Propaganda and the Magical Art of Reality Creation

The point of art for most of human history was magical- culture was about the cult.

The goal of art was to commune with the gods- to create environments in which human beings were surrounded by images of them. We'll leave aside the obvious parallels with the post-World War II cargo cults and the rest of it (for now at least), because I'm more interested in exploring the cultural aspect of this.

Secret Star Trek: Levels Above Human

PART ONE / PART TWO / PART THREE 

PART FOUR / PART FIVE / PART SIX 

PART SEVEN / PART EIGHT

If Star Trek is indeed inextricably linked to the human potential movement and a bizarre flying saucer cult, why is that so? What is the purpose of programming these strange themes into what is one of the most successful sci-fi franchises of our time?

Secret Star Trek: "An Outgrowth of The Outer Limits"

Daystar Trek: From Project Vulcan to a projecting Vulcan

This series has taken us from the connections between Star Trek, the flying saucer cult known as the Council of Nine and Esalen, the New Age resort in Big Sur to the dizzying array of connections between Star Trek and the short-lived sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits. This is no detour. This cuts right to the core of what Star Trek is really all about.  

Secret Star Trek: Playground of the Elementals

Back row: Should've been played by Jasika Nicole,
James van der Kirk, Sylar. Front: Englebert Cabbagepatch

That the team that brought us Fringe also brought us the revised Star Trek is no accident. In fact it was inevitable. Fringe took huge chunks of storyline from The X-Files but it also drew inspiration from a bizarre period in American history when Cold War budgets were financing fringe scientists at Stanford Research Institute, Xerox PARC and other locales in north-central California. 

Secret Star Trek: The Godfather

The connections between the secretive flying saucer/channeling cult known variously as The Council of Nine, Lab-9 or simply The Nine with both Star Trek and the legendary Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California have been known for many years. 

Secret Star Trek: Meet Your New Gods

Just as we learned that something very much like the Council of Nine predates Andrija Puharich's contact with them, so may the presence of the Nine inside Trek prefigure Gene Roddenberry's involvement with Lab-9 in 1975. 

Secret Star Trek: "It Partook of the Occult."

It all started with such a trifling thing; the teaser in the new Star Trek into Darkness film has our heroes saving a primitive race on the planet Nibiru and by doing so creating a cargo cult.

This is exactly the kind of scenario we see when symbolism is injected into a fictional narrative intentionally and consciously; it draws attention to itself, awkwardly.*

Secret Star Trek: "Not Entirely Real"

"Somewhere out there," [Gene] starts off, his eyes widening as he continues, "there's this massive ... entity, this abstract, unknown life force that seems mechanical in nature, although it actually possesses its own highly advanced consciousness. It's a force thousands of times greater than anything intergalactic civilization has ever witnessed. It could be God, it could be Satan, and it's heading toward earth."

-- Star Trek Movie Memories

In the first part of this series we looked at the curious fact that an alien planet that acts as the battlefield in the ninth Star Trek film is virtually identical to the legendary New Age resort, Esalen. In the second part we looked at what connected both Star Trek and Esalen- the bizarre and secretive UFO cult known variously as The Nine, the Council of Nine and Lab-9.

In this chapter we will look at the almost unbelievable latticework of connections between Star Trek, Esalen and The Nine, as well as evidence that there may well be iconic tributes to the late Esalen co-founder Richard Price throughout the Star Trek franchise itself...

Roddenberry didn't really have much luck after Star Trek. Which, truth be told, was considered a failure in its original run. He later penned a feature film starring Rock Hudson, Pretty Maids All in a Row, which was a critical and box office failure. 

Secret Star Trek: The Unknown Nine

In part one of this series, we looked at a strange clue embedded in the now-obligatory ancient astronaut/cargo cult sequence in Star Trek into Darkness, a clue that led back to one of the lesser entries in the franchise's nearly 50 year history, that being the ninth feature film. 

That film takes place on a planet nearly identical to the legendary New Age resort in California, Esalen. 

Secret Star Trek: California Dreaming

You've probably heard (or seen) that the teaser for the new Dawson's Trek movie has James van der Kirk trying to save the primitive people of "Nibiru," whose planet is about to be destroyed by a supervolcano.

Highly Strange Cinema: Wavelength (1983)

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but somewhere in the course of my wanderings I came across this strange interview from the Project Camelot site. It wasn't from the Dying NASA Scientist, but close- it was from a physicist who claimed to work at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California. In it, he made this rather startling claim:

What can you tell us about the ET presence?

Look up the movie Wavelength. It’s based on a totally true story. Have you seen it? It's based on an incident that took place at Hunter Liggett. This is a hot one. 

Astro-Gnosis: "The Waters Above the Firmament"

Gnosticism is not easily understood, and was intentionally designed that way.

The point was to drape its extremely radical- and weird- messages in layers of allegory and symbol, some of whose definitions are lost to us today.

Unified Weird Theory: Why It Matters

When I wrote about the Unified Weird Theory it wasn't based in some impulse to bring together a bunch of pseudo-sciences and quasi-superstitions under one tent.

Unified Weird Theory: An Introduction

Hey, you wanted weird...

Food preparation is both an art and a science. It's a science because it's about taking certain elements (ingredients) and subjecting them to various processes of measurement and mixing and exposing these to carefully determined levels of heat (sometimes cold) at determined intervals in order to achieve a desired outcome. 

Secret Star Trek: The Ultimate Trekkies

 

For such a small and obscure group, Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate cult has had an outsized impact on the culture. Their mass suicide captured the public's imagination in ways that the more grisly horrors at Jonestown, Waco and the Solar Temple did not.

The 2013 Ausurs®: Better Late than Never

Back in 2007 I started blogging about Jack Kirby in the context of synchro/datamysticism, and looking at the almost-unfathomable numinous power his work contained. 

The first series I did here looked at his 1983 miniseries Silver Star and its obvious influence on the then-popular/now-forgotten TV show Heroes.

Bowie Meets the Men-in-Black

People are going to interpret this as a comment on celebrity culture, but it's clear that this is about alien visitations and MIBs.

You see the classic MIB in the supermarket and their trademark archaic black sedan in the alley, and the lyrics about sexless figures watching us in "our primitive world" or menacing us while we sleep or lurking in the dark on the stairs pretty clearly spells it out. 

As does the photo of Bowie from The Man Who Fell to Earth on the cover of the fake tabloid. One of Bowie's studio players said that one of the tunes they were working was originally called "Born in a UFO"- I wonder if this is it.

Revisiting the Temple: In Light of Recent Events...

Recent drama at the Vatican didn't happen in a vacuum. It's part of an ongoing struggle, a cold war that could shake the world to its foundations if it were to go hot. 

Doctors, Doorways and Dimensions, Part One

One of the main tenets of my research is that our most resonant pop culture is a kind of lucid dreaming, in which the creator acts as a guide for a shared visionary experience with the audience. 99.9% of the crap out there is immune to this process and is produced for reasons that are entirely mundane or cynical. 

But the stuff that resonates does so because it captures something elusive, something that changes the course of cultures and societies.

Jack Kirby, Mindbomb: Break on Through to the Inner Side

 From 2001: A Space Odyssey #2

 I realized I left this series hanging and didn't adequately wrap it all up. 

Seeing as how Synchronicity insisted I do so- in its own inimitable way- here's the coup de grace for what was an unexpectedly popular breakthrough series.