Happy New Year from the All-Seeing Eye

 

 Well, Down Under they rang in the New Year under the watchful gaze of the All-Seeing Solar Eye (BBC story here). I'll be posting updates as they come. I have a feeling I'm going to be busy today...

The New Pyramid Power

GERMANY: Two intellectuals have launched a project to build a copy of the Egyptian pyramids in the declining eastern city of Dessau as a burial site not for a lone king but for five million people. They say it would grow slowly - one concrete memorial slab at a time - but could within a couple of decades dwarf the Great Pyramid of Giza.

 

2008 in Review: The Stairway to Sirius

A year ago, any mention of any kind of extraterrestrial activity here - Sirius, UFOs, AAT - would be purely in the context of pop culture. I had no idea so many of these symbols would begin to bleed (allegedly) into the political sphere. Which, of course, is merely theater of a different kind. 

Looking for Signs at the End of the Age

"Tell the king; the fair wrought house has fallen.
No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves;
The fountains are now silent; the voice is stilled.
It is finished."- The Delphic Oracle, 393 AD

When you reach the end of an age, the myths and the symbols that once defined that age begin to turn against it. Often in horrifying and merciless ways.

(Secret) Season's Greetings

Rockefeller Plaza, seen from space. Note alignment of tree and 30 Rock obelisk.

 

"Rollover to See the Power of the Sun"

No, that's not a line from the Contendings of Horus and Set. Or even from the 11th Degree ritual. It's a tagline for a new online ad campaign for Sharp Electronics.

 

Seen From Space: Xmas Eve Earthrise

Ahhh, so now we know why the Apollo 8 story got such play on CNN this week.

"...On Christmas Eve 1968, none of the astronauts on board Apollo 8 were ready for the opportunity to witness their own Earthrise.

 

Yahooccultism: Speaking of Ferris Wheels

Just the other day we were looking at the Ferris Wheel symbolism that has been popping up in strange contexts. Now comes this story on Yahoo News: 

Trapped passengers evacuate Singapore ferris wheel

Stairway to Sirius: Twin Tombs "Discovered" in Egypt

 

The video begins with an interesting shot of the Step Pyramid of Djoser, which we looked at in relation to the Stairway to Sirius. Also interesting is that the two tombs of these two minor functionaries were lavishly decorated and named, and yet Pharaoh Khufu's "tomb" only had a bit of mispelled grafitti indentifying it as his. 

Thus Spake Zira-Thustra

 

My favorite starts at 1:30 

Still don't know what to ask Santa Odin to put under your Saturnalia evergreen? Check out this semiotic mashup with these great old ads for Planet of the Apes action figures, which were manufactured by the now-defunct Mego Toys. 

Winter Solstice Sunrise- Live from Ireland

 

Winter Solstice Sunrise

the not live version 

Did you know that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy? Timely, eh? Looks like there's a new push for science education as the Bush Era begins to fade. Or something.

 

Seen From Space: Drip, Drip, Drip

I rented Mission to Mars and Red Planet tonight (I'm watching them again so you don't have to), and sure enough, here come more "revelations" from NAZCA NASA about our future home:

What Did I Just Say?

What did I just say?

I said: "it's my belief that Obama could very well have been installed to transform America from an arms-based economy to a space-based one." 

 Well, how about this news item? 

Trailer Trash: Nic Cage is KNOWING

 

Annihilation and human extinction coming to a theatre near you! Directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow/Dark City/I, Robot) and starring good ol' Nic "Ben Star-Gates" Cage. Bonus Synchronicity plot device! 

And don't forget Roland Emmerich's 2012 starring John "Superstar" Cusack. Man, we're getting wiped out on the silver screen! 

