Monday, November 26, 2012

New (Reptilian) World Order

http://illuminatimindcontrol.com/new-reptilian-world-order/  

New (Reptilian) World Order

lizard New (Reptilian) World Order

By Uri Dowbenko

What if Planet Earth was ostensibly run by a race of shape-shifting reptilians? Believe it or not, this outre’ political-science-fiction scenario has become a focus of historical researchers as well as spiritual visionaries. In fact, the resonance of corroborating evidence from science and metaphysics has a synchronicity that is nothing but astonishing.
Serpents and flying dragons have, of course, been a staple of ancient myth and legends of indigenous people around the world. The assumption has always been, however, that they are metaphor or allegory – and not a literal description of actual beings.
But what about the admonition of Jesus and John the Baptist when they chided the “generation of vipers” and “serpents? What if they saw these creatures with their spiritual vision – the overshadowing of humans by astral beings from another dimension? How would they communicate this vision to others?
And what about the stories from the Book of Enoch and the Forbidden Books of the Bible which refer to the Nephilim – literally “Those Who Were Cast Down” – and the Watchers, the so-called “Fallen Angels”?

Sumeria: The Cradle (Or Test Tube) of Civilisation

Scholars and historians have been totally confounded by the abrupt rise of the Sumerian culture nearly 6,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This “sudden civilisation” seemed to appear out of thin air and refused to conform to the popular historical theory of linear development in cultural evolution.
Historian Professor Charles Hapgood squarely faces the issue when he writes that “today we find primitive cultures co-existing with advanced modem society on all continents… We shall now assume that 20,000 years ago while paleolithic peoples held out in Europe, more advanced cultures existed elsewhere on earth.”
Likewise the rise of Sumeria has been a major puzzle. Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God writes, “With stunning abruptness… there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden… the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all high civilisations of the world.”
William Irwin Thompson puts it even more succinctly. “Sumer is a poor stoneless place for a neolithic culture to evolve from a peasant community into a full-blown civilisation,” he writes, “but it is a very good place to turn the plains and marshes into irrigated farmlands… In short, Sumer is an ideal place to locate a culture already having the technology necessary for urban life and irrigation agriculture.”
A more stunning conclusion was reached by Professor Samuel N. Kramer, one of the greatest Sumerologists of our time. He reviewed the table of contents from the Tablets of Sumer and found that each one of the 25 chapters described a Sumerian, and in fact a world-first, type of achievement.
The Sumerians had the world’s first medicine and pharmacopoeia. The world’s first brain surgery. The world’s first agriculture and farmer’s almanac. The world’s first cosmology and astronomy. The world’s first law codes. And they utilised a highly advanced technology capable of sophisticated metallurgy, smelting, refining and alloying as well as petroleum fuel refining. Most importantly, the Sumerians were responsible for the world’s first genetic engineering.
Like a mystery without a suspect, the Sumerian story remained a riddle, until historian-archaeologist Zechariah Sitchin published a remarkable book called The 12th Planet (1979). In his subsequent series entitled “The Earth Chronicles,” Sitchin describes in great detail the crossbreeding program of the Sumerian “gods” through genetic manipulation.
Having spent thirty years studying Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Hittite texts and the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, Sitchin deciphered the ancient scripts, transcribed them, transliterated them and, finally translated them.
His conclusion? Sitchin writes that the Sumerian civilisation did indeed appear out of thin air. The forerunner of Greek and Roman civilisation was initiated by a highly advanced race of extra-planetary colonists who came to earth, established their settlements, and began their single-minded pursuit of wealth and power by mining gold and other minerals necessary to sustain their high-tech high-maintenance lifestyle.
And who were these “colonists”? The Sumerians themselves described them as the “gods of heaven and earth.” They were also called “the ancient gods,” or the “olden gods,” and according to Sumerian lore, they had come down to earth from heaven. In the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Sumerian gods of heaven and earth are referred to as the Nephilim. The Sumerians themselves called the colonists the Anunnaki.
The Bible and Strong’s Concordance does not mention the Nephilim specifically by name, but Nelson’s Concordance has several listings. Sitchin translates the biblical verses from Genesis 6:4 as:
“The Nephilim were upon the Earth, in those days and thereafter too, when the sons of the gods cohabited with the daughters of Adam and they bore children unto them. They were the Mighty Ones of Eternity.”
And what does “Nephilim” actually mean? Normally translated into English as “giants,” the word stems from the Semitic root NFL (‘to be cast down’). It means exactly what it says – “Those who were cast down upon Earth.”
“Contemporary theologians and biblical scholars have tended to avoid the troublesome verses,” writes Sitchin, “but Jewish writings of the time of the Second Temple did recognise in these verses the echoes of ancient traditions of ‘fallen angels’.”

Tracks of the Nephilim and the Watchers

Apocryphal texts like the Book of Enoch, the Pseudepigrapha, and other politically incorrect so-called “Lost” Books of the Bible reflect a precise knowledge of fallen angels on Earth. In fact, scholars maintain that there were two accounts of separate “falls” of the angels. First, there was the archangel’s rebellion against God and his fall through pride, in which he was followed by other angels – the Nephilim. And second, there was the story of angels who “fell” (lowered their vibration and began their incarnations on Earth) through lusting after the daughters of men – the Watchers.
According to the Book of Enoch, a band of angels led by Samyaza “became enamoured of the daughters of men” and decided to go after them, saying “come let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children.” So they all took an oath, all two hundred of them, and descended to earth. “Then they took wives, each choosing for himself; who they began to approach, and with whom they cohabited; teaching them sorcery, incantations… Moreover Azazyel taught men to make swords, knives, shields… Then Michael and Gabriel, Raphael, Suryal and Uriel, looked down from heaven, and saw the quantity of blood which was shed on earth, and all the iniquity which was done upon it…”
Indeed, bloodshed, including ritual abuse and human sacrifice through endless wars are the hallmarks of these creatures.

Invasion of the Serpent “People”

In a book called Flying Serpents and Dragons: The Story of Mankind’s Reptilian Past, R.A. Boulay, a former NSA cryptographer, writes that “from a combination of ancient secular and religious sources, it is possible to piece together the story of our ancestry which lies in the coming of the alien serpent-gods or astronauts who colonised earth many eons ago.”
In fact, the evidence lies in a complete reappraisal of the legends, myths and “history” of the world. The Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh and Agga points to this interaction of “humans” and “serpents.” And of course, there are the well-known “serpent gods” of the Indus Valley, the Nagas or Serpent race of Ancient India, and the Hindu epics, “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata,” which also deal with the serpent- gods. In Chinese history, “Vih King” describes how man and dragon lived peacefully together and even intermarried. And the serpent gods in American mythology are described in the Mayan book “Chilam Balam” where Itzamna, the serpent god is revered by the “people of the serpent.”
The story of St. George overcoming the “dragon” in England and St. Patrick driving the “serpents” out of Ireland are also part of Christian iconography.
Too many “coincidences” point to a pattern which has been seemingly willfully ignored by ivory tower mainstream academics and historians.

Before the Flood

According to Boulay, the Anunnaki genetic engineering was done by “combining the characteristics of the native ape man or neanderthal with their own saurian nature” producing the so-called Adam of the Old Testament. “This Adam was half-human and half-reptile, however, and being a clone could not reproduce himself.”
Berossus, the Babylonian priest writing in 3rd century BCE Athens, claimed that man’s ancestry and origin can be traced to “Oannes,” an amphibious creature that came out of the Persian Gulf to teach the arts of civilisation to man. “Berossus called them ‘annedoti’ which translate as the ‘repulsive ones’ in Greek. He also refers to them as ‘musarus,’ an abomination,” writes Boulay. “If the tradition had been invented, a more normal attitude would have been to glorify these creatures as splendid gods or heroes, yet the fact that they chose to describe their ancestors this way argues for the authenticity of the account.”
“The Sumerian gods regarded Man as a convenience and nothing more,” says Boulay. “He supplied their wants, kept their cities, and provided cannon fodder for their various military ventures.” (Sound familiar?) “The gods could be cruel and unsympathetic masters. They considered humans merely as unruly children, not more important than pets, to be governed ruthlessly and without sentiment.”
The ruthless “policies” of the New World Order reflects this ancient bias in the incessant propaganda that a population “crisis” exists on the planet and that the best way to remedy the situation is through wars to kill off the “cannon fodder” or through abortion to kill off future “useless eaters,” those who consume resources without the value-added productivity that the masters of Earth require.
Boulay contends that the Old Testament begins at Sumer and there is a large body of religious literature besides the Book of Genesis which deals with the period before the Deluge. He cites sources such as the three Books of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, Gnostic teachings, the Dead Sea scrolls, the Haggadah of the oral tradition of the Jews, the Rabbinical writings, the works of Josephus, and the Books of the Pseudepigrapha, especially the Book of Jubilees.

What Was the Serpent of Eden?

Carl Sagan cryptically titled one of his books The Dragons of Eden, but ancient Jewish legends describe the Serpent of Eden as manlike. In other words, he looked like a man and talked like a man. What does this mean?
“The section of the Haggadah that deals with the Creation describes the Serpent who inhabited the Garden before the creation of Adam as an upright creature that stood on two feet and was equal in height to the camel,” writes Boulay. “The serpent was man-like in many ways. He was tall and stood upright on two legs. He did all the work of the gods particularly the mining and agricultural work. And above all the Serpent had an intellect superior to Man. These are all the attributes of the Anunnaki.”
Boulay says that “according to the Haggadah, the bodies of Adam and Eve ‘had been overlaid with a horny skin’ and moreover of Adam’s skin, it was said that ‘it was as bright as daylight and covered his body like a luminous garment. Adam thus had the outward appearance of a reptile with its scaly and shiny skin. It was for this reason that Adam and Eve did not wear nor did they need clothing for protection or comfort.”
“The reptilian appearance of the Biblical gods was a well-kept secret and only occasionally is it perceptible in the Old Testament,” writes Boulay. In a radical reinterpretation of scripture, he says that in the Haggadah, the source of Jewish legend and oral tradition, “it is revealed that Adam and Eve lost their ‘lustrous and horny hide’ as a result of eating the forbidden fruit. The Gnostics, rivals to the early Christians, relate that as a result of eating the fruit, Adam and Eve achieved knowledge, part of which was to realise that their creators were beastly forms.”
The Haggadah also explains what happened in the Garden after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. “The first result was that Adam and Eve became naked. Before their bodies had been overlaid with a horny skin and enveloped with a cloud of glory. No sooner had they violated the command given them than the cloud of glory and the horny skin dropped from them and they stood there in their nakedness.”
Even the bizarre ritual of circumcision may have a reptilian connection. “Just as the serpent achieves long life through sacrificing and leaving off part of himself, so man may also be saved by ritually sacrificing part of himself,” continues Boulay.
“The rite of circumcision also served as a perpetual reminder to man that his true origins lay in the serpent-god creator and that he existed at the forbearance of these gods.”

