destroying the bridge, very much like the Point Pleasant event. I was primarily concerned with how traffic would get across the river, which is 3 miles at that point. The water was littered with construction debris and floating cars. Vladimir Putin was there, witnessing the event and he and I discussed the arrogance of the UFO's inhabitants. But the UFO was phasing in and out of this dimensional reality. Finally, the UFO - still phasing - was brought down telepathically by a small, bald Asian man. It was like watching a building collapse in slow motion- it took forever. But the bridge was still gone.

I can name any number of items in my thoughtstream lately that played into this construction, but the power of the Unconscious mind takes those bits and pieces and creates something unforgettable of them. And in a few short seconds, I could find just the right images to quickly construct a collage of to illustrate the story.

My question is why is so much of popular culture so dead and empty? Because we as a culture are not dreaming anymore. Americulture is a speed freak; unable to sleep and unwilling to dream. As with all speed freaks, our public life is becoming a dreary, ugly, miserable hallucination.

We are the Night People

A pack of gluttonous, raccoon-eyed paranoids drunk on consumerism, Calvinism and overstimulation.

An expert diagnosis of Bush-era America? Well, that's a bit outside of the Secret Sun's province. Here, it's a description of Jack Kirby's "Night People," whom Captain America tangled with following the Madbomb Saga. Christmas is probably still fresh in your memory, so this montage should ring true....

Firmly ensconced in the endless ocean of the Dreaming Mind, Kirby foresaw the future of America and only got a few of the details wrong. The Night People have indeed come, only the Elite wasn't defeated and the Madbombs keep going off all the time.

Foreseeing the Bush Administration's policy of "Shock and Awe" or the constellation of control techniques Naomi Wolf catalogs in her book The Shock Doctrine, the Night People's Inquisitor turns the Horus-resonating Falcon and his lady into one of them using their sacrament, the "blessing" of electroshock treatment. In addition to the Egyptian stand-in superhero, we have Leila, whose name is Arabic for "night."

The Night People have their heaven, only it's not on Earth. It's in another dimension and they use their own homemade Stargate to move back and forth. The only problem is their dimension is the dwelling place of demons- their heaven is actually a Hell. Devising their own interpretation of the Rapture, the Night People concoct a plan to transport all of the demons through the Stargate to Earth, so their dimension can be Heaven once again and Armageddon will befall the fallen world they left behind.

This kind of prophecy must leave a semiotic trail to its fulfillment and here we get hit after hit.

You see, the Night People had their own Mega Ritual, transporting their asylum on Zero Street to another dimension, along with a healthy chunk of Manhattan's bedrock. Zero Street is now a fenced-in Ground Zero, its native soil replaced with alien atoms.

Which brings us to 2001. Two pages before Captain America enters the Stargate, we see this house ad for his adaption of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which draws our attention by using an early, superior cover layout. Drawing our attention even further is the 17-17 hovering above it, drawing our attention back to the Falcon.

No Ground Zero/ Stargate ritual drama would be complete without a Texas oil millionaire with patrician facial features, and here Kirby delivers the goods. Taking the role is Texas Jack Muldoon, a rootin' tootin' hellraiser jes' a-rarin' to jump on through that Stargate to the madman's heaven and kick some Ausländer ass.

Kirby gets the ethnicity a bit off but the semiotics down pat. Muldoon is an Irish name meaning "commander of the fortress." The crotch-hugging straps are a nice, prophetic touch. The twin Roman numerals need no explanation.

Nor does that reverse-Madbomb/Kong pose mirroring Cap as he emerges from the other side of the Stargate.

Ironically, fans were right when they labeled Kirby's 70s work "irrelevant." Kirby was looking through the prism of the Collective Unconscious straight into the 21st Century. The Night People saga is a pitch perfect foreshadowing of the orgy of paranoia, materialism and self-righteousness that befell America circa 2002- 2004. In many precincts, the Night People still reign triumphant.

Ironically, "The Night People" came out smack dab in the middle of America's Bicentennial but had nothing to do with 1976. It was about the next 100 years.

The Leprechaun

One of my biggest influences is Graham Hancock, the pioneering British journalist and explorer. In my opinion, Hancock is a giant of our times and his influence on popular culture is as huge as it is unacknowledged. I attended his first talk on his latest masterwork, Supernatural, as New York's sublime Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Being a Casteneda fan from way back in the day, I was captivated by the talk. Yet at the same time I was desperately hoping that people wouldn't use the book as motivation to go out and chug some ayahusca for themselves. I see that kind of activity as the equivalent of deep sea diving or Antarctic exploration- best left to the experts.

Many of the details in Hancock's talk struck a chord with me. When I was a kid I would get respiratory infections all of the time. As a result I would get terrifyingly high fevers, often peaking at 106ºF. As a result of that, I would often hallucinate. When I was 12, I got a particularly serious ear infection and was bedridden for over two weeks. Actually I was couch ridden- I was so weakened I couldn't walk up and down the stairs. If I wasn't so incredibly sick it would have been Paradise- nothing to do but lie around and read comics. I was a big Captain America fan at the time and was reading about three years worth of the title during that episode.

One night during this illness, I woke to a most peculiar tableau. A leprechaun was sitting on a rock in the middle of the living room and there was a thunder storm flashing in the adjacent room. I call him a leprechaun only because he was small and bearded and wearing archaic clothes and a rope belt. But he didn't seem cute and charming, he seemed scary as hell. He was shouting over the noise of the storm in a language I didn't understand, maybe Gaelic. And at some point the ceiling opened up and gold coins rained from the ceiling. The noise was unbearable and I passed out.

The thing is, that happened. It wasn't a dream- it all happened when I woke up and stopped when I passed out. I remember it better than yesterday. I was painfully awake at the time. There were no coins on the floor the next morning nor any burn marks on the floor or on the furniture in the dining room. But that doesn't mean the episode didn't have weight and mass and sound and sight and smell. It also doesn't mean that it wasn't extremely unpleasant either.

After Hancock's talk I waited in the receiving line and then told him that story. His face lit up and he nodded knowingly the entire time. He told me that my experience was basically identical to any number of the shamanic experiences he heard about in the field. He said that high fever seemed to throw the same filtering switch in the brain that hallucinogens did. I was gratified by his response, but at the same time I wondered how anyone could put themselves through that kind of thing voluntarily.

Still and all, I was captivated by Hancock's research. And as per usual, the more I heard about shamanism and its by-products the more I was reminded of Jack Kirby....

