In late March, Sibyl brought some weirdness in the sky to my attention with what seemed like an emerging pattern. As I kept my eye on it, more stories popped. I have collected here a list as best as I can recall, and in writing the list I notice a recurring theme: KingKills (Dallas & 9/11), Virgins, Hawks, Sirius (Osiris, Isis, Horus), Birds.
March 28th: JetBlue Captain has midair meltdown. Sibyl writes "2nd airline employee goes crazy inflight in less than a month. Both occured when the planes were in or over Texas. One was a captain and the other a flight attendant, but both had the exact same delusional rant (about a 9/11-type plane crash incident in progress)."
April 20th: Athens, Georgia. "A 13-year-old boy has been killed after falling though a skylight at the main hangar at Peachtree City-Falcon Field Airport. Police said AustinBailey of Temple appears to have climbed onto the roof of the main hanger Friday afternoon and stepped on a skylight, which gave way. He was taken to Piedmont-Fayette Hospital where he died.Peachtree City Police Capt. Rosanna Dove said the hangar is being re-roofed by a company that employs the boyfriend of the boy's mother. The child had accompanied his soon-to-be stepfather to work. Dove said the child had climbed unaccompanied onto the roof." (via)
April 22nd: Nevada & California. Loud sonic boom caused by a daytime shooting star prompts a flood of 911 calls. Witnesses described it as "a green fireball in the sky."Dan Ruby[slippers], associate director of the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno, said it’s unlikely the fireball had anything to do with the current peak of the Lyrid meteor shower.
...
(Thunderclap, or Lightning Flash?)
(A new Tarot cycle commences? The Titanic sinks and the Stars fall from heaven.)
She represents our shared consciousness, trapped in the material world as a result of the Fall. She died in the bathtub. But the lights within her live and she will be regenerated through them when they are gathered together. We are those lights.
This, it seems, is the dark-haired soul of the world (think Ellen Page and Wendy Torrance) who has been kicked around for untold aeons. (Judy Garland is a survivor.)
Encountering Betty and Veronica
But periodically, others enter into her world. In the opening of A Clockwork Orange we see a gang of hoodlums attempting to rape a girl on a theater stage--more fallen starlets trapped within the Hierophantic director's (Demiurge's) Mystery Play . . .
Quilty and Jack are both the "writers" of the "play"; they control the "party" and events like the 9/11 "mega-ritual"--true "acts of God".
Cliff's plane falls to earth in the opening scenes of The Rocketeer, another duplication of the Lightning Flash. (9/11 complete with falling planes!) Though the plane is wrecked, Jenny's picture (the archetypal image of Truth) has survived (Das ewig-weibliche zieht uns hinan).
American Airlines Flight 77?
The plane is NR77V. The Lightning Flash is represented by the number 777.
But if we compare with Mulholland Falls, we might get the idea that it was Jenny herself who fell out of the sky. The parallel goes further, since she was actually dropped out of an airplane in MF.
Violet MacDermot, The Fall of Sophia: A Gnostic Text on the Redemption of Universal Consciousness
Fortunately, since she's evidently waterproof and fireproof, Jenny lives and works in Hollywood, in the movies--she's another Diana of the Holy Wood, a starlet.
She has, however, been stripped of her autonomy--she is not in control, but instead Neville Sinclair, the King of Hollywood (the Rex Nemorensis). His whole life revolves around artifice and falsehood.
The Empire Blonde, the producer's niece, is the one on stage.
And Dr. Bill ("physician, heal thyself") will be haunted by visions of his own wife consorting with the mysterious naval officer. A visual reference to Lolita is again employed, as Alice is seen on top of a quilt, referencing the sinister Clare Quilty. (We will return to the meaning of this later.)
Back in The Rocketeer, Cliff collapses the wall of King Neville's movie (the Mystery Play) to find the real Jenny--he breaks the Fourth Wall and unveils the illusion, finding the still point of Truth (Jenny as Subject and Object) around which the phantasmagoria of falsehood swirls. (She has concealed herself from the profane as a lowly extra.)
"I'm looking for Jenny Blake."
Jennifer is also the center of the Dark City, the point of Truth around which the Lie revolves. Another performer.
John (the Baptist) breaks through the glass, like Cliff breaking through the wall of the movie set.
