Using his own blood Neville is trying to develop a vaccine, which he perfects just prior to his death in a lab explosion (shades of Jack Parsons). He hands the vaccine to two survivors, a woman and a boy- to take to a mountain sanctuary where plague survivors are working to restore humanity.
We looked at the Osiris symbolism in relation to the film, but there is also the more obvious Christian symbolism as well, itself preceded (if not derived) from the Isis and Osiris Mysteries.
But Osiris/Asar and his equivalents (Ashur, Anshar, Ahura, Arthur), and his wife Isis/Aset and her equivalents (Asherah, Astarte, Ishtar, Inanna, etc), as well as his son Horus/Heru and his equivalents (Helu/Helios, Surya, Mitra, Heracles/Hercules) are themselves drawn from even more ancient archetypes from Sumer and other cultures in Mesopotamia. Those antecedents themselves might be mythologized renderings of even earlier characters.
When you look at the iconography of these figures, you can't help but notice that A., a lot of them are winged, B.. others are identified with flying disks or boats, and C., many of them are associated with strange apparatuses that look like machinery. Which in this day and age makes the whole prospect of studying these characters a bit touchy, since if you even bring up the possibility that these figures may not have been "gods" but technological-advanced extraterrestrials, you face the prospect of being forever branded a heretic by the scientific establishment.
Even though the science for AAT exists - at least in theory - by this point.
Even so, starting with Charles Fort, up through Morning of the Magicians and Chariots of the Gods?, heretical freethinkers have been looking at the ancient myths in the context of modern science and drawing the obvious parallels.
And thus "Ancient Astronaut Theory" was born.
AAT was widespread in the 70s (TV stars like Rod Serling and William Shatner both starred in AAT documentaries), but then a funny thing happened: at the exact time that AAT gathered momentum, hundreds of millions of dollars - if not billions- began pouring into Fundamentalist religious movements, as well as into very powerful telecopes and other space detection technology.
Then an army of so-called "skeptics" arose bashing memes like AAT, but conspicuously avoiding any criticism of established (read: 'majority') religious systems. Following them was a coterie of Fundamentalist conspiracy theorists who demonized not only UFOs and AAT, but UFO and (particularly) AAT researchers as well. Almost as if someone wanted to study this mystery but scare everyone else off.
Wholly unrelated phenomena? Maybe.
But here's the thing- after years of near-total invisibility AAT has begun creeping back into TV shows, movies and video games in the past few years, concurrent with the implosion of the Fundamentalist movement in America. Coincidence again?
Even stranger, we've also heard pronouncements from the Vatican about the spiritual nature of ETs, even though they've not given us any evidence that said ETs exist.
So last year we looked at all of this in light of all of the Sirius double-entendre and Phoenix symbolism thrown about.
I said last year that there seemed to be a subliminal effort to identify Obama with King Tut, which certainly was confirmed on his Egypt trip. Assuming this isn't all pure coincidence, it may in fact speak to an uncertainty on the part of some of these players- ritual behavior is usually the result of anxiety.
Call it a hunch, but I genuinely believe that the PTB have no real idea what's going with UFOs or with the possibility of alien visitation, but like the rest of us they sense something might be coming. I won't argue here whether that sense is justified or not, but the rush to build all of this new space hardware during a worldwide economic crunch may well be a contigency move, at the very least.
I've been through all of this before, so I'm not keen to make any predictions. Partly because predictions on UFOs are almost always wrong and partly because I've no real idea what's going on.
So what does this crazy-talk have to do with I Am Legend?
Well, we looked at Will Smith here before, and the explicit connections to Horus in his superhero (read:Heru) film Hancock. And we looked at the Osiris symbolism in I Am Legend, or at least the Osiris parallels. Given that some of the same people are involved in both films, it's not unreasonable to wonder if the two films are companion pieces.
What's important here is that Osiris was seen as the creator of civilization in the ancient mythology, and was often identified with Oannes, the fish god of the Persian Gulf that we've also looked at.
Both these characters figure into the AAT continuum (as well as John the Baptist lore, which we'll look at another time).
And if you look again at the basic plot of IAL, you could make the argument that it's an Intervention Theory allegory: an alien scientist using genetic engineering to create thinking human beings out of feral protohominds, exactly as Neville is trying to do with the zombie/vampires in IAL.
Again, that's my personal interpretation, but not an unreasonable one. Let's at least agree that the parallels are there, intentionally or not.
Now, back to the Obama synchronicity in Norway. All of this Sirius business began for me with Obama's campaign, and the strange UFOs floating near the Franklin Institute (where I saw the Tut exhibit in Philadelphia) during an Obama rally. And now we have another odd - if not unexplainable - aerial phenomenon over the skies of Norway just prior to his acceptance of the Nobel prize. Something which I'm happy to say people are generally skeptical of. But we still don't know it was and we still don't know what it might have meant to whomever was responsible for it. Wouldn't it be funny if it was in fact some kind of extraterrestrial manifestation?
Equally important for my syncstream was the mural under which Obama delivered his speech. Not only did it picture decidely non-Norwegian looking blue-skinned deities, but the composition was highly reminiscent of Egyptian murals, particularly those that depicted everyday activities in a tiered fashion, all lorded over by the gods who are often situated in the same spot that those strange blue creatures were as well. Again- maybe all a coincidence, but the coincidences keep piling up, don't they?
What also fascinated me is the sync of Will Smith tagging along with Obama in Oslo and then his odd statement that "the idea of Obama" represented an "evolutionary flashpoint for humanity." I still have no idea what he meant by that and I can't help but wonder if it was scripted by somebody else.
But for our purposes it ties right into both Intervention Theory (literally) and I Am Legend (figuratively)- the genetic transformation of feral prehumans into thinking human beings certain represents an 'evolutionary flashpoint', no? And again, the parallels to Sirius symbolism with the two celebrities is pretty astounding in the overall memestream we're wading in here.
But while working on all of this I suddenly remembered another reference to the Stairway that we've looked at in the past, and how that ties into this overall constellation of symbolism and scientific speculation.
