The Secret Sun: Foresight is 2020: Where the Ducks Are

Well, here we all are. I don't where exactly that is or where it's all leading to, but one thing is for certain: this is real, this is happening. What exactly "this" is, I don't know either.

Well, we can't say we weren't warned.

In the previous post, I explained my cockeyed theory that prophecy is all around us, and can often be found in places we least expect. I also lamented the fact that we usually don't find out about these odd foreshadowings until after the fact.

Our old pal Jake Kotze posted this teaser on the Ides of March, which a lot of you probably already saw.

Some eagle-eyed readers brought this historical fact to our attention as well. This Saint Corona was said to live during one of the Roman Empire's many debilitating plagues, a fact some folks may not be aware of.

There's also an old episode of The Simpsons, way back in the day when it was not only watchable but in fact funny. Ancient history, right? It looks like someone fudged some of the details (there was no mention of a coronavirus in the episode) but it's just another notch in the prescience belt for the long-running series.

I think these Simpsycs are always interesting, but given the longevity and countless references in the show, I'm never bowled over by them. Anyone can hit a target with a shotgun, I'm more interested in someone who can hit it with a peashooter. A rare breed, alas.

Anyway, my point is that seeing as how we do usually only find out about these prophecies and predictions when it's too late to do anything, wouldn't it be helpful to try to look back at what sources that have been fairly-reliable predictors and see if there's anything else coming down the pike that we may want to hear about before it's too late?

Just a thought.

Like The Simpsons, The X-Files is another long-running series with a similar barrage of references raised in various episodes, but what interests me in particular is trying to determine exactly when the stories are drawing on information whispered into Chris Carter's ears by his extensive contacts in federal law enforcement and the "intelligence community," quote-unquote.

Ergo, some X-Files fans have been talking about one of the main thrulines in the series, and that's an engineered pandemic. This riveting scene in the otherwise-meh Fight the Future seems to be eerily prescient, but was probably drawing from scenarios bandied about in certain circles, speculating on some outside hostile force destabilizing the country. Or equally likely, some scenario bandied about internally.

So many of these types of scenarios (and more besides) were aired first in The X-Files, often culled from sources publicly available but never actually read by the public. Unfortunately.

Of course, the big daddy of these showed up in early 2001 and lit up the Conspirasphere for a very long time after. Having actually watched the entire episode (which too many others have not) I had a bit of a different take on the issue, which I wrote on back in 2012. I think it's worth checking out, if you have the time.

Then we had the "Event Series" in 2016, which was just an utter train-wreck, entertainment-wise, in this writer's opinion. But as a medium for weird symbolism, parapolitics and telling tales out of school, it was quite the trove.

And after throwing a bunch of juicy conspiracy tropes into the first episode (which lit up the Conspirasphere like a supernova, albeit briefly), the series flailed from one half-baked idea to another until Carter seemed to land back on the engineered-virus trope. And seemed to land on it at the last minute since it was rife with the ear-scraping comic book dialogue so typical of what are almost certainly his first drafts.

Carter nursed his unexplained obsession with Twins and doubles in the episode, having Mulder and Scully try to stave off a planned pandemic with the help of their weird younger counterparts, Miller and the horridly-named Agent Einstein.

Carter introduced these agents in the utterly-batshit-crazy-fever-dream of a penultimate episode, "Babylon," a semi-musical comedy about terrorism and magic mushrooms, with songs by artists like Billy Ray Cyrus, Tom Waits, Carrie Underwood and The Lumineers.

Let me just mention that Carter introduced his Twins in an episode inspired by a real-life event in Garland, Texas.

You heard me.

Twins. Garland.

Do you think it was regular life that drove me insane?

Having not anticipated an eleventh season, Carter ended the whole story with all-Hell breaking out, a way of flipping the bird to fans who complained for years that all Hell never did in fact ever break out.

Then when the show was renewed, Carter had to do what he had to do in a similar situation twenty years prior when Millennium was renewed after killing everyone off in an engineered pandemic.

The resulting episode was yet another whiff for The X-Files. Like the previous cliffhanger it had some nice set-pieces but was sabotaged by Carter getting even more comic-booky in the dialogue than ever before, including some pointless and cringey Sin City-type inner monologues. Shame.

Not content with kicking at the online fan hornet nest, Carter then shot the Shippers through their swelling hearts by insinuating the Smoking Man was in fact the father of Scully's child, a revelation he'd previously teased in the series' originally run but never went through with. Unfortunately, he teased all this mostly in episodes that the Shippers never watched, other than the Season Seven quasi-Myth ep "En Ami."

Note that Scully is shaking hands in "En Ami" with a character called "Marjorie (Pearl) Butters."

Yeah.

I'm crazy for a reason, OK? Leave me be.