He who is not able, by the exercise of his reason, to define the idea of the good, separating it from all other objects, and piercing, as in a battle, through every kind of argument; endeavoring to confute, not according to opinion, but according to essence, and proceeding through all these dialectical energies with an unshaken reason;—he who can not accomplish this, would you not say, that he neither knows the good itself, nor anything which is properly denominated good? And would you not assert that such a one, when he apprehends any certain image of reality, apprehends it rather through the medium of opinion than of science; that in the present life he is sunk in sleep, and conversant with the delusion of dreams; and that before he is roused to a vigilant state he will descend to Hades, and be overwhelmed with a sleep perfectly profound. (Plato, Republic)
The Monolith isn't simply a stargate--it's a Monomyth. The only way to exit the ever-recurring Play is to Participate in the Mystery.
In the Sepher Yetzirah we are told that "Ten are the numbers of the ineffable Sephiroth, ten and not nine, ten and not eleven." The 9/11 number (being that of imperfection, rather than the "perfect 10") would indicate the imbalance that occurred in the moment of creation (the Lightning Flash) that gave rise to the Qlippoth. A catastrophe easily comparable to September 11, 2001.
The "Zohar" attributes the primary cause of evil to the act of separation. The act of separation is refered to as the "cutting of the shoots". What was united becomes divided, and the boundary between one thing and another can be regarded as a shell. The primary separation was the division between the Tree of Life (Pillar of Mercy) from the Tree of Knowledge (Pillar of Severity). . . . evil is caused by an excess of the powers of Din (judgement) in the creation. The origin of this imbalance may be innate, a residue of the moment of creation, when each sephira went through a period of imbalance and instability (the kingdoms of unbalanced force) . . .
Nothing was as it should have been in an ideal world. The four worlds of Kabbalah slipped, and the lowest world of Assiah descended into the world of the shells. This can be seen in the G.D. picture of the Eden after the Fall. Much of Lurianic Kabbalah is concerned with corrective actions designed to bring about the repair or restoration (tikkun) of the creation, so that the sparks of light trapped in the realm of the shells can be freed.
Monroe and Campbell: One of these things is like the other
The Monolith of 2001 represents the Monomyth of Joseph Campbell. Kubrick's protagonists (Humbert Humbert, Dave Bowman, Wendy Torrance, etc.) are symbolically trapped within the Monomyth and not in control of their own destinies. The Monolith is likewise the movie screen, which is why Dave Bowman must travel through it in order to become a Star Child, thus symbolically piercing the Veil of existence in order to discover the Truth. This is the allegory of Plato's cave, wherein the people chained in the cave (ourselves) apprehend only shadows on the wall (the projections in the movie theater), rather than the Truth that those images convey.
Many instances of a frame within the frame can be noted throughout the film, but one in particular is to be recalled. Just before Humbert sees Lolita for the first time, and as her music is playing in the background, foretelling her presence outside in the garden, an interesting shot is worth analyzing. Charlotte and Humbert are in the foreground, and she gives him her phone number (1776: the Declaration of Independence, as Humbert notes: Lolita escapes from him on July, 4th in the book). In the background, the large French window leading to the garden is wide open, framed by curtains, showing the sunny garden from where the music comes. This open French window, a typical frame within the frame, is thus the visual equivalent of the music: it makes the two spaces in which Humbert and Lolita stand permeable to each other. Once he crosses that threshold and joins her in the garden, the story can actually begin. (Marie Bouchet)
The threshold at the beginning of Lolita clearly appears as another Monolith--once Humbert crosses it, he discovers the High Priestess in the Garden and the Monomyth of the story begins. He has gone from a passive observer to an active participant in the unfolding narrative: Humbert steps through the "stargate" into the movie.
The events of Sept 11, 2001 are both predicted and depicted by EWS. When Alice drops here dress we can pinpoint the undoings of EWS as just after 9/11. ISIS has been stripped bare. The Twin Pillars of Boaz and Joachim have tumbled down and we have entered the land of the dead. Eyes Wide Shut is chronical of the secret conspiracy behind those events. The greatest conspiracy the universe has known. And we're all in on it. (Mark LeClair)
Opening the gate
Dorothy entered Oz in a tornado. JFK in Dallas entered the Underworld with a magic bullet from Oz-Wald. (Jack Ruby slippers, etc.)
Stepping through the television-Monolith . . .
"One of these nights I may just jump down that rainbow way, be with my baby, then . . ."
