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| HEBREW WORDS. |
MASKS OF GOD / VEILS OF ISIS.
V for Vendetta is saturated with the occult belief of Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the Old Testament backwards. Gnosticism is based on the Gnostic gospels (which is what Dan Brown's DaVinci Code is taken from). Gnosticism teaches that there are many gods. The queen of heaven's name was Sophia. Sophia gives birth to a terrible unwanted child, Yahweh (the God of the Bible). Yahweh is aborted into the universe where he grows up thinking he is the only god. He creates his own universe and ultimately Earth where Adam and Eve are kept as prisoners in Eden. He rules as a tyrannical, conservative god where all are united through faith in Him. Sophia ... realizing the error of her ways and sympathizing with the humans, comes to the garden disguised as a snake and gives Eve knowledge (or "gnosis" in Greek) by having her take of the forbidden fruit, and sets her free, enlightening her to the world that is. Yahweh learns of this and casts out Adam and Even from the garden.
Let's look at V for Vendetta. We have Evey whom V calls "Eve". She lives in a time where the government is run by a tyrannical, conservative man named Adam. He believes everyone should be united through faith in God "Strength through unity. Unity through faith." V rescues Eve from this tyrannical god figure by freeing her. Before freeing her, she must first take of the forbidden fruit to gain knowledge. ("Gnosticism and V for Vendetta")
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| LIFE IMITATES ART. |
Qi is frequently translated as “life force” or the energy that flows through all things in the universe. It’s said to be created by the dynamic tension between Yin and Yang. Gong means “accomplishment” or “skill” that is cultivated through practice. So, together, Qigong means “cultivating life force energy.” And in case you hadn’t noticed, the name Qui-Gon looks awfully similar to Qigong ... when Anakin restores balance to the Force he is in a sense reaching a kind of dynamic equilibrium between the light and dark sides and the interplay of each within the other. As a result, a third, completely unanticipated possibility arises: use Qui-Gon’s technique to become one with the greater Cosmic Force and go beyond the never-ending conflict between the two forces. (Star Wars Ring Theory)
Batman and the Joker as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker will continue fighting each other in the Empire State down through history, unless a radical break is made -- Ra's and Dahlia knew the whole edifice had to be destroyed.
The following excerpts from a series of online forum posts should be read in full, as they drive to the heart of the matter. As the deleted scenes show, the Empire is a Solid State in which private property is abolished, but this State is only the form that arises before the final inauguration of the Kingdom of God on earth, built upon the infrastructure that the Empire has put in place:
Lucas knows that the medium is the message, and has positioned Lucasfilm as the Empire, in a battle against the rebel pirates that distribute unaltered bootlegs of the original films. The highest level of Star Wars fans reject the expanded universe wholesale, don't buy merchandise, and in fact must actively attack Lucasfilm - and now Disney. What are commonly held as the main tenets of Star Wars fandom are actually evidence that the point has been lost. This is why Lucas produced the prequels as satirical tales of stupid, ineffectual liberals playing at being the heroes in a videogame-universe before being crushed by the machine they helped create.…
The original Star Wars was obviously a hermetically-sealed work, with highly symbolic characters and settings (e.g.: "The Desert", "The Wizard", etc.). The opening text announced outright that it was a myth. Then something went very wrong, and this was forgotten.
The shift from symbolism to simulation is also evident in how Ben Kenobi's Wizard robes and magic sword became the mass-produced uniform of the entire Jedi order. Imagine two hundred Merlins all wielding Excalibur. Yes, it's satire.
… the different versions of the original trilogy can be treated as alternate timelines ... the former choice leads straight back to Episode 1; Luke simply restores the corrupt Republic, and nothing is accomplished. In the Special Edition sextology, there is no end - only endless revisions.
… the inclusion of the Noo signals an alternate timeline. Vader either wails Nooo or does not, depending on which version of the film you watch. This is intimately tied to whether the rebellion succeeds or not - whether we loop, endlessly, back to the future.
In Revenge of the Sith, the Noooo obviously stands for Vader's failure - the moment he realized that he preserved his wife's body but crushed her soul in the process. Vader's Nooooo in the Special Edition is an obvious callback to that moment. In other words, he's simply trying to restore Padme....
Vader's act must be a mad suicide from which the light side, defined as the holy spirit, can finally emerge.…
Return Of The Jedi ends in Luke's implicit failure, as the inherent corruption of the Republic causes the Sith to re-emerge. Fans may recall that 'Return' was originally titled 'Revenge of the Jedi'. Although that title was softened, the idea of cyclical vengeance is still present: each trilogy ends with one party achieving a temporary revenge.
