An EMP attack. Don’t forget Jericho, Survivors and Jeremiah.

German Film Poster

Highest Levels of Illuminism Revealed

By: Jay

In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, we are presented with a prescient, dystopian future based on Phillip K. Dick’s novella, “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?” We will see that this film is full of not only accurate predictions of the future’s general landscape, but is also suffused with occult imagery and deep symbolic themes, as well as raising crucial moral and social issues.  As I will argue, the film operates on several levels: as the immediate story itself, the predictive future level with social critiques, the level of covert operations and mind control, and the deepest level, that of myths, archetypes, and alchemical occult initiatory transformation.  All these levels must be integrated to grasp the full import of the film as Ridley Scott conveys it.  The deepest level is what holds the other levels together in coherence and meaning.

As the film begins, the viewer is shown the 2020 landscape of Los Angeles, and then an eye viewing the landscape.  The eye represents the viewer, and just as I explained in my analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, the viewing of the film itself will constitute an initiatory experience.  The viewer is going to be shown the elite plan, yet the eyes of most will remain shut.  For the masses, there is no ability to make deeper level connections and associations between ideas, symbols and archetypes.  For the viewer who has eyes to see, they are seeing the future itself, as well as the worldview of the ruling class.  In fact, Blade Runner ranks with Eyes Wide Shut as one of the most explicit revelations of the method of the ruling oligarchs.  My interpretation of this is confirmed by the fact that the film doesn’t show us whose eye we see.  In fact, the reflection in the eye shows the scene the viewer just saw of the L.A. cityscape.

It is significant that we are presented with two shots of the eye and then the cut to the Tyrell corporation’s ziggurat/pyramid shape. Immediately we are presented with Egyptian symbology, as well as the notions of the so-called “Illuminati.” The all-seeing eye is flashed in between images of the exalted pyramid in order to initiate the viewer into who is running things.  This is the connection of imagery and meaning that most are not able to make. 

We are given hints as well that perhaps this is an ancient technology of dominance – the “technology of the gods.” In reality, the technology of the gods meme refers to the elite perspective of themselves and their “magickal” worldview: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke’s third law says.  The “god” is the one who controls the genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.  The cap of the pyramid is empty because the head of the system is secret.  It’s a shadow corporate government, where the eye floats above the pyramid itself.  The eye is thus above and transcends the externalization of the hierarchy on earth. 

Original DARPA “TIA” logo, echoing the Tyrell Corporation.

When the viewer approaches the pyramid in the open scene, it is engulfed in golden sunlight, conjuring up notions of Ra and Egypt.  The mysteries of Egypt center around the godlike philosopher king (Pharoah), as the material manifestation of Atum Ra, mirroring the spiritual hierarchy on the spiritual plane.  In this dystopian future, the Egyptian scheme is replaced by a corporate system.  The light is enlightening the viewer, taking him along for the ride in the flying car to the top of the pyramid.  In other words, for those that can see, you are about to see what they see.

We are then shown “Voight-Kampff” testing given to Leon, one of the Replicants, or advanced A.I. robots created by the Tyrell Corporation.  The test is designed to see if the possible Replicant has emotions, will and desire.  “Kampff” recalls Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his manifesto devoted to his struggle, characterized as one of will. Tyrell, we learn, has been in the business of developing assassination droids, sex droids, etc., yet some Replicants, however, do not know they are programmed with false memories and a false identity (which the BBC just reported in relation to DARPA). 

In this perspective, the Replicants seem to partly resemble the infamous plans of various states over the last century to create “supersoldiers,” or mind controlled assassins in operations like MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE.  With examples like Sirhan Sirhan, it would appear there was success, and it was in fact Nazi scientists, hearkening back to the Mein Kampf reference, who worked on such mind control projects, as well as the Soviets and the U.S.  “Roy Batty,” (played by Rutger Hauer) the “Nexus 6″ model and leader of the rebel Replicants is himself a supersoldier assassin, “more human than a human,” as Tyrell states.  The retinal image returns and this time it’s Leon Kowalski.  Leon is given the test and assassinates his tester at a certain point when the trigger words “tortoise” and “mother” are mentioned, signifying that in mind control, manipulation of symbols and Jungian archetypes is crucial. The tortoise is associated with Hermes/mercury, as I will show and which will be relevant later.

“Eye World”

The Replicants are given a four-year lifespan which allows Tyrell to have total control, keeping them from ever rebelling or having a lengthy time to work towards revolution.  Similarly, in real life the elite have always sought to control lifespans and populations through eugenics and full spectrum dominance.  It could also possibly have reference to the self-destruct programming in the mind controlled assassins to kill themselves rather than be interrogated and spill the beans.  In fact, in regard to Project ARTICHOKE, a memo is reported to read: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”

The viewer then hears advertisements from huge telescreens and billboards telling him that the system can take you “off world.”  The system thus holds out a hope of fulfillment in a heaven-like “golden” “off world” colony, much like states in the past have controlled their subjects through a non-existent hope.  The masses are thus weak, shifting sands, subject to the sway of childlike propaganda and psychological warfare.  From Plato’s Republic to August Comte’s notion of a purely civic religion, the idea of a state-controlled and created fake religion for the purpose of mass manipulation is an ancient foundational elite control mechanism. 

We also see Chinese businesses and foodstuffs everywhere, indicating that the U.S. has become a third world cesspool of globalism.The populace is thus managed by a top-down corporatocracy above, while below, a degenerate and poverty-stricken populace is blended together (Asians, Russians, etc.), and ruled by their corporate overlords. The future then, is a kind of intense corporate police state fascism, where everyone is tracked and traced, particularly by retina scans. Dragons are also seen everywhere in Chinatown, suggesting the control of the primeval serpent: a world run by the shadow corporatocracy is one where the iconography of the serpent dominates, conjuring up ancient archetypal imagery from Genesis where the serpent deceives man into thinking he can become god, which will be crucial to Blade Runner’s overall message. 

Deckard stands under a Pentagram, with a snake-eyed Pentagram in the background.

Indeed, globalism itself is partly used by the elite to wipe out the middle class and polarize the masses into a large swath of poor with a tiny cadre of super rich at the top.  Ironically, the corporate system itself mirrors the communist party system, where the CEO is the party leader, the shareholders party bosses, and the wage-slave populace working endlessly for nothing other than the furtherance of the system itself.  It is significant as well that we almost never see daytime in the film, aside from one scene.   Blade Runner takes place almost solely at night, possibly due to a wrecked corporate-controlled ecosystem that exists solely to serve the interests of the Tyrell Corporation. How prophetic, given the fact that China is busy buying up the U.S.?

Dick wisely places the corporation at the center of the future’s controlling power, giving it an “Illuminati” status, as opposed to some oppressive government or dictator. The future, for Dick, is controlled by a single global mega corporation, headed by a tech genius who happens to obtain a kind of godlike status by creating sentient beings in his own image (Replicants). This will be crucial for my analysis of the film’s underlying esoteric theme – that Blade Runner is a gnostic myth or allegory.  Recall as well that Ridley Scott used this same theme in Alien, where the future is controlled by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

Gaff’s Rooster.

Deckard is “handled” by a mysterious figure named Gaff (played by Edward James Olmos), who recalls Deckard from retirement to hunt down the Replicants.  We don’t learn much about Gaff, yet he does something very significant. Throughout the film, as he leads Deckard, he leaves origami figurines as symbolic indicators that reveal the method to Deckard himself. The first origami figure is the rooster: in Freemasonic initiations, the rooster is associated with Hermes/Mercurcy/Thoth, the guide to the Underworld and initiator of mysteries.  We have again returned to the initiatory theme.  Gaff is enlightening Deckard as well as the audience, as the eye, pyramid, snake, rooster are serving to tap into the archetypes in the psyche of the audience, enlightening the viewer to the mysteries of the elite.  According to the British Grand Lodge, the rooster is associated with alchemy:

“Mercury appears as the rooster drawn on the wall of the Chamber of Reflection. This animal is connected to the deity Hermes, that is, Mercury. It is a feminine principle, referring to Vigilance and it also corresponds to Faith. As the rooster sings at dawn announcing the light of day, so it announces to our future initiate, the Light he may receive.”