The King's Daughter and the Twin Towers (Spirit consorting with Matter)
John Lamb Lash, Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief
Listen closely to Alice's stress of the English word He as she drops her A-bomb. The He of which she speaks is the young naval officer of her Cape Cod fantasy-fuck. A naval officer is a seaman. A Seaman is semen. Semen carries the seed. The seed is He. Now I am well aware that the proper articulation of the Hebrew letter He is as Hay, but poetic license is at work here folks. Alice's He is the semen of all men, all potential breeding stock. The shell-shocked Bill is learning, for the first time, that a woman's love of a man begins and ends not in the heart but in the loins that will nurture his seed. Alice has unwittingly unleashed the daemon.
The Mystery
The Call to Adventure (Nigredo)
Death of Ignorance
It is neat that Kubrick blocks his actors to mirror the deathbed scene in 2001 with Bill as Bowman and Alice, with the window looming over her, as the Monolith. Poor Bill is nowt but a dribble of dust that must enter the living as a seed among millions in the vast and fickle space of Woman-hood. It's no wonder that he doesn't feel so special anymore. (Mark LeClair)
This card recalls the Legend of Persephone, and herein is a dogma. Concealed within Mercury is a light which pervades all parts of the Universe equally . . . (Aleister Crowley)
The movie [Eyes Wide Shut] cut much of the dream that was presented in the original screenplay.
I think it started in my parents house. They weren’t there. I was alone. That surprised me because our wedding was the next day and I didn’t have a wedding dress. Then you and I were floating above a ancient city. It was a kind of crazy mix of ancient architectural styles. Oriental, Egyptian, Greek and Roman architecture. And it was completely deserted. The streets were empty–no people, no animals. And I remember thinking, so this is our honeymoon. Then it was night and the sky was so full of stars, and so blue and wide it seemed like it was painted. You said it was the ceiling of our bridal chamber and you took me in your arms and made love to me and said you would love me forever…We made love and it was wonderful, though there was a sadness to it, and a presentment of sorrow. Suddenly it was morning and we were somewhere in the strange city. We were still completely alone. But something terrible had happened–our clothes were gone. I was terrified as I had never been before, and felt such a burning shame that it almost consumed me. At the same time I was furious with you because I thought it was your fault. And this sensation of terror, shame and fury was more intense than any emotion I had ever felt before. You felt guilty and rushed away naked, to go and get clothes for us.
As soon as you were gone I felt wonderful. I neither felt sorry for you, or worried about you. It was heavenly to be alone. I was lying in a lush garden, stretched out naked in the sunlight, and I was far more beautiful than I ever was in reality. And while I lay there, a young man walked out of the woods. He was the young Naval officer I told you about from the hotel. He looked different but I knew it was him. He stopped in front of me and looked at me searchingly. I laughed seductively and wantonly, as I have never laughed in my life, and he held out his arms to me and sank down beside me…
He looked at me…and slowly took me in his arms…and we began making love. I seemed to live through countless days and nights–there was neither time nor space. And the more we made love the more our hunger for each other increased. And just as that earlier feeling of terror and shame went beyond anything I had ever felt, so nothing can be compared with the freedom and happiness and the…desire that I now felt. Then I realized there were other couples around us–hundreds of them, and they too were making love. Then I was making love to the other men, and as soon as my longing was satisfied with one, I wanted another. I can’t say how many I was with. And yet I didn’t for one moment forget you. And all this time, you were buying the most beautiful clothes and jewelery you could find for me.
Then you were being followed by a crowd of people who were shouting threats. Then you were seized by soldiers, and there were also priests among them. Somebody, a gigantic person, tied your hands. You were still naked. I knew you were going to be crucified but I felt no sympathy for you. I still blamed you for everything that had happened. I felt that I was far removed from you but I knew you could see me naked in the arms of countless men in this sea of nakedness which foamed around me. The soldiers began to whip you and blood flowed down you in streams. I saw it without feeling any surprise or pity. Then you smiled at me as if to show you had fulfilled my wish and bought me everything I wanted. But I thought your actions were ridiculous and I wanted to make fun of you, to laugh in your face. They began to nail you to the cross and I hoped that you would be able to hear my laughter. And so I laughed as shrill and loud as I could. That must have been the laugh that you heard when I woke up.
It’s made obvious from this dream that the film isn’t just about a man with a narrow view of women struggling with expanding his mundane view of sexuality. Kubrick has charged the film with mystic subcontext . . . We are perhaps close here to a version of the mystic marriage, of the Shekinah cleaved from the King, the godhead (of which she is a part), to reside in exile in the base world, the mother of all, and the task being the reunification of her with the En Sof.
The desire is to unity.
