Introduction
The motto over the door of psychologist Carl Jung’s house read, “Summoned or not, the god will come.”
If he comes unsummoned, he will be a stranger to you and perhaps even your enemy or tyrannical master whom you must slavishly worship as the Abrahamists do their monstrous deity. But if you yourself summon him, the most incredible alchemy can take place: you and the god can become one. You yourself can achieve divinity.
Most of us go through life on autopilot, tuned to the wrong channel. We need to scan for new frequencies – above all for our own personal hero channel. This is a magic channel that takes us to new and extraordinary worlds, landscapes of endless possibilities and new beginnings. From there, we can bring back to this world incredible stories, knowledge, elixirs and treasures. We can educate, inform and heal. We can become the shamans, the gurus, the bold adventurers, the fearless explorers who cross the edge of the world into the Unknown Country. Only we are brave enough.
Psychologically, the hero’s task is to allow his ego to perish so that his Self may be born. Whereas the ego is limited, narrow in its outlook, afraid of change, the Self is expansive, fully part of the cosmos, brimming with energy. It represents a whole new way of being, higher, more connected, more adventurous. The confines of the old ego are obliterated.
The Self can soar to new, unimagined heights. It can see the farthest horizons. It can enjoy new, glorious vistas and panoramas.
When you are your Self, you walk with the gods. You have moved your centre from the mortal world to the immortal.
Everyone has access to the hero but few choose to activate it. Only those who do can become psychically whole. Only they can establish their true identity as complete people who have fully integrated all of the different strands of their life. They are the people who can defeat their inner demons, transcend their apparent limitations, aim for the highest stars that surround the throne of God.
It’s time to become a hero. Beyond that there is only one more stage…
To become
Ego versus Self
No one is ever hailed as a hero for selfishly and relentlessly pursuing his own self-interest. It’s extraordinary that celebrities and the super rich are treated as human heroes and gods when, judged by their greed and narcissism, they do not possess a single altruistic quality. These are people who have tirelessly worked to glorify themselves, to win and preserve the adulation of the masses, to show that they are “superior” to every ordinary man and woman. These are in fact the worst type of anti-heroes: those who are in it absolutely for themselves. They are creatures of the ego.
Psychologist Carl Jung contrasted the Ego with the Self. The Ego is the centre of consciousness and gives the individual his sense of identity and purpose. The Ego is what we imagine ourselves to be, yet we are entirely mistaken. The Self is the centre of our psyche, our real centre. It’s where our true identity resides. Jung said, “The Self is not only the centre but also the circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of the conscious mind.” (Likewise, the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles, a Grand Master of the Illuminati, said, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.”) The Self is nothing less than the soul, the divine spark, the higher self, the imago Dei itself: the Image of God.
We must go on an arduous quest into our unconscious to find who we really are. No task is more difficult. Only heroes can succeed.
“The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself.” -- Jung
The Hero’s Soul Connection
Most people hold absurd ideas about the soul. The “soul theory” to which they subscribe arises from discredited “holy” texts of ancient religions that have demonstrably failed the test of time. Just as Abrahamic texts contain the ludicrous idea that the earth is an immovable object at the centre of the universe – contrary to all known scientific facts – so they make assertions about the soul that are equally untenable and incredible.
Modern scientific and psychological theories are absent from traditional soul theory, implying, if such theory is correct, that the soul has no connection with modern science or psychology. An intelligent person could no more believe this than believe that the earth is flat or orbited by the sun.
A select few secret societies such as the Illuminati have always had teachings consistent with modern thinking (though obviously not expressed in the same vocabulary) and have taken the trouble to continually update ancient ideas to suit contemporary thinking. Religions that are locked into sacred texts – the inviolable words of God, allegedly – have no room for manoeuvre. With each passing year they become more outdated and preposterous, thus proving that no God authored them. Imagine how anachronistic the Torah, the Bible and Koran will be a million years hence. Future humanity will laugh at them and wonder at how these crackpot theories ever managed to flourish. They claim to present eternal verities, but their “truths” haven’t even survived two millennia with any credibility.
One of the central aims of the Illuminati is to show how the soul theories of the established religions have been comprehensively refuted by science, and to reveal what the authentic character of the soul is. The soul is not some spooky, anti-science entity that exists in some weird dimension defying definition. To understand the soul, it is necessary to understand the true nature of reality, and that is best done within the framework of philosophy, science and mathematics. Religion is not at odds with these subjects. Instead, it is the final meaning that emerges from them, their logical and inevitable culmination.
The conflict of religion with science is caused by “holy” texts being regarded as indisputably true when of course they are incontestably false. God is not contradicted by science, he is defined by it. God is the ultimate scientific concept. By the same token, he is the supreme expression of philosophy and the final and definitive meaning of the universe. He is the personalisation of the particle physicists’ mantra that anything not forbidden is compulsory. If it is not forbidden for the evolving cosmos to attain an apex of consciousness in one being then it will definitely do so.
The soul is our connection to God. In other books in this series, we will reveal the scientific nature of the soul, but the current focus is on the connection of the myth of the “hero” to the quest for the soul, and how this is intimately related to the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.
The Great Beyond
All paranormal activity, everything out of the ordinary, everything that transcends our everyday experiences, everything that is uncanny and spine tingling, comes from the unconscious. Our contact with the divine originates there.
Our ancestors, who possessed a primitive consciousness in comparison with ourselves, were much closer to the “gods” and felt their presence in a direct way every day thanks to the “bicameral mind”. This was a concept proposed by psychologist Julian Jaynes, based on the fact that the human brain has two hemispheres (“bicameral” is an adjective meaning two-chambered). Jaynes said, one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man.” The god was a hallucinated voice that arose the right hemisphere and was obeyed by the man in the left hemisphere.
If Jaynes’ hypothesis is right, voices and images of the gods were an ever present reality for ancient humanity, part of their immediate awareness.
As humanity switched from this bicameral mind that was in such close touch with the immortal gods to the modern conscious mind of mortal men, our sense of the divine shrank spectacularly. But the bicameral mind is still with us. It’s locked in our unconscious, the layer immediately beneath consciousness, and from time to time it breaks through, particularly in times of high stress. Our unconscious mind is a repository of astonishing gifts and knowledge that mostly stay just beyond our grasp, forever tantalising us.
Secret societies such as the Illuminati have dedicated themselves to probing the unconscious, to illuminating the darkness in which so much transcendent knowledge resides. To put it simply, the unconscious is the realm of the divine while consciousness is the arena of our petty, trivial, daily lives.
The conscious mind is tiny in comparison with the unconscious. It’s a filtering and focusing mechanism to convert the vast, unwieldy and potentially overwhelming unconscious into a sharp, practical tool. The problem is that we now regard consciousness as primary and the unconscious as a mere oddity, as an alien entity that we ignore as much as possible because it would be too disturbing to really think about what it is and how it influences us.
In fact, it is the unconscious that is primary while consciousness is merely a useful device that allows us to engage more successfully with the material world. All religiously minded people agree that this material world is not our destiny, so consciousness is of little use in defining the meaning of our lives. Only the unconscious can help us. All transcendent states are connected with the unconscious. In order to make contact with the divine order, nothing is more critical than escaping normal conscious states.
Fasting, meditation, drugs, extreme exertion, extreme isolation, extreme pain, extreme tiredness, extreme prayer – they are all designed to bring us to a state where we can break free of the grip of our consciousness in order to release our unconscious. That is no accident. Consciousness is a restriction, a barrier, an obstacle. It holds us back from becoming who we truly are, from attaining Its evolutionary purpose is to help us navigate the material world, not the spiritual one.
Consciousness lends itself to materialism, scientism, consumerism and the pursuit of the petty comforts and joys that we see all around us. It’s strongly connected with the Jungian categories of extraverted sensing, thinking, feeling and intuition, while the unconscious is mostly concerned with introverted intuition, thinking, feeling and sensing.
Jung, when he introduced the concept of the collective unconscious, gave the modern world its first access to what ancient secret societies knew; that the unconscious is the store of all that is most profound in the human condition. It was known as the “horos” by the ancient Illuminati, the horos being an intermediate, boundary region between the world of the Demiurge (the false God) and the realm of the True God. It prevented entry to the higher realm, hid it, and ensured that only the meritorious could pass through it from the lower to the higher realm. It was regarded as a region of infinite paradox that was everywhere and nowhere. It was both a cosmological feature and an aspect of the mind.
Freud rejected Jung’s idea, failing to grasp its significance. He was an extrovert, lacking Jung’s extraordinary introverted intuition, a gift so extreme that many people concluded that Jung was schizoid. Freud stuck rigidly to his limited concept of the personal unconscious, unique to each individual, but it was the collective unconscious, transcending the individual, that offered a radical new way for people to understand their true nature.
The collective unconscious, according to Jung, is populated by archetypes, which can be thought of as mini psychological programs that run in the interface of the unconscious and consciousness when triggered by certain events, just as reflexes, instincts, immune responses etc. are akin to mini biological programs triggered in specific circ*mstances.
One crucial constellation of archetypes is concerned with the “hero” and is designed to bring it to life in all of us. Every nation, every culture, every tribe in every period of history has glorified the hero. The vast majority of novels, plays and films are stories about heroes. Ancient myths and legends are about gods and heroes; ordinary people are entirely absent except when they interact with gods and heroes. Fairytales and folk tales revolve around heroes and heroines. The word “hero” is liberally used in all parts of our society.
Why should all human societies have such reverence for the hero? Why are there no societies that reject the hero? Why is the concept of the hero so deeply ingrained in the human psyche? Jung’s answer – that it’s a fundamental archetype – is persuasive. We are all attuned to the hero. We all love stories about heroes. Everyone wants to be a hero. And yet most people fail dismally. Why?
Christopher Vogler, in his influential book The Writer’s describes the trajectory of the hero. His work was inspired by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand and Campbell, in turn, was inspired by Jung.
A special and unique program exists within us all – the Hero Program. We just need to activate it, and Vogler and Campbell tell us how to do it. It needs courage and determination, of course, and those are not qualities in great supply these days. We live in a superficial world dedicated to cheap pleasures, junk entertainment and permanent distraction. Arguably, it has never been harder to be a hero, and the harder it becomes the more our culture desperately saturates itself with images of the hero. But the “heroes” of today are a joke. David Beckham earning £25 million per year is no hero, yet he is presented on huge billboards as a heroic figure. Ditto Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Bono and all the rest of the freak parade of celebrity.
Heroism is now a commodity to be bought and sold, a “brand” to be advertised and promoted. Heroes, in the past, were people who put their lives on the line for their communities and fought against overwhelming odds, often for no reward. Now they are super rich men and women who do impressions of heroes in movies, or who perform well in major sporting events. But Roger Federer is no hero; he’s just a successful tennis player. Tiger Woods is no hero; he’s just a man who plays golf better than most others and gets paid extravagantly for his talent. Thierry Henry is a good footballer, happy to cheat in order to defeat the opposition team. What’s heroic about that? These three men earn huge fees to endorse various products. What’s heroic about that? The modern concept of the hero is a mockery and perversion of true heroism. Everything that is most sacred gets defiled and trivialised in our contemporary culture.
We need to get back in touch with real heroism. That can never happen in a capitalist system that uses “heroism” as a mean of selling baked beans, beer, razors and video games.
Ironically, we have perhaps never been as skilled at portraying heroism as we are now, but it’s all show and no substance. It’s a simulacrum of heroism, an imitation, a cheap impression. We inhabit the fraudulent world of ersatz heroism.
Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to consider the presentation of the hero in the movie The This conforms almost exactly to Vogler and Campbell’s formula.
Archetypes that typically appear in the Hero’s story are: the Herald (the character or situation that issues a challenge to the hero), the Mentor (the hero’s wise guide), Allies (the hero’s helpers), Enemies (the hero’s opponents), the Shapeshifter (this person does not keep the same “shape” i.e. shapeshifters have an unstable identity and are often liars, con-men, hypocrites, informants or traitors; they introduce doubt into story), the Shadow (the hero’s ultimate enemy – usually himself if he did but know it; the version of himself attracted to the wrong path), the Trickster (a character who plays jokes on the hero and cuts his ego down to size), Threshold Guardians (those who control entrances, exits and staging posts through which the hero must pass on his journey; can be good, but are often bad), Anima/Animus (the hero/heroine’s love interest), Persona (the hero’s mask to the world that he wants to shed), Ego (the hero’s false self that gets in the way of his quest for his Higher Self), Aurum (the hero’s fantasy self based on narcissism), the False Claimant (a character who questions the hero’s credentials, or claims he was the real hero and the hero is in fact an impostor), and finally, and most importantly, the Self (the hero’s apotheosis).
In The Neo is the Hero, Morpheus is the Mentor, Trinity is firstly the Herald (giving Neo his challenge and announcing his need for change) and then his Anima, Cypher (the traitor) is the Shapeshifter, Agent Smith is the Shadow, the Oracle is a Threshold Guardian (like the Sphinx, she presents the hero with a riddle before he can continue his journey).
Neo: the Ultimate Hero
These are the steps that make up the “hero program”:
Departure, Separation
World of Common Day (Ordinary World)
Call to Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Supernatural Aid (Meeting with the Mentor)
Crossing the First Threshold and entering the Extraordinary World
Belly of the Whale
Descent, Initiation, Penetration
Road of Trials (Tests, Allies, Enemies)
Meeting with the Goddess
Woman as Temptress
Atonement with the Father
Apotheosis
The Ultimate Boon (Reward; seizing the sword)
Return
The Refusal of the Return
The Magic Flight
Rescue from Without
Crossing the Return Threshold
Master of the Two Worlds (Resurrection)
Freedom to Live (Return with the Elixir)
World of Common Day (Ordinary World)
This is our day-to-day life: mundane, boring, routine, repetitive, uninspiring, tedious. We are numb, on permanent autopilot. The most important element of this life is conforming to what society expects of us. We exist rather than live. We are stuck in stasis. We are nowhere near fulfilling our potential. The status quo reigns. This is a spiritual wasteland. It’s the world of the persona, the public mask we wear. We are desperate to be acceptable to others. We are too scared to be ourselves, to be individual.
Many Hollywood movies introduce the would-be hero as an underpowered, vaguely depressed, unsatisfied, confused person stuck in this ordinary world.
Neo in The Matrix is literally asleep when we first see him. A message appears on his computer screen telling him to wake up. He is then instructed to follow the “white rabbit”. When Trinity first meets him, she tells him that they are watching him. We next see him arriving late at work where he is clearly unhappy with his job and his tedious, uninspiring, corporate boss. This is Neo’s ordinary world, and it’s a very familiar one for most people.
Neo’s “outer” problem is the Matrix itself. His inner problem is that he doesn’t know who he is; he isn’t fulfilled; he’s aware that something is wrong with the world and doesn’t know what it is. He can’t commit himself to anything until he discovers the truth. It’s obvious that something will have to change. Both the simplest and hardest thing to change is ourselves.
“One of the things I learnt when I was negotiating was that until I changed myself I could not change others.” -- Nelson Mandela
Call to Adventure
The hero encounters something unexpected: a problem, a challenge, something that makes him realise that his complacent and undemanding position in the ordinary world is under threat. We are all in this position. We are all being called, but most of us aren’t listening. We don’t want to hear it. It demands too much of us. We lack the courage. We’d rather watch TV or play video games or go the shopping mall.
In The the message telling Neo to wake up notifies the audience that Neo will soon be pulled out of his ordinary world. His initial encounter with Trinity confirms it. Morpheus then contacts him and we start to comprehend that Neo’s ordinary world is anything but ordinary. (In fact, the opening scene of the movie showing Trinity’s reality-defying fight with the police and the Agents revealed instantly that there was something very wrong with this world. Most of us are denied this clear insight into the truth that sits beneath the surface.)
The call to adventure gives us an indication of what the stakes are in the story. What is the dramatic question? What issue will be resolved for the would-be hero? In The Trinity tells Neo at their first encounter that he is being watched and is in danger. She says that she knows why he hardly sleeps, why he lives alone and why he’s on the computer night after night searching for “him” (Morpheus). She says that she was once in the same position. When Morpheus found her, he told her that she hadn’t really been looking for him, but for an answer. “It’s a question that drives us,” she says to Neo. “It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did.”
Neo then asks the central question of the movie, “What is the Matrix?”
Trinity replies, “The answer is out there. It’s looking for you. It will find you, if you want it to.”
This is the perfect call to adventure. We know that by the end of the story, Neo (and us) will know what the Matrix is and we will have gained profound knowledge about the true nature of our world. We are primed to go on a great quest, with Neo acting on our behalf.
Refusal of the Call
When we get the call, we can often be apprehensive, even afraid. Few people welcome change. They are scared of the unknown and set in their ways. Although they are dissatisfied, they are in a comfort zone and are reluctant to leave it. Maybe everything will fall apart if they do something new. In The Neo is receptive to change, but not receptive enough to take the literal leap of faith that Morpheus asks of him to escape the Agents who are pursuing him.
“This is insane,” Neo says. “Why is this happening to me? What did I do?” As he tries to reach the precarious scaffolding Morpheus has pointed out, he says, “I can’t do this.” Through fear and doubt, he has failed to accept the call. He is too reluctant to change his ways, to leave the ordinary world, to believe in himself and his talents.
Everyone is called, but most refuse the summons. They are stuck in the comfort zone. When they are old and the opportunity has long passed, they will do nothing but regret their failure to act at this sacred moment.
In films, the refusal is always used to increase dramatic tension. We know that the hero will, sooner or later, take up the gauntlet. Often, fate decrees that there are no exits from the adventure. Sooner or later, every way out is sealed off and the hero has no choice but to face the life and death issue.
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” -- Seneca
Supernatural Aid (Meeting with the Mentor)
In most stories, the would-be hero meets an older and wiser figure who helps him to overcome his reluctance to act, and prepares him for what is to come.
The term “Mentor” originates in Homer’s The Mentor was the loyal friend of Odysseus, charged with raising the hero’s son Telemachus during the long years when Odysseus was engaged in the siege of Troy and then the arduous return home, during which he was cursed by the gods.
Merlin the wizard is an archetypal Mentor figure, providing wisdom and supernatural aid to King Arthur. In Star Obi Wan Kenobi, a Jedi Knight, is Luke Skywalker’s mentor and supernatural helper. In The Morpheus performs the same role for Neo. He explains to Neo the true nature of reality – that the minds of humans are locked into a computer simulated fake reality while their bodies are imprisoned in a grotesque real world where they are used as batteries to provide energy for machines. Morpheus shows Neo that because “reality” is a simulation (a dream), it’s possible to transcend the rules of the simulation and do things that seem supernatural, such as flying, having super strength and super speed, like a super hero.
In more down-to-earth stories, the mentor will be wise and experienced, but will have no special powers. In the world of secret societies, adepts guide initiates. Initiates graduate through various degrees to gain access to the most secret knowledge of the society.
Most people never encounter a mentor and this is one of the reasons why they fail to respond to the call to adventure.
Crossing the First Threshold
This is the moment when the would-be hero finally seizes the moment and crosses from the ordinary world into the extraordinary world. He has picked up the gauntlet and moved from passive to active. He is no longer prepared to sit and do nothing.
Most people never cross this threshold. To them, it’s a chasm that cannot be bridged. The OWO are masters at making this gulf seem infinitely wide. Many of their efforts are directed at making the ordinary world sufficiently comfortable and trivially pleasant to dissuade anyone from wishing to leave it. The zombie masses have little inclination to step out of the comfort zone. They will spend the rest of their lives engaged in the usual distractions of junk food, junk entertainment, shopping malls, sporting events, and gazing at images of themselves, their friends and family on Facebook in a narcissistic haze.
In The the first threshold arrives when Morpheus presents Neo with the red and blue pills. The blue pill will take him back to the ordinary world while the red will take him down the rabbit hole and into the extraordinary world. The rules and limits that exist beyond the first threshold are unclear. Do they even exist? This is the Great Unknown. Fearful people will turn back at this stage. They will take the blue pill and go back to normality.
Belly of the Whale
This represents a partial death then rebirth of the hero. There is a clear separation between the hero’s old and new self. He dons a new mantle for what lies ahead in the special world. The belly of the whale is a universal womb image, and within it is where the hero undergoes his first radical metamorphosis.
In The Neo, after taking the red pill, finds himself naked like a newborn baby in a pod filled with the equivalent of placental fluid. His body is connected by wires and tubes, like weird umbilical cords, to a mechanical tower containing a host of other pods. There are countless other towers and pods, forming a vast, horrific farm where humans are harvested for the energy their bodies provide.
Road of Trials (Tests, Allies, Enemies)
The hero now encounters allies and enemies, and is subjected to ordeals as his transformation proceeds. He often fails in some of his tasks because he is struggling to come to terms with his new way of living. In The Neo meets the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar who will be his allies. He fails many of his training tests, particularly the jumping exercise where he must leap between two skyscrapers without falling. He is told about the Agents – the sentient computer programs that protect the Matrix. These will be his most daunting enemies.
Meeting with the Goddess
The hero finds transformative love of a type he has never experienced before. It represents an encounter with the hero’s anima: his idealised image of a female. (A heroine would, correspondingly, meet her animus figure.)
In The Neo starts to develop a profound relationship with Trinity.
Woman as Temptress
The hero is drawn away from his task by temptation, often lust. In Gnostic terms, the lure of the physical world entices the soul away from the spiritual path. Many people who have reached this far fail at this point.
Neo, so in love with Trinity, does not encounter any temptress.
Atonement with the Father
The hero confronts whoever controls his destiny, usually the most powerful person in his life. This is often a father, or father substitute: a dominant figure of some kind.
In The Neo meets the mysterious, all-knowing female Oracle who tells him what his future is. This is a critical moment.
Apotheosis
The hero reaches a higher state of being than hitherto. He feels more fulfilled than ever before.
In The the boy who bends the spoon impresses Neo. He feels he is gaining a greater understanding of this world. The Oracle tells Neo that he has “the gift” but is not “the One”. It’s as if he’s waiting for something, maybe the next life (this is a reference to reincarnation). Neo feels relieved since he did not believe that he was the Chosen One, despite what Morpheus told him. The Oracle tells him that either he or Morpheus will soon die, and Neo resolves that he will sacrifice himself to save Morpheus. He is content with this decision. His life has meaning now.
The Ultimate Boon (Reward; seizing the sword)
This is what the quest was all about. The hero takes possession of what he came for.
In the case of Neo, he now has a detailed understanding of the Matrix, he loves Trinity and he is no longer the person he was at the beginning when he was too scared to take a leap of faith. He is willing to sacrifice himself for others.
The expression “seizing the sword,” relates to actively and aggressively taking the prize desired in the special world (in tales of old, it was often a magic sword or kingly broken sword, or the sword of a hero, or a father’s sword).
The Refusal of the Return
Having achieved his goal, the hero may not wish to go back to the ordinary world. For Neo, no such possibility exists.
The Magic Flight
The hero takes the precious gift back to the ordinary world, but is again chased and harried by enemies who wish to prevent his escape. Often, he attempts to use “magic”, special gadgets (as in James Bond) etc, to raise obstacles in the path of the chasers and fend them off.
In the case of The they are tracked and trapped by the Agents and heavily armed SWAT teams and, despite their attempt to use their “magic” powers to escape, they fail. Several are killed and Morpheus falls into the hands of the Agents.
Neo and Trinity put their own lives on the line to save him, showing that they are willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the community. They deploy their full “magic” powers in order to rescue him.
Rescue from Without
The hero may need help to get him back to the ordinary world, particularly if he has been injured or weakened by his quest.
Neo is eventually killed by Agent Smith but is resurrected (or one might say reincarnated in his old body) by Trinity’s kiss and her overwhelming love for him.
Crossing the Return Threshold
When returning to the ordinary world, the hero must work out how best to use what he has gained to help the community.
In Neo’s case, he is now “the One” and can manipulate the Matrix at will. He effortlessly defeats Agent Smith.
Master of the Two Worlds (Resurrection)
The hero has become a messiah-like figure who has mastered both spiritual and physical reality.
In The Neo has suffered, died, and been resurrected. He has attained apotheosis and is effectively the Saviour in this world. He can now realistically overcome the controller of the Matrix.
Freedom to Live (Return with the Elixir)
The hero is released from fear of death and has the maximum freedom to live. He has returned home with new powers, new talents, and transcendent new knowledge. By his own efforts, he has raised himself to a higher level and can now help others. The elixir may be an object – gold, a grail, a sacred stone, a miracle drug, treasure, or it can be a spiritual quality such as love, self-understanding, enlightenment, happiness, contentment, health, fame, wealth, power, peace, success, knowledge etc.
In Neo’s case, it’s knowledge of how to overcome the Matrix and allow the trapped human beings to escape and lead meaningful lives. He can bring everyone to
Neo is a representation of an ultimate hero: a Chosen One, a Messiah. He undergoes a descent into the underworld (down the “rabbit hole” and into the dark underground world of the human resistance to the controllers of the Matrix.) This is equivalent to a journey into the caves of the unconscious, the heart of darkness.
