numb3r_5ev3n

- I went to an outdoor flea market, and woah it is still way too hot here to be doing that. But I got a Cool Knife. Not a mall ninja knife (I still don't trust myself to be able to use a butterfly knife or balisong without injuring myself) but a functional folding knife. I needed to retire my old "every day carry" knife, anyway.

- I watched The film adaption of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and forgot how much it really did to get a lot of the ideas held by "Dragon Court"-type peoples out in front of the General Public - and no one seemed to do it better than he did. He took ideas from the book The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (one of the characters names from the book, Leigh Teabing, is a combination of all their names) and made it into something the average reader could grok and glom onto. He did it better than Messers. Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln did, and better than anyone else who tried to springboard off of the concepts they were proposing (Margaret Starbird, Laurence Gardner, Nicholas de Vere, Tracy Twyman, etc.)

People from the old Dragoncourt Dot Org forum that I am still in contact with have claimed that Dan Brown was a proverbial "fly on the wall" on one of the other forums that a lot of Nicholas de Vere loyalists wound up on in between the time when de Vere was kicked off of Laurence Gardner's Mediaquest site in 2000, and when Webmaster Bill got the Dragoncourt Dot Org site up and running in 2001. They claim that he came and he joined, and he lurked. And then he wrote a bestselling work of fiction based on the concepts he saw there.

And the movie that is based on the book is a lot of fun! Seeing Sir Ian McKellan hamming it up is a hoot! Tom Hanks's hairsyle isn't nearly as distracting as people kept claiming it was!

And people within the "Dragon Court Community" were super mad that Dan Brown took those concepts and ran with them so successfully. They were mad because the fact that a fiction author was the one who did it meant that people could point at those concepts and call them a hoax and a work of fiction and a bunch of pseudohistorical nonsense.

But people had already been doing that, anyway. Dan Brown only made those ideas popular for a while. It was a fad. It had its day, and then became passé, as fads do. And I think that they were mad about that, too - because they didn't want those concepts to be a fad, even if it was a very successful fad for a while (136 weeks at the top of the best-seller list!) They didn't want the concepts described in the book to be disseminated in the kind of "book-club book-of-the-week"-type novel that captured the attention of wine-mom book-clubbers everywhere in the early 2000s. They wanted those concepts to become accepted as historical fact, and for them to be normalized. They wanted those ideas to be taken seriously, dammit.



They wanted whoever it was they were championing as The Descendant Of The Merovingian Kings, And Therefore Jesus And Mary Magdalene (depending on the faction, Nicholas de Vere, Michel Lafosse AKA Prince Michael Stewart of Albany, etc) to be fully accepted as such, and to be elevated to a position of power because of it. They didn't want a Hokey Whodunit Movie with Tom Hanks and his Hokey Hair.

Come to think of it - I'm wondering if the seething, irrational hatred that a lot of people in the qanon/conspiracy theory community seem to have for Tom Hanks really started with this movie, in 2006.

Which brings me to this: that it's easy to see how the Da Vinci Code hype could have led to the formation of the phenomenon that would become Qanon. The obsession with symbols and Gematria, or the meaning of secret number correspondences and combinations, and the idea that "The Cabal" would have their foolproof plan for World Domination in the bag, if not for their pesky compulsion to keep dropping clues and hints that clever internet sleuths will always be able to spot!

I've seen Right Wing Wacksters panic-tweet about the so-called "The Bloodlines Of Satan/The Illuminati" and their supposed tyrannical control over the world - while claiming that Trump and Putin are descended from the Merovingian Kings, and are therefore the rightful rulers of civilization - seemingly completely unaware that when taking the theories proposed in the Dragon Court Narrative and The Da Vinci Code to their logical conclusion, they're referring to the exact same group of people. It's just another permutation of "my preferred Alleged Merovingian Descendant should be the one in power, and all of the rest are a bunch of illegitimate pretenders and fakes."