When a man sins it is as though he strips the Shekinah of her vestments, and that is why he is punished; and when he carries out the precepts of the law, it is as though he clothes the Shekinah in her vestments.
. . . Bill goes running off to find clothes for Alice, all that he does seeming as an effort finally to win her back, even to the point of self sacrifice, a self sacrifice she appears to demand. (Juli Kearns)
In his taxi outside Somerton, Dr. Bill tears in two a one hundred dollar bill, to persuade his driver to wait for him. First: the position of Dr. Bill in relation to the cabbie. It is a mirror to just before, at Rainbow Fashions, when Miss Millich stands behind the brave doctor to hide from her father's raging. . . . The torn hundred is the rending of the Mother. The essence is that of Isis, the eternal woman. We are being treated to another variation of the inexorable link between Money, in particular American Money, and the Goddess. . . . Anyway, in Gnostic terms, so that the eternal child would not fade away and die at last, the Great Mother will rend her own body and use a piece of herself to surround him as he tumbles endlessly across the cosmos in search of a home he will never find. This womb and it's still birth are the twins of PKD's Valis, Isis and Osiris, designated mourners one to another. When Bill tears money he is re-enacting the really-big-shoo of the Gnostic Cosmic Magic Trick, he is tearing a womaninhalf. (Mark LeClair)
Over the rainbow: The three protagonists of The Shining are seen to be "trapped" in the Monolith-Monomyth next to Wendy. Captain Jack might have gone a bit crazy.
The film Heathers depicts the torturous romance between the Demiurge and the World Soul. Christian Slater (Jason Dean the Easy Rider, in a performance clearly indebted to Jack Nicholson) and Winona Ryder ("writer"?) are the collaborative masters of Fate; they thrill on death, destruction (think 9/11 again), and irony. But just as in The Shining and Labyrinth, the Writer goes insane and the girl must overthrow him. Dorothy takes the place of the Wizard in the Emerald City.
"Great party, isn't it?"
. . .
(The "As the World Falls Down" video explains the Masked Ball symbolism: The girl has fallen hopelessly in love with the Demiurge's mask . . . the Authentic Self is lost beneath the phantasmagoria of photocopies.)
(It is now the ruling Ego itself that must plumb the depths for the lost Self.)
it's just a game
Critic Randy Rasmussen interprets Ziegler as representing Bill's worst self, much as in other Kubrick films; the title character in Dr. Strangelove represents the worst of the American national security establishment, Charles Grady represents the worst of Jack Torrance in The Shining, and Clare Quilty represents the worst of Humbert Humbert in Lolita. ("Eyes Wide Shut")
"Danced with you too long . . ."
We are meant to infer that the mask is Bill. . . . He owns this mask. It is his real face, a composite of social and cultural co-ordinates that until moments ago, Bill thought was an authentic personality. It is all there is to him. There is nothing underneath. (Mark LeClair)
The Mysterious Woman and her sacrifice on behalf of Dr. Bill is as I have described: the act of giving birth into the cosmos. There is only one woman and she must give her blood to the survival of her eternal child. This passion is necessary to the development of Bill into a real adult, passed through the refiner's fire and updated to the brutal necessities of maintaining reality at a cosmic level. Amanda Curran may die, just as the American Century of Liberty must also die, but thanks to this sacrifice Dr. Bill will live on, upgraded into a new metal. A 21st century man. A New World Man. A man who has earned his lumps and knows the painful truths that scurry in the shadows of the heart and mind. . . .
Occult science is that of metaphor and the big truth of 9/11 is that it is a Heirophantic event . . . Beyond this third degree, aspirants court the Abyss itself, gaze itno the yawning yaw of Yah-weh and cry out: More Light! The result is self-evident. For Doctor William Harford, the journey was a lightspeed leap from ignorance to Gnosis. He just growed up. Fast. (Mark LeClair)
Vanilla Sky ends in the same way as The Game, with Tom Cruise jumping off of a building (with the WTC conspicuously in the background) after discovering that his world was a charade. Tom's death is an atonement for Sofia's death--should we assume that they both happened at Ground Zero?
Refer back to The Fountain--his death (the Hanged Man dangling from the Empiress) duplicates the original death, and thus the end is the beginning. "You jump, I jump, remember?"
"From a cozy apartment in Harlem (where she's "never been south of 125th St."), Dorothy (Diana Ross) travels to Oz, landing at the New YorkState Pavilion . . ."
During the development of Contact, the production crew simultaneously watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for inspiration.
