The Taybor Revisited

A couple of years ago, I was brought up short by the realization that Space 1999 might just be more than a shallow, if entertaining, 1970s science fiction vehicle. An episode from the second season called "The Taybor" forced me to give the series a rethink. Specifically, elements of the subtext and imagery, in that episode, point directly to the Tibetan concept of the rainbow body.

I watched "The Taybor" again, recently, and realized that I still hadn't given the episode, or possibly the entire series, enough credit. I'd glossed over a number of details, allusions so direct it's hard to imagine they are not conscious and deliberate.

This analysis of the series addresses the possibility that it's not meant to be taken at all literally – that it only really makes sense if you assume some sort of divine intervention and higher purpose to Moon Base Alpha's unlikely journey across the space.

The idea that the Moon could be thrown from its orbit to drift at speeds allowing it to cross interstellar space in time periods of weeks or months is difficult and often impossible for many viewers to accept. The mass of the Moon is so large and its orbit around Earth so apparently firm and the force of a series of atomic explosions so more likely to obliterate the Moon than to blast it out of orbit, that the imaginations of many of even the most ardent science fiction aficionados were challenged beyond their limit to stretch, despite the fact that the planet Pluto is credibly posited by scientists to have been a satellite of planet Neptune that broke away from Neptune and settled into an irregular orbit around the Sun. And then there is the difficulty that some people have of assimilating the prospect of such an event being caused by human error. Most people prefer to think of future, technological man as incapable of contributing to a disaster of such magnitude.

Coraline and the Blue Pearl

My dear friend Frog recently created this satire of Coraline called Cameline. His point is that there are some very odd parallels between Cameron Clark's experiences in House Teal and Coraline's in the Pink Palace apartments. It got me thinking about some of the deeper elements of Coraline, things I'd overlooked when I saw it in the theater. So, I've given the film a fresh look and moved Neil Gaiman's award-winning book up on my reading list, which is to say, I've now read it.

It goes pretty well without saying that Gaiman is a genius. Coraline, the novella, is a masterpiece. Like Alice in Wonderland, to which it is often compared, there's a nod to the shamanic ability of children to traverse worlds through the odd doorway. The story has its own version of the Cheshire cat and even a tea party of sorts.

It is also a brilliant depiction of narcissism. The Other Mother lives in her own world, populated by puppets she controls. Those who defy or bore her – who no longer reflect her desires – she throws behind a mirror. She eats up the lives and souls of anyone who crosses her path. Anyone who has ever been taken in by a narcissist for any length of time knows the kind of creeping surreality, the warping of perception, that comes from being caught up in their world view.

Henry Selick expanded on Gaiman's book, which wasn't really long enough for a feature film. Characters were added and storylines were extrapolated. What I now realize about the film, is that a mythic subtext was woven through it and that these themes are revealed in striking visuals.

Doctor Who and the Approaching Skingularity

William Henry believes that we are facing a time of decision. Will we choose to remain fully organic beings or will we merge so completely with artificial technologies that they become part of our very skin? Henry has released an eBook, free to whomever asks for it. I recently received my copy and have only just started reading it and poring over the spectacular images. More information on The Skingularity is Near and how to receive your copy can be found here.

In March, Henry appeared on Coast to Coast AM to discuss our future, what is increasingly possible and what is our true potential. Whether or not you agree with Henry that humans are inherently and organically capable of transforming into light beings, the vision of tech companies to transfigure us through technology should reasonably terrify you. They're wearing us down, though, by promising ease, interconnectedness, and even virtual immortality.

Many of the technologies under development mimic the language, the imagery, and even the properties of cross-cultural resurrection and ascension mythologies. The possibilities entice not only because the promises are fantastical but because they resonate with core archetypes. Henry points out that it may well be a devil's bargain. We may be handing over our fundamental liberty to a convergence of state and corporate power. What looks like an enhancement of human power could really be very cleverly packaged tyranny.

We humans have an instinctual fear of merging with inorganic machines that has long played out in our modern mythologies. The Borg of Star Trek: Next Generation portray our primal terror of losing our humanity and independence to co-optation by intelligent machines. The Matrix trilogy depicts a world lost to our development of artificial intelligence, as self-aware machines reduce humanity to batteries and trap our consciousness in a VR simulacram. But the most direct parallel to Henry's "skingularity" and it's conflict with natural human evolution plays out in Doctor Who.

Tesseract: A Journey Through Art and Time

A Wrinkle in Time was considered essential reading in my home. My mother simply loved this book and, once she'd persuaded me to read it, so did I. It has all the elements: a strong female character that any adolescent girl could admire, a fantastical storyline, and travel to other planets. I've always loved stories about interstellar travel. The book revolves around something called the tesseract which allows the central characters to move through space at light-speed by folding, or wrinkling, time. I'd always assumed "tesseract" was one of those funny, made-up words. Obviously, I was incorrect and I only learned this years later when I began to work with sacred geometry and learned about the hypercube, aka, the tesseract.

Once Upon a Time There Was a Chymical Wedding

"Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything -- we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories." ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves

I'm a little late to this party -- two years to be exact -- but I have recently fallen in love with Once Upon a Time. Once again I tried to curl up with a little diversionary fluff and was instead abruptly pulled into the heart of the mysteries. As ever with these pop culture creations I am left to wonder if the writers are just randomly pulling these profound archetypes out of their deep subconscious, totally unaware of the implications, or if it's a carefully scripted foray into Gnosis.

