Big Trouble in Little China (1986) – Esoteric Analysis

March 25, 2012 3 Comments

"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. Read more of this post

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Kierkegaard’s Existential Despair and Western Dialectics

January 24, 2012 6 Comments

A religion identified as a sickness, where despair is blessedness? I'll pass.

By: Jay

In The Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard works within the scope of an Augustinian tripartite view of man, arguing that man’s existential dilemma is one of despair. Augustine is relevant, since he also underwent his own existential crisis in the famed “tolle lege” incident, in which his world of licentious pleasures came tumbling down as he realized the finitude and emptiness of his own being. Ever since, the West has been in a dialectical battle with itself, as philosophy works out this same tension present within each man

A man confronts himself, as Kierkegaard says, the essential self is the transcendence of the self as related to itself. This self is spirit, and it’s important to notice the correction Kierkegaard thinks he is rendering to Hegel. For Hegel., the universal is the real, and the ideal alone is real. Where Kant erected a boundary between the individual mind and the noumenal realm, Hegel sought to tear down that divide by making the ideal and the ideal alone, real. This rationalist project is rejected by Kierkegaard, and turned on its head.

The actual universal confronted by man is death, and man’s confrontation with death demonstrates to the individual his own finitude. Finitude and the infinite eternality of death or the next life, is thus a dialectical struggle for man. In The Sickness, the self is spirit, and appears to be modelled after the Augustinian conception of the trinitarian analogue of man’s being, which is based on the relational definition of the divine persons. In that Augustinian and Thomistic scheme, Person is relation, but for Kierkegaard, the true self is that which transcends the dialectic of self in relation to itself, which is held captive by the determination of despair, occasioned by an outside force being allowed to determine the self.

This will clearly lay the ground for Sartre’s distinction between being in itself and being for itself, where the individual is condemned to be free, and must not hide behind various collectivist masks and facade identities, exteriorly determined. Despair is the means by which one reaches this conversion, if you will. Part of the difficulty here is the desire for man to escape from a philosophy in which he is determined, and his own being is conceived of as inherently evil. This notion derives from Manichaeanism, and characterizes the belief system of the younger Augustine, prior to his conversion to Catholicism. Read more of this post

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Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tirade: A Response to Harold Bloom and Leo Daugherty

December 9, 2011 4 Comments

Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian"

  

By: Jay

     Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is considered by many critics to be one of the best novels of the last century, ranked by many with Moby Dick and Absalom! Absalom!, while some have called McCarthy the heir apparent to William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.  Blood Meridian is certainly not your average book, and as such, many find it difficult and inaccessible.  As Harold Bloom notes, it is a modern great, and in may respects resembles Homer or Dante.   However, Blood Meridian is also more than a novel: it is a statement about many things, the most crucial of which is McCarthy’s gnostic tirade against life as it is.

     Critic Leo Daugherty’s thesis is thus only partially correct: that the novel is a “gnostic tragedy,” and this is precisely what endows the novel with its elevated style and inaccessibility.  Daugherty’s thesis is too weak: to those steeped in the theological discourse of the early patristic period, including the polemical tracts of the early fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyon, it is quite clear that Blood Meridian is brimming with gnostic themes and ideas on virtually every page, and is fact is a gnostic polemical tirade.  Daugherty is correct about it being gnostic. However, there are many elements he misses and misinterprets.  My purpose is to respond to his statements, as well to Bloom’s claim that it is incorrect to see the Judge as a gnostic figure or archon, but rather that he should be cast as more of an enigma. Bloom claims:

     The citations and references to the work of Jacob Böhme, who is, after all, a very specific type of Kabbalistic Gnostic… I think you would have to say that they’re something of an evasion of the themes in Blood Meridian. McCarthy knows exactly what Gnosticism is, and he could have made Judge Holden into an explicitly Gnostic figure if he’d wanted to. He wants to keep Judge Holden completely inexplicable. Saying that he is a sort of Gnostic demiurge is too facile for McCarthy’s portrayal of him.[1] Read more of this post

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The Dark Crystal – Esoteric Analysis

February 27, 2011 11 Comments

Henson's Dark Crystal

By: Jay

 Much like Labyrinth, Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal is one of those kid’s films all of us who grew up in the 80s seem to have a strange affinity for. And, much like Labyrinth, it is chock full of Henson’s same occult proclivities. While Labyrinth, in my analysis, constituted the inner journey into Sarah’s psyche (much like Inception is an inner journey into Cobb’s labyrinthine psyche), Dark Crystal is more of an exterior journey.

 We are told in the beginning the setting is a long gone “age of wonder” on another world where time comes and goes in thousand-year cycles, or aeons. Such terminology may be said to be of another world, but as the symbolism necessarily goes, such films (and all stories in general) function as statements relative to the human story. Thus, the two great races that arise in the age of the Dark Crystal are symbolic of two kinds of people (passive and aggressive/followers and elites), which is itself a manifestation of the film’s obsession with duality. Indeed, the film follows perfectly in a long train of gnostic nostalgia, elsewhere reviewed by me.

