By: Jay Dyer
The popular 80s pastiche series Stranger Things begins with a familiar scene of E.T. nostalgia, centering around Dungeons & Dragons. The scene is particularly familiar to me, since I played D&D back in the day, but learned very quickly this nefarious practice was like kryptonite to all things female. Oddly enough, the series appears to reflect a new trend amongst Hollywood A-listers, where nerd culture has revived the ancient 80s practice of playing D&D. The Hollywood Reporter explains the trend and its connection to acting and role-playing:
“Vin Diesel plays it. So do Dwayne Johnson, Drew Barrymore, Stephen Colbert, Mike Myers and Jon Favreau, among other bold-face names. Some even built their careers by playing it…
The decades-old role-playing game — in which participants roll multisided dice while pretending to be mystical creatures such as elves and dwarves — finally is coming out of the closet (or, in this case, Mom’s basement). “There’s a huge resurgence of nerd culture, especially with the tech boom,” says Silicon Valley’s Martin Starr, a longtime D&D enthusiast. “If nerds were still poor and living at their mothers’, nobody would be paying any attention to Dungeons & Dragons. But nerds rule the world, and D&D is making a big comeback — and I’m excited about it.”
While this certainly relates to a furtherance of one’s improv skills, it also relates to the occult side of Hollywood, though I don’t take the ridiculous evangelical view that D&D is inherently evil. Rather, the notion of role-playing is synonymous with the ancient view of acting as dramaturgy, or ritual invocation of the gods. Comparative religion scholar Dudley Young writes:
“The earliest gods were invoked by ritual act (dromenon = the thing done) such as a sacrificial dance, commemorating the fact that our life begins and ends when they call upon us. Subsequently the thing was said (legomenon) as well as done, and the dromenon was on its way to becoming the drama. Once speech within the temple precincts has been endowed with the power of word-magic, we have “the invocation” properly so called.” (Dudley Young, Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War, pg. 413)
Set in the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana in 1983, we will see the accidental dramaturgical invocation where the D&D simulacrum appears to actually be related on a deeper level to the occult phenomena that begin to occur. The disappearance of young Will Byers sparks a series of events that take Hawkins down a black rabbit hole of every conspiracy theory ever, melded with the opening of the inter-dimensional gates from every John Carpenter film. Originally slated to be titled “Montauk,” the series echoes the dubious accounts of Project Montauk, where purportedly time and space were altered in government-sponsored PsyOps and “time travel” experiments with famed UFO researcher Jacques Vallee commenting the experiments were related to the Philadelphia Experiment. For more information and speculation on this topic, I interviewed Dr. Farrell on his views here.
The stories of Montauk appear to originate in a book series by Preston Nichols, who claims to have discovered “repressed memories” of the event. This laughable scenario immediately smacks of PsyOps, making the original connection to large-scale deception all the more appropriate. Even Vallee alleges the “experiment” is a hoax, suggesting an experiment in seeing what you can get people to believe, as opposed to some real space-time warping experiment. Vallee writes:
“I hypothesized that the experiments had to do with a radar countermeasures test. Indeed a Raytheon advertisement published thirteen years ago suggested that the corresponding technology was now out in the open (Raytheon, 1980). This hypothesis, however, failed to explain a few of the facts that highlighted the story. In particular it did not account for the observed disappearance of the destroyer from the harbor, for the mysterious devices brought on board under extreme security precautions, or for the alleged disappearance of two sailors from a nearby tavern.”
While it may be the case that the Navy altered space-time, does Vallee not consider the possibility this is all bullshit, as so many “military whistleblowers” and “generals” so often “leak”? Rather, as is so often the case, all the “evidence” for these events relies on some retired Navy man with all the credentials of the Navy man from the Village People. This is also why the Montauk tale mixes aliens and other nonsense in with the notion of the Apollo Mission being staged – disinformation. Vallee himself was a high up government operator with an interest in occultism and Rosicrucianism, and is represented in Spielberg’s Close Encounters by the character of Claude Lacombe (played by Francois Truffaut).
Thus, all of this functions as the spirit behind Stranger Things, as well as myriad other influences, such as Star Wars, Alien, Goonies, H.P. Lovecraft, Evil Dead, X-Men, Stephen King, and John Carpenter. That said, I consider the series as accurately showing some aspects of the spiritual realm, couched in scientistic mysticism, where our initial suspicion of extra-terrestrial alien manipulation is revealed to be both terrestrial and demonic. The Demogorgon inhabits a realm that is the “upside down,” the negative or demonic dark side of our world, which matches up to the Kabbalistic notion of the Qilphoth or the Abyss of Da’at at times, as Crowley claims:
“This doctrine is extremely difficult to explain; but it corresponds more or less to the gap in thought between the Real, which is ideal, and the Unreal, which is actual. In the Abyss all things exist, indeed, at least in posse, but are without any possible meaning; for they lack the substratum of spiritual Reality. They are appearances without Law. They are thus Insane Delusions… Now the Abyss being thus the great storehouse of Phenomena, it is the source of all impressions.”
