Bake And Wake 1

We have to had them whether we’ll like it or not. They’ll have to have us now then we’re here on theirspot. Scant hope theirs or ours to escape life’s high carnage of semperidentity by subsisting peasemeal upon variables. Bloody certainty have we got to see it ere smellful demise surprends us on this concrete that down the gullies of the eras we may catch ourselves looking forward to what will in no time be staring you larrikins on the postface in that multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled without end to end. (p.582)

The Wake for the end of history continues on. It is a "collideorscape," a kaleidocosm, all times and places, people and events, shifting in rainbow colours at once. A bang at the gate. A shout in the street. A letter written in the indelible ink of piss and shit, stamped and signed with a jism stain and pecked out of an archaic midden mud-heap by the mother goddess hen.

Cock and Biddy

The Wake has two main layers, each striated into many sub-accretions. These are called HCE and ALP -- standing for, from one perspective, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle. Both of these layers make up the dream of the Wake, a couple sleeping foot to head, a sixty-nine, yin-yang position spiraling out the form of the nightmare.

HCE is ultimately, along with many other things, the creator god. He is Atum who has crafted the lesser gods and the rest of the world by spunking on the primordial mud pile. His boasts that he alone has created the universe are betrayed by his thunder-like stuttering. Deep down he feels the guilt of arrogating to create without acknowledging the Mother. This is the first great Fall and all other falls follow from this original sin.

 

He is the blind Demiurge, Ialdabaoth, his guilt causing a split within himself both between old and new and right and left. The whole nightmare of history is the unfolding drama to attempt to assuage this guilt -- a war of sons against fathers, brothers against brothers, all futilely trying to possess and conquer their wife/mother/daughter/sister. Finnegans Wake is the last act of this drama which can only end with the Goddess' love and forgiveness after all is surrendered to Her.

ALP is this goddess. She is the River that runs through and beyond all space and time. Joyce is the creator of the Wake, in which he aimed to contain the entire cosmos, but ultimately he humbles himself completely before the Goddess. The whole book is intricately structured and layered with meticulous and manic attention to detail, but it is all kept entirely open.



All chance, all synchronicity, all unpredictability, all unintended meanings are allowed to flow through it. But "allowed" is not the right word -- in complete surrender to the River, Joyce gave himself no choice. He entirely offered himself as a sacrifice to the Muse, manifested by his mother, his wife Nora, and his schizophrenic yet sparkling and dancing daughter, Lucia. ALP is the reason why all can be found in the Wake -- everything within Nature and Imagination bubbles and ripples through it.

Letting The Pieces Play

The Humpty Dumpty of tradition has fallen off the wall. God is dead. Modernism attempts to put the pieces back together again, although presumably in a way that is more rational and just. Like the King's men and horses it inevitably fails -- the process of constructing and falling anew only accelerates. Finally, postmodernism gives up. It "plays with the pieces." The modernists and old traditionalists snort in disgust. It seems to be pure nihilism.

But then something magical occurs. The pieces begin to organize themselves. A complex, chaotic order forms its own patterns, without centre and without control.

This is where ALP flows. This is the fully anarchic free market gift economy of the Gaian mind bound to replace all modernist models, both capitalist and socialist, of attempted economic and political control.

This involves a new paradigm of language, one discovered in the Wake. Beyond Ferdinand Saussure's view of language, taken up by the structuralists and the post-structuralists, as being a synchronic network of difference is his disconcerting discovery of hidden anagramic layers of meaning throughout Latin and other poetry. From this, he reluctantly realized that the emergence of unintentional meaning might well up and be present within all texts. This is ALP. This is what is beyond the post-modern.

Perhaps every text is an open text, as Umberto Eco termed it. Definitely all "sacred" texts seem to be so. Norman O. Brown claimed that only the generation of Westerners able to grasp the full significance of the Wake could ever hope to understand the Koran. Only now can we find the strands of Indra's Net through all works.

 

Mohammed countered his critics by claiming that it was impossible for the Koran to be a forgery because only Allah could compose a book so complex and perfect. Mohammed challenged anyone to try anything similar. Joyce took up the challenge and met it with the Wake. Both Allah and Joyce are names for the Creator of the universe.

In Joyce's testament, however, the God seeks forgiveness. Joyce names 111 of the 114 books of the Koran and refers specifically to Sura 18, "The Cave," which is called the Islamic Apocalypse. This Sura also has 111 lines (including the title) and it introduces Al Khidr -- Elijah, the Wandering Jew, the Green Man, Osiris, the Green Face -- ultimately the consort and messenger of the Goddess. Instead of "Allah the All Merciful," Joyce addresses his chapter to "Annah the Allmaziful." Annah is the archaic White Goddess, also the mother of Mary.