A Very Sirius Election: Strange Shapes in the Sky

I was reading a post a while back on Spelunking thee Ideosphere when a comment pointed to the "Issues" section of Obama's campaign website. And that's where I found this: 

Credit Where Synchromystic Credit is Due

From "The Age of Horus Dawns," November 2000

A recent discussion on the Rigorous Intuition board had a few posters accusing Jake Kotze and myself of "plagiarizing" Goro Adachi of Etemenanki fame. Regrettably, Goro himself has had some unkind things to say about Jake Kotze on his site, accusing him of all sorts of nefarious acts, plagiarism the least of them.

The Age of Horus: Hancock, Part I

Little did I realize... The same day I posted the first installment of "Space/Gods," the Will Smith superhero-as-god film Hancock was released on DVD. To mark the occasion, the logic board on my new iMac crapped out just minutes after I posted. As it turns out, the gods of Synchronicity apparently wanted to get my full attention.

 

Seen From Space: The Great Expectation

The very worrying new Keanu Reeves film is going to be (Heavenly) beamed into space:

The Day The Earth Stood Still — the movie about aliens coming to Earth to wipe out mankind is going to be broadcast into space. The director of the new remake, Scott Derrickson, doesn't want to be blamed for aliens landing on Earth after they see his movie.

 

The First Christmas and Three/17

Man, the hits just keep on coming. The Telegraph reports:

Astronomers have calculated that Christmas should be in June, by charting the appearance of the 'Christmas star' which the Bible says led the three Wise Men to Jesus.

"I Want to Believe" (in the Sirius-Oannes Connection)

Note saucer-eye view

A lot of fans were disappointed that the new X-Files film didn't feature the alien colonization mythology storyline. Perhaps they simply weren't looking hard enough.

Stairway to Sirius: National Treasure

Please click to enlarge

As we saw, the Monolith Hotel brings a strange twist of Hollywood and Astronaut Theology to the Stairway to Sirius drama. However, 2001: A Space Odyssey isn't the only semiotically loaded film that has left a footprint on lower Manhattan. 

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.

Stairway to Sirius: Death and Restoration II

Anyone with a passing familiarity to esoteric symbolism is still reeling from the Atlantis Rising ceremony that was put on last week. The headline had it that the ritual could be "seen from space," and indeed it would have been incomprehensible to anyone less than two thousand feet or so in the air.

Karen Carpenter and the Show Biz Crab Bucket

What the hell is that disk 

in the background?

My god, this is fascinating. I had only seen brief bits of Karen Carpenter playing the drums, but I had no idea she was this kind of virtuoso. Coming from a pretty hardcore musical family (and being a former musician myself), I can tell you that as players the Carpenters were drop-dead pros with impeccable chops. 

"Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft"

As we sat and waited for the Malthusian remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (with Keanu Reeves as Klaatu and one-time Secret Sun siren Jennifer Connelly as Helen), I was reminded of a very strange episode in pop history, when the squarest musical combo to walk the face of the planet spent a king's ransom recording a telepathic invocation to authoritarian space messiahs. 

Now Discovery Channel does the "UFO Thing"

Sensing a pattern here? UFOs Over Earth premieres this week. I haven't had time to check it out, but I'm not holding my breath for it being anything but a bunch of ad hoc arguments, professional kooks and establishment-mouthpiece "skeptics" getting the last word.

Sirius Star: As Seen From Space (Updated)

 

 Here's an odd little twist to the Sirius Star drama- an inexplicable article in the Guardian showing the tanker as seen from a space satellite. First the Dubai ritual, now this. 

Space/Gods: Eleven to Heaven

We continue our inexorable voyage into a brave new world, where ancient myths and futuristic technology walk hand in hand. A world where the last secular pretenses of the 20th Century give way to a restoration of the oldest world order imaginable. 

"Behold, Atlantis Rising!"

I am absolutely speechless: "Dubai has thrown a spectacular light show to celebrate a new $1.5bn marine-themed resort built off the Gulf coast on an artificial island in the shape of a palm tree. Organisers claimed that the fireworks display for the $20m party could be seen from space," the BBC says.