The central plot is clever and entertaining. The evil queen from Snow White, she of the poison apple, takes her revenge by casting a spell that drags a myriad of fairy tale characters into a small town in Maine. There they live trapped in time and unable to remember who they really are. But the curse may be undone by the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, who was secreted out of the enchanted forest before the curse fell and predestined to return at the age of 28. Twenty-eight years later Emma Swan is living a lonely life in Boston until a young boy claiming to be the son she put up for adoption pulls her to Storybrooke. He insists she must fulfill her destiny and break the curse cast by his adoptive mother, who he is quite sure is the evil queen in his very unusual book of  fairy tales.

Each episode weaves together the complimentary narratives of the characters' lives in Storybrooke and their history as fairy tale creatures. It's skillful, if somewhat predictable, storytelling. But it's in the imagery that the creators tip their hand. They speak the language of symbols far too well for me to take the series lightly. From the first episode I was struck by the subtle but brilliant use of sacred geometry, character names, and striking tableaux. 

It is essentially a mystical story employing the most basic numerical code to appeal to conscious oneness.

Television and the Quest for Immortality

Torchwood: Miracle Day begins tonight
Sept. 14 at 9:00 pm EDT on BBC America

I've not been doing much writing lately... obviously. I'm still settling in after our most recent move. But, on my breaks from unpacking boxes, I've mostly been staring at that other box... the idiot box. It was supposed to be passive, relaxing entertainment -- a restorative after long, hard days of hating the entire process of moving.  Instead, I've once again been pulled down a rabbit hole into a network of intertwining symbolism and myth. I pretty quickly noticed that a theme was emerging and that the theme was immortality.

I finally had the opportunity to see Torchwood: Miracle Day when it came on Encore. I'd been wanting to see it since it came out but I don't have or want Starz. The previous Torchwood miniseries Children of Earth was excellent if very, very disturbing. I had wanted to write about some of the symbolism of that series when it aired but after I watched the final episode, I was just too emotionally wrecked and I never wanted to look at the series again. Miracle Day is also very dark. The mythic symbolism is, once again, so veiled, you could easily miss it.

Human immortality is suddenly, inexplicably achieved and the world discovers that it's really very inconvenient. This is not a good version of immortality. It's not an ascension of any kind. It's just an inability to die no matter how sick, old, injured, or executed one might be. But underneath all the gruesome dreariness of that Torchwood sensibility, there are subtle points to some greater themes, which keep this from being pedestrian science fiction of the "wouldn't it be weird if" variety.

As Doctor Who fans know, Jack Harkness's immortality is an aberration -- a fluke that the Doctor finds disturbing and wrong and against the natural order. But there are subtle nods to a deeper mythos. In Children of Earth, for instance, Jack is killed, dismembered and buried in cement, only to be reassembled and resurrected. He has become Osiris. In Miracle Day we again see him playing out a resurrection mythology as he is effectively crucified -- hung by his arms, tormented by townspeople, and put to death, only to rise again... and again and again.

The Taybor and the Rainbow Body

Padmasabhava

I've been rewatching Space 1999, mostly as an exercise in nostalgia and to amuse my inner child. My inner child loves her some Space 1999. It's not a terribly deep or esoteric show, particularly by the second season. But every so often it wanders into an intriguing archetype.

The other night I was watching "The Taybor." Taybor is "an inter-galactic merchant [who] arrives from hyperspace on his ship the 'Emporium.'" He is a silly character and the episode is largely quite silly but I was taken with their depiction of the hyperdrive that allowed him to move anywhere in space.

The drive itself is an oculus, aka., circumpunct, aka., stargate:

William Henry on the Judgement Day Device

I noticed this article about the Muslim view of the apocalypse The Huffington Post and it reminded me that I've been meaning to listen to two recent interviews with William Henry. From the article:

Muslim and Christian views of the Apocalypse are remarkably similar, albeit with a different ending.

. . .

Contemporary Muslim apocalyptists have even borrowed from their Christian counterparts, such as Hal Lindsay, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to discern the dates of the Antichrist's arrival, said David Cook, an expert on Islamic eschatology and associate professor at Rice University.

. . .

Some Muslims don't like the idea of Jesus playing the messianic hero, and have thus assigned a larger role to the Mahdi, said Cook. That belief is strong among Shiites, particularly the "Twelvers" in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has often spoke of the Mahdi's return.

William Henry's research adds an important piece to the puzzle of apocalyptic prophecies: the Ark of the Covenant. Henry believes that all the players are seeking the ark, in hopes of harnessing its mythical power. Above is posted his recent interview on Red Ice Radio and his interview on Awake in the Dream can found here.

The whole thing is a study in the dangers of literalism. Supplemental reading and listening can be found here and here.

"And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." ~ Luke 17:20-21

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The Increasingly Blatant Symbolism of Doctor Who

"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." ~ Doctor Who

A while ago Stephen Fry made waves when he bemoaned the infantalizing nature of BBC programming and characterized Doctor Who as "not for adults." Perhaps Fry, for all his many talents and artistic sensibility, is one of those hardcore atheists who has no appreciation for the power of myth. Admittedly, I haven't spent a lot of time on the mythical underpinnings of the show, although I did explore one episode's point towards indigenous creation mythology here. 