ALP equals 111 in gematria, and this is her number. The books of the Koran are thus sacrificed in flames to her. Robert Anton Wilson, who often signed his writing with his initials RAW, also became obsessed with the number 111 through his study of the Wake. This is what he writes in his book Coincidance:

This 1:11 business turns out to be more curious than we realize at first, even if we note that it is connected with Bloom's son, who died at age 11 days, Shakespeare's son Hamnet who died at 11 years and the 22 (2x11) letters in the Hebrew alphabet or the 22 words in the first sentence of Ulysses. If ALP and APL invoke all this, the LAP, a further permutation, invokes the LAP where a Freemason wears his apron, as in Aleister Crowley's BOOK OF LIES, Chapter 54, in which some Freemasons guess that the lost Mason Word is AMO, whose number is 111, and some guess that it is LAP which also has the number 111. (By Cabala, AMO=A which is 1, M which is 40, and O which is 70, 1+40+70=111, while LAP=L or 30, A or 1, and P or 80, and 30+1+80=111.) 

William York Tindall, a Joyce scholar who likes to count, has noted that many long sentences in FW have 111 clauses. Anna Livia Plurabelle's untitled "mamafesta" in Chapter Five has 111 alternative titles; when sad, she is described as "wan wan wan"; in Chapter 8, she has 111 children. Most books on Cabala hint at trancendental meanings in the fact that the Hebrew A or aleph=ALP=111 when spelled in full as aleph-lamek-pe.

It seemed to be no coincidence to his followers, therefore, that Wilson died on 1/11/07. What is weirder, though, and definitely a manifestation of the playful flow of ALP, is the fact that his initials RAW appear four times in a row on page 111.

...peraw raw raw reeraw puteters out of Now Sealand in spignt of the patchpurple of the massacre, a dual a duel to die to day, goddam and biggod, sticks and stanks, of most of the Jacobiters...

Happy Sins

Also on page 111 is the first appearance of the Letter, which is the Wake itself, signed at the end with a tea stain. The very last word of the Wake, usually seen as joining the first sentence and so creating an endless loop, is "the." Thé in French is of course tea. This is the tea stain. The tea or "T" is also the Tunc page of the ancient Irish manuscript, The Book of Kells -- which Joyce somehow claims was inspired by the Wake.

Many scholars assert that the Tunc page contains the whole mystery of The Book of Kells and that it points to active pagan survivals, most notably the serpent cult, within the pre-Roman Catholic, Celtic Church. The Tunc page, with its large illustrated T, represents Christ on the Cross flanked on either side by the two thieves. For Joyce, the Cross is his final the, thé or T, the two thieves are Shem and Shaun, and Tunc is also the ever-giving, ever green and fertile cunt of the Goddess. A new theology is created.



Joseph Campbell, who really began his career by writing the first full-length book on trying to decipher the Wake, called the Tunc page the key to unlocking the Wake. Campbell writes in his Occidental Mythology,

The so-called Tunc-page, bearing the words of the Gospel according to Matthew: "Then there were crucified with him two thieves" (Tunc cru/cifixerant/XPI cum eo du/os la/trones).

We recognize the cosmic self-consuming, self-renewing serpent, whose lion-head recalls the old Sumerian lion-bird, while the T of the word Tunc is a lion with serpentine attributes, either swallowing or emitting (or both) a tangled pair-of-opposites. The serpent, as we have learned, is generally symbolic of both the self-consuming and self-renewing powers of life; the lunar mystery of time, while the lion is the solar power, the sun door to eternity. The circumscribing serpent, therefore, is the demiurgic, world-creating and -maintaining principle, or, in the Gnostic-Christian view, the God of the Old Testament, while the lion of the T is the road of escape from this vale of tears: the "way and the light," that is to say the Redeemer.

The Greek letters XPI, inserted in the text after crucifixerant, are the signa of Christ (Greek Χριστός ). The same three letters furnish the base of the whole design, as appears when the page is turned clockwise, to lie on its right side. In this position, the great initial unites with the central bar to form P: the middle letter of the sign, symbolizing the Savior between the two thieves, which latter now are represented by the X and I, and thus one with -- indeed parts of -- XPI, or Christ.

The Book of Kells was itself the most famous, most brilliant example of Irish illuminated manuscripts composed during the 700 years of the Celtic Church. This church lasted from the arrival of St. Patrick in 432 AD to St. Malachy's establishment of the Roman liturgy along with his archbishophoric in Armagh in 1132. 

  
1132 is another number which pops up throughout the Wake. Certainly the 11 represents completion and return after the sequence of 1 through 10, and the 32 is the number of feet per second that objects fall through the air. It also represents the Fall and the Resurrection, Campbell points out, as explained in Romans 11:32.

For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all.

This verse introduces the doctrine of the happy sin, or felix culpa -- the original Edenic Fall being happy because it actuated Christ to come and redeem humanity. Joyce alters "felix culpa" to "phoenix culprit" -- the guilty person, HCE, of the incident at Phoenix Park, which is both Eden and the ever burning and rising phoenix of ancient myth.