Because there is something about all of this, a "Return Of The Rightful Heir/King" romantic archetypal storyline that "gets" people, if that makes sense. That's how it "got" a lot of people on the old Dragon Court forums, Dot Org and otherwise.

But I think the real truth behind all of this has gotten lost. And it was best expressed by my Mom back when I first told her about the Dragon Court, a year or so before she read The Da Vinci Code novel.

"So if Jesus was just a man, and the Merovingian Kings were descended from him, and we're descended from the Merovingian Kings - but Jesus was a human being and not a Divine Superbeing - then what does that mean, exactly? Why is it cool to be descended from Jesus if he wasn't the Actual Son Of God? What does that do for me, right now, in the course of my life?"

And then she read The Da Vinci Code, and she got it. It snapped into clarity. Because the really important thing, the thing that everyone keeps losing track of, is the idea of The Divine Feminine being re-introduced back into Christianity. The idea that on some level, The Goddess is alive, and Magic is afoot. And that Her Mysteries don't conflict with the teachings of Christ - they complement them.

This was the concept that had grabbed the imagination of my Mom and and a lot of other people, Goddess worshipers and otherwise, via Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel The Mists Of Avalon two decades or so before The Da Vinci Code was written. Mom didn't care about Maybe Being Descended From Jesus. She was excited about the idea of a secret conspiracy to keep the concept of The Divine Feminine alive through centuries of Church suppression. And of course the Holy Grail was wrapped up in it somehow, as a symbol of the Divine Feminine.

And, historical fact or fiction aside, this is also what I believe to be the true purpose of The Da Vinci Code and the Dragon Court Narrative or Mythos as a whole. This is why it is important, why it's a part of the Collective Unconscious that manifested and expressed Itself when it did.

Then we had a bunch of Evangelical Right Wing Fuckery, and now it's lost in the maelstrom of Qanon batshittery and the Conspiracy Theory Industrial Complex. Which did what authoritarian control structures do best: it assimilated the symbols and the message of The Resistance, and incorporated them back into its system of control.

BUT! Maybe it's not about the "Return Of The King" at all. Maybe it's about the Return Of The Queen. The Goddess.

There is also the aspect of the "Dragon Court" or Da Vinci Code narrative being an attempt to recontextualize Christianity itself. And the idea that the Romans (specifically Constantine, as stated in The Da Vinci Code) took the story of a Jewish dissident leader who was murdered by an apparatus of the Roman Imperial State for trying to resist the Roman Imperial occupiers and colonizers, and twisted it into something that benefited those same occupiers and colonizers and their Imperial State Cult.

Much like the Normans: who, a few hundred centuries later, would appropriate and subvert the story of a British Celtic warchief named Arthur, and the Grail. But that's a subject for another post.

Current Mood:

I meant to get more writing done this week. But everything is still happening so much, and my brain is fried. But I'd like to share a recent spiritual epiphany I've had.

If you've been on the internet at all over the past few years, you may be familiar with this meme:


More than one of the "everything is happening so much" issues I've had to deal with recently has involved people who were arrogant. They believed they were immune to consequences. And it dawned on me that this is really what "arrogance" is.

There's a common type of mythological story that goes, "Mankind grew arrogant. Then the gods smited or smote them." (I'm not sure which one of those is grammatically correct here, but yeah.)

Well, mankind has grown arrogant. And we're being smited. Or Smote.

We've seen it in larger world events, in chickens coming home to roost in regards to Donald Trump, his finances (or lacktherof) and the events of January 6, 2021. We've saw it expressed in the tragic submarine disaster this past spring. And whether or not we want to acknowledge it, we have seen it expressed in our collective responses to climate change and the Covid 19 pandemic.

But the seeds of this epiphany were really planted in 2015, when I went to the Texas "regional burn" or Burning Man-style event, "Burning Flipside."

It had rained almost nonstop for weeks beforehand, and really showed no signs of letting up. But when the friends of mine who had been going for years chuckled (nervously) and said, "there have been wet years before, a little rain and mud never hurt anyone," I felt reassured.