I will also give Fry benefit of the doubt and assume his comments in 2010 pertained entirely to the pre-Matt Smith years. There is no question that with the massive production changes after David Tennant's departure, came a more interesting, and I dare say, more adult show. Smith, as an actor, has more depth and gravitas than Tennant. (Christopher Eccleston was also brilliant and I took his departure hard. I know. I know. David Tennant was the most beloved Doctor ever. Blah, blah, blah... whatever.)

Not only is the writing under Steven Moffat darker and edgier, there has been a peeling away of the veils that obscured the core mythos. It seems rather obvious in discussing a show that opens with a trip through a wormhole, that we're talking about alchemy/kundalini/stargate mythology. But with the recent Christmas episode, "The Snowmen," key archetypes were even more blatant than they were in the London Olympics. Even the advertising was provocative.

Note the Blue Pearl opening above the Doctor's head. William Henry explains a bit about the mystical experience of the Blue Pearl in Secret of Sion.

As I discussed in Starwalkers and the Dimension of the Blessed, traditional shamanic peoples around the world describe a Blue Pearl, an exquisite, enchanting blue light that is a mode of transport. It appears in a flash, without any provocation or thought, and opens like a lotus or a wormhole.

. . .

In fact, says Muktananda, it contains the whole universe It is the seed of the heart, the Supreme within us. It has been described as vibrant, electric blue, brilliant indigo, azure, cobalt, and cerulean.

. . .

Also known as the Pearl of Infinite Power, the Blue Pearl, Stone or Apple is actually how our soul travels to the inner realm and it is inside of a quantum egg or in an "interphasic state of existence" (it enables us to jump through time and cross great distances or even to use this skill locally.)

Hmmm... What does that sound like?

In "The Snowmen," the Doctor meets Clara, who susses out his hiding place... in the clouds. This she does by locating something akin to Jacob's ladder.

She ascends a spiral staircase.

And at the top she finds the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space). So, she ascends a stairway to heaven where she encounters multidimensional awareness.

Jacob's Ladder ~ William Blake
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Later in the episode Clara is invited into the TARDIS and given the key -- the ritual by which the Doctor initiates his companions into the mysteries of time-space travel.

The TARDIS has been given a bit of a redesign for the new season. And I can't help noticing that the circumpunct imagery has also become more blatant.

So the connection between wormhole physics that was always implied in the show was underscored with alchemical imagery in "The Snowmen." Other mystical and kundalini themes are hinted at but they are subtler and require, to some extent, stripping the context from the archetype. For instance, we are introduced to the concept of a "memory worm" which wipes memory from all who touch it.

The plot also centers around the mystical idea of reflective reality. "The snow reflects." A strange, new, memory snow patterns itself on the people, personalities, thoughts, emotions, and objectives, its exposed to, and takes on form.

I can't help wondering if the plot line was influenced by the, albeit deeply flawed, water experiment made famous in What the Bleep Do We Know? I say flawed because the results have not proved to be replicable and Masaru Emoto has been less than transparent about his research methods. All of which leads us back to that fundamental question? Does the world reflect our thoughts or our consciousness? Because they are not the same thing. But I've discussed this little problem of new age reductionism at far too great a length already.

"The Snowman" explored the metaphysics of the TARDIS but the physics has long been a subject of discussion.

Something clicked for me a while ago when I was watching The Science of Doctor Who, which explored some of the theoretical physics of the show with prominent physicists. Michio Kaku's offered his explanation for why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside.

People forget that the phone booth is not the TARDIS at all. It's the door.

The humor of the cloaking mechanism that got stuck in police box mode back in the '60s, when they were ubiquitous in London, has provided writers with many challenges and opportunities through the years. But whether it was conscious or unconscious on the part of the show's creators, I've long thought the cubic form of this "door" implied a tesseract, or hypercube. It appears that I may be onto something.

The explanation is that a TARDIS is "dimensionally transcendental", meaning that its exterior and interior exist in separate dimensions. In "The Robots of Death" (1977), the Fourth Doctor tried to explain this to his companion Leela, using the analogy of how a larger cube can appear to be able to fit inside a smaller one if the larger cube is farther away, yet immediately accessible at the same time (see Tesseract).

There have been many indications since Steven Moffat took the helm that Doctor Who is taking us into the heart of the mysteries. I thought at the time that "The Impossible Astronaut" was playing with Gnostic themes. Specifically the Silence suggested, to me, the Archons.

Let's see... They're an ancient alien order who've been controlling human history from time immemorial but no one can remember seeing them. And like the Archons, there are allusions to both the greys (look at them) and the "men in black" (they erase your memory). Men in black were most notably associated with the Archons -- as Smith, et al. -- in The Matrix trilogy, where they also notably distorted memory and cognition. For a little more background on the elusive Archons of Gnostic lore, see here.

I have tried a few times to write something more in depth regarding the archontic symbolism of the Silence but my head goes all mushy. Not surprising, I guess, given the subject matter. Bloody Archons. Perhaps I should take to crosshatching my forearms every time I contemplate the deeper allusions of the Silence and get derailed.

It began to dawn on me over the past few seasons of Doctor Who that the Doctor should not simply be viewed as a frequent savior and protector of humanity. Rather, he can be seen as a symbol of our human potential.

Amy: But you look human. The Doctor: No, you look Time Lord. We came first. ~ Doctor Who, "The Beast Below"

As we learned in "Human Nature," Time Lords have an ability to hide their expanded, Time Lord consciousness inside a fob watch and become human.  In so doing, they forget the bulk of their awareness. In that sense, we're all Time Lords.