His mentor Morpheus initiates him into the “mysteries”. His persona (his mask for facing the world) is dismantled as he realises that what he thought was reality is false and fake (symbolising that most of us are false and fake in the world we inhabit). He becomes a man of the ego rather than one of the persona i.e. he has graduated to a higher level of consciousness by removing his mask. He encounters his anima in the shape of Trinity and she helps to guide him towards his true Self. (His relationship with Trinity allows him to penetrate ever further into the dark recesses of the unconscious.)
He and his companions suffer betrayal (Cypher takes the role of Judas) and Morpheus is captured. Neo risks his own life to rescue his mentor then ensures that Morpheus and Trinity return to base safely. Agent Smith then finds him. Trinity wants Neo to run, but he stands his ground. This represents his confrontation with his shadow, with all the deadly contents of his mind that will sabotage and destroy him if he gives them a chance. This is the supreme struggle. After heroic resistance to Agent Smith’s extraordinary power (representing the power the shadow wields over our lives), Neo is killed. All the while, his knowledge and awareness have been growing. By his self-sacrifice he has shown that he is ready to leave the plane of ordinary humans and ascend to the divine realm. His old self (governed by the ego) must die so that he can be resurrected as his new, true self (governed by the Self).
Trinity’s unconditional love and her transcendent kiss of life help him to make the final transition (symbolising that we usually need the support and love of others before we can fulfil our potential). Neo immediately reincarnates in his former body and re-commences his fight with Agent Smith. This time, he defeats him with consummate ease. He goes inside Agent Smith’s body then explodes from it in a dazzling burst of light: divine light has dispelled the shadow. Illumination has destroyed Neo’s shadow and everything that was holding him back from realising his Higher Self.
We are part of a community. We need others to maximise ourselves and, in turn, we must help others to maximise themselves. We, and our community, advance together. In our contemporary culture, the Power Elite, the Old World Order – the dynastic families that rule the world – care only about themselves. They have no interest at all in helping “the masses” to rise to a higher plane. In fact they actively oppose such a transition since if the masses were of higher calibre, their power over them would bethreatened.
The Matrix ends with Neo calling the Demiurge directly from a telephone box, while an onscreen message says “carrier anomaly”. Neo says, “I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change.” A new onscreen message appears: System Neo continues, “I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin…I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders and boundaries. A world where anything is possible.”
He then soars into the sky…a man flying into the heavens like a god.
Neo’s final message is exactly that of the Illuminati in relation to the Old World Order.
It’s the task of all of us to be an anomaly, an error, in the Demiurge’s system of control. He can control everyone else, but never us. We will be the malfunction in the Old World Order that brings about System Failure, the complete collapse of the Demiurge’s tyranny, the end of the Old World Order.
And then we will have a world where “anything is possible.”
The Inner and Outer Problems
All human beings are confronted with problems and, as we have seen, they come in two types: inner and outer. There are external obstacles blocking our path, laid by other people, and there are internal obstacles that we have raised ourselves.
In the hero monomyth, the hero uses the crisis provoked by an outer problem to resolve his profoundest inner problems.
The outer and inner problems are inextricably linked: the hero will not succeed with the outer problem if he fails with the inner. The harder the outer problem, the deeper inside himself the hero must go. The greatest acts of heroism demand the greatest self transformation. The supreme external challenges require heroes capable of being gods; those who can transform the whole world by transforming themselves.
The vast majority of people inhabit a comfort zone where they seek easy pleasures to make life pass “pleasantly”. They don’t confront any external problems in any serious way. They engage ego-defence mechanisms such as denial, displacement and projection to avoid facing up to their problems. They are afraid of challenging authority, breaking free of social customs, separating themselves from the herd, departing for daunting destinations.
Ordinary people are afraid of hard work, of taking risks, of being unusual and setting themselves “unrealistic” goals. They are afraid of their own inner demons and refuse to look at them. Above all, they are afraid of attaining their Higher Self because that will change their life forever in the most radical way, and may result in the complete severance with their old, comfortable way of life.
All of us are called by our Higher Self, but most of us resist the summons. If we want to be extraordinary, we have to cut the umbilical cord that links us to everything trivial and ordinary, but most of us never raise the knife that will free us. We are refuseniks, and cowards, the legions of the bland and banal. We are “last men” devoted to petty self-interest and trivial comforts.
Those who pursue the easy life will never achieve anything great. They will never be heroes. Our whole culture is geared towards taking the soft option, of gratifying ourselves as swiftly as possible, hence this is the ultimate anti-hero society. It distrusts and fears true heroes. It only likes comic-book heroes or those who do exactly what society regards as “good” (i.e. as defined by the ruling establishment).
But the hero never allows himself to be defined by others. He defines himself; he creates himself. Only those with the courage to find their authentic self will ever be genuinely authentic.
We live in a fake and phoney world. We live in bad faith. We have a false consciousness. We are inauthentic. We desperately need to build a hero culture, a society of heroes.
It’s time to depart on the long, hard road to find our Higher Selves. It’s time to separate ourselves from the ordinary world that has ensnared us with its trivial concerns and easy, disposable pleasures that reach their sell-by date almost as soon as they are touched. It’s time to cross the threshold that separates the world of Common Day from the extraordinary world.
The hero’s path is right there in front of us, all marked out for us, yet it’s a path that few will be taking.
You want an extraordinary life? Then what are you going to do that is extraordinary? You want to be a hero? Then do something heroic. Take that first step into the Unknown Country and begin the process of transforming yourself from base metal into gold.
The hero monomyth is the supreme act of alchemy that takes the prima materia (the primary material) – ourselves – and purifies and perfects it until it shines, glints and gleams like the gold of God.
The Unheroic Ego and the Transcendent Self
The Ego is turned towards materialism and the ordinary world while the Self is turned towards spirituality and the divine realm. In comparison with the Self, the Ego is extraverted while the Self is introverted. The more extraverted we are (i.e. the more we orient ourselves outwards rather than inwards), the less chance we have of reaching our Self. Those who have a strongly introverted, intuitive nature are those most likely to succeed in their quest to find their soul.
The Ego is locked into the Demiurge’s materialistic world while the Self is our divine spark that connects us to the divine order.
We must move from the culture of the Ego (the arena of anti-heroes striving to be egotistic gods worshipped by the masses; the Satanic path of self-love, selfishness, narcissism and dominance over others; the over-rational mind that is mired in scientific materialism and rejects the spiritual aspect of life; the delusion that “consciousness” defines us) to the culture of the Self (the arena of true heroes, striving to raise everyone up to divinity, to form a community of gods; the path of the True God, of love of all, selflessness, self-mastery rather than mastery of others, of deep humility).
The greatest irony is that the masses slavishly worship and glorify “God” when, in fact, the True God perfect humility and would never welcome being worshipped. Nothing is less god-like than the desire to be worshipped. To crave worship is to be a creature of an out-of-control ego. It is Satan who demands worship, and his followers (all of those so keen to bow and prostrate themselves) are Satan worshippers, nothing more and nothing less. The ceremonies of the Christians, Muslims and Jews where they debase themselves in their desperation to glorify Satan are grotesque and nauseating.
You should reject any religion that demands that you bow, prostrate yourself, pray constantly, restrict what you do on certain days, read a “holy” text over and over again to the exclusion of all other texts, wear certain clothes, avoid certain foods etc. These are nothing but ways of controlling you and no genuine religion would have anything to do with them. True religion is all about knowledge, liberation and salvation.
Although Neo is “God” in relation to the Matrix, there is no suggestion that anyone would start worshipping him, or waving holy texts in the air. There would be no priests and popes, imams and rabbis, temples, synagogues, churches and mosques for Neo. None of these things have any connection whatsoever with religion and spirituality. They are instruments of control, the tools of the Demiurge. A true religion dispenses with all of them. Neo had no desire to be worshipped. The idea would be absurd and offensive. Likewise, the True God desires nothing but that we should emulate him, and, finally, become one with him.
What person of true nobility and goodness would ever want people on their knees in front of him? Only a Tyrant wants the masses bowing before him in an act of degrading submission and subjugation. It’s no accident that Islam means “submission” and that these unfortunates (the Muslims) have been brainwashed into prostrating themselves before a Fascist Dictator who revels in bloody sacrifices by way of suicide bombings that are done to “glorify” him and win his favour.
It would seem impossible that this “God” should not be seen for what he is: Satan, the counterfeit God, the false God, the god of blood and hate, division and oppression, the god who demands that no one should ever contemplate rivals, the “jealous” god who demands that his “book” must never be challenged. This is no God. God would never behave this way. This point cannot be emphasised enough – all forms of worship are Satanic. Anyone who tries to separate us from God, who attempts to portray an infinite and unbridgeable gap between God and us is wicked and evil. The Torah, Bible and Koran are grotesque books by false prophets, intended to lead us into the worship of the tyrant Satan. They are all about emphasising the difference between God and us, when they should be emphasising the similarities and showing us how we can become God. They are all about emphasising petty rules, regulations and commandments that turn us into slaves and robots. They are not a message of liberation, love, peace, hope and salvation, but the exact opposite.
These texts say that we are made in God’s image. If so, why don’t they say that we ourselves can become God? Gnostics teach that the imago Dei is imprinted on us all. We all have God’s image within us. It’s our Self. And if we succeed in reaching it, we can release our divinity. We move from the image of God to becoming one with God.
That is the true message of the fabled quest for the Holy Grail. It was never a straightforward object (rather it is the bridge between objects and spirit), and it certainly had no connection with the impostor Jesus Christ. The object of the quest is to achieve apotheosis, deification, absolute gnosis where we understand everything, have complete knowledge and have entered an indissoluble union with God where it is no longer possible to tell the difference between him and us.
“The sense of mystery, of a real danger to be faced, of an overwhelming Spiritual gain to be won, were of the essential nature of the tale. It was the very mystery of Life which lay beneath the picturesque wrappings; small wonder that the Quest of the Grail became the synonym for the highest achievement that could be set before men, and that when the romantic evolution of the Arthurian tradition reached its term, this supreme adventure was swept within the magic circle. The knowledge of the Grail was the utmost man could achieve, Arthur’s knights were the very flower of manhood; it was fitting that to them the supreme test be offered. That the man who first told the story, and boldly, as befitted a born teller of tales, wedded it to the Arthurian legend, was himself connected by descent with the ancient Faith, himself actually held the Secret of the Grail, and told, in purposely romantic form, that of which he knew, I am firmly convinced, nor do I think that the time is far distant when the missing links will be in our hand, and we shall be able to weld once more the golden chain which connects Ancient Ritual with Medieval Romance.” -- Jessie L. Weston
The Soul Mystery
The soul is not some bizarre thing that exists in a weird dimension beyond the reach of science. It is not your consciousness, your ego, or what you regard as your identity. It is, however, every bit as extraordinarily mysterious and inaccessible as if it were in some alternative reality.
It resides at the heart of your psyche, at the centre of the collective unconscious that connects you to the whole of the human race. To reach your soul you must confront and embrace the contents of your unconscious mind. It’s the greatest challenge of all, which is why so many questers fail. It often requires many lifetimes before you succeed. Reincarnation is an extremely complex subject that has nothing in common with Eastern notions of karma. (Other books in this series describe what reincarnation truly is.)
Yet although the soul is not easily reached, it is still within our grasp. We have an inbuilt archetypal program for managing it: our “Hero Program”. All those who succeeded in finding the Holy Grail were heroes. All the great figures ofancient myths and legends were heroes. Even our cynical, cheap, junk, contemporary society is always seeking heroes. The hero is so important to the human psyche because it is the hero archetype that allows us to bridge the chasm between the Ego and the Self, between the centre of consciousness and the centre of the unconscious, between the mortal and immortal, the human and divine, the Demiurge’s world and that of the True God.
Are you hero enough to succeed in the quest for the Holy Grail, the quest for your own soul? Some people think that if they join the Illuminati, their problems will be at an end: they will be told exactly what to do by those who have achieved illumination. Anyone who thinks that has no chance whatever of succeeding.
The “Hero program” is a more colourful and vivid version of Jung’s so-called Individuation process, but it serves precisely the same need, for the Ego to be replaced by the Self as the focus of our psyche, for the vast unconscious to be brought into consciousness. You need to be a hero to reach the Self. After all, you are overcoming the greatest obstacle of all – No matter what the world throws at you, you have the choice, the freedom to do something about it. It may be staggeringly difficult, but that’s why you need to be a hero. And if you’re not a hero then what are you?
The hero’s journey is the one you must undertake to be a human being who has lived to the fullest extent. This is your personal Grail quest. Most fail, but at least they tried. The worst are those who don’t try: the Ignavi, the despicable ones, the Last Men.
Why do people flee from heroism? Low self-esteem, lack of ambition, cowardice, apathy, easily distracted by trivial pleasures – you name it. The greatest ordeal is to confront ourselves, to get rid of the all the bullsh*t we construct to protect our self-image, to smash down our ego defence mechanisms. We are all wounded but we can all try to heal ourselves. We can succeed if we pour our heart and soul into it.
We all have a lesson to learn. It’s associated with our personal “secret”, and we assuredly all have one. The Hero Program allows us to confront it, deal with it and move on to a higher level. Jung recognised that the task of an analyst was to discover a patient’s secret because it was this secret that was preventing the patient from living properly. In this regard, the analyst is equivalent to the archetypal mentor. He helps the hero face the greatest challenges. He prepares him for the ordeal. But, ultimately, it is the patient and not the analyst who must do battle. The hero must find his shadow and deal with his secret wound, like the spiritual wound of the Fisher King. He must recognise the persona – the mask he wears for social acceptability – for the fake appendage it is and bring his true self into the external world. He must come to terms with his anima – the ideal of female perfection in his own mind – and recognise it for what it is: a way of compensating for qualities lacking in him. Finally he must reach into the deepest recesses of the collective unconscious and seize his Self, the archetype of archetypes, the divine spark itself. These are the steps of Jung’s individuation process, and they are precisely the same steps that the hero must successfully accomplish.
When we make contact with our divine spark, we can retune to a new frequency, so to speak, and receive messages from the divine order. Our world is transformed. We have become our Higher Selves. We are like Neo as he flies for the very first time.
The Illuminati provide ten degrees of ascending difficulty for reaching the soul. Many members of the Illuminati never reach the last three mystery degrees, so being a member guarantees nothing. Why should reaching the soul be easy? Why would anyone think that? It’s the culmination of a whole life’s worth of dedication to the task. And not just one lifetime…many. Wouldn’t you rather watch TV, go out for a drink, chat, shop, play some music, go on do a few hours of video games (see if you can reach level 33 of that hot new release)? Most people don’t have the guts, the dedication, the imagination. They love heroes, and they even fondly imagine that they are in some way heroic, but they are not. They are deluding themselves. Heroism is far beyond most people. They are so easily distracted from their goal. Like the Ignavi, they commit themselves to nothing. Like Nietzsche’s Last Men, they seek petty comforts and joys. They are the masters of trivia. They always turn away from serious endeavours because they would prefer to fritter away their time. The Old World Order rely on it. Satan and his archons take it for granted. That’s why they think they will never be defeated.
Bono, lead singer of U2, likes to present himself as some great benefactor, a hero in the fight against world poverty. Yet this man is one of the richest people on earth. It is precisely because people like him exist that others are so poor. The poor are a direct consequence of the existence of the super rich: it’s simple cause and effect. Yet this nauseating hypocrite (together with his friend “Sir” Bob Geldof) struts around the world stage like some leprechaun peaco*ck, meeting world leaders and revelling in all the attention. Bono is the supreme narcissist. He suffers from “ego inflation”. This is where the Ego (essentially a self-centred, self-serving entity) hijacks and abuses the Self’s selfless and altruistic urge for wholeness and for heroically helping the entire community. So we end up with the grotesque spectacle of a narcissist claiming the moral high ground, trumpeting his desire to help others while simultaneously enjoying the luxury lifestyle of the super rich. Hypocrisy as staggering as this is always caused by ego inflation. Saint Francis of Assisi gave away all of his riches to help the poor. He spent his entire life working amongst them. What a contrast with Bono and Geldof.
The Ego says: What’s in it for me? It’s all about me. Because I’m worth it. I’m all right, Jack. Who cares about anyone else?
The Self says: How may I serve? It’s about us. Because we’re worth it. Is everyone all right? Who needs help?
The hero, like the great ancient gods, suffers, dies and is resurrected. He must meet death before he can be reborn and transformed. He must sacrifice something like an old habit or belief; something that is blocking his progress. His task is to go from the humdrum, ordinary, boring world to the special, exciting, extraordinary world and bring back secret knowledge and special powers that raise him and his community to a higher level. He comes back renewed, stronger, better, and promoted to divinity.
“There are things known, and things unknown, and in between are The Doors.” -- Jim Morrison
“Things known” – consciousness, the material world, Ego.
“Things unknown” – the unconscious, the spiritual world, Self.
“The Doors” – the secret doors of human curiosity leading to the possibility of expanded consciousness and communication with the divine order.
All hero stories are about the hero going through the mystical door from the known to the unknown world, the ordinary to the extraordinary world, from consciousness into the unconscious, past the threshold guardians who test the hero and block his path. He must endure ordeals that would break lesser souls then return with secret knowledge that expands the boundaries of the known world. His quest involves a confrontation with death and brings about, at the very least, a symbolic death of his old self. Every story needs a teacher, a mentor, to prepare the hero for death. The hero’s supreme goal is to find his Self, to become complete and whole.
We have a divided psyche – consciousness versus the unconscious, the Ego versus the Self – and that is the cause of our problems. When we heal our psyche by bringing the Ego under the control of the Self, by illuminating the unconscious contents of our mind that had previously haunted us, we reach a higher state of being. We are unique in the animal kingdom for having this Ego/Self split in our psyche. It’s our task to try to reconnect the two.
The Soul Search
Why are souls so difficult to detect? The answer is simple: theycan easily be mistaken for other things that we would fully expect to see, things that exist in the world all around us all of the time, things that fully exist in the objective, scientific world rather than in some weird and undefined other dimension. Our world is full of light, so how, for example, would you ever see a living light entity, capable of continually changing its form since it’s not tied to rigid shapes of the type we are familiar with in the material world, and know it for what it is? You would always interpret it as something else. Is a “trick of the light” just that, or is it as glimpse of a light soul?
Souls are nothing like what you are told about in religious studies at school. Souls are light. If people opened their eyes – really opened them – they might start to see what is all around them.
The Death of the Ego and the “Birth” of the Self
In Jungian terms, the Self, the centre of the Psyche is the key to being a whole human, to maximising human potential, and ultimately to becoming God. The Self is the imago the image of God. It transcends normality, overcomes the boundaries of the ordinary, and allows us to perceive how everything is fundamentally interconnected. It’s our apotheosis. The individual’s entire centre has moved: from humanity to divinity.
A god always helps the group. The Self is concerned with the community and society while the Ego is concerned with selfishness and itself. The Self is the hero leading his people to safety while the Ego is Narcissus transfixed by his own reflection in the pool.
Jung’s individuation process is a strategy for success, happiness and fulfilment in life. It’s a practical model for leading a good and noble life. It revolves around personal growth, around becoming consciously aware of our true self rather than our false self – the Ego – with which we wrongly identify, thus alienating our Higher Self. The Self is far beyond the Ego, far more mysterious, and links us to the divine order. The key to self-development is for an individual to rise high above his ordinary self, then look down and see how limited his personal perspectives and conscious ideas are in comparison with the vastness of the collective unconscious that stretches all the way back to the very origins of the human race, and then to the roots of existence itself.
Our Ego is only a small part of who we are; a surface phenomenon, the tip of the iceberg. We have roots that stretch as deep as human history that are never seen or acknowledged, but it is these roots that nourish our soul. We have to escape from the tyranny of the Ego, from the delusion that this is who we really are. Richard Dawkins is someone locked into the Ego, with no idea of a greater, nobler and transcendent reality. His rightful condemnation of mainstream religion has tragically led him to cut himself off from the wonder and awe of the authentic religious world. Over and over he defends a narrow, sterile view of the human race, locked in a mindless process of pointless, mechanistic evolution that strips all meaning from human existence. That is what happens to those who become obsessed with a superficial “self” and see it as the only reality. The more they defend their position, the more they distance themselves from their true Selves.
The hero must undergo a symbolic showdown with himself (via his Shadow), endure a Crisis (a turning point), a Climax (point of maximum emotion) and a Denouement (a final outcome). He must be separated from his previous existence, must undertake a descent into an underworld or special world where he will be tested by an ordeal, be initiated into new and profound knowledge and return with this new knowledge to his original world. A person who returns at a higher state can keep repeating this process as part of a dialectical improvement.
The hero is aiming for an epiphany where he clearly sees the essence of things, and is reborn as a god. He desires self-realisation, self-actualisation, new insights, new He wants to undergo an apotheosis and begin again, this time as a god.
The Shadow is the primary obstacle to heroism. It contains all the undesirable, petty, lazy, apathetic, cowardly aspects that sabotage our efforts to make the most of ourselves, to express our true and highest nature. The encounter with the Shadow is our supreme ordeal.
Are you ready to slay your Shadow, to be a hero? Join The Movement, change the world and discover your soul. Or is that too much for you?
“If man hasn’t discovered something to die for, he isn’t fit to live.” -- Martin Luther King
The Shadow
All conflict is psychological. The wars, the cruelty, the inhumanity that have afflicted the human race throughout its turbulent history are products of a few simple psychological laws. Tragically for the world, the governments of nations comprise self-serving politicians rather than high calibre psychologists.
We live in the Shadow World, where the hidden contents of the human mind pour out in an endless torrent of callousness, violence, selfishness, greed, degradation and narcissism. That flow could be stemmed easily, simply by teaching people where it all comes from. But there are those in high places who have no desire to change anything. They love the sewers that humanity wades through. They want to watch us being debased and brutalised. We are the damned, the inmates of a planetary mental asylum. Humanity is the creature of the diseased unconscious. The toxins spill out everywhere, turning the atmosphere into pure poison. We can scarcely breathe because there’s so much pollution. We are the undead, a vampire species sucking each other’s blood and never seeing any true human face reflected in the mirror.
Yet we could easily escape from this twilight world and step into the sunlight. We need to demand that the political class that has failed us so dismally is swept aside. In their place, we would place meritocratic psychologists whose remit is not to manipulate how much money we have but to optimise the contents of our minds. “Psycho government” is government of people’s minds, by people’s minds for people’s minds. If we cure the problems of the human mind, everything else – the arena of conventional politics – falls into place. Think of the trillions of dollars that would be saved if jails, police, armies, navies, airforces, nuclear armaments, conventional armaments, secret services, intelligence services, criminal lawyers, law courts were all rendered obsolete. With that money, the world could be altered beyond recognition. What are we waiting for?
The Persona, Shadow, Ego, Id, Anima/Animus, Superego and Aurum
The world is a masque. It’s full of people wearing masks concealing their true selves. Jung called the human mask the It’s our public face, how we present ourselves to others. We have a variety of masks: one for work, one when we’re with family, one when we’re with friends, one for our sexual partners, and so on.
The closer our persona is to the person we think we are, the happier we are. We don’t like having to mask our real thoughts and emotions, yet we know how difficult life would be if we told those we despise what we really thought of them. Most employees hate their bosses, and vice versa, yet they all have to engage in the pretence of mutual respect. Happy employees are those who respect and like their bosses, and vice versa. Good bosses are highly recognisable: the difference between their salary and that of their lowest paid employee is much smaller than that of the bad bosses and their lowest paid employees. To pay a pittance to any of your workers is to show contempt for them. The boss would never work for that money, but he expects others to accept it. Why should they? Inherent in capitalism’s massive disparities of wealth is the virulent concept that some human beings are of much less intrinsic value than others and don’t deserve any better than they get. If you have no respect for others, how can you expect the world to be a good place? The great Thomas Jefferson said that all men are created equal, but the Old World Order have spent all of their time proving the opposite.
Freud said that the superego component of our personality is the repository of the rules of our parents and of society in general, for the inner moral voice (the conscience), for respect for “authority”. It is censorious, rule-bound and moralistic. It judges all of our actions and deems them acceptable or unacceptable. If unacceptable, the superego makes us feel guilt, shame and anxiety. The superego is closely related to the persona. Both are concerned with social acceptability, obeying the rules, acknowledging authority, conforming.
