Interestingly the Land of Oz has been said to be the Underworld or Duat of the egyptian Mythology. Osiris was the rebirth god of the Duat, going over the spectrum of light, into the only color that is the absence of light; Black. The Night-Time or Twilight hours, the Twilight Zone is between the worlds of Night and Day, the Duat is the evening hours of dark knight where the sun goes into unconscious and imagination or Moon rule. Going over the rainbow is symbolic of going into the underworld or unconscious, symbolized by the Moon . . . (Indras Net)
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| The Yellow Brick Road |
DG = 47, the Black Dahlia, and emerges in OZ as the World-Soul crucified on the X of wood.
Plato‘s Anima Mundi was seen as composed of intersecting lines in the heavens. . . . the visible body of the universe mirrors as closely as possible the form of the invisible Cosmic Soul, whose two intersecting circles give the shape of an X. . . . Plato‘s celestial X was composed of the intersection of two visible celestial circles: the Milky Way and the zodiacal light that illuminates the path of the Planets, the two perceptible structures in the heavens that embody Plato‘s Visible God. (George Latura)
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| "And with the attainment of the Grade of Magister Templi (the attainment of Binah); having crossed the Abyss, one is said to cast one’s star into the heavens to be embraced in the body of Nuit . . ." |
Coraline: Core-Align Jones (CJ/JC) is in the starry garment of the cosmos, the Self at one with its origin in the Galactic Center. More on her later.
In contemplating an image of our galaxy, what are we actually beholding? Are we on some level beholding an image of Sophia in the form of a snow-white rose? Is Sophia, as the wisdom or plan of creation, one and the same with what we see revealed in the structure of our galaxy? Considering that Sophia - according to her own words from the Book of Proverbs - has always had a relationship with our evolution "from the beginning of creation", is it reasonable to conclude that Sophia is a being connected with the heart of our galaxy, the galactic center being the source or origin of the entire creation of our Milky Way galaxy? (Astrogeographia)The Milky Way that we see is not the true image of Eternity, but merely a moving image adapted to our limited perceptions. But the result is the same.
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| Two Suns, OZ: Christ and Antichrist (Hero Twins) |
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| The Fool's staff |
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| Animal Mother |
Once the devotee has risen to the highest height and knows himself to be encompassed in the Divine Name, which he has 'unified,' he is supposed to leap into the abyss of the 'other side,' in order, like a diver, to bring up sparks of holiness, there held in exile. "But only a perfect zaddik can accomplish this . . . for he alone is worthy to descend and make a selection from among the kelippoth, the realms of the 'other side,' even against their will. If anyone else sends his soul down among kelippoth, he may well prove unable to raise up the other fallen souls, or even to save his own, which will remain in those realms." (Gershom Scholem)
The Wasteland has engulfed the Kingdom, the nebulous darkness of the Other Side and the Qliphoth that is the unknown blasphemy against all existence.
As Glitch is in reality the Fool, he is the first archetypal figure encountered by DG on her Fool's journey, and he duplicates the original "leap of faith" of the Tzaddik into the Other Side.
Now that DG has made her first steps on the Path of the Wise, the Illusion collapses; the Endless Circle of the Wheel of Fortune has been breached and the Holographic Time Loop is at last overcome.
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| "Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence." |
When Lucifer was struck down by the Archangel Michael, the emerald jewel in his crown was cracked and knocked down to earth. John Milton describes Satan and his demons as falling for 9 days (And Hell is closed by "thrice-threefold gates"). The Emerald City lies at the heart of Oz, much like the capital of Hell, Pandemonium. In The Matrix, the "last human city" is called Zion, and is located "deep underground near the earth's core, where it's still warm." "Zion" is an anagram of "In Oz." Also, "zo" means life in Egyptian, so we might see the reverse of zo, or "oz" to mean death. Both Oz and Hell are sectioned into 4 slices, and even the Garden of Eden is broken up by it's four rivers. The lands are all surrounded by a desert (Remember in Constantine, Hell is specifically shown to be void of water), this is the land Adam and his children had to work upon expulsion from the Garden. The bottom right is a more idealized Eden from the Hollow Earth theory, a fitting allegory for Oz/Underworld/Eden or the Land of Eternal Life. (The Stygian Port)
The Tin Man himself is Cain, by which we should understand the Gnostic Cain who, like Judas, is a friend of Sophia-Zooey. The "Cane" is also the Magician's wand.
