Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Alien Dreaming and the Widening Gyre, pt. III


So many strands of inquiry have been coming together...

Like Chris Carter, Jack Kirby intuitively linked visionary experience to alien contact. In his astro-Gnostic opus in Devil Dinosaur, contact with interventionist aliens is preceded by a hallucinatory vision of a great beast swallowing the Moon, and of a great reptile whose body is made of pure energy and giant eyes flying in the sky.

There's also this eerie foreshadowing of the Stargate sequence in 2001:A Space Odyssey, drawn in 1958, but not published until after production had begun on the film. Contact with an alien artifact on the Moon transforms human astronauts into pure energy and takes them for the trip of their lives. Note the mushroom aliens in the bottom left panel.
 

When Kirby drew the comic adaptation of 2001, he subtitled this story, "The Ultimate Trip."
 

Way back in the dark ages of 2007, I looked at my first Kirby Komik, the immortal Kamandi #30. Quite a place to start, with this symbolically-charged Stargate image. I'm sure there were other stories at the time imagining inter-dimensional portals, but no one did it quite like Jack. I suppose this is a good time to mention that Art Spiegelman called Kirby "an idiot savant obsessed with orgasm."


And, of course, that Kamandi story was entitled "UFO: The Wildest Trip Ever."


How appropriate then that The X-Files used the Kirby Kreation named "The Silver Surfer" to identify the young Gibson Praise as the missing link between humans and our ancient alien progenitors- the "young Karnak" who held the "secrets to the pyramids" and was "the key to everything in the X-Files" until Mulder had his own alien transformation into the psychedelic Osiris. 

  And it was all centered in the brain, the skull, the crown chakra. The veneration of John, Baphomet, Leto Atreides, and the "one who was lost," all pointing us to the (alien?) biocomputer residing in us all. Are these are just random scraps from pop culture, or are they breadcrumbs forming a subconscious trail to a greater revelation?

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