The on the other hand, couldn’t care less about rules. It’s guided by the pleasure principle and simply wants to have fun: to do whatever it likes, no matter what, and regardless of others. It is unashamedly selfish and considers that the whole world exists only to serve its needs. It is the expression of absolute personal freedom and vanity, of total lack of concern for others. The Old World Order are
The Freudian ego sits between the id and superego, mediating between their conflicting desires. The ego obeys the reality principle i.e. it weighs up what is practical and what isn’t. It carefully considers the consequences of actions. While the id is immoral and the superego moral, the ego is amoral, rational and calculating. Where possible, it will side with the id, but generally it acknowledges the superego’s social rules.
Yet it knows that obeying the superego is just a cynical act. Where the superego has a conscience, the ego does not. The ego is a pragmatist and instrumentalist. For Jung too, there is an ego beneath the persona and, again, it is pragmatic. It knows when to wear a mask and when to drop it, except in the case when a person has identified so closely with their persona that it has consumed them: the actor can’t stop playing his role. The longer he stays “in character” the more he fears that it’s because he has no character of his own underneath. There’s simply nothing there. Many successful people are of this kind, particularly those who hog the public eye, such as movie and TV stars, politicians and CEOs. They have dead eyes. They are defined by their persona. They shrivel if the limelight turns away from them. They can never step off the stage. If they do, it’s usually to express the opposite of the persona – the (Jung’s shadow is closely connected with Freud’s id.)
Whereas the persona is heedful of and defined by others, the shadow revolves around the self. It’s raw, uncivilised, primitive, self-seeking, animalistic, contemptuous of others. It’s the inferior being within us, yearning to do everything that we have trained ourselves not to do. It’s what society tells us not to be.
If the persona is Dr Jekyll, the shadow is Mr Hyde. If the superego is Dr Jekyll, the id is Mr Hyde, a creature of the night: a cruel, heartless figure stalking the shadows. In The Picture of Dorian the protagonist stays supernaturally well preserved while a portrait of him locked in his attic becomes hideous, reflecting the corruption that should have been etched on his real face. His pristine, youthful face represents a perfect public mask. The portrait is his shadow and has turned utterly demonic.
Our world loves the “shadow”. Newspapers never tire of turning every piece of news into a black and white story of good guys and bad guys. The former are those with a pleasing persona, the latter are the wicked shadow people who populate our nightmares. Gangsters are shadow characters. So are serial killers, megalomaniacs, dictators, cheating husbands, jealous boyfriends and bunny boiler girlfriends, thugs, femme fatales, criminals, robber barons, racketeers, carpetbaggers, conmen, and even those with unfortunate, clumsy personalities, those lacking charm and social graces. UK newspapers mercilessly pilloried Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, because he was not a smooth operator in public. That made him “bad”, someone not up to the job, someone from whom we should flee in revulsion. It’s a well-known fact that in criminal cases beautiful people receive lighter sentences than ugly people, and are more likely to walk free.
Hollywood movies are full of shadow characters. TV shows and documentaries are obsessed with them. Crime novels, thrillers, whodunits, mysteries, fantasies, chick lit…they all have shadow characters in central roles.
In the story of the protagonist’s new wife is forbidden to open the locked door to his secret room, symbolising the unconscious where his shadow resides, hence an exceptionally dark, disturbing and dangerous place. Bluebeard’s wife is lucky to escape with her life when, to satisfy her curiosity, she goes ahead and opens the door (metaphorically entering the most infernal part of her husband’s unconscious). Her predecessors were not so fortunate.
In the tragic story of the Lady of the eponymous heroine is forbidden to look directly at the world and must gaze at its reflection in a mirror. “I am half sick of shadows,” she says in Tennyson’s famous poem. The world she sees obliquely is the unconscious where the shadow lurks. She catches sight of Sir Lancelot, falls in love with the great knight, and can’t stop herself looking directly at him. Instantly, her mirror shatters, symbolising mental breakdown. Knowing that her love will never be requited, she starts to die of a broken heart. She leaves instructions for her body to be placed in a black barge and directed downstream, where it eventually finds its way to Camelot and to Sir Lancelot himself. The river is a common symbol of the unconscious. Sir Lancelot is the Lady of Shalott’s “animus”: her unconscious, idealised image of a man. (Bluebeard is also an animus figure, though of a less salubrious kind.) In this tale, an encounter with the unconscious proves fatal.
The story of the Lady of Shalott can also be interpreted as a Gnostic allegory. The pure Lady in her high tower represents a soul in heaven. She becomes enamoured of the things of material world – represented by Lancelot – and succumbs to the lure of earthly delights, with the direst consequences. Her soul becomes trapped in the physical world, and she will have to endure many cycles of reincarnation until she can attain gnosis and escape.
In the fairytale the poor heroine in rags, locked in the dark basem*nt, represents the the underdeveloped aspect of the personality. She is ignored and neglected by her elder sisters who shut her in whenever they go out. They represent the persona, interacting with the real world, while she stands for the contents of the unconscious, forbidden from being brought into the light of consciousness. However, the unconscious escapes into the real world (Cinderella goes to the ball). Cinderella meets her handsome Prince (the ego – the light of consciousness), but they are unable to sustain their liaison. They need another factor to come into play before they can enter a happy union with each other. The magic slipper represents the “transcendent function”, the mysterious process that Jung invokes to overcome dialectical standoffs between thesis and antithesis. The transcendent function brings about the needed synthesis that moves a person onto a higher level of consciousness where many of the previously neglected contents of the unconscious are absorbed into consciousness. Finally, Cinderella and her handsome Prince are married – symbolising the higher synthesis, the union of ego and shadow, the penetration of the unconscious by consciousness.
Many fairytales have this archetypal nature. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is both an animus figure and a shadow character. When Little Red Riding Hood strays off the path (the superego’s rules of proper conduct), she enters the stormy world of the unconscious, and the wild and dangerous sexuality of the id (like a ravening wolf). Vampires, werewolves, ghouls and all the staple antagonists of modern horror movies are also shadow creatures. Freddy Krueger literally lives in and emerges from nightmares…the shadow reifying itself and entering the real world.
The immensely successful Twilight series is so popular because it combines a vampire, a shadow figure, with a “nice” boy ruled by his superego. The vampire doesn’t have sex and doesn’t drink human blood. He is “vegetarian” – he only drinks the blood of animals and they must not be from endangered species. This is a caring, sharing, “green” vampire. Such a figure commands the fanaticism of teenage girls. They get the bad boy and good boy in one handsome package. They are allowed to enjoy “the eroticism of abstinence.” The vampire is the sexy outsider, the rebel, the unconventional one that girls often fixate upon. Yet this particular vampire is also loyal, dutiful, considerate, romantic and loving – the other type to which girls are drawn. He is both marriage material and a bit dangerous: a perfect combination in the imagination of a teenage girl. Thus from simple psychological elements are worldwide bestsellers born. The author of the Twilight series is a religious fanatic – a Mormon – who is no doubt haunted by a highly erotic shadow. Her books are simply a reflection of her own unconscious struggle between her restrictive religion and her dark desires.
The alien abduction experience that many people report has several interpretations. One is that it is about being absorbed by your shadow, your alien inner self. The alien, the “other”, is often a symbol of the shadow.
The vast majority of stories can be analysed as encounters between elements of consciousness and those of the unconscious. In Kafka’s The the protagonist represents the ego entering the bewildering world of the unconscious with its own very odd rules (represented by the labyrinthine and illogical legal proceedings of the trial) where no reason can be discerned, mysterious forces are at play, and failure to come to terms with the unconscious inevitably leads to death. In Kafka’s The the protagonist is again the ego and is again completely frustrated in his attempts to make any sense of the unconscious (represented by the mysterious castle of the title from which strange and confusing messages emanate, like the contents of a dream).
Kafka’s stories can also be interpreted gnostically. In The the protagonist (the human soul) is in the Demiurge’s world, does not understand what it is doing there, nor what is being done to it by the archons – those upholding the bizarre laws of the Demiurge’s world – and is trying to attain gnosis and escape, but finds that there is no harder task, and failure is deadly.
In The the human soul is again trying to attain gnosis (the protagonist is always desperately seeking information, knowledge and truth), but only receives garbled messages from the higher world(symbolised by the mysterious and impenetrable castle) that do not provide illumination, thus showing the difficulties of making contact with the divine order.
In The Great the rich and beautiful Daisy Buchanan – “Her voice is full of money.” – is Gatsby’s anima figure, the narrator Nick Carraway is his superego (temporarily seduced but then disgusted by the moral degeneration of the world of shallow narcissists obsessively pursuing wealth and fame). Gatsby himself is a shining persona with nothing underneath. He has shirts that he doesn’t wear, books that he doesn’t read, a pool he doesn’t swim in. He throws lavish parties he never attends. It’s all for show, all an illusion. Meanwhile, his shadow is coming for him, and eventually it kills him. The green light he likes to look towards across the water is pointing, firstly, at his anima (Daisy Buchanan), but also beyond that, to the Imago Dei – the image of God (the Higher Self) that he yearns for. But he is separated from it by the water (the unconscious) that he can’t cross. The Old World Order are often sad, Gatsby-like figures.
In almost all movies and novels, you will discover interplay between characters based on id, ego, superego, shadow, persona and anima/animus. These are archetypal figures and they are involved in the archetypal stories that we see all around us every day. Your work colleagues, your friends, your lovers, your family…look closely and you will see the archetypes manifesting themselves in their behaviour.
If you examine the conflicts of the world, you will not find religion, philosophy, nationalism, politics, economics, justice, justness or any other of the usual pretexts, but the id and the shadow alone – the dark side of the “force” to use the Star Wars terminology Wars was deliberately designed as an archetypal story). And you will find a phenomenon known as projection whereby we cast our shadow – the deep and dark contents of our own unconscious, the things we particularly dread and wish to avoid and disown – onto others so that we can pretend to ourselves that they don’t exist within us. The victims of our projection are our scapegoats. We transfer our sins to them and then we sacrifice them to our gods to be rid of them. In exorcism, the demons come from within not from within the “possessed”. We are Dorian Grays. Rather than confront our horrific shadow, we would rather cast it onto someone else. Then we can safely hate it because we are able to delude ourselves that it’s not part of us. Yet, in truth, it becomes even more deeply embedded, and now it also carries our guilt and shame at what we have done.
Conflict is the consequence of our failure to understand our unconscious minds, of the failure of governments to pursue psychology as a means of conflict resolution. “Politics” consists of the horse-trading of neuroses and psychoses dressed up as principles and just causes. Of course, governments themselves are in denial about the filth, the bestial*ty, and the primal desires locked inside their own unconscious.
“Sin for Salvation” is a technique used for releasing pent-up tension. The whole world needs Sin for Salvation. Jung recognised that those who had not had an encounter with their shadow, those who had not sought to master its secret contents, were leaving themselves open to catastrophic projections of their shadows. People who are obsessed with “sin”, who draw up endless commandments, rules and restrictions are those who are guaranteed to push their own sinful natures deep into their unconscious and then project them onto others. Whenever you hear an evangelist frothing at the mouth about sin, you should shudder in revulsion, because you know that this man’s unconscious is full of perversion, and someone somewhere will surely suffer because of it.
Jung considered that the perfection attributed to Christ was a problem because such perfection was psychologically bound to summon its opposite: the Antichrist. It was a psychological law, he maintained, and it explains why there is such an expectation amongst Christian Fundamentalists of the coming of the Antichrist. It’s their own shadow content – the content they have done so much to repress – that is really coming. These are not healthy, whole people. They have not come to terms with their shadow.
The more restrictive and rule-bound society is, the larger is its shadow. The most hypocritical, debauched and depraved societies have always been those that claimed to be the most moral. Victorian Britain, on the surface, was a model of Christian rectitude and probity. Underneath the facade, prostitution, decadence and exploitation were rife. “Good” Christian men and women treated millions of poor people as sub-human.
Modern America calls itself the world’s hyper power and yet a huge proportion of its people live in abject poverty and misery. Hurricane Katrina, and the devastation it wrought in New Orleans, revealed the hidden underbelly of America – the true face of America, the Dorian Gray portrait that the government never shows to the world. President Obama is the latest feeble attempt to conceal the reality.
A liberal Facebook society can have a huge shadow too. Those who don’t conform to the Facebook mentality are labelled losers, loners, dorks, geeks, nerds, anoraks. They are “uncool”. Yet what is really being reflected here is that the Facebook generation lives in terror of having no social lives and no friends. They compile long lists of fake friends, virtual friends, cyber-friends…all to make them feel less lonely. Yet all the while their anxiety grows because they are all too aware of how synthetic, fleeting and disposable these relationships really are.
Schizophrenia can be regarded as a condition where the shadow is projected not onto others, but onto the sufferer’s own ego. The ego then attacks itself until it finally fragments into a number of hostile voices. It is reminiscent of an autoimmune disease but, instead of the body attacking itself, it is the mind that attacks itself.
Muslims, with their disgust for the “infidel”, project their own doubts about their faith onto others. They think that if they kill the unbelievers they will banish their own doubts. The fanatical Christian Crusaders were of a similar ilk. The witch-hunting crazes of medieval northern Europe, the Salem witch trials of America, the Soviet show trials of the twentieth century…they all concern a desperate attempt by the “true believers” to destroy the unbelievers, but they can never succeed because the unbelief is actually inside themselves. The worst horrors are frequently internal, not external.
There are those who say the horrors of the past couldn’t happen now, yet they’re everywhere, just as before. The War on Terror, immigrants, scroungers, vagrants, beggars, gypsies, hoodies, druggies, gangs, trailer trash…the list of those we demonise is endless. “Tabloid” newspapers are psychotic in their hatred of the “other”. “Shock jocks” do nothing but pour out the poison from their own shadows. They have no self-awareness, and nothing constructive to say. They are experts at summoning images of the Enemy, the Evil Stranger, the Predator, the Stalker, the sinister Other.
The lynch mob, the baying crowd, the rabid “moral majority”, projects its collective shadow onto its victims. David Icke and his kind orchestrate the collective shadow of crazed anarcho-capitalist libertarians. The “Truth” movement’s hysteria grows in direct proportion to the extent to which its arguments are refuted. Has any member of the Truth movement ever backed down on a single point? These same people project their collective shadow onto the Illuminati and the New World Order. Their warped image of the Illuminati exists only in their own minds.
If you believe in the devil, you’ll be determined to find him “out there” so that you can say, “Told you so.” You’ll always find him all right – in your own shadow, which you’ll always project onto others, whom you will then persecute for being Satanic.
A nation can have a collective shadow. Nazi Germany, in pursuit of Aryan purity, rejected everything that deviated from its rigid definition of blond, blue-eyed Nordic perfection. Endless toxins were crammed into the Nazi shadow and then projected onto all of those didn’t match the Nazi ideal, the Jews in particular. The death camps were built by the shadow. They are the sacrificial temples of the shadow.
Jesse Owens is someone who should be held in the highest regard because he went into the capital of Nazi Germany during the Olympics and showed that the Nazi ideology was spectacularly false by winning four gold medals.
As for the Jews, they themselves have now developed a grotesque shadow that they project onto the Palestinians. In response, Islam’s collective shadow is projected onto Israel and its ally America, which then also drags in America’s European allies. The West then projects its collective shadow onto Islam, and so we go round and round, with Satan and his archons orchestrating the great shadow show. We live in the long night of shadows, and only Illumination can dispel the darkness.
Men who commit hom*ophobic attacks may be fearful about their own sexuality. Bullies may be terrified that deep down they are weak and feeble: they’re getting their retaliation in first. The Old World Order are haunted by the idea that they are pathetic nothings, so they project that onto everyone else. They do everything to separate themselves from ordinary people. They are infinitely greedy so that they can afford endless status symbols to differentiate themselves from regular people. They are driven, above all other things, to be “somebodies”, to be better than the masses that they regard as non-entities, as a collective waste of space. Read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged if you want to know the sheer contempt that the super-rich feel for ordinary men and women. Every fan of Rand’s “vision” is psychotic. Many such people are prominent in the highest echelons of American life.
The Old World Order live in terror of the truth that they know all too well; that there is nothing remarkable about them. These are not great geniuses. They are not dazzling philosophers, scientists, poets, artists, musicians or inventors. They didn’t come from the humblest of origins. They are not self-made men. They are born into privilege, given every advantage, given “access all areas” passes to the most influential people and jobs. These are not masters of the universe. They got lucky, nothing more. They know as well as anyone that they don’t deserve their good fortune, and the more they know that the more they try to pretend that they are worth it. Underneath it all, they have a crippling insecurity complex. They’re terrified of losing it all, of having it all taken away from them (an outcome they know is entirely just). To make themselves seem worthy of it, they must do everything to increase the gap between them and us, to transform it into an unbridgeable, unassailable gulf.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that the Emperor Caligula concluded that either emperors were gods, or men were beasts. How else could the infinite distance between them be explained? The same logic is used by the OWO. If regular men and women are human then they must be gods in comparison, and rewarded appropriately. If they themselves are ordinary then regular men and women must be sub-human who deserve only the worst treatment. Either way, the financial gap between them must be made as vast as possible.
But we play along. We promote celebrities and the super-rich to the status of gods. They are the heroes of our culture, the people we want to be. We yearn for their lifestyles, their power and influence, their fame and prestige. We are in a pathological relationship of mutual dependency with them. The more they steal from us and widen the gap between us, the more we admire them, the more we want what they have. It’s a form of the Stockholm Syndrome – we start to take the side of our oppressors, those who have kidnapped our minds. We vote them into power. We do nothing to challenge them. We let them walk all over us.
Human beings have an archetype named “Aurum” (the Latin for gold, although fool’s gold might be more appropriate). It represents our craving for a personal earthly paradise. It’s our fantasy version of ourselves leading the ideal, golden life. (Collectively, it represents our ideas about fabled Golden Ages of the past, the days of the Garden of Eden, Shangri La, Camelot etc). We project it onto others, onto those who have we want, those who are what we want to be. They are the golden people and we would give anything to be like them. We hero worship them, love them. We’ll give them whatever they want. Advertisers relentlessly exploit this strange obsession, this mental illness regarding celebrity, that afflicts so many of us.
The Aurum archetype is all about temptation. Every human must learn to overcome it. It underlies our pathetic, childish worship of celebrities and the super-rich. It’s what Mephistopheles offers. If we accept, we have sold our soul, just like the members of the Old World Order. They are the legion of the damned. They are legion for they are many.
Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other means. In fact, war is the discontinuation of psychological self-awareness.
Society must remove its mask. Nations must drop the mask. Hypocrisy is ingrained. Individuals have to face life more honestly. The institutions that promote hypocrisy – particularly mainstream religions and political parties – must be abolished. Our masks grip our faces so tightly we can barely breathe. Only when we strip away the masks can we bathe in the light of consciousness and taste clean air.
We will always have a dark side, but we need to learn to live with it, deal with it and understand it. Society will be much healthier if we diminish the power and ubiquity of the mask, and let the shadow find channels of expression. Best of all would be to harness Nietzsche’s concept of sublimation, to take the dark energy of the shadow and direct it into healthy areas and works of creativity. Our bodies and minds would be healthier, our culture elevated.
Nietzsche despised Christians because they hated human nature. (Sex, to a Christian, is pure sin. Pleasure is unacceptable. Alcohol is the drink of the Devil. The Christians deny their desires, renounce them, denounce them, exterminate them.) Nietzsche also hated those who overindulged their desires, who surrendered to every temptation. Sublimation was his answer to both problems. Humanity could raise itself by converting primitive drives and desires into higher pursuits – art, philosophy, science, creativity. Killing the passions was no good, and nor was submitting to them; they had to be alchemically transformed from base desires to noble ones. Physical lead must become spiritual gold.
Nietzsche admired the ancient Greeks because they were able to have great Dionysian festivals where they celebrated sex and alcohol. The rest of the time, having got the passions out of their system, they could devote to the great culture for which they became world famous. Isn’t that what we need too? – new festivals of Dionysus a few times a year; Sin for Salvation. Letting it all out, so that it no longer haunts us. Then we can seek to re-direct our passions to higher goals. It is the opposite of Christian self-hate; it’s the opposite of endless indulgence; it’s periodic excess in order to allow the release of prolonged creative passion.
The self-haters and the sin-obsessed create monstrous shadows that crave the greatest debauchery. The over-indulgers create shadows that are neurotic, paranoid, rule-bound. Both extremes are dangerous. Sublimation, the middle path, is where harmony, balance and creativity lie.
Nietzsche advocated a union of Dionysian and Apollonian forces. Dionysus provides group ecstasy and intoxication. Apollo provides contemplation, art and reason for the cultured individual. Balance is provided when Apollo harnesses Dionysus.
Nietzsche said that Greece lost its way when Greek tragedy, under the influence of the playwright Euripides, started to lose its Dionysian energy and become too Apollonian. With the rise of Socrates and Plato, Greek philosophy also became massively over-rational. The world turned increasingly Apollonian and cast an ever-greater Dionysian shadow of horror and terror. The solution is to bring back Dionysus. When it is an explicit and well-understood part of our culture, it will no longer cast its shadow.
The more the shadow is repressed, the more power it acquires, the more it grows, the more dangerous it becomes. If we let it grow too strong, it overwhelms us. The War on Terror is a struggle between collective shadows. A proper understanding of psychology could resolve all conflict and lead to “Crime Zero: War Zero”, the condition of no crime and no conflict anywhere on earth.
Of course, there are real enemies as well as projected shadows. Satan, his archons and the OWO are all too real. Yet understanding our shadow in all of its manifestations can enable us to defeat them. If we diminish the shadow, we increase the light.
Satan is the shadow director, the orchestrator of the poisons present in the unconscious. He thrives on imbalance, on unconscious desires and unspoken fears. To defeat him, society has to attain harmony, proper balance between men and women, young and old, different races, different religions, different nations, different economic systems, different political systems.
The New World Order is based on sublimation and psychological balance. It is about defusing the shadow, both individual and collective.
The True God is unique: he has no unconscious. He is fully self-aware. Every aspect of his mind has been brought into consciousness, every “issue” resolved. Satan, the counterfeit God, on the other hand, is controlled by his unconscious. He has almost no true self-knowledge.
Gnosticism, the pursuit of the highest, transcendent knowledge, is fundamentally psychological. Knowledge grows as more and more of the unconscious is illuminated by consciousness. When we understand our minds fully then we know the mind of God.
The Imago Dei – the image of God – is within us, at the centre of our unconscious, at the precise centre of our psyche. That is what we must find if we wish to succeed in our quest for the Holy Grail.
“I Am Half Sick Of Shadows.”
The story of The Lady of Shalott is an astonishingly powerful Arthurian myth described in the eponymous poem by Tennyson. It’s largely inspired by the tale of Elaine of Astolat, related in Thomas Malory’s famous 15th-century work Le Morte though Tennyson himself claimed the primary influence was a 13th-century Italian novelette entitled Donna di
Elaine of Astolat is a fair maiden who falls in love with the great knight Lancelot but dies of a broken heart when she realises her love will never be requited. She leaves instructions for her body to be placed in a black barge. One of her hands clutches her favourite flower – the lily – while the other clasps the last letter she ever wrote. The barge floats down the Thames to Camelot where members of Arthur’s court discover it. They read Elaine’s letter to Lancelot, who then explains what took place between the maiden and him. He pays for a grand funeral for her.
In Tennyson’s poem, there is no physical contact between the Lady of Shalott and Lancelot. The Lady lives under a curse, the origin of which is never revealed, and is condemned to spend her days in an isolated fortress tower on an island in the middle of a river. Day and night, she weaves a magic web, full of brilliant colours. She is permitted to look at the outside world only via its reflection in a mirror. However, one day she glimpses Lancelot riding past and is so smitten she cannot resist looking at him directly. Instantly, her mirror shatters, her web is destroyed, and the curse’s punishment falls on her. She leaves the tower, and sets out downriver for Camelot in a small boat. She sings a final song and then she dies. Her boat reaches Camelot where Arthur’s knights find it. Lancelot, who has never cast eyes on her before, says she has a lovely face.
Tennyson’s poem has poweful allegorical and metaphorical resonances. It might, given Victorian mores, be said to represent the disaster that would befall an unmarried woman if she surrendered to sexual temptation. In a sense, her life was over, especially if she fell pregnant.
It might describe the Gnostic idea that souls in spiritual heaven (represented by the pure Lady in her tower) can become enamoured of the material world (represented by Lancelot and Camelot) and succumb to the lure of earthly delights with dire consequences. The souls then become trapped in the physical world, symbolising the death of spirituality.
The poem might symbolise the struggle of a shy, sensitive person to find a place in a brash, uncaring world. (The Lady of Shalott writes her name on her boat – a futile attempt to establish her identity in the “real” world. Lancelot, the object of her passion, has no idea who she is – the indifference of the “real” world.)
By a similar token, the poem can represent the ordeal of outsiders who try to fit in. They have a tremendous desire for normality, to be no longer persecuted and reviled, but when they enter the normal world, they fail to engage with it. In their despair, they may take their own lives.
The river down which the Lady floats may be the river of life, its currents too strong for sensitive beings, causing them to drift away into oblivion and death.