Cain was the child of Eve and the Serpent, and not of Eve and Adam; and therefore when he had slain his brother, who was the first murderer, having sacrificed living things to his demon, had Cain the mark upon his brow, which is the mark of the Beast spoken of in the Apocalypse, and is the sign of Initiation. (The Book of Thoth)
If we read the Bible narrative forwards (right to left, as the Hebrews), focusing on the black marks of the letters, then it is the story of the Fall; if we read it backwards (left to right), focusing on the white space around the letters, then we are able to retrace our steps and attain redemption.
Qaheen - Cain, the archetypical god of Self awareness. Qaheen, upon discovering Self or Soul or Spirit as well as his connection & import to the higher planes, slew his lesser self or animal-soul represented biblically by Hevel (Abel). ("Carlo Suares: Revived Qabala: Lexicon: Qahaeen/Hevel")
Cain has comprehended the Other Side, and is thus forced to relive the death of his wife over and over, until he is at last freed by the intercession of DG. But he will bear the Mark of Initiation that is the loss of innocence that comes with eating from the Tree of Knowledge.
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| On the Cliff |
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| Taking the Fool's leap |
Helena's consort in MirrorMask is named "Valentine," by which we should perhaps understand the Gnostic sage Valentinus, inasmuch as "Helena" was said to be the consort of the arch-heretic Simon Magus.
The Cowardly Lion is "Raw," by which we must understand Ra, the Solar Force of the Gods; but he is subservient to the lunar force of DG. The Mystery of the Woman and the Beast, or Dorothy and Toto, or Wendy and Pan.
DG begins to remember that the OZ is her own artistic creation, drawn in archetypal (that is, Aeonic) form within the Pleroma before she descended into it.
Valentinus, according to Clemens Alexandrinus (Valentini homil. ap. Clem. Strom. iv. 13, 92), spoke of the Sophia as an artist (Zographos) making this visible lower world a picture of the glorious Archetype, but the hearer or reader would as readily understand the heavenly wisdom of the Book of Proverbs to be meant by this Sophia, as the 12th and fallen Aeon. Under her (according to Valentinus) stand the world-creative angels, whose head is the Demiurge. Her formation (plasma) is Adam created in the name of the Anthropos proon. ("Aeon")
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| Ink stains the Page |
When we first see our heroine Helena, she is entranced by her own left and right feet: The light and dark socks are the two pillars of the play of the Shekinah.
AL and YaM represent the two ‘sides’ of the creative equation. The expansive side is the right and the contractive side is the left. The meaning of the sides is a key to some of the most complex Biblical symbolism. However the most important aspect is the center between them. In the name Elohim this is presented as the letter heh. The letter heh symbolizes the Shechinah directly. It rests between right and left, expressing the heart (lev = 32) of creativity. The heh is the central presence by which expansion and contraction manifest. The attributes of right and left merely serve the center to arise as an ever-changing field of phenomena. (David Chaim Smith, The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis)
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| Frozen time block theory |
When DG was still asleep, her "parents" told her stories of her life in OZ; these were to prepare her for the adventure she would one day undertake. "The soul needs an outer drama that can help awaken & pull into conscious awareness the inner myth & seeded story it carries within." By walking the Path of the Yellow Brick Road, she will come to understand that this is No Myth.
OZ is the home to Milltown, by which we should understand the Eternal Wheel of Suffering by which the Universal Substance is ground down into matter; its residents are cyborgs, and counts among its numbers DG's own foster-parents. They are but of the dust of the earth, and thus do not represent DG's true spiritual nature as a fallen Princess, for which reason Christ the Hierophant says in the Pistis Sophia:
"For this cause therefore, have I said unto you aforetime: 'He who doth not abandon father and mother and come and follow after me, is not worthy of me.' I have, therefore, said at that time: Ye are to abandon your parents the rulers, that I may make you sons of the First Mystery for ever."