Alchemical woodcut of Hermes/Thoth/Mercury

An article on Greek and Indian mythology elucidates this connection well:

“Hermes often helped travelers have a safe and easy journey. Many Greeks would sacrifice to Hermes before any trip.  In the fully developed Olympian pantheon, Hermes was the son of Zeus and the Pleiade Maia, a daughter of the Titan Atlas. Hermes’ symbols were the rooster and the tortoise, and he can be recognized by his purse or pouch, winged sandals, winged cap and the herald’s staff, the kerykeion.”

Gaff (who carries a staff/cane) is leading Deckard all along, enlightening him to his true nature and, as will be seen, leading him to safe haven.  It is interesting as well that Tyrell’s pyramid/ziggurat resembles Mt. Olympus, and is full of Imperial and occult symbolism. Gaff, as the travelling messenger (Hermes/Thoth) of Olympus/Egypt takes Deckard to Tyrell, who can apparently only be accessed at the top of the pyramid by flying car.  The Owl, with prominent eye imagery, as well as a Masonic/Egyptian obelisk and a fascist Roman Eagle, all mark Tyrell’s golden kingdom. Deckard is informed he must hunt down the remaining Replicants, two of which are sex slaves and two assassins, two unknowns are Rachael (Sean Young) and Deckard himself. 

Is that a synthetic obelisk, or are you happy to see me?

Deckard is instructed to test Rachael with the Voight-Kampff test to see if he can detect emotions.  Rachael is identified as a Replicant after a hundred questions from the test, while Deckard realizes he has feelings for her.  Deckard is amazed that Rachael is unaware, and Tyrell explains the company implants false memories.  This becomes crucial in the analysis of the film, because the concept of forgetting one’s true origin is central to the gnostic cosmology.  In the process of the fall (in the gnostic and Platonic schemes), the many has lost its origin in the one, the monad.  The multiplicity of particulars are thus in a process of return to the monad from whence they have fallen into individuality. 

The microscopic serial number shows inside knowledge of nanotech in 1982.

In fact, in the next scene, Roy Batty is himself seeking out his creator by visiting the eye manufacturer.  When Roy finds him, he cites the famous gnostic mythological poems of William Blake, America A Prophecy and A Vision of the Last Judgment. Blake’s poem is a mythological account of the American revolution against King George III, presented as an anti-christ figure and emissary of Urizen, Blake’s view of the biblical God, portrayed as an old, miserly, vengeful deity.  Just as Orc rebelled against the King, and Lucifer against God, so Roy Batty will rebel against his creator, Tyrell, for allowing him to be created with a flaw.  Wikipedia explains:

“The implications of the work are taken up in America, with the King of England trembling as he sees Orc, the embodiment of the American colonies. The Angel of Albion believes Orc is the anti-christ and Orc believes the King of England is the same. This is followed by Orc’s apocalyptic vision:

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations

The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up

Orc provokes the Angel of Boston to rebellion:
What God is he, writes laws of peace, clothes him in a tempest

What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs

What crawling villain preaches abstinence; wraps himself In fat of lambs?

no more I follow, no more obedience pay

Together, the rebels are able to be freed of the psychological chains that bind them:

the five gates of their law-built heaven

And Roy Batty’s line:

“Fiery the angels rose, as they rose deep thunder roll’d

Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc.”

William Blake’s painting of the gnostic Great Architect deity.

The Orc recalls the rebellion of Satan and his angels against God for the purpose of erecting a model synthetic kingdom that mimics the kingdom of God.  This is significant, as much of Blade Runner centers around genetic engineering and synthetic reality, as we constantly see mannequins and dolls, especially in J.F. Sebastian’s studio loft. For example, the background includes Atari signs: Atari is a video game company—video games are synthetic, virtual reality. Tyrell’s company is a genetic engineering company, specializing in replicating reality to the point that when Deckard finds the scale from Zhora’s snake, he has to take it to a specialist to see if it’s real or synthetic.  Dick was amazingly prophetic in this regard, and not only was the foresight in regard to genetic manipulation prescient, the microscopic serial number on the snake scale even points to nanotechnology, far before it was well-known (in the Ted.com promo video of Scott’s at the bottom, Peter Weyland mentions nanotechnology). Zhora, too, is introduced as a stripper who “receives pleasure from the snake,” and Eden is specifically mentioned by the Fez-wearing Abdul.  The Fez, originally a Muslim symbol, is the headgear of the Shriners, made up of upper level Freemasons.

The Shriner Fez.

The next origami figure Gaff leaves is a man with an erect penis. The little figure signifies Deckard is about to confront another stage in his transformational process, particularly in his confrontation with Zhora, the woman united with the snake.  Zhora also performs her dance as Salome, the biblical character who seduces Herod and asks that he cut off the head of John the Baptist. In alchemy, the process of calcification involves union with the feminine principle to achieve synthesis and balance.  What has been divided must be united to find harmony and elevation to the next level: that of the Philosopher’s Stone, following the period of nigredo (blackness) and albedo (whiteness) prior to becoming gold.  Deckard is lacking his compliment, and must here confront the temptation of lust by the snake, if you will.  The spiritual version of alchemy, modelled on the chemical, involves the mastery of the passions by the will—apt for the character of Deckard who, himself a Replicant, is discovering that he doesn’t live, but is a slave of the system. Deckard is an Agent for the system itself, all the while being the very thing he is hunting! 

I only have red eyes for you, baby(bot).

When Deckard meets with Rachael at his apartment, it begins to become clearer that Deckard is a Replicant: at an emotional moment both his and Rachael’s eyes alight red with the trademark Replicant glow, right after Rachael inquires whether Deckard himself had ever taken the Voight-Kampff test.  The love scene follows, and Deckard unites with Rachael, completing the unification process in Deckard’s own psyche (though his own process is still unfinished).   Earlier, there was a mysterious scene where Deckard had fallen asleep playing the piano and dreamt of a unicorn. 

The mythical beast arises from Deckard’s robotic subconscious.

This is crucial, since the unicorn in alchemy signifies the Philosopher’s Stone itself. Deckard is dreaming of archetypal symbols related directly to alchemy, and this will become evident when Gaff leaves the final origami figurine: a unicorn.  This means Gaff knew all along what Deckard’s implanted memories were, which surfaced in his dreams. Deckard this second time falls asleep, but awakens to the sound of Rachael playing his piano, and he begins to realize that they thus both have similar implanted memories.  Carl Jung writes of the unicorn, also associated with Mercury as follows:

“The unicorn in alchemy: The example of the Unicorn is chosen to demonstrate how the symbolism of Mercury is intermingled in the traditions of pagan gnosticism and the Christian Church.  As the unicorn is not a single, clearly identified entity, more specific concern is centered on the beast with a single horn (the alicorn).  Examples are given from the literature, especially the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencrantz), in which the unicorn, the lion and the dove appear, all of these being symbols of Mercury.  Reference is also made to medieval art in which images of the virgin and the unicorn appear. These images are said to represent the dual aspect of Mercury: the virgin as the passive, feminine aspect of the unicorn, and the unicorn or lion as the wild, rampant, masculine force….References from the Church fathers are variously given in which the unicorn is identified with the God of the Old Testament or Christ. It is pointed out that there are ecclesiastical quotations in which the unicorn is said to carry the element of evil.  It is this inner contradiction that makes the unicorn an appropriate symbol to be used by alchemists’ monstrum hermaphroditum. [the hermaphrodite – a key stage of unification in the alchemical process]” 

Get your first 20 Glamour Shots free!

Remember that when Roy Batty saves Deckard from the precipice, his palm is nailed in a Christ-like fashion, while he sets free a dove—another Mercurial image.  Lest anyone think this is a stretch, this is exactly the same idea in Ridley Scott’s Legend, where the unicorn plays a central role in precisely this alchemical and gnostic scheme.  In fact, Legend is entirely focused on dualism, where good and evil cyclically and eternally battle for “balance,” in contrast to a linear biblical view of time. Consider also Ridley Scott’s new Prometheus and Alex Jones’ stellar analysis of its themes and meanings, which fit perfectly with Blade Runner’s transhumanism:

When Pris and Roy enquired of Sebastian how to get access to Tyrell, the Masonic double-headed eagle is visible.  In this scene, Pris is debating her ontological status, and says, “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes’ famous cogito.  The question of what it means to be a human—to be a puppet, a slave, a programmed drone thus runs throughout the film. On the level of social criticism and futurism, it is asking the viewer to question their own enslavement to the Tyrell Corporation, as well as transhumanism and biometrics’ desire to transcend the human and become like God.  The double-headed eagle signifies elite management through mastery of dualities and dialectics. 