Why Cain Killed Abel

In a fascinating reassessment of the well-known Bible story of Cain and Abel, Boulay proposes an alternative rationale. For instance, in the Apocalypse of Adam, a Gnostic document of the 1st century CE, Adam reveals to his son Seth “that the Lord who created us created a son from himself and Eve your mother.”
“If the deity was the father of Cain, while Adam sired Abel,” writes Boulay, “it would explain further events – Cain would be semi-divine, part-reptilian and more ‘god’-like.” About the birth of Cain, this document observes that Eve “bore a son and he was lustrous” – a description of the shiny luminous hide of the reptile gods. The Apocalyptic version of this text also describes Eve’s dream. She tells Adam, ‘My Lord, I saw a dream last night, the blood of my son Amilabes, called Abel, being thrust into the mouth of Cain his brother and he drank it mercilessly… And it did not stay in his stomach but came out of his mouth.’ They got up to see what happened and found Abel killed Cain.’”
The crime of Cain was apparently not only to commit fratricide but to eat the flesh and blood of his brother. “This behaviour seems more reptilian than human since Cain was sired by the deity unlike his brother who had Adam as his father,” concludes Boulay.

The Serpent Gods

What did the ancient ‘gods’ look like? “The coming of the Anunnaki coincided with the end of this period as the Earth began to dry out and the meat-eating dinosaurs and small mammals appeared,” says Boulay. “The reptile gods needed moisture and warmth and probably the reason why civilisations were founded at the mouth of great river systems – the Nile delta, the Indus River valley and the Tigris Euphrates system.”
“In appearance the serpent gods were tall, at least 8 to 10 feet, and walked on two feet. They had a tail like a reptile and a tough hide somewhat like a lizard but with a large amount of horny or scaly skin. Their hide was generally lustrous and smooth, somewhat like a chameleon and probably varied in different hues of green and gray… They had short horns on their head which they considered to be a sign of divinity. Humans were repulsive to them because they were hairy, had soft skins and bony limbs.”
“The sons of the Serpent gods, the Nephilim of the Bible, which descended before the Deluge and mated with human women also dabbled in genetic engineering,” concludes Boulay. “Eventually mankind will have to learn the truth about his origins and face the fact that his gods and ancestors were reptiles, truly monsters by any of our current definitions. There will be a great cultural shock as we have never seen before,” Boulay predicts.

Reptilians Among Us

“Researchers into the reptilian phenomenon conclude that at least some originate in the Draco star constellation,” writes David Icke in his book The Biggest Secret.
“There are three suggested origins for the Anunnaki reptilian intervention in human affairs,” writes Icke. “1. They are extraterrestrials; 2. They are ‘inner’ terrestrials who live within the earth; 3. They manipulate humanity from another dimension by ‘possessing’ human bodies. I think they are all true.”
Icke’s book is a repository of mind-bending, paradigm-shifting information which sounds like a grade-Z sci-fi movie – until you read the evidence. His premise is simple – what if the Global Power Elite are part of these reptilian bloodlines still controlling and ruling Planet Earth as their own private galactic fiefdom?
“These bloodlines,” writes Icke, “became the British and European aristocracy and royal families and thanks to the ‘Great’ British Empire, they were exported across the world to rule the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and so on. These genetic lines are manipulated into the positions of political, military, media, banking and business power and thus these positions are held by lower fourth dimensional reptilians hiding behind a human form or by mind-puppets of these same creatures.”
“These same reptilians have been occupying the bodies of all the main players in the conspiracy going back to ancient times,” continues Icke. “The obsession with interbreeding within the [Babylonian] Brotherhood bloodstreams comes from the need to hold the reptilian genetic inheritance and therefore maintain the vibrational connection between the human body on the third dimension and its controlling force on the lower fourth. It was to hide this truth that they arranged the destruction of ancient historical records, texts, and accounts over the centuries as they ravaged and raped the native societies of the world. The reptilians wanted to destroy all memory and records of their earlier open existence and control in the past. If they could do that, humanity would have no idea that they were being controlled through physical bodies that look human by a fourth dimensional force.”

Incarnation of the Lizard-People

With a background in Jungian psychology, author Barbara Hand Clow excels in shamanic cosmology, an intuitive storytelling technique that integrates history, legend and myth using her own internal guidance. In the third volume of her “Mind Chronicles Trilogy” called Signet of Atlantis, she also tackles the problem of the “lizard race” from her own perspective.
Clow refers to the physical incarnation of this race on Earth. “They [the Anunnaki] nevertheless have received a measure of control over the planet’s surface,” she writes. “Most notably they have achieved the ability to incarnate. No longer will they have to persuade the people to build temples in order to link up to their own control centres; no longer will they require a channel to enter Earth; now they can become humans themselves.”
“The various non-physical lizards creeping around the canals of Baalbek are considerably attracted to the idea of taking human form through incarnation,” she continues. “They look forward to creating fear more directly. These monsters are not content to lumber around as fourth dimensional reptiles, occasionally eating someone up. Much more appealing to them is the idea of actually entering the third dimension – in the twentieth century, for example, actually becoming an Adolf Hitler, a Charles Manson, a Stephen King, or making the twentieth century film that creates fear of the act of eating, the ‘Night of the Living Dead/ They will even baldly show themselves for who they really are by creating a movie called ‘V.’” 
Other sci-fi movies with this theme of alien-reptilians on Earth include “The Arrival,” “They Live.” And “Alien Resurrection.”
“You must realise that the Holy Land is a laboratory of stellar control patterns,” writes Clow. “In temple secrecy, we were taught everything about the visitors, but this information was taken out of the Bible. For 300,000 years, the central agenda by the Nibiruans [colonists from Nibiru, also called Marduk] has been to control the Earth and the use of its resources.”
It is also a special time, the return of humanity’s spiritual powers and the choice of self-transcendence. “The return of these archetypal powers is also a result of your ability to perceive wider spans of the light spectrum,” she continues. “This expanding vision is your key to integrating all the dimensions into your awareness. This broader awareness is natural, but it was once taken from you by the ‘gods.’ The Nibiruans and other visitors – those demigods who felt disconnected from their Source – narrowed your perceptive abilities in order to help themselves materialise on Earth.”
“The Nibiruan mind-set that has poisoned planet Earth has most recently manifested as the reptilian attitude that American political leaders call the ‘New World Order.’ This is a mind-set that believes in scarcity and limitation when the Earth is actually abundant and unlimited. This is the mind-set that would throw all the people into crocodile pits. The world’s power brokers are gluttons who control more resources than they need in order to protect themselves against the scarcity they fear.”
Clow calls them the World Management Team, which she defines as “individuals in the third dimension who are controlled by the Anunnaki who impulse them to carry out plans that benefit Nibiru and not Earth. All individuals working in Team agencies – such as in the Vatican, secret societies, banks, governments, school systems, the medical system and many businesses – are agents of the Anunnaki, unless they are conscious of the Annunaki vibrations and do not carry out their plans. In recent days, the World Management Team has been calling itself the New World Order.”

The Coming of Christ

“Since the coming of Christos, the time has come to choose life over death,” writes Barbara Hand Clow in her book Heart of the Christos. “The death wish comes from the paralysing fear of the black place – Orion. In the wars with Orion, pain and separation were first experienced, and after that point many souls chose to cease to be. But all changed with Christos. A being of such love and compassion came to Earth that now all souls have access to the desire to be alive, to be alive just to experience the love of Christos.”
“The fallen angels have sidetracked themselves by playing around with various experiments which have been creative but without wisdom. As the third dimension has become increasingly complex, especially during the last five thousand years, the angels have amused themselves by being voyeurs of the results of materialisations. Technology with no divine inspiration or wisdom has been the latest project of the [fallen] angels.”
After all, Christ himself admonished his students, “Be ye wise as serpents.” What did he mean?

The Rape of the Anunnaki

According to many leading experts, sex has gotten a bad name ever since the trauma of the Anunnaki who came to this planet and raped the women of Earth. In The Pleiadian Agenda, Barbara Hand Clow writes that “the Anunnaki selected women to have sex with them so they could actually birth themselves into the incarnational cycles of Earth, and that was something that had never occurred before.”
Prior to this time, she contends that “all sex was very natural. You easily merged electromagnetic fields and your physical bodies, and the vibrations of the Moon, Sun and planets flowed through your kundalini channels. You were drawn to each other by planetary affinities in your birth charts and merging was always easy and pleasurable. Sex with the Anunnaki was forced and unnatural in so many ways because there were few energy affinities. You became confused while the gods felt kundalini energy for the first time. They loved it. Male gods even had a lot of sex with each other and with the few female goddesses once they found out what sex felt like on Earth…”
“All imbalances between men and women today come from energetic imprints of incompatible energy fusion from these ancient times,” writes Clow. “Your loathing for reptiles also comes from this phase of your evolution because the most embodied Anunnaki were very reptilian, and those Anunnaki were the ones who could mate with human females.”

Serpents. Dragons. Reptilians. Coincidence or Conspiracy?

Satan and the fallen angels are often pictured as serpent-reptilians themselves.
In one of the seemingly uncensored passages in the scriptures, Jesus rebuked them saying, “Ye serpents! Ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore behold, I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them ye shall kill and crucify, and some of them ye shall scourge in your synagogues and persecute them from city to city, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Zacharias, son of Barchias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.” (Matt. 23) The bloodlust and the modus operandi of the embodied Watchers has changed little in the two thousand years since.
More references to the “generation of vipers” are in Matt. 3:7, Matt. 12:34-35 and Luke 3:7. They are also called “princes of this world.” Despite censoring, tampering and editing the Bible, code words or euphemisms for this reptilian race in the Old Testament include terms like “the wicked,” “mighty men,” “the giants,” and “evildoers.”

‘Lizzies’ and the Human Dilemma

Barbara Marciniak, author of Bringers of the Dawn, Earth and Family of Light comes to a similar conclusion about Earth and the reptilian agenda.
“The creator gods who have been ruling this planet have the ability to become physical, though mostly they exist in other dimensions,” she writes. “They keep energy at a certain vibrational frequency while they create emotional trauma to nourish themselves.”
“You have only dealt with gods who have wanted to be admired and to confuse you and who have thought of Earth as a principality, a place that they own out in the galactic fringes of this free-will universe.”
Marciniak semi-facetiously calls these hybrid part-human part-reptilian beings, ‘Lizzies.’ “These beings, who are neither spiritually informed nor learned in spiritual ways, deny the existence of a spiritual force,” she writes. “They have developed scientific principles and technologies that scatter the laws of spirituality… It is possible to become a brilliant master of manipulating matter and reality without understanding spiritual connections.”
After all there’s nothing like a race of godless materialistic ‘Lizzies’ to diddle with your planet. And current world events reflect this reality every day.