Richard Dreyfuss the Hierophant gives the sign of esotericism. All the ladies are hooked on his magic act, which is the Mystery of the Manifested Universe. In the tetragrammaton YHVH, the first Heh (Binah) gives birth to Vav (= the Hierophant), the Aion as the Demiurge, the first Son of his Mother, the Elder Horus who is blind and kills blindly. Cosmos is the Son of God as Great External King.
The Lord and Master of all things (whom ’tis our custom to call God), when He had made the second God, the Visible and Sensible,—I call Him sensible, not that He hath sensation in Himself (for as to this, whether or no He hath Himself sensation, we will some other time enquire), but that He is object of senses and of mind,—when, then, He’d made Him First, and One and Only, He seemed to Him most fair, and filled quite full of all things good. At Him he marvelled, and loved Him altogether as His Son. (Hermes Trismegistus)
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| The Black Dahlia? |
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| Mom? |
Though the Hierophant says many wise things, things that will serve DG on her Quest, they are not the end of the Path. The letter killeth, and the spirit giveth life.
In our youth we are presented with a Book and told that these are the Words of God, which, when read, are but the ravings of a drunken madman and the petty bickerings of sectarians; all these things are so many pages of the TORA that must be burnt on the altar. Thus the first answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx always entails the rejection of the doctrines of the Outer Church, so that the Inner Church may be attained.
It is, again, the Sign of the Left-Hand Path that gives DG entrance into the Heart of the Mystery of Self; for is not the heart on the left side?
Helena has no mask, as she is the only thing that is real. She is the Dreaming Mind, confronting her own dreaming Mother, the Queen, by whose rescue she will effect her own salvation.
Like the sleeping princess in the enchanted castle the spark of the self-consciousness of God in man sleeps within the human soul until it is awakened by the power of divine love becoming active within his own heart. Then will the soul, the life, of man recognize its own divine nature and immortality, for immortality will recognize itself in the soul. There is no outside power of any kind that can save man, if that power does not become manifested in him. It is therefore not to any outside God or gods, but to the light in ourselves that we must look for redemption from darkness. This light of divine wisdom is neither the visible light in nature, nor the deceptive light of the arguing intellect, but the spiritual light of divine wisdom becoming manifest in the soul produces the interior awakening from an illusive existence into real life in divine truth. (Franz Hartmann)
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| B'reshit |
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| "Look into it . . ." |
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| (Freke & Gandy, Jesus and the Lost Goddess) |
Kabbalistic theory of creation: from the still point of Kether a universe is created. The MirrorMask is the "charm" which allows her creation to manifest, as there would be nothing to perceive if not for a Subject-Object divide.
The triad KaChaB (keter, chochmah, binah) can be understood in the manner of a circle. A circle is constructed through the interaction of three parts: center point, radial line and periphery. These correspond to keter, chochmah, and binah respectively. The center point represents the essential potency that only assumes a fixed position relative to a set of boundaries. It extends itself as a line which can stop at an infinite range of secondary points. It can manifest an entire world in which infinite internal relationships can appear. This is made possible by envelopment, which is the consequence of the line rotating in a 360-degree arc around its center point. This circumscribes both line and center within a circular periphery.
When the line stops, it assumes measured length. Then it is taken for a segment and its radiant nature becomes obscured, and it appears ‘closed’. Therefore a distinction can be made between the line’s true nature and the appearance of its relative function. The same is true of the circle’s periphery, which is the total ‘self-envelopment’ of the line. The relative appearance of the periphery suggests a boundary, but its nature is as open as the line is. It manifests anywhere radiance arises, and represents the contextual expanse of the line’s infinite capacity for ‘play’.