 The notion of a 1,000 year cycle is also a Hindu theme, similar to the theory of Kali Yuga, where we are currently entering an age of dominance of chaos, the demonic, strife and dischord. This is also similar to the notion espoused by other occultists that this is the aeon of the child, etc. Occultist Madame Blavatsky also formulated bizarre theories of numerous other races and worlds that preceded our own, as well as the Babylonian Talmud mentioning such ideas. It becomes evident that Henson, like Lucas, borrowed heavily from the mythology of various cultures in creating these fantasies.

 The eastern dualist conceptions are marked in the film, as mentioned. The Skekses represent the left hand path of severity and cruelty, control and empire, while the “gentle mystics” are supposed to represent the “gentle ways of natural wizards.” The Skekses, then, are harbingers of technology and power – they harness the Dark Crystal for the purpose of advanced control mechanisms and even brainwashing (yes, brainwashing), while the mystics are purported to be in tune with nature and the forest. The Mystics, as is worth noting, chant the Buddhist “Om,” further reinforcing the eastern dualist religious conceptions, while the Skekses are busy enacting the “Ceremony of the Sun” for the passing of the Emperor, which brings to mind ancient Egyptian theology, and it’s identification of Pharoah as son of Ra. Read more of this post

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Tron Legacy: Esoteric Analysis

January 9, 2011 11 Comments

Notice the pyramidal structure of the black on bottom and top, from which light emanates. This symbolizes the gnostic version of as above, so below - dualism. Its "Just a Game" because its an illusory world.

By: Jay

I hate to always harp on gnosticism, but it’s undeniably the recurrent theme of most sci fi and fantasy/cult films. Gnosticism is the ancient perennial tradition that descends from Egypt and (possibly) older civilizations. In its modern form, it comes to us from the Nag Hammadi documents recently discovered, whose tradition was passed down in the secret societies and occult orders, of which Freemasonry is a good example. I am not saying that Freemasonry is actually a lineage from Egypt, but that there is a similarity of doctrine that has come down through the ages. 

By the first century, the gnostic traditions flourished, rivalling and challenging other sects, becoming a force of its own. To put it simply, gnosticism posits that the present creation is a subordinate, evil one, wherein evil is given a substantial existence as the created order itself. Religions such as Manichaeanism are perfect examples of this trend, where a dualism is sometimes posited between a “good” God who is far away and unknown, identified with thought or light, and an evil deity or demiurge, identified as the Creator of this world. In the time of the rise of Christianity in the first three centuries of the Church, the gnostics were the chief opponents of the God presented in the Law and prophets of the Israelites, and charged God with Himself being evil.  Texts such as the Hypostasis of the Archons and The Gospel of Thomas are prime examples.

The gnostics instead proffered that “Jesus” was thus a revolutionary reformer who tossed away all traditional concepts of Jewish theology, and brought in the new gnosis, or knowledge – the Gospel of salvation through enlightenment. It is to such patristic commentators like Irenaeus of Lyon and Tertullian of Carthage that we get an indepth glimpse into 2nd century gnosticism, from figures like Marcion.  But gnosticism is not just a reaction against the God of the Bible, it also shares many commonalities with ancient eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, and thus exemplifies syncretism.  Themes such as pantheism and/or dualism, many gradations of archons, or gods or avatars that rule this kosmos, etc., all recur in gnosticism. In this regard, gnosticism is in many ways the inheritor of the ancient pagan religions, and particularly Egypt.  So with that said, we can now analyze the kind of symbolic scheme that is put forth as an image of our world as presented in Tron Legacy.  

Daft Punk, who did the soundtrack and appears in the film, performs here atop the pyramid.

Central to gnosticism is the theme of redemption or salvation from this world through special knowledge, which constitutes the “gnosis.” Generally, this is knowledge that has been lost, and must be recovered, often symbolized in literature or film by some magical object or memory, etc. In Tron, Flynn’s (Jeff Bridges) son, Sam, must “save” his father from the “grid,” or matrix, where he has become enslaved, having more or less forgotten his family in the real world. Sam, of course brings to mind “Sammael,” another name for Satan in the biblical tradition, and this makes sense, given that Tron presents Sam Flynn as the savior of the feminine archetype, “Quorra.”  This also mirrors gnostic themes, where the feminine principle, the Pistis Sophia is one of the archons of gnostic salvation.  Wikimedia notes of Quorra:

Quorra, the Pistis Sophia, revealer of mysteries and the psyche of the (cpu) world

“Prior to the conflict between the Basics and ISOs, Quorra was friends with Radia. She witnessed Clu’s betrayal when he attempted to kill Tron and Flynn, and when Clu declared war, she – with the help of a prototype security program named System Monitor – attempted to warn Radia and the ISO’s about him as well as combat the viral program Abraxas.” Read more of this post

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