It is obvious, though, that 1132 refers to the history of Ireland as well. St. Malachy effectively ended the relatively autonomous Celtic Church and, in the same year, the Abbess of Kildare was raped and deposed from power. The Abbess was the representative of St. Brigid, who was a contemporary of St. Patrick. St. Brigid, in turn, is the Christian transformation of the Celtic goddess, Brigid. Both St. Brigid and Brigid share the same feast day at Imbolc, the First or Second of February, which is also Joyce's birthday. 



Thus in 1132, the female and pagan elements of Christianity in Ireland were effectively overthrown and patriarchal, direct rule from the Vatican was established. This marked a huge tragedy for Joyce. There is more to the story, though. St. Malachy is attributed as writing the Prophecy of Popes, forgery or not. This is a poem of 111 lines. Each line represents a verse for every pope following and including Celestine II, the reigning pope when Malachy first had his prophetic vision. 

Joyce directly refers to this prophecy in the Wake and notes the connection of the 111 popes with the 111 of ALP. The end of the list, sometimes concluding with a 112th pope, Peter the Roman, is seen as marking the end of Roman Catholic Church and the start of the Final Judgement. Did Joyce view this ending as marking the return of Brigid?

(secunding to the one one oneth of the propecies, Amnis Limina Permanent) (p.153)

It is interesting that the 111th pope is in the Vatican right now -- Pope Benedict XVI who in the prophecy is named as "the glory of the olives." Is the Wake, then, a prophecy about the present?

Sleeper Awakening

In previous posts this blog has noted the possible awareness that Joyce had of the Rosicrucian 108-year cycle, particularly that of 1904 to 2012. Joyce does not write anything explicitly about 108 years, although there are several references to 432 (108x4) in the Wake. In Ulysses, on the other hand, during the "Ithaca" chapter Joyce includes several numbers which sum to 108 -- just as Homer includes a list making up of 108 suitors in the Odyssey.

Stephen wrote the Irish characters for gee, eh, dee, em, simple and modified, and Bloom in turn wrote the Hebrew characters ghimel, aleph, daleth and (in the absence of mem) a substituted qoph, explaining their arithmetical values as ordinal and cardinal numbers, videlicet 3, 1, 4, and 100.

Readers of this blog will note the Hebrew letters Gimel and Daleth, connected to the 13th path of the Tree of Life and the gateway of Da'at. The numbers 3.141, or pi, will come up in a subsequent post making a deeper reading of the Wake. An earlier post noted that this year, 2012, is also 1132 according the traditional Nepali sambat calendar. Whether Joyce was conscious of any of this, or whether this only emerges from the mysterious substratum of ALP, the connections can be found.

In any event the "story" of Finnegans Wake, like Crowley's writings from 1904, includes the rebirth of Osiris as Horus and the dawn of a New Aeon, the rising from sleep into the morning Sun.

The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the domnatory of Defmut after the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the yonderworld of Ntamplin, tohp triumphant, speaketh. (p.593)

 
Did Joyce also know about the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012? Whether he was writing on the intentional level of HCE, or he was acting as an unconscious channel of ALP, the world maya is mentioned a significant seven times within the Wake. Seven is significant because it is the number of colours in the holographic rainbow kaleidoscope that is personified by the seven Rainbow Girls. The maya references are more clustered towards the end, towards the awakening, with three in the last chapter and two of these in the last few pages. 

Obviously maya is also associated here with both the Hindu idea of illusion, also the veil of Isis, and the mother of the Buddha. But these references are almost invariably coupled with the statements about the end of time, about awakening, about the coming of ALP the Goddess.

Where did thots come from? It is infinitesimally fevers, resty fever, risy fever, a coranto of aria, sleeper awakening, in the smalls of one's back presentiment, gip, and again, geip, a flash from a future of maybe mahamayability through the windr of a wondr in a wildr is a weltr as a wirbl of a warbl is a world...... (p.597)

But you're changing, acoolsha, you're changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I'm getting mixed. Brightening up and tightening down. Yes, you're changing, sonhusband, and you're turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Imlamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hindmoist. (p.627)

A flash from a future of maybe. And she is coming. This resonates well what many also associate with the turn of the Mayan great cycle in 2012. Do we wake this year?

The 108-Year Roscrucian Cycle Part Two

The previous post examined the 108-year Rosicrucian cycle as imparted by H. Spencer Lewis. This describes a system of alternating 108-year periods of open and hidden activity for Rosicrucian lodges. The post proposed that this cycle has been in effect in the years from 1904, the dawn of the Aeon of Horus, to 2012. In this year the behind-the-scenes Work of more than a century will be revealed to all.