From the highest view, the circle represents open space contextualizing whatever luminosity asserts. If this is honored, the point represents the heart of creativity, the line is its radiant nature and the periphery is all encompassing space. All three are of equal value and are a complete unity. However if only measurement is honored then the point represents logistical position, the line is a measuring tool, and the periphery is a mere boundary. All three are then fixated upon as ‘objects’ when a view based on measurement freezes their open creative nature. This equates measurement with fixation. It is analogous to conceptuality stopping the mind with the assumption that something ‘exists’. This obscures the open apparitional possibility of space and its light. This happens wherever the mind fixates on phenomena. The circle becomes a symbol of limitation if its nature is obscured and forgotten. When this occurs only a superficial ‘shell’ (klipah) remains. However, if all three aspects express open dynamic creativity, the circle is a symbol of wholeness and freedom. To this view, apparitional enclosures come and go, but the Divine nature that makes them possible is honored. (Smith)
Above is pure boundless creativity, and below continually adapting phenomena are manifested. Each depends on the other ‘like a flame and a burning coal’. There can be no creativity without the display of phenomena. How could it be called creative without it? There cannot be phenomena without creativity. On what basis would it arise? Therefore neither exists independently each depends on the other for its purpose and distinctiveness. They are a creative unity, and are only separated in artificial conceptual terms. (Smith)
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| Tohu and bohu |
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| (Freke & Gandy) |
MirrorMask has presented us with a comprehensive Gnostic mythos of the creation of the universe. Look upon your God, you infidels, and despair. There is little that can be said to explain it, as it has explained itself; but fortunately, Tin Man will explain it again, in slightly different terms.
In her Heroine's Journey, DG must descend into the archetypal Cave at the heart of the earth to uncover her darkest memories; and for DG, as she is consubstantial with the primordial creatrix herself, this takes special significance. She and her sister, like the archetypal Sophia, will be lured into the Darkness by a false light; a light that, in truth, comes only from herself.
In sacred geometry, chochmah is represented by an endless line that radiates the primordial point of keter anywhere and everywhere. . . . The translation of chochmah is wisdom. This is the wisdom of pure cognizance, the mind’s unborn nature. This cognizant lucency is the raw knowingness that makes all of the mind’s phenomena possible. From a relative point of view, phenomena are divided between internal and external manifestations. These and all divisions are arbitrary from the perspective of wisdom. Chochmah’s illumination is so far beyond subject-object fixated cognition that it is referred to as ‘darkness’ in mystical literature. This is because its light cannot be reduced to substantial or tangible terms. It does not arise from somewhere to shine to somewhere else. It is illumination beyond any measurable origin or destination. (Smith)
The light of Chochmah (which is the light of Ain Soph, or Sophia's Eye, in extension) radiates from the center, illuminating the bounded circumference (the Outer Zone) that becomes the womb of Binah. We are told by the Kabbalists that the world was created by 32 paths of Wisdom (Chochmah), or the 32 paths of Sophia as she gazes into the kaleidoscopic "sapphirine reflections" of herself. Binah is the lunar mirror of the Cosmos in which Sophia's Eye gazes before she is broken into pieces (Snow White Light and the seven prismatic dwarves of the seven lower sephirah) by the lightning flash. Jupiter-Chesed is the highest emanation, but it is still below the Abyss.
And though Love is in Chesed and the symbol of Venus encloses all of the sephirot, Understanding (Binah) is found only above the Abyss, when the Universal Sorrow is comprehended.
Written in the Pleromatic Archetypes (i.e., Aeons) of what is to become the manifested creation (Malkuth) is the pattern of the universe, in which Light first succumbs to, and then vanquishes, the unformed Chaos to produce an Omega Point of greater complexity. A Manichaean cosmo-conception. "The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete."
And what the light of Chochmah illuminates is the Mask of the Illusion as Spirit descends into identification with Form.
"The Sophia, from which emanated the last sefirah, named 'earth' [which, as we know, is the lower Sophia] is in everything." This brightness . . . the primordial light of creation, which was later hidden and whence the Shekhinah or the lower Sophia emanated, could also have been, originally, the higher Sophia. . . . The Shekhinah below "is the light emanated from the first light, which is the hokhmah." . . . It is difficult to decide whether this duplication of the Shekhinah should be understood as a fission of the feminine into mother and daughter or rather as analogous to the double Sophia. (Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah)
This is predicated, as with the Jacintha Saldanha death, upon a sort of deception; Sophia is deceived by a false light--the reflection of the light of the unknowable Bythos--and descends into Chaos, as she wishes to create a manifestation of this archetypal world glimpsed in the Pleroma. This selection from Gilles Quispel is of the utmost importance for divining the paradoxical nature of reality:
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| (Gilles Quispel, "Gnosis and Psychology") |
This should be compared with the recent unveiling of Kate Middleton's image, as it is manifestly the same event. Mona Lisa is Sophia's image; the laser is Chochmah, the Moon is Binah-Malkuth.
