I made mention the other day of this shot from HuffPost pertaining to the "Ground Zero Mosque" debate surrounding Park51 or the Cordoba House or whatever it's being called this week.Knowing Huffpost's tendency to slip highly loaded symbolism into otherwise mundane stories, I made note of it but didn't dig deeper, seeing as how the story gives me a major headache. I know there's some weird hidden agenda hiding behind all of the controversy, I just can't figure out what the real story here is.
Park51, originally named Cordoba House, and sometimes referred to as the "Ground Zero mosque", is a planned $100 million, 13-story, glass and steel community center and mosque in New York City. The facility's design includes a 500-seat auditorium, theater, performing arts center, fitness center, swimming pool, basketball court, childcare area, bookstore, culinary school, art studio, food court, September 11th memorial, and prayer space that could accommodate 1,000–2,000 people.The whole story has an air of unreality around it and readers have pointed to the 51 number vis a vis Area 51 and 3x17. The 13-story thing is a bit strange, certainly more Masonic than Islamic. Those details nagged me but weren't much in and of themselves.
Despite the fact that the story is ubiquitous, I didn't think to look into it until a writer at The Daily Beast compared the Mosque to the Balloon Boy melodrama (a story that was closely followed here when it broke), arguing that at best the Mosque is more an idea than a reality.
With less than $9,000 raised and a chaotic PR strategy, the “ground zero mosque” is nowhere close to becoming a reality. Asra Q. Nomani on why the media frenzy is this summer’s Balloon Boy. As debate rages over the “ground zero” mosque, the media has once again whipped itself into a frenzy over a story that doesn’t really exist.
Without money, a nonprofit organizational structure, or a coherent PR strategy, the plan to build an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, dubbed Park51, remains nothing more than a pipe dream.
Then there was also this odd detail about the planned development - the site was struck by a piece of Flight 175, which seems a bit peculiar to say the least.
But the thing that really struck me was the map there, since it introduced the Stairway to Sirius into the drama. What's the Stairway to Sirius? I'm glad you asked.
The Stairway to Sirius comes from the First Degree Masonic tracing board, which pictures angelic beings descending from the "Blazing Star" of Sirius. Sometimes the stairway is a ladder, but it usually leads to a Masonic lodge, presumably where these cosmic visitors from Sirius will reveal the secrets of the Universe to the initiate.
However the Freemies themselves choose to interpret the image (and I've gotten some flak from some of them for this), that's what it shows.
The icon seemed to reappear during the 2008 Election. The logos of the two major Presidential candidates seemed to split the components of the Sirius hieroglyph and incorporated the stripes of the flag as steps.
Obama's logo also incorporated the circumpunct, or point in circle, which researcher Wayne Herschel has recently linked to the Sun of Ra, which we also looked at before the election. Whether or not the ringed sun is actually Sirius is still up in the air.
From the election forward I've been working from the assumption that the Stairway to Sirius is an important- if not definitive- symbol of this point time (all of this is in the ritual vocabulary that many other authors have documented, pertaining to the street map of Washington, DC and the rest of it).
Who exactly the symbol is important to is another question.
A joint appearance by McCain and Obama at Ground Zero on 9/11/08 got thinking again about the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan which also encodes the Stairway to Sirius, with the five faces of the cut pyramid corresponding to the pentacle and the step pyramid (designed originally as a "stairway to Heaven") corresponding to the stairway.
The Stairway played a major part in a series inspired by the Norway Spiral drama, a cycle which seemed to culminate in the revelation of the Sirius Stargate, represented by the excavation of the Gate of Isis from Alexandria Harbor on December 17 this past year.
The WFC now dominates the downtown skyline when faced from the Hudson River (which itself hosted a recent drama ripe with ritualistic parallels) and may well be the signature of Manhattan the way the World Trade Center once was.
But where the twin towers corresponded to the pillars of Solomon's Temple, the symbolism of the WFC takes us much further back, perhaps even to the Zep Tepi or "First Time" of Egyptian legend. We looked at that possibility in a major post called "Bringing It All Back Home," which summed up the symbolism thrown around during and after the election.
The palm-lined Winter Garden of the WFC also aligns directly with the so-called Millennium Hilton, a hotel explicitly based on the Monolith seen in Kubrick and Clarke's ancient astronaut/intervention manifesto 2001, A Space Odyssey. A pretty remarkable coincidence in light of the connection here to the Stairway to Sirius (as well as the fact that palms are in the Phoenix genus).
So what does this have to do with the Ground Zero Mosque?
Well, nothing except for the fact that the site for the Park51 building aligns directly due east with the pyramid of the World Financial Center, or the Stairway to Sirius...
...which you can see in this image, included in a MediaMatters gallery of the recent protests (from "Eye of the World") for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. Another nod and wink?
My question is is this controversy a distraction or yet another initiation into this ongoing symbolic narrative?