Another possibility is that the poem encapsulates the dilemma facing artists. To find the time and space to pursue their work (to weave their webs), they need to cut themselves off from ordinary life (to look, so to speak, obliquely rather than directly at the world; represented by looking at the world via a mirror). They may well become isolated and reclusive. In time, they may regard this lonely artistic existence as a curse and choose to plunge into “normal” life, thus sacrificing their gift (the sacrifice being symbolised by the Lady of Shalott’s death), and they may fail in any case to establish a home and identity in the alien and hostile non-artistic world.
In a similar vein, the tale may represent the academics in their ivory towers who study the ordinary world yet find it difficult to gain acceptance in that world. Their talents are simply not valued there, and they’re doomed if they go there.
In his famous painting of the Lady of Shalott, Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt chooses to depict the pivotal moment when the mirror cracks and the Lady of Shalott knows the curse has been activated. (The other logical part of the tale to illustrate is the Lady’s tragic journey to Camelot. Here, John William Waterhouse’s even more famous 1888 painting provides the definitive image.)
Hunt is alive to the complex symbolism the poem offers. He may have seen it as reflecting his own position regarding art. The artist’s duty is to resist the blandishments of the world and remain true to his art, with his artistic integrity retained. To do anything else is to court disaster, as exemplified by the fate of the Lady of Shalott – herself an artist – who surrendered to temptation.
What are the main features we can discern in the painting? Hunt himself provides a detailed exegesis in his 1905 catalogue entry for this painting:
1. Tennyson, in the poem of “The Lady of Shalott”, deals with a romantic story which conveys an eternal truth, based on the romance of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The name of the Lady and the events recorded are the invention of the poet.
2. The progressive stages of circ*mstance in the poem are reached in such enchanting fashion as to veil for the casual reader the severer philosophic purport of the symbolism throughout the verse.
3. The parable, as interpreted in this painting, illustrates the failure of a human soul towards its accepted responsibility. The lady typifying the Soul is bound to represent faithfully the workings of the high purpose of King Arthur’s rule. She is to weave her record, not as one who, mixing in the world, is tempted by egoistic weakness, but as a being “sitting alone”; in her isolation she is charged to see life with a mind supreme and elevated in judgement. In executing her design on the tapestry she records not the external incidents of common lives, but the present condition of King Arthur’s Court, with its opposing influences of good and evil. It may be seen he is represented on his double throne, the Queen is not there, and he is saddened by her default; but he is still supported on his right and his left by the virtues.
4. At his right hand Charity is sheltering motherless children under her aegis, while justice and Truth are on his left.
5. The knights below are bringing their services. Sir Galahad is offering on his shield the cup of the Holy Grail, which alone pure innocence and faithfulness have enabled him to attain; parts of the web which are not yet completed would reveal the true services of other knights, but on the left of the embroidery the Lady has already pictured the vainglorious Sir Lancelot, who brings no offering but lip-service, kissing his finger tips.
6. The Lady’s chamber is decorated with illustrations of devotion of different orders: on one hand the humility of the Virgin and her Child, and on the other the valour of Heracles who, having overcome the dragon, is seizing the fruit of the garden of the Hesperides while the guardian daughters of Erebus are dead in sleep.
7. The mirror stands as the immaculate plane of the Lady’s own inspired mind, or, if you prefer the interpretation, the unsullied plane upon which Art should reflect Nature as opposed to bald realism, and so far she has obeyed, but seeing the happiness of the common children of men denied to her for the time wavering in her Ideal she becomes envious, and cries, “I am half sick of shadows”.
8. In this mood she casts aside duty to her spiritual self, and at this ill-fated moment Sir Lancelot comes riding by heedlessly singing on his way.
9. Fascinated by his reflection in the mirror, she turns aside to view him through the forbidden window opening on to the world below.
10. Having forfeited the blessing due to unswerving loyalty, destruction and confusion have over-taken her. The mirror “cracks from side to side”, the doves of peace which have nested in her tower find refuge from turmoil in the pure ether of the sky, and in their going extinguish the lamp that stood ever lighted, her work is ruined; her artistic life has come to an end. What other responsibilities remain for her are not for this service; that is a thing of the past. It was suggested to me that the fate of the Lady was too pitiful! I had Pandora’s Box with Hope lying hid, carved upon the frame.
11. Unwittingly, the traitor Lancelot, imparts consolation in his final words -- She has a lovely face; God in His mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.
To what extent does Hunt faithfully reflect the story? Certainly, all the main ingredients of the critical moment are portrayed, but he adds many symbolic elements missing in the source material (Hercules, the Virgin Mary, a lamp, doves, wild hair etc).
This is a good example of how a story mutates, gaining new features, a new “spin”. Although Hunt would seem to have captured a truth suggested by Tennyson’s poem, has he done proper service to the truth of the poem? Is there even such a thing as a definitive truth of any artistic work? Perhaps truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and as each new person comes to an artwork, they will find their own way to interpret it. Through this mechanism, all stories, myths and legends evolve as they are continually reinterpreted, embellished and “improved”.
Interestingly, Hunt met Tennyson, and they discussed an earlier version of Hunt’s depiction of the Lady of Shalott. Hunt recollected their conversation:
“[Tennyson asked] Why did you make the Lady of Shalott, in the illustration, with her hair wildly tossed about as if by a tornado?”
Rather perplexed, I replied that I had purposed to indicate the extra natural character of the curse that had fallen upon her disobedience by reversing the ordinary peace of the room and of the lady herself; that while she recognised that the moment of the catastrophe had come, the spectator might also understand it.
“But I[Tennyson] didn’t say her hair was blown about like that. Then there is another question I want to ask you. Why did you make the web wind round her like the threads of a cocoon?”
“Now,” I exclaimed, “surely that may be justified, for you say –
‘Out flew the web and floated wide!’
Tennyson insisted, “But I did not say it floated round and round her.” My defence was, “May I not urge that I had only half a page on which to convey the impression of weird fate, whereas you had about fifteen pages to give expression to the complete idea?” But Tennyson laid it down that “an illustrator ought never to add anything to what he finds in the text.”
Here we see how The Lady of Shalott no longer “belongs” to her creator. Tennyson objects to Hunt’s interpretation, yet Hunt seems justified in his choices. The problem, of course, is that all artworks contain multiple subtexts, some of which may not have been consciously intended by their creators, and it’s often these shadowy subtexts rather than the primary text which influence other artists.
Whereas Tennyson appears to view the Lady of Shalott as a largely tragic and romantic figure, the hapless victim of a curse, Hunt sees her as an active participant in her downfall. She chooses to be ruined. She courts and merits the curse. She is a fallen woman rather than a falling woman.
In his dramatic depiction of the Lady of Shalott, Hunt invokes the Victorian conventions for depicting prostitutes or adulteresses. The trajectory of the archetypal Victorian fallen woman is initial innocence followed by seduction and abandonment, culminating in the woman becoming an outcast. Her despair and remorse frequently conclude in suicide. All of these elements are explicitly or metaphorically present in the Lady of Shalott’s sad tale.
Hunt shows the Lady’s sexual awakening by depicting her with bare arms and tousled hair. Victorian iconography required the fallen woman to be represented in gaudy, over-elaborate terms to illustrate her descent from natural simplicity. Hunt’s Lady is clearly not dressed or posed as a simple maid; she wears the finery of a courtesan. Although she has not literally been sexually corrupted, her ideological innocence is metaphorically violated, thus the analogy with the fallen woman.
Hunt seems to be asserting that he and not Tennyson has discovered the eternal truth contained in the tale of the Lady of Shalott. That may or may not be the case, but Hunt has certainly produced a startling work of art that deepens our engagement with Tennyson’s haunting poem.
The Human Aura
Are there people with psychic powers who can see colourful auras around others, giving them direct access to our “hidden emotions”? Do they know when people have been suffering from suicidal depression and can they accurately predict the day of their death? Or is it all moonshine and charlatanry?
In fact, there’s a way in which the subject of “auras” is scientifically respectable. Consider how our minds construct the colours of the world. If we were colour blind, we would never contemplate the blueness of the sky. The blueness is produced by how minds interpret sensory data, not the sensory data itself. The light reaching our eyeballs is exactly the same whether or not we are colour blind. The colour isn’t on the light’s side of the fence, it’s on ours. Colour is a subjective experience based, ultimately, on how light interacts with the physical structures – and in particular the brain wiring – produced by our DNA, and how our minds interpret that interaction. None of us can be sure that our experience of “blue” is the same as someone else’s. There’s simply no way to tell.
What if the brain wiring that gives rise to the signals we interpret as colours got mixed up somehow and instead of being based on light it was based on our subjective interpretation of someone’s emotional mood. If we think they’re down in the dumps, we might see them as a having a tinge, an aura, of gloomy, purple-black. If they’re happy and cheerful, we might see them glowing with a warm orange-yellow. Depending on how accurate our emotions detector is we might literally be able to see people’s moods as colour coded.
People with a rare condition known as emotion–colour synaesthesia may indeed see colourful auras around others, but nothing paranormal is going on. Jamie Ward, a psychologist at University College London, said, “These colours do not reflect hidden energies being given off by other people, rather they are created entirely in the brain of the beholder.”
Welcome to the bizarre world of synaesthesia, a condition found in approximately one in every two thousand people. In sufferers, stimulation of one sense produces a response in one or more of the other senses. So, for example, when a sufferer sees a certain breed of dog, they might hear a certain piece of classical music, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, for example. When they see a different breed, they might hear an Elvis Presley song. Others may experience shapes with tastes or smells with colours. The range of unexpected combinations is effectively infinite. Scientists increasingly believe that the cause of these surprising associations is cross-wiring in the brain.
In a normal person, visual signals are processed exclusively in the visual cortex. But what if inappropriate neural wiring caused the auditory cortex to be triggered too? Then a sound would be experienced too even though no sound was made.
In Ward’s study, “GW” could see colours such as purple and blue in response to people she knew or when their names were read to her. For example, “James” triggered pink, “Thomas” black and “Hannah” blue. These colours spread across her whole field of vision.
Ward said, ‘The ability of some people to see coloured auras of others has held an important place in folklore and mythology throughout the ages. Although many people claiming to have such talents could be charlatans, it is also conceivable that others are born with a gift of synaesthesia.’
Synaesthesia may indeed be a gift that enriches people rather than a condition they suffer. Synaesthesia rarely has any debilitating effects. In fact, arguably those with it can have deeper, more stimulating experiences than the rest of us.Indeed some scientists have speculated that neural cross-wiring of this kind may lie at the root of creativity, and may exist in all of us to some degree, allowing us to make connections that would never otherwise be apparent.
The use of psychedelic, hallucinogenic drugs can induce synaesthesic experiences in those who don’t have the necessary wiring.
Imagine that there was a time long ago when human beings could routinely see each other’s aura. Life would have been a lot more colourful!
Jung’s Concept of Archetypes
Jung defined an archetype as “an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time” Works, 10, paragraph Archetypes, according to Jung, constitute the contents of the collective unconscious. This, Jung says, “contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.” Works, 8, paragraph
Arguably, we are the products of our DNA. How does Jung’s “spiritual heritage” relate to our genetic inheritance? Does Darwinian natural selection apply to this spiritual heritage? If so, what is selected and what is discarded, and how is this process conducted? Have some archetypes fallen by the wayside? Is there scope for random mutations in archetypes, as in genes?
Jung suggested that the archetypes were “present in the germplasm” so in fact he was proposing nothing less than parallel and interactive evolution of biological and psychic forms.
Philosopher A C Grayling said, “Biological ‘design’ is manifestly not the outcome of previous planning and execution by an intelligent purposive agency, unless that agency is markedly incompetent or markedly malevolent.”
That does not rule out Jung’s hypothesis. Jung is not suggesting any form of conscious, intelligent design. Rather, he is proposing unconscious mental activity that would, inevitably make many blunders just as Grayling has suggested.
We have no fossil record to study of the psychic evolution, but we do have cave paintings, ancient religions, legends and myths. These have mutated over the long centuries every bit as much as the fossils.
We can’t examine archetypes directly since they exist in the twilight zone of the collective unconscious. We must infer their existence from how – via dreams, images, symbols, myths and stories – they manifest themselves in our consciousness and our writings, religions and art. Have all of these not evolved remarkably?
Human evolution began with the appearance on earth of single-celled creatures. Did these cells also have unconscious minds, the seeds of what became modern consciousness? It’s an exceptionally powerful and intriguing idea.
Humans and chimpanzees have 98% of their DNA in common. Analysis of chimpanzee behaviour reveals that it has many similarities with human behaviour. A theory that explains human behaviour is likely to have validity in terms of chimpanzee behaviour too, albeit at a level that is more primitive.
Although chimpanzees and other non-human animals are not traditionally considered to be conscious, there’s no reason to exclude the possibility that on the “consciousness continuum” they are knocking on the door of consciousness and have their own chimpanzee archetypes guiding them.
Jung began formulating his ideas about archetypes when he observed that insane people were seemingly invoking a collective fund of common symbols in their dreams and delusions. There was “method in their madness”, clear patterns.
Jung’s ideas about archetypes have perhaps had their greatest impact is in the creative writing industry, and the analysis of myths and legends. Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces was strongly influenced by Jung’s ideas.
Campbell asserted that all myths, no matter what part of the world they come from or when they were written, were derived from a single template that he referred to as the “Hero’s Journey”, or “monomyth”, comprising twelve basic steps. The power of this monomyth is demonstrated in the present era by the success of movies such as Star Wars and The which are closely modelled on Campbell’s story-telling template.
More recently, Christopher Vogler has written The Writer’s Journey which borrows heavily from Campbell’s work. Many creative writers use this book as a guide for how to structure their novel/screenplay and to decide which characters they should use to populate it. Hollywood is replete with screenplays following Campbell and Vogler’s “Hero” template. They provide an excellent framework for story analysis.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is often cited as an example of the Jungian conflict between the persona and the shadow. It could equally well be interpreted as Freud’s superego versus the id.
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is an example of the Ego versus Shadow in literature, but on another level it’s a cautionary tale about the pathological consequences of the Peter Pan syndrome the eternal boy). Is the TV series The Prisoner an additional example of Ego versus Shadow given that ‘No.1’ and ‘No.6’ are the same person, or is it telling us that we are our own gaolers, that the one inescapable prison is ourselves?
The twelve steps of the archetypal Hero’s Journey are:
1.Ordinary World
2.Call to adventure
3.Refusal
4.Meeting with the Mentor
5.Crossing the Threshold
6.Tests, Allies, Enemies
7.Approach to Inmost Cave
8.Ordeal
9.Reward (Seizing the Sword)
10.The Road Back
11.Resurrection
12.Return with the Elixir
These steps have much in common with visiting a psychotherapist and undergoing a course of treatment:
JOURNEY TO THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST
1.Normal life; problem has not yet manifested itself
2.First appearance of problem
3.Reluctance to confront problem; denial; anger
4.Meeting with Therapist
5.Negotiate programme of treatment with Therapist
6.First attempts to overcome problem; encounter setbacks
7.The need to overcome problem is more urgent; danger of failure more apparent; depression setting in
8.Painful acceptance of problem and confronting it head-on
9.Possible cure; shining moment
10.Renewed tests, trials, temptations that threaten to reverse the cure
11.Cure tested almost to destruction, but survives
12.Return to normal life, cured
The “Twelve Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous have much in common with the Hero’s journey. The alcoholic has to become a hero and search for his Higher Self (God). It’s his ego that is the true alcoholic and only the Self can rescue him. He has to bravely and heroically admit his shortcomings to himself and, especially, others (since it’s easy to dupe oneself). He has to make restitution for his mistakes and the harm he did to others. When he has found his Higher Self after a long and arduous journey, he must bring back the wisdom he has gained and help others:
1.We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3.Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood
4.Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6.Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8.Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9.Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10.Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11.Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12.Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
The hero’s journey is reflected in the hero’s character arc, which Vogler defines in the following twelve steps:
1.Limited awareness of a problem
2.Increased awareness
3.Reluctance to change
4.Overcoming reluctance
5.Committing to change
6.Experimenting with first change
7.Preparing for big change
8.Attempting big change
9.Consequences of the attempt (improvements and setbacks)
10.Rededication to change
11.Final attempt at big change
12.Final mastery of the problem
In Jung: A Very Short Anthony Stevens wrote of Jung, “What he refused to tolerate was the prevalent fallacy of scientism – the denial of everything that is not susceptible to scientific explanation. He preferred to give due weight to those irrational, acausal experiences which science declines to consider worthy of its attention.”
Jung said, “Science comes to a stop at the frontiers of logic, but nature does not; she thrives on ground as yet untrodden by theory.” Works, 16, paragraph
The Basic Storytelling Steps of Myths and Fairytales
Myths and fairytales can be broken down into a small number of basic steps. All the world’s greatest stories can be analysed in these terms. Many of the same steps and characters that appear in the Hero’s Journey also appear in fairytales. However, characteristically, a fairytale contains fewer steps and fewer archetypal figures.
If we take Jack and the Beanstalk as a typical fairytale, we can highlight the reduced set of steps that feature in a fairytale. There are eight in general:
1) Ordinary World: Jack lives in a cottage with his widowed mother. They are poor and need to sell their cow at market.
2) Call to Adventure: Jack meets an old man on the road to market and trades the cow for magic beans.
3) First Threshold: Jack must climb the magic beanstalk to enter the extraordinary world: the Land of the Giant. (The extraordinary world is the world of magic, the faeryworld, the Otherworld, and is entered via some sort of portal. In Jack’s story, the beanstalk plays the role of portal.)
4) Tests, Allies, Enemies: Jack in the Land of the Giant.
5) Ordeal: Jack chased by the Giant.
6) Reward (Seizing the Sword): Jack successfully steals the Giant’s treasures.
7) The Road Back: Jack climbs back down the beanstalk and chops it down while the Giant is clambering down in pursuit.
8) Return with the Elixir: Jack returns to his mother with the Giant’s hen that lays golden eggs and the Giant’s golden harp that sings. At the end of the fairytale, Jack and his mother are rich and happy. Jack’s adventure has transformed their personal fortunes.
Refusal of the Call, Mentor, Approach to the Inmost Cave and Resurrection are the steps that are typically omitted in fairytales. In the first case, fairytale characters are usually eager to begin their adventure (as Jack is); in the second case, there is rarely a need for a mentor because the adventure is too simple to merit one; in the third case, the approach to the inmost cave might be too traumatic for a child to read about, and the same is mostly true for the Resurrection component (though Red Riding Hood, for example, is “resurrected” in some endings of that particular fairytale, emerging from the dead wolf).
Vladimir Propp, a Russian scholar, analysed Russian folktales and proposed that they contained thirty-one basic elements. Others reduced this number to just five:
1) hero discovers a lack in himself or his life
2) hero goes on a quest
3) hero finds helpers/opponents
4) hero is given tests
5) hero is rewarded, or a new lack develops
So, the most enduring stories of a traditional character, whether myths, fairytales or folktales, are built around a small number of basic and common steps. The formula is a simple one: a hero leaves his ordinary world, enters an extraordinary world where he has a great adventure involving tests and trials, and returns (tragedies excepted) as a better person, often with a treasure.
Split or Steal?
“Golden Balls” is a junk TV game based on a famous philosophical conundrum known as The Prisoner’s Despite its trashy content, the show illustrates the workings of the Old World Order better than anything else.
In the game, a pot of money is built up over a number of rounds and two contestants must finally decide whether to “split or steal” the prize. If both contestants choose the “split” option, they each take home half of the money. If both choose “steal” then neither gets anything. If one chooses “split” and the other “steal”, the stealer takes it all.
Before the decision is taken, the two contestants are given the chance to have a chat and declare their apparent intentions to each other. Of course, no one ever openly says that they are going to steal. The discussion invariably revolves around both contestants swearing blind that they can be trusted, that they would never dream of stealing and that they will definitely split the prize.
In the event, many contestants then shamelessly choose the “steal” option and often reveal that it was their intention to steal right from the beginning.
This crass TV show goes to the heart of the human condition and reveals the repulsive nature of much, and perhaps most, of humanity.
Imagine the sort of person who sets out to steal rather than share a lucrative prize. He knows he will have to lie through his teeth to deceive the other contestant yet it doesn’t deter him for a moment. He has no qualms whatever. At the end of the show, if he is successful in his deception, he is delighted and considers it a job well done i.e. he is ecstatic that he has duped a good, decent person who was eager to do the right thing and share the prize. He considers the other person a sucker, someone who had it coming for being so gullible and trusting. He sees himself as a master of the universe who has shafted a naïve dreamer in sore need of a reality check.
A feature of the show is that the audience is always delighted when two contestants share the prize, always condemns anyone who chooses the steal option and is always immensely sympathetic towards someone who chooses the “split” option and then has the prize stolen from them by the other contestant. Yet there can be no doubt that if many members of the audience were participants in the game, they too would join the “steal” gang.
What does that signify? People in a community (the audience is a community), support community values, most important of which is sharing. But people in a private capacity don’t care a damn about the community and will maximise their own self-interest, at the expense of other members of the community. Stealers obey their private will, not the general will of the community.
The show reveals another aspect of human nature. People who would instinctively belong to the “split” party, start worrying that the other person will steal from them and grow suspicious and distrustful. They don’t want to be a victim. So, despite their best intentions and natural inclinations, they end up choosing the “steal” option, not out of a desire for self-gain but to thwart the stealer. They know they will probably leave with nothing but at least they will stop the stealer leaving with everything. In other words, good people become corrupted by the presence of the “steal” gang. Their nature changes. They no longer trust their neighbours. Community spirit is corroded and finally destroyed.
The members of the Old World Order all belong to the “steal” gang. If they come up against each other, they leave with nothing because, reflexively, they steal from each other. So, they turn their attention to the splitters. If they find themselves amongst nice, innocent, good people, they can fleece them every time. If one stealer were amongst ninety-nine splitters, he could take everything from the whole lot of them. He’s the rotten apple that spoils the barrel. He ruins everything for everyone else, but he gets everything he wants. Why should the community let him get away with it?
A stealer is someone who, instead, of sharing with his neighbour – meaning that both go away happy – takes it all, leaving his neighbour with nothing. The stealer will become the richest man in town, the person with all the power, yet he has shown by his actions that he is unfit to be a member of the community. The Wall Street fat cats are classic “stealers”. They always take and never give. They don’t want to share with others, they don’t want to help others, they don’t want to do anything that isn’t all about helping No 1.
The stealers are selfish, egotistical, and contemptuous of others. It’s not too strong to describe them as evil. They should be banished from the community rather than being allowed to lead it.
A community can’t function if the people leading it don’t possess community values. That’s exactly the situation we have today. The Old World Order hate society and yet they are in all of the top positions in society. Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, a truly evil and wicked person, brazenly declared, “There is no such thing as society”. Thatcher was the champion of the British steal gang. She did everything in her power to destroy society and transfer as much money as possible to the stealers. Ronald Reagan did a similar job in America at the same time. Those two monsters were the true authors of the financial crisis of the present period. They started the greed train that has only just hit the buffers. (But already the train is getting back on clear track, and you can be sure it will travel faster than ever on behalf of the super rich, leaving ordinary people far in its wake.)
No community in its right mind should ever elect anyone who is not entirely committed to the community, yet, over and over again, enemies of the people are elected to the highest offices.
The Old World Order are out for everything they can get. Theirs is a “f*ck you” approach to life. They are all sharks, carpetbaggers and robber barons.
Stealers corrupt the whole of society.
But stealing can take another form. In the former Communist nations of the defunct Warsaw Pact, lazy, inept workers stole, in a moral sense, from hard-working, talented workers. They stole by wanting and expecting to be paid exactly the same as the hard workers even though they themselves had not broken sweat. This insidious form of theft is as corrosive to a healthy community as the more explicit type of stealing.
The Illuminati seek a New World Order and that means that stealers will, by hook or by crook, be removed from the community. If stealers are present in a community, they always poison it. They cannot be permitted to contaminate society. The greedy, the stealers, the Old World Order must be driven out. They are the damned.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “In order that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.”
For any community to succeed, everyone must abide by community values. Those who do not subscribe to those values cannot be tolerated. The Old World Order are the enemies of the people. It’s because of their greed and selfishness that we live in societies where crime, poverty, cruelty and lack of compassion are rife. Most of us are natural splitters but we have been turned into callous monsters by the stealers amongst us.
A community can and should have liberal values – anyone can do anything they like as long as it brings no harm to others – but it should have zero tolerance towards those who do harm. The stealers are, by definition, those who take from others rather than sharing. That’s the antithesis of community. It cannot be tolerated.
In a New World Order, there would be only splitters and no stealers. Everyone would get their fair share. Everyone could trust everyone else. No thief would walk away with everyone else’s money.