Sirius Star: ISS Unveiled

The hits just keep on coming. Today is the 10th Anniversary of the launching of the Zarya rocket, which kicked off the International Space Station, or ISS.

I was lucky enough to be at mission control in Moscow's Star City when the Russians launched the first stage of the International Space Station (ISS). They called it Zarya, which means Dawn. 

The enterprise itself was meant to be just that - a new dawn for human space exploration. Moments after the launch, the then head of Nasa, Dan Goldin, said: "Within a few years, the brightest star ever will appear in the sky." He said it would be a sign of hope because nations who had once fought each other had now come together to use their ingenuity, not to blow up humanity, but to make a better world.- BBC

Goldin. Dawn. Gotcha.

Astronaut Theology: Let's Play a Game

I'm always looking for ways to be The Secret Sun more exciting and interactive. One of the ideas I came up with is "The Allegory Game." The point of this game is to look at a particular sequence in a film and see if in fact it's actually an allegory of something else, something not part of the external narrative. 

Seizing "The Sirius Star"

A lot of you have commented on the big story of the day- the seizing of the Sirius Star oil tanker (which is 330 metres long) by Somali pirates (don't forget Somalia is next to Kenya, where the family of our "serious man for serious times" Barack Obama hails from).

 

Jack Kirby's Entheogenic Space Odyssey... in 1958

Have fungi, but be careful...

Secret Sunbather Ned Sonntag sent me this vintage page from the great Jack Kirby, from a comic called Blast-Off, published in 1965. But the story itself was actually drawn in 1959, for the same title (Race to the Moon) that Kirby wrote his prophetic Face On Mars story. 

Stairway to Sirius: Death and Restoration, Part I

Left to Right: The Solar Obelisk, Heavenly Beam, 

Stairway to Sirius and Goddess Columbia.

A hawk-eyed Secret Sun reader caught this news story:

The Moon Sacrificed to the Sun

While the excitement over the election wanes, the Mediastorm returns to its usual diet of madness and atrocity:

(CNN) -- Eight people were arrested Tuesday, one on a charge of murder, in connection with the fatal shooting of a woman at a remote Louisiana campsite during what police say was an initiation ceremony for the Ku Klux Klan. The woman, whose identity has not been confirmed, was recruited over the Internet to join the Klan by the suspects, said Capt. George Bonnett of the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office.

Yahooccultism: The Oannes Brothers

Did the boys at Yahoo get drunk last night and do MadLibs type semiotics? I literally LOL'd when that little montage popped up on my screen ("Sauron takes young starlet as bride/sacrifice"). 

Space is an Altar: Eye See You!

Looks a lot like Sauron, no?

"Using the latest techniques in space technology, astronomers at NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used direct-imaging techniques to capture pictures of four newly discovered planets orbiting stars outside our solar system..."

 

Stairway to Sirius: Look at It This Way

Here's an antique Masonic Tracing Board depicting the Stairway to Sirius. The juxtaposition of the twin columns of Jachin and Boaz and their proximity to the Stairway is eerily reminiscent of the pre-9/11 Manhattan skyline that we looked at earlier...

A Very Sirius Election: Enough Already!

The Alaska governor said 2012 was too far off for her to decide whether she would run for the US presidency...

 In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News, the 44-year-old said: "I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is."

The mother-of-five added: "And if there is an open door in 2012 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plough through that door."- BBC

Subtle as a sledgehammer, that woman is....

A Very Sirius Election: Bringing it All Back Home

Angelic beings descend to Earth from Sirius 

in classic Masonic Tracing Board

Ancient Egyptian historians will tell you quite soberly that for thousands of years the gods themselves walked the earth and ruled their land. When the gods left, the Throne of Horus was created. The so-called "Horus Kings," took the gods' place until the establishment of the First Dynasty.

A Very Sirius Election: Phoenix Phlashback

Let's go back to this enigmatic shot of the Phoenix-on-Globe taken at the end of Obama's victory speech. I had almost forgotten there was quite a brouhaha among the far right conspiracy crowd during the Clinton years, pertaining to a similar brooch that Hillary and some other prominent Washington women wore.