Spoiler alert, but the missing children are not only part of MK Ultra, but are being used in top-secret testing that includes LSD, sensory deprivation and the development of Men Who Stare at Goats (or Kids Who Stare at Kittens)-type mental powers. Interestingly, the abducted super-soldier kid named “11” and “El” is specifically told to kill a kitten which is rumored to be an aspect of trauma-based mind control. Basically, all the rumors of hardcore child abuse and mind control are rolled into the series with the character “El,” who is able to remote view the spiritual realm and spy on Soviets (as well as Demogorgons).
Oblivious to the dangers of such programs, Mr. Man in Black Shadow Government from the Dept. of Energy persists in hunting down his escaped “daughter” El (hinting at sexual abuse), who finds her way into the Goonies gang of Mike, Will and Lucas (I’m assuming you’ve seen it). Most interesting is the biblical and occult notion of the opening of “gates” through such “scientific” experiments, which are in fact occult rituals involving child adduction and sacrifice under the guise of “cancer” research (MK Ultra). Could this be a hint at what the cancer complex is really involved in? Genetic and psychological experimentation with children for the “greater good”? Certainly there have been numerous cases of missing children in the US, as well as small towns experimented on by the shadow government. It would seem that Stanger Things is obliquely referencing these themes, as well as the possibility of actual murders and abductions, as author William Ramsey argues here.
Two notions that occurred to me I have not seen tacked yet in the series is the strange reference to the loss of “father” and “God,” as we see no strong male figures. Hop the cop, like a horny rabbit, hops from girl to girl having lost his daughter, while Will’s father is a deadbeat. In Mike and Nancy’s household, the ineffectual, sterile father character of Mr. Wheeler remains ever clueless while arguing to Mrs. Wheeler the “government is on our side,” and would never lie.
Set in the Cold War, the fear and panic of the ridiculous “Russian Threat” in the background of the series allows the shadow state to develop the explicitly-named Star Wars Defense Program, where “lasers and space weapons” are being made to destroy the “Russkies.” Amazingly accurate in this insight, this is a point JaysAnalysis has been highlighting the last few years with the hype of the Cold War deception allowing for the rise of the dark military industrial complex which seems to have a penchant for human sacrifice. Note that I have argued many times that Mk Ultra was not merely a mind control experiment, but was about the entire biosphere, under the Department of Energy.
The sacrifice of the youth for the dark designs of the shadow government is the ultimate conspiracy in the series, but what is more remarkable than this is the explanation by the Man in Black Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) that the sacrifice of sons and daughters for the gorgodemon is for the good of America. In other words, we are given the impression our villain knows the real source of the dark power in Hawkins, the demonic, and that the sacrifice of humans and blood draws it nearer and nearer. Foolishly assuming this dark energy can be harnessed for U.S. supremacy, Dr. Brenner is behind both MK Ultra and the SDI program that requires the sacrifice of America’s “sons and daughters”! This spiritual dimension is the accurate and insightful aspect of the series, but the message is not all good.
The flip side, as mentioned, is that El as an androgynous, yet dominantly feminine archetype, is a form of the incarnation of the goddess. We have seen this of late in pop fiction more times than I can count, in examples like Hanna, Hunger Games, Lucy, Ex Machina and Jupiter Ascending, where the gnostic perspective of exalting the opposing force to the male is assumed to bring a cosmically needed “balance” to the war hawk patriarchy. A perennial myth of liberal fantasies, the feminist archetype will in no way bring peace and balance, only more destruction as gender roles continue to be confused. Feminism is part of that very destruction, and the fact that El shouts out in the aether “God,” “Dad” and “Gone,” suggests her association with Dr. Brenner as her “dad” and Father God’s lack of answer to her call, means the solution to the spiritual problems of man can be found in a Luciferian evolution of humans beyond the “traps” of gender and evil patriarchal deities. In occultist Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen, we read:
Downe in the bottome of the deepe Abysse
Where Demogorgon in dull darknesse pent,
Farre from the view of Gods and heauens blis,
The hideous Chaos keepes, their dreadfull dwelling is.
— (Book IV, Canto ii, stanza 47)
Indeed, El annihilates the cruciform Demogorgon as if it were a demiurge that has imprisoned the town spiritually. This is precisely the Luciferian view – Jesus and/or God the Father are demiurges who have imprisoned humans in this dimension and sap their energy as vampires, requiring blood sacrifice. Of course, none of that is true, as the Logos is the salvation of the human race, reconciling them to God by becoming Incarnate and destroying Death. In the gnostic scheme the roles are reversed, where El becomes the Luciferian dark hero rescuing the town through her sacrifice to destroy the cruciform demon-god. And, as you probably guessed, that is why her name is “El,” recalling the old Canaanite term for the gods who warred against Jehovah in the Bible. In fact, the Demogorgon is generally traced back to the demiurge.
The series also uses numerology frequently, such as “11” and “77” suggesting the demonology of Crowley and references to 9/11 as a ritual initiation. Interestingly, light is mentioned several times in the series as both a means of communication and symbol of enlightenment. As you can see in the above image, “photosynthesis” is placed behind El as she dissolves the Demogorgon, suggesting the dissolution of Traditional Religion by “enlightenment,” perfectly consonant with the message of Gnosticism and Luciferianism. The gateways have been opened through mass human sacrifice of America’s sons and daughters – the “new man” is a dark, half-androgynous goddess who will destroy the “genocidal” patriarchal religions and bring a new Amerikan aeon of the crowned and conquering girl-child, a Luciferian world order.
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