Bear in mind that River Song, as we learned recently, is the child of two human parents but because she was conceived in the TARDIS she has many of the abilities of a Time Lord, including regeneration.

If we begin to look at the TARDIS, not as an alien space ship, but as a symbol for multidimensional awareness, we arrive at the essence of mystical thought. Each of us contains the universe. The microcosm contains the macrocosm. The inside is bigger than the outside.

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O Christmas Tower

The Eiffel Tower seems to be trending. Decorative accent sculptures, lamps, candle holders, 3D puzzles and, of course, the traditional art prints -- I've been seeing them in increasing numbers in stores over the past couple of years. But I knew something had really hit critical mass when I noticed a Christmas lawn ornament in front of a neighbor's house.

I've been acutely aware of this particular trend not because I'm so besotted with the idea of Parisian glamor. I don't really have a burning desire to see gay Paris. As with so many things that seize my attention, at this point, my interest is more esoteric.

Many years ago, I went to a shamanic journey workshop. It consisted of live drumming as we all attempted to journey questions suggested by the organizers. One of the questions had to do with finding community. I was a tad disappointed to learn, in my journey, that I have no community and would not have until I accomplished certain spiritual initiations. None of this surprised me, exactly, but it was still a little frustrating. Central in this journey was a kind of mountain... tower... thing. My sense was that I would have to reach the pinnacle of it before I could connect with my community. And my sense was that it would take years. It was a very sharp, elongated triangle, with concave sides. I drew my impression of it when I completed the journey. And I thought, but that's the Eiffel Tower. What on earth could that form have to do with anything? It's not a pyramid. It's not a tetrahedron. It's not any of those cardinal, sacred geometry forms, that I would expect. But there it was. A very rudimentary Eiffel Tower form. For some time, I refused to believe that the shape I'd been shown had anything to do with something that had become, in my mind, a cliche of American Francophilia. But it came up, over the years, in other journeys and meditations. The shape was unmistakable. Nearly ten years later, I gave up on denying that there was some connection to the iconic architecture.

Stargate Skyfall

I caught Skyfall over the holiday weekend and I loved it. Daniel Craig continues to bring a gravitas to the role that transitions Bond from outrageous camp to something with surprising depth. And this was probably the darkest yet -- a journey through death and resurrection, as the series reboots itself yet again. This is a bold re-envisioning, exchanging the high tech gadgetry, that has become too ubiquitous to be entertaining, for low tech cleverness. Javier Bardem is just flamboyant enough to be a Bond villain, yet tragic and human enough to be a believable character. He's also consistently brilliant.

The movie is excellent. But the opening credit sequence is a masterpiece.

Leaving aside for a moment the sheer awesomeness of the cinematography and the buttery richness of Adele's voice, what captivated me was the layering of esoteric imagery. It was the genius of the opening credits (posted above) that convinced me to brave the crowds and see this movie in the theater.

As with the recent Olympics, and so much in popular art and entertainment, it's hard to say how much of the symbolism is deliberate and how much is subconscious. But it's hard to believe that a film about a journey through death and rebirth just happens to have one portal image after another by accident. 

This is the end...

The sequence opens with a wormhole as Bond is pulled through a swirling vortex on the ocean floor. From there, the viewer moves through one circular gate after another, from bullet holes, to the circumpunct like barrel of a gun, to James Bond's eye. We slide through these apertures, moving from one dark, surreal landscape to another.

Skyfall is where we start...

There are also numerous images of the Celtic Cross, aka the Medicine Wheel, aka the four directions. We see it in classic form on tombstones, but also made up from guns and the great stag. In one remarkable turn, Bond finds himself at the center of four, intersecting, shadow selves.

Where worlds collide and days are dark...

In one particularly stunning sequence, we move from trails of blood in the water and into the realm of the Chinese lung, or dragons -- the great, fire-breathing wyrms themselves.

Where you go I go. What you see I see...

There is also a lot of mirroring imagery, as one divides into two, in perfect reflection. And in the penultimate sequence, Bond finds himself in a hall of mirrors. He shoots holes in one mirror after another, finally shattering the illusory world around him.

Let the sky fall. When it crumbles...

The title itself, Skyfall, suggests the death of the illusory world. The sky, the boundary of our perceptual world, crumbles. It's the apocalypse -- the revelation of secrets hidden behind the veil.

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The Alchemy of Puss in Boots

I only just got around to seeing Puss in Boots with the family. It's a cute little film that could fairly be described as Shrek meets Zorro meets Desperado. And I have little doubt the boardroom discussion went about like that.

I was not, however, prepared for all the esoteric subtext in the movie. I do remember William Henry pointing out the stargate imagery in the Friskies commercial tie-in. Not that there's anything terribly new about fantastical imagery in children's stories -- including portals into magical lands. But it is kind of interesting that it's through a circular Stargate like opening. Having now seen the movie, I think it's at least arguable that the commercial is a thematic extension of the movie.

It had never occurred to me before that Jack and the Beanstalk is a kundalini metaphor. Now it all seems kind of obvious -- a magical vine that connects earth to heaven and leads to a winged creature that manufactures gold. No duh, huh?

But Puss in Boots ups the ante on that metaphor. Not only is the gold they discover in the shape of an egg, which connects it to core creation mythos. Puss's partner in crime is an egg, specifically Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty's lifelong ambition is to find and plant the magic beans of legend. So an egg is seeking golden eggs. And ultimately the base, mortal, and terribly fragile Humpty is transformed into the gold he is seeking.