 

A Very Sirius Election: The Phoenix Goes Down

Another Mars probe, another mysterious system failure. Nazca, er, I mean NASA, has reported that the Phoenix has gone dead. Soon after another Phoenix went down in flames. 

As above, so below, eh?

A Very Sirius Election: Stairway to Sirius

In the first installment of this series, we looked at the incorporation of elements of the hieroglyph for Sirius in the McCain/Obama campaign logos. Next we looked at what certainly appears to be a move to symbolically tie Sarah Palin to Isis and Sirius, starting with her speech at the RNC. 

What we must remember is that the very term "president" comes from ancient ritual, as does his "inauguration."

'Tis the Season for Gothic Goodness

 

 Siouxsie's become the Goth Madonna these days. She's still looks great but her music is strictly for the cabaret set. But once upon a time she was killer, and had one of the most accomplished bands on the scene. This snarling performance features the late, lamented John McGeoch on guitar. From the absolutely essential Juju.

Astronaut Theology: Monolithic

A reader commented in yesterday's Jack Kirby post that the excavation scene at Tycho in 2001: A Space Odyssey reminded him (or her) of  Ground Zero. That got me reaching for my 2001 DVD to see if there weren't any other clues in the scene I might be able to divine. I did notice this one...

The Eternals: "Will the Gods Return One Day?"

Kirby was just warming up with The New Gods...

I stumbled across an interesting editorial Jack Kirby wrote for the first issue of his mid-70s comic series The Eternals. This is one of the few comics from my childhood that I still remember buying and reading for the first time.

Thunderbirds: "Terror in New York City"

OK, so this is 1965- we have "Terror in New York" in one episode (in which two skyscrapers collapse, the ESB and the "Fulmer Finance" building), "City of Fire" and then pyramids and aliens in another. 

Hathor Watch: Cleopatra Zeta-Jones

Catherine Zeta Jones is to star in a musical film about Cleopatra and her relationship with Anthony and Caesar, according to a report.

 

A Very Sirius Election: Lipstick on a Dog (Star)

 

 We've seen how the iconography of the Obama and McCain campaigns incorporates different aspects of the Sirius glyph. We have the "star-making" joke equating herself with a dog (Pit Bull Terrier, in this case) that Sarah Palin recited at the Republican Convention, which reminds us that Sirius is the Dog Star and also that Sirius was equated with Isis:

Jack Kirby, Astro-Gnostic: The Devil Enters Eden

Hey Kids- A Tech-Gnostic Alien Eden!

Apparently, two 70s titles about ancient astronaut theory were not enough for Jack Kirby. Aside from 2001:A Space Odyssey and The Eternals, Kirby managed to work some alien-based Biblical revisionism into a title that would seem to be completely inhospitable to it.

Yahooccultism: American Pravda

Forgot about this one: Yahoo put this on their front page a couple of weeks ago. Doesn't get more explicit than this, does it? 

 Interesting to note that Yahoo! draw almost exclusively on AP stories, like most other news sources here do these days. I remember back in the Cold War days, American commentators were slamming the USSR for having a news monopoly with TASS. I guess it's OK when our corporate monopolies do it. 

Clown Show 2008: High Weirdness and Low Men

Bruce Springsteen was stumping for Obama on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the heart of Philadelphia when a fan caught what looks like a triangular (and -please forgive me - perhaps partially cloaked) UFO hovering overhead in broad daylight.

Inner Space Capsule

First of all, let me apologize for the extremely infrequent updates here. I've been working seven days a week, anywhere from 12 to 17 hours a day. Whatever downtime I've had has been spent with my family. This has been a very challenging year, given the workload and the absolutely dreadful weather we had here over the summer.

