"Looper" and the New Aeon Part 1: The Kid-Messiah

Like other Messiahs in history, Cid from "Looper" has an absent father

Isis/Horus Mary/Jesus

I've been trying to "figure out" the movie "Looper" since I watched it two weeks ago. Even to discuss it would spoil some surprise elements of the film, because at some point it does a 180-degree turn and becomes a totally different movie than one would expect. So I leave that warning out there for those who haven't seen it but want to.

Now then, "Looper" is not really a film about time-travel, though certainly that is the "device" used to facilitate the narrative. On the surface, it's about trying to undo the mistakes of the past with hindsight -- but that's not really it, either.

"Looper" is about the coming of the new Aeon of Horus, and how we can either work with it or resist:

I. Cid Is Horus/New Messiah/"Anti-Christ"

(Please note that I'm using the term "Anti-Christ" here not as a religious judgement, but as he might be perceived by someone with an Evangelical Christian/Osirian reality tunnel)

Horus the child

I'm going to start with a dream I had in mid-October of 2004, as it reminds me very strongly of the subject matter:

I see the comic book, the last pages. After the "explosion," you found out that it was just Jesus "coming into his own" and finding out from God who he really is. He is confused and shocked. All the men around him are dead, from the blast caused by the revealing of God, but this killing was unintentional. 

To break this down:

After the "explosion":

...you found out that it was just Jesus "coming into his own" and finding out from God who he really is:

 He is confused and shocked:

All the men around him are dead:

 ...from the blast caused by the revealing of God:

 ...but this killing was unintentional:

 The dream went on to say:

The one who would be Jesus had to fill a certain height requirement--in order to fulfill the prophecy. Later, you read how the Anti-Christ was a thin little boy with a shaved head* & a Celtic tattoo around his arm, and that Jesus wanted/needed to torture him to death. Torture a little child?

But Jesus belongs to the previous Aeon, that of Osiris and organized religion; that of the story of the Dying God and his resurrection. I interpreted the creator of the "explosion" as Jesus at the time of the dream because he was presented as a messianic figure, which I assumed would be Jesus. However, the real messiah is the "little child" -- Horus. Cid, the super-powered, messiah-type "little child" in "Looper," is not Jesus; but since he seems to have these massive, Jesus-like powers, he must be the opposite number of Jesus: "Anti-Christ." (compare to similar tropes in the "Omen" movies).

Dueling Messiahs

Again: to a hardcore Christian (and I was pretty far along in Evangelical Christianity when I had this dream; which explains a lot of my confusion), the idea of this herald of a "new age" -- and the idea of a new age in general -- is considered blasphemous, and any such messiah would be the "Anti-Christ."

Old Joe, about to do something horrible

In "Looper," Old Joe (Bruce Willis) goes back in time to kill this messiah, who he says will grow up to be a destructive force of nature called "The Rainmaker." The story of the child-messiah with incredible super-powers being hunted down is pretty deeply ingrained in both our mythology and popular culture, but with the 2012 end-date looming, as well as ideas such as the Singularity and Indigo Children/Hybrids, it's become particularly relevant.

These Messiah Children -- so powerful and dangerous and persecuted and full of potential for good or evil -- can be found everywhere:

Andrew Detmer in "Chronicle":

Carrie White:

Renesmee Cullen from "Breaking Dawn Part 2":

Akira:

Anakin Skywalker:

The Children of the Damned:

Damien Thorne:



 Adrian Castevet:

Most of these children are portrayed as "monsters" -- but also the heralds (literally, in the case of "The Omen" and "Rosemary's Baby") of a New Era. This new era is the Aeon of Horus, referred-to by occultist/poet/philosopher/etc. Aleister Crowley as "the crowned and conquering child":

"The Aeon of Horus is here: and its first flower may well be this: that, freed of the obsession of the doom of the Ego in Death, and of the limitation of the Mind by Reason, the best men again set out with eager eyes upon the Path of the Wise, the mountain track of the goat, and then the untrodden Ridge, that leads to the ice-gleaming pinnacles of Mastery!"

New Aeon Awakening

It is, literally, a new stage in the Evolution of mankind, a stage where man and woman can become so much more -- these creepy movie children, "kid-messiahs" with their freaky powers, represents the fear our current Osirian society has over this Big Change. And the character of Cid in "Looper" is the latest "kid-messiah," Horus stand-in.

Old Joe, played by Bruce Willis, won't accept the New Aeon -- his "job" is to kill the Messiah, to stop him from ever becoming into his full-flower. Old Joe is basically trying to stop the so-called "Anti-Christ"/New Age, and, like Herod of old, he's not adverse to killing innocent children in his quest to do so.