Transcending the Virus of Salvationist Religion

Is “religion” itself then a virus insinuated into society by an alien extraterrestrial species for the purpose of societal control?
In his inspired – and inspirational – book Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology and the Future of Belief, John Lamb Lash deconstructs the “Belief Systems” (BS) of the Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam, while explaining the metaphysical teachings of the so-called “Gnostics,” who have historically been disparaged as “pagans.”
After all, even the word “Gnostic” itself means “know it all,” a pejorative invented by the Roman Church to put down their rivals, who called themselves the Children of Seth. Despite the anti-Gnostic propaganda for the last 2,000 years, the Gnostics’ enlightened and holistic worldview has now become increasingly relevant because it describes so precisely the spiritual conflicts of our day.
The Gnostics taught that religion is the elaborate production of aliens who sold the concept of an off-planet Savior-Redeemer God (or an absentee landlord god, if you will) responsible for the patriarchal and fratricidal mindset endorsed by the Abrahamic religions.
In his groundbreaking exposition of the Gnostic perspective on Abrahamic mythology/religion, Lash writes that the Gnostics understood the origin of redemptive religion – “‘Yaldabaoth himself chose a certain man named Abraham and made a covenant with him’ but proposed a different way to view it. Yaldabaoth is the Demiurge, a.k.a. Yahweh or Jehovah, a demented pseudo-deity who works against humanity… Salvation by superhuman powers, rather than through the divine potential innate to humanity is the hallmark of extraterrestrial religion.”
Do the Abrahamic religions promote the reptilian-alien agenda? And are the “salvationist” dogmas and doctrines of the Abrahamic religions the work of “gods” working against the spiritual evolution of humanity?
The Gnostics called this “god” Yaldabaoth, their name for the Demiurge, a “pseudo-deity who claims to be the creator of the natural world, identified with the biblical father god called Yahweh or Jehovah,” in Lash’s words. They taught that he is a “demented pretender who works against humanity as the leader of the Archons,” which have been variously described as soulless beings or astral-mental parasites that “exaggerate human error and intrude upon humanity by psychic stealth in order to propagate the ideological virus of redemptive religion.”
Salvationist theology, writes Lash, promotes a belief system in “the Demiurge of the Old Testament, an arrogant demented pretender who claims that humans are ‘Made in His Image’. These four words are the corporate motto of patriarchy. Branded on the human soul, ‘Made in His Image’ signifies the total enslavement of humanity to an alien off-planet agenda. If the Gnostics were right, the rise of salvationism was a unique mistake for our species, not a new moral revelation. Nothing serves the hidden controllers for cover better than a message of cosmic love… a ruse to endorse and foster the victim-perpetrator bond. No matter how hard we try, we cannot derive a genuine message of love and goodness from divine paternalism. This is perhaps the hardest of all lessons that history can teach us.”
Is “religion” then just another stumbling-block on the ever-winding road of spiritual evolution?
The Gnostics’ perspective was that this alien belief system foisted upon humanity by the “Archons” was a primary cause of the spiritual stagnation that humanity endures into the 21st century.
Lash, on his website Metahistory.org, notes that the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, contain explicit accounts of threatening encounters with reptilians. For instance, the Testament of Amram:
“I saw Watchers in my vision, the dream-vision. Two of them were fighting over me, saying… and holding a great contest over me. I asked them, ‘Who are you, that you are thus empowered over me?’ They answered me, ‘We have been empowered and rule over mankind’. And they said to me, ‘Which one of us [will have you]?’ And I lifted my eyes, and looked at one of them directly. His appearance was dreadfully frightening, and his skin was multicoloured, darkly glittering scales.” (4Q542)
“Gifted with powers of paranormal perception, such as remote viewing, Gnostic seers who had met and repelled Archons observed the persisting presence of reptilians among the Dead Sea cult of the Zaddikim,” writes Lash. The First Apocalypse of James (NHL V, 3), which contains descriptions of face-to-face encounters with the reptilian aliens, warns that “Jerusalem is a dwelling place of many Archons.”
Is that the reason why the Middle East, and especially Palestine-Israel, are still the scene for such brutal warfare against the evolutions of Terra?
It becomes quite evident that Gnostic-based empirical mysticism conflicts with Salvationist-based Abrahamic religions on many levels. The alien agenda of Salvationism asserts that humans are in error, flawed and sinful “by nature” and require redemption and rescue from this condition by an intermediary, a messiah or through the observance of strict ritual law, while empirical mysticism claims that divinity itself is a natural essence of humanity and can be revealed through Mystery School initiation which can be used to combat this alien ideology.

Breaking the Spell

So why does the spell continue? Obviously the shedding of blood through satanic ritual murders and wars replenishes the energies they feed on. Negative emotions like fear and hatred are another source of their so-called power.
“The reptilians manipulate from the lower fourth dimension, the so-called lower astral frequency range,” writes Icke. “To control this planet they have to keep the mass of humanity at or below that level and disconnect them from anything higher. Crucial to maintaining the human psyche in disconnected ignorance is the manipulation of low vibrational emotion, fear, guilt, resentment, dislike of self and condemnation of others which in the end are all expressions of fear. These are the very emotions which resonate to the frequency range of the lower fourth dimension and once we succumb to domination by these emotions, we succumb to the control of the reptilian consciousness.”
Icke says that “the more you open your heart, the more powerful this flow and the quicker you will synchronise with the rising vibrations and transform into a higher state of consciousness. If you close your heart and you close your mind, you will be resisting these changes and more and more of your energy will be spent fighting the very energies that will transform your life and set you free.”
Marciniak writes that the “3-D world is headed for a collision of dimensions – not a collision of worlds, a collision of dimensions. Many dimensions are going to come crashing into each other. The test, the initiation [will come] – and initiation always means to move through another reality, to conquer it and transmute it.”
“The battle of light and dark and good and evil is only between portions of yourself,” Marciniak continues. “These portions are multidimensional extensions or reincarnations of the same collective of energies that you are a part of as an individual… The avatars and masters have now permeated the gridwork of the world bringing with them their own tools for teaching … This hierarchy works with love, cherishes who you are and has been able to see through the time mechanisms that are keyed into the planet to know that consciousness is ready for the evolutionary leap.”
It is an awesome choice then for the residents of Earth – to be or not to be the Christ. Especially in the face of tens of thousand of years of indoctrination. This includes lifetime after lifetime of hard-core programming that “sin” is our original legacy as well as continuous mind control through religion that guilt and fear are mankind’s “natural” estate.
Sifting out the so-called “tares among the wheat” is an ongoing process – within oneself and the planet as a whole. On a personal level, each decision to act ethically and morally is crucial. If fear is the lock on the virtual prison of Planet Earth, then Love is the key to soul liberation. The victory over the Nephilim enslavement of humanity, however, is ineluctable. After all, we’re all playing for keeps…

References

Author interviews with David Icke, Barbara Hand Clow and Barbara Marciniak
R.A. Boulay, Flying Serpents and Dragons: The Story of Mankind’s Reptilian Past (1990), The Book Tree, Escondido, CA, USA, www.thebooktree.com
Gregg Braden, Awakening to Zero Point (1994), Walking-Between the Worlds (1998), Laura Lee Productions, Washington, USA, www.lauralee.com
Barbara Hand Clow, Eye of the Centaur (1986), Heart of the Christos (1989), Signet of Atlantis (1992), The Pleiadian Agenda (1995).
Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Institute of Psychohistory, New York, USA, www.psychohistory.com
Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (1959), Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, USA.
John Lamb Lash, Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology and the Future of Belief (2006), Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, USA.
John Lamb Lash, www.metahistory.org
Barbara Marciniak, Bringers of the Dawn (1992), Earth (1995), Family of Light (1998), Bear & Company, Vermont, USA.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), The Origin of Satan (1995), Vintage Books, New York, USA.
Zechariah Sitchin, The Twelfth Planet (1976), The Stairway to Heaven (1980), The Wars of Gods and Men (1985), When Time Began (1993), Genesis Revisited (1990), Divine Encounters (1995), The Cosmic Code (1998), Avon Books, New York, USA.
William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History (1971), Harper Colophon Books, Islands in Time (1990), Bear & Co., Vermont, USA.


Writer and Artist URI DOWBENKO is the author of Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy and Hoodwinked: Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open. He is also the founder and publisher of www.ConspiracyPlanet.com, www.ConspiracyDigest.com, www.AlMartinRaw.com, and www.InsiderIntelligence.com, as well as the publisher of The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider by Al Martin. You can visit Uri at www.UriDowbenko.com and www.NewImprovedArt.com.
The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 7.
 

Final Conflict 2012? Towards the Engineering of World War III?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/final-conflict-2012-towards-the

Final Conflict 2012? Towards the Engineering of World War III?

nato3
In today’s increasingly interdependent and interactive world, every action has a myriad of causes, meanings, objectives and reactions; many visible, many invisible. Some, openly admitted and declared; others no one would dare confess.
When trying to come to grips with the many complex conflicts going on in the world and the dizzying pace at which they transpire, it would be a mistake to approach them in isolation. Only a “holistic” bird’s eye view gives us the picture of where we are and, more importantly, whereto we are being dragged.
21st century geopolitics cannot be understood applying a silo mentality. Syria’s civil war, Egypt’s “Arab Spring,” the destruction of Libya and Iraq, growing China, crippled Japan, the Eurozone crisis, America’s “missile shield” in Poland, Iran’s nuclear program, the coming Latin American “Spring…” Approached haphazardly, the picture we get is one of utter chaos. Approached applying the right model of interpretation, we begin to see how things interrelate, react and move in obedience to extremely powerful and dynamic – albeit, mostly invisible – forces silently driving today’s world.

Don’t (just) Read the Newspapers…

It’s good to be informed; it’s useless, however, if you cannot format that information into proper intelligible models. Too much unprocessed information will send your brain into overdrive. Thus, it’s good judgment to step away from all the noisy headlines, breaking news, terror alarms and show-biz news anchors. It’s like when you look at a Claude Monet impressionist painting: if you stand too close, you only see a maze of little coloured dots, but when you take a dozen steps back then the beauty of the work unfolds before your eyes.
In today’s information overdrive, we must join the dots correctly in spite of the global media’s insistence that we connect them all wrong. By now, most of us have realised that ours is “a planet at war”; not at war with some alien world (that would make things easier to understand!). Rather, we are a civilisation waging civil war with itself and against itself.
Reading the global press, you might think this is a war between sovereign nations, but it’s more complicated than that. This world war is waged by a hugely powerful, illegitimate, authoritarian but numerically tiny Global Elite, embedded deep inside the public and private power structures of just about every nation on Earth; notably, the United States of America. Like a cancerous malignant tumour, we can’t remove it outright; we can only hope to weaken it and arrest its growth before it metastasizes, killing mankind’s whole body politic. What the world needs now is some subtle sort of “virtual political chemotherapy” to remove and destroy this malignant tumour governing the world.
A key manifestation of this social and political illness lies in the extreme inequalities that exist in the USA, where the richest 1% of the population owns 35% of the country’s wealth, whilst the bottom 90% must do what they can with just 25% of national wealth. Worse still, the overwhelming majority of Congressmen, Senators, and top Executive Branch officers fall under the “top richest 1%” category.1 Understanding hidden intentions, long-term plans, hegemonic ambitions and the unconfessable plots necessary to achieve them is particularly important for US, UK, European and Australian citizens. After all, it’s their leaders who formally order their countries’ armed forces to ransack and destroy target countries. When voters in Argentina, Colombia, Nigeria or Malaysia choose the wrong leaders, they themselves are the sole victims of their bad electoral judgment. But when US, British or French voters in their folly put the wrong people in power in their countries, then hundreds of millions around the world suffer from their bombs, drones, invasions, interference and regime changes.