Olympics Close Goes For Alchemical Gold

We've made it through the entire Olympics, both opening and closing ceremonies, without a false flag incident or alien invasion. This leaves the woo woo world with nothing to do but pick through the Illuminati and Masonic symbolism and speculate about how the elites are mocking us with their openly practiced death rituals. They're not entirely wrong. There was some interesting symbolism in the closing ceremony and, as in the opening, it was fairly well obscured by bad theater. But, again, all I saw were beautiful, recognizable, symbols of ascension. And as with the opening ceremony, if the viewer wasn't looking specifically at that nearly subliminal through-line, there wasn't one. The close was considerably less cluttered and confusing than the opening but it was equally high on spectacle and low on making sense.

They continued on with the theme of "Great Britain has produced many great musicians and wouldn't you like to hear them all in rapid succession but in no recognizable order." As a theme, a "Symphony of British Music" creates a less than coherent narrative. "Disco at the end of the wedding," another description offered by organizers, is even less helpful... unless you're considering the possibility that we are looking at a stream of alchemical symbols. A wedding is a marriage of opposites, or polarities -- a representation of the transcendence of duality and return to oneness. One notable example, attributed to the Rosicrucians, is The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rozenkreutz. Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval give a thorough analysis of the symbolism in The Master Game, concluding:

It seems to us beyond serious doubt that a great allegory of death, rebirth and spiritual transformation lies at the heart of the Chemical Wedding and that Adam McLean is right to compare the entire process to an ancient mystery initiation.

So was the closing ceremony celebrating a completed initiation into the mysteries? I'm inclined to say yes. The only other explanation is that a lot of highly respected talent collaborated on a giant mess with a few random symbols poking out by happenstance.

The most apt and unintentionally funny line came from commentator Bob Costas, at the very beginning, as he described the opening sequence. Narrated by Michael Caine footage from The Italian Job c. 1969, a yellow car explodes and out pops a slightly chubby Batman with his sidekick Robin, as Costas put it, "for whatever reason." That sums up the closing ceremony quite well. "For whatever reason a bunch of stuff happens" would be a very fair tagline. The baffling choices start right there. Why the thoroughly American, DC Comics heroes Batman and Robin?

In point of fact, the sequence itself is a very British, very inside joke. This leaves out Costas and probably most non-Brits watching the spectacle. It's taken directly from a sitcom called Only Fools and Horses, in which the characters Costas correctly identified as Del Boy and Rodney run into some car trouble.

If we are looking at an ascension narrative, it rolls out right here, at the start, with some oblique references to gold. Whether this is alchemical gold,  Olympic gold, or simply a fluke, I still can't say with absolute certainty. But bear with me for a moment as I follow the weird tangents. Only Fools and Horses still runs on a British oldies network called simply Gold. It's logo is a variation on the circumpunct which among other things is the symbol for gold.

The Caine movie The Italian Job, which seems so oddly juxtaposed with Batman and Robin, is about a gold heist involving the iconic town of Turin where the shroud believed by some to be the remnant of a resurrected Christ is kept. It also bears mentioning, perhaps, that Del Boy and Rodney's car is a sunny, golden yellow.

The loveliest and most uplifting message came from John Lennon. The sequence is a center of gravity in a largely disjointed and superficial seeming spectacle. In a project overseen by Yoko Ono, footage of Lennon singing "Imagine" was remastered and the resulting, very crisp print was played as part of an etherial musical number. A giant John Lennon edifice was puzzled together before our eyes. Then it was disassembled, dispersed, and finally white balloons ascended the heavens. Anyone who's ever done the Easter Sunday balloon ritual at church should recognize the symbolism of spirit rejoining God. John Lennon became one with everything before our very eyes while singing a message of peace and unity. I actually teared up a little and John Lennon isn't even my favorite Beatle.

That was a pretty hard act to follow and that such a sorry job fell to George Michael seemed a tad unfair. Sadly, he looked less animated than a dead John Lennon. But he poured himself into some leather pants and put on a game face. The message was clear: FREEDOM. And that's what the language of ascension is all about -- freedom from the illusory world in which we are all trapped in a cycle of unconscious deaths and rebirths. Not to put too fine a point on it, Michael wore a giant skull belt buckle and around his neck hung a slim silver cross -- death and ascension.

A performance of "Pinball Wizard" from Tommy was certainly rife with circumpunct imagery. If you were watching the screen, you saw the concentric circles grow out of a single point of light and then morph into the octagonal structure of the Union Jack.

From there it was an homage to gold... I mean David Bowie. Well, Bowie was used as the jumping off point for a celebration of Britain's contribution to fashion. And all the models were dressed in, you guessed it, gold.

Next we were treated to the dragon (kundalini) imagery of Annie Lenox arriving on a flaming, Viking ship. She sang "Little Bird" about the self as a fallen bird with a dream of ascension.

I walk along the city streets
So dark with rage and fear
And I...
I wish that I could be that bird
And fly away from here
I wish I had the wings to fly away from here

. . .

They always said that you knew best
But this little bird's fallen out of that nest now
I've got a feeling that it might have been blessed
So I've just got to put these wings to test

And after Lenox's gorgeous portrayal of the fire serpent, a performance of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" ended with a recreation of it's iconic cover which depicts a man on fire. Subtle.