Note the double-headed 33rd degree eagle in the fireplace.

In fact, the double-headed eagle is even visible with the triangle above it, distinguishing it from the older, Byzantine Imperial double-headed eagle without the triangle.  Note as well that Batty is playing chess for Sebastian with Tyrell, and chess is a game of strategy based on a dualistic scheme: black versus white.  Sebastian, we discover, has Methuselah syndrome, which makes him look old, while only being twenty-five.  Order out of chaos.

33rd Degree Scottish Rite Double-headed Eagle.

In the gnostic cosmology, the creator demiurge (the evil tyrannical entity) co-creates with other archons, and in the Blade Runner mythos, J.F. Sebastian is the “dollmaker” for Tyrell, the distant, uninvolved, unknown deity—the Deus Absconditus. Sebastian has also created a Pinocchio-looking von Bismarck, which is fitting since Pinocchio wanted to be a “real boy.”

Pinocchio von Bismarck?

Sebastian is a bumbling fool who serves the uncaring tyrant Tyrell, and so is associated with a lesser archon.  In Plato’s mythology (from which gnosticism in part derives), certain gods are involved in creating certain things, such as man’s body, the world, etc.  Batty, on his tirade to live forever, kills both Sebastian and Tyrell, whom he calls “Father,” after confessing his “sins” and being called a “prodigal son.”  The biblical imagery is prevalent, but more consistent in a gnostic reworking than in any kind of traditional biblical scheme, especially given all the Egyptian and Masonic symbolism.  

“Owl I want is to be a real boy!”

The logo of the Tyrell Corporation is the Owl.  The owl is associated with Athena, as well as Illuminism and The Bohemian Grove.  This imagery represents the actual Illuminists who control the planet in a corporate slavegrid. 

Technology is the application of will and desire towards matter to bring about a desired effect: technology arises out of chemistry, which arises from alchemy.  The process of history from this perspective is one of evolutionary process toward rapid mechanization and transcending of bodily limitations. 

Roy “Bat/bird-shit Crazy” Batty

Keeping with the Masonic theme, the death of Roy Batty includes a shot with an interesting “X” pose. It is the pose of the dead Pharoah, the philosopher king. The famous Lodge of the new world, America, was St. Andrew’s, which issued ”Knight’s Templar” degrees in 1769.  The 17th degree ritual utilizes the ”X” cross symbolism, which is also the cross of Scotland, home of the Scottish Rite, and which is symbolized by the double-headed eagle above. 

Just as 2001: A Space Odyssey features man in an evolutionary battle with artificial intelligence for the next level of apotheosis, so Blade Runner presents Deckard and Rachael as a kind of new Adam and Eve who are freed from the prison of this system by Gaff and finally, Roy Batty, a sort of gnostic anti-savior who stirs up Deckard’s will to be free and live.  Roy has killed Tyrell and saves Deckard from death just before his own “retirement.”  Deckard then escapes in the final scene with the help of Gaff, who leaves an origami unicorn showing both that Deckard had found freedom and that Gaff wouldn’t retire him as the sixth Replicant.  The alchemical process is complete: Deckard has found his oppositional union in Rachael, and escapes.  And to be clear, Ridley scott confirmed Deckard was a Replicant in a 2007 New York Times article: “Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”

The Germanic elements of the film are also worth considering, such as Roy Batty’s Aryan look,  Voight-Kampff, the Illuminati arising out of Bavaria, and the Otto von Bismack look of the doll, as well as the double-headed eagle as used by the Austrian Empire (the supposed continuation of “the Holy Roman Empire”), and Leon Kowalski living at “Hunterwasser Hotel” (Hunterwasser was a German architecht who favored monarchy and Otto von Hapsburg).  In fact, at the end, Batty mentions the “Tannhauser Gate” (presumably a Star gate?), and Tannhauser was written of course by Wagner, the Reich’s musician.   

Prometheus steals fire from the gods.

Purveyors of the Western occult tradition will be familiar with the notion of the golem – the idea of creating a ‘robot man’ with the ability to perform certain activities. Such a feat has been the goal of many esoteric aspirants and in our day is beginning to become a reality. Dick foresaw this and thus the film is pregnant with this notion, as well as the deeper, esoteric notion of the creation rebelling against its apparently deistic, absent creator god (Tyrell). As with “David” in A.I. (the Spielberg/Kubrick film), or Data in Star Trek, the Nexus 6 Replicants are the first to develop actual emotions.  The gnostic deity is removed from creation – he is an architect who works with already existing prima materia (and prima materia is essential to alchemy); not a Creator ex nihilo and that is precisely how that being is presented in Blake’s famous painting. Hollywood has pushed these notions for decades now because these are the real issues of our day. 

Blade Runner is a story of what it means to be human, what it means to die, and whether death can eventually be cheated, as the elites believe, through alchemical technological transhumanism.  The viewer has been taken on a ride–an initiatory journey like Deckard, and shown the methodology and worldview of the elite themselves, in what H.G. Wells termed the “open conspiracy,” providing one has eyes to see, of course (and they don’t remain wide shut).  We are, then, ever in the garden as Adam and Eve were, and this is what Ridley Scott wants us to ponder.  In this way, the highest levels of Illuminism are revealed (and yet concealed) in that the ancient mysteries signify alchemical and technological transformation into extended life and the search for the fire of the gods and immortality: the story of Prometheus.

And here is an hour-long interview with Mary Sean Young, female lead of Blade Runner (Rachael) on conspiracies:

The iconic Connery in Dr. No.

I’m posting the introduction to my master’s thesis, for anyone interested.  Comments and criticisms welcomed.

 007 AS THE EMBODIMENT OF THE ANGLO-ESTABLISHMENT’S MYSTICAL IMPERIALISM

By: Jay

Ian Fleming’s James Bond is one of the most recognizable and successful characters in modern popular culture.  The novels have sold over 100 million copies, and the film franchise is the second most successful in history, having been recently displaced by the Harry Potter series.  For most readers and viewers, 007 is merely a Western pop icon. However, there is much more at work in the novels and films than appears on the surface.  In fact, there are deeper undercurrents, themes, symbols, and messages that operate as psychological warfare propaganda and an in-depth semiotic analysis of the novels and films yields an interpretation that confirms this thesis.  Much has been written on the subject of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. From Umberto Eco’s older essay “Narrative Structures in Fleming” to Christoph Linders’ modern collections The James Bond Phenomenon and Revisioning 007: James Bond and Casino Royale, there is a wealth of critical work on capitalist/consumerist, imperialist, gender, and racial analyses in the books and films.  In this wealth of criticism, key elements have been ignored that will here be explored.

     The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader features Tony Bennett and Janet Woolacott’s article “The Moments of Bond,” which chronicles the rise of the franchise in terms of marketing and sales as well as the zeitgeist of Western Imperial capitalism and the sixties sexual revolution that propelled Bond to international fame.  Michael Denning’s “Licensed to Look” analyzes the consumerism that fueled Fleming and Bond and the mythical qualities Bond embodies that form a potent combination with the espionage genre.  Denning focuses on “eye” imagery and its utilization by film media as a particularly potent manipulative semiotic device.[1]  Linder offers an overview of criminology and the “global conspiracy” evolution the franchise exemplifies concurrent with the socio-political threats of the respective decades of Bond releases.  Particular attention is given to the Cold War and Bond “saving Britain’s image.”[2]

Cultural impact studies have been done with James Chapman’s License to Thrill and Edward Comentale’s Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007.  Chapman gives an analysis of different elements and themes in choice Bond installments, including the literary setting (detective novels) for Fleming’s early stories, the fact that Bond was first published in Playboy, comparisons of the early films with Alfred Hitchcock’s works, and the oft-repeated attempt to resurrect British Imperialism.  Chapman moves on to consider the reason for the franchise’s success, making no definitive statement about whether “Bondmania” is the result of the zeitgeist or the development and advancement of the film industry, or both.  “Bondmania” was well in place by 1964, and from there, Bond would dominate the sixties and make his way to American theaters, ultimately to become an international icon.  Chapman continues with analysis of the propaganda for imperialism and of Bond as the preeminent Cold Warrior.  Attention is largely given to Bond in comparison with other action films and heroes, but little attention is given to the deeper, mythical elements.   