The stealers are liars, cheats and crooks. Do you want people like that leading you? That’s what we have at the moment. Our system actually rewards the stealers. When they steal our money, they become more powerful and are then able to steal even more from us. Everyone in any position of power in this world belongs to the steal gang and all of the world’s problems stem from that single fact. We need leaders who are natural sharers and wouldn’t dream of stealing. One sure sign would mark out such people – they would never be conspicuously rich, and neither would they seek great wealth. Of how many of the world’s leaders can that be said? It’s time to depose the Old World Order. It’s time to build a New World Order of fairness, justice and sharing.
The Sick Society
Every nation, like every person, has a psychological profile. Many nations, like many people, are neurotic, unbalanced, mentally ill. What is the psychological health of the Old World Order, the New World Order and the anti New World Order? Two are sick and one is healthy.
Freudian Nations
Freud’s theory of the personality can be extended from individuals to nations. Freud argued that our personality is shaped by three components – the id, the ego and the superego – two of which are in conflict, with the third mediating between them.
The id is infantile, narcissistic and pursues the pleasure principle. It wants self-gratification at every moment and resents anything that stops it getting what it wants. It’s the ultimate spoiled, over-indulged child. Its supporters link it to freedom and self-expression. “Do whatever you want, regardless of others,” is the id’s mantra.
The superego is the ultimate stern parent. It’s obsessed with right and wrong, morality, conscience, rulebooks, law and order, discipline, and it obeys the control and morality principle. Where the id cares only for itself, the superego is preoccupied with others, with group dynamics, with society. Its supporters link it to maturity and with consideration for others. “Do as you would be done by,” is the superego’s mantra.
The id and superego are always in conflict.
Between the id and superego stands the ego, which listens to both and takes action according to the reality principle. The ego is the component most grounded in the real world and deals with the art of the possible. It seeks to express the id while operating within the superego rules of society.
The tension between the id and superego is evident everywhere. Islamic nations are classic superego societies: black, drab, authoritarian. Women must conceal themselves. “Moral” police are everywhere. Thieves have their hands cut off. hom*osexuals are hanged. Adulterers are beheaded. Fornicators are stoned to death. People must pray to Allah five times a day, including in the middle of the night. They must orient themselves towards Mecca. Islam prohibits alcohol and drugs. Music and art are frowned upon. “Fun” has to be “Koranic”. Sex is strictly confined within marriage.
Islam is an example of the superego unrestrained. The id is suppressed, and the ego has no role.
Islamic nations are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “We love death more than you love life,” Muslims say to Westerners. This is a pathological statement, and Islam is an anti-life ideology. Muslims’ collective mental illness makes them obsessed with suicide, which they choose to refer to as “martyrdom”. Given that their lives are so lacking in pleasure, their love of death isn’t surprising. There are now so many recorded incidents of suicide bombers that no one could possibly refer to the phenomenon as an aberration. It is clearly profoundly embedded in the Islamic psyche, and is justified by Islamic beliefs. No one can deny this.
Several Christian fundamentalist sects are also superego dominated, as are Orthodox Jews. Much of the trouble in the world stems from these inflexible societies. Theirs is the world of the intolerant, unyielding, religious fanatic, eager to send to hell everyone who is does not agree with them. These societies are always governed by grim, hateful old men in black clothes and long white beards: the ayatollahs of Iran, the elders of the Amish, the men in black suits, odd hairstyles and ill-fitting black suits who lead Orthodox Jewish communities. These societies are full of bitterness. They’re suspicious of outsiders and terrified of change. They’re wedded to tradition and the past.
The West on the other hand is an unrestrained id culture. Everything is geared up for self-gratification. Capitalism is the delivery system – the addict’s syringe – of the ultimate drug: pleasure around the clock, delivered to you whenever and wherever you want it. Fast food. Fast sex. Fast entertainment. Fast cars. Fast talk. Everything is fast in order to get your dose of pleasure to you without delay. Capitalism is the smack dealer standing on the street corner. Capitalism is drug pushing turned into a political and economic ideology. It creates endless junkies, obsessed with their next fix. They suffer appalling withdrawal symptoms if they don’t get their hit for the day.
Ask any western woman what her favourite pastime is and she will say “retail therapy”. What kind of society has shopping as its most desirable activity? What does that say about the spirituality of Western women? Ask any man and he will say “watching sport”. Does the meaning of life lie in football, baseball and basketball? Men can recite endless statistics about sport – to what end?
Junk TV, junk computer games, junk Hollywood movies, peep shows, internet p*rn, social networking, theme parks, cheap alcohol, cheap drugs. The western world is Disney World run by drug pushers and gangsters. The superego is extinguished. The West is the opposite of the superego societies. Whereas those are run by old men, western societies revolve around spoiled brats, men and women who never grow up, people suffering from arrested development, stuck in their baby phase. The West is an infantilised culture.
The credit crunch was the inevitable consequence of an unrestrained id ideology. In an id culture, no one holds back. Those who are allowed to be as greedy as they like invariably take everything they can get, regardless of the consequences, and regardless of others. Why would they stop? They are simply fulfilling the core ideology of the society they live in. Regulation, the superego mechanism for moderating markets, was dismantled in America thanks to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bush presidents, and, in the UK, to Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Their collective ideology was that markets were more efficient than anything else. In fact, markets are reflections of the id and are driven by first greed and then fear (boom then bust), and always lead to disaster if not curbed by strong regulation. The whole basis of the free market approach to social governance is flawed. Markets – id forces – only work if blended with effective regulation – a superego force. The members of the regulatory bodies have to be as well paid and as highly talented as the people in the institutions they are regulating. This has never happened under Western capitalism. No one wants to break up the party. Greed is “good”, remember. In that statement is contained the credit crunch. The many pay for the greed of the few.
The members of the Old World Order prefer the pleasure principle society because this offers the best mechanism for manipulating the dumbed down, doped out, zombified masses. The Old World Order’s greed can be indulged without restraint in such a society. Their ability to justify huge disparities in wealth is unchallenged. Wealth is control in id societies. If you have no wealth you are a nobody with no future. Most people are indeed nobodies with no future, but they have been conned into supporting the system that oppresses them. They all buy into the absurd “American dream” that will never happen in 99.999% of cases.
Obama promised change then changed nothing because change can be effected only from without the system, never from within. It’s the system itself that is at fault, and the system does not provide any scope for internal change. So change must come from an external source. Usually, from revolution.
In most societies, the ego – the component that is supposed to ensure a healthy balance between id and superego – is overwhelmed. In most societies, the id or the superego becomes luridly magnified, until it is unstoppable within a particular culture. The sensible ego obeying the reality principle is nowhere to be seen. All we get instead is the undiluted pleasure principle or the undiluted control and morality principle.
As for the anti New World Order, they find their inspiration in a man such as Henry David Thoreau. They like his isolationist stance, his self-sufficiency, his suspicion of government, his willingness to engage in civil disobedience and resistance to unjust laws, his simple life, his independence, and his resistance to taxes. The Unabomber, survivalists, and cults like the Branch Davidians have much in common with Thoreau. The members of the anti New World Order movement project their fear of others, and their resentment of being governed by anyone other than themselves, onto the New World Order. These people have difficulty operating in large, complex societies because their id and superego are essentially anti-social in character. They are suffering from acute paranoia.
A healthy society is one where the ego dominates, and the id and superego are each given healthy, but not excessive, expression. That is the world advocated by the New World Order. That is the essence of the new society the Illuminati seek to build. Capitalism – the id philosophy – must be consigned to history, as must the superego ideologies of the fanatic – Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Communism, Fascism etc.
Who in their right mind would oppose this New World Order? Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are not in their right mind.
*****
“We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.
“As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy. We’re at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed. We live in a little village. Your village may be different from other people’s villages, but we are all prisoners.” -- Patrick McGoohan 1977
The Panopticon
“A machine to grind rogues honest.” -- Jeremy Bentham
In 1787, philosopher Jeremy Bentham produced a design for a circular prison that would allow a few guards to observe all of the prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether or not they were being watched. He labelled it the “Panopticon” from the Greek “panoptes” meaning “seeing everything”.
As the guards cannot be seen they need not be on duty at all times. The prisoners, who must assume the guards are always there, are constantly on their best behaviour. The “watching” is left to the watched. Such a prison design is said to create the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”
The Panopticon is the perfect metaphor for the society ruled by the Old World Order.
Ancient Gnosticism taught that the earth is a prison planet: a global Panopticon, always under surveillance by the unseen controllers.
Is not God – always watching everything we do, supposedly – the supreme gaoler? Why do people choose to worship a cosmic Prison Warden?
The Perfect Prison
Bentham thought he had created the perfect prison design since, in theory, it would function just as well whether or not guards were actually present, and save a fortune on staffing costs, he believed. Prisoners, never knowing whether or not they were being watched, would be compelled to behave as if surveillance were constant and never ending. They would be transformed into their own guards. This is the precursor of Orwell’s Big Brother society where every citizen believes himself to be constantly monitored by the authorities via “telescreens”.
The Panopticon was never built during Bentham’s lifetime, but a number of buildings have been based on his concept.
French philosopher Michel Foucault used the Panopticon as a metaphor for “disciplinary” societies, and their desire to observe everyone and regulate everyone’s behaviour according to “acceptable norms”. Open-plan offices are a version of the Panopticon – everyone in the office can see and monitor everyone else. There are no hiding places.
“CCTV Society”, where cameras are positioned on every street corner, are part of the Panopticon tradition. If CCTV had been available to Bentham, he would undoubtedly have replaced guards with cameras and saved even more money.
Vast, soulless, open-plan call centres where every member of staff is monitored at all times (by technology rather than by people) are almost perfect Panopticons.
Bentham described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” It would be hard to imagine a more sinister statement: an early declaration of mind control by the authorities.
Foucault said that all hierarchical organisations such as the army, banks, businesses, offices, factories, hospitals, schools, police, the media, the government, have a Panopticon mind-set. All of the lower ranks are watching each other, and believe they are being watched by the higher ranks. They are self-policing, self-regulating, self-censoring. Conformity is absolute. Mavericks are never tolerated.
The power of a disciplinary society is maximised when people police themselves in relation to sexual, moral, social, religious, intellectual and psychological standards. Much of the function of religion is to establish this Panopticon mindset. Prisons, schools and offices are not there to rehabilitate, educate and provide a creative working environment, but to control and dominate, to produce conformity, to restrict freedom.
Our lives are ruled by oppressive governments obsessed with a Panopticon mentality. The “War on Terror”, largely a fiction, has allowed a massive extension in the government’s powers to spy on us and interfere in our lives. There can be no doubt that 9/11 was an ideal event from the point of view of Panopticon governments; their pretext to extend their dominion into every area. All of their new tyrannical laws must be rolled back. We are under far more danger from malign government pretending to be benign than we are from “terrorists”. A few thousand people have been killed by terrorists; billions are affected by government intrusion into their lives. The true function of the State is to maximise the merits of its citizens, not to spy on them. Citizens flourish when they are free from surveillance and encroachment in their lives. Government must be strong in setting up the framework of society, and weak when it comes to interference in people’s daily lives.
The Panopticon, as Foucault observed, combined power, knowledge and control in a single structure. People and the space they inhabited were brought under one, integrated, disciplinary technology.
The Old World Order are obsessed with the Panopticon. There are far too few of them to control the world by their physical presence. So, they sit at the heart of things, like spiders at the centre of the web awaiting their prey, in the central observation tower, and they have complete knowledge of the people, and complete power and control over them. Best of all, they don’t even have to be there. Indeed, they never are. But the people think they are, and behave accordingly. It’s the ideal system of global control. The earth itself is a Panopticon. The very idea of an all knowing, all powerful, all seeing God who monitors everything we do and judges every action is nothing but the Panopticon transferred to the metaphysical sphere. Its function, as ever, is to ensure absolute control of the people. “Sin for Salvation” is the antidote to the “divine” Panopticon. In fact, only Satan would want to foster a Panopticon society, and all those who advocate this model are servants of Satan. It’s freedom, not constant surveillance, for which humanity yearns.
There is only one place where the Panopticon model is acceptable. The people at the top of our society should be subjected to the Panopticon treatment. In other words, the Panopticon should be inverted in its function: the watchers should become the watched. The people should look in on the leaders, and the leaders should be fully aware that their every move is being monitored at all times. The Wall Street “masters of the universe” should not be allowed to cut secret deals behind locked doors. Given their decisive influence on the economy, they should be under constant public scrutiny. Every transaction carried out by the rich and powerful should be performed in public. No more secret deals. No more concealment from the people. It’s time to demand the Reverse Panopticon where the Old World Order become those who are permanently watched. They should be placed in a transparent “Moral Box”, so to speak, where it’s impossible for them to carry out any immoral, private deals for their own benefit and contrary to the interests of the people.
The Panopticon is the essence of control. The controllers are the watchers, and the controlled the watched; the watchers are subjects, the watched objects; the watchers are autonomous agents, the watched are ‘Other’. No one in their right mind would buy into the Panopticon model.
An extract from Bentham’s somewhat chilling and sinister description of the project is provided below:
PANOPTICON;
OR
THE INSPECTION-HOUSE:
CONTAINING THE
IDEA OF A NEW PRINCIPLE OF CONSTRUCTION
APPLICABLE TO
ANY SORT OF ESTABLISHMENT, IN WHICH PERSONS OF
ANY DESCRIPTION ARE TO BE KEPT UNDER INSPECTION;
AND IN PARTICULAR TO
PENITENTIARY-HOUSES,
PRISONS, HOUSES OF INDUSTRY, WORK-HOUSES, POOR-HOUSES, LAZARETTOS, MANUFACTORIES, HOSPITALS, MAD-HOUSES, AND SCHOOLS:
WITH
A PLAN OF MANAGEMENT
ADAPTED TO THE PRINCIPLE:
IN A SERIES OF LETTERS,
WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1787, FROM CRECHEFF IN WHITE
RUSSIA. TO A FRIEND IN ENGLAND
BY JEREMY BENTHAM,
OF LINCOLN’S INN, ESQUIRE.
Before you look at the plan, take in words the general idea of it. The building is circular. The apartments of the prisoners occupy the circumference. You may call them, if you please, the cells. These cells are divided from one another, and the prisoners by that means secluded from all communication with each other, by partitions in the form of radii issuing from the circumference towards the centre, and extending as many feet as shall be thought necessary to form the largest of the cell.
The apartment of the inspector occupies the centre; you may call it if you please the inspector’s lodge.
It will be convenient in most, if not in all cases, to have a vacant space or area all round, between such centre and such circumference. You may call it if you please the intermediate or annular area.
About the width of a cell may be sufficient for a passage from the outside of the building to the lodge.
Each cell has in the outward circumference, a window, large enough, not only to light the cell, but, through the cell, to afford light enough to the correspondent part of the lodge.
The inner circumference of the cell is formed by an iron grating, so light as not to screen any part of the cell from the inspector’s view.
Of this grating, a part sufficiently large opens, in form of a door, to admit the prisoner at his first entrance; and to give admission at any time to the inspector or any of his attendants.
To cut off from each prisoner the view of every other, the partitions are carried on a few feet beyond the grating into the intermediate area: such projecting parts I call the protracted partitions.
It is conceived, that the light, coming in this manner through the cells, and so across the intermediate area, will be sufficient for the inspector’s lodge. But, for this purpose, both the windows in the cells, and those corresponding to them in the lodge, should be as large as the strength of the building, and what shall be deemed a necessary attention to economy, will permit.
To the windows of the lodge there are blinds, as high up as the eyes of the prisoners in their cells can, by any means they can employ, be made to reach.
To prevent thorough light, whereby, notwithstanding the blinds, the prisoners would see from the cells whether or not any person was in the lodge, that apartment is divided into quarters, by partitions formed by two diameters to the circle, crossing each other at right angles. For these partitions the thinnest materials might serve; and they might be made removable at pleasure; their height, sufficient to prevent the prisoners seeing over them from the cells. Doors to these partitions, if left open at any time, might produce the thorough light. To prevent this, divide each partition into two, at any part required, setting down the one-half at such distance from the other as shall be equal to the aperture of a door.
These windows of the inspector’s lodge open into the intermediate area, in the form of doors, in as many places as shall be deemed necessary to admit of his communicating readily with any of the cells.
Small lamps, in the outside of each window of the lodge, backed by a reflector, to throw the light into the corresponding cells, would extend to the night the security of the day.
To save the troublesome exertion of voice that might otherwise be necessary, and to prevent one prisoner from knowing that the inspector was occupied by another prisoner at a distance, a small tin tube might reach from each cell to the inspector’s lodge, passing across the area, and so in at the side of the correspondent window of the lodge. By means of this implement, the slightest whisper of the one might be heard by the other, especially if he had proper notice to apply his ear to the tube.
With regard to instruction, in cases where it cannot be duly given without the instructor’s being close to the work, or without setting his hand to it by way of example before the learner’s face, the instructor must indeed here as elsewhere, shift his station as often as there is occasion to visit different workmen; unless he calls the workmen to him, which in some of the instances to which this sort of building is applicable, such as that of imprisoned felons, could not so well be. But in all cases where directions, given verbally and at a distance, are sufficient, these tubes will be found of use. They will save, on the one hand, the exertion of voice it would require, on the part of the instructor, to communicate instruction to the workmen without quitting his central station in the lodge; and, on the other, the confusion which would ensue if different instructors or persons in the lodge were calling to the cells at the same time. And, in the case of hospitals, the quiet that may be insured by this little contrivance, trifling as it may seem at first sight, affords an additional advantage.
A bell, appropriated exclusively to the purposes of alarm, hangs in a belfry with which the building is crowned, communicating by a rope with the inspector’s lodge.
The most economical, and perhaps the most convenient, way of warming the cells and area, would be by flues surrounding it, upon the principle of those in hot-houses. A total want of every means of producing artificial heat might, in such weather as we sometimes have in England, be fatal to the lives of the prisoners; at any rate, it would often times be altogether incompatible with their working at any sedentary employment. The flues, however, and the fire-places belonging to them, instead of being on the outside, as in hot-houses, should be in the inside. By this means, there would be less waste of heat, and the current of air that would rush in on all sides through the cells, to supply the draught made by the fires, would answer so far the purpose of ventilation. But of this more under the head of Hospitals.*
* There is one subject, which, though not of the most dignified kind, nor of the most pleasant kind to expatiate upon, is of too great importance to health and safe custody to be passed over unconsidered: I mean the provision to be made for carrying off the result of necessary evacuations. A common necessary might be dangerous to security, and would be altogether incompatible with the plan of solitude. To have the filth carried off by the attendants, would be altogether as incompatible with cleanliness, since without such a degree of regularity as it would be difficult, if not ridiculous, to attempt to enforce in case of health, and altogether impossible in case of sickness, the air of each cell, and by that means the lodge itself would be liable to be kept in a state of constant contamination, in the intervals betwixt one visit and another. This being the case, I can see no other eligible means, than that of having in each cell a fixed provision made for this purpose in the construction of the building.
The Other
Simone de Beauvoir said in The Second “[Woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is ‘the Other’.”
Exactly the same could be said of ordinary people with respect to the Old World Order: “Ordinary people are defined and differentiated with reference to the Old World Order and not the Old World Order with reference to them; ordinary people are the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. The Old World Order are the Subjects, the Absolute – ordinary people are ‘the Other’.”
The only people who matter in this world are the rich and famous, the privileged elites, the dynastic families, the masters of the universe, kings, queens, popes, princes, prime ministers and presidents – the Old World Order.
We are “other”. We are acted upon. We don’t act. The OWO are the subjects and we are the objects. But we don’t need to be. We have a choice.
In America, people often talk about “Wall Street versus Main Street”. There are only a few hundred major players in Wall Street; there are hundreds of millions of people in Main Street. Why are a few hundred allowed to control hundreds of millions? Why does Main Street allow itself to be “Other”? Why doesn’t Main Street tell Wall Street to go to hell? It goes back to Hegel’s Master and Slave dialectic. A few masters can control vast numbers of slaves. But why do the slaves allow it? Why don’t they resist? Why do they accept their fate, their eternal condition as second-class citizens? The answer has always been the same one: because they are afraid and have no stomach for a fight.
Do you like being “the Other”? You must do otherwise you would do something about it. In order for the world to change, you must change yourself. And when enough people have changed then everything becomes possible.
More than ever, all those who are “Other” need to activate their hero archetype.
How to stop being “Other”
Masters know they are autonomous agents because they are able to dominate others but are never themselves dominated. You know you are Other if you are dominated. You are not autonomous. You are controlled. You are not free.
The Old World Order have transcendent lives. Every day is different. They travel to glamorous places, cut lucrative deals, meet VIPs, get invited to swanky parties and host their own extravagant celebrations. The rest of us, by contrast, repeat the same passive and mundane tasks of everyday existence. We are condemned to lives of endless repetition and drudgery, living in our functional, square boxes called houses, while the OWO live in elegant mansions in the most beautiful locations.
Until the rise of feminism, women saw themselves as innately inferior to men. For ordinary people, there has been no successful equivalent of feminism. They still see themselves as innately inferior to the privileged elites of the OWO.
In Britain, protocol demands that the Queen’s “subjects” should walk backwards when leaving her presence, as it would show insufficient deference to turn their backs on her. They must bow and scrape to her as though she were some divinely appointed super being rather than a tiresome, stupid old woman. Anyone who walks backwards from another person is being humiliated by that person. The Queen’s protocol is designed to show who has the power, and who is the Other. Only a slave would tolerate being treated so demeaningly. The Queen, and everyone like her, is an obscenity and must be overthrown in the name of the dignity of the people.
Ordinary people are part of the Old World Order’s narrative, and not the other way around, as ought to be the case. We are implicated in our own subjugation. We must secretly prefer it because otherwise we would fight against it.
Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Similarly, we are not born slaves of the OWO, but we become slaves. Why? Because we’re too lazy, inept and cowardly to do anything else. Isn’t it time we chose a new role for ourselves?
The Illuminati’s programme has always been both religious and political, and the two aspects are closely connected. When a person “becomes God”, it is impossible for him to be a slave of another. The Illuminati’s mission – to release the divine spark within people – automatically has profound political ramifications. The Old World Order would be swept aside if humanity were able to communicate with its divine self. The Old World Order regard themselves as gods, but they are false gods, and it’s time to topple these brass idols. We are living in the twilight of the idols. And soon will come the dawn of the True God – Abraxas.
Deconstruction
“Deconstruction, if there is such a thing as deconstruction – and I wouldn't say there is just one deconstruction – is something heterogeneous, complex. Deconstructions are ways of accounting for the main assumptions common to the culture, common to what we call Western culture.” -- Derrida
Jacques Derrida was one of the most controversial philosophers of modern times. His technique of “deconstruction” is both widely admired and condemned. The complexity of deconstruction can be seen from the fact that Derrida criticised any attempt to define exactly what deconstruction is, on the grounds that any such definition would itself be open to being deconstructed i.e. anyone who attempted to say what it was hadn’t understood it! Deconstruction is so complicated and difficult to explain because it challenges, criticises and undermines the very words and language necessary to explain it. It has something of the paradoxical nature of observation in the quantum world, the very act of which changes what is being observed, making it different from what you were seeking to observe.
Roughly speaking (because that’s the only way the subject can be approached), deconstruction revolves around “decentring”. In every arena of life, a “centre” is defined and anything not identified with that centre is pushed, subtly or unsubtly, to one side. Take “God”. God is almost always referred to as “he” (although a few feminists deliberately use “she”). God is a not a sexual being and therefore has no sex. “He” should actually be spoken of in non-gendered terms, but no such vocabulary exists since no one wants to refer to God as “it”. The use of “he” privileges men over woman and places them at the centre of life and woman on the margins. The use of “she” would do the opposite. The point is that the choice of personal pronoun for referring to God instantly places one group above another. Until the rise of feminism, the centrality of God as a male was never seriously challenged, and society on earth was invariably controlled by men.
In a masculine society, women are marginalized. In times of great wars – as most of our history has been – the masculine is dominant. Nowadays, with wars being small and fought far away, with relatively few casualties, the centre of the Western narrative is turning away from the masculine and becoming increasingly feminine. Political correctness, caring, empathising, sympathising, hugging, social networking, compromising, accommodating, consoling, consensus…the key words of our contemporary culture are essentially feminine. No one preaches strong values because some people might be offended. Strength itself is not welcome nowadays. No one stands for anything because that would mean putting principles above getting on with others, and that’s unacceptable. So, the centre of our narrative is changing, and now the masculine is becoming “other”. The Old World Order are delighted with the feminisation of society because it reduces the chances of any forceful response to their control over us.
The subject of a book is that book’s “centre”. Jesus Christ is the centre of a book about Christianity. Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists are automatically made non-central in such a book. They are at the margins; they are excluded; they are “other”.