And in case you think Pink Floyd wasn't working with some serious alchemical imagery, here's a round-up of some album art.

From there things became increasingly psychedelic. Well, entheogens are one way to pierce the veil. Although, I think the primary lesson in this sequence was that Russell Brand should never, ever sing. If you can't warble out a tune as simple as "Pure Imagination" at least as well Gene Wilder, don't. As for the Britishness, follow the bouncing ball. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was written by British author -- and spy/playboy -- Roald Dahl. Yes. The famous children's author was a real life James Bond. He also wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice. I guess he'd know, having spent a good bit of his life On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Sooooo British.

Brand also belted out a sad rendition of  "I Am the Walrus" from Magical Mystery Tour -- pure rainbow covered psychedelia and my childhood favorite.

Next, commentator Ryan Seacrest gave voice to our collective bafflement over the... um... giant octopus as it morphed out of Brand's psychedelic bus.

As you watch this, try and make sense out of the octopus in the center. Your guess is as good as mine?

I don't know... Cthulhu? No. Lovecraft was American.

The suggestion from deep in the woo is that it represented the Rothschilds, but like the vampire squid that is Goldman Sachs, I don't really think that's how they self-identify. I suppose they could just be mocking us all... with their diabolical partner in crime DJ Fatboy Slim. I'm still more inclined to call it absurd, meaningless spectacle. I don't know. Is there some deep symbolism to the octopus? It has eight limbs like the Union Jack it's splayed out on, and octagonal symbolism seems to abound here. I'm quite sure I'm missing something... Probably something to do with the ordering of chaos in the deep, primordial waters -- much like the divine creatrix energy of spider. The whole show saw repeated images of spoked wheels -- the underlying structure of a web -- from the Union Jack itself to the London Eye (Ferris wheel), to umbrellas.

I have to give mad props to the exquisite Eric Idle who alone seemed to grasp that he was in something far more absurd than Monty Python and had a bit of fun with the Bollywood act that inexplicably hijacked his performance of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" -- a song which Idle sings suspended on a cross in the crucifixion scene of Life of Brian. There is some discussion in the deep woo about the python/serpent connection. Considering that the whole thing has been rife with kundalini imagery, there could be something to that. It could allude to the serpent (in this case python) on a pole. It could also point to the Pythia, the oracle of Gaia, at Delphi. For added fun, look at how much gold is in that sequence. Mont Piton, by the way is a volcanic mountain on the island nation of Mauritius, which was under British rule until 1968.

If the Brazilian sequence seemed out of place in the thoroughly British spectacle, it did at least tie in thematically. It was all volcanoes, mountains, goddesses, and, once again, dragons. But you had to look close. The vocalist was Maria Monte (mountain) and she actually appears emerging from a mountain of spinning umbrellas and singing like a siren on the rocks. Pelé, the famous Brazilian footballer who put in an appearance, shares the name with the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes and with active volcanoes in Martinique and on Jupiter. Also performing was Seu Jorge. St. George is the patron saint of England and he was most famous for slaying a dragon. So, I guess my point is that the fire serpent imagery kept coming even through that oddly out of place, not terribly British, interlude. And the capoeira was fun.

Missing from the US broadcast, perhaps over a rights dispute, was Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" complete with pyramid. Here's a description:

One of the highights featured a stepped pyramid created out of 303 white boxes to Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill, and when the song got to, "If I could make a deal with God" all the dancers were in full prostration on the floor.

In numerology, the O counts for zero, so in other words, the white boxes making up the pyramid represented the number 33, the most significant number for any Freemasonic ritual and the highest order that can be achieved.

As I have suggested previously, the number 33 is not arbitrary. It's the number of vertebrae in the average spine and its use in Masonry points to the ascent of kundalini toward the pineal gland, aka, the "all seeing eye."

If there remains a question that the closing ceremony was an esoteric ritual, the conclusion should put it to rest. The extinguishing of the Olympic flame was quite simply exquisite. The flames -- one for each participating country -- fanned out to form a primordial mound from which emerged a flaming phoenix. The phoenix is a later iteration of the Bennu bird of Egyptian myth, born from the abyss with the Benben stone, which is described alternately as a mound, a tetrahedron, and a pyramid. According to Graham Hancock in Heaven's Mirror, the Benben stone "provided the model, and was in fact the name used by the ancient Egyptians, for the capstones (pyramidions) of all pyramids and for the tips (but not the shafts) of all obelisks." He continues:

The model for the phoenix of the later Greeks, the Bennu was another manifestation of Atum, this time in the form of a grey heron that was said to have appeared at the moment of creation, perched atop a pillar on the Primeval Mound. It is important to note, as Egyptologist R. T. Rundle Clark has pointed out, that the rising of the mound and the appearance of the phoenix were not viewed as consecutive events but rather as 'parallel statements, two aspects of the supreme creative moment'.

In the texts that moment is epitomized as the victory of light and the spirit over darkness and death and specifically as 'that breath of life which emerged from the throat of the Bennu bird, in whom Atum appeared in the primeval nought.' In Rundle Clark's eloquent evocation of this scene:

One has to imagine a perch extending out of the waters of the Abyss. On it rests a grey heron, the herald of all things to come. It opens its beak and breaks the silence of the primeval night with the call of life and destiny.

Hmm... That's so evocative of the song by the dragoness Annie Lennox.