Report From Iron Mountain

An old book from the late sixties called Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace2 was allegedly authored by the Hudson Institute future-prying think-tank at the request of then US Secretary of Defense Robert S McNamara. Many say the book is a hoax. But it uncannily reflects the realities of the past half century.
The book includes the claim it was authored by a Special Study Group of fifteen men whose identities were to remain secret and that it was not intended to be made public. It concludes that war, or a credible substitute for war, is necessary if governments are to maintain power.
Report from Iron Mountain states that, “wars are not ’caused’ by international conflicts of interest. Proper logical sequence would make it more often accurate to say that war-making societies require – and thus bring about – such conflicts. The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social control.”
The report goes on to explain that, “the production of weapons of mass destruction has always been associated with economic ‘waste’.” Iron Mountain stresses that war is an important tool, because it creates artificial economic demand, a demand that does not have any political issues: “war, and only war, solves the problem of inventory.”
Not surprisingly, Iron Mountain concludes that “world peace” is neither desirable nor in the best interests of society, because war not only serves important economic functions but also plays key social and cultural roles. “The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for stable government; it supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority… War is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state.”
Thus, “war has been the principal evolutionary device for maintaining a satisfactory balance between gross human population and supplies available for its survival. It is unique to the human species.” So, in order to guarantee its own survival through its entrenchment inside the US, UK, European and other power structures, the Global Power Masters need war, the threat and rumours of war, just as fish need water, tigers need weak prey, and dogs need trees… and all for similar reasons! But the United States, Britain and their allies cannot have just any enemy. They need a credible, dangerous, “scary” enemy: first it was Germany, then Japan, the Soviet Union, the global “Red Menace”; today it’s “Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism” and, increasingly, China and Russia are going centre-stage on the Global Power Master’s geopolitical radar screen.

The Case of Russia

In recent times, Russia has variously played the role of Buffer, Brake and (now, hopefully) Wall against Western power aggression. When Russia acts like a Buffer, the world feels frustrated as the cases of Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Palestine show. In all these cases, Russia sounded adversarial, “confronting” the US/UK/EU/Israel in word but certainly not in deed. The Western powers always got their way, even at the UN.
In recent times, however, Russia is increasingly acting as a Brake on Western hegemonic ambitions, notably in Syria and Iran. In November 2011 and February 2012, Russia vetoed two US/UK/French sponsored UN Resolutions against Syria which, if passed, would have had the same devastating effect on Syria as UN Resolution 1973 had last year on Libya. Also, Russia has refused to support IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) pseudo-reports and sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. In addition, Russia has dispatched credible dissuasive military forces to counteract NATO’s militarisation of the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean.
Here we begin to wonder whether a gunfight might actually break out. This has had the sobering effect of forcing the US, UK, France and Israel to drag their feet in carrying out their threats of unilateral attacks on Iran and Syria. The downside is that this is cornering the US and its allies to resort to covert and criminal tactics involving engineered insurrection and civil war – aka “Arab Spring” (see below).
The key question is what needs to happen – what outrage must the Western powers commit – for Russia to start acting as a solid Wall, telling the Western powers in no uncertain terms, “This is as far as we’ll let you go; this is as much as we will tolerate!”
If and when Russia finally does that, will the Western powers stand down or will they bulldoze their way through the Russian Wall? This is the key question because it holds the answer of whether or not the near future will see the unleashing of World War III.
More importantly regarding the West’s decision-making process, all we say about Russia also holds for China which the Global Power Masters see as their real long-term enemy, because of its huge economic, political, demographic and military growth, and China’s increasing geopolitical control over the Pacific Basin and Indian Ocean.

The Case of China

As great air and naval powers, the US and UK well understand that China has many more options to control major oceans than does Russia, which is basically land and ice-locked. Add to this the fact that China holds over two trillion dollars in US-Dollar denominated government bonds, plus another trillion in Euros and then we begin to understand that China holds the financial valve that can trigger sudden collapse of US Dollar hegemony. We must move away from just thinking in economic/financial terms as most in the West do, concluding that China would never swamp international markets with one or two trillion in US Treasuries because that would destroy their worth and, in a boomerang process, have a negative economic impact on China itself whose reserves would thus evaporate. But China – the Empire of Ten Thousand Years – has a different thought process.
China bides its time when it plays chess with the American Adolescent Empire. China might even decide to play a geopolitical – not financial-economic – card, sacrificing all its Dollar reserves just to cripple the US behemoth’s monetary free-ride with which it pays for its gigantic military machine. Will China fire the first geopolitical shots on the global financial stage?
In 2010, Wikileaks reported that in 2009 then Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd discussed with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton how to deal with China, both voicing their fears over its rapid rise and multi-billion dollar store of US debt, prompting Hillary to ask, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?” Both agreed that the Western powers should try to “integrate China into the international community, while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.”
The Pentagon knows full well that its long-term enemy after 2020 is China. US News & World Report quotes Aaron L. Friedberg – a former close Dick Cheney advisor, PNAC3 and Council on Foreign Relations member, and Princeton University professor – as saying that the US should spare no effort to “keep the Chinese dragon in its lair” because “strength deters aggression,” and warning “this will cost money.”
Keeping China in mind helps to better understand US moves in other far-away places as direct or indirect stepping stones on the road to China. Take the Middle East, for instance, where geopolitical positioning and control over oil reserves by the US also acts as a beachhead into Russia’s Heartland and is geared at closing off oil sources to China – notably from Iran.
Wikileaks also exposed Kevin Rudd telling Hillary Clinton that China was “paranoid about Taiwan and Tibet,” adding that, “the West should promote an Asia-Pacific community intended to blunt Chinese influence.” Yet another example of Western double standards and misrepresentation because contrary to the US and Europeans, China has no global hegemonic ambitions. Rather, China seeks to continue being the dominant power in the Asia-Pacific basin steering traditional Western intrusion, colonialism and interference away.
The West’s worst nightmare-scenario – as noted by Samuel Huntington in his “Clash of Civilisations” theory in the 1990′s – is if China achieves two key geopolitical goals on which it is progressing slowly but surely:
Bonding closer ties, cooperation and agreement with Russia and India on the Asian continent, and
Negotiating closer cooperation and overcoming the distrust of the past with Japan. If Japan and China agree a common geopolitical strategy as France and Germany did after World War II (leading to the EU), then the whole Asia-Pacific region powerhouse with two-thirds of the world’s population would be hands-off for the West. Just imagine marrying Japanese cutting-edge technology with Chinese resources and manpower!

The Five Types of War…

When Report From Iron Mountain was written back in the sixties, its authors went so far as to study whether substitutes could be developed for war but – alas – they surmised that war had to be maintained, even improved in its effectiveness, .
War could, however, take on unexpected and more subtle characteristics with fabricated “pretexts” and justifications. The Report’s recommendations included:
*    A giant space-research program whose goal was largely impossible to achieve (a black hole, budget-wise and hence able to feed the economy);
*    Invent a new, non-human enemy: e.g. the potential threat of an extra-terrestrial civilisation
*    Create a new threat to mankind: for example, pollution
*    Implement new ways of limiting births: via adding drugs to food or water supply
*    Create fictitious alternate enemies  [the Global War on Terrorism]
Almost a half century later, some of these “recommendations” have been implemented (e.g., 1: a military and civilian space program), others are on-going or in the making (3, 4, and, if Hollywood’s PsyOps machine is any indication, number 2 is no doubt on the books), but 5 is the real keystone: “creating fictitious alternative enemies,” of which we’ve seen so many recently: Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Islamic Terrorism, and now: Iran and Syria.
The huge challenge mankind faces is that the US is increasingly resorting to covert, clandestine and technology-driven warfare over outright invasions, as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan looked really bad on the Evening News…
Thus, there are basically five types of war used by the Global Power Masters through their US/UK/NATO proxies, each characterised by increasing PsyWar and strategic/logistic complexity:
  1. Military Invasion – Clearly visible, very territorial and using overwhelming military force and economic strength. As the Colin Powell Doctrine from the 90′s recommends, “the US should only wage war against foreign enemies where American military power is so overwhelming that victory is guaranteed.” Can a more ruthless doctrine by a major power be imagined? Cowards bombing people half-way around the world using a joystick and screen inside some safe facility.
  2. Military Coup – Identifies dissident and treacherous elements inside the target country’s armed forces, egging them on to removing the local legal authorities and backing them with arms, money, “positive” global and local media coverage and diplomatic support. A favourite method used against Latin America in the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s, it’s still being used here and there, as Egypt shows.
  3. Financial Coup – Consists of first cornering a country into an unpayable “sovereign debt” morass with the powerful global mega-banks. Then, when the target country cannot service that debt, the banksters send in the IMF/World Bank leeches supported by global media and rating agencies. They trigger economic and social hardship, financial and monetary collapse leading to widespread social upheaval, thus “justifying regime change.” Throughout Latin America they perfected the “Sovereign Debt Model” that is now being wielded against Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland and – soon to come – the UK and US.
  4. Social Coup – Consists of financing political activists to bring about controlled regime change in the target country. Here the local US/UK/Israeli embassies support all sorts of dissident groups rendering them ample financing and media coverage, plus the logistics to generate constant street turmoil, which ends up grouping around some US-friendly political party or movement. In the 80′s, they used the so-called “human rights” movements in Latin America of which Argentina’s “Mothers of Plaza de Mayo” were a leading case.4
  5. Engineered Civil War – Consists of financing, arming and supporting militarised “opposition” groups against the target country’s on-going government. Normally, a key “national liberation” or some such “council” is set up, as in Libya, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, around which other militant groups, thugs and mafias can revolve. Here, CIA, MI6 and Mossad fronts play a key role and, in the cases of Libya and Syria, CIA offshoots like Al-Qaeda also play a fundamental “freedom-fighter” role. In the Middle East, they dubbed this the “Arab Spring,” presenting it to global public opinion as a spontaneous, genuine and legitimate fight for freedom by the local population against allegedly repressive and authoritarian regimes. Thus, local conflicts ready to explode are taken advantage of: regimes that have been in power for too long (as in Egypt and Libya); religious divides (Shiites against Sunnis). It comes as no surprise to learn that Bassma Kodmani, a “member of the executive bureau and head of foreign affairs” at the Syrian National Council, attended the Bilderberg Conference last June in Virginia, USA.5
Lately, this author has been warning of the rise of a “Latin American Spring” that takes advantage of grave social and political grievances throughout Latin America reflecting the huge divide that exists between the very rich and the very poor. Normally, the rich are very US-aligned and the poor have leaders that naïvely point to “Yankee corporate exploitation” as the sole culprit, missing really fundamental political and social factors. Signs of this coming “Latin Spring” can be seen in the recent Monsanto-orchestrated coup in Paraguay, the money-sloshing election fraud in Mexico, and increasing US militarisation in Colombia and elsewhere in the region. Often these types of war start at a lower level – say, a social coup – and are then escalated into full-fledged civil war insurrection mode if it suits Global Power Master objectives. Libya, Syria, Egypt are examples of this.