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| Creating DG's eidolon (Adam formed by Sophia) |
They taught that the world-soul and Wisdom (Sophia) had inclined towards the lower regions of the world, though she has not come down, but has only illuminated, so that an image (eidolon) was made in the matter. From that image, they say, comes another image, which is the Demiurge who removed himself from his mother and made a world which consists of images only; they say this in order to blame the Demiurge, who made this picture (2.9). (Plotinus, paraphrased by Gilles Quispel)To reiterate: Sophia (Chochmah = Wisdom) projects her reflected image into the Mirror of Binah (the circumference of the circle). The Kenoma is Malkuth, after Binah is hypostatized into World. The dual Sophia paradox.
The formative motion of the heavens directly extends the pure undivided space of binah . . . Therefore all the right and left sefirot of the heavens are bound to the upper heh, even though their reflections are grasped at within a seemingly separate lower heh. But the endless hall of mirrors that is attributed to malkut is not separate from binah. Malkut and the heavenly energies that form it both project the Shechinah equally. The creative potency of the supernal water echoes throughout space, and the sum of its echoes are apprehended as malkut. (Smith)
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| The Mask of the Demiurge (IBM Eye Beams) |
It is, in fact, the mask of separation that is encountered by Sophia as she begins to reflect upon herself. As Tin Man would have it, Sophia-Achamoth well and truly does project herself into the Darkness of the Other Side, and herein is the cosmic catastrophe, as has been said. Manti Te'o might disagree.
There is, as Jung might say, an unintegrated Shadow (the eternal Other) that exists latent in the Godhead, represented by the hag in the cave.
. . . and herein is the Mystery of Sophia's copulation with Darkness at the foundation of the world. The Shekinah is defiled by the influences of the Other Side--the Qlipoth.
The Great Goddess EVE, being tempted by the fruits of the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE whose branches tend upwards to the seven lower Sephiroth, but also downward to the Kingdom of Shells, reached down to them and the two pillars were left unsupported.
Then the Sephirotic Tree was shattered. She fell and with her fell the Great ADAM. And the Great Red Dragon arose with his seven heads and ten horns, and EDEN was desolated—and the folds of the Dragon enclosed MALKUTH and linked it to the Kingdom of the Shells.
And the heads of the Dragon rose into the seven lower Sephiroth, even up to DAATH at the feet of Aima Elohim. (Golden Dawn ritual)
Eve's Original Sin, then, is in manifesting the Division of the Tree; between inner and outer, and upper and lower. She falls, and the Tree falls to pieces.
And in Coraline, our heroine must, in order to rescue her parents, once again imitate the original creative act by breaking her reflected self into pieces.
The myth starts with Sophia as a virgin living alone with her Father. This represents the pristine psyche united with Consciousness, before the process of physical incarnation. Then Sophia runs away from home and undergoes many misfortunes, symbolizing the psyche's birth as a body in the world and the suffering inherent in the bodily state. Unaware of her true nature, she is taken advantage of. She looks for love in all the wrong places, becoming a whore and exchanging love for money. Although she longs for her true lover, she lives with the false bridegroom, representing the ego, and is too frightened to leave. Finally she is abandoned like a lonely widow, left with only her feeble children, representing her bad egotistical thoughts. As it says in The Naassene Psalm, 'Hemmed in by evil, she knows no way out. Misled, she has entered a labyrinth.' (Freke & Gandy)
And in MirrorMask, Helena has a doppelgaenger, who again inhabits the Mystery of Sophia-Achamoth: she has run away from the Pleroma and created a Universe for herself. The Initiation, again, is one of self-knowledge; knowledge of her own origins and fall--"who we were, what we have become, where we were, whither we have sunk, whither we hasten, whence we are redeemed, what is birth and what rebirth."
