This golem has prodigious strength and grows beyond measure. He destroys the world, or in any case does a good deal of damage. . . . the power of the tellurian element, aroused and set in motion by the name of God . . . rises up in blind and destructive fury. The earth magic awakens chaotic forces. The story of Adam is reversed. Whereas Adam began as a gigantic cosmic golem and was reduced to the normal size of a man, this golem seems to strive, in response to the tellurian force that governs him, to regain the original stature of Adam. . . . The golem has been interpreted as a symbol of the soul or of the Jewish people, and both theories can give rise, no doubt, to meaningful reflections. (Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism)
The 2003 Hulk movie centers around Bruce Banner recovering the memories of his murdered mother. Hulk, as the Banished Adam of dust, is figuratively "created" when his mother dies while a gamma bomb goes off--not due to the bomb itself, but to his father David Banner (= DB the Goblin King) chopping her to pieces with his knife. This is a perfect retelling of the Black Dahlia mutilation as atom bomb explosion theme. By this act is the world created: Osiris the Green Man becomes the outcome of the Godhead descending into Nature.
(Timothy Freke, & Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries)
Putting Osiris back together
His mother (the original Unity as the Adam Kadmon) is somewhat literally "dis-membered," since Bruce forgets all about her--to become whole, the Green Man must "re-member."
John Murdoch (Sewell) awakens in a hotel bathtub, suffering from amnesia. . . . John discovers the corpse of a brutalized, ritualistically murdered woman, along with a bloody knife. Murdoch flees the scene, just as the group of men (known as the Strangers) arrive at the room. Eventually he learns his real name, and finds his wife Emma (Connelly). ("Dark City")
The female body is the soul, which is defiled by our unconscious due to our lack of wholeness (See Stephen Hoeller's work on the Gnostic Exegesis of the Soul). The spirals carved by the Strangers can signify the expansion of the unconscious, the path taken and, again, the ruling aspects of Saturn/Chronos; time as the spiral. (Future Fossil)
(John Lash, Not in His Image)
In Hulk the recurrent Gnostic element comes into play: While Bruce's mother is killed, Betty's (Jennifer Connelly's) earliest memory--and a recurring dream--is of being abandoned by her Father at the same time that the bomb (the "splitting of the Adam") goes off--her exile, as the fallen Sophia, from the Pleroma.
Bath salts
If we return to Dark Water, Jennifer Connelly's character is named, naturally, "Dahlia Williams," thus amalgamating her Labyrinth character Sarah Williams with the Black Dahlia. Perla Haney-Jardine (the "Pearl" again) plays both the Dead Girl in the Water and JC's own younger self, circa 1974 (inverting the Dahlia year 1947) . . . a "split personality."
(Alan Moore, Promethea)
4=7 is supposedly four sephirot down, seven sephirot up on the Tree of Life, which is where the Tree becomes divided--thus "chopping a girl in half". In both Hulk and Dark Water, we see that the girl is a personification of her own fears of abandonment by her parents (division from the Three Supernals)--
She has visions of the Hulkster (the Adamic Man of Dust who arises after the breach) strangling her. Here it is not the "high priest Jesus" who comes to set things right for the abandoned lower Sophia, but Bruce Banner--who, like her offspring Christ in the Gnostic myth, abandons her and leaves the Demiurge as a Shadow in his wake.
This same sense of loss inhabits Reservation Road, where Mark Ruffalo (who plays Bruce Banner in The Avengers) kills JC's son on his Wheels; her Child of the Promise as the would-be Messiah wished to release the fireflies being held captive (liberate the light from the darkness).
"And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam . . ."
Ruffalo's own son lives on in his place . . . his eye is wounded in the accident--a form of spiritual blindness. Adamic Man becomes a temporary bridge.
The Barren Mother conceives in herself a passion for a Redeemer for her bastard creation, and attempts to restore the lost Archetype of the Christ. Her revision, however, is a crude and debased ape--though it is remarked that “she had good intentions.”
For the genesis of Apollo from Isis and Osiris that took place while the Gods were still in the womb of Rhea, is an enigmatical way of stating that before this [sensible] cosmos became manifest, and Matter was perfected by Reason (Logos), Nature, proving herself imperfect, of herself brought forth her first birth. Wherefore also they say that that God was lame in the dark, and call him Elder Horus; for he was not cosmos, but a sort of image and phantasm of the world which was to be. (Plutarch)
Thus there continues to be some ambiguity of exactly who her savior is supposed to be--with the hint given that it is humanity itself. But in Hulk there is a complete inversion, and it is Bruce that needs to be saved by Betty, which is where the paradox of things dwells. (They're after the same rainbow's end.)