A Very Sirius Election: My Turn to Be the God

 

This is all getting much, much too strange. When you do this kind of work, you often pull on a semiotic string that unravels the veil, and leads to a chain reaction of connections that call to mind images of thousands of dominos tumbling in a pattern like a DNA helix. 

The last person you expect to trigger it all is someone like Bruce Springsteen.

A K2 (Kotze-Knowles) Flow

 

Jake Kotze reviews the basic tenets of his Synchromystic exegesis in this must-see video. Jake's muse Robin Tunney is heavily featured as is The Wizard of Oz. As Synchronicity would have it I'd been poring through some old YouTube clips of The Brady Bunch Hour (don't ask) just when Jake unleashed his new manifesto. 

So just like the old days, I thought I'd celebrate Jake's new vid by offering up a taste of the old school K/K flow.

Fringe (sic)

Fringe is TV's latest attempt to redo The X-Files. This time Hollywood enlisted the ultimate inside ballplayer, JJ Abrams, to get the job done. Which was probably what will ensure this show's doom.

  Fringe is competent TV- and too competent at that. It is almost suffocatingly overproduced. Like nearly every network TV show I've seen for the past several years, it's over-lit, over-shot, over-casted, over-edited and underwritten. I don't believe a single one of the characters. Oh, they're all fairly competent actors, but everyone looks exactly like everyone else on every other network drama. 

The X-Files was so revolutionary precisely because the producers went out of their way to cast ordinary looking people. The point was to believe what you were seeing was really happening. The X-Files also had the wisdom to shoot in Vancouver, which was a decidely-unpretty town in the early 90s and had a rich, velvety blanket of mist all year round. 

 The point here is that The X-Files sought to be real, while the kind of TV Abrams and his cohorts specialize in seeks to be sexy. There's a big difference. Network TV dramas are shot to seamlessy blend in with the commercials, and I was often confused while watching the show online when the commercials kicked in, since they were lit and shot exactly like the show itself was. 

 The show is fairly interesting, though, and important in that it goes after the biotech industry in the same way that The X-Files did. The only problem is that I don't feel any passion or conviction in it. It all feels like commitee. 

Someone said, "You know, there were all these really great X-Files standalones- 'F Emasculata', 'Wetwired', 'Pine Bluff Variant'- about field experiments being done on civilians. I think we could build a show around that." 

And everyone smiled and nodded and thanked God they'd made it this far in Hollywood where they were sitting around with JJ Abrams doing his X-Files, and hoped they'd never go back to doing cereal commercials. 

 Chris Carter fought tooth and nail to do his shows his way, for better or worse. Most producers today would geld themselves before they pissed off an exec. So all the guys who play ball get a shot to do their Chris Carter shows -- Invasion, Threshold (the most egregious of the bunch), Dark Skies, The Eleventh Hour, Fringe -- and most of them will die. 

None of them will ever make any dent in the Collective Unconscious because Carter and Co. broke all the old rules and wrote new ones and then the power players come in and play by them.

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THE SECRET HISTORY CAN NOW BE TOLD!

From Dragon*Con to Dragon Cult

Well, the vacation I had planned all year for turned out to be quite the disaster when I caught a good dose of a summer flu that's been going around. It knocked me flat on my ass for a good week and put the Dragon*Con trip in doubt.

 

Boards of Canada: Over The Horizon Radar

 '

Whatever the Montauk Project became, it started as experiments with OTH , or over-the-horizon radar. The sonic sorcerers known as Boards of Canada gave one of their most excruciatingly beautiful pieces that title and a talented fan made this heart-ripping video for it. 

This thing hurts like hell, but in a good way. It also takes on an added touch of melancholy as we near summer's end.

Fine Art Friday: Isis in Rome

We often forget that Isis wasn't just an Egyptian deity, she reached her loftiest heights of divinity in Rome. This is an early model, from when Rome was on the march. 

Deconstructed

The Deconstructionists- people like Foucault and Derrida- gained notoriety in the late 80's and early 90's with the rise of post-structuralism in literary theory.

