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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More Fun With Olympics Symbolism

I just set my DVR to record the Olympics Opening Ceremony tomorrow night, even though I haven't watched or cared about the Olympics since I was a kid. But now I need to know if it will be first contact, or the beginning of the alien war, or just a garden variety terrorist attack, or... who knows. Mostly, I want to see for myself the spectacle of symbolic imagery that William Henry and Chad Stuemke have been talking about.

Henry and Stuemke had another chin wag about the upcoming festivities on Revelations and it's a lot of fun. There is no question that the volume and organization of symbolism we've seen during run-up is staggering -- stargate symbolism, alchemical symbolism, pagan symbolism, alien imagery. Someone is having a lot of fun. And as ever, it's hard to say how much is conscious and deliberate and how much is the subconscious, intuitional, creative process.

While this year seems really over the top, in terms of imagery, I have to say that I really hadn't realized how much the Olympics has been playing with some of these themes in past years -- the alien thing in particular. I didn't know, or didn't remember, until I watched the Red Ice Radio video special, that the 1984 Olympics had produced a spaceship and a giant alien. Says Stuemke, of the 7'8" alien, "Out of this world. Didn't make a lot of sense. But people loved it."

That's the thing. It doesn't seem to make any sense as anything other than cheesy spectacle. The spaceship is kind of cool but the alien made me think of nothing so much as Waiting for Guffman. "Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring..."

But now that the alien theme has evolved into Wenlock and Mandeville, I have to consider the possibility that the Olympic committee is, and has been, trying to say something. My favored possibility there is that it's part of a kind of spiritual evolution zeitgeist and that we are at long last becoming "galactic humans." And I think Henry and Stuemke have really tapped the vein on a very powerful archetypal narrative that points in that direction. But if it turns out that it's really about the royal family orchestrating our total takeover by the reptilian overlords, all I can say at this point is God Save the Queen.

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Red Ice Radio: Olympic-Size Strange Special

A while ago I posted a William Henry interview on the strange happenings and symbolism associated with the Summer Olympics in London. Red Ice Radio interviewed both Henry and his guest from that show Chad Stuemke, in a special broadcast on the topic. They also brought together a sampling of other perspectives on just what is going on with the Olympics Planning Committee.

It's quite a compendium. In addition to Henry and Stuemke, there are interviews and excerpts of interviews with David Icke, Stewart Swerdlow, Bob Schlenker, Ian Crane, and the late Rik Clay. The commentary ranges from the insightful to the paranoid to the deeply paranoid to the unintentionally hilarious.

Of course much of it revolves around the conspiracy theory du jour, which is to say that the Illuminati is preparing us for a false flag event and/or alien invasion so that our reptilian overlords will be better able to enslave us or kill and eat us... or... it's not entirely clear. Where that argument is the strongest lies in the draconian security measures. London is being fully militarized for this event. But then, Great Britain has been morphing into a police state for a while now -- more than the US, even.

William Henry sees a kinder, gentler mega-ritual. He slices right through those convolutions to the underlying symbolism and associates it more with expanding human consciousness than a diabolical scheme to keep us as a slave race. The cardinal symbols he references: the tree, the serpent, the rainbow, and the wormhole. Well, the tree and the serpent are two of my favorites but that's hardly news. But in a striking synchronicity -- one that I'm not at liberty to discuss -- Henry also mentions Glastonbury Tor which they are also apparently working into this year's Olympic motif. This got me to thinking. Something I have never really contemplated is the possible connection between Glastonbury Tor -- and tors more generally -- with the mythical "primordial mound." So I did a bit of googling and found that, yes, this is so. I found the following in a book called The Shining Ones. 

The name 'Glastonbury' translates as 'glass borough'. It was known as 'the Isle of Glass' due to the calm, still, glass-like appearance of the waters or lake which once surrounded the town and its central mound, the Tor. The deeper significance of Glastonbury and its Tor also stems from two unusual springs, which are said to have emerged from a cave entrance under the Tor. One of these springs is known as the White Spring, as it contains mineral deposits which give it a milky-white appearance, and the other is known as the Red Spring is said to have a regenerative properties. Here we have yet another reference to the familiar theme of the red and white, but this time we see it in the real phenomena surrounding Glastonbury Tor -- which is said to have been a place of initiation for the pagans and Druids of the region in Celtic times.

In Glastonbury Tor, we have a 'primordial mound' surrounded by seven concentric rings or levels, which was once surrounded by water, and and upwelling vortex, along with two energy springs like the pingala and ida 'serpents' or nerve channels.

So, asked and answered. Here I'm talking about those basic geographical features more than Philip Gardiner's scholarship which I can't speak to. The form speaks for itself. And it's really interesting because it reflects so clearly this image I had in my head earlier of the primordial mound surrounded by concentric rings and a serpent. Again, the reason isn't important. But this, for the umpteenth time, is why I love William Henry. He keeps pointing to the things I see in my head and helping me contextualize them. His work is just very synchronous for me.