Who does Old Joe represent?

And who does "Young Joe," played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, supposed to represent?

The answer to these questions will plant us firmly not only in the Aeon of Osiris -- the Aeon that has passed/is soon to pass -- but in the Bible as well. Next post!

*The aspect of the thin child with a shaved head can point to those persecuted kid-messiahs who are also sickly/incarcerated/experimented on, such as:

Jimmy/Leech in "X-Men 3":

The "old" kids from "Akira":

"Powder":

And so many more:

Aquaphobia: Apocalypse, or Age of Aquarius?

From "Evan Almighty"

 A widely passed-around New York Times article appropriately titled for 2012/apocalyptic flair, "Is This The End?", postulates that sometime in the future -- as close as 50 years from now -- all of New York City will sink into the water, a modern-day version of Atlantis. While couched in a plea for New York's government to recognize the seriousness of climate change, the piece evokes a larger, rather wistful eschatological feeling, almost seeing the eventual demise of my home city as part of an overall civilizations-destroying circle of life.

From The New York Times article, "Is This The End?"

Is that NYT post simply another symptom of the current End-Of-The-World Romanticism that has always infused our popular culture -- through Hiroshima, through the Cold War and the Atomic Age, through the ashes of idealism in the paranoid 1970s, through Y2K, 9/11, and barreling straight down into the end of this sort of "fated" year?

Sync Alert: Steve Carell in the Noah-themed "Evan Almighty"; Carell has also most recently starred in:

 No; I believe that within 50 years or so, maybe earlier, the islands of New York City will experience, at the very least, significant damage due to water. I know what you're probably thinking next, the most important of factors to consider here: where do we put all the important works of art? How do we preserve the punk scene monuments and the Apple Stores?

About 6 years ago, a boyfriend who lived in the Lower East Side, right at the edge of Alphabet City, told me of a dream he had about looking out the window of his co-op and seeing nothing but water. After Hurricane Sandy, I'm sure a portion of that dream might have become a reality. Or maybe it was foretelling an even more distant time in the future. At any rate, the dream bothered him quite a bit, and he mulled selling his place and moving.

I dream a lot about such things as well. I often look out at the NYC skyline from my subway train and think: "one day, this will all be gone," most likely due to the very conditions outlined in another article that ran in NYT the same day as "Is This The End?", "Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines." Maybe they'll know in advance and start moving everything to a "New New York City" somewhere more inland; maybe they can lease out Detroit. I have dreams of water decimating cities all the time.

But perhaps such flood dreams are simply primal, part of our DNA; certainly, they pre-date the Bible and the story of Noah. And they are seeded into our pop-culture in countless movies, such as "The Last Wave":

"The Day After Tomorrow":

 

"The Abyss":

 

"Deep Impact":

and, of course, "2012":

The catch-phrase for "2012," by the way, was "We Were Warned" -- which is basically the "message" of both NYT articles cited here. While I do believe in climate change and global warming as contributing factors to the "crazy" weather we have had as of late, I only think this is part of the story -- the other part being, the Earth, much like humanity (we'd like to think, anyway,), is a dynamic system that is constantly changing.

Yes, "We Were Warned" but there is only so much we can do -- and that goes beyond recycling our cans. We need to be smart and start moving our cities off coastlines now -- and pour more money into space exploration so we can eventually get off this rock.

Being a Pisces, I love comic books and stories about underwater superheroes like Aquaman, The Submariner, and the Man From Atlantis. In an "Aquaman" storyline called "American Tidal," San Diego was flooded, and thus dubbed "Sub Diego":

The current storyline in "Aquaman" is called "Throne of Atlantis," in which the underwater denizens of Aquaman's hometown invade the surface-world -- a perfect metaphor for our primal flood-fears:

"The Throne of Atlantis" also mixes in some Lovecraftian "horrors under the sea," a trope that often gets paired with these water-based disaster movies, as in the case with "Cloverfield":

You'll notice that in many of these movies and stories, the mangled Statue of Liberty is showcased in some fashion:

This repeated symbolism of the "Goddess" being torn down is an interesting one, used in all variety of apocalyptic entertainment -- that deserves a post all in itself.

But that brings up the question: does the flood imagery + the eschatological elements = some sort of actual Age Of Aquarius? Or, connected, an Aeon Of Horus?

Again: that's fodder for a future post. In the meantime: try to stay dry.

They Grow Up So Fast: Honey Boo Boo, Renesmee, And Other "Sacred Monsters"



 



"Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster Of The Cinema In Her Time"

by Salvador Dali

We've seen -- or heard -- of kids being sexualized in a whole bunch of "acceptable" ways as of late:

The TV show "Toddlers and Tiaras":

Accusations that "Modern Family" actress Ariel Winter's stage mom made "attempts to sexualize"  her 14-year-old daughter:

15-year-old actress Chloe Moretz is repeatedly made up in movies to look the "Lolita" part:

The latest news is that little girls in bikinis are apparently being used in China to show off automobiles at car shows.