The ape as realization of the Anthropostemplate (as per John Lash) is her savior, or he will be . . . maybe. But this offspring is unfinished and defective. Though Man, as the Fallen Adam, participates of the nature of the Demiurge who created him, as an archetypal figure he can and does become Christ; not a Christ who redeems the world in some apocalyptic event, as the Outer Church would have it, but redeems Sophia as an aspect of the fallen World-Soul within. But since Sophia is the Essential Self, in distinction from her Redeemer, who is naught but Ego, we engage in the paradox of things whereby the King must have his head removed.
"Some dreams can't be shared"
(Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion)
In Breakfast at Tiffany's, the Father married Audrey Hepburn when she was going on 14 (the ideal age for princesses of the 13th Aeon), but she ran away from home (the Pleroma).
She has a brother--he "growed up into a giant," i.e. a Hulk (a man of earthly, or "Titanic" elements).
Green Man Sion: People said Audrey was horribly miscast as a nature goddess, but perhaps that's the point--she's a long way from home.
Josie McClellan (Jennifer Connelly), the stereotypical "spoiled rich girl," . . . is someone he has known all his life in school, where they were worlds apart. Josie had spent the past several hours asleep in a dressing room after backing out of shoplifting some merchandise in a half-hearted attempt to run away from her abusive father . . . ("Career Opportunities")
In a few short lines, John Hughes' Career Opportunities hits all the notes for a modern Gnostic mythos: here Jennifer Connelly runs away from her father in the Pleroma with the intent of shoplifting--that is, stealing back shards of holiness that have been trapped by the Darkness--but instead falls asleep, immersing herself within her own "Dreaming."
(Swiontkowski)
(Swiontkowski)
In Batman Returns, the Penguin (Oswald "Cobble Pot" = shattered vessels) is trapped within the Cube of Space and gets tossed out of his parents' house, the Pleroma, into the waters of Chaos. Then Selina Kyle falls as well, motivated either by "curiosity" for what would happen to this evolving cosmos, or alternatively by a desire to retrieve the shards of holiness imprisoned within it (shoplifting), feeling personally responsible. By perceiving her reflection in Malkuth, she glimpses a vision of wholeness wherein spirit and matter are re-integrated into one.
(Sergeĭ Nikolaevich Bulgakov, Boris Jakim, The Lamb of God)
In noting this dual nature of Christ, the function of "JC" in such a dual Sophia role becomes apparent.
(Lash)
The human singularity
(Moore)
While we sleep, they go to work
(Lash)
Labyrinth is Gnostic myth; Sarah as Sophia (the World-Soul) and Jareth as Demiurge. Sarah again longs for someone to redeem her from her unfinished child (Toby, the child "to be"), and thus creates Jareth from the unformed Chaos.
In Gnostic soteriology, the Savior comes not to save the world in general, but the World-Soul in particular; i.e. Sophia herself. The Sophia figure yearns for Bowie, who represents her archetypal fantasy of the perfect man (she not having a consort of her own); but she then loses herself behind his mask; behind the veil of Nature as she falls into her own dream.
The Demiurge's power of crystallization, the "Mirror Ball," allows her to outpicture her Dreams on the Silver Screen. We all fall asleep while the Archons go to work in this Dark City, created after the memory of the Pleroma. This is the nature of reality as Hierophantic construct, or, alternately, as arising from a yearning within the World-Soul for her own redemption, which is the central fact of the Gnostic mythos. And there is no contradiction here, for the Demiurge is simply charged with depicting the World-Soul's anguish ("it will show you your dreams").
When she forgets her essential divinity as a fallen aspect of God, the Goblin King becomes the ruler over her. Aeons pass, and the whole of human history begins.
The ape of Sophia
(Lash)
The Wizard of Oz and the bronzen thief
Ruled my girl with teutonic teeth
But all was lost when her mouth turned green
Surprise surprise, the boys are home
My guardian angel's rung down my telephone
The heat's on mister, can't you hear them scream
Whatever happened to the Teenage Dream
Being the Dreamer enmeshed within the Cake of Matter (the Ghost in the Shell) provokes an identity crisis (split personality disorder) and amnesia regarding her divine parentage in the Pleroma.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the theme repeats:Jaden Smith, as JC's child, represents humanity as a whole (this is part of the movie's overt symbolism)--he's kind of an annoying little brat, actually, but she has committed herself to caring for him.
