Thursday, May 06, 2010

Inanna Montana, Revisited

"I'm not a mistake, I'm not a fake, 
It's set in my DNA"

Reader レベッカ brought this to my attention- Miley Cyrus' Lady GorGon move for her new video, "Can't Be Tamed." On the surface it's the same old Marilyn Manson rehash meant to gee up the same old outrage, but this time someone's come up with a quite a juicy (and timely) new twist.


 It all has to do with those wings young Miley's donned for the clip. What is that idiot droning on about now, you may be asking? Well, last year we riffed on an owl-print shirt Miley Cyrus wore in a publicity still, which led to all kinds of juicy semiotic dot-connecting. 

That post was "Inanna Montana," from 3/3/09. Here's a refresher:
 
Or could this (the owl shirt) be a subconscious identification of Miley with Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of music, sex and war?
This connection to the half-owl goddess Inanna was especially scintillating, given the name of Miley's alter-ego, Hannah:
Inanna's name is commonly derived from Nin-anna "Queen of Heaven"... In some traditions Inanna was said to be a granddaughter of the creator goddess Nammu or Namma. These difficulties have led some early Assyriologists to suggest that Inanna may have been originally a Proto-Euphratean goddess, possibly related to the Hurrian mother goddess Hannahannah, accepted only latterly into the Sumerian pantheon, an idea supported by her youthfulness, and that, unlike the other Sumerian divinities, she at first had no sphere of responsibilities.
See? The wings bit was further explored in an update, riffing on the Cyrus surname:

Her surname Cyrus has interesting origins as well. From behindthename.com - From Κυρος (Kyros), the Greek form of the Persian name Kûrush, which may mean "far sighted" or may be related to the Persian word khur "sun". It's also the name of Cyrus the Great, the only non-Jew to be called a messiah in the Bible.
Cyrus was commonly pictured as having wings, and there is a statue in his honor in Sydney Olympic Park, of all places. Cyrus was believed to have been crucified like Jesus and beheaded like the Baptist, and as a martyr, his tomb still stands in modern day Iran. 
And surprise of surprises, Cyrus is a hero to the Freemasons, and many lodges are named in his honor. I'm almost given to wonder if Cyrus was something a little bit more than human, given the wings and all. 
And I also wonder why most people have never heard of this crucial historical figure (I'm sure 9 out of 10 Freemasons would have no idea why Cyrus was so important either).

So we have winged Inanna, the "Lady of the Sky" and winged Cyrus, the man of the Sun etymologically linked to this seemingly-innocuous pop starlet. 

Not much to write home about until said starlet actually takes on the appearance of one of those pesky old sky gods, who seem to be popping up so often these days. Then it gets really interesting.
  

SEMIOTIC PHISHING 

 I was walking the puppy this morning and thinking about how dogs - like nearly all animal life on this planet- have these wonderful instincts that allow them to adapt to their environment, even without the benefit of other dogs to teach them. 

That got me to thinking how humans do not have those same instincts, which got me on my usual DNA-and-memory hobby horses.  That in turn got me thinking about how all of these mythic archetypes seem wired deep down inside us. 

Which then lead back to my usual obsessions about the collective consciousness as neural shareware and how these icons and symbols are roughly analogous to passwords, activating subroutines in these very complex software programs that seem to have come pre-installed in our squishy little bio-mainframes. 

My point? 

A lot of the stuff we see out there with this symbolism and the ritualism reminds me of a kind of semiotic phishing. People have figured out that all of these memes are some kind of code for a much more profound reality, though I'm not entirely sure that anyone (even those dastardly Freemies) really fully grasps what that reality entails. 

This is why so many of the people screwing around with all this stuff need to distance themselves with projection and drama (meaning they have to pretend that they're involved in some grand struggle with some invisible enemy to justify their own fascination with all of this occult business). 

 But the way things are going, weird will no longer be weird- it will be the new normal. And someone somewhere is going to stumble into cracking that password-protection, and everything is going to change. 

 And change - real change- is always a very, very messy process.