 

The Gnosis of Pain

The great Alex Grey

A lot of people in the general orbit of the Synchrosphere have been writing eulogies for Kent Daniel Bentkowski, aka Kentroversy. I didn't know Kent and I wasn't all that familiar with his work. But I listened to a conversation between the great Greg K of Occult of Personality about the enormous suffering Kent had endured as the result of his hemophilia (which resulted in being HIV+ and having Hepatitis C, apparently because of a bad blood transfusion) and realized Kent and I were members of the same fraternity- The Brotherhood of Pain. 

Ten Thirteen: Grill Flame

Investigating an air crash and finding 

a psychic, from "Exegesis" (1998)

Get your innerspace suits on, we're going for a ride... 

 Droidy had a post up last week with a clip from the Millennium episode, "Owls," which had Peter Watts (played by Terry O'Quinn) explaining the worldwide Masonic conspiracy to Frank Black (played by Lance Henriksen). 

The Obligatory Southland Tales Post

 

 This is very, very untimely, but it's a movie I've resisted seeing. Donnie Darko is one of my favorite films of the new millennium (particularly the director's cut) and I didn't want anything to tarnish that. 

Worse, everything about this film set off my personal alarm bells. It's very common for young directors to go over the top with the followups to their sleeper/cult hits (Mallrats, anyone?) and the cast was not over-populated with my favorite thespians. 

17 Days in Beijing: Not off to a Great Start

 

 The month of the Olympiad began with a provincial terror attack, continued with increasingly alarming reports of surveillance tactics that make Orwell look like a Pollyanna, and recently saw the murder of an American guest. Now we see the usual Olympic globalist happy vibrations shaken to their core by a bloody border war in Western Asia. 

 What are we looking at? Psyops? The types of destabilization tactics speculated on by Emory? Karmic chickens coming home to roost? All of the above? Whatever the case, I have a sinking feeling there's more bad news on the way. 

 UPDATE: A feeling which turned out to be correct...

17 Days in Beijing

I was wondering what kind of symbolism the Chinese would whip up for their big Olympic show and our friends in the People's Republic certainly came through with flying colors. And by 'flying colors,' I mean 'blatant, in-your-face Solar iconography.'

 

"What if God were the Sun?"

Did you know that America's most prominent Spiritualist is also a novelist? John Edward- a onetime TV star who claims to be able to speak with the dead - wrote this fascinating book, which was the basis for a 2007 Lifetime TV movie. 

My, the man is a veritable cottage industry. 

Bruce Timm, Funnybook God

Thor for Thursday, along with Sif and Him! 

Just spreading the objectification around!

I've been having a lot of trouble falling asleep every night, so I've been taking the opportunity to meditate. 

It's been a blessing in disguise (and I believe that that's how all blessings come) and it's also helped me sort through a lot of things that I wouldn't necessarily address in my waking, working hours. 

The X-Files & the Spiritual Malaise of the West

The new X-Files film got destroyed by Batmania Redux, but at their core the two films address the same root problem: how bad religion, bad politics, radical selfishness and the canonization of materialism have destroyed the heart and soul of Western Civilization, and replaced it with something dead, hard and extremely cold.

The Obligatory Dark Knight Post

Well, I finally saw it. After all the hype, after all the analysis, after all of the speculation, what's left is a technically-impressive, entertaining summer film that has been hyped, praised and speculated-upon far beyond what is actually on the screen deserves. 

Solar, 17, Bla Bla Bla

Sometimes there are stories that you can't help but wonder are planted in the media for some strange ritual purpose we're not meant to understand. This is one of them.

Chav Culture and the Brave New World

 

 Here on the Secret Sun - and in the wider Synchrosphere as well - we like to look at examples of pop culture prophecy. It's interesting to note that these examples tend to arise in instances of symbolic significance; it seems that when an artist really plugs himself into the Memestream, extraordinary perception is often the reward. 