So the Olympics closes where it began, with the primordial mound of creation, now having completed a transformation and resurrection into full flight. Much of it wasn't even subtle. It was a celebration of the primal goddess in her fire serpent, kundalini, aspect, reconnecting us to the divine unity.

But if the Olympics ceremonies were a paean to the mother goddess, NBC's coverage kicked her in the teeth. Much about their monopoly on the games has been criticized. That they parceled out the big events during prime time, while trying and failing to maintain a media blackout on the results of the un-aired events, wasn't even the worst of their crimes. It was their endless trivializing of women athletes. They weren't alone in this but as the network with its hands on the coverage valve in the US, the responsibility for that tone rests primarily with them. And their contempt for women was on full display. Their grossest misstep had to be pulled from their website due to outrage. This was the appropriately titled "Bodies in Motion" video. I say appropriately because, ever so typically, women were completely reduced to their bodies.

The video, titled "Bodies In Motion," depicts select female Olympic athletes in slow motion. The first two shots are of one woman taking off her shorts and another licking her lips. The women selected are overwhelmingly white, thin and wearing uniforms that are varying degrees of revealing, and the footage is set to what Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan describes as "soft core porn music." The mashup, which was originally posted on NBCOlympics.com, NBC's official Olympics website, elicited a swift wave of criticism from media outlets such as Jezebel and ThinkProgress. The video has since been taken down (the full clip can still be viewed on Jezebel), but the criticism raises larger questions about NBC's coverage of female athletes.

The video is simply hideous. The camera lingers endlessly on women's body parts, panning slowly up to show faces last and almost incidentally. When faces are the focus, it's only because they're too close to their breasts or because there's something arguably provocative going on with their mouths. It's a celebration of all the T&A taking home its weight in gold medals.

All across the media spectrum, women were measured for everything but their athletic accomplishments. Runner Lolo Jones was savaged in a New York Times column for posing nude and for saying publicly that she is a 30 year old virgin. Her nude modeling was, in fact, part of an elegant  spread in ESPN Magazine with both male and female athletes that even included paralympians. The photo is not particularly sexual. It is beautiful. And, anyway, who cares?! It's just so typical. Women are too sexual or not sexy enough. We're sluts. We're weirdly virginal. The one thing we never are is good enough.

Writes Sarah L. Jackson of the appalling coverage of female athletes like Jones:

During the women’s road race on Sunday, commentators continually referred to the competitors as “girls” despite the fact that the top finishers for the U.S. were Shelley Olds, 32, Evelyn Stevens, 28, and a former Lehaman Brothers associate, and Kristin Armstrong, 39, and competing in her third Olympics. That adult women, at the top of their craft, with full lives and countless accomplishments continue to be referred to as “girls” in sports coverage is minimizing to say the least.

. . .

In perhaps the creepiest Olympic sexism, London Mayor Boris Johnson wrote in an editorial earlier in the week that the popularity of women’s beach volleyball at the Olympics could be attributed to the “semi-naked women” who were “glistening like wet otters.” Wet otters?

. . .

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon has also noted NBC’s “obsession” with motherhood in this year’s Olympic coverage. It seems no commentator can talk about female Olympians who have given birth without reserving most of their praise and discussion for that fact. To top it off, Proctor & Gamble’s “Thank You, Mom” Olympic campaign wants us to spend a lot of time thinking about and being moved by the fact that Olympic athletes have supportive mothers. As Williams puts it, hey, “Suck it dads!” This media obsession with motherhood has some serious implications besides narrowing world-class athletes down to the value of their uteruses (or the one’s they came out of). It also demonstrates the way women athletes are constantly framed by judgments of their sexuality and femininity; something male athletes are simply not subjected to.

Almost completely ignored by NBC was the first American gold medalist in judo. This drove my martial artist husband crazy because judo was one of the few events he cared to see. They never showed the match, only the winner's tearful victory hugs. The judoka in question was Kayla Harrison. But Harrison is more than an Olympic champion. She is a sex abuse survivor who took her power back, put her abusive judo coach in prison, came out publicly in response to the Penn State scandal right before the Olympics, and then went on to win the gold. She is a woman of tremendous courage and strength who ascended from as painful an abyss as one can find herself in.

Kayla Harrison's athletic brilliance was not interesting enough to be broadcast by NBC. That breasts jiggle when women run, however, was so endlessly fascinating that it needed to be shown in slow motion with a bow-chick-a-bow-bow soundtrack.

Such is our sorry state of affairs when it comes to the appreciation of female power. No wonder the symbols of the divine feminine have to be hidden. But the fire serpent -- so demonized in Western culture -- was on full, if terribly misunderstood, display at the Olympics this year. For all the paranoid fear around these symbols, it was exactly what William Henry and Chad Stuemke forecast -- a thinly veiled narrative on the path through the stargate. It even ended with a song about returning to the stars.

No doubt, the woo woo world heard Take That's performance of "Rule the World" as still more confirmation that the Illuminati is laughing at us poor peasants. But that would miss the point. Fans of the movie version of Neil Gaiman's Stardust will recognize it from the denouement, played as our hero marries his immortal beloved, achieves the (celestial) crown, and sheds his mortal identity to become a star. It all seems kind of obvious now doesn't it? Here's a little video montage. Have fun counting the symbols.