According to the site Jalopnik, girls as young as five at the Chutian Auto Culture Festival were "scantily clad, wearing tall boots, and swaying their hips" to show off cars:

Of course, their parents volunteered them for the job. Parents or the community at large "sacrificing" the best of their young is a primal story, from ancient times to overbearing stage parents to "The Hunger Games."

But the best current metaphor for the little girl who suddenly "grows up" too fast would have to be Renesmee Cullen from "Breaking Dawn Part 2": who not only grows from infant to school-girl age (the actress portraying her is 9) in an amazingly short amount of time, but is "imprinted" as basically a "soul mate" to the character of Jacob, played by 20-year-old Taylor Lautner:

"It’s a fine line, and I was worried about it," Lautner admitted of Jacob Black's supernatural, (platonic — for now) love-at-first-sight connection to Renesmee, the half-human, half-vampire offspring of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. (By comparison, Edward's a century older than Bella, so in the grand scheme of things it's not that bad....)

Played by 9-year-old Mackenzie Foy, Renesmee grows from infant to school-age girl in a superhuman span of time — and, in keeping with the story arc of the novels, Jacob is compelled by his Quileute legacy to instantly "imprint," or attach, himself to her side in a manner that eventually will take on romantic undertones."

The term "imprinting" sounds a lot like "grooming"...but it's a theme used in some supernatural fiction to justify the bond between characters of vastly different ages. "It's a supernatural thing...you just wouldn't understand."

Of course, the uncomfortable intersection between America's #1 icon for children, Elmo, and a man who was allegedly trolling around for underage men throws yet another element into the mix. But haven't we been subconsciously "getting used" to this whole subject matter anyway, as a culture?

Isn't the baby character on "Family Guy" sexualized constantly -- and could you find one person out of ten on the street who would have a single negative thing to say about it? I mean, to see Stewie Griffin in drag dancing around a stripper pole is nothing, isn't it? Stewie, the toddlers in tiaras, the girls at the Chinese auto show -- all these cases could and are explained away as just "cute," the equivalent of a girl trying on mommy's oversized shoes.

As for the cases of Ariel Winter and Chloe Moretz, isn't it rather common for these teen actresses to work towards their "coming out" as Women, as some sort of rite of passage? Isn't that what Kristen Stewart did when she allegedly slept with the married director of her movie? Granted, she was in her very early twenties at the time, but had been heavily identified with a "teen" series of movies and had to impress movie-makers and the public that she was an "adult now":

Isn't that what Brooke Shields did when she posed in that racy Jordache Jeans commercial ("nothing comes between me and my Jordache?"):

Or was it years before for Brooke, in "Pretty Baby":

Isn't that what Miley Cyrus did when she took naughty phone pics of herself and then starred in her first "sexy" video, "Can't Be Tamed?"

Of course, Miley has seemed to do a 180 since then, shedding her long locks, wearing "butch" clothing and generally seeming sort of a bad-ass:

Anyway, while I do not subscribe to the idea of this "idyllic" view of adolescence as being like some sort of hermetically-sealed fantasy land where no thought or mention of sexuality dare encroach, I think being "sexualized" at too early an age is harmful for teens. Yes, back in "the old days" (and in some places, still recent), girls as young as 14 or so were already married and having kids. But consider the culture and the context.

Today's youth -- both male and female -- need time to mentally mature, especially in this society. And while they might "experiment" with each other (as teens are sometimes wont to do), teen/adult relationships by their very nature involve an imbalance of power.

We laugh and roll our eyes at the (mis)adventures and various cheesy soft-core photo shoots of "child bride" Courtney Stodden, who married actor Doug Hutchison when she was 16 and he was 51. But look at her:

And are we, as a society, devolving as much as we're evolving, going back to this primal, archaic state where the elder Alpha Male picks the best of the latest crop of young virgins, like something out of a feudalistic society? And at the same time, we're discovering and using technology waaaaaay beyond the spiritual and emotional development of most of the population.

It is, for me, an issue way beyond the immediate topic at hand. This topic is just a symptom of a greater problem: WE NEED TO EVOLVE FASTER PAST OUR ANCESTRAL "ANIMAL" BRAINS. Because we need the brainpower, insights, and basic spiritual evolution of our smart and innovative young women (and young men!) in this society -- it is vital to the overall development of our species. Rather than just draining their youth and contributing to the overall entropy of the Universe.