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| Not-I |
The heh’s horizontal is a ‘window’ through which phenomena are seen. The letter heh represents vision itself. Every Hebrew letter has a kabbalistic symbol to which it corresponds, and the attribution for the heh is a window. This window does not look ‘into’ or ‘out from’ anything, it is cognizant space itself, the essence of the Shechinah. Remembering this will nullify belief in divisive subjects and objects. It reminds us of the interdependent creativity beyond beginnings and endings. . . . When malkut’s apparitional space is held as equal to the basic space of binah, then the ‘son’ inherits his parents’ kingdom. This opens the visionary scope of the sefirot, and allows each act of cognition to display its inherent purity. (Smith)
Herein is the essential division that occurs between Self and Other, or Subject and Object. Nuit, as the goddess of continuous space, is the "Not I" in distinction from Hadit, the "I" as conscious observer . . . but are these not all merely the one self perceiving herself? Are not the Two Sophias really One?
It may seem as it one's internal world is swallowing up one's external world. Rather, one is beginning to nurture their union on the plane of the Ruach. Note that the Rainbow represents Nuit and is even in the shape that she is posited in the Stele of Revealing. Nuit is ‘Not-I’ or the outer world. And one's inner zeal needs to manifest there, as the outer world must be taken internally, producing the chaos, as is the nature of the outer world. This period may be marked by feelings of losing control over one's self and one's life. It may even manifest with a loss of control that could find one as if tossed to the wind. ("The Veil of Qesheth")
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| Binah |
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| Malkuth |
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| (Or vice versa?) |
. . . but these two are merely all the dreams of the original creatrix as she re-emerges from the cloud of unknowing into conscious expression.
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| Knowledge and Conversation |
In her youth the dreaming Psyche perceives her Will as distinct from herself, as the figure of the masculine Holy Guardian Angel (the Christ of the Outer Church) who will become her Fairy Prince and take her away to a castle in the sky. Upon attaining to Tiphareth, which is the function of going "over the rainbow" by piercing the first veil of Qesheth, her Sovereign Will is reunited with herself and she takes up the Cross of Christ. The function of the Will of the Adept is to seek and penetrate the Mystery of the universe, and thus DG's father is named "Seeker." It is for this reason, also, that Sophia's syzygy is named Theletos, or "Will."
The hot air (pneuma) balloon is, according to some, a glyph of the Oversoul of the individual, and this appears to be the sense in which it is used in Tin Man, if we take her Father as indeed being her unintegrated masculine syzygy or "Higher Self."
When each traveler meets with the Wizard, he appears each time as someone or something different. To Dorothy, the Wizard is a giant head; the Scarecrow sees a ball of fire; the Tin Woodman sees a beautiful woman; the Cowardly Lion sees a ravenous beast. ("The Wonderful Wizard of Oz")However, we must remember the important fact that in the original Wizard of Oz, the Wizard functions in the same role as the externalized Will, who must of necessity disappear (Jesus' ascent into heaven) when this Will is no longer seen by Dorothy (that is, Mary Magdalene) as external to herself.
Now all these heresies have their own peculiar Jesus; but he is seen differently according as the place is different towards which, he says, each soul is borne and hastens. (Now each soul) supposes that (the Jesus seen from its particular place) is alone that (Jesus) who is its own peculiar kinsman and fellow-citizen. And on first beholding (this Jesus, that soul) recognises Him as its own peculiar brother, but the rest as bastards. (Hippolytus)
Having attained Tiphareth, DG now lets her heart guide her; the Compass is Compassion.
"Dorothy" is best translated as the Door of Theos, or "Gate of God," and it is this function that she serves for DG, who is to carry on her legacy.
Since the beginning of time, Dorothy has waited; waited for someone to heed the eternal Call and return to her.
The Stone of the Philosophers (the emerald jewel of Lucifer's crown) is hers . . .
. . . But only for a moment. The Dark Sister wishes the Stone for herself, as it will ensure the perpetuity of Time and the Empire.