Here, this lunatic fiction will be ballooned out even further. It will be shown that Crowley appears, either knowingly or otherwise, to have encoded the key developments of this 108-year timeframe within the 22 major arcana cards of his version of the tarot, The Book of Thoth.

While Crowley, and artist Lady Frieda Harris, altered some of the iconography and names in their deck, the basic structure, number and order of the cards highly conform to the traditional tarot. If anything, Crowley hoped to reverse some of the discrepancies and contradictions that he saw prevented the older tarot decks from fully corresponding to other occult systems like astrology, the Kabbalah, Egyptian mythology, etc. The Thoth deck, in this regard, is both modernist and traditional.

In most versions of the tarot, the 22 cards of the major arcana correspond to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and both the cards and the alphabet can be placed on the 22 paths connecting the ten sephiroth on the Tree of Life. Certain authors also correspond the 22 trumps with the 22 chapters of The Book of Revelation.



It is well-known among occultists that the "story" of the major arcana on one level depicts an alchemical transformation of the would-be initiate. This blog will also touch upon this interpretation at some point. What is not so discussed, though, is that the sequence of 22 cards also reveals a collective and historical undertaking of the Great Work. It is surprising that this reading of The Book of Thoth is not more widespread, especially given Crowley's own preoccupation with the shifting of the ages.

This post will contend that the sequence of 22 cards in the major arcana of the Thoth deck depict the 108-year period of Great Work that will fully usher in the Aeon of Horus this year.

Bullock-Befriending Bard

The number 22, like the year 1904, is also prominent in the life and work of James Joyce. Joyce placed much significance in the fact that he was born on the Second of February -- 2/2 or 22. In addition to being the 33rd day of the year, on leap years ( and Joyce's year of birth -- 1882 -- was a leap year) there are 333 days left in the year. It was also celebrated as Imbolc in pagan Ireland, and later Christianized as St. Brigid's Day. Brigid plays a very important role in Joyce's fiction.

 

Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was first serialized on Feb. 2nd, 1914. His most celebrated novel, Ulysses, was published on his 40th birthday on Feb. 2nd, 1922 (2/2/22). The date June 16th, the setting of the novel, also sums to 22 (6+16), and both Joyce's protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and Joyce himself were 22 years of age in 1904. Robert Anton Wilson points out in his Coincidance (a title taken from the Wake), that the first sentence of Ulysses contains 22 words the final being "crossed":

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

 
As several scholars have pointed out, this opening scene is really a mock mass, a theme that continues throughout Ulysses and eventually degrades into an open black mass. Joyce is consciously inverting religious tradition in order to make us all conscious of its power. Contrary to appearance, Joyce is entirely respectful of esoteric tradition and would have known well that in Jewish tradition only those 40 and over are allowed to study the Kabbalah. His final book, Finnegans Wake, is pure Kabbalah.

Both Crowley and Joyce, then, recognized the value of 22. The 22 major arcana map out the progression of this 108-year period between ages. I have not found a precise pattern in the "playing" of these cards. They are not evenly played at regular intervals during the 108 years. Instead, it appears that like in Mckenna's Timewave Zero there is an acceleration or compression towards the end of the cycle. More cards are played near the culmination of the 108 years. 

Much work needs to be done here to make this a comprehensive theory. What follows is a rough sketch that is only intended to be suggestive. At this point it is nothing more than a fictional narrative.

The Dark Mandala

The first card which is readily recognized in relation to events comes very late in the sequence. It is hoped that at some point the whole progression of 22 trumps will be matched with events that have taken place from 1904 to 2012, but at this stage I'll start with the playing of card 16, The Tower.



The iconic connection between The Tower and the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 was quickly noticed by many observers. The fire from above, the collapsing tower, the falling bodies, even the sinister overseeing Eye are symbols common to both.



9/11 is still a great mystery that continues to influence nearly everything on the world stage. There is no consensus as to what happened or what it ultimately meant. Even the official version of events, as is often pointed out, is a conspiracy theory and the only question is how far and how deep the conspiracy extends. It is obvious that the official U.S. 9/11 Commission was in no way interested in finding this out. The actual details will likely remain in shadow.

The greater significance of 9/11, though, is its identity as an era-changing event. While it falls late in the 108-year cycle, it is the opening pulse of the more compressed fractal iteration of 11 years. As noted in the last post, this shorter period roughly corresponds to the 11-year sunspot cycle.

In a sense, it is a major bifurcation point. It tended to push people in one of two directions. On the one hand, it provoked an even deeper entrenchment into the dualistic mindset -- "either you're with us or with the terrorists." Conspiracy theorists also did not escape this polarizing trance. The active dualism was only replaced by the "patriots" or "truth seekers" vs. the "globalists," the "NWO," or the "Illuminati." This might represent a higher turn in the spiral, but it remains mired in dualism.
 

On the other hand, 9/11 forced a smaller group of people even further down the rabbit hole. It exposed the matrix-like unreality of the entire world system. Everything is a part of the conspiracy. But beyond even the matrix is the realization that even the dreamers are a part of the dream. The Illuminati are dazzled by their own Spell. We are the Illuminati. It reminds me of Nietzsche's "History of an Error," in which he explains the interdependence of  "reality" and "appearance,"

The real world—we have done away with it: what world was left? the apparent one, perhaps? … But no! with the real world we have also done away with the apparent one!

The dualistic reality models as shown in movies like The Matrix quite naturally morph into the more complex, less certain, multi-layered models as depicted in a film like Inception. Of course these are mainstream representations. Fans of Philip K. Dick and psychedelics would have known all this long ago. With 9/11, the clear blue-sky veil of reality was irreparably rent. The door opened between the two pillars. Strange things are pouring through.

9/11 does not wholly represent the crowning act of the New World Order, a mass sacrifice and the capping of the pyramid, but instead it is a desperate gesture, a fumble and flailing to maintain illusory control. But it is also something more than this. It was, and really still is, the centre of a dark mandala of world attention.

 

It was a ritual on a global scale orchestrated more than anything, perhaps, by the process of consciousness itself.  9/11 satisfied a mass desire for something momentous to happen, something apocalyptic, something to shake us all up, something to make us face our many problems, something to get things rolling. If 9/11 did not happen we would have been forced to make it happen. Maybe we did?

Quite early on, researchers like Goro Adachi, Jake Kotze and others pointed out the "megaritual" quality of 9/11. Those deepest down the rabbit hole, addicts of the red pill, were "initiated" by this ritual and able to see the matrix beyond the matrix beyond the matrix..... Conspiracy theorists went mainstream and predictable, and synchronicity artists are now entrenched in the radical margins. 

The next card was not played for several years after 9/11. Presumably the full consequences of 9/11 had to first run their course before the next act was staged.

Following 9/11, Fear and his cohorts have had a heyday -- the War in Afghanistan, the War on Terror, the War in Iraq, multiple terrorist attacks across the globe, the deepening and darkening of the conspiracist subculture, all manner of natural disasters, multiple epidemic scares, the Patriot Act and its equivalents internationally, the steroidal expansion of the police state control grid, etc., etc. All this was an expected outgrowth of 9/11.

Higher Turn of the Spiral

The next shoe to drop, though, was economic -- the "financial  9/11" of 2008, signified most obviously by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The world must not only be transformed geopolitically, and in terms of "security," but the entire structure of the production, distribution and consumption of wealth must be completely overhauled. All human transactions must be transformed.

The card for this is not as obvious as The Tower, as its corresponding event is not as sudden or dramatic. And whereas The Tower has almost wholly negative connotations the next trump, The Star, is much more ambiguous in its meaning. The collapse of the global economic system is undoubtedly a terrible thing, but for many it represents the end of a great evil and its demise is the sign of Hope. This is precisely the meaning of The Star.

  
We know from some of the earliest tarot decks, as in the interpretation of Antoine Court de Gébelin, that the star of Card 17 is really the Dog Star, our old friend Sirius. Crowley uniquely corresponded this card with the Hebrew letter, Daleth "the Door" -- the letter of Da'at. There is a mystery in this.

We also know that the astrological sign corresponding to this card is Aquarius, the water-bearer. The Star is the sign, for those who have eyes to see, of the coming Age of Aquarius -- the dawning of which coincides with that of the Aeon of Horus. Of her design of the Star card Frieda Harris writes,

This is built up as a design on a spiral to show the rising force of a new age. The woman holds two cups, the north and south poles of magnetic attraction. Above her a new star is rising, beneath her are the crystallising dogmas of a former Age.

The spiral represents the transcendence of Euclidean conceptions of space. Crowley writes that "It will be seen that every form of energy in this picture is spiral." In the New Aeon even our old ideas of time and space must be laid aside. Joyce repeatedly makes this same point in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

The spiral appeared in the sky of Norway on Dec. 9, 2009. This is a classic NCE (Non-Consensus Event). The official story is that it was an out-of-control Russian missile, but many still believe that it was a type of UFO or an opening wormhole. A creative interpretation is that it was a "crop-circle of the sky."

Whatever it was, it brought the figure of the spiral to the conscious attention of millions. It was a living symbol of the "playing" of the Star card.  While old forms, most notably economic, are in the process of passing away a symbol, "real" or not is unimportant, of the new was revealed -- and coincidentally on the day before Obama received the Noble Peace Prize in Norway. 

The Sinister Passage

The next card in the major arcana is The Moon. This is called by Frieda Harris "the most sinister card."



Card 18 reveals the dangerous passage between the towers of death and horror. In this it reminds one most of the terrifying journey Frodo and Sam made between the towers of Minas Morgul in order to pass into the dark land of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. As in the meaning of this card, theirs was a journey through a shadowy realm that was necessary in order to restore the light. Harris also writes,

This card represents the state of impure horror, hidden darkness which must be passed through before light can be reborn.

The Moon further represents illusion and the breaking of illusion. It is "at the brink of important change." This dangerous passage well describes our collective experience of the last year and a half. We all have had the sense, consciously or not, that the world is on the brink. We live in constant anxiety of total economic collapse as the ramifications of the 2008 crisis have not in any way resolved themselves.



In 2011, protests, riots and revolutions spread across the globe most in direct response to economic pressures. It is a mistake to conclude that these movements were in all cases fully created and/or manipulated by the elite. Obviously the intelligence agencies had their fingers in the pie -- it is their job to attempt to control events -- and we see this most in "rogue" nations like Libya and Syria.

But what of all the unrest in allied or complicit countries -- in Bahrain, in Djibouti, in Kuwait, in Israel, in Spain, in Chile, in the UK, in New York City? Was this all orchestrated as well? Or, as this blog keeps saying, is something bigger happening? Is the genuine unrest and the covert manipulation all part of a more complex pattern?

Added to the disruptions in economic and social systems are the "natural" disasters which have been afflicting much of the planet -- earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, storms of all sorts. Are the "Illuminati" the cause of all of these as well? Or, reflecting the non-divisible unity of mind and body, is the imbalance of the global brain -- planetary human civilization --  causing dis-ease within the body of the Earth? The narrow passage is also the passage along the birth canal. The scarab acts as midwife and a new Sun is about to be born.

The sign of The Moon card came with the Moon herself. On December 21, 2010 -- two years before the Mayan calendar end date -- there appeared a dramatic and rare Winter Solstice lunar eclipse. To me, the blood red Moon is as good a sign as any of the dark passage before the coming Aeon emerges brightly from the shadows for all to behold.

Here Comes The Sun

Card 19 is The Sun and the imagery of this card matches nicely with the symbolism that's been apparent in London 2012. There is good reason to suppose that this powerful trump was "played" during the Closing Ceremony.

Crowley's version of the card depicts the Sun rising over the World Mountain. The mountain is at once Mount Olympus, the Glastonbury Tor and the Mount of Purgatory.

The Closing Ceremony, while not as multi-layered and as rich in symbolism as the Opening, is certainly a ritual to mark the shifting of the ages. I won't go through every aspect of this symbolism, others have already brought much of it to light, but I'll focus on aspects of the Ceremony relating to the ongoing analysis of this blog.

With the very first act we know where we are. During the first performance by Emeli Sandé the camera takes a close-up of the truck she is singing on. The truck is wrapped, like everything else in the ceremony, with newsprint bearing headlines from the plays of Shakespeare and other works of British literature.

The first headline we notice should be familiar to the readers of this blog -- "We are such stuff as dreams are made of." This is from Prospero's famous soliloquy closing The Tempest, which was quoted at the end of a previous post. We are still in the dreamland of Purgatory. We are still on Prospero's mysterious island.

This all becomes blatant a few minutes later. The focus shifts to the middle of the stadium, the intersection point at three crosses of a huge Union Jack, where Winston Churchill emerges from the top of the Big Ben tower (note the time shown on the clock -- 9:11) and delivers the same Caliban speech as Brunel gives at the Opening Ceremony.

 

This sets up a number of symbolic parallels. The centre of the three crosses of the Union Jack, representing also the saints of Britain, is at the same "location" as the Glastonbury Tor was during the Opening Ceremony. This is the Axis Mundi. As George Michael revealed during his performance later in the evening,

Remember right now you are at the centre of the universe.

The Big Ben tower is the equivalent to the great Oak, the World Tree, which was the living portal atop of the Tor at the Opening Ceremony. We notice that while Brunel gave Caliban's speech at the base of the World Mountain now, after completing the Purgatory of the Games, Churchill/Brunel gives the same speech emerging from the "Tree" at the summit of the "Mountain."

Dante gives us our bearings here. At the top of Mount Purgatory is the Earthly Paradise, Eden. We can only return to the Garden after purging all of our sins -- transmuting selfish vices into virtues. The three crosses of the Union Jack also remind us of this -- the three X's of the XXXth Olympiad. These are the three crosses of Golgotha, another representation of the World Mountain which by tradition was the resting place of the skull of Adam.



The three crosses are also the two pillars and the veil of the Temple. The veil is torn and and we return to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the site of the Fall. Once again we come back to the portal of Da'at. This exactly what is being conveyed at the centre of the Olympic stadium during the Closing Ceremony of London 2012.   

This should not surprise us. This point is always where we return to at the shifting of the ages. The world is once again at the chaotic tipping point between the Fall and the Redemption. The Closing Ceremony, London 2012 in general, the entire sequence of the thirty modern Olympic Games, the "playing" of the Major Arcana exist as rituals to honour this passage in an attempt to derive power from it.

Also situated at the middle of the stadium, the intersection of the three crosses, is a familiar symbol -- the Ferris Wheel. This simulation of the obviously esoteric London Eye is either anchored to or suspended above the centre during the entire Ceremony. Why?



This is an obvious response to the original Ferris Wheel last in operation at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis. The 2160 passenger capacity represents the 2160 years of an astrological age. The wheel's return to the centre of London 2012 indicates that the cycle has now closed. The wheel has turned, a new age has now begun, the 108 years of hidden activity is now complete.   

Many of the "headlines" shown may also refer to this juncture, this transition between states:

To be or not to be,
This is how the world ends,
After this is silence

We are in a moment of collective passage through the portal, through the stargate. The Ceremony contained much symbolism of this sort, too much to briefly explicate here. Many researchers have pointed out the connections of the Ceremony and the Aurora shooting -- Michael Caine, Bruce Wayne's butler in the Dark Knight trilogy, counting down to a Batman pantomime. Why was this featured? Either as synchronicity or as an intended message, the implications are pretty staggering.

We can expect more and more of these sorts of connections, and an ever increasing number of people to become aware of them. I think it is a mistake, though, to interpret these connections too hastily or too definitively. Too much is in play here and things are moving too quickly to make any final conclusions. All we can say with certainty is that the weirdness is approaching a crescendo.

Up From The Ashes

The most significant point of the entire ceremony was the extinguishing the Flame in the Olympic Cauldron. The symbolism here was absolutely mind-blowing. The Flame may have been snuffed out, but the Phoenix arose from the ashes. The transition into the New Aeon was completed.



The symbolism of the phoenix is precise -- it exemplifies the culmination of the Great Work. In The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P. Hall spells this out very clearly,

Mediaeval Hermeticists regarded the phoenix as a symbol of the accomplishment of alchemical transmutation, a process equivalent to human regeneration.... to all initiates and philosophers the phoenix is the symbol of the transmutation and regeneration of the creative energy -- commonly called the accomplishment of the Great Work.

We see this reflected in the iconography of numerous alchemical prints of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. It is easy to see the parallels with the Closing Ceremony.
　
 
The Phoenix is also commonly known as the bird that rises from the ashes of its parent and former self. This symbolism is universally related with the turning of the ages. As the bird of fire returns to its nest, incinerates itself, and a new bird rises from the ashes the grand cycle is renewed. Just as the Phoenix is both an individual and a collective symbol, so the Great Work is completed on both individual and collective levels.

The length of the cycle that the Phoenix's fiery death and rebirth spans has differed in traditional accounts. While 500 years became the standard classical Greek reckoning, there is evidence of an older and much more precise Egyptian measure.

The Egyptian precursor to the Phoenix is called the Bennu, a mythical bird whose self-immolation and resurrection coincided with the Sothic cycle of 1461 years. The Sothic cycle describes the number of years, due to precession, it takes for Sirius to rise with the Sun at the same position. (It's interesting that the Wikipedia entry for this notes that, "This cycle was first noticed by Eduard Meyer in 1904...")

The Phoenix has in this way always been connected with Sirius. This blog has explored how the 70 days of the Torch Relay represented the traditional journey of Sirius through the underworld, or Duat. We also looked at how the actual heliacal rising of Sirius with the Sun over London occurred on Aug. 12th, the day of the Closing Ceremony.

The symbolism of the Phoenix, then, not only points to the heliacal rising but to the shifting of the ages. This refers to the 108-year transitional period, but also to the wider shift between the Ages of Pisces and Aquarius and possibly even greater cycles of time as the Maya calculated.

 

A Strange Loop

Many researchers and web commentators appeared almost disappointed that false flag doom did not strike London 2012. They were convinced that all signs seem to indicate this and when it did not occur they concluded that the "Illuminati" themselves promoted this false conspiracy in order to further discredit and ridicule the "Truth" movement. After "crying wolf" for so many times the "Truth" movement would be understandably entirely ignored by the public as a source of reliable information.

This whole line of analysis, this blog maintains, is misguided. The elite may have promoted these conspiracy theories, but not primarily to discredit anyone. The conspiracy theorists are already sufficiently effective at this. Instead, the promotion of the esoteric, conspiratorial dimension of London 2012 was to attract attention.

Billions of mainstream sports fans predictably tuned into the mass spectacle, but the spinners of the matrix also required a more discerning audience. They want us, esoteric researchers, to analyze their symbolism, to speculate on its meaning, and spread these theories over the web. They require the ambiance -- made legitimate because derived from "alternative" sources -- of fear and mystery that we imbue the Games with.