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Olympics Opens With Ascension Blueprint

I've been getting caught up on my Olympics Opening Ceremony viewing. As stated, I was not home on Friday evening so I had to record it. I was at a Lughnassadh (Lammas) ritual gathering. It rained. We all got wet -- which was kind of nice, actually. And it produced this magnificent rainbow. My husband got one good snap of one end of it, with his cell. You can also just make out the traces of a quickly dissipating second rainbow that started to form alongside it. But it was one of those magnificent, full bows that you could see from end to end, arching over the trees. I was about dumbstruck, not only because it was a beautiful ending to our ritual, but because we were seeing it at the exact same time as this year's Olympics was kicking off, replete as it is with rainbow imagery.

That said, it's taken me a while to plow through my recording of the ceremony... mainly because it's just awful. When it comes to the performing arts, I'm a "less is more" kind of person, so on that score, this show utterly failed for me. I get that Great Britain is rich in history and great literature. It's also produced many great musicians. But did we really have to hear to them all? I hate medleys. They insult my intelligence.

Perhaps the goal was to obscure all the esoteric imagery, because there was a lot of it. I guess if you can't achieve subtlety in scripting your subtext, putting your audience into total, sensory overwhelm is the next best thing. There were some beautiful images and tableaux in both the film montages and the arena performances but they were nearly lost in rapid-fire smash edits, dizzying camera angles, and what I can only describe as a huge, overcrowded mess.

The spiritual imagery started right from the beginning as did the assault on the senses. The opening film featured an electric blue (pearl) dragonfly (immortality) emerging from the water at the source of the River Thames, marked by a stone reading:

Isles of Wonder

This stone was placed here to mark the
source of the River Thames

The dragonfly was just a blue blur, moving about as fast as electrical current.

We followed the flight of the blue dragonfly as it zipped up and over the serpentine curves of the river...

through tunnels...

until it reached the stadium where we saw the triple goddess holding a painting of a swirly, blue person, alongside the 2012/Zion logo and rainbow-colored overlapping spheres.

Champion cyclist Bradley Wiggins started off the ceremony by ringing a bell made at the White Chapel foundry which made our own, ahem, Liberty Bell. I happened to glance up just in time to catch this Jacob's ladder imagery and it took me a moment to understand that the stargate over this man's head was a bell... about to produce a tone.

The stadium show started in ancient, agrarian England and it's all just incredibly Pagan: Maypole dancers, Glastonbury Tor, and a "world tree" perched on top of the tor instead of St. Michael's Tower or any of the churches and other man-made structures that have been there through the centuries. As discussed Glastonbury Tor is a symbol of the primordial mound and while trees and towers are both symbols of the spine through which kundalini ascends, the tree is the richer archetype.

As an aside, just as I was posting this picture of the Maypole, my daughter came into the room to ask me about pole dancing. She just read Stephen Colbert's I Am A Pole (And So Can You), which contains a pole dancer image -- his nod to the arguably inappropriate, full-frontal nudity of Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen. I was in the process of trying to break down, for a ten year old mind, the sexism and objectification of the stripper industry when it suddenly occurred to me that pole dancing is a tragically reduced form of goddess-kundalini imagery. I just never thought about that before. Huh...

But back to the Olympic "carnival." The pastoral scene was disrupted by a "salute" to the industrial age and the beginning of modern warfare. The world tree was ripped out by the roots...

and the tor (primordial mound) birthed a labor force to give their bodies to the Industrial Revolution.

It bears mentioning that the war industry is specifically decried as "Satanic" in the William Blake poem, sung so beautifully by a boy soprano in the beginning of the ceremony. But even in the industrial sequence we were treated to more kundalini imagery. Smoke stacks were raised quicker than Melusine's tower (spine).

Between these smoldering towers, a river of fire snaked its way through to ignite a sphere.

Then, in a somewhat surreal sequence, more rings floated into the scene looking like some kind of spaceships, merging with the freshly forged, ascending one.

Then, of course, they came together to form the Olympic symbol with all it's overlapping spheres and vesicae piscis. But I thought it was interesting that when they were in place they started raining light. The image put me in mind, more than anything, of the Aton with its beams reaching down with the key of life.

Coalesced completely into the Olympic symbol, one of the rings -- probably the one that was just made in the kundalini foundry -- is gold (alchemy). This alludes to the imagery in the promo discussed here, in which molten steel hardens into base metal only to be transformed by the rainbow into shimmering, alien figures.

The less said about the celebration of children in hospital, complete with giant Voldemort and Mary Poppins army, the better, but the upshot of that was... well... You know, when we got home Friday evening, we came in right around this point and all I could say was, "Is that a... giant... baby? What the..."

Said Matt Lauer, "I don't know whether that's cute or creepy." I gotta go with creepy. But it certainly cements the themes of birth and renewal. (I should also add, in fairness to the freakish Voldemort war, that Harry Potter is entirely rooted in Western Alchemy.)

All of this took place in the giant, blue-lit circumpunct that is the Olympic Stadium.

And speaking of rainbows, I was very amused by Saffy's African get-up in the brand new "Olympics" episode of Absolutely Fabulous that aired this weekend. It certainly is a coat of many colors and right on her forehead is a rainbow shaped pattern.

I have little question after watching this ceremony that there was more at work here than the workings of the subconscious. That's a pretty seamless ascension narrative weaving its way through the utter chaos of the show itself. But then, the ascension process is painful, disruptive, and nigh well insufferable at times, too.

As for the much discussed possibility that this could be a first contact, "Disclosure," potential alien war thing... I don't know. Maybe.

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