Edward Comentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman’s Ian Fleming & James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 is a collection of articles similar to those of Linder.  Comentale’s article centers around the process of Bond in relation to the rise of corporatism and managerial control.  Bond is an example of modernity and, as such, simultaneously represents a rebellion against hierarchy, and the rise of a new, ensconced hierarchy that turns in on itself and eliminates the avant-garde nature of the early Bond.  The character of Bond becomes the corporate, company man. Comentale’s treatment also highlights the “Fleming Effect,” brought to light in the work of Kingsley Amis (The James Bond Dossier), which is Ian Fleming’s unique method of describing the fantastical in real terms.[3]

Bond has thus been explained from perspectives of imperialism, sexism, and racialism.  Toby Miller in his “James Bond’s Penis” argues that phallocentrism in Fleming functions as a form of propaganda in both book and film.  Joyce Goggin’s and Rene Glas’s “It Just Keeps Getting Bigger: James Bond and the Political Economy of Huge” treats the connection of Bond narratives and their constant presentation of largess and the ever-increasing capitalist consumerism and its obsession with largess. Linder’s “Why Size Matters” works from Slajov Zizek’s view of Blofeld, arguing forcefully that Bond is a representation of global capitalism as a force for the West’s ever-increasing expansionist attitude and wasteful consumption.  Blofeld and the Soviets are defective and thus economically useless, leading Bond and the West to become a force for modern global imperialism.[4] Even here there is still no analysis of the prevalent themes of eugenics, occultism, and phallic homosocial dominance and their interrelationships.[5]

Claire Hines contributes to the same collection a comparison of Bond and Sean Connery with the rise of Playboy Magazine and the popularity of both concomitant with the hedonism of the sexual revolution, with Bond adopting a Hugh Hefner image.  At the same time, Playboy was printing Fleming’s stories.  Of particular relevance is Cynthia Baron’s essay “Doctor No: Bonding Britishness to Racial Sovereignty,” which correctly identifies examples of racial supremacy evident in the novels. Baron uses Dr. No as her exemplar, yet, as I will argue, she fails to recognize British eugenics as the real impetus, and she misses Live and Let Die as a more potent example of racial supremacy. Colleen Tremonte and Linda Racioppi analyze the use of Bond’s body and sexuality in “Body Politics and Casino Royale: Gender and (Inter)national Security” in Linder’s collection.  Tremonte and Racioppi correctly associate Bond’s own body as the incarnation of British national imperialism and its identification with the masculine and the identification of the feminine with the “object of desire.”[6]

In “James Bond, Cyborg Aristocrat,” Patrick O’Donnell surveys the interplay between Bond and technology, correctly describing him as more machine than human.  The ever-present technological gadgetry in Bond warns of the determinacy of the displacement of the human with the robotic.  This is useful insofar as Bond is presented as a machine beyond good and evil, which is the argument of Ishay Landa in “James Bond: A Nietzschean for the Cold War.”[7]  This appears contradictory, as Landa portrays Bond as an anti-elitist whose missions are represented as “good” British elitism which thwarts Blofeld’s evil Nieztscheanism.[8] However, Bond is beyond the common man’s binary moral schema, and formulates his own volitional will-to-power morality.  As Bond declares at the close of Casion Royale following upon the death of his love interest, Vesper Lynd: “Pass this on at once: 3030 was a double, working for Redland…..Yes dammit, I said ‘was.’  The bitch is dead now.”[9]

Aaron Jaffe discusses the marketing of brand names and the explosion of Bond memorabilia consumerism in “James Bond, Meta-Brand.”[10]  Product placement itself and advertising become intertwined with the film experience, which can relate directly to the use of psychological warfare and propaganda.  I will argue that along with such manipulation, the character of Bond himself becomes an advertisement for nostalgic British Imperialism.  This is effective in the Bond character because, as Drew Moniot argues, the novels and films are able to “dig deep into the sociological self-conscious of the audience….The screenwriters took every possible opportunity to mirror and satirize this nation’s [America] fears, misgivings, interests, pastimes, and values.”[11]  Moniot concludes the film formula “is cultural; it represents the way in which a culture has embodied both mythical archetypes and its own preoccupations in narrative form.”[12]

Political and espionage-focused analyses are available in Jeremy Black’s James Bond and Political Philosophy.  Black correctly identifies the eugenics theme present, for example in Goldfinger.  He writes:

Goldfinger was personally disordered, with a misproportioned body, not English, a “Balt” with possible Jewish blood, and psychologically warped—in part, Bond feels, due to his short man’s inferiority complex. “Napoleon had been short, and Hitler.  It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”  Such characterization reflected both racialism and crude psychology.  Like much imaginative literature earlier in the century, Fleming had been influenced by the popularity of eugenic assumptions.  Ironically, in Live and Let Die, although the villain’s first name was Buonaparte, Mr. Big had “huge height and bulk.”[13]

And later, the Zorin character from A View to Kill states: “In a variant of The Boys From Brazil, he was a product of Nazi eugenics, born in Germany as part of an attempt to create a race of superhumans.  This, at once, links him with Drax, another manipulator of genetics.”[14]  Black’s passing references deserve a more indepth treatment of eugenics in the Bond novels, and the connection with psychological warfare. Moonraker, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Live and Let Die are of particular relevance for eugenic considerations.

From a literary perspective, when Fleming’s secret agent first appeared, he did not have a favorable critical appraisal. This changed when world-renowned literary critic, semiotician, and author Umberto Eco analyzed Fleming’s novels,[15] giving them attention in academic literary circles.  Eco’s analysis helped gain them literary respectability, at the same time hinting at deeper meanings and subtle clues about the Manichaean structures and other patterns they contain, such as the “purifying process” that Bond creates in saving the sexually deviant women, leading to a unification of opposites, yet which leaves the “race uncontaminated.”[16]    This is a crucial eugenics concept. Eco is presently one of the world’s foremost “Bondologists,” demonstrating the popularity of, and thus confirming, the tremendous possibility for utilizing Bond as imperial propaganda.  Prior to such attention, such usage would not originally have seemed possible.[17]

Although Fleming himself hinted at the reality of the Bond stories and these deeper connotations of mystical imperialism,[18] as the films were produced and became increasingly popular, the possibilities for the use of such imagery as propaganda mounted.  Jeremy Black cites the Soviet organ Pravda as a perfect example of the anti-Western view of Bond:

His [Bond's] creator is Ian Fleming, who posed as The Times correspondent in Russia in 1939 but was in truth a spy for the capitalist nations.  Although he is now dead, James Bond cannot be allowed to die because he teaches those sent to kill in Vietnam, the Congo, and Dominican Republic and many other places.  It is no accident that the sham agents of Soviet couner-intelligence, represented in caricature form, invariably figure in the role of Bond’s opponents, because Bond kills right and left the men Fleming wanted to kill—Russians, Reds, and Yellows.  Bond is portrayed as a sort of white archangel, destroying the impure races.

The Bond cult started in 1963 when American leader John F. Kennedy, unsuspecting that some American hero with the right to kill would shoot him, too, declared that Fleming’s books were his bedside reading.  As if by a magic wand, everyting changed.  The mighty forces of reaction immediately gave the green light to Fleming.  And in James Bond he has created a symbol of the civilization which has used bombs to drown the voice of conscience.  The men and women who allow their talents to be used in the making of films about the exploits of this man are guilty of furthering the aims of the Western Capitalists.[19]

The Soviets were thus prompted by Bond to respond with their own psychological warfare propaganda and analysis in the KGB-run magazine Pravda.  They were also correct in noting the racial and imperial undertones in Bond, yet here fall short of detailing either eugenics, Freemasonry or phallocentrism and their interrelation as the undercurrents.

Fleming’s novels and their film counterparts (especially so) are produced with the intent of illustrating an overarching story of the continuance of the Anglo-Establishment’s mystical, destined world supremacy, even with the historic decline of the British Empire. The narratives include the propaganda tactic of displacement, where immoral acts done by one side are blamed upon the enemy.  This thesis will examine the symbolism of the novel and film versions of Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service for their usage of eugenics, occultism, and phallocentrism.  Since the novels are, in places, a bit different from the films, all four books and films will be analyzed, with an emphasis on Bond as the icon of propaganda.  These four have been chosen as the best examples of occult propaganda for this form of eugenicist imperialism.