Then we went, and it was a nightmare. The day after the burn, the land flooded and suddenly became three separate islands surrounded by rising floodwaters. Those left had to seek whatever shelter they could until they could be airlifted out. Which wasn't me or anyone I had camped with, because we'd spent the previous day striking camp and packing up, because some instinct or set of firing neurons was warning us that if things started to look bad, we needed to be able to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

And that was when I realized that Mother Nature didn't care that we were a lot of tree hugging Hippies, she'd kill us just the same. We were stupid and arrogant to be out there.

I'm grateful, and I'm surprised, that no one was killed. Hearing about the similar situation this year at Burning Man made me sick to my stomach.

Our ancestors lived in this reality every day of their lives, for thousands and thousands of years. For most of human history, in fact. They didn't live apart from nature, because the level of separation from it that we imagine we have today didn't exist for them. They knew that Nature (to borrow a turn of phrase from Nicholas Cage's character from The Rock,) would kill them the moment they stopped respecting it.

Any Egyptologists reading this are free to correct me, but I feel like this concept was symbolically expressed and deified as the god Sobek. The Crocodile god.

The ancient Egyptians relied on the Nile river. It was the literal lifeblood of their civilization and their culture and their economy and their national identity. And, just like the crocodiles and hippopotamuses that lived in its waters, and just like the waters themselves in certain conditions, they knew it would kill them the moment they stopped respecting it.

Fuck Around And Find Out.

When we were warned about climate change, a lot of us denied it and came up with conspiracy theories about how it wasn't happening, or how it couldn't possibly be manmade.

Another epiphany I've had recently is about how most conspiracy theories work this way. They're a way of denying responsibility, or denying reality. If the bad thing isn't really happening or if it isn't manmade, or is the fault of some shadowy clandestine bad guys, or an attempt by those sinister clandestine bad guys to manipulate or control people's behavior, then you don't have to do anything to change your behavior. You don't have to adapt. You can even tell yourself a feelgood story about how refusing to adapt is admirable and heroic!

A lot of people have been the same way about the Covid 19 pandemic. You've heard them say that it isn't real, it's a government plot, it's not as dangerous as people are saying, people are overreacting, and in fact the things we have to protect ourselves from it - masks and vaccines, are more dangerous than the virus itself even. Anything to deny responsibility, anything but having to change our behavior.

I've seen people who identify as Druids (one of them here on Dreamwidth, a guy who is very prominent in Druidic and Occult subcultural circles and has several books to his name) make these claims, as if staring Mother Nature or The Goddess Herself in the face and screaming "I WILL NOT COMPLY!"

I'm really not sure what to make of anyone claiming to be a Druid with this kind of mindset, whatever their politics are. What I think it goes to show is: we're so sheltered and separated from nature and the normal cycles of cause and effect that even people who claim to revere the natural world to the point of adopting one of the modern Druidic revival belief systems are afflicted with this kind of arrogance, and the denial of responsibility and the reality we're in.

As someone who has made a serious effort to study Traditional Witchcraft, I see a lot of Traditional Witchcraft types scoffing at the idea of Wiccan concepts like the Threefold Law. And honestly, I think the Threefold Law was invented because teenage dingbats (like I used to be) playing around with magic and maybe trying to hex someone for the first time don't really understand the concept of consequences and personal responsibility yet, if ever. But if they can imagine something bad that they want to happen to someone else, they can imagine what it might be like to have it rebound upon themselves three times over. It's a scare tactic that serves a purpose.

And I feel like we maybe don't have enough of those anymore.

Because we're arrogant. As Philip K Dick said, "Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it." And it's killing a lot of us, because we're not respecting it. It's already been going on for a while now.

And if the last three or four years have taught us anything, there are lots of people who would rather cling to their arrogance than save their own lives. Or the lives of those around them.

Fuck Around And Find Out.