Sunday Matinee: Star Wreck

 

We discovered this brilliant film at last year's Dragon*Con. Double-click if you want a full-screen version. This was made by a bunch of Finnish sci-fi fans, who seem a bit hipper to the imperialist undertones of Star Trek than your average Trekker in this country. They also toss in a Babylon 5 parody to sweeten the deal. 

Suffice it to say that this is how the whole Trek fantasy would play out in reality...

Sync Log: Matt Groening

I'm not out at the San Diego Comic-Con this year, which is fine by me. The last time I went (2004) I was completely exhausted by the middle of the first day. And I must say that last time was sorely lacking in that San Diego magic; those wonderful syncs that used to pop up like mushrooms after a rainstorm at that con.

 

Dark Knight Templar

Of course the big story in pop culture this week is the record-breaking opening of The Dark Knight, the second installment in Christopher Nolan's radical re-imagining of the Batman franchise. Being the obsessive-compulsive that I am, 

I can't help but notice that the film was released at the same time of the year that Sirius rose in the night sky in the ancient world. The iconic poster tagline "Why So Serious?" takes on added significance in that light. 

I Do Believe...

... the new X-Files movie is great. This is not an effects bonanza- it's a very dark, disturbing and intimate thriller. It's getting a lot of negative reviews, so I was prepared to be disappointed. I drove home not only not feeling disappointed, but feeling extremely angry - yet again- at the reviewers, who seem more and more like lemmings every year. 

There's no doubt in my mind that most of the critics decided to hate this film a very long time before they saw it (and it was a terrible idea to open it a week after the new Batman). I don't have to tell any of my readers here that the media is full of shit, but I guess my vestigial idealism always gets the best of me. I've rented several movies in the past few months because they got good reviews, and without naming names, I pretty much hated every single one of them. 

And watching the coming attractions tonight - how the hell does Vin Diesel have a new movie out?- I thanked God that The X-Files is a black sheep in our enervating and soul-deadening pop culture. PS: 

Check out this interesting site- A Jungian exploration of the X-Files.

Praying to the Aliens

 

"Praying to the Aliens" is one of my favorite Gary Numan songs, but the video for it is extremely unsettling. I'm not sure what this is supposed to be- is it primitive video art or some leftover MK-Ultra demo reel?

Secret Star Trek: Occult Entrainment Masked as Sci-Fi

OK, last month we were looking at Star Trek in the context of high initiate symbolism and its role in the transformation of our culture. We also puzzled over the phenomenon of a group of strange, disincarnate entities who have supposedly meddled with our dimensional reality. In between all of that, we were looking at the possibility that the sun the Egyptian god Ra represents is not our own.

Jonas Brothers or Oannes Brothers?

Why do they do this to me? Saturday we looked at the weird montage of the starlet and the distant star on Yahoo, which led us to the Oannes Brothers, those squeaky-clean Jersey boys who themselves are superstars with the 'Tween set. The Brothers are a Disney project, which usually means deeper weirdness can be found lurking somewhere in the background. 

 Time and time travel seem to be pressing concerns with the Oannes Brothers. Their first CD, It's About Time, includes titles like "Time for Me to Fly," "One Day at a Time," "6 Minutes," and "7:05." Their first big hit was a cover of "Year 3000" by the UK band, Busted (who themselves also cut a track called "Thunderbirds are Go!")

 

For our purposes, the "Year 3000" could be 3000 BC, the dawning of the Imperial Age in the Middle East and the dynastic eras in both Sumer and Egypt.

 

This stela is of Narmer, the pharaoh believed to have succeeded the Scorpion King somewhere around 3000 BC. Note the classic pose taken from the Constellation of Hercules on the obverse and a strange image of two animals with intertwining necks oddly reminiscent of a DNA helix.

 

Strangely, that same motif is seen at the same time in the seal of the Sumerian king Uruk. Seeing how these animals are not known to have existed, what meaning could they have to two kings hundreds of miles apart? Since these creatures are used to identify kings, what significance is there with these strange animals to the royal bloodlines? 

