Space is an Altar: A Mother and Child Reunion

If you scroll down and look at the right hand column, you'll come across Knowles' Law. It reads as follows: "Whenever a controversy over symbolism erupts in the media, it's usually disguising another hidden symbolic message altogether."

Now, I'm not a betting man, but something tells me that the donnybrook being whipped up by this Time magazine cover is yet another example of Knowles' Law in action. The story in question is about "attachment parenting" and features an attractive young mother and her three year-old son, who is feeding from her exposed left breast.

The controversy is already frothing up, with Fox News leading the charge:

Time magazine made a bold move with its cover story this week that has industry experts calling it everything from a cheap shot to desperate.

Industry insiders told Fox411 that they think this is Time’s attempt to take a page from Newsweek/Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown’s handbook of shocking your way into the news cycle. 

But the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the cover was this.... 

 

Oh, I know what you're thinking, that nutty Secret Sun guy. Always seeing stuff that isn't there. But let's deconstruct this rather stark cover design. Note that it's the left breast that's exposed - the exposed left breast was a symbol in divinity in classical art.

Note that young Harpo (my nickname for the tyke) is wearing camouflage pants, most commonly associated with the military. Horus was the god of war.

Young Harpo is standing on a chair, rather than a stool or a small stepladder. Isis' name comes from the ancient Egyptian word for "throne", which is why she was often depicted with a throne atop her head.

The headline on the left refers to the French elections, which saw neocon errand-boy Nicolas Sarkozy being tossed out of office. One of the most iconic images associated with France is the goddess Liberty leading the peasant army against the aristocrats during the Revolution. The French being the French, both of her breasts are exposed.

But if Lady Liberty rings a bell, you might remember the recent Sirius blowout, in which I recounted information supplied by Richard C. Hoagland pertaining to the symbolic importance of the coming Venus Transit. We saw this shot from Obama's presentation at the corrupting White House Correspondents Dinner.

Richard also pointed out the shot with Bo reclining under the painting "Liberty 1869", featuring the goddess Libertas, whose sword and spear and crown of stars links her to Hathor and Ishtar, goddesses later identified with Venus but who retained their identities as goddesses of love and war (see Scully, Dana). Is there a meaning here? A Sirius-Venus conjunction of some kind? Stay tuned.

 

The French also utilized the left breast motif, such as in this painting where one of the Louis' is being blessed by the goddess Victory.

 And the Romans used the motif as well, as in this statue of a rather butch-looking Venus.

Botticelli used the motif for his depiction of the birth of Venus. But the motif has spawned controversy recently in Sparto-America....

Republican Atttorney General of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli kicked up some controversy of his own when he redesigned the state seal to cover up the exposed left breast of the goddess Virtus. 

Unsurprisingly, given his political affiliation, the goddess looks more like a Spartan hoplite and the dead tyrant looks more like a sexual conquest, perhaps one scored at a Virginia rest stop.

The other headline is even more interesting: "The God of Cricket." Like their cousins the grasshoppers, crickets are commonly associated with summer, or the Dog Days, if you like. They've been associated with the mysteries of the soul and rebirth in different cultures and the ancient Egyptians made magical amulets with their image.

However there's another variety of cricket- the Cicada, variously known as the "Dog Day Cicada" or the "17 Year Cicada." This type of cricket is absolutely bursting with symbolic import, as we read in the article "A Symbol of Rebirth."

Linnaeus named the Cicada which means “tree cricket” in Latin. The group’s genus Magicicada comes from the Greek word Magi, meaning magic. The lifecycle and metamorphosis of this cricket was observed by ancient Greeks, Chinese and Mayas. They craftily associated the creature’s emergence from the ground and transformation into a winged invertebrate fully capable of flight,  to rebirth and the immortality in poetry, literature and art. 

While the familiar green-and-black Dog-Day Cicadas are present every July and August in small numbers, the Periodical Cicadas appear, simultaneously, only once in seventeen years in any given area. Periodical cicadas do not emerge everywhere at the same time. Twelve broods of 17-year cicadas appear in different areas of the northeastern U.S. in different years, emerging from late May through June.

17? Dog Days? Rebirth? Magic? Yeah, sounds like a Secret Sun post to me.

The date of the magazine is also fascinating, and might be the key to this puzzle. It's four days after the Soyuz is due to dock at the International Space Station (aka ISiS) and two days after a pivotal event in the history of space ritual exploration.

SpaceX and NASA have settled on May 19 as the launch target for the first privately funded cargo mission to the International Space Station following a delay due to a longer-than-anticipated software validation process, SpaceX revealed late last week.

Already months behind schedule, a launch date scheduled for Monday was cancelled last week as SpaceX and the U.S. space agency raced to test the company's Dragon capsule software systems. If the May 19 launch is delayed for some reason, a backup plan is to lift off on May 22, a SpaceX spokesperson told PCMag.

In what will be the second demonstration launch for SpaceX in NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon capsule with cargo for the ISS will lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Once in orbit, the automated Dragon capsule will berth with the ISS if it passes a systems check.

The unmanned test flight was originally scheduled for April 30, then pushed back to May 3 before NASA and SpaceX settled on a date a few days later in May. SpaceX, run by PayPal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk (pictured), plans to conduct manned flights to ISS by 2015 as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program.

Yes, that's 5/19, or for those using European notation (like Elon Musk) 19/5. I'm sure it's all a coincidence or yet another example of those nutty space guys giving a symbolic shout out to Richard Hoagland.

April 30 is Walpurgisnacht, by the way.

 
Incidentally, Enterprise Mission has published a paper on the Venus Transit which I heartily recommend to everyone reading this. It's eminently readable and accessible, even for the left-brain deprived members of the population such as myself.

Now, would Time go to all this trouble to symbolically mark the flight of the Falcon 9 and the symbolic reunion of Horus and Isis in space? 

I mean what could any of this possibly mean to the Time Warner Corporation, right?

UPDATE: The Falcon/ISiS reunion was originally slated for February. And how did Time choose to mark that occasion? Note the Syria headline- there might be a little clue there...

Here's another.

UPDATE: Covergirl Jame Lynne Grumet is founder of an NGO called the Fayye Foundation. If you're thinking that logo looks vaguely familiar, you're not alone...