Derrida was concerned with revealing the assumptions that accompany the centre, and what it means for those entities excluded from the centre. Deconstruction takes apart a product of any type and exposes the agenda that underlies it. Books, newspapers, magazines, movies, paintings, sculptures, political systems, religions, celebrities, advertising…absolutely everything can be deconstructed. We learn that we are never dealing with objective facts, but with narratives that promote the underlying agenda. To understand the deceit that lies, fundamentally, at the centre is to be released from the prison of illusion that the centre constructs.
Look at all the “centres” of our culture: freedom, democracy, liberalism, capitalism, equal rights, Judaeo-Christianity etc. Everything else is pushed to the fringes, rendered irrelevant, unworthy of consideration. But, via deconstruction, we can cause the centre to collapse, bring the “other” to the foreground, and gain a wider and better understanding.
A Muslim is trapped in a brainwashed state because he can’t understand that the Koran is nothing but a text that places seventh century Arabia at the centre of life. Equally, the New Testament is centred on Judea of 2,000 years ago, and the Torah on Moses and the history of the Jews. If Muslims, Christians and Jews were intelligent people they would deconstruct their sacred texts, but of course they won’t because then the texts would no longer be sacred. These “believers” have done the opposite of deconstruction: they have constructed false centres that marginalize everything else. No Muslim ever questions the Koran, or Christian the Bible, or Jew the Torah. Nothing could be more dangerous than the fanatic who refuses to see the world through different eyes, as the violent history of the main religions has amply demonstrated.
Most of life consists of the creation of false centres that then take on a kind of religious significance that no one dare challenge. Deconstruction is the antidote. Deconstruction is one of the greatest tools of liberation ever devised because it makes us question everything we read and learn, and that’s exactly as it should be. Our material has its own centre, and can be deconstructed like everything else. But, unlike others, we encourage seekers of truth to engage in deconstruction (but we have no interest in unconstructive people who want to pointlessly argue with us, as many of those who contact us choose to do). Only when you have deconstructed can you be trusted to construct. You will do so knowingly, aware of the limitations and the assumptions built into your constructions.
Even individual words can have a centre and political implications. Often, a word can be show to have multiple and contradictory meanings. We have to understand the context to understand the word’s meaning. When someone tries to define only one of a word’s many potential meanings, they are forced to exclude the other meanings, to marginalize them, yet later on the other meanings may seep back in. Derrida gives the example of the Greek word pharmakon which can mean both a poison and a cure! Other meanings are also possible. So the word’s meaning is unstable, and all the functional words of a text are similarly unstable, meaning that the whole text is ambiguous, shifting, changing. Nothing is holy writ. There are no sacrosanct readings of a text.
Deconstruction doesn’t lead nowhere as its critics maintain; it leads us to the truths that we can finally stand by. When every text has been decentred, when every “other” is no longer other then we can see for ourselves those things in which we ought to invest our energy. We again construct centres, but this time having taken the “other” into due consideration. If we now ignore others it is not because they were marginalized and made invisible to us through a subliminal process, but because we understood exactly what we were doing, and the full consequences of our actions.
Deconstruction is always political and ideological, just as construction and centring were in the first place. Deconstructionists are those who no longer fall for the propaganda of the central, privileged position.
The Old World Order remain the centre of the world’s grand narrative. It’s time for us to deconstruct them out of existence.
Even before deconstruction existed, Nietzsche was attacking the ultimate grand narrative – God at the centre of the universe, the infallible judge of all of humanity, the supreme moral paragon. What if that centre were false, Nietzsche asked, what if God were dead? Then the centre of existence has collapsed. Morality vanishes. Good and evil no longer exist. No one is in charge. The meaning of life is called into question. What then? Nietzsche proposed a new centre – the Superman, the man who takes on the mantle of creator and judge, and obeys his own will to power. In effect, the Superman deposes God and replaces him as God, but he is a God who knows he is fallible.
The centre of the Illuminati’s narrative is the True God, but we openly encourage Nietzsche’s approach because those who dare to don the mantle of God are the only ones who could ever imagine what it is like to be God, and it is precisely those people in whom God is most interested. They are the ones worthy of divine love because they are the ones who come closest to understanding it. Nietzsche’s advocacy of the Superman is remarkably similar in intent to the Illuminati’s advocacy of the search for the higher self, the divine spark. In both cases, humans look inside themselves and try to become something greater, nobler and more divine. They find their inner hero and strive to be the God they are capable of being.
Bad Faith and Abandonment: Gnostic Existentialism
Existentialism has been called “Gnosticism for atheists”. Nietzsche, one of the founding fathers of existentialism, removed from humanity the comforting idea that there is a divine, benevolent omnipotence overseeing us. Instead, we inhabit a cold, unforgiving, brutal world where there are no absolute standards, no certain guides of conduct for us to follow. We are in a hostile, disturbing landscape that, while not created and ruled by a malign being (as Gnosticism teaches), is certainly not there for our comfort and joy. But whereas Gnosticism offers the possibility of salvation via the attainment of gnosis and reaching the realm of the True God, existentialism offers no such hope. We are abandoned on a desolate shore by an implacable universe and no one is coming to save us. What then?
Dostoyevsky’s message in The Brother Karamazov was that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. No divine power is stopping us from doing whatever we like. For Jean-Paul Sartre, an ardent atheist, everything is indeed permitted. Humanity is free – radically free. There is no one directing us, no one expecting anything of us, no one looking out for us. We are free to make of life anything we want. At every moment, we are free. Even in the grimmest circ*mstances, we are free. Even if someone is holding a gun to our head, we are free. As Sartre put is so chillingly, “Man is condemned to be free.” Freedom is no joyous, easy, wonderful attribute. It can be the greatest burden. We must accept full responsibility for everything that happens in our lives, whether or not we are happy to do so. Most people aren’t. They want to blame others, blame the system, blame everything and everyone except themselves. They are denying that they are responsible for their fate. Such people will never truly live.
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” -- Marcus Aurelius
We do not have to accept being slaves and puppets of the Old World Order. Most of us choose to. We could fight, but we don’t because it takes too much effort and courage. We comply because we are cowards. In Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, we are the slaves. We have no one to blame but ourselves. There are billions of us, yet we allow a handful of people to control us and lord it over us. What kind of people are we? Do you think you are close to finding your higher self if you bow and scrape to others, if you wave a flag when a President or Queen goes by, when you ask a celebrity for an autograph?
Most people are led to believe that they are not free, and they eagerly take refuge in their imagined lack of freedom. Life is simple and straightforward if all you have to do is obey. A Christian is not free to disobey the Bible, the Jew the Torah or the Muslim the Koran. People do not think that they are free to break the law or to do whatever they want whenever they want. They think they have duties and obligations, and standards of conduct that they must follow. But they don’t. It’s all an illusion. People are free not to do any of these things. The immense, overwhelming freedom that Sartre talks about fills people with anguish and despair. He referred to the “dizziness” of freedom. Imagine a high-wire act at a circus, with no safety net. Would you like to be up there, or would it drive you insane with fear?
Since the future is always radically in doubt because it is entirely dependent on what we choose to do, many of us are crushed by angst. Freedom is too much for us. It demands too much. To escape anguish, we adopt strategies of “bad faith” where we deny that we are fundamentally responsible for our actions.
Sartre provides two vivid examples. A man, trying to seduce a woman, takes her hand. The woman ought to accept it or reject it, but she does neither. Instead, she pretends nothing has happened and simply leaves her hand where it is as if it’s an object that doesn’t belong to her. She has abdicated her responsibility to make a decision. She has rejected freedom, rejected herself as a subject and become instead a passive object. That is how many people lead their lives. They are inauthentic.
In Sartre’s second example, a waiter in a café performs his role with an absurd degree of enthusiasm, as if he’s trying to become the very essence of a waiter, the Platonic perfect waiter. His whole life seems to be defined by his “waiterhood”. But being a waiter is just a choice, an act, a job; it doesn’t define anyone. A waiter could choose to stop being a waiter at any moment and just walk out. Why does he allow this role to subsume him? Why does he pour his identity into it? Is that the best he can do? The truth is that he is avoiding making other choices by locking himself into this part. He is refusing the infinite opportunities available to him. Our world is full of people who are defined by their jobs. They lose their identities if they lose their jobs. How sad and pathetic is that? Who wants to become synonymous with their dreary job, to have no identity beyond the drudgery they have freely chosen to embrace? Again, these people are inauthentic. They are fake human beings. They could scarcely be further from their higher selves.
At any moment, we can choose to change everything. We can abandon our status as puppets of the Old World Order. We can stop being slaves. Each of us can change our circ*mstances, and if we all change then the whole world will change. Instead, people make excuse after excuse, and nothing changes. But there are no acceptable excuses. Everyone is free. The only thing stopping us is ourselves.
Sartre was famous for denying that individuals have essential selves. He said, “Existence precedes essence”. This is the core of existentialism. Our existence is primary. The “self”, the “ego” is a construct. It is not “given” to us at birth. It is not an indivisible source of our behaviour and character. The experiences arising from our existence shape our selves. That being the case, we can reconstruct ourselves. No one says it is easy, but it can certainly be done. Our constructed “self” restricts our freedom because of the seeming requirement to “act in character”. But we could choose not to. We can always choose. Isn’t it time to become new people? Isn’t it time to become heroes?
The Power Narrative
Michel Foucault was preoccupied with the subject of power and how, in a very real sense, it changes how reality is perceived. If history is written by the winners, by those with power, then what that does that say for the reliability and accuracy of history? If the Nazis had won WWII, what would the word “Holocaust” mean? Would it even be mentioned? Would anyone know what it was? Would the term exist? The Nazis could tell any story they liked about the “resettlement” of the Jews in some far away place to explain why all of the Jews had vanished. A few fake “Potemkin villages” could be set up somewhere to give the semblance of truth to the lie. Would they even bother to conceal what they had done? Perhaps they would build monuments to commemorate their efforts. Or perhaps all references to the Jews would be erased.
Imagine the horror of a Jew who had escaped from a death camp and discovered that not a single person believed his story. Everyone he met thought he was insane. Wouldn’t he soon become insane? Foucault argued that if historical “truths” are a function of power then an event like the Holocaust is no longer a matter of strict fact, but instead depends on the dominance of a particular narrative. History is never anything other than propaganda. As Napoleon said, “What is history, but a fable agreed upon?” There are no objective facts. If it is conceivable that the Holocaust could have been concealed from history in the aftermath of a Nazi victory, what else has been hidden, what else has been distorted until it is unrecognisable? How can any narrative be trusted? How can any “fact” be treated as genuine?
The Holocaust has been turned into something else: an industry. Jews can point to it forever and proclaim themselves eternal victims to whom constant concessions must be made as reparations. They can justify their savage treatment of Palestinians on the basis that “We must never let the Holocaust happen to us again: we will take every measure to defend ourselves.” The Holocaust was the best thing that ever happened to Zionism. Without it, the State of Israel would never have come into existence.
In Washington DC, there is a “Holocaust Memorial Museum” – a theme park dedicated to genocide rather than to Mickey Mouse. You can watch WWII snuff movies on an endless repeat cycle: extermination as eternal recurrence. At the beginning of your tour you are issued with an ID card matching you to a real victim or survivor of the Holocaust. At the end, you throw your ID card in the bin.
Is nothing sacred?
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering by Norman G. Finkelstein contends that the American Jewish lobby exploits the memory of the Holocaust for political and financial gain, and to garner political, military and economic support for Israel. Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, thinks this insidious industry corrupts Jewish culture and betrays the Holocaust victims. Finkelstein should be praised by Jews, but instead he is condemned.
Foucault, like Nietzsche before him, claimed that truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil, normality and abnormality are illusory. They are creations of the will to power, the will to dominate. Language is used in a particular way to prosecute certain vested interests and particular agendas. Myths are sold to the people. Narratives are constructed to advance the positions of the powerful. A centre is created from which those who oppose the centre are marginalized. The most successful story on earth is that of the Old World Order. They have harnessed the whole of society to support their dominant position, and all of the slaves go along with it. They lap up the nonsense about “freedom and democracy”, “law and order”, the “War on Terror”, and all the rest of the drivel.
Foucault used the term “the archaeology of knowledge.” Although what he meant by this phrase is complex, it’s a brilliantly illuminating concept in its ordinary meaning. History is not a neat, tidy arrangement of indisputable facts. History involves getting down and dirty, into pits of the past. The facts are covered under layers of dirt and grime. Some are like books with many pages torn, charred or missing, with many words smudged and indecipherable. Some facts are hidden and irretrievable. Some facts have been moved around by earth tremors, floods or grave robbers. Many facts seem to contradict many others. Everything is open to interpretation and misinterpretation.
The idea that history exists in any objective way is laughable. History is a weapon. Facts are marshalled to support a viewpoint. That doesn’t make them true. We were asked if Thomas Jefferson was indeed a Freemason since there is no formal “proof” in the public arena. This question presupposes that there is some infallible version of history, where everything can be neatly proved or disproved. No such history exists. Even if we were to provide our evidence of Jefferson’s membership of a Masonic Lodge, all those who don’t like the idea would immediately challenge it. Some would accuse us of manufacturing it. Instantly, it would no longer be a “fact” but a point of debate, research, and controversy. Some people would agree with the evidence, and others wouldn’t. If some people can deny that the Holocaust ever took place, of what value are “indisputable facts”?
Jean Baudrillard argued in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that the first Gulf War did not actually happen. Before it began he said it wouldn’t take place and after it was over he said he had been proved right. The reporters at the “front” were embedded in army units and were unable to move around freely. They got most of their information by watching CNN on TV, and CNN got most of its information from the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was only interested in the message it wanted to convey to reflect itself in the best way. “Truth” was nowhere. No one cared about it. The whole Gulf War could easily have been staged, or to use Baudrillard’s preferred word, No one watching at home would have known any better. The whole war lacked reality. Many people said it was like a video game. They were able to watch pictures taken from cameras fitted to cruise missiles. They got a missile’s “viewpoint” as it flew through a window before exploding: the ultimate precision bombing.
NATO is currently engaged in a war in Afghanistan. There are no battles. There is no indication that NATO is winning. NATO says it is fighting on behalf of freedom and democracy but there’s no evidence that the Afghanis want NATO’s version of freedom and democracy. Soldiers die and are brought home in flag-draped coffins, but no one’s sure what they’re fighting for. No victory is in sight. There is no “exit strategy”. Most people probably couldn’t point to Afghanistan on a map. They have no idea why NATO is there beyond some vague notion of the “War on Terror”. No one really knows what the War on Terror is or who the enemy actually is. Are the Iraqis and Afghanis to be called “terrorists” because they’re fighting to get an army of occupation out of their country, just as the Americans and British would do if they were invaded?
The truth is that the War on Terror is a simulation of a war. “Terror” is an abstraction, not a real, identifiable enemy. It’s a matter of opinion whether someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter. The purpose of this strange, obscure, undefined war is to keep the military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies in a position of permanent power, to justify governments taking draconian measures against their people in the name of “Homeland Security”. Everyone is spied on by the authorities. In Orwell’s prophetic novel Nineteen war was permanent, the perfect means to control the population. If there are no real wars then the Old World Order simply simulate them, just as Big Brother did in Nineteen No one can tell the difference anymore.
The real war is that of the government against the people.
Each person constructs his own version of history based on his personal ideology. He excludes things that don’t accord with his view, and eagerly embraces those things that do. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. If you find yourself being doubtful about many of the things we say, our message isn’t for you. You should move on to something that you can be more passionate about. Finding your higher self comes about via your zealous commitment to a cause. Gnosis isn’t straightforward knowledge. It’s a deep, inner certainty that you reach not through a field of facts (most of which are illusory) but through profound personal conviction. The truth isn’t so much laid before you as seizes you. You know which facts are true and which are false because you have “become God”, the only genuine arbiter. You are like Neo in The It wasn’t “facts” that transformed Neo, it was his realisation of who he was and of what he was capable. He became a Superman; his higher self was fully unbound and unleashed.
The Matrix is practically the perfect Gnostic tale. A man (Neo) is unknowingly living in a world controlled by a malign, hostile controller (the Demiurge). Agents (the archons, the “ultimate puppetmasters”) operate within the Matrix, eliminating any threats. Humanity is literally asleep. People are arrayed in huge battery farms to provide energy for machines. They are collectively fed a dream of an illusory world (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, freedom, democracy etc). Neo is contacted by mysterious guides (the Illuminati) who offer him a chance to find the truth. They tell him that he is the Chosen One (meaning that he is ready to make full contact with his higher self: to at last find the Holy Grail after many prior reincarnations). He doesn’t really accept who he is, but nevertheless joins his guides in their great struggle against hopeless odds. He endures many ordeals (representing his arduous initiation into the great mysteries), like the archetypal hero of myth, and is pursued relentlessly by his enemies. Still, he fails to realise who he is (nothing is more difficult than facing up to yourself; abandoning all of your comforting delusions and safety nets). He must die and be reborn before he can assume the mantle of his higher self (all mystery religions require the metaphorical death of the initiate before he can gain access to the higher truths). Neo then achieves gnosis and understands everything. He sees right through the Matrix. He can manipulate “reality” at will. By the end of the trilogy, he is blind, but can still see (the sight of the soul), and he is bathed in a mystic, glorious light (of the True God).
Can you too be Neo? You will never get there through slavish devotion to “facts”. How many facts existed in the Matrix? None at all. The whole thing was an illusion. Don’t you “see”? Knowledge and facts are not synonymous. Knowledge can transcend facts. Knowledge of the world of ego-consciousness is not knowledge of reality.
Nietzsche said, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” That is higher knowledge. True knowledge comes from grasping the huge, gaping limitations of the ordinary human mind and not being sucked into illusory “certainties”. When Socrates heard that the Oracle at Delphi had named him the wisest man in the world, he was initially perplexed. Then he said that perhaps it was true because whereas he knew that he knew nothing, others pretended to know everything, and yet manifestly knew nothing.
The unconditional worship of “facts” is dangerous and leads to the sterile atheism of someone like Richard Dawkins: he has closed off his mind entirely from his higher self. Even worse is faith, which dispenses with facts altogether and leads, inevitably and inexorably, to the insanity of suicide bombings in the name of “God”.
Gnosis is about transcendence of the human condition by reaching direct, experiential contact with the divine spark, a fragment of the divine order that, in the manner of a hologram, contains the whole divine order. To reach that state, the seeker of truth must tread the finest of lines…respecting and being guided by facts but at all times realising that facts may betray him. Nietzsche, despite being an atheist, was well on his way to contacting his divine spark because he was intent on removing, with surgical precision, every trace of the false knowledge that blocks the path to enlightenment. He was deconstructing himself, and from that immensely challenging process the true self can emerge.
Isn’t it time to “wake up” (as Neo was told at the beginning of The The whole of humanity needs to do so. The Illuminati can guide you in the right direction but only you can transform yourself. Everything is rendered clear and bright when you liberate your divine spark. Otherwise, you are seeing through a glass, darkly. You will never encounter your divine self via a cause in which you have doubts and suspicions. Above all, if you don’t think you have a divine spark, you will never find it. Why is the Holy Grail so hard to find? – because too many people get bogged down in minor detail and fail to grasp the big picture. They engage at the level of facts rather than that of profound transformation. They are blocking their own progress, almost as if they are too scared to complete their great quest. They approach the task in absolutely the wrong way: like detectives rather than philosophers.
Foucault sought to show that human beings are knowing, knowable and self-knowing in terms of power relations. People are allocated a certain level of power from the day they are born. It’s very hard to break out of the range that society has allocated to you. You are expected to do x (which is suitable for your level of power) but not y (which is above your level), or z (which is below it). Everyone knows where they stand in the power hierarchy, or they quickly learn. The subtlest signs can be used to demonstrate someone’s status. More often, unsubtle signs are used: designer clothes, bling, big houses, flash cars. We are locked within networks of power. Are you happy to live in the box that society has allocated to you? Why not break out? Reject the signs of “status”. Reject the false power hierarchy. The only legitimate hierarchy is the one based on demonstrable merit.
Don’t let society construct you. You must become yourself: an autonomous, self-directing person, immune to the boxes others wish to place you in, but you must also stop placing others in boxes. We all collude in the process. We must remove the power-tinted spectacles through which we view everything.
Whenever you see an authority figure, ask yourself whether their authority is legitimate or a construct. Rapidly, you will reach the conclusion that authority is, more often than not, a con trick. Many “criminals” are in prison because they decided to use exactly the same tactics that, thousands of years ago, the great dynastic families of the Old World Order used to seize power – violence. It was right then; now it’s wrong, supposedly. Why should those who have authority and power now be immune from the processes that allowed them to gain authority and power in the first place?
No matter how deeply ingrained the Old World Order’s narrative is, don’t forget that it can disappear at any time. The grand narrative of Communism collapsed overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Isn’t it time we pushed over the OWO’s invisible wall? Isn’t it time we saw them as emperors with no clothes? And when they’re revealed in all their feeble nakedness, the game will be over.
It won’t be easy, but no one should expect it to be. As Thomas Paine, the great political essayist and pamphleteer who contributed so much to the American Revolution, said, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph: what we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”
Paine was a fierce critic of hereditary monarchy on the grounds that it involved a previous generation dictating the rulers of future generations. By the same token, when dynastic families take active steps to ensure that their offspring have far superior opportunities than those of other families, they are effectively deciding who the rulers of the future will be. They have no right to do so, and that power, in the name of meritocracy, must be stripped from them. Hereditary rule and privilege are effectively the same thing. Those who oppose monarchs should oppose dynastic, elite families too.
As Paine said, “For all men being originally equal, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and though himself might deserve some decent degree of honour of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of the hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”
Paine was a true meritocrat; an outstanding individual who rose from the humblest of origins. He held a Gnostic view of the world, regarding the God of the Old Testament as hateful, vengeful and spiteful. He was an advocate of deism and condemned both atheism and Christianity.
It still seems remarkable that anyone would buy into religions such as Judaism and Christianity. Is it because they don’t actually understand them? In the Old Testament, God promised Abraham that he would “shower blessings” on him and make his people, the Jews, “as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore.” He didn’t keep his promise, did he? Why do the Jews still believe? Wasn’t the Holocaust proof enough that there is no God looking out for them?
According to the Bible, Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience – the “original” sin – cursed humanity for eternity. Why such an extreme response? Why no second chance? What kind of God behaves in this way? It was God himself who placed temptation in the path of Adam and Eve. What did he expect? Moreover, he knows everything, so he knew they would be disobedient. So how can Adam and Eve be held responsible? They were entirely innocent.
The God of the Bible, we are told, is kind, loving, forgiving and merciful, yet all of humanity is under sentence of going to hell because of original sin. There’s precious little evidence of love, mercy or forgiveness, is there? Why did God create us in the knowledge that the vast majority of us are going to hell? What a cruel, sad*stic and horrific thing to do.
St Augustine said that, by God’s grace, a few of the baptised will be saved from the fires of hell (the unbaptised have no chance at all). God chooses to bestow his grace upon an elect few; they, and only they, will go to heaven. The gift of grace has empowered them to live Godly lives. According to Augustine, we have no control over our fate; it is entirely in God’s hands. This is the vile and repellent doctrine of predestination. How can anyone believe anything so monstrous? God, with virtually no justification, seems committed to sending most souls to hell. And this is supposedly a ‘good’ God worthy of worship.
No, this is Satan, Lord of Hell.
The Invisible hand and “complicitous silence”
In The Wealth of Scottish political economist Adam Smith said that people acting in their own self-interest would be guided by an “invisible hand” to the benefit of society. What a joke. There is no “invisible hand”, just the violent fist and the grasping claw of the Old World Order. They are a cartel, conspiring to defraud the public for their own profit. “Free markets” are no such thing. Again, the powers-that-be create a narrative that suits their agenda.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that elites in a society typically maintain their power not simply through the control of wealth, but also through a domination of the social culture. They create the “norms”, the parameters that shape society. They define right and wrong, good and bad, sane and mad, acceptable and unacceptable. They control the education system, what is taught and what isn’t, the economic arena, the media, the political system. They get their ideas, their values, their propaganda “out there” and they marginalize the voices of the opposition. They even define “silence” – what is never said, what is assumed, the unstated values that subtly pervade the prevailing culture. Bourdieu wrote, “The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than a complicitous silence.”
The Old World Order rely on “complicitous silence”. It is one of their best weapons.
The people are deaf and blind to their plight. They are unaware of their historic destiny to defeat the Old World Order: they have a “false consciousness” created by the OWO. The OWO have the resources at their disposal to continually counter the challenges to them, but all it takes is for them to lose concentration for a moment and then they are lost. The Roman Empire collapsed when it lost its sense of what it truly was, when it became overstretched, overly decadent, and infected by a new and strange religion (Christianity). The same thing will inevitably happen to the Old World Order.