What, Why, When & Where

What then exactly does this all add up to? Basically, we can see that such chaos engineered by the Global Power Masters, although chaotic locally in specific countries and regions, really points to a “new world order” on a global scale.
The “chaos” part is deployed to destroy whole countries, especially those that have come this far preserving their national sovereignty in one way or another. That is a key characteristic shared by all attacked “rogue states” – Libya, Iraq, Serbia – prior to them being invaded. The same goes for on-going targets like Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and Ecuador. The more sovereign states can be weakened, the better for the one-worlders who, after all, basically want to drag us all towards a single global state under their total control.
All those Arab (and Latin) “springs,” invasions, no-fly zones, sanctions; all that “rogue state” rhetoric, are ground-clearing exercises geared at positioning the Western powers and their allies for the final assault on Asia which means war with Russia and China.
Of course, such a war would be a gross contradiction of the Powell Doctrine. China and Russia are very powerful, so messing around with them carries huge risks. If – God forbid! – it ever comes to war between China/Russia and the West that dragged in other powers like India, Pakistan and Brazil, hopefully it won’t happen any time soon. However, that’s what lies beyond the 2020 threshold. Its preliminaries are being played out today in different hotspots.
Why is all of this being done? Maybe imperial overreach and the grossly hyper-inflated dollar that saved the Money Power Bankers (don’t say that too loudly!) has cornered the Western Elites into an irreversible and unsustainable corner.
It’s like chess: What do you do when all possible moves only lead to checkmate? Well, basically, you have two “options on the table”: (1) admit defeat, or (2) kick the chessboard and… go for your gun.
Notes
1. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, 14 October 2011 acceptance speech of the Jury du Prix Tocqueville Prize, bestowed upon him by former French president Valery Giscard D’Estaing. Not surprisingly, both belong to the Rockefeller/Rothschild Trilateral Commission, a key “rich and powerful” decision-making body.
2. Originally published in 1967; re-published 1996 by the Free Press (Simon & Schuster).
3. PNAC – Project for a New American Century; the Neo-Con think-tank group from the late nineties that designed and planned the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, promoting Israel’s strategic interests in the Middle East, that served as a blueprint for US post-9/11 policies to this day.
4. Its leader Hebe Bonafini is known to have embezzled millions of dollars.
5. See official Bilderberg site www.bilderbergmeetings.org/participants2012.html . Characteristically Ms Kodmani’s nationality is described as “International.” She serves her international masters very well.
Adrian Salbuchi is a political analyst, author, speaker and radio talk-show host in Argentina. He has published several books on geopolitics and economics in Spanish, and recently published his first eBook in English: The Coming World Government: Tragedy & Hope? which can be ordered through his web site www.asalbuchi.com.ar, or details can be requested by E-mail to arsalbuchi@gmail.com. 
The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 134 (Sept-Oct 2012). <http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/latest-issue/new-dawn-134-september-october- 2012> Read this article with its illustrations and much more by downloading your copy of New Dawn 134 (PDF version).
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The JFK Assassination and the Lost Prospects for Peace

http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/tracy-j2.1.1.html

The JFK Assassination and the Lost Prospects for Peace

by James F. Tracy
Global Research
Report From Iron Mountain: On The Possibility and Desirability of Peace is a uniquely important document worthy of careful reconsideration a half-century after JFK’s passing. It points to not only the rationales behind the military industrial complex and its overarching influence, but perhaps more importantly how a very real discussion concerning the nation’s priorities proceeded under Kennedy’s watch – a window of possibility that was violently shut on November 22, 1963.[1]
Those who are old enough may likely offer their recollections of where they were at the time they received the news of President John F. Kennedy’s death. Then a bachelor, my father heard about the assassination while traveling home from a business trip to visit family. As he approached the front door his father was waiting at the threshold and, much like the rest of the nation, they proceeded to cry in each others’ arms.
Such recollections suggest the degree of potential Americans recognized in themselves that was confirmed in their young leader’s intelligence and charm. This sense of possibility extended to the political system more broadly, and it has since been effectively shattered and replaced by a perpetual effort to becloud and sideline attempts at a more concrete public understanding of past and present issues and events. Among these were the very crucial concerns at stake in the early 1960s that remain underlying motivations for US domestic and foreign policies to this day.
During the Kennedy Administration there was an unmistakable reconsideration of the relationship between the permanent wartime economy with the broader national and international political economy. This was evident not only in JFK’s move to scale back US involvement in Vietnam, evident in National Security Action Memorandum 263, but also in his attempt to dismantle the Central Intelligence Agency, and challenge the power of the Federal Reserve Bank by issuing genuine silver-backed currency. In very short order such actions were overturned by Lyndon Johnson and the US was plunged into a murderous and costly war. With Kennedy’s passing the world’s inhabitants may have lost any serious prospect of world peace.
“This Book Is Not to Be Misunderstood.”
Released in 1967, Report From Iron Mountain: On The Possibility and Desirability of Peace (hereafter Iron Mountain) was presented by its publisher Dial Press as the product of a secret government-sponsored Special Study Group. The initial account of the paper’s origins asserted that it was leaked by one of the study’s participants to New York-based freelance writer Leonard Lewin. According to this story, the group was commissioned with the task of examining whether and how a preeminently modern nation state such as the US might successfully transition to a peacetime economy.
Upon Dial’s assurance of the report’s authenticity Esquire magazine prepared a 28,000-word condensation of the book, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller eventually translated into fifteen languages. Yet controversy inevitably followed the work given its prescient observations and uncertain origins.
“One informed source confirmed that the ‘Special Study Group’,’ as the book called it, was set up by a top official in the Kennedy Administration,” US News and World Report observed shortly after the book’s release. “The source added that the report was drafted and eventually submitted to President Johnson, who was said to have ‘hit the roof’ – and then ordered that the report be bottled up for all time.”[2]
Iron Mountain’s contents were unsettling from the outset not because it was a joke, but rather because from an elite policy standpoint many of its observations were entirely logical, thus fostering the military industrial complex’s potentially unrestrained nature warned of in President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address.
Rumored to be a possible author or participant in the study, Kennedy’ ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in the Washington Post under his pseudonym Herschel McLandress, “As I would put my personal repute behind the authenticity of this document, so I would testify to the validity of its conclusions. My reservations relate only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public.”[3]
For several years Iron Mountain’s specific origin remained a mystery until Lewin claimed authorship in 1972, stating that the report was indeed a colossal hoax conceived by himself and New York Times journalist (eventually publisher of The Nation) Victor Navasky to cultivate discussion of war and peace in an incendiary way.[4]
Yet it was not until the early 1990s when the book became an underground phenomenon among US patriot and constitutionalist groups– who deemed it as an authentic government document and thus in the public domain–that it raised the ire of a liberal intelligentsia that sought to further downplay its significance through sensationalistic innuendo and even legal action.
“The nutties out there are told by their leaders – who claim to have special knowledge – that this is a real government document because it fits how they view the Government: wicked,” Lewin told the New York Times in 1996 as Simon and Schuster threatened to prosecute political activists distributing digital copies of the book.[5] “It’s like trying to get rid of mildew on your shower stall,” career conspiraphobe Chip Berlet exclaimed.[6] “Paranoid conspiracy theorists now believe that the quashing of the Iron Mountain report is itself a real government conspiracy because they are paranoid and conspiracy theorists [sic]” Navasky declared.[7]
The truth lies somewhere in between, and the controversy over whether Lewin wrote Iron Mountain is far less important than how the manuscript’s observations were especially characteristic of the ideas and possibilities being entertained by policy elites in the early 1960s. In fact, the essence and significance of Iron Mountain transcends political persuasions because most all of it rings true and is all but confirmed in contemporary issues and events.
“This book is not to be misunderstood,” Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty asserts.
It is a novel; but it’s content is so close to the reality of those years that many readers insist that the “report” must be true. I have discussed this fully with the author. He assures me that the book is a novel and that he intended it to read that way in order to emphasize its serious content.[8]
Beginning in 1961 Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tapped academe and the business sector to bring in a new crop of strategists and policy makers to the Pentagon, many of whom were not versed in Grand Strategy and thus open to examination of the perpetual warfare state and its political justifications. “We would take part in luncheon discussions that sounded much like Lewin’s writing,” Prouty recalls. “That is what was said in the halls of the Pentagon. What Lewin wrote is true to life, and we would all do well to heed his words.” With this in mind it seems safe to conclude that Iron Mountain was in all probability one or more government-sponsored think tank reports skillfully distilled by Lewin into a more accessible form.[9]
Engineering Past, Present and Future
Report from Iron Mountain is in many ways a design for the world as it exists today, with endless war – once against communism and now “terrorism” – as the defining basis for human existence under state guidance and control. As author G. Edward Griffin puts it, the book “is an accurate summary of the plan that has already created our present. It is now shaping our future.”[10]
Like the militarized police state depicted in Orwell’s 1984, the overarching theme of Iron Mountain is that in an era when nuclear weapons threaten to eliminate all life on earth, military ventures must take the form of protracted and uncertain conflicts that expend resources, justify the constant state of military readiness and, most importantly, make the nation state’s system of governance appear necessary and legitimate to its subjects.
“The war system makes the stable government of society possible,” Lewin writes. “It does this essentially by providing an external necessity for a society to accept political rule. In so doing it establishes the basis for nationhood and the authority of government to control its constituents.”[11]
Iron Mountain concludes that in addition to sustaining the political realm, war and militarization comprise a bulwark for virtually every facet of society – economic, sociological, ecological, cultural and scientific.[12] Not surprisingly, today the “[u]ncritical support of all things martial,” one observer notes, “is quickly becoming the new normal for our youth.”[13]
Indeed, war is so essential to the overall order of things that new “enemies” must be conceived to provide continued justification for the warfare state. As the “War on Poverty” and the especially disastrous “War on Drugs” helped to destroy and criminalize African American families and their communities, Iron Mountain suggests how another broader plan was being conceived to manufacture all encompassing nonmilitary crises from which the state could be presented as savior and proponent of peace, thereby positioning itself to reshape the societal and geopolitical designs and ways of life. “[A]n effective political substitute would require “alternate enemies,” some of which might seem equally farfetched in the context of the current war system,” the document observes, anticipating the development of the present era’s pseudo-environmentalism that demarcates a new enemy with which to wage war – humanity itself.
It may be, for instance, that gross pollution of the environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principal apparent threat to the survival of the species. Poisoning of the air, and of the principal sources of food and water supply, is already well advanced, and at first glance would seem promising in this respect; it constitutes a threat that can be dealt with only through social organization and political power.[14]
Close to half a century later the intentional pollution of the food and water supplies by genetically modified organisms and fluoridation, widescale programs of geoengineering and weather modification that poison the air, poorly designed and ramshackle nuclear power plants, and the especially ubiquitous and stealth pollution of electromagnetic devices constitute a tremendous impact on the environment and all living things.
And as they take their toll lavishly funded private organizations carry out elaborate and coordinated public relations campaigns to convince the population that carbon – of which all living things are constituted – is the chief cause of environmental degradation and catastrophe. In a thoroughly Orwellian turn the new enemy is humankind, while scientific and bureaucratic elites largely responsible for actual environmental destruction escape serious scrutiny or punishment.
The Conspiratorial Style of the Global Elite
Iron Mountain is a “hoax” or “satire” for those who would lead us to believe that historical phenomena especially of a political nature are a product of happenstance. Sometimes they may be. But honest historical accounts suggest how often those with exclusive means and interests act to shape vital matters of the day. Reasoning to the contrary has as its corollary two sets of assumptions.
The first suggests that overwhelmingly powerful institutions such as the US State Department and Pentagon, the National Security Council, leading think tanks, central bankers, transnational corporations and the forces behind them act in transparent and almost wholly uncoordinated fashion with the same motivations as the neighborhood paperboy – the pursuit of profit.
Yet as C. Wright Mills revealed over a half century ago, and as David Rothkopf has more recently argued, the motivations of the already wealthy “superclass” in fact revolve around increasing access to relationships within the corridors of institutional power in an effort to minimize unpredictability and exert greater control over present and future events.[15] In fact, in the era of “too big to fail” and carbon emission taxes John D. Rockefeller’s assertion that “competition is a sin” takes on renewed significance.
A second assumption is that such entities are incapable of producing, overseeing, and carrying out long-range strategies to engineer the world’s social and physical relations and ecosystem. A look at policy proposals and plans in the years following Iron Mountain from entities such as The Club of Rome, the Project for a New American Century, or the multiple concerted funding efforts and campaigns supported by major philanthropic foundations also calls such a notion into serious question. While there may be disagreements within influential circles over, say, whether covert destabilization or outright aggression to prompt regime change in Middle Eastern countries, or the techniques for keeping track of the world’s inhabitants, regime change and surveillance comprise broader plans and are not open to debate.
The dismissal of such a perspective as “conspiracy theorizing” should be broadly understood as an exercise in drawing public and intellectual attention away from the tremendous multifaceted power wielded by today’s ruling elite – those whose influence and interests transcend national borders and almost without exception defy the common good.
Iron Mountain provides an overview into the motives and rationales of those who pull the strings of our elected leaders, enlisting our faith in the illusion of popular sovereignty – a faith by which the public has been systematically mislead and abused since November 22, 1963.
Notes
1. Mainstream news media and government still insist on the validity of the Warren Commission’s Report. Yet between 75 and 90 % of Americans do not believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Gregory Korte, “Conspiracy Theories over JFK’s Assassination Thrive,” USA Today, September 26, 2010. See also Adrian Salbuchi’s excellent discussion of Report from Iron Mountain, “Final Conflict 2012? Toward the Engineering of World War III,” GlobalResearch, October 3, 2012.
2. “Hoax or Horror? A Book That Shook the White House,” US News and World Report, November 20, 1967. In Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On The Possibility and Desirability of Peace, New York: Free Press, 1996, 138.
3. Herschel McLandress, “News of War and Peace You’re Not Ready For,” November 26, 1967. In Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On The Possibility and Desirability of Peace, New York: Free Press, 1996, 132-133.
4. Doreen Carvajal, “Onetime Political Satire Becomes a Right-Wing Rage and a Hot Internet Item,” New York Times, July 1, 1996.
5. Carvajal, “Onetime Political Satire.”
6. Carvajal, “Onetime Political Satire.”
7. Victor Navasky, “Introduction,” in Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain On The Possibility and Desirability of Peace, New York: Free Press, 1996, xv.
8. L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, New York: Birch Lane Press/Carol Publishing, 1992, 356f. Prouty served in the top levels of the Pentagon during the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, acting as a liaison between the military and intelligence communities, and his correspondence with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison were the basis for the character “X” in Oliver Stone’s early 1990s blockbuster film JFK. For more information visit http://prouty.org/
9. Prouty, 219.
10. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, 5th Edition, Westlake Village CA: 2010, 576.
11. Lewin, 79.
12. Aaron R. O’Connell, “The Permanent Militarization of America,” New York Times, November 12, 2012.
13. Lewin, 94-95.
14. Lewin, 81.
15. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, New York: Farrar, Strous and Giroux, 2009.
Reprinted from Global Research.
November 26, 2012
James F. Tracy is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University.

Copyright © 2012 James F. Tracy

The Origins, Meanings, Rituals, and Values of The Magic Flute

http://www.conspirazzi.c


The Origins, Meanings, Rituals, and Values of The Magic Flute


(c) by Stephen W. Seifert
Executive Director
Opera Colorado
Introduction
The Magic Flute is a fairy tale and a philosophy. It is an adventure-rescue story and a political commentary. It is an entertainment and an invitation to enlightenment. It is, simply stated, and endlessly fascinating work of art.
The Magic Flute involves the audience at a conceptual and intellectual level, through the teachings of Sarastro and the trials of Tamino, but also at an emotional level through the love pangs and near suicides of Papageno and Papagena.
The Magic Flute is ecumenical and classless. All those who aspire to the brotherhood are welcome. Deep intellectual and conceptual truths are available to the most common of us if we are prepared to apply our patience, courage, and faith.
The Magic Flute is a work inclusive of all the major musical styles of opera in Mozart’s day. Effortlessly Mozart combines the coloratura of opera seria in the Queen of the Night, the simple elegance of opera buffa in Pamina and Tamino, simple German song in Papageno, the spiritual and oracular declamations of Sarastro, and even throws in an old German chorale for good measure.
The Magic Flute has been described by Jeremy Noble as an opera with its head high in the clouds and its feet planted firmly on the earth. A “pop” entertainment which becomes sublime. It was an opera designed to entertain the decidedly unroyal audiences in its first run theater, but it also had a profound moral purpose to improve, to inspire, and to enlighten.
As a member of an audience today, you may treat the opera as a charming and tasty entertainment, just as Papageno accepts his simple pleasures – a good meal, lots to drink, and a loving wife. Neither he nor you will be any the worse for that approach. Or, as you choose, you may find in The Magic Flute the message that things are not as simple as they may seem, that an internal struggle is at work within us, and that rituals, faith, love, the struggle for truth, wisdom, enlightenment, the support of equally committed friends, and overcoming the fear of death, will enable us to prevail in that internal struggle. Visiting Mozart’s enlightened world through his work of the Age of Enlightenment, we in the audience today are invited to be free actors able to create our own destinies just as the characters in the opera are able to influence their own lives.
The Magic Flute may itself be thought of as a musical ritual in which the magical effects of music, storytelling, and stage craft link the creative imaginations of all those present in the audience with the world of the sacred or divine. Just as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is a musical journey, or ritual, that invites listeners to join the joyful brotherhood of mankind, The Magic Flute is a musical ritual whose passage by the audience may change them.
Multiple Interpretations
Almost no other opera, at least no other opera outside the multi-layered works of Richard Wagner, is open to quite so many interpretations as is The Magic Flute. The Italian author Italo Calvino used the term “open work” to describe those works of art that are susceptible to multiple valid meanings, multiple meaningful experiences. In that sense, The Magic Flute is wide open.
The author Andrew Porter said of Flute: “The libretto and the score contain between them more ‘information’ than any single production of the opera can hope to compass. That is why we can see it again and again, making ever-new discoveries. Each performance of the piece offers but a partial realization of myriad possibilities.” Or, as Stanley Sadie has said: “The Magic Flute is an entertaining, pantomime-like tale about a prince, attended by a comic birdcatcher, who is ultimately united in an ideal marriage with a damsel formerly in distress. It is also a serious allegory about the nature of Man and his search for harmony within himself.”
Among the many ways in which The Magic Flute can be experienced and has been interpreted are these:
The music itself
The score contains a wonderful mixture of popular tunes – lied – and opera seria arias, of memorable whistleable or sing-along type songs and the most imposing coloratura challenges. The evening in the opera house delivers a masterful mixture of burlesque and solemnity, of bel canto and opera buffa.
Enlightenment Philosophy
The Magic Flute is sometimes argued to be an allegory for social justice and freedom of belief. The ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment philosophers and hopes of the French Revolution take theatrical form.
Political diatribe of the day
Some argue that the characters in The Magic Flute are storybook representations of important public figures of Mozart’s day. For instance, under this theory, the Queen of the Night is Maria Theresa, who represented conservatism, repression, and ambition for absolute power. Sarastro is Ignaz von Born, the leader of the most prominent Masonic Lodge in Vienna. Monostatos is the Catholic church, or perhaps more specifically the black-robed priests of the Jesuit Order. Tamino is a role model for Leopold II, who had recently ascended the throne as Emperor of Austria, or as a role model for Francis II, Leopold’s son, who was even more reactionary than Leopold and was thought by the progressives to need even more “education.” Under this view of the opera, if our leaders, like Tamino, are filled with virtue and righteousness, then earth will be like heaven.
Commentary on the French Revolution
A Jacobin pamphlet published in London in 1795 claims Flute as a commentary on the French Revolution – The Queen of the Night is, according to this approach, the ancien regime, Pamina is freedom, Sarastro is the wisdom of better legislation, the priests are the National Assembly, the Three Boys are intelligence, justice, and patriotism, which guide the people, who is represented by Tamino.
Anti-Jacobins, on the other hand, claimed it for their own – Sarastro to them represented anti-revolutionary sentiment and those initiated into his rituals are those dedicated the preserving the old order.
Masonic proselytizing
Clearly The Magic Flute is brimming over with symbolism and hidden meanings. The origins of these symbols and meanings are the secret rituals and ceremonies of Freemasonry. Mozart and Schikaneder were members of a Masonic Lodge in Vienna. Thus, the journey that Tamino takes in the opera is thought to be representative of the initiation that a new Mason would have undergone in Vienna in the 1790s.
Although the origins of Freemasonry predate the Age of Enlightenment, the fundamental concepts extolled in both could co-exist comfortably. Truth is to be found in science and reason. Nothing is quite as it seems, and certainly not as simple as it seems on first blush – one must dig deeper to be enlightened. So, in the story, Tamino has to learn through hard work, patience, and the application of reason about the Queen of the Night’s true nature, and about Sarastro’s.
Fairy tale magic story
The Magic Flute has been taken on one level as a charming fairy tale or magic story. Children (of all ages), in this view, are the best recipients of this charm. To the extent there is something more than adventure in the story, it is the kind of teaching of straightforward morals about truth and integrity that one might find in Grimm. From this point of view, it is completely understandable that someone such as Maurice Sendak should have designed sets and costumes for the show.
Personal psychological interpretation or allegory
We might also acknowledge that The Magic Flute is about a person becoming a “complete” person. The great film version of this opera by the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman treats the story in this way as an internal or psychological exploration about a journey and personal growth. Each of us is a complex character made up of multiple elements, including those which the various characters in the opera represent — the good and the bad; simple and noble; hedonistic and aspirational; and so on.
Jungian interpretation
Yet another psychological approach sometimes taken to understanding The Magic Flute is to apply the theories of Carl Jung. In this approach, we find Jung’s “archetypal figures” – Sarastro is the Wise Old Father figure; the Queen of the Night is the Destructive and Formidable Mother. Confrontations between animus and anima are identified, and so on.
A Living Depiction of the 22 Major Aracana Cards of the Tarot Deck
Tree of Life
One author claims to have found another key to understanding The Magic Flute. Mozart and Schikaneder both played cards. The deck they used was a version of the mediaeval tarot deck. (The deck of 52 cards we use today descends from the same source.)
The overture and 21 following musical numbers make a total of 22 different musical depictions. The mediaeval tarot deck contained 22 Major Arcana cards, reflecting the physical and spiritual forces at work on humans and culminating in the card called “The World,” which is a balance of all necessary elements, light and dark.
In this view, The Magic Flute puts on the stage living versions of each of these physical and spiritual forces, ending with the last musical number in which order and balance are restored to the realms of Sarastro and the Queen of the Night.
The number of scenes actually exceeds the number of musical sections. In addition, the last numbered musical section prodigiously includes Pamina’s attempted suicide, the passage of the final tests by Tamino and Pamina, Papageno’s attempted suicide, his discovery of Papagena, the final assault on the kingdom of the sun by the forces of the Queen of the Night, and the final chorus hailing beauty and wisdom.
In other words, it might be argued that for this Tarot theory to have any currency one must wink at a few items. But keep in mind that the composer and librettist created the numbering of the musical sections and that the last lengthy musical section does begin with the Three Boys announcing what will be the result of all the ensuing action, thus tying all of it to the culminating Tarot card “The World”:
Soon, heralding the morning, the sun will shine forth on its golden path. Soon superstition will vanish, soon the wise man will triumph. Oh, sweet repose, descend, return to the hearts of men; then earth will be a realm of heaven, and mortals will be like gods.
A love story
The tales told in this opera certainly also amount to a love story of sorts. It’s a bit of a conceptual courtship, but it ends with the union of a man and a woman. It’s a love story about transcending sensual love in order to attain spiritual love.
Part of the Mozartian Canon of operas
Others take a step back and look at The Magic Flute as but one work among many in Mozart’s most well-considered operas. From their point of view, the opera should not be analyzed by itself, but rather in relationship to all the other works, and to all the things that Mozart was trying to tell us through his art. The same kind of analysis is often done with Wagner’s 10 canonical operas, and similarly with Verdi’s principal operas.
According to this theory, Mozart was always wrestling with certain issues, and he used different operas to present different arguments or points of view with respect to those issues. For instance, the role of women. According to these authors, if one wants to understand how Mozart viewed the role of women, one would be ill-advised to stop with either the fickle and susceptible ladies of Cosç or the high-minded and faithful Pamina in Flute. One must consider both those shows to see that Mozart was working out his various feelings.
Star Wars
For an interpretation, or more accurately a comparison, that is right up to date, consider the similarities between Flute and George Lucas’ Star Wars series. Luke Skywalker is Tamino, Princess Leia is Pamina, Darth Vader is the Queen of the Night, Obi Wan Kenobi is Sarastro, C3PO is Papageno. The light saber is like the flute. It’s a story of self-discovery, a story of the internal struggle between good and evil.
History of the Composition of The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute was written in the last year of Mozart’s life. He had been in Vienna for 10 years, but it was a tough town, and Mozart was considered something of a novelty the effect of which had worn off over those years. Younger and newer lights were taking up some of the attention Mozart still deserved. He was teaching and doing commission work to pay the bills, and even that wasn’t generating enough income. He often had to beg friends to make loans to him.
Emanuel Schikaneder proposed the Flute idea to him. Schikaneder was five years older than Mozart, and he outlived him by more than 20 years. He had been connected with a traveling theater company for several years appearing in Southern Germany and Austria in comedies, tragedies and singspiele. He was a serious and a comic actor and also wrote plays, with at least 99 works believed to be his, some of which were simply for the spoken theater and some of which were librettos for musical works. As an actor he was particularly famous as Hamlet and King Lear.
In 1789 Schikaneder opened a theater called the Theater auf der Wieden, which specialized in works in the Viennese comic tradition. One of the actors in that theater was Carl Ludwig Giesecke, who, soon after Schikaneder’s death, claimed to have been the author of Flute. While he was not likely the sole author, he may well have had some influence on the libretto. (He, too, was a Freemason.)
We don’t know exactly when Mozart started composing, but it’s clear that he was working on the opera in June 1791. By July 2 Act 1 was finished. Soon he received two famous commissions, which he needed for the money. One was for an opera in honor of the coronation of Leopold II, Austrian emperor, as King of Bohemia, to be performed in early September in Prague. It was to be La Clemenza di Tito. He was also approached by Count Walsegg-Stupach to write a requiem for his recently deceased wife, secretly so that the Count could claim to have written it himself. Tradition has it that Mozart took this commission as a premonition of his own death and that the requiem he was writing was really for himself.
Thus, in the last months of his life Mozart wrote three major works, each of which was in a genre he had not worked in for a long time – opera seria (La Clemenza di Tito); singspiel (Flute); and sacred music (Requiem). Two were commissions. The Flute was his own project.
Mozart finished most of The Magic Flute before beginning work on Clemenza and the Requiem. He still had not finished the overture, the Priests’ march that opens Act 2, and possibly three other numbers in Act 2. With that much done, however, Mozart left Vienna in August for Prague where Clemenza was performed on September 6. In mid-September Mozart returned to Vienna and finished Flute on September 28, two days before its premiere on the 30th of September 1791. The opera was not an immediate hit, but over the course of a few weeks it gained in popularity.
Mozart directed the first and second performances. Flute had 20 performances in October and long remained in Schikaneder’s repertoire. Mozart saw several performances in October and reported to his wifein a letter that the opera was becoming more and more esteemed. He told her that he was particularly pleased with its growing “silent approval.” At one performance he played the glockenspiel while accompanying his friend Schikaneder and intentionally mis-timed the bells as a joke on his friend. He also took his mother-in- law to a performance and his son Karl to another. Salieri, the chief court composer, attended often, always applauding and cheering enthusiastically.
Within 10 weeks after the premiere of Flute, Mozart died on December 5, 1791. Flute remained one of the most popular operas in the German repertory through the end of the century. Goethe thought it a work of high art and even planned a sequel. Its popularity in France and England was not as great. Often it was performed in Italian translation as Il flauto magico. It had a famous revival in 1911 in England, in English, and has remained firmly in the repertoire of all Western nations since.
Freemasonry and The Magic Flute
In understanding Flute it’s important to understand something about Freemasonry. Mozart became a Mason in 1784 – Schikaneder and Giesecke were also Freemasons. The Masons of Vienna saw themselves as a philosophical group persecuted by the Hapsburgs and the Catholic Church. Indeed, the Pope had issued two edicts decrying Freemasonry.
Certain elements of The Magic Flute find Egyptian heritage. The gods Isis and Osiris are invoked. Egyptian images and architecture appear. This is a magic land to which Masonry traced some of its origins. Likewise, ancient Persia was viewed as a source of Freemasonry. The character Sarastro’s name is certainly derived from the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster.
Entire books have been written about the Masonic symbolism contained in The Magic Flute. Here are but a handful of examples. The number three held significance in Masonry. Thus, we find three strongly emphasized chords in the overture, three Ladies in the service of the Queen of the Night, three Boys who lead Tamino and Papageno on their quest, in the original cast three slaves and three priests, three temples, three knocks on the doors of the temple, and three flats in the key signature of E flat, the home key of the opera. Other numbers are aslo significant in Masonry. For instance, the 77 strokes of the bastinado which Monostatos is to receive at the end of the First Act hearken to the idea that in Masonry the number 7 represents wisdom. The serpent which chases Tamino, the padlock used to punish Papageno for telling a lie, the portrait of Pamina, the flute and bells, the gender of some of the characters, the references to air, earth, fire, and water, the allusions to darkness and the sun, the colors of certain costumes – all these things can be tied to Masonic iconography.
But the opera was not written for a closed circle of the initiated. It was written for a suburban theater, a popular, not a highbrow theater. One of the amazing things about Flute is that it works on so many different levels, and may either be enjoyed simply for its music and charm, or may be debated and discussed at length as a meaningful treatise on human existence. Or both.
Sources and Possible Sources of the Libretto
Scholars have identified nearly as many sources and possible sources for the stories used in The Magic Flute as interpretations of those stories. Among those literary forefathers are these:
Sethos: Histoire ou vie tire des monuments, anecdotes de l’ancien Egypte
A novel by the Abbe Jean Terrason published in Paris in 1731 and translated into German in 1732 and again in 1778. Three ladies are found in Sethos; Tamino assumes characteristics of Sethos; Darkness yields to Light in Sethos. Terrason’s use of the sun as a symbol of enlightenment and underground caverns as symbols of the shadowy pathways of life were quickly accepted into 18th century Freemasonry, as was the concept of science as a liberal influence.
Dschinnistan
A collection of fairy tales assembled by Chritoph Martin Wieland, one of which was Lulu, oder Die Zauberflîte, by A.J. Liebeskind, which appeared in the third volume of the collection in the mid-1780′s. Three boys are found in Dschinnistan. The Queen of the Night assumes characteristics of Queen Daluca. The boy gets the girl – in Lulu a prince, Lulu, is sent by a good fairy to rescue her daughter, Sidi, from the clutches of an evil magician, Dilsengbuin, and is equipped with a magic flute for the purpose. He succeeds after various adventures, and these include a scene in which he enchants animals of the forest with his flute.
Other Plays and Operas
Osiris, a Masonic opera by Naumann
Oberon Kînig der Elfen, an opera by Wranitzky
Sonnenfest der Brahminen a play by Hensler
Il re cervo a play by Gozzi
Il purgatorio di San Patricio, a play by Calder¢n
Kînig Thamos, a play by Gebler
Kaspar der Fagottist, a play by Muller
The Orpheus Myth
Orpheus was viewed by NeoPlatonic philosophers as one of the old sources of Plato’s ideas. Along with Orpheus in this group were the Persian Zoroaster and the Egyptian Trismegistus (the Egyptian god Thoth, the legendary author of works on alchemy, astrology, and magic.) In Flute, Tamino represents Orpheus, Sarastro is Zoroaster, and Pamina’s father, who dies before the opera begins, but who created the magic flute, is the Egyptian.
The Persephone Myth
The daughter of Demeter and Zeus was abducted by Hades but rescued by her mother and thereafter spent six months of the year on earth and six months in the underworld.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were sacred rituals that were the most important of ancient Greek religious festivals. The people of the town of Eleusis observed the mysteries, which were later adopted by the city of Athens as an official festival. The ceremonies included a priest’s address to the mystoe, the initiation candidates, a cleansing in the sea, a sacrificial rite, and a procession from Athens to Eleusis, where the initiation occurred in secret ceremonies. The tale of the search of Demeter through the underworld for her daughter Persephone was probably reenacted at the initiation. It was related to the search for immortality and happiness in a future world, which was the presumed purpose of the ceremonies. The Eleusinian mysteries were probably celebrated until the 4th century AD, when Eleusis was destroyed.
The Aurora
Aurora
This book, written in 1612 by Jakob Bohme, deals with integrating Hermetic elements into the Christian tradition. Bohme had a large influence on the intelligentsia of the 18th century. Bohme believed that man is naturally a part of three different universes, each of them divine in origin. There are the outer physical world and two inner worlds, both eternal. One of those inner worlds is dark, which should remain dormant, and the other is light, the world in which we are unified with the kingdom of Christ. The dark world manifests itself when not dormant in a desire to set ourselves above and beyond our natural positions in the divine order.
Bohme described the evil forces working within us against the Christ-like forces as a fierce lion (“grimmige Lowe,” which is the same phrase used to describe the lion in the original version of Flute – the version calls for a lion to chase Tamino in the opening scene. Apparently the reason for changing the lion to a serpent was that 18 days before the premiere, Emperor Leopold decreed that a satire called “Biography of the Lion RRRR,” the title of which was a play on the emperor’s own name, be suppressed. Perhaps Mozart and Schikaneder felt that to start an opera by killing a lion on stage would be too close a call.). Bohme describes Christ as being like a strong tree, and Pamina explains in Flute that her fathercarved the magic flute from a thousand year old oak tree in a magic hour. Is it possible, therefore, that Mozart and Schikaneder knew some Bohme and their images were meant to be representations of Christian philosophy (albeit far removed from the organized Catholic church)?
Bohme also proposed that the sun was at the center of the universe and the outer limits of the universe were composed of the Wheel of the Zodiac, which, like a clock measuring time, controlled the temporal aspects of man’s existence. Could it be, thus, that the Queen of the Night is that Zodiac, that is not evil in itself, but simply represents the darker impulses that need to be controlled by spiritual guidance and enlightenment?
Bohme also dealt with the four elements – pride or sanguinity (air), covetousness or melancholy (earth), envy or phlegmatic behavior (water), anger or choleric behavior (fire).
Bohme also talked about the original state of man before The Fall. Adam contained within himself the true divine image (“Bildnis”) and was both male and female. The outer fiery male was characterized by beauty (as the Three Ladies describe when talking about Tamino), and the inner watery female was the characterization of wisdom. This helps explain the arias Dies Bildnis, Mann und Weib, and Bei MÑnnern, and finally the last words of the opera have beauty and wisdom crowned – “die Schînheit und Weisheit mit ewiger Kron’.”
Bohme postulated that when the outer male part disturbed the divine image he provoked the withdrawal of the inner female partner, which could only be satisfied by the creation of a separate physical female, i.e. Eve, and the relation between male and female became purely physical, instinctive, and animal. The spiritual path involves the rediscovery of the female intuitive wisdom within us, which is the path back to our true spiritual home. Tamino and Pamina are the embodiments of those two separated paths, which are reunited in the course of the opera.
The Tarot Deck
The opening sung musical piece is numbered “2″ in the original score, thus conferring on the overture the number “1″ – very unusual – but which makes the total of musical sections in the opera 22. Is there Masonic significance in that number? If not Masonic, perhaps another. The traditional tarot deck consists of 78 cards, broken into 56 Minor Arcana and 22 Major Arcana. The 22 Major Arcana are supposed to represent the physical and spiritual forces of life – illness, death, storms, strength, power, love, and religion. (The 56 other cards are divided into four suits – spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds. Each suit contains ten numbered cards, ace through ten, and four court cards, King, Queen, Knight, and Page. Today’s ordinary deck of playing cards is a direct descendant of 15th century tarot packs, with the Page eliminated and the Joker or Fool from the Major Arcana thrown in.)
The first published study of tarot appeared in a 9 volume work by Court de Gebelin called Le Monde primitif, which tried to show a relationship among the different religious and cultural traditions of the world. One of the original subscribers to the 9 volume work was Thomas von Trattner, in whose house Mozart lived in the months before he became a Freemason in 1784. The 8th volume, issued in 1781, contained a study on tarot cards in which he attempts to prove that the tarot are actually the missing Book of Thoth, the last surviving authentic record of the ancient Egyptian mysteries. (The Egyptian god Thoth was the legendary author of works on alchemy, astrology, and magic.) The Egyptian connection with Flute is clear, and the opera was even known in Mozart’s time by the subtitle “The Egyptian Mysteries.”
Mozart and Schikaneder would have been familiar with tarot as a card game. The so-called “Marseilles” pack of tarot cards was in use at the time. McNair believes that:
Card X, The Wheel of Fortune, is represented by the overture.
Wheel of Fortune Tarot
Card XI, Force, contains a lion whose jaws are being held open by a lady, and thus is the first acted scene of the opera, in the original setting.
Strength Tarot
Papageno’s first aria might be represented by the unnumbered card The Fool, which is the origin of the Joker in our modern decks of cards.
The Fool Tarot
Der Hîlle Rache is Card II, the High Priestess.
The High Priestess Tarot
The Queen of the Night’s first aria is the Empress, Card III.
The Empresss Tarot
Card VI, the Lover, is Papageno’s Ein MÑdchen.
The Lovers Tarot
Card XXI, The World, shows a naked woman in the center surrounded by the four Evangelical creatures, which are signs of the four elements, i.e. the lion (for Leo, Sarastro), the angel or man (for Aquarius, Tamino), the eagle (a more advanced symbol for Scorpio, Papageno), and the bull (for Taurus, Monostatos) – this demonstrates the balance of all elements which is the culmination of all earlier cards.
The World Tarot
Did the Plot Change from its Original Plan?
It has been suggested that the opera was to be a telling of the Lulu fairy tale story, and that the plot was changed after Mozart and Schikaneder saw another singspiel, at the Leopoldstadt Theatre, called Die Zauberzither, oder Kaspar der Fagottist, which had a similar plot. Not wanting to be accused of plagiarizing, it is suggested that they changed the story mid-stream.
According to this theory, the character Sarastro would have been truly evil and Tamino would have set out on a conventional rescue to reclaim the kidnapped daughter of the Queen of the Night. Instead, when Mozart and Schikaneder discovered that they had been scooped, they decided not to rewrite what they had already done, but rather to insert a lengthy conversation between Tamino and the First Priest at the gate of Sarastro’s temple in which the First Priest informs Tamino that Sarastro is really not evil, but that he cannot yet reveal why Pamina has been abducted.
If Mozart and Schikaneder were worried, however, about being accused of plagiarizing a story called Der Zauberzither, why then did they not change the title of their opera? Is the story a mish-mash done over in the middle and patched together? Or should we agree with Otto Jahn who said: “It would be superfluous to criticize this libretto. The small interest of the plot, the contradictions and improbabilities in the characters and in the situations, are clear to all; the dialogue is trivial, and the versified portions are wretched doggerel, incapable of improvement by mere alteration.”
Alternatively, is there a better design to this work of art than Mozart and Schikaneder are given credit for by the likes of Jahn? Should we assume that Mozart, usually tagged with epithets of perfection and divinity, would create or participate in something so shoddy as this assumed patchwork job?
Look at the behavior of the Three Ladies in the beginning. Although they are supposed to be thought of as servants of the “good” Queen of the Night under the theory that the story underwent a large change, their motives seem suspect, and their fawning over Tamino, purely a response to his physical beauty, seems to have the quality of a morality play, like much of the rest of the story.
On the other hand, if one subscribes to the notion that no change had to be inserted mid-way through composition, one nevertheless must admit that the Queen of the Night, though an antagonist to Sarastro, is not fully “evil.” After all, her agents save Tamino’s life, show him Pamina’s portrait, and inspire in him a love for her. They also give him the magic flute, without which he will not survive the trials later in the opera.
Perhaps we should not think of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro so much as two extremes in a world which must be either exclusively good or exclusively evil, but rather we should see them more through the eyes of Eastern philosophies in which two halves must exist in order to have a balanced whole. The Day cannot exist without the Night. In other words, the Queen, the Three Ladies, and Monostatos are not simply allegories of evil which we should strive to expunge, but rather are allegories for parts of our characters which need to be accepted, acknowledged, and managed through the hard work of reason and love.
Final Thoughts on the Value and Values of The Magic Flute
There are, after all is said and done, only a few good, enduring stories. They have been told in Greek and Roman myths, in the Bible, in the Upanishads, and around campfires…. The Magic Flute is part of the ancient tradition of retelling meaningful stories.
The poet W. H. Auden sees The Magic Flute as an altogether hopeful story, because the characters have the freedom to choose their paths and to enjoy or suffer whatever fate comes from their choices – how happy they will be depends on the choices they make. They are free agents who can control. What they need is help in making the proper choices – a moral framework, a set of rituals and rules, the support of a brotherhood.
Papageno and Tamino are both Mozart himself – two different aspects of his character, of all of our characters. The child and the spiritual adult. The synthesis of Tamino and Pamina, and that of Papageno and Papagena, represents the creation of the perfect society which Mozart hoped the philosophy of Masonry and the French Revolution, and his own works, would inspire. This opera is one of those aspirational expressions of humanity which are so uplifting and energizing, and yet so frustrating and tragic at the same time.
These same principles have been identified and preached about for centuries. Nevertheless, we still struggle, apparently not having learned their salutary lessons. We can enunciate the principles, but we also seem to know that the struggle is all too often waged in vain. We’ve seen too many earlier experiments fail. We cannot permanently reside in, but rather can only taste, the joys of the utopia which The Magic Flute creates evanescently on stage.
Ultimately the works of great artists such as Mozart and Shakespeare are imbued with a sense of happy resignation to the joys of life such as we can find them, in spite of the cynical but realistic observation that our more noble strivings too often fail. As that happy student of world mythologies, Joseph Campbell, describes it, the “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”
The eternal question is always behind the works of these greatest artists – to participate, knowing all the while the inevitable end, the tragic flaws which will thwart the noble struggle, or, by action, to end the experience knowing not the outcome? The brooding Hamlet asks the question directly. And he is not alone. Those happy characters of Mozart’s Magic Flute, Papageno and Pamina, also contemplate, and nearly complete, their own suicides.
In The Magic Flute, at least, Mozart answers this lingering question in favor of the experiment. He understands the ambiguities of life and accepts them in favor of the experience, either the simple, hedonistic side of the experiences of Papageno – good food, good wine, a pretty wife – or the spiritual side of the experiences of Tamino – the appreciation and knowledge of wisdom and beauty in spite of all the other realities.
In fact, Mozart seem to revel in the ambiguities, not just to resign to them. They, perhaps, for Mozart are reason enough for the experience – the bitter needs the sweet, and vice versa, just as, in Eastern philosophies, the “good” needs the “evil,” and vice versa. Mozart is, in the end, life affirming. And his music conveys, as only music can, the subliminal and emotional message that the listener is not alone, that Mozart has been there too, that he is there with you now.
Sources:
W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, The Magic Flute, English Version after the Libretto by Schikaneder and Giesecke, Random House (1955)
Brigid Brophy, Mozart The Dramatist, Da Capo Press, Inc. (1988)
Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute Unveiled, Inner Traditions International, Inc. (1992)
Cliff Eisen, “Die Zauberflîte,” Liner Notes, Erato, Les Arts Florissants, William Christie, conductor (1995)
Joachim Kaiser, trans. by Charles Kessler, Who’s Who in Mozart’s Operas, Schirmer Books (1984)
Nicholas McNair, “‘Enter, Pursued by a Lion’: Hermetic Influences in The Magic Flute,” Liner Notes, Archiv, The English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner, conductor (1996)
William Mann, “Die Zauberflîte,” Liner Notes, EMI Recordings Ltd., Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, conductor (1988)
Charles Osborne, The Complete Operas of Mozart, Da Capo Press (1978)
Andrew Porter, “Notes on Die Zauberflîte” for Metropolitan Opera Program (1998)
Stanley Sadie, “The Magic Flute,” Liner Notes, DG, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, conductor (1980)
Encarta 98 Desk Encyclopedia by Microsoft (1996-1997)
Grove Encyclopedia of Music
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