More information on The Blood Poets volume Two: Millennial Blues
END NOTES
1. The �Demiurge� is perhaps the central tenet of Gnosticism , as found in the Nag Hammadi Library (the sealed codex discovered in the Middle East in 1947). The Gnostics taught that Jehovah�accepted by the Jews, and by Christianity after them, as the creator of mankind, its one true God�was in fact a pretender, a false god, whose real name was Samael, �the god of the blind,� or the Demiurge. Samael was begotten by the goddess Sophia (wisdom) but quickly rebelled and assumed his false throne as world-creator and �god� (rather like Lucifer), crying �I am that I am, there are no Gods besides me,� etc, etc. Despite Sophia�s insistence that he was lying, that he was but a blind god leading the blind, mankind accepted the lie and allowed themselves to become enslaved to it. As The Gospel of Truth puts it: �Ignorance of the Father brought about anguish and terror; and the anguish grew solid like a fog, so that no one was able to see. For this reason error became powerful; it worked on its own matter foolishly, not having known the truth. It set about with a creation, preparing with power and beauty the substitute for truth.� The Hypostasis of the Archons describes a veil that exists �between the world above and the realms below; and the shadow came into being beneath the veil; and that shadow became matter; and that shadow was projected apart.� Thus began a program of mind control�or soul enslavement�maintained by Samael and his �Archons� (rulers) which involved keeping mankind distracted by material problems and concerns, imprisoned by its own fear of death, of mortality, and ignorant of its true, divine nature. Hence the soul became �entangled in the darkness of matter,� confined to bodily identification, and condemned to endless, repeated reincarnation, without possibility of parole, of graduation to godhood. (Rene Descartes seems to entertain a similar prospect when he writes: �I shall suppose, therefore, that there is not a true God, who is the sovereign source of truth, but some evil demon, no less cunning and deceiving than powerful, who has used all his artifice to deceive me. I will suppose that the heavens, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things that we see, are only illusions and deceptions which he uses to take me in.� Descartes�s Meditations, quoted by Doug Mann and Heidi Hochenedel, in �Evil Demons, Saviors, and Simulacra in The Matrix,� link at Matrix as Messiah Movie ) In Letter from Peter to Philip, Samael is called �the Arrogant One� who steals a part of the creation. �And he placed powers over it and authorities. And he enclosed it in the aeons which are dead . . . But he . . . became proud on account of the praise of the powers. He became an envier and he wanted to make an image in the place of an image and a form in the place of a form. And he commissioned the powers within his authority to mold mortal bodies. And they came to be from a misrepresentation, from the semblance which had emerged. . . Now you will fight against them in this way, for the archons are fighting against the inner man. And you are to fight against them in this way: Come together and teach in the world the salvation with a promise.� Combine all this with modern UFO lore, which posits an evil (Draconian) alien race implanting human beings since the beginning of time with tiny mind control devices (the �Gods of Eden� and their livestock), for the exact same purpose: of ensuring eternal forgetfulness, endless sleep, so that the souls are denied the possibility of evolving, remain enslaved to the alien beings (the Archons), who (at least in some versions) use the souls as an energy source. Combine all this, and you have The Matrix. More or less.
2. In certain Gnostic texts, Jesus is said to have a twin brother whose name is Judas: Judas Thomas, or �Judas the twin.� Without making too many creative leaps it is possible to draw the conclusion from these texts that it was not in fact Jesus who died on the cross, but Judas, his betrayer and twin, �the one who came into being in his likeness,� as The Apocalypse of Peter has it. (Nag Hammadi Library. The full quote is: �The savior said to me, �He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshy part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness . . . he whom they crucified is the first born, and the home of demons, and the stony vessel in which they dwell . . . But he who stands near him is the living Savior, whom they seized and released . . . Therefore he laughs at their lack of perception, knowing that they are born blind.�) In which case, the myth begins to take on rather more complex ramifications (the betrayer was sacrificed and so redeemed; the point of the crucifixion being a blood offering [DNA?], it follows that, as Jesus�s twin, Judas�s blood was a perfectly acceptable �substitute�). Thomas in The Matrix, then, is not the doubter, he is the double, the one who must be sacrificed, just as is Abel by Cain. Neo, his perfect twin, is the �resurrected,� the image that ascends, the Christ half of the equation. It�s interesting to note, in regard to this, certain Christian interpretations of the movie that see Neo as �the AntiChrist.� The fact that Keanu Reeves recently played the son of Satan (Al Pacino) in Devil�s Advocate cannot be too quickly dismissed as a mere coincidence. Of course, pyscho-history does not allow for coincidences.
3. The most disappointing thing about The Matrix is its reliance on the familiar terms of action movies, presenting violence and �resistance� as the only means to overcome tyranny.
4. The name is especially curious considering the Gnostic tenets of the movie: Judaism and Gnosticism are diametrically opposed, philosophically speaking, and mortally at odds, historically speaking.
5. As Morpheus puts it, �They are still part of the system, and that makes them our enemy. . . . Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. [They] are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.� Since the AI agents are capable of entering into�of �possessing��any human still hooked up to the machine, and of thereby converting them into mindless automatons that do its bidding, programmed killers, no less, any human not actively recruited by the Illuminati is a potential threat to it.
6. Shaman means �skywalker,� which is where George Lucas got the name for his hero. Doubtless The Matrix, above all if the trilogy ever comes off as planned, is the movie that Star Wars never quite succeeds in being.
7. Castaneda reputedly died of liver trouble, but his death was not reported until a week later, by which time the body had already been cremated. There seems ample room for all sorts of mystery and speculation to grow in here, all the more so since this �last� (?) work appeared post mortem, as it were.
8. McKenna could even have been foreseeing The Matrix when he says: �I think cultures are kinds of virtual realities where whole populations of people become imprisoned inside a structure which is linguistic and value-based.� Later he remarks: �Now, if we�re gonna become a planetary being, we can�t have the luxury of an unconscious mind, that�s something that goes along with the monkey-stage of human culture. And so comes then the prosthesis of technology, that all our memories and all our sciences and our projective planning abilities can be downloaded into a technological artifact which is almost our child or our friend or our companion in the historical adventure.� Made to order Matrix, anyone? (All quotes can be found in the Art Bell/Terence McKenna interview of 1998)
9. In one of the scripts more interesting quirks, agent Smith explains to Morpheus that the �first Matrix was a perfect human world,� that AI originally created a surrogate reality of earthly bliss, a return to Eden, but that humanity rejected it out of hand, that �no one would accept the program�! Hence, they unconsciously chose purgatory instead.
10. �Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.� The Serpent of Genesis, 3:5. In John 10: 34, Christ says the same, with only slight variation: �Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are as Gods?�
Back