The crew soon focuses on asking questions about the sphere and then on attempting to open it and learn about its nature, contents, and origin. Harry eventually succeeds in opening it and goes inside. Upon returning, he has a terrible headache and he remembers little about what happened inside or how he opened it.
As they continue to theorize, they are contacted by an intelligent, seemingly friendly life form which calls itself Jerry, apparently from within the sphere. It first contacts them via a code of seemingly strange number series, which Harry translates. But while they struggle to communicate with Jerry, increasingly bizarre and deadly events occur, including the appearance of sea creatures that Beth claims don't exist, and soon Jerry tells them he is "manifesting" the creatures. Members of the team start to die in various attacks by sea life and a new form of giant squid, and the dwindling survivors struggle to placate the unthinkably powerful, childlike, and temperamental Jerry.
Throughout their time in the habitat, both Norman and Harry notice that Beth gets more and more beautiful. It is revealed that Beth's beauty is actually a manifestation from Jerry, because she was nice to him.
Norman suddenly has an important role as he realizes he must use psychology to keep the surviving team (now only himself, Beth, and Harry) alive by placating Jerry. Translating the original code himself, though, Norman discovers that Jerry is actually Harry: by entering the sphere, Harry acquired the power to manifest his subconscious thoughts into reality. As Harry noted his childhood fears of squid and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, he has unconsciously created them as an enemy.
(It is not only ego that must be confronted, but the chthonic gods of Nature . . .)
33&1/3 . . . 333 Choronzon (the monster from the Id?) Also: Flight 77 (777 lightning) strikes the Pentagon at 9:37am (9 X 37 = 333)
Leslie Nielsen: Dr. Morbius, just what were the symptoms of all those other deaths, the unnatural ones I mean.
Dr. Edward Morbius: The symptoms were striking Commander. One by one in spite of every safeguard my co-workers were torn literally limb from limb.
Leslie Nielsen: By what?
Dr. Edward Morbius: By some devilish thing that never once showed itself.
Leslie Nielsen: And the Bellerophon?
Dr. Edward Morbius: Vaporized as the three remaining survivors tried to take her off.
Leslie Nielsen: And yet in all these 19 years you personally have never again been bothered by this planetary force?
Dr. Edward Morbius: Only in nightmares of those times. And yet always in my mind I seem to feel the creature is lurking somewhere close at hand, sly and irresistible and only waiting to be reinvoked for murder.
...
Leslie Nielsen: What is the Id?
Dr. Edward Morbius: [frustrated] Id, Id, Id, Id, Id!
[calming down]
Dr. Edward Morbius: It's a... It's an obsolete term. I'm afraid once used to describe the elementary basis of the subconscious mind.
Leslie Nielsen: [to himself] Monsters from the Id...
Dr. Edward Morbius: Huh?
Leslie Nielsen: Monsters from the subconscious. Of course. That's what Doc meant. Morbius. The big machine, 8,000 miles of klystron relays, enough power for a whole population of creative geniuses, operated by remote control. Morbius, operated by the electromagnetic impulses of individual Krell brains.
Dr. Edward Morbius: To what purpose?
Leslie Nielsen: In return, that ultimate machine would instantaneously project solid matter to any point on the planet, In any shape or color they might imagine. For *any* purpose, Morbius! Creation by mere thought.
Dr. Edward Morbius: Why haven't I seen this all along?
Leslie Nielsen: But like you, the Krell forgot one deadly danger - their own subconscious hate and lust for destruction.
Dr. Edward Morbius: The beast. The mindless primitive! Even the Krell must have evolved from that beginning.
Leslie Nielsen: And so those mindless beasts of the subconscious had access to a machine that could never be shut down. The secret devil of every soul on the planet all set free at once to loot and maim. And take revenge, Morbius, and kill!
Dr. Edward Morbius: My poor Krell. After a million years of shining sanity, they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them.
[pause]
Dr. Edward Morbius: Yes, young man, all very convincing, but for one obvious fallacy. The last Krell died 2,000 centuries ago. But today, as we all know, there is still at large on this planet a living monster.
Leslie Nielsen: Your mind refuses to face the conclusion.
Dr. Edward Morbius: What do you mean?
…
Leslie Nielsen: You still refuse to face the truth.
Dr. Edward Morbius: What truth?
Leslie Nielsen: Morbius, that thing out there - it's you.
(Participation in the Mystery: One of the Twelve sacrifices herself so that Bill may live . . .)
Sphere:
