Twilight of the Archons - A deep dive into the manipulation of money and consciousness by the powers that control our daily lives

Archon (Gnosticism) ... any of a number of world-governing powers...

In the last decade we have seen an exponential change in the manipulation of basic human instincts through a technological and societal shift often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Everything we do, from sex, dating and purchases to political affiliations and how we define ourselves is being manipulated and commoditized. 

Money is the air of civilization, necessary for just about everything we do outside breathing, but many people still lack a basic understanding of what it is and how it is created.  How can we have a democracy if our most basic of necessities is almost universally misunderstood?

The just released documentary, Twilight of the Archons, critiques the materialist worldview with a strong emphasis on the meaning of consciousness and money and features Joseph Campbell, the economist Richard Werner and Rupert Spira among others. 

Before we can liberate ourselves from the web of control, we first have to understand how it operates. Twilight of Archons gives us a glimpse into how the ‘machine’ really works and who is running it. 

It’s time to end the manipulation and begin the self-actualization. 

Face the truth and begin the change.




 

Individuals with a Cervix

A recent flash in the pan on Twitter was this tweet from CNN.


In an effort to be more inclusive and accurate, CNN purposely avoided using the traditional term for ‘individuals with a cervix’- women.  The expected brouhaha exploded over the Twitterverse and anyone with the slightest familiarity with a user’s profile could predict with quantum accuracy their point of view.

Such is the world we live in.

There weren’t any original arguments, though one side did have a clear advantage in terms of humor, which should give the other pause. (men=individuals with erections)

But there is a profound dilemma underlying this seemingly pedestrian skirmish from the culture war; the accuracy of perception itself and how it’s transformed into language. The current cultural revolution spreading through the United States is founded on an ideology that weaponizes language.  It sees structural inequality embedded in the words we use and the key to their revolution is the transformation of language itself and the 'reality' it describes.

By deconstructing traditional narratives they inevitably find easily toppled fallacies and assumptions.  Little by little, most of the myths holding together the country are crumbling.  As Wittgenstein put it, “At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”

To understand what is going on, we must step back and review what we think we know, and how we know it.

The mind interprets sensory inputs and classifies them in a way that best favors evolutionary fitness, NOT their accuracy in regard to the “objective consensus reality”.

It's not important how ‘true’ any perception or linguistic interpretation is, what’s crucial is its ability to facilitate decisions that give us an evolutionary advantage.

The Coronavirus Test - Are you a Clock or an Orange?

Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange
‘I've implied the junction of the organic, the lively, the sweet – in other words, life, the orange – and the mechanical, the cold, the disciplined [the clock].’  Anthony Burgess explaining the title of his novel, A Clockwork Orange.

As the coronavirus sprang upon us in the first months of 2020, it seemed possible that this virus could undo some of the intense polarization that has gripped the nation since at least 2016.

It didn’t turn out that way.

The virus has actually thrown more gas on the fires of discord- something that would have seemed impossible back in the 'quaint' days of January 2020 when impeaching the President was all the rage.

Clocks and Oranges


There are two diametrically opposed views on this crisis.  The first argues that it's a catastrophic pandemic and we must drastically change the basic functioning of our civilization until we find a safe way out.  Let’s call the folks who follow this view the clocks.

The clocks see nature as a beautiful garden that they're charged with caring for, cultivating and molding.  They are the masters of science, logic, and materialism and feel an obligation to drive nature toward the good, the just and the equitable.

 Orange King
The other view of the virus is that it’s just one more curveball mother nature has tossed our way.  We have survived other pandemics and we'll survive this one.  Those who follow this view are sceptical of the science and feel empowered to embrace their mortality and move on.  Let’s call these folks the oranges.

The oranges feel a part of nature.  Not only do they accept her harsh realities, they feel empowered by their role in her epic drama.  They are not here to change the world, but to be part of it.

The clocks want to convert the oranges into timepieces, creating a ‘clockwork orange’ while the oranges just want to be left alone.

The oranges are leery of change.  The clocks want to change absolutely everything.

We all know who the oranges voted for in 2016, and since then the clocks have done everything in their power to remove him.


The 21 Faces of God – The True Origins of the Tarot

The Tarot is the poor cousin of the other esoteric disciplines such as alchemy, the kabbalah and astrology.  In the 20th century Carl Jung elevated alchemy to respectability and Gershom Sholem did the same for the Kabbalah while in astrology figures like Liz Greene, Robert Hand and Geoffrey Cornelius have written serious, scholarly work on the topic.

But the Tarot has found no such allies or towering figures to do its bidding.  Both astrology (Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos) and the Kabbalah (Zohar)  have foundational texts and alchemy has revered works like the medieval Aurora Consurgens which was attributed to Thomas Aquinas.  Newton was obsessed with alchemy and Kepler was known as a brilliant astrologer, but the Tarot has no such legendary figures to enhance its credibility.

The origins of the Tarot are in a Mamluk card game which arrived in Europe sometime around the early 14th century.  The major arcana of the Tarot were added to the original game in Italy in the 15th century and it’s in the major arcana, the 22 trump cards, wherein lies the transcendent power of the cards. The only prominent academic to write about the tarot, the English philosopher Michael Dummet, insisted that it had no esoteric meaning and though the prominent Renaissance scholar Frances Yates, took umbrage, no one of her caliber has ever taken on the challenge to dig deeper into the meaning of the major arcana.

We are left with 18th and 19th century figures like Etteilla, Antoine Court de Gébelin, and Éliphas Lévi and 20th century figures such as Arthur Edward Waite and Aleister Crowley to find some transcendent qualities in the cards.  This is were the confusion arises as these 19th and 20th century occultists focused on  Egypt and especially the Kabbalah as the cosmological backbone of the major arcana.  This was a crucial error and began a tradition of attributing to the Tarot whatever suited one’s fancy.

The main cause of this problem is the number 22.  The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters and there are 22 paths connecting the Sephiroth on the Tree of Life and because of this occultists jumped on the connection and were sure that the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the major arcana were correlated.  First off, this is mere coincidence, and secondly, there are really only 21 cards in the major arcana, The Fool being a liminal figure between the Trump cards and the minor arcana.  The prominent scholar of the Kabbalah, Gershom Sholem, was adamant that there was no connection between the Kabbalah and the Tarot.

One might as well try and connect the Kabbalah to Buddhism.  The Kabbalah and the Tarot come from very different linguistic, cultural and religious world views.  The major arcana of the Tarot are rooted in alchemy, Pythagoras, Plato, western astrology and medieval Christology.  Nonetheless, the Tarot has become a place where all ideas stick and while this has creative and psychological merit, it also takes away from the true meaning of the cards.

But maybe for just this reason, the Tarot is all the rage.  The Village Voice even went so far as to write, “New York is in the middle of a tarot revival” and goes on to describe how New Yorkers are in the grips of a Tarot craze and the The New York Times writes, “Tarot-deck sales in general are up 30 percent this year, after rising 30 percent in 2016 — the highest in 50 years,” and it goes on to explain how Dior is using Tarot images in it’s designs.

In spite of the lack of a great text or eminent figures to support it, the Tarot persists in convincing millions that within what appears as a mere game, there is something more - and there is.  The new documentary, The 21 Faces of God attempts to tap into the deeper meaning of the cards by exploring the foundational ideas of the of Western esoteric tradition and weaving the path of the cards using film, art, music and commentaries from figures like Joseph Campbell, Terence Mckenna and Carl Jung.

We're All Zombies

Night of the Living Dead (1968) - Directed by George Romero
"I have always liked the 'monster within' idea. I like to think of zombies as being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters." - George Romero

The most heinous thing a human can do is eat another human.  Fear of cannibalism along with the other two great taboos, incest and intra-family violence, are the bedrocks of human culture.  Without these taboos there is no human civilization, yet zombie cannibals are everywhere, from the most popular TV shows in the US and Europe to the most played PC games.   Everywhere we look there is a zombie dragging his feet looking for human prey.  The ubiquitous nature of this meme of semi-human creatures that survive only by breaking the most fundamental of human taboos is a clear indicator of a collective cultural pathology.

Humans must not only kill and eat plants and animals to survive, we must make sure they keep coming back so they can be killed and eaten again and again.  Life needs death;  we must kill to live, and eventually we all wind up as someone else's food.  This paradox lies at the core of the world’s religions and mythologies and the fear/repulsion of eating other humans is the keystone of our culture, without it we turn on ourselves and self-annihilation ensues.  The zombie meme is a modern myth pointing to a deep fear of self-destruction.

The great psychologist and mystic Carl Jung was asked if a myth could be equated to a collective dream and he answered this way, “A myth…is the product of an unconscious process in a particular social group, at a particular time, at a particular place. This unconscious process can naturally be equated with a dream. Hence anyone who ‘mythologizes,’ that is, tells myths, is speaking out of this dream.”

The Seven Pillars of the Matrix

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Contemporary baptized, corporatized and sanitized man rarely has the occasion to question his identity, and when he does a typical response might be, “I am product manager for a large retail chain, married to Betty, father of Johnny, a Democrat, Steelers fan and a Lutheran.”

His answers imply not only his beliefs but the many responsibilities, rules and restrictions he is subjected to.  Few if any of these were ever negotiated-  they were imposed on him yet he still considers himself free.

But is free the right adjective for him, or would modern domesticated simian be more apt?  He has been told what to do, believe, think and feel since he can remember.  A very clever rancher has bred billions of these creatures around the globe and created the most profitable livestock imaginable.  They work for him, fight for him, die for him, believe his wildest tales, laugh at his jokes and rarely get out of line.  When domesticated man does break one of the rules there are armies, jailers, psychiatrists and bureaucrats prepared to kill, incarcerate, drug or hound the transgressor into submission.

The Moral Hazard of Modern Banking: How Banks Create and Destroy Money

The Money Lenders by  Quentin Metsys - 1466
"I'm just a banker do doing God's work."  Lloyd Blankfein

Much has been said about both the moral hazard of banks being bailed out and people bailing out of mortgages. The major question raised was, would this ‘bailout’ contagion infect the integrity of our economic and political system?  But far more interesting and much less discussed are the mechanics of modern banking and their moral implications.

During the housing boom trillions were loaned out in mortgages creating a housing bubble and the eventual collapse of the financial markets. But where did all that money come from? The vast majority of people think that banks borrow money from the Fed or depositors at one rate, lend it at another and make a spread. This concept is completely false. Banks create money, loan it out, make their margin through compound interest, and destroy the same money that they created as it is paid back.

The Mechanics of Fractional Reserve Banking

The mechanics of modern banking are opaque, misunderstood and arguably dishonest. Modern fiat money, the dollar, euro, yen etc are all based on debt. For every dollar in existence, there is somewhere an IOU for the same amount. This is best illustrated with an example of a typical mortgage.

Imagine Jack wants to by Jill’s house for $100,000 and he has no money to buy it so he goes to his local bank and asks for a mortgage which is approved. The bank will ask Jack for a promissory note, an IOU, for the $100,000 and once he signs it, they open an account in which they create from nothing $100,000 for Jack in exchange for his IOU. That $100,000 is a liability for the bank, their asset is the IOU. The bank just ‘created’ $100,000 which is backed by the good faith of Jack to pay it back as well as the deed to the house he bought.  Now the bank loans that money to Jack, with compound interest. The interest is the fee the bank charges for monetizing the debt. Jill would not have wanted an IOU from Jack for the 100K, so the bank did him the service of converting his IOU into dollars, and for this service they charge him interest. As Jack pays down his mortgage principal, the value of the IOU will be drawn down as well, until all the money ‘created’ is destroyed, and the IOU is worthless.

Are Cats a Higher Life Form?

I have a good friend who is very intelligent. She is a highly educated scientist and I would say that her IQ is in the 135+ range. But not only is she very intelligent, she is unselfconsciously intelligent, which is a refreshing trait in today’s self-congratulatory culture. Remember when athletes didn’t jump up and down like little girls every time they did what they were being paid millions to do? Thank God for baseball, nothing like a 95 MPH fastball up and in to shut up a blowhard. But back to cats.

My friend is not only very smart and unpretentious, she is a genuinely good person, you could say she is very kind, maybe the “most good” person I have ever known. She never makes grandiose statements, never gives big speeches, and her most common answer is ‘maybe’ or ‘I don’t know.’ So yours truly feels like a stupid, pedantic and evil human in her presence, but that’s another story.

She has a cat named Moshe. Moshe is a black cat with patches of white on his paws and neck. Moshe is a street cat, brought to my friend’s house as a lost kitten by the neighborhood kids. He is very wild and would just as soon bite or scratch you as purr in your lap. Moshe has something of Bulgakov’s foul mouthed, vodka swigging Behemoth. When Moshe bites me or scratches me, I usually give him a good swift kick in the ass, but we have, for the most part, learned to maintain a tense truce.

Now Moshe, like all cats, is very peculiar. He is fascinated by water, like many cats, and while eating is his biggest joy, there seems to be one thing that he enjoys more, and that is classical music. If Bach is on the sound system not even the shaking of his food bag will bring him out of the bedroom to eat. And he has a strange affinity for books. Don DeLillo’s Underground, a serious tome, was on the widow sill for awhile and Moshe always rested his head on the book as if he were pondering DeLillo’s Cold War America. Watching this, I made the comment to my friend that maybe her feline companion had been a member of the aristocracy in a past life, but probably due to some homicidal tendencies was brought to the world as a cat.


Gold Will Break Below $960 – It’s in the Script

As gold broke below the psychologically important level of $1,200 an ounce late in December of 2013, the mainstream financial media burst with headlines like this one from Marketwatch, "Gold’s Safe-Haven Role is Over".  The Nobel prize winning economist from The NY Times, Paul Krugman, penned a wicked missive on the ‘barbarous relic’ by invoking Keynes and the absurdity of miners going to “great lengths to dig cash out of the ground, even though unlimited amounts of cash could be created at essentially no cost with the printing press.”

The basis of a vibrant and dynamic society is an open and free marketplace where people ‘vote’ with their decisions on where to spend money, where to live, what to read, who to vote for, etc.  In the United States, a good example of what occurs when decisions are centralized is healthcare and education-  the key decisions are made outside the mainstream of the marketplace and the country ranks far below the rest of the developed world, even behind countries with considerably less economic wealth.  As central planning and regulations remove potential players and solidify the positions of special interests, the quality of education and healthcare has plummeted.

So what does this have to do with the price of gold?  Everything.


Vladimir Vladimirovich and the Grey Lady

Bill Keller, editorialist for The NY Times and former executive editor of the paper, has recently penned a strong attack on Vladimir Putin arguing that Putin’s leadership “deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West”, describing the Kremlin’s policies as “laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as ‘foreign agents’, expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.”

Keller, who during his tenure as executive editor of The NY Times argued for the invasion of Iraq and wrote glowingly of Paul Wolfowitz, makes no mention of Moscow’s diplomatic maneuvers that successfully avoided a US military intervention in Syria or the Russian asylum given to Edward Snowden.  Keller, who had supported the US intervention in Syria by writing, “but in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy,” also made no mention of Seymour Hersh’s stinging dissection of the Obama administration’s misinformation campaign regarding the sarin attacks in Syria.  Hersh’s piece, which drives grave doubts into the case against Assad actually having carried out the attacks, was not published in The New Yorker or in The Washington Post, publications that regularly run his work.

Sometimes a Man Stands up during Supper by Rainer Maria Rilke

Paula Modersohn-Becker.Rainer Maria Rilke, 1906

Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house, dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far our into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.

Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke trans. by Robert Bly



From the Summer of Love to the Arab Spring

Those who believe that the world of being is governed by luck or chance and that it depends upon material causes are far removed from the divine and from the notion of the One.
— Plotinus

On May 27, 2010 the planet Uranus entered Aries and in December of that same year, in Tunisia, Tarek Bouazizi self-immolated himself after his electronic scale and the fruit he had bought on credit were confiscated from him by a corrupt policewoman.  That spark sent flames throughout the Middle East, toppling regimes from Libya to Yemen.  Uranus would make its definitive entry into Aries on the fateful day of March 11, 2011, coinciding almost to the hour with the earthquake and ensuing disaster at Fukushima.  Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and the most self driven while Uranus is the planet that represents revolution, innovation and change- together they make a radical, ego driven cocktail.

Uranus reflects many of the traits of the time it was discovered, 1781, when the American Revolution was in full bloom and the French variant was ready to boil over.  The last time the restless Uranus had passed through the cardinal sign of Aries was between 1927 and 1935, a time when two of the most revolutionary (Uranus), and megalomaniacal (Aries) leaders in history consolidated power.  Uranus will not definitively leave Aries until March 6, 2019, by which time the world will have undergone profound changes.  We cannot say with certainty whether another calamitous dictator will appear on the world stage, but, at least in the West, we are devoid of inspired political, cultural and spiritual leadership and someone with exceptional qualities could become the focal point of a world thirsty for meaning and direction.

Trayvon and the Matrix

The Trayvon Martin affair was one of the most important media events in recent memory.  The major networks spent endless hours of prime time discussing it, but what made the episode so exceptional was who benefited from the incredible amount of coverage.

At the heart of the story were two young men who both made poor decisions- one died, and the other almost wound up in prison for life.  But is this so exceptional in America?

In fact, it’s all to common.  Data from 2008 shows that more than four minors (under 18 years) were murdered a day in the US- four Trayvons a day.  Was it the racial aspect of the case that was so exceptional? Yes, but not for the obvious reasons.  More than 80% of interracial violent crimes are black on white, which would make one think it more likely that a black on white crime would galvanize the nation, but that wasn’t the case.

Most reasonable people probably saw the tragic elements as the most outstanding feature of the Trayvon/Zimmerman encounter.  Both young men let their pride get the better of them. If only Zimmerman had stayed in the car, if only Trayvon had not began an altercation. The story is filled with the regret of how we weave our own demise- true tragedy.  But the media wanted to make this a racially charged issue, but for whose benefit?

The Infomocracy Dilemma: Revolution or Disengagement?


A very small yet conscious minority has come to the realization that the current world regime is one giant corporate infomocracy that needs to be terminated with “extreme prejudice”, disengagement being the weapon of choice.  The next revolution will not be carried out by mobs of angry people, guerrillas, terrorists or, god forbid, politicians.  It will be accomplished by a small (10%) militant minority that will simply unplug the matrix.



A Very Condensed Case for Revolution

An enormous, dictatorial corporate cartel is ruling the world through its proxies in government, banking, academia and media.  Our entire western culture has become an insidious farce with the sole purpose of maintaining the enslaved masses in their conjured up democracies, religions and histories.  Two developments have increased its control exponentially:  globalisation and the information revolution. 

The world is entering the final acts of a great social, political and economic shift.  The international currency regime, the keystone of control,  is peering into the abyss; the middle east is being turned upside down; the bankrupt United States government is fighting several wars and maintaining more than 560 military bases in over 120 countries.  The insatiable greed and desire for world control have created a breach in the system.  People are becoming aware while their masters scramble for control as the chaotic climax approaches.