[continued from previous chapter- Know / Now / No / Gnosis / Hypnosis..]
It's all in the eyes
a girl and a tree
In my last post, I tried to make some sense of the pop culture connections between Nick Cage and occult -"hidden"- knowledge, but I was sidetracked by the patterns around his ex-wife Patricia Arquette and her connections to the idea of a spiritual medium seen in her role in NBC's Medium and the movie Stigmata, which poses some interesting questions about possession and spiritual channeling undercutting the role of the modern christian church. There have been more than a few horror films based on the idea of demonic possession in the past few decades, and just about all of them use the virginal girl as the target, pointing to the meme of the mythic sacred feminine. The Virgin Mary was, in a way, "possessed" by God after all...
a girl and a tree
a girl and a tree in The Fountain
Act 3: The Possession of Mary
"The movie is loosely based on the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas and a verse therein (verse 77: Jesus said: I am the light that is over them all. I am the All; the All has come forth from me, and the All has attained unto me. Split a piece of wood and I am there. Raise up the stone, an ye shall find me there.) ; a document which the Vatican and most other Christians have declared as being the product of a heretic Gnostic group."
Patricia Arquette's divine possession; Is that a red hood?
The 1999 horror-drama-thriller Stigmata, starring our Medium-Messenger Patricia Arquette and End of Days' Gabriel Byrne, revolves around an atheist who receives six of the seven wounds of Jesus' torture, and becomes the blind conduit through which a deceased Brazilian priest relays the Gospel of St. Thomas, which -allegedly- are the actual words of Jesus Christ. The Catholic church spoke out, predictably, against the portrayal of the Vatican as sinister and oppressive, and Christian advocates voiced complaints that the scenes involving Arquette's divine trance looked a little too much like a demonic possession.
Arquette under the spell
The demonic imagery is blatant, and even I was struck by the violence in some scenes. Upon reflection, I was reminded of the infamous possession sequence of The Exorcist... as our main character experiences her first fit of divine demonic channeling, she happens to be taking a bath in an old style bathtub, reminiscent of Rachel Weisz's water-portal revelation with Keanu Reeves in Constantine and -to a more subtle degree- her bath scene with 2008 Oscar-host Hugh Jackman in The Fountain...
Weisz baptized in The Fountain
Exorcism in the Bath House with Shia LaBeouf in Constantine
bathtub wake-up from Inception
In both Constantine and The Mummy Series, Rachel Weisz plays a woman possessed, the holy/unholy medium... after Constantine's exploding bathtub scene (shown above), Weisz goes into a trance and blindly leads Neo to the answers he seeks...
...and in The Mummy, she shows the truth to Brendan Frasier by channeling a fictional princess named Nefertiri, synchronistically reflecting the famous wife of Akhenaton, Neferititi, popularly represented by an eerily one-eyed bust...
Weisz battling her dark reflection in The Mummy Returns
The predominantly european (roman-occupied) representation of Egypt in The Mummy is made more fitting by Weisz's next movie: in December 2009, Weisz will star in the historical drama Agora as the Roman Egyptian Hypatia of Alexandria.
Is she gazing at the tower's light or the moon-earth?
Staring directly at a partial eclipse can make you blind;
watching a full eclipse, however, is perfectly safe.
From Wikipedia:
"Hypatia of Alexandria ... was a Greek scholar from Alexandria in Egypt, considered the first notable woman in mathematics, who also taught philosophy and astronomy. She lived in Roman Egypt, and was brutally killed by a Christian mob who blamed her for religious turmoil. She has been hailed as a 'valiant defender of science against religion..."
Hypatia, elephants, triple-goddesses and even Pan
Izzie/Isis/Hypatia, the Astronomer in The Fountain
Hypatia (HYP-atia) was a staunch and well-educated gnostic...
Weisz's Hypathia in Agora
...and may have been the first recorded victim of a Christian witch-burning; either before or after her brutal murder by a Christian mob, her flayed body was set ablaze, similar to Arquette's Medium at the end of Stigmata, and Jovovich's Joan in The Messenger.
Joan of Arc was burned alive as a heretic, but through posthumous sainthood was later (hypocritically) reborn, reflecting Milla Jovovich's Alice from Resident Evil, the mythical phoenix and the telepathic red queen Jean Grey...
Just as Nicolas Cage is shown the pattern of catastrophic numerology in Knowing, Arquette and Weisz -as women- are harshly punished and associated with the unholy for being chosen to reveal the Gnostic knowledge, the Knowing, the secret ancient truth...
The irony of the nature of gnosis and hypnosis in these historical and pop-culture references tells a strange story. What are these modern and ancient mythologies teaching all of us about the concept of unlocked knowledge? Is there a reason for the demonization of the process of divination (the act of channeling the spiritual), and the desecration of the sacred feminine Vessel? The self-inflicted hypnosis of meditation can help us all attain a closer walk with the spirit; with the phoenix-fire of gnosis, sacred knowledge of all, and the trance-sition through the pineal water door, maybe, hypocritically, we can reach out by reaching in...
_004.jpg)
the fire behind her eyes reflects the moonlight
The woman's natural affinity for the spirit -some call it premonition- holds a significant connection to the revelation of generational memory, the living knowledge of the ancient undead. Unfortunately, it appears that for the established order to maintain power, the holy hypnosis of fiery enlightenment through gnostic knowledge must, hypocritically, remain heresy.
But then again, what do I kNOw...
_004.jpg)
the fire behind her eyes reflects the moonlight
But then again, what do I kNOw...
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