It will be a “black swan” event coming out of nowhere that leads to the destruction of the OWO. It’s the job of the enemies of the OWO to try to manufacture black swan events. Our series of books is one such attempt. There are many others. The Illuminati have many cells, operating independently, all trying to create the toxin that will poison the OWO. One of them will surely succeed.
The Magic World
Our world is ruled by primitive magic. Does that seem a bizarre thing to say? Well, we shall prove it to you.
In The Golden the famous study of magic and religion, J.G. Frazer wrote:
Principles of Magic – If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolves themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion…Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homeopathic, Imitative or Mimetic Magic. Charms based on the Law of Contact or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic… But in practice the two branches are often combined; or, to be more exact, while hom*oeopathic or imitative magic may be practised by itself, contagious magic will generally be found to involve an application of the hom*oeopathic or imitative principle…they are familiar in the concrete, though certainly not in the abstract, to the crude intelligence not only of the savage, but of ignorant and dull-witted people everywhere…Both branches of magic, the hom*oeopathic and the contagious, may conveniently be comprehended under the general name of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we might conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be empty.”
Consider the advertising industry, one of the primary forces that shape our world. It is based almost entirely on hom*oeopathic magic. One of its most fundamental techniques is to take a “god” – i.e. a celebrity who is rich, good-looking, successful, popular, and skilled at what they do – then show them endorsing a particular product. So, for example, Tiger Woods at his commercial peak was seen to endorse an endless array of products, none of which had any connection whatsoever to golf, his area of special expertise. We saw him smiling into the camera as he eulogized razors, automobiles, hats, T-shirts, soft drinks etc.
What is the idea being communicated by such adverts? Simply that if these products are good enough for gods then they’re certainly good enough for you, the “commoners”. And more than that: if you want to be like a god you must imitate them and buy the products they buy. If you’re not wearing Nike you’ll never be like Tiger Woods. So everyone who admires Woods thinks – “got to get myself lots of Nike gear pronto.” And that’s exactly what they go out and do.
So, we are in the realm of imitative magic. If you want to be successful, you must imitate success. Now, Tiger Woods is an athletic, muscular, gym-honed guy who has spent his whole life devoted to golf (at great expense to the healthy, balanced development of his psyche). That’s why he’s a golfing legend. It has nothing to do with any of the products he lucratively endorses. A fat slob who puts on a Nike cap as worn by Tiger is not going to become one iota better at golf, or indeed anything else. Yet he falls for the “magic”. He gets out his wallet and pays top dollar to Nike Corporation, just as millions of others do. As the cash registers ding, a big bell rings in an office of Nike HQ and a mechanical voice says, “SUCKER!”, but no one ever hears it because it’s in a sound-proofed room. The Board of Directors go in there from time to time to laugh at the cretins who buy their goods and to thank God for the power of Mimetic magic. They pay a fortune to Woods for his endorsem*nt (and not a cent of that money contributes to the quality of the product), all of which then gets added to the price of the goods. But, of course, the goods were manufactured by slaves in sweatshops in South-East Asia, so Nike can keep the prices down and still reap vast profits. It’s not as if we care a f*ck about the gooks – we just want to be like Tiger, and screw everyone else.
Have you ever noticed that all adverts for the beauty industry feature naturally beautiful people? Isn’t there something wrong with that? Surely the only point of the beauty industry is to make average people look a bit better, or, best of all, to make the ugly look gorgeous. A beauty will still be beautiful without any make-up at all. A beauty product that transforms an ugly duckling into a swan may be worth the money, but a product that makes a beautiful swan a tiny bit more beautiful isn’t up to much, and a beauty product that makes no discernible difference to the attractiveness of an ordinary person is a complete waste ofmoney.
Yet, once more we are in the dream arena of imitative magic. If you buy the beauty products endorsed by the beautiful people (who probably don’t even use them), you too will be beautiful. Yeah? Dream on. Yet women all over the world fall for it in droves. Suckers! Are these people “dull-witted” or what? If ugly people were used in beauty adverts the whole industry would collapse overnight. A British company once launched a fashion campaign featuring normal-sized women. It was the shortest-lived campaign in history. Even average-sized women didn’t want to see themselves reflected on screen. They wanted the dream, not the reality. And magic always comes alive in the dreamscape.
The whole of advertising is based on the ludicrous idea that if you buy certain goods your life will be better, that if you imitate celebrities you stand a better chance of being a celebrity, that if you fail to imitate the stars like everyone else then you will be shunned and regarded as a freak.
In other words, if you don’t imitate what THEY want you to imitate (by paying a premium for it) then you are a failure and a loser.
And billions of people across the globe succumb to this garbage, the simplest form of ancient magic imaginable. Wake up! If imitative magic didn’t work – i.e. getting ordinary people to imitate their heroes – there would be no advertising industry, no capitalism, and no celebrity culture. So, imitative magic is the basis of the modern world!!!
Capitalism is an economic system based on Mimetic Magic. Whereas Buddhism defines desire as the source of suffering, capitalism is dedicated to the creation of fake desire i.e. to manipulate you into buying things you don’t need. In this sense, capitalism produces nothing but suffering. It tantalises you with images of perfection i.e. it puts you in a hell of desire, and then it offers you the possibility of instant salvation. All you have to do is buy the product advertised and your desire will be satisfied there and then. Hell, they’ll even give you credit so that there are no obstacles whatsoever in your path. Who wouldn’t want to plunge themselves into debt providing they can wear the same things as their gods?
Has there ever been a more cynical and abusive system? Capitalism is nothing but psychological warfare waged day in and day out against the people. Its purpose is to make you hunger for what they want to sell you. Your appetite can only be assuaged by buying it. Hell is not having the object; heaven is when you do. And the objects are promoted via the endorsem*nt of human gods – celebrities – whom we must all worship and imitate.
Such a simple, and even crude, system. Yet so stunningly effective. Like magic, in fact.
f*ck that!!!!
“Two thousand eleven – we’re gonna raise hell till it’s heaven. M for the Movement.” -- Pho’
NLP
NLP – “neurolinguistic programming” – is a modern fad in therapeutic psychology. It explores the relationship between neurology, linguistics and observable patterns (“programs”) of behaviour. At the simplest level, it’s about the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who uses positive, optimistic words and gestures all of the time will “program” themselves to be a positive, optimistic person. Conversely, if you consistently use pessimistic, negative, defeatist language, you will become all of those things. It’s well established that if you are feeling down, you can make yourself feel better by doing nothing more strenuous than smiling. The act itself releases chemicals associated with pleasure.
NLP, like advertising with which it has many links, is also based on Mimetic Magic. Its defining idea is that you should find someone you admire – a person who is excellent at what they do – and then copy them. You should painstakingly study them, learn their secrets and then replicate what you’ve picked up. By using their words, their techniques, their way of putting things, you program yourself to match their success. You start projecting their power and charisma. People start responding to you as they would to them. You notice that people now react to you differently, more favourably, and this leads to increased confidence on your part, and thus an even greater effect, in a virtuous cycle. And for some people it actually works. Give it a try. You’ll either like it or you won’t. You’ll either benefit from it or not as the case may be. But it’s a worth a shot.
Salespeople are particularly keen on NLP. They tend to concentrate on two phases of selling: the pitch and closing the deal. Of course, only a fool would be taken in by them, but there area great number of fools out there. “Boiler room” teams who deal in fake shares have a thing called a “sucker list” – the names of tens of thousands of people whom they consider prime material for their scam. Pray you’re not the sort of person on the list!
Everyone receives messages from Nigerians. In bad English, they say things like, “From the Desk of Mr Mohammed Abu. I need to get ten million dollars out of the country. I will give you a million dollars if help me you do, beautiful Sir or Madam. I look forward to hear from you. First you must send me a thousand dollars so that I can get my people to link to your account. URGENT!”
And there are people who respond!!! Plenty of them. This type of scam has been going on for ten years and still many people haven’t wised up.
But the NLP gang haven’t understood the first thing about greatness. You don’t change the world through imitation. It’s innovation that marks out the extraordinary from the also-rans. Those who excel don’t follow the crowd – they lead. They are authentic, not fakes. They are creators. They live and breathe what they do. The imitators are just parrots; their motivation is entirely wrong. They want to be successful on someone else’s terms because they can’t manage it on their own.
NLP is worth studying, but not from the point of view of imitation. Instead, you should use it to find techniques that help you to release your true self, that higher part of you that can operate at a more effective level than your normal self. Don’t copy others; find yourself. Be all that you can be, not a shadow of someone else.
An aide to a Chinese Emperor once thought he could impress his master by letting him hear the wonderful impression that an entertainer could do of the song of a nightingale. The Emperor listened politely then turned to the aide and said, “But why would I want to hear a copy of the nightingale when I can hear the nightingale itself?”
Magic II
Now we come to part II of this magic world of ours – close encounters of the third kind – physical contact!!!
People crave breathing the same air as their celebrity gods, being in the same arena, reaching out to touch them. They will scream and beg for the celebrity to look their way, to let them take a picture. They will pass out if the celebrity wafts by. They will pay any price to be in the presence of these divine beings. Autographs of the famous become treasured objects. Items they once wore or touched get auctioned for enormous prices. People like to stay in the same hotel room where a famous person once slept.
The credulous masses think that to be in the presence of divinity means that they can suck in some of that divinity. That they can impress their friends. That they can make themselves seem cooler.
A few hundred years ago, people believed that they could be cured of illness if they touched a monarch. Why? Because monarchs were God’s chosen ones, hence imbued with divine powers. What a load of sh*t!!!
People still believe this nonsense in the present day. If the people of Britain didn’t think there was something “magical” about their rancid queen, they would surely have overthrown her.
Such is the significance of physical touch that many rulers have gone out of their way to emphasize the effect. Some rulers decreed that their feet should never be allowed to touch the ground. So, when they appeared in public they were carried around on portable thrones and if ever they had to get down, courtiers had to allow the royal feet to walk over them until the ruler had reached privacy.
Many rulers forbade people to even look at them. The same thing can be seen in the modern world with the Muslim masses who bow and scrape when saying their prayers to their God, never once raising their eyes.
Pythagoras was fascinated by the power of these prohibitions. They seemed to have a magical effect on people. So, when outsiders came to see him, he sat behind a curtain, ensuring that their only contact with him was with his disembodied voice. He always began in the same way: “I swear by the air that I breathe and the water that I drink that I will never suffer censure on account of that which I am about to say.” As he anticipated, his godlike reputation grew with astonishing rapidity the more he restricted people’s access to him. One person even claimed that he had caught a glimpse of Pythagoras and observed that he had a golden thigh!
Celebrities ration their contact with ordinary people. Elizabeth Hurley refers to regular folk as “civilians,” as if she’s some sort of super soldier in an alternative reality.
Monarchs, Presidents, Popes…they all play the same game. They make it almost impossible for ordinary people to breathe the same air. They surround themselves with enormous pomp and ceremony, all designed to impress and intimidate. And people fall for it.
It’s all bullcrap!!! Wake up.
“Never believe in anything until it has been officially denied.” -- Otto von Bismarck
The human race is under a deep and dark magic spell cast by the Old World Order. So powerful is the spell that it even powers the economy.
Are we all insane? This is black magic, designed to do us nothing but harm. We need to break the spell, shatter the magic glass, lift the curse.
f*ck the rich. There’s nothing special about them other than their greed. All celebrities should be boycotted. All products they endorse should be boycotted. No one should go to their gigs or movies. Destroy the false idols. Be gods yourselves. Make your own products, your own movies. Don’t watch others. Don’t be in thrall to them.
Where’s the action? Is it where you’re at? And, if it isn’t, shouldn’t you be doing something about it? One of the main themes of The Last Bling King by Mike Hockney is whether or not anyone would want to watch the movie of which YOU are assuredly the star – your own life. Would the audience be on the edge of their seats, or falling asleep? Are even you half-asleep? How can you have a meaningful life if you haven’t woken up yet, if you haven’t freed yourself from the spell of your “masters”? Why would anyone want to watch your movie when they could watch the movie of the masters instead? Hell, even you prefer their movie. That’s why you want to be them. That’s why their spell over you is unbreakable. Everyone who worships celebrities is confessing to the world that they’d rather be in any movie other than their own.
All celebrity culture is toxic. In a celebrity culture, celebrities have infinite value and everyone else is valued at zero. Only morons would sign up for such a culture. If you’re not a celebrity in a celebrity culture then you’re a guaranteed loser. Just by participating in it, you’ve proved you’re a second class citizen. You deserve to be treated with contempt because you chose that fate for yourself. The moment you cheer a celebrity is the moment you surrender your right to be regarded as anything of worth. If you don’t rate yourself, why should anyone else rate you? If you yourself place so much value on the “A-list”, doesn’t that make you lower than the Z-list?
For us to be Gods, we must destroy the false gods. While they exist, we cannot grow and evolve. All of the resources that we need to transform ourselves are poured instead into the tiny group of terrestrial divinities.
So, don’t forget – magic rules the world and it consists of imitation and physical contact. In voodoo, the two are combined. A likeness of the victim is created, including an item with which the victim was in physical contact, and then the victim is at the mercy of the magician. In our world, the greatest magic is pulled off by the Old World Order who have cast a spell over us while they reach into our pockets and rob us. How did they do it? Simple. They said, “We deserve it. Be like us and you can have it too. Be like us and you can come into physical contact with us in our magic circle.” And, incredibly, we believed them! SUCKERS!!!
One of the greatest and most subversive movies of all time is The Wizard of The curtain is pulled back and the Wizard is revealed for the bumbling charlatan he is. That’s the Old World Order – feeble fools who delude themselves that they are gods. If we snapped out of their spell, with which ordinary people collude because most of them are terrified of taking power and having to assume responsibility for their lives, we could overthrow them as easily as Eastern Europe shed the tyranny of the Soviet Union in 1989.
There’s nothing to fear!!!
Isn’t it time to activate your superpowers? You’ll never do it by being in the shadow of others.
WikiLeaks
Have you heard the latest leak, the most startling yet?
“Breaking news: strange cult that advocates human sacrifice has infiltrated the American Government to the highest levels.”
Actually, that’s not a WikiLeak. Nevertheless, it’s completely true. The “strange cult” is Judaeo-Christianity, and everyone in the American Government belongs to it. All Abrahamists endorse the example of Abraham. This man was ordered by his God to commit human sacrifice. Not just any human sacrifice: that of a child. Not just any child: his own son. Abraham agreed unconditionally. So, the issue is this – is America safe in the hands of a Government that would slaughter their own children if their God ordered it? You either support Abraham’s example or you repudiate it. If you don’t repudiate it then you have acknowledged that you are prepared to engage in human sacrifice.
Shouldn’t every member of the American Government be asked to stand up in Congress in front of all the cameras of the world and be asked to support human sacrifice by endorsing Abraham’s example, or, alternatively, to reject Abraham and his God that demands unconditional obedience to the extent of killing children?
This is a question that literally cannot be asked because if it were it would destroy America. Those running America would have to publicly support human sacrifice, contrary to the American Constitution, the Declaration of Human Rights and common decency and morality, or reject Judaeo-Christianity and declare it unconstitutional, hence illegal. Civil war, holy war, would erupt.
So, you can see that WikiLeaks is trivial in comparison. What could be more shocking than that half the world endorses human sacrifice and child murder – providing it is sanctioned by “God”? The leaking of information is neither here nor there. What matters is who asks the questions, and who is compelled to answer them.
If Abrahamists were questioned about human sacrifice, what answer would they give? If they reject it then they reject Abraham, hence their religion. If they don’t reject it then they are monsters.
Every American should write to Obama and ask him the following question:
Dear Mr President,
I am an extremely concerned citizen. I understand that you are an advocate of human sacrifice. I say this because you are a self-professed Christian, and, as you know from your detailed study of the Torah, Old Testament and Koran, all Jews, Christians and Muslims agree with their patriarch Abraham that if God orders them to kill their own children then they should do so without question.
In my opinion, an American president who supports this position is unfit to hold any office, let alone the presidency. Please confirm as a matter of urgency whether you do indeed advocate God-sanctioned human sacrifice, or please state for the public record that you repudiate the example of Abraham, and the evil religions of Abrahamism to which he gave birth.
I am sure you can appreciate the gravity of this situation. There is no question that Abrahamism contradicts the American Constitution and the Declaration of Human Rights. By any standards, Abrahamism represents a crime against humanity, and its history has demonstrated that it is guilty of innumerable war crimes. The “God” of Abraham committed genocide against the human race when he caused the Great Flood that exterminated everyone other than Noah and his family. Should he therefore not be indicted for waging against humanity? If human political leaders are to be held accountable for their crimes against humanity, why is God not similarly indicted?
I look forward to your prompt reply in this matter. If you refuse to reply, I will seek your removal from office on the grounds that your beliefs are anti-constitutional, and it will be up to the Supreme Court to adjudicate on whether it is legal for publicly elected American officials to be advocates of human sacrifice by virtue of their support of Abraham who did not hesitate to comply with God’s order to kill his son.
*****
There is nothing in this letter that is factually false; there is nothing secret about Abraham’s willingness to commit human sacrifice. Indeed, it is celebrated every year by hundreds of millions of Abrahamists, particularly Muslims.
As we have previously explained, Muslims believe that “Satan” three times pleaded for the life of Abraham’s child and was three times driven away by a stone-throwing Abraham. On 9/11 when passengers on the hijacked planes were pleading for their lives, you can be sure that the Islamic terrorists thought to themselves: “Aha, these people are pleading with us just as Satan pleaded with Abraham, and we must surely drive them away just as Abraham did. Nothing will deflect us from obeying the will of God. Allah Akbar!!!” In other words, Muslims have been pre-programmed to reject any pleas for mercy and to carry out the most horrific acts conceivable. If a Muslim would not shirk from killing his own son, why would he hesitate for a moment to slaughter as many infidels as possible?
WikiLeaks has not yielded anything at all that anyone who watches the news or reads the newspapers would not already have known or suspected. The significance of WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange in particular, lies elsewhere. Assange’s importance is that he has managed to seize control of the narrative. Because of him, the Elite are having to discuss matters they would prefer not to. Even worse for them, they don’t know what’s coming next. Maybe WikiLeaks will get their hands on something really juicy.
Assange has become a hero, a rallying point for all anti-establishment forces. He will never sell-out, that’s for sure. He will certainly be pilloried and defamed. They will do everything to bring him down.
The Elite’s main weapon is that they control the narrative. Once they lose that, they’re finished. That’s why the internet is potentially so important. It allows the official narrative to be bypassed. The content of our books would never have been sanctioned by the Elite’s media gatekeepers, but in the age of the internet they are no longer relevant.
Social networking is an ingenious attempt by the Elite to make the internet as vapid and pointless as the rest of the media. Their main aim is to ensure that the people never ask difficult questions. Facebook is a circus of trivia, exactly as the Elite like it. The people, the Elite decree, must be prevented from challenging the legitimacy of their leaders.
Consider the Queen of the UK. She is the head of State and yet she is unelected and unaccountable to the British people. Not a single person is allowed to ask her a question. Do you realise how breathtaking that is? The British people are not citizens but “commoners” and “subjects” who are not entitled to change their head of state or even to ask them anything, and they are expected to walk backwards when they are withdrawing from the “royal presence”. Why would any sane person agree to such an arrangement? Nor is it ever discussed. All voices in Britain that advocate the replacement of the monarchy with a republic are ignored. No mainstream political party supports a republic, nor any newspaper or well-known public figure. All debate concerning the monarchy is suppressed.
The Queen should be asked a single question: “Are you for or against meritocracy?” If she answers “for” then, as an unelected, anti-meritocratic hereditary monarch she would have to abdicate on the spot. If she says “against” then she has explicitly acknowledged that the UK is a society of privilege that actively works against the forces of meritocracy.
The fact is that if you don’t already have the worst possible opinion of the ruling Elite then you obviously haven’t been paying any attention to the world around you. There is NOTHING that WikiLeaks could reveal that would lower our opinion of the rulers of this world because it’s already as low as it can get.
All of us have enormously more information than we could ever need to judge the rulers of the world. We don’t need any more. We don’t need any leaks. They simply provide more of the same data. They don’t change the big picture one iota.
Look at the Zeitgeist movies. How often have you heard these being discussed in the mainstream media? Every issue they raised is ignored. Why? Because the last thing the people in charge want is for these issues to become the heart of the political, economic and cultural debate. The Zeitgeist movies are freely available and millions have watched them, but enormously greater numbers haven’t and aren’t aware of any of this material. They are locked into the narrative of the Old World Order. They’re happy with their X Factor television dross, their video games, Lady Gaga, and their Facebook lives that pose no challenge at all to the prevailing hegemony.
What is the world waiting for? If the Credit Crunch didn’t cause a revolution, why should WikiLeaks prove any more successful? We are confronted by endless scandals and abuses regarding the Elite. Everything they do is a provocation and an insult to the people. Britain has a Queen who refers to the people as her subjects. Why would anyone tolerate that? Yet the British do, in their legions. Why do so few people have any dignity and self-respect? Why don’t they care? Why don’t they think? Why do they have no standards and values?
These are the real issues. Everything else is mere distraction.
Those who control the narrative control the consciousness of the masses. While the Elite can provide bread and circuses just as they did in ancient Rome, their position remains practically impregnable, but the cracks are growing.
The real war is between a small group of super privileged on the one hand, and a growing number of radical and revolutionary opponents on the other. The masses in the middle are just flocks of sheep and herds of cows seeking guidance from whoever sets the narrative. They are sheeple, not people. They will happily watch American Idol or X Factor while Rome burns all around them. Yet as economies grind to a halt, dole queues lengthen, foreclosures rise, protests and demonstrations multiply, even the sheeple will start to ask questions.
WikiLeaks is part of the answer in terms of the embarrassment it causes the Establishment, but the complete solution is to make the Elite subject to the people. Heads of state must be accountable. They must answer to their people. They must be interrogated by the people regarding the tough issues of the day. No question can be off limits. If they call themselves Christians then they must justify their beliefs. If they hand over public money to private banks then the people must sit on the boards of those banks. The personal financial affairs of the richest 1% of the population should be subject to public scrutiny.
*****
Despite everything, the world is starting to change. The Tipping Point is approaching. Everyone can feel it. The “People Reactor” is reaching critical mass – 5% of the population is all that’s needed: all of the dynamic, strong, determined tribunes of the people coming together in one great resistance movement. When the chain reaction begins, it will be unstoppable. All of the neutrals will be drawn into the vortex of energy. Look at pictures of events in London in 2010 where even the apathetic British were roused to action by government education cuts. School kids led the uprising. Congratulations to all of them. It’s about time! If you won’t fight for your future, why should anyone else?
The future king of England and his wife were pictured cowering in their luxury limo, shocked and stunned that the “commoners” weren’t showing them the usual deference. In fact some people were heard to shout, “Off with their heads!”
“All the power’s in the hands,
Of people rich enough to buy it.
While we walk the street,
Too chicken to even try it.”
The Clash (“White Riot”)
Are we heading for a new French Revolution, on a global scale? Are we just one spark away? The rotten edifice of the Elite has now reached an astoundingly precarious position. In Europe, the Euro currency is close to collapse, which would precipitate a global financial crisis and destabilise every stock market in the world. The financial system is already stretched to breaking point. If new trouble hits, big banks will certainly go under. Every debt will be called in. Foreclosures will rapidly increase; dole queues will grow spectacularly.
The Elite have no credit left. One final heave and they are gone for good. More and more, 2012 looks like the year when the Old World Order will perish. Will they go quietly or will they call out their puppets in the police and army, those perpetual class traitors and lackeys of the rich, to attack the people? We already know the answer:
The people at the top of the pyramid aren’t the geniuses they make themselves out to be. Quite the reverse, in fact. The credit crunch originated in risk models created by “brilliant” groups of PhD scientists, mathematicians and economists. They were so complex that no one understood them, just as no one understood derivatives. It was discovered after the crash that the risk models were, in effect, all predicated on a single premise that even the biggest moron on earth would have known was laughably bogus. This was none other than the belief that house prices always rise. The whole world economy started to revolve around this single axis, and while house prices went up, the risk model worked perfectly and everything boomed. But then banks started giving mortgages to people who did not have jobs nor any income – this was the infamous “sub-prime” market. This didn’t matter in the slightest while house prices were rising because people could simply keep borrowing against the rising price of their houses, and use this to keep paying their mortgages. But then the music stopped. House prices began to falter, stall and, finally, fall. The sub-primes couldn’t borrow any more. They couldn’t meet their liabilities. House prices started to collapse. And thus the whole house of cards imploded. The fatal assumption that house prices could never fall was hideously refuted.
But the real question is why something so staggeringly obvious was ignored by all of the “geniuses” at the top of the tree who pay them themselves such enormous sums of money for their supremely rare “talents”. Was it perhaps because they were blinded by sheer greed, that they personally raked in enormous amounts of money and they knew that if anything went wrong they could simply turn to the taxpayers and get them to bail out the system.