For Helena, the result is the same. And as we have already established that Valentine is Judas, we should not be surprised to find him accomplish the Mystery of the Betrayal into the hands of the Dark Mother (she wants Helena herself, as the Stone is consubstantial with she who bears it). And just as Dorothy's silver slippers were transformed into ruby on the silver screen, Judas' pieces of silver become jewels.
DG thus undergoes the full force of the Crucifixion and is locked away within the sepulcher of death and darkness.
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| Adam formed by Sophia after the archetype of the Anthropos: Animating the golem |
Thus, as DG has now become fully at one with the Mystery of Christ, it is she who is buried within the tomb and resurrected, thereby nullifying the Outer Mystery in all its patriarchal falsehood--in so doing, paradoxically, confirming its eternal Inner Truth.
This is not the beneficent Moon of the High Priestess, but the diabolical Moon of sorcery and abomination, which sets itself in front of the Sun and promises only perpetual darkness.
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| Helena's reflected image |
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| Sand gets in your eyes |
The Mystery of the Cross entails full comprehension of Darkness, and thus Helena entirely succumbs, for a time, to the Other Side, and the shadowy Other Mother--the dark, sterile AMA of Binah--claims her as her own.
For a fuller explanation of this, we should turn to Neil Gaiman's other film, Coraline. Here the "underworld" to which she travels is our world, even as it also functions as the unconscious (the paradox of the two forms of Hades-Oz). The Other Mother is World as Maya and occludes Coraline by appeasing her vanity; the Garden, like that of the Gnostic Demiurge, is illusory and deceptive.
All nations of antiquity show in their literature traces of a legend in which the soul makes a journey through a dark underworld. The vagueness of its location, however, has failed to give any scholar an illuminating suggestion as to its totally figurative and unreal character. Nobody has ever seriously presumed to locate this dreary region, in spite of the fact that it was childishly regarded as an actual place. It was hazily associated with the grave or assumed to lie in some dim region into which the soul passed after death, somehow, somewhere "under," but under what, it was not apparently ever determined. The cause of bafflement was the ineradicable assumption that its "underness" was to be oriented in relation to the earth! No one has caught the idea that its location was under the heavens, and hence that it was our own earth itself! (Alvin Boyd Kuhn)
If she were to stay in this world, she would lose her eyes and become permanently occluded; that is, blind to the spiritual truth. The Other Mother lures her into her world (this world) by giving her a doll--that is, an eidolon to identify with. The creatures in her makeshift world are made of sand; i.e., matter. Coraline has to find the pearl (as in the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl) that functions as the eyes of a missing child. Core Align frees the souls trapped in Hades and is hailed as the "Savior." Psychotic phenomena.
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| The Hag |
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| The Daughter |
DG in Tin Man, then, is the Aeonic "Sophia above" not spatially, but temporally, as she represents the archetypal mystery of Self that exists only in potentia; the grand synthesis that is the embodiment of the World Dancer of the Tarot. Her journey, then, has been one of awakening to herself, and a casting away of those things which were contrary to her nature--that is, the Qliphotic influences of the Other Side.
In the Christian myth cycle Sophia is the last archetype of the pleroma and Achamoth inhabits the ogdaad at the edge of the cave of the kenoma. The two aspects of the Goddess exist either side of the Cross of Light. When the Christ aeon's mission is complete and all the lost seeds of spiritual essence are retrieved, the two aspects of the Goddess will be made one. . . . "The One Tower, motionless and unborn, appears as a reflection in the moving waters below. When the image is perfected it will become like the blessed infinite stillness above." (Freke & Gandy)The Dahlia is slain in 1947, meaning that the End actually precedes the Beginning; or, rather, the Omega Point is already conceived in the Mind as it initially gazes into the Dark Reflection. Sophia as a glyph of wholeness is an archetype (the Galactic Center) emerging into manifestation, thereby working backwards in time (Pleroma + Kenoma). This is one of Philip K. Dick's revelations; time is not as it appears to be.
The Two waters having become One, the Daughter and Mother, Kenoma and Pleroma, Malkuth and Binah, Achamoth and Sophia, the Sleeper awakens.