After seven straight episodes of underwhelming X-Files the rest of the eleventh season was pretty damn good. It wasn't classic XF by any stretch (Duchovny and Anderson's chemistry long since dissipated) but I quite liked how the meandering Mytharc was righted by "Ghouli" and the series finale.

Note both episodes featured young Canadian actor Madeleine Arthur, or "Magdalene Osiris" in Secret Sunnish.

And remember that Magdalene popped up in Color Out of Space, which we discussed just a short while back. And remember that Color Out of Space was the second adaption of "The Colour Out of Space" in two years, along with the Alex Garland's -- Garland again -- quasi-adaption Annihilation.

And all of the above are arguably about a deadly pandemic, right?

You know where that takes us back to...

Anyway, remember that time a while back when I told you that Alex Garland's Annihilation is basically about an alien virus that crashes to Earth and turns the world into a Cocteau Twins video?

And you all shook your heads and said, "What a shame, he was so interesting before this idée fixe got lodged in his head?"

Granted, that's true. But so is this...

...when the five armed pixies enter the Shimmer, the exteriors were not actually filmed in the Florida Panhandle...

....but in the VERY SAME EXACT FUCKING LOCATION that the exteriors for the "Pearly Dewdrops' Drop" video were filmed 33 years earlier, in Windsor Great Park.

THE.

SAME.

EXACT.

LOCATION.

In other words, I was literally right that Annihilation is about the world being turned into a Cocteau Twins video.

This is a good time to remind everyone that celebrity Garlandavirus patient Rita Wilson has the birth name of Margarita ("Pearl") Ibrahimoff. Kudos to KTV for reminding us of that.

See what I mean?

I'll also remind you that both Dana Scully and a certain Sibyl you might remember were both depicted as the mitochondrial Eve's of a new race of alien-human hybrids during the millennium, the latter playing that part in The Millennium Dome Show, which no one but a few Secret Sun readers and middle-aged Brits have heard of but may in fact end up being remembered as the business plan for the 21st Century.

Particularly when you take into account the dramatic climax of the show.

Note that a certain Sibyl worked with former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel on The Millennium Dome Show's soundtrack and later with former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett on her unreleased progger-than-anything-Genesis-has-done-in-40-years solo album, which she recorded with the members of Spiritualized, one of whom is her husband.

Note also that Genesis has recently announced a new tour and that Genesis P. Orridge recently succumbed to leukemia. Everyone with me?

In other Sibyl-adjacent news, legendary screen star Max Von Sydow recently left us.

A week after Sydow's death, Minority Report co-star Samantha Morton died a theatrical death on The Walking Dead, as per her comic book counterpart. We talked quite a bit about Morton on the private blog.

Quite a bit indeed. Yes, we did.

Speaking of the Apocalypse, Carter's delirium-tremen-of-a-freakout "Babylon" had Mulder and Scully watching YouTube videos of the weird "trumpet" noises that made the rounds a few years back. Remember those?

It turns out one of the better-known episodes of this phenomenon occurred right up the street from where The X-Files was produced, back in 2013.

There's a funny thing about this video, and something I noticed quite a bit when this story was burning up the wires...

...and that's that it reminded me, rather uncannily, of the intro to this witchy-as-all-motherfuck track, in pitch, timbre and tone. Maybe even rhythm. Just without that terrifying vocal loop. A song released in 1982.

Tell me I'm crazy. Please.

I've noticed that some of the other "heavenly trumpet" events were eerily similar to the old musique concrete collage the Twins used as their walk-on music when they toured with Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark back in the noise-rock days.

Again, please tell me I'm just sick and obsessed.

Because remember "Five-Ten Fiftyfold?"

Yeah.

Oh, and Reader Brandon reminded us of "Through the Dark Months of April and May."

Yeah.

And then I went back to look at this 2020 preview reel (the opening music there is by the late Swedish DJ Avicii), having remembered there was a lot of Chinese references in the films, including Hollywood's ludicrously-racist The Mask of Fu Manchu, starring Boris Karloff.

Which gave us all the spectacle of the Sibyl cooing her riddles in front of Fu Manchu working with noxious chemicals in his evil laboratory.

I'm telling you-- you might want to study the videos of these performances. I told you time and again it was a signal all hell was about to break loose, just like The Millennium Dome Show 19 years prior.

And lo and behold.

See, you go hunting where the ducks are and you go divining where the Sibyl is/was. And I don't know exactly who or why, but when big moves are going to be made on the Grand Chessboard, someone will want to rub this woman all over them for good luck. Count on it.

I've been at this game a very, very long time and I've never seen anything like this. I just had to get a lot better at doing this kind of work before I could begin to understand what was in front of my eyes the whole time.

Never forget that true prophecy is-- and has always been-- deeply cloaked in symbol and riddle. As well as in symbols buried in symbols, and riddles hidden in riddles.

The question becomes then are we really at the dawn of the Apocalypse?