Abrams is consequently in the unenviable position of making a film that's more Star Wars than Star Wars itself. Episode 7 must break the cycle by surpassing Luke, being even more Light. Anything less would be, essentially, a remake - totally superfluous.…
Put more simply, Luke must understand Vader as the good guy and pick up where he left off - ruthlessly crushing the false Jedi, and those who'd seek to restore the Republic….
If you've seen The Dark Knight Rises, Chris Nolan totally restages the end of Return of the Jedi with Batman as Luke, Bane as Vader ...
The conventional reading of Star Wars is that Darth Vader killed Anakin when he became 'more machine than man'. So, when he takes off his mask, he becomes 'human again': Anakin comes back to life and good humanity triumphs over the evil machines. This is accurate except for one thing: we've all seen Anakin, in the Prequels, and he's a piece of shit! Darth Vader is an angelic/demonic avatar of Truth and Justice, so devoted to Justice that he would destroy even himself. Anakin, on the other hand, is a genocidal fascist and whiny mommy's boy - a genocidal fascist because he's a momma's boy. When he has to choose between the leprous Sandpeople and his mom, he chooses poorly - with obvious results.
So too with Bane: Bane wears the mask of Truth and Justice. When the mask is removed, we get Anakin again: a 'nice guy' virgin and fascist loser. He's pathetic, and gets swept aside. What must be understood in both films is that Vader and Bane's human failings in no way diminish the Truth that they stood for. The only hope for the Galaxy, and for Gotham, is if their successors carry on where these radically Evil figures left off ….
No, the prequels can only be understood as the gravest betrayal of the people by their leaders. And which character has the will to crush any and all that betray the force?
Darth Vader - and I'm not talking Anakin here - Darth Vader is so ruthless in his commitment to his ethical ideal that he'll choke to death those on 'his side'. He'll kill the Emperor - even himself. This should not be understood as some cliche, like 'he's just so damn crazy'; Darth Vader is rightfully disgusted by the Imperial officers' human arrogance and pride, their petty motivations. "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." He's radically Evil, capital-E Evil. The imperials are just a bunch of punks.
Anakin was an Imperial, but Darth Vader is clearly beyond the Empire. His extreme devotion to the Dark Side is such that he brought it to its culmination, allowing the Light side to finally emerge. So I'm talking the same ruthless devotion - but to the Light, to the people.
This means not cleansing the galaxy of machines, but a radical appropriation of the Imperial state apparatus - putting it in the service of the proletariat.... That's the victory, if Luke does the right thing....
Return Of The Jedi implicitly equates Jabba with the Emperor and both of them to... C3PO on his wooden throne(!). Jabba is killed when Leia, his slave, strangles him with her own chain. This foreshadows Vader using his own 'chains' to kill the Emperor. Vader, in other words, is the one fighting to end slavery.
... the Jedi and the Sith are both monstrous spawn of the same Thing: the id-machine. Palpatine controls them both.... The authentic light side ... has nothing to do with the Jedi Order....
Vader is this Christ figure, the incarnation of the Force. He is the Force. In a radicalized Christianity, the crucifixion represents the death of God by suicide, and the beginning of a terrifying existential freedom....
Tatooine (for example) represents the feeling that you have been abandoned by God. It's a vision of Earth as an infinite desert. When C3PO wanders through this infinite desert, he says "we seem to be made to suffer". This is metaphor.
The Death Star is, likewise, a vision of Earth's future. It's a planet that is fully controlled, rigidly ordered. There are no trees, etc. When it attacks other planets, it is just about literally an image of worlds in collision ... The simple image of Alderaan blowing up glibly summarizes the conflict in the prequels: the Death Star emerges from inside the hippie world, supplanting it.
With this in mind, you can hopefully see the importance of the trash-monster. Despite the sterility, shit still needs to go somewhere. So, to escape from the Death Star, the heroes need to jump in the toilet, baptize themselves in sewer-water, and emerge from the other side....
So Luke kills himself, as his mother did....
Padme's story is that of a strong woman who is deprived of her agency - who struggles, does her best, and still succumbs. But then her final act of suicide is a huge fuck-you to the entire universe. It's the first, and only, truly radical act in the prequel films - perhaps in any of the films. Padme provides the purest expression of the light side....