THE HITS JUST KEEP COMING In "Year 3000" the Jonas Brothers chirpily sing, "I've been to the year 3000/Not much has changed but they lived under water." 

Three guesses who lived under water in 3000 BC...

"(Oannes) was accustomed to pass the day among men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. 

He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and shewed them how to collect the fruits; in short, he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften manners and humanize their lives. 

From that time, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun had set, this being Oannes, retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the deep; for he was amphibious. After this there appeared other animals like Oannes." - Berossus, from Ancient Fragments

The latest Jonas Brothers record shows them "living under water" as it were, in a stylized version of Times Square. Note that they could share their strangely royal JB logo with John the Baptist. We see the crown again over the sign for "The Wykcoff," a reference to their hometown in New Jersey, which is tucked in the crowded area between routes 287 and 17. 

 We see a reference here to the "Love Bug," whose video features another time travel motif, only this time towards the past. As the boys warble, "Called her for the first time yesterday/Finally found the missing part of me/ Felt so close, but you were far away," we travel back in time to the 1940s where we are first confronted with this strange image...

 

The lighthouse is a stand-in for an obelisk, and has the added advantage of the beacon of light ("beacon" is a favorite motif in Barack Obama's speeches), and of course the water sacred to Oannes and his successors. But this lighthouse looks quite odd, nothing like the familiar kind we see a lot in modern Christian iconography. 

Check out Todd Campbells's post on maritime iconography for deep background, no pun intended.

 

It looks a bit more like the famous Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt. Which - as with Barack Obama and the beacon- brings us right back to the Stairway to Sirius imagery we've been looking at lately. Hmm, can we find any imagery of the Oannes Brothers tying back more explicitly to the Stairway to Sirius?

 

This is from the June 21, 2008 issue of Billboard magazine, featuring the boys brooding with their scarves on a stairway. OK then, where's the Sirius? Well, June 21 is the Summer Solstice, and was also the date of the heliacal rising of Sirius in Ancient Egypt. 

BONUS ROUND Speaking of the lighthouse, Alexandria was sacred to Isis, and coins were minted there showing the goddess riding a dog, a reference to Sirius. The Solstice is also the time of year sacred to Ioannes the Baptist. 

 In The Sirius Mystery Robert Temple pointed out the etymological similiarity between "Sirius" and "Siren." 

Like Oannes, the Sirens were half-fish, half human. Just to bring it all full circle, I posted quite a few Siren-related posts here that no one seemed to have read, but incorporate this weird semiotic juncture of pop music, esoteric symbology and UFO theory. All sorts of themes and memes I once thought unconnected become intimately connected when you take the time to trace them back to their roots. 

However, the problem is that it all ties back to some strange event in prehistory that is somehow related to a distant star system. And that's beyond the pale of polite conversation in both mainstream circles and the so-called alternative media, despite all of the tantalizing evidence- semiotic and otherwise- pointing directly to it. 

UPDATE: Michael and Droidy pointed out that in the comments that It's About Time was a show about time-traveling astronauts (read: time-traveling Freemasons) that premiered- wait for it- on September 11, 1966. 

The show was produced by Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz, which of course then syncs us back to The X-Files. Which in turn syncs us to Hancock, which then thematically syncs us to The Eternals. Oh, such a small world. 

 UPDATE II: The Oannes Brothers at the White House? (thanks to Astronut for the tip)

The White House, which boasts 55,000 square feet and 132 rooms, is set on 18 acres filled with magnolias, dogwoods and maples. When the Obamas move into the White House, they will primarily use the mansion's second and third floors and have access to a solarium and a movie theater.

For the Obama daughters, birthday parties could include surprise appearances by the Jonas Brothers. And their grandmother, 71-year-old Marian Robinson, a lifelong Chicago resident, is preparing to pick up and move to Washington to help shuttle the girls to soccer games and recitals, according to The Associated Press. -Seattle Times