When the novels were adapted to screen, some details are altered for the purpose of historical relevance, and often these changes and details are significant.  The themes of mystical imperialism and Bond as the incarnate overman unify the entire narrative, but it is crucial to actually view the imagery in the films to understand the propaganda and its usage. “Mystical imperialism” is described by researchers Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould as follows (citing the literary example of imperialism par excellance, Rudyard Kipling):

As the end of the nineteenth century approached, that [foreordained British] destinty seemed more and more to favor Britain’s ambitions to empire and and no one better than Rudyard Kipling would capture the longing for conquest and spiritual fulfillment divine right brought with it….On a mystical level, their quests [Peachey and Carnahan of The Man Who Would Be King] to be come kings of Kafiristan brought them into realms more in keeping with the spiritual goal of the British Empire to weave the light of heaven and the darkness of earth together through an earthly conquest.[20]

This mystical warfare between light and dark is mentioned by Eco in his essay as a Manichaean form of dialectical propaganda.[21]  Indeed, Fleming’s Bond novels share the same Freemasonic connections and symbols with those of Kipling.  Historian Niall Ferguson traces the British eugenics movement and its connections to the royal societies and Cecil Rhodes, with support from the Rothschilds, that served in part as the basis for the 19^th century British Imperial motivation.[22]  Not only do Ian Fleming’s novels portray this model of white British racial supremacy, but there is evidence to suggest that Fleming himself was influenced by eugenics (as critic Jeremy Black claims above), given the presentation of Bond, as well as the contents of Fleming’s personal library which contained numerous well-known treatises on eugenics and racial supremacy.

Included in Fleming’s private collection are rare editions of the Comte de Gobineau’s four volume Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines, an early eugenics work; Hitler’s Mein Kampf;  Sir Francis Galton’s Fingerprints, forming the basic outline of British eugenics; and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Master Race, devoted to Germanic racial supremacy.[23]  Evidence also suggests Fleming’s own special operations groups Assault Unit 30 and T-Force were very likely part of Operations PAPERCLIP and SURGEON, which led to the arrest and utilization of hundreds of Nazi scientists in the United States, England, and Russia, including the inventor of the V-2 rocket, Werner von Braun.[24]  This operation bears striking resemblances to Fleming’s 1955 novel Moonraker, which centers around former SS member Hugo Drax and secret rocket technology. While it is admittedly speculation based upon his personal collection and associations with PAPERCLIP, the tenor of the novels, and Live and Let Die in particular, demonstrate this racialist attitude.

Propaganda and psychological warfare using the arts are nothing more than the manipulation of symbols, and it is highly significant that Ian Fleming worked for years as the British Navy’s Political Warfare Executive, specializing in propanda, psychological warfare and rumors, becoming a “major force in British Intelligence.”[25] The film versions are crucial for semiotics due to the focus on the image of Bond, and that image’s promotion of a certain set of values for consumer consumption, as Michael Denning remarks in his “Licensed to Look: Jamed Bond and the Heroism of Consumption.”  However, to fill a gap in the available research, the thesis of this paper will be that Bond constitutes an iconic embodiment of the British establishment’s belief in its own destined supremacy.  From the time of Elizabeth I and her court astrologer, Dr. John Dee, the first “007,” to Cecil Rhodes and the Royal Society, the British Empire sought to fulfill the national myth of its own destined racial supremacy.[26]  Previous Bond research has not fully examined the philosophical implications of a national narrative that includes the idea of an alchemical, occult summation of a kind of Nietzschean overman, incarnate in the character of Fleming’s Bond.

Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen was written with the intention of exalting Britain as the legitimate successor to the previous world empires.[27]  Greece gave way to Rome, and Rome gave way to Britannia, according to the mythology of the Faerie Queen.  By the 1950s, the era of Fleming, a national hero archetype was needed to serve as a propagandist image of the belief in that perpetual dominance. Critics like Richard Carpenter and Drew Moniot have even comapred Bond to mythological characters like Hercules, with “M” functioing like the high deity and Q (of the Equipment Branch) being a version of Hephaestus.[28]  Bond researcher Philip Gardiner makes a host of claims about Fleming’s interests in the occult, arguing that there are patterns of alchemical and Masonic associations and references purposefully placed in the novels and films.  Gardiner is correct in tracing the lineage of 007 to John Dee[29] in The Bond Code: The Dark World of Ian Fleming and James Bond, and gives a masterful analysis of the occultism in Live and Let Die, but never connects these ideas to propaganda, race and eugenics.

This thesis will make the case for the specific occultic British Imperial message that gradually emerges in the Fleming Bond novels and films.  Fleming himself must also be examined since his was  an upper class family where members worked in British Intelligence and propaganda.  Fleming married into the aristocracy,[30] all of which forms some basis for the character of Bond.[31]  Intelligence agencies have long used media and films for propaganda, from Operation MOCKINGBIRD, to the present day modus operandi of the Pentagon.[32]  The utilization of the Fleming franchise as propaganda was no different when Bond expanded to Hollywood.  I argue that themes such as Western capitalism, secret societies such as Freemasonry, alchemy, racism and eugenics, male social dominance and psychological warfare tactics of displacement (the tactic of blaming one’s own black operations on the enemy) are the crucial purposes and effects of the Bond stories themselves.  What emerges is a specific worldview of British Imperial supremacy with Bond as its alchemical summation—a veritable philosopher’s stone, completing the “great work” that Fleming and those in his aristocratic circles found so fascinating.[33]  MI6 historian and British Intelligence Specialist Dr. Stephen Dorrrill writes:

The modern conception of the world of the secret intelligence services and assassinations derives partly from the fictionalised activities of James Bond.  The licensed-to-kill operative is the model for the secret service agent of the public’s imagination.  While this is fantasy, the former naval Intelligence and one-time MI6 asset Ian Fleming based the plots and details for his 007 books on incidents in his own life and information he picked up during his career in the secret world.  However fantastic the story, there is always an element of truth in Bond.[34]

While it may seem highly speculative to deal with matters that are arguably “conspiratorial,” it should be remembered that the field of espionage is inetricably bound up in conspiracy, and this is no different for espionage fiction.[35]  As Fleming himself famously stated, “Everything I write has precedent in truth.”[36]

Primary Bibliography

Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale (New York: Penguin, 1953).

Casino Royale. Dir. Martin Campbell. Perf. Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen and Judi Dench. Eon Productions, 2006.

_____. Live and Let Die (New York: Penguin, 1954).

Live and Let Die. Dir. Guy Hamilton.  Perf. Roger Moore and Jane Seymour.  Danjaq and Eon Productions, 1973.

_____. Moonraker (New York: Penguin, 1955).

Moonraker. Dir. Lewis Gilbert. Perf. Roger Moore and Michael Lonsdale.  Danjaq and Eon Productions, 1979.

_____. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (New York: Penguin, 1963).

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Dir. Peter R. Hunt.  Perf. George Lazenby, Diana Rigg and Telly Savalas.  Danjaq and Eon Productions, 1969.

Secondary Bibliography

Alford, Matthew. “A Propaganda Model for Hollywood.” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. Vol. 6, No. 2 (2009), 144-56.

Amis, Kingsley.  The James Bond Dossier (New York: Signet, 1965).

Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency – America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

Belfield, Richard. A Brief History of Hitmen and Assassinations: An Expose of Political Hits, Killers and their Paymasters (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2005).

Black, Jeremy. The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s Novels to the Big Screen  (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

_____. “What Can We Learn From James Bond?” History News Network. Web. January 24, 2006. <http://hnn.us/articles/3556.html>

Cabell, Craig.  Ian Fleming’s Secret War (Barnsley, England: Pen & Sword Military, 2008).

Chandler, Daniel.  “Semiotics for Beginners: Introduction.” Aberystwyth University. Web. <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html>.

Chapman, James. Liscense to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: I.B. Taurus, 1999).

“CIA Reveals James Bond-like Spy Gadgets.” Indian Expres. Web. Feb. 23, 2011. <http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cia-reveals-james-bondlike-spy-gadgets/753731/>.

Corera, Gordon. The Art of Betrayal: Life and Death in the British Secret Service (London: Weidfield and Nicolson, 2011).

David Earnest and James N. Rosenau. “The Spy Who Loved Globalization.” Foreign Policy, No. 120 (Sept.-Oct. 2000), 88-90.

Dorril, Stephen. MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Service (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Dulles, Allen. The Craft of Intelligence (Guilford, CT: The Globe Pequot Press, 2006).

Duns, Jeremy. “The Secret Origins of James Bond.” Spywise.net. Web.  <http://www.spywise.net/pdf/wheatley_spywise_final.pdf>.

Dupre, Louis. Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (Chelsea, MI: Yale University Press, 1993).