Perhaps we are creating the occult narrative. The masonic sorcerers require our input. This appears to be confirmed in rumours that the theme of "the green and pleasant land," etc. was inspired by Danny Boyle's perusal of conspiracy websites. Regardless of the veracity of these of rumours, we see this kind of thing everywhere.



In movies, in music videos, in concerts, in advertisements, in political campaigns, in fashion, and so on we see the same esoteric symbolism and meaning as is exposed in conspiracy sites. Are the marketing experts and trendsetters simply scouring the net for new and vital memes, realizing that occult and conspiratorial images and suggestions will get their products and clients far more widespread and close attention then conventional promotion? Are we all just unwitting and unpaid stooges in a vast viral marketing scam? Are we only auditory distortions in a giant feedback loop?

If this the case, why bother to continue with this? Why provide TPTB both the creative fodder and the attention that they so desperately crave? Once again, though, we must look beyond the obvious polarities. Are the symbols coming from esoteric researchers which are then co-opted and disseminated by advertisers hungry for attention? Or do corporations and governments intentionally use these esoteric symbols in order to derive magical influence from them, and later we researchers expose these intentions?

This is a chicken and egg question. Could it be, though, that the symbols emerge, as it were, on their own? Does the human collective unconscious, acting like a psychic planetary thermostat, cause symbols and archetypes to well up into consciousness as they are required? This is the suspicion of this blog. The 108-year cycle is much more like a pattern or a rhythm than a plan.

 The Forging of the Lapis

Sirius rises with the Sun in Leo, the House of the Sun. The Phoenix presides over the hottest dog-days of summer when Sirius doubles the power of the Sun. Representations of The Sun Card in other tarot decks directly associate it with the Phoenix, and the eight rays of the Sun are often shown in a pattern identical to the crosses of the Union Jack. There is little doubt that The Sun was played during the Closing Ceremony of London 2012.

  

The following 17th century alchemical print, reproduced in Jung's Psychology and Alchemy and titled "The Mountain of the Adepts," really encapsulates much of the symbolism behind London 2012. The Great Wheel, the London Eye, is shown here as the precessional cycle of the zodiacal ages. This reveals that the Great Work is both individual and collective.

The four elements are also the four directions, the four points of the cross, the Four Apostles, and the four kingdoms of Britain with their respective saints. The Mountain, like Purgatory and like the Glastonbury Tor, rises up from seven tiers -- depicted here as the seven stages of the alchemical process. 

 
The fiery Phoenix arises from the ashes of the consummation of the Sun and the Moon. This consummation is discussed in Dante, in Blake, and throughout the poetic and alchemical tradition. It is the hieros gamos of Dante and Beatrice, The Lamb and the Holy City, Salt and Mercury, the boy and girl dancing together on the mountain of the Sun card.

This Divine Marriage reverses the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the rise of the Phoenix signifies the new Redemption. The final forging of the Lapis, the Philosopher's Stone, is the equivalent to the return of Christ (and also Antichrist). It is also the portal of Da'at.

All symbols, to be effective, must be ambiguous. They must contain at once the entire cosmic cycle of dissolution and coagulation. They must contain day and night, summer and winter. For something to be truly Whole, as Jung continually taught, it must also integrate its Shadow. This is why we go astray when we interpret ritualized events like London 2012 as only the evil Illuminati, or as only the culmination of the Agenda to implement the full New World Order.

There is no doubt that this is a big part of what is going on. But it is not all. Just as on a fairly mainstream level we can interpret the Olympics in two opposing ways -- idealistically as the coming together of all nations in a celebration of human excellence, or cynically as an orgy of nationalism and corporate consumerism only made possible with the implementation of a temporary police state -- esoterically we can also take two perspectives.

Was London transformed into Zion? The green and pleasant land of the opening was by the closing a Union Jack highway intersection. No obvious transcendence there. But it, like 9/11, was also the centre of a planetary mandala of attention -- a mandala that even sucked in hardened and cynical researchers like myself. We also played our role. And that was the point. The Sun card was played and the Ages are completing their shift.

There are only two cards left to complete the 108-year cycle which we can expect to see played by the end of this year. The first will be The Aeon, when the new age is definitively announced, and The Universe is last, when the completion of cycle merges into the completion of all cycles. And with The Universe comes the return of the Woman and the Snake.

   

Postscript One Hundred and Eight

In a cosmic giggle-type confirmation of these blog posts a crop circle appeared in England on Aug. 26th, probably the most stunning of the entire season, featuring a huge circle with a three dimensional cube inside of it. The cube is showing only three of its faces, but on each face is 36 "squares." In total, then, there are 108  sections.

Additionally, as the three hidden faces of the cube presumably also have 108 divisions then we reach the full 216 years of the Rosicrucian cycle -- 108 years of hidden activity and 108 years of open movement. Is there still any doubt that this year begins the next cycle?

The 108-Year Rosicrucian Cycle Part One

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