Like, her act actually ruptures the fabric of the plot. The medical robots are baffled, and Palpatine (our narrator, remember) doesn't understand it at all. He says Anakin killed her, and he doesn't appear to be lying. It's just incomprehensible to everyone. Padme is, consequently, the first person to actually defeat the emperor.
"This Truth-Event is simply a radical New Beginning, accompanied by the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of Another Dimension that is not 'mediated' by the domain of terrestrial finitude and corruption. ... Therein resides the message of Christianity: the positivity of Being, the Order of Cosmos regulated by its Laws, which is the domain of finitude and mortality, is not 'all there is.' (From the standpoint of Cosmos, of the totality of positive Being, we are just particular beings determined by our specific place in the global order, with the Law ultimately another name for the Order of Cosmic Justice which allocates to each of us our proper place.) Rather, there is Another Dimension, that of True Life in Love, accessible to all of us through divine grace. Christian Revelation is thus an example (the example) of how we, human beings, are not limited to the positivity of Being, since from time to time, in a contingent and unpredictable way, a Truth-Event can occur which opens up the possibility of our participation in Another Life by means of a persistent fidelity to that Event." -Zizek
... Luke attempted suicide in Empire Strikes Back. And if you ask why he attempted suicide, you're not going to get a clear answer. The actual answer is that Obiwan abandoned him, and Luke was left totally alone. And, in his solitude, Luke realizes Darth Vader is absolutely right - not about the parentage thing (because why kill yourself over that) but the fact that Luke has been using the Dark Side all along. The rebels are bad guys. So Luke, like Padme, realizes the entire universe is corrupt, that he himself is corrupt. So he 'dies of a broken heart', or tries to....
With Amidala, The Queen is absolutely not a protagonist (she's introduced as just this talking head on a screen) - but you can make a strong case for Padme the handmaiden. Her arc in the film is to rise up and dethrone The Queen - literally telling The Queen that she's not in charge anymore. Padme takes over and becomes Queen Padme.
Lucas is deliberately using multiple actresses to portray a single character - and this includes the woman killed by the bomb at the start of Ep.2. That woman is The Queen - the same character we saw in Phantom Menace. This woman's death signals the completion of Amidala's transition from being Queen Padme to being Senator Padme.
As the above commenter hints, Vader is Metatron as the legate of the Shekinah, i.e. the dead Padme Amidala, who is the real motivating force behind his donning of the Mask of God. Luke, as the aspirant to the Pole, can only dethrone the Hierophant of the Outer Church (Emperor Palpatine), but in doing so, he must take his place and become the Great Deceiver, as Crowley said in the Cry of the 6th Aethyr. Therefore, to divine real absolute truth beyond the two battling boys of Light and Dark as the eternally fighting Horus and Set, we must attain to the central Point of the balance, a Point which is entirely unseen in the Original Trilogy, although hinted within the unrealized potential of Leia. This hidden potential as the true Center of the balanced opposites, and the only hope of their transcendent reconciliation, is the function of Rey in The Force Awakens. Please imagine that the woman in the center 'where the dance is' holds not two wands, but two lightsabers, red and green:
The image at the top of this post indicates the nature of Padme as the High Priestess of the Twin Towers who is the real impetus for Anakin as Dubya to fight for his woman in the desert; a woman he has already lost.
The Prequels, as bad as they are, are very tied to what was going on at the time in the Bush era. The 9/11 prophecies in Attack of the Clones make Back to the Future look like child's play: The film opens with a terror attack in the middle of a city upon the Queen-Goddess, followed by the transformation of the Republic into an Empire that goes off to fight a nebulous and unwinnable video game war orchestrated by shadowy Forces.
Anakin is George W. Bush and he just wants to kill Sand People, because of what they did to his mother Babalon. (Iraq = Babylon; all wars are fought by men over women, whether consciously or otherwise -- see Helen of Troy!) Palpatine's whole facial disfigurement even parallels the real-life story in Ukraine that happened at the same time (Yushchenko having allied himself with the Western Empire).
Anakin is George W. Bush and he just wants to kill Sand People, because of what they did to his mother Babalon. (Iraq = Babylon; all wars are fought by men over women, whether consciously or otherwise -- see Helen of Troy!) Palpatine's whole facial disfigurement even parallels the real-life story in Ukraine that happened at the same time (Yushchenko having allied himself with the Western Empire).
Yoda as the little Green Man whips out his little green lightsaber and goes to town on Palpatine, but even his fructifying energies only succeed in driving Spirit further into matter. I.e., Yoda is the Hebrew Yod and Palpatine as Pontifex Maximus of the Outer Church merely drives the Kabbalistic Lightning Flash into Malkuth.