Edward Comentale, Stephen Watt, and Skip Willman, Eds. Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005).

Garner, Dwight.  “Floating a Wild Plan and a Dead Man to Defeat the Nazis.” The New York Times. Web. May 11, 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/books/12book.html>.

Godzic, Wieslaw. “Iconolographic-Iconologic Method in Film Research.” Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1981), 151-7.

Kackman, Michael. “Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Summer 2007), 71-72.

Gardiner, Philip.  The Bond Code: The Dark World of Ian Fleming and James Bond (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2008).

Heale, Elizabeth.  The Faerie Queen: A Reader’s Guide (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

Hoffman, Michael A. Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (Oregon: Independent Press, 2005).

Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments  (Stanford, CA: Stanford, University Press, 2002).

Jacob Held and James South. Eds. James Bond and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2006).

“James Bond in the Cold War.” BBC. Web. May 24, 2009. <http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A51925962>.

Jenkins, Tricia. “James Bond’s ‘Pussy’ and Anglo-American Cold War Sexuality.” Journal of American Culture, Vol. 28, No. 3  (September, 2003), 309-17.

Kelley, Brian. “The Movie Breach: A Personal Perspective.” Studies in Intelligence. Web. March 25, 2008. <https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-52-no-1/the-movie-breach-a-personal-perspective.html>.

Levenda, Peter. Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft Vol. II: A Warm Gun (Trine Day Books, 2007).

Levenda, Peter. Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult (New York: Avon Books, 1995).

Lidner, Christoph. Ed. The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader  (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009).

_____. Revisioning 007: James Bond and Casino Royale (New York: Wallflower Press, 2009).

Lycett, Andrew.  Ian Fleming (London: Orion Books, 1995).

MacIntyre, Ben. For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond (New York: Bloomsbury Books, 2008).

Master, Anthony.  The Man Who Was M: The Life of Maxwell Knight, The Real-Life Spymaster Who Inspired Ian Fleming (London: Grafton Publishing, 1986).

McKay, Sinclair. The Man with the Golden Touch: How the Bond Films Conquered the World (New York: Overlook Press, 2008).

Moniot, Drew. “James Bond and America in the Sixties: An Investigation of the Formula Film in Popular Culture.” Journal of the University Film Association, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer 1976), 25-33.

Palmer, William J. “Spies and Their Novelists.” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Autumn 2006), 497-501.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. “Mystical Imperialism: Afghanistan’s Ancient Role.” Invisible History. Web. (2009). <http://www.invisiblehistory.com/the-books/mystical-imperialism/>.

Prouty L. Fletcher. The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008).

Quigley, Carroll.  Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: MacMillan, 1966).

Richelson, Jeffrey T.  The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Westview Books, 2002).

Riffee, Mark. “CIA Pitches Scripts to Hollywood.”  Wired Magazine. Web. September 16, 2011. <http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/cia-pitches-hollywood/>.

Roberts, Brian.  Cecil Rhodes: Flawed Colossus (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987).

Shaw, Tony. “The Politics of Cold War Culture.” Journal of Cold War Stories, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Fall, 2001), 59-76.

Robert Toplin and Oliver Stone. Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History and Controversy (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2000).

Waller, Douglas. Wild Bill Donovan  (New York: The Free Press, 2011).

Williams, Hugo. “Pornography and Light Sadism With Ian Fleming.” The New Yorker. March 22, 2002. <http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2008/05/pornography-and.html>.

Yates, Dame Frances.  The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1972).

"Have ya paid yer dues?"
"Yeah, the check's in the mail!"

By: Jay

 Big Trouble in Little China is another one of those goofy 80s films that you’re presently assuring yourself has no deeper relevance. You’re smugly saying, “Oh come on Jay, seriously? Another 80s esoteric analysis of something completely silly, like BTILC?” Well, dear reader, let me assure you of your error, and further promise to deliver juicy esoteric tidbits to sate your hunger as you journey on. Consider the opening scene that Fox mandated be added (where Egg Shen recounts the adventures of Jack Burton).  The actor is Jerry Hardin who played “Deep Throat” early on in the X-Files. Interestingly, the ambiguous government agent played here is similar to Deep Throat. What is also interesting is the obelisk on the desk behind him, initiating the viewer into what will be an occult journey.

Egg Shen reveals that the tale ahead will be one of Chinese “sorcery and black magic.” As proof, Egg Shen offers typical 80s blue lightning, of the Force variety. According to IMDB, the Chinese script in the beginning title sequence reads, “Evil spirits make a big scene in little spiritual state,” meaning the film will feature the primeval ancient religious tradition of the higher aeons or gods incarnating themselves in lower, visible, solid forms. This is almost universal in ancient cultures, from Greece and Rome, to China, and lends credence to the view that polytheism and monotheism come from a single religious tradition, as described in Genesis 1-12.

Note also that Egg Shen conceives of the usage of good and evil magic by both sides. Magic, in this view, may be used by the dark side and the light side, in what the dualistic scheme of most world religions views as the ultimate template for all reality. Eastern religions in particular have this dualistic focus, with the binary opposition never being transcended in this life, apart from “enlightenment” that results in some kind of dissolution or absolving into “pure being,” “thusness” or “nirvana,” or some state of being beyond the present world, which is often identified as “evil” and the domain of the fallen spirits and demons. The problem with this type of worldview is that it is self-defeating and contradictory. It claims to seek transcendence of the material and of all binary opposition, but its answer is to seek it in absolute impersonality. Since particularity and form in this world are the sources of “evil,” all particulars must dissolve. The result is monism and collectivism, and the history of eastern cultures demonstrates this enslavement clearly.

I also came to the same conclusion one writer for Huffington Post did: Jack Burton represents Amerika in its modern, aberrant and excessive forms. Jack Burton drives a truck—nothing is more typical of the blue-collar Amerikan man—and is not very intelligent. In fact, in production he was described as a moronic John Wayne. He is self-absorbed, had several wives, eats junk food and acts more or less like a pig, which is why he drives the “Pork Chop Express.” Consider as well that the pig is, in Jewish law, unclean: A perfect image of unbridled consumerism whose worldview is based on cliché one liners and catchphrases. As Jack arrives in Chinatown, director John Carpenter shows several shots of animals (humans are often likened to animals before the gods), calling to mind that Jack is in the wild. And not only is he in the wild, leaving civilization, he is about to enter the Underworld. Not just the Underworld of Asian crime, but the actual Underworld of the dead, as is often found in myths like Orpheus or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or even the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

"Deep Throat" has a Masonic obelisk. The beginning of a series of occult/phallic references.

There are also plenty of stereotypes and phallic references, such as “Wang” and “Jack.” Butterfly imagery appears early on in the background cluing the viewer into the transformational nature of the coming journey. Not only does alchemy have an ancient pedigree in the West, it has just as elaborate a history in the Orient, and here we will see Jack engage on a transformational odyssey of his own. Does this signal Amerika’s own alchemical journey into a hellish control of the Underworld as an alchemical purifying process? Indeed, we do see Amerika collapsing into just such a situation.

At the airport, Jack and Wang bump into a version of the Triads, the “Lords of Death,” emphasizing the spiritual nature of the Underworld journey Jack is about to embark on. The Lords of Death are the gods who rule in this dual nature Underworld: of both crime and hell. In the airport, Jack meets “Gracie Law,” played by Kim Cattrall. The dualism present in her name is evident, as Amerikan Christian religion, especially in the Pauline tradition, has always been in a state of binary oppositional tension between “grace” and “law.” Wang is there to pick up Miao Yin, his bride, and synchronicity ensues in the fact that Gracie Law also has green eyes. Miao Yin is kidnapped by the gang and taken into Lo Pan’s sex trade operation, we later learn. Her name is interesting in that it also hearkens to dualism, while Miao recalls Mao Tse Dong, the communist leader who utilized dialectics, and “yin” which refers to the feminine, unseen principle, and “yang” to the complimentary masculine principle. It also refers to earth and sky.

The common symbol of Eastern religions signifying dualism/dualties. The dualism theme is common in Hollywood films, as well as in the occult.

Next, a seemingly incoherent scene happens where two rival street gangs based on actual Chinatown gangs (the Hip Sing and the On Leong Tong gangs), wherein Lo Pan appears in his “atomized” form and sends blinding light into Jack Burton’s eyes. Lucifer is spoken of in Christian Scripture as appearing as an “angel of light,” as well as the “bright and morning star.” Following upon this scene, Jack and Wang enter a succession of events that seem to not make sense chronologically. There isn’t much coherence, as they seem to walk in and out of the spiritual world, with demons and spirits appearing and disappearing on a whim. Jack has been blinded by Lo Pan in order to have his eyes opened to the spiritual realm—something also very similar to the tradition of Paul the Apostle in Acts.