Shamanic Visions

Jack Kirby may not be a household name, but we all are immersed in his visions. So many of the Hollywood wizards people celebrate today - not to mention video game makers - were raised on his comics. You can essentially separate action and sci-fi cinema at the point before and after Jack Kirby fans poured into Tinseltown and changed the look, tempo and intensity of these films. Somehow Kirby tapped into something so incredibly deep in the Collective Unconscious that it transformed his work and subsequently transformed society. It simply took some time for the technology to put Kirby's visions on the screen.

But Kirby may have been more than a mere visionary cartoonist- as if that's not enough in and of itself. I remember one night I was lying on the couch, flipping through a stack of Kirby's Eternals comics when a documentary on the Discovery Channel was talking about how shamanic art in different cultures had similar features- abstracted human figures, dots, squiggles, and odd geometric designs. What struck me about that was in the mid 1960's Kirby's art underwent a startling transformation and incorporated all of those motifs.

Subsequently, Kirby's Marvel work became popular with acid-dropping college kids. And when I am lost in my musings (which is pretty much all the time) I sometimes wonder if the man didn't drop acid himself. It wouldn't surprise me; in fact, it would explain a lot. Kirby was an artist, not a stockbroker, and had hip baby-boomer kids. But at the same time I don't know if acid or any other mind-altering drugs are necessary to tap into the deep recesses of the dreaming mind. As it is, Kirby's work was already infinitely more mind-bending than the Haight-Asbury artists, as talented as they were.

If anyone in the media was a shaman, it was Jack Kirby. Among tribal societies it's believed that shamans can transcend the limitations of time and space. So could that explain Kirby's bizarre foreshadowings of the Gulf War, 9/11 and the Bush era? Or was some outside intelligence driving his visions? And is there any real difference between the two?

It's important to remember when you see some of the wacked-out stuff Kirby put on paper that he claimed that his stories existed inside his mind, and he simply traced them onto the page. But Kirby's psychedelia wasn't the self-conscious, self-important variety of the Boomer cartoonists who followed in his wake. In fact, Kirby's stories are rife with corny dialog and silly characters. His work came from the same sensibility as 50's drive-in movies and the pulps. And it was only with the guiding hand of super-salesman Stan Lee that Kirby's fever dreams were able to reach the mainstream. He most certainly didn't think of himself as a shaman or a visionary, which may well be what allowed him to really dive into the deepest waters of the subconscious mind.

But using therapeutic terms like "the subconscious" makes all of this too pat, too easily pigeonholed. Kirby was gripped by something powerful and compelling, as are all artists and visionaries like him. Many people like that often teeter on the brink of full-blown schizophrenia. The line between a shaman and a madman is vanishingly small. It's almost always mind-numbingly depressing when the line is crossed. It's even more depressing when it's exploited for profit's sake.

The problem is that trying to write about all of this without sounding like a credulous idiot is a pain in the neck. It's tempting to leave all of the interlocutory jargon behind and speak the language of the Dreaming Mind itself. You see this language in Blake's poetry, the Bible, and the work of writers like Plutarch or Ovid. But there's always the danger that you can follow shipwrecks like Syd Barrett into the abyss. I often wonder how Jaz Coleman is able to function, he can be so terrifyingly unhinged at times. I wondered the same about Philip K. Dick after reading through his Exegesis or Elizabeth Fraser in 1994. Which is why I find the guiding hand of Jungian analysis so incredibly important.

The Convulsive Power of the Dreaming Mind

Not only is it no accident that a Jung stand-in pushed Captain America into the ether just before Kirby's return, it may have even been intentional on the part of the writer, Marv Wolfman. The 70s were a pretty dreary decade, but it didn't lack for pop intellectualism. Marvel was full of writers who came in from the counter-culture, and a smart cookie like Marv Wolfman may well have realized that Kirby's obsession with the gods resonated with Jung's work. Captain America was about to embark on a 22-issue descent in the depths, a Jung-like 'night sea journey' into prophecy, conspiracy and visionary madness. Free-falling over the skies of Manhattan would be the least of Cap's problems.

When I was writing Our Gods Wear Spandex, I hadn't read up on my Jung for some time. But when I was promoting the book it suddenly hit me: my book was pure Jung in its approach. I was analyzing readers' motivations for being drawn towards superhero comics, and broke the myriad characters down into a handful of mythic archetypes. I had integrated Jungian thought to the point it became unconscious.

When you look into how dream-driven artists like Jack Kirby or Chris Carter create fiction that becomes the world's reality, you are smack-dab square in Jung Country, where internal thoughts become external reality. Dont ask me to explain it, but when you delve into this line of thinking and make it your own, sooner or later things start to happen- synchronicity, coincidence, manifestation. And eventually you live in a tangibly numinous world, whether you are awake or not.

Jung and New York are intimately linked in my mind since I immersed myself in his teachings when I was working in the world famous obelisk known as the Empire State Building, doing designs for kiddie togs. The ESB may well be the inspiration for much of the pre-9/11 plane-skyscraper symbolism we see, having been the site of such an event in 1945. I remember being evacuated from the ESB after the first WTC bombing, and having some plainclothes guy give my co-workers and I a 'routine' lecture on 'fire safety' during the Gulf War. I lost touch with Jung when people like Scott Peck and Thomas Moore were watering him down, making his very challenging work safe for middle-aged housewives. Or maybe it was because there were other ideas I wanted to explore. I'm not certain yet.

While working on the Silver Star series, I had an astonishingly vivid nightmare of being trapped in Manhattan during a 9/11-like scenario. Only this one was a 'dirty' bomb that arrived by way of a cruise missile. My friends and I watched it zoom overhead as we lunched in Bryant Park. People were bursting into radioactive flames all around me. SWAT teams were on the streets preventing people from leaving the city, because we were all contaminated. I couldn't get a signal on my cell phone so I couldn't call my wife and tell her I was all right. And at one point I was chased by an armored cop down a staircase. It was real as life - I woke up with my heart pounding, drenched in sweat.

So no one can tell me the dreaming mind is trivial or unimportant. Some of humanity's greatest achievements have been born there. I think in many ways modern society's contempt for the Unconscious is at the root of its malaise. When desires or fears go unanalyzed they metastasize and distort our personalities. A state which some people seem to aspire to.