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| I FELL. |
The Hanged Man ... is also entitled the Drowned Giant, and in this likeness may be said to refer to the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalists—the ideal man who reflects the Image of God, even as the face was but now reflected in the bowl of water.... In the act of Creation, it may be said that the Supreme sacrificed Himself [sic] by imposing certain limits; thereby He [sic] was thenceforward bound in manifestation, even as the Word conformed to the limitations of Humanity in His Incarnation. Therefore, must we also offer ourselves as a living sacrifice; holy, acceptable unto God. (Felkin, The Secret Inner Order Rituals of the Golden Dawn)
Luke in the Hanged Man pose beneath Cloud City calls for Obi-Wan and gets nothing; only Leia can hear him. Anakin has just broken his heart and strangled him, in much the same was as he did to Padme. Anakin quite literally chokes Padme to death. Darth Vader quite figuratively turns Luke into the Hanged Man. His initiatory suffering as the Gnostic Christ is the universal suffering of his Mother, repeated:
Padme is playing at being a goddess, and thus her fall mirrors that of a goddess, as it must. A god who, from her high estate as an impersonal idol-queen, inclines downward into the depths of Chaos in the Dark Side of the Kenoma, just as she does in Black Swan; an act of individual expression by which she attains perfection. Christ does not die on the cross as the image of God as a Man sacrificing himself; he dies to atone for the Goddess' original error in creating the Universe, and creating him as a half-formed manchild under the rule of beggarly elements. In the Gnostic worldview, his despondency and abandonment on the Cross is an echo of Sophia's own despondency when she is cast out of the Pleroma; the Gnostic community of the elect participate and are united in her suffering.
None of this is explicit in the films, but hinted in the repeated hanging motifs around Padme; she is figuratively choked by her clothing before being literally choked by Anakin; i.e. she is the Hanged Man who dies to give life to the world, or at least this is the myth she plays out. She is all of Creation in travail, waiting for the birth of the Sons of God, but instead has only Ialdabaoth as Christ's material shadow. "So Luke kills himself, as his mother did."
The Gnostic Christ is radically anticosmic; God is utterly opposed to the closed rule of Heimarmene in the world as the endless cycles of time. Mercy cannot fight Severity directly and thus is useless; in the Prequels, all of the old heroes are impotent as they fight in a make-believe video game world where nothing really matters. Bad movies about bad people doing pointless nothings. The Heimarmene of the Hebdomad can only be overcome by transition to the Ogdoad outside the self-contained ecosystem of the films; translation back to the Mother.
Somewhere between the original ROTJ and the SE ROTJ, Lucas became the Empire; now Han no longer says "Trust me" when he hangs supernaturally by his toes over the Sarlaac pit, hinting his own growing Force sensitivity; this is reduced to a materialistic explanation.
Abrams can succeed at being "more Star Wars than Star Wars" by being truer to Campbell's vision, when the Hero of a Thousand Faces who has become "NO ONE" in the cup of the Goddess is reincarnated in Rey. Expanding from the central point of the revolving cosmos, the two brothers of the waxing and waning year as the OT and PT will continue to wage war over her in a closed loop, like the Greeks and Trojans over Helen.
None of this is explicit in the films, but hinted in the repeated hanging motifs around Padme; she is figuratively choked by her clothing before being literally choked by Anakin; i.e. she is the Hanged Man who dies to give life to the world, or at least this is the myth she plays out. She is all of Creation in travail, waiting for the birth of the Sons of God, but instead has only Ialdabaoth as Christ's material shadow. "So Luke kills himself, as his mother did."
The rise of Empire and the Sith are a necessary Nigredo in the Hegelian-alchemical dialectic of civilization ("His extreme devotion to the Dark Side is such that he brought it to its culmination, allowing the Light side to finally emerge"); Anakin the petulant manchild becomes Darth Vader as the executor of the Law on behalf of the same dead woman.
Vader is beyond Empire. Vader is the Mask of Empire itself used to destroy itself. The Republic was flawed because the Sith was still latent within it and unrecognized by those who build towers of Mercy for themselves. Revenge of the Sith and V for Vendetta are two pairs of the whole; man donning the Mask of Empire and losing the woman, and the same woman finding the man in the Mask as Guy Faux who says, 'all this is Empire, but I will burn myself in effigy and you, the Star, will be free.'