Another thing Henry mentions in this interview is the tower that Anish Kapoor designed for the games and its serpentine appearance. From Henry we learn that Kapoor compared it to, of all things, the Tower of Babel. Very exciting.

But when I googled up an image of this thing, it put me in mind of something else.

Yes, I recently saw The Avengers and Anish Kapoor's tower has that same platform thing jutting out of the front as Stark Tower. The angle is also similar. And seriously, can we talk about The Avengers?! That platform on the front of Stark Tower plays host to a tesseract which opens an interdimensional wormhole. Subtle. Seriously. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

William Henry and Chad Stuemke also present a lot of information on the symbolism. Both consider the possibility that there is malicious intent behind the use of these powerful archetypes to manipulate us all. But they are more inclined to the idea that the planners, artists, and architects are both consciously and unconsciously assembling the keys to ascension and presenting them to the public. And that's pretty much how I see it.

On the other hand, there's the perspective of Stewart Swerdlow and others that it's all part of a master plan make us bow to a false, probably reptilian, god. And I'm not saying that there isn't a cogent narrative to be assembled from the available facts that supports that, but as with so many conspiracy theories, it ascribes a level of coordinated genius that I have trouble imagining. Worse, it completely inverts the meaning of a lot of very powerful and beautiful symbolism. But mostly, it infers conscious, malicious intent from some very innocuous material. For instance, this is Swerdlow on astronomy:

In the last several months, almost every other day, there's been some kind of story on the news about outer space. For example they said that in our galaxy alone, there were three hundred to four hundred million earth-like planets. And they even said by 2014 we will discover a planet with life on it. So how would they present those figures unless they knew for sure?

Ummm… Because they estimate from the data they have? Something scientists do all the time? There's also a lot of wiggle room between three and four hundred million. Those are hardly precise figures. And Mr. Swerdlow clearly never got the memo on how press releases from the science industries work. All these agencies need to fight for funding, now more than ever, and making grandiose promises in sound-bite form is a big part of that process. And then the figures get revised as new data comes in and it either disappoints or exceeds expectations. That's how it works. What almost never happens is that a research body presents an estimate of time or quantity and hits it squarely on the head. "Sure" really doesn't enter into it. I can understand why Mr. Swerdlow would have the notion that scientific bodies speak in exact and irrefutable terms. We have a lot invested in thinking everything that comes out of the sciences is holy writ but it's a comfortable lie.

Swerdlow also ascribes a lot of significance to scientific speculation that life forms on other planets would likely be reptilian. What he doesn't seem to want to consider is that we're reptilian. We evolved from early reptiles and our first brain is the reptilian brain. Then comes the limbic or mamalian brain. And then comes the neo-cortex. Whether we call this the triune brain or ascribe to it some other, more fine-tuned theoretical construct, those three, fundamental components are most definitely in our skulls. These are the simple facts that even David Icke acknowledges. Icke also never said that all reptilians are evil -- only that there is a particular reptilian race that is responsible for interfering with human consciousness. So if you're going to be paranoid about reptilians, at least narrow it down to the right ones.

And then there's this nonsensical bit of dialog between Red Ice host Henrik Palmgren and Swerdlow regarding an "insider" Palmgren had hoped to get on the show.

Palmgren: He definitely mentioned again that the G4S, or the G-Force as I call them, who are behind the security of the Olympics are purposely looking for incompetent people and also the fact that he was told in some way that you as a worker in here or a security agent are going to be responsible for the evacuation of London or the biggest historical event in the history of London which is just an interesting little tidbit that I haven't heard him really expand more on that yet. But do you think they would tell actually the people involved in this in a subtle way like this if it really was true that they were planning something?

Swerdlow: Yeah, they have to because they have to -- the staff must be aware or expect something without maybe knowing exactly what it is. Because they need certain programmed responses from that staff that will enhance the entire event and make it look as if it's a natural event or something that happens suddenly and they didn't expect. Yes, the staff would have to be advised that some thing will happen.

So they have to be prepared to look surprised? Oh, but they can't really know that they've been prepared to look surprised. That'll really make'em look suprised! Ummm...

Everything Palmgren is describing is standard operational planning. You always have to plan as if the worst catastrophe possible will occur so that you're prepared to deal with it if the worst happens. Why would an employee be told he'd be responsible for the largest evacuation in London's history? Um, because people from all over the world will be crammed into a not very large city in an age when we're all deeply paranoid about terrorism? This is the same kind of logic that says, if they're not planning war with such and such country, why are there battle plans made up? Because there are battle plans made up and ready for every conceivable contingency! It's called military preparedness. There are battle plans being made up and revised constantly for countries most of us have never even heard and will probably never in a million years go to war with. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, battle plans cause wars the same way fire extinguishers cause fires. And the same goes for evacuation plans. What really would be concerning is if they didn't have security preparing fully for a massive evacuation and "acting as if." The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

So there are real leaps in logic and things that border on paranoid delusion in this show. There are also some genuinely concerning things -- the kind that make you go, whaaa? But mostly there's William Henry and Chad Stuemke separating the wheat from the chaff and explaining some very exciting, symbolic imagery.