The chief executives who made their banks insolvent were allowed to “leave” with vast golden goodbyes – at taxpayers’ expense, though no taxpayer was ever consulted. Why weren’t they dismissed in disgrace and escorted off the premises without a cent? That never happens in a society of privilege where the Elite are always protected.
The Information War
The people at the top of the pyramid know nothing about computer security. The control of data on a system as vast as the internet is simply impossible. There are endless ways to extract enormous amounts of data. Any “secure” data on the internet is inherently at risk. Everything can be hacked. There are no secrets in cyberspace.
The Information War is here. This is the Third World War, but it doesn’t involve nation states with marching armies but sedentary armies of cyber-geeks. Russia and China have recruited vast forces of hackers to disrupt the West, to commit espionage, to steal data.
The Third World War will not involve bombing civilian populations. It will be about cyber attacks on governments, institutions, agencies, private corporations, and super rich private individuals.
The group known as Anonymous is potentially much more powerful than WikiLeaks. When they attacked financial institutions that had tried to strangle WikiLeaks’ operations, they showed how the Third World War will be fought.
In the future, the people will identify companies and institutions that they despise and Anonymous will set out to put those companies and institutions out of business by sabotaging their computing infrastructures, by preventing them from using the internet, by grabbing all of their data. As in The computer hackers will be the Resistance, the new Knights Templar fighting the good fight.
He who controls the information controls the world. That control must be wrested from the Privileged Elite.
The Hour of Decision is coming ever closer. One spark, just one spark, and everything changes. Are you ready to take control? Are you ready for a New World Order?
The clowns running the circus have run out of jokes. No one’s laughing anymore.
David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has a leafy, affluent constituency in Oxfordshire in England. A 12-year-old boy in his constituency was infuriated when he heard that the popular local youth club was going to be closed because of financial cut backs. Via he arranged for a protest outside Cameron’s constituency office. Shortly afterwards, police visited his school, hauled him out of class and warned him that he would be arrested if any trouble broke out at the protest, whether or not he was present at the demo! Anti-terrorism officers had monitored his Facebook campaign! Britain is becoming a police state in front of our eyes.
Cameron enjoyed the finest education money can buy. He attended the most elite private school in the world – Eton College – then went onto one of the world’s most elite universities: Oxford, where he was a member of the ultra-elite Bullingdon Club.
As his Government implements savage cuts throughout the British economy, this multi-millionaire says, “We’re all in it together.”
Does he really think we’re that stupid? As the cuts hit, it won’t be him or his family that suffer a single blip in their lives of extreme privilege. But when a Meritocratic Government replaces his and implements a 100% inheritance tax then he’ll be right that we’re all in it together.
There’s only one way to reboot the world, to change it forever, and that is to bring an end to private wealth staying in the hands of elite families generation after generation, allowing the rich to keep getting richer and defying the law of the regression to the mean.
Generational private wealth = the Society of Privilege = the Old World Order = monarchs and Zionist bankers and nobility and aristocracy and heirs and heiresses and trust funds and elite private schools and colleges, bribery and corruption, cartels, exclusive clubs and societies for the rich, rigged markets, an in-crowd, an A-list, a fast-track for the well-connected, and the world being owned by banks, private corporations and a few thousand individuals.
100% inheritance tax = the end of all of that.
A 100% inheritance tax will create a Commonwealth where all of the money is continually recycled and is available to the whole population, and none of it remains locked forever in private hands.
Private dynastic wealth is the curse under which humanity toils. That curse is lifted by the Commonwealth. There is no other cure.
A new world.
A new beginning.
Everyone setting out on the race of life from the same starting line.
No masters. No slaves. No privilege. No underprivilege.
Meritocracy. Justice. Freedom. Equality before the Law. Equality of Opportunity.
Isn’t it time to create the world we should have had all along?
Only one thing stands in our way – the supporters of privilege and private wealth. They control the agenda of the world. They have brainwashed the world with their toxic message. They have made us their slaves. They have subjugated us with their Devil religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that advocate total submission to the powers-that-be, even to the extent of human sacrifice.
Adam Weishaupt devoted his life to the overthrow of the old religions, the old power structures, the old elites. He achieved great things, but he failed to liberate the world once and for all. Has the time come at last for Weishaupt’s vision of a New World Order where the People righteously rise up and cast off the chains that have bound them for so long?
All it takes is a single spark.
“The Ancien Régime is a Satanic Order. The Illuminati’s noble and historic mission is to release man’s higher self by destroying the archons – the princes of the world – who prosecute Satan’s will and hold mankind in their thrall. Their corruption has reached its zenith in France. That diabolical tyranny is ripe for destruction. All that is required is a spark. We are the spark.” -- Adam Weishaupt (Grand Master of the Illuminati), 1789
Saturnalia
In the days of ancient Rome, the great pagan festival of late December was called the Saturnalia in honour of Saturn, the god of agriculture, who was said to have long ago presided over the fabled Golden Age of the world when food and wine were plentiful and of the highest quality, when peace and tranquillity reigned, when all property was held in common. There were no masters and no slaves. But, without warning, Saturn disappeared and the world fell into ruin, discord and evil.
The festivities of Saturnalia were designed to summon the beautiful memory of the carefree paradise of the past. They lasted for a full week, ending on the winter solstice (considered, in the Julian calendar, the of December, the birthday of the sun and all gods of light).
It was a time of freedom from all the usual routines of life. Law courts were closed and no criminals punished. All public business was suspended. Schools were shut.
Merrymaking and riotous fun were the rule of the day. It wasn’t unusual for violent disorder to break out, or mass orgies. Debauchery was everywhere. The whole city let it all hang out. Every dark passion was vented: a true vision of Sin for Salvation.
Female slaves were allowed to dress up and go around mocking and jeering at everyone they met, and bitching and throwing stones at each other.
In the Saturnalia, slaves reversed places with their masters and the masters were duty bound to attend to every need of their slaves. A King of Misrule was appointed, and given a crown, a robe, a sceptre and a throne. It was his task to oversee and urge on the feasting, revelry and abandoned behaviour. All moral codes were ignored.
The Christians were clever enough to realise that they couldn’t deprive the people of their fun, so they simply superimposed their own special celebration over the usual festivities. They imitated the example of the many pagan gods born at the winter solstice and invented a birthday of December 25 for Jesus Christ.
Thus we have the uncomfortable dichotomy that persists to the present day of decadence, debauchery, gluttony, lust and party-time coexisting with carol singing, holy mass and a reverential day in honour of the birth of the “Son of God”.None of it makes sense. It breeds hypocrisy and double-think. Sanctimonious fools make a great display of going to church and then, as soon as they get back home, they tuck into mountains of food and knock back the booze as if there were no tomorrow. You would think they would fast and pray all day, but, no, they join in the Saturnalian excess like everyone else.
“Christmas” is about capitalist consumption in overdrive, about wallowing in objects (called “presents”), about cloying sentimentality and nostalgia, about fake brotherhood, about materialism, about competition regarding how impressive your Christmas lights are. It’s one of the saddest days of the year, fully exposing the human proclivity for being neither one thing nor another, for making no commitment. Either Christmas is a holy day or it’s a day of debauchery. How can it be both?
It’s time to bring back the original pagan Saturnalia and get rid of all the phoney Christmas trimmings. They were fake the day they were invented and they’ve remained fake ever since. Let’s make the Saturnalia an honest festival – honestly devoted to getting out of our heads for a week!!!!!! Get rid of “Baby Jesus” and all the rest of the ludicrous God Squad sh*t.
Consider the absurd tale of a virgin giving birth to the Son of God in a stable in Judea. It’s such a staggeringly ludicrous concoction that it beggars belief that this nonsense has been peddled for two thousand years and is still going strong. If ever you wanted proof that a good story beats the truth every time then the Nativity tale is surely it. People want to believe it so they do. In order to believe it, they have to disengage their rational minds, so they do. Unfortunately they start disengaging their reason and logic permanently and thus they became credulous fools, able to be conned by any charismatic snakeoil salesman. Christianity is the greatest con job in history, a masterpiece of exploiting the gullible.
It even manages to pull off the impossible trick of presenting Jesus Christ as the humblest of people – born in a lowly stable, and visited by poor shepherds – and yet with a heavenly star overhead (how many “ordinary” people are born under a star sent from God?), and visited by three “kings” of the East who proclaim him King of the World. He is even explicitly described as belonging to theroyal house of King David. Throughout his life, Jesus is presented as just another person and yet also as a king, a messiah and a God. Talk about having your cake and eating it.
Consider this. The whole point of Christ’s “atonement” for the sins and crimes of the human race was that he suffered horrific agony on a cross. Yet did he really suffer? If he was God, as he was purported to be, then how could he suffer? It’s impossible. God isn’t tormented about his personal fate, about what comes next, about how he will be judged, so it’s ridiculous to talk of the “Passion of Christ”. When you “become God” you transcend the human condition. You no longer suffer the agonies of mortals. You have escaped from all of that. It’s ridiculous to say that a man-god has the same experiences as an ordinary person. They are the complete opposite. Anyone who has attained divinity has gone infinitely far beyond the human condition and it’s senseless to refer to them as an ordinary person. The whole basis of Christianity – that “God” fully entered into human existence as an ordinary mortal while nevertheless remaining God and all that entails – is preposterous.
*****
Just as the Christians hijacked a pagan festival, we shall hijack theirs. Here is our Christmas short story...
Reverse Christmas – Short Story
sh*t.
Every year Jake got his timing wrong. When the annual Christmas Eve blackout came, he was always Mister Wrong-Place-Wrong-Time. He’d just started to take a leak against Agnes Smith’s fence, and now the blackout ensured he couldn’t see a frigging thing. The piss was alternately running down his leg and splashing off his shoes into the powdery snow.
He was in big trouble. Home was still a whole street away. Why did he agree to that last, fatal drink? Every year, the same dumb bravado: ‘Oh, they’ll never catch me.’
He zipped himself up and stood perfectly still, praying he wouldn’t hear the high-pitched sound of doom. Last year, the ten-strong choir had sung Slade’s Merry Christmas Two broken ribs were the outcome. He was particularly dreading Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every He’d probably be hospitalised for weeks. He felt so fragile. Who wants to be in Emergency on Christmas Day?
Could he melt into the shadows, cover that final couple of hundred metres like the stealthiest cat?
Then – Christ Almighty – a loud cough. Jake spun round and there they were – the multi-ethnic choir of orphans, each resembling a perfect angel. They were holding their torches at chest level, pointing the beams straight upwards so that their faces looked otherworldly. What torture did they have in mind this year? Of course, like all angels, they were messengers, but no one wanted to receive the message they were here to deliver. Yet it wasn’t these choristers in their white, winged costumes and cute halos who would land the crippling blows. Where were
Jake glanced around in desperation. Flickering candles that cast the softest of festive light illuminated the windows of the surrounding homes. He longed to be safely inside. His Mum would be standing at the bay window, wondering where he was, praying he was safe. Why did he have to get From eleven o’clock until midnight everyone knew there was only one place to be – indoors. Because the streets were Their territory for one hour on Christmas Eve. The Dark
The angelic choir broke into their first song. God spare us – Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father
They said there’ll be snow at Christmas
They said there’ll be peace on Earth
A violent shudder racked Jake’s body. Only one song could have spelt bigger trouble – Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s deadly duet: Peace on Earth/The Little Drummer You had to be thinking body bags if you were unlucky enough to hear that one.
Jake fell to his knees. ‘Please, I’m begging.’
But the choir simply sang more loudly. He was a goner. They would be alerted to where he was. They’d emerge from the shadows, full of their Christmas Eve mulled wine followed by the inevitable peach schnapps shooters to sharpen their aggression.
He wanted to push the angels to the ground. Grind their faces into the snow then rain snowballs packed with ice down on their haloed heads. They were the heralds of…
And there They were – finally – wearing those new bright-glo, orange zoot suits with luminous-green night cravats. There were five of them; real bloated like they’d been in a hi-flab, anti-health farm in London for the last week. The word Millionaire was stamped in electric-blue shine writing on every inch of their suits.
Gold Sacks boys.
Every year their blood-sucking Merchant Bank gave them a leather sack full to the brim with Krugerrand and told them to go out and make sure the world knew exactly who they were. ‘Light up the Dark Hour, boys and girls. Show the poor what they’re missing. Restore the natural order of masters and slaves.’
‘Guess what, dosser?’ the leader of the Gold Sackers said over the strains of Greg Lake’s lyrics, aggro-max style, taking no prisoners and all that. ‘This is a reverse mugging.’
Jake, standing up straight, took a slurp from his can of Stomach extra strong lager and laughed nervously. He decided he had no option but to give it the big bluff. ‘I thought for a moment you ponces said you were going to mug me.’
‘Not a mugging, numb balls,’ the fattest of the millionaires came back ten four, cool and creepy, ‘a reverse mugging.’
Jake was seeing stacks of puzzle cubes in his mind. ‘What do you, um, mean?’ His mouth was going into stutter action. ‘I’ve never heard of a, er, you know, em, a reverse mugging.’
‘That’s because we’ve only just invented it, The Gold Sackers all snigg*red and pointed at the shine-writing on their suits to emphasise their fat-catness.
Jake’s brain was booking serious overtime. ‘Let me get this, um, straight. I’m the poor guy without any money and you’re the rich guys and you want, er, me to give you my money?’
‘Good try, muppet, but one hundred and eighty degrees in the negative,’ the head honcho hard-talked and signalled to his colleagues as the choristers sang even more lustily.
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked at the sky with excited eyes
The five millionaires surrounded Jake. Act One – knuckleduster punch to the solar plexus. Doubling up, agony drill. Act Two – karate chop to the neck. Swinging brogues, parabolic trajectory, multiple direct hits in the groin. Tears and fears. Going down, all the way. Blackout curtains closing round his eyes.
The millionaires lifted Jake off his feet and launched him headfirst into a puddle, where three glow-in-the-dark used-condoms were floating on the surface. The Gold Sackers formed a circle around their victim, their orange bodies inflating and deflating like bad wheezes, and put the boot in. Afterwards, they unzipped themselves and urinated over him. Then came the final touch, the piece de resistance. They took out their bags of gold, counted out five coins each and threw them at Jake’s prostrate body.
‘So, now you know, dumb arse,’ the fattest man hissed. ‘A reverse mugging is when the rich guys kick the blue bells out of the poor guy, then give him their money. Now go find a job, c*nt. Oh, and Merry Christmas.’
The attack was over. The reverse muggers left, laughing all the way to their parked flash cars.
The snow was falling more heavily, swirling in the wind. The angelic choir reached its crescendo.
They said there’ll be snow at Christmas
They said there’ll be peace on Earth
Hallelujah Noel be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas you get you deserve
With that, they turned and walked away, searching for fresh prey for their Dark Paymasters.
Jake lay still in the water, too bruised to move, strapped to an aches and pains matrix, all scratchy and Heath Robinson. His mouth had been burst open and he spat out some blood.
‘Merry Christmas,’ he repeated morosely as snow peppered the water. He imagined he could see ice crystals forming in the little pool. Would he be encased in a block of glittering ice, shining from the inside with its gorgeous gold treasure? At least he could afford to buy his Mum a nice present in the Boxing Day sales now.
The truth hit him like a slap in the face. He was in a sh*t-forsaken world and he’d just reached rock bottom, or rather the particularly nasty crap under the rock at the very bottom.
That was when it happened, the beginning of the strangest thing.
Screw the feel-good a voice whispered. The time has come for something different. The world is crying out for our medicine.
Jake raised his head, fearing the millionaires and their evil choir of familiars had returned, but no one was there.
Don’t you see? the strange voice continued. It’s time to spread the feel-bad factor. Feeling sh*t is going to be the ultimate fashion statement for next year.
Jake groaned and pushed his face closer to the surface of the puddle. He saw a little chunk of red shimmer-light falling from a candle in the window of a hooker’s apartment. The image wavered and was replaced by that of two well-scrubbed faces. He looked up and found himself in the unmistakable presence of two do-gooders, Jehovah’s Witnesses by the look of them, carrying neon Bibles.
‘Hello, have you had a personal crisis recently?’ The taller of the clean-cut young men stretched out a hand towards Jake.
Jake declined the offer and continued to lie in the puddle, watching flicker-trick red water entering the opening of the can of lager he’d drunk from earlier.
‘We can help.’ The second well-dressed young man crouched down, shining his torch straight into Jake’s face. ‘We’re part of the world’s largest family. You can be part of that family too. A problem shared…’
‘Is a problem multiplied.’ Jake wondered what had happened to the strange voice he’d heard earlier. ‘I’ve heard the tune before. It’s the words I don’t get.’ Fresh, and much more intense, pains began. It was as if someone had switched on an electric circuit linking every nerve-ending in his body. He was a lit-up Christmas tree short of the Christmas.
‘You shouldn’t look at it that way.’ The Witnesses introduced themselves as Oliver and Theodore.
‘Do you believe in the End of the World?’ Jake said. He rolled onto his back and stared at the black sky.
‘The End is a lot closer than most people imagine.’ Theodore had a knowing look in his eye. ‘Most people have no idea.’
‘No idea at all,’ Jake stated flatly.
‘It could be today,’ Oliver added.
For you, it certainly will be. It was the voice again.
‘Christ, did you hear that?’ Jake squealed.
‘Hear what?’ The Witnesses looked around, confused.
‘That whiney little voice. It’s threatening me.’
‘We heard nothing. Perhaps it’s an after-effect of your injuries.’
‘Maybe you’re right.’ Jake wondered if one of his ribs was broken. Jesus, maybe it was much worse…brain damage? He hauled himself out of the puddle and struggled to his feet. The streets of Newcastle were wet and dark, dime-detective-novel sleazy. A lot nicer than Jake’s native Glasgow, right enough, but lacking the fond fellow feeling inspired by all of that famous fraternal Glasgow kissing
‘We must get you out of those wet clothes,’ Oliver said. ‘You’re soaked through.’
Jake brushed off a condom that had become entangled with the belt of his jeans. ‘You’re Jevvies, aren’t you?’
‘If you mean Jehovah’s Witnesses then we certainly are,’ Theodore answered. ‘Would you like to read some of our literature?’ He fished in his satchel then thrust a copy of Watchtower at Jake.
Jake waved it away. He wasn’t sure why he was even talking to God Squadders. Normally he’d have told them to f*ck right off, no matter what condition he was in. Maybe he was feeling vulnerable because of that nasty little voice.
As soon as he thought that, the voice spoke again. You might believe you have a degree of control over what’s happening, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
‘What the f*ck is happening?’ Jake moaned.
The two Jevvies exchanged curious glances. They’d seen demonic possession before.
‘Who’s talking to me?’ Jake shouted. ‘I demand to know.’
Tonight’s the night, Jakey the voice replied. The stranger within becomes the stranger without.
‘I don’t frigging believe this.’ Jake cradled his wet head.
You’re finished, Jake, the voice continued. You had your chance and you blew it. Look at you. All washed up; a nobody going nowhere. For f*ck’s sake, fat millionaires have beaten you up and now you’re talking to Jevvies. You couldn’t sink any lower. So, you see, it’s time for a new outfit to run the show. Get the picture?
‘Why don’t you pick on someone else, you bastard,’ Jake ranted.
You’ve been chosen, Jake, my boy. There’s nothing you can do about it. Just tell yourself it was written in the stars or some astrological bollocks like that.
‘Why me?’
Why not, you sh*tty c*nt?
‘Get out of my head!’ Jake screamed.
I’ll be doing more that. I’ll be getting you out of your head.
And, with that, Jake knew he was in the biggest trouble of his life.
All of the lights came back
Christmas.
Instantly, a huge hologram appeared in the night sky, showing breathtaking festive images. Grottoes and elves and cribs; snowy castles and cosy families and dining tables crammed with mouth-watering dishes. Parcels galore wrapped in the most expensive Christmas gift paper. Wine and song and merriment. Everyone laughing. A million bright smiles. A great, shining, dazzling, brilliant, multi-coloured star in the sky.
Three men wearing gaudy Christmas paper crowns emerged from a Speak-Easy. They were guffawing, patting each other on the back and wishing each other a Merry Christmas.
‘Merry Christmas to you too,’ they shouted to the Jevvies, but Theodore and Oliver scowled.
‘We may be Christians,’ the Jevvies said, ‘but we don’t celebrate Christmas.’
‘Eh?’ one of the three drunks said. ‘We’re professors of philosophy from East University. How can you be Christians if you hate Christmas?
A little girl wandered by, clutching a handbag shaped like a sheep.
Jake glanced at the dilapidated building directly opposite: a closed-down wine bar called The Stables. The truth dawned. None of this was any accident. Here he was on Christmas Day, with a strange voice inside him trying to get out, with three wise men from the East – or Kings if you preferred – standing in front of him. There was a little shepherdess too. Throw in a couple of doubting Thomas’s, for good measure, and unjust persecution (well, a good beating up) by rich folk. Last and not least, a spectacular star in the sky. What did it all add up to?
Jesus Christ, Jake thought, I’m turning into Jesus Christ!!!
c*nt! the voice snarled.
Correction, Jake reconsidered: I’m turning into the
The hairs on his body stood on end. His hands shook. Colours and sounds ran into each other. Long-forgotten faces reappeared in his mind. Snippets of thousands of dimly remembered conversations strolled in and out of his consciousness as though they were promenading though Leazes Park. He had the feeling his mind was being emptied in preparation for being filled anew, with the memories of someone, or something, else.
Jake was getting desperate. Maybe the Jevvies’ Jehovah was just the guy he needed to help him fight back against the voice. Whatever it was doing to him, the process was well under way, and accelerating. He didn’t have much time left.
‘When the end comes, only Jehovah’s Witnesses will be saved,’ Theodore said.
‘Everyone else?’ Jake winced involuntarily as fresh pains convulsed through him.
‘We need only concern ourselves with the Saved.’
‘Saved from what?’
‘From ourselves.’
Jake understood perfectly. He sure as hell needed to be saved from the voice in his head. It was pushing him out of the driving seat. Adrenaline surged through his body and he started to sway.
‘The word of Jehovah can be overpowering,’ Oliver whispered. ‘We understand how you feel. I was the same my first time.’
Jake didn’t answer. He had an army of worker ants toiling away inside him, rearranging his molecular structure. The voice was gaining the upper hand and he was powerless to prevent it.
You’re on your way out, the voice mocked. Say hello to the dinosaurs ‘cos you’ll soon be every bit as extinct.
Jake futilely tried to comprehend the incomprehensible.
You don’t understand, do you? the voice said. I am a voice that hasn’t been heard for an Eternity. If you said, like those trashy newspapers you enjoy reading, that I was a god and that I had a taste for late-night beach crawling on the golden sands of ancient Greece, you’d be either bang on the mark or off your f*cking trolley. Not that I intend to confirm the rumours either way.
What I’m prepared to say is this. I’m all strange things. I’m strangeness itself. Think of me as a kind of sickness; a sickness, I might add – and indeed I shall since I’m that sort of guy – that once it has touched you, can only be purged by an eruption. You may ejacul*te, but not over the carpet, for f*ck’s sake. Or vomit. Ditto. Maybe you’ll scream until the top detaches itself from your head, and so much the better.
The voice’s takeover was nearing completion. Jake ought to have been appalled, yet somehow he scarcely minded now. Maybe it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. At last – someone in charge who actually knew what he was doing.
the voice declared. It had won. It prepared to declare its first audible words to a quaking world. Oh, how the fools would suffer.
‘My God, what’s happening to you?’ Theodore said to the former Jake.
The former Jake smiled, knowing his transformation must have rendered him a sight terrible to behold, striking fear into every heart. He attempted to speak aloud to the world for the very first time, but strange – wrong – words were in his mouth. What the hell was going on? He caught sight of his reflection in a window and vomited, making a nice Jackson Pollock mess on the snow.
He wasn’t the young, slim, godlike creature, in the most stylish of clothes, that he was expecting. Instead, he was tubby, old – with a thick white beard – and a large sack over his shoulder containing what felt like hard-edged, boxy parcels. And why on Earth was he wearing red, his least favourite colour?
‘Ho, ho, ho,’ he blurted involuntarily.
Then the realisation – the horrific, cold, unadulterated truth – struck home. He knew exactly what he’d become, and the terrible, appalling first words that were sure to spew from his mouth, mocking everything he stood for.
‘Merry Christmas everybody,’ Santa Claus bellowed in a ridiculously jolly voice.
God’s Calculator
Bored by Christmas? Here’s something to distract you from the Christian horror – God’s calculator, no less. Master484 has kindly offered a fascinating insight into this mystical instrument. Do you believe that words conceal secret mathematical codes that can reveal hidden patterns and connections? Here’s your chance to test out your speculations.
You can download it from here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?ipidhdbt7q1b656