The Gnostic Christ is radically anticosmic; God is utterly opposed to the closed rule of Heimarmene in the world as the endless cycles of time. Mercy cannot fight Severity directly and thus is useless; in the Prequels, all of the old heroes are impotent as they fight in a make-believe video game world where nothing really matters. Bad movies about bad people doing pointless nothings. The Heimarmene of the Hebdomad can only be overcome by transition to the Ogdoad outside the self-contained ecosystem of the films; translation back to the Mother.
The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart. The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity. And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed—whether she will or not. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace. (Joseph Campbell, "Monomyth")Anakin views Padme as an Other to be fought for; a Body to be preserved and not a Soul. Luke views Leia as Sister and transcends the Other dichotomy; this is the Tat Tvam Asi so prominent in Campbell's writings. Leia is awakened to an impossible anamnesis of her Mother (since she is "incarnate in every woman," or in the Anima of the Jungians). Padme wills herself dead inexplicably; Leia brings Padme back to life inexplicably; both defy materialistic logic -- but this thread of the Monomyth is abruptly truncated, as if Lucas did not know how to present it. The Goddess remains veiled, and we know that "something" is missing from ROTJ.
Somewhere between the original ROTJ and the SE ROTJ, Lucas became the Empire; now Han no longer says "Trust me" when he hangs supernaturally by his toes over the Sarlaac pit, hinting his own growing Force sensitivity; this is reduced to a materialistic explanation.
There is an iconographic depiction of Horus and the Egyptian Seth in opposition known as the “Balance of the Two Lands, in which Upper and Lower Egypt have been weighed.”20 Similarly, the opposition of Jedi and Sith would seem to reflect a cosmic balance, with Anakin Skywalker heralded as the one to bring balance; after all, just as there exist only two Sith at any given time, his conversion brings as an immediate consequence the destruction of all but two of the Jedi. Yet such a quantitative “balance” ignores the very principle upon which balance depends, that is, the central position between the opposites. Unity is not a combining of dualities; Anakin is not the one to bring balance by being torn between two loyalties. The two snakes of the Hermetic caduceus are only reconciled around the central axis of Hermes’ staff.
This central principle is not absent from Lucas’ vision; in fact, the symbolism of the axis has already been identified in the designation “Jedi” inasmuch as it relates to the Djed Pillar of Osiris. As if to remove any doubt as to the relevance of this connection, a Djed Pillar is clearly depicted in the climactic duel on Mustafar in Episode III. By a curious linguistic coincidence, among the names of the Pole Star in Arabic is Jadi, and this fact should perhaps not be too quickly dismissed, given the stellar context of Star Wars and the dominance of Arabic in the names of stars…. These characteristics refer to the complementary aspects of mercy and rigor that are depicted, for example, on opposite columns of the Qabbalistic Tree…. It is also significant that Anakin’s path to become Darth Vader is placed in the context of the Sith order “66,” since this number has been identified by Guénon as signifying the “Supreme Realization” that balances all contrary pairs according to Islamic asterism.
Vader’s path leads to a reenactment of the Osiris myth that had been evoked in the earliest Star Wars film. In ancient Egypt, the figure of Osiris dominated the rituals surrounding the passing of a pharaoh, rituals that were designed to ensure some sort of immortality for the ruler. A correspondence between the events on Mustafar and the Egyptian myth is signaled not only by the Djed pillar, but also by Obi-Wan Kenobi calling Anakin his brother. Vader the Sith, however, does not murder Obi-Wan, but rather his own Jedi identity; and while his betrayal of the Jedi is fully accomplished along a river, it is a river of fire, unlike the Nile where Osiris was betrayed by Seth. Appropriately, the birth of the “redeemer” – in the balanced form of twins - follows the apparent “death” of the father. Given this Egyptian context, the “entombment” of Vader within his mechanized body recalls very strongly the science of mummification26 that sought to make the body “immortal” in the world. Lucas very carefully juxtaposes Vader’s scientific preservation with a remarkable reference to a “path of immortality” attained by the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, who had fallen in battle against a Sith in Episode I…. it may be recalled that just as the Sith are but a parody of the Jedi, so was the Nazi “order” a counterfeit which desecrated the very emblem that symbolizes the activity of the Pole, the swastika. (Mahmoud Shelton)
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| (Joseph Campbell) |
"Now the mask there is not defeated, and simply said, 'It's just myth.' Instead the mask represents the power that is shaping the society and has shaped you. And now you are a representative of that power."