I guess it's all in how you look at it. For instance, when I read the William Blake poem alluded to in the opening ceremony, I see a brilliant piece of esoteric literature hinting at ascension. And consciously or unconsciously those very alchemical themes are woven seamlessly into the thematic language of the event. For example, here's an analysis of one part of the poem:

The poem Jerusalem (1804), by William Blake, is actually an excerpt from the preface to one of his “prophetic books", Milton.

Jerusalem is here the symbolic residence of a humanity freed of the inter-related chains of commerce, British imperialism, and war. Blake's "mental fight" is directed against these chains. In his Blake: Prophet Against Empire, David Erdman tells us that Blake’s "dark, Satanic Mills" are "mills that produce dark metal, iron and steel, for diabolic purposes . . . . London . . . was a war arsenal and the hub of the machinery of war, and Blake uses the symbol in that sense.”

As I pointed out here, there is a sequence in one of the promos of golden, molten metal being poured to make drab steel which is then transformed by the rainbow into living, golden beings. Pure alchemy.

Others see reference to that poem as a clue to an evil "zionist" conspiracy to take over the world. Eh. You say tomato...
 

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my charriot of fire! I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land.

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William Henry on Olympic Strangeness

Wenlock and Mandeville: Mascots for 2012 London Olympics

I will be the first to admit that I don't pay much attention to the Olympic Games. When I was a kid, I liked the figure skating but even that doesn't hold my attention anymore. No sports fan I, but more than that, I've completely lost interest in group-think. I find the collective, water-cooler nature of the experience off-putting. At the same time I realize that that's the major draw for a lot of people, hence the group-think. This year, though, I think perhaps I should pay more attention because it seems like something unprecedented is being directed at the collective mind. Or so I've learned from William Henry.

Henry's interview with Chad Stuemke is fascinating. The symbolism associated with the upcoming games in Great Britain is positively heavy-handed. So much so that Iran has threatened to pull out because of charges of a Zionist conspiracy. They've also apparently blocked the website. It would seem that by pulling the logo apart and readjusting the angles a bit, we come up with something that looks sort of like the word Zion. So conspiracy theories abound.

William Henry, however, has a somewhat different take, which speaks to one of the reasons I love his work. Henry's new book Secret of Sion is an examination of the mythical significance of Sion/Zion. He posits that it points to plane of existence associated with ascension, the seraphim, and the legendary rainbow body. And both he and Stuemke see the imagery associated with the 2012 Olympics as redolent with those themes. And, now that they say it, it's kind of hard to miss. This page on Stuemke's website gives a good rundown.

The promo video which introduces Wenlock and Mandeville -- the "one eyed rainbow riding aliens" -- alludes to alchemical transmutation. They start as molten, golden steel. They harden into lumps of dull, grey, base metal. After being sculpted into their weird, little alien forms, they are transformed by a rainbow from heaven into iridescent, golden beings. They ascend on rainbows promising to return to London in 2012. A cake celebrating the builder's retirement is a circumpunct, albeit, missing a slice. I believe I've mentioned my obsession with that form one or ten times. The video is just full of suns and spheres and eyes.

Henry and Stuemke discuss at length two different ways to view the apparently conscious use of all this symbolism: Illuminati conspiracy or spiritually guided consciousness event. As I've said before, I don't do the paranoia. When I look at all these symbols that so much of the woo-woo world says are the secret government flaunting their power and engaging in public rituals to keep us docile, I see the opposite. I see symbols of illumination designed to awaken humanity. How much of that is conscious and how much of it is artists, architects, and world leaders plucking archetypes from the subconscious I can't say. But when I look at a collection of symbols as blatant as these, it's hard to call it anything but deliberate.

Personally, I think what has become of the word Zion is a tragedy. Like so much of this symbolism, its meaning has been inverted. This is not a commentary on the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. I don't do those. It's more a reaction to the reaction and the way fear and paranoia distort and stupefy. As I've said before, if there's a conspiracy associated with these symbols, it's a psych op to make us fear rather than embrace them. It is positively Orwellian the way Zion has come to represent war instead of peace. These symbols are powerful. We need to reclaim them and give them their rightful place in our consciousness.

I'm with Henry's wife Claire, whom he interviews here to speak in her capacity as a native Brit:

When are we going to have some leaders that say, "Let's make this world a better place." We know what we know. We've got the ancient knowledge. It's about time that it was put on the top table and all this symbolism and hidden knowledge and art that's been showing us the way for years and years and years; for eons. It's about time we all wake up from the dream and make this world a better place.

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