References are also made to Dante’s Inferno and/or Purgatio, as Jack and Wang begin to encounter different sins or vices on their journey into the Underworld. Wang had described to Jack that there are different Chinese levels to hell, including the “hell of boiling oil,” “upside down sinners,” etc., all of which hearken to Dante’s different levels of hell and purgatory. In fact, the journey is very similar to two Chinese tracts that describe the journey into the Underworld: The Jade Record and Journeys to the Under-world. First, however, Jack and Wang encounter Lust in the whorehouse, which is very similar to Dante’s first level of hell. In the whorehouse, Jack requests a green-eyed girl, and instead, a massive green supernatural storm arises. This storm is in fact a gateway where Lo Pan’s three lesser gods, who resemble characters from Mortal Kombat. Jade is relevant, as it is associated with the Jade Emperor in the Jade Record, and thus has associations with the Underworld. Burton, it turns out, had led the three gods to the cat house.

"You were not put upon this earth to 'get it' Mesta Burton!"

Following this madcap madness, Gracie Law appears at Egg Shen’s and says Lo Pan is a banker. Gracie says she is interested in protecting the girls’ civil rights, and thinks with her journalist friend “Margo Litzenberger” that Lo Pan should be exposed in the media. Oddly, this has also transpired in the U.S. presently, as the middle strata begin to catch onto America’s problem as “bankers,” and the media begins to expose such nefarious activity amongst the elite. Egg Shen and friends then engage in divination to see what Lo Pan and the gods are up to: the result is that the “goat’s horns are entangled.” The goat is also associated with the devil: in Chinese folk religion, the creator god is “Pangu,” a hairy beast-like creature. Pangu is also believed to have created earth (yin) and sky (yang). Think as well of Pan, the satyr of similar Greek mythology—but not only Pan, Aleister Crowley had a fascination with Pan, and one of his more famous poems, the Hymn to Pan, contains “Io Pan, Io Pan…” and which likely had reference to gay sex with a companion:

Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea
From Sicily and from Arcady!

Keep in mind as well that Hollywood writers and directors are often well-versed in Crowley and gnosticism, and written I and O look like “LO.”  So Lo Pan is a reference to Pan, the goat-devil, and Egg Shen explains that the meaning of the divination was “Ordo ab Chao,” that Lo Pan’s desire was to bring order out of chaos—Egg then explains that all movement is caused by “positive and negative furies,” and in Lo Pan the furies are imbalanced, and cause him to be a devil in human form. Lo Pan pretends to be a man, but is actually a dark spirit of lust. As Jack and Wang re-enter Lo-Pan’s Underworld, and are caught and placed in the “hell of upside down sinners.” Lo Pan threatens them with the hell where people are “skinned alive,” which is the special level run by Lo Pan. We discover that Lo Pan was once a warrior emperor who has now become a demon subservient to Ching Dai, the demon god of the East who rules him and whom he must appease to become flesh again.

33rd Degree of Masonic Scottish Rite: Order out of Chaos. Note as well the dualism of the two heads.

Gracie and Margo are now enslaved in the Underworld sex slave prison, and Margo says it’s as if the entire experience isn’t real, while Gracie is tied up in a sexual bondage pose. Margo mentions that the entire experience is like Alice in Wonderland, keying the observant viewer into the elite mind-controlled nature of the film. Alice in Wonderland has meaning on several levels, from the MKULTRA brainwashing programs, to the occult Underworld and the actual underworld of crime and the sex slave trade. In actual fact, this underworld is run by gangsters who are in turn run by higher-level interests, who are in turn run by the gods and demons. The earthly hierarchy mirrors the heavenly hierarchy, as does the Underworld’s hierarchy. The idol of the god of death even has a third eye – the eye of the so-called “Illluminati,” whose philosophy is “ordo ab chao,” or order out of chaos.

This may sound far-fetched, but Lo Pan actually does mind control on Gracie and Miao Yin. Through “magic,” Lo Pan brainwashes them both into loving him through some kind of bizarre chi ceremony that places them both in a trance state. The focus is on their eyes, which them become blank, showing they are mind-controlled. The ritual has a sexual component to it, as the “sword” is a classic phallic image. Both Gracie and Miao levitate and touch the “burning blade,” which “tames the savage heart.” Since there are two girls, one will be sacrificed to the god of the East, and the reincarnated David Lo Pan will be enfleshed once again to experience sexual pleasure. Meanwhile, Egg Shen tells Jack and Wang that since Lo Pan inhabits a dream world, only entering a dream can kill a dream. In order to enter the archetypal dream world, they must ingest a powerful hallucinogen. Here we meet with Jungian concepts, where the dream world is identified with the inner psyche and subconscious, which are also linked to the Underworld. All three are linked, in other words, in the spiritual realm.

The god of death idol has a 'third eye' of Illumination, or the all-seeing eye.

Lo Pan then performs a ritual sexual marriage, where they invoke Ching Dai, the demon god of the East. Lo Pan pricks both Gracie and Miao with his “needle of love,” and has what appears to be an orgasmic spasm. This brings to mind Crowley again, and his version of Tantric sex magick. Energies are transferred in sex as well as in liturgical rituals, and here we have the combination of both. See The Shadow of the Dalai Lama for an indepth treatment of occult “Illuminism” and Tantric traditions, where it is common to find marriages or sexual unions being performed through union with a deity through possession of the sexual partner. After this, the battle that ensues is utterly laughable, and very much like a video game, but the climax shows Jack’s “knife” stabbing Lo Pan in the third eye.

"Oh Ching Dai, extend my Needle of Love."

Replete with sexual and occult imagery, Big Trouble in Little China does operate on numerous levels, despite its very silly elements. It also operates on a level of exposing a very real trend of foreign-run sex slave trade that does exist in the U.S. and in San Francisco in particular.   But the deeper meaning is one of commentary on Amerika, as well as occultic ’Illumination’ and alchemical transformation. Jack remains Jack, but has been enlightened after his descent into the Underworld. The final scene, though, has one of the demons attached to Jack’s Pork Chop Express, leading the viewer to wonder if Amerika will survive its haunting, psychologically traumatic trip to the Underworld.

“Run into the mystic night….” Whatever this means…..

The sphinx which appeared in Wells' Time Machine. The sphinx is the cherub who guards and controls space and time.

By: Jay

UPDATE Below!

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At the end of H.G. Wells’ Outlines of History, he speaks about the “rise of the machines” and their ability to allay the toils of men, granting them more leisure for scientific products, art, and other harmonious progressive pursuits.  Education will become universal, and a better world will ensue.  Wells was, to be fair, spot on with many of his sci-fi predictions.  One can’t but notice that this article confirms his claims from The Time Machine concerning the devolution into “stunted pig-goblin creatures” to quote Alex Jones, likened to the Morlocks, while the elites will become like the Eloi.

However, the rise of the machines has been wilder than even Wells could have imagined, and will probably not be the universal utopia Outlines imagines, but something closer to the dystopia of The Time Machine.  In fact, we have reached the point where A.I. is nearing the ability of what we see in many science fiction films and novels, yet I agree with the affirmation of Douglas Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, Bach that we will not achieve self-awareness.   Even if this did occur, there is no certain test to determine the existence of “self-awareness,” and the modern scientists who argue to no end against the soul or mind must also take their dogma of the inability to “prove consciousness” and apply it to the golem.  On their basis, you could no more prove one than the other.   So the reductionists who think consciousness is merely matter have no problem identifying humans as “more complex” computers (like Daniel Dennett).  Nevermind that they are all guilty of the naturalistic fallacy.

In effect, this is a Prometheus situation, and is precisely the goal the occultists, alchemists and “scientists” have sought for millennia.  Don’t be fooled by the propaganda of the “new atheists” and sciencey labcoaters: the real secret is that the mysteries are real.  Granted, many of the “Illuminists” are of an atheistic and rationalist bent (and the actual Illuminati were Enlightenment rationalists), but there is a definite esotericism behind the creation of the golem.  Atheism itself can become a form superstition, as I’ve written many times on this blog.  I want to make clear, though, that I’m not anti-technology, nor am I saying I disagree with these goals.  Clearly the Enlightenment thinkers were right–in fact, some of them are central to the mathematics behind all this, as well as to religion and metaphysics and esoterism, such as Leibniz.  Newton, too, was an esotericist, and other examples can be given such as Nikola Tesla and Wolfgang Pauli.