And in Hulk, Nick Nolte is the Demiurge, and he's also the Devil. He's Bruce Banner's father. Bruce as the Adamic Golem is an abomination; half-man and half-Beast. (Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .)
If we return back to Mulholland Falls, it's motherfucking Nick Nolte investigating the death of motherfucking Black Dahlia-alike Jennifer Connelly from gamma fucking radiation. Fuck!
JC's transcendent Father in the Pleroma (being the executor of Cosmic Law) thinks Bruce is damned forever, but she thinks he can be helped; i.e. that the Demiurge's creation of evolving humanity can be corrected. This gets to the contradiction of whether the Empire is destroyed or transubstantiated into something real--or whether these are not the same. In Labyrinth Sarah as the Vast Active Living Intelligence fights to reclaim her offspring-sibling Toby (the evolving cosmos as the Son) from the Demiurge. Thus the stolen "house" of House of Sand and Fog and the Child of Labyrinth become interchangeable.
(Lash)
God's Lonely Man = GLM = GoLeM
In Meyrink's interpretation, the golem is a kind of Wandering Jew, who every thirty-three years — it would seem to be no accident that this was the age of Jesus when he was crucified — appears at the window of an inaccessible room in the Prague ghetto. This golem is in part the materialized, but still very spooky, collective soul of the ghetto, and in part the double of the hero, an artist, who in the course of his struggles to redeem himself purifies the golem, who is of course his own unredeemed self. . . . At a certain stage in his creation Adam is designated as 'golem.' (Scholem)
"Once Upon a Time in America there was a beautiful, young girl . . ."
Eric Bana in Hulk and Robert De Niro in Once Upon a Time in America both represent God's Lonely Man (the GoLeM) as the Banished Adam, eternally wandering through the ages. He wishes to end his misery through a union with the King's Daughter, who is going to alchemically purge away the dross of his earthly personality in order to turn Pinocchio into a Real Boy.
21 Tell me, you who want to live under the law, do you know what the law actually says? 22 The Scriptures say that Abraham had two sons, one from his slave wife and one from his freeborn wife. 23 The son of the slave wife was born in a human attempt to bring about the fulfillment of God’s promise. But the son of the freeborn wife was born as God’s own fulfillment of his promise. 24 These two women serve as an illustration of God’s two covenants. The first woman, Hagar, represents Mount Sinai where people received the law that enslaved them. 25 And now Jerusalem is just like Mount Sinai in Arabia, because she and her children live in slavery to the law. 26 But the other woman, Sarah, represents the heavenly Jerusalem. She is the free woman, and she is our mother. (Galatians 4)
In House of Sand and Fog, Kathy is the suffering Sophia in exile; Behrani (Ben King-sley) is a Muslim who refuses to relinquish his house (= Jerusalem, the Dark City), as she (being a recovering junkie, waking from the Illusion in which she was immersed) lost it through her own negligence. Behrani's son is named Esmail ("Ishmael"), the child of Bondage, who lives under the Law of the Demiurge. The Father fights to preserve his "human, all too human" offspring.
Dan in the Middle
Thus we have the archetypal struggle between God and the Devil for the soul of humanity--if there is a part of Bruce that can be redeemed, there is also a part of him that remains damned, and the Devil claims him as his own. We are speaking of a Shadow that manifests itself across time.
In Little Children, Patrick Wilson as the "Prom King" (such is his designation in the film) must care for Jennifer Connelly's child, who quite literally "comes between" the two figures when the King wishes to consummate the hieros gamos with his wife. Though they were always destined to be together, her child as Hero-Messiah (such is the symbolic function of the jester's cap he wears) must first fulfill his intended evolutionary purpose (guided by his father) and reunite the King and Matrona.
While they are in separation (and she is "dead" in an epistemological sense), she remains an active force, concealed and yet ubiquitous, calling creation back to herself.
Contacting the sacred narrative (the Monolith Monomyth)
So the material universe is a womb in which a single but 3-aspect VALIS is replicating itself; that which the material universe will give birth to is the offspring of the original sentient entity but probably the entity and its offspring will constitute one single realized organism, not two, since it is self-generating. That (entity or offspring) which it will produce, then, is itself. We see the universe backward: the creator lies at the end or Omega point: forming (directing) creation teleologically, from its outcome backward. (Philip K. Dick, Exegesis, pg. 267)