If there is one thing I am trying to do with the Secret Sun, it is to add my two cents to the cultural conversation. What I would like to ultimately see is artists and writers digging deeper into their inner reality and creating better art as a result. All art is the manifestation of inner reality in one way or another, and our inner reality is a hell of a lot deeper and profound than our present popular culture would have you believe.

Not so long ago, I felt like I was walking into a dream when I stepped into a movie theatre. Good or bad, it had an immersive effect. Nowadays I mostly feel like I wandered into an accounting seminar. My wife and I love to watch movies in bed, but I feel as if anything new we rent from the video store is going to be medicore by definition. We recently watched Superbad- a well-regarded comedy written by an actor I like very much named Seth Rogen- and we couldn't wait for it to end about halfway through. There were so many absurd crowd-pleasing bits in the film I was taken completely out of the narrative. And once you step outside that, you're basically left with a bunch of people running around pretending to be someone else and reciting lines written by someone else. And that was one of the better recent films we've rented.

The magic is totally gone from our cinema -hell, our mass media- and what's left stinks of desperation. Most of today's producers and writers and actors seem to care about nothing but the opening weekend gross. Hollywood has always looked down on the rest of the world, but never before has the contempt felt so overt. And the rest of the world is returning the favor by finding other things to do with their leisure time.

Mark my words- people will continue to lose interest in film or theatre or TV or novels unless someone can figure out how to recapture that dream reality again. And as culture goes, so goes the society. Culture is a barometer of a people, and our culture is telling us that the Bush years have ripped out our collective soul and replaced it with narcissism, cynicism and despair.

Were he alive today, Jung would look at this nation and instantly recognize it was on its own night sea journey.

The Alchemical Romance of The Fifth Element

2009-04-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

Like The Matrix, the 1997 film The Fifth Element mines the feverishly imaginative world of comic books. But whereas The Matrix derives from Marvel Comics and manga, The Fifth Element draws its visual punch from French comics, formally known as bande desinee (BD), familiar to readers of the American magazine Heavy Metal, which reprints a great deal of comics from Europe. Bande desinee is, like manga, a medium and not a genre. Any number of types of stories are produced, usually in hardcover oversized albums. But the most familiar form of BD to American readers are the kinds of outrageous and decadent science fiction yarns serialized in French magazines like Pilote and Metal Hurlant. These sci-fi stories are characterized by lavish, nearly-baroque art and design, and a narrative sensibility that emphasizes sophomoric nihilism, sadistic violence and decadent sex.

The dizzying visual imagination of the BD sci-fi subculture is mirrored in The Fifth Element . In fact, Besson enlisted one of BD’s premier talents, Jean Giraud, to forge the visual look of the film. Giraud is known to BD readers by his pen names ‘Gir’ and ‘Moebius.’ As Gir, he has drawn the long-running adventures of the Western hero, Lieutenant Blueberry. And as Moebius, he illustrated a large body of science fiction stories, often in collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky, the South American filmmaker best known for his films El Topo and Santa Sangre.

Giraud’s own work is also of a distinctly spiritual bent, but defining the precise nature of that spirituality is often elusive. Moebius is (or was) the follower of a French New Age guru named Jean Paul Appel Guery, who changed the course of Moebius’ work from dystopian sci-fi to incredibly opaque new age sci-fi. Moebius has also worked on several sci-fi/fantasy films, including Alien, Willow and The Abyss.

Besson also enlisted the visual talents of another French legend for The Fifth Element. Jean Paul Gaultier, the fashion maestro best known for his work with Madonna, designed many of the sexually-provocative costumes for the film, and gave the film a distinctly decadent and androgynous sheen.

The plot of The Fifth Element. concerns a struggle between the forces of good, here in the form of the alien Mondoshawans and their human accomplices; and the forces of evil, represented by a malevolent Death Star-like planet (known only a “Mister Shadow”) and its alien and human enablers. Gary Oldman, scenery-chewer extraordinaire, plays Zorg, an evil weapons manufacturer who works in concert with the alien Mangalores to help make manifest the destruction of earth by this ultimate Evil.

The Mondoshawans send their champion, the so-called “Supreme Being”, to Earth to help destroy the Ultimate Evil, but the Mangalores shoot down their ship before it can reach the Earth. A salvage team is sent to the crash site (which is on a moon) and a piece of a arm is recovered, which turns out to be from the Supreme Being. The severed limb is brought to Earth and through DNA something-or-other is reconstituted into an intact replication of the supreme one. Happily, it transpires than underneath their bulky and cartoonish armor, the Mondoshawans look like hot, young, naked supermodels. Hence LeeLoo, the reconstructed supreme being, is played by hot, young, naked supermodel Milla Jovovich.

However, LeeLoo freaks out when she is reborn, busts out of her rebirthing chamber and ends up in the care of soldier-turned-cabbie Korben Dallas (played by Bruce Willis). At her urging, Dallas then brings Leeloo to the priest Father Cornelius, played by Ian Holm. Cornelius is part of a hereditary line of priests that do the Mondoshawan’s bidding in protecting the Earth.

What must be done next is to recover the ritual stones symbolizing the four elements and get LeeLoo to Egypt post-haste, in order to perform the ritual that will repel and destroy “Mister Shadow." However, the stones are being kept by an alien chanteuse on a galactic pleasure cruiser halfway across the galaxy. Hence, Dallas, Cornelius and LeeLoo rocket out to the cruiser to recover the stones. Along the way, LeeLoo immerses herself in human lore and language, with the aid of a laptop computer supplied to her by Father Cornelius. The messianic troupe also make the acquaintance of a maniacally-epicene galactic talk show host named Ruby Rhod, played by Chris Tucker.

Along the way they are countered by Zorg and his Mangalores cohorts. All sorts of mayhem ensues, and the alien singer protecting the stones is killed by the Mangalores. As she lays dying, she tells Dallas that the stones are located inside her body, and Dallas must pull them out of her corpse. Zorg is also after the stones, but is ultimately destroyed by a bomb he places on the cruiser (literally ‘hoisted on his own petard’, you might say). Dallas, Cornelius and LeeLoo escape just in the nick of time and return to Earth to perform the ritual.

The trip back seems to be going well until LeeLoo stumbles across the subject of war in her humanities studies. She is so driven to despair by visions of man’s inhumanity to man that she is unable to perform the ritual. The stones are put into place, but the Fifth Element isn’t activated. Cornelius reckons that LeeLoo needs a first hand lesson in the ways of love to ease her despair over man’s barbarism, so he orders Dallas to have a snog with her. Dallas and LeeLoo neck and the Evil Planet something-or -other is destroyed in an orgasmic burst. The film ends as Korben and LeeLoo enjoy a hearty shag in a sarcophagus-type reactor chamber in a Nucleo Lab, as the President of the Earth and a worldwide television audience look on.

METATEXT

Aside from the obvious comic book, action movie and Solar ritual drama motifs, Besson seems to borrow heavily from Alchemical symbolism. Or, more precisely, Jungian interpretation of Alchemical symbolism. That final scene where Korben and LeeLoo copulate in the reactor chamber while the lord of Earth look on is directly taking it cues from three of the pivotal stages of Alchemist’s so-called “Chemical Marriage” process.

As depicted in numerous Alchemical texts like the Mutus Liber, the Chemical Marriage is a process in which the Sun (represented by a king), and the Moon (represented by a queen) are reunited into a single primevel being, the Royal Hermaphrodite, or the Rebis. In some texts the King and Queen copulate in a chamber filled with Mercurial water ( water collected from the morning dew), in others they commingle in a furnace.

Another product of this Royal Copulation is the Lapis, otherwise known as the Philosopher’s Stone. The Philosopher’s Stone is the device the Alchemists beleived could transform base metals into gold. This fabled Stone is now familiar to hundreds of millions of people the world over thanks to the Harry Potter novels.

Alchemy is the most arcane of ancient sciences, and since the Alchemists deliberately obscured their teachings either in wordless books or in arcane symbols, scholars disagree as to their meaning. Was the Chemical Wedding purely symbolic and spiritual, or was it some arcane recounting of an actual process? My vote is for the latter, but no one can say for sure. Carl Jung thought it was a metaphor for a person’s “individuation process” where the two halves of human nature- spiritual and rational- are conjouned.

However much Alchemy is scoffed at today, in many ways it was the forerunner of modern chemistry, and had a huge influence on modern medicine as well. Sir Issac Newton, arguably the most important scientific thinker in history, was obsessed with the alchemical arts. When Sir Issac wasn’t discovering the laws of gravity or inventing calculus or revolutionizing the study of Astronomy, he busied himself amassing England’s largest Alchemical library and conducting Alchemical experiments.

The language of Alchemy is the crux of The Fifth Element. The Alchemists believed that all matter was composed of four fundamental elements- Earth, Air, Water and Fire.

Some historians that the word "Alchemy" itself is derived from Al Khemiya which in turn is derived from Kemet (“the black land”), the name the ancient Egyptians new themselves by. ”Egypt” is a Greek name given to Kemet by the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty, and derives from aigis or “shield.”

The etymology of the word “Alchemy” is directly referenced by the location of the Mondoshawan temple in Egypt. And again, the use of the four elements is drawn from Alchemic arts. And the “Fifth Element” is not LeeLoo alone, but the by-product of the Coninunctio, or the Chemical Wedding between Korben and LeeLoo.

Their make-out session overseen by the priests in the Mondoshawan temple was their nuptials, and the episode in the rebirthing chamber was their royal consumation. The kings, queens and princes of the Earth are their to witness their apotheosis, which signifies the supreme status of the Alchemical arts in this ritual drama.

Not surprisingly, this Alchemical ritual drama is rife with Solar imagery. The big baddie, Mister Shadow in the tale is depicted as a Black Sun, a burning orb that gives no light nor heat. In other words, a spiritual force that exists only to serve its own needs, and possesses neither love nor compassion. It is pure, elemental Evil. It’s a sun that gives off light instead of shadow. It’s accomplice, Zorg, is a disciple of Evil. He believes that destruction and warfare are necessary facets of existance, and that personal enrichment is the highest good.

In the Alchemical Wedding drama of The Fifth Element, Korben is the Sun King and LeLoo is the Moon Queen. Leeloo herself represents the prima materia of the Alchemical grail quest.

LeeLoo is reconstructed from a genetic fragment recovered from the Mondoshawan ship, which crashed on a barren and dusty moon. The moon, being traditionally untouched by man, is thereby a source of the prima materia , or the “untouched matter” which the Alchemists sought to transform into gold. The Moon also reflects the Sun, which accounts for the solar touches in LeeLoo’s outfit.

Korben is a depicted as deactivated soldeier from an elite military order. Exactly which order Korben serived is no mystery to those familiar with medieval or military iconography. When we first meet Korben in his small, Spartan apartment we see has a golden trophy adorned with the Templar cross (00:18:27) And in a nod to Horus, Korben’s never-seen mother complains that she has left him 17 messages on his answering machine in the same scene.

Finally, the Mondoshawan priests dress in red and gold robes, and their Egyptian origin and extraterrestrial and godly alliances links them with the Shemsu Hor, the priest kings who ruled Ancient Egypt when the Netjer, or gods, returned to the Heavens. The Shemsu Hor are traditionally believed to be the guardians of the sacred arts, not the least of which is Alchemy.

Solar Symbology in the Chronicles of Narnia

2009-04-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

Far from being the dour hermit of Evangelical propaganda, CS Lewis was a much more complex and fascinating character. His eccentric personal life has come under scrutiny in recent years (his only marriage came in his late middle age and was an immigration scam, he also never fathered any children) and his religious eccentricity has never really been a secret. He once wrote to a friend, "I had some ado to prevent Joy and myself from relapsing into Paganism in Attica! At Daphni it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer. But somehow one didn't feel it would have been very wrong - would have only been addressing Christ sub specie Apollinis." Lewis biographies are rife with this kind of enthusiasm.

Indeed, Lewis came to Christianity from a lifelong obsession with Nordic and classical paganism, which he never disavowed. Indeed he imagined Christianity as the fulfillment of paganism, particularly that of the Solar tradition. As a serious scholar, Lewis understood how similar the Solar monotheism of the late Roman Empire was to Christianity, and it's the earlier tradition that informs his most famous work of fiction...

Lewis' first novel in The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, tells the story of the four Pevensie siblings- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy - sent away from London during World War II to the countryside to stay with a kindly professor named Kirk.

Stuck inside on a rainy day, they explore the professor’s large estate and find an empty room with nothing but a wardrobe in it. Lucy, the youngest, enters into the wardrobe during a game of hide and seek and finds herself in a snowy forest. She stands near a lamppost in a clearing and encounters a faun named Mr. Tumnus. The faun then invites Lucy to his home for a typical British teatime. There, Tumnus informs Lucy that he was instructed to kidnap her. Overcome with pangs of conscience, he then lets her escape.

Lucy returns to Kirk’s estate through the wardrobe and tells the others of her adventures. They dismiss her story as childish fantasy, but during another round of hide and seek Edmund, the second youngest, follows Lucy into the wardrobe, and then into Narnia, the snowy land. Unable to find Lucy, Edmund encounters Queen Jadis the White Witch, ruler of Aslan. She offers Edmund a dessert called ‘Turkish Delight,’ which Edmund finds irresistible. The Witch then asks him to bring his brothers and sisters to Narnia.

Following this, Edmund finds Lucy in the woods, and the two return through the wardrobe together. Lucy tells Susan and Peter that Edmund too discovered the land of Narnia. Edmund's denies this, much to the consternation of Lucy. But the others end up hiding in the wardrobe one day when the professor has over visitors. They then enter the land of Narnia together. Lucy takes her siblings to see Mr Tumnus, only to discover that his home had been trashed, and he had been arrested by Maugrim the wolf, head of the White Witch’s secret police. They decide to try to find him, since they are unable to find the way to the wardrobe.

The Pevensie children then meet Mr and Mrs. Beaver, who take the kids to their home in a dam. The Beavers feed their guest and tell them of the horrible curse of the White Witch, who has kept Narnia in winter for a 100 years. They tell the Pevensies of the prophecy of Aslan, who will come and defeat the white witch. He will bring the Spring with him. The Pevensies then resolve to go meet Aslan at the Stone Table, where is supposed to appear. But Edmund flees the beavers’ home while this conversation takes place and returns to the White Witch. He lusts after the Turkish delight the witch keeps. He betrays his siblings by telling the Witch and Maugrim all that the Beavers had said of the return of Alan.

The Beavers then take the other children on journey to find Aslan. They spend a cold night huddled together in a cave. That morning they meet Father Christmas, who gives them all presents. Mr Beaver proclaims that the return of Father Christmas is a sign that the Witch’s spell is beginning to break and that Aslan’s power is on the rise. Meanwhile, the Witch takes her sleigh and her wolves to find Aslan and defeat him. Edmond is dragged behind her team, quite miserable. But the sleigh runs aground as the ice and snow begin to thaw. Springtime is coming to Aslan.

The other children then meet Aslan at the Stone Table. He greets the children and tells Peter of his destiny of king of Narnia. Aslan then learns that the Witch is planning to sacrifice Edmund, so he sends the Talking Beasts to rescue the boy from her clutches. But the White Witch comes to Aslan’s camp and claims that Edmund is rightfully hers. She claims his life on the basis of the ancient law that allows her control over all traitors. Aslan and the Witch confer and come to an agreement. Then Aslan leads his followers to the Fords of Beruna, to prepare for battle against the forces of the Witch.

That night, Aslan leaves camp for the Stone Table, where the White Witch has set up her camp. Lucy and Susan accompany him. They hide as Aslan presents himself to Witch for sacrifice. The witch orders that Aslan’s mane be shaved and that he be tied to the Stone Table. Aslan is then killed, and the Witch takes her minions to Beruna to finish off his forces. Lucy and Susan go weep for him at the Stone Table. As dawn breaks, mice begin to unravel his bonds and he is restored to life as the Sun rises. The Stone Table cracks. He and the girls then go frolic on a hilltop. After this idyll, Aslan goes and frees the animals that had been turned to stone by the Witch and kept in her courtyard.

Aslan then leads the freed beasts to battle against the forces of the White Witch. She is defeated and the Pevensie children are crown the Kings and Queens of Narnia. Years pass and the children- now grown- go hunting for the fable white stag and end back at the lamppost which marked the doorway between the two worlds. They then tumble back into the wardrobe and back into their present day. They are children once again. The Professor warns them not reenter the wardrobe, since they will return to Narnia soon enough.

AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOLAR SYMBOLS

The use and placement of pre-Christian symbols in The Lion, the With and the Wardrobe correspond with their role in the course of the narrative. And what is clear is that it is not Christ, but rather the reborn sun of the Winter Solstice that Aslan actually symbolizes. Most modern Christians are almost as weak on their Bible as they are on the traditions that influenced the construction of Christianity, so this fact is mostly lost.

The first signifier we see in Narnia is the lamppost in the forest, an obvious phallic/obelisk symbol. Ancient obelisks were often topped with lamp-bowls. The Victorian model he uses is merely a utilitarian version of that ancient device.

Mr. Tumnus is simply Lewis’ fanciful name for Pan. He is the first denizen of Narnia that Lucy meets, which points to his significance in the story. Pan is identified with nature and fertility, and his capture by the White Witch’s minions corresponds to the diminution of fertility in the winter months.

Mr. Tumnus tells Lucy “about long hunting parties after the milk-white stag who would give you your wishes if you caught him. “ (pg.17) The White Stag is a manifestation of the Celtic sun god, Lugh.

Tumnus reveals to Lucy that the Witch represents the cold winter months in this elemental struggle: “It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas, think of that” (pg. 20) It is never Christmas there, because December 25th is the day when the recovery of daylight first becomes noticeable.

Mr. Beaver then reveals that Aslan is the strengthening Sun of the post-Solstice days as the Winter gives way to Spring on the Equinox. He tells the children that when Aslan bares his teeth “Winter meets its death. When he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again” (pg. 85) The Lion’s mane is an ancient symbol of the Sun’s rays.

Lucy is identified as a representation of the summer months when Lewis tells us "At the name of Aslan, Lucy got the feeling you get when you wake in the morning and realize it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer." (pg. 74)

The children shout out "Tell us about Aslan...once again that strange feeling - like the first sings of spring had come over them." (pg. 85)

Mr Beaver says when Father Christmas shows up, “This is a nasty knock for the witch. It looks as if her power is already crumbling.” (pg. 116) This is a clear reference to the ‘Nativity of the Sun god’ on December 25th. Indeed, this is when the power of Winter “begins to crumble.”

Similarly, Father Christmas himself says that his coming showed that “Aslan is on the move. The Witch’s magic is weakening.” (pg. 117) This is exactly the reason the Ancients celebrated the rebirth of the Sun on the day we now know as Christmas.

The gifts receive from Father Christmas correspond to their identities as the four seasons.

Father Christmas gives Susan a bow and a quiver of arrows. Arrows are an ancient symbol for the rays of the Sun, predating both Judaism and Christianity. In the ancient Egyptian hymn to Aten, the Sun’s arrows are praised:

“Thy rising [is] beautiful in the horizon of heaven, O Aten, ordainer of life. Thou dost shoot up in the horizon of the East, thou fillest every land with thy beneficence. Thou art beautiful and great and sparkling, and exalted above every land.. Thy arrows (i.e., rays) envelop (i.e., penetrate) everywhere all the lands which thou hast made."

This identifies Susan as the Spring, the season where the Sun comes into its fullest power, from the Equinox to its peak on the Solstice.

Father Christmas gives Lucy a bottle with a tonic made from the fireflowers “that grow in the mountains of the Sun.” He tells Lucy that the elixir will restore anyone who is hurt to health. (pg. 118-9) Again, this reinforces Lucy's role symbolizing the hot summer months, which are signified by the fireflowers.

Edmond- who symbolizes the dying sun of the days following Autumnal Equinox- then becomes a witness to the Sun’s gathering strength while the Vernal Equinox approaches. Lewis writes that “the mist turned from white to gold” and that “(s)hafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor.” Edmund sees the ground “covered in all directions with little yellow flowers” (pg. 131)

The Witch’s dwarf henchman reiterates Aslan’s identity as the Sun when he cries to her, “Your winter has been destroyed, I tell you! This is Aslan's doing.” (pg. 133)

Aslan’s power is such that the forest is seen “passing in a few hours from January to May.” It is explained that only the Witch knew that this is what would happen when Aslan returned to Narnia. (pg. 136)
Lewis’ description of Aslan’s camp is rife with inarguably Solar imagery, here expressed in color: “A wonderful pavilion it was - and especially now when the light of the setting sun fell upon it - with sides of what looked like yellow silk and cords of crimson and tent pegs of ivory; and high above it on a pole a banner which bore a red rampant lion..." (pg. 138)

As the Sun sets, Aslan later takes Peter to a hilltop to show the boy his future domain. Lewis describes the sight of the castle as “shining because it was a castle and and of course the sunlight was reflected from all the windows which looked toward Peter and the sunset, but to Peter it looked like a great star resting on the seashore.” (pg. 142) This tableau was used in Disney’s The Lion King.
The juxtaposition of the “sunset” and the boy’s future seat of kingship show that Peter will be the guardian of the Sun while it works to regain its power in the winter months. Castles were designed as fortresses meant to protect the King or lord.

Aslan leaves his camp for his sacrifice at the Stone Table while “(t)he moonlight was bright” (pg. 163) This recalls the primacy of the moon in the winter skies of the Nordic lands that Lewis was so obsessed with.

The Witch commands that Aslan “ first be shaved.” The cutting of the lion’s mane is an ancient motif meant to symbolize the weakening of the Sun’s rays in days leading up to the Solstice. (pg. 166) This has a parallel in the Samson stories as well.

Aslan’s face is linked to the sunrise when Lewis writes that it “ looked nobler as the light grew and they could see it better.” Remember that the name Horus comes from the Egyptian Heru, meaning “face.”

Aslan’s resurrection is presaged by a pack of mice who chew at his restraints to free him. Susan note that the mice “think it’ll do some good untying him.” (pg. 175) In Ancient Greece, mice were sacred to Apollo, who later became identified with Helios, god of the sun.

Aslan’s resurrection is linked unmistakably to the sunrise. “The rising of the sun had made everything look so different...the Stone table was broken into two pieces ...and there was no Aslan.” (pg. 177)

Christ remains in the cave for three days and nights in the Christian resurrection story, but Aslan dies at night and is reborn with the sunrise. This directly parallels the Sun’s ‘rebirth’ on the morning following the Winter Solstice, when the daylight hours begin to lengthen.

The reborn Aslan is then depicted as “shining in the sunrise.” Aslan is bigger and stronger than before and is depicted as triumphantly shaking his regrown mane, again a ancient symbol of the Sun’s rays (pg. 178)

Hilltops are important in this story, just as they were to ancient Sun Worshippers. After his resurrection, the first thing Aslan does is take Susan and Lucy for a hearty romp atop a hill. (pg. 179)

The girls then "climbed onto his warm, golden back" (pg. 180) and rode atop Aslan through the forest. This corresponds to the girl’s identity as symbols of the fertile spring and summer months, when the Sun is in its glory.

Aslan’s breath melts and thaws the ‘stone curse’ of the witch. This action compared to "lighted match" put to "a bit of newspaper.” (pg. 184) This “slow burn” corresponds to the thawing power of the Springtime sun.

In Chapter 17 (the final chapter) we see the grown up Pevensie siblings hunting the white stag. Secret Sun readers are familiar with the number 17 as being identified with Horus avenging the death of Osiris, and the number of the New Age through the Aquarius symbolism in the Tarot.

At the end of the story, the remnants of the Witch's army linger in the forest just as the fields thaw first and the forest stays frozen longer.

Chasing the white stag into a thicket they come across the iron lamppost, then return to Britain as children. (pg. 203) This is the ‘reversal of time’ motif, yet again.

The day Lewis chose to first show the printed proofs for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to the ‘Inklings’ - June 22 - is the first day following the Summer Solstice, and the day the Sun enters the astrological sign of Cancer. The significance of this day in relation to Biblical prophecy was discussed in an earlier chapter, and given the promiscuous use of Solar symbolism in his novel, my guess is that he understood the inherently Solar nature of those prophecies as well.

CORONA-TION

The Pevensie children’s coronation scene in the Disney/Walden adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reveals what they are meant to represent and their thrones are all decorated with golden rising sun motifs. The order in which they are placed and each character’s role in the death and rebirth of Aslan correspond to the four stations of the Sun- the Autumnal Equinox, the Winter Solstice, The Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice.

The first in line is Edmond. He is the traitor to the Sun. It is through his subjection to the power of the White Witch leads to the death of Aslan, the Sun King. He represents Autumn, when the Sun's power weakens and dies. Aslan dies in Edmond’s ‘place’ (meaning the Autumnal Equinox in the Fall) and is then reborn.
Second in line is Peter. Just before he leaves Narnia, Aslan bestows his authority upon Peter, who represents the Lion in winter. The name ‘Peter’ comes the Greek petra, meaning ‘stone.’ The significance of his name is symbolized by the stone statues in the garden of the White Witch symbolize the frozen earth. Peter is the young apprentice king, and his uncertainty in wielding his sword represents the reborn Sun in winter as it slowly regains its power after its ‘death’ at the solstice.
Next is Susan. The name Susan comes from the Hebrew Shushan, meaning ‘lily.’ The lily had sexual connotations in the ancient world, and hence became associated with the ancient mother goddess Astarte (or Eostre), and the arts of sexual love and procreation. Today, lilies are used by Christians in Easter celebrations. Since she and Lucy found the reborn Aslan, she represents the Spring, when the Sun regains its power against the night.

• Last in line is Lucy. Lucy means ‘light’ and she represents the power of the Sun at its zenith. It is she who discovers Aslan, and it is her arrival in Aslan that breaks the spell of the White Witch. It is Edmond who follows her through the Wardrobe, just as the Autumn follows the Summer.

THE BATTLE OF WINTER AND SUMMER

The idea of the a dramatized battle between the summer Sun and the Winter is nothing new. Sir Frazer tells us that such dramas have an ancient and venerable history:

SOMETIMES in the popular customs of the peasantry the contrast between the dormant powers of vegetation in winter and their awakening vitality in spring takes the form of a dramatic contest between actors who play the parts respectively of Winter and Summer.

In Morals and Dogma, Albert Pike also explored the origin of the Solstice celebrations in ancient times:

(Prehistoric humans) knew nothing of the immutable laws of nature; and whenever the Sun commenced to tend Southward, they feared lest he might continue to do so, and by degrees disappear forever, leaving the earth to be ruled forever by darkness, storm, and cold. Hence they rejoiced when he commenced to re-ascend after the Winter Solstice, struggling against the malign influences of Aquarius and Pisces, and amicably received by the Lamb. And when at the Vernal Equinox he entered Taurus, they still more rejoiced at the assurance that the days would again be longer than the nights, that the season of seed-time had come, and the Summer and harvest would follow. And they lamented when, after the Autumnal Equinox, the malign influence of the venomous Scorpion, and vindictive Archer, and the filthy and ill-omened He-Goat dragged him down toward the Winter Solstice. Arriving there, they said he had been slain, and had gone to the realm of darkness. Remaining there three days, he rose again, and again ascended Northward in the heavens, to redeem the earth from the gloom and darkness of Winter, which soon became emblematical of sin, and evil, and suffering; as the Spring, Summer, and Autumn became emblems of happiness and immortality.

In this regard, Lewis’ use of the Lion as the protagonist in this Solar ritual drama is also significant. The association of the Lion with the Sun goes back to at least the ancient Sumerians, in the third millennium before Christ. The constellation of Leo also has been invested with Solar significance:

Leo has always been associated with the Sun. Pliny wrote that Egyptians worshiped the stars of Leo because they knew that the Sun appeared to enter them during the time when the Nile flooded to bring fresh fertile soil onto the land. Because of this, it was thought that the Sun rose in Leo at the time of creation. Thus, Leo was the emblem of the fire and heat that nourished the land, intimately associated with all the blessings that rained down from the greatest of the gods that filled the world with light each day.

It’s important to remind ourselves that that lion was also a pivotal symbol in the Solar religion of Mithraism as well, as is December 25th and the militaristic symbolism we see in the Narnia books.

Christians often note that Christ is named as the "Lion of Judah" in the book of Revelation, but in I Peter 5:8, the Bible tells us that the devil is also a lion: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly coincidental that Disney's Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe premiered 666 months after Lewis first presented the galleys of the book to the Inklings at Oxford. But again, 666 represented the Sun in many ancient traditions, and modern Biblical scholarship has proven that it is actually 616 which was "the number of the Beast."

Tracy Twyman Speaks on Creation Myths, Gnostic and Otherwise...

2009-03-17T15:24:00.000-07:00

Tracy Twyman is one of the top esoteric scholars in the world. The former editor of Dagobert's Revenge, Tracy more recently has published important works on the occult in our present times. Her two latest books are Solomon's Treasure: The Magic and Mystery of America's Money and Mind Controlled Sex Slaves and the CIA, a harrowing collection of essays on the hideous legacy of Operation Paperclip (which brought Nazi spies to the US) and MK-Ultra, the CIA mind control program run by Sidney Gottlieb, the man that Psi pioneer Russell Targ called "America's Josef Mengele."

Readers of The Secret Sun know that I view the historical claims of ancient scripture and mythology primarily from an AAT/Interventionist perspective. But I also want to present alternative views from scholars and researchers whom I respect and have been influenced by and Tracy tops that list. The topic at hand is Gnostic creation myths and "aliens." Like a lot of Secret Sun readers, Tracy approaches this material from a more mystical, occultist viewpoint than my more pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts take (which I admit is a bit out of favor these days), but also offers some fascinating insights from years of serious research. So let's get into it....

CK- Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman believes that the Gnostics were not converted Pagans but disillusioned Apocalyptic Jews. They began to see the promise of Jehovah's saving his people from their oppressors as being broken after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. They called Yahweh "Yaldaboath" and created a new host of fallen demiurges like the blind idiot god Samael.

Yahweh in the Book of Exodus could be interpreted as an alien being in a classic cigar-shaped flying craft. And his behavior in the early books in the Bible (commanding his followers to rape and murder children, for example) is nothing at all like the more spiritually-evolved figure in the prophetic books, particularly after the Babylonian captivity.

Tracy: Well, I wouldn't want to say that the Bible is telling UFO stories. That would be backwards, wouldn't it? Because the Bible is old and UFO stories are fairly new. I am more likely to believe that the modern myth of UFOs and grey aliens is a recent manifestation of an ancient religious archetype, rather than to say that the religious archetype is just a garbled memory of aliens.

In other words, the flying saucers in the alien stories are modern man's way of expressing a concept and an experience that is as ancient as civilization. Just like you see modern superheroes as manifestations of ancient god-forms. You would not say that this is evidence that ancient man really worshipped comic book superheroes.

"Alien" just means something outside of our normal experience. I recognize that many people have encounters with unexplained phenomena, including things that they describe as aliens in flying saucers from other planets. Other people describe encounters with angels, demons and ghosts. It is impossible to make a judgment about the validity of most of these stories, how much of the experience was purely internal, or how much of it happened in physical reality. All we can be sure of is that the same sorts of stories have always been told, and indeed this is the subject of most of the world's oldest stories.

That said, I agree with you to a certain point. Clearly, the Bible describes beings (Watchers, Angels, etc) that are capable of taking physical form and mating with humans. The offspring are described as being quite different from the rest of humanity. Specifically they are described as being "giants."

This meshes with myths from other cultures as well. They seem to have otherworldly qualities too: like blinding white skin, piercing red eyes, and enigmatic, hypnotic magnetism. In some cases they do take people for trips to the various "heavens." This might seem similar to alien abductions scenarios. And of course, the megalithic wonders of the ancient world could have been built by aliens using technology instead of being built by giants or gods, as our ancestors claimed they were.

Then you have Kabbalistic stories and Gnostic creation myths about God and the Devil mating with humans (God mates with Lilith, God rapes Eve, Samael mates with Eve, Lilith mates with Adam, etc.). So then the obvious question arises: are God and the Devil aliens too?

Fact is, I just don't know if we are talking about aliens from another planet. My gut instinct is that this is an oversimplification. But then again there may be some truth to it. Like I think I said in my previous answer to one of your questions last year, if the aliens had to cross the universe to get here, they'd probably have to travel inter-dimensionally, and that takes the concept of an alien to a whole other level I think. Then they are more akin to our current conception of gods.

And maybe they did come down from "the heavens" and give us a head start on civilization thousands of years ago. Maybe even did some interbreeding and genetic engineering. But who taught them how to do that? Who gave them a head-start on civilization? Does that negate the concept of God as a spiritual being or as the creator of the universe? I don't think so. I just think that gods and demons (and perhaps aliens) are way more complicated than any theory that anyone has ever come up with.

If I drew a circle on the ground and evoked Ialdaboath into visible manifestation inside of the circle would you say that he was an "extraterrestrial mortal being" or a "spiritual entity"? Do you deny that it is possible to do this? Because there is no doubt in my mind that all religious scripture is describing interaction with higher beings on a spiritual level. That's part of the definition of religion. And I have no doubt that religion works: all religion works, in my opinion. But sometimes people interact with their gods on a physical level as well. Yet if we are dealing with transcendent beings, then they can probably manifest on any level they want to. Mormons certainly see no distinction between the heavens in outer space and spiritual Heaven.

I suppose aliens from another planet, manipulating our world inter- dimensionally, could be doing all of this. Allen Greenfield wrote about this possibility in Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts. It seems there are quite a few people in modern times that have channeled beings which they believe to be aliens from another planet. I guess this all ties in with the so-called "Typhonian current" which appears to be a space alien interpretation of Aleister Crowley's writings, assuming that he was channeling an alien when he wrote The Book of the Law.

I think it was the Thule Society in Germany that used to have seances where they channeled Sumerian gods. They believed that these gods came from outer space, but at the same time they believed that they could commune with them spiritually. And the gods gave them instructions for how to build flying saucers. These diagrams ended up in the hands of Nazi scientists who went about trying to create them. Then after WWII all of the sudden everyone was talking about UFOs and aliens.

My take on UFOs, after having had all these years to think about it, is this: Most sightings of UFOs (those that haven't been thoroughly debunked as something else) are probably sightings of experimental military aircraft. I think that during the 50s and 60s, the US intelligence community purposely floated stories of human interaction with aliens, particularly stories that indicated the US government had a secret alliance with aliens. The Soviet Union also floated similar stories. This was just psychological warfare. They were trying to scare each other and waste each other's intelligence resources with red herrings.

It was part of what led to the space race. Both the US and the Soviets were afraid that the other side was going to get the upper hand in space, and be able to launch missiles from there. So they needed to get up there right away and make sure that didn't happen. They also needed to make sure that there weren't any aliens up there.

It seems to me that the UFO hype has really died down in the last 20 years, in direct relation to the relaxing of hostilities with Russia, along with the explosion of satellite technology. There are still unexplained sightings of things (which could still be experimental aircraft and other fringe technology experiments). But there are fewer abduction stories and supposed "government informants" coming out to tell all. Because the government is no longer hiring people to do this for them.

But could our gods be aliens? Sure, I suppose. I think we are dealing with a complete unknown here. If you are praying to something, or channeling it, it's like talking to a stranger through a screen. You have no idea what's on the other side. And if it appears to you physically, and seems to interact with you physically, you're still just seeing and feeling what it wants you to see and feel. So maybe it wants you to think of it at various times as a god or an alien, depending on what suits you, or what suits its purposes.

We shouldn't assume that they would ever be benevolent enough to tell us the truth or to show us their true form. But for some reason, they seem to want to involve us in their intramural disputes.

They want us to take sides: to worship them, to hate their enemies, and to hate the followers of their enemies as well. And thus we end up hating each other.

CK- Do we have evidence in the Gnostic texts of any of the heavenly host as being possible extraterrestrial mortal beings as opposed to being spiritual entities? There are plenty of examples you can cite in the Old Testament, but are there any such parallels in the Gnostic literature?

And further; Could someone infer that Yaldaboath was a renegade alien who rebelled against a larger alien hierarchy, which is why he and his followers fled to the desert for several decades?

The Gnostic interpretation of creation rightly interprets the story of Genesis as a fight amongst the gods over who was "first." And the Gnostics took sides with a different character in that drama than the Jews did. They saw the creator god as having himself been created by someone else, and said that he was insane for believing otherwise, or was "rebelling" against the true hierarchy by proclaiming himself the one true god.

But I think they got this information through channeling, which is how I think the Torah began as well. So I don't look at Genesis and the Gnostic creation stories as history, really, any more than I would the Delphic Oracles. It's myth and prophecy, and while I'm sure it must contain some residual memory of things that happened to ancient man in the distant past, it would be impossible to determine the "truth" about any of it. Certainly we would never be able to determine the truth about which god came "first" or who is the rightful heir to whatever. In the case of Genesis, it seems like we are discussing events outside of linear time anyway.

But to get back to your specific question: Yes, it seems to me that Yahweh was one of several gods, all together in a family dynasty, who at one point overthrew the existing hierarchy to proclaim himself the one true god, just as Zeus overthrew the Titans in the Greek myth.

This is spelled out pretty explicitly in the Gnostic creation stories, but there are many traces of it in Genesis as well. Perhaps this is why, in the Bible, God always favors the younger sons of his chosen people instead of the eldest, rightful heirs to the family blessing (Seth over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, etc.) He will even allow them to resort to subterfuge to get it. It's a family tradition. And yes, I think the patriarchs were "children of God", quite literally. You can choose to see Yahweh as an alien if you wish.

For more on Tracy and her work, visit the Quintessential Publications website.