Leibniz also features somewhat prominently in my old debate partner’s new book, Anatomizing Divinity: Studies in Science, Esotericism and Political Theology.  James sent me an early copy of this a couple of years ago, and it’s excellent.  An audio interview on the GnosticMedia podcast can be found here, and I highly recommend it.   I highly recommend the book. What he discusses is the direct association of alchemy with its spiritual meaning, which was never meant to be divorced from the work done in the lab.  This is still the case, he argues, as a divorce of the techne from the telos is what prognosticates our doom.  We end up with Oppenheimer’s warning of becoming Shiva, destroyer of worlds.  Kelley is right to think the origin of Greece’s alchemy is Egypt I believe, too.  This is explained well in the works of Egyptologist Wim van den Dungen.

Another reason Leibniz is relevant to these questions is divine exemplarism.  Google has a plan to have objects mapped into a real-time matrix-style model of the actual world.  It is likely that there already exists a real-time map that records many events, but the goal would be to shoot for ever-closer omniscience (though this is of course impossible).  This would be done presumably by RFID chips in some nano-form being sprayed or somehow distributed so as to attach to as many objects as possible.  This would all then be integrated into Google and the Skynet satellites, presumably.  You would then have a real-time tracking and recording of a majority of the phenomena that acutally occured.  The project is even hinted at being the “Mind of God.”

Now, I argue that this would be totally impossible, unless divine exemplarism were true.   Here we are, as humans, mapping the real world onto virtual matrices using algorithms.  These algorithms must match up to, or refer to, actual phenomena and our symbols must have some real, essential association with the objects of experience, or else this would be impossible.  But we know from the trivium and quadrivium this is not impossible, because the world is actually highly structured, all the way down to the tiniest particle, even to the point of existence itself being constituted in a binary form, where there is existence and non-existence, being and non-being, I and O.  This the Egyptians figured out.  So when reality is mapped onto a computer, it is mapped according to the same structure the objects of the world actually possess.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the Egyptians and the Kabbalists held to a form of divine exemplarism, and that is essentially the basis for Leibniz’s system, too, in regard to his monadology.   However, we should agree with Kelley that Leibniz, and the western Christian conceptual scheme of the Trinity is one which makes God a Being similar to the created coninuum, forcing God into being a kind of technology to be mirrored and manipulated.  Or more precisely, what happened was the Western doctrine of the Trinity, bound up as it became with alchemy and the primal trinity, became identified with the created trinities exhibited in creation.  This is what the esotericists of the western tradition have done, believing since Augustine and Plotinus that the One is a monad from which all things sprung in a emanational, mirrored fashion.  In this scheme, God eventually loses personhood and becomes an amorphous, absolute blob of “pure Being in itself,” so the Western Catholic scheme goes.

And so, based on this kind of meaningful, ordered world, you can construct a model virtual world.  The Pentagon and DARPA have known this for decades, and it was DARPA from which the web arose.  What is fascinating about this is that the Terminator concept of Skynet is based on the Pentagon plan for a fully integrated satellite/net system, which then interlocks all these, including chipped, tracked and traced humans, as the 1997 Army War College report declassified.  That report is showing you Skynet, with its interlocking control grid, and on top of that there were plans using virtual reality and tanks, that would then also be interlocked with the Skynet grid.  So you basically have a combination of the Terminator, Total Recall and the Matrix.  For example, Skynet is described as follows:

“The new system enables UK forces to make use of next-generation weapons systems, such as the recently introduced Reaper drones.  These unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are deployed over Afghanistan but are remotely piloted by RAF personnel in the US. Their near real-time video passes through Skynet.” (BBC)

The Army’s present system is not self-aware, but is a form of A.I., and the goal is to make the drones all unmanned and A.I., hooked into the Google/Skynet hive.   The Army’s site reports:

“ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md., Nov. 7, 2011 — U.S. Army engineers will discuss the results of their efforts to enable a self-aware, decision-making network during the Military Communications Conference 2011, Nov. 8 at the Baltimore Convention Center.
The U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s communications-electronics center, or CERDEC, has developed cognitive wireless networking capabilities that employ network-wide learning and reasoning algorithms that share information that enable nodes to make decisions.

"Johnny 5 is alive!...and I'm 'bout to f&%@ you up!"

CERDEC engineers hope that the results of their Cognitive Algorithm & Network Design Experiment, or CANDE, will enable easier network maintenance, reduce human decision-making requirements, increase network lifetime, transfer data with less delay, and reduce energy consumption — all of which result in a higher degree of network performance on the battlefield.

The algorithm looks at the delay estimation to all source destination pairs and then determines which route has the best bandwidth or least traffic before transmitting data. The algorithm then updates itself on a periodic basis and learns from past experience not to take certain paths,” Graff said.” (Army.mil)

Just as with the British model, the goal is an A.I. robot drone army: literally what the Terminator is based on.  Wired reported in 2003 that DARPA was working on a program to track, trace, profile and store everything individuals did, called at the time “LifeLog.”  This program looks strangely like Facebook itself, but the entire web is actually DARPA’s tracking and tracing spy grid.  Notice how this too is linked into satellites–i.e, Skynet.  This was simply the public announcement of what had already been happening.

“The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.

All of this — and more — would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual’s health.

This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to “trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life,” to see exactly how a relationship or events developed, according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog’s sponsor.” (Wired)

This really puts things into perspective and makes the present world-system irrational and irrelevant.  That is why there is an entire breakaway civilization of advanced technology, just like Ayn Rand described in Colorado in Atlas Shrugged.  The news tells you about Jay-Z and other nonsense, while alchemists are building a “Mind of God” robot army.   In this video, futurist Ray Kurzweil discusses Leibniz, exemplarism, pattern reading and recognition, and I am adding, consider how this is very similar to divine exemplarism.

Darpa’s director has left for Google.  As you can she, she’s Illuminated.

The left eye.

Enlightenment liberalism will continue on for many decades to be sure, but I think Spengler and others are correct that it actually died a long time ago and is in a state of gradual death.  An entirely new reality is emerging that will end up vindicating Rene Guenon:

“Modern man is in a state of decline, the Kali Yuga is reaching a crescendo and the scientific/technological culture that he has created has stolen the mysticism from his soul and replaced it with consumerism and materialism. The most fashionable spiritual fads represent “lowest common denominator” movements which move the wallet rather than the mind and which accustom people to “counter initiatic” values. The esoteric traditions themselves have become isolated from their traditional exoteric “homes” and in isolation have become morally bankrupt and full of false promise. Guénon argued quite prophetically that in the Kali Yuga even the language and terminology of the Mysteries would be lost. Today this is undoubtedly so, concepts such as Karma, Soul, Magic, Alchemy, Hermeticism, occultism (we could continue indefinitely), have been countermanded and used in ways contrary to their transcendent nature. For modern man to survive the tumultuous upheavals that are occurring and will accelerate as we head into the future, he must regain his soul and in Guénon’s view, rediscover the vital esoteric traditions that are staring him in the face. There is no need for new fads, movements, nor to travel to foreign and exotic places, within our own heritage(s) is a life changing tradition if only we can rediscover it.” (source)

The techy stuff will continue to dominate, and the mystics of this flavor were right.  DNA–the discovery of the human genome is arguably the most important discovery ever made, and demonstrates the complete error of the Enlightenment empiricists and their tabula rasa.  It means man is not a creature who can be fixed by proper education and social programs because at his innermost being because his flaws are inherent in his very being.  But all leftist denials of objective reality, of genetics, of the better and best will collapse because it is a philosophy of self-destruction.  The fundamental nature of reality is spoken word and symbol.

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General Petraeus just mentioned publicly what is the essence of this article. Wired reports that every day “smart” gadgets and appliances wil be fitted.  But this is all old news, actually.  Power cords themselves, being based on the same binary system as the computer, can track and discover data, as the BBC reports and as the NSA has known for a long time.

But as this blog often analyzes, much of what is in Hollywood is purposefully placed there as a signifier of what actually exists and is already in place.  So you can simply use a high frequency sonar in cellphones to “image all of Gotham,” while massive supercomputers map the information onto virtual planes – the 3d map mentioned above.